Havholm and Sandifer dismiss my claim that Batman attests to corporate planning with the logic chop that "since the movie can attest corporate planning with respect to the merger only if it is indeed the corporate allegory Christensen claims it to be, it becomes, in that sentence, allegory by fiat." My argument is not quite so Longinian as all that. The verb I employed was attest, not prove. Attest was carefully chosen in order to comply with the legal context of the case of Paramount v. Time Warner and argue, not decree, that the film could have been used as evidence in that case to defend the ostensibly irresponsible performance of the Time Inc. board. I did supply other concrete evidence of the allegory. The most explicit piece of evidence is the inserted image of Time magazine, which, despite their strenuous manipulations of the history of the comic book and the script, Havholm and Sandifer are unable to wish away. If, however, I ask myself, "Is the insertion of Time an instance of 'allegory by fiat?'" I must, in good faith, answer, "Obviously." Either somebody ordered that the magazine be used or somebody arbitrarily placed it on the set. Whoever did it was nonetheless not responsible for the corporate allegory because he or she was acting in full compliance with a corporate intention; he or she, immunized by the rule of limited liability, was, like Nora Ephron, an instrument for the corporate authorship of the film.¹⁹

The other piece of evidence I offered was the opening of Batman, attended by Steve Ross and Richard Munro and followed up by a telephone call from Ross to studio head Mark Canton. That too is an example of allegory by fiat, except that we know whose fiat it was: Steve Ross's. Havholm and Sandifer prefer to account for the credit that Ross lavished on Canton by referring to the stupendous weekend gross (which, by the way, could not have been counted when Ross placed his call on Saturday evening). They trumpet that explanation as if they were wielding a newly sharpened Occam's razor. It is not, however, a razor they wield, but a shoehorn. The one-size-fits-all box office explanation cannot account for the single most conspicuous incident of that decisive weekend: the attendance of Munro at the screening with Ross. Munro did not need to be in the theater to learn about the boffo box office. He was hardly inclined to go; he had not attended a movie for ten years. But he was there to see the movie and, in the presence of Ross, to read the text. The money mattered, of course, but as the history of that peculiar merger reveals, cash value was never critical, or Time Inc. would have struck a better deal. "Allegory by fiat" is just another way of describing the charismatic Ross's creation of a customer for Time Warner by arranging that Munro be present at the creation of a new, powerful brand identity. To accomplish that demonstration Ross represented Time Warner; he did so on behalf of an intention that did not belong to him but to the corporation, that aggrandizes individual aspirations and actions for its own ends and that had already presupposed the inclusion and eventual subordination of Time Inc.

Money matters, of course. But what is money? According to Levin there is hard money and soft money—and the latter, which includes motion pictures and other forms of advertising is, he attested, a medium of exchange preferable to cash. If readings in the history of the global operations of multinationals and of the merger mania of media conglomerates in the late decades of the twentieth century teach us anything it is that to charge that reasoning is circular does not disconfirm aggressive arguments for investment or merger or diversification or takeover that are backed by sufficient political, cultural, or financial capital. Scenario thinking worked for Shell and Time Warner as it had worked for the National Security Council because it was devised to absorb all contingencies into a feedback loop. In the case of AOL and Time Warner, the initial affiliation of the companies involved a deal in which AOL agreed to advertise a Time Warner film that advertised AOL and suggested a possible merger. That promotion raised AOL's market value by inducing stock purchases based on the belief that the stock would ascend to a new level due to others' purchases made in the belief that the stock would ascend to a new level. And that bubblicious increase in stock value created AOL as a customer for the purchase of Time Warner, which was acquired when, in payment for an utterly illusory share of power in the merged company ("See, our name comes first!"), AOL returned to Time Warner shareholders an incommensurate portion of the value that You've Got Mail had created. That value, the very concept of value, promulgated by Case and Levin was, it turned out equally illusory. ²⁰ Three years later, after all the machinations and promotions, stock rising and stock falling, Levin is gone, and Case as good as gone. It turns out that the only thing of value associated with You've Got Mail that persists is The Shop around the Corner--not the store owned by Kathleen Kelly but the film made by Ernst Lubitsch, who had the good fortune to work for Paramount in the thirties, not Warner Bros. in the nineties.