XV.

It fascinates me that we as a culture cannot grasp reality better than when it is given to us as entertainment. Hence the tendency for Hollywood to take subjects so current as possible - yet these are in no way documentaries. The purely imaginative is gaining on reality. The quantum leap came, I suppose, with the trend of "re-inventing" ancient material in contemporary settings. Suddenly fiction was knocking on reality's bedroom door. The issue at hand is not merely that we begin more and more to perceive reality - our friends, family, and the man at the depanneur - as fiction, but that reality begin to behave more and more like fiction: The fictitious has embedded itself into the collective unconscious, making us act on reality in the ways we used to interpret the brilliance of Mr. Holmes or the cruelty of Dr. Caligari. We are all, now in a sense more urgent than mere poetry, actors in the teatrum mundi. The events of the real hardly have time to unfold before the captains of industry breathes down its neck...luring it with the promise of being more, of being infinite. Was the wars in Iraq or Afghanistan anything else to us than fables when they came to us through a never-ceasing continuum of images?
A sad consequence of the freedom of the press...unlimited access on all areas were supposed to bring us closer to Truth. We were never further from it than now. Facts turn into fiction and vice versa; it doesn't matter anymore. The plurality of images only means that we can never tie them together to a coherent whole. Perhaps we should just resign ourselves to living the attitudes of the silver screen?
Some might say "Let us turn then to the documentaries in our search for Truth"; look at the structure, the narrative, listen to the score, notice the aestheticism of the camera angles...and tell me frankly if this is anymore than a "realized" fable. When did the population discover that it was in fact at war? When it reared its ugly head, disguised as topos, in the visual recreations of art.
The imaginative has seduced the real, as was always its goal. The new world order consists simply of this, a reality that has finally and irreducibly moved beyond our grasp - only the residual remains.