Isolationism as a Control System (Part 1)
Chapter Seven of my book Movie Wars: How Hollywood and the Media Limit What Films We Can See (Chicago: A Cappella Books, 2000). The cover below is that of the U.K. edition published by the Wallflower Press. Because of the length of this chapter, I’ll be posting it in two parts. — J.R.
Is it possible that because of the rise of the new media, which have given us the ability to manufacture what we call virtual reality, we are now able, without quite knowing what we are doing, to create a secondary world that we are liable to mistake for the primary world given to our senses at birth? If so, the prime need it serves is probably not political at all but the one Freud identified as the chief motive for dreaming: wish fulfill-‐ ment—a need catered to both by our luxuriously proliferating sources of entertainment and the means of their support, namely, advertisement of consumer products. In our variant of self-‐deception, pleasure plays the role that terror plays under totalitarianism.
— Jonathan Schell, “Land of Dreams,” The Nation, January 11/18, 1999
This chapter and the next explore complementary and mutually alienating attitudes: the desire to keep out foreign influences in order to preserve American “purity,” and the fact that what we consider American “purity” is often composed of foreign influences.
