Kilgore Review

NOTES

1. Unfortunately, it is also a failure as a parody, because it misrepresents what it hopes to ridicule, muddying the waters rather bringing his target into the clear light of day. Sokal could have done better, for example, than assume that Derrida is, of all things, a relativist.

2. Broughton is concerned about nationalistic narratives that glorify suicidal, patriotic cyborgs. His reading is shaped by Stanley Kubrick's classic, "Dr. Strangelove, or how I stopped worrying and learned to love the Bomb." (1963) He refers particularly to the famous scene in which an American aviator, played by Slim Pickens, rides a nuclear bomb to ground zero (152). This technocultural convention continues to find expression in American film. In the recently released Independence Day (aka ID4, 1996), a whiskey-soaked Vietnam veteran finds a more explicit moment of redemption by flying his bomb into the open underbelly of an alien ship. By doing so he saves the day. As a piece of filmmaking it borrows from Strangelove, erasing the original's satiric intent.

3. This does not mean, however, that one should believe that Woods' vision is completely closed to appropriation or commodification by elites. A clue to how this might happen may be garnered from Philip Johnson's recent statement that he is now "in love" with curves. He plans to work on a curvilinear architecture well into the next century. If this is so we may see designs reminiscent of a Woodsian aesthetic much sooner than we might think and these structures will not be erected in the service of heterarchy.