dotinthesky: (Default)
Dot in the Sky ([personal profile] dotinthesky) wrote2003-07-01 10:59 am

extract from a g**d book

...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

Re:

[identity profile] commonpeople.livejournal.com 2003-07-02 02:05 am (UTC)(link)
I remember so many of my friends at the time saying they felt as if it were all just a movie.

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[identity profile] jellyfishfur.livejournal.com 2003-07-02 11:01 am (UTC)(link)
Yes, I heard that a lot too.
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[identity profile] commonpeople.livejournal.com 2003-07-02 03:56 pm (UTC)(link)
Arnie is already busy getting ready to take over California's governor seat. I suggest Cher for Texas, Rupaul for Alabama, Mary Hart for Supreme lord of Senators, Kevin Coster for keeper of the eternal flame, Mini Me for carrier of the flame during the Olympics and Drew Barrymore for the mother of the Second Coming.
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Re:

[identity profile] commonpeople.livejournal.com 2003-07-08 07:52 am (UTC)(link)
He's Canadian so he can't...