My post-modern film theory paper on post-modern film theory
It seems like just yesterday that we believed time was real- that we held tightly our concepts of how the world worked. It’s impossible in the Present to feel anything but sympathetic pain for the martyrs of that time. If it weren’t for them, I can know perfectly that we wouldn’t be like this today. And it brings me to tears knowing what they suffered for us - these foolhardy and overly bold pioneers of an unknown terrain.
Some names, of course, are lost to us now. Their efforts, however, cannot be ignored or forgotten because they contributed greatly to the overall thought process of humanity at that time, engaged in an expansive conversation and always pushing the topic of thought forward. Though their points might not have stood out, they were responsible for the emergence of more important players of the Game. Perhaps, it is for these bit parts, now relegated to the realm of the unconscious, for whom I feel most.
Then, there are the names that are impossible to forget: Sigmund Freud, Martin Luther King, Ralph Nader, and Lady Gaga. Nothing special when examined with The Clear Head of the Present- in fact, simply the brighter points of light in the infinite collection of the stars in the night sky. But, like, the brighter stars, they have become our most useful constellations and serve to help us navigate The Present on our unending journey - when reality becomes most terrifying, the seams undone, that we can look at these figures for solace as we do Today.
Let us consider the work of Baudrillard, for instance, who had turned the great wheel of thought towards a recognition of the effects of cultural production. See, we had produced culture endlessly for years without a clear understanding that we had been doing so. We fought tireless wars and enslaved one another for various ideological purposes in which we fully believed. For instance, there was the belief that power over others somehow made one’s life enjoyable - so some controlled the elaborate system to ensure themselves a continuous supply of comfort and social capital. Right as Baudrillard came into the picture, parts of us started to recognize the power these ideologies were having. We could see how teaching the lesson, for example, that a luxurious form of transportation increases a person’s self worth could be used as a form of ideological control over a person’s mind. What Baudrillard showed us was that we should never confuse the map for the territory. That is, our cultural products- you remember cinema and television- should not be valued more highly than the ability to make cultural products - that one’s own life, the miracle that anything exists in the first place, is the thing that allows value and cultural products to exist in the first place.
Of course, he did not teach us this explicitly. It was through some ideas he had had that brought us to The Present. As technology was evolving at an exponential rate, microchips getting smaller and machines more autonomous, he revealed the threat of an addiction to communication. See, Then, there was this complete numbness to the fact that life was wholly incomprehensible. Things had been organized in just such a way that reality could be understood in easily digestible facts. We were taught this all the time and we had experts who would narrow their focus of study to such degrees that they became grossly enrapt in their fields: experts in structural engineering to scholars of Hong Kong film theory. Though they were experts in their fields, to be an expert was inherently meaningless because the field of study was so fetishized as to be completely detached from the larger picture.
So, people began to value the sheer stimulation caused by an influx of information, which is why the television had been so popular. People would merely sit in front of screens which could do all of their imagining for them. The screens would flood them with a supply of visual, auditory, eventually tactile and nasal, information. And when they went anywhere, which wasn’t often, they got into transportation machines that were fully automated. A person, known as a driver, just sat in what was known as a car, which took them from point A to point B with no effort on the part of the human. While en route, the driver would ingest information from a variety of sources: music, news stories, movies, and more TV. An onboard computer integrated into a vast network of other computers, and so the information of countless other humans, would update the driver on the thoughts, feelings, and activities of friends, family members, and pets. The windows of the car, which had formerly been used by the driver to navigate the car - as driving was once fully dependent on the actions of a user - was now just a series of screens. And, so it was that life resembled TV and the representation of lived experience became more real than lived experience itself.
During this time, there were people who called themselves artists, writers, filmmakers, and musicians who tried to warn us of the horror that this sort of reality would lead to. Takeshi Miike in his Visitor Q, for instance, portrayed the ultimate displacement from reality that representation was leading to. In his film, a modern remake of an older Italian film, violence, rape, murder, and chaos permeate every scene while a neutral observer records the mayhem on a video camera. This detached documentation of the, almost absurd, violence coupled with the fact that the film itself is a copy of an older film hint at humanity’s progress towards hyperreality. Of course, artists attempting to communicate such a valuable message to the human collective were drowned in the noise of the rest of the information surrounding them. There were other artists without any clue as to what was happening that would simply create more pointless stimuli. And for any helpless human to be able to distinguish between the authentic and the false representations became impossible.
So, if it weren’t for people like Baurdillard who had begun to reveal this danger to us, we could have been trapped in The Past - when concepts like “time” dominated our perception of the world. What he had underestimated, however, was the teleonomic nature of things.
Just as flowers eek in their growth towards bloom and death, it seemed that we did too. There were, as it was with flowers, occasional individuals that managed to sprout in harsh environments, but without a field of thriving companions with which to create a sustainable surrounding ecosystem, it was a long time before a flourishing field could develop. We now know that creating that obscene false reality was a necessary part of the blossoming process.
The events that took place are hardly worth recounting as their facts are well known and are sure to elicit pain in their retelling, but as has come to be tradition, it must be done so that we can avoid recreating our painful past in the future.
Most philosophers at that time were unable to be optimistic. Life had always been so painful that it was impossible not to be cynical. And perhaps it was this pessimism that lead to our continuous improvement as a species. It was necessary to our survival. What they had not foreseen was that the idle time created by the development of technology lead to boredom. A human would sit in a car playing video games and even the video game would become hyperreal, just as the scenery outside of the car had become. Not only did the mountains look fake, but so did the cultural paraphernalia. All games, television shows, and movies were the same - copies of copies of copies. And, at the same time, there was the constant influx of information regarding the inequality of the society via news sources and online friends. It seemed that the veil was lifting. Humanity began to recognize the lack of value that propaganda had and the expense at which it came. What had typically been reserved for the realm of dreams, hallucinatory drugs, and schizophrenic episodes was becoming the natural state of perception. In the collision of the real with the hyperreal, human beings were entering into the nightmare that was later deemed “self-awareness”.
Violence occurred as the teeming hordes of psychotics struggled to, once again, put the world into digestible bits as they had done in their various “academic fields” in the past (even Freud or Baudrillard’s creation of ideological paraphernalia was guilty of this). But it was too late. The leisure classes had finally faced the worst culturally fabricated reflection to date and the vision of themselves in that last plastic funhouse mirror could not go away.
We still hold that memory of the day when it arrived in the mail. We took it out of its package and saw the life sized mechanical clone of ourselves - the Simulacrum that was to do our living for us. And, like some sort of bad acid trip, the falseness of our beliefs, our perceptions, and even our material world was exposed.
Shattered, we struggled to do anything for a long time. Some of us still half-heartedly made movies, wrote books, attended school and work. Others were ontologically crippled and begged for an answer to who planned this hoax. We rooted around in our philosophical and theological past, seeking any and every explanation for where the world came from and where it would go- yielding only further ideological holograms - coming up empty handed.
Simultaneously, we looked around at the mess we had made in fabricating countless illusions. The majority of the world’s population, the backs on which the holographic universe was supported, still went hungry, died of curable disease, and suffered violence and physical and psychological torture. The planet was nearly destroyed. Certain people tried to call attention to this fact, practically screaming, “Why are we still wasting time with these stale cultural artifacts? Stop producing this ideological crap, these illusions. Stop recounting endless theories about the crap. Can’t you see there are people starving needlessly out there?” But it was only through the production of cultural artifacts that the screaming could be loud enough for us to finally become aware.
Through use of the previously established communications network, an idea spread like wildfire, a meme: no one knows what’s happening to them and they all want it to be okay. It seemed that we could all agree on this. Our technological advancement allowed us to form committees and subcommittees dedicated to the construction of a social system that met most people’s needs most of the time. It wasn’t perfect, which was a good thing because we had seen what trouble aiming for absolute perfection had gotten us into in the past. concrete distinctions between “you” and “I” were slowly subdued. Though they still existed, it was out of linguistic and perceptual necessity to get things done, to continue getting the necessary resources to everyone. With only a tiny fraction of any population suffering needlessly out of choice or through their entire removal from society, time could be spent creating cultural holograms with the full understanding that it was all hallucinatory already, effectively transforming billions of separate individual schizophrenics into one consciously consensus hallucination.
Of course, as Today is here to always remind us, the end is near. This has happened infinitely in the endless permutations of the past and will happen infinitely in in the future. Cracks and fissures already present themselves in the consensus hallucination and it was always understood that this harmony would be, not just temporary, but all too brief. Like a field of flowers blossoming so beautifully in the spring seasons, we too must wither and die.
05/25/12
