Trigger Happy
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structures of logical thought incarnated in a beautiful
dance of electrons.
Martin Amis wrote that Battlezone has “the look of
op or pop art and the feel of a genuine battlezone.” This
intriguing comparison is instructive in its shortcomings.
For unlike op art, which produces an illusion of
movement in the abstract, static image, Battlezone has
partly representational ambitions (that is a tank, that is a
flying saucer), and produces an illusion of movement
by stringing together simple static images at high
speed. Battlezone’s defining aesthetic (owing in part to
technical limitations at the time), on the other hand, and
in contrast to pop art, is one of purely imaginary
surfaces. Where pop art glories in colorful flat shading
and razored curves, Battlezone evinces contempt for
color, for material, for substance itself. Such qualities,
it murmurs seductively, are illusory anyway. The edge
is everything: the frontier where one plane meets
another, where turret joins body, where missile meets
flank.
The look of Battlezone or Tempest was at the same
time shockingly weird and comfortingly familiar, not
from Warhol or Riley but from a much nearer and more
disturbing medium. It was as if high school
mathematics lessons had come to life, benignly. No
