There is a tradition, the spirit of which begins at least with Plato, that judges media images as ‘nihilistic’ - and therefore negative - in the sense that they distract attention away from true reality, redirecting it toward repre-sentations that are merely replicas of reality. In contemporary times, this par-ticular criticism has been levelled most vigorously against the movies, which arguably exercise a wider influence on worldwide popular culture than any other media form. Authors such as Thomas Hibbs and Darren Ambrose, for example, contend that the saturation of world culture by €lmic illusions has led to the perpetuation of nihilism in a number of ways; none of them good. First of all, the content of many popular €lms, it is claimed, promotes a nihil-istic world view by encouraging widespread popular despair, passivity and/or immorality (Hibbs 2012: xiii, xiv, 4-5, 41-2, 61, 73-5, 76, 100-1, 121, 158-9). Second, in depicting idealised images of men and women that are unattainable, many popular €lms encourage vain aspiration on the part of gullible audiences and the exploitation of arti€cially created desires by those seeking to make a pro€t (Ambrose 2013: 147-9). Third, €lm imagery can often serve to anesthe-tise the public by engrossing audiences in illusory worlds, thus encouraging them to neglect the ‘real’ world of personal relationships, politics and creative change (Hibbs 2012: 100-1, 136-7, 158-9, 239; Ambrose 2013: 2-7, 147-9). There are other related complaints, but they all tend to centre on the idea that we live in an age of nihilism, and popular €lm too frequently serves to deepen our entanglement in this negative situation by keeping audiences focused on debasing illusions while reality passes them by. In a secular age, popular €lm may have replaced religion as the opiate of the masses.

Because of this generally negative assessment, the literature tends to be dominated by calls for the overcoming of nihilism (Hibbs 2012: xiv; Ambrose 2013: š, 147-50; Stoehr 2006: „). In this collection of essays, however, I take a different stance. Starting from the position that nihilism is not an essentially negative phenomenon, I shall suggest that the separation standing between €lm ‘illusions’ and the ‘real’ world is a potentially positive circumstance that actually contributes to the value and philosophical appeal of motion pictures.