No Receipts for the Sender

In her classic essay “Banality in Cultural Studies,” Meaghan Morris recounts an anecdote about how the news from Sydney was that there was no news. The point of the anecdote is that there is a media event which is, in fact, equally a non-media event and a media non-event.
 
I think I’ve loved this anecdote for a long time because it clarifies something so often at stake in media culture. Like Guy Debord said, in the society of the spectacle, that which is good appears and that which appears is good.
 
Roughly the same time that Morris published “Banality in Cultural Studies,” several films ventured to map the mediascape of its present and future apocalypses and dystopias by means of communication media. In other words, word trickled out through mass media, and then there were no words, and the pathos of this non-communication underwrite the depressive bewilderment of these stories in which there is no more oversight, no final account, and no receipt for a sender’s message.

A break in communication, or more to the point, the break in communicability via apparatuses like broadcasting and journalistic publishing, formed a rhetorical trope in imaginations of dystopian and apocalyptic narrative cinema in the mid-to-late 20th century. In my mind, this stretches from Chantal Akerman's News from Home (1977), even, into Death Watch (Bertrand Tavernier, 1980) or Sleeping Dogs (Roger Donaldson, 1977), as well as Romero's second and third Dead films.