An assassination attempt so fake that it had to be real
The news were extraordinarily quick to report on the attempted assassination of Donald Trump at Butler’s showgrounds, highlighting the critical security lapses that had taken place when the gunman — flagged as suspicious — managed to climb onto a warehouse roof and fire shots towards the 45th president of the United States. Despite extensive security, the would-be assassin was not apprehended in time, resulting in Trump’s relatively minor injury when compared to the death of the retired volunteer firefighter shielding his family. The Secret Service ultimately neutralised the gunman, but it was said the event exposed significant flaws in security protocols, leaving many questions about how such a breach occurred.
Seeing the announcement blink up on my smartphone that morning — the announcement that regaled in as few as ten words that Trump had been attacked at a rally in Pennsylvania — I immediately knew the action sequence of the attempted assassination would be so tremendously disappointing that I’d might as well put on a James Bond film instead. As such, GoldenEye is a 1995 James Bond film which follows Bond as he tries to stop ex-MI6 agent Alec Trevelyan from using the GoldenEye satellite weapon to trigger a global financial meltdown which is ironic in retrospect considering we’d achieve all that without the use of a satellite weapon come 2008.
Sitting down to watch a film like GoldenEye in the aftermath of an attempted assassination is particularly fascinating once you’ve gone and filtered your brain through the schizoanalytic of Instagram and — I don’t know — had few puffs on a cherry flavoured vape pen? Sitting there I knew Donald Trump had been shot at and what’s more I knew I needed to leave it until morning to catch up on the news via Instagram reels if only to garner a real picture of the event — to understand it’s impact on the culture in the most significant way. In many regards I was holding off reading about the event in realtime by edging myself closer to the reality of the situation, edging myself closer to the orgasm of images that would no doubt explode by lunch time that very next day. Having since experienced the conspiracy brainrot of each mythic reel pull first-hand I’ve come to realise how the seventeenth instalment in the James Bond series is most definitely an expression of popcorn cinema whose narrative exemplifies the surreptitious method of soft disclosure; defined here as the gradual release of sensitive or controversial information by governments or organisations.
More often than not, this form of disclosure involves leaking bits of information through various media to introduce concepts subtly; helping to acclimate the public and prevent panic or as a taxi driver once told me, exactly the kind of thing they do in the Fast and Furious films — right? — with all those silly narratives designed for cosying us up to the ubiquitous intensity of surveillance capitalism. Likewise, through the keyholes of soft disclosure we glimpse a reality defined in part by advanced technologies, covert operations, and those extraterrestrials who aren’t really aliens but they are demons — and they run Hollywood.
In less hyperbolic but certainly more significant ways GoldenEye introduced a generation of moviegoers to ideas about satellite-based weapons and the Electromagnetic Pulse (EMP) effects which had resulted from those discoveries made after the use of nuclear weapons.
“GoldenEye operates via a detonation above the atmosphere,” Q explains to Bond, “creating a pulse — a radiation surge that destroys everything with an electronic circuit. Hiroshima and Nagasaki were just the start.” Of course, this line suggests — maybe even discloses — how our understanding and potential weaponisation of an electromagnetic pulse began with those observations made following the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki during World War II.
It appears as if these bombings not only highlighted the destructive power of nuclear explosions to the world but also led to subsequent research which revealed that such explosions could also generate EMPs, leading to the development of EMP-based weapons like the GoldenEye satellite in the film. Consequently, GoldenEye’s connection to real historical events adds a layer of realism and plausibility to the fictional narrative, grounding the science fiction elements in actual scientific and historical facts.
Let’s not forget that hyperreality is defined in part by the way this kind of grounded fiction quickly becomes grounded reality. In his essay ‘The Evil Demon of Images,’ Jean Baudrillard discusses the 1983 television film, The Day After. In this essay, Baudrillard explores how the film simulates the reality of a nuclear catastrophe and how the media representations of such events shape public perception. He argues that the film does not just depict a potential future disaster but also serves as a hyperreal image that can alter the way people understand and react to the concept of nuclear war. Likewise, in the wake of this attempted assassination, it is profoundly disturbing how hyperreal conceptions of armed gunmen have altered the way people react to political violence — let alone the death of a retired firefighter shielding his family.
Furthermore, Baudrillard also wrote about Stanley Kubrick's film Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964), where Dr. Strangelove was used as an example of how the media and cultural representations of nuclear war transform the reality of such an event into a spectacle. Baudrillard rightly argues that Kubrick's film — with its dark humour and satirical approach — turns the unimaginable horrors of nuclear conflict into a hyperreal simulation, blurring the lines between fiction and reality. What’s more, Baudrillard illustrates how the representation of catastrophic events in media can lead to a desensitisation and a detachment from the actual implications of those events in an analysis that aligns with a broader critique of how media and simulations dominate contemporary society, creating a reality where images and signs replace direct experiences and authentic events.
Prescience is perhaps the creepiest form of entertainment which is why we had another tremendously entertaining example of nuclear genocide this year which — as to be expected these days — set off the terminally online intellectual vanguard when Amazon’s adaptation of the Fallout franchise presented capitalism in a way that seemed incompatible with Marxist teachings when the series presented a world which sought disaster when mutually assured destruction became — well — good for business. All fairly predictable stuff to those Baudrillardians who had read Fatal Strategies — or for those of us who had rotted our brains so much on the conspiracy side of Instagram that it all started to sound like soft disclosure to us.
Through an extravagant theory-fiction that once seemed very outlandish and materially very distant — but subsequently rendered really quite banal in the end — Baudrillard suggests that the televisual participates in a larger system of simulations that replace and redefine reality, making it difficult to distinguish between what is real and what is a mere representation, a phenomenon of the televisual intensified by the hyperreality of the perpetual scroll; a phenomenon of doomscrolling so hotly contested and miserably poured over today only because we are already so far beyond it. After all, in more ways than we might care to accept the eschatological condition that doomscrolling pertains to was long ago fully-accomplished. And what’s worse is perhaps the degree in which we’ve actually come to enjoy it.
As for a good case in point of simulations dominating direct experiences scroll no further than the attempted assassination of Donald Trump then which seemed so fake that it had to be real. ‘A butterfly can flap its wings in Peking, and in Central Park, you get rain instead of sunshine.’ Explains Jeff Goldblum in Jurassic Park, and as it turns out, a single-bullet fired from a roof-top in Pennsylvania triggers the metamorphosis of social media users into ballistics experts. In the end it turns out hyperreality is why gunshots sound less scary in real-life. The bullets sound so disappointing when compared to James Bond’s shoot out in a Soviet chemical weapons facility, don’t they? And then there’s the blood — just how it looks on WWE.
From the fist pump to the stars and stripes it is in equal parts frightening as it is hilarious that every moment of everyday has become a picture perfect snapshot for history to contend with. No doubt if the assassination attempt was tomorrow revealed as a scam then it would change absolutely nothing about the way the spectacle of the event played out having already played out in our minds as bad cinema. What has been disclosed on a cultural level however is what’s already been floating in the fluorinated water for a long time now and it’s the fact that reality and its performance have become indistinguishable from one another to the point where even the fourth estate — our once great and powerful mediators of information reality — are today left asking why the Secret Service don’t move as spectacularly as Gerard Butler in Olympus Has Fallen.
Cover photo by Gage Skidmore