sound of subway gears mashinggrating&groaning to disko percussive explosions, skreams hoarse chants of in-coherency 2 imagebeat of tanks, missile silos Buddhist demons deformed bodies surgical operations: audience paralyzed by mix of sound and image, sparks clanging off handcrashed sheet metal oversized industrial strength spr-ings: Momentary exorcising of obsessivecultural neuroses, sensory overload in-tentions on their part? Or, a condemnation that reenacts what is being condemned? What func-tion these images of multimutilated-mutated bodies, militaristic imagery? Commentary, ex-orcism, critique? Or maybe also, simple reduplicationof technoviolence as esthetic assault on spectator-participant.
the esthetics of alienation
Does this temporarily wake us up to the dai-ly horror around us that we neutralize with perceptual and psychologicalideological armor-ing (see Wilhelm Reich), or might it actually be putting us right back to sleep, moreasleep, more repressed than ever...
psychological immunization techniques
What functions, these images of disaster destruction mutation & mutilation? Do they attempt to remind us of what we already know, what we fear and in fearing, distance ourselves from...? Butisit also their function to call up these anxietyfears of dismemberment mutilation and death by modern technological living only to repress them, silence them more severely and securely. ultimately the conception of the whole world as a casualty of nuclear testing and nuclear warfare-is the most ominous of all the notions with which science fiction films deal. Besides these new anx-ieties about physical disaster, the prospect of universal mutilation and even annihilation, the science fiction films reflect powerful anxieties about the condition of the in-dividual psyche; [they...may also be describ-ed as a popular mythology for The contemporary negative magination about the imper-sonal. The image derives most of its power from a sup plementary and historical anx ely, also not experienced consciously by most people, about the depersonalizing conditions of modern urban For argam there isce historically spectable Iwish which intensites the anne ty.... collective incineration and extinction which could come at any time, virtually without warning.