> WELCOME TO THE DESERT OF THE REAL!
> Slavoj Zizek
>
> us all the time with the talk about the terrorist threat; this threat
> was also obviously libidinally invested - just recall the series of
> movies from Escape From New York to Independence Day. The unthinkable
> which happened was thus the object of fantasy: in a way, America got
> what it fantasized about, and this was the greatest surprise.
I'd put this more specifically: what made this different was that two neo-national mass-cultural disaster narratives -- the doomed plane and the skyscraper blowout -- literally ran into each other, like an unexpected fission reaction, generating a global mediation. It's not that we saw something we feared/anticipated; it's that the internalized maps of the global media biz we all carry around got wiped out. The medium literally crashed into the message; the explosions were the punctuation mark at the end of the Pax Americana and the dawn of the EU-East Asia codominium. The skyjackers of the 1970s might have threatened to blow themselves up, as a way of broadcasting some sort of anachronistic political message, but those of the 2000s -- adepts in their own way of efficient, just-in-time production -- go right after the global institutions themselves.
> production in a factory? And the function of Bond's intervention, of
> course, is to explode in firecraks this site of production, allowing
> us to return to the daily semblance of our existence in a world with
> the "disappearing working class."
Well, you have to distinguish between the classic Bond films of the 1960s (Dr. No to You Only Live Twice), with their later, lesser spin-offs -- the originals are all about conspicuous consumption: gadgets, stunts, pulse-pounding action, the action finale is really a choreographed version of WW II, when Bond's individual struggle turns into collective mobilization of some kind (or, put another way, a collective consumerism mediated by military-industrial superstructures, the purest expression of the 1945-70 Long Boom imaginable). After the destruction of the enemy base, there's always some denouement showing a *new* site of production, e.g. the submarine in You Only Live Twice.
-- Dennis