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For me, the main purpose of art is transportation. I'm not talking about murals on the sides of buses. I'm talking about the singular ability of art to pull us, Alice-like, through the Looking Glass and into other realms.

I have always maintained that the fictional depiction of such journeys—as when Aeneas descends into the Underworld, or when the Pevensie kids go through the wardrobe to Narnia—is really about what happens when a person encounters art. In fact, in the second Narnian story, the kids literally climb into a painting. But however it happens, Alice and Aeneas and everyone else go someplace otherwise inaccessible—to the other side of the rainbow, the horizon, the mirror—and then, even better than that, they return, still the same, but somehow ineffably changed. They come back from the dead, as it were, and tell us about it. And their journey is a picture of what it is to read a story, or view a painting or a film; you enter a realm beyond your own and then you return to your own realm, but you are not the same. To put it yet another way, you fall asleep and dream and wake up.

And nothing can take us elsewhere more quickly and powerfully than movies. There is something about the visual and aural power of film that is unparalleled. If the sound is good enough and the screen is large enough and the other people in the audience eat their popcorn quietly enough we can sometimes vault up into the darkness and over the bar at the edge of Reality and fall and fall like Alice into another world. This, generally, is why I go to movie theaters.

But most movies these days don't aspire to pull their audiences into other worlds the way they used to, and that is why I often find myself hissing like a treed cat at the current state of cinema. I am especially bothered because never before in the history of film have special effects been so good. Digital technology can take us to Mars and make it convincing even to a jaded adult. So when movies don't use this technology for real transportive purposes, I get upset. Let me give you an example.

Did you see Jurassic Park? I know it's old news, but it serves my argument here and most people saw it. When it came out I thought, At last, something that will take me to the other side of the mirror! I couldn't wait to see it. I knew that, given the advances in technology, I would, in fact, actually see a dinosaur. A real dinosaur! Now, technically I'd seen dinosaurs before—who hadn't?—in cel animation, in stop-action claymation. I'd seen the guys in the rubber suits galumphing over crappy HO-scale models of pre-Nikkei Tokyo. I could see their unconvincing and ill-shaped plastic mouths, painted sloppily by some hungover intern on a deadline. The high-octane suspension of disbelief necessary for these sweaty pseudo-lizards was achievable only via fatigue and malt liquor, and keep it coming. Ah, but Spielberg's dinosaurs would be different. The reviews told me so, and hallelujah, the reviews were right. Spielberg and his special effects geniuses delivered the goods, and I was in heaven. At least at the start of the movie. For a few moments it was unutterably glorious, and then—Ichabod!—the glory departed. But those few moments are worth recounting.

They were toward the beginning of the movie, when the three protagonists have arrived at the eponymous Jurassic Park, and are zipping along in a jeep, hoping to spot their anachronistic quarry. Then, behind them—or beyond them, so the viewer sees it but they cannot—rises up as out of some premythical depths the awesome spectacle of what we had only heard existed, of what we had only imagined existed, and now here it was, the very thing itself: a view-filling 80-ton brontosaurus so outrageous and so real that one was immediately in awe of it. We were suddenly and actually in the presence of a living monster, resurrected from the prehistoric mist. And a few seconds watching it showed that this beast was no phoney-baloney stop-action model; no, it was the true monster itself, the one all those ersatz reptilians meant to get at, of which Godzilla is a mere type and shadow. This is what it's all about, I thought. This is worth 150 million dollars and two years of labor. And closer to home, this is even worth eight bucks for a box of Good'n'Plenty and a waxen cup of Dr. Pepper the size of a fat man's fez.

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