On a rainy afternoon in late December 1992, I walked from one side of Manhattan to the other in order to see The Crying Game. I had been attending a meeting of the Modern Language Association and wanted to escape the chaos of the academic marketplace for a few hours by sitting in a dark theater with other moviegoers. I have loved movies all of my life and believe that the pleasure one takes from the cinematic process derives in part from being with others and participating in their most intimate fantasies without violating them or being violated by them. In the darkness of the movie theater, our fantasies somehow manage to coexist, perhaps because the community of moviegoers is so absent-minded. In any case, something happened as I watched the movie that afternoon. It was nothing mystical or mysterious but more like an experience of concentrated distraction. Yet when I left the theater, I could not get the experience out of my mind. Though it started as a distraction, it soon became an obsession; and out of my need to say something about it, I began to write this book. Though I can never convey to the reader what the experience was (and have not ruled out the possibility that it is a myth), I know that in some form it has entered into the intellectual process that lies behind this work.