THE MURDEROUS CAPACITY OF IMAGES In 1981 Baudrillard was announcing, not predicting, the ‘death of the real’. In Simulacra and Simulation, he ironically reveres Disneyland, which he says ‘is presented as imaginary in order to make us believe that the rest is real, when in fact all of Los Angeles and the America surrounding it are no longer […]
CATHY O’BRIEN AND THE GHOST OF DE SADE If a lethal text is one which destroys the mind of its reader, making it impossible to communicate the content of the text to others, The Trance-Formation of America by Cathy O’Brien and Mark Phillips comes as close as anything I’ve read. Such a controversial and widely-known […]
In Hampton’s Fancher’s original screen adaptation of Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep by Philip K Dick, Rick Deckard, a ‘blade-runner’ or police assassin hired to hunt down rogue ‘replicants’ or androids, is instructed to go to the Tyrell Corporation headquarters to test their latest model, the Nexus 6. His task is to find out whether his […]