Life or movie: Which comes first?" is a glimpse into an aspiring screenwriter's mind as he tries to figure out the inner workings of high concept movies. The author starts out with the premise that there are very easy rules that govern storytelling, rules which are universal and tolerate no exceptions. That is how he was led to discard traditional perspectives of movie analysis one after the other (Field, Campbell, Jung, Freud) which all proved to be unfaithful to observable facts. The author proposes then a change of paradigm and a different look at storytelling: fiction is like magic, you cannot explain it or it will break the spell, ruin the magic. But when you think about it, there are no two rational ways of making a rabbit appear from a hat.