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Arnold] was one of the first major movie stars who winked at the audience, understanding that they too were intelligent enough to see through the pyrotechnics and absurd dialogue to be amused by the pure entertainment of the spectacle” (p. 88). Indeed, the 1993 film Last Action Hero corroborates the irony of Schwarzenegger’s wink. A depiction of “blockbuster mentality and movie fan obsession . . [the film] clearly plays to an ironically intertextual mode of address as the film within a film simultaneously plays to and satirizes the high-octane Schwarzenegger star vehicle,” explains film critic Rebecca D.

Addressing the power and impunity of images, cultural critic Susan Sontag (1978) argues that the “limit of photographic [mass media] knowledge of the world is that, while it can goad conscience, it can, finally, never be ethical or political knowledge” (pp. 23–24). As such, the perfunctory and biased representations of the mass media either ignore or quickly exonerate any discrete, hidden forms of ecoterrorism in favor of the spectacular images surrounding events such as were experienced on Tuesday, September 11, 2001.

Sociologist Pierre Bourdieu (1990) explains that such objectification of everyday life “constitutes the social world as a spectacle offered to an observer who takes up a ‘point of view’ on the action and who, putting into the object the principles of his relation to the object, proceeds as if it were intended solely for knowledge and as if all the interactions within it were purely symbolic exchanges” (p. 52). Although poet, critic, and philosopher Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1817/1985) long ago suggested experiencing spectacular symbolic exchanges through “the willing suspension of disbelief for the moment that constitutes poetic faith,” such willingness to surrender one’s critical faculties is vulnerable to being consumed, co-opted by the commodity motives of visual culture claims Debord (1994).