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Psychohistorians—those, at any rate, who are worth paying attention to—have labored hard since about 1973 to drive home one primary message: in human history, psychological change precedes technological change. And, as a corollary of this proposition, technological change is also a form of psychological expression that tells us an enormous amount about what is going on in the “heads” of those who constitute a particular society, or a particular stage in the development of a society.
The thought is a truism by now, so obvious that one would think it needs no emphasizing. Obviously, the smallest individual or collective action has to be “inside the head” before human beings can impose it on the environment. And that applies to such minutiae as the design of a streetlamp or the arrangements of the county jail as well as the mega-developments we associate with technology and international affairs. Still, the resistance to understanding in this area is formidable, and is based on a century of sociology—perhaps one should say sociologizing—whose propensity for jargon should always have clued us in to its fundamental regressiveness.
The fact is, of course, that personifications like “technology” and “society” are no different from the deities and demons and allegorized representatives of the supernatural encountered by anthropologists and historians in any premodern culture, except that the world of the supernatural tends to have more color and charm. Those who say that “capitalism caused a crisis in the family” or that “society put new kinds of pressures on women” don't have bones through their noses and aren't given to roasting missionaries. In every other respect, they are primitives who cannot separate documentable human functioning from the convenient abstractions that get generated in academic settings.
All of this has enormous significance for students of the cinema. Like all the other inventions that have transformed our lives—barrel-vaulting and the dome, the stirrup