Pretend We’re Dead: Capitalist Monsters in American Pop Culture

Newitz, Annalee. Pretend We’re Dead: Capitalist Monsters in American Pop Culture. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006.

Reviewed by Janice M. Bogstad, SFRA Review #285 (Spring 2008): pp. 21-22.[1]

Bogstad notes that in the next to last chapter of the book Newitz

takes on cyberspace and AI as subsuming the human, starting with Logan’s Run and moving on to The Matrix. Her focus here is the mass media portrayed through the media — that is, “mass media which swallow up the people who consume it.” This discussion [...] about the way that media representations are embraced by their audiences so that they try to become what they see links both machine control of humans as in Logan and Matrix, where supercomputers literally control the human body, to the mediated self-reflexive gesture found in such films as Pleasantville (a comment on 1950s television defining the family for its viewers) to The Truman Show, which attempts to create a candid, reality-television feel with a person who does not know he is a character being viewed by millions.

RDE, finishing, 13Jan21