on? The newspapers? All of them package and promote content that is edited from someone’s perspective, typically the preferred point-of-view or “interpretation” of the corporation that owns them.
Thus, all presentations of reality are suspect to interpretation and motive. Modern technology and media complicate this phenomenon because they have the ability to create a reality that is more real than real, artificially. Hollywood cinema often tries to combat popular presentations of actual events by crafting films like Network and Apocalypse Now which go behind-the-scenes, or is that the machinery, that fabricate popular perceptions of reality. When it comes to modern politics and warfare, Three Kings is an excellent example of an attempt to cut through the hyper-real presentation of modern warfare by exposing the politico-media fabrication and asking probing questions about our motives, justifications, and the consequences of what still equates on any level to human beings killing other human beings. Luckily, the film avoids preaching and does not provide any answers pertaining to these questions, but, it does ask them and asks us to question our own principles and strength of character in so doing.
This analysis will explore the film Three Kings to show the dilemma in modern culture of sorting the real from the unreal in a total information system where most mass media images are “fabricated” to portray one particular interpretation and as often to mask real motivations. While films like Three Kings offer a counter-balance to such “spun” presentations, modern media and political machinery often make this sorting process difficult and complex. Other films like Courage Under Fire and Wag The Dog will be used in order to help support the theory that modern politics and the use of technology create an information dilemma, or, if-you-will, a reality crisis for the individual exposed to them. A conclusion will ...