Page 420
Watkins and crowd preparing scene for
The Journey
(1987).
Production still by Sylvia de Swaan.
something destructive which one has to simply pluck out, like plucking out the core of a malignancy. Here the core is not a lump. It's got obscene roots going everywhere now. And the moment you understand that, you have to start dealing with why people are not reacting. And
that
leads to why people know so little.
We have to deal with the way we are receiving our information (and our entertainment, because the two are linked together) and with how that process is intricately interwoven into the quality of life. We all know this in theory, but we never move on it. We just go on letting it happen, without any kind of public reflexivity, which is really what I'm talking about: public participation in the processing of information.
I suppose one way of saying it is that I think the process I'm trying to get going in this film is one model, just one, of the kinds of ways in which I think the media should be working with the public. There should be a psychological and intellectual relationship, a working relationship, between the media and the public, not simply a closed masonic secret language coming from one kind of power source to the receiving public who don't quite understand the language of manipulation. This is
totally undemocratic
.
As things are, the media is a fantastic metaphor. The United States fires off nuclear missiles, including the MX missiles they test, from the