ABSTRACT
Like other social activities, storytelling occurs throughout society. Many art forms are pressed into service for the social task of storytelling, including short stories, magazine articles, television, poetry, novels, and movies. Movies are only a twentieth-century invention and the novel only rose to prominence in the eighteenth century. Before this, drama and poetry were probably more prominent. But today of all the plays performed on stage, poems recited, and novels read, it seems the movies are the preeminent art form employed in basic, society-wide, perhaps worldwide, storytelling. Movies are one of the most important media through which underlying social and religious beliefs are expressed. The Western has been linked to American ideologies of individualism and a personal resolution of social problems. The human imagination is constantly searching for comparisons with things it knows about to press into metaphoric service in the act of God describing.
