Matthew Yglesias has a post up on how hard it is to generate imaginative resistance in movies. I used to think this was a very important feature of imaginative resistance, and indeed my first paper on imaginative resistance turned on this, but now I think this isn’t the most central thing. What is central is that imaginative resistance arises when the authors tries to show us one thing and say another. Since it’s both hard and inadvisable to really say something rather than show it in a movie (save the use of voiceovers and the like) imaginative resistance doesn’t arise.