Additionally, since we can no longer discriminate between cinematic images and
the real thing due to recent technological advances that deceive our senses, Brean and
Motss’s fictitious conflict will not be the first or last time that war follows a carefully
orchestrated script. As Baudrillard highlights in The Intelligence of Evil in the context of
the Gulf War,
[w]hat we are watching as we sit paralysed in our fold-down seats isn’t
‘like a film’;; it is a film. With a script, a screenplay, that has to be followed
unswervingly. The casting and the technical and financial resources have
all been meticulously scheduled: these are professionals at work.
Including control of the distribution channels. In the end, operational war
becomes an enormous special effect; cinema becomes the paradigm of
warfare, and we imagine it as ’real’, whereas it is merely the mirror of its
cinematic being (124)
Asserting that cinematic hyper-reality has totally engulfed the real, Baudrillard
leaves the reader with the following conclusion: “It’s the same with the cinema: the films
produced today are merely the visible allegory of the cinematic form that has taken over
everything-social and political life, the landscape, war, etc.” (The Intelligence of Evil
125).
Like reality and morality, the writing of history is now part of the larger framework
of the omnipresent universe of simulation. For Baudrillard, not only are we doomed to
experience non-events that transpire on a quotidian basis, but we also incessantly relive
them in our collective imagination generations later when nothing else remains besides
a contrived image. Similar to the protagonist Brean in Wag the Dog, Baudrillard realizes
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