A Collapsing MicroUniverse of Continually Reducing Options Offers The Promise of Exponential Growth Increases in Certainty of Outcomes

Tom : 

I take it you don't get 

many Strangers here.

IVO: 

Strangers?

DOCTOR: 

Yes, Visitors. 

Foreign Devils. You know, 

people you don't know.

IVO: 

Everyone here is known.

ROMANA: 

Well, what about people 

from the next village, 

or the nearest town?

IVO: 

There is only The Village 

and The Tower, nowhere else.

DOCTOR: 

Who lives in this Tower of your?

IVO: 

Why do you ask what everyone must know? 

Are you sent to test me? 

I am Ivo, HeadMan of This Village 

like My Father before me 

and His Father before him. 

The Lords know I'm loyal.

DOCTOR: 

Please, don't shout. Splendid, I'm sure. 

So you Serve The Lords, but 

What Do The Lords Do for You?

IVO: 

They Protect Us from The Wasting.

DOCTOR: 

Did you say The Wasting?

IVO: 

I have work to do.

ROMANA: 

Come on, Doctor. This is silly.

(Ivo starts tidying up the chairs.)

DOCTOR: 

Oh, come on, Ivo. 

These Lords of yours, how long 

have they ruled over you?

IVO: 

Forever.

DOCTOR: 

Really. As long as that? 

Well, that's a long time.

(The Doctor and Romana leave. Ivo shuts the door behind them, goes to a box on the wall and takes out a walkie-talkie.)

IVO: Kalmar. Kalmar, can you hear me? (burble) Two strangers, here, in the village. (burble burble) That's right, strangers. They were asking about scientists.

KALMAR: We have a generator. It gives us power for air, light and heat, and the communicators.

TARAK: But no weapons, eh, Kalmar.

KALMAR: When we have rediscovered basic scientific principles, we shall be able to make weapons of our own. But it takes time.

TARAK: How many of us have lived and died because everything takes time.

ROMANA: How long have things been like this?

KALMAR: Forever. The Lords rule in the Tower, the peasants toil in the fields. Nothing has changed in a thousand years.

TARAK: But it will change when we overthrow the Lords.

DOCTOR: What? Isn't that a bit dangerous? I mean, a chap in the village told me the Lords protected you from the Wasting.

KALMAR: You know about the Wasting?

DOCTOR: Well, only by hearsay. What is the Wasting?

TARAK: The Wasting?

DOCTOR: Yes.

TARAK: The Wasting is --

(Kalmar stops him.)

TARAK: 

The Wasting.

DOCTOR: Ah.

Tom : 

Listen. I'm going to have to 

go to The Rebels for Help. 

But 'Will they HELP...?' I ask myself.

K9: 

Probability of indigenous dissident group 

rendering effective assistance, very low.

Tom :

Shush. I'm thinking --

I've got to make a very impressive entrance. 

Something that'll win them over entirely.... 

Got it! Right, K9, we need 

a slight spatial movement 

and no temporary displacement. 

Very tricky, these short hops.....

K9: 

Information, Master.

Tom : 

What? What is it?

K9: 

The relative smallness of E-Space 

should render fractional increments more stable.

Tom : 

But of course! Good boy, K9!

[Outside The TARDIS]

Tom :

There she blows. 

ADRIC: 

We found it. 

Tom :

Yes, well, that's one of the advantages of living 

in a rapidly shrinking micro-universe. 

ROMANA: 

What are the others? 

(The Doctor enters the TARDIS.) 

Tom :

Other what? 

ROMANA: 

Other advantages? 

Tom : 

Ah, well, it's difficult to say. 

[Outside the gate]

PACKARD: 

The Ship's moved!

 

(It is within sight of The Gate now.) 

RORVIK: 

Contracting continuum. 

PACKARD: Gobbledygook. 

RORVIK: Oh, you never learn anything, do you. There's only one thing for it. Right, everybody. The MZ. 

(The bridge crew re-enter the gate. Aldo holds Royce back.) 

ALDO: I'm not going near that thing. That's a dangerous weapon, that it. 

ROYCE: No, Rorvik knows what he's doing. He's seen us right up to now. Hasn't he? 

(There is the sound of the MZ powering up. The two men run for it. KaBOOM! and smoke and bits of masonry come flying out of the gate, followed by Rorvik and his crew.) 

RORVIK: Don't give up, lads. We'll go for the back blast. 

[Tardis]

ADRIC: Why don't we just dematerialise and go? 

DOCTOR + ROMANA: No. 

ROMANA: We can't just dematerialise and leave them. There are slaves on that ship. 

(The rumble of the warp motors knocks them off their feet. The spaceship lifts off.) 

ROMANA: What's happening? 

DOCTOR: Shush. Mass attraction. There's something moving out there. It's shaking the entire gateway. 

(The spaceship turns.) 

ADRIC: Look! 

ROMANA: What's he doing? He can't take off with his warp motors in that state. 

DOCTOR: Back blast. 

ROMANA: What? 

DOCTOR: Back blast. He's going to use the jets to try and smash through the mirrors. 

ROMANA: He's mad. The back blast backlash will bounce back and destroy everything. 

DOCTOR: Yes. 

ROMANA: It's bound to accelerate the collapse of space around here. 

DOCTOR: Yes. 

ADRIC: But surely that would flip you back into N-space if you dematerialised at the right moment? 

DOCTOR: Shush. 

ROMANA: We cannot even think of that with those slaves on board. We've got to do something. 

DOCTOR: I'm not hopeful. 

ROMANA: Neither am I. 

ADRIC: Wait a minute. There is that damaged area. 

DOCTOR: Yes. What damaged area? 

ROMANA: Of course. 

DOCTOR: What? 

ROMANA: By the warp motors. 

DOCTOR: Yes? 

ROMANA: The main cable insulation is exposed. We might be able to short out his power. 

DOCTOR: No. 

(The Doctor goes to the console and flicks a lever.) 

DOCTOR: Right. Stop! If I'm not back for whatever reason in thirteen and a half minutes, I want you to dematerialise. 

ADRIC: Without you? 

ROMANA: I am not letting you go alone. 

DOCTOR: That's an order. It's about time you started accepting orders. 

ROMANA: It is long past time, but how do you think you're going to find the cable? 

DOCTOR: With my eyes. 

ROMANA: Adric and I have seen it. 

DOCTOR: Good. Come on. 

ADRIC: I'm coming too. 

ROMANA: You are not. It's long past time you learnt to obey orders. Now stay here, and if we are not back for whatever reason in thirteen and a half minutes, I want you to dematerialise. Do you understand? 

DOCTOR: I like that. I think you're improving. 

ROMANA: It's a matter of complete indifference to me. 

DOCTOR: Indifference? Thirteen and a half minutes. 

ADRIC: I'm sure you will. 

[Bridge]

RORVIK: Steady now. I want a landing that wouldn't ripple the skin on a custard. 

(The spaceship touches down with its engines pointing at the Tardis, which is very close by.) 

RORVIK: Good lads. Who's got control of the overload power? 

MAN [OC]: I think it's me. 

RORVIK: You think? Listen, everyone. This isn't the MZ we're messing around with here, it's a full blown back blast. I'd appreciate it if you'd keep your eye on the controls. 

PACKARD: Back blast activated, and building. 

RORVIK: How long till full power? 

PACKARD: It's hard to tell with the motors in this state. About ten minutes. 

RORVIK: Revivals. Break out the cargo. 

PACKARD: What, now? 

RORVIK: Well, if this works, we'll need to see where we're going. 

PACKARD: You can't do a proper revival in ten minutes! 

RORVIK: We'll revive them all. One of them might come through. Well, try it. Let's do something round here for a change. 

[Cargo hold]

ROYCE: Don't switch the light on. 

ALDO: Why not? 

ROYCE: Well, it's bad for them. 

ALDO: What, you think this is going to do them any good? 

(They wheel out the first Tharil.) 

ALDO: I don't know. Ten minutes to plug them all up. Rush, rush, rush. 

SAGAN: Ready? 

ROYCE: Yes, sir. Just as the Captain ordered. Meet the sardines. 

SAGAN: Prepare for revival. Switch on now. Well, what's the matter? 

ALDO: Er, I feel I'm coming over a bit nauseous, sir. I'll be all right with a breath of air. 

(Aldo leaves, and Royce tries to follow.) 

SAGAN: And where do you think you're going? 

ROYCE: Oh, I'll just go and make sure he's all right, sir. I'll be back in a minute. 

[Spaceship]

(Aldo has hidden in a store room, and brewed a couple of mugs of drink.) 

ALDO: Psst. 

(Royce enters and takes a mug. There is a scream from the cargo hold.) 

ALDO: I can't stand a lot of that. 

ROYCE: Funny you signed on with Rorvik. 

ALDO: Light duties is what he said. 

(Another, louder, scream.) 

ROYCE: It'll all end in tears, mark my words. 

(A third scream.) 

[Cargo hold]

(Rorvik and Lane enter.) 

SAGAN: Sorry, sir. It's no good. 

RORVIK: No good? What kind of report's that? 

SAGAN: Three tries, three rejects. 

LANE: Could be the power fluctuation where we had the damage. I'll go and look. 

RORVIK: Since when do you give yourself orders on my ship? I'll check the cable, you get back to the bridge. Well, break out some more. 

(Biroc and the other Tharil, who is apparently called Lazlo, are hiding by the main hatch when Rorvik leaves the spaceship. Lazlo enters.) 

[Outer skin breach]

ROMANA: The clipboard marks the spot. I'll stand guard. 

(The Doctor climbs through the hole and up a ladder. When he's out of sight, Romana enters and heads for a staircase. The Doctor reaches the top of the ladder.) 

RORVIK: Is this what you're looking for, Doctor? 

(Rorvik drops the clipboard.) 

DOCTOR: Look here, Rorvik. You've got to stop this back blast. You'll kill us all. 

RORVIK: So you say, Doctor. I say it's the only way out of here. 

(Rorvik stands on the Doctor's fingers.) 

DOCTOR: You can't blast through those mirrors. You must realise by now it just throws the energy straight back. 

RORVIK: They've got to break. Everything breaks eventually. 

(He kicks the Doctor back down the ladder, comes after him and starts to strangle him with his own scarf. Romana arrives and tries hitting Rorvik with the clipboard.) 

DOCTOR: Never mind the clipboard, short the cables. 

(The Doctor gives Romana the manacles.) 

DOCTOR: Drain the main power line. Earth it to the ladder. 

ROMANA: I know. I've done it. 

(Rorvik lets the Doctor go and heads for the ladder to undo the damage.) 

DOCTOR: Biroc? What are you doing here? 

BIROC: Nothing. 

DOCTOR: It's all right for you. 

BIROC: And for you, too. Do nothing. 

DOCTOR: Do nothing? 

ROMANA: Of course, Doctor. Don't you see? 

DOCTOR: Yes, that's right. Do nothing, if it's the right sort of nothing. 

(They join hands with Biroc and fade away. Rorvik has removed the manacles from the cable.) 

RORVIK: Run, Doctor. Scurry off back to your blue box. You're like all the rest. Lizards when there's a man's work to be done. I'm sick of your kind. Faint-hearted, do-nothing, lily-livered deadweights. This is the end for all of you! I'm finally getting something done! Bwahahahaha! 

[Cargo hold]

(Sagan rolls his latest failure off the gurney. Then Lazlo enters.) 

SAGAN: Here, where did you spring from? I haven't done you. Never mind, you're just what we need. 

(Sagan pulls his blaster, but Lazlo easily overpowers him and brings an exposed piece of cable towards his chest.) 

SAGAN: Just a minute! Argh! 

(Lazlo goes to the nearest Tharil and holds his paw out over his forehead. The Tharil wakes. He repeats the operation.) 

[Outside the Tardis]

DOCTOR: We've made it. Quick, quick, inside. What's the matter? 

ROMANA: I'm not coming with you. 

DOCTOR: Inside. That's an order. 

ROMANA: No more orders, Doctor. Goodbye. 

DOCTOR: What? What a moment to choose. 

ROMANA: But it is, isn't it? A moment to choose. I've got to be my own Romana. 

BIROC: And we need a Time Lord. 

ROMANA: Goodbye, Doctor. 

Tom : 

No, no, no. Wait, wait. There's something else. 

K9. He'll be all right with you behind the mirrors. 

ROMANA: 

I'll take care of him. 

Tom : 

I'll miss you. You were the noblest Romana of them all. 

(The Doctor enters the TARDIS. Romana carries K9 away, with Biroc. 

They return to The Gate and go through The Mirror. 

The TARDIS dematerialises, glowing red 

in the building back blast from the spaceship. 

The Gate explodes, then the spaceship goes boom and bursts into flames.) 

[Monochrome land]

(The TARDIS briefly appears in mid air by Powis Castle. 

Romana, Biroc and K9 watch from the terraced gardens.) 

ROMANA: 

The TARDIS. Gone. 

K9: 

TARDIS preserved in concept, Mistress. 

This unit contains all necessary schedules 

for duplication of The TARDIS, Mistress.

 

ROMANA: 

Exactly, K9. Biroc will help us use The Gateway 

to travel anywhere in E-space, 

and We can give him 

Time technology.

 

BIROC: 

You shall be Our Time Lord, and We will travel far. 

Our People are enslaved on many planets. 

ROMANA: 

And You and I, K9, are going to help Biroc free them. 

That's something we've got to do, don't you think?

K9: 

Affirmative, Mistress. 

(Time-shifted images of Tharils leave the smoking remains 

of the spaceship and enter The Gateway.) 

[TARDIS]

ADRIC: 

The Picture's fading.

 

Tom : 

Yes. 

ADRIC: 

It's gone. Nothing there. 

Tom : 

So it has. Nothing. 

Well, that's something. 

ADRIC: 

How can nothing be something? 

Tom :

Well, if the E-space image translator doesn't work, 

I'm hoping we're in N-Space.

 

ADRIC: 

Back in Your Own Universe....

Tom :

Yes. 

ADRIC: 

Can you be sure?

 

Tom : 

Did I say 'sure'? 

ADRIC: 

No. 

Tom :

Yes -- One Good, Solid Hope's 

worth a cartload of Certainties. 

ADRIC: 

Will Romana be alright? 

Tom :

Alright? She'll be superb.

Hindsight is Always 20:20

Fire Captain

Keep those children back, Thompson! [Liane finds the boys and walks up to them]

Coon

Please sir, you must let us-

Liane

Sweetie, let the nice firemen do their job.

Coon

Shut! Up! Mom! God!

Officer

Wait. Look! Up in the sky!

Fireman

It's him! My God, it's really him!

Fire Captain

He's come to help us. Captain Hindsight! [in the distance a superhero flies towards the town. He's wearing red and yellow tights and a black cope with a blue eye on it - looking behind]

Stan

Who's Captain Hindsight?

Announcer :

Captain Hindsight, 

The Hero of The Modern Age!

[a series of comic book pictures follows] 

Once known as Jack Brolin, a reporter for the national news, 

the hero was born when a freak accident gave him the amazing power of extraordinary hindsight. 

From toxic spills to unjust wars there is no task too large for... 

Captain Hindsight! 

[the hero descends and lands next to the firemen]

Fire Captain

Captain Hindsight, thank God you've come!

Captain Hindsight

What's the skinny?

Fireman

There's people trapped in that burning building, Captain Hindsight. And the fire is so massive we can't get to them.

Captain Hindsight

Hmmm... You see those windows on the right side? They should have built fire escapes on those windows for the higher floors, then people could have gotten down. And then on the roof: they should have built it with a more reinforce structure, so a helicopter could have landed on it.

Fireman

Yes, of course.

Captain Hindsight

And then you see that building to the left?

Fire Captain

Yes.

Captain Hindsight

They shouldn't have built that there. Because now you can't park any fire trucks where you really need to. [stands up tall] 

Well, looks like my job here is done. Goodbye everyone! 

[takes off]

Fireman

Thank you, Captain Hindsight!

Officer

Thank youuu!

Fire Captain

All right everyone, I guess that's it. Let's pack it up. 

[the firemen and officers quickly pack up and leave, but the building keeps burning. Coon and Friends can only watch helplessly as trapped residents scream.]

The Marsh house, dinner time. 

The family is eating quietly

Randy

Whoa, boy, did you hear about that fire downtown, Sharon?

Sharon

Oh my gosh, yes! They said like 14 people died.

Randy

It's just ridiculous to me that they didn't build fire escapes on those upper floors! Ridiculous!

Sharon

Oh I know, and if you ask me, they should've built a roof with enough support to land a helicopter.

Randy

I mean, hello!

Stan

Hey you guys are just repeating what that hindsight guy said.

Randy

Why yes, Stan. Captain Hindsight is our protector and guardian. We're just thankful he was there for that fire. And now we can all eat in peace

CHERNOBYL : A RETRO SCENARIO

Myth, chased from The Real by the violence of History, finds refuge in Cinema. 

HISTORY: A RETRO SCENARIO 

In a violent and contemporary period of history (let’s say between the two world wars and the cold war), it is myth that invades cinema as imaginary content. It is the golden age of despotic and legendary resurrections. Myth, chased from the real by the violence of history, finds refuge in cinema. 

Today, it is history itself that invades the cinema according to the same scenario—the historical stake chased from our lives by this sort of immense neutralization, which is dubbed peaceful coexistence on a global level, and pacified monotony on the quo­ tidian level—this history exorcised by a slowly or brutally con­ gealing society celebrates its resurrection in force on the screen, according to the same process that used to make lost myths live again.

History is our lost referential, that is to say our myth. It is by virtue of this fact that it takes the place of myths on the screen. The illusion would be to congratulate oneself on this “awareness of history on the part of cinema,” as one congratulated oneself on the “entrance of politics into the university.” Same misunder­ standing, same mystification. The politics that enter the univer­sity are those that come from history, a retro politics, emptied of substance and legalized in their superficial exercise, with the air of a game and a field of adventure, this kind of politics is like sexuality or permanent education (or like social security in its time), that is, posthumous liberalization. 

The great event of this period, the great trauma, is this decline of strong referential, these death pangs of the real and of the rational that open onto an age of simulation. Whereas so many generations, and particularly the last, lived in the march of his­ tory, in the euphoric or catastrophic expectation of a revolu­ tion—today one has the impression that history has retreated, leaving behind it an indifferent nebula, traversed by currents, but emptied of references. It is into this void that the phantasms of a past history recede, the panoply of events, ideologies, retro fashions—no longer so much because people believe in them or still place some hope in them, but simply to resurrect the period when at least there was history, at least there was violence (albeit fascist), when at least life and death were at stake. Anything serves to escape this void, this leukemia of history and of politics, this hemorrhage of values—it is in proportion to this distress that all content can be evoked pell-mell, that all previous history is resurrected in bulk—a controlling idea no longer selects, only nostalgia endlessly accumulates: war, fascism, the pageantry of the belle epoque, or the revolutionary struggles, everything is equivalent and is mixed indiscriminately in the same morose and funereal exaltation, in the same retro fascination. There is how­ ever a privileging of the immediately preceding era (fascism, war, the period immediately following the war—the innumerable films that play on these themes for us have a closer, more per­ verse, denser, more confused essence). One can explain it by evo­ king the Freudian theory of fetishism (perhaps also a retro hy­ pothesis). This trauma (loss of referentials) is similar to the discovery of the difference between the sexes in children, as se­ rious, as profound, as irreversible: the fetishization of an object intervenes to obscure this unbearable discovery, but precisely, says Freud, this object is not just any object, it is often the last object perceived before the traumatic discovery. Thus the fetishized history will preferably be the one immediately preced­ ing our “irreferential” era. Whence the omnipresence of fascism and of war in retro—a coincidence, an affinity that is not at all political; it is naive to conclude that the evocation of fascism signals a current renewal of fascism (it is precisely because one is no longer there, because one is in something else, which is still less amusing, it is for this reason that fascism can again become fascinating in its filtered cruelty, aestheticized by retro).1 

History thus made its triumphal entry into cinema, post­ humously (the term historical has undergone the same fate: a “historical” moment, monument, congress, figure are in this way designated as fossils). Its reinjection has no value as conscious awareness but only as nostalgia for a lost referential.

This does not signify that history has never appeared in cinema as a powerful moment, as a contemporary process, as insurrec­tion and not as resurrection. In the “real” as in cinema, there was history but there isn’t any anymore. Today, the history that is “given back” to us (precisely because it was taken from us) has no more of a relation to a “historical real” than neofiguration in painting does to the classical figuration of the real. Neofiguration is an invocation of resemblance, but at the same time the flagrant proof of the disappearance of objects in their very representation: hyperreal. Therein objects shine in a sort of hyperresemblance (like history in contemporary cinema) that makes it so that fun­ damentally they no longer resemble anything, except the empty figure of resemblance, the empty form of representation. It is a question of life or death: these objects are no longer either living or deadly. That is why they are so exact, so minute, frozen in the state in which a brutal loss of the real would have seized them. All, but not only, those historical films whose very perfection is disquieting: Chinatown, Three Days of the Condor, Barry Lyndon, 1900, All the President’s Men, etc. One has the impression of it being a question of perfect remakes, of extraordinary montages that emerge more from a combinatory culture (or McLuhanesque mosaic), of large photo-, kino-, historicosynthesis machines, etc., rather than one of veritable films. Let’s understand each other: their quality is not in question. The problem is rather that in some sense we are left completely indifferent. Take The Last Picture Show: like me, you would have had to be sufficiently distracted to have thought it to be an original production from the 1950s: a very good film about the customs in and the atmo­ sphere of the American small town. Just a slight suspicion: it was a little too good, more in tune, better than the others, without the psychological, moral, and sentimental blotches of the films of that era. Stupefaction when one discovers that it is a 1970s film, perfect retro, purged, pure, the hyperrealist restitution of 1950s cinema. One talks of remaking silent films, those will also doubtlessly be better than those of the period. A whole genera­tion of films is emerging that will be to those one knew what the android is to man: marvelous artifacts, without weakness, pleas­ing simulacra that lack only the imaginary, and the hallucination inherent to cinema. Most of what we see today (the best) is al­ ready of this order. Barry Lyndon is the best example: one never did better, one will never do better in ... in what? Not in evok­ ing, not even in evoking, in simulating. All the toxic radiation has been filtered, all the ingredients are there, in precise doses, not a single error. 

Cool, cold pleasure, not even aesthetic in the strict sense: func­ tional pleasure, equational pleasure, pleasure of machination. One only has to dream of Visconti (Guepard, Senso, etc., which in certain respects make one think of Barry Lyndon) to grasp the difference, not only in style, but in the cinematographic act. In Visconti, there is meaning, history, a sensual rhetoric, dead time, a passionate game, not only in the historical content, but in the mise-en-scene. None of that in Kubrick, who manipulates his film like a chess player, who makes an operational scenario of history. And this does not return to the old opposition between the spirit of finesse and the spirit of geometry: that opposition still comes from the game and the stakes of meaning, whereas we are entering an era of films that in themselves no longer have meaning strictly speaking, an era of great synthesizing machines of varying geometry. 

Is there something of this already in Leone’s Westerns? Maybe. All the registers slide in that direction. Chinatown: it is the detec­tive movie renamed by laser. It is not really a question of perfec­ tion: technical perfection can be part of meaning, and in that case it is neither retro nor hyperrealist, it is an effect of art. Here, tech­ nical perfection is an effect of the model: it is one of the referential tactical values. In the absence of real syntax of meaning, one has nothing but the tactical values of a group in which are admirably combined, for example, the CIA as a mythological machine that does everything, Robert Redford as polyvalent star, social rela­ tions as a necessary reference to history, technical virtuosity as a necessary reference to cinema. 

The cinema and its trajectory: from the most fantastic or myth­ ical to the realistic and the hyperrealistic. 

The cinema in its current efforts is getting closer and closer, and with greater and greater perfection, to the absolute real, in its banality, its veracity, in its naked obviousness, in its boredom, and at the same time in its presumption, in its pretension to being the real, the immediate, the unsignified, which is the craziest of un­dertakings (similarly, functionalism’s pretension to designat­ing—design—the greatest degree of correspondence between the object and its function, and its use value, is a truly absurd enterprise); no culture has ever had toward its signs this naive and paranoid, puritan and terrorist vision. 

Terrorism is always that of The Real. 

Concurrently with this effort toward an absolute correspon­ dence with the real, cinema also approaches an absolute corre­ spondence with itself—and this is not contradictory: it is the very definition of the hyperreal. Hypotyposis and specularity. Cinema plagiarizes itself, recopies itself, remakes its classics, retroactivates its original myths, remakes the silent film more perfectly than the original, etc.: all of this is logical, the cinema is fascinated by itself as a lost object as much as it (and we) are fasci­ nated by the real as a lost referent. The cinema and the imaginary (the novelistic, the mythical, unreality, including the delirious use of its own technique) used to have a lively, dialectical, full, dramatic relation. The relation that is being formed today be­ tween the cinema and the real is an inverse, negative relation: it results from the loss of specificity of one and of the other. The cold collage, the cool promiscuity, the asexual nuptials of two cold media that evolve in an asymptotic line toward each other: the cinema attempting to abolish itself in the cinematographic (or televised) hyperreal. 

History is a strong myth, perhaps, along with the unconscious, the last great myth. It is a myth that at once subtended the possi­ bility of an “objective” enchainment of events and causes and the possibility of a narrative enchainment of discourse. The age of history, if one can call it that, is also the age of the novel. It is this fabulous character, the mythical energy of an event or of a narra­ tive, that today seems to be increasingly lost. Behind a performa­ tive and demonstrative logic: the obsession with historical fidelity, with a perfect rendering (as elsewhere the obsession with real time or with the minute quotidianeity of Jeanne Hilmann doing the dishes), this negative and implacable fidelity to the materiality of the past, to a particular scene of the past or of the present, to the restitution of an absolute simulacrum of the past all complicitous in this, and this is irreversible. Because cinema itself contributed to the disappearance of history, and to the ad­ vent of the archive. Photography and cinema contributed in large part to the secularization of history, to fixing it in its visible, “ob­jective” form at the expense of the myths that once traversed it. 

Today cinema can place all its talent, all its technology in the service of reanimating what it itself contributed to liquidating. It only resurrects ghosts, and it itself is lost therein. 

Note i. 

Fascism itself, the mystery of its appearance and of its collective energy, with which no interpretation has been able to come to grips (neither the Marxist one of political manipulation by dominant classes, nor the Reichian one of the sexual repression of the masses, nor the Deleuzian one of despotic paranoia), can already be inter­ preted as the “irrational” excess of mythic and political referential, the mad intensification of collective value (blood, race, people, etc.), the reinjection of death, of a “political aesthetic of death” at a time when the process of the disenchantment of value and of collective values, of the rational secularization and unidimensionalization of all life, of the operationalization of all social and individual life al­ ready makes itself strongly felt in the West. Yet again, everything seems to escape this catastrophe of value, this neutralization and pacification of life. Fascism is a resistance to this, even if it is a pro­ found, irrational, demented resistance, it would not have tapped into this massive energy if it hadn’t been a resistance to something much worse. Fascism’s cruelty, its terror is on the level of this other terror that is the confusion of the real and the rational, which deepened in the West, and it is a response to that. 

THE CHINA SYNDROME The fundamental stake is at the level of television and information. Just as the extermination of the Jews disap­ peared behind the televised event Holocaust—the cold medium of television having been simply substituted for the cold system of extermination one believed to be exorcising through it—so The China Syndrome is a great example of the supremacy of the televised event over the nuclear event which, itself, remains improbable and in some sense imaginary. 

Besides, the film shows this to be the case (without wanting to): that TV is present precisely where it happens is not coinci­dental, it is the intrusion of TV into the reactor that seems to give rise to the nuclear incident—because TV is like its anticipation and its model in the everyday universe: telefission of the real and of the real world; because TV and information in general are a form of catastrophe in the formal and topological sense Rene Thom gives the word: a radical qualitative change of a whole system. Or, rather, TV and the nuclear are of the same nature: behind the “hot” and negentropic concepts of energy and infor­ mation, they have the same power of deterrence as cold systems do. TV itself is also a nuclear process of chain reaction, but implo­ sive: it cools and neutralizes the meaning and the energy of events. Thus the nuclear, behind the presumed risk of explosion, that is to say of hot catastrophe, conceals a long, cold catastrophe, the universalization of a system of deterrence. 

At the end of the film again comes the second massive intru­ sion of the press and of TV that instigates the drama—the murder of the technical director by the Special Forces, a drama that sub­ stitutes for the nuclear catastrophe that will not occur. 

The homology of the nuclear and of television can be read directly in the images: nothing resembles the control and tele­ command headquarters of the nuclear power station more than TV studios, and the nuclear consoles are combined with those of the recording and broadcasting studios in the same imaginary. Thus everything takes place between these two poles: of the other “center,” that of the reactor, in principle the veritable heart of the matter, we will know nothing; it, like the real, has vanished and become illegible, and is at bottom unimportant in the film (when one attempts to suggest it to us, in its imminent catastrophe, it does not work on the imaginary plane: the drama unfolds on the screens and nowhere else). 

HarrisburgWatergate, and Network: such is the trilogy of The China Syndrome—an indissoluble trilogy in which one no longer knows which is the effect and which is the symptom: the ideolog­ ical argument (Watergate effect), isn’t it nothing but the symp­ tom of the nuclear (Harrisburg effect) or of the computer science model (Network effect)—the real (Harrisburg), isn’t it nothing but the symptom of the imaginary (Network and China Syn­ drome) or the opposite? Marvelous indifferentiation, ideal con­ stellation of simulation. Marvelous title, then, this China Syn­ drome, because the reversibility of symptoms and their con­ vergence in the same process constitute precisely what we call a syndrome—that it is Chinese adds the poetic and intellectual quality of a conundrum or supplication. 

Obsessive conjunction of The China Syndrome and Harrisburg. But is all that so involuntary? Without positing magical links between the simulacrum and the real, it is clear that the Syn­ drome is not a stranger to the “real” accident in Harrisburg, not according to a causal logic, but according to the relations of con­ tagion and silent analogy that link the real to models and to sim­ ulacra: to television’s induction of the nuclear into the film corre­ sponds, with a troubling obviousness, the film’s induction of the nuclear incident in Harrisburg. Strange precession of a film over the real, the most surprising that was given us to witness: the real corresponded point by point to the simulacrum, including the suspended, incomplete character of the catastrophe, which is es­ sential from the point of view of deterrence: the real arranged itself, in the image of the film, to produce a simulation of catas­ trophe. 

From there to reverse our logic and to see in The China Syn­drome the veritable event and in Harrisburg its simulacrum, there is only one step that must be cheerfully taken. Because it is via the same logic that, in the film, nuclear reality arises from the televi­ sion effect, and that in “reality” Harrisburg arises from the China Syndrome cinema effect. 

But The China Syndrome is also not the original prototype of Harrisburg, one is not the simulacrum of which the other would be the real: there are only simulacra, and Harrisburg is a sort of second-order simulation. There is certainly a chain reaction somewhere, and we will perhaps die of it, but this chain reaction is never that of the nuclear, it is that of simulacra and of the simula­ tion where all the energy of the real is effectively swallowed, no longer in a spectacular nuclear explosion, but in a secret and continuous implosion, and that today perhaps takes a more deathly turn than that of all the explosions that rock us. 

Because an explosion is always a promise, it is our hope: note how much, in the film as in Harrisburg, the whole world waits for something to blow up, for destruction to announce itself and remove us from this unnameable panic, from this panic of deter­ rence that it exercises in the invisible form of the nuclear. That the “heart” of the reactor at last reveals its hot power of destruc­ tion, that it reassures us about the presence of energy, albeit cata­ strophic, and bestows its spectacle on us. Because unhappiness is when there is no nuclear spectacle, no spectacle of nuclear energy in itself (Hiroshima is over), and it is for that reason that it is rejected—it would be perfectly accepted if it lent itself to spec­ tacle as previous forms of energy did. Parousia of catastrophe: substantial food for our messianic libido. 

But that is precisely what will never happen. What will happen will never again be the explosion, but the implosion. No more energy in its spectacular and pathetic form—all the romanticism of the explosion, which had so much charm, being at the same time that of revolution—but the cold energy of the simulacrum and of its distillation in homeopathic doses in the cold systems of information. 

What else do the media dream of besides creating the event simply by their presence? Everyone decries it, but everyone is secretly fascinated by this eventuality. Such is the logic of sim­ulacra, it is no longer that of divine predestination, it is that of the precession of models, but it is just as inexorable. And it is because of this that events no longer have meaning: it is not that they are insignificant in themselves, it is that they were preceded by the model, with which their processes only coincided. Thus it would have been marvelous to repeat the script for The China Syndrome at Fessenheim, during the visit offered to the journalists by the EDF (French Electric Company), to repeat on this occasion the accident linked to the magic eye, to the provocative presence of the media. Alas, nothing happened. And on the other hand yes! so powerful is the logic of simulacra: a week after, the unions discovered fissures in the reactors. Miracle of contagions, miracle of analogic chain reactions. 

Thus, the essence of the film is not in any respect the Watergate effect in the person of Jane Fonda, not in any respect TV as a means of exposing nuclear vices, but on the contrary TV as the twin orbit and twin chain reaction of the nuclear one. Besides, just at the end—and there the film is unrelenting in regard to its own argument—when Jane Fonda makes the truth explode di­ rectly (maximum Watergate effect), her image is juxtaposed with what will inexorably follow it and efface it on the screen: a com­ mercial of some kind. The Network effect goes far beyond the Watergate effect and spreads mysteriously into the Harrisburg effect, that is to say not into the nuclear threat, but into the simu­ lation of nuclear catastrophe. 

So, it is simulation that is effective, never the real. The simula­ tion of nuclear catastrophe is the strategic result of this generic and universal undertaking of deterrence: accustoming the people to the ideology and the discipline of absolute security—to the metaphysics of fission and fissure. To this end the fissure must be a fiction. A real catastrophe would delay things, it would con­ stitute a retrograde incident, of the explosive kind (without changing the course of things: did Hiroshima perceptibly delay, deter, the universal process of deterrence?). 

In the film, also, real fusion would be a bad argument: the film would regress to the level of a disaster movie—weak by defini­ tion, because it means returning things to their pure event. The China Syndrome, itself, finds its strength in filtering catastrophe, in the distillation of the nuclear specter through the omnipresent hertzian relays of information. It teaches us (once again without meaning to) that nuclear catastrophe does not occur, is not meant to happen, in the real either, any more than the atomic clash was at the dawning of the cold war. The equilibrium of terror rests on the eternal deferral of the atomic clash. The atom and the nuclear are made to be disseminated for deterrent ends, the power of catastrophe must, instead of stupidly exploding, be disseminated in homeopathic, molecular doses, in the continuous reservoirs of information. Therein lies the true contamination: never biolog­ ical and radioactive, but, rather, a mental destructuration through a mental strategy of catastrophe. 

If one looks carefully, the film introduces us to this mental strategy, and in going further, it even delivers a lesson diametri­ cally opposed to that of Watergate: if every strategy today is that of mental terror and of deterrence tied to the suspension and the eternal simulation of catastrophe, then the only means of mitigat­ ing this scenario would be to make the catastrophe arrive, to pro­ duce or to reproduce a real catastrophe. To which Nature is at times given: in its inspired moments, it is God who through his cataclysms unknots the equilibrium of terror in which humans are imprisoned. Closer to us, this is what terrorism is occupied with as well: making real, palpable violence surface in opposition to the invisible violence of security. Besides, therein lies terror­ism’s ambiguity. 

Note 

i. The incident at the nuclear reactor on Three Mile Island, which will shortly follow the release of the film

Safety Not Guaranteed

Advice is a form of Nostalgia – 
Dispensing it is a way of fishing The Past from The Disposal, 
Wiping it off, Painting-over The Ugly Parts 
and Recycling it for more than it's worth

Listen, I'm sorry about the noise level here. 

But we need to maintain cover. 

I'm certain I'm being recorded, I'm certain I'm being followed. 

Government agents maybe. Probably. 

But The Joke's on them. The technology I've invented can't be understood by the average mind. 

Just hold it in your holster for a second, okay? 

 I'm still making up my mind about you as a potential partner. 

I have to be absolutely certain that I can trust you before I include you in Certain Information. 

Well, I just don't wanna be jerked around. 

You know, jerking around is for jerks. 

Jeff :
What are you doing in The Lobby?

Arnau : 
Are they still in there?

Jeff : Yeah, that's The Point. She's still in there.

You go.

Arnau :

What do you mean I go?
 

Jeff :

I didn't want to hang out with these three.
I did it for you!
 

Arnau :

I don't think so. It's fine. You go.

Jeff :

Are you gay?

Arnau :

What? No...

Jeff :

Is that what this is?

Arnau :

No.

Jeff : I'm asking you seriously, I'm not judging you.
You don't know this about me, but I don't care about that stuff.
 

Arnau :

No, Jeff, I'm not gay, no.

Jeff : This is set up perfectly.
Do you not think she's hot?

Arnau :

You're acting like it's so easy.

Jeff :

Because it is so easy.

Arnau :

No, Jeff. 

It's easy for you, not for me.

Jeff :

Why not?
 
Arnau :

Because I'm not you, Jeff.
Do you just wanna see me get embarrassed?
 

Jeff :

No!
Arnau, come here, man. Come here.
Fucking come here.
I'm not pranking you, man.

You're not gonna get this opportunity very much longer.

You're Not Always Gonna Be 21, Young Man.
 

I promise you fucking that.
 

Arnau :

I don't know. I don't know what to...
How do I start?

Jeff : First of all, take these pedophile glasses off and don't wear these, they make you look like a weirdo, man.
I'm gonna put these on you. 

Holy shit!
Look at that killer.
 
That Dude right there crushes chicks.

I would take a photo of you and show you how good you looked right now, 'cause you look fantastic.

You look like a damn pilot.

Arnau :

Okay.

Like a cool pilot who drives jets.
Pop this shit.
 

Act like you've been There before.
You're not gonna be your age forever.

One day, you're gonna be The Old Dirtbag.
All by Yourself.

This is The Moment You Live for.

Arnau :

Okay.

Jeff :

Okay?
 

Arnau :

Okay.

Jeff : Hey, Halloween, you smoke?