This paper is about the importance of art, specifically the cinematic artform, in informing how we live, to investigate the social environments we live in, and as a mode of thinking or thought itself. The cinematic artform being investigated is perhaps more of a movie house movie than a filmmaker’s film. That is, it encompasses the event of the film’s showing in public and private, the cinematic technological arts on show for and to an audience, as well as all the cultural associations the film has gathered and created throughout the history of its showing. At the heart of the argument is a philosophical experiment where the thought of the cinematic artform has the maximal resonance within our thinking as social scientists investigating both the idea of the human and what it means to be human in the 21st Century. Thus, the paper will present the expressionism of James Dean’s bodily skill as an actor within the cinematic medium, the imagination that his presence within script, scene and frame propels as an idea, and the affection that he becomes as a virtual space of desire. Then, now, and always, the philosophical here is after Gilles Deleuze.