Hollywood is an advertisement for a dream, a very shallow dream–a dream about a simplified Heaven, about life that is supposed to be reality, but is not.
For life is not like the movies.
In how many Hollywood pictures do you see a person cleaning a house or washing a baby—especially a really dirty baby?
In the Hollywood world, you see the results, but you do not see the sweat; you do not see the hard work.
And think how different real relationships are from the way people fall in love in the movies.
We all know that life does not always happen according to Hollywood pictures; still, some part of us believes that they are pictures of a possible reality.
Hollywood has trained us to believe that somehow there will be a happy end, and that if something in real life does not work out, it is just a mishap.
Therefore, we do not distrust the Hollywood religion itself.
We tend to think that if something goes wrong, it is our fault–we were doing it wrong in the first place, or it was not the right solution.
Even in those few movies that leave us unhappy, we somehow think that this unhappiness is incidental, it is not that important.
We believe that the misery will somehow be resolved by itself, by a hero, or by good luck, and that it will surely pass.
People know that those are dreams, but they believe that they can somehow become real.
In that sense, the Hollywood religion is the "opiate of the masses."
–Rabbi Adin Steinsaltz
From Simple Words, p. 143, by Rabbi Adin Steinsaltz