Susan Sontag's Innovative Essay

Fifty years on from Susan Sontag’s innovative Essay “The Imagination of Disaster”, which incorporates the use of disaster films as analogies to argue that “from a psychological point of view, the imagination of disaster does not greatly differ from one period in history to another”, but on the contrary “from a political and moral point of view, it does”, Jean Baudrillard exchanges a similar set of concerns in his more recent essay ‘The mirror of terrorism’. He forms his essay on the ideas that the Western media is becoming the basis to advance how we are entering “the era of simulation and hyperreality” with “reality TV”. John C. Gilmour’s ‘Fire on the earth’, also relevant to Sontang and Stockhausen’s bald claims, contends that Anselm Kiefer, a german sculpture and painter, seeks to

What he meant by this, was that the Gulf War was so heavily reported on by mass media before it actually happened, that it became “a non-event”, alluding that the war had already been “produced and packaged as a media event”. Baudrillard also makes overt reference to the concept that disaster must have a protagonist, articulating that our [modern] “anthrax is scare” and how this has been “ascribed to Bin Laden” in the context of the Afghanistan Gulf War. This is quite similar to Sontang’s essay where she describes this as being one of the most fundamental aspects of disaster films, “a mysterious lineage come to do battle on behalf of good and against evil”. Having said that, disaster is considered to be at the forefront of art and in complying with Sontang’s essay, it is. However mainstream media distorts and nullifies the psychological element from modern issues, desensitising the silent majority of it viewers through its over-exposure and over-mediation of such