the last book I ever read (The Sound of Music Story, excerpt eight)

from The Sound of Music Story: How A Beguiling Young Novice, A Handsome Austrian Captain, and Ten Singing von Trapp Children Inspired the Most Beloved Film of All Time by Tom Santopietro:

The moral certainty found in The Sound of Music, one that caused fans of the film to so embrace the look, sound, and feel of the onscreen world that their repeated viewings came to represent a form of wish fulfillment, seemed to represent nothing less than an attempt to live inside the movie and become von Trapps themselves. Audience members knew there was a distance between their own lives and what was on screen, but they wanted to be inside that world nonetheless. It’s a notion Woody Allen plays with beautifully throughout The Purple Rose of Cairo (1985), in which Cecilia (Mia Farrow), married to an abusive man and drowning in a dead-end job, depends on the movies for her escape. She sees the movie The Purple Rose of Cairo so often that the film’s star walks off the screen, into her life, and falls in love with her. For all the women who dreamed of marrying Captain von Trapp, and all the children who wished for a governess or mother just like Maria, the notion struck home. Whether naïve or savvy, these super fans shared one overriding desire: to dive into the screen and live in the world of The Sound of Music. Only total immersion in that world would suffice. In the words of Nicholas Hammond: “Everyone in the world wants to be in our home movie—you show it to your kids.”