This article forms part of the series Rapture & Decay: The New Eschatological Cinema. Read the Introduction here.
...modern mankind found itself in the midst of a great absence and emptiness of values and yet, at the same time, a remarkable abundance of possibilities -Marshall Berman.
From Adbusters and the anti-capitalist movement to discussions of "post everything syndrome" and more recent analyses of the London riots; the notion that we live in a disorientating, overloaded, media-driven, celebrity-obsessed world is not a new one. Revolutions are televised. Ikea can help us to sleep better (whilst we may experience the beginnings of split personality disorder leading to the erection of international fighting club franchises, at least we won’t be hospitalised after tripping over badly stored shoes on our way to the bathroom in the middle of the night). Plastic mannequins are more attractive than real women (see case of H&M in the media this week). Disneyland is the ultimate escape from handling your hyperactive, unable-to -play-by-themselves children this Christmas. Lonely? Call in the entertainment factor of your mate Dave, available at the flick of a Freeview remote control.
Semioticians such as Umberto Eco and Jean Baudrillard have utlitised the term hyperreality to describe how, in advanced postmodern cultures, we are increasingly unable to distinguish fiction from fantasy, the real from the unreal. Our world consists of hollow signs and simulacra where the fake offers a better experience than the real thing. How many Facebook friends do you have? How much of your holiday did you spend snapping away on your digital camera, constructing the perfect narrative to describe the experiences that you want to look like you were having? Did you truly experience anything or were you just projecting your explorer fantasies onto an 18-24, ten day guided coach tour of Hidden India?
Science is beginning to produce results which suggest that the hyperreality hypothesis is more than just an idea; earlier in the year I posted this link to a paper which describes how "digital doppelgangers" can induce false memories in those exposed to them.
Now as an actress, I deal in fictions. But I don't deal in fakes. I’m all for exploring imagination, total unreality, multiple realities, and so on. Yet the fictional worlds which I dip in and out of are ones which I feel very deeply connected to indeed. They become my reality. The problem with hyperreality is that illusion reigns, nothing is felt, everything is sign, simulation, replication, masquerading as reality. It’s the lie that is the dangerous part. We seek simulated stimuli, no longer sure of what is real and what isn’t, not even questioning experiences, forever unfulfilled no matter how much we gorge on "culture" or engage in "exercise" or participate in "down time". We seek out highs and stimuli and entertainments like overwrought addicts. We are organised and enchained and bored out of our minds. Take television, for example. Do we ever ask ourselves why we would rather watch a recreation of a scene in an accident and emergency ward rather than doing anything else out of the infinite range of possibilities of "activities" available to us at 8pm on a Wednesday night? As Baudrillard points out, "television knows no night. It is perpetual day. TV embodies our fear of the night, of the other side of things". Ah- ha, so, we’re afraid of the dark! Baudrillard takes this even further whilst discussing aspects of modern excess and its inherent emptiness:
"Tentacular, protuberant, excrescent, hypertelic: this is the inertial destiny of a saturated world. The denial of its own end in hyperfinality; is this not also the mechanism of cancer? The revenge of growth in excrescence. The revenge and summons of speed in inertia. The masses are also caught in this gigantic process of inertia by acceleration. The masses are this excrescent process, which precipitates all growth towards ruin. It is the circuit that is short circuited by a monstrous finality".
Perhaps we are, ultimately, afraid of this monstrous finality. Afraid of death. And what makes us afraid of death? Fear of our limited time here, fear of underachieving, of lacking a legacy, fear of pain and suffering, fear of a wasted, meaningless existence. Fear of the meaningless of existence. Some people face this fear, decide to drop out, and commit suicide. Some people read Camus and decide to hang on for a bit. Some people join mega churches and pin their hopes on salvation and eternity. Some people audition for X Factor. Some people eat too much. Some people eat too little. Some people turn to drink. Most people try to construct a sense of meaning. Most people try to "think positively". Some people, as Umberto Eco obsesses over, write lists:
"We have a limit, a very discouraging, humiliating limit: death. That's why we like all the things that we assume have no limits and, therefore, no end. It's a way of escaping thoughts about death. We like lists because we don't want to die".
There are undeniable forces at work. Forces of chaos, of craved for and enforced order, of seeping unreality and of desperate attempts to reconstruct a former reality. I’m waiting for my box of locally produced organic veg delivered by a fairly paid driver to arrive at my door any minute now.
Sometimes it’s hard to face the future, sometimes the future is uncertain. Sometimes it feels like the world is ending and we wish it would just hurry up. Next time, I’ll take a look at ways in which contemporary filmmakers are exploring the hyperreality hypothesis, of how they are projecting this sense of disorientation and saturation onto film, and why they should even bother attempting it...
(Image: David Dees)
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