Star Wars’ was a sell-out from the start, and that is just about the only remarkable thing about this depressingly mediocre franchise. Mark Fisher Read Quote
The moment that most fascinated me in Ursula Le Guin’s ‘The Lathe of Heaven’ was its descriptions of times of transition from one reality to another. Mark Fisher Read Quote
Crucially, Marxist atheism is only achieved once the theological critique of capitalism is completed. This is what separates Marxist atheism from the gliberal platitudes of the likes of Nick Cohen, who proclaim secularism while remaining attached to the theology of capital (liberal commonsense). Mark Fisher Read Quote
Christopher Nolan’s ‘The Prestige’ is an enthralling study of doubles, doubling and duplicity. Its twinned themes are obsession and the Secret: the Secret as objet-a, that which inspires, but which can never satisfy, obsession. Mark Fisher Read Quote
On the Junior Boys’ ‘When No-one Cares’ beats are abandoned altogether, the track’s ‘endless night’ lit only by the dying-star flares and stalactite-by-flashlight pulse of reverbed electronics. Mark Fisher Read Quote
The sustaining fantasy of Nolan’s Batman films – which does chime uncomfortably with Romney -is that the excesses of finance capital can be curbed by a combination of philanthropy, off-the-books violence and symbolism. Mark Fisher Read Quote
What is remarkable about Joy Division is the way they are bereft of two of the mainstays of most other rock and pop: longing and supplication. Mark Fisher Read Quote
No ideology better understands the need for enemies than neoconservatism, and when the cold war dramatically and unexpectedly ended, the way was prepared for the ‘Arab threat’ to emerge. ‘True Lies,’ the 1994 James Cameron comedy thriller starring Arnold Schwarzenegger, duly served up the Arab villain Salim Abu Aziz. Mark Fisher Read Quote
The reality of nostalgia is nowhere better invoked than at the end of Tarkovsky’s ‘Solaris.’ When the camera pans away from Kelvin embracing his father on the rain-soaked steps of his dacha, we realise that the scene is yet another of the simulations produced by the inscrutable planet. Mark Fisher Read Quote
