And because "Knight of Cups" is about the world of movie-making itself and is set mainly in and around Hollywood, it's also a vision of the modern world, the world of inescapable images and of their dubious demiurges, of whom the movie's protagonist, a screenwriter named Rick (played by Christian Bale), is one.
My favorite bar though was polluted with TVs and so inescapable images of Houston drowning.
The inescapable Shelley-image, which he created for himself in both poems and sketches, is of the lone sailor out on the sea.
But imagine a society in which the ubiquitous, inescapable leader's image (on the currency, on billboards, on television screens night and day) is that of a saturnine frump who resembles Ernest Borgnine somewhere between "Marty" and "McHale's Navy".
And, ultimately, they continued to be trapped in the same black box, carted away to do the same routines and gags, their image inescapable.
As it shuttles between the US and China and between the present and memories of 1989, the play throws up a host of provocative issues: the true nature of heroism; financial dependency and its effect on press freedom; the changing role and ethics of photojournalism; the inescapable ambiguity of images etc.
The pin-up footballer's image is inescapable (even in soccer-shy America).
In a way reminiscent of the German Enlightenment philosopher Immanuel Kant, he held that, although the manifest image is inescapable, it does not give metaphysical truth about the world as it really is in itself.
In the first days, Pakistan's offshore independent channels televised the suffering, and the images were inescapable: people waiting in vain to be rescued; hundreds of thousands sleeping outside in cold rain, waiting for tent camps to be built; the injured, with bleeding wounds or broken limbs, staggering about in search of treatment.
