Fear and anguish

Each era creates the ideology it needs. In his biography, Ozzy Osbourne notes: his band Black Sabbath rehearsed, in its early days, next to a cinema on the outskirts of London. It only filled up when they showed the most bizarre horror films. That's how Black Sabbath came to adopt the dark attire. Ozzy started making a lot of money because, he says, "people need to feel fear: and they pay for it."

Martin Heidegger, 40 years earlier, followed a similar path. He differentiated between fear and anxiety. For him, fear is based on an object. Anxiety rests on nothingness. People will pay whatever it takes, the devil himself, to escape the state of anxiety and move to the state of fear. Technically, a scapegoat is sought upon which evils are purged. "The Blair Witch Project" was so successful because it explored anxiety, nothingness, perhaps for the first time in Hollywood: what Freud called the phobic object was no longer a shark, a Jason: it was nothingness, the wind, nature (incidentally, the word panic comes from "pan," the primal fear of nature).

Dictators construct their speeches by pointing to tangible scapegoats. "We don't speak to say something, but only to produce some effect," noted Hitler's propaganda minister. This thing called a human being likes those who point out the scapegoat, which gives us a sense of palpability. Fear without a face is useless. Le Bon, Freud, Wilhelm Reich, Elias Canetti, and Ortreg y Gasset all said the same thing, 15 years apart: the people gather and support the leader who shows them the object upon which we will purge our fears.

The doctoral thesis of journalist Ignacio Ramonet, from Le Monde Diplomatique, written many years ago, says it better, and more. It indicates that, in times of crisis, cinema attracts the masses by purging their real fears with even more terrifying imaginary fears. It was after the crisis of the First World War that the Weimar Republic produced the climate for Nosferatu, for Fritz Lang, and for the black and white terrors and monstrosities of Murnau. The classic monsters of Japanese cinema, Gargoyle, the H-Bomb Monster, Godzilla, came after Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The 1973 oil crisis led to the first filming of The Poseidon Adventure, Jaws, and The Towering Inferno, starting in 1975. The fear of the turn of the millennium, from 2000 to 2001, brought us The Perfect Storm and Independence Day. Hollywood also sought other panegyrics: when federal authority entered a crisis in the US, starting in 73 with the Watergate scandal, the American film industry invited minorities to be federal heroes on the screen: the Greek cop Kojak, the black cop Shaft, and the Italian cops Columbo and Serpico.

There's a good way to make money from this: choose an enemy, invade their country, and sell off their unsold production. Demonize the enemy and generate profit. Let's look at the work *Le bonheur économique*, by François-Xavier Chevallier (Albin Michel, 1998, Paris). He tells us some rather discouraging things, based on the theories of "cycles" by the Russian economist Kondratieff. For the economist, technological advancement and reduced production time result in wars and localized instabilities – to support the unsold production caused by the reduction in its manufacturing time. In this view, the Industrial Revolution, starting in 1783 and following the economist, generated the London Stock Exchange crash and the Revolution of 1830. The introduction of iron chemistry, starting in 1837, gave impetus to the Revolution of 1848, the American Civil War, and the Vienna crash. The use of harsh chemicals at the beginning of the century is believed to have fueled and triggered World War I, the 1929 crash in New York, and the 1930 Revolution in Brazil.

When Kosovo was invaded in April 1999 to remove the Monica Lewinsky scandal from the media (the thesis of the brilliant journalist Phillip Knightley, author of First Casualty), the then US Secretary of State, Madeleine Albright, celebrated that the former Yugoslavia would be a great market for US production... Hosni Mubarak and Muammar Gaddafi served the US within that framework by which former President Roosevelt defined the Nicaraguan dictator as "a son of a bitch, but our son of a bitch".

Who will be the new character from whom the US will draw its support, in exchange for offloading the surplus, now generated by the housing bubble crisis two years ago? The betting on demonizations is booming. And speaking of which, watch World Invasion: Battle of Los Angeles, which promises a more stylized fear than the Japanese nuclear leak.