My thanks to Samuel R. Smith for his detailed and lively discussion of my post on NBK (although my post probably didn't merit such detail-- I'm grateful for it anyway). On the relative value of image over narrative (or vice-versa): when discussing this film with people who liked it (and enjoyment is a key term here), I find myself feeling old-fashioned, needing narrative and character and all those trite old things. I don't entirely agree that Stone has been "meticulous--almost painfully so--in his organization of images." Rather, the flurry of rear-projected (etc.) images seem to me to fall in certain categories but to me mobilized with little specific discrimination at the great majority of points. Hitler and Auschwitz, modern atrocities; animals killing or humping; TV banalities (the Cleavers, the Coke ad), etc. I see the categories, but the details become a blurr. I agree this large-scale use of this kind of technique is rather new for a full-length feature film. But I don't see this in itself as any great virtue, possibly because it wasn't enough for me to make up for other more traditional deficiencies. I'm fully aware of the connotations of "pastiche," and one of the things that botheres me about NBK is the way it seems like somebody's bone- headed idea of postmodernism--e.g., the media floods us with images which we absorb, etc. I DO find NBK's imagery "tossed together willy-nilly," as Smith says, and while I also find that this play of images fails to "mirror [any] deeper, richer meaning," this isn't entirely my complaint. If there is some meaning or point, I find it so blunt as to hardly be worth stating. As Smith says, the style itself isn't new, but the full-scale deployment is. (Odd how one ends up talking about the film in para-military terms--"deployment," "mobilization"--admittedly my terms, no one else's.) I do not find the film's commentary on the media "powerful." It's this I find perhaps the most hackneyed and unsophisticated. This relates directly to my largest argument about the film, which Mr. Smith didn't like or didn't pay much attention to: that the film is not a critique, that there is no critical distance, that the violence is deployed as much for joke-y pleasure as anything else, and that there's no distance between what's ostensibly being criticized and the critique. I take this failure of critique, this collapse, as being *quite* postmodern. It is precisely a glorification of violence, of the type we're very familiar with, from Terminator to Tarantino. Whether the tongue is firmly in the cheek or not seems to me to make little difference. It's not that I see such violence as reprehensible or morally dangerous-- I couldn't care less. What's of interest to me is the way the purported moral point-of-view functions as an excuse to display the violence, which certainly goes back at least to the gangster films of the '30's, but the moral point-of-view becomes progressively hollowed out. d I really don't think NBK is a parody of anything. No, the viewer doesn't miss the point: when it's written in ALL CAPS in Stone's style, how could anyone miss it? But what point is this point supposed to have? That's what I don't get. (Perhaps my response is pure thick-headedness on my part. I can only hope my own stupidity can lead to some helpful discussion/clarification.) When TV has become what it's become, you can't really parody it. I firmly believe that TV is insult-proof, because as long as people tune in, parody is simply beside the point. (And here my inspirations are Slotterdijk's Critique of Cynical Reason and a brief talk on dramaturgy given by playwright David Hare back in the late '70's.) I'm afraid I too have gone on too long, and perhaps I've more stated a personal viewpoint than given critical arguments, but I've tried to ground my personal reactions in certain critical positions which can be debated. My boredom and annoyance over the film is for me not very open to debate. It's just a fact. But *why* I took it that way and what the implications of the film are--those are critical questions that are of more general interest. Very truly, Edward R. O'Neill