That 70's Show

After the fantastic opening shot, The Conversation flails in outdated technology and hair and eyeglasses combinations. When it ventures toward the timeless, in the form of a sad sack main character named Harry Caul, the film's emotional potency increases. Still, The Conversation is anti-drama; a hermetic study of a single, loveless man who wants only to pass through life unnoticed. Under Coppola's magnifying glass gaze, Gene Hackman portrays a man who acts only when no one is looking. Harry Caul is perpetually uncomfortable around people. You get the impression he can only relax when he is alone. He is devoutly religious and will only reveal himself to a faintly lit lattice slot in a church confession booth where hopes there is an attentive priest on the other side. Caul descends into paranoia by the film's conclusion and one is left with the feeling that he is lost forever by the time he guts his apartment trying to find a bug recording his every sound.

this week's blog

I was going 2 write a post abt our reading assignment for this week, but m rly sorry i spent the whole time on fb lol

"War is no longer what it used to be..."

Baudrillard's critique of the handling of the Gulf War reminds of Marshall McLuhan's evisceration of the televised 1976 Presidential Debates.

"In this forum of war which is the Gulf, everything is hidden: the planes are hidden, the tanks are buried, Israel plays dead, the images are censored and all information is blockaded in the desert: only TV functions as a medium without a message, giving at last the image of pure television."
-Gulf War Did Not Take Place, pg. 63

Baudrillard writes that the war did not live up to the scale and media coverage of previous wars. It seems to me that Baudrillard's experience of the Gulf War is primarily through television. In his essay he doesn't complain about how the war was written about in the press - his observations sound solely derived through McLuhan's ultimate cool medium. This is why the two philosophers remind me of each other.