Patrick Bjork asks: "You know, "based on a true life story" is often used in TV to sell certain programs/movies. Why people resist metaphor remains a mystery to me, but if someone on this list could explain it to me, I'd be eternally grateful." I'm not about to "explain" something this complex (and I still haven't seen PULP FICTION--it opens here tomorrow), but I wonder if it has anything to do with the primacy of The Word (calling Derrida!) and the faith in the "reality" of the visual. Most people still see films as a "window on the world" that offers glimpes of Reality (ordered and arranged, to be sure). While allowances can be made for certain films that fall within a particular genre (eg. fantasy), audiences seem to prefer films that offer some vision of reality with a Lesson to be learned from it (a kind of compromise between Aristotle and Plato, perhaps). We over-educated few who have learned to "read" metaphor in words and images tend to prefer a different kind of film as well. (Just as anecdotal evidence, I find a high degree of resistance among my students to film modernism and post-modernism, whether it's Bergman or Tati, but they generally enjoy Hitchcock, perhaps because he creates an illusion of reality in which to cloak his fantasy). I encounter similar resistance among people of education to the films of Powell and Pressburger, because of their high degree of artifice. NATURAL BORN KILLERS seems to have lost some of its shock value and is declining (at least locally) while FORREST GUMP still has legs (so to speak)--fantasy with a sweet "message." GUMP reaffirms the belief that reality can be beautiful, while NBK tells us that reality as a media-created monster. Guess which message is going to have more appeal? (And frankly, I dislike both films.) I don't know if any of this is consistent--I'm fighting off a cold and am lucky to be coherent at all, but it is an interesting question. --Don Larsson, Mankato State U., MN