This book is about the basic paradox of movies: on one hand, we screen moving images to lose ourselves vicariously in the bigger, more glamorous, more vivid world we see and hear on the screen; on the other hand, we screen moving images to reencounter our own immediate sensuality in that more vivid world. -Introduction

Movie kisses were the first sex acts I ever screened. Before I had my romantic first kiss, I already knew, from movies, that one needed to tilt the head a little to avoid bumping noses, but that if both kissers tilted the same way they would still bump noses, so a complex choreography of bodies had to be worked out for this simple act. -Chapter 1, The Long Adolescence of American Movies