extract from a g**d book
Jul. 1st, 2003 10:59 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
dotinthesky...The attacks on New York and Washington, D.C. were organized as epic horror cinema with meticulous attention to mise-en-scene. The hijacked planes were aimed to impact precisely at the vulnerable border between fantasy and reality. In contrast to the 1937 radio invasion, thousands of people who turned on their televisions on 9/11 were convinced that the cataclysm was just a broadcast, a hoax. They thought they were watching rushes from the latest Bruce Willis film. Nothing since has thrown cold water on this sense of illusion. The more improbable the event, the more familiar the image. The "Attack on America," and its sequels, "America Fights Back" and "America Freaks Out," has continued to unspool as a succession of celluloid hallucinations, each of which can be rented from the corner video shop: The Siege, Independence Day, Executive Action, Outbreak, The Sum of all Fears, and so on. George W. Bush, who has a bigger studio, meanwhile responds to Osama bin Laden as one auteur to another with his own fiery wideangle hyperbole.
Has history, then, simply become a montage of prefabricated horrors crafted in Hollywood writers' huts? Certainly the Pentagon thought so when it secretly conscripted a group of famous screenwriters, including Spike Jonze (Being John Malkovich) and Steven De Souza (Die Hard), to "brainstorm about terrorist targets and schemes in America and to offer solutions to those threats." The working group is based at the Institute for Creative Technology, an Army joint venture with the University of Southern California that mines Hollywood expertise to develop interactive war games with sophisticated story paths. One of its products is Real War, a video game that helps train military leaders to "battle against insurgents in the Middle East." When on 20 September an unidentified "foreign intelligence agency" warned the FBI of a potential attack on a major Hollywood studio, it was the last twist in a Mobius strip weaving simulation into reality and back again.
- taken from Dead Cities and Other Tales, by Mike Davi
Has history, then, simply become a montage of prefabricated horrors crafted in Hollywood writers' huts? Certainly the Pentagon thought so when it secretly conscripted a group of famous screenwriters, including Spike Jonze (Being John Malkovich) and Steven De Souza (Die Hard), to "brainstorm about terrorist targets and schemes in America and to offer solutions to those threats." The working group is based at the Institute for Creative Technology, an Army joint venture with the University of Southern California that mines Hollywood expertise to develop interactive war games with sophisticated story paths. One of its products is Real War, a video game that helps train military leaders to "battle against insurgents in the Middle East." When on 20 September an unidentified "foreign intelligence agency" warned the FBI of a potential attack on a major Hollywood studio, it was the last twist in a Mobius strip weaving simulation into reality and back again.
- taken from Dead Cities and Other Tales, by Mike Davi
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