Stanley Cavell was the first to account for the transformation of theory and criticism brought about by reflection on popular culture and its 'ordinary' objects, such as so-called mainstream cinema. However, Cavell is less concerned with reversing artistic hierarchies than with the self-transformation required by our encounters with new experiences, and with the moral education they provide. According to him the value of a culture lies not in its 'great art' but in its transformative capacity, the same capacity found in Emerson's 'moral perfectionism'. This new accent on examining the educational value of films as public occurrences of ethical theorising points towards the analysis of linguistic and aesthetic expression in a larger corpus works of 'popular culture', hence to going beyond Cavell's focus on the classical Hollywood movie.