McLuhan to Robert Fulton, July 12, 1978

"I had no idea that you wanted the media coverage of death. I had instead sent you some basic analysis of the American relation to death. The TV coverage of death is necessarily frothy fantasy like the news itself. Movies are a completely different proposition. The movies take a death more deeply than TV. For example, the world of Kojak is a cartoon world straight out of the comic books. The current Star Wars type of violence is not only fantasy but nostalgia for comic books. It would be meaningless to refer to death as such in relation to in relation to any current entertainment since all of it is in the order of kids’ games of cops and robbers. This, by the way, is a world of nostalgia and appeals to those who have lost their identity. When you come to the Kennedy funeral you enter at once a ritualistic world of mock death. This is less true of Martin Luther King funeral because of the deep emotions felt by the blacks. These emotions rubbed off on some of us."