Professional Documents
Culture Documents
2 2010
David B. Clarke
Swansea University
The cinema has never shone except by pure seduction, by the pure
vibrancy of non-sense – a hot shimmering that is all the more beautiful
from having come from the cold.
- Baudrillard (1990a, 96)
1. Réalité Vérité
the shape of the film’s Replicants – was amongst the first to suggest the
potential of Baudrillard’s work for analysing film. Interestingly, however, the
psychoanalytic resonances of Blade Runner were woven into a synthetic
analysis that divorced Baudrillard’s particular conception of simulation from
its broader conceptual field – a field avowedly incompatible with
psychoanalysis. It is undoubtedly true that Blade Runner lends itself to
psychoanalytic readings (Penley 1991; Silverman 1991). As Botting (1999)
astutely observes, Replicants still have navels! Nonetheless, Doel and Clarke
(1997) moved towards an alternative reading of Blade Runner, deploying
Baudrillard’s (1993b, 39) distinction between the ‘deferred death’ of (slave)
labour and the ‘immediate death’ of sacrifice – implicitly appealing to
Baudrillard’s claim to have developed an understanding beyond
psychoanalysis, whilst simultaneously diminishing the significance afforded
to Baudrillard’s then widespread association with the postmodern.
A considerable portion of the debate around Blade Runner focused on
the absence of any guarantor of reality in the wake of its technological
simulation. When the Blade Runner, Deckard, confronts the experimental
Replicant, Rachel, her confidence in her own reality is seen to rely on her
memories – but, as she soon becomes painfully aware, these have been
implanted by her maker, Tyrell, and cannot attest to her authenticity as a
human being. The suggestion, brought out in the 1992 Director’s Cut, that
Deckard is also a Replicant, reinforces the pervasiveness of the indistinction
between the real and the simulated: once reality can be perfectly simulated,
its meaning as such is evacuated, abolished by the excess of reality. For
where there are no grounds for taking so-called representations as inferior to
the things they purportedly re-present, reality and that which feigns it lose
their distinction: the quondam ‘representation’ becomes ‘its own pure
simulacrum’ (Baudrillard 1994, 6). The fact that the Voigt-Kampff test,
employed diegetically to police the distinction between Replicant and
Human, proceeds by falsification – not by guaranteeing the definitively
Human, but by progressively confirming whatever has not yet been proven
not to be Human – suspends determination in the realm of the undecidable.
The Replicants, ‘by becoming real, have driven reality from reality, leaving us
in a hyper-reality devoid of meaning’ (Baudrillard, 2001, 134).
Baudrillard (2004, n.p.) notes that ‘there have been other films that
treat the growing indistinction between the real and the virtual: The Truman
Show, Minority Report, or even Mulholland Drive, the masterpiece of David
Lynch’. However, given its supposed construction around Baudrillard’s ideas
– and opening diegetic homage to Baudrillard – the Wachowski brothers’
(1999) The Matrix and its sequels rapidly became the touchstone for
Baudrillardian cinematic commentary (Constable 2006, 2009; Merrin 2003,
2005). As with Blade Runner’s simulated life, the virtual reality of the matrix
short-circuits the distinction between the real and the imaginary – except that
here, ‘the set-up is cruder and does not truly evoke the problem’, as
Baudrillard (2004, n.p.) remarked after a sustained period of restrained
silence: ‘The actors are in the matrix, that is, in the digitized system of things;
or, they are radically outside it, such as in Zion, the city of resistors’.
The most embarrassing part of the film is that the new problem posed
by simulation is confused with its classical, Platonic treatment. This is
a serious flaw. The radical illusion of the world is a problem faced by
all great cultures, which they have solved through art and
symbolization. What we have invented, in order to support this
suffering, is a simulated real, which henceforth supplants the real and
is its final solution, a virtual universe from which everything dangerous
and negative has been expelled. And The Matrix is undeniably part of
that. Everything belonging to the order of dream, utopia and phantasm
is given expression, ‘realized’. […] The Matrix is surely the kind of film
about the matrix that the matrix would have been able to produce.
(ibid.)
2. Double Negative
Naturally, the mirror is smashed and the double, become again the
phantasm it once was, vanishes into thin air. But … it is he who is
dying. … In his death throes … he grasps at one of the fragments of the
mirror scattered about the floor and realizes that he can see himself
again’. (Baudrillard 1998, 188)
belief, episteme and doxa, reality and imaginary – culminating in their ex-
termination, their abolition as terms. In its wake, ‘all things stand ultimately
for nothing but themselves – there is no division between things that mean
and things that are meant’, as Bauman (1993, 36) puts it. ‘It is just by
linguistic inertia that we still talk of signifiers, bereaved of signifieds, as
signifiers; of signs which stand but for themselves, as ‘appearances’’ (ibid.).
Indeed, the world of simulation operates on the basis that ‘signs are
exchanged against each other rather than against the real’ – ‘on condition
that they are no longer exchanged against the real’ (Baudrillard 1993b, 7).
The significance of the mirror in The Student of Prague is redoubled in
The Mirror of Production (Baudrillard 1975). Baudrillard’s title is almost
pleonastic: the mirror is – or is (mis)construed as being – synonymous with
production, the original sense of which ‘is not in fact that of material
manufacture; rather, it means to render visible, to cause to appear and to be
made to appear: pro-ducere’ (Baudrillard 1987a, 21). Insofar as they are
‘condemned to the servile fate of resemblance’ (Baudrillard 1996, 149),
mirrors slavishly give back a faithful reflection. They yoke appearances to the
burden of re-presentation, bearing witness ‘to the world with a naïve
resemblance and a touching fidelity’ (Baudrillard 1987b, 14). They are the
‘the watchdogs of appearance’ (Baudrillard 1990a, 105). The mirror accords
to production qua principle, and, ‘through this … mirror of production, the
human species comes to consciousness [la prise de conscience] in the
imaginary’ (Baudrillard 1975, 19). Despite Marx’s naturalisation of its terms
of reference, production is, in fact, ‘a simulation model bound to code all
human material and every contingency of desire and exchange in terms of
value, finality’, and equivalence (ibid.). The imaginary, ‘through which an
objective world emerges and through which man recognizes himself
objectively’, is overcoded by ‘this scheme of production which is assigned to
him as the ultimate dimension of value and meaning’ (ibid.). Such are the
terms of ‘the identity that man dons with his own eyes’ on gazing into the
mirror whose sole purpose is to bring into alignment the ‘discourse of
production and the discourse of representation’ (ibid. 20). So it is that, in
proposing that, from ‘now on political economy is the real for us … and
therefore the imaginary, since … the two formerly distinct categories have
fused and drifted together’, Baudrillard (1993b, 31), should speak of the
systemic ‘necessity of resurrecting and dramatising political economy in the
form of a movie script, to screen out the threat of symbolic destruction’ (ibid.
32).1 Needless to say, Baudrillard envisions this as a disaster movie, referring
to ‘the kind of crisis, the perpetual simulacrum of a crisis, we are dealing
with today’ (ibid. 32). And despite having been written in the 1970s, the
sentiment holds as true as ever. Nevertheless, this account would seem to
involve a decidedly cool assessment of cinema. This is, moreover, a verdict
that Baudrillard has delivered repeatedly.
Films today, Baudrillard (2005b, 125) contends, have become ‘merely
the visible allegory of a cinematic form that has taken over everything –
social and political life, the landscape, war, etc. – the form of life totally
scripted for the screen’. Cinema has, therefore, been lost in its generalised
dispersal and cross-contamination with the real. ‘Reality is disappearing at
the hands of cinema and cinema is disappearing at the hands of reality, a
lethal transfusion in which each loses its specificity’ (ibid.). This is especially
evident in ‘the anticipation of reality by images, the precession of images and
media in relation to events’ (Baudrillard 1987b, 19); in the extent to which
images ‘invert the causal and logical order of the real and its reproduction’
(ibid. 13). Reality itself, Baudrillard (1993b, 73) proposes, has come to be
defined as ‘that of which it is possible to provide an equivalent reproduction’,
because the ‘modern revolution in the order of production (of reality, of
meaning)’ forces the world onto a trajectory that is governed ‘by … the
anticipation of its reproduction’ (Baudrillard 1987b, 13). Hence the ‘strange
precession’ (ibid. 21) of the film before the real event, exemplified by the
Three Mile Island nuclear disaster at Harrisburg, which occurred
1
The context should disarm simplistic ‘It’s only a movie’ interpretations of this
formulation. For a discussion in relation to Freud’s concept of secondary revision –
‘It’s only a dream’ – see Lippitt (2007). Baudrillard (1994, 40) repeats the same
observation with respect to ‘the energy crisis and the ecological mis-en-scène,’
concluding that ‘it is the social itself that, in contemporary discourse, is organized
along the lines of a disaster-movie script’.
immediately after the release of The China Syndrome (James Bridges, 1979).
‘It is only a further step … to reverse our logical order and see The China
Syndrome as the real event and Harrisburg as its simulacrum’, as Baudrillard
(1987b, 19) sardonically remarks. Likewise, rehearsing the analysis that
would subsequently lead to the controversy over Baudrillard’s (1995) take on
the Gulf War, Baudrillard (1987b, 17) maintains that ‘‘in itself’ the Vietnam
war never happened’, whilst Frances Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now
(1979) was ‘the completion of that incomplete war, its apotheosis’. ‘If the
Americans (apparently) lost the other, they have certainly won this one.
Apocalypse Now is a global victory’ (ibid. 18). Parenthetically, this is
surprisingly close to Easthope’s (1988) remarks on Coppola’s film.
So, to sum up, ‘Irreality no longer belongs to the dream or the
phantasm, to a beyond or a hidden interiority, but to the hallucinatory
resemblance of the real to itself’ (Baudrillard 1993b, 72). Such is the strange
materialisation of the indetermination of the real and the imaginary. It has,
of course, always been the case that ‘reality is the effect of the sign’
(Baudrillard 1987b, 47). Reality, as Freud hypothesised, was inaugurated on
the basis of a ‘reciprocity between the world and ourselves’ (Baudrillard
1998, 188). The modern attempt to eradicate flighty and deceptive
appearances – ‘All meaningful discourse seeks to end appearances’
(Baudrillard 1990a, 54) – rested on the principle that ‘a sign could be
exchanged for meaning and that something could guarantee this exchange’
(Baudrillard 1994, 5). Reality was nothing without the mirror that made it
the reality of the image. Likewise, the referent proceeds directly from the
structure of the sign:
Through this mirage of the referent, which is nothing but the phantom
of what the sign itself represses during its operation, the sign attempts
to mislead: it permits itself to appear as totality, to efface the traces of
its abstract transcendence, and parades about as the reality principle of
meaning (Baudrillard 1981, 162).
1994, 160–161). As Baudrillard (2005c, 92) avers, ‘we are still iconoclasts:
we destroy images by overloading them with signification; we kill images
with meaning’. Consequently, the image no longer belongs to the privileged
realm of ‘dreaming or the imaginary’ (Baudrillard 1987b, 28).
Dreams rise in the darkness and catch fire from the mirage of moving
light. What happens on the screen isn’t quite real; it leaves open a
vague cloudy space for the poor, for dreams and the dead.
2
Baudrillard (2002, 29).
3
Though incidental to present purposes, Kracauer is referring to Eine DuBarry von
heute (Alexander Korda, 1926).
The humble servants of appearances, they can reflect only the objects
that face them, without being able to conceal themselves. … But their
faithfulness is specious, for they are waiting for someone to catch
himself in their reflection. One does not easily forget their sidelong
gaze. They recognize you, and when they surprise you when you least
expect it, your time has come.
‘Such is the seducer’s strategy’, Baudrillard (ibid.) adds. Seduction – from ‘se-
ducere: to take aside, to divert from one’s path’ (Baudrillard 1990a, 22) –
serves to ‘definitively shatter the specularity of the sign’ (Baudrillard 1988,
58). For despite the realism of signs and images, despite our naïve confidence
in their ability to conform to the real and to stand in for the real, their
destiny lies elsewhere. Unbeholden to the reality principle, the sign regales in
its clandestine capacity ‘to oppose another scene to the real one, to pass to
the other side of the mirror’ (Baudrillard 1997a, 12). Such is the principle of
seduction. By virtue of its character, ‘Seduction is not that which is opposed
to production. It is that which seduces production’ (ibid.). Baudrillard has
used Woody Allen’s (1983) Zelig to illustrate its character.
animals are never conformist, they are seductive, they always appear to
result from a metamorphosis. Precisely because they are not
individuals, they pose the enigma of their resemblance. If an animal
knows how to conform, it is not to its own being … but to
appearances in the world. This is what Zelig does too … he is
incapable of functional adaptation to contexts, which is true
conformism, our conformism, but able to seduce by the play of
resemblances’ (ibid. 15–16).
Likewise, it is the very conformity of signs and images to reality that seduces
the real, anticipating it and appropriating it to their own ends. ‘It is precisely
when it appears most truthful, most faithful and most in conformity to
reality that the image is most diabolical’ (Baudrillard 1987b, 13).
The real ‘can be uncovered only if appearances have been swept away
– and therefore carries forever the mark of the broom’ (Bauman 1993, 36).
The real cannot but be beholden to the sign. The sign, however, is subversive
in its complicity, remaining ineluctably antagonistic to the real. Just as the
reality principle assumes the conformity of the sign and the real, the sign is
dedicated to their irreconcilability: ‘in this situation what we have is the sign
alone; and it is the power which is proper to the sign itself, it is the pure
strategy of the sign itself that governs the appearance of things’ (Baudrillard
1987b, 47). True to form, appearances belong to the realm of illusion. Yet
this ‘‘illusion’ is not simply irreality or non-reality’ (ibid. 45):
rather, it is, in the literal sense of the word (il-ludere in Latin), a play
upon reality or a mis en jeu of the real. It is, to say it one more time,
the issuing of a challenge to the ‘real’ – the attempt to put the real,
quite simply, on the spot (ibid. 45–6).
Thus, ‘illusion is not the opposite of reality, but another more subtle reality
which enwraps the former kind in the sign of its disappearance’ (Baudrillard
1999, 131). It is in terms of this challenge to the real that Baudrillard (1990a,
95) locates the power of the cinema: ‘at the heart of the cinematic myth lies
seduction’.
‘The power of signs lies in their appearance and disappearance’, writes
Baudrillard (1990a, 94). Appearance and disappearance apodictically belong
to a world of illusion. They are reversible events of the kind forcibly exiled
from a world forged in the image of the reality principle. Nor is appearance
opposed to disappearance: they are the dual manifestation of the same
reversible form. Unlike the irreversible finality of death, ‘What has
disappeared has every chance of reappearing’ (Baudrillard 1990b, 92): ‘what
dies is annihilated in linear time, but what disappears passes into a state of
constellation. It becomes an event in a cycle that may bring it back many
This disavowal ensures that the ‘‘realistic’ image does not capture what is,
but what should not be – death and misery; it captures that which … ought
not to exist’ (Baudrillard 2005c, 93). Fortunately, however, the image’s
power to capture what is, to challenge the world to exist, and to connect
with the radical illusion of the world, cannot be so easily vanquished: ‘the
image’s only destiny is to be an image’ (Baudrillard 1999, 134).
The image attains its power by subtracting dimensions from the world.
The power of the image thus lies in its intensity, and ‘The degree of intensity
of the image matches the degree of its denial of the real, its invention of
another scene’ (ibid. 130). It reaches its maximal intensity in the photograph.
4
Despite the ostensible antipathy to time in such statements, the qualities of
Baudrillard’s ‘pure image’ are at least in some respects redolent of Deleuze’s (1989)
time-image. The tension between, on the one hand, the element of simulation
associated with cinematographic technologies responsible for adding movement to
the photographic image and, on the other hand, those elements of cinema that
Baudrillard likes (simplifying to the extreme, those that relate to the Open; with all
that this entails in Deleuze’s analysis of the cinema of the time-image) might usefully
be considered in relation to Agamben’s (2002) discussion of difference and repetition
in the cinema of Guy Debord (see also Clarke 2007). Though space prohibits further
consideration here, Baudrillard’s emphasis on disappearance may prove of most
significance to the distinctiveness of his position (Baudrillard 2009).
.
In contrast, cinema, for Baudrillard (1997a, 8), has evolved to the point
where this power of illusion has been definitively lost:
What can one say about the cinema, if not that now – almost at the
end of its evolution, of its technical progress, from silent movies to
talkies, colour, high technology and special effects – its capacity for
illusion, in the radical sense of the word, has vanished?
This is, viewed from the other direction, the same process as the implosion of
the real and the imaginary – here accomplished by the disillusion of the
image, ‘the extermination of the real by its double’ (ibid. 9).
Yet this also provides the key to Baudrillard’s intense affection for the
cinema.
‘cinema too can recover th[e] specific quality of the image – which is
both complicit with, and apparently foreign to, narration – having its
own static intensity, though fired with all the energy of movement,
crystallizing a whole course of events in a still image by a principle of
condensation that runs counter to the principle of high dilution and
dispersion of all our current images. In Godard, for example.
(Baudrillard 1999, 134–5)
Not a still image, ‘still an image – that means not only a screen and a visual
form but a myth, something that belongs to the sphere of the double, the
phantasm, the mirror, the dream’ (Baudrillard 1987b, 25). For Baudrillard
(2002, 30), the world as it is seduces: it is bathed in ‘the white light of the
image’.
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Filmography
Galeen, Henrik (1926) Der Student von Prag [The Student of Prague].
Germany.