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Aug 20, 2022Liked by David Livingstone Smith

I'm embarrassed that this had not occurred to me before, and I thank you for this piece. I think the film industry assumes that physical attractiveness is necessary for audiences to identify, care about, or empathize with characters. Audiences need to see themselves in a character, and also want to see themselves as more attractive than they are in reality. The impact of cinema to thus distort and rewrite history is doubly disturbing, because so many "learn" their history from movies today, versus books or scholars, like yourself. That is why I hope this newsletter gains the following it deserves.

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Thank you for this essay -- I had never realized, though after reading this it seems obvious.

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