Rob i n M ac kay
Image I nvas i o n
What I 'll present here is a personal memoir with a very direct relation to the
Cold War and its images, both those d rawn from dystopian tictions and those
stemming from efforts on the part of both the U K government and its critics
in the late 1970s and early 198os to prepare the public for nuclear Armaged don.
The benign propaganda fed to me as a child in the early 8os by my anti -nu
clear-campaigning parents was a perfect i ntroduction to nihilism. I 'm not sure
of the intended effect of encouraging a child otherwise diligently shielded from
violent images (especially the then newly- i m ported American TV shows) to
watch tilms such as Threads, The Day After. and When the Wind Blows-visions
of pre-nuclear terror and post- nuclear devastation which supplemented the
ominous warnings of the Xeroxed pam p hlets often scattered about the house.
both anti-nuclear campaign tracts and helpful state advisories on the appropriate
action to be taken in the event of a n uclear attack. Its actual effect was to
focus my imagination on those precious m i nutes after the warning was sounded,
Now .. ... ....
M .,- ,.._.ion Is -.oll') oa 1lw ral._ -. ,_.
liculul) lior Ille lihl ltKI dayo Md ....IS aAcf IA alllldt. ....
lhr 1•b011 4aafrt' cauld bc cfilil:al. Tu provide ._ you sllollld
lllil 111 - ,.,..,.. lllit .... tllo4ld be lllllck - lillod ... ...
-U 1o lfthl 1hc rMiallOL 1111 o!Nuld be l1ui11 •••)' r.* •"* walla.
.... .. .... .... :
t. MUc 1 "lauMo" •;* .... � l&Un I.- -• llbooe or
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� al ... « llooes al -111 or sud - "' lloob. or dll.... - - ,... .. " ,_ "'•· .... llllCbor ..... ....
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"Now the Inner Refuge' ... pages from Protect and Survive pamphlet. UK government, 1980.
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Threads ( B BC. 1984 )
an ultimate holiday during which all rule and law would be null and void, the
conventions and strictures of society would crumble, nothing would matter any
more, and everything would be permitted: schoolmates who taunted me every
day could be dispatched with the sharpest kitchen knife, the sweet shop could
be raided with impunity, we could set huge fires to burn down school and home
alike ... and so much more, as quickly as possible, while the siren wailed, in those
precious minutes before the bomb dropped.
The absoluteness of the threat relativized everything: and when environ
mental crisis began to loom in the gos, with increasingly cataclysmic scenarios
mooted, I suspect I was not the only 70s baby for whom the sentiments of
doom and visions of a devastated planet were familiar and comfortingly bleak.
The Cold War, that nebulous awareness of the g reat power poised for
attack elsewhere, unknown and alien, a nd its threatened punctual incursion
into reality-the Bomb-heralded transcendent objects. Yet these gargantuan
abstractions immanently infused everyday life with dread ... and surreptitious
nihilistic thrills. And they did so through cultural forms that triggered, fast-for
warded, and dramatized the latent threat into transformed images of the
everyday world-X-rays penetrating the surface of normality to set aglow the
skeletal lineaments of its immanent, and imminent, ruin. The more compellingly
the virtuality was imaged, the more its psychic effects had already taken hold.
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Publicity still (a devastated New York) for Invasion USA (American Pictures Corp. , 1952) .
This miscarried domestic propaganda perpetrated on me by my leftist anti-Amer
ican parents mirrored earlier efforts 'on the other side', as it were. to mobilise
Americans against the communist threat.
The Alfred E. Green movie Invasion USA (1952) , with its promise to 'scare
the pants off you', on one level serves as a straightforward piece of ideological
programming -revealing the horror of a full-scale invasion (by an unnamed but
obviously Soviet army) so as to remind the American populace of their respon
sibilities as citizens. At the same time it is a piece of entertainment in which
we get to thrill to the spectacle of destruction and chaos. Let's take a look at
some of the overwhelmingly visual promises the trailer makes to its audience:
An electrifying look into the enemy's plan of conquest!
See New York Disappear!
See Seattle Blasted!
See San Francisco in flames!
See paratroops take over the capital!
r
1
----
• IT WILL SCAR E TH E
PANTS OFF YO U I "
• • • •
Hedda Hopper
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Poster for Invasion USA . 1952.
In addition to these promises of spectacular satisfaction , thoug h , Invasion USA
exhibits a reflexive awareness of cinema 's ideolog ical functioning as a form of
collective dream or hypnosis, and as inception.
A cross-section of American society meet in a New York bar. all full of
gripes and grumbles about their lives, and more interested in the next beer
than in the vagaries of international politics. They pay lip service to the good
fight against the evils of communism . but for them the threat is far away, an d
they don 't appreciate its being used as an alibi by the government to make
additional demands on them: price controls. commandeering of factories for
military production . high taxes-each of them has a complaint.
A mysterious customer who has been listening in on their conversation,
M r Ohman (he is lugubrious. he has a strange accent, and. worst of all. he is
reading a book; he describes himself gnomically as a 'forecaster') berates them
for wanting it both ways: they want to be defended from the communist threat .
but they also want to retain their easy lifestyles and to maximize their individual
liberty and freedom from government predations; they expect the protection
of the nation , but they are unwilling to go out of their way to help the state.
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Dan O' Herlihy as the mysterious M r. Ohman.
Ohman goes on to issue a sardonic warning to them about their complacency:
Mr. Ohman: Yes. I'm against [war] . I think America wants new leadership [ ... ]
I suggest a wizard, like Merlin, who could kill his enemies by wishing them dead.
That's the way we'd like to beat communism now. The manufacturer wants
more war orders. and lower taxes. Labor wants more consumable products, and
a 30-hour week. The college boy wants a stronger army, and a deferment for
himself. The businessman wants a stronger Air Force, and a new Cadillac. The
housewife wants security, and a new dishwasher. Everyone wants a stronger
America, and we all want the same man to pay for it. George. Let George do it.
Tractor Manufacturer: I disagree with you-I don't want to let George do it !
Mr. Ohman: Then you must be the exception?
Tractor Manufacturer: No- I'm George !
Mr. Ohman: A very good joke, but a war is not won with jokes. To win a war. a
nation must concentrate.
DiStracting the assembl ed audience from Ohman's cryptic hectoring, the TV
nev..is row begins to report the breaching of US borders by an unknown air force.
As the scale of the invasion rapidly escalates and US power bases are destroyed
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As Carla Sanford ( Peggie Castle) plummets to her doom . the nightmare scenario is
revealed to be the product of Ohman's collective hypnosis.
one by one. transfixed by increasi ngly horrendous d ispatches. the bar-room
acquaintances are galvanized into action ; they separate and return to their
respective lives finally determined to do their bit for the now all-too- real struggle
against the red terror-but one by one their efforts founder: it is too late .
The culmination of the action comes when the dame of the piece. assaulted
by one of the boorish . drunken foreign troopers who have now entered the city,
jumps from a high window to her death ... . But in a fi na l revelation, the whole
catastrophic scenario is revealed to have been a collective hallucination, its
accelerated collage of violent images reced ing back i nto the cognac glass that
M r. O hman had been hypnotically swirling before them . N ow he is gone, and
they stand shell -shocked at the visions they have shared .
And truly, the trance has been an awakening-the hypnotism of the image
conjured onto the TV screen by O hman 's sorcery had been necessary in order
for them to appreciate that the apparently distant threat of communism was
in fact already effectively in their midst, that the war was a l ready here.
The movie ends with the cast spring ing into action, determined to avoid t h e
fictional scenario they have witnessed , to do all they can for the quotidian fig ht
for freedom before the nightmare becomes reality-ironically, they finally realise
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Footage of 'enemy' paratroops. in Invasion USA.
that. in order to stave off com m u n i s m , t hey must to put aside their individual
interests and align themselves with state i m pe ratives.
Invasion USA is thus a movie that thematises its own ideological function ,
using the small screen of the T V as a d iegetic deputy for its own enterprise of
image-hypnosis. But w hat is additionally i nteresting here is that all of its unprece
dentedly graphic violent images of the enemy war machine in action, the entirety
of the dramatic destruction of the US. was pasted together from real footage of
US forces i n action: that is, i n order to bring the latent peril spectacularly to life,
the filmmakers drew on the media made available to them by the state. At one
point. when this thrifty technique threatens to become overly conspicuous to the
audience. the screenwriter even introduces the conceit that the invading army,
now closing in on the White H ouse and the Pentagon, have clothed themselves
in American uniforms as a deceptive tactical measure-a plan that. in one of
the most memorable scenes of the movie, is thwa rted by an attentive American
guard as one of the invadi ng troops attem pts to pass u ndetected:
- Halt, who goes there ?
- Com/XlnY B, von hundred eighty-sird Infantry.
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- 183rd, tha t 's an Illinois outfit, ain 't it ?
- Yezz... . Yezz, Zhicago Illinois.
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- D'you ever go see the Cubs play?
- Cubs . [confu sed] . . a cub iz a young enimal, a bear.
. .
.
[ Blast-out ensues]
The dissimulati on, of course, is in fact i n the other d i rection : it is the reality of
the violence of the US war machine that is got u p i n Soviet d rag in order to
d ramatize, in heated images, the unknowable a n d i mageless coldness of the
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alien threat.
Immanent Cold War d read feeds, a n d feeds o n , its virtual cinematic culmi
nation, its simulated irruption i nto reality through the image: the transcendent
unknown is projected into speculative scenarios by cobbling together resources
drawn from the domestic imaginary, the relation to the outside assembled from
the image-banks available on the inside.
*
Today, the inhuman machine that looms over us, i n certai n respects taking up
the vacated place of Cold War menace, produces its own cinema-or rather,
various forms of machinema: fro m d rone footage to awe-i nspiring data vis
ualisations to cognitively intractable i mage overload (even the tumblr sublime
can provoke dread) . Whether it concerns d istant threats or intimate psyc hi c
pathologies, the sense of i m ma nent t h reat here is both more diffuse and more
ubiquitous: What to do with these i mages, which a re not just seductive calls to
the imaginary but also sig ns, icons, signals, false news, memes, machinic triggers,
the asignifiant semiotic arsenal of a n i m ma nentized war? And what are they
doing with us? Not images of a pocalypse but a n image-apocalypse.
Often these images are re-presented pointedly to us in contemporary art in
order that they might be deli berately contemplated rather than passively pro. cessed . In this register, which attem pts at once to strip them of their machinic
function and to concentrate our minds on it, they a re rendered hypnotic in a
new way; ripped out of the Google search gallery and cooled by the ice-white
of real gallery walls, they become images once again , a nd are rendered newly
unfamiliar-perhaps i n the hope that spending slow time in their company will
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galvanize us agai nst t h e i mmanent t h reat . shake us out of our zapping com pla
cency. Even when , instea d , a rtworks instead attempt to plug directly into the
accelerated circu its of the conte mporary i mage-worl d , decanting a n indigestible
torrent of i magery i nto the g a l lery, the intention is sti l l , i nvariably, i n framing
them in this unfamiliar context . to cool it. The aim is to frame and evaluate the
threat. whether by forcing the i mages back into an indexical mode in order to
cou nteract the u ncontrollable sliding of u n moored i mages flush to the neural
substrate (this is sti l l a n i mage of something that matters ) or by presenting their
unmanageable multiplicity as such (something that matters is happening with the
image) . I ndeed . many a rt ists . w hether i n person or i n their works or bot h , if not
elevating themselves to t h e level of a saviour Merl i n , affect the prog nosticatory
tone of a M r. Ohman, glancing u p lugu briously from his cog nac and his weig hty
reading matter to offer h i s services: it is already happening, everywhere. to all
of you ... but you will need me to show you-I will use the trickery, the hypnosis
of images to help you see the truth... . But this time, rather than whipping u p an
ersatz spectacle of destruction, what we supposedly need is for images to be
arrested in order for their mean i ng to be patiently assessed and extracted . To
win the war against images, with images, a nation must concentrate.
What image of knowledge and of the object of knowledge does this i mply?
Images are always specific. and for an image (even one that is already a multiplic
ity) to stand for a tra nscendent u n known d iffused immanently i nto genera l ized
dread requ i res the complicity of the viewer. You a re only seeing one piece of
the puzzle, extracted fro m its functional role in a neuro- mach inic network: its
mode of presentation solicits you to conj u re up the sublime horror of the whole:
but you have to agree to be ed ified i n this way-and indeed , despite its air of
discursive overcom p l icati o n , to e nter i nto the context of contemporary a rt is
largely to submit to this simple synechdochic mesmeric protocol .
Today the stock footag e conti n u a l ly c h u rned out by t h e mach ine itself-of
which we o u rselves a re effectively s ervo m otors-is too easily passed off,
from inside the gal lery, as the image of a n a l ien i nvasion , and thril led at (with
due gravitas) a s such: but it doesn't seem like we have come so far from the
clunky conceits of Invasion USA; which i s all the more problematic g iven that
the machine that th reatens us today is n ot just contingently, but i ntrinsica l ly
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unimageable. making such a mode of i n d i rect a n d col l usive representation
increasingly obsolete.
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This is how art proposes itself as the practice of mak i ng images that i mage
the yet-to-be-known. the knowledge-bomb that has not yet exploded but whose
immanent latency must be crystallised i nto a galva n ising proposition.
Ohman's hot images reveal the truth of the a l l too easily ignored latent
threat-the alien monster- by rendering it t h rou g h fou nd i mages as a violent
fiction of assault. Today the cooling of images seeks to reveal the truth of the
all too easily ignored Cold World that l ies behind the apparent (social , sexual,
informational. futural. memetic) hotness of the image a pocalypse: that unknown
agent that coldly manipulates the fevered participatory creation of a constantly
evolving image culture. delegating its operations to the steely prowl of algo
rithms and the calculative capture of attention- a n equally a l ien , equally cold
creature. But ultimately this is about encountering ourselves as machine parts,
as programmable neurobots as passively obedient to the black box of the digital
media machine as the communist populace depicted in Cold War cautionary
tales are to the commandments of their red masters.
I n Invasion USA the hot shock of violent hypnotic i mages leverages citizens
out of their own complacency about. and complicity i n , an individualism t hat has
gone too far-calling citizens to subordinate themselves to the state in order
to hold communism at boy. I n the cooling of machinematic or algorithmically
distributed images in contemporary art, a dual purpose is served : art at once
wants to reinstate the referential power of the i mage and its delivery of meaning:
disconnected from its cybernetic circuits, this is, after all. an i mage of something,
and in the context of art its indexical relation can be recemented; but at the same
time, it wants this to constitute a revelation of our everyday alienation and com
placency: to mesmerise u s s o as t o offer us another chance once we w a l k out of
the gallery door; to persuade us, before it 's too late, that the i mmanent apocalypse
today is an extinction of the human and of the h u ma n ability to engage properly or
meaning fully with images. Not an extinction i n the heat of the n uclear blast or in
the slow death of radiation sickness. but an extinction from within, as human and
social i nteraction itself is decanted into a system of control and circulation that
machines i nd ividuality and alienates the subject. I f this threat is something like a
transcendent ( non-)object. though, it is one that is already inside: we are face to
face with what Kant called the t ra nscendental subject: the thing that thinks for
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me but to which ' I ' have no experiential access. a thing which today is formatted
by and plugged into cybernetic systems of control.
One might therefore wonder a bout this effort to use hypnosis to bring us
back to ou rselves, to awa ken us from our complacency in order that we might
take up civil arms against the immanent threat : for rather than unvei ling the real
of the image. as it claims. it simply presents us with a hypnotic collage that offers
the thrill of the real. itself a med ia a rtefact and a form of benign manipulation,
innocently u nselfconsciou s about its own ideological and indeed economic
function , and liable to fail or m isfire in its ethical mission to use a privileged
mode of vision to save the children of the Cold World from the image enemy.
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An electrifying look into the enemy's plan of conquest!
See subjectivity disappear!
See agency and identity blasted!
See liberalism in flames!
See algorithms take over the capital!