As a kid, I had more of an entrepreneurial streak than I do now. I remember wondering once why there weren’t any 4D movies — movies that, in addition to 3D glasses, had tubes that pumped in smells and chairs that buzzed and rocked with the action on screen. At the time, it seemed obvious to me that any moviegoer would want to be more immersed in the world of the film. 

Although I certainly wouldn’t turn down the opportunity to see a smelly movie today, I recently began to question the obviousness of my original assumption. What makes more dimensions better? Why does every artistic exposition nowadays seem to be followed by the epithet “the experience?”

In imagining my immersive movie, I was unaware of the cultural waters that I was myself immersed in. Try now to recall the last time you saw a movie in 3D. I’m willing to bet that answering the question took you longer than expected. For me, it was “Fly Me to the Moon,” an animated 2007 film that was, apparently, notable as “the first ever animated movie created for 3D.”

Before “Fly Me to the Moon” came the 2004 film “The Polar Express,” the release of which constituted a turning point in the history of 3D technology. The movie was evidently much better when viewed through red and blue lenses, with 3D cinemas grossing 14 times more than their 2D counterparts. In the years that followed, there was a three-dimensional explosion, the frenzy peaking with the release of James Cameron’s “Avatar” in 2009.

The early 2000s was the second golden age of 3D technology, the first being in the 1950s. The novelty of 3D films brought people back into theaters as TV sets became increasingly common in homes. The poster for the 1953 mystery-horror flick “House of Wax,” for instance, features a woman leaping out from the screen, her feet touching down just over the heads of silhouetted audience members. Beside her is written “Beauty and Terror meet in your seat … as every thrill of its story comes off the screen right at you in natural vision.”

Anyone who has seen a 3D film can attest that the experience is far from “natural vision,” but this is nonetheless the enduring myth of the technology. It is a myth in the sense that 3D films can die for a time, but when they reemerge — their underlying technology transmuted but fundamentally the same — they retain all their cultural power. 

The promise of natural vision is, at its core, a promise of transcendence. Churches are emptying, and people are searching for new ways to exceed ordinary experience. The alleged naturalness — which is to say, immersiveness — of a 3D film aims to fill this void by offering a controlled, albeit somewhat lame, hallucination. If you take off the glasses, the image on the screen becomes absurd, unintelligible. But the fragility of the hallucination is the very thing that makes it fun; when you start in your seat as something flies towards you, disillusionment comes hard on the heels of surprise. Knowing that you have been suckered into gasping at an illusion, or rather, allowing yourself to do so, is where joy creeps in.

But 3D films are bad. Their fundamental problem is that they don’t allow new kinds of stories to be told; they are, in other words, a populace-pleasing veneer over an existing art. Though it seems silly to proclaim the coming dawn of a new age of 3D cinema, it would be equally foolish to deny that such a thing will ever occur. In fact, I would like to take my chances and argue that we are already seeing the reemergence of the myth in a new guise. Behold, the Apple Vision Pro.

Apparently the harbinger of the era of “spatial computing,” the Apple Vision Pro hit the market early this February. One of the device’s major selling points is its dual ultra-high-resolution, micro-OLED displays, which not only make it “the ultimate entertainment device,” but also allow for the most faithful representation of the user’s actual environment, upon which digital apps and windows can be superimposed. 

This latter feature, referred to as “pass through,” is what the Vision Pro’s marketing campaign seeks to subliminally obscure. When you look through a pair of these gadget goggles, your perception of the environment is mediated by 12 cameras, “seamless” as the transition between the so-called physical and digital may be. The Allegory of the Cave analogies come easily.

It is in the latter respect that the device departs from the early fantasy of Google Glass. In an effort to keep the fantasy of natural perception alive, the front of the Vision Pro appears to be made of semi-translucent glass, offering a view of the user’s eyes. Here too, it differs from devices like the Meta Quest and Oculus, which looked like opaque plastic boxes strapped to the head. It turns out that this is its own fantasy, the user’s eyes also being digital projections on an outward-facing screen.

Oh, how far we’ve come from disposable dual-tone glasses. But I wonder: does dropping $3,500 actually get us closer to the ultimate entertainment experience? It is possible that the technology opens the door to new forms of storytelling, if filmmakers are willing to adapt to it. However, this isn’t Apple’s marketing strategy. So, the money may buy a more immersive experience, but without introducing the premise that the degree of immersion corresponds precisely to the degree of entertainment, the original statement doesn’t make much sense. Wearing almost one-and-a-half pound goggles for 90 minutes doesn’t sound particularly enjoyable, either.

The point here, however, isn’t to review a device I haven’t tried. Rather, it is to display it as the most recent artifact of a persistent cultural idea: that minimizing the dissonance between illusion and disillusion makes for better entertainment. 

I think it’s instructive that the word entertainment can be translated literally as “to hold mutually.” What is held in any sort of spectacle are opposing beliefs: the train barreling towards me on the screen is harmless, and yet I jump. Above the rim of my red and blue glasses, I can see the unintelligible image. Knowing full well that you are being fooled and getting fooled all the same is an intoxicating mixture of mental states.

There is at least one more interpretation of this translation. That is, what is also held together at a show is people. In Apple’s promotional images for the Vision Pro, there are no two people sitting side by side both wearing headsets, presumably seeing the same thing. For all the gimmick of 3D movies, they are experienced among others, in synchrony. If what we’re searching for is transcendence and joy, it’s probably better that we keep a crack in our vision, our heads a little above the water.