THESIS ABSTRACT THE SUSPENSION OF DISBELIEF: HYPERREALITY, FANTASY, AND THE WANING REALITY PRINCIPLE IVY R. ROBERTS JUNE 2009 The twentieth century brought technologies, such as film, video, and the Internet, that fundamentally altered the way human kind interacts and perceives the world. Investigating trends in popular culture, youth culture, the media, the Internet, and film and video technologies, these chapters pull together facets of contemporary thought in order to make sense of the digital age, a time where we take for granted the speed and magnitude of information. Deconstructing our way of seeing, it becomes clear how we take for granted the images flung at us through the media: images that bear little relevance to the everyday world as we naturally perceive it.
In movies, advertisements, newspapers, and web pages, constructed images hail us to view the world in a specific way. This constructed gaze becomes manufactured to a simulated degree as we travel further into an age of hyperreality. The chapters herein raise a number of questions: how do we perceive the media; do we take our way of seeing for granted; how do we understand the power mechanisms behind the media; how do the media play upon our personal desires; how do the media construct beliefs? What’s particularly interesting in this digital information age is the effect it has on adolescents. Issues such as coming of age, historical perspective, memory, and addiction inform a broad study of how the very term “teen” infects our constraining age-consciousness.
It’s critical at this juncture to look to the young people who will herald the future. What happens if these teens neglect the lessons of history? What happens when hyperreality becomes total, and history ceases to bear relevance? By talking with teens, reviewing patterns in popular culture, and criticizing movies, this thesis proposes that hyperreality overwhelms our vision. Roberts All Rights Reserved ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS This project would not have been possible without the gracious help of many knowledgeable and enthusiastic individuals. Saari, of Antioch University in particular is to credit for guiding the way.
His advise, gentle nudges, and outright flattery helped immensely. Kenneth Peck, my mentor, came onto the project in 2006 in a similar guiding role. He taught me that there are more than a few ways to look at the material, and that there’s no right answer. A study this broad incorporates libraries of knowledge; with Dr.
Saari’s and Dr. Peck’s guidance, it’s structured and approachable. I was also glad to have the generous help of Dr. Rob Sloane of Bowling Green State University.
Though I have yet to meet him in person, our phone conversations and email discussions are the reason I can understand how American culture works. I’m grateful for Dr. Sloane’s selflessness and participation in this work. This thesis absolutely would not exist without the aid of Russell Richardson and the Indie Program.
When I came to Indie in the fall of 2006 I couldn’t have realized the tremendous impact it would have on me and my studies. The Indie students who have helped me on this project are too many to name, though you will get to know them in the following pages. It makes me glad and hopeful that each of them are so set in their opinions, preferences, and particular talents. Thank you Indie! Last but not least I would like to thank my mom and dad for their support.
They’ve always offered their criticism of my work. They’ve both been very adamant when discussing the contents of my work. Without these conversations, the work would be incomplete. Mom and Dad, you show me that my way of seeing is too particular to be comprehensive.
I’m glad that I have so many passionate people around me, each with their own opinions and perspectives. TABLE OF CONTENTS ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS. REALITY AND REPRESENTATION. INVISIBE EFFECTS AND THE REALITY PRINCIPLE.
LEARNING TO LOVE THE VIRTUAL. THE FOURTH WALL. THE INTELLIGENT MEDIA. YOUTH CULTURE ON THE FRINGES .198 iii 1 INTRODUCTION I used to believe in fairies.
Or I should say I used to want to believe in fairies. There was a part of me that knew it was ridiculous. But another part, one that I couldn’t silence, told me that there was still a vestige of wonder in the world. An unconscious desire, this latent belief has been with me for as long as I can remember: whole-hearted in a way that hope for Santa Claus can never excel toward.
That image has so been engorged by popular culture that its aura has depleted. Santa is an unreal real. The belief in fairies is more than a child’s wish. In search of wonder in a modern world that is so thoroughly knowable (at least that’s what our eyes tell us) one gravitates toward areas that capture the promise of mystery.
For me it’s the cinema. A symptom overwhelms the searcher: a desire for fantasy and the yearning to possess an object that is (unconsciously) impossible, what Lacan calls the objet petit a.1 He or she has felt the lack of this impossible object from birth; reclaiming it would fill the void. Lacanian psychoanalysis tells us that this search is our birthright while it is a fruitless search, since the object does not exist materially. Once we find a symbol to fill the position of the impossible object, it disappears or shifts so that we must begin our journey again.
1 Lacan insists that the term is untranslatable, but English writers who require the term sometimes call it “the impossible object.” 2 No simple wish can will the impossible object into existence. But “wish” is a thin word. The desire for fantasy, for the realization of a fundamental lack felt since birth, can be ever so strong: strong enough to compel an individual to the extremes, to accommodate belief contrary to logic and reason. I should make a note here on “fantasy.” Slavoj Zizek, a cultural critic with interests in Lacan and film theory, explains: “fantasy organizes how we see and understand reality.
It works as the frame through which we see and make sense of the world.”2 In the Lacanian sense, fantasy differs from its colloquial understanding as a literary genre or flight of fancy. An individual’s fantasy derives from his or her deep felt desire to approach the impossible object and is therefore a fundamental act of human nature. Both meanings of the word will be used in the pages that follow. Lacan’s term “imaginary” also differs from its regular use.
“Imaginary” relates to his Mirror Stage, the point in human development when a child recognizes his own image in a reflection thus distinguishing himself from his environment. Lacan’s term refers to the self and its identification with an image, not to the usual use of imaginary as a connotation of imaginative faculty. Image, not imagine. Again, both uses will be used in the following pages.
I will refer to the theoretical term as a strong term and the colloquial as a weak one and where appropriate place the strong term in italics. This imaginary recognition of the fantasy of our desire, I feel, is a postmodern syndrome. For one thing, the world is leached of wonder. 2 John Storey, Cultural Theory and Popular Culture (Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 2006), 83.
3 Technology, science, and reason engorge all the magic that once existed (perceived through religious and cultural belief systems). The world maintains a glimmer of wonder contrived through the mechanisms of the cinema. The cinema operates to feed the desire for fantasy at the same time that it demands that we relinquish our fantasies to the apparatus. Fantasy cannot breach the apparatus.
On top of all of this, the cinema cannot convey a true reality; it only re-presents reality, regurgitates everyday life as something more than real. The cinema shows us a hyperreal. But what if we have this all confused? What if the real world is already a hyperreal and the cinema exists to show us what we have lost? In postmodern theory, hyperreality first came into play with the massive reproduction and dissemination of images. What were once representations of a fundamental reality became, for the perceiver, a reality of their own.
The image now precedes the object that it represented. The image is more real than real. Jean Baudrillard adds to this the terms simulation and simulacrum, states along the spectrum of hyperreality. A simulation masks reality while the simulacrum masks the absence of reality.
I like to refer to hyperreality in terms of the effect the media has on the perception of everyday life. Films offer us a window (or mirror) into a world represented for our viewing pleasure. Over a century of film spectatorship has taught us that the world is not what it seems. The media provide a vision of the world that equals the world itself.
Habitual viewers and media consumers, those who grant power to the image, negotiate between the representation and the real 4 thing to the extent that there is little difference between the two. This is a distinct perception that I believe pervades society. How much power do you afford the image? How does the image affect your experience of the world? We can approach the cinema screen as a window (a realist stance) or as a mirror (psychoanalytical). How real is the film? Are we looking through it or into it? These differing views depend on the theoretical approach to film as a representation of “reality.” The screen as a window relies upon the viewer’s assumption that reality exists on the other side, a reality that was photographed in the past and is re-presented for us in the present.
As a mirror, the representation becomes the image photographed as it has been stripped of its meaningful value. Psychoanalytic film theorist Christian Metz went so far as to postulate that the film image was marked by absence, insinuating that the film image was not actually there, stripped of meaning and reality: “In the cinema it is not just the fictional signified, if there is one, that is thus made present in the mode of absence, it is from the outset the signifier.”3 According to semiotics, a signifier– the image or reproduction of reality on screen–refers to a signified–the true meaning, in this case the past event and associated reality. Metz articulates the absence of the cinema in that the representation signifies the past that is not present in projection of the film. Reality loses its meaning when represented.
He continues: “The unique position of the cinema lies in the dual character of its signifier: unaccustomed perceptual wealth, but at the same time stamped with 3 Christian Metz, The Imaginary Signifier (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1982), 44. 5 unreality to an unusual degree.”4 Metz suggests that the cinema presents a reality that is hyperreal. Cinema ups the ante of narrative in that it gives us fantasies full fledged– we no longer visualize and internalize the narratives. It’s all given to us.
Do the fantasies exist in some other-place? The place where they did when first photographed? The media–or any narrative-based art, for that matter–show us the world in its extremes. As in the Aristotelian virtues of comedy and tragedy, narratives provide form for experiences, showing us the better or worse of the real human condition. Reality, in this respect, and everyday life, appears as the mediation of greater than and less than what one can expect from extravagant narratives. I often find myself at odds when critiquing films.
In discussions, others tend to notice the extreme love-hate relationship I have with the cinema. Some wonder so far as to ask why I study cinema in the first place, since I seem to hate the institution with such a vengeance. I like to put it this way: there aren’t many films that live up to my expectations of what the cinema can achieve.