It's unreal: how phony realism in film and literature is corrupting and confusing the American mind.

• Author: Easterbrook, Gregg

In this summer's hit movie, Independence Day, the president oversees attacks against the aliens by watching fancy color monitors with live-action images of airplanes and spaceships. A Marine pilot brings down a trailing alien fighter by deliberately opening and releasing his F18's tail parachute in flight so that it flops on the alien's windshield and blinds the occupant. Amraam air-to-air missiles, fired at the alien starships,create tremendous explosions. Area 51, the ultra-secret desert location where the wreck of the Roswell UFO has been reconstructed, is shown in detail. A squadron of B2 bombers launches nuclear-tipped cruise missiles at an alien dreadnought.

OK, lets assume away the aliens and their 300-mile-wide mother ship as the premise of the flick. And let's accept the notion that you can destroy an entire space fleet with a bottle of Scotch and a laptop computer. After all, it's a movie. Otherwise, which of the above aspects of Independence Day are realistic?

The military does not have live-action view screens that show perfect representations of things thousands of miles away: Even the fanciest radars display information as cryptic data squiggles. Amraam missiles do not make tremendous explosions: They have small warheads designed to cripple the relatively thin skin of aircraft. Deploying the tail chute (used during carrier landings) of an F18 during flight would cause directional instability and an immediate crash. There is no Area 51. (Of course, agents of the cover-up instructed me to write that.) The B2 does not carry nuclear-armed cruise missiles.

What about that heroic laptop? Suspend disbelief and assume a powerbook could somehow communicate with an alien computer system. But the idea of delivering a computer virus so potent it instantly disables an entire interstellar space fleet is, well, about as realistic as a light sabre. And just as Stars Wars boosted the prospects of SDI through its special-effects quality, suggesting to audiences that powerful lasers actually exist, Independence Day may aid the revived Ballistic Defense Initiative by suggesting that war in space is already technically feasible.

In the context of efforts such as Independence Day, the line between "realism" and "real" increasingly blurs. Ever-better special effects now leave audiences for film and television steadily less able to discriminate between a Hollywood premise and something real. Increasingly, the passing off of the invented as reality plagues not just the movies but journalism, nonfiction books, pop novels and even literary writing. By this I don't mean movies such as Zelig, in which the historical and Imagined are swirled, but everybody...