" 1948: The Best Years of Our Lives. The characters in the film have retained a candour towards - and naive faith in - their feelings which we no longer possess. Our feelings, which we delightfully term emotions in order to salvage the fiction of an emotional life, are not affects any more, merely a psychological affectation, having lost all credence in our eyes. Or, alternatively, they are conversion emotions, betraying the melodrama going on in the body rather than the nuances of the soul. We do not even have this candour in our relations to our dreams, where we grapple with their interpretation, their splitting, their ironic reflexes. But the worst thing is that not just life, but cinema too, seems to have lost all simplicity since that period. But the worst thing is that not just life, but cinema too, seems to have lost all simplicity since that period. It knows only how to parody itself affectedly, and has veered towards psychodrama or visual melodrama. Retrospectively, these were then, also, the 'Best Years' of cinema. "

― Jean Baudrillard , Fragments