Words for Cold Days #3

...The past had just about been strip-mined for all it is worth. As for the present, it had already been exposed as a long term marketing scheme, existing primarily to provide material for future nostalgia-oriented syndication.

The imagination killers - film, video, all-around media overfarming, abuses of story development analogous to the excessive use of pesticides and chemical fertilizers - had had their way. Impossible to picture anything that had not been pictured. "Their showing that again?" Nothing but old news. Jesus on the mount? Seen it. Car crash in extreme close up? Seen it. War, pestilence, genocide? Seen it. The responses - stockpiling of effective narrative devices, replacement of old-fashioned matte work by more fluid computerized imaging techniques, frantic but insufficient effort (too little and too late) to resuscitate dying genres - emphasised rather than resolved an overall sense of closure.

People had nothing left to make a picture of except that very depletion, pictures of people looking at pictures, wearing them, defacing them, combining them, juxtaposing them in allegedly surprising ways, partially painting over them, submerging them in urine, ripping them and selling the pieces. The pictures wouldn't go away, wouldn't change, wouldn't renew themselves. The opaque icons just accumulated, like the non-biodegradable plastic jetsam piling up on Pacific atolls...

From the surreal, impressionist, kaleidoscopical, jawdroppingly amazing book, The Phantom Empire: Movies in the Mind of the 20th Century by Geoffrey O'Brien. Published by Norton in 1993.