5—
Postplay in Global Networks:
An Afterword

The most crucial and decisive battle of World War II is about to be fought . . . by you! . . . As the top gun of the Navy's most elite crew of fighter pilots, you must pilot your specially-outfitted P-38 into the very midst of the enemy squadron. . . . The outcome of history's most fateful air/sea battle rests in your hands! Can you avenge Pearl Harbor?
—Cartridge cover of the Nintendo video game
    1943: The Battle of Midway

My friend Kenneth Newell has noted the irony of a Japanese video game being sold in the United States that reenacts the historic battle that was a crucial turning point in World War II, leading to Japan's defeat and America's emergence as a major world power. In making this game part of their victorious new superentertainment system and marketing it so successfully in the United States, perhaps Nintendo is demonstrating that World War II was only one phase of a larger global sporting event that is still in progress. This reading is supported by similar ironies, such as Hiroshima's football team being called "The Bombers." The case of Matsushita, however, is even more directly related to the game in question. In order to minimize anti-Japanese reactions to its recent purchase of MCA/Universal for $6.59 billion (the largest takeover to date of an American company by a Japanese

firm), Matsushita reportedly strove to close and publicize the deal well before December 7, the anniversary of the attack on Pearl Harbor. Apparently Japanese corporations like Matsushita, Sony, and Nintendo are well aware that their stunning economic success can be read as an ironic reversal of the Battle of Midway.

Within this game of global economics, where the growing power of synergy is becoming increasingly apparent, the assimilative Pac-Man—like strategy of erasing opposition by absorbing former opponents (their markets, properties, and distinguishing characteristics) is by no means limited to Nintendo, Sony, and Matsushita. A recent front-page Los Angeles Times story on Dentsu, the largest advertising company in the world, reported:

Dentsu represents almost every major Japanese corporation, even competing ones, under its banner of "total communication service." . . . [It] is renowned as the hand behind the conservative Liberal Democratic Party, perennially the ruling party. . . . The cozy web of relationships extends to the opposite end of the political spectrum as well. . . . Dentsu is tied closely to the two Japanese news agencies, Kyodo and Jiji, in a cross-shareholding arrangement that results from their once having been merged as the Domei news agency, which disseminated government propaganda in the dark decade through the end of World War II. . . . Domestically oriented Dentsu plans to expand its global network dramatically and is shopping overseas for acquisitions.^[1]

In no way do I intend these statements as "Japan-bashing," which is unfortunately pervasive right now in the United States; rather, I am merely trying to suggest the scope of the game in which we are competing and the many interpenetrating levels of intertextuality on which it is being

played. Since closure to my project would contradict its line of argument, in this brief epilogue I will merely attempt to reposition my discussion within a larger context: that of global political economics. To develop this aspect in depth would of course require another book, so I will limit myself to indicating a few directions that such an argument might follow—directions apparent to anyone who has even casually followed the news over the past year in any major urban newspaper, such as my own hometown daily, the Los Angeles Times .

Ninjas and Networks

On the new economic battleground of the 1990s, successful Japanese corporations like Nintendo, Sony, Matsushita, and Dentsu are emerging as the powerful Mutant Ninjas who use assimilation and accommodation to master and transform the game of multinational consumer capitalism. In this battle for world markets, one of Japan's major rivals is still the United States. With their respective ideological emphases on team spirit and individualism, both nations (like the Turtle and Nintendo networks) are vying to absorb the other within its own system. At the moment Japan clearly has the edge: in 1989, the U.S. trade deficit stood at $108 billion, 45 percent of which was with Japan, making the United States the world's largest debtor nation and Japan the world's largest lender. In the American press, this edge is also being dramatized by narratives featuring individualized Japanese characters and companies, who have been able to convert their old-style imitation into a postmodern form of creative transformation, as in the following story that also appeared recently on the front page of the Los Angeles Times .

As a young Toshiba engineer in 1950, Sakae Shimizu was assigned to develop a power transformer. Surveying the

field, he concluded that U.S. technology was best and arranged a licensing deal with General Electric Co. Today . . . Shimizu could no longer purchase, imitate or expropriate from the United States the transformer know-how that Japan requires. Toshiba and others in Japan have surpassed U.S. firms in key areas of transformer technology. . . . [They] are part of a new Japan—one that aims to invent, not imitate. . . . As the United States is exhorted to become more like Japan, some Japanese firms see their future in employees who are more like Americans—inventive, individualist, free-thinking.^[2]

One area in which the Japanese have proved their inventiveness is scientific research, where they demonstrate a very different combination of team play, competition, and individualism than are found in the United States. As with land and other natural resources, Japan has a much smaller supply of scientific researchers than the United States, yet the Japanese have developed effective cooperative strategies for maximizing use of these resources and for devoting them almost exclusively to economic survival. For example, although Japan has only one-tenth the number of researchers working in robotics as the United States, the two countries' level of development in this area is about the same. This finding was reported by Jet Propulsion Laboratory's Stephen Peters, the first foreign scientist allowed to participate in a planning session at Japan's largest government lab, the Electrotechnical Laboratory in Tsukuba.^[3] Peters claims that in order to use their limited number of scientists more efficiently, the Japanese divide up research tasks and share their findings, thus avoiding duplication of efforts and displacing the competition to a later stage of R&D: application of the research to the development of consumer goods. This same strategy is also operative in private research labs, which in 1988 accounted for 80 percent of Japanese research (in con-

trast to the United States, where only 60 percent of scientific investigation is privately funded and where much of the remaining 40 percent is linked to military projects). According to Stanley Krueger, president of the Japanese office of United Technologies, "In the end everybody has the same nugget of technology. Then the question is, who gets to the market first."^[4]

Ironically, one of Japan's major postwar accomplishments was to ideologically reinscribe postindustrial capitalism by proving that individualism was not an essential element, as our own ideology would have us believe. At first the Japanese subverted the aura of "uniqueness" through an intertextuality of cheap imitations, which soon became a sophisticated, invasive postmodernist simulacrum superior to the original. In cinema, the most immediate example is Akira Kurosawa's reinscription of the western genre in films like Seven Samurai and Yojimbo . Noël Burch, who noted Kurosawa's ability to improve on the Western cinematic models he borrowed, feared that such appropriations of individualism would subvert traditional Japanese values.^[5] Hollywood's domination over world markets seemed so entrenched, Burch never considered that the American conventions themselves were also subject to subversion (if he had, he would have welcomed such a development). Yet as we are seeing right now, the Japanese are transforming those Western conventions they borrowed both from cinema and capitalism, helping to decenter both in the process.

Decentering the Oscar

The 1990 Academy Awards celebration officially acknowledged Hollywood's international decentering by having several of its awards announced in foreign settings—Buenos Aires, Moscow, Geneva, London, and most significantly Syd-

ney, since 20th Century Fox had recently been purchased by Australia's News Corporation. Even so, few members of the global audience for that event would have believed that by the end of the year four of Hollywood's major studios would be owned by foreign companies—not only 20th and Columbia, but also MGM/UA (which was bought by the European conglomerate Pathe) and Universal (taken over by Matsushita). Now only Warner Brothers, Paramount, and Disney studios remain as domestic targets for foreign acquisition, and will undoubtedly be pressured to seek out mergers in order to compete with their multinational rivals.

On the night of the Oscars, as if to single out Japan's dramatic entry into Hollywood with its 1989 purchase of Columbia Pictures (and perhaps to atone for the Academy's embarrassing 1987 preference of director Sydney Pollack for Out of Africa over Kurosawa for Ran ), the centerpiece of the ceremonies was the special lifetime achievement award to Akira Kurosawa on his eightieth birthday, presented by Hollywood's all-American "wonder kids" George Lucas and Steven Spielberg (who, we were reminded, are personally responsible for eight of the top ten box office successes of all time). Accompanying the award was a montage of clips from Kurosawa's canon; spanning three decades of the postwar era, this selection demonstrated the director's status as a multinational icon, for it included his great adaptations of Western Shakespearean classics (like Throne of Blood and Ran ) as well as works later adapted by the West (like Rashomon, Seven Samurai , and Yojimbo ). (Two significant omissions were The Hidden Fortress , the primary source for the plot of Star Wars , and Dersu Uzala , the Soviet-Japanese co-production made in Siberia that won an Oscar for best foreign film of 1976.)

The staging of the award seemed designed to underscore the irony that the genius and influence of this Japanese mas-

ter are more appreciated by commercial Hollywood auteurs like Lucas and Spielberg than by the Japanese film industry, which will no longer finance his projects. As film critic Charles Champlin reported the following morning: "'Kurosawa can't get a job in Japan,' Spielberg remarked to a friend not long ago, in a mixture of indignation and astonishment. Indeed, George Lucas was instrumental in helping Kurosawa find financing for Ran and Spielberg himself used his own powers of persuasion to get Warner Bros. to back Kurosawa's latest film Dreams "^[6]

The Decline of Japanese Software

Kurosawa's problems with financing are closely tied to the overall decline of the Japanese film industry. By 1989, movie ticket sales in Japan were down to 143.5 million (a mere 13 percent of the all-time 1958 peak of 1.3 billion), and only 1,912 movie theaters were still doing business.^[7] This decline was apparent even in the United States, where Japanese-language movie theaters, which had been going strong for at least eighty years, were now disappearing. On October 31, 1990, film critic Kevin Thomas observed: "Ironically, at a time when Japanese companies are investing heavily in the American film industry and the Japanese-speaking community is growing, the last of those theaters [in Los Angeles] is going out of business."^[8]

Largely because of this sharp decline in the Japanese film industry, Japanese movie studios have been reluctant to back venturesome movies; instead they are increasingly investing in other leisure activities, such as video porn, bowling alleys, bicycle races, and amusement parks. Even in the purchase of MCA/Universal, it was reported, "a key factor appears to have been MCA's theme parks in which Matsushita was deeply interested";^[9] and after acquiring Columbia Pictures,

Sony announced its intention of opening a chain of international amusement parks called "Sonyland," which would soon display the company's latest cutting-edge soft- and hardware and make Disneyland look obsolete. The Japanese films that are doing well at the box office these days are not (for the most part) art films in the tradition of Kurosawa, but primarily commercial fare. For example, the biggest success in 1989 ($35 million in ticket sales) was Kiki's Delivery Service , an animated film about a young witch who makes deliveries on her broomstick — a premise no sillier than that of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles .

As the world becomes ever more "multinational," tastes in mass media become increasingly uniform worldwide, and business interests, regardless of nationality, seek software with a track record of global appeal. With the Japanese film industry at its nadir and with current Japanese films proving limited in international marketability, successful electronics giants like Sony and Matsushita (which sells its products under the more familiar brand names Panasonic, JVC, Quasar, National, and Technics) are investing in Hollywood in order to acquire American software that can match and extend the power of their own hardware. As Elaine Dutka and Nina J. Easton put it:

Experts say that, with the coming entertainment revolution, the values of studio libraries will skyrocket, making the MCA and Columbia deals look like bargains in retrospect. . . . The value of the movies themselves will skyrocket given the privatization of European broadcast stations, greater at-home access and the possibility of packing more and more programming on satellites through digital compression.

They quote Andrew Lippman, associate director of MIT's Media Laboratory, as saying: "It's 'old-think' to have a U.S.

vs. Japan attitude. . . . Without international cooperation, it will be impossible to distribute a program worldwide."^[10] In this process of radical restructuring, then, not only hardware and software are being transformed, but also nations and industries.

In the 1970s and 1980s, partly because of Japan's technological innovations in and growing domination over electronics hardware (television sets, compact disc players, and video cassette recorders), American movies have been increasingly domesticated as part of an ever-expanding home entertainment system, which, in the global context of multinational consumer capitalism, has redefined our conception not only of "movies," but also of "home." When Sony took over first CBS Records and then Columbia Pictures, it also raided Warner Communication (one of its big American rivals) to recruit the producing team of Peter Guber and Jon Peters, those Super Mario Brothers of Hollywood, to run the studio. Because both this deal and Matsushita's later takeover of MCA/Universal were "brokered" by "superagent" Michael Ovitz, chairman of the Creative Artists Agency (which represents superstars like Steven Spielberg, Robert Redford, and Tom Cruise), the definitions of Hollywood agent and superstar also underwent transformation.

Now that it controls a major movie studio, Sony will probably help pioneer Hollywood's conversion to high-definition television (HDTV) technology, thereby erasing a functional difference between the two modes of formerly competing image production (as well as between two competing nations) and cashing in on its former mastery of video hardware. Robert Epstein reports that "when Sony paid $3.4 billion for Columbia and moved it to the Culver City lot, it also budgeted another $10 million for its 2-year old HD team. Right now, the Sony people say their main interest in Culver City is to demonstrate their equipment in a studio setting."^[11]

And if Sony/Columbia is pursuing this course, can Matsushita/Universal be far behind?

The Compositing Power of HDTV

In contrast to film and video, the new HDTV medium has an enormous capacity for increasing the compositing power both of images and of international markets. With its digital picture and sound and its video luminance of 1,920 pixels per line, HDTV can composite up to twenty-seven generations without significant loss of resolution. Undoubtedly, it has the potential to enhance the clarity, realism, and involvement of any visual/auditory representation. Yet what has seemed most compelling, at least during the first five years of application, is its capacity for surrealism and special effects—that is, its ability to make obvious simulations look "realistic." This paradox may be explained by the extraordinary technical compositing power of the medium; or by the postmodernist cultural context in which this new technology is being developed; or by the current popularity of music videos, which have appropriated and commercialized the surrealist aesthetic; or by the economic consideration that special effects is the only area where the medium is presently commercially competitive—or by a combination of all these factors. Such use has not been restricted to music videos and commercials, but has also occurred in the feature film Julia and Julia and in sequences from big-budget movies like Back to the Future, The Abyss , and The Hunt for Red October . Despite its poor showing at the box office, Kurosawa's American-financed Dreams (1990) made one of the most visionary uses of this new technology to date, particularly in the episode (shot in Sony HDTV and later transferred to film) where the dreamer enters the paintings of Vincent van Gogh (played by Martin Scorsese). The sequence creates a

stunning "composite" vision of Japanese/European/Italian-American artistry in the combined visual media of dream/painting/cinema/HDTV—a highbrow analogue to the kind of pop fluid assimilations we found in Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles .

The "compositing" power of HDTV is especially controversial in the economic sphere. With three different standards of television signals currently in operation (NTSC, the technically inferior system used by North America and Japan for broadcasting to over 40 percent of the world's TV sets; PAL, used in Australia and most of Western Europe; and SECAM, used in France, Eastern Europe, and the USSR), many feel that the choice of a new standard for HDTV represents "an opportunity to establish a . . . compatible standard for universal international signals . . . that would streamline signal transmission and interpretation."^[12] Europe, however, is doggedly resisting such global unification in order to retard the expansion of Hollywood software (whether controlled economically by the United States or Japan) in European markets, which are rapidly being restructured into a new economic supersystem that will be larger than Japan and the United States combined.

The current shakiness of U.S. domination over global mass media is nowhere more apparent than in the plans for HDTV, which is already being used for some regular broadcasts in Japan and which promises eventually to affect the whole superentertainment system—movies, electronic cinema, terrestrial and satellite broadcasting, video software (including video games), databases, and other scientific and educational uses of video. Robert Epstein reports:

Last week Sony introduced three HD products for sale in Japan only: a 36-inch commercial HD monitor, a commercial HD decoder and a $17,000, 36-inch-wide televi-

sion set capable of HD pictures once a consumer decoder is implanted in it. . . . Now [Sony] and other consumer product manufacturers are getting ready to sell HD sets, once the FCC next year and the rest of the world two years later agree on how many lines make for high definition. What follows will be HD video recorders, players and cameras.^[13]

The Japanese television network NHK is also doing HD production in New York (at the Kaufman Astoria Studios) and Los Angeles (at KSCI), and is sponsoring workshops on HDTV and experimental productions in some of America's leading film schools, including the University of Southern California School of Cinema-Television. Yet America's role in this new technology is still quite indefinite. As Dutka and Easton report, "While the HDTV debate continues in Congress, the Federal Communications Commission is going forward with a testing program and says it will adopt an American HDTV standard in 1993, creating in all probability, three different standards worldwide—ours, Japan's and Europe's."^[14] Despite such reassurances, A. G. Hawn warns that the United States still lags far behind:

With the European and Japanese investment in R&D already exceeding $1 billion and the yearly market projected at $20 billion by the mid 1990s, it becomes increasingly important that some major decisions be made as to the role of the United States in the marketplace. . . . But while the Japanese will have a system on-line sometime early this year and the Europeans are expecting to be in operation by 1992, the United States has made little progress toward the development of a signal standard or distribution program that would enable the consumer to utilize the system."^[15]

The Theatrical Realm of Global Politics

Similar warnings were expressed by Congressman Edward J. Markey, chairman of the House Telecommunications and Finance Subcommittee, in reaction to the first public announcement (on September 25, 1990, in the Wall Street Journal ) of Matsushita's negotiations to purchase MCA, whose holdings include Universal Studios (the producers of serial blockbusters like ET, Jaws , and Back to the Future ); the Universal Studio tours in Los Angeles and Orlando, Florida; 49 percent of the Cineplex Odeon theater chain; Geffen Records; and Putnam Publishing. Strongly opposing the takeover, Markey declared: "When Matsushita melds its vast hardware empire with MCA's huge video software library, it will be in a position to dominate the global communications marketplace and squeeze American companies out of key markets. . . . The Japanese and the Europeans are in the seventh inning of the global technology game, and the U.S. is arguing over how to get to the ballpark."^[16]

The MCA deal was not seriously threatened by warning statements like Markey's, partly because of the earlier Sony/Columbia deal, which probably made opposition seem futile, and perhaps (as Epstein suggests) because of the political clout of Lew Wasserman (MCA's powerful chairman of the board), whose "decades of support for politicians may have taken the edge off any resistance."^[17] A serious threat did come, however, when this deal was repositioned within another network of international political economics: the Mideast oil crisis. Matsushita was revealed to be a participant in the Arab-led economic boycott of Israel, and the question arose whether MCA would also be drawn into this arrangement—a situation that would violate not only the U.S. law forbidding any American company (even if foreign owned) from participating in this boycott, but also the political

loyalties of Wasserman, who is one of Hollywood's strongest supporters of Israel. Yet economic interests ultimately prevailed, and political loyalties were adjusted. As MCA president Sidney J. Sheinberg put it, his company decided to sell because it needed "a strategic alliance."^[18]

A similar justification had been expressed a few weeks earlier by Kirk Kerkorian, the former majority stockholder at MGM/UA Communication Co., which Pathe Communications purchased for $1.36 billion dollars. As if to explain why he was no longer willing to compete with Sony's Columbia Pictures, Kerkorian lamented: "You've got to be in hardware today, you've got to be in satellites, you've got to be in manufacturing home videocassettes and in theaters. That's what it's all about these days."^[19] Pathe, a European multinational conglomerate, was founded in 1989 when it took over the independent Cannon Group (formerly run by Israelis Yorum Globus and Menachem Golan).^[20] The new MGM-Pathe Communications Co. is co-chaired by Italian financier Giancarlo Parretti and his business partner Florio Fiorini. Parretti (who "was convicted of fraudulent bankruptcy in Naples, Italy this year")^[21] had a difficult time putting the financing together for the MGM takeover; his credibility was further strained when he made a surprise bid to Wasserman for the purchase of MCA, only a few hours after the deal had been closed with Matsushita. Ever since his acquisition of MGM, the studio has been struggling to remain solvent.

Within this "game" of ever-expanding systems (that are constantly being restructured into larger networks through intertextuality), there is "an infinite play of difference" to generate new meaning and profit. Even a popular computer journal like MacUser informs its readers:

Connectivity is maturing from just a buzzword to the single most important competitive tool of business computing.

As with the uniting of the European Communities, the force driving this coming together of computerdom is not altruism but self-interest. . . . More and more companies will become part of an emerging "GlobalNet"—a United Nations of corporate, academic, and government databases and information networks. . . . The role of the GlobalNet . .{nb. will be to connect users to the rest of the world, regardless of what box they have. This is no mere technological fantasy—it's a revolution in progress.^[22]

Within this new global computer/television/cinema hookup, Dutka and Easton insist, one must ask: "Does your TV become your computer, or does your computer become your TV?"—a question that touches on the issue raised at the end of chapter 3 concerning the merger of Nintendo and the TMNT supersystem: that is, which would absorb the other? The answer, Dutka and Easton claim, has "huge implications for global competition, because the Americans dominate the computer arena while the Japanese drive the consumer electronics industry, particularly in the area of HDTV."^[23]

At times this restructuring process can be survival-adaptive, as when national boundaries are transcended so that ecological problems can be addressed in a global context or beyond. As a genre, science fiction is particularly well suited for dramatizing the value of such shifts into larger orbital systems. Hence Star Wars was the perfect vehicle for launching this merger of systems—as a marketing strategy within the sphere of mass entertainment, and as Reagan's star defense system within the theatrical realm of global politics.

The New World Order

At no time in recent history has this restructuring process been so rapid and pervasive as it is right now at the begin-

ning of the 1990s, with the dismantling of Eastern Europe, the Berlin Wall, and all the familiar Cold War configurations, and with the formation of new structural networks in Europe, the Middle East, and the Pacific Rim. In January 1991, these configurations dramatically shifted again with the outbreak of war in the Persian Gulf. Although in the economic sphere Japan was still ahead and Europe was making great strides, the United States suddenly surged ahead in the political sphere. Drawing on the same restructuring principles that I have described in the foregoing chapters and adapting them as a rhetorical strategy for international power politics, George Bush dubbed this "defining moment" of history a "new world order."

Within this newly defined GlobalNet of the post—Cold War era, Bush has convinced most players at home and abroad that the United States need no longer be seen as a waning economic power, plagued by recession, bank failures, and the homeless and forced to trim its military budget and might—an anachronistic Godzilla without its Rodan. Rather, the "new world order" created a new remilitarized zone, in which the United States was refigured as the lone surviving Superpower—a resuscitated Robocop—capable of leading and policing other united nations and allied networks in a new moral military crusade. Thus, just as World War II provided the context in which the United States first emerged as a major world power, the war in the Gulf provided an arena in which the United States could reverse those optimistic yet threatening historical assessments that were generated at the start of the 1990s: the crediting of Nobel Peace laureate Mikhail Gorbachev and his glasnost policies for bringing an end to the Cold War, the economic success of Japan and West Germany as forward-looking nations wisely diverting their resources from military to consumerist spending, and the celebration of the Pacific Rim

and a newly consolidated Europe as the supernetworks of the 1990s. Now, within the warp zones and quick reconfigurations of this new remilitarized global network, Gorbachev was crushing liberation movements in a crumbling Soviet Union on the brink of civil war, West Germany and Japan were defensively contributing billions of marks and yen to the allied cause in compensation for having no troops, and the United States was leading a new alliance that had already absorbed both the Pacific Rim and the European Economic Community.

In the media coverage of the war, a similar scenario was developing. The war immediately stimulated the growth of cable TV, not only here in the United States but also throughout Europe, for everyone wanted to be kept up-to-date on the Gulf crisis. Moreover, the definition of "network news" was almost instantly transformed and globalized by the twenty-four-hour reporting of CNN, Ted Turner's international cable television station headquartered in Atlanta, Georgia—whose broadcasts could be received via stellite in over one hundred nations worldwide. CNN's coverage so far surpassed that of the national American networks (ABC, CBS, and NBC) that anchor Walter Cronkite suggested (on national television) that it was time for these networks to switch their emphasis from mere reporting to analytic commentary; in a similar vein, former NBC president Laurence Grossman claimed that with the combination of CNN and local news, national network news was "becoming an anachronism."^[24] Yet CNN's dominance also meant that once again, as with other popular media like movies, TV series, and pop music, the voice of America was the primary mediator of world events—and now a new channel for international diplomacy as well.

In covering the Gulf war, CNN and other stations frequently used the game metaphor—juxtaposing the war cov-

erage with sporting events like the Super Bowl, tallying downed scud missiles and planes or captured prisoners like competitive scores, or interviewing young pilots who claimed that on bombing missions they felt as they did in high school just before the big game. In his press conference on the final day of the war (February 27, 1991), while giving a detailed description of the allied forces' military strategy, General Schwarzkopf also used the football analogy—then, a few sentences later, as if acknowledging both the popular appeal and the disturbing moral implications of the game metaphor, he disavowed it by reminding us (as so many other officials and journalists had done) that this was "not a Nintendo game!" Apparently such reassurances were necessary because the computerized precision of the military equipment and the media's emphasis on the hardware had made the video game analogy so powerful and pervasive.

The Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles myth was also brought to mind on February 9, 1991, when CNN broadcast a special assignment called "Shell Shock"—on the psychological damage done to Iraqi ground forces by constant bombardments from American B52s. Although the illustrative footage was drawn from World War II (when the syndrome was called "combat fatigue"), the name of the mental disturbance was drawn from World War I. CNN probably chose "shell shock" as the title of the show not only because it is more dramatic and alliterative than "combat fatigue," but also because in the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles video games being played in arcades across America, "shell shock" is a well-known euphemism for death.

As political and economic lines are redrawn, multinational mass media like CNN will play an increasingly important role in helping citizens to assimilate and accommodate themselves to these new geopolitical formations. At least equally important will be the role played by the new multinational

Hollywood. For decades we students of film have been writing about the so-called invincible hegemony of Hollywood over global film and video markets—a hegemony that all other national cinemas seemed always to be struggling against and that showed every sign of holding fast, even in the post—Cold War era and in the face of America's economic decline. Yet Europe and Japan have already begun to undermine Hollywood's hegemony from within, at a pace rivaling that of the Eastern European revolutions, and this merger seems strangely compatible with the myth of those successful multinational transformers, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.

Like those heroic mutants, together we are becoming a new global force that is accelerating the mass reproduction of postmodernist players. That is, players who are skillful at forestalling obsolescence, castration, and death through a savoring of transmedia referentiality, fluid movement between cinematic suture and interactive play, and (as Beverle Houston wrote of television) "an extremely intense miming of the sliding and multiplicity of the signifier."^[25] Together we are also helping to accelerate the redefinition of movies, television programs, commercials, compact discs, video games, computer programs, interactive multimedia, corporations, nations, politicians, superstars, and toys as amphibious software—any one of which can be used to promote the other in a gigantic network of commercial intertextuality. This process of transformation helps to explain why a Mutant Ninja like Michelangelo, in the midst of martial arts combat on the mean streets of New York, can shriek with jouissance , "I love being a Turtle!" As advertised, we are the multinational team that is "playing with power."