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.
 Copyright, 2009

Ivy R. Roberts

All Rights Reserved

 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

This project would not have been possible without the gracious help
of many knowledgeable and enthusiastic individuals. Dr. Saari, of Antioch
University in particular is to credit for guiding the way. His advise, gentle
nudges, and outright flattery helped immensely. Dr. 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 ........................................................................... ii
Chapter
I. INTRODUCTION ..................................................................................... 1
II. REALITY AND REPRESENTATION .................................................... 12
III. INVISIBE EFFECTS AND THE REALITY PRINCIPLE ....................... 30
IV. LEARNING TO LOVE THE VIRTUAL .................................................41
V. SIMULATED ENVIRONMENTS ...........................................................47
VI. PROJECTING FANTASY ....................................................................57
VII. THE FOURTH WALL ......................................................................... 71
VIII. THE INTELLIGENT MEDIA ...............................................................81
IX. IRRATIONAL IDEOLOGY ................................................................... 90
X. BLOCKBUSTER MANIA .................................................................... 106
XI. CONTROVERSIAL CHILDHOOD ..................................................... 124
XII. ADULTOLESCENCE ....................................................................... 138
XIII. IMPOSSIBLE TERRITORIES ......................................................... 149
XIV. YOUTH CULTURE ON THE FRINGES ..........................................163
XV. CONCLUSION ................................................................................. 185
BIBLIOGRAPHY ..................................................................................... 192
FILMOGRAPHY ......................................................................................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. Mainstream

Hollywood cinema is a cop out: entertainment for its own sake. Sometimes, a

truly spectacular film will arise out of Hollywood cinema, and these products

occur on two levels. First, and the most obvious, Hollywood is not Evil – as I

would like to believe. Quality films pop up here and there, and indie wings of

major studios recognize well-made films. Second, blockbuster films, despite their

outwardly spectacular appearance and seeming sole interest in thrill, have the

tendency to insinuate ideas of cultural relevance. Blockbusters do not arise out of

4
Metz, 45.
 6

thin air. They are part of a complex interplay of popular and aesthetic taste. While

addressing these ideas demands a critical eye, mainstream media tend to create

audiences that read on the surface. Blockbuster films can hold value in the

interpretation of culture.

Discussing media and culture requires an understanding of ideology. In

simplest terms, it refers to a set of ideas maintained by a society. It also refers to

the ways of viewing the world. According to Marx, ideology operates invisibly

behind the scenes, unconsciously. For cinema, ideology can be understood in

the relationship between Hollywood, the producer, and the consumer of a film. A

producer may not perceive the ideological connotations of his work, nor may the

viewer. Nonetheless, the system establishes a power relationship between the

two, as well as within the larger apparatus of the industry and economy. The film

will bear the ideological message of the system. In this way, ideology can be said

to instill ideas in viewers of the film. Ideology arises out of the structure of the

industry and of society, acting unconsciously on producers and receivers and in

the cultural texts themselves.

In Althusserian terms, ideology interpellates subjects. Marxist philosopher

Louis Althusser theorized that ideology, the complex workings of a socio-political

system, maintains order through subject positioning. Ideology pertains to a host

of mechanisms that create social order: ideas, laws, ways of seeing. In terms of

power relationships, ideology interpellates, or hails, subjects into positions.

Subjects don’t recognize that they’re being interpellated. This process operates

as a fundamental aspect of the cinematographic apparatus. Apparatus theory

 7

provides the parallel to social ideology in the cinema.

I do not believe that ideology is a black or white issue. As many theorists

have attempted to proliferate universal methods for approaching ideology and

power relations in the cinema, there are too many diverse products and too many

different modes of production to allow a blanket theory. While in so many cases

film criticism levels on textual analysis, it can be employed toward understanding

how ideology operates in disparate situations, among audiences, and within

various industry settings.

Ideology finds its place in cinema most pronouncedly through Hollywood

and blockbuster films. These are products centralized upon consumption,

spectacle, and entertainment for its own value. While critical value can be found

within the products of Hollywood cinema, it depends upon a reader adept at

viewing the ideological mechanisms at play in order to decode the workings of

power relations and subject positioning. In the pages that follow I attempt to

deploy film criticism as a means of approaching media and cultural studies

without losing sight of real circumstances and situations.

Taking the issues of hyperreality, representation, and ideology into accord,

the latter chapters (ten through fourteen) consider the affect of the media on

maturation. The term “reality,” and our understanding of it, needs re-examination

in our age of postmodernism, mediating technologies, collapsed community, and

perpetual adolescence. As a culture, America experiences an identity crisis and a

denial that now is actually now, here is actually here. What troubles me is the

generation of young people who fail to consider this dramatic turn. Teenagers,
 8

born in the Internet age, have little perspective when it comes to technology. Our

education system as it is fails to confront this lifestyle change. Adolescents live

with technology as a status quo while neglecting its real consequences as

concerned with community and interpersonal communication.

I have been called an idealist and a romantic for my belief that today’s

society lacks what traditional communities cherished. Before the Internet, the

medium that heralded the technological revolution, people had to look each other

in the face in order to communicate. The prefix “tele,” at a distance, loses its

meaning when attached to so many technologies: telephone, television,

telecommunication. Dramatic changes brought about in the mass age

fundamentally altered society in innumerable ways. The collapse of community

and the shifted focus toward individualism led to the dissolution of socialized

rituals.

Traditional communities protected their knowledge by creating social

barriers between young and old. The elders possessed the community’s

knowledge. When young people came of age, they received that knowledge.

These barriers no longer exist for a number of reasons, most prominently due to

the wide availability of knowledge through technology: television and the Internet.

As a result, age labels lose their meaning. In an individualist society, you choose

your own label.

What does it mean for a young person to live in a large youth-centric

culture? Adolescents live in a MeWorld: all technology geared toward their

manipulation, all information laid out to use at their own will5. The absence of
5
“MeWorld” is a coined phrase from Thomas de Zengotita, Mediated: How the Media
 9

benchmarks leaves it up to the teen to decide when he or she will “grow up.” This

process can occur over decades, if it occurs at all. We’re never quite sure when

we’ve become adult. Adulthood is a precarious, transparent term. Chronology

breaks down inside popular culture, which tends to position subjects as

perpetually adolescent.

I thought I’d come of age in college. It didn’t go the way I thought it would,

the way I hoped or the way I planned. For me, it was all about planning, and

nothing happened organically. This caught me off guard. I thought naively that I

would just grow up, that I wouldn’t have to think about it. I had a tough time with it

all. I ended up dropping out of college at the age of 18, feeling lost and

abandoned and at a dead end.

My coming of age happened in three long phases, and each time I thought

I was getting closer to becoming an adult. At the end of each phase, I felt like I

was no closer to the end than when I had started. I entered Emerson College at

16, dropped out at 18. After a year I re-enrolled at Marlboro College with

newfound optimism. I had a great experience at Marlboro, and I excelled. But I

didn’t have a very good idea of where I was going when I graduated. I spent a

year working in the film industry in Boston, but it was more like meandering than

following a set path. I didn’t know what I should have been doing, how to do it,

how to make it doing what I wanted to do. So I enrolled in the IMA program at

Antioch University McGregor. I decided I wanted to be a scholar. Upon making

this choice I felt more adult, more professional. Being a graduate student gave

me a firm purpose. A year later I became a professional teacher in the Indie

Shapes Your World and the Way You Live In It (NY: Bloomsbury, 2005).
 10

Program, and I had reached the point where I felt like a real adult.

Adulthood is entirely circumstantial. I hold the markers of adulthood:

higher education, the job, the recognition within a community. But there are still

aspects of my life in which I feel like an adolescent: areas that I have yet to

mature. I see a problem here, in a wider cultural sense. I bear the outward marks

of adulthood, but inside I feel perpetually adolescent. While others may view me

as an adult, I’m still a liminal being.6

My coming of age was rocky, and I felt like it shouldn’t have been that

way. If it’s up to you to grow up, and you decide when and where and how that

happens, you have to choose. If this is the case, why grow up at all? Why go

through the long and hard process of becoming an adult?

I work at Indie Programs, a not-for-profit media education organization, in

Boiceville, NY. My work brings me into contact with teens daily, making me

aware of a contemporary age-consciousness and at the same time the absence

of history. Thought is either driven forward or stuck in the present. Nobody

seems to recognize that the age of technology marks our present situation. I try,

day to day, to stress the importance of technology in our lives. Unfortunately, its

ubiquity blinds its very presence.

6
The term “liminality” comes from cultural history and ritual studies studied primarily by
Arnold Van Gennep and Victor Turner. The term corresponds to a state of being in which you are
there and yet not there, alive and dead simultaneously.
 12

REALITY AND REPRESENTATION:

TOWARDS AN AESTHETICS OF FILMSPACE

“In spite of any objections our critical spirit may offer, we are forced
to accept as real the existence of the object reproduced, actually
re-presented, set before us, that is to say, in time and space.
Photography enjoys a certain advantage in virtue of this
transference of reality from the thing to its reproduction.”
– Andre Bazin, “Ontology of the Photographic Image,” 198.

It’s taken me a long time to come to terms with my grievances toward the

film medium. I’ve always enjoyed watching films, but there was something I felt

on a very fundamental level that was disquieting: the difference between the film

image and real life, between structured narrative and real lived experience. This

feeling bubbled up from deep inside me, perhaps subconsciously, intervening in

my enjoyment of fantasy and entertainment. I wanted to know why my own life

could not approximate a film, or why film differed so perceptibly from what I

observed in the real world. It has been these great disparities that form my

perspectives in analyzing films: their difference from everyday life and the world

perceived by the individual.

There are certainly fundamental differences between film and everyday

life. The camera lens is not a human eye, and both function technically very

different; cinematography does not equal eyesight. The look of film is quite

different from the look of reality due to the chemical process of developing the
 13

film and the fact that the image is doctored; the appearance of the film image is

not the same as the first hand experience or appearance of reality. The editor

cuts up the shots to maintain continuity and to maintain an illusion of time in a

similar way that the eye naturally blinks; continuity or montage editing does not

compensate for real perception. The formed film narrative does not equal real life

experience; it omits the tedium and unnecessary bits to create a structured form

suitable for entertainment and art; film aesthetics do not equal the flux and flow of

everyday experience.

I began my investigation by searching for a film or type of film that most

closely resembled everyday life. The films of the Lumiere brothers, for example,

show mundane situations in a relatively objective way.1 Dziga Vertov attempted

to show “life as it is” in his non-narrative experimental documentary The Man

with the Movie Camera. Vittorio De Sica’s Neorealist film The Bicycle Thief, for

example, also show an amount of realism, though his cinematic aesthetics

overwhelm the realistic narrative. The French Nouvelle Vague, British “kitchen

sink” films and American “renaissance” films of the 1960s also attempt to

respond to Hollywood domination and return the medium to a more lifelike

representation. Dogma 95, the Danish realist movement, has perhaps had the

most influence in this area recently, since it integrates a radical social statement

with an indictment of Hollywood aesthetics.

These examples, despite the fact that they attempt realism more so than

1
See “Workers Leaving the Lumiere Factory” (http://www.youtube.com/watch?
v=HI63PUXnVMw) and “Arrival of a Train at a Station” (http://www.youtube.com/watch?
v=1dgLEDdFddk), 1895.
 14

Hollywood films, still fall short of representing everyday life. Their primary pitfall

has to do with their reliance on montage editing and score. Once montage comes

into play, manipulation of the viewer’s imagination begins. The pioneering

Russian Formalists juxtaposed footage in order to create a meaning greater than

the singular shots. The real life moments are rearranged so as to create a

fabricated reality. Even Dogma films, which maintain contemporaneous realism

and location shooting, utilize jump cuts, manipulating time in an effort to form

reality.

Realism of time and space can be obtained to a degree by using long

takes and deep focus.2 These techniques can be used to an extent, but most

films combine these techniques with montage editing. A few anomalies exist,

such as Russian Ark and Rope, which utilize long takes and moving camera to

create realistic hermetic universes. Greg Toland’s deep focus cinematography in

Citizen Kane (a technique that allows all planes in the perspective to be in focus)

established a unique type of realism. The film still relies heavily on cinematic

technology to create its representation; the camera lens is not a human eye. The

techniques used in Citizen Kane helped reclaim the status of the shot, but did not

reify reality (largely due to the reliance on structured narrative).

Most tellingly, Vertov’s The Man with the Movie Camera, in conjunction

with his Manifesto and Kinopravda (film truth), speaks volumes to the film

medium’s inability to portray real life objectively. His theoretical concept of the

2
See David Bordwell, Classical Hollywood Cinema (NY: Columbia University Press,
1985). Bordwell attempts a broad definition of realism by investigating various aspects of film
such as time and space.
 15

kinoglaz, or camera-eye, presupposes that film viewers are manipulated to

perceive the world through a surrogate eye. Vertov’s kinoglaz eliminates the

possibility for viewers to subjectively perceive a film experience, since the

experience is presented to them from the particular position of the camera. In this

case, the cinema functions as a highly manipulative ideological apparatus in its

presentation of “truth.”

The question persists: can the cinema provide a true realism?

Approaching film as a representational medium, then the answer would be no.

The mechanisms involved copy the images from real space and time. The

images are rearranged to construct a new reality, a new meaning. The

represented reality in the film differs fundamentally from the original.

Taking a step back, we could ask what constitutes reality in the first place.

Is reality an individual’s perception? Is it the product of cognitive functions of the

brain, chemicals and electrical signals? Is it socially constructed? While these

rhetorical questions can be endlessly debated, art has done its part in attempting

conjecture.

Science fiction films, for example, commonly take up themes of memory,

identity, and perception to answer hypothetical questions. Films like Strange

Days, The Matrix, Existenz, Videodrome, Dark City, and Blade Runner establish

alternate worlds where these conundrums can be examined. Though rarely

posing literal questions, they create imaginative situations where perception is

put to the test.

Take for instance the technology present in Strange Days. In its futuristic
 16

world–turn of the century Los Angeles–a kind of virtual reality slash camcorder

technology exists that allows individual experience to be recorded straight from

the brain onto a disc. The moments can then be re-experienced by another,

replete with emotion and physicality. While this technology bears resemblance to

film and video games, it presents the possibility that firsthand experience could

pass for, or even replace, collective experience.

How exactly does the VR technology in Strange Days differ from the

cinema? Sitting in a darkened room, the film viewer experiences vicarious

emotions through characters and narrative. While the film viewer remains

autonomous from the film image, a remarkable union occurs, facilitated by the

viewer’s imagination. The narrative provokes the viewer to enter the story world,

vicariously experience the character’s life, and believe in the altered

representation of the world. Motion pictures thereby elicit empathetic responses

from viewers.

The VR technology in Strange Days involves direct recording of individual

experience, which circumvents editing and narrative. The encoded experiences

represent real life engagements rather than fabricated narratives in fiction film or

constructed arguments in documentary film. Those discs are neither reality nor

representation; do they equal memory? The film asks its viewers to examine their

own physical reality and how they experience the world as individuals. If memory

could be transferred so easily from person to person, what constructs individual

identity? What does this say about personal perspective?

In his examination of film editing technique and practice, Walter Murch

 17

prophetically announces a fantastical future not unlike the world envisioned in

Strange Days. He imagines “the diabolical invention of a black box that could

directly convert a single person’s thoughts into a viewable cinematic reality. You

would attach a series of electrodes to various points on your skull and simply

think the film into existence.”3 Such an invention, says Murch, would elicit a

“Faustian bargain” from those filmmakers brave enough to take up the immediate

transference of personal experience, memory, and imaginary vision. The struggle

settles upon filmmaking as a collaborative art versus the conveyance of a

personal vision. Murch says that it’s the combination of the two that makes the

final film product a vessel for mass experiences. Because filmmaking is a

collaborative venture, many perceptions enter into the production of a narrative

universe. While Bigelow’s and Murch’s futures are not unrealistic, the recording

devices simply don’t exist yet. But scientific research will soon make reality out of

this science fiction.4

If we concede with the postmodernists, that we live in an era of

reproduction, technology, and unreality, then the media largely form our concepts

of the world. It becomes increasingly difficult to draw distinctions between

narratives, media, and everyday life. The media permeate everyday life and play

a part in forming conceptions about the everyday world. What is it that makes

everyday reality autonomous from its media reproductions? If you ask me, the

3
Walter Murch, In the Blink of an Eye (Beverly Hills, CA: Silman-James Press, 1995),
142.
4
Yoichi Miyawaki, Hajime Uchida, et al, “Visual Image Reconstruction from Human Brain
Activity using a Combination of Multiscale Local Image Decoders,” Neuron 5 (Dec 2008): 915-
929.
 18

difference is becoming increasingly marginal. To some extent, we live more

through these representations, these images, these narratives, than we live in an

unmediated reality.

Let’s take a step back for a moment and consider unmediated reality. We

rarely experience daily life without some sort of intermediary separating us from

the world re-presented. This occurs in many ways. All the constructs of modern

life mediate our experience: not just the electronic media. In Mediated, Thomas

De Zengotita explains this situation well. He imagines a driver lost on the

highway somewhere in the middle of Saskatchewan. His car breaks down. His

cell phone dies. There’s nothing around. Or more appropriately, there are no

connections to the modern world. He’s surrounded by a vast and empty

landscape: “Pretty soon you notice how everything around you just happens to

be there.”5 It sounds pretty boring. Unmediated reality doesn’t exist for us much

anymore. We construct the modern world around ourselves so as not to be

bored.

These days we’re assaulted by images and events in every day of our

lives. We’re taught to occupy ourselves, to keep busy, to keep up. Are we also

conditioned to insulate ourselves from boredom, nothingness, and emptiness?

An empty place, as we call is, is not precisely empty, just devoid of interest. Do

we fear empty places because they’re devoid of mediation? Is it that we lack the

perceptual tools to decode natural space?

The postmodernists have noted how we often prescribe real life with the

5
Thomas de Zengotita, Mediated (NY: Bloomsbury, 2005), 13.
 19

images imbedded in us from the media. Watching a sunset over the highway not

too long ago, I proclaimed, “wow, it’s like something out of a movie.” Without

realizing it I had stripped that natural moment of its spontaneity. I laughed at

myself. How do we negotiate between the media representation of the world and

the first hand experience? Do we live in an age of tele-experience?

In the documentary 9/11, the camera witnesses a man on the street

watching the towers burn. This man says, overwhelmed, “it’s like something out

of a movie.” An image at once so powerful, horrific, and disturbing did not belong

in the real world, in front of his eyes to be perceived without interpretation. It

belonged in the summer blockbusters. Honestly, we’d seen that before, though

the reality of our memory recognition made it seem unreal: hyperreal. We’d all

seen Armageddon, where asteroids destroy New York, and Independence Day,

where aliens destroy the White House. Even though those images remain with

us, they belong in those created worlds however much they may resemble our

own. The blockbusters dull our normal perception of the catastrophic. It depends

on which image, which experience you afford power.

Film scholar Bill Nichols holds the view that the natural world exceeds

representation: “This is a brute reality; objects collide, actions occur, forces take

their toll. The world of the historically real is neither text nor narrative. But it is to

systems of signs, to language and discourse, that we must turn in order to assign

meaning and value to these objects, actions, and events.”6 The world of everyday

experience exists as an unmediated place, without meaning until it is assigned

6
Bill Nichols, Representing Reality (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press,
1991),110.
 20

through cognitive mechanisms of interpretation, narrative, and analysis. So what

is it that makes reality, anyway? Is it a personal construction: a series of random

occurrences and interactions? Or is it a socially constructed reality, laden with

meaning that needs to be interpreted?

Arthur Asa Berger, in his book Narratives in Popular Culture, Media, and

Everyday Life, assigns everyday life the qualities of mundanity, where events

occur at random. Narratives, on the other hand, structure events with precision to

give created worlds form and meaning. Where does form and meaning sublimate

in the real world? Through narratives? “We used to think of the stories we read,

listen to, and watch as little more than trivial amusements employed to ‘kill time.’

Now we know that people learn from stories, are emotionally affected by them,

and actually need stories to lend color and interest to their everyday lives.”7

Humans naturally make sense of first hand experience by telling stories. To tell

stories, the teller needs a forum. We’ve far surpassed the age of campfires; we

use them today for nostalgic value. Today stories are told over the phone and in

blogs. Do make sense of our lives by distancing ourselves from it: another kind of

tele-experience?

If we are to agree with Berger, that narratives give form to human life,

what differentiates these narratives from our experience of reality? It may be that

the human imagination provides such a powerful function that narratives and

everyday life have more similarities than differences–that the imagination

7
Arthur Asa Berger, Narratives in Popular Culture, Media and Everyday Life (Thousand
Oaks: Sage Publications, 1997), 174. See page 162 for a chart comparing narratives and
everyday life.
 21

functions just as much as society does in the construction of human perception.

Storytellers naturally embroider their tales to make them either more interesting,

more dramatic, or more structured. This process distances the stories we tell

from the real lived experience.

Consider the Internet as a mediating technology. It has totally reshaped

our methods of interpersonal communication. I would argue a degree further: the

Internet and other mediating technologies allow viewers to live in their minds, in

their solitary living rooms to the extent that our experience of reality focuses more

on interiority than actual communication.

If images and narratives permeate everyday life, if the images are more

real than real, then how do we reclaim unmediated reality? How do we dissociate

media from everyday life? How do we attempt to make sense of our lives without

the aid of the media? Film, by its ontological nature, can never reveal a truly

realistic character–based on the fundamental technicality of the mechanisms

involved. How can we elucidate the differentiation between film narrative and

everyday life when the two are so intimately linked?

Back in the dawn of cinema, more precisely 1929, Soviet realist filmmaker

Dziga Vertov proclaimed in his insistent, political statement that film must tell the

truth about everyday life. His concept of the kinoglaz, the camera-eye, speaks

profoundly to issues of aesthetics, perspective and manipulation of the medium

and for audiences.

Vertov, intent on showing truth through film, proclaimed that the film

medium provided a way to explore alternate perceptions. His example proves

 22

telling, since his intentions in a way contradict the product. With The Man with

the Movie Camera, Vertov set out to show “life as it is.” His aesthetic eye put to

montage, however, circumvented his objective for realistic portrayal. His mission

statement can be viewed in a number of ways, but, The Man with the Movie

Camera, as an experimental non-narrative documentary, shows that the film

medium is inadequate in presenting any kind of objectivity as it concerns reality.

Vlada Petric, one of the few critics equipped to handle this material in context,

states that Vertov’s film “represents an outstanding cinematic transposition of

‘life-facts’ by giving priority to aesthetic expressivity over the observational

photographic recording of reality. Yet, with all its structural and formal features,

the shots per se are perceived as ‘life-as-it-is.”8 Vertov’s intricate manifesto

combines problems of film aesthetics with an intention toward realism and

political education. A most interesting combination, the products of his movement

approximate political propaganda more than realist documentary. His cinematic

eye, especially toward editing, enabled him to construct a political argument out

of mundane footage.

As early as 1929, the inability of the film medium to present the truth of

reality was made clear through Vertov’s work: “The Vertov paradox is his merger

of a truthful, observing attitude with his aesthetic view of film structure.”9 The film,

as an expression of Vertov’s manifesto, shows the incongruence of realism and

political ideology, the collapse of objective representation in the hands of a

8
Vlada Petric, “Vertov’s Cinematic Transposition of Reality,” in Beyond Document:
Essays on Nonfiction Film, ed. Charles Warren (Hanover, NH: Wesleyan University Press, 1996),
271-294.
9
Petric, 291.
 23

politically motivated filmmaker.

Vertov’s manifesto sheds light further into the questions of viewer

identification, interpretation and perspective concerned with the film medium. He

wrote in his manifesto, “I am the Cine-Eye. I am a mechanical eye. I, a machine,

show you the world as only I can see it.”10 Considering the camera as an eye with

a specific perspective negates any possibility of omniscience. If the world of the

film is represented through an eye that picks out what we see, then there are

objects that end up on screen and others that are omitted. The cine-eye chooses

what we see.

If the camera is the eye with which the viewer identifies, then the

perspective is one of the all-perceiving.11 He is made to believe that he is

omniscient. He is interpellated into the ideology of the film–its narrative, its logic.

Contemporary film theorists argue the contrary. The current trend of Cognitivism,

led by Bordwell and Carroll, maintain that the viewer is the perceiver, not the

camera.12 The viewer chooses when to look and look away. Take a film like

Koyaanisquatsi, for example. The film leaves it up to the viewer to decide what

the film is about. But here is an odd type of film, and one that operates according

to Cognitivisit principles. Omit direct human empathy. The majority of films

depend upon subject positioning as a means of narrative recognition.

There are multiple ways to approach the problem of viewer identification

10
Dziga Vertov, Kino-Eye (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985), 17.
11
Metz, The Imaginary Signifier (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1982).
12
David Bordwell and Noel Carroll, eds. Post-Theory: Reconstructing Film Studies
(Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1996). Noel Carroll, Mystifying Movies: Fads and
Fallacies in Contemporary Film Theory (NY: Columbia University Press, 1988).
 24

with film. Firstly, the viewer associates with a character in the film, which is

necessary in order to achieve a logical narrative and empathetic response.

Alternatively, we could agree with Vertov’s view that the cinematic apparatus

interprets the world for the viewer and presents it anew in an altered state; the

viewer identifies with the camera–the kinoglaz or camera-eye.

To take the former stance, the viewer associates with a character in a film

and establishes an emotional connection. The viewer is consumed into the world

of the film, living the narrative events vicariously though another’s perspective.

The viewer’s imagination becomes entwined, even subordinated to a greater

narrative logic. Whatever ultimate meanings, ideologies or lessons the narrative

conveys, the viewer will suspend disbelief as long as he or she empathizes with

the character. In this way, the viewer’s imagination becomes subject, and can be

manipulated at the whim of the narrator.

As far as Vertov’s cine-eye explains viewer identification, we must

consider the viewer an empty vessel. His cine-eye–his director’s eye at viewing

the world and his political ideology mediating that view–maintains a way of

seeing that will likely differ from the way the viewer might inherently witness the

events in an unmediated situation. The Cognitivists are in an uproar at this point.

The surrogate eye cannot copy individual experience of the world, since the

viewer’s perspective remains individual.

The term “objective reality” assumes the absence of the personal

worldview. But isn’t it true that no two people think alike, much less see alike?

Everyone sees the world differently, through conditioned paradigms. Color,

 25

depth, ideology, and perspective: all the interpretations are personal. Take for

example a home video. It should represent the experience of the photographer

and even serve as a record of an historical experience. However, there remains

a fundamental difference between the digital record of the event and the

photographer’s memory. The record has been filtered through a cinematic

apparatus, observed through the photographer’s surrogate eye.

Everything we see we interpret through out brains. There can be do

eyesight without the brain, which lets us know what we’re seeing. Visual

perception involves the method of decoding the visual world, and since this is a

personal activity, it’s allows for a degree of opinion. Therefore there’s a difference

between what you see, what you remember seeing, and what the camera

records.

How does the cinematographic apparatus copy or reproduce the natural

act of seeing? It doesn’t. Watching movies is a totally different way of seeing.

Film and video may appear to resemble reality, but are fundamentally different.

Stanley Kubrick provides a great example here with his technical attempt at

photographing in low light situations. While preparing for the production of Barry

Lyndon, Kubrick sought lenses that would accommodate his production scenario;

he wanted to shoot with available light, in this case candlelight. Film (celluloid)

requires a certain degree of light in order to expose properly. This scenario

proved difficult. Kubrick landed on “an ultra-fast lens” that would allow enough

light through in order to expose the film properly.13 The cinematographic

13
Ed DiGiulio, “Kubrick and Barry Lyndon: Two Special Lenses for Barry Lyndon,” Visual
Memory, http://www.visual-memory.co.uk/sk/ac/len/page1.htm (accessed 1 Sept 2008).
 26

apparatus is a complex technical device that does not operate in a way similar to

the human eye.

Vertov’s manifesto suggests the juxtaposition between realistic objectivity

and film aesthetics. His groundbreaking film, as a product of his ideology, shows

further that the two are irreconcilable. Given the filmmaker’s political position, he

constructed the images taken from real life to make a Socialist statement. But

real life is not that way, is it? The Man with the Movie Camera tells us that film

aesthetics subordinate the portrayal of experiential reality. It becomes clear with

realist movements again and again: with Italian Neorealism, Nouvelle Vague, and

Dogma 95. Realist movements convey ephemeral statements; the products last

as historical documents. But since the realist movements so often integrate

mission statements, aesthetic intentions and political motivations, they ultimately

fail to reclaim reality for the individual.

The world recreated on film is merely a representation: images of the real

world we inhabit. Since the cinematographic apparatus copies images from real

life, reconstructs them, and reproduces them, the product becomes

fundamentally altered from its original form. There remains a resemblance, but its

essence is ultimately disfigured. As Walter Benjamin wrote, “the technique of

reproduction detaches the reproduced image from the domain of tradition.”14

There can be no realistic representation of reality through art, since art is always

a fabrication of realty; it must be transmitted according to aesthetics.

14
Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” in Film
Theory and Criticism, ed. Leo Braudy and Marshall Cohen (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
1999), 731-751.
 27

As in any art form, aesthetics play an unmitigated role in the construction

of filmic reality. The Dogma Manifesto states that the filmmakers must strive to

present reality and truth without aesthetics considerations: “My supreme goal is

to force the truth out of my characters and settings. I swear to do so by all means

available and at the cost of any good taste and any aesthetic considerations.”15

Interestingly, due to this anti-aesthetic notion, the Dogma 95 corpus has a

distinct look and feel contrary to Hollywood films. The Dogma corpus displays

grain, low-key lighting, and incongruent color palettes. Taking the “Vow of

Chastity” into consideration while observing the look of its products, it becomes

evident that film aesthetics perform a definite function in the making of and

presentation of any piece of art. As a piece of art, or even simply as a

representation of something that once was, film necessarily involves an aspect of

aesthetics due, if nothing else, to its visibility.

Filmmakers seem to believe in the existence of objectivity while

overlooking the inherent power of cinematography. Taking a closer look at

Hollywood aesthetics, we can see the use of spectacular camera dynamics and

the manipulation of color. Films that claim an objective view of the world do so by

presenting omniscient narration. In this way, the products manipulate the

viewer’s imagination. No matter how you look at it, films always employ an

ideological stance: “objectivity is itself a perspective.”16 We should not forget the

work of the cinematographer in molding the perspective, however. Omniscient

15
Lars Von Trier and Thomas Vinterberg, “Dogma 95 & The Vow of Chastity,” In Purity
and Provovcation, ed. Mette Hjort and Scott MacKenzie (London: BFI, 2003), 199-200.
16
Nichols,126.
 28

cinematography most often situates the viewer in the place of God, given the

ability to view everything. The film artists–director, cinematographer, editor, etc.–

reconstruct the recorded world to offer a new view through a represented reality.

The film medium presents an altered view of the world since it relies on

perspective and aesthetics. Realist movements, such as Kinopravda and Dogma,

may make their amendments but can never actually alter the requisites of the

medium itself. Whether looking through the camera-eye or the character’s eyes,

the world of the film appears different from everyday life, from the way individuals

experience reality firsthand. The simple fact that the viewer looks through a

surrogate eye should account for the fact that the film medium, in any of its

multiplicities, offers a view of the world fundamentally altered from the world of

everyday reality. The long-held assumptions that the medium can present truth

should be taken with a grain of salt. Dangerously, contemporary viewers look

through the screen-window into the film world, naively believing that they are

witnessing a real event. We take the suspension of disbelief all too much for

granted.
 30

INVISIBLE EFFECTS AND THE REALITY PRINCIPLE

“Gradually introduced over the last five years, digital special effects
have transformed the landscape of the visual in film, transporting
the viewer seamlessly beyond that which is real into a synthetic
world where computer animation, morphing, and digital effects
blend the actual into the fantastic. Perhaps one of the most
disturbing aspects of the new wave of digital effects films is that
they do not seem–at first glance–to contain any effects at all.”
– Wheeler Winston Dixon, The Transparency of Spectacle.

Prompted with the term “special effects,” minds jump to extreme

examples: flashy CGI sequences, green screening, color replacement, etc. We

tend to forget that an image by its very nature is a re-presented view of reality. To

give form is to insinuate an aesthetic. Whether the picture captures a model, a

landscape, or a science-fiction scenario, it’s already a step away from reality by

its very nature as a representation. “Invisible effects” range from simple wire

erasures and color correction to realistic looking fully animated CGI characters

and digitally created settings. Realistic visual effects incorporated into realistic

films exacerbate hyperreality, which ups the ante of the everyday; realistic films

are made to look more real than real. No longer does Hollywood settle for

representing reality. To achieve realism nowadays, digital effects are utilized to

the extreme in order to visualize a perfected world blemish-free. To give form to

reality represented is to imply an ideology. A way of seeing is a moral category.

Realism is ideological, and perhaps the most manipulative of art forms.

 31

The recent dystopian sci-fi Children of Men has been called a thinking

man’s action film. The film employs techniques of realism, such as realism of

time through long takes, handheld camera and documentary-style

cinematography to engage the viewer. The film sustains a remarkable realism,

which, at first glance, departs only slightly from the look out the window on any

modern day city. While the film appears realistic, we must take a step back to

consider the high degree of planning required for long takes, the digital erasure

of cinematographic rigging, and especially the digital reconstitution of the images.

Upon release of the film, critics were divided in judging its realism.1

Despite the film’s futuristic setting, it maintains a surprisingly contemporaneous

ambiance by avoiding most sci-fi conventions. At first look at downtown London,

it seems like not much has changed in 2027. The technology is old and dirty;

fashions have not changed; apart from the next generation Macs and some

digital billboards, the world looks much the same. What sets the film apart most

from the present day is its evocation of a severe cultural depression: the infertility

crisis. The film shows us a world without hope of the future and without a

scapegoat. In this exaggerated setting, contemporary issues play out vividly so

that the audience may take it with a grain of salt. Specifically, the portrayal of

totalitarian political and military powers hits some familiar notes.

One shot in particular, which occurs toward the end of the film,

incorporates multiple image layers to achieve its effect. The continuous shot, in

which Kee, the film’s Virgin Mary, gives birth to the first baby in 18 years,

1
While Ross Douthat’s review of the film, “The Book is Better,” pictures it as any old
escapist action film, Ryan Gilbey’s comments in “Bombs, Killer Flu and Ping-pong-ball Kisses,”
speak positively of the film’s effective use of realism and cinematography.
 32

includes cable erasures, digital breath, and a CGI baby. In a Hollywood Reporter

article the film’s visual effects director describes the process: “‘The baby had to

be completely (computer-generated)… The actual shot is four minutes long, and

we couldn't get the movement required from an animatronic.’”2 In the context of

the film, the shot is seamless. Because of the realistic tone of the film as a whole,

innocent viewers accept this elaborately conceived shot precisely because of its

verisimilitude.

Children of Men dances precariously between poles: future and present,

sci-fi and realist, and relevant and escapist. Judging on the division of the critics,

it might seem that the film achieves all at once. How can a vision of the future

also connote contemporary issues? How can a science fiction also convey

realism? The poles may not be as extreme as they seem, for these opposites are

fused and fiddled with through the film.

Needless to say, as film history goes we’ve far surpassed New Wave

style. What remains apparent is the copying of realist techniques in an entirely

new setting. With the aid of digital technology, a film can be made to appear

realistic when in truth the case is quite the opposite. Is this new move in

Hollywood verisimilitude just another step in the direction movie effects have

been heading? Can we view invisible effects as a kind of digital visual effect on

par with spectacular ones? Or does his move toward digitally enhanced realism

signify something greater?

From the beginning of film history, filmmakers have been at odds with the

2
Debra Kaufman, “Seeing Eye to Eye,” Hollywoodreporter.com,
http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/hr/content_display/news/e3i19a1b95e867baa55e29e1ff28bc57
019 (accessed 22 Sept. 2007).
 33

stylistics separating the spectacular and realistic. Since 1900, with the films of

the Lumiere brothers on one end of the spectrum and Melies’ on the other, the rift

has been wide. The Lumiere brothers’ adherence to realism and Melies’

attraction to spectacle makes clear the stark differences between realist film and

fantasy–not to mention the apparent range of possibilities for the industry to

come. Certainly taste enters into the equation, but what about ethics? In “An

Aesthetic of Astonishment,” film historian Thomas Gunning is hard pressed to

find credible reactions to the early special effects save the famous story of

Lumiere’s Arrival of a Train at a Station.3 Steeped in mythology, film historians

can only conjecture as to the original reactions to A Trip to the Moon, not to

mention the effects of the moving image itself upon the minds and hearts of

audiences. The shock factor sustained the industry through its infancy and

beyond: “Shock becomes not only a mode of modern experience, but a strategy

of a modern aesthetic of astonishment.”4 The more spectacular the better, and

year after year filmmakers strive to one-up their predecessors. This makes for a

spiral–whether upward or downward will rely on the beholder to decide. We’re

heading toward an age of all-encompassing hyperreality–living through it day to

day without noticing its escalation.

The French New Wave and Italian Neorealism mark important transitions

in world cinema. Complementary to Hollywood’s growing obsession with

spectacle and façade, Truffaut, Godard, De Sica, Rossellini, and others

3
Tom Gunning, “An Aesthetic of Astonishment: Early Film and the (In)Credulous
Spectator,” Film Theory and Criticism, eds. Leo Braudy and Marshall Cohen (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1999), 818-832.
4
Ibid., 831.
 34

embarked to create a new cinema seated in veracity and verisimilitude. From

Italy came The Bicycle Thief only a few years after the Technicolor spectacular

The Thief of Baghdad. In France, Breathless arrived the same year as William

Castle’s 3-D horror thriller 13 Ghosts. Historically, these realist styles sought to

reawaken national cinemas in the wake of war and socio-cultural depression.

Their innovative, gritty, techniques gain them notoriety while foregrounding the

need for cinema to return to a raw, naturalistic style–as opposed to the

Hollywood edifice. The French New Wave, for example, brought the camera to

the streets, omitted elaborate cinematographic rigging, and enabled a naturalistic

evolution of organic story and character.

Most mainstream film these days include some kind of visual effect. Digital

technology has become the norm, and in order for a director to achieve his or her

vision, realism is tossed out the window. A common perception abounds in the

film industry today that in order to achieve the desired look, visual effects must

be incorporated. Colors are saturated or replaced altogether. If an actor doesn’t

give the desired expression, the visual effects supervisor will fix it in post-

production. Somehow reality is never enough. In The Transparency of Spectacle,

Wheeler Winston Dixon offers a grim, frighteningly apparent vision of the future

of film in light of technological advancements: “The routine use of computer-

generated imagery is becoming so prevalent, and cost-effective, that sets,

costumes, locations, and even supporting players can be conjured up with a

whisk of the electronic paint box.”5 Forget about trucking your crew half way

5
Wheeler Winston Dixon, The Transparency of Spectacle (Albany: SUNY Press, 1998),
10.
 35

across the world to shoot in an exotic location. With digital technology, the

locations come to you. The final images will look comparable, if not better, when

digitally created. What does it matter that actors never set foot on that sandy

shore? If the audience can’t tell the difference, there is no difference. With

Hollywood films embracing hyperreality, the look of real world loses out on what

the technology can fix. Invisible effects have been utilized in recent films such as

Flags of Our Fathers, Blood Diamond, and Casino Royale in order to modify

landscapes. To achieve the precise look for Flags of Our Fathers, for example,

locations required alterations:

According to Digital Domain visual effects supervisor Michael Butler, the

majority of Flags was shot in Iceland, which had a black-sand beach
similar to the one at Iwo Jima. Nearly everything else–ocean, sky and
certainly the island itself–was replaced in 450 digital shots (with Warner
Bros. Pictures' Letters From Iwo Jima, the count goes up to 700). In
addition to set extension and replacement, the DD team also created
thousands of digital Marines and boats.6

The final product appears realistic through the use of invisible effects, which

modify the original images. With the appropriate lighting, color, and texture,

digital enhancements seamlessly layer onto the original images to create a

complete look.

This enhanced Hollywood look has become the norm. Omitting blemishes

and mistakes that occurred during production, films are made during the editing

process more so than on location. Realism is created in post-production. As a

result, the screen visions represent more the computer process than a captured

reality. Contemporary “realistic” films of this sort convey an artificial realism

6
Debra Kaufman, “Seeing Eye to Eye,” Hollywoodreporter.com,
http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/hr/content_display/news/e3i19a1b95e867baa55e29e1ff28bc57
019 (accessed 22 Sept. 2007).
 36

enabled by computer technology that bears little reference to the real world apart

from the look. A film of this sort presented as a realistic vision plays upon the

viewer’s perception of the everyday. The constructed, enhanced Hollywood look

turns into the favored reality despite content–because nowadays it has become

clear that images speak more powerfully than words:

Our ability to see is a process of socio-visual construction, taught by

parental and educational structures, and deeply influenced by cultural and
religious values. Film has become one of the more potent of these
influences, altering the way we perceive national tragedies, heroic
activities, gender roles, and sexual conduct, among other activities.7

The Hollywood way of looking has developed to such a stylistic degree that the

world itself no longer looks the same. We expect Hollywood moments in our real

lives, overlooking the fact that films are premeditated and aesthetically mapped

to create a vision of the world. Although real life is not the same as cinema, both

narratively and aesthetically, the differences are becoming more and more slight

based on our cinephilic tendency.

The problems encountered with invisible effects are precisely due to their

verisimilitude. On the screen, it’s simple to distinguish the real from the make

believe in spectacular instances. For example, despite the realism of a monster

flick, viewers know that the aliens in Independence Day are fictional creations.

This division is made all the more difficult, in some cases impossible, when

presented with realistic effects within realistic films. The digital erasure of wires

from a sequence in the James Bond action film Casino Royale might imply to its

viewers that the stunts were capable as is. The film’s opening action sequence

7
Margaret Miles and S. Brent Plate, “Hospitable Visions,” Crosscurrents (Spring 2004):
26.
 37

employs a host of techniques: some real, others digital. Bond (Daniel Craig)

chases a bomb-maker (Sebastien Foucan, co-creator of Parkour) through an

industrial construction site. Foucan performs all of his own stunts, but Craig has a

double. They climb up a crane and leap to a building. The height is incredible.

Viewers might suspect that it’s all real, or alternatively doubt that any of it had

occurred. This mix of realistic action blends the real with the computer-enhanced

to disable our belief. Here we have a breach not only in the way of viewing but in

the way of perceiving. The hyperreal becomes everyday.

Seasoned film viewers have become accustomed to editing and special

effects techniques. But with this new wave of invisible effects, the techniques

have adapted to require an altogether more attentive viewer. With image

layering, effects are seamlessly incorporated onto original footage for a realistic

look:

Visual cues alerted us to the artificiality and constructedness of the

manufactured image we see on the screen; now these cues are absent.
Images within images are nothing new. Images seamlessly bonded to
images within the same frame are a different matter altogether.8

It has become increasingly difficult to distinguish between real and altered

footage in films. The Hollywood look has developed in such a way as to cover up

its rigging so that all will be perceived as real. The suspension of disbelief

activates in order for the viewer to enjoy the entertainment, but hinders his or her

ability to distinguish fantasy from reality. The invisible effects and hidden

alterations to the original footage make for hyperreality. More so than in the past,

due to the accelerated possibilities of digital technology, the reality principle

8
Dixon, 32.
 38

comes under attack. What consequences do we pay for suspending our

disbelief?

In accord with Hollywood’s tried and true cure-all (upping the ante)

audiences are fed bigger and better spectacles in films that push the limits of

possibility in a realistic way. Audiences will, at the same time, demand more and

more. Dixon prognosticates that the reality principle will pay its toll for this

acceleration in the film industry: “Audiences will demand a souped-up, picture

postcard vision of existence for entertainment consumption, while the actuality of

their physical lives becomes ever more marginalized.”9 Movies are changing

faster than society can keep up. Basing a perception of reality on the impression

given by “realistic” films embeds hyperreality in the real world. When we base our

expectations of physical reality by what we see in film, we will always be

disappointed. This new wave of digital filmmaking will only exacerbate our

extravagant expectations of reality.

In response to Children of Men, cultural critic Slavoj Zizek remarks: “For

me, Children of Men is a realist film… The changes that it introduces do not point

to an ultimate reality, but makes reality more what it already is. It makes us

perceive our own reality more like an ultimate reality.”10 Realism cannot prescribe

to the film in the textbook definition. Simply due to the fact that the film

incorporates a large amount of image alteration, the reality it presents

necessarily becomes a heightened one. The film’s future setting maintains a

contemporary feel, which adds to the jarring realism of the scenario. While the

9
Dixon, 34.
10
Slavoj Zizek, “The Possibility of Hope,” Children of Men. DVD. Dir. Alfonso Cuaron.
Universal Studios, 2007.
 39

film utilizes long takes and documentary-style camera work to obtain a realism of

time and space, these aspects do not exceed the breaches made on reality

through the use of CGI, image manipulation, and premeditated cinematography.

In response to Zizek’s comment, Children of Men achieves a certain kind of

realism but does not represent everyday reality as is. Children of Men presents a

vision of the future in a realistic way, but should not be considered a realist film.

In this age of digital technology, we see more enhancements, alterations,

and additions than of the originally captured images. Erasing blemishes and

correcting errors constitutes an aesthetic choice, which alters the reality of the

image. As a consequence, the viewer perceives the altered, realistic image as if

it genuinely portrayed reality. The form hides the process. Will we expect reality

to look more like the images we see? Or can we reject the hyperreality of the

movie screen as nothing more than an image? The gap between the screen and

the everyday may becomes bridged, for better or worse, if we can realize that the

physical world has already achieved its own hyperreality.

We forget that there’s a difference between the reality and the

representation. Does that difference matter in the end? If the map precedes the

territory, there’s no need to travel, no need to be here and now. What remains is

the belief that there is a space. Whether that space is virtual or real matters less

than its visual aesthetic. The world looks better represented.

 41

LEARNING TO LOVE THE VIRTUAL:

TECHNOPHILIA, HOLLYWOOD AND HYPERREALITY

“The best science fiction extrapolates from known technology and

projects a vision of the future against which we can evaluate
present technology and its direction… [S]cience fiction matters,
[the] actual development of technology and our response (or lack of
response) to it are influenced by popular culture.”
– Daniel Dinello, Technophobia!

When the first trailer was released for Beowulf in the summer of 2007, I

wondered what people would make of it. I sat for a minute, unblinking, at the

sheer hyperreality of it. How could anybody really want to see a movie like that?

It’s a videogame on the big screen, and you don’t even get a joystick! In the wake

of The Lord of the Rings, I supposed that the producers were just mining the

fantasy material.

I had heard that the film utilized the same technology used to make

Gollum in The Lord of the Rings. It’s funny, because I had wondered about the

real versus computer generated elements in Jackson’s trilogy: there were more

of the latter. Jackson and his crew labored to make their created world resemble

the one in their heads. Why not just do it the other way around: start in the

computer. I’m afraid that this method is all the more frightening for its

repercussions in the real world. As much as The Lord of the Rings creates a

hyperreal Middle-Earth, it uses a real world reference: New Zealand.

Beowulf does the opposite. It is pure simulacra. It references a look of the

 42

real world (albeit a period film referencing a place none of us have ever seen), a

place in the pages of history and legend. Beowulf uses photorealism, graphic

representations reconstituted from photographed images. It looks real, appears

to be photographed, but the images are yet one more step away from the real

thing; a real object becomes a photograph of real object which then becomes a

photoreal representation of photograph of real object. We must ask ourselves

what difference it makes.

In the behind the scenes featurette on the Beowulf DVD, director

Zemeckis recounts a discussion with Peter Jackson early

in his production process. Jackson mentioned the

technicality of creating Gollum using performance capture,

and the look it produced. In effect, The Lord of the Rings

trilogy skirts two looks (photographed images of real

real
objects and computer generated imagery) that aim at integration. A

kind of mask is placed over the elements to blend them

together. Why bother with this tedious balancing act?

Why not recreate the world in the computer?

Zemeckis discarded the balancing act. Many

critics believed that Beowulf resembled too much the look of the not real

video game. But sitting in the theater for an hour and a half, that impression gets

lost. The world of Beowulf begins to look real.

Separating Beowulf from the classic tradition, Zemeckis says, "this has

nothing to do with the Beowulf you were forced to read in Jr. high school. It's all
 43

about eating, drinking, fighting, and fornicating." This is not a film for children, like

Zemeckis’ last venture The Polar Express that utilized the same performance

capture technology. Despite the PG-13 rating, the film is loaded with violence

and sexual reference. Beowulf is a film aimed at adolescents while outwardly

inappropriate for its target audience.

Critics have variously noted the film’s thrilling aspects and its heralding of

an age of pure simulation. Steven Hunter of The Washington Post brings up the

uber-spectacular quality of the movie, highlighting the action sequence in which

Beowulf battles Grendel naked:

Now, is action this outlandish a movie or a cartoon or some weirdness in

between? The answer is the last. Watching it–through glasses, by the
way, because it's in 3-D at most theaters, and the shades are cool
Wayfarer-type frames, not the '50s cardboard punch-outs–has the strange
feel of a dream from someone else's head, where the details aren't quite
sharp enough to convince but so sharp they almost convince.1

Technically, Beowulf is a great achievement in visual effects. Bridging the gap

between real and graphic, the very existence of the film shows that producers are

really starting to push the envelope of what’s aesthetically pleasing, moral, and

artistic. Beowulf reviews sprawl hurrahs for its technological achievements:

Beowulf must overcome the "uncanny valley," the term for that moment
when a simulated human becomes creepy on film, says Carolyn Giardina
of The Hollywood Reporter. But Beowulf is coming along at the right time,
she says. "I think audiences are getting used to more sophisticated, lifelike
animated characters as a whole," she says, noting various characters that
have been interspersed among real actors. "We've seen it with Gollum,
King Kong and Davy Jones. We saw it with the Silver Surfer. There are
more every year."2

Perhaps in consumer society, more is better. As Gunning notes wisely in his

1
Stephen Hunter, “Surface Treatment,” The Washington Post, 16 Nov 2007.
2
Anthony Breznican, “Beowulf Aims to Change the Look of Movies,” USA Today, 9 Nov
2007.
 44

“Aesthetic of Astonishment,” “[a] stimulus shield dulls the edge of experience,

and more intense aesthetic energies are required to penetrate it.”3 Even the most

radical reviewer shies away from the ultimate perceptive adjustment that the film

requires of its audience. Perhaps its obviousness requires silence to appreciate:

a 3-D simulation of real actors translated into a virtual setting, screened in iMAX.

Washington Post critic Hunter concludes in his article, “the astonishing becomes

commonplace.4 Looking into the future through the eyes of these theorized

“sophisticated” audiences, there will come a day when the difference ceases to

be apparent. But today, for many viewers there is no difference between the real

and the virtual. Teenagers who spend hours on X-Box live, Wii, and a host of

interactive virtual games, I suspect, have trouble making this differentiation.

Many people these days spend as much time in the virtual world as in the real

world.

In the summer of 2009 it will continue. The struggle between technophilia

and technophobia becomes apparent through the continuation of the Terminator

franchise. With Terminator: The Rise of the Machines (2003), the films finally

came to fruition as a trilogy–one that took three decades to bring to life.

Terminator excels to the level of franchise with the fourth edition Salvation, slated

for a May 2009 release. This episode brings a new look to the films: it’s post-

apocalyptic, set in a world where humans fight machines, setting handguns

against lasers. You might expect the franchise to embrace its technophobic

3
Tom Gunning, “An Aesthetic of Astonishment: Early Film and the (In)Credulous
Spectator,” in Film Theory and Criticism, ed. Leo Braudy and Marshall Cohen (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1999), 831.
4
Hunter, Ibid.
 45

message. But there’s a continuing quarrel here. It’s a big-budget action film.

Millions of bucks are packed in to ensure an entertaining experience. Low-tech

and big-budget don’t mesh.

The release of the teaser trailer for Terminator: Salvation in July 2008

brought cheers, whispers, and hurrahs from the audience. We all wondered to

what film the images were attached. The trailer brims with digital artifacts and

glitches; it looks like a low-resolution Youtube video. It’s Christian Bale and a big

gun and a bunch of explosions until the title pounds onto the screen followed by

the contrived tag line: “the beginning of the end.” This summer blockbuster revels

in its own technological virtuosity, washing over the strong technophobic struggle

of men versus artificial intelligence. I shudder to think what the videogame knock-

off will look like.

Introducing his study of science fiction and its effect on society, Daniel

Dinello notes the difference between “the techno-utopia promised by real-world

scientists and the techno-dystopia predicted by science fiction.”5 Dinello

foregrounds the actuality of science fiction, as if it weren’t fiction anymore. In

many ways he’s right on key. You might have to think back to the 1950s–or go

back through the cinema–to see what our forefathers had envisioned as science

fiction. While many of the apocalyptic visions strike the contemporary viewer as

totally absurd: technologies that never existed, like rotary carphones, for

example.6

But let’s not discredit science fiction. The genre enables writers to

5
Daniel Dinello, Technophobia! Science Fictions of Posthuman Technology (Austin:
University of Texas Press, 2005), 2.
6
A rotary car-phone is featured in a 1957 artifact Beginning of the End.
 46

meditate on current situations in order to look at what might come. While many

visions are absurdly off base, for example the string of millennial anxiety films in

the 1990s, we have to consider that the science and the fiction are in

disequilibrium: “posthuman evolution–the development of human/machine

fusion–is clearly under way.”7 We don’t live in a full-blown science fiction, but

we’re getting close. Just look at the immensity with which we utilize digital

technology in our daily lives. We interact using technological devices, zone out

on the tube, mediate our experiences in the very environments we call home.

There is nothing left of unmediated experience. We live in the hyperreal, and

anyone who tells you otherwise hasn’t taken the red pill.8

7
Daniel Dinello, Technophobia! (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2005), 4.
8
In The Matrix, Neo chooses between the red pill and the blue pill, which designate real
and virtual.
 47

SIMULATED ENVIRONMENTS:
SUCCESSIVE PHASES OF THE IMAGE IN
TARKOVSKY’S SOLARIS

“When the real is no longer what it was, nostalgia assumes its full meaning.”
– Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation.

The first impression many viewers have of the work of Russian filmmaker

Andrei Tarkovsky centers on the difficulty of interpreting his work. He embodies

the antithesis of Hollywood. The films of Andrei Tarkovsky are well known to

critics and viewers alike as ambiguous explorations in spirituality and

epistemology. His films are difficult to place, enigmatic to a degree, and

elaborately coded with symbolic detail. In the following pages I will apply

Baudrillard’s theory of “the successive phases of the image” to Tarkovsky’s

Solaris (1972) to show how he transforms natural environments into simulated

ones chronologically through the film. In this way, viewers are made to question

assumptions about the status of their own environments and their desire for

natural reality.

Solaris, based on Stanislaw Lem’s science fiction novel, follows

psychologist Kris Kelvin as he travels through four progressively simulated

environments that symbolize “the successive phases of the image.” It is a

science fiction film that defies generic conventions. It relies on imagery and
 48

extended ambient exploratory sequences that create a vivid sense of place: the

idyllic natural, industrialized urban, simulated space station, and utopian

simulacrum. The film begins on Earth with Kelvin, who prepares for his journey to

the Solaris space station. In the opening sequences Tarkovsky sublimely evokes

nostalgia for natural environments, which will be played with throughout the rest

of the film. We get the sense that Kelvin has returned from an urban setting to a

childhood home, the dacha, in order to say goodbye. At the dacha, we are given

exposition as to the problems on Solaris; the scientists are experiencing

hallucinations. Kelvin has been requisitioned to travel to the station to decide

whether or not to shut down the mission.

Two extended travel sequences ensue. One follows Kelvin’s friend Berton

on his journey from country to city. The other documents Kelvin’s trip to the

Solaris station. While these sequences seem apparently unnecessary to the plot

progression, they develop an intuitive rhythm for the film and the viewer’s sense

of place.

When Kelvin finally arrives at the station, it becomes immediately evident

that something is amiss. The place appears deserted and in shambles. The

mysterious space, along with its enigmatic survivors Snaut and Sartorius,

provides few answers as to the circumstances of the mission. Kelvin must

experience the place for himself. As he orients to his new surroundings, we

realize that Solaris holds vast mysteries and that the answers are highly

subjective. Kelvin clashes with the others in his personal perspective since he

views the situation as a psychologist rather than a scientist. This position allows
 49

him to experience the hallucinations personally, but also exposes his repressed

memories of grief and regret.

The film explores vivid spaces and situations, balancing between scientific

and spiritual perspectives. Relying on imagery and ambiance, the film opens

itself up to a multitude of readings, each of which are equally valid:

Solaris invites several parallel, and even contradictory, interpretations. It

can be read as a Swiftian satire, a tragic love story, a Kafkaesque
existentialist parable, a metafictional parody of hermeneutics, a
Cervantean ironic romance, and a Kantian meditation on the nature of
human consciousness. But none of these readings is completely
satisfactory, and Lem intended it to be so. The simultaneously
incompatible and mutually reinforcing readings make the process of
interpreting the text a metaphor for the scientific problem of articulating a
manifestly paradoxical natural universe.1

The following reading will interpret Solaris as a journey through spaces: the

environmental progression from nature to simulacrum. The film can best be

described in abstract terms, since it relies so heavily on philosophical

conceptions. The environments could easily be interpreted as imaginary spaces

with more symbolic than literal meaning. This interpretation draws on the film’s

juxtaposition of reality versus imaginary, strengthening the relationship between

the latter and the simulacrum.

In the first part of the film we are made to feel comfortable in a natural

environment. The long sequence presents Kelvin in nature, contemplating and

inspecting the pond, the reeds, the wind, and the forest. Kelvin visits his father’s

dacha, which symbolizes family and familiarity. This sequence evokes home: the

ideal image of the present and unmediated reality. Simultaneously, Kelvin’s

1
Istvan Csiscery-Ronay, Jr. “The Book is the Alien: On Certain and Uncertain Readings
of Lem’s Solaris,” Science Fiction Studies 35 (March 1985).
 50

docile attitude drudges up feelings of unease. The presence of an unexplained

box and his ritualistic burning of photographs and papers imply mysteries in his

past, demons with which he must grapple. In the opening moments, a symbolic

image appears that will reverberate through the rest of the film: a natural object

forced into an unnatural setting. A horse retreats to its stable after galloping

majestically through a field. This image creates an unsettling feeling as well as

an ominous foreshadowing of the denaturalization to come.

Gradually, simulated and industrial symbols intrude. Inside the dacha

there are various objects connoting history, civilization, and progress. A long

sequence involving the television detaches us from the here and now as we

receive the exposition. The presence of art objects reflects the vast history of

Western civilization as we are made to ponder “demuseumification.”2 The interior

space of the dacha creates the impression of “the reflection of a profound

reality.”3

In the next extended sequence of almost ten minutes, Berton rides to the

city along highways, through tunnels, and finally through a complex urban road

system. The landscape becomes progressively more simulated, allowing the

viewer to adapt to the industrial world. The city is also the here and now, but one

that “masks and denatures a profound reality.”4 Looking back, we can consider

the change in environments as more simulated than the countryside. However,

the cityscape is still familiar. Though intended as a science-fiction landscape of

2
Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press,
1994) 11.
3
Ibid., 6.
4
Ibid., 6.
 51

the future, the city functions in the film to heighten the viewer’s understanding of

progress. This travel sequence moves from the rural (past) to the urban (present-

future). Nostalgia has already set in.

A subsequent travel sequence shows Kelvin on his way to the Solaris

space station. These shots transition from the reality of what we know on Earth to

a dislocated, simulated environment that “masks the absence of a profound

reality.”5 Immediately the imagery introduces the station as a simulated

environment. Referencing the natural environment of the dacha, air vents suck

up the fog from the space vessel in the docking bay. To read this metaphorically,

the station, a mechanized environment, rids itself of natural phenomena. But the

inhabitants seek to reinsert natural things into their environment to humanize it,

to familiarize the sterile simulation. The scientists post photographs and artifacts

in their rooms. They try to make the unreal setting more real by making believe

that they’re still on Earth, fooling themselves to forget that they’re floating in

space.

In a later situation, Kelvin places paper strips on an overhead air vent to

simulate the sound of wind rusting leaves. While the sound familiarizes the

space, it also creates an imaginary response in the auditor that connects the

simulation with the real. In Kelvin’s desire for the natural, he relies on the

imaginary to transform the simulated environment of the station. As a sensory

trick, the paper strips fool his ears but not his heart. In similar attempts, the

scientist Snaut fills his room with memorabilia of the natural: art reproductions, a

photograph of a horse, and a case of butterfly specimens. Despite their best

5
Ibid., 6.
 52

efforts, the inhabitants of the simulated environment cannot make it into a home:

The opposition manifests itself on two levels. On a purely technical level,

we are presented with the images of the cozy, earthly house and the
distant, impersonal experimental station. On a symbolic level, we can
identify the juxtaposition of the familiar, safe world of the home with the
alien, mysterious interiors of the ‘foreign territory.6

The move from natural to simulated environments displays a symbolic shift,

which at once could be interpreted on historical, ideological, and personal levels.

The most polarized image appears in the space station’s library. The room

is decorated with nostalgic memorabilia: art reproductions, classical sculptures,

and old books. The look of the room echoes back to the interior of the dacha, but

in a fundamentally altered form. In this place, there are no windows. Most

tellingly, a similar, perhaps identical, classical bust appears in both the dacha

and the station library: “The sculpture connects the two spaces and, along with

the other details, introduces the notion of highly subjective time, reinforced by the

emphasis on the total isolation from the outside world.”7 This parallel could be

interpreted as a statement of the desire for familiarity and the nostalgia for the

natural. In order to make the sterilized space station into a home, the scientists

surround themselves with earthly objects and memorabilia. Ultimately, they make

their environment into an unreal, fantasy setting. The simulation cannot be

humanized in its essence. The scientists blend fantasy into the simulation in

order to facilitate their desire to return to the real.

The last sequence on the space station implies travel, as in the earlier

6
Roumiana Deltcheva and Eduard Vlasov, “Back to the House II: On the Chronotopic
and Ideological Reinterpretation of Lem’s Solatis in Tarkovsky’s Film,” The Russian Review 56
(Oct 1997): 534-5.
7
Ibid., 537.
 53

literal passages from country to city and Earth to the station. This time the travel

is subjective, moving from the simulated (space station) to the simulacrum

portrayed through Kelvin’s hallucinations. In an extended dream sequence,

Kelvin’s room on the space station merges with the dacha. This imaginary

transportation functions to move Kelvin physically and psychologically to the final

stage of simulacra. The story progresses to the point where viewers question the

truth of the narration itself. As viewers question the truth of the telling, they can

no longer distinguish between the reality and the simulation in a similar way as

Kelvin.

Lastly, the pre-eminently ambiguous and subjective image of the movie

appears: the simulacrum of the dacha on Solaris. The symbolic environments

come full circle. Kelvin returns to the “natural” environment, but details have

changed. There is an overriding surrealism in this last sequence: rain falls

indoors, characters seem distant, and the sky is overcast. Kelvin’s pastoral

fantasy connotes the thematic nostalgia for nature and the desire for simplicity.

The place is no longer real, but a product of his memory, hallucination, and

ultimate desire. It is a purely narcissistic simulacrum, which exists not in the

imaginary but on the surface of Solaris: The planet Solaris “becomes a

macrocosmic mirror of the human image. The Solarists' obsession with the

mysteries of Solaris dissolves into the broader struggle to understand human

reflection and identity.”8 Viewing the Solaris dacha as a simulacrum implies that

the desire for fantasy and nostalgia has transcended and obliterated the real.

8
Istvan Csicsery-Ronay, Jr., “The Book is the Alien: On Certain and Uncertain Readings
of Lem’s Solaris,” Science Fiction Studies 35 (March 1985).
 54

Kelvin’s decision to stay on Solaris distinguishes his ideology. His decision

also implies an overall message to the film, insofar as a viewer will agree with

this particular reading. Finding refuge in the fantasy of his desire, the

simulacrum, Kelvin reflects the struggle for a real social utopia, implying that the

ideal is not attainable in reality. Kelvin desires to return to the natural, the dacha,

even though it is a thing of the past that resides only in memory.

Baudrillard has suggested that science fiction ceases to be effective in this

day and age, since truth and falsity no longer provide the empirical base for

reality. He tends to overlook the philosophical underpinnings of much of

contemporary science fiction, however: “Why bother clothing the present world in

sci-fi garb, when the estranging future has already arrived?”9 This notion is also

present in the film Solaris, since the environments reflect less futuristic than

contemporary and historical relevance. The film could be looked at as an

allegorical representation of the successive phases of the image rather than a

literal sci-fi tale.

All of Tarkovsky’s films rely upon notions of nostalgia: “They view the

world as in danger of being lost, and see it from the point of view of someone

striving to hold on to it.”10 In Solaris, Tarkovsky commits personal history to the

status of memory, and collective history is shown as highly temporal in the

transportation from one place to another – from one phase of history to another.

In the film, the four spatial planes connote separate physical and ontological

9
Phillip Lopate, “Solaris,” Criterion Collection (Nov 2002),
http://www.criterion.com/asp/release.asp?id=164&eid=259&section=essay (accessed 27 May
2007).
10
Chris Fujiwara, “Solaris,” Cineaste 28 (Summer 2003).
 55

meanings. Passage from one to the other is stressed in extended travel

sequences. The progressively simulated environments are shown over a short

temporal period. One could interpret the film from Kelvin’s ideological

perspective: finding refuge in the fantasy of his desire while totally neglecting the

truth of the real. The message stresses the primacy of the imaginary as the last

vestige of hope: “The only universe man can truly explore exists inside his own

head…”11 Kelvin’s last and only vestige is his desired fantasy, where he has

omnipotence over relationships and the environment.

Solaris is a kind of historical opus through humankind’s journey. It tracks

progress from the natural through the simulated all the way to the complete

simulacrum. Kelvin’s desire for the return to the real, the Solaris simulacrum,

parallels a real world cultural movement toward this same venture, just as

Baudrillard has theorized. Does humankind desire to reside in the simulation? Is

the collective imaginary a contemporary simulacrum? The film speaks of

humankind’s reliance on the imaginary as a vestige of hope in a simulacrum

divorced from collective history.

11
Jonathan Rosenbaum, Movies as Politics (Berkeley: University of California Press,
1997): 280.
 57

PROJECTING FANTASY:
THE GAP BETWEEN FANTASY AND REALITY IN
THE LORD OF THE RINGS

Fantasies find their expression in reality through the cinema. Lacanian

psychoanalytic film theory posits that cinema offers an empty surface onto which

viewers project their fantasies in hopes of finding the cause of their desire. But as

fantasies, by their very nature the desire is unattainable without an imaginary

intermediary. The cinema fulfills this function by projecting subjective images;

viewers fill in the gaps.

The cinema of integration, a category theorized by Todd McGowan,

encompasses films that attempt to bridge the imaginary gap between fantasy and

reality. Films of this type posit that the cause of desire can be mastered, an

ideological position that is fundamentally flawed. The cinema of integration lays

out dangerous territory for viewers who submit to its ideology. As philosopher

Slavoj Zizek writes: “the realization of desire does not consist in its being

‘fulfilled,’ ‘fully satisfied,’ it coincides rather with the reproduction of desire as

such, with its circular movement.”1 Desire is a circular process, requiring that the

subject is never satisfied. Since Lacan’s psychoanalytic theory originates lack,

and the subsequent desire to fill that lack, in the moment of realizing one’s own

dissociation from the image, merging that lack would regress the subject. In this

1
Slavoj Zizek, Looking Awry (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1991), 7.
 58

way, fulfilling one’s own desire can be disastrous.

Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings trilogy provides ample territory to

explore issues of fantasy and desire in the cinema. An epic story based on the

quest to overthrow monstrous power, the films take majestic form in their

depiction of landscape (Middle-Earth and New Zealand) and a simple hero’s

journey. The methods employed in the construction of the film cause problems in

the way that the environment is evoked. The Lord of the Rings transforms New

Zealand into an imaginary fantasy space. The films gloss over the fact that the

real setting and the film’s setting bear only imaginary resemblance. New Zealand

does not equal Middle-Earth. The resultant tourism industry in New Zealand

following the release of the films further complicates the problem, in that an influx

of visitors came to see Middle-Earth, not the actual terrain.

In this essay I will deploy psychoanalytic (Lacanian) film theory to ask

questions concerning the relationship of the film viewer’s fantasy and the cinema

screen. Using the term fantasy in the context of The Lord of the Rings along with

Lacanian psychoanalysis requires disambiguation. In psychoanalytic film theory,

fantasy refers to the quest to fulfill a desire resulting from a lack felt by an initial

absence. This absence is referred to as an impossible object, or the objet petit a:

“The object a is precisely that surplus, that elusive make-believe that drove the

man to change his existence. In ‘reality,’ it is nothing at all, just an empty

surface.”2 Psychoanalytic film theory further explains that the cinema screen can

function as a fantasy space. Zizek continues: “fantasy space functions as an

2
Zizek, 8.
 59

empty surface, as a kind of screen for the projection of desires.”3 Fantasies

cannot exist in reality, since they consist most prominently of individual longings

and hopes to fill the absence in desire. Fantasies can only take form in empty

places that provide a canvas for imaginary identification.

Christian Metz, preeminent psychoanalytic film theorist, explains that the

cinema is an imaginary terrain.4 Metz implies that the cinema screen provides an

empty space onto which viewers project their fantasies, and are psychically

affected by the images they witness. In this sense, imaginary functions as a

Lacanian term signifying the recognition of the subject without himself: an image

that testifies to the autonomy of the subject from his surroundings. Metz, in the

Lacanian tradition, supposes that the cinema screen functions as a second mirror

into which the viewer views himself dissociated from his environment.

The subjective perception of place is apparent in the term “environment,”

which inexorably links a place to the person’s experience of it: a mental

landscape, “the natural world, especially as affected by human activity.”5 The

extent to which we attribute imaginary characteristics to the environment in

everyday life, the amount to which we believe in the wondrous possibilities of our

surrounding relies upon the individual as much as the belief system he or she

ascribes to.

Fantasy and desire bleed into real life, and have a rich documented

history. I would like to make a slight diversion here into the history of

cartography. It might be difficult to imagine what life was like during the Age of
3
Zizek, 8.
4
Christian Metz, The Imaginary Signifier (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1982).
5
The Concise Oxford English Dictionary, 11th Ed., s.v. “Environment.”
 60

Discovery, and grand myths abound as to our forebears’ naïve beliefs in a flat

world, dragons at sea, and phantom islands. Specifically of interest here are the

pictorial representations of terra incognita on maps of the middle ages. Having a

concept of the world and its geography that was patchy at best, medieval

cartographers were lain the task of filling in the blank spaces: places unknown.

The term “Here be Dragons” refers to such terra incognita, and has its own

history in popular culture and modern myth–the term actually only arises once,

on the Lenox Globe circa 1503-07.6 We can conjecture about the existence of

terra incognita: did medieval cartographers believe in the existence of sea

serpents?; does the representation of terra incognita on maps of the time

represent a real fear of the unknown, or mirror a belief in the fantastic

possibilities of unknown space? The Age of Discovery is rife with speculation on

the possibilities of terra incognita. Travelers had to negotiate between their

beliefs, their hopes and fears, accepted knowledge, and their perception of

reality.

Everything we imagine is real, just not corporeal. The world of everyday

experience becomes mundane unless the individual believes in an absent

wonder, unless a prescribed belief system reveals a non-corporeal wonder.

Invented wonder is a symptom of the modern world, a psycho-social remainder

(absence) caused by what Daniel Boorstin calls our extravagant expectations:

America has provided the landscape and has given us the resources and
the opportunity for this feat of national self-hypnosis. But each of us
individually provides the market and the demand for the illusions which
flood our experience. We want and we believe these illusions because we

6
Erin C. Blake, “Here Be Dragons on Old Maps,” MapHist,
http://www.maphist.nl/extra/herebedragons.html (accessed 29 Aug 2008).
 61

suffer from extravagant expectations. We expect too much of the world.

Our expectations are extravagant in the precise dictionary sense of the
term–‘going beyond the limits of reason or moderation.’ They are
excessive.7

While Boorstin places a negative value on extravagant expectations, I believe

that they can be useful as a coping mechanism. Believing in the possibility of

fantasy (in the Lacanian sense), and finding that fantasy exhibited in some empty

surface, enables human beings the freedom to pursue the object of our desire.

We can hope that our desires will come to fruition. While this perspective can be

dangerous, walking a fine line between illusion and reality, belief in wonder

provides pathways for understanding self and its place in society.

Cinema exacerbates this exaggerated expectation that one can actualize

the fantasy of his or her desire in the everyday world. The cinema of integration

replays through its diverse narratives the actualization of the impossible object

through the hero’s journey model of storytelling.8 By envisioning desire and

fantasy playing in the same field–in a real setting–the cinema of integration

allows its heroes to actualize their fantasies and possess their impossible

objects. McGowan uses the example of Indiana Jones and the Raiders of the

Lost Ark: an archetypal example of the hero’s journey, the quest for the mythic

object. Unlike Arthurian mythology, Raiders shows that the object of Jones’

desire, the Arc, is real and can be possessed. The Hitchcockian object, the

McGuffin, an impossible object utilized in his films to fuel the desire of the hero

but entirely inconsequential by the end of the film, provides the ultimate example

7
Daniel Boorstin, The Image. (NY: Vintage, 1992), 3. Italics added.
8
Todd McGowan, The Real Gaze: Film Theory after Lacan (Albany, NY: SUNY Press,
2008).
 62

of the impossible object in film. Think of The Maltese Falcon, the object named in

the title that every character yearns but can never possess. Contemporary

Hollywood film largely misrepresents the impossible object to make it seem that

the desire for fantasy is real and that the impossible object can be attainable.

These are ultimate and epic narratives that, though inevitably replayed through

our culture, in our living rooms, and in our imaginations, foreground the one-time

journey for the object of our desire, and the attainability of the impossible.

In this way, contemporary Hollywood cinema, the cinema of integration,

distorts our expectations of reality. The desire for the impossible object in

Lacanian psychoanalysis relies upon the continual replay of the drama–once the

object has been found, it disappears–in order to avoid neurosis in the subject.

These films, too numerous to cite one by one but visible by their box office

ratings, are commodities that guarantee the subject’s (viewer’s) satisfaction: the

fulfillment of desire through the eyes of the hero. Achieving the impossible object,

the cinema of integration feeds our exaggerated expectations of what the world

offers and how we operate in the real world.

In 2001, Peter Jackson heralded his epic Lord of the Rings trilogy with

The Fellowship of the Ring. The story presents a romantic vision, a timeless epic.

The movie visualizes the world of Middle-Earth, a universe that bears little

relation to the real world. It is a fantasy construct made to facilitate an adventure,

a universe with its own rules and logic and immense history that sprung from the

imagination of J.R.R. Tolkien, a professor of history and linguistics.

In his examination of Lord of the Rings and ecology, Thomas Murray

 63

Wilson reveals the story as a pastoral high fantasy that conveys a Luddite

philosophy.9 This approach reveals Jackson’s adaptation as doubly contradictory

with its use of computer generated images and high profile technology to

visualize an otherwise realistic pastoral setting. Wilson names this Blockbuster

pastoral, stating that the Lord of the Rings films present a “post-pastoral

aesthetic” that render a naturally beauteous landscape hyperreal through the

intrusion of technology. Jackson’s Lord of the Rings films employ computer

graphics and high technology in an altogether contradictory way. Again, we have

the backlash of technophilia and technophobia as with The Terminator. Visions

such as these require complex computer graphics to render the fantasies real–or

so say the Hollywood filmmakers.

With the Lord of the Rings films, fantasy breaches reality in a way

previously unseen. Take a real place: New Zealand. Impose of spectacular vision

of a make-believe place: Middle-Earth. What do you get? A hyperreal vision. But

much more: a collective belief in an imaginary hyperreal place that exists in

entirety on two levels. First you have a real place photographed: Glenorchy, New

Zealand, for example. Second you have a reference made to an imaginary world:

Glenorchy used as a template for Isengard. When I say template I mean the real

place made virtual. Sweeping shots made from a helicopter were used to create

a map of Glenorchy that was then altered to create a virtual image of Isengard.

What we see as Isengard is in some way Glenorchy–a real place–and also a

computerized construction. The films represent both the real New Zealand and a

9
Thomas Murray Wilson, “Blockbuster Pastoral: An Ecocritical Reading of Peter
Jackson’s The Lord of the Rings films,” in How We Became Middle-Earth, eds. Adam Lam and
Nataliya Oryshchuk (Zurich: Walking Tree Publishers, 2007), 185-196.
 64

hyperreal version. Viewers who identify with Middle-Earth adopt the desire to

inhabit that hyperreal space.

In reality, Glenorchy is a magnificent place. But seeing Glenorchy with the

expectation of seeing Isengard reveals that the fantasy in the empty surface of

this cinema can only exist in the cinema, not in reality. The cinema screen

reflects the fantasy space in which one projects the desire to inhabit Middle-Earth

for his or her individual reasons. That fantasy cannot breach the screen.

The Lord of the Rings movies are a hodge-podge of imagery blending

production design (visual artists who first painted portraits of middle earth based

on the books and their imaginative representations of it) and images grabbed

from real life (New Zealand and studio sets, real life actors and CGI characters).

As a result of the cinematographic and computer techniques engaged in

constructing the world, it appears more real than real, verifying the Middle-Earth

of the film as a new vision of a separate and autonomous reality. Middle-Earth as

represented in the film is part real-world part computer graphic, which makes the

otherworld appear more real than real without detracting from its realism.

New Zealand became Middle-Earth. The island nation became more than

the real world parallel to the imaginary place; it transformed into the Middle-Earth

that Tolkein fans and fantasy buffs seek to inhabit in various ways. With that

parallel visualized, what viewer would not desire a pilgrimage to that real space

where the imaginary becomes real? New Zealand becomes the fantasy

landscape where the fantasy of our desire becomes manifest, if just in our own

heads. It is a hyperreal place for those who travel there with the desire to inhabit
 65

Middle-Earth.

One of the most important elements of the Lord of the Rings narrative is

the environment. The story relies heavily on the land, tracking the travelers’

journey across hillsides, plains, over mountains, and through forests on foot and

horseback. Director Peter Jackson chose his native New Zealand as the location

for Middle-Earth:

Everywhere, picturesque natives fashion papier-mâché images of

themselves. Yet all this earnest picturesqueness too often produces only a
pallid imitation of the Technicolor motion picture which the tourist goes to
verify. The Eternal City becomes the site of the box-office hit Roman
Holiday; tourist-pilgrims are eager to visit the “actual” scenes where
famous movies like Ben Hur and Spartacus were really photographed.10

One set removed from experiencing the location as the real place, tourists who

travel to New Zealand attempt to experience Middle-Earth only to discover that

the places are a “pallid imitation” of the image both in their heads and on the

screen.

In the wake of Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings movies, New Zealand’s

tourist industry was booming. Masses of start-ups facilitated pilgrimages to the

location spots across the two islands. Merchants pedaled artifacts from the film.

Millions of spectators flocked to see what they had missed in the movies: the real

Middle-Earth:

In the tourist’s world, the strange is tame, domesticated, no longer

frightens; shocks come in a package deal with safety. This makes the
world seem infinitely gentle, obedient to the tourist’s wishes and whims,
ready to oblige; but also a do-it-yourself world, pleasingly pliable, kneaded
by the tourist’s desire, made and remade with one purpose in mind: to
excite, please and amuse.11

10
Boorstin, 107.
11
Zygmunt Bauman, “From Pilgrim to Tourist – or a Short History of Identity,” in
Questions of Cultural Identity, eds. Stuart Hall and Paul Du Gay (London: Sage, 1996), 29-30.
 66

New Zealand becomes the construct for imagining Middle-Earth. Whether one

has a pre-existing vision matters less than the willingness to participate in a

massive imaginary world that exists more in a collective belief than in the

physical location. The influx of tourists, traveling to the physical location where

the imaginary world is said to exist, speaks for the power of the collective desire

for fantasy.

Edoras, one of the key locations in The Two Towers, the second of the

trilogy, is a city built onto a hillock in a wide valley. Edoras is actually Mount

Sunday, a remote location on the south island of New Zealand. The production

involved building a massive set at the peak of the hill: a king’s hall in the Nordic

tradition. Upon completion of shooting, the set was dismantled and the remaining

pieces flown out by helicopter. When viewers watch the films, they place

themselves in the shoes of Eowen or Aragorn on the steps of that palace. As

tourists, Edoras loses its resonance as Mount Sunday is revealed to be only a

real place. The real thing doesn’t add up to its Technicolor existence. The valley

itself is an unmediated place, and that may catch tourists off guard.

Since the films have a wide fan-base, viewers of The Lord of the Rings

identify greatly with the evocation of place. Live action roleplay and MMORPGs

play upon epic stories similar to The Lord of the Rings, and the fan-bases overlap

quite prominently. A desire exists in such a viewer to actualize the experience of

inhabiting an imaginary place; the film tells us that these places are real. The

viewer can travel to the shooting location and fulfill his or her desire. But it’s

revealed upon first sight that the cinematic space differs significantly from the
 67

real place. As Boorstin elucidates: “People go to see what they already know is

there. The only thing to record, the only possible source of surprise, is their own

reaction.”12 The media mimics reality, presenting us with heightened events and

interesting characters. When the viewer identifies with the image, placing

personal fantasies within its projection, he relinquishes his imagination to a

greater power: one that can never add up to what exists in reality. Did the viewer-

traveler get any closer to achieving their desire?

Fantasy films engulf their viewers in otherworldly experiences.

Psychoanalytic film theory posits that the film screen is a mirror onto which we

view ourselves. We all believe in the world as we see it and as we imagine it. Our

experience of the world is based on our ability to negotiate between the two.

Approaching the Lord of the Rings movies requires a negotiation between these

two schools of thought. Because the world and events depicted in The Lord of

the Rings cannot traditionally be called realistic. The film relies on lack and

absence felt in its viewers of something bigger and better than what the real

world has to offer.

In his essay on illusion of space and place in the Lord of the Rings films,

David Butler mentions the impossible shots in LotR as situating the viewer in

God’s seat: sweeping shots, heli-mattes, the cinematic visualization of grand

landscapes devoid of character perspective.13 The audience plays the part of

God looking upon the wonderful imaginary world. The sweeping helicopter shots

sustain His vision, and the viewer is placed in His seat to look upon the world of

12
Boorstin, 116.
13
David Butler, “One Roof and No Walls Make a House,” in How We Became Middle-
Earth, eds. Adam Lam and Nataliya Oryshchuk (Zurich: Walking Tree Publishers, 2007).
 68

Middle-Earth, or New Zealand, as his or her creation. The fact remains that this

world does not exist in reality. It is a computer construct of heli-mattes, locations,

and digital manipulation. We make the world real.

Cinema’s ability to project reality without showing the process or

mechanisms involved allows the viewer to perceive the film world as real: “The

equipment-free aspect of reality here has become the height of artifice; the sight

of immediate reality has become the [unattainable] blue flower in the land of

technology.”14 We want to believe that these things, these places, these people

are real. The suspension of disbelief only functions to the degree that the viewer

allows. What happens when the viewer fully succumbs to the screen fantasy,

internalizing the desire? How much can fantasy be made real by desire?

According to Ernest Bormann, social reality is inherently structured by collective

fantasies.15 In this way, we create our own way of seeing the world through our

interactions. Do we not also create and live out fantasies in our daily lives?

Middle Earth is a real place

because it exists on a map.
New Zealand is Middle
Earth because it is
imagined so and
collectively agreed upon.

14
Walter Benjamin, “A Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” in Film
Theory and Criticism, eds. Leo Braudy and Marshall Cohen. (Oxford: Oxford University Pres,
2004), 744.
15
“Symbolic Convergenge Theory,” Wikipedia,
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Symbolic_Convergence_Theory (accessed 29 Aug 2008).
 69

Chasing fantasies in an impossible struggle; the object sought correlates

to an original absence, an object that never existed in the first place. Fantasy and

reality exist on two separate planes. Comparing the cinema to the dream-state,

Metz postulates that the cinema is:

The delusion of a man awake. The dream delusion has been partly
neutralized, ever since man dreamt, by the bromide that ‘this was only a
dream.’ This time-honored method of trivialization, despite such
equivalents as ‘it’s just a film,’ is harder to apply to the filmic delusion,
since we are not asleep at the cinema, and we know it.16

Do individuals who identify with the images they see it the media, that other

mirror, experience an extended period of identification (mirror stage) in which the

imaginary and the symbolic fuse into a hybridic reality? For viewers to reconcile

their impossible fantasies with their experience with film, the imaginary surfaces

need to be both differentiated and discerned. But since the cinema has

functioned as a dream machine for so long, the process seems inevitable. One

question remains: can the viewer be satisfied with his innate fantasies in reality

without recourse to the cinema?

16
Metz, 108-9.
 71

THE FOURTH WALL:

SELF-REFLEXIVITY, WORLDBUILDING, AND PERCEPTION
IN FUNNY GAMES

A few years ago, when researching the beginnings of realist cinema, I

read that early silent films were shot from a distance to preserve the fourth wall.1

The directors placed themselves at a distance from their subjects so as to situate

the viewer in the audience with respect to the stage. It didn’t take them long to

catch on that films don’t have to look like stage plays.

The separation of on-screen and off-screen space doesn’t matter so

much, as we now know. You can sit in the front row of the movie theater and,

though you might experience vertigo, you’ll still recognize that the subjects are on

the screen and not stepping on your toes. Those keen viewers in the front row

can actually see the fourth wall, and also beyond it. The fourth wall is

transparent; it’s the screen itself. We know nothing can get through, but the

events and characters and interactions and emotions affected through that wall

are enormous. At times there seems to be no barrier separating the two worlds.

Based on the yearnings of those front row viewers, there may be no wall at all.

Whole-hearted belief in the world of the fiction is a contemporary disorder.

These days, you hold the fiction in your own hands. You own it and you can

reconstruct it at your whim; take fan fiction for example. People become so
1
David Bordwell and Kristin Thompson, Film Art: An Introduction. NY: Knopf, 1979.
 72

fervent about these fictional worlds that they worship the stars that play their

favorite heroes. Take for example Jodie Foster’s stalker, or the Crash cult

inspired by famous car accidents. Sometimes people forget that the actor is

merely playing the character. Fandom in this respect resounds from the

disillusionment that the barrier between the real and the fiction can be broken.

Kendall Walton, a philosopher and aesthetician, explains:

We feel a psychological bond to fiction, an intimacy with them, of a kind

which otherwise we feel only toward what we take to be actual. Fictions,
unlike objects of other intentional attitudes, are in this way thought of as
though they exist. We have a strong tendency to regard them as part of
our reality, despite our knowledge that they are not.”2

Mimetic art forms like storytelling and other time-based media have the ability to

affect their viewers in powerful ways. While the fourth wall–a component of the

suspension of disbelief that tells us the images on the screen are there and yet

not there, true but at the same time fictitious–separates us from fictions, there’s a

part of us that wants them to be real, that can treat them with as much veracity

as the person sitting beside you in the theater. Is the suspension of disbelief

dissolving in the postmodern age, where truth is up for grabs at every turn and

the very substance of reality is becoming flimsy? Or is the suspension of disbelief

like a pair of glasses we put on everyday so as to block ourselves from actually

experiencing the world?

Walton makes the crucial differentiation between the viewer’s experience

of fiction as a suspension of disbelief and that of the actor impersonating a

fictional character. While a viewer may make believe that he impersonates

2
Kendall Walton, “How Remote Are Fictional Worlds?” Journal of Aesthetics and Art
Criticism 28: 19.
 73

himself in the fiction to experience the appropriate emotions, the actor

consciously makes believe that he is the fictional character experiencing the

appropriate emotions whether or not he actually feels them. The viewer actually

experiences the emotions, even while he understands that it’s make-believe:

“Charles’ act of imagining himself afraid of the slime is hardly a deliberate or

reflective act. It is triggered more or less automatically by his awareness of his

quasi-fear sensations. He is simply disposed to think of himself as fearing the

slime.”3 Walton urges that our experience of fiction, art, and film is more real than

we consciously believe it to be. A belief that humans are innately imaginative and

liminal drives his writing. In “Fearing Fictions,” Walton explores the close

relationship of the viewer as an active participant in dramas. We put ourselves

intentionally within fictional worlds so as to make them real: so as to make

ourselves actors, fictional.

Films that include self-reflexive moments or integrate self-reflexivity into

the core of the diegesis play upon this recent upset. The films that employ self-

reflexivity are too numerous to mention: The Purple Rose of Cairo, The Last

Action Hero, Living in Oblivion, Day for Night to name a few. These films fold in

upon themselves to make the audience question the limits of the film world in

respect to the real world. Michael Haneke’s Funny Games in particular provides

rife territory for examining layers of interaction across the fourth wall. This horror-

thriller unveils violence in the media and everyday life by presenting an unsettling

anti-hero, a psychopathic killer who appears very normal and well adjusted,

3
Kendall Walton, “Fearing Fictions,” in Philosophy of Film and Motion Pictures, eds. Noel
Carroll and Jinhee Choi (Place: Press, date), 234-246.
 74

breaking the fourth wall so as to ask the viewers which horrible act he should

commit next. Funny Games brings to light the proximity of fictional worlds, how

imaginative and horrible creations are inside us as well as ubiquitous. It reveals

that constructed worlds are just as real as ours, and that the fourth wall could be

punctured by a needle’s point.

Can we take a step back and question how we view films? It’s anything

but a natural experience. It can be approached as a subjective perception,

through semiotics and literacy theory, through the theory of art. As Thomas

Gunning proposed in “An Aesthetic of Astonishment,” that original myth of

Lumiere’s train arriving at a station drives the hypothesis that film can be

perceived as real, or more real than real.4 According to the story, the first time the

film screened in New York City in the early 1900’s, audience members fled the

theater thinking that the train was actually on the stage about to run them down.

The fourth wall was broken. The suspension of disbelief was a true belief.

Two parallel traditions run through film theory, which argue whether the

screen presents a window (realist) or a mirror (psychoanalytic) on the filmed

world. For Funny Games, the horror of the film rings true according to the

hypothesis that the film presents an open window, a screen that can be

perceptually breached depending on the level of reality that the viewer affords

the filmed world. This realist stance assumes that the filmed world existed in

some real time and place. Funny Games operates on both levels. The film

presents at once a social commentary bearing relevance to violence and class

4
Thomas Gunning, “An Aesthetic of Astonishment: Early Film and the (In)Credulous
Spectator,” in Film Theory and Criticism, ed. Leo Braudy and Marshall Cohen (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2004): 818-832.
 75

stratification and a stylized view of the effect that media violence can have on an

audience. In the first sense, the film shows a realist view. In the second, Funny

Games implies complex methods of viewing in the psychoanalytic vein.

The world of Funny Games could be interpreted as a mirror that reflects

the viewer himself. An early proponent of the psychoanalytic school, Jean Luis

Baudry explained the cinema as an apparatus: an all-encompassing system that

pre-determines the viewer’s response.

An infinite mirror would no longer be a mirror. The paradoxical nature of

the cinematic mirror-screen is without doubt that it reflects images but not
‘reality’; the word reflect, being transitive, leaves this ambiguity
unresolved. In any case this ‘reality’ comes from behind the spectator’s
head, and if he looked at it directly he would see nothing except the
moving beams of an already veiled light source.5

The cinematic apparatus, as a mirror, presents a psychoanalytic frame where the

viewer sees everything that is at once inside him and controlling him. As an

ideological apparatus, the cinema controls the viewer in that it predetermines

what and how he sees. But this is too all encompassing. The cinema as mirror,

as a psychoanalytic paradigm, constructs both fiction and real worlds as power-

ordained. It’s a Marxist standpoint that makes the world seem as though the

power were not in our hands.

Humanistically, considering the film as a mirror means that the viewer

looks into the screen and sees himself. Identifying with a character, or with a way

of seeing (identifying with the camera), this mirror theory requires dissociation

and dislocation. The problem with psychoanalytic film theory is that it

5
Jean-Louis Baudry, “Ideological Effects of the Cinematographic Apparatus,” in Film
Theory and Criticism, ed. Leo Braudy and Marshall Cohen (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2004): 352.
 76

universalizes the spectator. Truth is, some people watch movies like this

sometimes, and not only this way.

Classical Hollywood mise-en-scene doesn’t jive with psychoanalytic film

theory. Viewers need to be able to approach films organically in order to

experience them. The cinematic apparatus remains invisible, the techniques

employed are taken for granted so as to appreciate the captured reality. We

forget that the shots are disparate, the director lingering off screen giving line

readings. The suspension of disbelief functions to allow the viewer to empathize

with the story world, to give himself up to the fiction. Kendall Walton offers that:

“Along with our epistemological access to fictional occurrences goes a capacity

to be affected by them. We respond to what we know about fictional worlds in

many of the ways that we respond to what we know about the real world.”6

Experienced viewers become adept at deciphering cinematic codes, which puts

the power in their hands to either accept or reject the filmmaker’s offering. The

viewer can choose to sit back and enjoy–to suspend his disbelief–or to watch

consciously and empirically. But what about inexperienced viewers? It’s false to

assume that every ticket-holder brings with him the baggage to decode Funny

Games. Those viewers who enter the theater expecting an entertainment from

Funny Games, who choose to suspend their disbelief, experience a perceptual

shock.

Funny Games questions the distance between the fiction and the real

world. It’s a movie that’s self-aware, like a unit of artificial intelligence gone

A.W.O.L. Director Michael Haneke describes his philosophy in a sort of

6
Walton, 12.
 77

intentional statement:

We don't of course anymore perceive reality, but instead the

representation of reality in television. Our experiential horizon is very
limited. What we know of the world is little more than the mediated world,
the image. We have no reality, but a derivative of reality, which is
extremely dangerous, most certainly from a political standpoint but also in
a larger sense to our ability to have a palpable sense of the truth of
everyday experience.7

Haneke employs direct address to counter the comfortable sedation that the

audience might feel while watching a movie, even a horror movie. He turns the

world upside down by placing all the power within his anti-heroes, Paul and his

sidekick Peter.

Peter and Paul, a pair of deranged serial killers, don’t fit our average M.O.

They dress in tennis outfits, converse sympathetically, but refuse to give in during

those awkward moments. This should be the first moment you realize there’s

something wrong, but Anna and George take a moment too long to orient. Peter

and Paul become unwanted visitors and, while they seem well adjusted and

friendly on the outside, they have despicable intentions for the suburban

vacationing family.

What marks this film is Paul’s behavior. He’s self-aware, mechanical,

intelligent to the point of madness, and he knows he’s being watched. He loves

his audiences, and he entices them to play along with his games. The first time

he looks into the camera lens, everybody’s shocked and a bit taken off guard.

And it only gets worse form there. Half way through the film, when one of his

games goes awry, he grabs the TV remote control and actually rewinds the

7
Christopher Sharrett, “The World That is Known: an Interview with Michael Haneke,”
Cineast 28, Summer 2003.
 78

scene. It plays again, and this time he makes it go his way. He is at once the

director, a player in the drama, a ubiquitous mind, and a hyper-violent maniac. At

the end of Funny Games, Peter and Paul try to work out a philosophical problem:

where is the barrier between reality and fiction.

PAUL: so where is your hero now? Is he in reality or is he in fiction?

PETER: his family is in reality and he is in fiction.
PAUL: well is the fiction real?
PETER: Why?
PAUL: Well, you can see it in the movie, right?
PETER: Of course.
PAUL: Well, then it’s just as real as reality. Because you can see it too,
right?
PETER: Bullshit.
PAUL: Why?

More than any of the violence and bloodshed in the rest of the film, this dialogue

is most unsettling. Paul doesn’t believe that there’s a barrier between fiction and

the real world. Since he knows we’re watching him, and he eggs us on, can we

as viewers be inserted into the drama as confidant killers? Are we cohort to his

deranged method? Or worse, since he knows we’re watching, will he someday

show up at my door?

Funny Games raises lofty questions concerning the proximity of fictional

worlds to the real world, and it doesn’t do it lightly. The film evokes fear and

adrenaline at the same time as it ignites intellectual contemplation on the

substance of reality and the penetrability of the fourth wall:

“Since real world novels, plays, paintings, and so forth are what determine
what happens in fictional worlds, we can affect fictional worlds to whatever
extent the nature of novels, plays, and paintings is within out power. We
can destroy an evil picture-man, not with a dagger, perhaps, but with a
paint brush… Painters, authors, and other artists are veritable gods vis-à-
vis fictional worlds. The isolation of fictional worlds seems to have
 79

vanished.”8

We can step outside the situation while watching a film to wonder, am I a part of

this? When it comes to film, the industry strips control from the average viewer.

There’s no ability to recut or disseminate the product (legally). You’re passive as

far as the producers are concerned. But the directors sometimes have different

intentions. Haneke, with Funny Games, intended to pull his audience from the

seats. He said that those who walked out on the movie were acquainted with

their views on violence in the media; and those who stayed needed the wake up

call.9 Perhaps the high walk out rate, accompanied by Haneke’s passion to

express his philosophic postmodern intention, is what led to the 2007 American

remake. You can’t let the good ones die, or be forgotten.

I want to return to the idea of prosthetic memory; we internalize what we

see–as memories. But where is the barrier between what we remember seeing

and what we remember actually experiencing? For Paul, there is no difference:

no fourth wall, nothing to separate the fiction from the real.

By the end of Funny Games, those viewers that maintain a distance from

the filmed fiction can extrapolate social relevance. What Paul says is true to a

degree–the degree to which we afford power to the image and reality to the

fiction. The critical viewer is not afraid; he can see that Paul presents a

theoretical conundrum by questioning the remoteness of the fictional world.

But Funny Games, as an entertainment, proves a problem in that it

questions the viewer’s very perception of the filmed world as a fiction. The

8
Walton, 13.
9
Sharrett.
 80

inexperienced viewer who suspends his disbelief during Funny Games leaves

himself open for a shock to the system. Common sense tells us that the film is

hermetic, and that nothing save a memory and a feeling can rupture the image.

Paul convinces these viewers that his world, even though it may be a fiction,

holds more veracity that they might think.

 81

THE INTELLIGENT MEDIA:

IMAGINING THE INVISIBLE FORCES BEHIND TV

Media products don’t spring forth fully formed. Industry producers create

products (films, TV shows, podcasts, etc.) because, for one, they have a sense

that they will create a profit and a following. Producers also create media based

on personal interest in the material or for an urge to communicate an issue. I

don’t intend to create an exhaustive list here. Real people make TV and film.

Media productions being collaborative productions mystify the identity of their

producers.

These invisible forces behind the media create their programs

purposefully. We could look at the production-distribution-reception model from

the perspective of the producer in a variety of theoretical ways. I will try to

negotiate these perspectives to create a method for interpretation. What makes a

show popular? How much control do the producers maintain? Does the industry

inflict power on its audience, or is it the other way around?

A Face in the Crowd and Network visualize the invisible forces behind

television. Using reflexivity, the films both raise these questions. In fictional

scenarios, the television producers conceptualize shows using differing

methodologies and ideologies. These films question the media-audience power

relationship.
 82

TV producers have a conception of what the audience wants. In Network,

entertainment programming director Diana Christensen (Faye Dunaway) urges a

fall line-up that recognizes and reinforces anger. A Face in the Crowd imagines

Marcia Jeffries (Patricia Neal) uncovering personal, real life stories for the benefit

of a mass audience. Contrasting these women, their invisible roles in the

production of media, and their disparate intentions to feed popular needs for

entertainment makes apparent the power in the hands of television producers.

The films recognize the need for an uncompromised ethical code as well as a

vision on their part of a real audience.

Diana Christensen thinks she knows what the audience wants to see on

TV. As the new head of entertainment programming at UBS (a network that could

be a CBS, NBC, or ABC) she pitches her audience research report to her team:

“The American people are turning sullen. They’ve been clobbered on all sides by

Vietnam, Watergate, the Inflation, the Depression. They’ve turned off, shot up,

and they fuck themselves limp and nothing helps… The American people want

someone to articulate their rage for them.” Diana recognizes a public need. TV

can supply a release that satisfies that demand. Diana is either a headstrong

executive seeking success or a woman attuned to the rhythms of a dissatisfied

nation. Either way, she has a notion of what the public wants, and how to get it to

them: “I want angry shows. I want counterculture, I want antiestablishment.”

Diana engrains herself in the UBS power play, gaining control of a news show

that has run amuck.

Because the news department loses money, it is made accountable for its
 83

deficit. The reportage of current events becomes intertwined with economics and

capitalism, paying for its reality. It’s made to dish our sensationalism–that sells.

As a result, the difference between fiction and reality wanes. Network executive

Frank Hackett (Robert Duvall) suggests “adding editorial comments.” This new

position toward the communication of current events plays upon opinion and

perspective, which makes way for the fictionalizing of real events. While Network

ups the ante, we have to wonder as viewers of the film–and of the network

news–how much is true.

Network is also about a crazed news anchor, Howard Beale, conditioned

by the day-in day-out teleprompter-mediated current events that are more

regurgitation than reality. Beale becomes a critic of that self-same system: “I’m

mad as Hell and I’m not gonna take it anymore!” When Diana Christensen takes

over the position as producer of “The Howard Beale Show,” the difference

between fiction and news becomes insignificant.

Howard Beale becomes more of a talk show host on par with David

Letterman and Conan O’Brien than a news anchor. “We’re in the boredom-killing

business,” he says. Despite his berating, overt, sensational language, volume

and pace, Beale speaks with a postmodernist’s veracity: more of a

consciousness of which we must be aware than of any current event.

And Diana Christensen started it all. She not so much authored “The

Howard Beale Show” as cleared the roadblocks for his airtime. By taking a news

show and fictionalizing it–in effect sensationalizing it–she makes a hyperreal

pseudo-reality TV show. That’s what she knows the viewing audience wants.
 84

Based on the ratings, she’s spot on.

Faye Dunaway’s performance in Network speaks for itself. She embodies

fervor for her profession. She’s bloodthirsty for success, recognition, power.

What’s telling about the character of Diana Christensen, and of the prophetic

quality of Network (1976), is how she reads the audience and makes a winning

show. To the audience of the film, The Howard Beale Show breaches the other

side of outrageous, synonymous with Oprah or Springer. Howard Beale is prime

time, and the retentive audience eats it up like candy. Diana Christensen is right,

even if her ethics are based in a demoralized hyperreal.

Elia Kazan’s 1957 film A Face in the Crowd, a nearly forgotten relic,

visualizes the invisible forces behind TV. Marcia (Patricia Neal) fills the role of

television producer, with a professional mission to show real life and experiences

through her show from which the film grabs its title. On her mission she comes

across Larry “Lonesome” Rhodes, a down-and-out performer who has a story to

tell and the charisma to tell it. Rhodes entrances Marcia. She sees celebrity-

potential.

The film presents three characters who fill different roles in the media. In

this triangular power dynamic, we see perspectives toward the ethical and

intelligent use of the powerful TV medium. Through these character bonds, the

film explains that personality is everything–with intelligence a close second.

Rhodes’ rags-to-riches story of a charismatic “wielder of opinion,” grabs

the audience from his first words. He spins language with a force, but devoid of

ethical notions. He attracts the love of an audience and succumbs to stardom

 85

with a capital S. Lonesome seems like a simple man; he goes with the flow and

tells people what he thinks they want to hear.

Lonesome has a counterpart in Mel Miller, or “Vanderbilt ‘44” as Rhodes

prefers, who serves as the star’s writer. Mel soon realizes that his skills are

unneeded; Rhodes works on the fly. Mel performs the vital role of offering critical

opinion of Rhodes’ power. He is the only one who sees Rhodes for what he is: a

vehicle. As he says, “you’ve got to be a saint to stand up to the power that box

can give you.” Rhodes is no saint.

At the center of this dangerous triangle, Marcia mediates between Rhodes

and Mel. She created his Rhodes’ persona. Marcia keeps the boat afloat. While

Marcia is at heart an ethical professional, she loses herself in Rhodes’ grandeur.

She supports him on his way to iconicity, which also paves her way to success.

Marcia and Mel, both educated and aware of the power of the medium, vigilantly

accompany Rhodes on his journey to stardom. While Marcia maintains her role

as show biz industry professional, Mel’s education and sober professional

attitude allow him to see through Rhodes’ electric charismatic façade. Mel acts

as a soothsayer in a way, when at the finale he prophesizes Rhodes’ future:

Suppose I tell you exactly what's gonna happen to you. You're gonna be
back in television. Only it won't be quite the same as it was before. There'll
be a reasonable cooling-off period and then somebody will say: "Why
don't we try him again in a inexpensive format. People's memories aren't
too long." And you know, in a way, he'll be right. Some of the people will
forget, and some of them won't. Oh, you'll have a show. Maybe not the
best hour or, you know, top 10. Maybe not even in the top 35. But you'll
have a show. It just won't be quite the same as it was before. Then a
couple of new fellas will come along. And pretty soon, a lot of your fans
will be flocking around them…

In this final speech, Mel demonstrates his power in the industry; he sees beyond
 86

the idol to what Rhodes’ manufactured persona has accomplished and will

accomplish in the future. This is a truth that neither Marcia nor Rhodes could

discover on their own.

I would like to believe that the media is in the hands of others like Mel

Miller. But unfortunately, I don’t think that’s the case, based on the intelligence of

its programming. The media, with few exceptions, does not commonly employ

self-reflexivity. Television programs that remain on the surface of things, that

employ suspense and repetition (cliffhanger endings and episodic structure for

example), succeed in the marketplace, not those programs that draw attention to

the medium’s weak spots.1 For viewers to watch TV critically, they must bring it to

the table themselves. I cannot honestly believe that this is possible in

contemporary American popular culture.

Critics labeled A Face in the Crowd as “elitist” for its attempt at self-

reflexivity.2 For the media to be intelligent, and ethical, it must allow viewers to

witness the truth of its execution. But this is simply not the case–television lies.

Then we must ask if television exists for the purpose of speaking the truth or of

communicating entertainments. To side with Network, there is no difference as

long as we adhere to the programmer’s version of the truth. In his review of A

Face in the Crowd, Thomas Beltzer attempts his own explanation as to why the

film might have been unsuccessful: “people don't like being told they are gullible

fools being manipulated by a shadowy elite.”3 There exists a definite imbalance

1
Take for example The Simpsons, South Park, and The Daily Show on TV, and Wag the
Dog, and To Die For in film.
2
James Wolcott, “An Unforgettable Face,” Vanity Fair, March 2007, 228.
3
Thomas Beltzer, “The Face in the Crowd,” Senses of Cinema 31 (April-June 2004).
 87

between entertainment and intellectual communication in the media. If Mel Miller

were a TV God, then 32 million Americans would probably be watching

something other than American Idol.

Edward R. Murrow has a great deal to say along this vein. A contemporary

of Kazan’s, Murrow pioneered TV journalism. His efforts to derail spectacular

media, well chronicled in Good Night and Good Luck, led only to his HUAC

inquisition. But, for that matter, how much effect does reactionary media criticism

have on the industry? In his 1958 speech at the RTNDA Convention, delivered to

a room of friends and foes, he indicted the industry for its lack of ethical values:

I am frightened by the imbalance, the constant striving to reach the largest

possible audience for everything; by the absence of a sustained study of
the state of the nation. Heywood Broun once said, "No body politic is
healthy until it begins to itch." I would like television to produce some
itching pills rather than this endless outpouring of tranquilizers.4

As history tells it, none of these proclamations have been taken well. None of the

prognostications as to the debasement of reality or the implications of one-sided

insipid entertainment have been heeded. We stayed on the roller coaster ride.

Perhaps we’d better follow in Mel Miller’s footsteps and keep our media criticism

out of the media. Intelligent criticism must persist. Without it we probably all

would become sheep, as George Orwell has rightly allegorized. If we keep our

messages out of other people’s entertainment, then maybe we’ll be met with

more welcoming response.

In A Face in the Crowd, the individual appears more intelligent than the

medium. We are shown the lengths to which the forces go to wield the medium,

4
Edward R. Murrow, “1958 Speech,” Kill Your Television,
http://www.turnoffyourtv.com/commentary/hiddenagenda/murrow.html (accessed 15 Mar. 2007).
 88

the maneuvering involved. But the messages, however manufactured, do not

stand up to the intellect, or the heart, of the individual. Mel’s book Demagogue in

Denim serves as the best example. In the book he apparently records the history

of Rhodes’ rise to success to reveal him for an ego-crazy maniac. We also see

snippets of audience reactions. These individuals, portrayed as average

American citizens, first accept his words with affection. Once his spiels display

his enthusiasm for advertising and politics, the audience accepts those as well.

But in the end, when Rhodes becomes a two-faced player, his words lose their

meaning. It takes a leap of faith on Marcia’s part to reveal Rhodes’ inconsistency.

And the public becomes aware of their idol’s manipulative ranting. The audience

members in the film, portrayed as normal individuals, display heart. They are not

the faceless masses, as the industry would like to imagine. As Murrow said,

explaining his opinion on the receptivity of the American audience: “I am entirely

persuaded that the American public is more reasonable, restrained and more

mature than most of our industry's program planners believe.”5 It seems Kazan

and Murrow had similar opinions of their audiences.

Network, on the other hand, imagines the host of producers and

executives bared to dish out sensationalism in return for your spectatorship. All

they want is for you to be watching. They already know what you want; they

know it better than you know it yourself. The film places the power in the hands

of this unethical horde who will place any psycho in the spotlight if he (Howard

Beale) speaks to the common consciousness as envisaged by the powers that

be.
5
Ibid.
 89

While A Face in the Crowd imagines Marcia as an ethical producer of the

media, she can’t step up to the force that she helped to create. Diana, on the

other hand, laid out a plan that came to fruition in Network. She has no regrets–

and why should she? Diana, as a television producer with an ear to the beat of

the audience, dealt out a popular entertainment. Her professional attitude omits

the ethical code, much less a rationale for upholding common sense reality.

Albeit an exaggerated image if not a sarcastic caricature of the modern TV

producer, Diana Christensen embodies the invisible forces behind the media, I’m

afraid–very afraid.
 90

IRRATIONAL IDEOLOGY:
THE MATRIX, HYPER-VISUALITY, AND THE
ABSENCE OF MEANING

“[A] society becomes ‘modern’ when one of its chief activities is

producing and consuming images, when images that have
extraordinary powers to determine our demands upon reality and
are themselves coveted substitutes for firsthand experience
become indispensable to the health of the economy, the stability of
the polity, and the pursuit of happiness.”
– Susan Sontag, On Photography.

As an undergraduate, my housemates thought I was a geek, or a

technophile, because I watched The Matrix so much. There were days when I set

the DVD player on repeat, reading critical theory to film’s techno-heavy

soundtrack. I enjoyed the thrills of the movie, its inertia, its rule-breaking. I like to

believe I watched the movie in order to decode its messages. And that’s not

exactly an easy task. It’s a movie that’s easy to watch on a basic level. Its simple

structure, its basic story of a man triumphing over a repressive system, not so

much speaks as beckons its viewers to submit to its way of operating. The Matrix

is a microcosm with a macro-morale.

The film operates according to various conflicting ideological. Simply, it

portrays dominant Hollywood ideology in its look and technique. But there’s

something deeper, embedded at the film’s ideological core, that makes it a

complex experience. At once it’s technophillic and technophobic. The film utilizes

groundbreaking special effects techniques in order to portray a dystopic techno-

universe. At the same time, the film’s heroes–Neo, Trinity, and Morpheus–
 91

struggle to “awaken” humankind to the “real world.” They walk a fine line between

Luddites and VR gamers. The rebels have a Machiavellian attitude that puts their

mission before their means. What does it matter if Joe Somebody dies in the

process of emancipating the human race? It’s a small price to pay.

At the heart of it, The Matrix is a film that speaks against itself. While it can

be read on both levels–phobic and phillic–the meanings are covert beneath its

sleek hyper-visuality. The Matrix presents an irrational ideological system. The

film is set in an alternative world representative of the world of everyday

experience but peopled with superhumans. The film presents a call to action to

question everyday reality while hypocritically escalating filmic effects technology

and fetishism.

The Matrix engages the dystopian imagination in its attempt to visualize

alternative futures in a science fiction setting. The dystopian narrative proves

inherently subversive to the dominant ideology because it projects pessimistic

views as to how current social situations might play out in the future. But when

incorporated in a science fiction film, the dystopian fiction becomes the

visualization of a future rather than a speculation on contemporary social

alternatives. The film decidedly revels in its own technological genius while

neglecting any social relevance.

How can a product of the dominant ideology utilize a dystopian framework

yet still fail to provide a socially subversive message. The Matrix (1999) presents

the viewer with two dystopian alternatives. The film, with an estimated $63 million

budget, was a production of the Hollywood system even though the director-
 92

writer pair were relatively new to that system: their work was a commission. The

film grossed upwards of $171 million while in US theaters.1 Although the ideas

inherent in the film’s narrative impel the viewers to question their reality, the tools

and techniques used in constructing the film create a visual experience that

contradicts that message: “The dystopia of the film is particularly gruesome and

especially technophobic for a film that revels in digital special effects.”2 The film

urges its audience to empathize with a group of rebels who know a privileged

secret about the nature of reality. The methods of the characters in the film are

as contradictory as its cinematic tools; the motive of the heroes is to emancipate

the human race, but they do so by slaughtering innocent civilians. The film,

therefore, conveys a pathological position in terms of society. The film quickly

developed a fan base, largely due to its utilization of special effects, never-

before-seen action styles, and philosophical messages. Given that cinema exerts

a dramatic effect on the viewer’s perception of reality, how does such a message

affect a viewer’s relationship with society? How can viewers of the film’s target

audience decode these messages, especially when the film provides an

excellently distracting array of eye candy, ground-breaking SFX technology?3

The Matrix tells the story of Thomas A. Anderson, a man who lives two

lives. During the day he works as a software programmer; during the night he
1
“Business Data for The Matrix (1999),” IMDb,
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0133093/business (accessed 4 Jan, 2007).
2
Edward D. Miller, “The Matrix and the Medium’s Message,” Social Policy (Summer
2000): 56.
3
It is noted in various sources that The Matrix, and other action-based eye candy films,
attracts a younger target audience than previously calculated. An ideal demographic of ages 18-
25 gives way to 12-18: predominantly adolescent males. See: James Bowman, “Moody Blues,”
American Spectator (June 1999): 64-5; Nathanial Kohn, Pat Gill, Thomas Bivins, and Ralph D.
Barney, “Cases and Commentaries,” Journal of Mass Media Ethics 18 (March 2003): 308-317.
 93

becomes a hacker, Neo. He has the enduring feeling that something is wrong

with the world and, at night, he searches for answers as to why the waking world

seems like a dream. He searches for the man called Morpheus who, in the

hacker world, is esteemed as a transcendent. When they finally cross paths,

Morpheus explains to Neo that in order to know “the truth,” he must make an

ultimate decision. Neo decides to follow Morpheus “down the rabbit hole,” in one

of the film’s many allusions to popular literature, and as a result the world is

opened up to him. Neo discovers that the world he knew is actually “a computer-

simulated dream world, created to keep us under control,” which is referred to as

the matrix. Human beings are used as battery power by a race of artificial

intelligence, and those that have escaped their control have joined the ranks of a

resistance. Neo discovers that Morpheus is the leader of a rebel squad in “the

real world,” which turns out to be a few hundred years in the future. “The real

world” appears sepia-toned as opposed to the matrix’s green. Morpheus’ team

battles the agents, autonomous AI beings, within the matrix in an effort to

emancipate the human race from the control of artificial intelligence. Morpheus

believes that Neo is the prophesized savior that will ultimately free the human

race from slavery. Through a series of brutal, mind-blowing action sequences,

Neo proves his strength and comes into his own. He embraces his destiny so

that he and the other rebels can one day destroy the virtual reality. Because of

the great box office success of The Matrix, two sequels were immediately

commissioned to round out a trilogy: The Matrix Reloaded and The Matrix

Revolutions. However, the sequels concentrated on action and effects even more
 94

so than the original.

In the opening sequence of The Matrix, policemen are involved in a

rooftop chase after the terrorist Trinity. An Agent, supposedly an FBI-type

detective, follows the woman in close pursuit. When Trinity and the Agent

majestically leap to an adjacent building that, using rational judgment, is quite an

unlikely distance, a policeman stops in his tracks and remarks, “that’s

impossible.” His statement works on two levels. The policeman’s

acknowledgement of the unbelievable, “based as it is on direct observation and a

coherent assessment of the facts–not on a refusal to face those facts, or on an

acceptance of them only because they fit neatly into a pre-existing framework of

irrational beliefs–emerges, therefore, by contrast, as all the more balanced, all

the more credible, all the more convincing; all the more probable.”4 This first

sequence works to present the viewer of The Matrix with an altered perception of

reality, which will be built upon throughout the film. The viewer continues to

question the rules of the film’s universe and witness the impossible feats of those

who know the privileged secret of how to bend physical laws.

Science fiction film employs strategies of defamiliarization in the creation

of alternative worlds. This process requires viewers to first admit to the

unbelievability of the alternative world and then submit to its autonomous laws

and particular narrative logic. Steven Neale, in his essay concerning knowledge,

judgment and belief in science fiction film, contends that films of this genre

require not only a suspension of disbelief but also a suspension of judgment:

4
Steven Neale, “‘You’ve Got to be Fucking Kidding!’ Knowledge, Belief and Judgment in
Science Fiction,” in Alien Zone, ed. Annette Kuhn (NY: Verso, 1990), 163.
 95

The ‘suspension of disbelief’ required by any fiction–or more accurately,

the suspension of judgment, on the one hand, coupled with a splitting or
division of knowledge on the other (as can be encapsulated in a formula
like ‘I know this is fictional, unreal, but will nevertheless treat it as worthy
of judgment, and therefore as worthy of credence’)–is given, in the
cinema, an additional twist (‘I know that what is presented by means of
these images and sounds is not really there, but nevertheless…’). Yet
further twists are added when it comes to a genre like science fiction,
which by definition deals, as we have seen, with the unlikely, and hence
the unbelievable; and when it comes to the mobilization, in cinematic
science fiction, of a regime of special effects, of specially fabricated
images and sounds, both to present and to authenticate its events and its
settings.5

Viewers relinquish their perceptions of natural reality to the narrative logic of an

alternative and unbelievable fictional setting. Science fiction films, which employ

this type of paradigmatic creation of belief, function on an ideological level,

reforming viewer’s perceptions in a gamut of ways. When a film of this type

couples such a strategy with a call to action, the results can be destabilizing for

the viewer’s perception of reality and participation in society.

The Matrix at once presents a dominant ideological perspective–through

the visual nature of its images and cinematic techniques employed–and attempts

to condemn that very system–through a narrative that shows a rebel group

attempting to emancipate the human race from the clutches of a polarized evil

power. The narrative message of the film–question your reality, wake up to the

dominance of power–stands in opposition to the cinematic techniques employed

in the film, which support the use of technology as artificial experience and

sustain the habitual spectatorship of vicarious media.

The media sustains an ideological framework through its very visual

nature: “Reality is nothing but an expression of the prevailing ideology… What

5
Ibid., 165.
 96

the camera in fact registers is the vague, unformulated, untheorized, unthought-

out world of the dominant ideology. Cinema is one of the languages through

which the world communicates itself to itself.”6 Cinema is bound up with society

and social responsibility, creating an intricate web in which economy (in the

capitalist American system, at least) is the dominating factor. And even while

some works may try to undermine that ideology, they ultimately fail because they

arise out of that framework. The media itself can include contradiction. While

works of the media may contain subversive messages, those works are still part

of a system that conveys an overall ideology.

Let us assume that Hollywood films deploy a specific ideology. This

ideology highlights American consumer capitalism, which uses technology and

the image to disseminate its messages. Taking the extreme stance, ideological

film theorist and critic Comolli argues: “the majority of films in all categories are

the unconscious instruments of the ideology that produces them.”7 If films

construct a story-specific worldview, then the film’s messages act upon the

viewer’s reality perception in distorting ways. This is nowhere more prevalent

than in films that present hermetic, highly stylized views in opposition to that of

the world of lived experience. The genres of horror, fantasy, and science fiction

partake the altered visual world in its most extreme juxtapositions.

The Matrix is informed by a multitude of philosophical and religious texts.

One of the film’s taglines, “reality is a thing of the past,” speaks to postmodern

6
Jean-Luc Comolli and Jean Narboni, “Cinema/Ideology/Criticism,” in Film Theory and
Criticism, ed. Leo Braudy and Marshall Cohen (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 755.
7
Ibid., 755.
 97

social and film theorists alike.8 The film consistently references Baudrillard’s

Simulacra and Simulation, but maintains a literal understanding of the work. In an

early draft of the script, Morpheus references Baudrillard by name, telling Neo

that he was living on the map, not the territory.9 Baudrillard’s work reveals the

post-industrial world changed in the face of technological dominance–a social

message: “the film, however, stops far short of Baudrillard’s hyperreal, preferring

to posit a real that can be uncovered by an understanding of the ideologically

created false consciousness that masks it.”10 The Matrix approaches technology

firstly as a constant in everyday life and secondly as a personified character; it

fails to contemplate an effective way to reaffirm a natural reality. Even though the

filmmakers revered Baudrillard’s work, incorporating its themes on a large scale,

their literal application of the theories do more to support a dominant ideology

than live up to the source material’s message concerning the degradation of

objective reality in the face of impending technology.

The film fails to create a permanent and arguable position on the

reification of reality. The inertia of the film relies on the viewer’s acceptance of

the simplicity of various concepts such as belief and truth:

That drive to escape the matrix…is carried out throughout the film as a
return to the real… It is an exchange of one set of constraints for another,
hardly a freedom from boundaries and borders, especially since the
implication throughout the film is that one can achieve unmediated access
to the truth, hardly the result of a completed antihumanist critique.11
8
“Taglines for The Matrix (1999),” IMDb, http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0133093/taglines (24
Dec 2006).
9
Andy and Larry Wachowski, The Matrix (1997). Drew’s Script-o-Rama,
http://www.script-o-rama.com/snazzy/dircut.html (accessed 3 Jan 2007).
10
Lia Hotchkiss, “Still in the Game: Cybertransformations of the New Flesh in David
Cronenbergs eXistenZ,” The Velvet Light Trap 52 (Fall 2003): 30. See footnote 13 in the
referenced document.
11
Ibid., 22.
 98

The Matrix does not intend to make a social statement. Its destabilized ideology

is exactly its demise in the way of its use of philosophical source material. The

Matrix uses its source material to make a statement about reality, psychology,

dreaming, and technology when its source material speaks more to social levels

of reality-perception.

In regard to illusion and simulation, a parallel could be drawn between the

virtual world of the matrix and the film’s impression of reality. In The Matrix,

illusion is the same as enslavement. In this sense, to continue the message put

forth in the film, reality is something to be cherished; the virtual simulation is

something to be destroyed. But this kind of statement could never be made

overtly in the film, since its artifice relies on the mechanisms of filmic illusion.

The Matrix’s story expresses an ambivalent view of technology. It walks a

line between the opposing positions of technophile and technophobe. In the “real

world,” technology is virtually non-existent, but the revolutionaries require the

little they have to fight the machines. They possess EMP, computers,

hovercrafts, and the VR technology to re-enter the matrix. Their ultimate mission

is to destroy that technology. The opposition is posed: low-tech good, high-tech

bad:

The Matrix paradoxically maintains both its fantasy of transcendence

through technology and its drive to stabilize the real because of
technological dread: transcending the matrix means simultaneously using
the technological tools of the matrix against its own construction while at
the same time reasserting the real, whose dystopian qualities in turn
renew the desire for further transcendence.12

Since the characters of the film utilize technology, the film’s message that
12
Ibid., 23.
 99

technology should be obliterated proves contradictory. The Matrix Reloaded, the

second of the trilogy, confronts the narrative position on technology, but avoids

clear cut answers as to how the dichotomy can be equalized. The machines that

filter their water, power their lights and hinge their rebellion are necessary. The

films present a conflicted view, unable to balance a position on technology with a

presentation of alternate realities.

A similar ambivalence is presented in the film’s form. As the story

debunks the use of technology by the dominant power, the film itself utilizes a

wide range of state of the art digital technologies to convey that message, such

as “bullet time” and “time splice”:

It warns that far from freeing us from the doldrums of ordinary life, new
technology may be aligning computer stations as the assembly lines of the
recapitalized western world, allowing the masses to be controlled by
‘techno-bosses.’ The film urges its audience to wake up to the power
dynamics and recognize the illusions of balance and propriety that
corporate and governmental forces put forth.13

But here’s the rub. What about the illusions of Hollywood cinema? This

revolutionary message is neatly packaged in a high-tech spectacle-driven motion

picture replete with clichéd good versus evil conflict and gun-toting, vinyl-clad

superheroes. The underlying message of the film may be effective, but the

casing is purely in line with the film industry standards. The actualization of the

film’s message would be to the detriment of the film itself.

Nowadays with the quickness of technological advancement, it is more

and more difficult to separate real life elements in film from computer generated

imagery and special effects. One must come to a film with a precise eye for

13
Miller, 58.
 100

telling the difference. The films exist to blend the difference, to make the real and

the effects inseparable. This poses a problem for the viewing audience. If in a

film, The Matrix for example, you are presented with revolutionaries performing

death-defying feats with the aid of wires and blue screens, how are we to know

these acts are impossible in real life situations if the wires are eliminated from the

final shots and the actors superimposed onto digital backgrounds? We all know

that humans can’t fly. But how are we to know that a woman the size and build of

Carrie-Anne Moss can or can’t take out a horde of armed guards with her three-

inch heels? In cutting edge films, the live action and CGI shots are so well

blended that the impression of reality in the audience’s eyes are drastically

altered so that on departure from the movie theater and the viewing experience,

our expectations of lived experience are greatly altered: “Children… who in

generations past were able to separate fact from fiction through relatively crude

techniques… may not be able to tell the difference so easily nowadays, and that

may pose a problem.”14 With the development of digital technologies in film, there

comes a new generation of viewers thoroughly enraptured by the images.

Without a perspective on the history of film art, youthful audiences are largely

blind to the rapid development of the medium. This makes the target audience of

science fiction and action films all the more susceptible to the contingent illusions

and the reinforcement of dominant ideology.

When it comes to entertainment for its own sake, social relevance is

sometimes difficult to ascertain. Science fiction and action films, especially when

14
Ralph Barney, “Cases and Commentaries,” Journal of Mass Media Ethics 18 (March
2003): 317.
 101

they employ regimens of digital effects, prove solely escapist. As far as narrative

film presents a hermetic world, and likewise worldview, special effects become a

part of that world to the point where there exists no differentiation between the

natural objects and the artificial: “Like other forms of mass communication,

[science fiction] does not precisely tell people what to think–about technology,

say–but rather forestalls thinking about technology in ways that are outside

authorized categories of reflection.”15 The effects are often taken for granted by

the viewer who is already embedded in a system of escalating spectacle. The

special effects are “transformed from cultural artifacts into natural objects.”16

These types of film defy critical contemplation on their own reflexive practices.

The Matrix’s narrative utilizes a contradictory moral and rational structure.

The means utilized by the heroes in the film should make this point evident; the

rebels commit Machiavellian slaughter of innocents, the same people they are

trying to free from the evil system. The rebels rationalize their battle so that their

actions are made in self-defense and toward an ultimate goal.

Of the film’s two representations of reality (the matrix and “the real world”)

the world of the matrix most closely resembles the one of real lived experience.

When the viewers associate the simulation world in the film with the natural

reality, what does this imply about social responsibility? In the film, actions in the

simulated world bear no consequences; all actions retain a Machiavellian notion

of freeing society from the constraints of illusion. If the world is merely “electrical

signals interpreted by your brain,” then what does society matter? If reality is of

15
Michael Stern, “Making Culture into Nature,” in Alien Zone, ed. Annette Kuhn (NY:
Verso, 1990), 72.
16
Ibid., 69.
 102

one’s own making, if actions bear no consequences, what is the purpose of

society or social obligation at all? The Matrix, in effect, relays a sociopathic

message: “As movie violence has become more physically ‘graphic’ and thus

allegedly ‘realistic’ it has simultaneously become more dramatically unrealistic

and detached from any moral context.”17 The film lessens the consequences of

violence just as the consequences of death are nearly nullified. The physical

human abilities of strength and agility are magnified to superhero levels,

downplaying real world consequences and effectively subjugating real life power.

In a scathing commentary of the film, critic Bowman reveals The Matrix, as

well as its director-pair, as playing on “adolescent pseudo-profundities.”18 He

attacks the directors for claiming intentions to present “ideas that challenge

perceptions of reality.”19 Bowman claims that the Wachowskis played on

adolescent fantasies, ones they held themselves, forwarding high-brow intentions

through religious and philosophical allusions that are really transparent: “adult

culture is in the hands of those who invented current youth culture and who never

want to let go of it.”20 His analysis brings to light infantilism in the film industry and

its products. Keeping social responsibility in the forefront of his commentary,

Bowman’s sharp criticism indicts the film industry’s propagation of fantasy while

neglecting viewer’s susceptibility:

All the predictable arguments about gun control and violence on TV and in
video games are made ad nauseam, but no one seems to have raised any
objection to the popular culture’s more insidious encouragements to the
kids to inhabit this fantasy world, or thought that their inhabiting it was
17
James Bowman, “Moody Blues,” American Spectator (June 1999): 65.
18
Ibid., 64.
19
Ibid.
20
Ibid.
 103

likely to impair their ability to tell fantasy from reality.21

Bowman takes an optimistic, active stance in his lucid argument. However, he

neglects the ultimate purpose of vicarious entertainment. Of course mainstream

entertainment, being violent and infantilizing, represents a part of American

popular culture: all the more reason to critically analyze the messages inherent in

media texts so that the underlying meanings becomes evident.

Being socially responsible, we can hope that audiences of fiction and

fantasy will recognize entertainments as such, and take their own steps to

making sense of them. This assumes a large amount of conscientiousness on

the part of the public to take movies seriously, to question the fantastical, and to

do what’s right–which may be asking too much:

The immediate question, then, is whether The Matrix’s audiences will

know that the multiple superhuman acts in the movie are fantasy fiction
and accept them as entertainment, or whether the movie deceives viewers
into believing such acts are actual human events. Closely connected to
the latter, of course, is the disturbing thought that viewers will accept the
fantasies of the movie as reality and base their own actions on those
premises.22

We should hope that film spectators have a basic understanding of the laws of

society and reality. The Matrix, as an ideological system, brings into question

these laws and the function of individuals in both systems. In the film, characters

defy natural physical laws and act against the social system. Since the film

presents a call to action to question reality, can we also imply that the viewer

should question physical and social laws as well? If The Matrix presents an

ideology, and that ideology conveys social meaning, then the film works on its

21
Ibid.
22
Barney, “Cases and Commentaries,” 316.
 104

audience to distort both systems of laws.

Entertainment for its own sake does not come without its requisite

ideological underpinnings. Critical analysis of seemingly harmless mainstream

film becomes crucial when considering dominant ideology. While the term

popular culture exists to define an area of commonly perceived meaning in

America, radical thought must exist in contradiction to those paradigms in order

to give them meaning. Without reflection, submission becomes prevalent,

followed by authoritative control. A film like The Matrix makes contemporary

power relationships evident, especially in light of critical dystopia.

If reality truly has succumbed to Baudrillard’s notions of the hyperreal,

then we must be all the more wary of distortion in order to reclaim whatever

remnant still survive: “The primitive notion of the efficacy of images presumes

that images possess the qualities of the real thing; but our inclination is to

attribute to real things the qualities of images.”23 We can do more than hope; we

can actively produce subversions of the dominant ideology in order to reclaim

objective reality from the images created by popular culture. This includes critical

dialogue, radical action and active statements woven into the very web of the

media. Since the prevalent modes of dialogue exist in the media, the

embodiment of hyperreality, critical dialogue must persevere in the shadow of

dominant icons.

23
Sontag, 158.
 106

BLOCKBUSTER MANIA:
LOWEST COMMON DENOMINATOR ENTERTAINMENT

“The point is to shake, rattle, and roll us, to keep us breathless, to

delight, dragoon, and rollercoaster us into an eager suspension of
disbelief. To say that the resulting plot ‘makes no sense’ misses the
point, since the goal is usually to make only enough sense to permit
the senses to take over.”
– Todd Gitlin, Media Unlimited.

Imagine a future when the average IQ has pit-fallen to an incredible low.

The world, populated by morons who can no longer solve their most basic

problems, becomes a dystopia. In the future of 2505, the most popular motion

picture of the year is called Ass, and that’s exactly what it is. It swept the Oscars

that year. Does this sound unlikely?

Mike Judge’s Idiocracy (2006) imagines such a future. While it didn’t win

any awards itself, and its producers cut their losses, it quickly grew into a cult film

for those who recognized its prophetic message. Judge’s irreverent humor,

memorable from Beavis and Butthead and Office Space, translates into a roast of

lowbrow culture. Idiocracy is accessible to a wide audience, which is more we

can say about all those intellectuals out there bemoaning the degradation of

American culture. An IMDb reviewer remarked: “Just how stupid does this movie

have to be for people to get the point?”1

But a year later (2007, that is) another film hit theatres that really drove the
1
“Idiocracy (2006),” IMDb, http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0387808/ (accessed 23 Dec 2007).
 107

point home. Critic Henry Miller of Sight and Sound aptly and sarcastically coined

the film’s unofficial title: Giant Fucking Robots.2 Looks like the future came 500

years early. Director Michael Bay, popular culture playboy, explains: “It’s just

fun.”3

Based on the 1980’s Hasbro toy line, Transformers doesn’t so much tell a

story as show off some flashy effects and make your seat vibrate. New York

Times Critic Manholha Dargis describes it as “the ultimate in shock-and-awe

entertainment. The result is part car commercial, part military recruitment ad, a

bumper-to-bumper pileup of big cars, big guns and, as befits its recently weaned

target demographic, big breasts.”4 As a summer blockbuster, Transformers fulfills

its roll splendidly. It’s a film for teenage boys, for adults with arrested

development, and for toy fans of all ages. Here we’ve got 143 minutes of blasting

metal and loud explosions. That’s much better than a fireworks display.5

But in all seriousness, where does this leave us? While the movie hasn’t

won any awards, it broke box office records with a $155M opening stretch. With a

sequel planned for June 2009, this transparent franchise is destined to become

the next Pirates of the Caribbean. Not only is the plot mind-boggling; the

paradoxical success of a spectacle entertainment predicated on advertisement,

testosterone, and Giant Fucking Robots leaves me wondering what happened.

When did the lowest common denominator become equivalent to the most

popular? Why do masses flock to films they know can never be as good as the

2
Henry Miller. “Transformers,” Sight and Sound (Sept 2007): 80.
3
Josh Rottenberg, “Heavy Metal,” Entertainment Weekly, 13 July 2007, 28.
4
Manholha Dargis, “Car Wars with Shape-Shifters ‘R’ Us,” New York Times, 2 July 2007,
E1.
5
Transformers was released on July 3, 2007.
 108

trailers? In the next few pages I hope to extrapolate the circumstances and

futures of this irrational system and dive into a few pertinent question such as:

what is the relationship between Blockbuster appeal and audience interest; how

are box office grosses and a film’s popularity connected; why does popular

culture thrive off the lowest common denominator? Most importantly, I want to

know who decides what’s popular.

To speak of popular culture–in the sense of mass culture, technological

reproduction, and the media–is to speak of power relationships between the

producers and audiences: Movies “do not simply ‘give people what they want’

(since they define those wants).”6 While scholars agree that popular culture

maintains a complex interplay between producer and audience, opinions vary

greatly as to where the power lies. As cultural theorist John Storey puts it, there

are six ways of approaching popular culture: well liked by many people, inferior to

high culture, mass or commercial culture, folk culture, hegemonic, and

postmodern.7 My understanding of popular culture begins with the mass media.

By pushing folk and high culture into the margins, popular culture maintains a

hegemonic control over the consumer’s attention. In a postmodern world, where

the ubiquity of the mass media passes for perception, the difference between ad

messages and personal taste disappears. You want what they want you to want

because their arguments are that convincing. Just jump on the bandwagon.

Everybody else is doing it.

6
Richard Dyer, “Entertainment as Utopia,” in The Cultural Studies Reader, ed. Simon
During (NY: Routledge, 1999): 372.
7
John Storey, Cultural Theory and Popular Culture: An Introduction (Athens: University of
Georgia Press, 2006), 4-11.
 109

To date, explanations as to the popularity of pop culture have

inadequately addressed the increasing vapidity of the American mass media.

Understanding the success of Transformers requires a discussion that goes

beyond its entertainment value. I cannot rest with media analyst James Monaco’s

statement that “American movies and TV are popular because they’re popular.”8

Nor does cultural commentator Todd Gitlin’s extended rationalization do popular

culture justice:

The multiplex is filled with American films because the United States was
first to produce a culture of comfort and convenience whose popularity
was its primary reason for being. All in all, American popular culture is
popular because (and to the extent that) its sleek, fast, fleeting, styles of
entertainment – its commitment to entertainment – dovetail with modern
displacement and desire.”9

While I would like to concede with Gitlin on this point, I believe that there are

invisible powers at work here. There’s more to popular entertainment than

adrenaline and distraction. How do Blockbuster films succeed when critics

consistently reveal their infantalism? Word of mouth leans the same way, yet

masses still push through the doors to see the next greatest spectacle.

When you think about the immense amount of movies and media

produced each year, it’s overwhelming how much it caters to a young audience.

The media in general envisions its audience as adolescent, the core

demographic, the audience with the disposable income, the obsession with

violence, destruction, and female objectification, the urge for freedom and the

license for rebellion. Marketers know that it’s the 16-year-old boys who go to the

8
James Monaco, “Images and Sounds as Cultural Commodities,” Sight and Sound 49
(Fall 1980): 229).
9
Todd Gitlin, Media Unlimited, (NY: Henry Holt and Company, 2002), 206.
 110

movies most often, and so in their minds everybody’s a 16-year-old boy.

In his book Teenagers and Teenpics, Thomas Doherty examines the birth

of teenpics in the 1950s, successfully rooting the juvenilization of Hollywood film

in a real past. His short study generalizes the teenpic as a film made for and

about teens. Doherty neglects current films as well as the contemporary

Hollywood situation. His study does pave the way for further extrapolation on the

topic. He claims that in the 1960s, “youth became a concept, not a chronology.”10

The Hollywood film industry began to conceive of its audience as young rather

than using demographics. It ceased to matter whether a 50-year-old of a 15-year-

old went to see the movie. The audience itself became a concept.

Doherty traces the development of the teenpic genre to the present,

concentrating on the “juvenilization” of American movies. As Hollywood became

increasingly aware of its audience, producers learned that there was money to be

made in the adolescent scene:

The courtship of the teenage audience began in earnest in 1955; by 1960,

the romance was in full bloom. That shift in marketing strategy and
production initiated a progressive ‘juvenilization’ of film content and the
film audience that is today the operative reality of the American motion
picture business. The process whereby ‘movies for the millions’ became a
less-than-mass medium is best revealed in the genesis and development
of what has become the industry’s flagship enterprise, the teenpic.”11

Doherty’s study clearly sets up the contemporary situation; the American motion

picture industry envisions its audience as juvenile, conceptually rather than

chronologically. But the theory under much debate is how much American

culture, as well as the movie-going audience, plays into that conception.

10
Thomas Doherty, Teenagers and Teenpics (Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press,
2002), 190.
11
Doherty, 2.
 111

Critics writing in Entertainment Weekly, Sight and Sound, and regional

newspapers knocked Transformers for its convoluted plot and lack of character

(to name just a few symptoms). Reviews centered on the film’s spectacular

effects and its resurrection of the Hasbro franchise. Surprisingly few put the film

into perspective. An EW subtitle read: “Some think Transformers represents the

future of the blockbuster–and some are afraid they’re right.”12 If popular culture

does not include its own self-criticism, we keep spiraling downward. Critical

thought is segregated to the margins so that aid in the decoding process is laid

only for those who seek it–or can see beyond its face value.

Gitlin insists, and develops his argument very persuasively, that American

popular culture rules by “soft power.” Those who do not submit, or do not

recognize its power, are foolish and misled: “The dominance of American popular

culture is a soft dominance–a collaboration.”13 In this way, media products are

not force-fed but delivered in such a way as to mingle with popular interests and

play upon streams of contemporary feeling. Viewers are not dupes in that they

ask for more by tuning in to the most popular shows again and again; viewers

thereby create popularity. Producers insinuate ratings as interest, and feed that

assumed interest with more of the same–but increasingly bigger, better, and

flashier. This reproduction from assumed interest creates a cycle of assumed

popularity, which makes it risky for different kinds of programs and products that

cannot bank on historically proven popularity.

The flood of entertainments rushing on TV, DVD, and in theaters makes

12
Josh Rottenberg, et al, “Heavy Metal,” Entertainment Weekly, 13 July 2007, 28.
13
Gitlin, 207.
 112

this system incomprehensible for the average viewer. There’s always something

newer and better: “To live comfortably with it, we gravitate to our favorites,

classify the parts, get our minds around segments while doing our best to ignore

the rest.”14 Contemporary American popular culture is so myopic that we do not

generally see its implications, foundations in economy, nor its products’ roots in

the American imagination.

Gitlin’s description of the “soft power” of the media maintains a flexible

relationship between producers and consumers. Given that the entertainment

industry functions, to use Althusser’s term, as an Ideological State Apparatus, it

would appear more likely that the producer’s power works on us rather than with

us. Attributing “soft power” to the production of cultural material raises the

individual or subculture up to the level of co-producer.

Certainly, fan subculture is represented in the production of a film like

Transformers. This population hardly allows such a film to rise to the status of

pop culture. Media makers these days take cues from past successes,

reproducing entertainments based on box office grosses and genre dominances.

The top grossing films of years past are bound to be copied in the future. That’s

what the people want. It should be apparent, however, that statistics do not

represent reality. Since the industry relies on consumer capitalism rather than

intelligence, its future products will grow out of what has historically sold: and

that’s spectacle. Popular films, and American popular culture in general, gravitate

toward action based on cheap thrills, sensation rather than cogitation. The lowest

common denominator will attract the widest audience, for it’s more likely that a
14
Gitlin, 119.
 113

consumer will lower his or her standards for accessible media than will

distinguish intelligent communication.

This picture appears to be plain dominance of the industry in its hold on

consumers. Stuart Hall offers a helpful way of theorizing the popular, and his

writing sheds light on questions concerning the power relationship between

producer and consumer:

First, if it is true that, in the twentieth century, vast numbers of people do

consume and even indeed enjoy the cultural products of our modern
cultural industry, then it follows that very substantial numbers of working
people must be included within the audiences for such products. Now, if
the forms and relationship, on which participation in this sort of
commercially provided ‘culture’ depend, are purely manipulative and
debased, then the people who consume and enjoy them must either be
themselves debased by these activities or else living in a permanent state
of ‘false consciousness.’15

Hall’s statement applies well to producers and products of popular culture, in this

case movies and entertainments. Does mass culture create false

consciousness? Again, looking historically, we can see that the media industry

reproduces products based on popularity. This proliferation is apparent in the

flood of reality TV programs in the 1990’s to present, for example. But the

differentiation between organic and created popularity may help here. Does the

consumer base ask for more reality shows or do producers simply reproduce the

formula until it runs dry? Of course, television networks cannot force viewers to

tune in to American Idol. There’s just nothing better to watch.

Perhaps these power relations were easier understood in the industry’s

infancy, before the process of popular entertainment production became as

15
Stuart Hall, “Notes on Deconstructing the Popular,” in The Cultural Resistance Reader,
ed. Stephen Duncombe (NY: Verso, 2002), 187.
 114

sophisticated as it is today. Adorno and Horkheimer wrote cogently of their

termed “culture industry” in a way that, I believe, accurately depicts the power

relations between popular entertainments and audiences. Even though their

writing dates back to the 1940’s, it is no less relevant today:

It is claimed that standards were based in the first place on consumers’

needs, and for that reason were accepted with so little resistance. The
result is the circle of manipulation and retroactive need in which the unity
of the system grows ever stronger. No mention is made of the fact that the
basis on which technology acquires power over society is the power of
those whose economic power over society is greatest. A technological
rationale is the rationale of domination itself.16

For two educated Germans, new to the American entertainment industry, a

despairing vision of the implications and reproduction of the system became

clear. Even though Socialist writing continued through the 20th century paralleling

the technological developments of the entertainment industry, criticisms took a

back seat to the pleasures and comfort of the media. Even Edward R. Murrow,

speaking to the Radio and Television News Directors Association (RTNDA) in

1958 could not shift the path, as influential and motivating his words may have

been. It seemed like the entertainment industry was burgeoning in profits, but the

American imagination was paying the price. The news became increasingly

trivialized, and entertainment became a platform for spectacles.

Sure, criticism continues. But how much difference can an article make

when armies of advertisements and entertainments compete for our attention?

Most of us simply block it out. Who has the time? The entertainments try so hard

to please, to play on the surface, that real world issues and ethics are cast out

16
Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, “The Culture Industry,” in The Cultural Studies
Reader, ed. Simon During (NY: Routledge, 1999), 33. Note that the Dialectic of Enlightenment
was first published in 1947.
 115

behind a curtain of spectacular images. Here’s an example. The climactic action

of Transformers takes place in a mid-western city. Robots battle soldiers and

other robots down the urban streets turning buildings to rubble. These are

images of domestic terrorism with civilians are caught in the crossfire. An hour

and a half into the story, riding the waves of action, how likely is it that you’ll

wake up to the social realities portrayed in this fantasy? What’s more likely, you’ll

sit back, shut up, and enjoy the rest of the movie. Because “it’s just fun.” But

Entertainment Weekly critics Juarez and Vary disagreed, calling the scenes

“unapologetically bombastic.”17 How could director Bay have known he would rub

people the wrong way? By the climax of the film shouldn’t viewers have hooked

into the characters so that the real world falls into the periphery? In response,

Bay says: “When you’re doing a fantasy movie, you can’t think like that.”18 Juarez

and Vary’s biting remarks stand lonely beside a slew of reeling reviews. Four

other articles in Entertainment Weekly alone cheered hurrahs for the 2007

summer blockbuster: “This toy story is hugely entertaining.”19 While they mention

the heavy advertising (“this two-hour ode to consumerism is probably the most

elaborate ad ever made”) the authors generally present information aimed at

getting the masses to the theaters.20

“More explosions! Better special effects! Even more villains!” doesn’t make

a better movie. But with all this riding on your side, you’re sure to make a big

profit. The situation could easily be the plot of a movie itself: Forging its way

17
Vanessa Juarez and Adam Vary, “Explain Yourself!” Entertainment Weekly, 20 July
2007, 14.
18
Ibid., 14.
19
Joshua Rich, “Aye Robot,” Entertainment Weekly, 26 Oct 2007, 53.
20
Ibid., 53.
 116

through of the Age of the Blockbuster, American popular culture descended to

the point of severe infantilism. Men become boys in this world where Giant

Fucking Robots rule the screens as well as the popular imagination. This is

hardly 1984, for rebellion is taken out of the equation. You can run but you can’t

hide. You are part of the mechanism itself. You go to see the movies, feeding the

machine. And even while you may protest to the messages of domestic terrorism

and extreme consumerism, you acquiesce to the spectacular narcotics. Because

it’s just fun.

To consider the blockbuster as the ultimate product of American popular

culture is to equate its qualities with the desires and ideals of society at large.

This comparison is difficult to make because of the quality of the 2007

blockbusters. Spider-man 3, Shrek the Third, Transformers, Pirates of the

Caribbean: At Worlds End, Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, and The

Bourne Ultimatum fill the top slots for the year’s highest box office ratings.21 It

was called the summer of the threequels because of the release of multiple

franchise installments. We have undoubtedly not seen the end of characters

such as Spidey, Jack Sparrow, Jason Bourne, and Optimus Prime. I wonder if

they would be truly mourned otherwise. The fact is that, while critics revealed the

slackening quality of the films this year, box office grosses increased from

previous years. Banking on past successes, character and story hardly matter

anymore: “Bloated scenes, murky plots, and superfluous characters didn’t stop

[the threequels] from generating $1.4 billion (and counting) at the box office.”22

21
“2007 Yearly Box Office Results,” Box Office Mojo, www.boxofficemojo.com (accessed
28 Dec 2007).
22
Jennifer Armstrong, et al. “Showdowns of Summer.” Entertainment Weekly, 7 Sept
 117

The blockbusters are still on a roll, and they’re showing no sign of stopping any

time soon. What’s astonishing is that the general decline in the quality of

cinematic storytelling did not affect the apparent popularity of these films. In order

to be successful, all a film requires is a payload of dynamite in Dolby.

Sequels have been all the rage in Hollywood since the 1970s, and the

massive successes of multiple installment films led to giant franchises. Producers

know, based on the success of a single film, whether viewers will pay to see

more. What’s surprising is that, today it seems like the trailers are better than the

features. It’s style over substance. What’s the use of a good story when people

will flock to see Spider-man versus Sand Man? That’s all you need to know. This

situation speaks volumes about American popular culture. When the most

popular film of the year can be reduced to such a high concept, you get a picture

of what the people are looking for in their entertainments: action over substance,

cheap thrills over dynamic characterizations. Riding on the backs of their

predecessors, you can expect the same but different–more extreme but missing

the details that make for quality cinema.

These are massive franchises that spread horizontally across multiple

industries. Transformers has its iron claws in GM, Mountain Dew, eBay, and

Burger King. Spider-Man appears on Papa John’s pizza boxes. In a culture such

as ours, ruled so heavily by consumer interests, brand names, and marketability,

entertainment, and economics are not easily dissociated. The fusion of media

and ads today is becoming more apparent with product placement, tie-ins, and

corporate partnerships.

2007, 46.
 118

Given the ubiquitous ad campaigns fueling these summer blockbusters,

it’s difficult to discern the difference between organic and constructed interest.

Would you have gone to see Transformers if the ads hadn’t made it look like so

much fun? Movie studios pump millions of dollars into these films to ensure that

the audiences turn up at the right place and time. Connecting movie marketing

and the popularity of blockbusters in this way raises the pertinent question: How

much does a movie’s ad campaign determine its popularity and resultant status

in popular culture? Even while the word of mouth on Transformers was highly

negative (outside its fan subculture), it still broke opening weekend box office

records. Friends tell you to skip it: “it’s the longest commercial I’ve ever seen.”

The commercials tell you “you can’t miss it.” Who do you listen to? They say it’s

worth it. Those giant, amorphous, ambiguous voices in the media finally pull you

into the theater. Nielsen Media, a leading research organization, tells us:

“Everyone wants to know what programs American audiences are watching.”23 If

popular culture operates in such a way, the autonomous American hardly plays a

role at all. The market forces fueling consumerism are too strong for any one

person to argue with. This model places the power in the hands of the

corporation.

The American entertainment industry has developed as a component of

mass culture where the most valuable products are not just the most popular but

the most commercial. The two go hand in hand. If you’ve got access–or a TV, or

eyes–then you have an idea of the popular, the spectacular entertainments

produced for our pleasure. According to the Nielsen ratings and box office
23
“Top TV Ratings,” Nielsen Media, www.nielsenmedia.com (accessed 23 Dec. 2007).
 119

grosses, American Idol, Survivor, CSI, Spider-Man, Pirates of the Caribbean,

Star Wars, Shrek rank highest in both statistical popularity and profit.24

The difference between entertainment and advertising is lessening.

Transformers is a virtual two-hour commercial, with corporations such as eBay,

Mountain Dew (Pepsi), and GM tightly knit into the film’s plot: “Transformers

represents not just another big, shiny, effects-driven blockbuster but the prime

example of extreme product placement… How successful that fusion proves will

likely provide a harbinger for the future.”25 Entertainment and consumerism fuse

unrecognizably into the core of popular culture. Transformers marks a high point

in cross-marketing, but for film audiences the future looks bleak. If Transformers

represents “a harbinger for the future,” leave me out. The advertising in feature

films is not so much subliminal as it is manipulative in its conscious integration of

product identity. If James Bond only drinks Coke, viewers attribute seduction to

the product. In Transformers, a Mountain Dew dispenser comes alive and attacks

civilians. Does this image appropriately sell the drink?

We must also consider the huge budgets flowing into these films.

Producers would like to think that spending millions of dollars promoting a movie

helps determine its final gross. In many ways, they’re right. An extreme case:

Sony pumped more than $25 million into promoting The Di Vinci Code, as if the

bestselling novel and controversial atmosphere surrounding its release were not

enough to drag you to the theater.26 Executives designed an “unconventional”

24
Statistic are based on Nielsen ratings, www.nielsenmedia.com, and Box Office Mojo,
www.boxofficemojo.com (accessed 23 Dec. 2007).
25
Rottenberg, “Heavy Metal,” 28.
26
John Consoli, “Spending more than $25 million.” MediaWeek, 18 June 2007, SR4.
 120

campaign, combining non-stop TV spots, cross-marketing with prime time TV

shows, and internet contests. The marketing team “blanketed eight major media

markets, including New York, Los Angeles and Chicago, with out-of-home

promotions in the form of billboards and transit posters. In one real eye-catching

example, New York's Museum of Arts and Design was wrapped with a sign

urging passersby to Be Part of the Phenomenon.”27 Producers take their game

seriously, and winning the hearts and minds of American viewers these days

requires not only appealing to the lowest common denominator. They grab the

seats of our pants with campaigns such as this. How can you refuse?

In his groundbreaking study of the American media, Daniel Boorstin

uncovers some marketing tactics that help unweave this mind-boggling tangle of

media messages: “Do not improved marketing techniques enable manufacturers

to know what we want better than we do ourselves? New ambiguities enter into

‘desire’ and ‘function.’”28 Does the entertainment industry, fulfilling its cultural role

of play and pleasure, accommodate for its $1.4 billion slice of the market?29 If a

culture can be judged by the way it plays, America is in a sad state where

hedonism and adrenaline rushes overshadow intelligent, thought-provoking,

character-driven drama. The summer blockbusters are the new spectator sport.

We live in the Age of the Blockbuster, which could be said to have begun

in the 1970’s with the disaster pic. Once films like Jaws, The Poseiden

Adventure, and Indiana Jones tore into theaters, we sensed the world would

27
Ibid.
28
Daniel Boorstin, The Image (NY: Vintage, 1961), 232.
29
Jennifer Armstrong, et al. “Showdowns of Summer,” Entertainment Weekly, 7 Sept
2007, 46. Authors estimate that the major summer blockbusters of 2007 generated $1.4 billion by
the end of the season.
 121

never be the same. One thing is clear: American pop culture is getting dumber.

The 1980’s brought remakes, which spoke to the point of slackening originality

that continues on Hollywood to this day. The next decade has often been

described by one encompassing statement: the search for the perfect

blockbuster.30 That quest continues through the turn of the century with

desperate conclusions. It turns out the perfect blockbuster will not only be pure

entertainment, but also the most infantile pleasurefest imaginable. To appeal to

the lowest common denominator, the perfect blockbuster must be a dumbed-

down thrill ride incorporating as many products as it can to ensure a supreme

box office gross. Are these the kinds of films we want to see in theaters?

Whether we like it or not, producers know what sells.

The age of the blockbuster marks a shift from what has classically been

associated with cinematic storytelling: story, character, and revelation. Sure,

blockbusters offer catharsis, but it’s an emotional thrill resulting from a

rollercoaster ride as opposed to a empathetic response. Live in the moment as

well as you can, because you won’t be able to make heads or tails of the plots

churning out of Hollywood. 2007’s third installment of the Pirates of the

Caribbean made this point quite clear: “It’s already obvious that market forces (or

audience demand) dictated the resurrection of several characters at the cost of a

cleaner, clearer storyline.”31 Forget about originality, much less inspiration.

Popular culture thrives on repetition as shown by this incarnation of a Disney

World theme park ride.

30
“Film History,” Filmsite, www.filmsite.org (accessed 23 Dec 2007).
31
Tom Charity, “Pirates of the Caribbean: At Worlds End,” Sight and Sound 17 (August
2007): 73.
 122

Transformers screenwriters Orci and Krutzman admitted: “It’s about a boy

and his car... That’s all we needed to know.”32 What’s left in this flood of high

concept glitz: Spectacle entertainments that act more on the viewer’s electrical

synapses than their hearts and minds? No more empathizing with dynamic

characters. Forget about endearing stories of the struggles of mankind. This is

the Age of the Blockbuster.

Let’s take a step back from this devastating present for a moment to

consider an alternative scenario. What if popular culture were more intelligent?

Imagine a world like our own where popular culture does not revolve around the

lowest common denominator. What if entertainment was not the center of the film

industry? Pop entertainments produce pleasure, signify leisure. What if in this

parallel pop culture, the population wanted intelligent films? Motion pictures have

always provided us with visions that fuel the imagination. Movies reflect our

cultural imaginary, give us insight into ourselves and others, allow us to play with

situations and their outcomes. Cheap thrills belong in theme parks where the

adrenaline is your own, not felt vicariously through Captain Sparrow. If this is the

best Hollywood can churn out, we’ve got some tough realizations to make.

Hollywood is an entertainment industry, and its products are made for the

pleasurable experiences of the consumers. Leisure is itself a commodity. What if

in this parallel popular culture, intellectual stimulation, knowledge, and

communication had a greater or equal value to emotional satisfaction?

32
Rottenberg, “Heavy Metal,” 28.
 124

CONTROVERSIAL CHILDHOOD:
SEXUALIZATION, SOCIALIZATION, AND SATIRE
IN TERRY GILLIAM’S TIDELAND

Are children growing up too fast, and if so why? Is it the prospect of

adolescence, particularly sex, that urges them along the way quicker than we

expect? Children forget about play, about wishing and fantasizing, when their

imaginative faculties are infringed upon by the media and their social play time

becomes TV time. Adolescence is beginning earlier, as early as 3rd or 4th grade.1

We’re growing up quicker, but to the level that has crystallized in American

popular culture: perpetual adolescence. If it’s shame that sustains childhood, and

TV and other popular, ubiquitous media that extinguishes shame, then children

learn what it means to be adult quite early: early enough to urge some to

contemplate the disappearance of childhood itself.

Neil Postman, in his examination of the concept of childhood, writes that

the developmental stage is as much an adult conception as a psychological one.

It is the concept of shame in adults that sustains the innocence of children:

“Shame is an essential part of the civilizing process. It is the price we pay for our

triumphs over nature.”2 To apply Postman’s theory, we could view the objecting

1
American Psychological Association, Task Force on the Sexualization of Girls,
Report of the APA Task Force on the Sexualization of Girls (Washington, DC: American
Psychological Association, 2007). See also Sylvia Rimm, Growing Up Too Fast: The Secret
World of America’s Middle Schoolers (Emmaus, PA: Rodale Books, 2005).
2
Neil Postman, The Disappearance of Childhood (NY: Delacorte Press, 1982): 48.
 125

producers and critics as symbolic of the shameful society. Adults have the

undying urge to protect children from grown-up secrets. In this effort, adults

censor children from higher knowledge in order to sustain their innocence.

The sad tale of Terry Gilliam’s Tideland–its commercial and critical failure–

confirms for us that decent adults don’t like to see little girls take their clothes off.

The film provides us with a surrealist social satire that pits sexualized childhood

against adult sensibilities. The former plays center stage while the latter proves

such a backlash upon the film’s release to ensure its box office demise. At first

glance, the story seems innocent enough. A nine-year-old girl, Jeliza-Rose,

moves with her father to Texas and becomes immersed in a world of her own

making, peopled with imaginary bog-men, ghosts, fireflies, and monster-sharks.

Critics have called it “Alice in Wonderland meets Psycho.”3

Jeliza-Rose is a curious, imaginative, and innocent girl who has little

awareness of social reality, who constructs her own concepts of sexuality and

human interaction. It should come as a surprise to anyone that she’s innocent,

considering the world she’s grown up in; neglectful dope-addicted parents treat

her like Cinderella. The dramatis personae include Dell, a one-eyed widow with a

deadly allergy to bees and a propensity for taxidermy. We also have Dickens,

Jeliza-Rose’s love interest, whose epilepsy has ridden him mentally

handicapped. Dickens navigates the Texan prairies in his submarine hunting

sharks.

Indeed, the landscape is a fantastical one. It may look desolate to the

3
Michael Wilmington, “Tideland crafts a sordid dream world.” Chicago Tribune, 20 Oct.
2006.
 126

unwitting observer, but it’s populated with the magical, grotesque beings of

Jeliza-Rose’s and Dickens’ imaginations. Jeliza-Rose’s imagination compensates

for her lack of social interaction. Her best friend is Mystique, a Barbie doll head

that she wears on her finger like a ventriloquist’s puppet. Besides, “the squirrels

make it less lonely.”4 Tideland is a truly imaginative tale, following the tradition of

Lewis Carroll, which shows the creativity of childhood in light of the dysfunction

and antisocial nature of the media age.

Intrinsic in the tale of Tideland is a scathing social criticism, which lies

beneath the general storyline. The satirical nature of the story rests in its

depiction of a sexualized female child, who probably adopted her notions of

sexuality, pregnancy, gender, and heterosexual intimacy from the media. She

appears in the film as a maladjusted Scarlet O’Hara, a starlet, an ingénue. Her

precociousness could easily be misinterpreted as promiscuity. Jeliza-Rose lives

in an original fantasy world that sets her circumstances apart from social reality.

This leads to the justification of her tale as social satire in the fairytale tradition.5

In the information age, where knowledge is readily available, adult secrets

are easily attainable. Neil Postman writes that the contemporary media liquidate

the innocence of children in its open stream of adult secrets. TV in particular

shows no shame in its programming:

Television erodes the dividing line between childhood and adulthood in

three ways, all having to do with its undifferentiated accessibility: first,
because it requires no instruction to grasp its form; second, because it
does not make complex demands on either mind or behavior; and third,
because it does not segregate its audience… The new media environment

4
This is the film’s main promotional tagline.
5
Historically, the fairytale genre has been taken up to convey socio-political subversion.
Tales from the German Romantic tradition display utopian urges disguised as children’s stories.
 127

that is emerging provides everyone, simultaneously, with the same

information. Given the conditions I have described, electric media find it
impossible to withhold secrets. Without secrets, of course, there can be no
such thing as childhood.6

What’s more, television liquidates all necessity for literacy. Could this in some

way explain the A.D.D. generation? In the age of rampant visual media, it is not

only the children who suffer. All of society shifts, since we rely less and less on

the printed word, the interpersonal communication, or the schoolhouse to access

knowledge of the outside world. But we still require a filter to separate the truth

(much less the believable) from the fictitious and false. This filter does not exist in

the minds of uneducated children. It is those minds that are becoming distorted

and distracted.

For children, who place less value judgments on information and media

programming, Jerry Springer is as credible as Sesame Street. Both present

information in the TV format. And while one program may be more oriented to the

child’s age group, the other does not prohibit its knowledge from free access.

Postman, following the ranks of other social critics, demonizes television

for its display of anything and everything that would promise a profitable

economic return. He constructs a very convincing argument as to how television

plays into the dilution of shame:

The plain facts are that television operates around the clock, that both its
physical and symbolic form make it unnecessary–in fact, impossible–to
segregate its audience, and that it requires a continuous supply of novel
and interesting information to engage and hold that audience. Thus,
television must make use of every existing taboo in the culture.7

Postman paints a picture of television as an exhibitionist medium. Daytime talk

6
Postman, 80.
7
Postman, 82.
 128

shows and soap operas, in their ubiquity, need material. And they loot the

storehouse of socio-cultural taboo in order to fill the programming void. As a

result, the availability of knowledge on the television dissolves the civilized

prohibition of adult secrets. The problem is that you don’t need a pass to attain

this information. As a result, adult knowledge becomes readily accessible to

children.

Postman’s streamlined historical rundown of the development and

subsequent annihilation of childhood proves hard to dispute. He equates the

socio-historical concepts of childhood and adulthood with technological

developments, such as the printing press and the telegraph. Much as Marshall

McLuhan preaches, “the medium is the message,” Postman extrapolates that the

media of any age connote the social relationships. The printing press deemed

literacy necessary in communication, and later made it certain that education

become necessary. In much the same way, digital media literacy predicates the

social knowledge of our age. Postman writes that, since television creates a level

playing field where all information is equal, digital media exterminates the need

for print literary as well as the social concept of shame. Since shame protects

childhood from adult secrets, childhood disappears in the age of digital media.

I do not hope to equate Tideland with Jerry Springer. The filmmakers

intentionally chose their material for its satiric value, its fantastical qualities, and

its penchant for surrealism. The controversial nature of the film should be looked

on as social satire, not taken at face value. To read the film, as Gilliam has said,

one must approach it with an open mind, and rediscover what it was like to be a
 129

child with innocent eyes. The dividing line between the censors and the

endorsers proves to be one of pompous adulthood and intolerance, immovable in

their perceptions of shame and childhood innocence.

Postman fails to mention tolerance and taste in the mix, however, which is

one of his argument’s only downfalls. Those critics who objected to Tideland’s

shameless depiction of childhood sexuality apparently have no tolerance for

satire in the media. In focusing on the television medium as an information

technology that equalizes its programming, he overlooks the fact that children

tend to lean towards children’s programming, and have less access to late night

shows. Sure, a boy might have a TV in his bedroom, but can we assume that he

will go out of his way to watch the Playboy channel?

Viewers of Tideland who have an understanding of sexuality and of

childhood should also have a tolerance for its use in fiction–especially when a

figure such as Jeliza-Rose conveys a great need for understanding child

development in the media age. If we are to approach fiction in its social role–its

capacity to draw upon social topics and interpret social problems–then we must

consider that stories are not merely representations of the social world but also

distorted mirror images. Since Tideland relies so heavily on surrealism and

fantasy, viewers must recognize its satiric value to appreciate its message.

If we are to approach Jeliza-Rose as a child who has been socialized by

the media it becomes clear how her concepts of childhood and adulthood have

become distorted. As a TV child, she is made aware of adult secrets, which

immediately enters her into the cult of grown-ups. However, her education is full
 130

of holes since the TV has been her sole teacher. Without real life cohorts, without

parental figures, without a real connection to objective social reality, Jeliza-Rose

can merely integrate her botched TV education into her fantasy world to create a

distorted picture of reality.

Unlike the TV child, Jeliza-Rose has a vivid imagination. If media culture

liquidates the need for imaginative visualization, this girl is an exception to the

rule. Jeliza-Rose’s imagination, which she utilizes in her solitary play, is that of

the ideal child: one who discards adult concepts of reality so as to experiment

with fantasy. Perhaps ideal is the wrong word here, since her imagination has

been poisoned by adult concepts of femininity. If we were to look at her play

activities, we would automatically notice how she performs solitary play with an

unbound imagination. In the digital age, child’s play has been nearly obliterated

with the profusion of visual entertainment. The imagination of the TV child no

longer provides an important function, since visual stimuli short circuit the mind’s

ability to create original images. Sharna Olfman supports the importance of play

in developing the child’s imagination in her article, “Where Do the Children

Play?”:

Indeed, creative, open-ended play is rapidly vanishing from our homes,

outdoor spaces, and schools. Today instead, children consume forty hours
of media each week (mostly on screens), surpassing the time given to
every activity but sleep. As media moguls compete for their market share,
these entertainments are increasingly rapid-paced, violent, and
sexualized, jolting children out of their age-appropriate activities and
encroaching not only on the time available to play, but on their very
capacity for deep imaginative play.8

Researchers, according to Olfman, have discovered the importance of childhood

8
Sharna Olfman, “Where Do the Children Play?,” in Childhood Lost, ed. Sharna Olfman
(Westport, CT: Praeger, 2005), 203-4.
 131

play in forming social relationships and emotional identity.9 Even solitary play

provides children with valuable lessons, though social skills are less applicable.

Jeliza-Rose’s central activity throughout Tideland is solitary play. Because her

imagination functions as a barrier, or perhaps rather a screen through which she

views social reality, she never stops playing.

Solitary play, or “dramatic play,” writes Olfman, provides children with

indispensable lessons unavailable through traditional education: “The child, left

alone to gaze and wonder at and then embody the butterfly in her play, trusts the

discoveries of her senses and her bodily experiences She begins to understand

what it means to be a butterfly in relationship to other natural delights in her

environment, and in the process acquires a deep empathy with her subject.”10 In

this way, Jeliza-Rose is a truly special child. Her imagination is as extraordinary

as Alice’s. In the use of her imagination, she displays her abilities to interact with

her environment. However, her solitary existence out there on the plains and in

the deserted farmhouse, ensures that she remains antisocial. But she’s hardly

alone; she has her Barbies to keep her company. Jeliza-Rose’s life is more rich

than the average TV child, since she intentionally peoples her world with

imaginary friends.

Unfortunately, the media have played a large part in Jeliza-Rose’s

socialization. She sees herself much like a starlet. At one point, she discovers

her grandmother’s costume chest in the farmhouse attic. A childlike Gilda, she

dons a feather boa, paints her face, and then goes around kissing things.

9
Olfman, 205.
10
Olfman, 210.
 132

Presumably, she learned this behavior from the movies. Feminity means

makeup, glamour, physical beauty: “Girls are taught that they should have skinny

bodies and that they need to be consumers of clothing, makeup, and accessories

in order to look ‘pretty,’ ‘grown-up,’ and ‘sexy.’”11 Jeliza-Rose takes these lessons

at face value, and no one in her life questions these facts. In all probability, she

has less a concept of age-appropriateness than gender differences.

Strangely enough, a similar social criticism was produced in the critically

acclaimed Little Miss Sunshine, which won an Academy Award for best original

screenplay in 2006 (Tideland was not recognized). The film follows the Hoopers,

a dysfunctional extended family, on their way to a California beauty pageant for

six- and seven-year-olds. Audiences gape, as do the characters on screen, as

the pageant commences with little girls masquerading as beauty queens, big

hair, and skimpy clothing and all. The reaction of the Hooper father (Greg

Kinnear) says it all. He fervently objects once his daughter, Olive, takes the stage

with an overt strip tease. What is wrong with our culture that would allow 6-year-

old girls to be objectified in such a blatantly sexual way? The social criticism

remains latent in the struggle between the Hoopers and the rest of the pageant

audience. Obviously, the sexualization of little girls has become an increasing

problem, and has numerable causes and consequences.12

If such a statement can be made overtly in an Oscar-winning film, why

cannot a similar statement be accepted in a marginalized one? I will contend that

11
Diane E. Levin, “So Sexy, So Soon: The Sexualization of Childhood,” in Childhood
Lost, ed. Sharna Olfman (Wesport, CT: Praeger, 2005), 137-153.
12
American Psychological Association, Task Force on the Sexualization of Girls, Report
of the APA Task Force on the Sexualization of Girls (Washington, DC: American Psychological
Association, 2007).
 133

it is the films’ disparate styles that separate their receptivity. Little Miss Sunshine

presented itself unpretentiously through a realistic depiction of the everyday

situation of a dysfunctional family; Olive was not necessarily the central

character, since the ensemble characters included a heroin-addict grandfather

and an intentionally mute brother. They all had problems. Gilliam’s style in

Tideland could have proved to be its downfall, since his mind tends to turn to the

surreal: “Like the surrealists, Gilliam is interested in showing the ‘real’ and the

sur-real’ (the more real than ‘real’) at the same time. ‘That’s the way I see the

world,’ he said. ‘I don’t distinguish between the two.’”13 Tideland is extremely

expressionist: full of dutch angles, extreme lens use, and stylistic production

design. Could the visual style of the film have gotten in the way of its reception?

We could alternatively blame the negative reception of Tideland on its

visual style, its surrealism, its scathing social criticism, or its low budget.

Obviously, the critics have already judged. The glory of the film rests in its fervent

bifurcation of positions between those who despise it and those who revel in its

originality.

While traveling the festival circuit, it could not have been much more

obvious that the film divided its audience. As a result, Gilliam slapped an

introduction onto the film to in part apologize and in part defend the material. In

his artist’s statement, he pleas for open minds. The film should be interpreted as

an innocent tale, without shame and without judgment, but through the eyes of a

child. It’s a child’s look at adult life:

I have a confession to make. Many of you are not going to like this film.
13
Nick Roddick, “Brittle House on the Prairie,” Sight & Sound. 16 (Aug 2006): 5.
 134

Many of you, luckily, are going to love it. And then there are many of you
who aren’t going to know what to think when this film finishes. But
hopefully, you will be thinking. I should explain: this film is seen through
the eyes of a child. If it’s shocking it’s because it’s innocent. So I suggest
you try to forget everything you’ve learned as an adult: the things that limit
your view of the world. Your fears, your prejudices your preconceptions.
Try to rediscover what it was like to be a child: with a sense of wonder and
innocence. And don’t forget to laugh. Remember, children are strong.
They’re resilient. They’re designed to survive. When you drop them, they
tend to bounce. I was 64-years-old when I made this film. I think I finally
discovered the child within me. And it turned out to be a little girl. Thank
you. Thank you. Thank you.14

But this plea proved more troubling than anyone could have expected. How

difficult could it be to lay aside your constructed concept of shame? Apparently it

is more difficult than watching with an open mind. Or even rediscovering your

innocence lost.

Tideland has many more detractors than advocates. The nay sayers

condemn the film for its grotesquery and its shameless depiction of childhood.

They call it “disturbing, and mostly unwatchable.”15 New York Times critic A.O.

Scott says: “this time [Gilliam] has stumbled into a different no-man's land, the

one between the merely bad and the completely indefensible.”16 Indeed, most

critics did not know what to make of the film. But this does not mean that they

should react with sharp-toothed aggression. It is best, when you don’t know what

to say, to say nothing at all.

Critic Owen Gleiberman called the film “gruesomely awful.” His synopsis

recounts the plot in adult terms, which situates his perspective in shame:

14
Terry Gilliam, “Tideland Intro - Terry Gilliam Speaks,” YouTube.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aRcvDaw0WB4 (accessed 12 Apr 2007).
15
“Tideland,” Rotten Tomatoes, http://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/tideland/ (accessed 12
Apr. 2007).
16
A.O. Scott, “A Girl Endures a No-Man’s Land by Dwelling in the Make-Believe,” NY
Times, 11 Oct, 2006. E5.
 135

Jeliza-Rose (Jodelle Ferland), a little girl who likes to play with scrappy
disembodied doll heads, watches as her mother (Jennifer Tilly), a Nancy
Spungen wannabe, expires with a croak from a methadone injection. The
girl then goes off with her rock & roll junkie father (Jeff Bridges), whom she
helps to shoot heroin, and a few minutes later he's dead as well, a corpse
propped in a chair, with its purplish tongue sticking out.17

Gleiberman’s interpretation, since the film is not the least bit realistic or

straightforward, derives from his reliance on shame and indeed his intolerance of

alternate views of life. He decidedly makes the statement that his view is the only

view, and that nothing productive can come of a discussion of the film: “Trying to

decipher the ‘signs’ of Tideland will get you nowhere. The only way to make

sense of the film is to read it as a splatter painting of disgust.”18 It is this type of

myopia that continually afflicts the reception of artistic independent film, not just

of Gilliam’s. Is it idealistic to wish for tolerance? Or is the film industry just that

reliant on economics and rationality?

For those acquainted with Gilliam’s previous work or Mitch Cullin’s novel,

the film can be seen as following in the tradition. Critic Michael Wilmington is

among the few who received the film with an open mind. The language in his

review clearly expresses his understanding of the film as well as his ability to

step outside himself. He calls Tideland: “a shockingly brilliant off-color effort that

flips a finger to proprieties… Crazy, dangerous and sometimes gorgeous: a feast

of nuttiness that takes you, for a while, over the edge.” Even Wilmington includes

warnings in his writing, to those viewers less willing than himself to delve into

Gilliam’s dark subconscious. He recognizes that the film includes marginal

themes, and is likewise intended (or doomed) for a marginal audience.

17
Owen Gleiberman, “Tideland,” Entertainment Weekly, 11 Oct 2006.
18
Gleiberman.
 136

Perhaps this is where the critics should leave it. Wilmington presents the

film in as bright a light as could be expected from a journalist. It is not the critic’s

duty to decide what the public will like or should like. But then again, individual

taste predetermines which films a movie-goer will see. And Tideland is not a film

that the majority of American audiences will be aching to see in any respect.

With adolescence as a physical and social age extending perpetually,

what does the disappearance of childhood insinuate? If children learn how to be

adolescent before they’ve truly experienced their childhood, what happens to the

arc of experience over a lifetime? Childhood is about more than play and

innocence. It’s a time filled with wonder and magic and curiosity about the

mysteries of life to come. When that time is cut short by the artificial processes of

an advanced society, we miss out on the joys of life–only to dive all too quickly

into the prohibitions and responsibilities of life as individuals on the brink of

coming of age.
 138

ADULTOLESCENCE:
COMING OF AGE IN MASS SOCIETY

The media re-present the world in ways fundamentally altered and

aestheticized: an ideal that conditions the natural way of seeing to become more

real than real. Is there a way to step back in order to realize the difference

between images and reality? Media images are so pervasive that they become

ordinary: to the point that their look equals and to some extent extinguishes the

ordinariness of the everyday world. We have all met a teenager enraptured by

these alluring image.

Adolescence is rife with tribulation. The media–fashion magazines, soaps,

MMORPGs–show us a world both beautiful and bracing, full of wonder and

expectation and adventure but devoid of mundane maladies. To what degree do

adolescents use the escape provided by primetime and Cosmopolitan in order to

cope in their daily lives? How much is the gap between the media and everyday

life a dividing line that instills at once satisfaction, escape, and identity

displacement?

In the mass age, ruled by the media, adolescents mature on their own turf.

With the dissolution of social norms, what Emile Durkheim called anomie, what

has historically been called “coming of age” evaporates into a long, drawn-out

series of social interactions and experiences. What anthropologist Thomas De

 139

Zengotita calls adultolescence is hardly a theory but a practice. Adultolescents

are the postmodern version of twenty-somethings.

Adultolescence is in a remark on the inadequacy of labels and, at the

same time, a much needed and helpful term to describe what’s happening to

culture in post-modern society. Instead of what the guidance counselors call

graduating, if not to college than to professional life, we now meander through

our options. Zengotita calls it “the drift factor.” How do you know when you

become adult? It must just be a feeling.

Zengotita further emphasizes the role of optionality: we decide who we

are.1 Technology takes over where culture leaves off. Vying for your attention,

the media make it seem as though you are the center of the world: “MeWorld.” In

this state, everything is for and about you. You are the sun of this solar system.

Forget about rituals, because traditions require social consensus and approval.

In the technology-oriented mass society, you decide for yourself. Or is it the

media that decide for you? Either way, there are myriad paths to decide upon.

Has the term “coming of age” lost their meaning? Given the absence of

substantive communities, which provide the infrastructure for personal and social

development, adolescents growing up in the mass age drift through assumed,

devalued labels. What is this transcendence to adulthood? Graduation?

Commencement? Bar Mitzvah? Marriage? Confirmation? Sexual maturity? Our

secular, individualistic society affords formal meaning to rituals; ceremonies like

graduation and weddings matter only as much as the participants believe in their

value to change identity. In this way, boys remain boys for as long as they deem
1
Thomas De Zengotita, Mediated (NY: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2005), 94.
 140

necessary.

On one end, the tern “coming of age” is too specific. It connotes a self-

contained experience, a rite of passage, a specific time in one’s life, ages 18-21

respectively. On the other end of the spectrum, the phrase is too general.

Coming of age is an individual’s experience; you choose which one. The period–

adolescence to adulthood–can last years, decades even. It can be gauged by

ones maturity, sexual or social. But who’s to say when an individual has matured

to adulthood? You are.

In one sense, coming of age is a communal event, in the other an organic

experience. “Coming of age” in the specific sense refers to a formative

experience in ones life that initiated transcendence. Coming of age experiences

are chosen in retrospect in an overwhelming nostalgia for an experience past.

Coming of age, today, amounts to more of an intellectual recollection than an

emotional, revelatory experience. A label may be donned, but it’s up to the

individual to actualize that label. The coming of age process only becomes

apparent after the fact.

On the other hand, you can choose to never grow up. You can drift. Or

you can choose, little by little, to grow into an adult. At some point society

expects you to grow up. Coming of age requires that you actively do something

irreversible. The drift factor is a consequence of inaction and anomie.

A quintessential example of coming of age can be found in the 1983 film

The Big Chill. It’s a nostalgia-fest of regrets and memories and togetherness

that’s too sentimental to be honest. Richard, the outcast of the ensemble, drops
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the line over an uneasy midnight breakfast, “your life isn’t exactly the way you

wanted it to be… Nobody said it was going to be fun, at least nobody said it to

me.” Is this the quintessential sentiment of being middle-aged? It makes you

wonder whether coming of age movies–and The Big Chill is no exception–can

counteract the sentimentality of nostalgic directors.

One of my students made a film recently about a formative experience in

her coming of age: skinny-dipping. In talks during the film’s development, she

explained how her first skinny-dipping experience opened her eyes to sexuality

and freedom. Making the film helped her recognize the difference between the

original event, her recollection of it, and her attempts to reassemble that event.

She explained that she had tried to re-experience that first event by going back to

the spot, enlisting friends to replay that time, and wishing that nothing had

changed. Her film is riddled with nostalgia and sentimentality. It comes across as

a depiction of a lost time, lost innocence, and an inability to recreate experience

honestly. By going back to the river, she had poisoned the memory.

Perhaps addiction is not precise, but I’m hard pressed to find a more

accurate word: “What we’re addicted to is the experience.”2 If we return to

experiences again and again, like my student’s reenactment of skinny-dipping,

we become addicted to the recollection. The replay becomes an attempt to

recapture the feeling of originality, but by its very nature the replay can never add

up to the original event. Concocting experience in a pathological urge to return to

that past moment creates a morbid sentimentality that not only hinders her ability

2
Stanton Peele, “The Addiction Experience,” The Stanton Peele Addiction Website,
http://www.peele.net/lib/addexp.html (accessed 19 Oct 2008).
 142

to construct new experiences but distorts the meaning and power of the original

event.

In the opening pages of Simulacra and Simulation, Jean Baudrillard

describes simulation through illness. Pretending to be sick leaves the reality

principle in tact; you don the outward appearance of sickness. But simulating

sickness manifests the symptoms so that it becomes real to an extent: “For if any

sickness can be ‘produced,’ and can no longer be taken as a fact of nature, then

every illness can be considered as simulatable and simulated, and medicine

loses its meaning since it only knows how to treat ‘real’ illnesses according to

their objective causes.”3 In searching for feelings, for truth, for originality, we blind

ourselves to the reality of our existence. The return to the past in our memory, to

the moment when we felt the revelation of coming of age, is to stop growth in its

path.

Replaying events in effect produces a simulation of coming of age.

Spontaneity cannot exist in such a scenario, since the dependence on memory

and nostalgia relies on repetition. But what one seeks is precisely that whim, the

unknowable prospects of playing by ear. Living in the moment requires apathy

toward outcome. Constructing events hoping to stir up similar emotions, to

recreate that original moment not just to re-experience but to one-up the original,

becomes an addiction. Like genre repetition in film, we want the same

experience, only better and more of it. Nostalgia sustains the belief that it can be

that way again. But in reality, life moves on, with or without the driver.

3
Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press,
1994), 3.
 143

My student made a spiral for herself by replaying the event again and

again, both in memory and in recreating experience. It’s an addiction to that

original event, a hope that returning to the place one can re-ascertain the joy and

spontaneity and organic nature of revelation. But in replaying, there’s no

catharsis.

I can’t help but reserve nostalgia for the way things used to be, in times I

have never seen. I’ve read about cultures that mandate rituals to make this

process smooth and concrete and self-contained. In small communities, in tribes,

in traditional cultures, the group designates the child as a child, and marks the

path to adulthood in a ritual setting. Adolescents are removed from society for a

time, segregated by their “liminal” status, for the in-between-state is dangerous

for the individual and society. Adults, the wise men, the mentors, initiate the

“neophytes” by passing along sacred knowledge, giving the young their tribal

power. They return to society immediately reborn, at once mature adults. Quick

and simple, right? Obviously this short description is a simplification, but it’s a

process clearly visible across cultures.4

Traditional cultures contained these rituals to protect the initiates and the

society as a whole; liminal beings are dangerous. They’re neither this nor that,

but both.5 Novices in the liminal period pose danger to society because of their

otherness, their lack of classification: “A society’s secular definitions do not allow

for the existence of a not-boy-not-man, which is what a novice in a male puberty

4
See Van Gennep, Rites of Passage, Turner, “Betwixt and Between,” and Eliade, The
Rites and Symbols of Initiation.
5
Victor Turner investigates liminality in his essay “Betwixt and Between.”
 144

rite is.”6 In traditional society, novices are exposed to greater knowledge, to

mysteries of the past, and to the presence of demigods: tabooed knowledge that,

if accessible to any layman, would mean death.

Mass society is different. These boundaries evaporate. To associate

coming of age with liminality and danger reflects upon contemporary society.

Adultolescence is a liminal phase, when a person suffers from an identity crisis.

The liminal stage, which corresponds to the rites of passage as studied by

French ethnographer Arnold Van Gennep and explored in greater depth by

cultural anthropologist Victor Turner, connotes “that which is neither this nor that,

and yet is both.”7 Liminality is a phase of being and non-being representative of a

cultural pull toward transcendence. The liminal being is first and foremost the

novice in a time of transcendence toward adulthood. Since adultolescence is a

liminal state, it corresponds to the not-man-not-boy identity that proves both

dangerous and disastrous as the norm. He is neither here nor there, and

therefore nowhere.

Jim Jarmusch’s 1996 film Dead Man provides a great example of rites of

passage in the clash of modern and traditional society. Set in the late 19th

century, William Blake (not the poet) travels west to find a new job. Only the job’s

already been taken, and he’s broke and alone. After being implicated in a double

murder, he flees into the wilderness, pursued by bounty hunters. His journey is a

contrived effort at a modern day rite of passage. With the help of a Native

American, called Nobody, Blake adopts roles of friend, seeker, and spirit warrior

6
Turner, “Betwixt and Between,” 235.
7
Victor Turner, “Betwixt and Between,” in Reader in Comparative Religion, eds. William
Lessa and Evon Vogt, 234-242 (NY: Harper & Row, 1979), 237.
 145

in his vision quest to nowhere. Blake doesn’t seem to have a destination, nor a

purpose apart from escape. He’s not quite running but rather slowly heading

toward realization. Trust is placed in Nobody to lead the way, for lack of a better

guide. Blake suffers through the film from slow blood loss as a result of an injury

during the initial gunfight. This wound serves as a symbol of the traditional rite of

passage, the loss of life, of social status: but Blake does not recover. While the

ending of the film remains ambiguous, it’s dark and pessimistic. Interpreting

Dead Man as a modern day rite of passage implies doom. Meandering through

life without purpose, without destination, Blake discovers his own identity, but too

late.

Meandering in such a way as Blake, contemporary youth walk a similar

path. Using the media as a guide through adolescence perverts perception and

morality. Adolescents start to replay experiences like TiVO, in their heads, in their

daily lives. There’s a point when it’s got to break: for individuals, a sudden

revelation; for society, a meltdown or slow decay.

Like the age-old chicken and the egg scenario, which came first: the story

or the experience? In postmodern society, the experience of storytelling and

entertainment turns on its head. The formless structure of everyday life pales in

comparison to the clarity of stories. Coupled with the allure of images, narrative-

based media refine the way viewers see the world: and experience everyday life.

Humans are storytellers: homo narans. We tell each other stories to make

sense of the world:

We used to think of the stories we read, listen to, and watch as little more
than trivial amusements employed to “kill time.” Now we know that people
 146

learn from stories, are emotionally affected by them, and actually need
stories to lend color and interest to their everyday lives. That is why some
scholars have described humans not as Homo sapiens, man and woman
the knower, but as Homo narrans, man and woman the storytellers, the
tellers of tales.8

Storytelling is our most powerful art form because it allows us to reconstruct

reality through events and imaginary characters. Narratives offer a gateway into

this otherworld so that we can view reality from a distance. In this otherworld

events have form, paths have definite objectives, and conflicts are neatly

resolved. We may learn from the character’s mistakes and gain solace through

their achievements. Returning to reality, then, we may see in our everyday what

we had previously thought was lacking. We bring back the lessons we learn from

these imaginary characters to real-life so that we may apply them to our own

experiences.

Movies are based on cathartic stories; protagonists develop through a

three-phase journey that concludes with a revelation, his coming of age. Age-old

narrative forms teach us that stories are best told in an arc of cause and effect:

equilibrium–upheaval–equilibrium restored. This structure can be stated in many

ways, and simple story structures exist, such as lack–lack liquidated (from

folktale structure) and genre theory.9

We have never been a race to tell stories so as not to live our own lives

sincerely–not until recently. Living vicariously through imaginary characters is a

8
Arthur Asa Berger, Narratives in Popular Culture, Media and Everyday Life (Thousand
Oaks: Sage Publications, 1997), 174. See page 162 for a chart comparing narratives and
everyday life.
9
Max Luthi, Fairy tale As Art Form. Vladimir Propp, Morphology of the Folktale. Thomas
Schatz, “The Structural Influence: New Directions in Film Genre Study,” in Film Genre Reader 2,
ed. Barry Keith Grant (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1995). Thomas Sobchack, “The Genre
Film: A Classical Expeirence,” in Film Genre Reader 2, ed. Barry Keith Grant (Austin: University
of Texas Press, 1995).
 147

post-modern disorder. Take for instance the case of Christopher Suri, a 10-year-

old Floridian.10 After a midnight showing of the Bridge to Terabithia, he ‘borrowed’

his father’s replica sword and strode through the Everglades in search of trolls

and pixies. The rescue squad found him early the next morning, no worse for

wear. Suri’s fantasy, initiated by external stimuli and exacerbated by the

enormous sway of the media, caused a local uproar of grief condemning the

fantastic.

I empathize with Christopher Suri, since his story is so much like my own.

We both have wildly overactive imaginations. The dreams projected in picture

palaces never own up to the pictures dreamed individually or lived first hand.

Screen dreams are bigger than life. But in the real world, the only magic

kingdoms exist in Orlando. The media leave viewers with exaggerated

expectations of what the world holds, and how experiences come to fruition.11

Suri sought Terabithia without realizing that it can only exist in the imagination.

The world never looks as good as it does in representation, or in the mind.

Narratives tell us about the world in manipulative ways. But life isn’t like it is on

the movies. Voyeurs come to believe that life should come in three acts, but the

pattern just doesn’t seem to work like that. Voyeurs want to be the heroes that

they admire and loathe and venerate. According to Thomas de Zengotita,

“mediated people learn to star in their own lives.”

As Thomas Hine writes in his prophetic book The Rise and Fall of the

American Teenager, “ours is a culture that is perpetually adolescent.”12 As

10
Ronnie Blair, “Missing Boy Found Safe,” Tampa Tribute, 5 Mar 2007.
11
Boorstin.
12
Thomas Hine, The Rise and Fall of the American Teenager (Harper Collins, 1999), 9-
 148

citizens in a mass society irrespective of nation, we relate to youth as much if not

more than with our own generation. The youth of a culture infuse it with vitality.

They serve as hosts to others’ vicarious experiences. If we have learned

anything from children’s literature, it’s that home doesn’t infuse the world with

wonder. Vitality, youth, and adventure are found in otherworlds like Neverland

and Oz. It’s not that we don’t need to grow up. The Captain Hooks of the world

are vital to the balance. A culture infused with youth can be a good thing, too.

Narratives are structured through their exploration of equilibrium, loss, and the

reestablishment of stasis. A culture unbalanced toward youth treads rocky

territory when stripped of virtues of wisdom and responsibility.

10.
 149

IMPOSSIBLE TERRITORIES:
NEVERLAND, OZ, AND PERPETUAL ADOLESCENCE

“The mediated world appears to children as if it were real. That is

why we especially venerate them.”
– Thomas de Zengotita, Mediated.

Human beings have always dreamt about undiscovered countries. These

places are first imagined, then sought. It’s to the credit of explorers that these

places have been mapped and quantified. Places like the West Indies and Brazil,

originally thought of in closer proximity to Europe, exist in the imagination as

much as on the map or in the actual territory.

Places also exist purely in the mind, but hold a

reality because they’re collectively dreamed and

manifested in fiction and the real world. For example,

Neverland exists because Peter Pan stands solid in

Kensington Gardens lighting the way for us to discover

Map of Neverland
Once Upon a Time Maps
his territory. Oz exists as well, and we have directions. Series, Candlewick
Publishing
We have maps.

J. M. Barrie’s Peter Pan, a particularly English phenomena, and L. Frank

Baum’s The Wizard of Oz, comparably American, both arose around the turn of

the 20th Century and equally captured young and adult minds with their

imagination, adventure, and exploration of undiscovered country. Since

 150

publishing, Neverland and Oz have been thoroughly mapped, imagined, and

explored. The territories remain intangible, but that doesn’t mean they don’t exist.

Waves of adolescent fantasy and sci-fi have washed into bookstores in

the wake of Barrie and Baum. We’ve become enraptured with these children’s

stories, because they’re not just for children. Harry Potter and His Dark Materials,

for example, offer children the excitement and escape of an adventure starring

characters they can engage with. The themes in these two series’ are very dark

for children, and the adults who adventure in these worlds find it tough to believe

that kids can get these deep and macabre themes. This same trend flows into

animation as well with Pixar’s recent films. Anyone who’s seen Wall-E will

wonder how this kind of entertainment can be geared at children. The gap is

closing fast. Is it the kids who are growing up too quickly, or the adults who enjoy

juvenile fantasies a little too much?

I don’t want to seem like a hypocrite. I enjoy reading young adult fantasy

as much as the next person. It’s just that at the intellectual level I see something

deeply disturbing about the wide appeal of a series like Harry Potter. When I

went to see the third movie there were as many single adults in the audience as

families with chldren. There was a boy sitting behind me who, with an audible

lisp, asked his mom what “Voldemort” meant, when Riddle wrote it out on the

screen. The boy hadn’t reached reading level, and he was sitting in this theater

watching Ginny dying. I don’t think it’s a problem with the ratings system. It’s

broader, engrained into our culture from before living memory.

Thomas de Zengotita, in his engaging and colloquial study of American

 151

popular culture and the media, explains: “If Peter Pan has a story for adults

hidden in a story for kids, then Harry Potter is a story for kids that adults can

enjoy, if they want to be kids again.”1 Zengotita, in his section on “The Cult of the

Child,” brackets the first half from the second half of the 20th Century. The first

half he associates with the influence of Peter Pan; adult authority reigned. Dating

a shift in the 1960’s, he says: “Adults no longer wished to observe kids from

above, no longer cared to instruct them by rote or preside, all knowing, over their

independent quests. Adults wanted instead to see things through children’s eyes,

to share their point of view.”2 With the aid of popular media and literature, adults

idolize children for their innocence and obliviousness while children dreamed of

someday achieving the freedom that autonomy permits. Barrie’s example of

childhood had nothing to wait for. Pan was adulthood full fledged, in its idealized

form.

Peter Pan and The Wizard of Oz, dating from the early 20th Century, read

on levels appropriate for both children and adults. The similarities between the

texts as well as the film adaptations, of which there are many, reveal aspects that

make these stories popular. In the first part, Neverland, I will look at the film

Hook along with texts that inform the landscape. In the second part, Oz, I look at

The Wizard of Oz with an eye to how viewers perceive fantasy and desire.

Studying these multiple texts with an eye to juvenilization in mass culture,

entertainment, and the absence of coming of age rituals may help to explain how

Western popular culture propagates perpetual adolescence.

1
Thomas de Zengotita, Mediated (NY: Bloomsbury, 2005): 58.
2
Zengotita, 54.
 152

Neverland

Dr. Dan Kiley wrote a pop-psych book back in the 1970’s titled The Peter

Pan Syndrome–he went on to write The Wendy Dilemma two years later. In the

book he exposes the symptoms of the contemporary disorder like a Facebook

profile: Male 16-50 middle to upper class. The category couldn’t be wider. Kiley’s

psychological profiles describe a good bisection of society. What strikes today’s

reader is his initial description: “Do you know this person? He’s a man because

of his age; a child because of his acts. The man wants your love; the child wants

your pity. The man yearns to be close; the child is afraid to be touched. If you

look past his pride, you’ll see his vulnerability. If you defy his boldness you’ll see

his fear.”3 This self-help book reads like the Red Scare. Perhaps Kiley reads like

a paranoid shrink because we have grown to accept these attitudes and

attributes. The Peter Pan Syndrome has become so widespread that it’s more a

socio-cultural disorder than a symptom.

Peter Pan is a liminal being: in between childhood and adulthood. And if

many individuals in today’s society empathize with the character, it’s because

we’re all in some way liminal. What goes unnoticed today is that adolescence

continues well into adulthood. In this way, adultolescents are liminal; this is a

dangerous state in which you are neither here nor there. Contemporary

dislocation happens in more ways than one: spatial, psychical, psychological,

straight to the core of our identities:

Read as imaginal field, for its mythic and archetypal context, Barrie’s novel
affords us a descriptive image of the dual dynamic at work in the psyche
caught in adolescent or transitional space. Barrie’s Peter Pan-field
3
Dan Kiley, The Peter Pan Syndrome (NY: Avon, 1983), 3.
 153

explores how that space operates, how it invites self-embodiment and

self-realization through play, and how equally it threatens dissolution and
alienation. The way of transition is fraught with dangers while one is in
Noman’s land, betwixt and between the old and new orders, the previous
and future send of self. This is the liminal, border experience.4

Liminality yields awkward placement: spaces and persons are both here and

there. Therefore, being in such a space defines a person as liminal in that he or

she exists in between two planes. The person is both there and not there. Rituals

of initiation take place in liminal space; the novice must be separated from

society so as not to contaminate, for the transitional initiatory process is seen as

dangerous.

There’s no better example that Steven Spielberg’s 1991 film Hook. Robin

Williams’s Pan is hardly the epitome of the Peter Pan Complex. The “Peter

Banning” of the film is a work-a-holic. He’s got a family, but no time to commit.

Hook chronicles Peter Pan’s later years after he’s left Neverland to make a family

with Wendy’s granddaughter. In the movies, Peter is a middle-aged lawyer. He’s

forgotten his roots and become the embodiment of everything you hate about

America. He’s stuck in his idea of what an adult should be, the polar opposite of

Pan. Hook, in the great Hollywood tradition, shows us that people are black or

white, and that they can change on the flip of a coin.

The film, no doubt due to Spielberg as herald of the project, enthused

adults to adopt childlike behavior. The film shows a foolish acceptance of wishing

and promotes a misguided faith in make-believe. Spielberg’s Hook neglects

Barrie’s text as well as the early script draft in order to appeal to a wide,

transparent audience.
4
Ann Yeoman, Now or Neverland (Toronto: Inner City Books, 1998), 171.
 154

Ann Yeoman, a Jungian psychologist, supports Spielberg’s approach in

that human beings are either this or that. Her explanation of Peter Pan revolves

around his quarrelsome relationship with Captain Hook. According to the Jungian

archetypes, the characters represent puer and senex: eternal boy and old man.

They’re two halves of a whole, each idealized and polarized toward their own

strengths. Hook is Pan’s weakness, as we well know from the story.

This kind of polarized psychobabble is what fuels Hook, only toward a

popularized, misguided intent. Hook gets his in the end. All the other adult

characters in the film egg the kids along. When the Lost Boys sit down to dinner

with Peter, the table’s empty–as it is in the book and the first draft of the script.

But in the film, the boys just have to believe that there’s an eight course

Thanksgiving dinner at their fingertips in order to enjoy it. They eat emptiness,

desire, like fools. Without silverware.

The first draft of the screenplay, which I view as untouched by Hollywood

agendas, portrays Peter as a self-obsessed “adult,” the kind of person you never

want to become. We find Peter waiting on a Customs cue at Heathrow. Writer

Jim Hart describes the scene beautifully: “We see it in Peter’s face. This is hell.”5

It makes me wonder, especially since the scene was cut from the film to make

room for a lengthy introduction of Pan’s adult character through work and family,

how much grown-ups really want to be able to fly–without the airplane, I mean.

Hart places Peter in a horrible position, and the character reacts accordingly. Are

grown-ups really so full of fear and anxiety? In this kind of situation, who wouldn’t

5
Jim Hart, Hook!: The Return of Captain Hook, First Revised Screenplay Draft (Tristar
Pictures, 1990). http://www.script-o-rama.com/snazzy/dircut.html (accessed 3 Nov 2008).
 155

want to shed the age label and fly out the window. The screenwriter describes

Peter early on as “the type-A stressed-out-male-heart-attack-poster.”6

When Peter first meets Tootles we see that he, Peter, forgot what it was to

be a child. Tootles is a figure that is tough to look at. Childhood drove him mad.

Over time, he lost all connection to the real world. “Peter pities the crazy old man

at the end of his life.”7 Tootles is an altogether different version of coming of age

gone wrong.

Soon afterward in the screenplay Wendy and Maggie have an interesting

exchange. Maggie asks if Wendy had a TV when growing up. Wendy

emphasizes that she and her family read stories to each other: “Reading is the

window into life,” she says.8 Wendy later tells Peter, sincerely trying to ease his

“giant burden of parenthood,” that “children need to be children. Sometimes

adults need to be children too.”9

Wendy finally tries to explain to Peter about his past and what really

happened: “The stories are true. Tootles grew up just like you. He went crazy

trying not to. He never forgot. You forgot the child inside you. You gave up

immortality in one world for the pain and joy of life and death in this one”10

On the first full shot of Neverland, the script reveals the land as: “not a

cartoon. It’s not a painting. It’s real.”11 Peter undergoes the difficult realization

that fantasy is real. He first interprets his vision through plain adult reason. But

6
Hart, 5.
7
Hart, 21.
8
Hart, 12.
9
Hart, 15.
10
Hart, 27.
11
Hart, 37.
 156

that’s not accurate to account for the world in front of his eyes. He’s in denial.

Peter doesn’t want the fantasy of Neverland to be real: “I just can’t accept this.

It’s not rational adult thinking. I can’t believe this is…possible.”12 Tinkerbell

responds, “children believe.”

Spielberg’s Hook revolves around family and parenting while the first draft

of the script foregrounds freedom and age-consciousness. During the final battle,

Hart places important words in Hook’s mouth–words that were omitted upon

filming: “I AM DEATH!”13 Hart’s script includes all the weird adult moments you

would expect if Pan were an adult: having difficulty believing, using reason as a

crutch, sexual perversions, and obsession with adult responsibilities. These

details are absent in the film, which speaks for its simplicity, “family movie”

categorization, and PG rating.

Neverland is a dream of death. People seem to forget this aspect of the

book: “Peter Pan is about mortality, about the inevitable limitations of earthbound

maturity as against the freedom of amoral and unbounded phantasy, as

authentically tragic vision only an adult could understand.”14 The story embodies

the wish, through its mythic protagonist, that children could never grow up, never

experience difficulty, reality, and, in the end, death. It’s a wish that trivializes all of

the positives of adulthood without the flip side; there’s freedom, autonomy,

adventure, love, camaraderie, struggle for the greater good, and notoriety. But,

returning to Yeoman’s question, there has to be a balance. Pan can’t exist

without his Hook. They’re extremes, and they have to mediate at the end of it all.
12
Hart, 38.
13
Hart, 115.
14
Zengotita, 50.
 157

Oz

Is the real world our home or do we actually belong in Oz? Dorothy says

once she returns to Kansas, “if I ever go looking for my heart’s desire again, I

won’t look further than my own back yard.” The film tells us that while we may

need to search for Oz from time to time, while we may need reassurance that it

does exist somewhere, we must remain content that we can find everything we

need and want in Kansas.

The Wizard of Oz (1939), a film based on L. Frank Baum’s children’s

novel, begs its viewers to question the real world in relation to their individual

escape fantasies. Those who find haven in impossible landscapes have difficulty

with the film’s message: “there’s no place like home.” Those of us who harbor

escapist fantasies haven’t found adequate appreciation for home. But it begs the

question, is Kansas really home? Dorothy’s overactive imagination allows her to

experience the alternative to home in the form of Oz. Oz is adventure, foreign

territory, magic, glamour, and friendship. Oz has an underbelly, the Wicked

Witch, that parallels the terror of the Kansas draught and tornado. The story

works on a variety of levels; while it can be interpreted as a revolutionary political

allegory, it is also a reaction to the failed promise of the American Dream.

While the film affirms the value of the imagination, it also villainizes

indulgence in escapist longings. The Wizard of Oz reassures our longings to

retreat into the otherworld. It stresses, however, that we can’t separate ourselves

from our home; we belong in reality, not make-believe. While the departure may

be desirable, the return is what counts. Dorothy appreciates home only once she
 158

is distanced from it. She realizes the real world can be beautiful and full of

adventure. She says: “If I ever go looking for my heart’s desire again, I won’t look

further than my own back yard. And if it isn’t there, I never really lost it to begin

with.” The magical world exists to give Kansas perspective.

The Wizard of Oz ends on a unique note: “there’s no place like home.”

While the film spends the majority of its time evoking the polarities of Oz, its

wonder along with its horror, the ending proclaims that reality is better. Jack

Zipes decodes Oz as “a specific American utopia, which may appear to be a

contradiction in terms, for a utopia is no place. But Oz is a place and a space in

the American imagination, and as such it embodies that which is missing,

lacking, absent in America.”15 Oz functions as an escape from American life, a

mid-western farm to be precise, because it embodies that which we desire.

Going to Oz, whether in the imagination, the movie theater, or as Dorothy herself,

fulfills our desire for the fantasy, which is never truly attainable. Dorothy helps us

to vicariously relieve the desire. The overarching theme of the film asserts that,

while we may have recourse to indulge in magical otherworlds, we must

ultimately stay in the real world. Oz exists to bring the meaningfulness of Kansas

to light. Had Dorothy stayed she might never have come to the realizations she

had in Oz. The relief of the return justifies Dorothy’s quest for home, her desire to

get swept away, and her wish to transcend the rainbow. Only with this passage

can she come to the understanding that Kansas is where she belongs.

The film, however, paints Kansas in dismal black and white–mostly gray,

actually. It is a terrible place, a place in which we would shudder to think of

15
Jack Zipes, Fairy Tale as Myth (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1994), 138.
 159

making a home. If we must, according to the film’s morality, remain in reality,

couldn’t that reality be a little less bleak?:

Anyone who has swallowed the scriptwriters’ notion that this is a film
about the superiority of ‘home’ over ‘away’…would do well to listen to the
yearning in Judy Garland’s voice, as her face tilts up towards the skies.
What she expresses here… is the human desire of leaving, a dream at
least as powerful as its countervailing dream of roots. At the heart of The
Wizard of Oz is a great tension between these two dreams… In its most
potent emotional moment, this is unarguably a film about the joys of going
away, of leaving the grayness and entering the color, of making a new life
in the ‘place where there isn’t any trouble.’16

While the film stresses the importance of the return, that our wishes can be

fulfilled “in our own backyard,” it also visualized the need for escape. Dorothy’s

journey parallels her original escape from home when she meets the surrogate

Wizard, Professor Marvel. One may wish to live eternally in Oz, or one might

agree with the wish-fulfilling qualities of reality. Dorothy, having experienced the

wonders of the magical world of Oz, accepts her reality. While in the real world it

may be impossible to leap over the rainbow, we have our imagination. The power

of the imagination allows us to see the otherworld; we are able to transport

ourselves to the impossible territory to momentarily find what we seek. We can

also experience a momentary escape from the real world through films–

adaptations of Barrie and Baum–and the production design becomes Neverland

and Oz as if it were real.

Conclusion

Neverland and Oz are landscapes that are impossible to mediate with

reality. Both places awaken troubled desires: for death, an end, a release, an

escape. Negotiating between home and faraway requires reassurance that

16
Salman Rushdie, The Wizard of Oz (London: BFI Publishing, 1992), 23.
 160

there’s something to return to. That these themes arise out of children’s literature

hints to a twentieth-century shift away from age labels and toward liminality.

In his study on youth culture, Jon Savage devotes a chapter to Peter Pan:

On the surface, Peter Pan is a play for children: like The Wonderful World
of Oz, it demands a suspension of adult skepticism and linear thinking,
and plays upon the archetypal fears of being lost and orphaned. But if Oz
is benign and forward-looking – full of optimism of a new continent – Peter
Pan is haunted and haunting: if, for Dorothy and the Darling children, there
is no place like home, then for Peter there is no home.17

I remember going to see Peter Pan: The Musical when I was in Kindergarden. I

was immediately enchanted by the green flying person soaring across the stage:

lofty and free and happy. I also remember liking Return to Oz much more than

The Wizard of Oz when I was a child. In the sequel, Dorothy really has to

escape. She’s not trying to get back home. It’s dark and dangerous and truly

frightening. Return to Oz is more a film for adolescents: a cult film. I still wanted

to go to Oz. As far as Neverland goes, I only ever wanted to be Tinkerbell.

Enraptured at such a young age, these impossible territories never recede.

Fantasy kingdoms stay with us in our heads; no Disney World vacation can help.

Reconstructing imaginary places in reality only makes then seem less real.

Theme parks heighten the fact that places like “Peter Pan’s Flight,” a Magic

Kingdom attraction, only exist for real in facsimile. And the characters never look

the way they do in your head – or even in the movie. The actors cast bear a

remarkable similarity, but it’s a simulacrum. Facsimiles only posit the truth.

Neverland is not a theme park.

17
Jon Savage, Teenage (NY: Viking, 2007), 80.
 161

What if the childish belief in wishing and fantasy never truly recedes? If we

fluctuate our beliefs, as we do in the cinema, do we destabilize our worldview

and thereby our belief in reality by living in the mass-age? If so, is it odd to posit

that adults still believe in the fantastical–and in the reality of that fantasy? As

adults, our fantasies become mundane. To a degree, we stop believing in the

fantastical in its otherworldly sense. But adults still fantasize; we never lose our

ability to dream about alternatives, to fluctuate reality in our heads.

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YOUTH CULTURE ON THE FRINGES:

INDIE PROGRAMS CASE STUDY

After a year of study at Antioch University McGregor I decided it was time

to pursue fieldwork. Without intending to return to my roots, my search landed

me back in my hometown, at the high school I graduated from in 1999. With the

intention of engaging a position at a media education organization, I searched for

programs that involved youth and community. After a round of interviews

including the Youth Action Coalition (Amherst, MA), Burlington Firehouse Arts

(VT), Raw Art Works (Lynn, MA), and the Gann Academy (Waltham, MA), I

settled on Indie Programs in Boiceville, NY. I realized that I could immediately

understand the Indie students, having spent my high school years in the area. I

began my work as a media instructor at Indie Programs in August 2007.

Indie Programs originally forged a relationship with Onteora High School

in 1999 as an alternative education option for students on the fringes. In the

beginning, Indie Programs operated cooperatively with ASPIE, for students on

the Autism spectrum. After a few years, ASPIE dismantled. Indie Programs

remained, however, with a focus on media literacy.

Integrating media production with traditional core curricula, Indie Programs

serves at-risk rural high school students, re-engaging them in their studies and

helping them to excel in school. Executive Director Russell Richardson, who took
 164

on the role in July 2007, explains: “‘When it started, there really were these tough

kids. The school didn’t know what to do with them. They’d tried everything.’”1

Since its inception, Indie Programs has fluxed through many forms. Two effective

courses have remained consistent: community school and filmmaking lab. While

the community school engages a group of underachieving students in English

and Social Studies through the media, the filmmaking lab offers the whole high

school population an arts elective. Indie Programs offers its students a

community within the greater high school culture.

The difficulties that Indie has experienced over the past eight years are

representative of greater struggles throughout the American education system:

disengaged students, outdated curricula, and ineffective learning techniques:

Richardson said, “over the years the program grew attracting a population of kids

who were ‘too bright, but too bored,’ scoring low on exams, but who found

motivation through the Indie media techniques.”2 Using media in the classroom

as well as inspiring students to produce their own media creates an interactive

learning environment at Indie Programs.

Indie-Onteora Relationship

Indie Programs, a progressive media education not-for-profit, has

struggled with the public high school’s administration since its inception: “Every

aspect of Indie is different from what is defined as public school, Richardson

said.”3 The ongoing struggle centers on the disparate standards of Onteora high

1
Lisa Childers, “Still Indie: High School Program Survives into Another Semester,”
Woodstock Times 4 Oct 2007, 12-3.
2
Ibid.
3
Ibid.
 165

school and Indie Programs. When the new Superintendent and Principal took

their seats in September 2007, Executive Director Richardson (also new to the

post) found not only differences of opinion but seriously divergent standards in

education and conflicting ethical codes.

Having been involved with the program for a few years in roles ranging

from artist in residence to mentor to media instructor, Richardson speaks of the

Indie-Onteora relationship from experience:

What matters is that Indie behaves differently from the school, and if
pushed will defend that difference. There are times when the school
administration accepts and encourages this flexibility as a real source of
strength of the school as a whole. There are times when different people
see the complementary stance of Indie as variously immature, disruptive
and time consuming. The current school administration and Indie
administration have an uneasy truce where we must be seen to work
together (due to Indie’s high public profile and support from the
community) but have difficulty being open and having any kind of
dependable, continuous relationship. Indie is always two strikes down. I do
not believe any true alternative program can avoid such conflicts but, more
often than not, it makes our position very vulnerable, as long as we are
highly dependent on monies through the school for financial viability.4

Richardson stresses the importance of Indie as an alternative community, an

open door for students who feel outcast by the mainstream system. This safety

net becomes a real culture within the walls of Indie. As a refuge for students who

don’t fit in, the place is full of acceptance and rarely are students sent away. Indie

also offers a resource to artistic students who have trouble engaging in the

traditional curricula. For some students, Indie is their reason for coming to

school.

Relying almost entirely on funding from the public school district, Indie and

4
Russell Richardson, interviewed by author, Indie Programs, Boiceville, NY, 19 May
2008.
 166

Onteora are married in this sense. Indie staff often joke about the marriage in

terms of custody and child support and alimony. At times, divorce comes up as

an option. But it comes down to the fact Onteora pays the way. In order to be

financially stable, Indie has to find sustainable income. With economic resources

slim, Indie relies on pro-bono grant writers and fundraisers, not to mention

independent philanthropists, to fill in the gaps.

Media Literacy

Spending a large amount of time playing video games, watching TV, and

cruising the Internet, teenagers these days have not just lost interest in reading

books. I heard an educator describe a lesson she taught that centered on an

audio tape. She expected her students to react positively to the Mercury

Theatre’s War of the Worlds broadcast. Much to her dismay, the radio play had

little effect on the students. In its time, the War of the Worlds broadcast stopped

Americans in their tracks, causing traffic accidents and an explosion of fear

across the country. Listeners visualized the action in their heads, imagining that

the country’s major cities under attack. My friend’s classroom sat inert. Have

children lost their ability to visualize? Could video games and TV have something

to do with the change?

If we accept that this kind of behavior transcends classrooms across the

country, it begs some pertinent questions:

• How can be re-ignite students’ visual imaginations?

• How do we get students interested in reading?
• Can visual media perform educational purposes?

Media literacy initiatives have sought to implement popular technologies to solve

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some of these problems. While the programs are still in infancy, it is apparent

that the skills generated are crucial for students in the Information Age.

What is media literacy, and how is it important? The Ontario Media

Literacy Resource Guide offers a proactive description of the emerging field:

Media literacy is concerned with the process of understanding and using

the mass media. It is also concerned with helping students develop an
informed and critical understanding of the nature of the mass media, the
techniques used by them, and the impact of these techniques. More
specifically, it is education that aims to increase students’ understanding
and enjoyment of how the media work, how they produce meaning, how
they are organized and how they construct reality. Ultimately, media
literacy education must aim to produce students who have an
understanding of the media that includes knowledge of their strengths and
weaknesses, biases and priorities, role and impact, and artistry and
artifice. Media literacy is a life skill.5

While definitions of media literacy vary between organizations, this description

offers a basic introduction. Significantly, the gross differences appear across

borders; America and Canada approach the discipline from different positions.

While media literacy in the Canadian educational system has been operative and

vital for over a decade, the United States has yet to implement a strategy for

dealing with the media.

Non-profit organizations speckle the map, but few exist that work

cooperatively with public schools and mandated curricula. Most notably, the San

Francisco-based organization Just Think collaborates with Bay area middle

schools. The majority of American media education organizations offer after-

school programs and focus on the arts, personal expression, and community

development.

5
Faith Rogow, “Media Literacy Education: Comparison Chart of Definitions,” AMLA,
2006. This handout, created for the Wolfsonian Museum New Literacy Symposium, offers a chart
of different definitions of media literacy.
 168

Integrated Media Education

Coming to Indie in the Fall of 2007, I noticed that the community as well as

the organization lacked the vocabulary to appropriately place the program in

context. Not only was Indie hidden beneath the umbrella of the public high

school. The community at large didn’t have a good idea of why Indie existed. I

attribute Indie’s invisibility to the lack of awareness of the necessity for media

education, the misguided educational standards that are taken for granted, and

the absence of an appropriate vocabulary to describe the program.

Over the 2007-2008 school year, the Indie-Onteora struggle attracted

attention from parents, educators, media artists, and public relations

representatives in the community. The polemic involved differences in

educational standards, teaching methods, and openness in the student

community. In June 2008, a Woodstock Times reporter took notice of Indie. As a

result, Indie Programs received a positive piece of press that attracted the public

eye:

There’s been a lot of buzz recently about the crisis of secondary schooling
in America–about the achievement and resource gaps between schools in
wealthy and poor districts; about the inflexibility of the industrial bell-
ringing high school model in a tech-driven highly individualized culture;
about the widespread disengagement among even high-performing
students. Solutions have been offered by experts across the country, but
we in Ulster need look no further than Boiceville to find a model that
works. That model exists in the Indie Programs. Indie is an innovative
collaboration between teacher and student in pursuit of creative, hands-on
learning experiences.6

While Indie is a small program (serving approximately 100 students a year)

attached to a small rural high school (with a population of around 800 students),

6
Doug Muller. “Reel Life: Indie Program Hosts End-Of-Year Show,” Woodstock Times 19
June 2008, 3.
 169

it offers a progressive model for media literacy and integrated English and Social

Studies curricula. The program also functions as a school within a school,

creating a close-knit community for youth on the fringes.

“The atmosphere is relaxed and students can talk freely on topics or any

other ideas and there are no formal textbooks,” says Richardson.7 Taking this

mission to heart, I began a specialized after-school program in January 2008.

Hoping to create a forum for students to discuss relevant issues of media and

youth culture, I enlisted a core group of a dozen students for weekly meetings.

For purely selfish reasons, I expected to gather information relevant to my

Antioch thesis. As an outlet for the students, the project served as a theoretical

base for understanding what it means to be a teenager. I was pleased to find the

students engaged and the attrition rate low.

Media Preferences

I began the program by casually eliciting media preferences from the

students. In the advanced section of the filmmaking lab, students expressed

interest in a wide variety of media, ranging from TV programs to popular

Hollywood cinema to classic films. The students in this group, having a few years

of film studies under their belts, were generally able to articulate their

preferences.

Livvy and Noria, for example, both gravitate toward an odd mixture of Joss

Whedon and lesbian-gay subculture media. Tessa and Paloma explained that
7
Childers, 12.
 170

they enjoy watching French films. Ace expressed his interest in watching TV

programs and films for their writing. Alex explained that he likes Chris Marker’s

cult film Sans Soleil because of its complexity.

Several of these students expressed their association with subcultures as

seen in these preferences. The media that we watch couples with the opinions

we express and the ideals to which we hold strong. Participation and association

with subcultures, likewise identity, can be gleaned from the media we watch.

These associations are also evident in the students’ appearance and behaviors.

Livvy and Noria expressed themselves as part of a lesbian-gay subculture by

citing Hedwig and the Angry Inch, The L-Word, Queer as Folk, and Shortbus as

media preferences. Tessa and Paloma defined themselves as contemporary

bohemians through their favorite films: The Triplets of Belleville and Amelie.

Younger and introductory students had a difficult time explaining their

preferences. Their examples were broad and haphazard. The 9th grade students

cited films like Batman and Robin, The Lion King, Boogie Nights, Seven, and

Fight Club, largely based on positive viewing experiences coupled with illicit

material and the prohibition of watching R-rated movies. In particular, Aleya, a 9th

grader referred to Indie because of low grades and behavioral issues, expressed

a keen awareness of the media. She said that she refused to watch TV shows: “I

think they’re completely biased.” Additionally, she said: “New movies these days

are all the same. They’re all generic.” Aleya’s understanding of the media can be

interpreted in two ways. First, her disapproval of media content and production

could be said to reflect her overall attitude combating systematization, including

 171

the regimented structure of the high school. Second, her perspective on TV and

contemporary movies expresses a consciousness of the banality of mainstream

culture, which is not to be taken for granted when it comes to the media.

Media Representations of Youth

Considering the students’ media preferences, I introduced media patterns

targeted toward youth. My intention was to define those areas in mainstream

media for their effectiveness in engaging youth. I also wanted to differentiate for

myself as well as for the students the divide between authentic youth culture and

perspectives created by the media.

Using Rebel Without a Cause and Superbad as examples, I engaged the

advanced filmmaking lab students in a discussion of timeliness and the

dispensation of youth culture through the media. The classic film Rebel Without a

Cause, about youth and the struggle of growing up, comes across to

contemporary teens as dated, set in a repressive 1950’s society that does not

transcend the gap of time. Natalie Wood’s performance, in particular, struck the

students in a negative way. One student called her portrayal of a confused

adolescent “way over the top.” Despite my opinion of Superbad as a film

representative of contemporary youth, the students still considered the film

dated. Its use of a 70’s style (in the opening credits) and references to Orson

Welles and Saved by the Bell define the film as a product of adult nostalgia

masquerading as youthfulness. Noria called it “the 80’s with iPods.”

What followed was a discursive examination of the films of Judd Apatow,

Kevin Smith, and John Hughes. The immense media market geared at teens
 172

holds little (conscious) relevance in authentic youth culture. The plethora of films

and TV shows are produced by adults both as nostalgic forays into dead

traditions and attempts to pedal outdated strategies onto teenagers who operate

on the fringes of mainstream society. Suffice it to say that media targeted at

teens does not represent authentic youth culture.

Authentic Youth Culture

Authentic culture, a term originally attributed to cultural theorist Max

Horkheimer in his early 20th Century writing, stands in opposition to high and

popular culture in that it rises up organically.8 Popular and mass entertainments

level culture, producing a society that appears uniform. Authentic culture, in this

case that of youth, performs on an individualized basis and is most often invisible

and unrecognized. Articulating authentic youth culture reveals organic activities

occurring within geographic groups. The hard task is to distinguish between the

authentic and the embedded remains of popular culture influences, which may be

an impossible task in these days of integration and blanketing. If popular mass

culture infiltrates our understanding of the world and the way we operate within it,

can there exist an organic, authentic culture for youths?

In order to gain an understanding of authentic youth culture unaffected by

the media, I engaged the students in a discussion of local youth culture based on

activity and community. Focusing on sites, the students related their experiences:

“It’s a rural area. There’s no unified youth culture,” said Ace. Much to their

surprise, it came out that youth culture in the rural communities of Woodstock

8
John Storey, Cultural Theory and Popular Culture (Athens: University of Georgia Press,
2006): 50.
 173

and Shandaken was more vibrant than they were aware. On the Woodstock

Village Green, in the Hudson Valley Mall, and in living rooms across the area,

youth were participating in and creating subcultures. Whether playing hacky

sack, x-box live, or strolling through the mall, youths create culture in ways

unrepresented in the media.

When I mentioned the term “bohemian,” Paloma became offended:

“People assign labels to you based on the people you spend time with.” Proving

the point that cultures are visible, the group concurred that, locally, groups bind

together based on friendships, preferences, and common activities. Local youth

cultures continue to thrive based on their active participants disparate of the

influence of the media.

Noria called it “lookism,” meaning that you can tell what culture or group

one adheres to based on the way they dress and make themselves look. “You

grow up influenced by your environment. And that’s who you are,” she continued.

Youth culture, even in a rural area such as Ulster County, is vibrant and thriving

based on its active participants. But Livvy intelligently questioned the discussion:

“Can you really take yourself out of all the media and become an authentic

person?”

History and Historical Perspective

My next task was to conceive of the teenage mind in the Information Age.

Having grown up in a world streaming with technology and information, I wanted

to find out about their perspective of the 20th Century. Using a host of references,

I interrogated the students on their views of the Internet and the media as far as
 174

they influence their way of life. Thomas Hine’s The Rise and Fall of the American

Teenager, Thomas de Zengotita’s Mediated, and Todd Gitlin’s Media Unlimited

proved essential to this endeavor. At times I quoted passages from the texts to

the students that offered new perspectives on viewing the “teenager,” the 20th

Century, and the influence of new technologies on our way of life.

I began with my own initial reaction while watching All the President’s

Men. In the film, Washington Post reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein

use 1970s research techniques to uncover the Watergate conspiracy: phone

calls, phone books, print archives, and personal interviews. It struck me as I

watched the film how easy research has become, and how impersonal. The

Internet flows information into our offices and homes while disconnecting us from

first hand, often more reliable and revealing, sources. The film illustrates

differences in information-gathering techniques as well as methods of

communication.

None of the students had seen the film. After explaining the situation, I

asked the students to offer their impressions of the differences between pre- and

post-Internet age. Tony said, “it’s faster [living in age of the Internet].” Ellena

offered, “people would be more active [without the internet and so much

technology]. They’d spend more time outside.” Moving the subject to television,

Geneva said that it “made us think faster.”

How do you get perspective, when you have known nothing else? These

students, between the ages of 14 and 18, have lived their whole lives with

technologies that put the world in their hands. It’s not that simple to transport
 175

yourself back to the 1970s. “What surprises me… is how unphased people are

[about the difference the Internet and technology makes,]” said Nick. I wondered,

in response, if Nick really understood that difference.

At that point I decided it would be a good idea to integrate some ideas

from Zengotita’s Mediated. For example, his coined term “MeWorld” requires little

background, for it can be seen played out in our daily lives: “The everyday

MeWorld they are constructing out of all the representational options that

surround them reflects their own tastes and judgments back at them constantly–

think of a teenager’s bedroom–that MeWorld they have been taught they are

entitled to, morphs quite naturally into solipsism when they come to talk

philosophy…”9 Nick recalled a friend of his demanding that he listen to his

music–the boy who wanders the school corridors bouncing to the silent rhythms

of his iPod. Nick’s comment explained quite clearly to the other students the

reality of MeWorld.

The Media and Hyperreality

We spoke briefly on the size of the world, and the sizes of our respective

worlds. The students gave anecdotes from their everyday lives according to how

they made sense of the world and how they attained information. While this

discussion merely scratched the surface of the theories of hyperreality that I

hoped to dive into, I think the students grasped a basic understanding of present

thinking versus historical perspective on the 20th Century.

When the subject moved to video games, Nick offered us an extensive

history of Atari and 1980s arcade games. “A whole new place of reality had to be
9
Thomas De Zengotita, Mediated (NY: Bloomsbury, 2005): 77-8.
 176

added to human perception,” he said. The conversation took a dramatic turn into

the virtualization of reality. Nick continued: Computers allowed me to expand my

mind, make my imaginings real, allowed me to experiment, learn, grow.

Geneva chimed in on her favorite subject: fantasy. Stating that

technologies are “taken for granted,” she explained her theory. Once it’s been

imagined, documented, experienced, shared, it becomes real. While I greatly

appreciate Geneva’s perspective, I can only hope that she realizes that her ideas

are theory. I know she believes in them wholeheartedly. Her views on reality and

fantasy are both a symptom of the contemporary age and a window into

understanding the influence of media on youth.

In order to introduce the concept of hyperreality to the students, I asked

them the question: If your life were a movie, what would it look like? The

students, having considerable experience in film studies and watching the media,

responded at first with confusion. I explained that I wanted to understand how

they viewed the world, and how the media sensitizes that view.

Noria said that her movie would look like a Gondry film: “He looks at the

world backwards.” Ace said that his movie “wouldn’t make any sense.” Our

discussion devolved into a contemplation of different paradigms on viewing the

world–the government can tell you how to look at things; your chosen leader will

show you what to look at; religion tells us how to see the world. The students

generally accepted that real life and film narratives tell stories in similar ways; the

prior remains common and the latter most often concerns heightened events.

Nick astutely concluded: “Nobody knows what it’s like to live in somebody else’s
 177

head.”

The students had trouble grasping the heavy theoretical ideas I threw out

at them. Much of my work is based on Baudrillard and McLuhan. I tried

integrating theories from Zengotita and Gitlin, which came across at greater

ease.

Preconceptions of “Teenagers”

Owing much of my inspiration to Hine’s The Rise and Fall of the American

Teenager, I chose to devote the next after-school session to a discussion of the

term teenager: “The concept of the teenager rests in turn on the idea of the

adolescent as a not quite competent person, beset by stress and hormones. This

idea… rests on data and assertions that have not withstood scientific scrutiny. At

most, we can say that the teenager is a social invention.”10 I wanted to find out

how much these conceptions of the “teenager” penetrate the minds of youth, how

they are internalized, played out, and made real.

The students immediately made it quite clear that they felt that teens were

looked down upon in society. Their views of the established power systems

placed youth on the bottom rung. Based on the rights and responsibilities

afforded to young people, they made their case. Livvy said, “we have to battle for

everything… Society has unwritten rules [for teens and work, teens and school.]”

Jacob added: “teenagers don’t have any rights.” No one objected to that. It

seemed to me that the students were making themselves appear victimized but,

in light of Indie’s ongoing conflict with the high school, I could understand why.

Beset by a highly structured regime, who wouldn’t feel thwarted?

10
Thomas Hine, The Rise and Fall of the American Teenager (NY: Perennial, 1999): 4.
 178

The discussion concluded with amendments made to the “Teenage Bill of

Rights.”11 Jacob again expressed his intelligent opinion on the matter: “The only

reason you have rights is because you’re weaker than someone else. And the

stronger people dictate what you can and can’t do.”

Coming of Age

My interests in coming of age, rituals in society, and rites of passage have

fluxed and morphed over the past ten or so years. While I was a teen I was

interested in rites of passage as it concerns the mythical journey (and Star

Wars). That led me to writing, screenwriting, and mythic narrative structure. My

academic advisor at Marlboro College turned me from myth to ritualistic rites of

passage in traditional societies. Now, swimming through American studies and

youth culture, I find myself sifting through new approaches to coming of age.

In his book Teenage, Jon Savage spends a great deal of time on Peter

Pan and Dorothy Gale–how the characters reflect and engender our conceptions

of youth, how they recreate comparatively English and American journeys for

traversing age gaps. Also, Hine writes that society creates artificial categories for

children, teens, and adults. Zengotita coined the term “adultolescence” to

question those labels.

I am particularly interested in this term “adultolescence,” since it questions

the nature of the categories. In the 20th Century, society adapted to new

technologies. The minds of the people came to reflect the cultural imaginings in

media, art, and narrative. Evident in American popular culture, we witnessed a

reconfiguration of lifecycles. Communities give way to mass society in the

11
Jon Savage, Teenager: The Creation of Youth Culture (NY: Viking, 2007): 455.
 179

Information Age. People sometimes say that the TV raises the kids these days.

Our perceptions of what life is, should be, and can be, are constructed in large

part by the media.

In a culture that worships youth, there are fewer and fewer examples of

successful, content maturity. In a society marked by the absence of coming of

age rituals, the journey from childhood to adulthood becomes treacherous. The

markers are gone; what’s left are vague conceptions of social agreements. Your

parent tells you that you’re an adult when you get your first credit card, or your

diploma, or your first job. But it comes down to the fact that no one really knows

what makes an adult, since our individualistic society tells us that we’re all

correct, whatever we believe, as long as we believe in something.

My intention in this last session of after-school discussions was to find out

from the students what their impressions were of adulthood and adolescence.

For teens, when do they think they’ll become adults? What marks the

boundaries?

As always, Nick broke out with a precise opening statement: terms like

teen, adolescent, and adult expand stereotypes. Using terms and defining normal

placements exacerbate the dividing lines between teen and adult. “There’s this

very lose classification between adolescent and adult,” he said. There’s a grey

area between the terms and the stages of life and the labels people call

themselves by. There’s also a prejudice in the terms and in the division, he said.

Geneva, holding fast to her beliefs that people make the world through

their own perceptions, explained: “It depends entirely on the person.” The
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individual decides when he or she is an adult.

Turning to personal experience, the students began recounting journeys of

their own, and ones they hope to make in the future. For Livvy, the difference

between teen and adult lies in “maturity levels.” “You grow up when traveling

alone. It’s like a rite of passage.” Paloma agreed: You become an adult “when

you get your own house. [It’s about] responsibility and maturity.” Nick joined the

bandwagon: “Going out on your own, proving yourself, [makes you an adult.]”

Geneva added her thought that, “you feel more grown up when you move in to a

college dorm, when you first set foot on campus. And road trips make you feel

more adult, more grown-up, more independent.” These personal statements can

be seen as hopes and dreams reflecting greater social ambiguities concerning

the roles of teens and adults. If teenagers experience prohibitions of freedom and

responsibility, it’s right for them to assume that adults are free from such

constraints. Each of the students expressed their own hopes that at the

successive stages of life, they would achieve their comparative freedoms.

But the absence of social markers makes the journey difficult. Paloma

said: “People just kind of grow up and say, ‘wow, I’m an adult’… It’s so gradual.”

Her statement struck me as a sad conception of growing up. I thought growing up

was supposed to come in stages, supported by society, led by experienced

elders. I realized my disillusion at this point. My impression of the mythic journey

coupled with rites of passage in traditional societies blinded me in a way from

seeing the contemporary state of things.

Contemplating the chicken and egg scenario, I wondered which came first:
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the story or the experience. Someone mentioned Stand By Me as a

contemporary coming of age film. It made me wonder whether the students’

expectations of growing up were based upon representations of someone else’s

coming of age journey.

Conclusion

The research gathered in these after-school sessions, casual discussions

after classes, and out-of-school meetings proves essential to my understanding

of contemporary teenagers and coming of age. My rapport with the students,

developed over the past year, allows the kind of casual discussion vital to this

ethnographic study. While I wish the discussions could have involved more

media and culture theory, I must realize that the philosophies of Baudrillard and

Zengotita require deep reading and contemplation in order to be understood.

My graduate thesis at Antioch University McGregor reflects the clarity of

vision I have achieved while working with the students at Indie Programs.

Serving as an instructor at Indie Programs has given me the insight into the lives

of teenagers, which is indispensable to my graduate work. While I cannot say

what the future holds in store for me, I hope to continue work with youth and

media as well as scholarship in film studies and American culture studies.

Postscript

I originally wrote this paper as a course requirement for my participation in

Indie Programs in the 2007-2008 school year. My after-school discussion group

aided in research gathering and preparation for writing my Antioch thesis. In the
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2008-2009 school year, I continue to work at Indie Programs as lead teacher and

media director. The staff has changed, with our previous lead teacher moving to

a satellite position at Ulster County BOCES, an alternative school for

underachieving students with behavioral and learning issues. With him went our

key intern. As a replacement, a former Indie student rose to the position of media

instructor, rounding out the Indie staff of three.

The other major change this year is determined by the contract made with

Onteora high school, which grants Indie less money than the previous year. Our

core courses have been eliminated (9th grade Community School, and 10th and

11th Works). Our contract secures the filmmaking elective (Lab) and after-school.

This change means that the Indie student body has decreased from 80 to 15.

Students in the Lab course are the ones who most frequently attend the after-

school time, who identify as Indie students. Mainstream students rarely pass

through Indie’s doors unless they have a reason, an invitation, or a motive.

Despite offering Indie to the school body, our facilities remain underused and

underutilized.

As a result of the downsize, we are able to collaborate on more

community projects, such as the Lower Esopus Watershed Partnership, the

Center for Photography in Woodstock, the Woodstock Film Festival, and the

Taleo Gallery. This year, the Indie staff are also taking to heart our appointments

as artists in residence, working on an integrated media campaign called

Mirand’a.

It looks unlikely that Indie will continue working with Onteora for another
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year. While the sustainability of the program has always been weak and

uncertain, this time the prospect looks grim. Executive Director Russell

Richardson is working unceasingly to find alternative resources for funding,

including grants and collaborations with other local media programs. His hope is

to shift Indie into the community to offer continuing education, GED accreditation,

and job creation for underachieving students. Whether the program survives

depends upon the community’s awareness of Indie as a vital project for its youth.
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CONCLUSION

The Future of Education: Media Literacy

If a society can be judged by how it treats its youth, America must go on

trial. Those in power treat education as if it were a second rate institution, and

schools suffer accordingly. It’s a complicated system, and I don’t want to pretend

that I know how it works. It’s a lot of politics and personalities and agendas. Why

should all this get in the way when it comes to the children?

Other nations recognize the importance of media education. Canada has

had a media literacy curriculum in place for nearly a decade. The United States

still cuts back peripheral programs, depriving students of arts, music, and sports.

It makes me wonder where our nation’s values lie.

I’m surprised that the United States, its government institutions, grand-

funding organizations, and education system doesn’t recognize the need for

media literacy. When a good proportion of young people spend their time not

reading but watching TV or playing video games, it drives the fact home that our

age isn’t ruled by the word.

Non-profit organizations across the country provide the system that

supports this new kind of education. Primarily grant-funded, these bodies teach

students how to use the media that infect their environments. Students learn that

the media can be manipulated, and not just by the powers that be. Media literacy
 186

is the greatest tool you can put in the hands of a TV child.

Perhaps Onteora High School (Boiceville, NY) is not a paradigm case, but

it’s a place where I have some history. Indie Programs, a not-for-profit media

education organization, first began working with the Onteora High School in

2000, a year after I graduated. It started small, with a few classes a week

targeting students will low-performance and at-risk of dropping out. Indie used

media to engage the students, focusing on individualized interests to strengthen

performance. The hope was to provide a sustainable education model that would

retain students in the school, rather than shipping them out to the alternative

program 20 miles away.

Indie has yet to succeed in this mission, and gauging the climate right now

it looks doomed to failure. Indie has a complicated relationship with Onteora.

Communication could be better. Funding is sliced every year, as are class sizes.

In the end, it looks like Indie suffers from its liberal agenda. The philosophies

don’t mesh, so the smaller body may be doomed to die.

The Future of Language:

The Inadequacy and Inaccuracy of Words

Digital bytes, IM chat, texting, and blogging rules our society today. Pretty

soon print will go out of fashion, and the Internet will rule Information. I have a

student, Roman, who, on a recent project, wrote in “OMFG” as a title over one of

his film images. I told him to omit the “F,” recognizing suddenly what it meant and

how he was attempting to communicate. Why couldn’t he have written “Oh, My

Fucking God”? Is it just too much to spell out?

I remember seeing an AT&T commercial promoting its family plan. During

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a Scrabble game, the teen spells out “ROTFL” (rolling on the floor) on the board.

“WTG,” (way to go) says Grandma. Mom checks the dictionary, “is texting all you

girls do?” They spoke in acronyms, subtitled. Is this supposed to be realistic, or is

it the future that cellular companies envision?

In this a culture of speed and inaccuracy, generation gaps become fatally

recognizable. We can barely communicate anymore, on the very fundamental

level. Technology companies peddle their new gear to young people, aiding in

the dissemination of information and the speed of communication. But the bell

curve has increased exponentially to the degree that users become an in-crowd.

Those of us who don’t choose to use the software or add on the functions to our

cell plans are left out in the cold, obsolete.

Another student of mine, Gemma, troubled and self-important as she may

be, loves to read. In an attempt to get her involved at Indie, I tossed her a copy of

The Giver one day. She threw it back to me saying, “I’ve read it.” I tried to

engage her in a conversation over its contents, but she withheld any

commentary. The book includes what is, for me, a critical dystopian anecdote on

the fate of language. She didn’t want to talk about it. I inferred that she didn’t

recognize its applicability. She either didn’t get it or didn’t want to talk to the

teacher.

The Giver, Lois Lowry’s sci-fi novella set for middle-school reading level,

tells the story of a secluded community. In this society, language is a privileged

form of communication: so much so that emotion is taken out of the equation.

Words must be accurate and meaningful. When you say “love,” you mean it.
 188

Lowry’s community has raised stakes, but her purpose should be clear.

Language degrades when communication takes the form of acronyms or images.

I have the feeling that some day popular culture will give

in totally to the culture of cute. LOLcats are already an Internet

phenomenon. Globally, users post annotated pictures of their

pets doing awesomely cute things. Titles on the pictures read in

the voice of the cat: “I CAN HAS CHEEZBURGER?”

The Future in Pixels: Hyperreality and Fantasy

I have slowly come to terms, within the past two years working at Indie

Programs, that young people believe in the Information Age. It’s a way of being.

They live in their own microcosms without realizing that the world is as large, if

not larger, than they think. Any agoraphobe could sit in their room these days

and experience the world–as long as they had wifi.

I asked one of the students, during my research into youth cultures, what

her favorite film was, and she only replied, “HALO on X-Box.” This blew my

world. I’d never heard of MMORPG’s (Massive Multi-player Online Role Playing

Games) before. It struck me, when I go home to watch TV or cruise the Internet,

she goes home to interact in this new media. Millions of people play MMORPG’s

on a daily basis, as a lifestyle even. I later met a family that played World of

Warcraft together on the net– while they were in the same room together. Father,

son, and daughter explored the world of Azeroth through their avatars, while

standing side by side in real life watching their individual monitors. When I asked

them about how it worked, their explanations were clear and grounded. They
 189

didn’t seem to think that there was anything weird about Multi-player gaming as a

family–in the same room.

During my second residency at McGregor, while preparing to write this

thesis, the program administrator explained to us the process for submitting our

drafts. Signatures and originals are important in this process. She explained that

we had to submit the original copy of the cover page, with the real signatures

from your academic advisor and thesis mentor. Have you ever realized that, in

conversation, that you use the word “copy” rather than “original?” It’s almost as if,

in the age of mechanical/technological reproduction that there are no originals

anymore. Take a Microsoft Word document, for instance. Where is the original?

Is it the digital version on the desktop of the computer? The “hardcopy?” The first

print out? It’s almost as if we have no use for the word anymore.

The same is true in the world of film (or video, which is used to more

extent these days). We still call it the film industry, though we use video more

than actual celluloid film. In this digital age, the film actually goes through many

more degrees of degradation than necessary during its path toward exhibition.

Those directors who insist to shoot on film suffer for it. There are very few films

these days that are edited manually (on film as opposed to in the computer). The

film is processed in the lab (chemically), and then digitally processed into a

computer. Using software, editors adjust color and add digital special effects. It’s

amazing what you can do with a computer that you would never be able to

produce in real life–or on celluloid. The very existence of the DVD (digital video

device) supports the premise that celluloid film won’t last much longer.
 190

The theory works the other way around, too. Those few filmmakers who

stand rigidly beside their Steenbecks know that their artistic methods can only be

achieved through their specific chemical processes. Digital intermediate editing–

cutting the film based off a digital version–is already the industry standard. Film

processing will soon be a lost art, displaced by digital video.

There’s a tribe at Indie that insists on originating all of their own material.

Nick, Tony, and Paloma are not so much stuck in the past, due to the fact that

they were born in the 1990s, but revere classic films. Tony wished nothing more

than to get his hands on a Steenbeck. He was the first Indie student to work on

celluloid film. Russell brought in his ancient Russian 16mm camera for him to

play with. Nick and Paloma walk around recording ambiance with their cassette

player. They make some pretty funky music. Nick, a photography enthusiast,

views the world by the color wheel and in F-stops. It’s tough talking with him

about video; he’s hardcore about celluloid. You have to admit, there’s a purity to

the ancient analog media. Nick insists on originating all of his own material: no

grabbing it off the Internet or stealing it from Final Cut Pro. He’s got to go out and

record something real. I admire this quality about him. But the celluloid tribe is a

marginalized kind. Most students who come to Indie jump on the computers and

immediately pull up MySpace.

What happens when, generations from now, people fail to see the

connection between real captured image and computer-generated imagery

(CGI)? To some extent, this shift has already come to be. The only difference is

that some of us know the difference. I wonder if a time will come when the
 191

difference doesn’t matter. We’re heading in that direction fast.

Movies and media becoming more like video games. DVD extended

editions give you the chance to view the whole “making of” process, with “behind

the scenes” features, extended and deleted scenes, and outtakes; it’s at your

fingertips. Videogames themselves are becoming increasingly interactive with

MMORPGs. Melding with Internet technologies, you can interact with millions of

people you will only meet as fantasy creatures in the World of Warcraft. To the

gamer, what is the difference between a person and an artificial intelligence?

These games don’t incorporate Turing tests.

We’ve had a quick learning curve since the mid-twentieth-century. Since

the pre-Internet age exists in living memory, the world is people by those who

know what reality means without the mediation of digital technologies. What will

happen when there’s no one around to tell us we’re living a simulation? What

happens when people fail to remember what unmediated reality truly means?
 192

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 199

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 200

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