Exceptional real-world events feel cinematic because screens normally insulate spectators from the Real.

Evidence

When the Real rushes in, everything feels like a film: not a film you’re watching, but a film you’re in. Suddenly, the screens insulating we latecapitalist spectators from the Real of antagonism and violence fell away. — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk, 1289

Categorization

• XREF: Ties to earlier claims that modernity lost belief but not fantasy, and consumer reality suppressing the uncanny, plus the Atrocity Exhibition chapter where Ballard reverses the relation.