A generation ago, going to film school meant picking up a camera and making movies. Now it’s learning words such as “diegetic,” “heterogeneity,” “narratology,” “narrativity,” “symptomology,” “scopophilia,” “signifier,” “syntagmatic,” “synecdoche,” “temporality.” “Is there a hidden method to these film theorists’ apparent madness? Or is film theory, as movie critic Roger Ebert said as I interviewed him weeks later, ‘a cruel hoax for students, essentially the academic equivalent of a New Age cult, in which a new language has been invented that only the adept can communicate in’?”