Sitting in the movie theater watching Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 9/11 amid an audience utterly riveted by a movie speaking to its deepest emotions, I kept getting a sense of deja vu. Where had I felt such crowd dynamics before? And then I remembered. What I was sensing was eerily similar to the awestruck devotion I had noticed in another audience--this time of Fundamentalist Christians--as it watched Mel Gibson's The Passion of the Christ. Both movies were appealing to what might be called their cultural bases. They weren't designed to persuade. They were designed to rally the faithful, to use the power...
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