> _eXistenZ_ is not a great film, but it's interesting to me that it
> came out about the same time as _The Matrix_ & _Fight Club_, which
> says something about the zeitgeist. All three suggest that our lives
> are like dreams from which we cannot or do not want to wake up and
> yet we also dream of having our dreams punctuated by a band of
> terrorists/saviours.
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from Don DeLillo, _Mao II_ (1991)
"'There's a curious knot that binds novelists and terrorists. In the West we become famous effigies as our books lose the power to shape and influence. ... Years ago I used to think it was possible for a novelist to alter the inner life of the culture. Now the bomb-makers and gunmen have taken that territory. They make raids on human consciousness. What writers used to do before we were all incorporated.'" (p. 41)
...
"'Beckett is the last writer to shape the way we think and see. After him, the major work involves midair explosions and crumbled buildings. This is the new tragic narrative.'
'And it's difficult when they kill and maim because you see them, honestly now, as the only possible heroes for our time.'
'No,' Bill said.
'The way they live in the shadows, live willingly with death. The way they hate many of the things you hate. Their discipline and cunning. The coherence of their lives. The way they excite, they _excite_ admiration. In societies reduced to blur and glut, terror is the only meaningful act. There's too much everything, more things and messages and meanings than we can use in ten thousand lifetimes. Inertia-hysteria. Is history possible? Who do we take seriously? Only the lethal believer, the person who kills and dies for faith. Everything else is absorbed. The artist is absorbed, the madman in the street is absorbed and processed and incorporated. Give him a dollar, put him in a TV commercial. Only the terrorist stands outside. The culture hasn't figured out how to assimilate him. It's confusing when they kill the innocent. But this is precisely the language of being noticed, the only language the West understands. The way they determine how we see them. The way they dominate the rush of endless streaming images. I said in London, Bill. It's the novelist who understands the secret life, the rage that underlies all obscurity and neglect. You're half murderers, most of you.'
He found the thought happy and attractive and he smiled through Bill's hand-wagging and the motion of his shaking head.
'No, it's pure myth, the terrorist as solitary outlaw. These groups are backed by repressive governments. They're perfect little totalitarian states. They carry the old wild-eyed vision, total destruction and total order.'
'Terror is the force that begins with a handful of people in a back room. Do they stress discipline? Are they implacable in their will? Of course. I think you have to take sides. Don't comfort yourself with safe arguments. Take up the case of the downtrodden, the spat-upon. Do these people feel a yearning for order? Who will give it to them? Think of Chairman Mao. Order is consistent with permanent revolution.'
'Think of fifty million Red Guards.'
'Children, actually, Bill. It was about faith. Luminous, sometimes stupid, sometimes cruel. Look today. Young boys everywhere posing with assault rifles. The young have a cruelty and unyieldingness that's fully formed. I said in London. The more heartless, the more visible.'
'And the harder it becomes to defend a thing, the more you relish your position. Another kind of unyielding.'
They had another drink, sitting crouched, face to face, with motorcycles going by in the brassy street." (pp. 157-8)
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Jacob C.