Feudal societies don’t create great cinema we have great theatre. The egalitarian societies create great cinema. The Americans, the French. Because equality is sort of what the cinema deals with. It deals with stories which don’t fall into ’Everybody in their place and who’s who ’ and all that. But the theatre’s full of that.

Cox contrasts the social assumptions embedded in two art forms. In his view, theatre—especially in traditions shaped by aristocratic patronage and rigid class hierarchies—often dramatizes rank, etiquette, and “place,” making status itself a central engine of plot and character. Cinema, by contrast, is framed as a medium whose typical narratives and camera grammar more readily democratize attention: it can follow ordinary people, collapse social distance through close-ups, and build stories around mobility, aspiration, and shared human vulnerability. His claim is less a strict historical law than a provocation about how cultural equality (or its absence) influences what kinds of stories become dominant and celebrated in a society.