Mediated Manipulation: A look into the concepts of 'Medium Cool'

The film Medium Cool raised a number of pertinent issues. The major issue, the one that seemed to speak the loudest, was that of the 'mediated society.' This is an issue that is quite prevalent in today's America. Film and television seem to dominate people's lives, for many the television is more alive then their own life. It is not uncommon for an individual to relate an occurrence in actuality to something experienced by a fictional character in a movie or television series, and America's faithfulness to it's mediated culture has reached a status of epidemic proportions.
Starting Point 1 in the problematic structure of our mediated environment is the falsity of our mediated portrayal. The easiest case-in-point: Image Doctoring capabilities. Everyone knows that the woman or man portrayed on the cover of the 'hottest magazine' has been 'photoshopped' to look like someone other than their actuality. We doctor our own image in a similar fashion through plastic surgery, at an extreme, and more simply through the use of make-up or hair dye. These self-doctoring methods can be used to enhance our true selves, but more often seem to be used to imitate the positive aspects of others that the public is told are also supposed to be their own positive aspects.
Point 2, and a major concept within this film, is the idea of the mediated, or representational image, as being something somehow more real than ourselves. Because of it's informative nature, specifically within news arenas, the media is viewed by the public as a source 'telling you the way it is'. While there is dialogue that occurs between media and the public, where one influences the other, it seems that the media often latches onto the very negative aspects of the american culture and chooses to repeatedly illustrate those aspects without attempting to overcome them and use it's influence over the public to reach a higher plane of existence.
Medium Cool addresses these issues and has a main character that documents the voices of those who need to be heard and who could bring awareness to a submissive and clouded public. At the end, the audience is informed about the car accident and subsequent death of the main characters through a news cast, high lighting the media-as-life understanding within American society.