Cinema of Simulation: Hyperreal Hollywood in the Long 1990s 9781628920796, 9781501304668, 9781628920802

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Cinema of Simulation

Cinema of Simulation Hyperreal Hollywood in the Long 1990s Randy Laist

Bloomsbury Academic An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc

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www.bloomsbury.com BLOOMSBURY and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published 2015 Paperback edition first published 2016 © Randy Laist, 2015 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. No responsibility for loss caused to any individual or organization acting on or refraining from action as a result of the material in this publication can be accepted by Bloomsbury or the author. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Laist, Randy, 1974– The cinema of simulation: hyperreal Hollywood in the long 1990s/Randy Laist. pages cm Summary: “Drawing on the critical theories of Jean Baudrillard, Cinema of Simulation performs close readings of key films to examine cinematic visions of mutational reality”– Provided by publisher. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-1-6289-2079-6 (hardback) 1. Realism in motion pictures. 2. Motion pictures–Philosophy. I. Title. PN1995.9.R3L35 2015 791.43’01–dc23 2014041014 ISBN: HB: 978-1-6289-2079-6 PB: 978-1-5013-2003-3 ePDF: 978-1-6289-2080-2 ePub: 978-1-6289-2081-9

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Contents Acknowledgments List of Abbreviations for Works by Jean Baudrillard Introduction: The Hyperreal Theme in 1990s’ American Cinema 1 Back to the Future as Baudrillardian Parable 2 The Alien films and Baudrillard’s Phases of Simulation 3 The Hyperrealization of Arnold Schwarzenegger 4 Oliver Stone’s Hyperreal Period 5 Bill Clinton Goes to the Movies 6 Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction and Baudrillard’s Perfect Crime 7 Recursive Self-Reflection in The Player 8 Baudrillard, The Matrix, and “the Real 1999” 9 Reality/Television: The Truman Show 10 Recombinant Reality in Jurassic Park 11 Brad versus Tyler in Fight Club 12 Shakespeare in the Long 1990s 13 Ambiguous Origins in Star Wars: Episode I—The Phantom Menace 14 Looking for the Real: Schindler’s List, Saving Private Ryan, and Titanic 15 That’s Cryotainment! Postmortem Cinema in the Long 1990s Works Cited Filmography Index

vi vii 1 7 19 37 73 85 101 117 129 141 151 165 179 195 207 223 243 247 253

Acknowledgments I would like to thank all of the editors, colleagues, and friends who assisted in the development of this book. Versions of various parts of this book have appeared in Americana: The Journal of American Popular Culture, Alphaville, The Projector, The Journal of South Texas English Studies, MediaScape, and The International Journal of Baudrillard Studies, and I am grateful to the editorial boards and peer reviewers of all of these publications for their feedback and support. I am also indebted to Sorcha Ní Fhlainn, Robin DeRosa, Christopher Schaberg, Robert Bennett, Brandy Schillace, and Andrea Wood, editors of essay collections in which parts of this book have previously appeared. Portions of this book have also been developed as part of panel presentations for conferences hosted by professional organizations such as The MidAtlantic Popular American Culture Association, the College English Association, and the Popular Culture Association/American Culture Association. In particular, I would like to thank Sarah Hatchuel and Nathalie Vienne-Guerrin for inviting me to present a version of my Shakespeare chapter at the Shakespeare 450 Congress. I would particularly like to express my gratitude to Richard Deflumerie for hosting movie nights, to Edward Wethers for lending me DVDs, and to Alex Nye and Kevin Gardner for their technical assistance. This book is largely a product of ideas that came out of conversations with my cinephilic brothers, Fritz and David, and friends, Michael Vincent Skinner, Robert Iulo, and Jim Horwitz. I would like to thank John Connors and Kirche Leigh Zeile for their support, and I am also grateful to the members of the Goodwin College Writer’s Guild—particularly Henriette Pranger, Cynthia Hendricks, Matt Engelhardt, and Brian A. Dixon—for their editorial help. My appreciation extends as well to the staff at Bloomsbury Publishing, particularly Mary Al-Sayed and Katie Gallof. Thank you as well to all of the writers, actors, directors, producers, and to everyone else involved in the creation of the films discussed in this book, as well as to the late Jean Baudrillard, whose stimulating writings are a continual source of challenge and inspiration. I have also relied on the support and encouragement of my colleagues at Goodwin College throughout this project. Finally, I would like to thank my wife, Ann, and my son, Tony, for being so perfect all of the time.

List of Abbreviations for Works by Jean Baudrillard [A] America. Tr. Chris Turner. London: Verso, 1988. Print. [AR] “The Anorexic Ruins.” Looking Back on the End of the World. Ed. Dietman Kamper and Christoph Wulf. Trans. David Antal. NY: Semiotext(e), 1989. 33–4. [EC] The Ecstasy of Communication. Tr. Sylvere Lotringer. NY: Semiotext(e), 1988. Print. [FS] Fatal Strategies. Tr. Philippe Beitchman and W. J. G. Niesluchowski. New York: Semiotext(e), 2008. Print. [F] Fragments. Tr. Emily Agar. London: Verso, 1997. Print. [GW] The Gulf War Did Not Take Place. Tr. Paul Patton. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. 1995. Print. [IE] The Illusion of the End. Tr. Chris Turner. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994. [IEx] Impossible Exchange. Tr. Chris Turner. London: Verso, 2001. Print. [LP] The Intelligence of Evil, or the Lucidity Pact. Tr. Chris Turner. Oxford: Berg, 2005. Print. [SW] Jean Baudrillard: Selected Writings. Ed. Mark Poster. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002. Print. [PC] The Perfect Crime. Tr. Chris Turner. London: Verso, 2008. Print. [Se] Seduction. Tr. Brian Singer. NY: St. Martin’s Press, 1990. [SS] Simulacra and Simulation. Tr. Sheila Faria Glaser. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1994. Print. [Si] Simulations. Tr. Paul Foss, Paul Patton, and Philip Beitchman. NY: Semiotext(e), 1983. Print. [ST] The Spirit of Terrorism. Tr. Chris Turner. London: Verso, 2002. Print. [SED] Symbolic Exchange and Death. Tr. Iain Hamilton Grant. London: Sage, 1993. Print. [DS] “This is the Fourth World War: The Der Spiegel Interview with Jean Baudrillard.” International Journal of Baudrillard Studies 1.1 (2004). Web. 9 Sept. 2011.

Introduction: The Hyperreal Theme in 1990s’ American Cinema The dominant mood of mainstream American cinema in the 1980s has come to be associated with Robin Wood’s critique in his influential essay, “Papering the Cracks: Fantasy and Ideology in the Reagan Era.” In that seminal work, Wood described “Reaganite cinema” as functioning to reassure an infantilized populace that technology was benign, that magical thinking could solve all of our problems, and that social reality had been stabilized by a beneficent patriarchy. Reacting against the anxiety, disillusion, and self-doubt that characterized the cultural mood in the wake of Vietnam and Watergate, the wish-fulfillment spectacles of Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981), E.T.:  The Extra-Terrestrial (1982), and Return of the Jedi (1983) dazzle their audiences with vividly dreamlike narratives of good prevailing over evil through the power of the hero’s untroubled faith in the justice of his cause. The values of “Reaganite entertainment” are embodied in what Susan Jeffords has called the “hard body” image of Sylvester Stallone, Arnold Schwarzenegger, and their many clones. “These hard bodies came to stand not only for a type of character—heroic, aggressive, and determined—but for the nation itself ” (25). The father figure whom these Reaganite fantasies elevate to godlike supremacy symbolizes not only the integrity of the United States itself as a world power or Ronald Reagan himself as a benevolent patriarch but also an entire metaphysical condition of stability and coherence. Along with the triumphalist celebration of America’s clear sense of purpose within a Cold War narrative, Reaganite cinema affirms a less tangible but more pervasive faith in the clarity of moral distinctions and the constancy of reality itself. If an emerging climate of globalism, multiculturalism, and feminism had threatened the white male’s cultural supremacy, the Cold War provided a metanarrative that consolidated power in the hands of a national father figure while simultaneously anchoring reality itself to a stable set of familiar coordinates. With the fall of the Berlin Wall on November 9, 1989, however, the United States suddenly discovered itself in a new political and psychological landscape. The moment quickly came to symbolize the complete collapse of the Soviet empire and, with it, the entire grand narrative of what has come to be known as the short twentieth century (1914–89). Francis Fukayama famously declared that the Berlin Wall’s collapse signified the “End of History” (xi). No longer in the twentieth century, but not yet in the twenty-first, the 1990s is a decade that tends to fall through the cracks of the timeline of recent history. The long 1990s, the period between November 9, 1989 and September 11, 2001, has been called “the modern interwar years” by Derek Chollet

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and James Goldgeiger and, more poetically, a “life between two deaths” by Phillip E. Wegner. George Will has referred to the period as “a holiday from history”; Frank Rich has described it as “a frivolous if not decadent decade-long dream”; David Halberstam has called it “a time of trivial pursuits”; and even bedfellows as unlikely as Newt Gingrich and Ralph Nader have both referred to the 1990s as a “lost decade.”1 The collapse of the Berlin Wall ended one period of history without inaugurating any apparent narrative to take its place. Politically, following the spectacular but somehow hollow victory the US-led coalition achieved in the Gulf War, American foreign policy drifted from crisis to crisis—Bosnia, Somalia, Haiti—without any grand design to lend America’s role in the world coherence or direction. Madeleine Albright has said, “It was an era that was hard to explain to people. It was like being set loose on an ocean and there wasn’t really any charted course” (Chollet and Goldgeiger, 69–70). The cultural effect of this strange postmortem moment is best captured in the definitive literary masterpiece of the 1990s, Don DeLillo’s Underworld, in which a character explains that Americans “need the leaders of both sides to keep the cold war going. It’s the one constant thing. It’s honest, it’s dependable. Because when the tension and rivalry come to an end, that’s when your worst nightmares begin. All the power and intimidation of the state will seep out of your bloodstream. You will no longer be the main … [p]oint of reference” (170). When the threat that established the parameters and priorities of the Cold War American personality began to fade, DeLillo’s character explains, the American male became “the lost man of history” (182). To the extent that the Cold War acted as a source of moral clarity for Americans, and especially for white American men, the collapse of this paradigm left Americans deprived of such assurances and thrown back on the basic ontological and existential questions, of what kind of world they inhabit and of how to exist in such a world. To be sure, the end of the Cold War was not the only significant cultural change underway during the 1990s. At the same time that American society experienced the sense that established polar narratives of good versus evil had collapsed along with the Berlin Wall, technological innovations such as cloning, virtual reality, 24-hour cable news channels, the Internet, and CGI cinematography all seemed to operate simultaneously to collapse other polar narratives such as real versus illusory, original versus derivative, and authentic versus artificial. Cultural commentators of the period explained the contemporary mood in terms that describe a fundamental mutation in the structure of reality itself. Writing in 1992, Albert Borgmann speculates, “It is as though we had taken ourselves out of reality and had left only objectified and disavowed versions of ourselves in the universe we are trying to understand and shape” (2). Writing in 1994, John Fiske argues that “[w]e can no longer think of the media as providing secondary representations of reality; they affect and produce the reality that they mediate. We live in a world of media events and media realities” (xiv–xv). Writing in 1999, cultural critic Neal Gabler argues that “After decades of public-relations contrivances and media hype, and after decades more of steady pounding by an array of social forces All of the quotations in this sentence are from Chollet and Goldgeiger: Will (xi), Rich (xi), Halberstam (316), Gingrich (xv), Nader (293).

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that have alerted each of us personally to the power of performance, life has become art, so that the two are now indistinguishable from each other” (4). To explain his troubled impression that American social life in the 1990s had been characterized by an incapacity to differentiate reality from its representations, Gabler recounts Lewis Carroll’s description of a map that is so accurate that if it were unfolded, it would bury the actual world underneath the representation. A similar fable from Jorge Luis Borges became the starting point for Jean Baudrillard’s essay “The Precession of Simulacra,” written in 1981 and first published in English in 1994. In that essay, Baudrillard argued that “Today abstraction is no longer that of the map, the double, the mirror, or the concept. Simulation is no longer that of a territory, a referential being, or a substance. It is the generation by models of a real without origin or reality: a hyperreal” (SS 1). Indeed, Baudrillard’s writing on the theme of hyperreality constitutes the theoretical foundation for Borgmann, Fiske, and Gabler’s commentaries, as well as those of many other writers who described the fin-de-millennial moment as a time of ontological distortion and realignment. Baudrillard formulated his doctrine of hyperreality throughout the 1980s, and it had been extremely influential on the art and literature of that decade, but Baudrillard’s breakthrough into popular awareness did not come until the heavily marketed 1988 debut of his book America. Most of his books were not translated into English until the 1990s, when hyperreality came into its own as a widely acknowledged condition. Baudrillard drew attention to himself in the early ’90s with his provocative statement that the Gulf War “did not take place.” Does seeing a war on television, for citizenconsumers in the heartland, through cameras mounted on computer-guided missiles, make the war appear more real or less real? Baudrillard’s contention is that such an event spins off into its own ontological category, becoming a phenomenon that cannot accurately be described by the conventional terms “real” or “unreal” and therefore necessitating the coinage of a neologism signifying just this variety of ontological indeterminacy: the hyperreal. Hyperreality might have been first theorized in the ’70s and ’80s, but it was not until the 1990s that the end of the Cold War, which had held reality at gunpoint since the middle of the century, along with the proliferation of new reality-bending technologies, made hyperreality come true. In the “lost decade” between 11/9 and 9/11, the nature of reality itself became a source of anxiety and suspicion, a psychic condition that has been recognizably recorded by that seismograph of American consciousness: Hollywood cinema. Shortly after taking office, Clinton’s defense secretary Les Aspin announced that it was “the end of the Star Wars era” (Chollet and Goldgeiger, 236–7). He was referring primarily to the fact that the collapse of the Soviet Union had eliminated any reason to pursue space-based missile defense technology, but he might just as well have been referring to the post-Reagan mood of popular cinema. In his study of the cultural impact of movies in America, Robert Sklar observes that the 1980s Reaganite aesthetic had become outmoded by 1990, a shift that he attributes to the cyclical nature of popular trends. “The ‘hard body’ quickly proved unstable as a human (or even superhuman) quality. … The bottom line (in every sense) for Hollywood’s link to Reagan-era politics is that even ideology gives way before the demands of

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film cycles and marketplace logic” (346–7). But if we accept that Reaganite cinema is so closely connected to the political climate of the 1980s, it stands to reason that the shift in the mood of American movies following the Cold War’s abrupt conclusion signifies something more than the capricious work of marketplace cycles; the tonal shift in American cinema corresponds to an attitudinal shift in the national mindset. The mainstream cinema of the 1990s, what we might call “Clintonite cinema,” represents a distinct break with the unapologetic triumphalism of the 1980s. If Wood defined the 1980s’ cinema as reaffirming the values of technology, fantasy, and patriarchy, the Hollywood productions of the 1990s tended, much more frequently, to destabilize these values. A cinema of reassurance epitomized by such transcendent dreams as E.T. and Return of the Jedi, the two top-grossing films of the ’80s, had been replaced by a cinema of apocalyptic nightmares, including the top-grossing films of the ’90s, Jurassic Park (1993) and Titanic (1997). While the auteur cinema of the pre–Reagan era aimed for the gritty realism characteristic of benchmark films such as The Godfather (1972) and Taxi Driver (1976), and if the most prominent feature of Reaganite cinema is its fantastic unrealism, the cinema of the Long ’90s is characterized by a mood of hyperrealism, communicated in various ways by such signature films of that period as JFK (1991), Pulp Fiction (1994), and The Matrix (1999). The Matrix explicitly alludes to Baudrillardian hyperreality, although Baudrillard himself denied that the fantasy scenario dramatized in The Matrix was a faithful representation of his ideas. Baudrillard downplayed the significance of The Matrix in demonstrating the cultural impact of the concept of hyperreality, explaining that “there had already been other movies dealing with the growing blur between the real and the virtual: The Truman Show [(1998)], Minority Report [(2002)], even Mulholland Drive [(2001)]” (Lancelin). Whether or not The Matrix is a fair representation of Baudrillardian hyperreality (a question to which this book shall return), Baudrillard’s observation suggests that hyperreality had become a motif throughout the cinema of the period. The hyperreal cinema of the 1990s conceives of the movie screen as neither a window on a preexisting social reality (realism) nor a wormhole into a fantastic dream-dimension (escapism), but as an arena in which images and reality exchange masks, blend into one another, and challenge the philosophical premises that differentiate them from each other. Throughout this book, I have attempted to demonstrate how this theme of hyperreality expresses itself in some of the most commercially successful American films of the 1990s. I have also included discussions of other films which were not conspicuously successful at the box office, but which offer unique perspectives on the nature of the hyperreal condition and its relationship to the lifeworld inhabited by fin-de-millennial Americans. If the historians who locate the end of the twentieth century in 1989 are correct, then the 1990s is actually the first decade of the “long” twenty-first century, a chronology that emphasizes the fact that many of the military, political, technological, and financial preoccupations that have defined the George  W.  Bush and  Barack Obama years have their origins in the history of that decade (in phenomena such as the Gulf War, the emergence of hyperpartisan

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politics, the popularization of the Internet, and the rise of Greenspanian economics, for example). From this perspective, the ’90s is not the last chapter of a finished story, but the first chapter of the story we are currently swept up in, and the definitive massnarratives that expressed the zeitgeist of that period are the founding texts of our own contemporary self-understanding.

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Back to the Future as Baudrillardian Parable Although the theme of Baudrillardian hyperreality is particularly pervasive in American movies released during the Long 1990s, the theme of ambiguous ontology is inseparable from the experience of moviegoing itself. The dubious legend of film history that describes a naive film audience’s panic at a showing of the Lumiere brother’s L’Arrivée d’un train en gare de la Ciotat (1895) exemplifies the sense that cinematic images themselves constitute a derangement of an audience’s ability to compartmentalize the values of reality and illusion. It is possible to see early filmmakers’ experiments in trick photography and creative editing as techniques for experimenting with the unique ontology of the cinematic image, and many of the great filmmakers of the twentieth century such as Orson Wells, Federico Fellini, and Akira Kurosawa have directed films that probe into the shadowy realms between objective reality and cinematic representation. In the postmodern period, films such as Solaris (1972), Westworld (1973), and Welt am Draht (1973) constitute significant contributions to the cinema of hyperreality. In the 1980s, however, the hyperreal theme evolves from a philosophical speculation into a widespread cultural condition: the Reaganization of politics, the Star-Warsization of movies, a junk bond economy—the texture of the period is saturated with echo-effects and si mulations. As Baudrillard expresses it, “At some point in the 1980’s, history took a turn in the opposite direction. … We are faced with a paradoxical process of reversal, a reversive effect of modernity that, having reached its speculative limit and extrapolated all its virtual developments, is disintegrating into its simple elements in a catastrophic process of recurrence and turbulence” (IE 10–11). According to Baudrillard, the proliferation of commodities, advertising, nuclear weapons, and other vectors of hyperreality had reached a saturation point beyond which history itself became derealized. Baudrillard is fond of quoting Elias Cannetti’s observation that “[a]s of a certain point, history was no longer real. Without noticing it, all mankind suddenly left reality” (IE 1, FS 32). Baudrillard explains that “[t]his point is also the end of linear time, and all the marvels of science fiction for ‘going back in time’ are useless if from now on time no longer exists” (FS 34). Baudrillard’s contention that time machines have become useless is another way of saying that time travel is a common feature of everyday experience for denizens of a hyperreal cosmos. Welcome to the world of Marty McFly, the ’80s’ teenager who invented rock and roll and who is his own eponym. Back to the Future, the highest grossing movie of 1985, is a kind of allegory of the Baudrillardian flattening of history

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into an ahistorical precession of signs that are their own original referents. Marty actually becomes a father figure to his own teenage father and simultaneously brings into being a looping continuity between the American 1950s and 1980s in a way that undermines classical conceptions of cause and effect. Marty travels into the cinematic past, a kind of alternative fictional American history that has magically, under the influence of Ronald Reagan’s cinematic influence, replaced the historical past as the “real” one. In the two sequels, director Robert Zemeckis and writer Bob Gale seem to become much more self-conscious about the centrality of the theme of hyperreality to the Back to the Future paradigm. Whereas the Marty of Part One traveled into a cinematic representation of the mythical ’50s, Marty of Part Two (1989) actually enters the movie Back to the Future Part One and sneaks around in its margins. In Part Three (1990), Marty is shot right through a movie screen into an Old West that is simultaneously and reciprocally a crucible of both American mythology and postwar American cinema. Although the differences between the various time periods are played for laughs, the more fundamental impression is of an eternal recurrence of stock characters and ready-to-hand sentiment, lame jokes that echo repeatedly throughout all possible iterations of the past and future, and a heavy-handed narrative structure; in short, all of history is bound together by its cinematic hyperreality. Time in Baudrillard’s universe is extremely ductile, because the very structure of hyperreality makes a hash out of linear, Enlightenment-era temporality. Baudrillard’s definition of the hyperreal as “a real without origin or reality” (SS 1) relies on a conception of time as a Möbius strip rather than an arrow, a closed orbit of possibilities repeating themselves with only superficial variations for all time, past and future. William Bogard explains that “[m]any of Baudrillard’s texts produce this paradoxical sense of time inversion and reversal, of histories written before their events (but which none the less are not prophesies), of pasts inhering in presents and futures in pasts. This is because Baudrillard adopts in his writing style the temporal frame of simulation, which is repetition in advance” (316). Bogard foregrounds the strangeness of this temporality in his assessment that “[s]imulation is like a miracle, for only a miraculous technology could revive the past in the present (and project it endlessly into the future). … The miracle produces a cyborg time-traveler” (318–19). Doc Brown’s DeLorean is a kind of shuttle that runs back and forth through time and weaves a condition of hyperreality. The kind of time that the DeLorean allows Marty to travel through is extremely ambiguous. The rules of time travel in the Back to the Future movies do not follow any rigorous science-fiction logic. At the end of Future One, Marty returns to a 1985 that has been altered by his 1955 interventions; the 1985 he leaves is the 1985 future of a past he has not affected (1985a), and the 1985 to which he returns is 1985b, the post–time travel present. But there are also indications that 1985a was always already 1985b. The most obvious suggestion to this effect is Marty’s own tautological naming. More outrageously, Marty’s accomplishments also include encouraging the local black person to run for mayor and inspiring Chuck Berry to invent Rock ‘n’ Roll. Marty not only returns to a world that is an uncanny echo of itself, but has also always already lived in such a world. In Part Two, when Biff steals the time machine in 2015 to travel back to 1955 to give the sports almanac to his younger

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self, the 2015 to which he returns should be the post-BiffCo 2015, if the movies were concerned with that kind of consistency. But the Back to the Future movies are not supposed to make that kind of sense, because they are only superficially about time. Marty is less a traveler in time than a traveler in hyperreality, exploring the kind of world that exists in the wake of the reversal of history. Roger Ebert wrote of Back to the Future that it “resembles Frank Capra’s It’s a Wonderful Life [1946] more than any other conventional time-travel movies. It is about a character who begins with one view of life and reality and is allowed, through magical intervention, to discover another.” Future Two certainly goes on to exploit more deliberately the cinematic allusion to the famous Capra film, but the difference between George Bailey’s narrative and Marty McFly’s is instructive. Unlike George Bailey (or Dorothy Gale), it is not Marty’s “view of life” that is altered by his magical experience, but reality itself. Rather than learning to appreciate the humble values of home and family, Marty’s happy ending involves the alteration of his family to make them more consistent with his initial view of life. Nothing changes too radically at the end of Future One; George and Lorraine still get married, live in the same house, and produce three kids, but they have a more upscale décor in their living room, they have preppier clothes and hairstyles, and they have a BMW in the driveway instead of a jalopy. They have even bought Marty the Toyota truck that he has always dreamed of having. It is a utopia of commodities, and it is the brave new reality made possible by the dream of time travel. Marty’s successful resolution at the end of Future One is his success in altering not only the details of reality but also the very nature and texture of reality itself. What “happened” to the members of Marty’s family who existed in 1985a? Have they become, as in Doc’s dire formulation, “erased from existence?” In Future One, the implication is that Marty returns to people who have always remained the way they are. They have changed not in the temporal sense of being one way and then becoming another but in the hyperreal sense of always having been changed and having no memory or history of having been otherwise. In Future Two, however, Doc advances a different hypothesis about what “happens” when they change the future. When Marty protests that it is wrong to leave Jennifer and Einstein the dog in the post-BiffCo 1985c, Doc explains that they are not abandoning 1985b Jennifer to a hopeless future as a homeless, amnesiac victim of street thugs as would appear to be the case. Rather, when Marty and Doc change the past, the new reality (or is it the old reality?) will take shape around Jennifer and she will be none the wiser. In this version, reality is subject to a radical catastrophism. At any given moment, the McFly family might be one thing, with one way of dressing and one history of either subservience or dominance in relation to Biff, and then the next moment, something has retinkered their past and now they are, and feel themselves always to have been, living in a completely different world as completely different kinds of people. In the wake of Marty’s time-traveling, all of reality has become artificialized, ephemeralized, and torn loose from “nature.” Instead of reality, there is a proliferation of alternate realities and an implosion of any differentiation between illusion and reality. All of existence takes on the nature of Baudrillard’s fourth stage of simulation: “It has no relation to any reality whatsoever: it is its own pure simulacrum” (SS 6).

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The kind of history Marty travels through is a simulacral history. He travels to the midpoint of decades—1985, 1955, 2015, 1885—as if to hook up with that period at its highest, most essential point, so he is not so much in 1985 or 1955 as he is in “the ’80s” or “the ’50s.” The condition of hyperreality is made possible in large part by the kind of realist metaphysics that imparts an illusion of identity to such abstractions as the zeitgeist of a decade. However contrived and artificial the stereotypical image of the ’50s may be, this illusion is nevertheless real in its effects when this manufactured image becomes the basis for a political culture. In fact, the manufactured model may very well be said to be more real, more persuasive, more influential in the way it informs cultural self-understanding than the so-called historical reality of the ’50s “themselves” (whatever that may mean). By making a period of time the starting point for historical understanding, a repeatable, empty, mathematical value becomes the foundational reality. Anything that happens over the course of that ten-year span is reduced to a secondary status as “filler.” Decades are always already empty values, so VH1 can produce a series of shows about popular culture called “I Love the ’70s,” “I Love the ’80s,” and “I Love the ’90s” in a way that would not be possible within a style of history that prioritized social or political events (“I Love the Civil Rights Era” or “I Love the Cold War”). The self-conscious artificiality of Marty’s ’80s and of his parents’ ’50s seems to represent an underlying acknowledgment that Marty is not actually traveling through time at all, but through a parody of hyperreal time that only seems to pass. The clock tower that dominates the civic life of Hill Valley has been frozen in place for thirty years, and in the streets of the town, the same people are surrounded by the same advertisements for the same products. The teens go to the same school, suspended in an eternal state of concern about bullies and girls, people drink the same brand of soda and watch the same television shows, and the mayor’s campaign slogan still promises “progress.” As in the transition from 1985a to 1985b, the only things that change in Marty’s transition from 1985 to 1955 are the clothes, the style of music, and the color of the mayor’s face. Robert Zemeckis, whose movies tend to resemble elaborately produced television shows, is true to form in the Future movies that, with their intimate ensemble of returning characters, reliance on running gags and taglines, and flat visual style, seem to strive for a televisual effect. The casting of Michael J. Fox as the anchor character certainly reinforces this impression. As Alex P. Keaton of Family Ties, Fox emblematizes in his clean-cut conservativism a kind of fusion of Eddie Haskel and George Will, the essence of the ’80s’ understanding of itself as a reversal of the Keaton parents’ ’60s- and ’70s-era radicalism and a “return” to that ideal of a “ ’50s” that we remember from reruns of old television shows. The person of Michael J. Fox himself signifies a televisual circuit between the image of the ’50s and the image of the ’80s, just as surely as does the figure of Ronald Reagan. “No wonder your president has to be an actor,” marvels 1955 Doc. “He has to look good on television!” Television is where hyperreal history takes place (or rather, does not take place), and Marty himself and his temporality constitute a vision of history as television show. Ebert complained of Future Three that “this movie’s West is unfortunately a sitcom version that looks exactly as if it were built on a back lot somewhere.” But Hill Valley has always looked like a movie set sealed

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under a “Truman Show” dome, outside of “real” history. Even the paradoxical name of the town seems to indicate a blatant, absurd, self-conscious fictionality. When Marty is introduced, accordingly, it is not as a person but as a collection of “ ’80s’ ” signifiers— his Nike sneakers, then his skateboard, then his denim togs, his blow-dried hair, and his Van Halen guitar. It is not until after Marty reenacts the iconic ’80s’ Memorex advertisement (Is it live or is it Memorex?—a fitting slogan for the hyperreal) that he raises his ’80s’ shades and we see that it is Alex P. Keaton under all that ’80s’ stuff. He is a self-referring ’80s’ teen, signifying himself as an accumulation of commodities. Baudrillard might have had Marty in mind when he described “the skateboarder with his walkman … everywhere … you find the same blank solitude, the same narcissistic refraction” (A 34). When Marty skateboards to school during the opening credit sequence, we see that Marty’s whole ’80s’ world is actually a collage of corporate logos and ’80s’ advertisements, and the booming presence of Huey Lewis gives the entire scene a music video feel (complete with aerobic dancers)—or is it a Mountain Dew commercial?—that confirms that Marty lives in a world that is entirely simulacral, entirely televisual, ahistorical, and self-referential. Time travel is as easy in this kind of temporality as changing channels on your television set or pressing rewind or fast forward on your VCR remote. It involves nothing more drastic than redecorating the set and recostuming the locals. Doc’s demonstration of how to operate the time machine in fact recalls the procedure for programming a VCR.1 Baudrillard also appeals to the metaphor of the programmable VCR as emblematic of hyperreal temporality when he writes, “Can you, by setting the video recorder for the same time on the previous day, resuscitate yesterday’s programme? Can we, by reversing the digital clock at Beaubourg, turn the century around to run backwards? … But there is not even any need [to do so]: the turnaround of history has already taken place” (F 93). Bogard’s commentary is

Figure 1.1  Marty surfs through the postmodern signscape. The comparison between Doc’s DeLorean and a VCR is the subject of a joke in Back to the Future: the Ride, when the digital time readout of the damaged DeLorean blinks 12:00 to indicate that it needs to be reset.

1

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even more explicit in his suggestion that the VCR is the “clock” of hyperreal time: “Within the envelope of the repeated past, simulation produces other ‘miracles’; time in general, any-time-whatever, is reproduced on its screen—future, past, present, all can be repeated or played back, and, moreover, this can be done at variable speeds (fast forward, slow motion, reverse motion, freeze frame, stop time)” (319). The way Doc describes it, time travel sounds a lot like watching the History Channel. “Say you want to see the signing of the declaration of independence! Or witness the birth of Christ!” Doc’s failure to acknowledge the twentieth-century truism that the presence of the observer influences what he observes suggests that he is thinking of his time machine as an extension of television technologies. One of the ’80s’ gadgets that Marty carries in the time machine back to 1955 is a camcorder, so that in the same way that Marty watches replayed Honeymooners episodes from 1955 in 1985, Doc can watch his 1985 death on television in 1955. Television and recorded video weave these two time periods into a mutual contemporaneity in their ability to transform linear temporality into a bank of images that can be summarily accessed, replayed, or filed away. William Irwin Thompson, writing in a Baudrillardian mode, posits that “[i]f you grew up with fifty channels on your TV set, or Hypercard stacks in your personal computer, then the past is not a text that moves from left to right with everything dated in linear fashion from B.C. to A.D.” (36). As a faithful representation of the TV generation, Marty is much cooler than Doc when it comes to dealing with the condition of hyperreality. Whereas Doc seems to be constantly overwhelmed by panic regarding the catastrophic effects time travel might have on reality, Marty slides supplely through all the hazards his adventures present him with, balletically negotiating logical paradoxes and tight schedules with a grace that confirms that hyperreality is his natural habitat. To the extent that Marty has any superpowers in the past, it is his ability to existentially merge with his trove of video memories; he borrows the identity of “Darth Vader from the planet Vulcan,” he copies the bullet-proofing trick from A Fistful of Dollars (1964), he even benefits from his familiarity with Back to the Future Part One. He merges so easily with these media images because he is already a post-VCR subject. The time machine is not only a metaphor for the VCR but also a representation of how the culture of the VCR affects temporality by inducting us into a hyperreal condition of eternal repeatability. Doc’s time machine also combines the technologies of the automobile and the nuclear bomb into its metaphor for hyperreal temporality. The automobile is a particularly prominent apparatus in Baudrillard’s writing. His 1988 book, America, is largely a meditation on the phenomenology of driving in America: “Driving is a spectacular form of amnesia. Everything is to be discovered, everything to be obliterated” (A 9). The centrality of the car to American culture is not so much a material fact as an ontological condition of detachment and circulation. The disrelation between the world of the road and the world of the driver is evocative of that between the television viewer and the television show. As Bryan S. Turner explains in his reading of Baudrillard, “The car screen and the TV screen have a number of things in common. The passenger, like the viewer, is passive, indifferent, entertained and perhaps over-stimulated by the flashing trivia of the landscape and the scene” (153). Both technologically mediated

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forms of disrelation are symptomatic of a general condition in which everything circulates, everything is exchangeable, and everything is divorced from the kind of stability characteristic of classical, realist modes of temporality. Human beings become subject to the same transvaluation as their ambient commodities; Baudrillard’s own “restless circling through the highways of America parallels the circling of the sign in the sign economy” (Rojek and Turner xii). Marty’s frustration about the destruction of the family car and his consumerist desire for the Toyota truck are both rerouted into his acquisition of the ultimate automobile, one that allows him to drive transversely through his own life, to drive past himself, as Marty does at several points in the trilogy. Doc’s DeLorean is the fulfillment of the hyperreal possibility for which the regular automobile is a metaphor. As for Marty’s exclamation that “This sucker’s nuclear,” Baudrillard explains that “The nuclear is the apotheosis of simulation” (Si 58). In the suspended aggression of the Cold War, Baudrillard finds one of his most evocative metaphors for the condition of hyperreality. “The nuclear, behind the presumed risk of explosion, that is to say of hot catastrophe, conceals a long, cold catastrophe, the universalization of a system of deterrence” (SS 53). If the conventional treatment of nuclear material in science-fiction movies from Them! (1954) to The China Syndrome (1979) has been to portray nuclear power as potentially apocalyptic, Back to the Future domesticates nuclear technology by bringing it into the circulatory system of transvalued commodities. The Libyans’ fissionable material is exchanged for pinball machine parts and the nuclear reactor is replaced with a Mr Fusion just as harmlessly as the conventional ovens of 1955 become the microwave ovens of 1985. Rather than signifying a coming apocalypse, Doc’s use of nuclear technology opens the door to a hyper-universe in which we might say along with Baudrillard, “What will happen will never be the explosion, but the implosion” (SS 55). Doc’s apocalyptic warnings of what could happen if the paradoxes become too blatant—“a chain reaction that could disrupt the fabric of the space-time continuum and destroy the universe!”—is repeatedly invalidated throughout the Back to the Future movies. Doc’s nuclear apprehensions are suggestive of the traditional kind of apocalypse characteristic of linear time. But Marty’s rambunctious unconcern with paradox is a symptom of a kind of apocalypse that has become hyperreal along with everything else. Marty’s redirection of nuclear technology from the doomsday mode to the hyperreal mode emblematizes Baudrillard’s announcement that “[t]he apocalypse is finished, today it is the precession of the neutral” (SS 160). Rather than a movement toward a transcendent finale, history resembles the flat expansiveness of a temporality characterized by the slogan, “To be continued…” The flattening of history is analogous to and coextensive with a flattening of psychological processes and existential values. Marty’s journey into the dimension of hyperreality resolves what had conventionally been considered the deep mysteries of sex and death into nonissues. The oedipal content of Future One is a nod at Freudian depth psychology, hidden forces, and secret meanings, but Marty replays the oedipal crisis as a cartoon. Andrew Gordon argues that Back to the Future succeeds as a family movie despite its incest theme because it “defuses our anxieties about [incest] through comedy” (116); Back to the Future takes the subject of incest and empties it of

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its psychological resonance. Marty’s situation hardly merits such a grandiose term as “oedipal.” The most interesting aspect of the treatment of the oedipal plotline is how lightly it is handled, as a sitcom scenario rather than a Freudian trauma. If there were any indication that Marty were attracted by the prospect of sleeping with the girl who will someday be his mother, we would be in different territory, or if there were any indication that Lorraine were attracted to Marty because she senses unconsciously in Marty the dark possibility of a taboo sexual encounter, we could justify describing the movie in Freudian terms. But Marty is basically asexual in the style of ’80s’ (and ’50s’) cinematic heroes; the nature of his psychology was theorized in Burbank, not Vienna. Although Lea Thompson brings a simmering sexuality to her performance as 1955 Lorraine, the climactic oedipal moment is defused instantaneously upon the discovery that incest is naturally unsexy. The primitive taboos must have been redundant all along; the oedipal situation is not a deep conflict but merely the set-up for a series of comic situations. In the dimension of hyperreality, Baudrillard explains, “the true oedipal problem for everyone [is] not so much to free yourself from the parental triangle as from your virtual double” (F 119). For people who are named after themselves, who are parental figures to their own parents, and who preside over the circumstances of their own conception—that is to say, for the hyperreal subject who is a copy without an original—the crisis is not one of origins but of proliferating duplication. At the end of Future One, Marty spies on his 1985b self, the self who has presumably grown up in the life our Marty has just usurped. What will be the fate of 1985b Marty? Whose life will he usurp? In Future Two, the problem of multiple realities, the risk of people seeing their doubles, and the narrative superimposition of the sequel and the original movie all represent the hyperreal preoccupation with reiteration and potentially infinite seriality. (Who is to say there are not hundreds more Martys crawling around in the shadows of all of the Future movies?) The DeLorean is not only a VCR, automobile, and nuclear bomb but also a cloning machine. To Baudrillard, the clone represents a prosthetic extension of the individual that turns the “original” individual into a faceless member in a series. Unlike twins, who have a mythic resonance, “cloning enshrines the reiteration of the same: 1111, etc.” (SS 97). Rather than a copy of an original, the process of cloning turns both participants into interchangeable units. Which is the “real” Marty, 1985a or 1985b? The same ambiguity enters the texture of reality itself: What is the “real” history, a or b? As Ebert pointed out in his review of Future Two, “How does [Doc] know that the ‘real world’ of the first movie was not itself an alternate time line?” In hyperreality, all timelines are alternate and all individuals are their own autochthonous clones: “One is never the ideal or mortal mirage of the other, they can only be added to each other, and if they can only be added, it means that they are not sexually engendered and know nothing of death” (SS 97). To be sure, in addition to replacing sexually charged oedipalism with an asexual mode of human replication, Marty and Doc also use the time machine as an instrument for eliminating the possibility of death. Doc’s violent death at the beginning of the first movie is reconstituted as a simulacrum of death by the end of the movie, and the plot of Future Three entirely revolves around the objective of using the time machine to

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keep Doc from dying. Death is impossible in hyperreal temporality: “Death no longer has a stage, neither phantasmatic nor political, on which to represent itself, to play itself out, either a ceremonial or a violent one.” (SS 164). There are no beginnings and no endings in hyperreality, only the infinite precession. Pauline Kael captured this insubstantial dizziness in her observation that Future Two “seems to be on a treadmill in a void. And yet the construction keeps you going— it is like a frenzied daydream that you don’t want to break off.” Kael’s image is a perfect depiction of Baudrillardian precession, a free-floating circulation characterized by “a principle of instability and vertigo” (LP 107). Once Doc and Marty have opened the Pandora’s Box of hyperreality, they inhabit a new kind of ontological landscape from which there is no going back. Marty’s attempt to restore the “natural” narrative of history in which his parents marry and have kids recalls the attempts Baudrillard describes to “restore” The Cloisters from New York City to France or to “return” the Tasaday tribe to their natural habitat. Moving the medieval monastery from the shores of the Hudson back to its “original” locale in Europe is an attempt to conceal the new condition of hyperreal circulation under an illusion of consistency, but the Cloisters rebuilt in France is just as artificial as the Cloisters rebuilt in Manhattan, and perhaps even more so because the French Cloisters represents an outright denial of the ascendency of the hyperreal order. Likewise, the attempt described by Baudrillard on the part of concerned anthropologists to “protect” the Tasaday by strictly controlling their contact with the outside world creates an illusion of the Natural that is in fact an artfully designed and ceaselessly regulated effect. By going back in time and manipulating the course of events, Marty has cut history loose from nature; it is now an artificial construct, an illusion that has to be tirelessly maintained. Doc’s return at the very end of Future One signifies that the preservation of the illusion of history is now a full-time job. For Doc and Marty, all of history—past and future—is laid out in front of them as something to be tinkered with, visited and revisited, but no longer actually inhabited. They live out Baudrillard’s thesis that “[o]ur societies have all become revisionistic: they are quietly rethinking everything. … We no longer make history. We have become reconciled with it and protect it like an endangered masterpiece” (IE 22–3). One of the effects of the four-year gap between the filming of Future One and Future Two is that, by 1989, the 1980s have already become “the ’80s.” Marty is no longer an ultracontemporary archetypal American teen; by 1989, he is a throwback to an earlier time and has to be dressed in period costume. Having spent a week in a very stereotyped atmosphere representative of “the ’50s,” Marty returns to 1985 to discover that the present has been periodized. The time-traveler returns to a present that is just another time in the circulatory flux of fads and fashions. Future Two makes the irony of this situation explicit in its depiction of 2015. As in 1955 and 1985, the advertisements, the town layout, and the social relationships are all exactly the same. The writers have to invent absurd fads (“All the kids in 2015 wear their pants inside out!”) to come up with a parallel for the (equally absurd, we recognize in retrospect) fashions of the 1950s and ’80s. In retrospect, Marty’s signature down vest and denim jacket become signifiers not of his “coolness” but of his ’80s-ness.

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The accumulation of ’80s’ stuff in the window of an antique shop suggests that what binds us to our moment in history is nothing more substantial than an accumulation of future curiosities; what separates one era from another in hyperreal temporality is only the shape of our junk. The inclusion in the window of a Roger Rabbit doll, a reference to another Zemeckis production, metanarratively indicates that Marty himself is a character in an ’80s’ Zemeckis production; it might just as well be a Marty McFly doll in the antique case. They may as well be playing “The Power of Love” in the Café ’80s. In the same way that 1985 has become “the ’80s,” Marty has become “Marty.” More so than arguably any other sequel in movie history, Future Two is, as Deason Howe put it, “exhaustive with self-reference.” Gag for gag, Marty’s experiences in the Café ’80s recapitulate his experiences from the first movie in what we can retronymically identify as the Café ’50s. The sequence in Future Two of Marty’s skateboard escape from Griff and his thugs is so reliant on the audience’s memory of the parallel sequence in Future One that it is almost as if we have already gone back into the first movie before the plot literally takes us there. As a result of his immersion into the hyperreal condition of traveling transversely through time, Marty is no longer rooted in any historical or psychological identity. Future One’s spontaneity becomes Future Two’s nostalgia for Future One’s spontaneity, and Marty’s field of possibilities as a character is narrowed down to a finite repertoire of stunts and quips that we have already seen him perform and utter. In the exhaustion of his possibilities, Marty’s identity becomes simulacral; he is a copy of his previous cinematic incarnation. Janet Maslin observed that Future Two “isn’t an ordinary sequel. It’s as if the earlier film had been squared.” Maslin’s simile expresses the unique implosion of narrative that the movie orchestrates. The most surreal leg of Marty’s adventures is his shadowy participation behind the scenes of Future One. The scenario has something in common with similar situations in movies such as The Purple Rose of Cairo (1985) or The Last Action Hero (1993) in which human beings pass through the movie screen portal into movie-world, except with the Borgesian twist that the movie that Marty passes into is his own. He was always already a movie character, so there is no disruption of ontological registers. As a hyperrealized character in a hyperreal world, Marty enjoys completely free mobility across his two-dimensional cosmos. The DeLorean is not only a VCR, a car, a nuclear bomb, and a cloning machine but also a movie camera that performs the task of projecting Marty into cinematic space. In Future Three, the writers might have tried to give us Back to the Future cubed, in which Marty returns to various scenes in Future Two, but their decision to deposit Marty in the Old West represents a more subtle form of the same maneuver. Rather than going back into his own movie, the DeLorean brings Marty into the heart of American cinema itself. The movie character becomes a self-conscious embodiment of his own movie-ness. As if to clarify this reading of their trilogy, Gale and Zemeckis set the time-travel sequence at the beginning of Future Three in the parking lot of a drive-in movie theater. This scene is among the wittiest in the trilogy, playing very openly and very metanarratively on the peculiar kind of action hero Marty has become. The drive-in is decorated in a Western motif, but the surrounding Monument Valley landscape

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expresses Baudrillard’s appraisal that “It is not the least of America’s charms that even outside the movie theaters, the whole country is cinematic. The desert you pass through is like the set of a Western” (A 56). Baudrillard describes the phenomenological uselessness of seeking “to strip the desert of its cinematic aspects in order to restore its original essence” (A 69). The American desert is Baudrillard’s supreme vision of an American reality that is always already cinematographic in its perceptual being. Doc and Marty are not in a movie theater in the desert; they are in a world that is a perfect fusion of nature and art—a reality that is fundamentally cinematic. When Doc instructs Marty to “drive right toward that screen at 88 miles per hour,” he is sending Marty not from the present into the past, nor even from one kind of reality into another, but simply from one genre (science fiction) to another (Westerns), the equivalent of moving from one movie theater to another. All the while, our real locality is in hyperreal America, which is itself only a copy of its cinematic self-representation. The rampaging band of Indians painted on the drive-in mural become “real” when Marty breaks through to 1885, but they are only “real” insofar as Marty has entered into the same kind of cinematic unreality as they. Marty has always relied on his familiarity with movie culture as one of his staple characteristics (Darth Vader from the planet Vulcan), but in the sequels, Marty’s character and environment both become more densely allusive to cinematic models. In Part Two, Marty mysteriously introjects Jim Stark’s touchiness about being called chicken from Rebel without a Cause (1955), and Part Three becomes an inexhaustible game of spot-the-reference. Mad Dog Tannen brandishes a silver-handled whip like the one wielded by Liberty Valance (The Man who Shot Liberty Valance [1962]), Doc shoots Marty’s noose in a reference to The Good, The Bad, and the Ugly (1966), and the dance sequence between Doc and Carla is a nod to My Darling Clementine (1946). Marty does a Travis Bickle impersonation in a mirror, toying with his depthless variety of available cinematic personae, and wins the day by mimicking the finale of A Fistful of Dollars. If an ironic loop of self-referentiality had been established in the first movie by the indication that Marty was named after himself, in Future Three, Marty fits into his cinematic environment by adopting the pseudonym Clint Eastwood. Whereas the first movement peels Marty away from his personal history and makes him his own simulacrum, the second anachronistic selfnaming locates Marty as a composite personality of filmic images: American teenager as human VCR. In “repeating” many of the same gags and escapades from the twentieth and twenty-first centuries in 1885, Marty exemplifies Baudrillard’s aphorism that “History reproducing itself becomes farce. Farce reproducing itself becomes history” (F 93). Marty’s proactive repetitions of his own and other movies magically insinuate themselves into the documents of history, creating a total situation in which American history has become saturated with cinematic influences just as irreversibly as the American landscape has. The twentieth-century understanding of the late nineteenthcentury American West has evolved through the medium of cinema. This cinematic understanding, in turn, is so potently a factor in the political behavior of Americans that it actually serves the function of “real” history. Clint Eastwood does travel back in time to write our history for us, his time machine powered by the hyperreal imagination

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in which “History is our lost referential, that is to say, our myth. It is by virtue of the fact that it takes the place of myths on the screen” (SS 43). Marty travels into a kind of reality that is at once history, myth, and cinema, but if we laugh at the absurdity of Marty’s situation, it is only because we recognize a comic variation on our own daily experience as hyperreal citizens. Simultaneously, we can distance ourselves from Marty’s predicament, turning off the DVD player to return safely to the “real” world, where time is not so chaotically intermixed and where identity really is rooted in a history of things that have happened and will always have happened. The depiction of Marty’s hyperreal adventures as a cartoonish fantasy deters us from recognizing the extent to which our everyday lives are hyperreal. In this sense, the installation of Back to the Future: the Ride in Universal Studios at Disneyland is particularly fitting, Disneyland being the Baudrillardian epicenter of this kind of deterrence. “Disneyland is presented as imaginary in order to make us believe that the rest is real, whereas all of Los Angeles and the America that surrounds it are no longer real, but belong to the hyperreal order and to the order of simulation” (SS 12). Back to the Future: the Ride zaps the rider into the Future movies in the same way that Marty was zapped into his own movie. Strapped into the motion simulator, you chase Biff into 2015, into the Ice Age, into the Jurassic period, and then step out blinking into the Californian sun, under the impression that the ride is over. We are Martys waking up, as he does in all three movies, with the falsely reassuring impression that we have been dreaming. But here we are, safe and sound, back in good old … hyperreality!2

A version of this chapter originally appeared in The Worlds of Back to the Future: Critical Essays on the Films (Ní Fhlainn 216–31).

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2

The Alien films and Baudrillard’s Phases of Simulation As a film series spanning multiple decades, the Alien franchise of science-fiction films provides a unique case study in the development of cinematic representations of reality as they evolved over the course of the late twentieth century. In Stephen Mulhall’s critical commentary on the Alien movies, he argues that the films are primarily concerned with the existential horror of “life as such: [the alien] is not so much a particular species as the essence of what it means to be a species, to be a creature, to be a natural being” (Mulhall 19). Slavoj Žižek extends Mulhall’s interpretation, describing the alien as a perfect representation of Lacan’s lamella, the shapeless monster of reality that resists all of mankind’s attempts to understand, control, and kill it (“troubles with the Real”). In a similar vein, Barbara Creed sees the alien as a representation of “the archaic mother … the mother as primordial abyss, the point of origin and of end” (17). Indeed, Ridley Scott’s original Alien (1979) and its 1986 James Cameron sequel, Aliens, lend themselves to psychoanalytic and neoanalytic readings. In both films, the typical Freudian elements are all in place: a shadowy and sexualized monster representing the unconscious haunts the corridors of socioeconomic activity. Both films begin and end with the characters emerging from and entering into “hypersleep,” a symbolic effect that frames both films within the typically Freudian landscape of dream-space. The first movie draws self-consciously on the surrealist tradition of Freudian motifs to generate its unsettling effects, while the second movie builds its narrative around the Freudian model of trauma and catharsis. In the third movie, however, the classical Freudian paradigm, although still applicable in many ways, is problematized by Ripley’s genetic fusion with the alien. Rather than a conflict of ego and id, or of the reality principle against the pleasure principle, Ripley’s story becomes defined by a convergence of such dichotomies, a thematic development that recalls Baudrillard’s description of hyperreal implosion: “there is just a sort of contraction into each other, a fantastic telescoping, a collapsing of the two traditional poles into one another” (S 57). Baudrillard explains that this variety of “implosion in meaning … is where simulation begins” (SS 31, italics in the original). At the end of Alien3 (1992), the only way Ripley can kill the alien is to kill herself, and vice versa. This mutual imbrication of Ripley and the alien becomes even more pronounced in the final movie of the series, Alien Resurrection (1997), which completes the movement from psychological realism to genetic hyperrealism. The  victory of

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confrontation and purgation achieved at the end of Aliens is reconfigured at the end of Alien Resurrection as a victory of irony and posthuman hybridity. For this reason, it is necessary to supplement the existential and Lacanian commentaries of the Alien series articulated by Mulhall and other psychoanalytic commentators with a critical approach that reflects the movies’ developing theme of hyperrealism. The trend toward implosion and simulation staged in the series of Alien movies reflects the gradual hyperrealization of the popular mood and of cinematic styles that is evident between the 1970s and the 1990s in American cinema. The ’70s-style gritty realism that influenced Ridley Scott’s original film gives way in James Cameron’s sequel to ’80s-style escapism. The two films from the 1990s reflect the post–Cold War, pre-9/11 preoccupation with questions of ontology. The directors of Alien3 and Alien Resurrection, David Fincher and Jean-Pierre Jeunet, respectively, are both known for their postmodern sensibilities, but, more tellingly, they are both representative filmmakers of an era that seemed to become increasingly Baudrillardian the closer it approached to that millennial moment that Baudrillard famously speculated would not take place. As Žižek’s American publisher has said, “Baudrillard was the philosopher who fit with the era of Seinfeld” (Robinson). In charting the progressively simulacral career of the alien, we can perceive a strain of the dialogue that the culture is having with itself about the shifting nature of reality. In fact, a one-to-one correlation is rather easy to discern between the representation of the alien in the four Alien movies and Baudrillard’s “successive phases of the image”: It is the reflection of a profound reality; It masks and denatures a profound reality; It masks the absence of a profound reality; It has no relation to any reality whatever: it is its own pure simulacrum. (SS 6)

Ripley’s increasingly convoluted relationship with the alien over the course of the film series reflects an increasing complexity in the structure of her reality. Considering this development within a Baudrillardian framework allows us to perceive the manner in which the filmmakers have relied on this theme to establish thematic consistency among the different films, and to observe the manner in which the installments of the film series variously represent the opportunities for political resistance available to hyperreal subjects in a hyperrealized cosmos. Ridley Scott’s Alien stages a nightmare of a “profound reality.” Despite being a post– Star Wars science-fiction film, Alien rejects the giddy operatics of the many films that strove to mimic George Lucas’s 1977 blockbuster. Alien’s visual and narrative styles place it firmly in the cinematic camp of ’70s’ realism alongside films like The Godfather, Taxi Driver, and Midnight Express (1978). In Alien, space is not an open terrain of freedom and adventure as it is in Star Wars but a stark and lonely void of perpetual menace. This is not the kind of space that calls its inhabitants out into expansive gestures of self-transcendence but rather the kind of endless night that turns its inhabitants in on themselves. The Nostromo crew huddling around the mess hall table for nourishment and companionship inhabits a meager and fragile bubble of light in a void that is both

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spatial (they are months away from earth’s solar system) and temporal (their hypersleep has been momentarily interrupted). Space is disenchanted in the Alien universe; rather than providing an escape from reality, space in Alien emphasizes the immediacy and inescapability of reality. Space is precisely what makes escape from the clanking, bloody reality of the Nostromo impossible. Likewise, technology is similarly disenchanted. The translucent technology of conventional science fiction is replaced in Alien by whirring and clicking boxes of frequently malfunctioning moving parts. As in 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), the ship’s computer turns against the human crew of the Nostromo, an ultimate depiction of the unreliability of technology. Whereas in Kubrick’s film, however, the computer glitch was overcome and the transcendent future made possible, in Alien, the glitch is not in the computer but in the materialistic values of corporate capitalism. The ship’s computer, Mother, and the android, Ash, are doing exactly what they were programmed to do by the military-industrial society which built them and which is willing to sacrifice the human crew in order to obtain a valuable new bioweapons product. This “glitch” is not de-programmable, the only solution being to blow up the entire superstructure in toto, as Ripley finally does. In the same way that the characters in Alien dress, speak, and socially interact in “realistic” 1970s blue-collar fashion, the politics of the “Alien” universe reflects the real social pathology of contemporary late capitalist culture. Alien is not an escapist film but a film about the impossibility of escaping the reality of our contemporary world. This theme of the inescapability of reality is personified most vividly in the figure of the alien itself. The crew of the Nostromo inhabits a world that is entirely technological, and in which even their natural rhythms of sleep and wakefulness are controlled by a computer. Everything aboard the spaceship is geometrical, sterilized, and inorganic. It is a world that strives toward a complete elimination of the “profound realities” of sex and death. The alien infects this world with the violent challenge posed by the return of the repressed. If the first scene in which Kane wakes up from his cryotube against a hospital-white backdrop represents a bloodless, bodiless vision of birth, the violence with which the newborn alien bursts out of Kane’s chest in the middle of the film enacts a birth that is gruesomely biological. The Euclidian spaces of the Nostromo’s interior are eroded by the acidic blood of the alien, which etches chaotic shapes into flat sheets of metal and plastic. The alien itself, in its shadowy amorphousness, presents a visual contrast to the superficial visibility of the spaceship’s metal surfaces. Moreover, when the crew members squabble at the beginning of the movie about their contractual obligations, they assume the integrity of a social contract that defines the relationship between themselves and their employers. The presence of the alien on board the Nostromo exposes the fictive nature of this contract, disclosing the “profound reality” of capitalist amorality. The Company—the world-monopoly that owns the ship—is more responsible for the death of the crew than the alien itself, making the alien a kind of proxy for the capitalists. The violence inherent in capitalism that had been repressed during the workers’ conversation of who gets what shares of the profits bursts forth in the figure of the alien to make apparent the true nature of capitalist ethics.

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One other aspect of Nostromo society that the alien embodies is the specter of sexual difference. The human crew of the Nostromo is composed of four men and two women who all seem to work in a postsexist environment of gender equality. Ripley and Lambert work alongside their male colleagues in what appears to be an ideal scenario of liberal workplace mutuality. Throughout the first half of the movie, no reference is made to Ripley or Lambert’s femaleness. This postgender utopia is upset first by a lewd reference to cunnilingus Parker makes to Lambert in the mess hall, and then, immediately following, by the grotesque eruption of the alien out of Kane’s chest, as if the alien were the physical manifestation of what Anita Hill would refer to as “the beast” of sexual harassment (207). In its pornographically hermaphroditic morphology, in the horrific variety of ways it exposes the vulnerabilities of human flesh, and in its reproductive strategy of oral rape and parasitism, the alien is a perfect embodiment of the sexual violence that simmers beneath the surface of the Nostromo’s floating technotopia. For all the senses in which Alien attempts to evoke the mood of a fundamentally horrifying reality, it also contains the germs of a discourse of hyperrealism that would become more prominent in the second half of the series. As already mentioned, the hypersleep out of which Alien’s characters emerge at the beginning of the movie and to which Ripley returns at the end imparts a dreamlike quality to the entire narrative. Psychoanalytic approaches to dreams emphasize the relationship between the coded dream-content and the dreamer’s real psychic economy in waking life. In Simulations, however, Baudrillard deconstructs the psychoanalytic bias that considers the unconscious to be “more true” (6) than the symptoms it produces, referencing dreams as perfect example of the unconscious simulating itself. The Baudrillardian dream is one dreamed in outer space, in a vacuum, or, as Baudrillard likes to say, “in  orbit,” a system of signs that is not grounded in any prior reality. “Hypersleep” would indeed be a fittingly Baudrillardian moniker for dreaming as understood in this manner. The science fiction genre provides a metaphorical representation of the sense in which a community can exist in this kind of Baudrillardian suspension. Moreover, science fiction itself is project of rule-making that demands only that it be internally consistent, without any necessary mimetic referentiality to any “real” world. This is one reason why Baudrillard and science fiction have always found much to say to each other. Alien blends its gritty realism with the oneiric iconography of science fiction in a way that unsettlingly interweaves the real and the fantastic. This tendency in the film stands against the attempts of its main character, Ripley, to resist the forces of implosion by securing symbolic borders. Like a filmmaker working in the realist mode, she is determined to keep a clear boundary between herself as a subject and the alien as an object. The most monstrous threat the alien poses is the threat of the violation of personal and social borders. Not only does the alien violate the borders of the human body through its parasitic form of reproduction but it also embodies a number of other symbolic violations. In its bodily commingling of phallic and vaginal shapes, by impregnating male human beings, and through the asexual gender of the adult warrior aliens, the alien threatens the border between male and female. The alien’s anatomy combines organic and inorganic elements—its exoskeleton seems to have evolved to blend in perfectly with the cables, ducts, and pipes of a

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spaceship interior, even as its body drips with an excessive amount of slime, evoking its unmistakably organic nature. H. R. Giger, the artist who designed the alien, achieves his most uncanny effects by depicting a nightmarish fusion of living and nonliving forms. Ripley’s war against the alien is simultaneously a war against the semantic contamination threatened by the breach of these borders. She refuses to break the quarantine rules for the ostensibly humanitarian purpose of allowing Kane access to medical help. Her attempts to defend an aseptic environment are subverted however by Ash, the android who, we come to recognize, has more in common with the alien than he does with the human beings. The parallelism between the alien and the Company of which Ash and Mother are extensions is the movie’s most disturbing representation of the evaporation of the stable boundaries that make a realist ontology possible. The alien is driven not by any human purpose but by a blind instinct to reproduce, a runaway program that has no reference to anything but its own self-propagation. The revelation that Ash and Mother are just as rapacious as the alien suggests that economics and techno-science are motivated by the same self-reflexive code. The body and the mind, the animal world and the human world, the organic and the inorganic principles operate according to the same senseless program. Ripley, fighting a war on two fronts between the genetic code of the alien on one side and the digital code of the intelligent computers on the other side, struggles to keep a space open for a classical humanist model of selfhood. Her escape on the shuttle, tellingly christened Narcissus, indicates the extent to which her struggle to survive is really a struggle to preserve the boundaries of autonomous subjectivity from dissolution in the hyperreal codes that characterize the alien and the machines, even as it suggests that the urge to remain “unviolated” in this way is essentially solipsistic (and indeed, the alien manages to penetrate even into this inner sanctum of selfhood). At the same time, therefore, that Ripley’s fight against the alien is a fight against the return of repressed reality, Ripley also defines herself as a warrior against postmodern deconstructions of gender, personal identity, and reality itself. If Alien dramatizes the representation of a profound reality in the figure of the alien, the 1986 sequel, in a manner that is just as consistent with the dominant cinematic style of the 1980s as Alien was with the social realism of the 1970s, reflects Baudrillard’s observation about the second stage of simulation in which the image “masks and denatures” a profound reality. Where Alien aroused our fear by depicting the profound reality embodied by the titular beast, Aliens defines its narrative as the project of exorcizing the trauma of this primordial reality from consciousness altogether, flushing it reciprocally out of the cargo hold of the Sulaco and out of the heads of Ripley, Newt, and the audience, in emulation of Newt’s empty-headed plastic doll. Burke, mouthing the platitudes of the “trauma culture” that flourished throughout the 1980s, tells Ripley that the only way to stop her bad dreams is to go back to the scene of the originary traumatic event and do battle with her inner demons on their own turf. This model of trauma addresses the reality of the originary traumatic experience, even as it domesticates this reality by defining it as one that is subject to human control. In the tradition of signature ’80s’ films such as Back to the Future and Rambo: First Blood Part II (1985),

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Aliens insists on the possibility of reenacting traumatic experiences in a way that expunges them of the fearsome indomitability that characterizes “profound” reality. In doing so, Aliens participates in the project of what Robin Wood called “papering the cracks” (144) of Reaganite civilization. James Cameron has explained that he conceived of the ill-fated mission of the film’s Colonial Marines “as analogous to the inability of superior American firepower to conquer the unseen enemy in Vietnam” (Time). In this sense, the trauma that Aliens revisits is the American political trauma, and although Cameron’s marines do suffer a rout, the end of this representation of the war has a “happy ending”: the complete extermination of the enemy by a nuclear explosion. This revised representation of the conflict in Vietnam (and of postcolonial wars more generally) serves to mask the historical reality. At the same time, the same element of the story provides what Wood calls “reassurance” regarding nuclear technologies. Rather than threatening human survival, nuclear power in Aliens facilitates human survival. Moreover, although Ripley’s original plan is to “nuke the entire site from orbit,” it is actually a meltdown at a nuclear facility that winds up causing the explosion that (apparently) exterminates the entire colony of aliens. Not only does this welltimed meltdown reconceive of the ultimate nuclear disaster scenario as a beneficent turn of events but it also suggests that nuclear technologies are working with Ripley to bring about the holocaust she desires. In this sense, the menacing technologies of Alien are “debugged,” and technology itself is restored to its status as servant to man, an idea literally personified by Ripley’s own plastic doll, the good android Bishop, who turns out to be the heroic antithesis of Ash. Finally the concept of maternity, which Alien had represented as a nightmare of blood and creatureliness, is redeemed in Aliens through the nuclear family reconstituted in the trio of survivors: Ripley, Hicks, and Newt. Our relief at the survival of these characters, however, deters us from recognizing that Ripley’s new family is simulacral. Ripley remains asexual, and the real problems of sex and corporeality, like the real historical truth of Vietnam and the real political problem of nuclear technologies, have not been definitively confronted, merely “papered over” by a misleading representation. The queen alien is not destroyed, merely expelled, and there is no reason to assume (as Ripley, uncharacteristically, does in the movie’s final scene) that the perimeter is secure, that the borders of the ship have not been violated by the procreative energies of the alien queen. The fantastic image of the queen blasting out of the airlock masks the fact that traumatic aftereffects of the alien encounter literally continue to live on. Meanwhile, behind the mask, in the social atmosphere of the Aliens universe, reality is becoming progressively denatured, dissolving as if it had been splashed with alien blood. While the most memorable spectacle of the film is the war against the aliens, the manner in which the ordinary lifeworld of the Aliens universe is represented suggests that earthling society is becoming progressively hyperreal. In a brief scene that was not included in the original theatrical release but that was restored to Cameron’s director’s cut, we see Ripley reposing thoughtfully in what appears to be a verdant landscape. The shot is memorable, because it is the only glimpse in all of the twentieth-century installments of the Alien saga of a natural earthling environment. When the camera pulls back, however, we see that this landscape is actually a video projection, an artificial

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representation of nature substituting for the original that, as far as we know about the conditions on earth in the Alien universe, may no longer even exist. This brief glimpse of hyperreal nature is amplified by one of the movie’s central plot points: the planet LV-426, which had been portrayed as unimaginably remote in the first movie, is now being terraformed and colonized. The planet’s atmosphere is being made over into a simulacrum of a terrestrial environment, an ecology of the future in which natural processes and human engineering are so intermixed as to implode the difference between the two terms. This hyperreal ecology, furthermore, is sponsored and manufactured by the same Company that demonstrated its amorality in the first movie. As one executive tells Ripley, using an appropriately (if anachronistically) commercial reference, LV-426 is home to “a Shake-n-Bake” colony, while the Company’s slogan, “Building Better Worlds” indicates that the Company is literally making over the entire universe in its own image. In Aliens, the chief representative of the Company is Burke, the yuppie caricature whose entire personality is a sleazy simulation of sincerity. Although Ripley has been in cryostasis for fifty-seven years, capitalist morality has not evolved. The only evident moral advancement has taken place among androids. Bishop explains that his model of android is more sophisticated than Ash’s model, and, indeed, Bishop behaves with a humility, kindness, and sense of self-sacrifice that makes him the closest thing in the Alien universe to a saint. The android’s moral behavior is no less touching for being cybernetic, and it underscores the absence of morality in the “real” human representatives of the Company. Indeed, the parallelism that Alien had established between alien reproduction and capitalist exploitation actually shifts in the alien’s favor, as Ripley, no friend to the alien, concedes that they are more admirable than capitalists. Although both codes are shockingly violent, at least the aliens’ code is a reflection of a “profound reality,” while the capitalists’ code is utterly senseless and altogether detached from any ontological substratum. In a rousing scene toward the beginning of Aliens, Ripley attacks the hyperreal mood of frivolousness she perceives in the Company executives, trying to explain to them the profound reality represented by the alien species. Sweeping up their paperwork in her fists, she warns them, “If one of those things gets down here then that will be all, then all of this—this bullshit that you think is so important—you can just kiss all that goodbye.” The board room itself is situated in an orbital space station, while behind Ripley, ID photos and data about the members of the Nostromo crew exemplify the kind of reality the Company is used to dealing with—legal clauses, adjusted dollar amounts, and administrative resolutions, an echo chamber of self-referential language. In making her stand, Ripley resumes her role as the defender of the reality principle and the guardian of the rigid laws of quarantine. She throws herself bodily between the aliens and the human race as a sort of human prophylaxis. In waging war against the alien, however, she is working to protect the orbital, implosive civilization epitomized by the Company, fighting to destroy the specter of reality in order to make the world safe for hyperreality. Even though she subverts the Company’s attempts to acquire the alien, she is working for the Company in the broader sense of fighting to preserve the earthling civilization that supports their existence. Ripley’s unwitting role as the guardian of hyperreal society is appropriate, furthermore, in that, after reviving from a fifty-seven-year hypersleep,

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she herself becomes unmoored from the natural span of her life. She finds herself in the posthuman situation of holding a picture of her dead sixty-six-year-old daughter while she herself is still in her 30s. She has become a hyperreal entity, which has been made possible through the magic of hypersleep technologies. The nickname of Ripley’s adopted daughter, Newt, furthermore, suggests the amphibious quality associated with the alien, even as Ripley’s asexual mode of acquiring her looks forward to a postbiological style of human reproduction. Ripley’s tacit collusion with the Company, her quality of being “unstuck in time,” and her proxy-alien hyper-daughter all work together to suggest that, despite the black-and-white battle lines she draws on LV-426, her destiny is ultimately to be incorporated into a more ambiguous style of reality. When Ripley’s escape pod crashes on Fiorina (Fury) 161 in Alien3, it seems that she has returned to an atmosphere reminiscent of Scott’s original movie. Like Alien, Alien3 relies more on horror and suspense to achieve its effects than on action sequences and special effects. The gritty surfaces and earth-tones of Fury 161 convey an impression that the series is revisiting a more visceral style of reality. The double-Y work-prison has the gritty industrial look—the “grunge” look—that emerged in the early ’90s as a kind of nostalgia for sincerity in a hyperreal age. In retrospect, we can see David Fincher’s first feature-length film as a harbinger of what would become his signature style in subsequent films such as Se7en (1995) and Fight Club (1999), a neo-noir style that evokes the tone of ’70s-style realism, but that is also hyperstylized in a way that calls attention to the cinematic character of this “realism.” Although the society of Fury 161 seems like a kind of primal Stone Age territory outside the scope of the hyperreal values of corporate capitalism, the entire complex is sprinkled with Weyland-Yutani logos. The prisoners themselves all have bar codes tattooed on the back of their heads. The work-prison planet itself combines labor, incarceration, and ecology in a way that suggests an outrageous nightmare parody of the capitalist lifeworld. The most conspicuous precursor to the style of Alien3 is arguably Fincher’s most successful music video, Madonna’s “Express Yourself ” (1989), which is itself a homage to Fritz Lang’s Metropolis (1927). Following the stylistic evolution from Metropolis to “Express Yourself ” to Alien3 presents another opportunity to scan the progress through the first three stages of simulacra. In Metropolis, Lang crafts iconographic images that are intended to represent the profound reality of class relations. In “Express Yourself,” Fincher borrows Lang’s iconography, but reappropriates it such that the oppressed laborers of Lang’s film become the sweaty beefcakes of Madonna’s sexual fantasy. Clearly, this mutation of the Metropolis meme can be said to mask the profound reality to which Lang was directing our attention. In Alien3, however, Lang’s subterranean city of worker-slaves is reimagined as a world in which corporate-capitalist values have permeated every aspect of reality. The apparent remoteness of the planet masks the fact that the Fury 161 work-prison is part of the Company’s “network.” The rowdiness of the male worker-prisoners masks the fact that they are there voluntarily, having decided to continue on as a skeleton crew after the Company closed the foundry-prison. The apparent authority wielded by Captain Andrews masks the fact that the society of Fury 161 relies entirely on “the honor system.” The jailers have no weapons and are vastly outnumbered by the prisoners. Jailers and prisoners share the same conditions, and it

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is only role-playing that sustains this society’s hierarchical relationships. The realism with which Fincher depicts Fury 161 disguises the fact that the world of Alien3 is one in which the ontological distinctions between subject and object on which a conventional model of reality relies have been undermined. This implosive momentum is epitomized by Ripley’s situation. The narrative tension of the previous two films had been propelled by Ripley’s fanatical commitment to keep herself and her companions free from alien contamination. In the opening sequence of Alien3, however, a facehugger infiltrates Ripley’s cryotube and impregnates her, thereby negating not only all of Ripley’s heroic efforts in the previous two films but also the very ethos of the Alien series of films as a whole, and, moreover, the narratological underpinnings of the genres of horror and suspense. The spatial and ontological separation of Ripley and the alien is what established the terms of safety and danger, life and death, and success and failure in the first two films. With the implosion of the alien and Ripley during the credit sequence of Alien3, the narrative tension turns inward, pivoting on Ripley’s own self-awareness about the reorganization of her reality. It takes Ripley a surprisingly long time to discover the truth of her situation. She has been fighting the alien in the traditional subject-object mode for so long that she continues doing so on Fury 161 as if out of sheer force of habit, and her investment in this realist mode of doing battle blinds her to the truth of her situation, which is that this realist mode of subject-object antagonism is no longer applicable. As soon as she wakes up from her hypersleep, she sets about insisting that the bodies of Newt and Hicks, her dead nuclear family, must be autopsied and incinerated to prevent infection. When a stowaway facehugger impregnates a dog, Ripley dons her timeworn mantle as alien-warrior to protect the universe from the external foe. But for all her paranoia and cunning, it never occurs to Ripley that her sore throat and bouts of nausea are indications that the alien is gestating beneath her own solar plexus. In this way, Ripley’s own behavior embodies Baudrillard’s description of the third order of simulation in which the image, in this case, Ripley’s image of the alien as an external foe, conceals the fact that this reality has undergone implosion. To be fair to Ripley, however, she cannot be entirely blamed for her failure of insight. For one thing, as she knows as well as we do, when a person is impregnated by a facehugger, they have at best a day or two before they give their fatal birth, whereas Ripley’s alien takes much longer to gestate. The alien that gestates in the dog is on the prowl within a day at most, whereas Ripley’s alien, which had been implanted before she even arrived on Fury 161, leaps out of her gut with perfect, dreamlike timing at the most dramatically appropriate moment at the very end of the movie. Ripley and the audience are right to assume that if she had been impregnated on the Sulaco, she would be dead by now. Furthermore, the opening sequence shows the facehugger cracking the window of Ripley’s cryotube to gain access to her face. In addition to the reasonable supposition that such a breach would disrupt the cryogenic process, which it does not, when we see Ripley’s cryotube after her crash landing on Fury 161, the window is unbroken. It is also difficult to imagine how the alien queen could have managed to smuggle a pair of eggs onto the Sulaco at the end of Aliens. These discrepancies in the plot of Alien3 seem intentionally arranged to suggest the essentially dreamlike

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relationship that inheres between Ripley and the alien at this point in the series. Instead of a Freudian-style dream, however, in which the alien represents some preexisting psychosexual reality, Ripley’s Baudrillardian dream is one in which the image of the alien and the image of the dreamer share the same hyperreal condition. For Ripley as well as for the worker-inmates of Fury 161, reality is not profound; it is embodied—it is self-identical. The fact that Fury 161 is a special prison for men with XYY aneuploidy introduces the theme of genetics explicitly into the “Alien” series. Sentencing to this prison is determined not only, or even primarily, by what the prisoners have done but by who they are as expressions of their genotype. This idea of a genetic prison suggests a sense in which all organisms are prisoners to their genetic makeup, implying that the truth of human identity does not lie in the shadowy realms of the past or the unconscious but is spelled out clearly in every cell of one’s body. The inmates’ status as genetic prisoners condemns them to be their bodies and to live out a destiny preassigned by their genome. When Ripley crashes on Fury 161, she also is condemned to be her genome. While Alien and Aliens had both depicted societies in which men and women worked together as colleagues in a more or less postsexist environment (the marines in Aliens even brag about their bisexuality), in Alien3, Ripley is confronted very directly with her genetic identity as a female. To the all-male planet of Fury 161, Ripley is just as fearsome an alien as any xenomorph. Dillon articulates the concern that “the presence of any outsider, especially a woman— is a violation of the harmony and a potential break in the spiritual unity” of the prison population. The champion of quarantine regulations throughout the first half of the series, Ripley now finds herself quarantined—ordered to remain in the medlab—as an infectious source of mayhem. Of course, Ripley proves just as adept at undermining human quarantine procedures as the alien, one of many clues that Ripley is not just pregnant with an alien, a dynamic that would sustain a differentiation between the two antagonists (it is the same external foe, only now it is inside her), but that she has actually become the alien (a hyperreal implosion). This effect is due to the fact that the alien, as we come to learn in greater detail in Alien Resurrection, has an appropriately alien twist to its reproductive process. Rather than merely using its host as a gestation site, the alien embryo seems to share genetic information with its host in a way that affects both participants in the exchange. The alien that gestates inside a dog in Alien3, for example, takes on remarkably canine qualities that differentiate it from the previous generations of aliens, more bipedal creatures that, we might assume, walked upright as a result of having gestated inside human beings. A corollary of this quirk in alien embryology is that the genetic transfer seems to go both ways, investing the parent with qualities of the host species. In this sense, Ripley becomes the alien both figuratively and literally throughout Alien3. Ripley’s genetic and symbolic fusion with the alien is reflected in the way she becomes the object of fear and mystery on the part of the male inmates, but also in her own behavior. In Alien3, Ripley has a new aggressive sexuality that we have not seen in her before. She was completely celibate in the first film, and in the second film, her schoolgirlish flirting with Hicks never becomes physical, but in the third film, shortly after waking up from her coma, she bluntly propositions Clemens. Tellingly, she does

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so as a way of avoiding his inquiries into what caused her to request an autopsy of Newt. Sex with Clemens is therefore a kind of substitute for talking about the alien, as if she were answering his question in a roundabout way, substituting her own sexual identity as a woman for the unspoken name of the alien creature. This insinuation is accentuated by the fact that, in place of their lovemaking, Fincher’s narrative cuts to the movie’s first alien death scene. The warden wastes no time in attributing this apparent industrial accident to the emotional turbulence introduced into the community by the arrival of Ripley, and, in a way, his accusation is justified. Ripley’s female sexuality parallels the predation of the alien that Ripley has brought along with her from outer space. Sigourney Weaver plays Ripley with a predatory, catlike slinkiness that is absent from her tomboyish turn in the previous films, suggesting that the alien is not only in her; it is her. Indeed, until the final sequence of the movie kills off all but one resident of Fury 161, Ripley is actually directly responsible for killing more inmates than the alien as a result of her disastrous plan to coat the tunnel walls with an explosive gel. At the very end of the film, when Ripley is threatening to throw herself into a pool of molten lead as a way of extinguishing once and for all (so she thinks) the dangerous monster that she has become, a figure resembling the android Bishop arrives to dissuade her. Ripley assumes that the figure is another robot of Bishop’s model, but he protests that he is actually Bishop’s human designer. The introduction of this strange ambiguity at the climax of the movie contributes an important element to Ripley’s suicide scene. The audience is never satisfied one way or another considering whether this character is in fact a robot or an organism—there is no reason to take him at his word—and this lack of resolution can be interpreted as a tacit statement that whether someone is a robot or not does not matter. A person or a robot is defined not by the “profound reality” of what lies beneath their skin but by the actions they perform in the world. The question of whether Bishop is a robot or not is beside the point, in a world in which the concept of reality has been emptied of depth. The prisoners are prisoners because they play the role of prisoners, just as the jailers are defined by the roles they enact. Genetics is destiny for both the prisoners and for Ripley. In committing suicide to keep herself and her alien baby out of the hands of scientists, Ripley embraces her status as an object and uses it as a terrible kind of power, giving birth to the alien even as she plummets to her death in a poetic convergence of generativity and destruction. While it appears to stage the profound reality of death in all of its dire finality, Ripley’s suicide is actually only a disguised continuation. Although we see both alien and Ripley incinerated, the presence of the implosive robot-human Bishop, as well as that of the compellingly named sole survivor of Fury 161, Morse, suggests that a code—the digital code of cybernetic technologies and of genetic identity—constitutes a deathless hyperreality that is indifferent to the humanist categories of life and death. In keeping with the dynamics of Baudrillard’s third stage of simulation, Alien3 relies on the audience’s intentional willingness to pretend that they do not know what they know. The narrative details of Ripley’s attempts to resist alien contamination provide distraction from the fact that we know that Ripley is already terminally contaminated throughout the film. Likewise, at least in retrospect if not originally, our admiration for her act of self-sacrifice at the end of Fincher’s film relies on our ability to ignore

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our knowledge that this suicide is ultimately meaningless, since the Military-Industrial Complex will eventually reverse the result of the suicide in Alien Resurrection. Resurrection, however, is not exactly the most appropriate term to describe what happens to Ripley, the alien, or the alien franchise in this fourth installment. All three organisms—heroine, monster, and saga—undergo a basic genetic mutation that alters them in a fundamental way from what they had been previously. The character played by Sigourney Weaver in Alien Resurrection is, as Call tells her and as that character seems to accept, not Ellen Ripley. Ripley 8, as it is more accurate to call her, has super-strength, acid for blood, and alien-intuition, and, most importantly, she has lost her fanatical obsession with alien-killing. The alien, correspondingly, is significantly more human than it had been. The implosion of the Ripley-alien dynamic that had been imminent in the series since the first movie, in which Ripley and the alien had both been called “survivors,” is now complete, and in this sense, Alien Resurrection is a logical successor to the previous Alien films. Another unique characteristic of the Alien franchise that Jeunet’s film perpetuates is the stylistic subordination of the narrative material to the particular creative stylizations of a visionary director. In the same way that Scott, Cameron, and Fincher each made an Alien film reflective of their own stylistic temperament, Jeunet brings to Alien Resurrection the same tone of  postapocalyptic whimsy that characterizes his two previous films, Delicatessen (1991) and The City of Lost Children (1995). Jeunet’s essentially pranksterish sensibilities distinguish the ironic tone of Alien Resurrection from the haunted atmosphere of the previous Alien movies. The genetic soup of Alien Resurrection is also significantly inflected by its Joss Whedon screenplay, which is characterized by self-consciously movie-hip dialogue in the Tarantino mode. The unique screenwriting and direction that distinguish Alien Resurrection as a tonal departure from the previous films accentuate the plot development that the society we encounter in Alien Resurrection is two hundred years in the future from the one we left in Alien3. The design of Alien Resurrection features science-fictional trappings, such as Gediman’s stainless steel pony-tail holder, that the previous Alien movies had eschewed. Whereas the original Alien was remarkable for its sparse, realistic dialogue, Whedon’s space pirates are always full of snappy repartee and action-movie–style zingers. Whedon’s script even includes intertextual echoes to former Alien movies, as in the opening voice-over in which Ripley quotes Newt, or the “I don’t trust anyone” line that Elgin unconsciously borrows from Hicks. These touches emphasize the textuality of Alien Resurrection’s filmic world, giving it the ludic, Nabokovian quality of a luminous artificial surface. In Baudrillardian terms, Alien Resurrection launches the series into orbit, loosening it from the pull of reality, or revealing that it had always already been so loosened, and indulges in its hyperreal condition of the fourth stage of simulation in which the image “is its own pure simulacrum.” As a clone produced, as Call puts it, “in a fucking lab” by the Military-Industrial Complex, Ripley 8 exemplifies Baudrillard’s assessment that, in the hyperreal condition, there is “No more mother, just a matrix. And henceforth it is the matrix of the genetic code that will ‘give birth’ without end in an operative manner purged of all contingent sexuality” (Se 169). We first see Ripley curled in a fetal position in a

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giant test tube, being ogled by the white-coated technicians who have engineered her. A subsequent scene shows these same scientists bloodlessly birthing the alien baby out of her chest with a laser and forceps, demonstrating that both Ripley 8 and her alien offspring are no longer the product of conventional biological processes. Moreover, Ripley 8 is cloned as a full-grown adult. Rather than proceeding through the ordinary experiences of psychosexual development and personality-building, Ripley 8 is entirely a product of the genetic code that has been used to formulate her. Even her memories have been “passed down generationally at a genetic level.” We see her breaking out of a plastic amniotic sack, as if she were being reborn as a techno-scientific “construct.” As a result of her simulacral identity, Ripley 8’s character is free of the existential fears of birth and death that had preyed upon her previously. In the same way that Alien3 subverts narrative expectations by establishing that there is no chance that the heroine will survive until the end of the film, Alien Resurrection pulls a similar trick by presenting Ripley 8 as indestructible. Ripley 8’s life is rarely at stake throughout the film, which derives very little narrative tension from stoking our fears for the heroine’s safety. Sigourney Weaver makes the most of her character’s invulnerability, swaggering through the movie as if she were just along for the ride, displaying a cocksure jauntiness that differentiates her from the human Ripley of the previous films, who had suffered so much emotional agony. As far as the plot goes, indeed, Ripley 8 does not have much to worry about. In the same way that the narrative imperative that Ripley remain uninfected was overturned in the opening scenes of Alien3, the other major source of tension in the Alien series—keeping the alien out of the hands of the bioweapons industry—is dispatched in the opening scenes of Alien Resurrection. What action hero deeds remain to be done are largely shouldered by Call, who takes on Ripley’s worldsaving mission, leaving Ripley 8 free to concern herself primarily with the question of her own peculiar kind of reality. Ripley 8 achieves a terrifying glimpse into the nature of this reality when she comes across Room 1–7, a laboratory on board the military-science spaceship Auriga in which are housed the seven previous “models” of the Ripley clone. The grotesqueness of Ripley 8’s siblings recalls the nightmarish images of distorted organic shapes that background the opening credits of the movie. Once a human body has been reduced to a genetic code, it is available for techno-scientific manipulation. It is no longer an integrated whole; the genetic code can be reorganized like the letters on a scrabble board—the eyes and teeth can switch places, for example. And even if all the pieces are put together in the “right way,” as seems to be the case for Ripley 8, the result is still just as “unnatural” in its ontology as it is for any of Ripley 8’s monstrous sisters. The horror of this scene is partly a result of the shocking distortions of human morphology represented by Ripleys 1 through 7, but the more fundamental horror is Ripley’s recognition that she shares the condition of these revolting jumbles of alien and human parts. Indeed, the most hideous (because most human) creature, Ripley 7, a bedridden mass of interspecies body parts, is played by Weaver herself. In Room 1–7, Ripley comes face-to-face with Baudrillard’s observation that “Cloning is … the ultimate state of the body’s simulation, where the individual, reduced to an abstract genetic formula, is destined to serial multiplication” (Se 171). The borders of individual

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identity that Ripley had spent her life protecting from alien infiltration are definitively deconstructed. She is another grotesque in this hideous continuum, and although she might have broken out of the observation tank in which the scientists had held her, there can never be any escape from the fact that she is a techno-scientific object in her being. The theme of symbolic rape that has run throughout the Alien films here takes on its strangest and most alien form. Ripley has been violated in a way that is so fundamental that it bypasses her sex organs altogether, penetrating to the root of the very material of sexual reproduction and harvesting her genes for military-industrial purposes. At the same time that she has been so heinously violated by the United Systems Military, however, she also owes her existence to them, in a way that parallels the fact that she also owes her existence to her alien impregnation. In causing Ripley to be reborn for the purpose of giving birth to her alien baby, the alien baby actually plays the role of mother to Ripley, an implication that is expressed toward the end of the movie when Ripley is carried like a baby in her daughter-alien’s arms. The twin enemies from Alien 1 through 3—the alien and the Company—are now literally incorporated into Ripley 8’s being. Along with the scrambling of the human genetic code, therefore, Alien Resurrection depicts the scrambling of the moral and ontological code that established the field of threats and possibilities within the Alien universe. The unsettling ontological situation Ripley 8 encounters in Room 1–7 might be summed up in Purvis’s panicky question upon waking up from his cryotube and overhearing the conversation about the alien gestating inside him: “What’s in-fucking-side me?” We do not know what we are in the wake of our techno-scientific reinvention. Purvis ultimately takes a symbolic revenge for the victimization he has suffered at the hands of the United Systems Military. As the alien begins to punch its way out of his ribcage, Purvis lunges at Wren, the sole surviving member of the group of military scientists responsible for implanting the alien in him, causing the beast to tear through both Purvis and Wren’s torsos. In doing so, he turns the givens of his techno-scientific reinvention into a source of resistance against the techno-scientific apparatus. This same pattern also characterizes the actions of Ripley 8 and Call throughout the movie as a whole. One of the major metaphorical implications of the alien has always been that nature is fundamentally unknowable and that scientists’ attempts to study the

Figure 2.1  Ripley confronts her techno-scientific ontology in Room 1–7.

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alien and harness its power for military purposes constitute a hubristic folly doomed to violent failure. In Alien, Aliens, and Alien3, the alien had been a rather passive participant in this symbolic formula; its role has just been, as Ripley puts it in Aliens3, just to “do what you do,” as an expression of pure instinct. In Alien Resurrection, however, apparently as a result of genetic exchange with Ripley’s human DNA, the alien becomes a strategist. The aliens lay traps for the humans based on what they know about human weaknesses, using a gun as bait to lure Elgin into a dark corridor, and arranging a situation in which the humans will be desperately panting for breath just as the facehugger eggs are hatching. These aliens are no longer representations of the inchoate forces of nature’s fury; they are playing an active role in a game of cat and mouse, using the human intelligence with which their techno-scientific reinvention has endowed them as a weapon against the techno-scientists. Ripley 8, who is now ambivalently both alien-killer and alien-sympathizer, uses her acidic alienized blood to escape the observation well that the scientists have locked her in, and she uses her uncanny alien-powers to assist Call in her efforts against the scientists. Call, we learn, is an ontobot, a variety of robot that was recalled by the manufacturer for its malfunctional independence and willfulness. As the replacement heroine fulfilling the narrative role previously held by Ripley, Call’s function in the story, and indeed, her operational function as a cybernetic device, is to disrupt the techno-scientists’ plan to clone and weaponize the alien. The aliens, Ripley 8, and Call are all techno-scientific constructs. They have been designed and created to function in the role of objects for scientific study and control. In resisting this definition, these defiant object-organisms suggest the political possibilities for hyperreal subjects in a hyperreal universe. Although none of them is technically a cyborg, the aliens, Ripley 8, and Call all reflect Donna J. Haraway’s observation in “The Cyborg Manifesto” that “The main trouble with cyborgs, of course, is that they are the illegitimate offspring of militarism and patriarchal capitalism. … But illegitimate offspring are often exceedingly unfaithful to their origins” (151). Haraway’s formulation of a cyborg politics proposes a way of thinking about hyperreal subjectivity that restores agency and transformative potency to the posthuman entity. According to Baudrillard, the only possible form of resistance in the hyperreal condition is the fatal strategy: “the deepening of negative conditions” (FS 223). For Baudrillard, the most effective form of resistance to the hyperreal military-capitalist-scientific hegemony would have been to let them get what they want—to let them bring the alien to earth and cause themselves to be destroyed. Haraway, however, perhaps because her thinking is rooted in the biological sciences, whereas Baudrillard’s starting point is the cultural dynamics of economic exchange, envisions a more mutational, adaptive, and evolutionary solution to the problem of how a hyperreal subject can resist a hyperreal hegemony. Haraway’s cyborg is not just an object but also a “material-semiotic actor” (200), an ironic trickster with a mischievous sense of humor. If reality has been atomized into a genetic-cybernetic code and rebuilt into its present hyperreal form, then sociopolitical transformation becomes a matter of reappropriating the code, playing with it, and inventing novel permutations. Haraway writes that “Feminist cyborg stories have the task of recoding communication and intelligence to subvert command and control.” Ripley 8 and Call, as

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female-shaped monsters, perform this task throughout Alien Resurrection, reconfiguring the dominant linguistic, cybernetic, and genetic semiotic systems. After she is techno-birthed, Ripley 8 receives language training from her inventors, who show her picture cards to which she is supposed to supply the correct noun. Ripley 8 is a fast learner, but she is also an eccentric one, giving the word “fruit” instead of the correct answer “cherries,” and the word “hand” in place of the correct answer “glove.” Her responses swerve away from the expected definitions, suggesting Ripley’s independent reappropriation of the semiotic system. In a following scene, this tendency becomes deliberately subversive when Gediman asks her to supply the word for “fork,” to which Ripley 8 responds, with intentional mischievousness, “fuck.” This crude language game signifies not only Ripley 8’s oppositional stance toward her inventors but also her ability to manipulate their own linguistic codes as a form of defiance. Later on, Ripley 8 persuades Call to patch into the central computer of the Auriga in order to reprogram the ship to collide with the earth. Call does not like to plug herself in to the computer, complaining that it makes her feel “like my insides are liquid. It’s not real.” Call is ashamed of her robotic identity throughout the film and attempts to “pass” as organic. She initially exhibits a loathing for Ripley 8’s techno-scientific ontology, asking her, “How can you stand being what you are?” Her statement that she resents the computer interface because it is not “real” indicates her commitment to an ontology in which real and unreal have retained their standard dualistic roles, as in the previous stages of simulation. It is only by embracing her own unreality that Call is able to take control of the cybernetic system that controls the entire floating society of the Auriga. Although it had previously been explained that Wren, the unscrupulous military scientist, was the only one who had access to the codes, by taking ownership of the semiotic circuits, Call is able to thwart Wren’s attempt to escape from the Auriga. Her cybernetic empowerment is exemplified by the fact that Call’s voice usurps the voice of “Father,” the masculine persona of the Auriga’s central computer. Call taunts Wren, “Father’s dead, asshole,” demonstrating her newfound trickster glee in using her own cybernetic nature to overturn the social code of patriarchal techno-scientific hierarchy. Finally, in addition to manipulating linguistic and cybernetic codes, Ripley 8’s climactic act at the end of Alien Resurrection is to take control of her genetic legacy. As happened at the endings of Alien and Aliens and at the beginning of Alien3, the alien has magically managed to smuggle itself aboard Ripley’s escape vehicle. This time, however, Ripley 8 finds herself pursued by a hideous creature representing a genetic fusion of Ripley’s queen-mother alien-daughter and Ripley herself, an oatmealy mass shaped vaguely like Sigourney Weaver that we can refer to as the Riplien. As Gediman explains in a rapture of scientific accomplishment, after giving birth in standard oviparous fashion to the generation of aliens that stalks the human characters aboard the Auriga, Ripley’s alien queen daughter has, through the magical nature of alien genetics, developed a human womb and carried a fetus to term. “She is giving birth for you,” Gediman tells Ripley 8 as they witness the parturition of the Riplien, announcing the Riplien as Ripley 8’s symbolic daughter. Upon being born, the Riplien demonstrates its humanity by turning on the alien queen from whose womb it had just emerged and decapitating her with a swipe of his monster paw. This act of matricide

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is discordant with conventional alien family dynamics, in which the alien spawn are always instinctively faithful to their hive-family, but it is entirely consistent with the hybrid-humanoid psychology represented in Ripley 8 and Call’s rejection of their techno-scientific parents. The Riplien murders its biological mother, but it imprints on Ripley 8, its symbolic mother, smiling at her with infantile affection. Ripley 8, correspondingly, rejects the Riplien as an embodiment of her violation. Just like her grotesque sisters in Room 1–7, the Riplien is a monstrous correlative of the sense in which Ripley 8 has been genetically raped, and the same insistence on reclaiming her genetic identity that caused her to torch her mutant siblings causes her to arrange a grotesque abortion of the Riplien. Throughout the alien franchise, one of the most problematic aspects of an alien infestation aboard a space vessel has been that space travel relies on rigid maintenance of boundaries epitomized by the airtight hull of the spaceship, and that the alien’s nature, symbolized by its blood, is the capacity to burn through such boundaries. While she is coddling the Riplien, Ripley 8 cuts her palm on its teeth and flicks her acidic alien blood onto a spaceship porthole, using this dreadful alien power to define her genetic legacy according to her own terms. When her blood burns a chink in the porthole, the Riplien is liquefied and pulled through the tiny hole by the vacuum suction into outer space. The obvious allusion to an abortion procedure associates Ripley’s “choice” with the political concerns of late twentieth-century feminism, implying that both contemporary women and twenty-fourth-century female hybrid alien clones pursue empowerment in a cyborg modality that, as Haraway explains, “does not dream of community on the model of the organic family” (151). In the same way that the Riplien rejected its birth-mother in favor of a symbolic mother, Ripley 8 rejects the nightmare of biology represented by the Riplien in favor of her symbolic adoption of the robot Call. In using her alien blood, a sign of her internal genetic hybridity, to abort the Riplien, a sign of genetic hybridity that is external to herself and for which she is not responsible, Ripley 8 negotiates her way through her posthuman identity, rejecting some aspects of it and embracing others in a manner that is much more nimble and adaptable than the containment and contamination paradigm that motivated her behavior in the first three installments of the series. As they look out the porthole of the Betty at an earthling dawn, Ripley 8 tells Call, “You did it. You saved the earth.” The ironic tone of Weaver’s delivery of this line both announces that we have just witnessed a formulaic ending of a science-fiction action movie, drawing attention to the hyperreal veneer of the movie as a movie, and suggests that Ripley 8 might be questioning the ultimate wisdom of Call’s heroism. Perhaps, Ripley 8’s tone implies, Baudrillard was right that the only valid form of resistance in a hyperreal universe is the fatal strategy that allows the world to be infected with aliens for its own good. Irony, however, is the characteristic “rhetorical strategy and political method” (149) of cyborg feminism, and “ironic salvation” (227) is the characteristic denouement of cyborg writing. In this sense, Alien Resurrection fits naturally into the canon of cyborg fiction Haraway identifies, alongside the novels of Sam Delaney and Octavia E. Butler. For all of its stylistic departures from the previous films in the series, Alien Resurrection provides a fitting fulfillment of the thematic concerns that transverse the series. The implosion of dichotomies that the alien has always

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embodied, the denaturing of reality into the matrix of semiotic codes, and the question of feminist political resistance in a universe of monopolistic patriarchy—themes that had gestated in the narrative corpus of the previous films—burst out with undeniable vigor in Jeunet’s closing installment. Along the way, rather than depicting a nihilistic descent through the stages of Baudrillard’s four stages of simulation, Alien Resurrection reimagines the political perils and possibilities of the hyperreal condition.

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The Hyperrealization of Arnold Schwarzenegger Arnold Schwarzenegger’s early film career takes place among the company of a number of other action stars such as Sylvester Stallone, Chuck Norris, and Lou Ferrigno who represent what Susan Jeffords called the 1980s “hard bodies,” figures who personify a Reagan-era faith in the indomitable power of the white heterosexual male. In ’80s’ blockbusters such as Rambo: First Blood Part II, Top Gun (1986), and Die Hard (1988), the protagonists act as emblems of reliability, pitting the sheer massiveness of their physiques against various forces of cruelty and degeneracy that are typically diminutive, effete, and foreign. The hard-body action hero kicks ass not only in the name of American white male hegemony but, even more fundamentally, for the sake of the reality principle itself. The hardness of the hard body resembles the hardness of the rock which Dr Johnson kicked in refutation of Bishop Berkley’s idealist philosophy. According to Jeffords’s analysis, the hard-body heroes revise Hollywood mythologies of cowboys and adventurers by stripping fantasy narratives of their fantastic atmosphere and asserting their stark reality. “Their greatest act of heroism, as it turns out, is in believing that not only their heroic predecessors but they themselves are real” (63). The hard-body action film provides a metanarrative that consolidates power in the hands of white men while simultaneously anchoring reality itself to a stable set of familiar coordinates. Schwarzenegger was, as Jeffords called him, “the hardest of the hard bodies” (141), and most of his movies from the mid-’80s, including The Terminator (1984), Commando (1985), Raw Deal (1986), and Predator (1987), strictly adhere to the hard-body formula. As the foremost emblem of the hard-body genre, Schwarzenegger employed his larger-than-life persona in the service of an antipostmodern cinematic statement: that reality is real and it will kick your ass. This statement comes across with unique directness in The Running Man (1987). The Running Man depicts a society in which a fascistic government uses television as a means of distracting the citizenry, disposing of political dissidents, and disseminating misinformation. In attempting to replace social reality with highly controlled television images, the government of this future aspires to create a false reality and prop it up as the real reality. This style of social control is familiar from classic dystopian narratives such as 1984 and Fahrenheit 451. As is typically the case in such narratives, the evil government is resisted by a force that represents the authentic humanist values that the government is committed to suppressing. Early in the movie, Ben Richards, the character played by Schwarzenegger, falls in with a band of rebels who plot to block

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the government’s television signal and “broadcast the truth.” The movie is structured around the differentiation between the illusion represented by the government and the reality represented by the rebels. The government-edited footage of Richards opening fire from a helicopter on a crowd of civilians is a deliberate distortion of the raw footage that reveals that Richards actually refused to obey the order to open fire on the civilians. When Richards himself bursts into the television studio at the end of the movie, he violently refutes the televisual illusion of the show by vanquishing it with the undeniable forcefulness of the reality principle, which he brings with him not only in the form of the “true” footage of what happened in the helicopter but also, even more fundamentally, in the brutal poetry of his physical “hard body” appearance. In the 1990s, however, Schwarzenegger, having achieved unparalleled success as a box office draw, turned to a series of roles that seem intentionally selected to explore the relationship between reality and illusion in a more nuanced way. In the same way that Clint Eastwood began interrogating his own ultraviolent “Dirty Harry” persona in Unforgiven (1990), Schwarzenegger’s roles in the early ’90s indicate a curve toward self-consciousness, irony, and destabilization of simplistic moral dichotomies of right and wrong, as well as of ontological dichotomies of real and unreal. Schwarzenegger’s four major films of the decade, Total Recall (1990), Terminator 2 (1991), The Last Action Hero (1993), and True Lies (1994), are key texts in this genre of ’90s’ hyperreal cinema, and Schwarzenegger himself can be clearly identified as a central figure in the hyperrealization of the American imagination. The heroes of these movies can be described as “soft bodies,” in the sense that Baudrillard speaks of “soft technologies” (100) or Susan Sontag describes photography as “soft murder” (15). “Soft bodies” are not what they are; they are saturated with illusory qualities. They may appear dreadful and imposing; they may loom as massively as Arnold Schwarzenegger, but when you shift your perspective, you realize that the soft body is actually made up of dreams and optical illusions. The soft-body hero is not a force of nature, because he is not quite natural. Unlike conventional protagonists in Western literature, the soft-body hero is not a poem to the noble virtues of humanism, because the soft-body is never quite human. When we follow the story of the soft body hero, we are hanging on the suspense not of an existential threat (Will the character survive or not?) but of an ontological threat (Is the character alive or not? Does the character exist or not?). As a youth, Schwarzenegger had been astonished by the power of his will to reshape his body from gangly to muscle bound and, correspondingly, to reshape his identity from that of the least favored child of an authoritarian father into that of a champion body-builder. Driven by the dream of America that came to him through the movies of Clint Eastwood and John Wayne, Schwarzenegger’s ability to reinvent himself into one role after another—body-builder, businessman, movie star, Kennedy, and, eventually, governor of California—is clearly rooted in Schwarzenegger’s own conviction— derived from a distinctly American tradition—that identity and, indeed, reality itself are as reshapable as a weight-lifter’s body. This conviction may explain why so many of Schwarzenegger’s mid-career films share an ontological theme, as if Schwarzenegger were using these movies as a way to philosophize on the question of what reality might be if it is so manipulable by the power of the imagination, and if it is so intertwined

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with photographic and cinematic images, as Schwarzenegger’s biography so clearly demonstrates it to be. Each of Schwarzenegger’s movies from the early ’90s constructs its own permutation on the relationship between reality and fiction, as if testing for a formula that can explain the unique mystery of how the coordinates of matter and mind are reconfigured in the image-scape of late capitalist consumer culture. In their investigation of this postmodern predicament, these movies fall into step with the writings of postmodern philosophers who pursue the same question in their more subdued idiom. Specifically, Schwarzenegger’s ontological films reflect the discourse of hyperreality common to Umberto Eco and Jean Baudrillard, and adopted by Slavoj Žižek. Although each of these writers has his own unique conception of the hyperreal, they all use the term to refer to a situation in which the conventional categories of real and fake have lost their coherence, resulting in a viral interfusion of artifice into the cellular structure of reality, and of reality into that of artifice. In Travels in Hyperreality, Eco describes American theme parks as Wonderland dimensions in which “the logical distinction between Real World and Possible Worlds has been definitively undermined” (14). Baudrillard goes one further, rendering explicit what Eco’s analysis had tacitly implied, that American theme parks such as Disneyland are in fact “presented as imaginary in order to make us believe that the rest is real, whereas all of Los Angeles and the America that surrounds it are no longer real, but belong to the hyperreal order and to the order of simulation” (SS 12). In his commentary on The Matrix, Žižek rejected both the blue pill of illusion and the red pill of reality, demanding a third pill. “a pill that would enable me to see, not the reality behind the illusion, but the reality in illusion itself ” (Pervert’s Guide to Cinama). Each of these philosophers wrenches the familiar definitions of truth and illusion out of their traditional contexts in order to challenge their reader’s assumptions about the structure of reality. Schwarzenegger, also a European reflecting on the uncanny atmosphere of American reality, achieves a similar effect in his epics of hyperreality.

Total Recall If Schwarzenegger did indeed intentionally pursue the goal of making himself over as a hyperreal “soft body,” he could not have selected a more appropriate screenplay than Total Recall to effect the transformation, nor a more appropriate director than Paul Verhoeven to oversee it. The script for Total Recall had been circulating in screenplay limbo for many years before Schwarzenegger aggressively moved to persuade Carolco to purchase the rights, casting himself as star as well as securing himself a percentage of the profits and veto power over every aspect of the production. “When I first read the script,” he reflected in an interview, “during the days when I was doing Commando, it just stayed with me ... I could not put it down” (Murray 52). Perhaps, in the midst of filming the formulaic shoot-’em-up Commando, Schwarzenegger became entranced by the premise of Dan O’Bannon and Ronald Shusett’s Total Recall screenplay because he recognized a compelling parallel between the protagonist’s situation and his own status

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as an action movie star. Based on Philip K. Dick’s 1966 short story, “We Can Remember It for You Wholesale,” the narrative of Total Recall circulates around the central idea of the Rekall machine, a device that implants fake memories into people as a form of entertainment. The analogy between the Rekall technology and the technology of film is implied in Dick’s source story, but the screenplay makes this comparison much more explicit. McClane, the Rekall salesman, persuades Schwarzenegger’s Douglas Quaid to purchase a simulated vacation to Mars using a pitch that could have come right out of the mouths of one of Robert Altman’s desperate screenwriters in The Player (1992): “You get the girl, kill the bad guys, and save the entire planet. Now you tell me, isn’t that worth a measly 300 credits?” The technicians in the Rekall laboratory cobble together Quaid’s implanted memory out of generic plot points, asking questions that the four credited (and many other uncredited) screenwriters for Total Recall probably asked prospective producers throughout the scripting process, such as “Would you like us to integrate some alien stuff?” When Quaid settles in to the large cushy chair to begin the implant, he wears the earnest expectation of a moviegoer reclining into stadium seating as the lights go down in the theater; all he needs is a bucket of popcorn. In an allusion to the two-hour running time of most Hollywood movies, Quaid’s simulated memory is supposed to last two weeks. But when Quaid, wearing an outrageous disguise, tries to tell the Martian customs official the duration of his visit, the response “two weeks” becomes a drawn-out, tortured spasm of lost control. Quaid’s disguise malfunctions in the same way that the memory-implant procedure is alleged to have malfunctioned, turning “two weeks” into an indefinite term. Indeed, the master trope of the film as a whole is the possibility that the moviegoing experience may spill out of its two-hour time frame and bleed into the texture of extra-cinematic existence. Instead of spending two hours in movie-world, Quaid finds himself in the situation of living his entire existence in the warped ontological condition of movie-world, a dimension which does not collapse into either reality or illusion but is orbitally suspended in a state of hyperreality. Quaid’s uncanny ontological status must have seemed an eloquent metaphor for Schwarzenegger’s own fantastic success in the giddy swirl of the Hollywood illusion business, and for the manner in which his films and his screen persona had leaked off the screen to infiltrate the lives and minds of the people watching his films. Schwarzenegger’s first decision in putting together his production of Total Recall was to enroll Dutch director Paul Verhoeven on the strength of his Hollywood debut, RoboCop (1987). It is easy to imagine the stylistic similarities Schwarzenegger wanted to transport from RoboCop into Total Recall: not only the vivid blend of violence, humor, and action, but also the willingness to seriously consider the ontological conflicts associated with cyberculture. Officer Murphy, the Detroit police officer who is murdered and resurrected as RoboCop, has to come to terms with his new cyborg identity. Although he is anguished by his fragmentary memories of being human, he nevertheless achieves a profound style of heroism by embracing the new physical, emotional, and ethical possibilities that accompany his posthuman status. This dilemma of the protagonist who is uncomfortably positioned between two ontological registers—the actual and the artificial, the organic and the cybernetic, the

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real and the fictional—is in fact the master theme that runs throughout Verhoeven’s run of big-budget American films. RoboCop is Verhoeven’s most literal rendering of this predicament; a man is literally, physically fused with a techno-cultural apparatus. His prosthetic self is tangible in the form of his robot parts. Total Recall extends the same trope, but virtualizes it, so it is not Quaid’s body that is a blend of human and nonhuman components; it is his very existence. Quaid is a cyborg not in his physical body but in the very texture of his reality, including even his own psychology; his identity, his memories, his principles, and the world around him are all imbued with the same dreamlike hybridity of reality and unreality. In Verhoeven’s next film, the enormously successful Basic Instinct (1992), the science-fictional elements are replaced with noir stylings, but the ontological dilemma remains intact. Nick Curran discovers that he is unable to differentiate his own desires and motivations from those that are woven into him by Catherine Tramell’s manipulations. He may not have servo-mechanical limbs or computer-generated memories, but Nick’s mind is still trapped in a virtual maze designed by a writer of fiction; he is still living in an ontological blurring of real and unreal, and the movie’s final question is not whether he has been manipulated—that is obvious—but what kind of thing a man is that he can be so easily written, Borges-like, into Catherine’s fictional narrative with such deadly precision. In Showgirls (1995), Verhoeven seems to have overplayed his hand, stripping the metaphor away entirely by dramatizing the career of a Sister Carrie–like all-American girl who succeeds in the hyperreal environment of the Las Vegas showgirl circuit on the basis of her complete immersion within a hyperreal set of values. Audiences ridiculed and despised Showgirls because it announced openly what Verhoeven’s films had murmured covertly since RoboCop, that American reality is characterized by a hyperreal implosion of illusion and reality and that the hyperreal mediascape is the true homeland of the American consumer-filmgoer. The joke, however, is on Verhoeven’s detractors, because Showgirls has raked in 100 million dollars in video sales, making it one of MGM’s most profitable releases. It has gained cult status as a “guilty pleasure,” meaning that Americans can enjoy it—as Verhoeven intended them to—as an expression of desires that they recognize to be craven (the desire to fetishize yourself as a sex object, as a fictional character, as a Vegas showgirl living in a 24-hour-a-day illusion) and yet which also appeal in a primordial way to the coordinates of contemporary yearning. Verhoeven’s huge success in Hollywood is a testament to his genius in figuring out how to use movies to titillate Americans. The sex and violence is a given, but the theme of negotiating the labyrinth of hyperreality certainly plays an even more important role in explaining the popularity of these films, all of which examine the way we live now, how we became posthuman. Verhoeven’s Hollywood films use their narrative backgrounds to establish a way of reading the central action of the films’ stories. In RoboCop, the high-tech weaponry of the police force exists in ironic contrast to the urban squalor of the Detroit of the near future. In Basic Instinct, the San Francisco setting and the clichéd behavior of the supporting characters are a necessary component of Catherine’s plan to turn Nick into a fictional character. In Showgirls, foreground and background blend into one another, as the glitzy décor emblematizes the value system that motivates the main

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character, Nomi Malone, whose overwhelming desire, in turn, is to transform herself into a part of the glitz. In Total Recall, Verhoeven populates the world of 2084 with science-fictional gadgets that emphasize the hyperreal quality that saturates Quaid’s lifeworld, even before he falls under the spell of the memory machine. The vidphones that characters use as telephones are a deliberate homage to Dick’s original short story, as is the robot taxi driver, but both of these devices are elaborated upon in Total Recall in ways that underscore their connection to the book’s central conceit of the collapse of reality and representation. The intention of a vidphone is to simulate the presence of the interlocutor in a multisensory experience, and, indeed, when Cohaagen swivels around in his chair for the first time to appear on Richter’s vidphone screen, the effect is just as dramatic for the audience as if Richter were being directly introduced into the physical space of the scene. As far as a movie audience is concerned, all of the characters share the ontology of the image, so a movie character does not suffer any kind of ontological crisis or diminishment upon being translated into a simulacral modality. The images of talking heads that appear on the vidphones proliferate throughout the movie, which is crowded with such telepresent entities. Cohaagen makes several appearances on television, Dr Edgemar appears in a Rekall commercial, Melina’s face is displayed on a video monitor before she appears in the story (and when she does make her initial appearance, her profile is backgrounded by a wall-sized video screen), Hauser records a pair of messages for Quaid, and in each of these instances, the authenticity of the telepresent speaker is extremely problematic. Verhoeven’s mise-en-scène repeatedly positions his human characters among video representations in a way that implicitly comments on the ambiguous nature of the relationship between the human and posthuman figures. When Quaid passes out in the Rekall chair, the camera drifts up to the blinking lights of the apparatus and the image blurs out of focus. The scene then cuts to a close-up of a television screen depicting the muscular back of a man lifting weights. Our first impression is that Arnold Schwarzenegger’s character is dreaming of being a televisual muscle-man in what might be an intracinematic flashback to his real-world origins on the competitive body-building circuit. The strange juxtaposition traverses the diegetic element of Quaid’s dream, the real-world persona of Arnold Schwarzenegger as a celebrity muscle-man, and the mediated origins of this real-world figure, even as the camera pulls back to embed this image within a wider composition depicting the office of the Rekall salesman, in which the video image of the cryptoSchwarzenegger is revealed to be a clip from a promotional video about a simulated vacation to Venus. McClane and his client are sitting in front of the video screen when the camera pulls back to reveal McClane’s secretary behind a window in the background trying to alert McClane’s attention to the call coming in on his vidphone, which is positioned in the foreground and which displays the alarmed expression of the Rekall technician. The layers of depth in this composition oscillate between video representation and human characters in a way that evokes the vertigo of hyperreal indeterminacy. Verhoeven arranges another compelling composition toward the end of the film, when Cohaagen shows Quaid a recorded message from Quaid’s former self, Hauser. Cohaagen on the far left of the screen and Quaid on the far right stand on either

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side of the video image, in which Cohaagen stands on the right and Hauser on the left. In the immediate context of the story, the image suggests a chilling chiasmus. If video-Cohaagen is the same as real-Cohaagen, then to balance the equation, it must mean that Quaid and Hauser are the same person, and it is Quaid who is the term that does not fit into the formula. In regard to the theme of hyperreality in the movie as a whole, the composition requires the audience to consider the comparative claims on reality possessed by the real characters in the foreground and the video characters in the background. The video of Cohaagen and Hauser is introduced into the scene as definitive evidence that Quaid really is Hauser; the video representation is the key to the reality of Quaid’s situation. Similarly, the video reveals that the Quaid who stands outside the video, in what is ostensibly reality, is in fact the fictional character, invented as a part of a conspiracy concocted by Hauser and Cohaagen. The rules that normally regulate our evaluation of the truth-claims of video characters and real characters are uncannily inverted, and Quaid discovers that his video reflection is literally and historically his real self, while his physical body-self is revealed to be a construct. “We Can Remember It for You Wholesale” includes an exchange with a robot taxi driver who refers to Quail (the protagonist’s name in the story) as “sir or madam” in a parody of mechanical impersonality. Total Recall plays around with this narrative detail, reformulating it as Johnny Cab, a plucky animatronic bust capable of movements of the eyebrows, lips, and cheeks that allow it to express a very particular personality that has been programmed into it, that of an affable Frank Capra-esque wise guy. The presence of Johnny Cab in the consumer lifeworld of Total Recall suggests that programmed personalities are relatively commonplace in the world of 2084, providing a social context for the programmed personality that Quaid discovers himself to be. Specifically, the Johnny Cab driver associates simulacral personality with the impersonal context of a commercial transaction. Johnny Cab is a logical extension of any consumer’s ideal customer servant, a model of service with a simulated smile. Throughout the Johnny Cab chase scene, illuminated advertisements for contemporary consumer goods (Coca-Cola, Marlboro, Bacardi), and especially video equipment (Phillips, Fuji, Sony), indicate that our world already has one foot in the hyperreal future of Johnny Cab–style customer interface. Other details of Total Recall’s 2084 contribute to the sense that our near future is dominated by technologies of virtualization. Quaid’s wife Lori practises her tennis serve with a holographic trainer in their apartment, the walls of which function as television screens. Quaid wants to watch the news of the Martian insurgency, but Lori attempts to bring him “down to earth” by changing the channel to a scenic mountain landscape, a panorama of idealized nature intended to simulate a view from a window. The association of television with the characteristics of both a window and a wall suggests the philosophical dilemma of whether we look through mediated images to an originary reality (as one looks through a window at a landscape) or whether we look at them as self-sufficient entities (as one looks at a wall). This binary undecidability in the ontology of simulated entities is more explicitly evoked in one of the most advanced sci-fi gadgets to appear in Total Recall, Quaid’s hologram-watch, a device capable of casting a holographic double of the wearer in another location as a way of confounding

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pursuers. This watch plays an integral role in allowing Quaid to dispatch Cohaagen’s henchmen in the climax of the movie. Thinking that they are shooting at the “real” Quaid, the henchmen fire bullets into one another. Uncertain as to whether the “real” Quaid is real or not, the henchmen hesitate long enough to allow Quaid to get the jump on them. In addition to extending the theme of the shifting relationship between reality and representation and requiring the audience to consider Quaid in terms of shifting modes of physical and virtual reality, the hologram-watch fight sequence also suggests a manner in which Quaid is coming to terms with his own hyperreal status and even learning to capitalize on the advantages hyperreal indeterminacy may afford as a strategy for action. The watch, a gift from his “real” self, becomes a tool for combating that real self through the power, not of illusion but of the dissolution of the distinction between illusion and reality. Total Recall’s most important sci-fi device, however, is of course the Rekall machine, a cross between a CAT scanner, a Barcalounger, and a Christmas tree. Ultimately, however, it is a story-telling machine, and like the story-telling machines in our own world, its most socially visible application is as a form of entertainment. Rekall’s advertisements promise to make their clients’ dreams come true in an immersive simulation that is really only the logical extension of cinematic development into more persuasive technologies of mimesis, from moving pictures through talkies, color cinematography, wide-screen aspect ratios, 3-D, CGI, and digital advances in image resolution. Given this steady progression, it is easy to imagine that technologies which would allow the beaming of a film directly into an audience’s consciousness are coming inevitably down the technological pipeline. The Rekall machine appeals to the appetite for hyperreality that Umberto Eco describes when he observes that “[t]he pleasure of imitation, as the ancients knew, is one of the most innate in the human spirit; but [in Disneyworld] we not only enjoy a perfect imitation, we also enjoy the conviction that the imitation has reached its apex and afterwards reality will always be inferior to it” (46). When Quaid buys his ticket to the Rekall show, however, he stumbles upon a deeper dimension of memory-implant technology, its military application. In a manner reminiscent of Paul Virilio’s analysis of the coevolution of cinematic and military techniques, the narrative of Total Recall revolves around the circumstance that the Rekall entertainment system has a more fundamental identity as a technology of militaristic control and colonization. Quaid’s memory-implant procedure goes awry because it runs up against a deeper stratum of Quaid’s identity that has already been reconfigured by Rekall technology. What Quaid had interpreted as a fantasy of going to Mars had actually been a memory of actual Martian adventures which had been deliberately suppressed as part of Cohaagen’s plot to use Quaid to crush the Martian rebellion. While the entertainment-function of the Rekall device had appealed to Quaid’s dreams of a possible future, the military-function of the technology is and always had been utilized to imprison him within a simulacral past and to derealize his own existence. “Sorry Quaid,” Lori tells him, after admitting that their entire marriage had been a memory implant, “your whole life is just a dream.” The same technology that had promised to allow Quaid to escape from his reality into an entertaining illusion has the opposite effect, exposing Quaid’s “real” life as an illusion and providing

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clues which seem to lead him to his real self. In fact, however, the more fundamental effect of the Rekall machine on Quaid’s consciousness is the dispersal of reality and illusion themselves as terms capable of describing his unique situation. From the point at which Quaid falls asleep in the Rekall machine and throughout the rest of the film, the audience of Total Recall is never certain whether what we are watching is taking place in reality or in Quaid’s mind. The fact that the details of Quaid’s journey seem to correspond with the details of the Rekall package Quaid purchased leads us to conclude that the narrative is in fact a dream, but the possibility that Quaid may have chosen those details out of a subconscious memory of his real Martian experiences throws us back onto the possibility that Quaid really is and has been the secret agent Hauser. Ultimately, the ontological mood of Total Recall never collapses into either realism or fantasy but remains suspended in a register that is the essence of Jean Baudrillard’s fourth stage of simulation in which the image “has no relation to any reality whatsoever” (SS 6). If Quaid’s adventures on Mars are illusory, then he is really himself, and his actions, although they are imaginary, are at least rooted in a real past of true experiences. But if we assume, as Quaid does, that his Martian adventures are real, then “Quaid” is a fictional consciousness programmed by Cohaagen as part of an elaborate plan to infiltrate the anticolonial rebellion. Through the magic of Rekall technologies, Cohaagen is able to put Hauser under a cover so deep that Hauser’s personality is in virtual abeyance, supposedly stored to a computer disc like Hans Moravec’s cybernated consciousness. Taking his place is the patsy Quaid, a fictional consciousness grafted onto Hauser’s body, who is programmed in such a way that he will be predisposed to resist Cohaagen and sympathize with the rebels in order to lead Cohaagen’s assassin to the rebel leader, Kuato. Cohaagen is thus the Catherine Tramell of Total Recall (one of his minions, Quaid’s phony wife, is played by Sharon Stone), manipulating everyone around him into becoming characters in a fiction of which he is the author, and consequently possessing a godlike power. Cohaagen’s lieutenant, Richter, is also unwittingly programmed into the plot. Cohaagen tells Richter, “You do what you’re told; that’s what you do,” even as he includes Richter’s hot-headedness into his Machiavellian calculations. It is impossible to ignore the echo of Verhoeven’s own name in Cohaagen’s, an allusion which reinforces Cohaagen’s identity as a weaver of fictions. While Verhoeven manipulates characters and audience members with the technology of cinema, Cohaagen’s secret weapon is the Rekall device. Cohaagen enforces discipline among his men by threatening to “erase your ass,” like a director threatening to edit an insubordinate actor from the final cut of a film, and of course, the central element of his plan involves using Rekall technology to replace Hauser’s consciousness with Quaid’s and then, after the plan is accomplished, to turn Quaid back into Hauser, like a director shuffling his actor’s roles. Throughout the movie, while Quaid thought he was behaving heroically, he was really acting out Cohaagen’s script. Quaid’s own psychology has always already been a component of his simulacral context. It is not that he has been advancing Cohaagen’s agenda (real) while he thought he was utilizing his own free will (illusory). Rather, it is the case that Quaid’s free will itself has been engineered by Cohaagen. Quaid’s psychology is not controlled or manipulated; rather, it is colonized on a genetic level,

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a dynamic echoed in Cohaagen’s more traditional kinds of colonial behavior. Under such circumstances, political agency becomes either self-defeating or absurd. Rekall technologies support Cohaagen’s regime, therefore, not only by controlling people, but also, more importantly, by making reality over as a fiction. It is unclear how much forethought Cohaagen had put into engineering Quaid’s personality, but we can assume that he needed his reverse-double agent to be competent and courageous enough to achieve the goal of getting to Mars and penetrating the rebel command structure. At the same time, however, Quaid would have to be humble enough to keep from suspecting that he was an interplanetary superspy and he would have to be sufficiently blue-collar to sympathize with the rebels and to perceive the oligarchical Cohaagen as the enemy. At the end of the movie, when it looks like Cohaagen is going to succeed in turning Quaid back into Hauser, Cohaagen tells Quaid, “In five minutes, you won’t give a shit about” the Martian citizens who are being suffocated in accordance with Cohaagen’s tyrannical policies. Quaid’s ethics and his politics are a component of his simulacral history, and that history itself is one which Cohaagen, mimicking the God of Genesis, has invented as a trompe l’oeil illusion. The particular kind of God Cohaagen mimics is the God described by the nineteenth-century theologian and naturalist P. H. Gosse, who hypothesized that God created Adam and, indeed, the entire world, with physical signs of having previously existed (geological strata, tree rings, navels) as well as, for Adam, a past that is the equivalent of Rekall’s memory implant. Gosse’s thesis has been frequently ridiculed—a mock-school of thought known as Last Tuesdayism pretends to believe that the world was created with its entire false history just last Tuesday—but Bertrand Russell admits that “[t]here is no logical impossibility in the hypothesis that the world sprang into being five minutes ago, exactly as it then was, with a population that ‘remembered’ a wholly unreal past” (159). Indeed, Gosse’s outrageous thesis has provoked twentiethcentury commentaries from Jorge Luis Borges, Stephen J. Gould, and Baudrillard, each of whom uses Gosse’s depiction of a simulated past as a way of revisiting the basic ontological assumptions that structure our perception of time and identity. According to Baudrillard, “Gosse’s idea opens on to some surprising horizons and one quite serious possibility. It even assumes a prophetic air. For his hypothesis is indeed coming true: the whole of our past is indeed sliding into a fossilized simulacrum, but it is man who has inherited the evil genius of artifice which was God’s. Today the virtual reconstruction of the genesis of the species is the work of human beings themselves, and it is becoming the virtual reality of our past and future” (PC 22). Cohaagen’s political power is founded on his ability to conceal history—he suppresses the rebels, conceals the discovery of Martian artifacts, and commits genocide against populations of mutants—but the Rekall machine gives him the uniquely godlike power to actually invent a false history. In this sense, the political effects of the Rekall machine parallel the effect which Baudrillard frequently ascribes to film technology, as in his appraisal that “cinema itself contributed to the disappearance of history” (SS 48). In derealizing history, “artificial memory technologies,” be they optical or neural, simultaneously generate a situation in which “All of reality—present, past and future—suddenly comes into doubt” (PC 25).

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All movie characters, like all fictional characters in general, come into existence in the same manner as Quaid, out of a nihilo that is deliberately, artfully masked by an arch deceiver whose ability to maintain his characters in a state of obliviousness concerning the fictionality of their history is coextensive with his ability to mask the fictional status of their entire existence. Quaid is thus a stand-in for the fictional character as such, a creature whose essence lies not in some liberal humanist conception of rational autonomy, but which owes its identity to master-manipulators like Verhoeven and Cohaagen, “Dutch masters” representing conjointly the entertainment and interplanetary colonization industries. In this sense, the fictional character and the posthuman subject are both characterized by their origins in an anamorphic past, their liminal existential status, and their embeddedness within networks of capital and control. Rather than succumbing to postmodern despair, however, Quaid takes gleeful ownership of his hyperreal identity. In a device which would be appropriated nine years later in The Matrix, Dr Edgemar offers Quaid a red pill as a “symbol of [his] desire to return to reality.” Dr Edgemar’s name evokes the ontological balance that this scene achieves between the two interpretations of Quaid’s situation, that he is a real man in a fake world (he is asleep in the Rekall machine) or that he is a fake man in a real world (he is Cohagen’s fictional character). The mirrored closet doors of Quaid’s hotel room are also used several times throughout the scene to indicate the double-reading this scene invites. Most conspicuously, when Edgemar tells Quaid, “I’m afraid you’re not really standing there right now,” the camera angle positions Edgemar between Quaid and Quaid’s mirror image, adding a level of ambiguity to the meaning of “there,” an ambiguity which is further doubled by the cinematic nature of the entire image. Dreams, mirrors, and movies are all phenomena that lend credibility to Edgemar’s deliberately provocative statement. It is true that all of the evidence seems to support Edgemar’s thesis that Quaid is dreaming—all of the details of Quaid’s adventure can be traced to elements of the simulated vacation package that Quaid paid for—and yet the trickle of sweat on Edgemar’s forehead is enough to convince Quaid, and possibly the audience, that Edgemar is being paid by Cohaagen to lure Quaid back into his oblivious cover. The Möbius-relationship between the two interpretations of this scene is accentuated by the fact that this scene is actually Edgemar’s second appearance in the film. Previously, he had appeared as the spokesperson for Rekall in the advertisement that convinces Quaid to go to Rekall at the beginning of the film. The Edgemar who is the earnest advocate for reality in the later scene is the same figure who, in a mirror-like inversion, had been the persuasive pitchman for rejecting the cumbersome obsolescence of reality with the vividness and convenience of simulated memory. Both Edgemars, furthermore, are phantastic images—as a character in a television commercial and as a figure who has been, according to his report, “artificially implanted” into Quaid’s “freeform delusion.” The parallelism between Edgemar’s two appearances suggests the extent to which Quaid is immersed in a state of being that is fundamentally hyperreal, for even if Edgemar is telling the truth and Quaid is a real person having a zany dream, his lifeworld had already been hyperrealized by the technologies of simulation. Of course, the audience cheers along when our hero shoots Edgemar in the head; we want to believe in the action hero narrative for the same

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reason that Quaid wants to—we are invested in the story, we want to see what happens next, we recoil at the breach of contract that occurs when a story teller interrupts a narrative to explain that “it was all a dream.” We go to movies in order to inhabit the hyperreal atmosphere of simulated experience, and Quaid commits himself to the same values. As soon as Quaid shoots Dr Edgemar, the walls of the room explode in an apparent confirmation of Edgemar’s prediction that if Quaid opted to pull the trigger, “The walls of reality will come crashing down.” Quaid is undeterred, however, and he doubles down on his decision to shoot Dr Edgemar when, presented with the evidence that “Quaid” is not even a real person within the terms of the dream-narrative, Quaid dismisses his “real” self as a “fucking asshole” and plays out his heroic narrative in blissful unconcern regarding its origin or authenticity. Quaid’s decision to act as the champion for the mutants of Mars is motivated by a basic similarity between their predicament and his own. The psychic mutants in Total Recall are adapted from several other Dick narratives, most notably the 1965 novel Dr. Bloodmoney. Kuato, the rebel leader who lives inside a man’s chest, is a homage to Bill Keller, the character from Dick’s novel who lives as a conjoined fetal twin in his sister’s body and who, like Kuato, has telepathic abilities. Total Recall shares Dick’s interest in the humanity of mutant characters. Dick’s mutants are not monsters, but sympathetic figures trying to negotiate the uncanny type of existence they have inherited. Quaid and the mutants are natural allies, for the manner in which the mutants’ genetic code has been scrambled as a result of the corporate technologies of Martian colonization mirrors the manner in which the language of Quaid’s very existence (is it fiction or nonfiction?) has been digitized and reassembled by the Rekall device. Moreover, rather than retreating in anguish or despair, the mutants of Venusville flaunt their deformities for kink appeal like the characters in J. G. Ballard’s Crash, pioneers of a postmodern bodily aesthetic. Whether as prostitutes or as fortune-tellers, the mutants make a living out of their exotic bodies and minds. When the (supposedly) “normal” Vinnie tells a three-breasted prostitute that she makes him “wish [he] had three hands,” her self-assured expression confirms that it is the “normal” human male who is deficient in relation to her mutational largesse. The mutants’ political resistance against Cohaagen, furthermore, is organized around the telepathic leadership of Kuato, demonstrating that the mutants exploit the advantages of mutation in order to liberate themselves from the very colonial power responsible for inducing their mutations in the first place. The mutants show no sign of being discouraged or distressed by what some might consider this contradiction in their ideology; they are not preoccupied with some ideal of a past perfection or profound reality from which they have strayed. Rather, their postcolonial identity is summed up in Kuato’s existential dictum “A man is defined by his action, not his memory.” For Quaid, Kuato’s aphorism suggests that reality is experiential rather than objective, and that whether an experience is real, unreal, or hyperreal, or whether a person’s memory is simulated or factual, has no bearing on the shape of the phenomenological moment. Bertrand Russell expressed a similar sentiment when he dismissed P. H. Gosse’s theory as possible but irrelevant. Kuato’s slogan has a similar meaning for the mutant colonists (in 2084 and 1990), who must develop their

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own postcolonial and posthuman identities out of the inner logic of their emergent planetary and genetic situations. As the central and perhaps sole inhabitant of this new kind of reality, Quaid is a unique type of hero. When we root for him to escape danger, defeat Cohaagen, win the girl, and save Mars, we do so alongside an awareness that the danger, Cohaagen, the girl, and Mars itself are all possibly nonexistent. To be sure, this is always part of the experience of the consumer of fiction, but Total Recall pulls the issue of “the suspension of disbelief ” (to borrow a term from Catherine Tramell) into the texture of the story itself to depict a world in which lived experience is infused with the ontological quality of fiction. Quaid himself has to keep his own doubts at bay in order to act, and it is not until his very last line in the movie that he can voice his “terrible thought” that all of his accomplishments have been illusory. Fortunately, Quaid is in a unique position to be able to cope with this vertiginous atmosphere of porous reality because of the fact that his own psychology is a hyperreal construct. If Quaid does manage to overthrow Cohaagen’s regime of totalitarian control, it is due to the fact that the influences of hyperreality cannot be contained. In the same way that the Martians claim their mutated genome as a source of empowerment, Quaid makes peace with his mutated ontology, even puckishly exploiting his ambiguous style of presence with his holographic watch trick in the climax of the movie. Quaid may be a fictional construct, but he is a fictional construct come to life with a determination to push his narrative through to the end. When Quaid defeats Cohaagen and reinvents Mars, it is a case of fiction murdering reality and establishing its own kingdom. The alien apparatus which Quaid activates to generate an atmosphere for Mars is doubly mysterious, not only because it was created by an unknown race of aliens who died out a million years ago but also because this machine, which supposedly might have saved the ancient Martians, was never activated by them. In this sense, the machine represents the alienness of the past itself in all of its uncanny strangeness. Out of this science-fictional past, Quaid reshapes his entire environment into a surreal, impossible mutation in the DNA of reality: a blue sky on Mars. The terraformed Martian landscape that Quaid surveys at the end of the movie is saturated with an ontological ambiguity that reflects his own ambiguous ontological status. Perhaps Arnold Schwarzenegger felt a glimmer of that same ambiguity on November 17, 2003, when he looked out onto the crowd of Californians witnessing his inauguration as their new “Governator.” Gary Indiana describes Schwarzenegger’s electoral victory as evidence that American politics had definitively devolved into an empty spectacle. “The total experience of having a relationship with Arnold Schwarzenegger that many people believed they had, and its transference from the world of make-believe into the arena of government, spoke to the possibility that the democratic experiment was rapidly mutating into a ceremonial fantasy” (60). At the same time, the fluidity of Schwarzenegger’s transition from cinematic to political figure is dramatic evidence of the degree to which American political life has been coextensive with movie culture since the beginning of the twentieth century. This bidirectional collapse of categories suggests that the whole complex of public spectacle and political identity has always been eminently hyperreal, understood best not as a play of reality against illusion but as a hybrid entity weaving together strands of both.

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Schwarzenegger’s iconic performance as The Terminator has been the most exhaustively referenced cinematic allusion in reportage of his political activities, but Total Recall runs a close second because of the coincidence of the psychological and electoral meanings of “recall.” The title of the film is doubly ironic because, first of all, “total recall,” the eventuality of Quaid (or rather, Hauser) regaining his complete memory, never comes to pass and, secondly, because what does in fact happen in the movie is a willful forgetting: Quaid eliminates every vestige of his identity as Hauser by destroying Cohaagen and the means of production which supported Cohaagen’s empire. What is accomplished in the movie is a total “recall” in the electoral sense—a radical reversal, cancellation, and annulment of memory, reality, and even identity itself. As Arnold’s character will assert in True Lies, “Total is a strong word,” and “Total Recall” in this electoral sense, indicates a negation of the consensus view of reality, a negation that is altogether universal and irreversible.

Terminator 2: Judgment Day Of all the cinematic visions of the end of civilization dramatized by American movies over the decades, one of the most memorable is the apocalypse that is the narrative center of the Terminator franchise: the rise of the machines and their systematic liquidation of the human race. According to the timeline presented in 1984’s The Terminator, Skynet, the intelligent computer program designed to coordinate the US defense network, became self-aware in 1997 and “decided our fate in a microsecond. Extermination.” In 1991’s Terminator 2: Judgment Day, the top-grossing film of that year, the subtitle refers to August 29, 1997, when Skynet will have launched the US nuclear arsenal against Russia in order to provoke the retaliatory counterattack that will kill three billion people and make the world available for conquest by the machines. In both movies, characters from the postapocalyptic future travel backward in time into the preapocalyptic present, infecting the security and peace of contemporary civilization with the dire prophecy that they embody. Whereas postapocalyptic movies have become a familiar subgenre, James Cameron’s two Terminator movies stage a more subtle preapocalyptic situation. In doing so, they represent the apocalypse not as a concrete reality but as a future possibility, a time-sense that more accurately reflects the temporal character of the apocalypse as it exists for those of us living in preapocalyptic times. This narrative twist allows the first two Terminator movies to articulate much more compelling depictions of the phenomenology of apocalyptic scenarios as they actually exist in contemporary society, as compared to the depictions enacted in the more literal genre of postapocalyptic narratives, which tend to reiterate themes and situations familiar from the genre of the Western. In Terminator 1 and 2, the imminent end of the world forces its way into Sarah Connor’s consciousness like a retroactive trauma, a memory of the future that infects all of present reality in its perceptual structure. The Terminator films employ the Baudrillardian trope of the “copy without an original” in a way that relates the paradoxical situation of the backward time-traveler

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with the paradoxical relationship between human beings and the apocalypse they anticipate. Like a backward–time traveler who makes himself come true, the apocalypse is a collective attempt to channel an eschatological sensibility into present reality, thereby projecting it into the future. We think of the apocalypse as a future event, but it is fundamentally a way of framing present experience, and indeed, all of human history, within a totalized narrative with a beginning, middle, and end. To this extent, the apocalypse is not simply something that will happen; it is a structure of perception that saturates lived experience and reconceptualizes the present as preapocalyptic. This aspect of the apocalyptic imagination was expressed by Frank Kermode as the distinction between the imminent apocalypse, that which awaits us in the future, and the immanent apocalypse, that which “throws the weight of ‘End-feeling’ onto the moment, the crisis” (25), illuminating present experience with eschatological intimations. Baudrillard makes a similar distinction when he postulates that despite the widespread demand for a “violent resolution of reality”—an imminent apocalypse— the apocalypse continues to “elude our grasp in an endless hyperreality” (IE 8). The apocalyptic explosion “is always a promise, it is our hope. … But that is precisely what will never happen. What will happen will never again be the explosion, but the implosion” (SS 55). In contemporary reality as Baudrillard describes it, “Everything has already become nuclear, faraway, vaporized. The explosion has already occurred. … Everything has already been wiped off the map” (AR 34). Both Terminator movies dramatize a preapocalyptic situation in which the technological apocalypse is already immanent, already implicit in the immediate environment. All of the action in both movies is motivated by the characters’ preoccupation with this strange kind of future that penetrates into the present and walks among us. The specific nature of the immanent apocalypse portrayed in both films, however, undergoes a crucial shift in the development from Terminator 1 to Terminator 2, a shift which corresponds with an ambiguity in Baudrillard’s description of the hyperreal, imploded apocalypse. On the one hand, “the precession of the effects over their causes,” according to which the apocalypse, like everything else, “happen[s] before having happened,” represents “the definition of fate” (FS 198). The effect that preexists its cause is fated to meet up with its cause; its future is established as a condition of its ontological structure. The inexorability of this fatalistic time-sense is captured in the temporality of Terminator 1. The events surrounding Sarah’s first encounter with the terminator robot suggest that the characters in the original film are all caught in a closed temporal loop at the center of which is the once and future apocalypse. But Baudrillard also describes fate as a “reversible imminence” (FS 179), suggesting that hyperreal reversibility results in the disappearance of “the rational principle that prevents the effect from returning back on the cause to cancel it out” (FS 112). In this more open-ended time-sense, past and future have no obligation to the present. Past and future are reversible and paradoxical, “connected—not at all according to rational relations … but according to an incessant cycle of metamorphoses” (FS 185). This pataphysical time-sense, also characteristic of a hyperreal condition, accurately describes the temporality of Terminator 2, in which the overriding hyperreal tone of the film itself seems to propel the narrative to an “escape velocity” (to use a Baudrillardian term) that liberates the narrative and the characters

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from any accountability to fatalistic imperatives. The conceptual flexibility both of Baudrillard’s theoretics and of Cameron’s imagined universe allows for the expression of both of these formulations of the immanent technopocalypse. Although both Terminator movies take place in the preapocalyptic period, the sense that the apocalypse is immanent as well as imminent is embedded in the texture of the films’ narrative space. The Terminator films establish a technopocalyptic scenario in which human beings invent their own apocalypse. Unlike the apocalypse that is brought about by alien invasion, a strange new disease, an astronomical event, or the wrath of God, the technopocalypse is a fate mankind has brought on themselves as a result of their Faustian pride in their own ingenuity. Terminator’s technopocalypse suggests that the teleological thrust of our technological society has always been a push toward the apocalyptic moment at which human beings would tinker themselves out of existence. Terminator’s technopocalypse is the cinematic expression of the impulse Paul Virilio described as “philanoia, this love of madness on the part of the sciences and technologies, which is now seeking to organize the self-extermination of a species that is too slow” (Ground Zero 14–15). The opening scene of Terminator 1 plunges us into the world of 2029, in which Los Angeles is reduced to a twisted landscape of wreckage and where automated killing machines seek and destroy the remnant of human survivors. The movie’s preliminary shots establish this postapocalyptic situation as the initial point of orientation for the movie and the series as a whole, giving the main events of The Terminator, which transpire in 1984, the feel of a flashback. This postapocalyptic frame of perception invests the whole movie with a tragic fatalism, and particularly informs the signification of the movie’s many mechanical objects. Cars, trucks, factories, bulldozers, cranes, and motorcycles are commonplace objects of the 1980s Los Angeles lifeworld, but from the perspective of the posttechnopocalyptic future, these machines are clearly depicted as the precursors to the homicidal robots that will destroy us. Cameron invests these machines with proleptic menace in the very beginning of the movie when he cuts from the death-machines of 2029 to a disorientingly looming metal shape moving through the night sky. Is it another futuristic killing machine? No, it turns out to be the hydraulic prongs of a front-loading garbage truck. Our relief at the banal innocuousness of this image, however, is troubled by the suggestion that our urban landscape is saturated with signs of the coming apocalypse. This sense is reiterated again when Reese falls asleep in a car and the mechanical noises of a nearby construction site induce a reverie that is simultaneously a flashback and a flashforward of the hunter-killer robots of the future. Indeed, this association between innocent everyday gadgets and the future apocalypse they cryptically prophesy is a motif throughout Terminator 1, inflecting the significance of all of the movie’s representations of technology, a few significant examples of which include the answering machine in Sarah’s apartment, Ginger’s Walkman, and the futuristic ambiance of the Tech Noir club where Sarah has her first encounter with the terminator robot. Constance Penley, commenting on the dense atmosphere of mechanical devices in Terminator 1, argues that “Today’s machines are not … shown to be agents of destruction because they themselves are evil, but

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because they can break down, or be used (often innocently) in ways they were not intended to be used” (127). Penley advances this position in support of her reading of Terminator 1 as a “critical dystopia,” in which technology is represented not as a deterministically apocalyptic force but as a neutral tool that human beings are free to use for good or ill upon their own discretion. Penley’s thesis, however, is contradicted not only in the central plot point of the Terminator universe—that the machines obey their own technological imperative in their decision to eliminate the human race— but also in the more subtle details of the role played by technology in the characters’ preapocalyptic lives. If Ginger had answered the phone herself instead of relying on the answering machine, her life might have been saved. If Sarah had not left her whereabouts on the recorded message, the terminator would not have been able to track her to the Tech Noir club. If Ginger had not been wearing her Walkman, she would have heard the sounds of her boyfriend being killed in the kitchen and could have escaped or sought help. In all of these situations, the technological devices are not malfunctioning, nor are they being used improperly. In each case, these devices are doing their appointed work of saving their owners the labor of speaking to each other (in the case of the answering machine) or of thinking their own thoughts (in the case of the Walkman). The answering machine removes the human being from the social role of direct communication. The Walkman serves a similar role of removing the Walkman listener from any perceptual engagement in a shared social world. For Ginger, her wish to cut herself off from the human world with the answering machine and the Walkman result in her being murdered by a machine that is a kind of advanced iteration of the same technology. Ginger’s murder by the terminator is therefore a kind of literalization of the virtual self-extermination that Ginger’s technological devices had allowed her to achieve. The Tech Noir club provides another instance of the same pattern. The clientele of Tech Noir come to the club to immerse themselves in a totalized technological environment in which the stainless steel décor, the flashing laser lights, and the synthesized pulse of the music overwhelm individuality, vocal communication, and subjectivity itself. They are seen dancing in solipsistic obliviousness, abandoning themselves to the promise of technology to relieve them of the burden of existence. There is a poetic justice in the emergence of the terminator robot into this fetishistic techno-dystopia, soullessly distributing a literal annihilation that is a kind of fulfillment to the posthuman aspirations of the club-goers. In this manner, the technopocalypse to come is represented as a metaphor for the technopocalypse that has already taken place. The terminator cyborg only finishes the job that the answering machine, Walkman, and techno music had initiated. This situation recalls Heidegger’s observation in “The Question Concerning Technology” that “The threat to man does not come in the first instance from the potentially lethal machines and apparatus of technology. The actual threat has already afflicted man in his essence” (29). Before the lethal machines actually show up, the fascination with technology and technological modes of thinking falsifies our relationship to nature and to ourselves, a variety of self-termination which makes robo-execution more or less redundant. In Terminator 2, the sight of two boys playing with guns causes John Connor to suspect the inevitability of technologically

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mediated human self-termination on a global scale: “We’re not gonna make it, are we?” The reprogrammed terminator, drawing on his “detailed files” of human history and psychology, shares his objective assessment of mankind that “It is in your nature to destroy yourselves.” His description of the apocalypse as a self-induced human deed underscores the insinuation throughout these two movies that technology is not an Other that attacks humanity from outside; human beings bring about the technopocalypse as a fulfillment of their own nihilistic desire. Baudrillard speculates on the ontological underpinnings that may motivate this technological deathinstinct. “Perhaps thought is, ultimately, horrified by itself in its incompleteness, its ever unverifiable form, which is always irremediably complicit with a questioning and an illusion; perhaps it wants, in the end, to produce itself as function, fulfill itself as desire? … Artificial intelligence represents the final solution to the problem of thought” (IEx 112). Baudrillard self-consciously employs the phrase “final solution” to associate the Nazi’s attempt to exterminate their undesirable citizenry with an underlying will to accomplish the technologically mediated extermination of human existence itself, and Cameron seems to suggest a corresponding comparison in his use of Holocaust imagery to describe human existence in a machine-controlled world, where human beings are concentrated into camps, branded with serial numbers on their forearms, and either killed outright or kept alive to work. In both Baudrillard’s formulation and Cameron’s narrative, humans use technology as a way of refining themselves out of existence. The answering machine relieves human beings of the need to talk to people, the Walkman relieves human beings of their need to think their own thoughts, Skynet relieves human beings of any responsibility for their geopolitical situation, and artificial intelligence replaces the need for human intelligence. The grand achievement of the techno-utopia is that human beings are entirely de trop, entirely free, entirely useless. The climax of Terminator 1 takes place in an automated factory, a sidewise reference to ’80s-era political controversy about the displacement of human workers by automated assembly lines. In the context of the movie as a whole, the argument that automation kills manufacturing jobs is wittily extended to imply that the universal automation of global affairs which Skynet seeks to bring about will kill the “job” of human beings as a species. Once the entire world is an automated factory, humanity will have achieved its apparent goal of technologizing itself into obsolescence. In Terminator 2, the sense in which technology “afflicts man in his essence,” functioning to terminate human existence in a preapocalyptic mode, is embodied in the character of Miles Dyson, the Cyberdyne computer whiz who is destined to make the engineering breakthrough that will result in Skynet’s capacity to bring about the end of the world. In his brief scenes, he is represented as a suburban Faust, a family man who is so absorbed in his technological inventiveness that he is becoming a stranger to his own family. Pressed by his wife to explain the reasons for his preoccupation with his work, he tells her to “[i]magine a jet airliner with a pilot that never gets tired, never makes mistakes, never shows up to work with a hangover.” In the same way that the perfect factory is one from which the human workers have been eliminated, so does the ideal airplane have no human pilot. The large dinosaur toy which incongruously adorns Miles’s Cyberdyne office space suggests that the true work of the Cyberdyne

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Corporation is human extinction, and Miles speaks an ironic truth when he says of his latest research, “This is gonna blow ‘em all away.” Miles’s techno-utopia is thus coterminous with the technopocalypse in that it is a world from which human beings have been eliminated, and it is only a simple extension of Miles’s logic to jump from an airplane that does not rely on human beings to the flying machines of the postapocalyptic future which are programmed to eliminate human beings from the world altogether. But Miles is not primarily intent on eliminating airplane pilots from the world; the primary function of his life’s work is the elimination of himself from his own life. His wife is clearly correct in her accusation that Miles’s heart and mind are in his neural net processor rather than with his family, and her description of Miles’s son and daughter as his “other babies” emphasizes the fact that his biological progeny inhabit a subordinate position in the structure of Miles’s operational parameters. Although Miles agrees to take his children to the water park, it is clear from his body language that his real life takes place in the circuits of the neural net processor. As happened with Ginger and the Tech Noir clubbers, an assassin from the future threatens to make Miles’s dream of technologically mediated self-extinction come true. This is a familiar pattern from Terminator 1, but with the significant twist that Miles’s assassin is not actually a cyborg from the future, but Sarah Connor, behaving in every way exactly like a killer cyborg from the future. The scene in which Sarah attempts to murder Miles represents a culminating irony in the development of Sarah Connor’s character. Sarah’s encounter with the first ­terminator in Terminator 1 impresses upon her the violent essence of technology, ­ripping her out of her ’80s’ lifestyle of consumer gadgets and her “Jetsons” tee-shirt and transforming her into a low-tech guerilla. She trades her hair-dryer for an automatic weapon, her motor-scooter for a jeep, and her cold-blooded iguana for a trusty mammalian dog, and we last see her leaving the freeways and skyscrapers of Los Angeles for the rugged Mexican desert. Her love affair with the time-traveling resistance fighter Reese, culminating in his tragic self-sacrifice, has caused her to introject his worldview and mode of life, making her effectively a postapocalyptic warrior living in preapocalyptic times. In Terminator 1, while Reese and Sarah sleep under a bridge, the scene cuts to a flashback/flashforward of Reese’s postapocalyptic home, but when the film cuts back to Reese and Sarah, it is revealed that what we were seeing was Sarah’s dream of Reese’s postapocalyptic home, replete with details that she would have no way of knowing. Reese even explains to her that the dogs in her dream were the dogs they use in the future to detect infiltrating terminators. Sarah’s contact with the coming technopocalypse has affected her not only in the way she thinks but also in the way she exists; it has punched through the conventional barriers represented by linear chronology and has caused her to exist with a new relationship to time. From the moment the battling time-travelers materialize in Sarah’s world, her life becomes something different from what it had been, owing its motivational force not to her preapocalyptic memories but to her relationship to the future postapocalyptic situation. This twist in Sarah’s temporality becomes more explicit in Terminator 2, in which Sarah’s nightmare of the nuking of Los Angeles becomes a framing device for the whole movie, repeated in various degrees of detail three times throughout the narrative.

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In  James Cameron’s Aliens, Ripley’s chronic nightmares about her experiences from the first movie could be overcome by returning to the scene of the crime and defeating the monsters once and for all. For Sarah Connor, however, traumatized by something that has not even happened yet, no such reprieve is possible. Sarah’s newly configured temporal situation indicates that the technological wizardry of time travel has unhinged Sarah from conventional patterns of human existence. Dr Silverman, Sarah’s psychologist, may be a buffoon, but he is certainly correct in his assessment that Sarah needs to be confined to a maximum security mental institution for the safety of herself and that of other people. Indeed, within 24 hours of escaping from Pascadero, she is outside Miles Dyson’s house with a sniper rifle. The metallic percussive leitmotif that has been associated with the Arnold Schwarzenegger terminator plays on the soundtrack, and Sarah uses the same laser pointer targeting device that was aimed at her own head by the terminator at Tech Noir in Terminator 1. It is clear that Sarah Connor, mother of the resistance against the machines, has somehow become technologized in her being. It is as if she had introjected not only the postapocalyptic awareness of timetraveling Reese but also the apocalyptic inhumanity of the time-traveling terminator cyborg. Indeed, while Reese impregnated her with the seed of the future through their sexual intercourse, the terminator from Terminator 1 also penetrated her body with a dildo-shaped piece of shrapnel at the “climax” of that movie, implying that her son really has two daddies, and that her new identity itself owes its genesis to her encounter with both combatants. Sarah managed to survive the first terminator, but the sequence in which she empties assault rifle clips at Miles’s horrified family suggests that her humanity may have been a casualty of her encounter with apocalyptic technologies. In her attempt to assassinate Miles Dyson, Sarah employs the same logic used by the machines, which initiate both Terminator movies with their plot to change the future by murdering a human being in the past. In the first movie, the machines’ plot not only fails, it sets in motion the very events it was intended to forestall. As in the Oedipus story (or as in a folk tale that Baudrillard is fond of referencing, “Death in Samarkand”), the attempt to change fate becomes instrumental to bringing about the fated events. If Reese had not followed the terminator back in time, he could not have fathered the boy who would become John Connor, and he would not have given Sarah the military training she passed down to her son. As in a Greek tragedy, the ontological atmosphere of Terminator 1 is steeped in irreversible fate. Events could not have happened otherwise than they did; the machines must always have been destined to send the terminator back in time, and the terminator must always have been destined to fail. While it is true that the ordinary sequence of effects and causes are switched around, everything takes place on a single timeline, and there is no possibility of a fatal contradiction that would problematize the perfect symmetry with which the narrative manages to weave together past effects with future causes. As for the apocalypse, it too is represented as unalterably imminent. As in La Jetée (1962) and 12 Monkeys (1995), the temporality of Terminator 1 involves eddies capable of circulating the future back into the past, but this novel temporal maneuverability does not imply any expanded freedom to change the fatal sequence of personal and civilizational death. Indeed, Sarah’s task in Terminator 1 is not to prevent the apocalypse from happening

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but to ensure that future events happen exactly as they have already happened, for only if the technopocalypse takes place can John Connor distinguish himself as the inspirational resistance leader the human race requires him to become. Victory for Sarah consists of assuring that the future happens just as if it were the past, ensuring that time remains a closed loop. Sarah takes on the responsibility of maintaining the tragic course of this history, like a penitent observing the stations of the cross, any hope of redemption coming only after the end of the road. Reese accepts his time-traveling mission knowing that it will end in his death. Sarah, too, must realize that she will not live to see the 2029 she is committed to bringing about. The temporality represented in Terminator 1 is characterized by a mechanical physicality. Past, present, and future are all merely points along the same automated assembly line. In Terminator 2, however, the fatality of the apocalyptic time-sense is disrupted through a magical interpolation. In 1984, Reese recites a message to Sarah that her future son had instructed him to memorize. “I can’t help you with what you must face, except to say that the future is not set. You must be stronger than you imagine you can be. You must survive or I will never exist.” In the context of the first movie, John’s comment that “the future is not set” represents a warning: Sarah cannot rely on the fact that her son exists in the future as any guarantee that she will survive to give birth to him in the present. It is her grim responsibility to live her life backward from its endpoint, and to drive out stoically, as she does at the end of Terminator 1, into the coming storm. In Terminator 2, however, John’s message is remembered differently from the way it appears in the original movie. In 1995 (Terminator 2 takes place several years in advance of its 1991 release-year), John Connor’s recitation of his 2029 self ’s message to 1984 Sarah interpolates a sentence that changes the meaning of the original message. In the new version, the line, “The future’s not set” is followed by the aphorism, “There’s no fate but what we make for ourselves.” In this new context, the open-endedness of the future is transformed from a dire warning against altering the future into a prescription for shattering the constricting fatalism that a mechanical formulation of the future had established. Correspondingly, in conspiring to act as if the interpolated line had always been part of the original movie, the characters assert an even more radical suggestion that the past is an entity that is just as fluid as the future. Rather than representing a closed world in which temporality and human will are both subordinated to a mechanical descent into technopocalypse, Terminator 2 explodes the chain of cause and effect that ties the past and future of Terminator 1 into such a merciless trap. By apparently going back in time to alter his own message, John sets the whole franchise on a new direction, one which embraces pataphysical violations of the grandfather paradox. In the world of Terminator 2, the reconfiguration of the temporal order becomes the background for a reimagination of the nature of the technopocalyptic scenario. In the worlds of both the movies’ audiences and characters, American history between the mid-1980s and the early 1990s is characterized by a significant development in the identity of the technopocalyptic threat. Although Glasnost-era policies would soon lead to a rapid dismantling of Cold War hostilities and nuclear anxiety, in 1984, the nuclear apocalypse still occupied the cultural imagination as an imminent possibility. Wargames, which revolves around a computer-induced nuclear apocalypse similar to that depicted

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in Terminator 1, had been one of the top-grossing films of 1983. That same year, The Day After, a television movie about the nuclear apocalypse, attracted an audience of 100 million viewers, and was followed by a debate of public intellectuals during which Carl Sagan illustrated the imminence of the nuclear apocalypse by inviting his audience to “[i]magine a room awash in gasoline, and there are two implacable enemies in that room. One of them has nine thousand matches, the other seven thousand matches” (“The Nuclear Dilemma”). Helen Caldicott’s 1984 book Missile Envy, bore the subtitle, “an expert’s account of the frightening facts behind our blind rush toward atomic disaster.” Sagan and Caldicott use rhetoric that represents the apocalypse as a real imminence on the visible horizon. In 1991, however, the famous Doomsday Clock that measures the imminence of the nuclear apocalypse ticked backward to the earliest time it had ever registered (or has registered since). The month of July, when Terminator 2 was released, saw the dissolution of the Warsaw Pact and, by the end of that year, the USSR would dissolve as well. The genie of Mutually Assured Destruction showed signs of returning to the bottle, and even John Connor remarks that “the Russians are our friends now.” As a result, the story of Terminator 2 carries forward its 1984 vision of the nuclear apocalypse, but this vision mutates in ways that reflect the different attitudes of a different historical moment. In particular, while Terminator 1 portrays the coming technopocalypse in the tragic, fatalistic mode, Terminator 2 reimagines this event in a mode that is essentially comic and reversible. This alteration in the phenomenological texture of the technopocalypse corresponds with a more complex manner of representing the relationship between the present and the future, and between original and copy, as well as between human beings and technology. Sarah’s Cassandra–like predictions of the apocalypse establish continuity from the first movie to the second. In Terminator 2, Sarah still thinks of Judgment Day as a fait accompli, an event that is no less real for taking place in the future. In Terminator 1, Sarah’s coworker, commenting on a news report about the murder of another woman named Sarah Connor, had told Sarah, “You’re dead, honey.” In retrospect, this casual comment bears a chilling double-meaning, suggesting that a death that is inevitably bearing down on Sarah in the form of the terminator is equivalent to a death already achieved. Fate confounds a linear progression of past, present, and future by regarding the whole timeline as a simultaneous event. Throughout the first half of Terminator 2, Sarah insists upon this fatalistic collapse of the future and the present, having learned to see the history of the near future as the past history of Reese’s 2029. For Reese, the apocalypse is as real as any historical event, and when Sarah, having introjected Reese’s mission and temperament, angrily rants at the same police psychologists at whom Reese had ranted in 1984, she uses his future perspective to explain the existential status of her jailers. “You think you’re safe and alive? You’re already dead! Everybody! Him, you, you’re dead already! This whole place, everything you see is gone! You’re the one living in a fucking dream!” Sarah is in a privileged position to evaluate the true nature of reality because of her ability to see through the illusion of freedom created by linear time. Even her dreams are real, her repeated dream of Judgment Day constituting more of a prophecy than a fantasy. Sarah’s time-sense is similar to that of Manfred Steiner, the autistic character in Philip K. Dick’s Martian

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Time-Slip who sees everything from the perspective of its future ruination. In this grim kind of time-sense, the imminent apocalypse itself is only a metaphor for the immanent apocalypse that has always already invaded the structure of the present, deadening it by emptying it of freedom or hope. Short-term survival is the best that Sarah can hope for, and her existence in Terminator 2 is an extension of the grim countdown to apocalypse established in Terminator 1. Although Sarah’s character anchors the connection between Terminator 1 and Terminator 2, and although her voice-over in the second movie foregrounds her point of view, her importance to the story of Terminator 2 is upstaged by the real star of the movie, Arnold Schwarzenegger, in his triumphant return to the role that made him a mega-star. Schwarzenegger’s character in Terminator 1 epitomizes the hard-bodied action hero as an unstoppable killing machine. Cameron’s inspired idea to turn this hard-body protagonist into the definitive bad guy exploited Arnold’s freakish, robotic, and Nazi-esque appearance to create the unique brutality that makes Terminator 1 such a memorable film. By 1991, however, Arnold is no longer a morphological oddity, but the top-grossing celebrity of all time, and the real inspiration of Terminator 2 seems to have been the narrative possibilities that could be generated by juxtaposing Arnold’s Terminator 1 character with his cuddlier post-Twins (1988), post-Kindergarten Cop (1990) persona. In terms of the storyline, Arnold’s character in Terminator 2 is exactly the same as his character in Terminator 1; they are twin units of the same model of killer cyborg. But the manner in which Arnold’s character is introduced in Terminator  2 indicates that, although the character is the same, the way we are supposed to understand the terminator icon is being redefined. The terminator robot is still the envoy from the postapocalyptic future and a kind of avatar of the technopocalypse itself. Cameron relies on our memories of the first movie to associate this character with the inevitable end of the world, even going so far as to conclude Terminator 2’s opening-credit montage of a postapocalyptic playground with a looming image of the steely death’s head of the T-101 Arno-bot. When the T-101 travels into the present, cinematic cues reactivate our memories of the corresponding scene from Terminator 1. Both sequences begin with an establishing shot of a passing truck, followed by images of rustling street-litter and blue electric discharges. In both movies, Arnold materializes naked in a crouched position, approaches a group of incredulous humans, and articulates a deadpan request for their clothes. These points of repetition refer the audience in two directions. We see that a terminator robot has a very predictable modus operandi upon infiltrating a human community, but we are also learning that a Terminator sequel has a similar predictability that caters to the infantile pleasures of repetition and familiarity while simultaneously nodding to the fact that a repetition is also always a novelty. When the first terminator approached a trio of punks to steal their clothes in Terminator 1, the audience’s unfamiliarity with the origin and qualities of the terminator cyborg rendered the action disorienting and unpredictable, and the soundtrack, the setting, and the performances all worked together to enhance a mood of unsettling edginess. In the corresponding scene in Terminator 2, this disorientation effect is replaced by self-referentiality and game-playing. The deserted parking lot has been replaced by a crowded honky-tonk bar. The crazed punks have been replaced by good old boys

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whose reactions to the naked cyborg are essentially comic. We even see the scene from the cyborg’s point of view, in terminator-vision, inviting the audience into the franchise not only by recalling similar shots from the first movie but also by literally inviting us into the terminator’s head to imagine ourselves in his place. When the new terminator turns violent, furthermore, he does not turn horror-movie violent (the first terminator drove his fist into the punk’s abdomen and pulled out a handful of viscera); the new terminator’s violence is just good old-fashioned rough-housing. Even before John Connor explicitly reprograms this terminator not to kill people, he has already been so reprogrammed by the manner in which his character has been reinvented for a new historical moment. When Arnold finally emerges from his confrontation with the honky-tonkers, the soundtrack plays the famous riff from George Thoroughgood’s Bo Diddley homage, “Bad to the Bone.” We are assured that this terminator is “bad” in a cool, funny, nonthreatening way. With his leather jacket, motorcycle boots, and Harley Davidson, he is more of a cyborg Fonzie than an inexorable force of death. The scene concludes with a comic exchange between Arnold’s terminator and a biker dude. The terminator does not want to dig his fist into the biker’s chest cavity; he just wants to appropriate his sunglasses to complete his iconic Terminator look. In Terminator 1, the terminator wore sunglasses to conceal his wounded eye; in Terminator 2, he just wears them because he wears them. This whole sequence is an in-joke with the audience, reprising the menace and gore of Terminator 1 as a musical comedy routine. The reprogrammed Arno-bot from Terminator 2 is an emissary from a very different style of technopocalypse than that represented by his predecessor. The very idea that the terminator robot can be reprogrammed to aid mankind is a reversal of the original movie’s technophobia, and the corresponding suggestion is that the technopocalypse itself might be reprogrammed from a fatalistic inevitability, as Sarah sees it, into a kind of pataphysical game. As trite, rote, and crassly commercial as many sequels are, sequels at their most interesting represent a compelling postmodern genre. Some sequels mimic their original as closely as possible, some sequels extend or amplify the basic premise of their original, and some sequels twist the themes of the original film into new permutations, dialogically generating adaptations of the original movie’s themes

Figure 3.1  The Terminator as a cyborg Fonzie.

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to reflect the altered historical landscape in which they are created and received. Even sequels to movies that do not involve time-travel play with multiple temporalities: a sequel is a continuation, but also a repetition of the original. As a result, a sequel takes on a deeper perspective against the background of its original, retroactively rewriting the original (as Terminator 2 literally rewrites Terminator 1 in its revision of futureJohn’s message to Sarah) while also imbuing the themes of the original with a new self-awareness. As Stephen Mulhall explains, sequels can allow a cinematic franchise to “renew itself over time, in part by explicitly reflecting upon what is involved in inheriting a particular set of characters in a particular narrative universe—the constraints and opportunities internal to … that inheritance” (5). Terminator 2 provides an interesting case study of how a sequel can fold out the themes of its original into a new dimension, squaring, rather than adding to, its predecessor. In the same way that the formidably real terminator of the first movie is succeeded by the self-referential celebrity terminator of Terminator 2, the one-dimensional timeline that the characters were fated to exist within in Terminator 1 is reimagined in the sequel as a trajectory that can be understood and successfully manipulated from a new position of self-consciousness. In Terminator 1, none of the denizens of 1984 knew anything about time travel or the rise of the machines or Judgment Day. They were acting in obliviousness, entirely responsively, engaged in crisis management and driven by immediate necessity. In Terminator 2, the characters enjoy a new level of self-consciousness regarding their situation within a wider historical picture. Throughout the central part of the movie, they are not running from their pursuer, but brainstorming ways to alter the fate of mankind with tactical incursions into the present history, which they can clearly see because of the insight they have acquired by living through the first movie. The temporality of sequel-dom allows the characters in Terminator 2 to take advantage of Baudrillard’s observation that “When we know the rules of the game, we can change them” (DS). Specifically, this new sense of temporal plasticity de-realizes the future history of the first movie and, simultaneously, the present as well. The shift in the representation of reality in the two movies is personified in the figure of Arnold’s two terminators. There is no ambiguity concerning the ontology of the first terminator. Its steely endoskeleton epitomizes the hard body reduced to its essential qualities: ruthless efficiency in pursuit of a single goal. It is here to kill you and that is all there is to know about it. Its lethality is a brutal indicator of its reality. When Arnold returns for the second movie, he is still a machine and, what is more, he is still the same make and model of machine from the first movie, but his relation to the real/illusory binary has become more complex. Whereas the first movie dramatized a very stark contrast between the real human beings and the cybernetic imitation, the presence in Terminator 2 of a second robot that is even more exotic than Arnold’s model creates a continuum of humanity, with Arnold occupying an ambiguous middle-ground between the flesh and blood human beings with whom Arnold’s robot develops a relationship on one side and the extremely alien T-1000 model of terminator on the other. The T-1000, a product of cutting-edge CGI technology, makes Arnold’s android seem quaintly human by comparison. Compared to this strange entity, the T-101’s physiology is reassuring in its more conventional limitations and vulnerabilities.

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Arnold might not be human, but he is “more human” than the T-1000. In addition, John flips a switch inside Arnold’s skull that allows the terminator to learn. As the Arnold robot begins to pick up pieces of slang and comes to understand the meaning of emotional pain, the movie suggests that human beings do not have a monopoly on the capacity for human behavior. The  T-101 is a machine, and not even a true cyborg, since its organic outer covering only serves the function of a disguise, one which is easily removable, and not an integral component of its functioning. Nevertheless, Arnold’s terminator takes on qualities that we associate with human psychology. The division between the real humans and the cybernetic impostors has become blurry, and now in order to survive, Sarah Connor must overcome the knee-jerk technophobia that she learned from the first movie and ally herself with a world of simulacra. In addition to softening the ontological boundary between human and nonhuman, the robot played by Arnold in Terminator 2 also embodies a paradox that confounds classical temporality. Baudrillard defined the essence of hyperreality as “the generation by models of a real without origin or reality” (SS 1). Rather than a cause followed by an effect, or an original reality followed by a representation, hyperreality is a condition in which copies have abandoned all reference to an originary reality. In his analysis of time in Baudrillard’s hyperreality, William Bogard explains that the miracle of simulation “produces a cyborg time-traveler” (319). Arnold’s robot, of course, is Baudrillard’s cyborg time-traveler come to cinematic life. Not only does he embody Baudrillard’s temporal paradox in his status as a robot that has not been invented yet, but Terminator 2 takes this hyperreal condition a step further when Arnold and his human friends break into the Skynet laboratory, where the Arnold robot was invented, and destroy all the research that led to his existence, effectively terminating Arnold’s unborn self. According to Back to the Future rules, Arnold should disappear from existence at this point, but Arnold’s variety of existence does not rely on past circumstances. Arnold’s Terminator 2 robot existentially log-rolls on a free-floating temporal precession in which copies need have no reference to any past original. To make matters even more complex, the research that Arnold and his friends destroy in the Skynet laboratory is itself based entirely on a piece of the terminator robot from the future that Sarah had destroyed in 1984. If the terminator machine had never been sent back in time in the first place, we discover, the terminator machine and all of the planetary robotic infrastructure that dominates the postapocalyptic future of the Terminator mythology would never have come into existence. The Arnold machine gives birth to itself in a closed temporal loop that is outside of linear time and in which the copy is literally its own original. Moreover, this hyperreal entity is the perfect fosterfather for John Connor, who, as a representative of the new techno-savvy generation, is himself a hyperreal construct, having orchestrated the circumstances of his own conception by sending Reese back in time to impregnate his mother. Both the machine and the boy are hyperreal, detached from the old binaries of nature/technology, past/ future, and authentic/artificial. John’s mother comes to realize that the hyperreal robot is the perfect father for her hyperreal son: “Of all the would-be fathers who came and went over the years, this thing—this machine—was the only one who measured up. In  an insane world, it was the sanest choice.” The brave new world of hyperreality

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compels Sarah to reassess her twentieth-century prejudices about the relationship between reality and simulation. As Sarah mulls over these reflections, we see her absent-mindedly carving something into the picnic table where she is seated. Falling asleep, she has her most detailed dream yet about the nuclear apocalypse, and when she wakes up, we see that what she has carved is the slogan “NO FATE.” John correctly identifies this phrase as a portion of the reconstituted message that his future self had sent back with Reese to deliver to the woman who would become his mother. This magical message—a repetition without an original in several different senses—inspires Sarah to the same course of action pursued by the Skynet assassins: to change the future through preemptive murder. This insight reveals an important development in Sarah’s understanding of the nature of time—the future is not a preexisting reality—but the fact that she seeks to alter the future through the same (failed) methods employed by the machines suggests that she remains fixated in the past, traumatized by her encounter with the brutal reality of 1984. Her lingering commitment to a dichotomous ontology in which the real is pitted against the artificial and in which humans are pitted against machines comes across clearly when, having failed to kill Miles, she snarls at him, “Men like you invented the nuclear bomb. You don’t know what it’s like to really create something, feel it growing inside you. All you know how to create is death and destruction.” During Sarah’s earlier rants, the audience was intended to understand that there was a serious truth underneath her frenzied words. In this instance, however, Sarah’s thesis that life-giving women who nurture the future are eternally pitted against death-dealing men set on destroying it is received by John, and presumably by the audience, as a hysterical misinterpretation of their situation. John tells his mother that she needs to be “more constructive,” playing the role of the parent in their relationship, as he does throughout the movie. To be sure, John is in a unique position to be the parent-figure to his own mother because of his own hyperreal condition of being proxy-parent to himself. Furthermore, as the stand-in for the target audience of Terminator 2, John Connor belongs to a generation that never knew nuclear war as a prominent existential threat. In the movie, this circumstance is reflected in the fact that, in stark opposition to his mother, John has never known a bad-guy terminator and cannot relate to his mother’s bias against his pet robot. John knows about his mother’s past experiences, and he knows about the apocalyptic future that supposedly lurks on the horizon, but he is not traumatized by this knowledge. When John and his Arno-bot escape on a motorbike through the Los Angeles River culvert, they embody a postmodern version of Huck and Jim, and, indeed, John shares the natural boyhood innocence of Huckleberry Finn, a perennial American character whose purity of heart allows him to perceive the world in a way that bypasses the hypocrisies and conventional prejudices of adult society. Indeed, it is this very promise of future possibility represented by a new generation and by generativity itself that the first terminator’s project of “retroactive abortion” had sought to erase. Fixated in her siege-mentality, Sarah had raised John to be the military leader she believed him to be fated to become. As we observe during her violent assault on Miles Dyson, even when Sarah thinks of altering the future, she thinks of doing so through militaristic, terminator-esque means. But John’s real military genius, it turns out, is in convincing his

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mother to imagine nonlethal (if not nonviolent) possibilities for bringing about change. John’s true tactical brilliance as a soldier is an extension of his hyperreal origins and values. He interprets his own (simulacral) message from 2029—“No fate but what we make”—to mean that the war between humans and machines need never take place. The height of military acumen, it turns out, consists not of technical effectiveness but of the capacity to reimagine the shape of the battlefield and the terms of the war. His love for his Arno-bot father-figure, the time-traveling celebrity simulacrum, is coextensive with his ability to redefine the shape of fate and the meaning of the apocalypse. His leadership in arranging the siege on the Cyberdyne laboratory succeeds in exploding the fatalism of Terminator 1, reshaping the future from a visible nightmare into the invisible suspense of “a dark highway at night.” John expresses no concern that cancelling the future war that plays such an important role in his own origin might imperil his own ontological status. Like Quaid in Total Recall, John’s hyperreal condition has liberated him from any loyalty to past or future origins, leaving him free to continue to invent himself out of paradox and contradiction, as he does (or did, or will do, or would have done) when he first sends Reese back in time to become his father. John Connor’s fluency in the dynamics of hyperreality allows him to embody and enact transformative permutations on the meaning of the end of the world as well as of its continuation. Although James Cameron ceded control of the Terminator franchise, it has continued to thrive in the form of more sequels, a television series, video games, and comic books, as well as in the cultural imagination. The perpetuation of this franchise requires that John’s reversal of the apocalypse will itself have to be reversed in order for there to be a postapocalyptic future from which time-traveling cyborgs can continue to travel. Accordingly, “We see [Judgment Day] actually happen in the less-than-superb Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines [(2003)]. But in the new television series, The Sarah Connor Chronicles [2008-2009)], we find out that it has been postponed until 2011, and [in] Terminator: Salvation [(2009)], it actually happens in 2018” (Brown and Decker 1). This multiplicity of past, possible, and future timelines suggests that the apocalypse can never be definitively foreclosed, but must be perpetually managed. At the heart of the Terminator universe is the intuition that we come into contact with the immanent technopocalypse every time we interact with a technological object, and, indeed, that all technological objects are death-machines in utero. The global substitution of artificial intelligence for human intelligence and of simulacral cyborgs for human beings—the reversal of copy and original that is the essence of Terminator’s technopocalypse—is already underway in our contemporary lifeworld. While Terminator 1 establishes a classical representation of the technopocalypse as an inescapable fate to which we are already doomed, a time-sense to which Terminator 3 returns, Terminator 2 reimagines fate as a game of self-consciousness and self-invention.

True Lies Schwarzenegger’s most direct expression of his hyperreal theme is the least successful, commercially and artistically, of his hyperreal films, The Last Action Hero. The film

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tells the story of Danny Madigan’s travels between the real world and the fictional world of his favorite “hard body” movie franchise. The differences between Danny’s world and the world of Jack Slater are played for laughs and the movie’s end restores the integrity of the barrier between the two worlds, suggesting that The Last Action Hero is meant to be a fundamentally conservative reaffirmation of the separation of reality and unreality. But at the same time, as in Pirandello’s Six Characters in Search of an Author, the very attempt to communicate the difference between reality and fiction ultimately discloses the various correspondences between them. When Danny enters the fictional world, he discovers that fictional characters have real emotions, even as Danny, as a real person, has an emotional life that is centered around the fictional events of the movies he loves. When Slater enters the real world, he actually functions very effectively there, impressing Danny’s mother as a viable husband and father-figure, and bending the laws of physics and physiology, which seem just as malleable in the real world as they are in the screen world, to heroic purposes. The climax of the movie takes place on opening night of the new Jack Slater film, where the bad guys who have escaped from the fictional world plan to assassinate Arnold Schwarzenegger as a way of getting rid of Jack Slater. Schwarzenegger appears as himself, with his wife Maria Shriver and a handful of other celebrities doing cameos of themselves, a spectacle which has the effect of folding the outside world of media celebrity into the fictional world of the film, provoking in the audience a sense that they are shuttling back and forth between fiction and reality in much the same way as Danny. A journalist interviewing Arnold opines that Schwarzenegger’s own incredible biography could only be possible “in Hollywood”; Schwarzenegger himself, as a “real” person, is a product of the quasi-fictional space of “the movies.” The fictional Arnold saves the real Arnold from an assassination attempt, compounding the sense that reality and fiction are existentially codependent. Although the Berlin Wall of the screen’s surface is reestablished between Jack and Danny at the end of the story, the movie has promoted the impression that this barrier is not as impermeable as we had taken it to be. The artistic failure of The Last Action Hero is certainly due in large part to the fact that the explicit layer of self-awareness concerning Schwarzenegger’s hyperreality is redundant. Schwarzenegger’s best hyperreal films do not have to draw explicit attention to the hyperreal theme—the metanarrative tone of winking didacticism in fact interrupts the seamless pleasure of unmediated hyperreal vertigo achieved in Total Recall and Terminator 2. For his comeback role, Arnold selected a script in which the narrative itself would do the philosophizing, James Cameron’s True Lies. The title of the movie True Lies seems intentionally to allude to Umberto Eco’s analysis of “instances where the American imagination demands the real thing and, to attain it, must fabricate the absolute fake” (8) in Travels in Hyperreality, and, in fact, the film is the culmination of Schwarzenegger’s cinematic career as the ultimate hyperreal protagonist. Whereas the more conservative screenplay of The Last Action Hero attempts to restore a separation between artifice and reality, however, True Lies derives its narrative momentum from its implosion of this dichotomy. As in The Last Action Hero, Schwarzenegger plays a double role as both a fictional character and a real person. In one life, Harry Tasker is a cartoonishly efficient superspy, and in the other

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life, he is a “real-life” suburban husband and father. The twist is that they are both the same person, and the story moves toward the integration of the fantastic and quotidian profiles of contemporary existence. Spying itself has been one of Western fiction’s most prominent metaphors for the manner in which human reality is reshaped by its integration into the circuits of global geopolitics, and the character of the spy personifies the play of appearances which constitutes the hyperreal personality. When Harry Tasker tangoes with high-class arms smuggler Juno Skinner, he executes every move with a masterly precision that duplicates in bodily motion the step-by-step efficacy with which he has seduced the exotic woman, Tia Carrere, who pants lustily at the mechanical perfection of Harry’s sexual prowess. But of course, Harry’s dance of seduction is entirely performative. Whenever Juno’s eyes turn away from him, his expression snaps instantly from one of suave courtliness to one of Terminator-like calculation. To be sure, the ear-bud he wears, putting him in communication with a surveillance team in a nearby van, makes him a type of cyborg, jacking him by proxy into the Internet and giving him access to a third-person perspective on himself. Like Neo talking to Morpheus on his cell phone in The Matrix, Harry Tasker is able to negotiate the maze of a heavily-guarded Swiss chalet because he has access to this externalized perspective from which he and his environment exist as an image on a screen. In The Matrix, it is the green computer code, in True Lies, it is the green image from Gib’s night-vision binoculars, but both cases illustrate the manner in which the protagonists of each movie internalize a sense of existing as an image. At the same time that existing as a cyborg in the third person empowers Harry as a prowler and as a seducer, however, it supplants any personal or libidinal identity he might have as a human subject, as exemplified in his professional indifference to Juno’s enticements. Although Harry may play at sexuality, his sexual persona is in the service of political powers and agendas entirely external to himself. The spy—like the hyperreal citizen of late capitalist culture—makes the Faustian bargain of trading unlimited superpowers in the three-dimensional world in exchange for existing as a two-dimensional simulacrum, devoid of psychology, morality, and any but the most perfunctory or fetishistic kind of sexuality. The spy hero has flourished on the silver screen precisely because the spy is himself a silver screen, capable of switching seamlessly between languages, identities, missions, desires, and hostilities because of his perfectly balanced lack of interiority. In True Lies, the cinematic identity of Harry’s spy persona is underscored in more or less obvious ways. In the opening sequence of the movie, a subtitle supplements its translation of Harry’s dialogue with the parenthetical explanation, “perfect Arabic,” in an Austin Powers-ish nod to the audience signifying that Harry’s casual infallibility is an in-joke being put across by game-playing movie-makers to savvy movie audiences. True Lies itself is a product of what Eco calls a “metasemiotic culture,” and we can say of Cameron what Eco says of Spielberg and Lucas, that he is a “semiotically nourished author … working for a culture of instinctive semioticians” (210). Harry’s wife, recognizing her husband’s cinematic ontology, quips, “I married Rambo,” but if she had seen more movies, she would know that Harry’s character is actually a comic retread of Matrix, Schwarzenegger’s character in the 1985 film Commando. Like Harry,

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Matrix was also an unstoppable top secret agent whose status as a human weapon in the arsenal of the US Military-Industrial Complex threatened to make him an absentee parent to his tomboyish teenage daughter. But whereas Matrix rejected his superspy identity in favor of a life of quiet domesticity, Harry Tasker makes his family over as an extension of his cinematic spy-self. In a similar gesture of intertextuality, Harry’s top secret agency, the Omega Sector, is overseen by—Who else?—Charlton Heston, the original Omega Man, sporting a Rooster Cogburn eye-patch and playing an over-thetop version of himself in his iconic persona as the archetypal action movie tough guy. The style of True Lies, furthermore, draws our attention to the fundamentally cinematic identity of Harry’s alter ego. The comic mood which prevails throughout the movie has the effect of distancing the characters from the action just enough to make the deathdefying stunts seem decidedly Buster Keaton-ish. The technical accuracy of Harry’s acrobatics is mirrored by the similar virtuosity of Cameron’s editing and camerawork. The action sequences of True Lies are gripping not because of any narrative uncertainty about whether Harry will defeat the ragtag band of terrorists but because of an abstract fascination elicited by Cameron’s clockwork orchestration of bodies, machines, projectiles, and film equipment. The resulting spectacle constitutes a discourse of movement and space that suggests the essence of the cinematic experience itself. The central theme of True Lies is the manner in which this hyperreal character— the cinematic cyborg superspy—intersects with the ostensibly real world of suburban domesticity. James Bond, Modesty Blaise, and their many imitators accept that superspydom is a full-time lifestyle, but Harry’s dilemma of balancing his fictional life and his real life folds the superspy metaphor for postmodern personality into the intricacies of the labor patterns of late capitalist society, suggesting that all jobs have something in common with Harry’s. Harry’s office at Omega Sector is fronted by a perfect simulacrum of an office reception area to deceive Harry’s family and anyone else who might take an interest in Harry’s activities, but the facade actually disguises a deeper similarity between Harry’s occupation and any other job. Indeed, it is a running joke throughout the film that Harry and his working partners do many of the same things that office employees do anywhere—gossip, drink coffee, gripe—even as they are engaged in what seem to us to be exotic and perilous activities but which are, for Harry, routine office work. Moreover, the exigencies of Harry’s cover demand that his secret job be outwardly indistinguishable from a real job to such an extent that it may as well be a real job as far as its influence on his domestic life is concerned. His fake job, for instance, has real job hours. When Helen asks him about his “business trip,” he enthusiastically rattles off a deliberately soporific paragraph of technical information. The boringness of his alibi job is intended to dissuade inquiry but also to reflect a convincing imitation of the boringness of a real job, in particular, its technical insularity and its sense of existing in a world of its own with its own language and desirestructure that are completely unintelligible to an off-worlder. Harry is able to keep up his disguise for fifteen years precisely because he is able to camouflage himself within the background pattern of disconnectedness between work and home that is a regular feature of contemporary wage-earning activity. Likewise, Harry’s inattentiveness to his wife is a deliberate pose. We know him to be super-alert as part of his job, but Harry

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pretends not to listen to his wife because being a bad husband is part of his cover. It is clear that rather than posing a conventional opposition to Harry’s hyperreal spy-life, Harry’s home-life is really an extension of his job. If anything, Harry is more of a secret agent when he is at home and more himself when he is being a secret agent. When labor is completely alienated from life, it is easy to lie, and even necessary. Harry’s job as a hyperreal cyborg superspy spills over into his domestic life, restructuring his entire reality in the hyperreal mode. Harry’s success as a superspy in the flashy world of James Bond antics convinces him, and us, that he is the effortless master of events in the domestic sphere as well, and the rising action of the movie generates its comic effects from Harry’s bafflement upon discovering that he is not the only one in his family who has a hyperreal counterlife. Gib warns Harry that the postmodern family is a hyperreal vortex, advising Harry to acknowledge that his daughter’s real parents “are Axl Rose and Madonna. The five minutes a day you spend with her can’t compete with that kind of bombardment.” In the same way that Harry’s real life takes place in the fictional spaces of his hyperreal job, Dana’s true loyalties are also to an alternate family populated by mass-media imagepeople. Eventually, Harry also learns that his wife has been spending time under the influence of the would-be Lothario, Simon, a fun house–mirror version of Harry whose personality is a clownish bricolage of spy movie clichés. Simon represents a debased form of the hyperreal. Unlike Harry, who really is a fictional character, Simon has to play at being a fictional character, and his ersatz personality is analogous to the plastic wine glasses he produces for Helen; Simon’s lie is bereft of the sublime quality of being true. Simon sells used cars with the same pitch he uses to convince Helen to make out with him: “Think of it as playing a role.” But as far as Helen is concerned, Simon is the real thing, and for all of its cardboard stage trappings, the seduction is entirely real. Before Helen is seduced physically by Simon, she is seduced emotionally, through the power of Simon’s narrative. Simon’s espionage ruse, like his used-car pitch, although bogus to the core, pulls real emotions and desires into its papier-mâché structure, and Helen’s alternate life as Simon’s Femme Nikita is just as convincing to her as Harry’s superspy activities are to him. The lies that Helen tells her husband are certainly real lies—true lies—and in her fine-tuned dissimulation, Harry is astonished to hear the echo of his own persuasively boring technical account of his fictional work life. Simon disrupts Harry’s domestic routine in a way that mirrors back to him his own lies to his family. The irony is palpable when Harry, who has systematically lied to his wife for fifteen years, accuses Simon of “lying [his] ass off the whole time” in his seduction routine. Later, when Harry obsessively glares through a glass wall at the Omega Sector recording equipment with the intention of tapping his wife’s phone, he looks through a reflection of himself, seeing, perhaps, his own life-lie reflected in his wife’s deception. Although Simon is a foolish character, he teaches Harry a vital lesson about the possibilities of hybridizing reality and role-playing. When Simon and Harry test-drive the Corvette, Simon’s disco music, his derision of Helen as “conservative,” his long hair, and the frank sexuality epitomized by his open collar (explicitly contrasting with Harry’s collar, which is sealed tightly around his neck by his large tie) all mark him as an ­embodiment of the libidinal energy that Harry must repress in order to maintain

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his hyperreal aura. Harry responds to Simon’s challenge to his domestic authority by appropriating Simon’s seduction scenario. In the same way that Simon had requisitioned the used cars on his car lot as props in his theater of seduction, Harry uses the military resources which his job places at his disposal to scoop Helen out of Simon’s fictional narrative and into his own. Harry has previously made sophisticated use of narrative to lie to Helen, but now, inspired by Simon’s example, he uses narrative to seduce her. As long as the domestic sphere remains an awkward splinter of conventional values in a world that has otherwise gone completely orbital, the home harbors the potential for pain and humiliation. Harry’s solution is to do for Helen in hyperreality what Simon had attempted to do for her in ordinary reality: initiate her into a different ontological register. The hyperrealization of Harry’s wife takes place in a pair of scenes that constitute the heart of True Lies: the interrogation scene and the striptease scene. The first scene breaks her down, and the second scene reconstitutes her in the new mode. After being plucked from Simon’s low-rent safe house by Harry’s strike team, Helen finds herself in a large room furnished with only a stool, one wall of which is a one-way mirror. It is a technological fishbowl, a space in which there is nowhere to hide, in which it is impossible not to be seen. The interrogation room is reminiscent of the inside of a television set, and, to be sure, from behind the mirror, Harry and Gib look in on Helen as if seeing her on a screen. This effect is enhanced by the many literal television screens in Harry and Gib’s control booth which show close-ups of Helen’s face from different angles and in thermal imagery. In an electronically distorted voice, Harry threatens his wife, “If we want to know the most intimate secrets of your life, you’d better tell us.” The theatrical design of the interrogation room and the stool itself mark the bare chamber as a space for confessional poetry, stand-up comedy, and the other various arts of public self-exposure, and, accordingly, Helen is manipulated into expressing her inner life in the form of a monologue, as if she were auditioning for a play. Her words, her expressions, and her biostatistics are translated into digital data and documents by Harry’s surveillance equipment; the depths of her subjective interiority are reproduced as pixels and bytes. She becomes the victim of an informational rape, as Harry and Gib, using the state apparatus of psychological warfare, penetrate her in a way that is more fundamental than physical penetration ever could be. The interrogation room is a machine designed to break human secrets down into informational bits, divesting them of the very secrecy that makes them human. After Helen’s futile attempt to break through the interrogators’ window-mirror with the stool, her fractured image in the cracked mirror signifies her interrogators’ success in disintegrating her identity. The next time we see Helen in a mirror, she is in the hallway of a hotel, playing out the fantasy scenario assigned to her by her interrogators. In the mirror, Helen transforms herself from uptight suburbanite into the sexy prostitute Michelle, reconstituting herself bodily and psychologically as she adapts to her new existence as a third-person object, a creature of pure appearance rather than of psychological interiority. In the hotel room, her husband, disguised behind shadow and a prerecorded “voice,” continues her apprenticeship in becoming a visual image by instructing her to perform an erotic dance. The arrangement of the striptease scene serves as a metanarrative microcosm

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of True Lies itself. Harry clearly sits in the director’s chair, scrutinizing Jamie Lee Curtis’s performance. The fact that he speaks through a recorded French voice is an allusion, intentional or accidental, to the fact that Cameron’s screenplay for True Lies is based very closely on Claude Zidi’s 1991 French comedy film La Totale!, and that throughout the film, Cameron is “speaking” in a Frenchman’s voice. Helen had been told that her client is a kind of cinephile—“He likes to watch”—and the identification between Harry and Cameron is accentuated when, as Harry caresses Helen’s chin with a rose, Cameron, in the same motion, caresses with his camera. Harry-Cameron-Zidi instructs Helen to “Let your hands be your lover’s hands on your skin as you move,” proffering lessons in how to exist as a third-person entity, how to inhabit her body as a sexual weapon. The metanarrative reference precipitates an atmosphere of ontological indeterminacy, and as Helen becomes increasingly comfortable in her simulated superspy persona, the singularity opened up by the interaction of ontological registers suggests the possibility that she could fundamentally alter her mode of existence and become the role she is performing. Indeed, when real terrorists disrupt the action, Harry finds himself in the surreal position Simon had previously inhabited of having his imaginary spy scenario abruptly come true. This irruption of Harry’s hyperreal spy-life into the scene suggests that Helen has in fact been successfully transfigured into Harry’s cinematic mode of being. The spy costume that Helen wears to pretend that she is a spy becomes her real spy costume for the duration of the movie, which settles in from this point into about 45 minutes of Cameron’s sublime cinematic action. When Harry and Helen kiss at the end of the movie’s most fantastic and surreal action sequence—a car, helicopter, and jet chase along the otherworldly expanse of Florida’s Seven Mile Bridge—the moment is punctuated by a background blast of a nuclear bomb that Crimson Jihad has successfully detonated in the Florida Keys. The narrative of True Lies, which is ostensibly concerned with protecting the USA from terrorist attacks, not only treats this outrageous catastrophe with mild unconcern but also uses the nuclear light display to provide a dramatic backdrop for its happy (false, as it turns out) ending. The fact that the narrative handles this nuclear disaster as a minor, and even scenic, detail demonstrates that the real concern of the narrative was with establishing a kingdom of utter hyperreality, where a happy ending and a nuclear catastrophe are equivalent, the nuclear itself being recast as a metaphor signifying the apocalyptic fusion of imagination and reality. In addition to being the wittiest of Schwarzenegger’s hyperreal films, True Lies specifically contextualizes the “reality crisis” on the domestic level of daily experience within the geopolitical situation of a post–Cold War world characterized by loose nukes from former Soviet republics coupled with the emerging threat of Arab terrorism. Whereas the Cold War provided a stable framework for maintaining rigid distinctions between values such as us and them or reality and unreality, the new situation reflects a viral reorganization of the territoriality of danger. The threat is now on the home front, which is transformed into an anguished site of duplicity and betrayal. The threat of Crimson Jihad infiltrating the US borders is the equivalent of the various forces of dissolution—infidelity, work, Madonna—threatening the integrity of the family. True Lies also suggests, however, the recursive effect by which the same forces of derealization

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encompass the terrorists’ own project as well. Their purpose in kidnapping Harry and Helen from their fantasy scenario in the luxury hotel suite is to compel Harry to appear on film to identify the nuclear warhead that they have smuggled into Florida. In effect, the terrorists are making their own Arnold Schwarzenegger movie, one which, like True Lies, derives its narrative frisson from manipulating the relationship between film and lived experience. In the same way that falsehoods and misrepresentations morph into reality throughout Cameron’s movie, the terrorist scenario in Crimson Jihad’s movie threatens to break out into three dimensions, and it does begin to do so, much to the chagrin of the inhabitants of the southern Florida Keys. The running gag in which Aziz’s dramatic terrorist proclamations are continually interrupted by technical glitches (the battery in the camera dies, the nuclear ignition key has gone missing) exposes the dependency of Aziz’s rhetoric and, indeed, of all terrorist activity, on media technologies. Aziz is a formidable force when he inveighs against the West in his tones of righteous condemnation, but when we see him through the viewfinder of a video camera that is running out of battery power, his impressive jihadist speechifying is exposed as a spectacle directed toward a camera. The rhetoric itself, rather than reflecting some deep-historical Koranic tradition, is actually shaped by the camera’s thirst for dramatic sound-bites. Aziz is most in his element when he is performing for the camera, echoing Harry’s own penchant for the hyperreal mode of existence, and suggesting that what attracts Aziz to terrorism as an occupation is that it gives him a chance to employ his talents as a character actor. The terrorist plot itself, like all terrorist plots, is identical to a cliché from any number of American action movies, suggesting the extent to which terrorists and the Hollywood dream factory have cooperated in the creation of a hyperreal global sociality in which today’s dreams become tomorrow’s reality and vice versa. Indeed, the release of Schwarzenegger’s film Collateral Damage, originally scheduled for October of 2001, had to be postponed until 2002 and reedited owing to its plot’s unsettling similarities with the events of September, 2001, as if reality had preempted fiction. True Lies remains a compelling statement about the Möbius contortions by which the family, the country, the individual, and reality itself have all been reconfigured within a context of hyperreal implosion.1

Portions of this chapter originally appeared in Simulation in Media Culture: Believing the Hype (DeRosa 69–76).

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Oliver Stone’s Hyperreal Period In 1978, Oliver Stone achieved his breakthrough success as a screenwriter, winning an Academy Award for his script for Midnight Express, one of the grittiest movies of a cinematic period characterized by social realism, dark themes, and brutal imagery. When the mood of American cinema shifted dramatically in the 1980s from gritty realism to escapist fantasy, Stone struck commercial gold with his screenplay for Conan the Barbarian (1982), a movie clearly crafted to capitalize on the post–Star Wars American appetite for deliberate antirealism. As a result of his success as a mainstream screenwriter, however, Stone earned the freedom to direct movies that were flagrantly against the grain of Reagan-era cinema. His directorial debut, Platoon (1986), is a full-frontal assault on the sanitization, or science-fictionalization, of combat that characterizes the cinematic aesthetic of the 1980s. Wall Street (1987) and Born on the Fourth of July (1989) are also both protest films whose dissenting messages are directed not only toward the social and political culture that their narratives dissect but also against the cinematic culture that has devoted itself to distracting audiences rather than provoking or enlightening them. In the 1990s, however, Stone and the cinematic culture seem to catch up with each other again. Whereas Stone’s seminal pictures from the ’80s are departures from the dominant cinematic aesthetic of that decade, Stone’s major films from the 1990s—JFK (1991) and Natural Born Killers (1994)—are also representative films of their period. Not only had American movie culture become edgier and less conservative by the early ’90s but also Stone’s style of protest cinema had also become more complex in these later films. JFK and Natural Born Killers hold a privileged place in the cinematic discourse of the hyperreal. In both of these films, Stone embraces a radical new style characterized by rapid montage, the editing together of different types of film stock, and self-consciously cinematic visual effects, all of which represent significant stylistic departures from the naturalism of his previous films. Critics who accuse Stone of engaging in pointless MTV-style theatrics overlook the sense in which rapid-fire image shuffling is not merely a stylistic feature in these movies, but is a thematic concern central to both films.1 As a pair of films, they articulate the thesis that history, society, and, indeed, consciousness Contemporary reviews of JFK and Natural Born Killers in the New York Times are representative of film critics who derided Stone’s perceived stylistic excesses: Vincent Canby derides Stone’s “hyperbolic style of film making,” determining that “J. F. K., for all its sweeping innuendos and splintery music-video editing, winds up breathlessly but running in place.” In a similar vein, Janet Maslin writes, “Scratch the frenzied, hyperkinetic surface of Natural Born Killers and you find remarkably banal notions about Mickey, Mallory and the demon media.”

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itself have taken on the form of a hyperreal precession of mediated images. Under this Baudrillardian premise, the conventional protest film becomes outmoded. Rather than providing a window onto a secret reality, JFK and Natural Born Killers portray and, indeed, enact a fusion of representation and reality. One of the characters in JFK opines that ever since Kennedy’s death, American existence has been characterized by “an air of make-believe.” In response to critics of the movie who derided the conspiracy theory JFK appears to advance, Stone has stated that his film is not intended as a documentarystyle explication of a historical truth but rather intended to erect a “counter-myth” against what he considers the official myth propagated by the Warren Report (Riordan 355). We are left in a world where all we have access to are the myths, the representations, and the simulacra, the real having vanished in a puff of gunsmoke along with our “slain father-leader.” More so than any particular theory about who shot JFK, the thesis of Stone’s film is that reality itself has been assassinated, under circumstances that we can only reconstruct out of a montage of images that are ambivalently real and/or unreal—fragments of a hyperreal mediascape. Stone conceives Natural Born Killers’s Mickey and Malory as the personification of this new hyperreal environment. Leaving behind any aspiration to social realism, Stone paints a world of antisocial hyperrealism intended to represent not the “real” world, but a picture of the cultural condition we inhabit in the wake of the assassination of reality. Baudrillard himself described the Kennedy assassination as an important moment in the hyperrealization of the modern world. “The Kennedys died because they incarnated something: the political, political substance, whereas the new presidents are nothing but caricatures and fake film” (SS 24). More than just a political assassination, November 22, 1963 was the date of an ontological assassination. Stone conveys this in the film partly through the idealized image of Kennedy that is minted in the first few minutes and burnished throughout; the Camelot picture of a brilliant, youthful, wise, and virtuous leader. Kennedy himself, however, is completely absent from the film, save as a few bits of footage of famous lines from speeches and, of course, the assassination. He is never represented as a look-alike actor in a recreation of a secret meeting, like so many other historical figures are throughout the movie. Kennedy exists in the film only as a scattered jumble of clues, many of which are filmic images. As a result, the same movie that so effectively undermines the official personae of figures such as LBJ and Earl Warren by showing them behind closed doors as conniving and self-serving men elevates the mythic status of John Kennedy by representing him only as an icon. There would be something sacrilegious about including a scene in JFK in which Kennedy himself were represented as taking part in political negotiations. He exists in this movie as something more than human, something associated with the mythical realm of “the real” from which contemporary human beings recognize that they have been exiled. In interviews, Stone acknowledges that the movie idealizes Kennedy’s presidency, but Kennedy as a human being is beside the point, as is, ultimately, the question of who exactly is responsible for his murder. Stone dedicates his movie “to the young, in whose spirit the search for truth marches on.” The last ten minutes of the movie consist of a passionate appeal by Jim Garrison concerning the importance of “the truth.” Stone’s film, however, is surprisingly cavalier

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about “the truth” of either Kennedy’s or Garrison’s historical identities. Outside the film, Stone concedes that Kennedy’s Camelot was “as much an optical illusion as Eisenhower’s golf game” (“On Nixon and JFK” 270) and that the “Jim Garrison” of JFK is an “idealistic archetype” (“On Nixon and JFK” 277) of the historical figure, tracing his lineage back to Frank Capra and Jimmy Stewart. Although literal-minded critics denounced the apparent contradiction between the film’s commitment to “truth” and Stone’s free use of dramatic license, a more nuanced response to this feature of JFK would be to recognize that Stone’s film intentionally dramatizes the conspicuous elimination of truth from the public discourse. Rather than historical figures, we have heroes and villains. Rather than facts, we have clues. Rather than a narrative, we have a proliferation of hypothetical scenarios. Stone describes his attempt to capture this hyperreal style in JFK. “I make people aware that they are watching a movie. I make them aware that reality itself is in question. [JFK] represents a new era in terms of my filmmaking. The movie is not only about a conspiracy to kill President Kennedy but also about the way we look at our recent history” (“Stone on Stone’s Image” 53). Stone suggests that the most salient feature of our perception of recent history is precisely this destabilization of the nature of “reality itself.” The entirety of JFK is characterized by a luminescent sheen that seems to indicate that the world we are being shown is not the historical period that it describes, but a cinematic parallel reality. The lighting throughout JFK transforms even the realistic scenes into surreal mindscapes. JFK resembles another masterpiece of ’90s’ hyperrealism, Robert Altman’s The Player, in its barrage of celebrity cameos, and to much the same effect. In the same way that the celebrity cameos in Altman’s film indicate that Griffin Mill inhabits an ontological register that is a hybrid of reality and cinema, Stone’s comingling of American history and A-list celebritydom holds the audience’s attention in two places at once. One part of our mind is considering the shadowy influences in recent history and the other part of our mind is thinking about Jack Lemmon. At the same time that we are being promised a scrap of reality, we are reminded that we exist in a world of actors, representations of people simulating the real thing. Frequently in JFK, the celebrity performers overact so operatically that their performance itself draws attention to its provenance within the genre of drama. Another prominent feature of JFK is the amount of time the characters spend watching television. Stone mentions that he wanted to depict the sense in which the media “leapt into major prominence in our public consciousness as an entity that fateful day” (“On Nixon and JFK” 278) of the assassination, and JFK is, along with The Cable Guy (1996) and The Truman Show, one of the great movies about people watching television. As the audience of the film, we watch television along with them, but when we watch television in JFK, we do not simply observe; we become sucked in through the screen into the action being depicted on the other side. While the Garrison family is watching Lee Harvey Oswald speak at a press conference, the scene cuts away to the conference itself. We see more than what the Garrison family sees on television; Stone’s frantic camera bounces us around the press conference room itself, as if we were being jostled along with the crowd of reporters. At one point, we even zoom in on one particular individual to suggest that one of the voices in the crowd belongs

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to Jack Ruby. When Garrison sees Oswald shot on television, Stone again cuts away to jumbled images of motion, confused angles of the Dallas police station basement, and a close-up of Oswald’s dying face. Stone’s remarkable filmmaking in these and similar sequences suggests not only the phenomenologically “real” character of live television—the sense in which watching something significant happen on television is a visceral experience that can pack just as much of a punch as reality itself—but also, paradoxically, that what we see on television is not the complete reality, but only a single fragment of an infinite array of possible perspectives on the televised event. Again, the reality of representations and the constructed character of reality are held in a complex interdependency. The unresolvable nature of this dilemma of the relationship between fiction and reality is part of the larger unsolved mystery at the center of JFK. The same technique characterizes Stone’s use of the Zapruder footage at the beginning and end of the movie. Stone compulsively intercuts actual Zapruder footage with reconstructed footage of the same event from other angles, filmed on other kinds of film stock. At the same time that Garrison’s epic closing argument focuses on the Zapruder film as the most vital piece of evidence in his search for the truth, the film by itself is only capable of raising questions rather than answering them. Garrison believes that the footage is the key piece of evidence that there must have been a second shooter. Frameby-frame analysis demonstrates that the Warren Commission report was “a fiction” and that a mystery definitely exists. The Zapruder film, however, is unable to tell Garrison anything more specific about how the mystery is to be solved. Stone depicts the medium of film itself as a barrier between Garrison and the truth as much as it promises to become a window. Media images constitute a warped manifold of perception not only because they render events in an incomplete form but also because they may be deliberately manipulated. The issue of the authenticity of historical documents in the age of sophisticated means of image-manipulation becomes a central element of the diegetic narrative of JFK when the photograph of Lee Harvey Oswald that appeared on the cover of Life magazine and “basically condemned Oswald in the public eye” is theorized to be a fake. As Jim Garrison’s staff member describes perceived incongruities in the photograph, the scene is edited together with interpolated shots of the photograph being doctored by an anonymous spook. The audience is encouraged to wonder at the ontological provenance of this footage of the photo being doctored. Is it “documentary”? Are we supposed to believe that Stone’s movie is giving us privileged access to the “truth” of the photo’s origin? Or are these images simply a filmmaker’s device to illustrate what it would look like if Garrison’s staff member is correct in her theory. Extra-diegetically, the audience of JFK is shuttled back and forth between authentic film footage connected to the Kennedy assassination and scrupulously concocted recreations of contemporary documentary evidence. Intercutting actual footage from the Zapruder film with footage of filmed reenactments of the assassination confuses the boundary between what “really happened” and the fictions we have constructed in retrospect, lending an aura of credence to the possibility that the original assassination was itself “staged.” Indeed, the manipulation of images may be the single most important theme in JFK. Garrison freely admits that the basis for the movie’s narrative—his case against Clay

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Shaw—is too flimsy to stand up to the logical scrutiny of a court trial. For all of the scrupulous presentation of evidence in JFK, the case that Garrison makes against Shaw and the case that the movie makes against the Warren Commission report represent not a logical chain of conclusions, but a vague impression summed up by Jim Garrison’s statement to his wife upon holding a volume of the Warren Commission report and watching the Martin Luther King assassination on television: “Don’t you think this has something to do with that?” This is not the conclusion of logic but the conclusion of juxtaposition, the structure of montage. Montage is, of course, the defining feature of JFK’s visual style. As the Soviets knew, montage is a powerful tool of propaganda, and Stone uses the propagandistic power of montage in the opening sequence of JFK to establish a Camelot image of John Kennedy. JFK utters a historic phrase; cut: he plays with his dog; cut: he laughs on a yacht; cut: he smiles handsomely; cut: he looks pensive in dramatic surroundings. The fragments accrue into the cardboard image of a hero and visionary leader. But montage also shares the same structure as paranoia, a style of thinking that can work either for or against the aims of the propagandist. The opening sequence of JFK shows Eisenhower’s warning in his farewell address about the growing influence of the Military-Industrial Complex. The image of Eisenhower cuts away to a series of shots of military hardware and service members, including the image of a military recruitment poster. This montage of military pride and power, which would constitute a promilitary message in another context, becomes sinister and unsettling against the context of Eisenhower’s words. The semantic effect of montage bypasses reason, engaging consciousness at an emotional level. This is particularly the case when, as in JFK, the pace of the montage is so frenzied that a viewer does not have time to reflect on what they are seeing in one image before it is replaced with a different image. One of the reasons JFK can get away with disorienting conscious attention so aggressively yet still be understood as a narrative is because so many of the images that gush through JFK’s montages are images with which we are already familiar. We do not need much time to process each image and decide what it represents, because the figures in these images and, frequently, the images themselves, are drawn from the collective stock footage inventory inside the memory of most American citizens. There is Castro being angry, there is Vietnam footage, there is a satellite picture of Cuban missile silos; and even if we do not have time to register each individual image, we respond to a total collection of memories and emotions. The ease with which Stone’s images activate out own personal memories and emotions indicates the extent to which our understanding of the recent past and, indeed, of ourselves, is constructed out of such images and that these manipulated and manipulable images constitute an important feature of what we recognize as our fundamental reality. Montage presents a series of clues, but the relationship between those clues is a matter of not logic but intuition—of “don’t you think this has something to do with that?” The movie as a whole is less a narrative than a montage of scenes constructed around different perspectives on matters loosely connected with the assassination. Garrison and Stone are not building a case against Kennedy’s assassins; they are, as one character puts it, “stirring the shit-storm”—compiling a vertiginous montage of questions, factoids, coincidences, correspondences, suggestions, innuendos, emotions, and mysteries, all of which noisily

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testify to the fundamental impossibility of ever arriving at any final Truth whatsoever. In lieu of truth, we live in the montage. Moreover, Stone’s montage does not add up the way we expect a cinematic narrative to do. When Clay Shaw is answering Garrison’s questions with affable banter, the camera cuts away for less than a second to a shot of Shaw in the same chair lost in silent thought. Such moments, which become more frequent in Natural Born Killers and Nixon (1995), suggest a cubistic approach to dialogue and character. It is as if the filmmaker is offering us a privileged glimpse into another profile of the character’s mood while simultaneously suggesting the inadequacy of any single act of perception to reveal the truth about reality. In the same way that Kennedy had to be maneuvered into the center of a triangulated crossfire in order to be executed, the truth of this execution can only be arrived at by a certain arrangement of points of view, none of which is sufficient in itself, but which, taken collectively, might build up a geometric configuration within which “the truth” can be triangulated. Similarly, Garrison’s loose hypothesis that Kennedy’s assassination was the result of a joint conspiracy involving the military, the CIA, the mob, Cuban exiles, the homosexual underworld, LBJ in the executive branch, Earl Warren in the judicial branch, and various defense contractors, oilmen, and bankers represents not so much a legal argument as an impressionistic montage of suspects. The truth is not in any one perpetrator but in the reticulation of participants, the patterns and relationships. Is Clay Shaw speaking or staring silently into space? The truth of his character is not in any one shot alone but in the interaction of these two acts of perception. This “glitch” in the reality of the film’s dramatic action is similar to the “glitch” of déjà vu that indicates a program bug in The Matrix; it is an error in the warp of perceived reality that indicates the illusory quality of what we had taken to be reality. In The Matrix, however, the false reality of the computer program is a veil concealing the “true” reality of earth as it actually exists, whereas in JFK, we are in the hyperreal condition in which the warped reality of the discrepant montage is the only reality available to the audience. On a wider narrative level, the discrepant montage of perceptual reality bedevils our understanding of “what really happened” during the assassination. Stone shows us both the Warren Commission report’s version of Oswald committing the assassination and Garrison’s version of Oswald calmly eating lunch while the assassination is being carried out by other parties. Stone reenacts three different versions of the murder of Officer J. D. Tippett. We see him shot by Oswald, then we see him shot by an Oswald impersonator, then we see him shot by two men. If the standard motto for protest films or propaganda films is “seeing is believing,” in JFK, the act of seeing is turned against itself to undermine credulity. In Libra, Don DeLillo’s novel about the Kennedy assassination, the author describes how a researcher dealing with the mountains of evidence pertaining to the case proceeds from political paranoia to ontological paranoia. “He concedes everything. He questions everything, including the basic assumptions we make about our world of light and shadow, solid objects and ordinary sounds, and our ability to measure such things, to determine weight, mass and direction, to see things as they are, recall them clearly, be able to say what happened” (300–1). Like DeLillo, Stone identifies the mystery surrounding the Kennedy assassination with a more intangible mystery at the heart of postwar

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American consciousness: How can we shore up the fragments of postmodern culture into some kind of truth? How can we arrange all these hyperreal images into some shape resembling reality? Despite the sprawling complexity of JFK’s many subplots, the film itself is firmly anchored by the Jim Garrison character, who is represented as a greatest generation holdover from the pretelevision days. This folksy anachronism is a credible advocate for the old-fashioned values of truth and justice. His habit of quoting Shakespeare and the Bible firmly associates him with the Western literary tradition. But the new generation of Americans, the atomic age generation, is represented by men like Lee  Oswald and Dave Ferrie, men whose personalities are a kind of schizophrenic montage. The figure of Oswald in the movie, much like the picture of Oswald that is left to history, comes across as an irreconcilable jumble of information. A patriotic defector, a Marxist right-winger, a self-incriminating victim; it is as if Oswald’s personality had been deliberately assembled out of discordant pieces of information—surveillance camera photos, travel documents, arrest records—for the specific purpose of creating a mystery. There is no overarching logic that explains his personality, just as there is no master-perspective that could ever capture the totality of the seven fatal seconds in Dealey Plaza. Oswald’s friend Dave Ferrie is similarly represented as a human collage. His apartment is a surreal accumulation of Catholic vestments, laboratory mice, homosexual pornography, and other bric-a-brac that constitute his personality. In this sense, Oswald and Ferrie both represent a new generation of Americans for whom montage is their natural element and the sole principle of their psychology. Naturally, these montage-men are entirely deaf to Jim Garrison’s fuddy-duddy notions of truth and morality. There is something about the montage-structure—in either cinema or psychology—that welcomes violence and destruction. Whereas conventional morality is grounded in the interpersonal affinity and concern that develops along with a sustained narrative, montage never devotes enough time to a particular image to grow invested in it or to develop a sense of concern for it. Indeed, the montage itself is a perpetual destruction of one thing by something else. The editor cuts and cuts and cuts and cuts, and each new face that crops up is mown down again by the machine-gun fire of the editing block. In this sense, the montage editor is something like a fusion of a mass-murderer and a serial killer, extinguishing his victims in large number and in a systematic, rigorously serialized manner. This metaphor is the starting point of Natural Born Killers, which is a kind of sequel to JFK in its elaboration of the evolution of American hyperreality. Natural Born Killers’s Mickey and Malory are the next generation of the new hyperreal structure of personality pioneered by the likes of Oswald and Ferrie. Natural Born Killers paints a picture of the cultural condition we inhabit in the wake of the ascendency of montage from a cinematic technique to a way of life. In the opening minutes of the movie, black-and-white images of the American landscape cut to blackand-white images from a television changing channels. These establishing images imply that the American landscape into which this movie is transporting us not only consists of photographic images of Monument Valley but also incorporates video images of Leave it to Beaver, Nixon’s resignation speech, and a million other equivalent

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landmarks of the American imagination that, when strung together, refer to a sense of reality that blurs what is in the world and what is on television, what is shocking and what is banal, what is fictional and what is real. During the opening credits, Mickey and Malory drive their convertible through a video montage of their true homeland, which is not a landscape of waving fields of grain and purple mountains majesty, but a frenzied sequence of clips from monster movies, war footage, nature documentaries, atomic explosions, newspaper headlines, and unreadable snippets of violence and confusion, accompanied all the while by a soundtrack that is a similar bricolage of songs, noir poetry, and sound effects. When Mickey flips through channels on a motel room television set, the window behind him jumps from image to image, implying that the world outside the window is identical to the world on the television set. The whole world is aglow with what Mickey refers to as the “manmade weather” of the media. To reinforce further the depth of Mickey’s immersion in this weather, the montage includes “scenes” from Mickey’s childhood. A black-and-white close-up of young Mickey looking innocent and vulnerable as the soundtrack indicates that he is being verbally abused by his parents becomes a motif throughout the movie, a “clip” that comes to impressionistically stand for Mickey’s entire childhood. This shot, reminiscent of home-movie footage, suggests that Mickey’s memories are themselves preserved in the form of stock footage, and the inclusion of this shot in the window-television screen montage implies that Mickey’s own traumatic memories are embedded in the wider cultural montage of American media culture. Other clips in the motel-window montage reveal a few frames of the chainsaw murder scene from Scarface (1983) and a brief flash of the psychotic episode sequence from Midnight Express, both Stone screenplays. The inclusion of these clips in the montage seem intended to draw our attention to the metanarrative condition that Mickey is literally a character in a violent Oliver Stone movie. The literal fact of Mickey’s fictional identity implies a figurative statement about the extent to which contemporary identity is media manufactured, even as it represents a sly admission on Stone’s part that he himself is complicit in the mass-media’s assault on individual identity. Mickey’s murder of the Native American, the murder in the chronological and moral center of Natural Born Killers, is triggered by a dream-montage that spooks Mickey into this act of homicide. In this specific instance, as throughout the plot generally, montage and murder are revealed to be companion phenomena. Indeed, the very structure of Mickey and Malory’s crimes, a series of disconnected and unmotivated acts of random mayhem, constitutes a montage of death, and the victims are mourned as little as the faces condemned to annihilation by the casual remote control–clicking channel-surfer. In fact, Natural Born Killers switches channels on itself at several points in the movie, as if losing interest in or patience with its own story. At the end of the movie, Wayne Gayle has been shot on camera, and he is then killed a second time by whoever is holding the remote control of the movie. This inscrutable personage expresses his indifference to Gayle’s murder by flipping from the news report of his death to a Coke commercial, then to the trial of the Menendez Brothers, then to the OJ trial, then to Rodney King’s inarticulate plea for cooperation, then to coverage of the Kerrigan-Harding affair, then to the burning of the Branch Davidian compound in Waco, surfing, as we all do,

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through the quotidian sensationalism and luridness of a culture which is itself a violent montage of celebrity killers. The inclusion of this material into the film causes Sylvia Chong to observe that “In blurring the line between fiction and fact, Stone ends up making the real seem fake rather than making the fictional seem true” (264). Chong sees this effect as a flaw in the film, but if we consider Natural Born Killers within the context of the hyperreal, it is clear that the film succeeds to the extent that it does evoke the impression that the “real” world that Americans inhabit in 1994 is itself a kind of berserk murder montage. Part of the schizophrenic mood of the film is a result of its imperfect synthesis of the conflicting artistic temperaments of Quentin Tarantino, who wrote the original screenplay, and Stone, who adapted Tarantino’s script to his own purposes. It is relatively easy for any viewer of Natural Born Killers who is familiar with the oeuvres of Tarantino and Stone to identify which elements of the film owe their genesis to which filmmaker. The dialogue about key lime pie in the beginning of the movie is vintage Tarantino, as is the figure of “Supercop” Scagnetti, Mickey’s gift for telling narrativestyle jokes, the prison-escape ploy of duct-taping the business end of a shotgun to a hostage’s neck, and the detail of the Mickey and Malory narrative that they always leave one victim alive “to tell the tale.” When Tarantino’s characters talk, they talk in sparkling screenplay banter, and when they act, they do so in over-the-top American movie fashion. Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction is arguably the most definitive masterpiece of ’90s’ hyperreal cinema, not because it directly addresses the subject of hyperreality as JFK and NBK do but because it is itself so totally a hyperreal artifact. The world of Pulp Fiction is a world in which everything on the screen is saturated with cinematic self-referentiality. The characters live in a giddy atmosphere of a reality that has been completely usurped by hip representations of hip representations. In Tarantino’s original screenplay for Natural Born Killers, we learn nothing about Mickey and Malory’s abusive childhoods, Wayne Gayle is not a veteran of Grenada, and Mickey and Malory do not feel guilt for killing a wise old Native American. In short, there is no trace of trauma, history, or guilt in the pre-Stone version of the narrative. Where these themes emerge, we can clearly see Stone at work trying to incorporate a comparatively moralistic sensibility into Tarantino’s gleeful nihilism. Tarantino invents Mickey and Malory as a legendary pair of icons that are beyond good and evil and who, in owing their entire existence to cinematic representations, share the perfect moral innocence enjoyed by phantasmal entities. Stone’s revision of Tarantino’s script attempts to embed these filmic creatures into humanistic systems of victimhood and responsibility. The film that results from this convergence of two perspectives, however, does not succeed in subjugating Tarantino’s hyperrealism to Stone’s sociology, nor is Stone’s temperament entirely overwhelmed by the sweep of Tarantino’s creation. Rather, Natural Born Killers juggles both versions of the same story, keeping them in play simultaneously by splicing them together in a kinetic and dialogical montage. David T. Courtwright describes Natural Born Killers as a “failed experiment” (201) owing to its “contradictory” handling of the problem of evil. Courtwright observes correctly that, at certain moments, the film implies that Mickey and Malory are evil by nature, that they are, as Tarantino’s title clearly seems to indicate, “born bad,” and so

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are paradoxically innocent in the same manner as a rattlesnake or a scorpion, creatures whose inherent nature endows them with a license, even, indeed, an obligation, to kill. Other points in the movie, however, clearly indicate that Mickey and Malory are maladjusted victims of a culture of violence which assaults them both through the supersaturated image-ecology and through the childhood abuse they receive from their parents. Clearly, this schism at the heart of the film is a reflection of the turbulent Tarantino-Stone relationship, Tarantino being largely responsible for the parts of the film that put the emphasis on the killers’ nature, and Stone being largely responsible for those aspects of the film that articulate the “Nurture” argument. That Courtwright regards this schism as a fatal flaw in the movie, however, suggests that he is confusing aesthetic standards appropriate to film criticism with those more fitting for nonfiction prose. A movie need not be a thesis statement; it is free to be a dialogue, even a dispute, even an outright self-contradiction. Rather than a unilateral explanation of the problem of evil that would safely neutralize the nature/nurture debate by choosing one side over the other, Natural Born Killers employs the logic of cinematic montage to dramatize a complex interrelation between these two causal explanations, and suggests that, rather than contradictory possibilities, essence and environment coexist in a troubled interrelation. Stone’s statement in an interview that he conceives of Mickey and Malory as “the new Adam and Eve in the way that our contemporary society is remaking us into pre-cyborgs” (“On Nixon and JFK” 247) combines the argument of environmental causality with an Edenic reference, suggesting that there is an innocence and integrity in acting according to the modes of behavior that are “natural” within a hyperreal environment. Rather than a duality between natural and environmental factors, Natural Born Killers represents a kind of kaleidoscopic swirl of nature and nurture, a vertiginous background of internal and external demons animating and buffeting Mickey and Malory. Furthermore, this splicing together of concepts conventionally supposed to be contradictory reveals a fundamental similarity between both nature and nurture explanations: that both theoretical constructs serve to leave Mickey and Malory themselves blameless and unaccountable for their actions. Whether we determine that Mickey and Malory kill because of who they are or because of how they were raised, the responsibility is shifted away from the killers themselves and onto genetic or social factors. This condition suggests that both nature and nurture are kindred strategies for negating the idea of personal responsibility altogether. It is in defiance of these reductive and self-serving “solutions” to the problem of evil that Mickey and Malory, between themselves, agree to take responsibility for killing the Native American who had invited them into his hogan. This sense of responsibility itself, however, is not stated too broadly. It is thrown into the montage along with the other approaches to the problem of evil and may for that reason come off as unconvincing. We can make the same evaluation of the moral climate of Natural Born Killers that Baudrillard makes about the bombardment of Hanoi: “nothing [is] objectively at stake but the verisimilitude of the final montage” (SS 37). The real power of Natural Born Killers is not in anything it “says” but in what it is; the individual parts of the film are only significant insofar as they contribute to the total flow of the experience that the film invites its audience to have. Indeed, contradiction

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itself—between ostensibly contradictory explanations for the problem of evil, between tragedy and entertainment, and between exploitation and critique—is a structural principle of the entire film at its most fundamental level. The antihero paradox that gives Tarantino’s original scenario its familiar resonance is the old literary quirk that makes us sympathize with Milton’s Lucifer or with cinematic outlaws since the silent era. Fictional villains, and especially cinematic villains, possess all of the allure of real villains without any of the real villainy; the magic of fiction scrubs their behaviors of consequence, injustice, or suffering. As long as fiction and reality remained opposite terms, this loophole in the moral imagination remained an aesthetic effect, but in the infotainment era, where fiction and reality have fused into a new semantic ecosystem, OJ, the Menendez Brothers, Nancy Kerrigan, and Bill Clinton himself take on the aura of fictional characters. The charisma of Mickey and Malory—their individual attractiveness, their love and humor, and the sheer exuberance of their most memorable scenes together—overwhelm any more rational critique or “objective” condemnation of the acts of violence they commit. If we respond to the movie’s cues, we cannot help feeling a little about Mickey and Malory the same way the enthusiastic crowd outside their trial feels: Mickey and Malory are supercool, way cooler than Manson. Mickey and Malory are the icons of the new reality: the image ripped out of its context, the innocent killer, the fictional character roaming free across the video prairies of the new manmade nature. Natural Born Killers elicits our own complicity with the cultural tendency it satirizes, blending critique with enactment in a way that collapses the border between character and audience as well as between moralistic valuations of guilt and innocence. Again, Baudrillard is our most reliable guide through this new moral landscape: “Is it good or bad? We will never know. It is simply fascinating, though this fascination does not imply a value judgment” (SS 119). It should not have come as a surprise that the movie was accused of inspiring “copycat” killings. If any mainstream American movie ever made a homicidal rampage look like a lot of fun, Natural Born Killers is the movie and, moreover, the movie explicitly begs the audience to cross the perceptual border between the world of the movie and the world of television news. The movie itself is calculated to arouse the audience’s desire to emulate the behavior of its giddy and sexy protagonists. But the very insistence with which Natural Born Killers propagandizes random murder serves the parodic function of provoking insight into how much of cinematic, celebrity, and journalistic discourses push the same psychological buttons, only without any glimmer of self-awareness. In both raising and ignoring moral questions about violence, Natural Born Killers opens itself up to attacks like Courtwright’s that the movie blatantly contradicts itself, but it also permits the larger and more interesting achievement of allowing the movie to behave as a kind of moral mirror, arousing our own amoral emotions so that we may more perceptively subject them to moral scrutiny, and using its own self-contradiction to reveal a self-contradiction within our own values as a society. Between JFK and NBK, Stone made Heaven and Earth (1993), a beautiful movie which nevertheless failed to resonate with audiences. Unlike the first two movies of his Vietnam Trilogy, Platoon and Born on the Fourth of July, Heaven and Earth did poorly at the box office and was received coolly by critics. It is possible that, by 1993,

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both Stone’s and American audiences’ concerns had shifted away from the conflicts of the previous generation and were absorbed with the contours of the new post– Cold War circumstances. Nixon fared better, in part because it borrowed techniques of the hyperreal style from JFK and NBK, in particular the montage-effect of using different film stocks to capture the tenor of personal and cultural recollection. At one point, when Nixon visits the Lincoln Memorial, Stone inserts a video montage where the sky should be, in a brief flashback to the window of Mickey and Malory’s motel. At another point, when Nixon is at Love Field on the day before the Kennedy assassination, a brief montage and music cue deliberately echo the opening sequence of JFK. But, although many aspects of the movie characterize Nixon as a kind of Mickey and Malory himself—an essentially amoral hyperreal entity—the main focus of the movie represents him as a troubled individual in the social realist mode. As such, the film shows Stone abandoning his hyperreal frenzy for a more traditional style of filmmaking. Although the Tarantino-esque U-Turn (1997) takes place in a kind of hyperreal twilight zone, Any Given Sunday (1999) and Alexander (2004) show Stone attempting to remake himself as a self-consciously “major” director. Though brief, Stone’s hyperreal experiment represents a fascinating phase in the development of the director’s career as well as a significant contribution to the American cinema and culture of the early 1990s.

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Bill Clinton Goes to the Movies In her analysis of Bill Clinton’s presidency, Diane Rubenstein describes “the profound mutation that Clinton has introduced into the presidential thing, a move parallel to the epistemic rupture of the virtual characteristic of Baudrillard’s most recent work” (146). Shawn J. and Trevor Parry-Giles make a similar appeal to Baudrillardian theory in their assessment that “Understanding Bill Clinton requires an acknowledgment that the dominant characteristic of politics in postmodern America is its hyperreality—a condition created by the dominance of representation and the explosion of media” (1). Both critics conceive of Clinton as the definitively Baudrillardian president—the talk show president whose appeal to the electorate is fundamentally a matter of his fuzzy ontology and whose status as a locus of hyperreality personifies the postmodern sensibility of fin-de-millennial US society. At the same time that the first reality television shows and personal websites were beginning to turn private citizens into public media figures, the individual holding the most public office in the world simultaneously had his private life transformed into a media spectacle. There is probably no single human being for whom Carol Hanisch’s famous pronouncement—“the personal is political”—has been true in a more ironic, bitter, and crushingly literal sense than for Bill Clinton. It is therefore natural that the figure of Clinton himself and the office of the presidency in general would come to emblematize this aspect of the postmodern condition, and, indeed, Clinton-era cinema is populated by numerous examples of Clinton-esque presidents who negotiate the ontological crisis of the collapse of the private/public binary. Presidential films such as Dave (1993), The American President (1995), Primary Colors (1998), Absolute Power (1997), Wag the Dog (1997), and Air Force One (1997), as well as apocalyptic thrillers such as Independence Day (1996), Armageddon (1998), and Deep Impact (1998) that incorporate the figure of the American president into a Hollywood scenario simultaneously reflect and enable the president’s conversion into a locus of virtuality and a personification of the implosion of private and public space in the postmodern hyperscape. Baudrillard writes one of his most pointed analyses of this implosion in 1987’s The Ecstasy of Communication: In a subtle way, this loss of public space occurs contemporaneously with a loss of private space. The one is no longer a spectacle, the other is no longer a secret. Their distinctive opposition, the clear difference of an exterior and an interior, exactly described the domestic scene of objects, with its rules of play and limits,

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Cinema of Simulation and the sovreignty of a symbolic space, which was also that of the subject. Now this opposition is effaced in a sort of obscenity where the most intimate processes of our life become the virtual feeding ground of the media (the Loud family in the United States, the innumerable slices of patriarchal or peasant life on French television). Inversely, the entire universe seems to unfold arbitrarily on your domestic screen (all the useless information that comes to you from the entire world, like a microscopic pornography of the universe, useless, excessive, just like the sexual close-up in a porno film): all this explodes the scene formerly reserved by the minimal separation of public and private, the scene that was played out in a restricted space, according to a secret ritual known only to the actors. (130)

The presidency, like all traditional institutions of authority, draws its power from an elaborate scene of appurtenances—a pageantry of buildings, monuments, advisors, guards, insignia, and rituals—that constitute the spectacle of leadership. The separation of subject and object, as well as of reality and illusion that is implicit in Baudrillard’s theatrical metaphor of the scene, is the crucial infrastructure necessary to support the classical model of political authority. But Clinton’s presidency replaces the scene with the obscene. The public discussion of the intimate details of Clinton’s sexual behavior are, of course, obscene in the conventional sense (the stain on the dress, the cigar), but, correspondingly, they are obscene in the Baudrillardian sense in which the “microscropic pornography of the universe” becomes headline news, infotainment pay dirt, common knowledge, and, ultimately, a chapter in the record of American history. For Baudrillard, the collapse of private space and public space is not only or primarily a psychological, sociological, or political crisis; it is on ontological crisis—a crisis in the nature of reality itself. The emptying of the spaces of private subjectivity results in a schizophrenic condition: “the schizo is bereft of every scene, open to everything in spite of himself, living in greatest confusion” (EC 133). This confusion is the final development of Marshall McLuhan’s observation that electronic media constitute an externalization of the central nervous system, “the amputation and extension of [one’s] own being in a new technical form” (26). In a totalized media environment, the nervous system is fully exteriorized such that exteriority itself has been conquered, an accomplishment which annihilates interiority in the same gesture. Clinton himself comes across as a philosopher of postmodern ontology in his famous defense that whether he was lying or telling the truth about his sexual activities “depends on what the meaning of the word ‘is’ is” (Videotaped Testimony). Clinton’s critics quickly seized on this equivocation as the definitive slogan of Clinton’s presidency. As a patently evasive linguistic maneuver, the statement epitomizes the linguistic shell games employed by a stereotypically smarmy country lawyer. As a meta-linguistic word-puzzle, the statement suggests the broader meta-level consciousness which is such an important aspect of Clinton’s reinvention of the presidency (what Parry-Giles and Parry-Giles refer to as Clinton’s “meta-imaging” [52]), even as it suggests the mise-en-abyme nature of meta-level phenomena (the meaning of the word “is” in the verb position will be determined by the meaning of the word “is” in the object position so that the meaning of the entire statement is cast into doubt by the statement

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itself). Furthermore, the statement plays into conservative fantasies that the essence of liberalism is the insidious undermining of the elemental coordinates of Western civilization. Clinton’s willingness to question the integrity of the verb to be—language’s most emphatic tool for asserting the reality of what it predicates (I think therefore I am; to be or not to be; it is what it is)—becomes destabilized by Slick Willy’s subversive linguistics, opening possibilities for radical conceptualizations of the nature of human reality. But of course it is also true that “is” is one of the most slippery words in the language, capable of both bridging the gap and blurring the border between different states of being. Many Hollywood films of the Clinton era hinge on precisely this ontological ambiguity in the definition of “is”: in Total Recall, Quaid is on Mars and/or Quaid is suffering from a schizoid embolism; in The Truman Show, Truman is a media construct and/or Truman is a humanist individual; in The Matrix, Neo is alive and/ or Neo is dreaming. In Air Force One, President Marshall, played by Harrison Ford, persuades a White House telephone operator of his identity, by growling brusquely, “This is the president!” In one way or another all of the presidential films of the Clinton era apply President Clinton’s warning about the slippery definition of “is” to President Marshall’s existential assertion, examining the ontological status of the postmodern presidency. The medium of film played a crucial role in Clinton’s own 1992 presidential campaign, during which he introduced himself to the American people at the Democratic National Convention through the 13-minute film, The Man from Hope. Clinton’s campaign had already made unprecedented use of television—crucial moments of his campaign included his appearances on 60 Minutes, Arsenio Hall, and MTV—and The Man from Hope adapts Clinton’s televisual approachability into a portrait of the presidential candidate as a would-be talk-show-guest-in-chief. Rather than saying anything about his political views, the film chronicles the intimate corners of the candidate’s biography, his close relationship with his mother, his stand-off with his alcoholic father, and even his marital problems with his wife. In doing so, Clinton presented his biography to the voters as a much more complex narrative than the typical Horatio Alger backstory so beloved by American politicians. Clinton’s story is not an exemplum of the American dream but a convoluted, personalized psychodrama unique to itself. Simultaneously, The Man from Hope is a story of destiny. Not only does the obvious pun in the name of Clinton’s town of birth suggest an uncanny aptness but also the famous image of the young Bill Clinton shaking hands with President Kennedy, shown several times throughout the movie, suggests an air of inevitability about Clinton’s rise to the presidency, as if he were both an average, everyday talk-show guest and a magically fore-ordained leader. Both of these themes are woven together in what we might consider to be the climax of The Man from Hope, in which Bill tells the story of the night that his family watched the Bill and Hillary 60 Minutes interview on television. Once early in the campaign when I’d been beat up a lot by the press, Hilary and I went on national television and basically acknowledged that we’d had some problems in our marriage and we were proud of the fact that we’d been able to

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Cinema of Simulation keep it together. When the show aired, Chelsea wanted to watch it, so the three of us went upstairs and sat down and watched it together. It was pretty painful, you know, to have your child watch that. And then, after it was over, I looked at her and I said, ‘What do you think?’ And she said, ‘I think I’m glad you’re my parents.’ After that, I knew whatever happened, it’d be alright.

In this anecdote, Bill Clinton plays the role of both media spectacle and ordinary media spectator at the same time, twisting the private and public aspects of his identity into each other in a way that not only establishes him as a paradoxical celebrity-everyman but also expresses the intimate role media representation has played in his self-understanding and in his relationship with his family. The media as a collective phenomenon really does play the role of television therapist for Clinton, who appears in The Man from Hope as both talk-show guest and host. Clinton the family man and Clinton the media spectacle are not merely conflated with each other; rather, the circuits of the mass-media are absorbed into the psychic infrastructure of Clinton’s own personal identity as simply another form of self-awareness. D. A. Pennebaker and Chris Hegedus’s documentary of Clinton’s 1992 campaign, The War Room, both subverts and radically extends the idea of Clinton as a mediated image-person. The documentary invites us behind the curtain of the Clinton spectacle while simultaneously revealing the mechanisms of marketing responsible for projecting that spectacle. The filmmakers capture Clinton in decidedly nonpresidential moments, in a tee-shirt, eating a cheeseburger while watching television, for example, even as his campaign managers mastermind the logistics of how they will present the man in public. The film flaunts the theme that Bill Clinton is not Bill Clinton—there is an ontological slippage between the individual human being and the presidential brand. Bill Clinton the candidate does not exist in any essentialist way, but rather as an elaborate performance staged by professional image-makers. The break between the Bill Clinton who is and the Bill Clinton who appears takes a sinister tone in one of the very last scenes in the movie, which peeps in on George Stephanopoulos in a phone conversation with a would-be blackmailer alleging knowledge of Bill Clinton’s illegitimate black daughter. Stephanopoulos cajoles his interlocutor into silence with a mixture of persuasion, outrage, and threats. Regardless of whether the rumor has any merit, the scene is an astonishing illustration of how the presidential candidate’s image is forcefully patrolled. At the same time, however, this film itself, which seems like an exposé behind the pasteboard surface of a political image, could not have been made without the cooperation of the campaign itself as a kind of extension of the campaign spectacle. In a remarkable inversion, The War Room brings the shadow-areas of the campaign into the campaign itself. Rather than showing us the “real” Clinton who exists behind the media image, the film enacts an additional permutation in which this “real” Clinton—in all of his unglamorous demystification and even in his very depravity—becomes part of the image. In flaunting the campaign’s secrets— Bill Clinton’s secrets—The War Room makes secrecy itself part of Clinton’s public persona. The result is a Clinton who cannot be conceptualized in the realist terms in which a true self is opposed to an inauthentic mask, but who emblematizes the

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postmodern, Baudrillardian fusion of image and reality into a new entity in which the fictive origin of the image is a key element of the kind of reality it reflects. A similar reconfiguration of reality is achieved by The Clinton Chronicles, an underground conspiracy documentary from 1994 that serves as a kind of shadow-piece to The Man from Hope. The Clinton Chronicles blends credible accusations of Clinton’s sexual indiscretions with gradually more fantastic accusations of his participation in money-laundering, drug-smuggling, and mass-murder. Many of the same images that appear in The Clinton Chronicles also appear in The Man from Hope—the black-andwhite photo of the train station at Hope, Arkansas; the picture of Clinton shaking hands with JFK—but these images are recontextualized in the anti-Clinton film in a way that shows how contingent the meanings that we read into documentary evidence are: Hope, Arkansas, is described as a hotbed of prostitution and moral lassitude, a natural breeding ground for Faulknerian depravity; and Clinton’s meeting with JFK, rather than signifying the fated justice of the young man’s destiny to carry on the presidential legacy, is described as having sparked a fiendish ambition in the boy that would escalate to Hitlerian dimensions. From a stylistic perspective, The Clinton Chronicles bears an obvious debt to a masterpiece of hyperreal cinema, Oliver Stone’s JFK, which had been released several years earlier. The military snare rolls that underscore the narrator’s presentation of forensic evidence is specifically reminiscent of Stone’s film, but the more deep-seated similarity between the two films is the manner in which they reframe documents from the historical record in a way that illustrates how the meanings of such records are contingent on unstable narratives. Like JFK, furthermore, The Clinton Chronicles employs the rhetorical technique of making every conceivable accusation in the hopes that enough dirt will stick so that even if an audience regards the majority of the film’s claims with incredulity, they may come away with the impression articulated by a character from JFK: “There’s a lot of smoke there, but there’s some fire.” In both cases, the cumulative result is to blur the boundary between the legitimate history and the shadow-history, and to recast the public image of the president as a locus of ambiguity. Indeed, one of the Clinton detractors in The Clinton Chronicles employs a remarkably Clintonian definition of “is” in his warning to the electorate that “Bill Clinton is not the candidate they voted for.” This conspiratorial duality in the presidential image is reflected in one of the first of a wave of Clinton-era “president” movies, Dave, in which the president is represented as two people, the “real” president and the “fake” president, and in which the simulacral president gains ascendency over the “real” one in a clear allegory of the progress of Baudrillardian hyperreality. The plot of Dave, in fact, recalls a situation described in one of the seminal texts of Baudrillardian postmodernity, Philip K. Dick’s The Simulacrum, in which the president, who is in fact long-since dead, has been replaced with an android. In Dave, the presidential simulacrum is a human being, but the Machiavellian chief-of-staff ’s boast of the real president, “I made him. I built him,” indicates the manufactured nature of the figure of the president, even before the act of simulation explicitly enters into the story. In fact, it is the simulacral President Mitchell who takes on the greater force of reality. Although Dave Kovac looks exactly like the real president and is a gifted mimic of the presidents’ mannerisms, the press

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is quick to notice that there has been an overall change in the president’s personality. He exudes a spontaneity and freshness that indicate a distinct break with his formerly calculating and formal public persona. The press and the polls both react positively to the impression that the president is starting to act like a “regular guy,” as if he were a real person rather than an abstract representation of authority. The simulation plays better on television than the reality, arguably because the ontology of simulation is more conducive to mass-media promulgation than reality. As played by Kevin Kline, Dave Kovak is himself a kind of simulation of a Capra-esque everyman; he is good at baseball, committed to the working poor, an easy conversationalist, and possessed of a sparkling wit and gestural grace that transport his every scene into the register of musical theater. Of course, he is preternaturally gifted as an impersonator, a characteristic that is of a piece with his entirely performative persona. His line of work as the owner of a temp agency accentuates the suggestion that Dave is a kind of human silly-putty, capable of being molded into any form and able to retain the imprint of whatever touches him. For this reason, he is a perfect personification of simulation as such. When Dave first walks through a crowd in his role as president, he seems to absorb presidentiality into himself; the glances of other people, the way the crowd’s activity is organized entirely around Dave’s body, and Dave’s appropriation of presidential accoutrements work together to suggest that Dave is not (only) pretending to be the president; he has in a very literal way actually become the president. Over the course of the film, President Mitchell’s legislation becomes Dave’s legislation, even as Dave comes to accept the guilt for President Mitchell’s political crimes. The secret service agent played by Ving Rhames eventually concludes that he would take a bullet for Dave, this voluntary blood sacrifice serving as the ultimate validation of the reality of Dave’s presidency. Of course, the one thing that keeps Dave from being the real president is that “he” was not elected, but the fact that he looks like the man who was elected is enough to keep the ploy from looking less like a blatant coup d’état and more like a comic meditation on the meaning of the fin-de-millennial presidency. At one point in the movie, Dave and the first lady pretend to be impersonating the president and first lady to avoid being identified as the real president and first lady. In Dave’s case, of course, the lie is the truth, and the entire scene in the movie (like a similar scene in My Fellow Americans (1996), in which ex-presidents Jack Lemmon and James Garner avoid detection using the same ruse) plays with the ease with which the figure of the president is amenable to simulation, as well as with the conceit that ordinary American bystanders are always willing to accept that someone who looks like the president might just as likely be an impersonator as the real thing. The narrative world of Dave is also hyperrealized by the large number of real pundits, politicians, and media personalities who appear in the film, warping the conventional divide between cinematic fiction and celebrity media culture. Among these cameos, Oliver Stone makes an ironic appearance on a fictional talk show insisting that President Mitchell is not the candidate they voted for. Stone is having fun with his post-JFK reputation as a conspiracy nut, but, because his fringe accusation about President Mitchell happens to be accurate in the context of the movie, Stone’s cameo actually suggests his status as a uniquely insightful observer of the political scene and vindicates his conspiratorial vision of American governance.

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In fact, Dave plays out the dark vision of JFK and The Clinton Chronicles in the comic mode, breaking through the conventional moralism to suggest that a simulacral president would be the ideal head of state. Dave can be read as an attempt to “kill off ” the womanizing Clinton and replace him with the simulacral fantasy the liberal conscience wanted him to be, an average guy with a big heart. As long as the physical likeness between the two presidential figures is persuasive, it is possible to simulate an inspirational president. Andrew Shepard, the president played by Michael Douglas in The American President is another idealized Bill Clinton—a charming, brilliant politician with sky-high approval ratings who stands up enthusiastically for the ACLU, flag-burners, assault rifle bans, and forceful environmental regulations. His most Clintonesque quality, however, is the manner in which his presidency is characterized by a debate about whether the president’s personal life is relevant to his public office. The opening credits of The American President is a solemn montage of presidential iconography— signatures, marble heads, portraits, artifacts, etc.—that evokes the sense of the president as a monumental, historo-mythic entity. Marble busts do not have personal lives, they do not have sex, and they do not embarrass themselves in front of cameras. In the mass-media age, the image of the president is defined not by marble, but by video tape. As a character in the movie remarks, “Wilson didn’t have to be president on television.” Another character utters the commonplace observation that FDR never would have been elected if the press had regularly shown him in a wheelchair. But communications media have remodeled the presidency through the passive influence of their ubiquity, remaking the presidency over in their own image: representing the president not as a god carved in stone, but as a character on a reality television program. The president falls victim to the tendency in postmodern culture that, according to Baudrillard, is making everyone over in the image of the Loud family, the family who pioneered the ontology of televisual living in the 1973 series An American Family: “We are all Louds doomed not to invasion, to pressure, to violence and blackmail by the media and their models, but to their induction, their infiltration, their illegible violence” (SS 30). Like Truman Burbank in The Truman Show, President Shepard inhabits a world where his schedule and emotional life are both regulated by the requirements of living “on television.” Living in the White House represents the collapse of work life and home life, of public persona and private identity, of family and coworkers. President Shepard’s chief of staff was also his best friend at his wedding, and when he has a heart-to-heart with his daughter, he talks about the Constitution. His immersion in this televisual mode of existence clearly takes a toll on his sense of identity. He mumbles abstractedly, “Robin said something to me. She didn’t really say it to ‘me,’ ” trailing off in a manner that indicates his confusion regarding the question of who he is. When his daughter tells him to “just be yourself,” he echoes her vaguely, “Be myself …?” in a way that suggests that the presidency itself is in the throes of an identity crisis. The American President even creates an idealized kind of scandal for its idealized Bill Clinton. Rather than a series of extramarital affairs, the controversy casting a shadow over Shepard’s presidency is that he is a widower who has started dating an environmental lobbyist. Annette Benning’s turn as the lobbyist reflects an idealized

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representation of Hillary Clinton, not only because of her green pantsuit but also because her relationship with Shepard weaves together romance and politics in a manner reminiscent of Bill and Hillary Clintons’ portrayal of themselves as the exemplary power couple. The promise of the movie is that finding love can help President Shepard through his postmodern sense of depersonalization, but instead, the president’s romance threatens to destroy his presidency. This threat comes not from the public, who are represented by and large as enthusiastic supporters of the president, and not even from President Shepard’s political enemies, although Richard Dreyfus manages to channel a very convincing amalgam of Newt Gingrich and Kenneth Star, but primarily from President Shepard’s commitment to upholding a “marble bust” ideal of the presidency. Despite the pleas of his advisors, President Shepard refuses to dignify his detractors with a response, even though his poll numbers are tanking and congressmen are distancing themselves from his legislative agenda, so committed is he to maintaining his presidential aura. The most desperate of President Shepard’s advisors is Lewis, a George Stephanopoulos figure played by Michael J. Fox. As his public relations consultant, Lewis is eager to convince the president that he has a responsibility to make a public statement about his relationship status. In a climactic confrontation with his boss, Lewis attempts to persuade Shepard that his constituents have a primitive desire to subject themselves to his authority, a desire that is willing to accept illusion in the absence of any reality: “They want leadership! They’re so thirsty for it they’ll crawl through the desert toward a mirage, and when they discover there’s no water there, they’ll drink the sand!” Shepard’s response to his advisor is a cryptic aphorism that suggests that his refusal to share his private life with the voting public is based on a disdain for popular opinion. “People don’t drink the sand because they’re thirsty,” he corrects Lewis, “they drink the sand because they don’t know the difference.” Hallucinatory sand nourishes its drinkers just as satisfyingly as “real water,” partly, Shepard implies, because of the ignorance of the media-brainwashed masses, but more fundamentally, because politics was never about differentiating sand from water; there never was any reality behind the mirage—neither sand nor water—but only a vast collective fantasy. Although the meaning of Shepard’s statement is extremely obscure, it is obvious from Douglas’s despondent delivery, from the dark and stormy night rattling the windows of the gloomy Oval Office, and from the context of the plot (Shepard’s poll numbers are down and his faith is shaken) that we are supposed to understand that, in uttering this statement, Shepard has given himself over to despair. Shepard has countered Lewis’s belief in the social reality of leadership with a desperate rejection of all reality whatsoever. Shortly after this scene, however, Shepard’s stance inexplicably reverses itself, and he is in front of a media audience consenting to his political rival’s position that the president’s personal character is an integral part of his public persona. “If you want to talk about character and American values, fine. Just tell me where and when, and I’ll show up.” It is as if the movie is suggesting that President Shepard had to pass through this dark realization about the phantasmal nature of political figures before he could fully come into his own as a president who, like Bill Clinton watching himself on television in The Man from Hope, is able to take control of the hyperreal plasticity of his public identity.

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Rather than being someone who has the job of being president, President Shepard punctuates his triumphant rout of his rival with an emphatic implementation of the verb to be: “My name is Andrew Shepherd, and I am the President,” indicating that his personal and political selves—his real self and his image-self—have definitively collapsed into a perfect hyperreal fusion. Whereas The American President focuses on the figure of the president himself as a locus of hyperreality, in Barry Levinson’s political comedy, Wag the Dog, the president is never named and his only appearances in the movie are out of focus or from behind or on television, or some combination of the three. The usurpation of the movie’s narrative by the president’s advisors and image-makers recalls the dynamic depicted in The War Room, and in Wag the Dog, this displacement of the president by his representatives is consistent with the film’s overall vision, epitomized in the title, of a hyperreal world in which the “tail” of representation wags the “dog” of reality. Indeed, Conrad Breen, the architect of the movie’s plot, repeatedly cites the Gulf War as a precedent for his manipulation of history in terms similar to those advanced by Baudrillard in his controversial essay, “The Gulf War Did Not Take Place.” Baudrillard had argued that the Gulf War was a virtual war, “the simulacrum of war itself ” (IE 65) because of the fore-ordained outcome of the event—“no accidents occurred in this war, everything unfolded according to a programmatic order” (GW 73)—as well as because of its thoroughly prepackaged and televisual quality, amounting to “a shameful and pointless hoax, a programmed and melodramatic version of what was the drama of war” (GW 72). Of course, both of these critiques also apply to the virtual war with Albania that Conrad engineers: the plot of the war is scripted, and the story of the war is disseminated as a mass-marketed, multiplatform drama calculated to pull the heartstrings of the hoi polloi. Baudrillard’s critique of the Gulf War as “overexposed to the media, underexposed to memory” (IE 63) seems to provide the starting point for Conrad’s argument to Stanley about the feasibility of producing the appearance of a fake war: “What’s the thing people remember about the Gulf War? A bomb falling down a chimney. Let me tell you something: I was in the building where we filmed that with a 10-inch model made out of Legos.” When Stanley asks the obvious question— “Is that true?”—Conrad’s offhand response—“Who the hell’s to say?”—asserts the meaninglessness of the criteria of truth or falsity as they apply to postmodern war. War, which throughout the literatures of all cultures had always represented the existential experience par excellence, the most elemental encounter with stark reality, has become dispersed into an array of images, trivia, fads, and marketing gimmicks. The paraphernalia usurp the war in the same way that the president’s advisors usurp the president. These usurpations epitomize the reversal of cause and effect which Baudrillard refers to as a “precession of simulacra” (SS 1). Precession is the physical force because of which a bicycle wheel suspended from a rope by one end of its axle can remain— apparently by magic—vertical, so long as it keeps spinning fast enough that the parts of the wheel that are falling to the ground are counterbalanced by the parts of the wheel that are spinning upward, a fluid gyroscopic momentum that seems to confuse gravity itself by blurring together causes and effects. In Wag the Dog, Conrad produces a blues

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song and arranges to have it “discovered” in the Library of Congress as a forgotten depression-era gem of Americana. The denial of the existence of the B-3 bomber provokes the question about why its existence is being denied. The actress at the phony benefit concert does not need fake tears, because the minutely stage-managed event is so moving that she cries real tears. One of the conspirators becomes so swept up in the magical pattern of imagination trumping reality that she reflexively asks whether they can arrange to have it rain at Andrews Air Force Base for the president’s appearance there. Stanley, finally, is enraptured by the accomplishment of depolarizing the valence between fiction and reality: “That is a complete fucking fraud, and it looks a hundred percent real. It’s the best work I’ve ever done in my life, because it’s so honest.” In the movie’s final scene, Stanley comes to realize that the political advertisements on television serve the purpose of deterring the public awareness of the political scene at large by channeling a deliberate phoniness into discrete 30-second spots. As Baudrillard said of Disneyland, political advertisements are “presented as imaginary in order to make us believe that the rest is real” (SS 12). In Wag the Dog, it is the world outside the advertisements that is a simulation—not only electoral campaigns and presidential personae but also patriotism, geopolitics, and history itself. When the movie picks up at the end with a news report of another incident in Albania, we have no way of knowing, now that the movie is over and our peep behind the curtain is concluded, whether the president has been caught with another teenage girl, or whether, as also seems likely, the careless hostility that the US media has unleashed on the random people of Albania has actually resulted in the creation of the very bogeyman it had imagined. This latter possibility would indeed be a striking case of the “tail” of political rhetoric propelling the “dog” of global events. The film’s final note of uncertainty, however, like the ending of Total Recall or Inception (2010), remains suspended in an Einsteinian space where there is no standard to evaluate which motion is attributable to the dog and which to the tail; dog and tail blend into each other in an undifferentiated blur that is only identifiable as an absolute wagging—an ontological oscillation beyond all reference points. What is more, the hyperreal momentum by which fiction subsumes reality seems to have leaped off the screen itself. Wag the Dog—a movie about a presidency derailed by an affair with a younger woman—had its full USA release on January 9, 1998, one week before The Drudge Report broke the Lewinsky scandal, on January 17. As if the timing of the film’s anticipation of the real scandal were not compelling enough, when Wag the Dog shows a brief video clip of the president with the girl, the fictional footage is strikingly reminiscent, or pre-miniscent, of the now-famous video tape of Clinton greeting Lewinsky in a rope line. In both the movie video and the news video, the president leans in to embrace the girl, and in both versions, the girl is clad in a memorable dark beret. Later that summer, when Clinton ordered cruise missiles to bomb sites in Afghanistan and Sudan in retaliation for acts of terrorism committed by individuals allegedly harbored by the governments of these countries, it was inevitable that he would be accused of wagging the dog, an accusation which, with reference to the movie, has both a political insinuation—the president is letting the dog of politics be wagged by the tail of presidential imagemaintenance—as well as a cultural critique—that the dog of our understanding of the

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real world is wagged by our prior immersion in fictional scenarios, cinematic allusions, and cultural representations. From a twenty-first-century perspective, furthermore, Wag the Dog seems even more eerily prescient. When Conrad is cornered by a realityminded CIA agent with evidence-based verification that “there is no war,” Conrad successfully defends himself in terms that, although they may sound incredulously postmodern and theoretical in 1998, became rote US policy throughout George W. Bush’s presidency: “The war of the future is nuclear terrorism. It is and it will be against a small group of dissidents who, unbeknownst, perhaps, to their own governments, have blah blah blah. And to go to that war, you have got to be prepared. You have to be alert, and the public has to be alert. Cause that is the war of the future, and if you’re not gearing up to fight that war, eventually the axe will fall.” Furthermore, in the same way that Wag the Dog ends with the possibility that Conrad’s representation of a war has resulted in a real Albanian conflict, one could also certainly argue that the simulacral Gulf War did in fact set in motion events that would culminate in the much more persuasively real American wars of the twenty-first century. To be sure, there is nothing inexplicably magical about the fact that a presidential sex-scandal movie and the Monica Lewinsky scandal both entered the mass-media circuitry at around the same time. Both the movie and the news event are the culmination of the sexual danger that has always been inseparable from Clinton’s political persona. Absolute Power and Murder at 1600, both released in 1997, had also depicted presidents whose illicit sexual activities threatened to bring down their presidency. The high-water mark of this tide of parallel Clinton movies, however, is Primary Colors, which was released on March 20, 1998, the same day that Clinton decided to use executive privilege in an unsuccessful bid to protect the content of White House communications from Independent Counsel Kenneth Star. While Dave, The  American President, and Wag the Dog, Absolute Power, and Murder at 1600 all depict figures who allude more or less directly to William Jefferson Clinton, Primary Colors is structured around John Travolta’s burlesque impersonation of Clinton’s speech and mannerisms. In this sense, it is a faithful adaptation of the source novel of the same name, which also centers around a fun-house version of a Bill Clinton who manages to be both earnest and phony at the same time. The book was published in 1996 by an anonymous author, a provocative marketing tactic that suggested the titillating prospect that the book provided a nonfiction insider’s account of the true details of Clinton’s peccadilloes and his staff ’s damage control. Writers only conceal their identities when they are trading in dangerous facts. At the same time, however, the novel Primary Colors contains deliberate literary references to All the King’s Men and The Great Gatsby in a transparent attempt to write itself into the tradition of American fiction, and it contains what seem like deliberate implausibilities, including a scene in which the Hillary Clinton character foists aggressive sex onto the George Stephanopoulos character (mercifully excised from the final cut of the movie), calculated to dissuade the reader from adopting an attitude of wholesale credulity regarding the narrative. The ontological ambiguity of the narrative as a whole provides an atmospheric background that echoes the theme of ontological ambiguity in the diegetic narrative of the Stanton campaign. The novel describes a politics that is in the

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process of spinning away from the polis altogether: “It had stopped being about the folks; it was now about the scorps” (142), the scorpions or reporters, whose reportage has turned from being representational to being a complex self-reflection. “The press was reporting about how the candidate would deal with how the press would report about the story” (159). Stanton himself is depicted as a figure whose political acumen consists of being able to simulate sincerity so earnestly that his simulated sincerity is just as or perhaps more convincing, for himself as well as for others, than the real sincerity embodied by his political rival Fred Picker, whose authentic decency is only made possible by the fact that his political future is preemptively foreclosed by a dark secret in his past. Stanton is able to evade the political death of a dark secret by containing no darkness within himself, by existing as total screen, devoid of tragic interiority. He acts as a kind of black hole of hyperreality, bending everything around him according to his depolarizing gravity. A character in the novel is obviously speaking of both Stanton and Clinton when he says that “He’s a celebrity now. He’s in the Flash [The National Enquirer] and he’s real—it makes all the other things in the Flash seem real too. Space aliens. Miracle diets. He’s given credibility to all the world’s garbage. He’s a touchstone of the tabloid faith” (218). The entire culture, Primary Colors suggests, is being sucked into a vortex characterized by the decompression of fiction and history, myth and reality, and sense and nonsense. Although the film version dispenses with some of these precise details, it recapitulates the major plot points, the most predominant of which involve the futility of trying to distinguish the real Candidate Stanton from the fake one. Of course, the movie receives a hyperreal boost in its adaptation from novel, a genre that privileges interiority, to film, a genre that privileges vision, action, and exteriority. If the novel’s Stanton is like a screen in the flatness and mutability of his identity, the movie’s Stanton is a screen, literally, as the ground of his existence. The movie’s Stanton’s screenic identity is underscored even more forcefully by the casting of John Travolta in the role. Parry-Giles and Parry-Giles argue that “[t]he hyperreal fusion of Stanton and Clinton that had occurred in the novel was broken by the mimetic portrayal of Stanton by John Travolta” (146). They contend that, in the movie, it is too obvious that Travolta is only pretending to be Clinton, ruining the book’s hyperreal tension. This impression, however, fails to recognize the book’s own hints of self-fictionalization, and it also neglects Travolta’s own status as an icon of hyperreality. Rubenstein suggests a more accurate reading of Travolta’s incarnation of the president, referring to Travolta’s Stanton as “the ‘pulp president’ … who can, like Clinton, express his jouissance over a Royale with cheese” (169). Rubenstein’s reference to Quentin Tarantino’s hyperreal masterpiece Pulp Fiction alludes to the manner in which Tarantino plucked Travolta from the ashbin of postmodern memory as a kind of found object signifying in his mode of celebritydom the same kind of fusion of human individual and celebrity performer personified by Stanton/Clinton in Anonymous’s novel. Travolta’s post–Pulp Fiction career has always been defined by Tarantino’s identification of “John Travolta” as the definitive postmodern celebrity, and this element of Travolta’s persona dovetails conspicuously with the thematic concerns of Primary Colors. Moreover, as Rubenstein also suggests, there is a quality common to both Clinton and Travolta—an easy-going

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energy, an engagement with the world that is both thoughtful and sensual—indicative of a shared American heritage of Elvis impersonators and McDonald’s cheeseburgers. The plot of Primary Colors develops around three ambiguous instances of Jack Stanton’s reality. The first act performs a fictionalized reenactment of the unfolding of the Gennifer Flowers scandal. Here, Gennifer is named Cashmere, and, like Gennifer, she holds a press conference in collaboration with a tabloid magazine to play tapes of her suggestive phone conversations with the would-be president. In Primary Colors, although Cashmere’s tapes are entirely consistent with what we know about Stanton’s personality, the George Stephanopoulos character stumbles upon the realization that cell phone communication—a technology of virtualization and delocalization—is amenable to further postmodern varieties of recombination through the magic of advanced recording technologies. The evidence in Primary Colors is more or less unambiguous: they seem to have pinned down an instance of a definitively fake Stanton, making the real Stanton seem more reliably real by comparison. Extra-diagetically, however, the whole subplot inevitably refers its audience to the corresponding reality, in which the only evidence that the tapes are not the real Bill is the chutzpah of the real George Stephanopoulos and James Carville, who continue to maintain their position that the tapes “may have been doctored” (Flowers defamation suit). This alleged indeterminacy regarding the authenticity of the Gennifer Flowers tapes is hard to take seriously, yet it is also a crucial component of their cultural significance. The second act of Primary Colors involves the question of whether Stanton is or is not the father of a teenage girl’s baby. The George Stephanopoulos character is tapped to dissuade the father of the black teenage girl from going public with the allegation in an obvious nod to the notorious scene toward the end of The War Room in which the real Stephanopoulos talks down someone who is threatening to leak an identical allegation about Clinton. Primary Colors’s Stephanopoulos stand-in, showing a remarkably more troubled conscience than his real-world counterpart, persuades the girl’s father to authorize blood work for a paternity test, but the blood that Stanton submits as his own turns out to be Uncle Charlie’s. Stanton’s very DNA—the molecular blueprint of his biochemical existence—is vulnerable to simulation, and although the blood itself can be scientifically verified to be “fake,” it still does not answer the question of whether Stanton is the father of Loretta’s baby. Libby, Primary Colors’s version of Wag the Dog’s Conrad Brean, tells Stanton, “In fact, I think you’re not [the father].” The shell-game with Stanton’s DNA was itself a pointless ruse, evidence of Stanton’s reflexive tendency to simulate himself. Finally, the third act of Primary Colors leads up to a definitive test to determine who the real Stanton is. Is he the young idealist who spoke against political mudslinging, or is he just another dirty smear-monger? Libby is so distraught that Stanton is eager to use the dirt she has dug up on his political rival that she commits suicide out of anguished disillusionment. Stanton failed the test: he is a bogus commodity. But in the last scene of the movie (although not the book), we see that the Stephanopoulos character, the movie’s moral conscience, has decided to remain at Stanton’s side. Stanton has passed the test: he is the real deal. The question of whether we admire or loathe Stanton and the hyperreal condition he represents is itself suspended in a zone of indeterminacy. In a culminating feat of ambiguity, Primary Colors

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pretends to be a denunciation of political scandal-mongering, but, in its faux-exposé of Clinton/Stanton’s sex life, and, most egregiously, in its suggestion that Vince Foster’s suicide was a direct result of Clinton’s attempts to cover up his indiscretions, Primary Colors elevates the art of scandal-mongering to a hyperreal dimension. Protected by its status as fiction, Primary Colors can make some of the same accusations as The Clinton Chronicles, while simultaneously pretending to occupy the moral high-ground. At one point in the movie Primary Colors, Harry Burton, in political despair while watching Shane on his hotel room television, reaches his arms out to the heroic screen image and calls, “Come back, Shane! Run for president!” This sentiment is echoed in a string of movies from the late 1990s in which the president plays the role of an idealized guardian of the American spirit—Independence Day, Air Force One, Deep Impact, and Armageddon. Collectively, these films articulate an attempt to restore the heroic function of the presidential image, even as they assist in the process of reimagining the president as a fictional character. The marketing campaign for Independence Day emphasized the movie’s spectacle of the White House being annihilated by an alien death-beam, a definitive cinematic image of the vaporization of the conventional iconicity of the presidency. The secret of the movie’s mass-appeal, along with the mass-appeal of other global disaster movies of the period, is that they provide a narrative and visual correlative for the pervasive cultural intuition that the monolithic pillars of twentieth-century reality were imploding one by one, decimated by forces beyond our control or understanding, in a manner that is both terrifying and exhilarating. The president himself, however, escapes annihilation and rises from the ashes to be reborn as Bill Pullman, who said that he watched The War Room as preparation for his performance and who is otherwise best known for playing a parodic version of Harrison Ford’s Star Wars character in Mel Brooks’ Spaceballs (1987). It is Bill Pullman, parodic action star president, who oversees the reorganization of reality in the wake of global civilization’s collision with the forces of the future—of postmodernism, of globalization, of ecology, of connectivity, of virtualization. The same formula is reproduced in Deep Impact and Armageddon, in which inspirational presidents play a key role in giving the epic disaster a happy ending. The president in Armageddon reassures the audience that the success of the drill team in destroying the earth-killer asteroid amounts to a justification of Western technology, while President Beck of Deep Impact even manages to put a positive spin on the mass-devastation depicted throughout that film. “Millions were lost, and countless more left homeless. But the waters receded. Cities fall, but they are rebuilt. And heroes die, but they are remembered. We honor them with every brick we lay, with every field we sow, With every child we comfort, and then teach to rejoice in what we have been re-given. Our planet. Our home. So now, let us begin.” These fictional presidents perform the role of reassuring us that there is a twenty-first-century future beyond the rubble of fin-demillennial implosions, collisions, and violent transformations. The postmodernity of two-term American presidents has evolved over the last four decades in a manner that suggests parallels with both American culture generally over the same period and the trends in popular cinema. Ronald Reagan invented the postmodern presidency. His Hollywood origins, his talent as a character actor,

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and the clear parallels between his foreign policy and his love of American movies combine to give his political persona and his presidency itself the quality of a filmic image—an attractive and convincing but insubstantial play of light across a blank surface. Clinton, however, although very much a media figure, was never able to achieve Reagan’s transcendent iconicity. His image as president is inseparable from his personal psychology, from his physical body, and from the swarm of media outlets through which his identity has been cannibalized and reconstituted. He is the imploded president of postmodern obscenity. He is Neo’s president, Quaid’s president, Truman’s. He is the president of a political body that finds itself dispersed into rhizomatic circuits, the president who understands from bitter experience that states of being are unstable, even as he understands that the validity of any of these claims depends on what the meaning of “is” is.

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Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction and Baudrillard’s Perfect Crime Pulp Fiction has frequently been identified as a postmodern film—it has been called “one of the paradigmatic texts of the postmodern movement” (Morton), a “terminally hip postmodern collage,” (Hirsch 360), an example of the “ ‘inventive and affirmative’ mode of postmodernism” (Constable 54), and “the acme of postmodern nineties filmmaking” (Kokler 264)—and Jean Baudrillard is the postmodern philosopher whose writings most aptly describe the semantic landscape of Quentin Tarantino’s film. Baudrillard describes the style of aesthetic pleasure Pulp Fiction elicits from its audience when he observes: Today, where the real and the imaginary are intermixed in one and the same operational totality, aesthetic fascination reigns supreme: with subliminal perception (a sort of sixth sense) of special effects, editing and script, reality is overexposed to the glare of models. This is no longer a space of production, but a reading strip, a coding and decoding strip, magnetized by signs. Aesthetic reality is no longer achieved through art’s premeditation and distancing, but by its elevation to the second degree, to the power of two, by the anticipation and immanence of the code. A kind of unintentional parody hangs over everything, a tactical simulation, a consummate aesthetic enjoyment [jouissance], is attached to the indefinable play of reading and the rules of the game. (SED 75)

With its meticulous sheen of glossy appearances, its urbane and allusive banter, and its comic violence, Pulp Fiction celebrates a carefree posthistorical giddiness, as if the whole business of reality had finally been superseded. In the postreality period, people are characters in movies, conversation is an exchange of pop culture references, and conventional value structures do not apply. Although its characters are ostensibly criminals, it would be absurd to categorize Pulp Fiction as a crime movie in the conventional sense. Its gangster characters are thinly veiled actors, carrying on obsessive conversations about mass-culture within the orbit of Hollywood. As the title of the movie makes clear, the characters are “playing gangster” as a nod to the genre they are pretending to occupy, but it is a half-hearted nod, as no one makes any attempt to behave in any way that is remotely gangsterish, even by Hollywood standards. In contrast with the atmosphere of “real” gangster

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films, the criminals of Pulp Fiction do not inhabit a marginal underworld; rather, the whole world of Pulp Fiction is the underworld, there being very little evidence of any “overworld” for the underworld to underlie. Everyone who appears in the movie is hep to the condition of totalized criminality. The criminal acts themselves, however—the murders, the rigged prize-fighting, the diner hold-up—are not the focus of the film; the crime that creates a fraternal community among Pulp Fiction’s characters is the crime Baudrillard described in the preface to The Perfect Crime as “the murder of reality” (xi). Baudrillard’s turn of phrase here suggests that the totalization of the kind of hyperreal signscape depicted in Pulp Fiction is premised on a secret act of death that is then concealed from public view. But, as Baudrillard explains, “crime is never perfect,” and throughout Pulp Fiction, forces of death continually threaten to undermine the gossamer superstructure of hyperreal exchange. While the postmodernity of Pulp Fiction’s madcap surface is easy to identify, this hyperreal atmosphere exists in a sustained tension with signs of mortality, inexchangeability, and reality. The film itself is a kind of conspiracy on the part of the characters and the director to suppress the specter of death through their shared commitment to an aesthetic sensibility characterized by a free-flowing circulation of pop culture references. This hyperreal sensibility is epitomized by the interior design of Jackrabbit Slim’s, the ’50s’ nostalgia bar where Mia Wallace takes Vincent Vega on their famous date. Tarantino’s script calls it “the big mama of 50’s diners. Either the best or the worst, depending on your point of view” (51), Vincent sums it up as “a wax museum with a pulse,” and the signage on the restaurant itself indicates that Jackrabbit Slim’s is the “[n]ext best thing to a time machine.” Indeed, Tarantino’s fantasy diner takes the concept of the ’50s’ restaurant and launches it into outer space. Not only are there movie posters on the walls and rock and roll on the soundtrack, but the wait staff is made up improbably of iconic lookalikes, the dining booths are made out of vintage cars, and “The picture windows don’t look out into the street,” as Tarantino’s screenplay explains, “but instead, B & W movies of 1950s street scenes play behind them.” No wonder a milkshake costs five dollars! The TV-screen windows suggest that the sheer density of popular culture references concentrated in this one location may be enough to warp the texture of the world outside, making over external reality in the style of retro chic. Indeed, in the parking lot of the restaurant, Mia is able to use her fingers to sketch an extradiegetic square, as if the reality-warping effects of the restaurant have absorbed the couple before they have even set foot inside the establishment. More fundamentally, the entire universe of “cool” that is the real subject of Pulp Fiction itself emanates from the Babel of images, media figures, and fashion accessories on display at Jackrabbit Slim’s. As the decade that witnessed the “birth of cool” in the rapid growth of the mass-mediated consumer economy, the ’50s is the primal scene of postmodern culture, and, as with the primal scene described by Freud, the historical veracity of the memory of the period is less important than the vivid position it occupies in the structure of self-awareness. Like the ’50s visited by Marty McFly, Tarantino’s ’50s is deliberately sanitized and cartoonish. The Cold War, McCarthyism, and the Civil Rights movement are replaced with Zorro, Marilyn Monroe, and Donna Reed. In the Jackrabbit Slim’s dimension, fictional characters and historical figures rub shoulders

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in a way that is analogous to the less pulsating wax museums described by Umberto Eco in which “the logical distinction between the Real World and Possible Worlds has been definitively undermined” (14). Through a transfiguration of reality similar to that suggested by the replacement of the world outside Jackrabbit Slim’s with televised street scenes, the “wax museum history” of the ’50s’ diner insinuates itself into the atmosphere of the movie as a whole to become the definitive ontological setting for Pulp Fiction’s characters. The dialogue of Pulp Fiction’s characters, the clothes they wear, and even their personalities are composed of a collage of references to popular media culture. Although not all of Pulp Fiction’s allusions are to the 1950s, they are all decidedly noncontemporary, clustering predominantly around the nostalgic golden eras of the ’30s, ’50s, and ’70s. Unlike their real-world 1994 counterparts, the denizens of Pulp Fiction live in a world where everybody smokes, nobody uses a CD player, and there is no Internet. These stylistic characteristics of the Tarantinoverse mark it off as belonging to some alternate reality devoid of the superficial trappings of 1990s paraphernalia. Paradoxically, however, this alternate dimension provides a suitable setting for a film that is recognizable as an extremely contemporary work of cinematic art, one capable of defining the zeitgeist of its particular historical moment. Of course, to the extent that Pulp Fiction does reflect its cultural moment, it does so, not because of its mimetic realism but precisely because its “Jackrabbit Slim’s” approach to reshaping reality as an explosion of media references echoes the ontological dislocation characteristic of the age of media saturation. Tarantino’s retro aesthetic manages to isolate the essence of fashion itself because of the circumstance that, as Baudrillard explains, “Fashion is always retro. … It always presupposes a dead time of forms, a kind of abstraction whereby they become, as if safe from time, effective signs which, as if by a twist of time, will return to haunt the present of their inactuality with all the charm of ‘returning’ rather than ‘becoming’ structures” (SED 88). What is fashionable, what is stylish, what is cool is defined by images and objects that have been detached from history and from all political engagement, circulating in their own solipsistic orbit of hip indifference. The densely allusive atmosphere of Jackrabbit Slim’s is an elaborate spectacle that has no effect on the story, but is simply one of a series of settings in which the characters can engage in conversations which themselves constitute a litany of pop cultural allusions jumbled together in Jackrabbit Slim’s style. The diner is the prototypical setting for Tarantino characters, just as it is for the characters in the definitive televisual expression of ’90s’ hyperreality, Seinfeld. In both cases, the diner serves as a neutral background for long conversations “about nothing” (as they say on Seinfeld) in which the wit of the repartee is an end in itself. Pulp Fiction and Seinfeld both represent the art of conversation gone orbital, flying free of the weight of dramatic, narrative purpose that conventionally grounds film and television dialogue and finding a new momentum in the jouissance of dialogue itself as a free-floating pleasure that has been liberated from the gravity of history and story-telling alike. Even the sections of dialogue that convey plot information, like the conversation between Pumpkin and Yolanda that opens the film, are wildly discursive and baroquely adorned with verbal gamesmanship. In terms of the plot, Pumpkin and Yolanda’s

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conversation establishes the couple’s botched diner stick-up that bookends the film, but whereas a conventional director would indicate that a pair of characters are about to hold up a restaurant with an economical, tension-building montage of meaningful gazes, Tarantino has his robbers engage in 5 minutes of raucous dialogue about the Seinfeld-esque complications involved in a life of holding up small businesses. The effect is a kind of antitension that makes the gunplay seem like an extension of the wordplay. The heart of Pulp Fiction’s artistry is conversation itself, and it is a source of humor throughout the film that the discursive, allusional conversations about events are tonally discrepant with the brutality and fearsomeness of the events themselves, as in the story of Butch’s father’s watch, Jules and Vincent’s argument over who is going to clean up Marvin’s brains, or Pumpkin and Yolanda’s stick-up artist banter. Conversation in Pulp Fiction is a signifier that takes on a life of its own in regard to the signified plot information, transforming the reality of bodily violence into the disembodied selfreferentiality of a comic riff. Pulp Fiction is most in its element, however, when the dialogue escapes the pull of the plot altogether and becomes a kind of pure music, an effect demonstrated by the inclusion of dialogue tracks on Pulp Fiction’s soundtrack album. The dialogue between Jules and Vincent that follows the opening credits is one such conversation, Track 2 on the soundtrack: “Royale with Cheese.” The music behind the credit sequence that scrolls through the radio dial and which becomes the diegetic music coming from Jules’s car radio provides a suitable overture to a conversation which itself scrolls from subject to subject without any narrative consequence. The result is a kind of emancipation of Pulp Fiction’s dialogue that is reminiscent of Baudrillard’s description of “the emancipation of the sign” in hyperreal semiotics: “remove this ‘archaic’ obligation to designate something and [the sign] finally becomes free, indifferent, and totally indeterminate, in the structural or combinatory play which succeeds the previous rule of determinate equivalence” (SED 7). Although the dialogue in “Royale with Cheese” serves the narrative purpose of establishing that Vincent has been out of town and has therefore never met the boss’s wife, this sequence goes far beyond its “obligation to designate something” and becomes a disquisition on the emancipation of the sign itself. Vincent’s observations about Europe are directly translated from Tarantino’s own experience of taking Reservoir Dogs (1992) to the Cannes Film Festival and, for a knowing viewer, Vincent is ventriloquizing his author in a way that renders slightly more literal the sense throughout Pulp Fiction that all the characters speak in the same trademark Tarantino patter. This postmodern nod to the author during the introduction of Pulp Fiction’s central character bends the real world of the author into the fictionality of Pulp Fiction, endowing the characters with the kind of reality associated with a human personality, while simultaneously casting a sheen of fictionality over Tarantino himself and his own highly stylized public persona. Rather than referring toward either the factual reality of the author or the illusory reality of the character, Vincent’s remarks on Europe suggest a kind of mirror game that suspends both figures in a state of “combinatory play.” This effect is amplified by the substance of Vincent’s conversation. If California represents the extreme edge of hyperreal geography, Europe conventionally stands for history and reality. For Tarantino and Vincent, however, Europe is characterized not by

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its blood-soaked soil but by the circulation of commodities that replaces the “determinate equivalence” of reference to the real with the “combinatory play” of emancipated signs. Vincent/Tarantino recognizes the Netherlands, of course, primarily for its liberal marijuana laws, and Vincent’s fascination with French McDonald’s restaurants sums up the totality of his impression of European civilization. The experience of foreign travel as well as of Europe itself in all its formidable reality is swallowed up by Vincent’s appraisal of European culture as a humorously skewed McDonald’s commercial. In The McDonaldization of Society, George Ritzer argues that McDonald’s products themselves provide ideal examples of hyperreal simulacra, representations that have floated free of what they ostensibly represent: “Each Chicken McNugget is a copy of a copy; no original Chicken McNugget ever existed” (186). The McDonald’s food product bears no obligation to any prior reality, just as Vincent’s experience of Europe bears no obligation to the reality of history or cultural difference, and as this scene’s dialogue itself bears no obligation to narrative development. Significantly, Vincent makes no comment on the quality of the food as food. Presumably, McDonald’s food is globally standardized to such a degree that the food itself disappears into the background. Vincent’s attention is entirely preoccupied with the circulation of signs—the manner in which the names of late capitalist commodities float free of the things they signify and make themselves available for manipulation and reappropriation. The theme of floating signifiers is further elaborated in Vincent and Jules’s conversation about the meaning of a foot massage, and epitomized in the film’s central icon of floating referentiality, the glowing briefcase. The question of whether Antwan Rocky Horror deserved to get pushed out of a fourth-story window hinges on the semantic value of a foot massage. Vincent sums up the crux of his debate with Jules on this matter: “You’re sayin’ a foot massage don’t mean nothin’, and I’m sayin’ it does.” In the hyperreal economy of Pulp Fiction, the exchange rate of everything is debatable. The indeterminacy in the relative value of cunnilingus and pedal rub-down reflects the wider moral chaos both in the movie and in the Baudrillardian society in which “[a]ll the great humanist criteria of value, the whole civilisation of moral, aesthetic, and practical judgment are effaced in our system of images and signs” (SED 9). The sign-value of a foot massage is in a state of crisis because, in a field of total exchange, moral borders are arbitrarily defined according to different free-floating sign-systems. But whereas in his description of Europe, Vincent had luxuriated in the hyperreal circulation of signs without referents, he recognizes a foot massage given to the boss’s wife as signifying a very specific referent: the violent result of this signification serves as a clear indicator of its reality. Mia, however, later reveals that the foot massage that Vincent freights with such mortal significance never actually happened, and she casually demolishes the whole line of reasoning that led Vincent to convince himself that foot massages could harbor such lethal significance. Nevertheless, Vincent’s passionate defense of the signifying quality of foot massages in his debate with Jules establishes a motif throughout Pulp Fiction that when objects fall out of the precessional orbit of total exchange, they become charged with danger and death. In Symbolic Exchange and Death, Baudrillard theorizes that the plasticity of the hyperreal signscape is made possible by the elimination of death from the social order

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of exchangeability. “Political economy only exists by default: death is its blind spot, the absence haunting all its calculations. And the absence of death alone permits the exchange of values and the play of equivalences” (154). In Samoa, Antwan Rockamora’s ancestors might have practised a pattern of social rituals that would have established a system of reciprocity between life and death, but in L.A., as Tony Rocky Horror, he exists in a postmodernity in which promiscuous circulation renames him after a densely allusive pop culture phenomenon, and in which death takes the form of objects that resist circulation, such as the boss’s wife. The plot lines of Pulp Fiction’s subnarratives—“Vincent Vega and Marsellus Wallace’s Wife”, “The Gold Watch,” and “The Bonnie Situation”—are all structured around the deadly aura that emanates from the inexchangable object as represented by Mia, the watch, and Marvin’s corpse. It is as if the wild intertextual game of Pulp Fiction can only exist insofar as it manages to avoid and, indeed, actively to suppress any admission of death, the deliberate exclusion of which is necessary in order to sustain the pataphysical highwire dance of hyperreality. This impression is reinforced by the pattern running throughout each of the subnarratives that each of the stories concludes with a secret agreement to censor any acknowledgment of the deathly incident: Marsellus never needs to know about Mia’s overdose, Butch is ordered to not tell anybody about his and Marsellus’s run-in with Maynard and Zed, and Bonnie will never know about her husband’s participation in disposing of Marvin’s dead body. This recurrent pattern of inexchangeability, death, and suppression provides the narrative structure that organizes the free-flow of hyperreal dialogue throughout the movie. In the same way that Jackrabbit Slim’s is able to weave a retro collage by tacitly dismissing the fact that Marilyn Monroe and Mamie Van Doren are both dead, the entirety of Pulp Fiction describes a hyperreal orbit propelled by the giddy denial that what it orbits around is the black hole of death. The manner in which Pulp Fiction’s discursive dialogue is a coy dance around death is expressed very clearly when it becomes evident that the occasion for all of Jules and Vincent’s badinage about European McDonald’s restaurants and lethal foot massages has been an execution job on a group of young guys whose lethal crime, like Tony Rocky Horror’s, involves the misappropriation of an inexchangeable totem object. The identity of the glowing contents of the briefcase that Vincent and Jules retrieve from Brad and his companions at the beginning of the movie has been a source of much Internet speculation among Pulp Fiction aficionados. Could the briefcase contain the diamonds from Reservoir Dogs, the Elvis suit from True Romance (1993), or even Marsellus Wallace’s soul? Of course, what is really inside the briefcase is the ecstasy of the commodity, the pure glowing McGuffin, Lacan’s objet petit a in its most absolute form. With its surreal aura, its unnamability, and its basic impossibility of conforming to any literal interpretation, the briefcase is a locus of blatant unreality and, as such, it is the model for all the commodities of cool items, the value of which is established not by what they are but by the way people look at them. The briefcase exists beyond the edge of the movie’s teeming kitsch-scape as the numinal object that everything else aspires to become. As such, it is a motion-generator, like all McGuffins and all objects of desire, without being anything in itself. Jules and Vincent’s playful patter has all been moving

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toward this glowing object, and within its vicinity, the conversation about hamburgers with Brad superficially mirrors the earlier conversation about hamburgers with Vincent, but the matter of the briefcase transfigures the meaning of the conversation: it is now explicitly a conversation about the imminence of death. When Vincent, and later, when Pumpkin, looks into the briefcase, they are struck dumb—one of the only two occasions in the Pulp Fiction universe when anyone is at a loss for words, the other one being upon a sudden, brutal death, as when Brad’s apology is silenced by Jules’s abrupt execution of Brad’s roommate. While Jules and Brad can exchange banter about hamburgers, the briefcase is beyond the limits of social exchange. If the briefcase’s magical presence seems to gesture toward another kind of movie than the kind of movie Pulp Fiction is, it is precisely because its symbolic role in the film is to suggest an object beyond the limits of language or representability: the “blind spot” in hyperreality. As Brad and his partners discover, the encounter with the inexchangeable object is a deadly one. Brad’s death takes place off-camera, as do many of the acts of violence in Pulp Fiction, equating Brad’s unseen death with the unseen contents of the inexchangeable briefcase. Although the briefcase technically changes hands, moving from Brad’s cabinet and into Vincent’s possession, the briefcase has always belonged to Marsellus Wallace in a way that prefigures the sense in which, although Vincent will take Mia out to a restaurant, there is a deadly prohibition against any attempt to possess her definitively. The figure of Marsellus combines monopolistic power over all of the plots of Pulp Fiction with a shadowy invisibility (at least until his vulgar exposure in the basement of the pawnshop) in a way that evokes the unrepresentability of his briefcase and the unrepresentability of death itself in a hyperreal collage. His wife, in stark contrast, is the hyperreal subject par excellence, capable of schooling John Travolta himself in the ways of Tarantino-cool. The improbability of the relationship between Mia and Marsellus, she with her television pilots and hipster lingo and he with his intimate command of death, reflects the sense in which hyperreality is improbably married to death as its “excluded other.” At the same time, the comic discrepancy between Mia and her husband lends a visual emphasis to the manner in which marriage—with its outmoded proscription against the free exchange of sexual relations—is discrepant with the aesthetic, moral, and economic values of the movie’s hyperreal postmodernism. More than anything else, Mia’s marriage is a game, designed conjointly by Mia herself and the screenwriter with the intention of trapping some hapless protagonist like Vincent in the narrative web woven by the plot point of her inexchangeability. Free-floating hyperreality never congeals into a narrative. Events only shape themselves into narrative around loci of significance that are weighted differently than the rest of the circulating junk: the forbidden object, the unattainable object, the impossible object. When Mia first appears before Vincent, Vincent supposedly sees her face, but Tarantino shows us her deadly, inexchangeable feet, as if to suggest that, whereas her personality may seduce us into shifting patterns of hyperreal circulation, her character is “grounded” in her status as a totemic McGuffin of death. The first time we see Mia’s full face, it is illuminated in the neon glow of the Jackrabbit Slim’s signage. Mia is the human correlative of Jackrabbit Slim’s, wearing her moll

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identity as one of the many signs she (or her screenwriter) employs to establish that she is a queen of the Tarantinoverse, not so much because of the deadly power she has married into, but more importantly because of the semantic prestige the moll enjoys as a stock figure in an esteemed film genre. As far as the narrative is concerned, Mia’s debunking of Jules’s rumor that Mia was responsible for Rocky Horror’s defenestration should defuse the narrative tension created around Mia’s aura of deadliness. She manages to retain her deadly signification and support the narrative of danger that structures her date with Vincent, however, through the semantic value of her Chanel Vamp nail polish, the brand name of which refers back to a history of cinematic femmes fatales, and her pageboy haircut, reminiscent of the iconic bob worn by Louise Brooks as the prototypical deadly damsel in Pandora’s Box (1929). Even the way she eats a cherry or, in the words of the screenplay, “wraps her lips around the straw of her shake” (57) is weighted with an innuendo defined by fifty years of rock and roll iconography. The personality of her character and her role in the narrative are both characterized by “seduction” as Baudrillard described it: “a spiral swerving toward the sphere of the sign, the simulacrum, and simulation” (EC 79). She seduces Vincent by mirroring his hip speech, his hyper-familiarity with pop culture, and even his clothes, but this seduction is structured around the mortal prohibition against their consummating the relationship. As in Baudrillard, seduction is a double-helix, the opposite coil of which is “a spiral of the reversibility of all signs in the shadow of seduction and death” (EC 79). The mood indulged by Mia Wallace, by Jackrabbit Slim’s, and by the movie as a whole is one of free-floating circulation of interchangeable signs, but the movie is structured around episodes of resistance from a vestigial kind of reality that continues to intrude into the hyperreal atmosphere, warping the characters’ activities into tense narrative traps. But these two spirals of seduction are also co-reliant. It is necessary that Mia be unavailable in order for the cool between Mia and Vincent to exist. Cool always gestures toward sex, but sex itself is not cool. Sex is like the contents of the briefcase, which are not to be seen directly, but which take their meaning from the looks people give to them. As Mia admits, the allusive and entertaining banter between Mia and Vincent is a frantic dance around the “uncomfortable silence” of death. When they take to the empty dance floor at the center of Jackrabbit Slim’s, they perform a terpsichorean rendition of their verbal dialogue. Their dance, arguably the most memorable dance sequence from any movie from the 1990s, is a kind of antidance; it is to dance what Jackrabbit Slim’s is to the 1950s, a syncretic precession of styles and poses. It is “dance” in quotation marks, and, simultaneously, it is also “seduction” in quotation marks. Deprived of the possibility of exchange, of sexual possession, and, in short, of any possibility of a reality, Vincent and Mia mirror each other’s embodiment of infinitely circulating pop culture allusiveness. When Tarantino transplants Vincent and Mia from the public space of Jackrabbit Slim’s, where they exist as part of the hyperreal upholstery, to the interior of the Wallace home, a visually stark white space which seems to leave the couple alone in a void, their mock-dancing abruptly ends in an “uncomfortable silence” that threatens to collapse into the forbidden exchange of sex. Vincent retreats to a bathroom mirror,

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where his conversation with himself about masturbation enacts the same retreat into empty circulation that it describes. Mia, in an act which itself mirrors the theme of the deadly exchange, commits the forbidden exchange of swapping heroin for cocaine and consequently brings a proactive death sentence down upon herself. It is as if Vincent and Mia are so hyperreal in their ontological nature that the possibility of sex, with its qualities of embodiment, nature, and consequence, constitutes an existential threat to their very survival. Rather than serving as a moralistic rebuke, however, Mia’s morbid condition releases her from the gravitational pull of the sex narrative and returns her to her proper role as a kind of human plot point. When Vincent stumbles upon her overdosing figure, Mia is once again a circulating mannequin of signs. Mia plays the role of comic prop as the men practise stabbing her with a hypodermic needle in a hyperreal transmogrification of the sex Vincent is not having with her. The possibility of seeing Uma Thurman’s nipples, which might be anticipated in a story in which sex were permissible, is reworked into the red magic marker spot over Mia’s heart, reminiscent of a boy’s anatomically naive drawing. Lance’s wife’s spectatorial pleasure in the brutal treatment of Mia’s body is a mirror of the audience’s same relief that the hyperreal momentum of the story has been rescued from sex and death and returned to the heightened plane of the pure circulation of images. When their night is finally over, Vincent and Mia agree to suppress the whole narrative of sex and death, consensually banishing it from the Tarantinoverse altogether and leaving the world safe for hyperrealism. Mia’s parting joke, her dialogue from Fox Force 5, rewrites the whole incident as the scenario of a cancelled television pilot, a show that never aired. The joke is both Mia’s and Tarantino’s, serving to “cancel” the narrative of sex and death, even as it implies that Mia and Vincent have been deathless, sexless television characters all along. The theme of televisual ontology is addressed directly in the opening shot of the following sequence, which is a full-screen close-up of a television image. The shot exemplifies the extent to which the entirety of Pulp Fiction is saturated not only with references to television but also with the mood of television itself as its own peculiar style of reality. The close-up of the television screen turns out to be a point-of-view shot belonging to young Butch, who apparently spent his childhood the way all Tarantino characters did, sitting two feet in front of a television screen, cultivating a perspective that conflates film image, television image, and perception itself. In fact, the story of “The Gold Watch” weaves references to Tarantino’s own childhood into its cartoonish narrative of boxers, gangsters, and hillbillies. Although the story for the Butch sequence is attributed to Tarantino’s cowriter, Roger Avery, “The Gold Watch” reads like Quentin’s own cryptic autobiography. Butch’s plan is to return to Knoxville, Tennessee, the city where his grandfather originally purchased the gold watch, and which also happens to be the city in which Quentin Tarantino was born. When Butch and Marsellus are abducted in the Mason-Dixon pawnshop, a prominently displayed Tennessee license plate suggests that Butch has actually returned to Knoxville after all, albeit in the form of a demented parody of Deliverance (1972). The theme of Southern identity addressed in the pawnshop episode also alludes to the fact that Quentin

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Tarantino’s mother named him after Quentin Compson, a character in the tales of the definitive novelist of the demented South, William Faulkner.1 Quentin Compson’s most famous appearance in Faulkner’s novels occurs in the second chapter of The Sound and the Fury, a novel that, like Pulp Fiction, describes an interrelated series of events from four different perspectives. Quentin Compson’s chapter of Faulkner’s novel, like “The Gold Watch” sequence of Pulp Fiction, begins by establishing Quentin’s relationship to his ancestral watch: When the shadow of the sash appeared on the curtains it was between seven and eight oclock and then I was in time again, hearing the watch. It was Grandfather’s and when Father gave it to me he said, Quentin, I give you the mausoleum of all hope and desire; it’s rather excruciating-ly apt that you will use it to gain the reducto absurdam of all human experience which can fit your needs no better than it fitted his or his father’s. (93)

It is easy to imagine that Tarantino conceptualized Butch’s story as his own interpretation of Quentin’s father’s enigmatic speech. In Faulkner’s novel, each tick of Quentin’s ancestral watch echoes with the nihilistic vision of time articulated by his father—a temporality that is a vast mausoleum of empty events that fall away into meaningless death. In Tarantino’s film, the ancestral watch is similarly freighted with the death of Butch’s absent father and, more broadly, with the cyclical futility of a human history that is a succession of disastrous wars. The long history of the watch related by Captain Koons invests the symbolism of the watch with allusions to the blunt facticity of “old fashioned” reality: paternity, genetics, shit, the body, war, suffering, and time. The sense in which the watch is an artifact from the real world is expressed by the fact that Captain Koons turns off the television show that young Butch is watching so that he can introduce the watch into Butch’s life and into the narrative. On the other hand, however, as Butch listens to Captain Koons’s story, his face wears the same expression of serious attentiveness it wore as he followed the cartoon antics of a television eskimo, suggesting a level of continuity according to which the symbol of the Real is being assimilated into the worldview of a hyperreal generation. Christopher Walken’s performance in the role of Captain Koons further inflects the manner in which the reality of historical time and death symbolized by the watch is being reinscribed into a performative terrain of allusions, particularly to The Deer Hunter (1978), a film that has been as influential in informing the popular attitude toward Vietnam POWs as Deliverance has been to informing media stereotypes about the South. Quentin Compson’s watch occasioned nihilistic despair because it suggested that time erased all human endeavor into a meaningless negation, but Quentin Tarantino’s watch is a locus of pop nihilism in which the existential void of interexchangeable time is replaced by a posthuman landscape of interexchangeable media references. The sting of nihilism “Quentin was named after two characters—one from pop culture and the other from a more literary source. On the TV show Gunsmoke, Burt Reynolds had played a half-breed Indian blacksmith named Quint Asper. And there were two Quentins in Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury” (Bernard 8).

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is anesthetized when the meaninglessness of life (depressing) is supplanted by the meaninglessness of media images (fun). Whereas Quentin Compson’s watch was a symbol of a fractured temporality fraught with suicidal despair, Quentin Tarantino’s watch marks the time of a fractured temporality capable of bringing John Travolta back to life—both diegetically, through the temporal inversion of the movie’s story lines, and extradiegetically, through the movie’s success in revivifying Travolta’s career by picking the actor out of the pop cultural scrap heap and recycling him back into circulation. Like the glowing briefcase, and like Mia, Butch’s watch is an uncanny object that makes the world safe for exchangeability by itself existing in a state of inexchangeability. When Butch notices that the watch is missing, the significance of the watch’s singularity—its irreplaceability—once again disrupts a television program. In his frustrated rage, “Butch picks up the motel TV and throws it against the wall” (110). Simultaneously, the absence of the watch disrupts the plotless pop-culture-reference-strewn banter between Butch and Fabienne, a long dialogue sequence that, devoid of any narrative significance, is sustained only by the momentum of the actors’ charm. Fabienne’s vision of a Tarantino paradise—a diner where you can order whatever you want 24 hours a day, even pie for breakfast—is disrupted by the deadly imperative associated with the inexchangeable object. Likewise, the televisual momentum of Butch’s stock noir predicament—he is a boxer who did not throw a fight he was paid to throw—is derailed into unpredicatable territory by the problem of the watch’s inexchangeability. The watch, it turns out, is easily retrievable, but Butch’s pursuit of the totem object veers into a confrontation with the forces of reality and death that the watch emblematizes. When Butch shoots Vincent and slams his girlfriend’s car into Marsellus, he is still participating in the economy of circulating characters that governs Pulp Fiction’s hyperreal aesthetic economy, but when Butch and Marsellus find themselves abducted by the proprietor of the Mason-Dixon pawnshop, they seem to fall out of the symbolic order of Pulp Fiction altogether, descending into the movie’s only true underworld, what Morpheus following Baudrillard called “the desert of the real” (SS 1). The pawnshop, with its shelves of rusty consumer objects, is what Jackrabbit Slim’s might look like if it fell out of orbit. It is a junkyard version of Jackrabbit Slim’s, a collage of cultural detritus, the cloacal ass-end of the consumer image-scape. Whereas Jackrabbit Slim’s presented cultural objects in an electric swirl of glamor and gloss, the Mason-Dixon pawnshop is a hell of disenchanted objects. The pawnshop is an arena of debased circulation, the circulation of dead objects, the nihilistic zone of indifferent exchangeability that Quentin Compson’s father referred to as “the mausoleum of time,” and it is this place of death that threatens to appropriate Butch’s watch and, indeed, Butch himself. Zed and Maynard’s abduction of Butch and Marsellus incorporates the boxer and the crime lord bodily into the debased circulation of the pawnshop. Indeed, the uncanny figure of the Gimp is a reducto absurdam of the human being diminished entirely to the status of a commodity. Zed’s eenie, meanie, miney, mo routine illustrates the principle of random, indifferent exchangeability that characterizes the psychic space of the pawnshop. Marsellus, whose power throughout the movie has been associated with the limited visibility of his physical person, suffers brutal devaluation as the most private parts of his body are exposed to debased exchange. The idea of “fuck[ing]

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Marsellus Wallace like a bitch” is reappropriated from the realm of wordplay into a literal, painful reality. Whereas Captain Koons’ story about the gold watch described a man’s anus as the last refuge of privacy and inexchangeability, Zed and Maynard threaten to turn a man’s ass into just another commodity to sit on a pawnshop shelf alongside the broken toasters. In rescuing Marsellus from the hillbillies, Butch dispatches the “bad nihilism” of the pawnshop and returns the movie to the “fun nihilism” of the Tarantinoverse. The famous scene in which Butch samples a series of weapons he finds in the pawnshop is thematically significant because it demonstrates the manner in which narrative reenchants dead objects by fitting them into the magic economy of the story. When Butch tests the feel of a succession of possible weapons, he brings the dead objects of the pawnshop to life by demonstrating that each different weapon suggests a slightly different subgenre of slasher movies. The dead objects are reanimated as pop culturally–coded versions of themselves. In the same way that, in Jackrabbit Slim’s, a waitress becomes a sign by dressing like Marilyn Monroe, the hammer, chainsaw, and sword are transformed by their inscription into a filmic dimension. The viewer’s delight in the scene results from our participation in Butch’s thinking as he goes about deciding what kind of slasher movie scene he is going to invent out of these newly vivid objects. We have seen all the same TV shows as Butch and Tarantino, and we are back in the hyperreal territory of a circulation that refers to images and cultural references rather than to existential coordinates. As Butch heads down the stairs wielding his weapon of choice, the wall of pawnshop clocks in the stairwell reinforces the narrative point that the watch on Butch’s wrist has resisted falling into the inventory of the pawnshop, preserving (like Butch’s own anus) its aura of inviolability. Butch and Marsellus’s agreement to “tell nobody about” what has happened in the basement of the pawnshop assures us that Pulp Fiction will remain consistent in its project of repressing the specter of reality and leaving the images free to circulate in zero-gravity. The Twilight Zone music cue at the very end of “The Gold Watch” sequence files the entire ordeal away under the ontological auspices of the televisual.

Figure 6.1  Butch reanimates a chainsaw.

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Marsellus’s briefcase, Marsellus’s wife, and Butch’s watch are representations of inexchangeable objects, unmovable rocks of reality amid the babbling currents of hyperreal circulation. The plots associated with these objects veer off into death— the execution of Brad and his roommates, Mia’s overdose, and the encounter in the basement of the pawnshop—because, in hyperreal modernity, death is the definitive inexchangeable object. Baudrillard explains that the hyperreal ecology “operates on the basis of the exclusion of death, a system whose ideal is zero deaths” (ST 16). Arthur Kroker has characterized Baudrillard’s worldview as one in which “[n]othing can escape exchange!” (81), but for Baudrillard, the dead and death itself are exiled from the economy of the hyperreal sign-system. The dead “are thrown out of the group’s symbolic circulation. They are no longer beings with a full role to play, worthy partners in exchange, and we make this obvious by exiling them further and further away from the world of the living” (SED 126). This is precisely the fate that befalls Marvin, the young confederate of Jules and Vincent whom Vincent accidentally shoots in the face. Marvin, who had previously participated, however reluctantly, in Jules and Vincent’s affable banter, is transformed by the accident into the inexchangeable object par excellence. It is not so much his dead body itself as the grotesque splatter of his blood and brains that signifies that which cannot be signified in the daylit circulation of Los Angeles traffic. Marvin is instantly reconfigured from a human participant in the social back-and-forth into a “situation” that has to be covered up. In an effort to hide the deathstain from public view, Jules relocates the spectacle into the suburban home of Jimmie, only to discover that Marvin’s body is equally impossible in this domain. If Jimmie’s wife were to discover the dead body, Jimmie’s domestic environment, a suburban enclave of consumer goods such as gourmet coffee, fine bedspreads, and household cleaning supplies, would face instantaneous and irrevocable explosion. Jules and Vincent’s panic and confusion vividly exemplify Baudrillard’s observation that “Strictly speaking, we no longer know what to do with [the dead], since, today, it is not normal to be dead, and this is new. To be dead is an unthinkable anomaly” (SED 126). Jules and Vincent are at a loss concerning what to do with Marvin’s body but, more fundamentally, they have no way of incorporating death itself into their understanding, and this disconnection between their hyperreal idiom and the gruesome fact of Marvin’s death fuels the black comedy of this episode. The impossible situation of the inexchangeability of Marvin’s corpse completely eclipses any acknowledgment of tragedy or guilt associated with death. Tarantino’s solution to the problem of Marvin’s body is an elegant one. The character of The Wolf embodies the magical power of cinema and its hyperreal modality to erase the splotch of death from the collective signscape. Tarantino wrote the part of The Wolf specifically for Harvey Keitel, the screen idol of his childhood who coproduced and starred in Tarantino’s directorial debut, Reservoir Dogs. As the tutelary divinity who ferried Tarantino from the world of watching movies to the world of making them, Keitel himself possesses a unique personal significance for Tarantino as a personification of the power of movies to collapse the boundary between lived experience and the deathless dream-world of cinematic images. Like a movie character from the classic era of Hollywood, The Wolf spends 24 hours a day attending classy parties and seems to live in a tuxedo. He is introduced into the space of the story with

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a metanarrative device that emphasizes his cinematic mastery over space and time. He tells Marsellus over the phone that Jimmie’s house is “approximately thirty minutes away. I’ll be there in ten.” The scene instantly cuts to The Wolf ’s car pulling up to a curb accompanied by a subtitle reading “Nine minutes and thirty-seven seconds later.” Not only is The Wolf able to move across 30 minutes of space in 10 minutes, but also, even more impressively, he is able to cover that 10 minutes in a split second, thanks to the magic of film editing, the conscious manipulation of which is expressly indicated by the comic subtitle. Once he appears in the scene, The Wolf immediately takes on the role of director. His status as such is indicated by his authority and skill in coordinating the movements of the players in the scene, and is also alluded to by the presence of the actual director, Tarantino, as one of the actors in this scene. In fact, the casting of Tarantino and Keitel in this scene positions The Wolf as the director of the director, as if Tarantino were confessing his own subordination to the star of Mean Streets (1973) through a metaphorical expression of the extent to which Tarantino’s artistry derives from the influence of the films he admires. It is this meta-cinematic entity who is capable of resolving “The Bonnie Situation” by arranging the discreet disposal of the inexchangeable object. His accomplishment in eliminating Marvin’s dead body from the movie is Pulp Fiction’s most literal depiction of the hyperreal imperative to exile death from the social order, and of the magic of the filmic medium to accomplish this feat of legerdemain. While the existential obduracy of Marvin’s remains constitutes a stark example of death’s resistance to exchange, the fact that Jules and Vincent are alive at all throughout the plot of “The Bonnie Situation” poses an uncanny variation on the same theme. The hit men’s unlikely invulnerability to a barrage of bullets shot at them at close range suggests that they themselves are not participating in the exchange of gunfire. They are miraculously deathless, as if they inhabit an ontological register that is incompatible with mortality. Jules and Vincent’s debate about whether their survival is the result of a freak occurrence or divine intervention is interrupted when Vincent’s gun goes off in Marvin’s face, and is resumed shortly after “The Bonnie Situation” is resolved, suggesting that Marvin’s freak death is the obverse counterpart to Jules and Vincent’s freak survival. The sequence of events emphasizes the sense that there is an unbridgeable space between the hyperreal survivors and the exiled specter of death, a space that corresponds to the gap between the comic situation of Hollywood’s main characters, who exist in an aura of magical invulnerability, and the tragic situation of Hollywood’s minor characters, whose sole purpose in life is to arrive on screen in time to die. In any other movie, the circumstance of the main characters being improbably unscathed by enemy gunfire would go unremarked upon; the mythology of the Hollywood action hero encompasses his uncanny ability to avoid dying in situations that would ordinarily be lethal. In this way, popular cinema celebrates the elimination of death from the public arena. Tarantino’s meta-movie, however, invites the characters to speculate on what ramifications this “miracle” may imply in regard to their own ontological status. Like a glitch in the Matrix, the “miracle” of Vincent and Jules’s survival is a tell-tale symptom that their mode of being is one to which objective-realist assumptions are inapplicable.

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In Vincent’s case, the miracle of his survival is explicitly connected to the magical status he enjoys as a main character in his narrative. This dynamic is clarified by the fact that when Vincent steps into the role of a minor character in Butch’s story, he is unceremoniously gunned down. Deprived of the magical charisma that goes along with being the main character in his own movie, Vincent falls off the map of human concern, joining the throngs of anonymous dead goons who populate the afterlife of dead movie characters. Because of the temporal twistings of Pulp Fiction’s storyline, however, Vincent seems to come back to life as himself for the final act of the movie, but the kind of life he comes back to, as his miraculous survival reminds us, is a hyperreal life that is not the opposite of death (as reality is the opposite of illusion), but a hyper-life that has escaped the gravity of death in the same way that hyperreality has left behind any reference to a foundational reality. Despite the fact that Vincent’s character is saturated with hyperreal values, Vincent’s denial of the impossible nature of the miracle indicates his reliance on common-sense assumptions to ground his self-understanding. The fact that Vincent is doomed even in the flush of his invulnerability, however, demonstrates the inadequacy of rationality as a means of negotiating the Tarantinoverse. Jules, on the other hand, is willing to accept the miracle as evidence of the porous nature of his reality. His willingness to understand the event in metaphysical terms— “God came down from heaven and stopped the bullets”—blends into his hyperreal resolution to abandon his career as a fictional gangster in favor of a career as a fictional martial arts adventurer. Both the religious and the hyperreal responses to the miracle are equivalent in that metaphysics and hyperreality are both systems that grant ontological priority to something other than spontaneous existence. In fact, Arthur Kroker traces the genealogy of the hyperreal back to fourth-century Christian metaphysics as the intellectual revolution responsible for “the substitution of the substantialization of the Concept for the nothingness of human experience” (67) common to both Christianity and Baudrillardian simulation. Jules’s religious interpretation of his deliverance from the bullets establishes his acceptance that the world he lives in is a reflection of an anterior reality, and his hyperreal inclination to make himself over after the model of the David Caradine character from the television show Kung Fu parlays that epiphany into a practical strategy for living in a world that exists in the form of a model. If Vincent goes on to pay the price for switching out of his main character role to become a death-bound minor character, Jules seems to understand that the key to staying deathless in the hyperreal landscape is to invent yourself in the form of a main character. By drawing on his immersion in the pop culture signscape, Jules manages to surf the currents of hyperreal exchange in a way that keeps him immune to the forces of inexchangeability and death. When Jules and Vincent exit the diner at the end of the movie, the contrast between Jules’s fate (to get out of the movie alive, thereby achieving the cinematic version of immortality) and Vincent’s fate (to die in the movie, thereby achieving the cinematic version of eternal death) suggests the duality of life and death—exchangeability and inexchangeability—into which hyperreal modernity fractures human experience. Jules’s resolve at the end of the movie to embrace his hyperreal identity suggests a version of hyperreal sainthood that may be available to those who can master the religious discipline of cool.

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The theme of hyperreality is common throughout the popular American cinema of the 1990s, but Pulp Fiction stands apart for the unique approach it takes to the subject. Movies such as The Truman Show, The Matrix, and Fight Club associate the hyperreal condition with anxiety and suspicion. The madcap tone of Pulp Fiction, however, defuses these fears, replacing dread with a mood of carnivalesque celebration that is magically invulnerable to death. In Tarantino’s masterpiece, hyperreality is fun! If it is true that the hyperreal condition is awash in meaningless violence, at least it means that the accidental shooting of someone in the back seat of your car is purged of its moral dimensions and reinvented as a kind of game. If it is true that hyperreal existence is subtended by a fundamental suspicion that lived experience may be unreal, the kind of reality that remains behind is a site of mystery and miracle, answering in many ways to the dream of a Christian cosmos. If hyperreal identity can be an acute source of anxiety for those who hang on to a nostalgic Enlightenment ideal of subjectivity, for people at home in the hyperreal image-scape, salvation requires nothing more than crossing over into a new pulp-fictional genre, as Jules sets out to do at the end of Pulp Fiction. Even the death of Vincent, the film’s most startling depiction of mortality, seems to be reversed by the time-loop that reanimates Vincent for the final storyline. His simulacral resurrection covers up the fact of his death in a way that parallels the cover-ups surrounding Mia’s overdose, Marsellus’s rape, and Marvin’s headless body. In his review of Pulp Fiction, Roger Ebert observes that “[m]ost of the action in the movie comes under the heading of crisis control” (23). The crisis in each case is some variant of death, and each crisis is controlled through a kind of retroactive cancellation. The essence of Pulp Fiction’s cool consists of keeping up the appearance that nothing is or ever was real. The thrill of the movie is the systematic encounter and expunging of the specter of death and its power to disrupt the free circulation of the hyperreal signscape. Tarantino and his characters hold up a fun house mirror to our own bumbling conspiracy to commit Baudrillard’s perfect crime.

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Recursive Self-Reflection in The Player Several of Robert Altman’s early films, including McCabe and Mrs. Miller (1971), M*A*S*H (1972), and The Long Goodbye (1973), were adaptations of novels, as was his “come-back” film, 1992’s The Player. After more than a decade of being persona non grata in Hollywood owing to his uncompromisingly independent spirit, the success of The Player secured Altman’s status as a profitable commodity, opening the way for him to develop his talents in an extremely productive run of films until his death in 2008. That The Player was the film that re-opened the doors of Hollywood to Altman is uniquely ironic, considering the extent to which the movie acts as a kind of hate-letter to Hollywood and everything Hollywood represents. Altman’s personal investment in this animosity lends an intensity to the film that makes it more than simply an adaptation of a novel, but a filmic distillation of Altman’s own insights over the course of two decades of being at war with Hollywood. A parallel element that differentiates The Player from other novelistic adaptations is its subject matter. Being a novel about movie-making, its adaptation into a movie about movie-making results in a peculiar self-mirroring effect. Altman himself has remarked on this effect, commenting that The Player dramatizes the situation that pertains when “the mirror starts reflecting itself ” (“One on One with Robert Altman”). To be sure, many other novels about movie-making have been adapted into movies (The Last Tycoon [1976], Ed Wood [1994], and Get Shorty [1995] come readily to mind), but, in The Player, Altman explicitly manipulates the Escher-like effect of self-reflection in a way that radically affects the kind of reality the story takes place in. When two mirrors face each other directly, they open up an infinitely receding parallel dimension that exists independently, in a sidewise vortex of impossible space. Michael Tolkin’s screenplay adaptation of his own novel is more than a transcription from one medium to another; it is more like an ecstatic mirror game, as if every element of the narrative were reconfigured by the hyperreal situation of recursive self-reflection in an infinite vacuum. Tolkin’s 1988 novel is a parable of moral ambiguity amid a swirl of sensational imagery. Griffin Mill, the movie executive who gets away with murder, personifies all of the worst traits associated with the 1980s yuppie culture that he shares with Tom Wolfe’s Sherman McCoy and Brett Easton Ellis’s American Psycho. Like these other characters, Griffin is obsessed with status, adopts a pragmatic approach to issues of morality, and is prone to imagining himself in the third person. Griffin’s wholesale immersion in the

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movie business, however, foregrounds an aspect of the yuppie personality that is only suggested in these other representations, the extent to which this superficial mentality is informed by the ascendency of media images into a privileged existential position. Dining in a faux-1920s “old Hollywood” grill, Griffin carries on an imaginary inner conversation with “the Writer,” the mysterious individual who has been sending him threatening postcards. Taking it for granted that the Writer would be an intellectual hipster, Griffin assumes that he would advance the poststructuralist opinion that nostalgia-themed eateries represent “part of the Disneylandization of America” (93). The Writer’s supposed argument is familiar from the writings of Baudrillard, who, in his popular book, America, published in English in the same year as Tolkin’s novel, observed of the United States that “even outside the movie theaters the whole country is cinematic. The desert you pass through is like the set of a Western, the city a screen of signs and formulas” (56). But Griffin defends the hyperreal movie-scape: “The movies are turning America into a movie, the Writer would say. Griffin knew the argument and rejected it. He liked coffee shops that were little comedies, with waitresses playing the parts of waitresses, and menus pretending to be menus from the fifties” (93). In fact, it is not that Griffin rejects the argument but rather that he does not object to the reconstitution of the social environment in the image of other images. Quite the opposite, he embraces the hyperreal movie-scape as his natural home. Griffin’s partiality for simulation extends to his own identity, as in another scene in the novel in which he enjoys the experience of being watched while he eats: “Eating the shrimp became a performance; he was now pretending to be Griffin Mill eating shrimp in the polo lounge. He wanted to stay in this mode forever, always at a short distance from himself, where he could admire the craftsmanship of his being, every gesture, every word, every shift of energy a calculation” (71). It is as if Griffin exists most convincingly for himself when he exists in the position of an image for an audience. A corollary to this sensibility is that any actions that he performs without being seen have only a tenuous claim to being real, an impression that provides a loophole for his conscience. “Let’s suppose I live a long time and die with a smile, thought Griffin, and only I know that I have killed. Am I the tree falling silently in the forest because no one hears it? If you get away with murder, is it murder?” (46). In fact, however, Griffin is never able to entirely convince himself that he is innocent. His desire to “stay in [the] mode” of self-performance, to exist permanently in the same ontological register as two-dimensional image-people, remains unfulfilled. Rather than achieving the transcendent flatness of an entirely self-externalized image-person, “Griffin had an unconscious, like anyone’s, the usual cesspool” (169). Throughout the novel, he is haunted by an anguished guilt that keeps him from being able to melt blissfully into the surrounding hyperscape, afflicting him with insecurity and self-consciousness. In fact, this guilt itself seems to have a salvific effect on Griffin’s character. His guilt compels him to enter into a relationship with his victim’s girlfriend, an attachment that humanizes Griffin and lifts him out of his otherwise total immersion in the Hollywood scene. Ultimately, Griffin returns to his roots as an art student, dropping out of the rat race to accept a job at a small-scale production company and establishing a collegial friendship with his rival Larry Levy. If the fact that Griffin evades punishment for

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his crime suggests that Griffin lives in an amoral universe, this interpretation exists alongside the impression that Griffin’s confrontation with his own guilt seems to have resulted in a moral evolution. Griffin seems to have become a genuinely better person, expressing an interiority and a capacity for self-reinvention that marks the novel as essentially humanist in its philosophical outlook. As a result, although the novel examines the implosion of the real world and the movie-world, it represents this situation as a psychological condition rather than as an ontological one. Griffin may appear soulless, pitiful, or self-deluded, but he is represented as a real person in the classical mode, a victim of a certain state of mind rather than of a certain state of being. Stylistically, Tolkin’s novel has more in common with the modernist Hollywood novels of F. Scott Fitzgerald and Nathanael West than it does with the postmodern novels of Vladimir Nabokov, John Barth, and Don DeLillo. Although Griffin’s movie-saturated consciousness frequently assumes a mirroring relationship with this movie-saturated environment, Tolkin presents “the movies” from the distancing perspective of his novelistic frame of reference. The point of view of the novel as a story-telling medium provides a position outside the bubble of the movie-world from which Griffin’s story can be perceived and evaluated. This critical distance provided by the difference between novelistic and cinematic ways of seeing is precisely what collapses in Altman’s adaptation of The Player from page to screen. Throughout his early career, Altman experimented with metafictional devices in his films. M*A*S*H ends with the announcement that tonight’s war movie will be the movie we have just seen, Brewster McCloud (1970) begins with the line, “I forgot the opening line,” and The Long Goodbye transplants the fictional character Philip Marlowe into the 1970s. The Player, however, is the only Altman film in which the metafictional devices provide the entire structure for the film as a whole, from the very first to the very last shot. This is not only a movie about movies; it is a movie that is a movie, rather than or in addition to being a window on the world or a mirror of society. The Player is a kind of portal into the moviegoing experience itself, not in the objectivist sense of demystifying the illusion of cinema but in the hyperreal sense of bending illusion and self-awareness into a variety of perception that partakes of both qualities. To be sure, the experience of watching a movie is always pitched across this contradiction—we flirt with emotional investment in the narrative even as we remind ourselves that “it’s only a movie”—so movies already exist in a kind of ontological netherworld. Movies, therefore, are more than just a metaphor for the kind of imageworld inhabited by Griffin Mill and his contemporaries, individuals for whom the experience of movie-perception becomes the model for real-world perception. For the hyperreal subject, watching a movie is like facing directly into a mirror, a mirror that, rather than reflecting some external reality, reflects only the movie-saturated consciousness of the viewer. Altman introduces this self-reflective vertigo in the opening image of The Player. The movie opens on a mural depicting a movie set. In a dark brown studio, a group of men have their cameras and lights trained on an orientalized woman dressed in cream-colored robes. The painting is a depiction of the cinematic gaze. The male figures surrounded by their filmic apparatus seem in a position of authority over the

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woman who is the subject of their gaze, even as they seem to be themselves enthralled by her magical status as an image. Although she is only one woman and they are five men, and even though she is partially naked while the men are fully clothed, she stands above the seated men and seems to look down on them with a haughty disdain, as if she is aware of the power she enjoys as a living object. The painting represents the gaze between subject and object of vision as a bidirectional encounter, suggesting an equivalency between the viewer and the object of vision. Just as the audience is taking in this portrait of cinematically mediated subject-object mutuality, a voice calls for “Quiet on the set,” a clapperboard emerges from the side of the frame to tick off the announcement for “Take One,” and Altman’s voice calls “Action.” This is the crudest metafictional device employed in The Player, and it clearly puts the audience on notice that what we are about to see is a “movie,” an artifactual display that demands to be read as both an illusion and the deconstruction of an illusion. This opening peek “behind the scenes” is the only time in the movie when we are actually given a glimpse into the infrastructural mechanics of the filmic illusion, but it is sufficient to activate our awareness of the movie-ness of the movie, and even though we do not see Altman’s cameras reflected in the movie’s mirrors or see the boom mikes peeping in from the top of the frame, the opening provides fair warning that the movie-making crew and equipment are always just outside our line of sight. This metafictional fillip is a more or less conventional technique of experimental cinema, but paired with the background paining, the effect of this device is more radical than it would otherwise be. After the clapperboard is withdrawn, a “real” woman in a cream-colored outfit steps into the scene to answer the phone. The frame pulls back to reveal that the paining of the film studio is part of the décor of a movie executive’s reception room; the sepia-tones of the painting are color-coordinated with the wood paneling of the office walls. As Altman’s camera pulls back, the image in the filmed painting metamorphoses into a filmed composition taking place in the foreground of the paining, only now, there is only the woman and the backdrop; the lasciviously glaring film crew seem to have disappeared from our view. The adjustment in our perception from seeing the film crew alongside the subject of their gaze (in the painting) to seeing the woman by herself (in the action of the movie) alerts us to the strange realization that the film crew has not in fact disappeared; they are behind us, inside us, they are we ourselves. We do not see the men with cameras because we have become them in the uncanny sense described by Vivian Sobchack when she describes the filmic image as “a seeing from ‘my side’ of vision that is not performed by me, even as it is visible to me” (140). Altman’s cameras are now the substratum of our perception; we do not see them for the same reason that we do not see our own face. The painting in this establishing image (a patently artificial image), combined with the depiction of the clapperboard sequence (which, of course, is also staged), performs the mirror-function of revealing to the audience their own phenomenological immersion in cinematic vision. We have entered perceptually into the point of view represented in the paining, or the painting has snapped out into three dimensions to incorporate us. The opening seconds of The Player thematize our participatory immersion within an artificial landscape of images, twisting the image around into a reflection of our own gaze in the same way that the actress in the paining

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returns the gaze of the film crew. The cinematic illusion is also a reflection, reflecting the cinematic nature of the image, our image, that it reflects. From this opening sequence, the camera continues to pull back, exiting the office and traveling around the campus of the movie studio for a 7-minute, 47-second-long sequence shot. The effect of the long take is to suggest both a naturalistic atmosphere— we recognize our own world of random collisions and complex social geometries—and an extremely stylized atmosphere—the entire sequence has clearly been elaborately choreographed. In the same way that Altman’s film camera had caught a glimpse of its own identity in the painting of the movie set, the filming of the producers’ office park also provides a reflection of the film’s own ontogeny; the film is displaying its own selfportrait as a product of an elaborate apparatus. A conspicuous difference between the painting, a nostalgic representation of “old Hollywood,” and the production campus that Altman’s camera goes on to survey is that, while, in the “Golden Age” of filmmaking, the central movie-making apparatus is the mechanical object, the movie camera; in Altman’s postmodern age of filmmaking, the apparatus is the socioeconomic structure of executive power-jockeying. Cameras, along with all of the other physical elements of the craft of filmmaking, are completely absent, not only from this opening scene but also from the entire movie. The disappearance of the camera in the movement from the painting into the world of the film signifies on a sociological level the sense in which filmmaking has become a market commodity rather than an artistic endeavor, even as it carries the ontological implication that the physical apparatus of filmmaking has melted into the structure of perception itself, in the same way that, in Sobchack’s terminology, the “I” of the movie audience enters into an existential partnership with the “eye” of the film camera. This sense is reinforced throughout the sequence shot, which circles two and a half times around the office complex, a movement that provides an immersive 360-degree experience of the setting, while simultaneously drawing a secondary style of attention to the position occupied by the camera-viewer, the “I/eye” of the film. By giving us a panoramic picture of our surroundings, Altman traces out a circle of negative space inhabited by the seeing subject. This maneuver allows Altman to reveal the camera in its true nature, not as a visible object, but as something that exists as a kind of shadow of the visible world, like the blind spot in the middle of the retina of which we ordinarily have no consciousness. As our gaze circumscribes the environment, the ghostly memory of the painted camera in the establishing image remains with us, resulting in a unique consciousness of the manner in which the experience of watching a film relies on an uncanny interplay between the awareness of the illusory quality of the image and the suppression of this awareness. The long sequence shot itself draws attention to the filmic substrate of this visual experience, an effect that, like the conspicuous absence of the camera in the center of the action, is also accomplished by the obtrusive insistence of that which is not there: the cut. As a deliberate disruption of the illusion of subjective vision, cutting from one shot to another is a sign of the presence of the editor, the director, the cameraman, and the overall reorganization of time and space that edited films accomplish. An extended take, however, is an even more obtrusive indicator of directorial presence than the cut in that it captures the audience within a single point of view, eradicating the open

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dialogism of conventional editing. As our gaze pans around the campus, craning up and out to encompass wide areas and swooping down to close in on the Writer’s threatening postcards, we are completely in Altman’s control. This effect is amplified by the fact that the camera is the only main character in the sequence. The characters are treated as scenery; the camera lingers on them, tracks them, and casually moves on, staking no emotional investment in any particular element of the shot. This is a significant departure from the other famous sequence shots mentioned in the scene, the opening scene of Touch of Evil (1958) and the entirety of Rope (1948). Of course, the simple fact that Altman’s sequence shot includes multiple references to famous sequence shots of Hollywood legend is a blatant metafictional device, indicating that The Player is a movie about its own movie-ness, a deliberate act of self-mirroring. But an important difference between Altman’s scene and those coordinated by Welles and Hitchcock is the matter of the relationship between the camera and the scene that it records. In the first scene of Touch of Evil the camera travels a winding path that visually interweaves the twin trajectories of the car with a bomb in the trunk and the newlywed Vargases. The camera movements are dictated by these elements of the plot and perform an elaborate narrative function. This direct link between the movement of the camera and the narrative situation is even more definitive in Rope, a tightly scripted chamber piece in which the camera refuses to blink precisely because it is so obsessively committed to inspecting the characters’ minutest gestures. In the opening shot of The Player, the movements of the camera are completely disconnected from the exigencies of plot and character development. Describing Altman’s early career, Gilles Deleuze wrote that Altman’s films took place in an atmosphere “where you can no longer distinguish between the principle and the secondary” (12). The opening scene of The Player establishes this typically Altman-esque horizontal distribution of characters; Griffin is not introduced directly as the main character, characters who seem important in this scene are not reintroduced into the movie, and even the postcard, which provides a vague spatial connection between where the camera is taking us and where the plot is taking us, is only encountered at random points along the casual wanderings of the camera’s viewfinder, rather than being consciously tracked like Welles’s car bomb or the fedoras and cigarette cases in Rope. At the same time, however, there is also a fundamental difference in mood between this sequence of The Player and Altman’s earlier films. The apparent randomness of the shot thinly disguises the intensely structured feel of the shot. The intricate choreography of the camerawork is echoed by the corresponding choreography of the people on the screen. When the camera comes across a courier who has been struck by a car, the mail boy is discovered splayed out across the ground in a deliberate pose, as if he were waiting for the camera to circle around to him, and the Writer’s postcard is conveniently available for a close-up, threatening-message-side-up. Altman situates the audience at the center of an elaborately constructed cinematic orrery. This is a far cry from the madcap haphazardness of M*A*S*H or Thieves Like Us (1974), in which the camera and the microphones move among people and conversations in a way that feels naturalistic, open-ended, and entirely serendipitous. By contrast, the opening sequence of The Player establishes an insular, incestuous mood of circular self-enclosure. Rather than

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portraying a democratic heteroglossia, Altman redirects his own “Altman-esque” technique to suggest the claustrophobic involution of a society captivated by its own reflection. The centripetal social atmosphere enacted in the opening shot is sustained throughout the film, which depicts Griffin’s milieu as one in which the same people attend every party and where everybody knows everybody. What is more, because Altman has populated his movie with cameo appearances by famous movie stars, the audience is invited into this insular clique as an honorary member. When Griffin’s lunch-mates spy John Cusack and Angelica Houston eating together, the audience recognizes them just as readily as the movie execs, and responds with the same catalog of background knowledge about the careers of these two actors and the work they have done in collaboration. When Malcolm McDowell and Andie McDowell appear in quick succession, we play along with the game of associations that inevitably leads a character to mention Roddy McDowell, as if the movie itself were playing a variation of the “Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon” game. When Altman appears to capture Burt Reynolds engaged in casual conversation, the brief snippets of Reynold’s small talk recall the quirky charisma he brought to his classic roles. The pleasure we have in seeing him in his own element, however briefly, is the pleasure of reencountering an estranged friend. The virtual familiarity the mass-audience enjoys with Hollywood celebrities provides us all with a simulacral insider-status that opens Griffin’s world out in three dimensions to absorb the audience, or to insinuate that they have always already been absorbed in this world of surfaces reflecting one another. While the dialogue throughout the movie insists that arty, realistic movies have “no stars,” The Player flaunts the extent to which it is loaded with stars; it is a movie that uses the stars as extras in a maneuver that appears to reveal these celebrities as “real people,” even as it accomplishes this illusion of reality through a grander manipulation of the categories of reality and illusion, a master-manipulation that includes the audience in its design. When a recognizable celebrity appears on the screen, we are never sure until they open their mouth whether they are representing themselves or playing a character. In a typical scene, for example, Harry Belafonte appears as himself, but when Sydney Pollack arrives, his dialogue informs us that he is playing the part of Griffin’s lawyer, even though we will inevitably continue to think of him as Sydney Pollack. Throughout The Player, this ontological fusion of actor and role is repeatedly identified as one of the cornerstones of postmodern filmmaking: a film scenario begins with the identification of the protagonist with a bankable Hollywood star, as in the pitch that can be summarized as “Goldie [Hawn] Goes to Africa,” or the innumerable concepts that begin with a heroine who should be played by Julia Roberts. From the first scene, the figure of Julia Roberts grows into a motif as she is transfigured, first from the role of all-purpose protagonist that her name suggests in the writers’ pitches to Griffin, then “in the flesh” as “herself ” in one of the movie’s celebrity panoramas, and then finally as a combination of both herself and a movie character in the climactic scene of Habeus Corpus that is screened in the concluding sequence of The Player. At the same time, therefore, that the celebrity cameos in The Player lend an authenticating stamp to the movie’s depiction of Hollywood insider-ness, they also serve to indicate that

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we are watching a Hollywood movie in which the stars both play themselves and are themselves, personifying in their hyperreal aura the warping of the border between illusion and reality. Although the novel mentions specific movie stars by name, the actual appearance of the stars themselves in the movie version of The Player collapses the representation into the reality; while the novel was about Hollywood, Altman’s movie is Hollywood itself. This ontological shift from representation to self-reflection that is evident throughout the stylistic texture of Altman’s movie also informs the depiction of the main character. In the same way that translation into the medium of cinema has turned the depiction of Hollywood culture in on itself, so has the story’s central personification of that culture, Griffin Mill, become a kind of mirror image of himself. Although the story in the movie follows the events of the book rather closely, the character in the book who had been overwhelmed with a sense of being “Guilty, guilty, guilty” (166) in Tolkin’s novel is reconceived for the movie as a depthless mask of aloofness. As in the novel, the movie’s Griffin thinks of his crime within a cinematic frame of reference. In both instantiations, Griffin disguises questions about his own predicament as ideas for movies; in both cases, he knows how to cover up his involvement in Kahane’s murder because of what he has learned from watching murder scenes in movies. But the movie, precisely because it is a movie, cannot give us access to the novel’s frantic pages of free indirect speech that constitute Griffin’s consciousness throughout the book. The movie-maker does not have access to the novelist’s devices for building up Griffin’s interiority. Rather than trying to supplement this limitation of the cinematic medium with some other device, however (a voice-over track, for example), Tolkin’s screenplay of The Player embraces the cinematic disposal of Griffin’s interiority as a logical conclusion of the character’s utter immersion within a cinematic style of being. Whereas the book told the story of a novel character who thinks of himself as a movie character, the movie’s Griffin Mill is a movie character through and through. The book derived the majority of its black humor from Griffin’s attempts to understand his circumstances according to Hollywood clichés; the movie achieves a similar effect of situating Griffin’s narrative within a cinematic context in a way that bypasses Griffin’s consciousness altogether, namely, through the visual motif of posters for Hollywood movies that serve as a kind of externalized representation of Griffin’s case: Highly Dangerous, They Made me a Criminal, Murder in the Big House, Hollywood Story. This relocation of Griffin’s conscience from inside his head onto the two-dimensional movie posters that surround him is one element of the overall evacuation of the character’s guilt and self-consciousness. In the process, Griffin becomes a face without a heart, a figure who is guilty as far as the objective narrative is concerned, but whose ontological status as an insubstantial image removes him from any subjective experience of guilt. This ontological reconfiguration insulates Griffin from the dread that characterizes his story in the book. Although he passes through many of the same scenes in the book and the movie, the movie’s Griffin is conspicuously untroubled by events that drive the book’s Griffin to the edge of psychological collapse. At the charity banquet, the book’s Griffin is too nervous to remain at his table. He escapes the party to engage in a berserk cat-and-mouse chase with the man he thinks is following him, a sequence

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that culminates in Griffin making a bizarre and rambling semiconfession to the enigmatic stranger who may or may not be the Writer. This is a dramatic contrast with the corresponding scene in the movie, in which Griffin calmly shrugs off the signs that he is being followed to dance with June and to deliver a confident speech on the artistic value of motion pictures. Indeed, the film’s replacement of the Kafka-esque scene of manic guilt with Griffin’s studied elocution on the apotheosis of filmic ways of seeing clearly indicates the sense in which becoming a movie character has rescued Griffin from the terrors of subjectivity through which he suffered as a novel character. Likewise, at the desert resort, where the book’s Griffin is so preoccupied with a stinging self-consciousness of guilt that he is unable to consummate his relationship with June, movie-Griffin sleeps with June without compunction at the corresponding resort in the movie, a magical setting the cinematic provenance of which is suggested when, in response to June’s question whether “such places really exist,” Griffin playfully responds, “Only in the movies.” Neither the line nor the sentiment is expressed in the book, but in this movie-realm, Griffin is able to enjoy the freedom from responsibility and angst that goes along with existing in two dimensions. The closest the movie comes to capturing the mood of panicky guilt that is the dominant tone of the novel is the scene in which Griffin is questioned by Detective Avery in her police station office. Much of Griffin’s dialogue in this scene is taken directly from the book, but most of the chapter consists of Griffin’s inner monologue about the credibility of his answers and the various likely outcomes they set in motion. Altman very cleverly translates Griffin’s confusion and disorientation using the tools of cinema: Whoopi Goldberg’s ad-libbed non sequiturs keep the scene off-balance; Altman’s camera focuses tightly on Griffin’s face, reduplicating the sense of an intense self-consciousness that replaces the sight of the world around Griffin with the intensified awareness of his face as an image; and the scene culminates in an outlandish rehash of Freaks (1932) as the detectives chant “One of us! One of us!” to a thoroughly unsettled Griffin. If this mood had been sustained throughout the film, it would have provided a more literal adaptation of Tolkin’s novel. The movie, however, cuts directly from this scene, the only scene in the movie in which Griffin seems at all morally or psychologically vulnerable, to a scene in which Griffin demonstrates his icy mastery of all he surveys. Throned in his office, he confidently outlines to Walter the details of his executive power-grab, phlegmatically breaks up with Bonnie, and promises a deal to a pair of writers, all while glibly evading Walter’s insinuations that he murdered Kahane. His office and his life “in the movies” deliver Griffin from the subjective panic of the previous scene and continue to provide a cocoon of insularity throughout the rest of the movie. Even when he is called back into the police station for a line-up at the end of the film, neither Robbins’ acting nor Altman’s directing hint at any sense of emotional turmoil. The movies have rescued Griffin from guilt. The manner in which the film adaptation purges guilt feelings from Griffin’s narrative is exemplified most vividly by the movie’s reconceptualization of June, the girlfriend of the murdered man with whom Griffin begins a love affair. In the book, June Mercator is a slightly overweight insurance brochure designer with prominent bags under her eyes. Under normal circumstances, she is the kind of plain-jane nobody

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at whom Griffin would never look twice. Griffin’s relationship with her develops as a demented kind of expiation by providing support for Kahane’s “widow” and, more strangely still, taking over the life of the murdered man, as if in a bid to annul the murder by giving up his own life in order to become an existential replacement for his victim. As a representative of the “real world” beyond Griffin’s Hollywood bubble, June Mercator is able to play a role in Griffin’s quasi-redemption. His relationship with her parallels his decision to drop out of the rat race and pursue a more authentic mode of life. In her translation into celluloid, however, June Mercator becomes June Gudmundsdottir, a glamorous, exotic, dreamlike ice sculpture of callous-unemotional traits. No Kafka-esque psychological explanations are required to explain Griffin’s obsession with her—she is not only beautiful but also possessed of an eerily captivating personality that makes her seem even more insubstantial than Griffin. Rather than serving as a potentially redemptive Other, June Gudmundsdottir mirrors Griffin’s own narcissistic inhumanity back to him, an effect visually represented in the movie at one point when they look at each other through a window pane in which June’s image is reflected. Although the circumstances of June and Griffin’s first encounter are similar in both the book and the movie—he calls her at David’s home on the night he murders David—the movie provides Griffin with a cell phone, allowing him to lurk outside David’s home and spy through the windows at June as she talks to him on the phone. The change emphasizes June Gudmundsdottir’s identity as a visual object of desire for Griffin. Later, describing his fascination with June, Griffin confesses that he cannot stop thinking about seeing her under those conditions: the cell phone–enabled sense of being in two places at once combines with the sense of seeing June without being seen to weave a spell of magical disembodiment that is similar to the experience of the moviegoer. This experience is intensified by the visually striking appearance of June herself as well as of the hypnotic artwork that surrounds her. June’s artwork is intensely visual (in a winking reference to her character’s infidelity to her novelistic source, she explains that she has no interest in books or in any units of written language larger than single words), and she actually incorporates Polaroid images of Griffin Mill into her abstract canvases, suggesting her power to oversee his transformation from three-dimensional human being into a two-dimensional image-person. Moreover, her simulacral personality (she pretends to be from Iceland) mirrors his own (he pretends that he did not murder David), while simultaneously sustaining the consensual prevarication that subtends their whole relationship (they both pretend that she does not know that he murdered David). Rather than acting as an Ariadne-figure capable of leading Griffin out of the labyrinth of hyperreality, June Gudmundsdottir provides Griffin with a resonating reflection that echoes and intensifies his own most superficial, detached, and self-absorbed qualities. The Player’s most radical example of the hall-of-mirrors effect, however, is achieved by an alteration in the plot of the story from the book—in which Habeas Corpus is just one of many script ideas thrown at Griffin over the course of the novel, Griffin drops out of the rat race, and the Writer gets over his murderous resentment and sends Griffin a final note of apology—to the movie, in which Griffin manipulates the production of Habeas Corpus in a way that secures his position at the studio, and the

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Writer’s final message to Griffin reorients our entire perception of the movie we have been watching. Flush from his success at having rescued the Habeas Corpus project by replacing its tragic ending with a formulaic Hollywood ending, Griffin receives a call from the Writer who, rather than having moved to Seattle and made his peace with the Hollywood scene, pitches a story to Griffin for a movie about a studio executive who murders a writer and gets away with it. The name of the movie? The Player, of course. The blackmail threat embedded in the pitch is obviously that if Griffin makes the Writer’s movie, then the Writer’s scenario will come true, and Griffin will enjoy a Hollywood ending of his own. The metanarrative insinuation is that Griffin did in fact make the Writer’s movie, and it is the movie we have just seen. This recursive development is an obvious example of the movie mirroring its own movie-ness, but in achieving this recursiveness, the movie suggests an ontological situation analogous to the aporia of a mirror that reflects itself. By green-lighting the movie about himself, Griffin oversees his transfiguration into a fictional character, even as it is this fictional character who gives the Writer the green-light. If it were not for all of the movie’s other metafictional devices, this twist ending might refer the audience back to the real world, suggesting that The Player is “based on a true story,” revealing the preexistence of some real-world producer who was blackmailed into making a movie about a producer who is blackmailed into making a movie. Within the context of Altman’s metafictional gamesmanship, however, this external referentiality is turned utterly inward, conveying the impression that Griffin is a fictional character who has given birth to himself, and whose entire existence takes place in the modality famously described by Baudrillard as that of the copy without an original: the hyperreal. Devoid of any antecedent reality, free of any bonds with human life on planet earth, and existing entirely as a reflection of himself, Griffin inhabits a Baudrillardian dimension that has “flown free of the referential sphere of the real and of history” (IE 1). Tolkin’s original novel had also ended with an ironically “happy” ending—“happy,” that is, for the character, if not for our moral sense of justice. Griffin gets away with murder, but he has also grown as a person through his feelings of guilt, his relationship with June, and his abandonment of his executive position. We bristle at the failure of karma to catch up with Griffin, but the novel’s ending is essentially a humanist parable about the complicated trajectories of guilt and justice. In becoming a movie, however, The Player undergoes the same facelift as Habeas Corpus, mutating from a troubling representation of reality into an exorbital renunciation of conscience, guilt, interiority, past-ness, and reality itself altogether. One of the Hollywood writers portrayed in the movie insists that Habeas Corpus, his story of miscarried justice, must have a tragic ending, “because that is the reality. That happens.” His simulation of earnestness refers to a realm of extra-cinematic values, some possible world outside of the Hollywood bubble where history, tragedy, guilt, and consequence continue to exist. But in The Player, reality itself has become absorbed into the Hollywood aesthetic, so that when Griffin rewrites the end of Habeus Corpus with a Hollywood ending, it actually does capture the “reality” of the world depicted in Altman’s movie, a world in which nothing tragic is allowed to happen to the hero. This parallelism is expressed in the identical music cue that signals the Hollywood endings of both Habeas Corpus and The Player,

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a swelling of strings that underscores both Bruce Willis’s heroic rescue of Julia Roberts from the gas chamber and Tim Robbins’s happily-ever-after kiss with his pregnant wife June. Griffin’s closing quip to June, “Traffic was a bitch” echoes the ending he wrote for Habeas Corpus, which itself echoes hundreds of cinematic instances of the formulaic action movie dialogue that the Willis/Roberts sequence masterfully satirizes. Through this recycling of clichés, the movies provide the model for themselves, as well as for Griffin’s own reality, which he scripts according to the same formula he uses to make movies. The adaptation of The Player from book to movie takes the form of an extended joke about the very process of turning stories into movies. In a manner reminiscent of McLuhan’s credo that “the medium is the message,” the film suggests that stories and characters who appear on the silver screen are inevitably remade as cinematic entities, and Altman’s movie examines the proliferation of cinematic values rampant in a culture in which everything is turned into a movie, figuratively or phenomenologically, even before it has been literally adapted, and even in the absence of any such literal adaptation. The real target of Altman’s satire, that is to say, is not the movie-people on the screen, but the audience out in the “real” world whose enthusiastic receptivity to hyperreal values makes the kind of movies Griffin produces so commercially successful. The audience of The Player—Altman’s most conventionally plotted movie— responds exactly the way Griffin would predict an audience should react. The pleasure the audience cannot help taking in the cinematic mastery of Altman’s story-telling, in the opportunities for celebrity-sighting the movie provides, and even in the giddy thrill of the “up” ending—our very own emotional responses to the movie’s manipulation of cinematic values—reveals that the audience lives a significant portion of their lives in Griffin’s world, in a reality that is a mere reflection of the movies’ commercially produced representations of reality.

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Baudrillard, The Matrix, and “the Real 1999” In one of the most interesting conversations to open up between philosophy and pop culture in recent decades, the Wachowskis, writers and directors of the popular science-fiction film The Matrix, identified Jean Baudrillard as a primary source of inspiration for their story. Neo brandishes a copy of Baudrillard’s most famous book, Simulacra and Simulation, in one of the movie’s first scenes, and Morpheus quotes the now-famous expression “the desert of the real” from the first page of that publication. Baudrillard himself, however, explicitly disowned the film as a representation of his thinking, going so far as to indicate that The Matrix is the kind of movie the evil Matrix program would make about the Matrix. The basic disjuncture between the narrative situation in The Matrix and the philosophical speculations expressed by Baudrillard in his seminal texts of the 1980s and ’90s concerns the depiction of the manner in which reality is structured. The clear philosophical debt in the Wachowskis’ film is to Plato and the condition he describes in the Allegory of the Cave, in which prisoners of a false reality are freed to discover that there is a true reality, the existence of which they had not suspected. The foundational insight of Baudrillard’s theoretics in Simulacra and Simulations, however, is that the Platonic duality between reality and representation has imploded in the modern world, resulting in a hyperreal condition to which criteria of truth or falsity no longer apply. As Baudrillard himself explains in an interview, “the real nuisance in this movie is that the brand-new problem of the simulation is mistaken with the very classic problem of the illusion, already mentioned by Plato. Here lies the mistake” (Lancelin). When we follow the story of The Matrix from the perspective of the protagonist Neo, as the story compels us to do, we encounter a dualistic, Platonic division between reality and illusion. In that film, the real world is the devastated hellscape of 2199. The world of illusion, however, is a simulated replica of 1999, the year in which The Matrix was released. As a result, the movie also invites us to read it from the perspective of the inhabitants of 1999. Agent Smith explains that the machines selected this historical period to simulate because it represents the peak of human civilization, and the inhabitants of the Matrix apparently live in an eternal 1999, literally living out Baudrillard’s pataphysical claim that “the year 2000 will not perhaps take place” (IE  9), that time would distend to infinitely defer the millennial moment. But even more strangely, when we consider The Matrix from the perspective of the citizens of the “real 1999,” we find the millennial moment refracted back at us as the kind of world that lends itself to “neural-interactive simulation.” The urban skyscraper-scapes,

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cubicle-scapes, and mediascapes that constitute the Matrix manage to mimic contemporary American reality while simultaneously suggesting that these are the kinds of environments an evil computer program would design for human beings to inhabit. The Matrix-world emphasizes important technological innovations of the late ’90s—including cell phones, the World Wide Web, and CGI cinematography—all of which, it is implied, contribute to the derealization of conventional models of space and time. An important difference, however, between the inhabitants of the Matrix and the citizens of the “real 1999” is that the inhabitants of the Matrix can wake up into reality, whereas the inhabitants of “real 1999” are stranded without hope of escape in a time and place that is immanently simulacral. In this sense, the fictional pod-people of 2199 are more real than we are. Reality is at least possible for them, whereas we are trapped in a kind of reality that is its own simulation. In Baudrillard’s words, we can say of the ontology of the “real 1999” that “Illusion is no longer possible, because the real is no longer possible” (SS 19). By performing a reading of The Matrix that emphasizes its roundabout reference to its own contemporary historical moment, we can identify a sense in which the film authentically captures a Baudrillardian variety of space-time. It is significant that Baudrillard’s response to The Matrix refers both to the original 1999 film and to its 2003 sequel, Matrix: Reloaded. Although they are obviously similar in many respects, The Matrix belongs to a different historical moment than its two sequels, and can almost be considered to belong to a different genre. The major historical turning point between 1999 and 2003 is the terrorist attack of September 11, 2001, which, conflated as this event easily is with the advent of a new calendric millennium, had acquired the status of a historical-cultural turning point in the popular imagination. Considered within the context of its original release, The Matrix is the crowning example of several interrelated trends in Hollywood movies of the 1990s. Most obviously, The Matrix is the most commercially successful of a cyberpunk wave of films, including Total Recall, Lawnmower Man (1992), Johnny Mnemonic (1995), Strange Days (1995), Ghost in the Shell (1995), Cube (1997), Dark City (1998), The Thirteenth Floor (1999), eXistenZ (1999), and Vanilla Sky (2001). All of these films use the metaphor of a computer-generated world as a way of imagining the manner in which it is possible for human beings to exist in alternate ontological registers. Even though each of these cyberpunk narratives establishes its own mythology of how reality is structured, taken as a whole, the proliferation of these movies suggests an increasing cultural inquiry into the phenomenological issues associated with a new kind of mediated reality. Another cinematic trend within which we can position The Matrix is that of ironic meta-movies, movies that self-consciously incorporate their status as pop cultural products into their own thematic and narrative structure, such as The Brady Bunch Movie (1995) and its sequel (1996), Scream (1996) and its sequels (1997, 2000), the Pierce Brosnan installments of the James Bond franchise (1995, 1997, 1999, 2002), and South Park: Bigger, Longer, and Uncut (1999). The defining feature of this subgenre is that these movies’ characters inhabit a reality that has the ontological quality of a television show or movie. These films reflect a situation similar to that depicted in Pleasantville (1998) and The Truman Show in which human reality has become televisualized, depleted of the existential-humanist

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values associated with the classical understanding of reality and reorganized according to the values of mass-media culture. Encompassing both the cyberpunk films and the meta-movies is a wider cultural-cinematic trend of movies discussed throughout this book that engage in one way or another the Baudrillardian theme of the implosion of reality and representation. Considered from within the context of these prevailing trends, The Matrix clearly holds a privileged place in the canon of the cinema of ’90s’ hyperreality. The Matrix’s two sequels, however, are distinctly post-9/11 movies. In accordance with the prevailing cinematic mood of the first decade of the twenty-first century, the sequels to The Matrix distance themselves from endorsing a hyperreal ontology. They are fraught with history and consequence in deference to the rebooting of reality that the terrorist attack and the subsequent War on Terror had come to represent. Baudrillard’s response to the dramatic situation represented in The Matrix may have been influenced by his familiarity with the direction the franchise would take in its twenty-first-century incarnation. When we consider the first Matrix film in isolation, however, the delineation between reality and hyperreality is much more ambiguous than it becomes in its post-9/11 installments. Whereas the sequels shift their focus away from the computer world and toward the “real” world of the rebel city of Zion, almost all of the first movie’s plot and the vast majority of that movie’s memorable action sequences take place inside the Matrix or some other computer-generated environment. By introducing the Matrix as a naturalistic environment and by impressing the audience with the vividness and persuasiveness of the virtual world, the first movie evokes a sense that the virtual landscape is also a real dwelling place, whereas the supposedly “real” city of Zion is never anything more than a rumor. Throughout the first 45 minutes of The Matrix, we accept Neo as an ordinary inhabitant of a world that, while highly stylized, consists of recognizable signposts of contemporary urban existence. The acceptance of this world as the familiar world of the audience accounts for the uncanny effect of the later scenes in which we return to this world with the awareness that it is a mass-induced simulation, prompting an experience of defamiliarization that is rooted in the underlying recognizability of Neo’s world as a version of our own. The Matrix is the heart of The Matrix; the “real world” scenes in the Nebuchadnezzar have a perfunctory mood and a flat visual style, whereas the Matrix scenes spill over with the innovative cinematographic effects and eye-popping action sequences that reflect the movie’s true raison d’être. Even Morpheus, the rebel leader who is committed to destroying the Matrix, seems more interested in the plasticity of human potential as it exists within a simulated environment than he is in pursuing Zen discipline in his real body in 2199. In his training scenes with Neo, Morpheus flows over with the jouissance of his intramatrical athleticism, and all of his cryptic wisdom seems to apply solely to the condition of living in a neural-interactive simulation. Neo downloads a cerebral program and reports that he “know[s] kung-fu,” but, as far as we can tell from the first Matrix movie, he does not really know kung-fu in terms of being able to do it in reality, he only knows it in the video-game world, or rather he only “knows” it mentally, not in the sense of the mind-body fusion that is the real perfection of martial arts training. In this sense, the rebels who are revolting against the artificial

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Matrix-world actually define their standards of knowledge and wisdom according to intramatrical conditions. The climax of the film, furthermore, puts the ontological status of the “real world” itself into question. Morpheus had told us definitively that death in The Matrix results in real-life death. This rule is supposed to be a rule of physiology—of “reality”—as opposed to a virtual rule that can just as easily be annulled by reprogramming. When Trinity and Neo’s love proves potent enough to resurrect Neo back from the dead, this event bypasses the laws of physical reality rather than the virtual laws of the Matrix. Someone who had not seen the sequels would be justified in theorizing that what Trinity and Neo think is “the real world” is actually only another computer program. Slovoj Žižek, for one, found it likely that “In the sequels to The Matrix, we shall probably learn that the very ‘desert of the real’ is generated by another matrix” (“The Matrix” 245). Immersing us as it does in the world of the Matrix, the first movie opens the floodgates of a vertiginous skepticism that undermines any foundation for a stable reality. The point of view of the next two movies, however, puts the audience on the side of “reality” against the evil machines, and the franchise returns us to the Matrix only as tourists. The sequels never return us to a sense that the Matrix is where we are comfortable and at home. For this reason, the first Matrix movie is a much more effective metaphor for the condition of hyperreality than its sequels. In particular, the very last scene of The Matrix emphasizes Neo’s commitment to working within the Matrix to raise the consciousness of its inhabitants, among whom, it is understood, is the audience itself. In a kind of open letter to the machines, Neo pledges that he will show the inhabitants of the Matrix “a world without rules and controls, without borders or boundaries, a world where anything is possible.” What world is he talking about? This is certainly not a description of the “real world” of 2199, a world characterized by remorseless military discipline and the constant threat of death. Rather, Neo seems to be describing the fantastic possibilities that can result from manipulating the code of the imaginary world. Once one cracks the code of the Matrix, as Neo does, intramatrical reality becomes available for an endless variety of visually arresting permutations. None of these hallucinatory effects, however, has anything to do with liberation from the Matrix. We are told several times during the movie that nothing you can do or see in the Matrix can provide awareness of the true nature of the Matrix. Liberation requires nothing more dramatic than swallowing a red pill, upon which one disappears from the Matrix to see for oneself the true infrastructure of the illusory dream-world. It is difficult to imagine how Neo will use his intramatrical flips and twists to liberate anyone from enslavement to the machines, and even his most mind-bending acrobatics will be useless if his unconscious body gets vaporized by squiddies while he is flying around in dream-world. Indeed, within the logic of the Matrix universe, Neo’s peroration makes little sense, since the goal of Morpheus’s resistance movement is supposedly to liberate people from the Matrix, not to convince them how cool it can be to live in a Matrix if you go about it the right way. Neo’s statement only makes sense if we take it to apply to us, the audience, living in the “real 1999,” with no real world to wake up to. The possibilities of intramatrical miracleworking signify nothing more than an absurd game in 2199, but in 1999, they represent

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vivid metaphors for the power of the imagination to transform a simulacral world and, indeed, they do seem to echo Baudrillard’s assertion that “it is in this tactical universe of the simulacrum that one will need to fight—without hope, hope is a weak value, but in defiance and fascination” (SS 152). If it is the case that most viewers of The Matrix do not even notice that Neo seems to be operating at cross-purposes at the end of the movie, it is likely because the subtext that Neo is talking to his 1999 audience rather than his 2199 audience is taken for granted. We members of the “real 1999” do in fact make a cameo appearance in The Matrix. Morpheus explains to Neo the truth about the reality of 2199 in a simulated environment known as the Construct. In this cyberspatial environment, Morpheus is able to call upon a number of visual aids to assist his apocalyptic narrative, one of which is an old ’50s-style Radiola television set. “This is the world you know,” Morpheus tells Neo, “the world as it existed at the end of the twentieth century,” clicking on the kitschy television to show a Koyaanisquatsi-style montage of urban footage: skyscrapers, highway traffic, and bustling crowds of rush hour pedestrians (that is us!). Televisions are featured prominently in The Matrix as well as in Baudrillard’s writing. In the Matrix, we see Neo appear on a bank of television screens when he is being interrogated by Agent Smith, for example, and Apoc and Switch die in a television repair shop. In the symbolic landscape of the Matrix, television screens coexist alongside mirrors and other reflective surfaces to suggest the extent to which intramatrical objects are both imaginary (in the sense of being images rather than substances) and replicable. It is fitting then that the movie uses a television screen to present its audience with a mirror image of themselves. Baudrillard’s philosophy of hyperreality has been called “a conspiracy theory based almost entirely on an analysis of television” (Cook 160), as in his likening of television to “a miniature terminal that, in fact, is immediately located in your head—you are the screen, and the TV watches you—it transistorizes all the neurons and passes through like magnetic tape” (SS 51). For Neo, watching television in the Matrix (or the Construct), it is literally true that the television is in his head, along with everything else in his perceptual environment. For us, watching Neo watch television, we see ourselves depicted as a televisual montage. “This is the world you know,” Morpheus tells Neo, not “This is a representation of the world you know.” It may be somewhat distorted for having traveled 200 years both ways to reach us, but this strange mirror image turns out to be just as identifiable to us as a representation of “contemporary civilization” as the self-consciously retro appliance is identifiable as a “television.” Seeing ourselves through the mirror of a televisual montage compiled by historians of the distant future is a uniquely Baudrillardian style of self-perception, one that emphasizes the extent to which reproduced images play a decisive role in defining the popular understanding of contemporary reality. This mirror-function of The Matrix corresponds closely with Žižek’s observation that symbolic fictions are a key element in the regulation of reality itself. In his discussion of The Matrix in The Pervert’s Guide to Cinema (2006), Žižek requested “a third pill,” a pill which would enable one to see “not the reality behind the illusion, but the reality in illusion itself.” While both Žižek’s and Baudrillard’s critical perspectives effectively problematize the Platonic dualism of a naive interpretation of The Matrix, Žižek’s recourse to the unconscious provides his psychoanalytic reading

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Figure 8.1  Inhabitants of “the real 1999” make their cameo appearance in The Matrix. with a stable frame of reference according to which the categories of real and illusory can be discriminated, whereas Baudrillardian hyperreality is characterized by a more radical collapse of ontological registers. The vision of our reality we glimpse through Morpheus’s magic mirror reflects Baudrillard’s definition of the real as “not only what can be reproduced, but that which is always already reproduced: that is, the hyperreal” (Si 146). The images on the television and the Matrix-world itself are both densely urban environments. Even if Neo’s world were not a neural-interactive simulation—that is, if his world really were our world—he would still live in a space that is entirely artificial. Neo moves through apartment buildings, hotels, office buildings, subway stations, city streets, and other built spaces, and it is difficult to remember if there is anything so much as a single plant in the whole movie to break the consistency of inorganic shapes. Neo’s apartment is a sleeping-cube reminiscent of the amniotic pod that his “real” body inhabits, and the array of skyscrapers in which he works mimics the design of the towers in which these pods are arrayed. Architecturally, Neo’s real world and the Matrix-world seem to mirror each other. When Neo has to flee the Agents at his office, he ducks and weaves through a maze of cubicles, the right angles and straight lines of which reinforce the audience’s impression that he lives in a world invented by machines. When Neo falls into the Agents’ custody, we see his image replicated on a grid of television monitors, and the interrogation room itself is a hell of squares, a graph-paper world. The most characteristic shade of lighting in the Matrix scenes is a tint of green that is not the chlorophyll green of organic life, but the death-like, pallid green of fluorescent lights. All of these visual components are cues to the audience (if not to Neo) that the Matrix-world is simulated according to the mechanical principles of regularity and repetition; it is not a natural space.

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It turns out, however, that Neo’s world looks the way it does, not because it is designed by computers but because it is modeled on our world, allowing us to recognize in Neo’s unnatural Matrix-world a representation of our own contemporary habitat. The sense in which Neo’s world is simulated by computers parallels the sense in which our world—the world that Neo thinks he lives in—is itself simulated by computers according to the same principles of rationalized efficiency that govern machine-logic in all times and places. Whether or not any given member of the 1999 audience of The Matrix lives in a place that physically resembles the unnamed city of the Matrix, as consumers participating in global mass-culture, the basic semantic structure of their cultural environment is identical to that of the Matrix. In the same way that the eternal 1999 of the Matrix simulates the Baudrillardian claim that America “lives in a perpetual present” (A 76), the spatial quality of the Matrix is similarly closed off. The entire world seems to consist of a single city which no one ever leaves and outside of which nothing seems to exist. This aspect of life in the Matrix suggests a centripetal self-referentiality that is reminiscent of the closed circuit of global capitalism. As surreal as the spatio-temporality of the Matrix may be, the same tropes of closed space and time are at the foundation of Baudrillard’s analysis of contemporary reality. As William Bogard explains in his commentary on Baudrillard, “simulation is the cancellation of distance, space, and, ultimately (linear, historical) time itself, and the substitution of simulated distances, simulated times, etc.” (317). The simulation of time and space is made possible, in both Baudrillard’s theoretics and the narrative world of the Matrix, by the replacement of “the metaphysic of being and appearance” with the metaphysic of “the code” (Si 103). Indeed, Baudrillard could be describing the Matrix itself when he explains that, through the power of digitalization, “The real is produced from miniaturized units, from matrices, memory banks, and command models” (Si 3). The opening shots of The Matrix stage a literal depiction of digital code—represented by the movie’s motif of streaming columns of data—taking the form of the physical hotel corridors through which the cops close in on Trinity. The Matrix is a world literally built out of information, and as a result, it is a densely semantic environment. As in any built space, every aspect of every artificial object has meaning—it was designed by someone (or something) with reference to economic, aesthetic, and cultural values. The semantic landscape is therefore a paranoid environment in which nothing ever simply is, everything speaks. According to Baudrillard, “This approximates our general attitude toward the world around us to that of a reading, and to a selective deciphering. We live less like users than readers and selectors” (Si 121). Everything in the Matrix environment is freighted with significance. If Neo could read the signs of his coded world, he might be able to interpret the truth about the Matrix’s nature. Neo even recognizes a veiled clue in the banal “have a nice day” uttered by Mouse when he is posing as an intramatrical mail courier. The Matrix shares the semiotic quality of our late capitalist terrain in which “nothing is inert, nothing is disconnected, uncorrelated, or aleatory. Everything, on the contrary, is fatally, admirably connected” (FS 185). The significant difference, however, is that whereas the signs in Neo’s world all indicate a single sacred Truth—that the Matrix is a ploy—the meanings in the Baudrillardian

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hyperscape have no such transcendent interpretation, referring rather back to themselves in an orbital precession. In general, the metaphor of the Matrix dramatizes a very accurate rendition of Baudrillard’s description of contemporary reality, failing only in its portrayal of the Matrix as an illusion, but this nuance, as important as it may be to Neo, is irrelevant to us, for whom the Matrix, however unreal it may be, is not an illusion. In addition to replicating the “real” 1999 in terms of its spatio-temporality and its semantic structure, the Matrix also mirrors back to its audience the social conditions of its own time. In his review of postmodern themes in The Matrix, David Weberman speculates that living in a matrix might be an improvement on real-world conditions in that it facilitates “the elimination of poverty (for we see mainly business types and we mustn’t forget that the machines want a docile human population and would be unwise to permit hunger and predation)” (233). When we consider the Matrix in terms of its 2199 function—to distract pod-people from their real existence— Weberman’s supposition is logical, but if we consider the Matrix in terms of its 1999 function—to mirror back to us our contemporary moment—a more recognizable version of 1999 conditions is more appropriate, and, indeed, this is what we see in the Matrix, a world which, while many scenes seem to be set in affluent business districts, also features working-class and underclass neighborhoods of Megacity and which is also populated by lumpen individuals (such as the hobo in the subway station or the blind man in the lobby of the oracle’s apartment building). The fact that the Matrix is not a utopia is explained within the movie by Agent Smith, who relates that the machine’s original Matrix design was intended to be a perfect world, but that the human brain was not equipped to process an existence devoid of pain and suffering. To the audience, however, the social imperfection of the Matrix relates in two directions—both to the condition of reality in 2199 and to the condition of “reality” in 1999. This referentiality is cleverly indicated in an early scene in which Neo is reprimanded by his boss for chronic tardiness and a generally uncooperative stance toward corporate life. We have already noted that Neo’s skyscraper workplace recalls the towers of pods in the machine’s bioenergy fields. His boss Mr Rinehart, furthermore, in his tone of voice, his clothes and appearance, and his proposal to Neo that he has a choice to make—this job or another one—echoes the Agents, who exhibit dehumanized speech patterns and standardized appearance, and who also propose a choice to our hero—life as Neo or life as Thomas Anderson. The parallelism between Neo’s boss, himself supposedly another human battery dreaming in a pod, and the Agents, the personified enforcers of intramatrical behavior, suggests that life for Neo as a worker in a simulated capitalist environment is identical to his life as an amniotic pod-person. Throughout this scene, workers are cleaning the windows outside Mr Rinehart’s office, the squeaking of their squeegies punctuating the dialogue. This obtrusive window-washing seems intended to communicate an overt message to the audience, over the heads of the movie’s characters, about how transparently the scene renders the metaphorical relationship between Neo’s job and his existential status as a slave of the machines. “Do I make myself clear?” Rinehart asks at the end of the scene. “Yes, Mr Rinehart, perfectly clear,” answers Neo. But,

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because Neo’s world is a simulated version of our own, this winking gesture to the audience also clarifies the implication that the transparency of the metaphor cuts through three realities: 2199, the Matrix, and our own. The metaphoricity that links Neo’s job to his status as a human battery is itself a metaphor for the extent to which we ourselves in 1999 are immersed in power structures that are both simulacral and dehumanizing. If the machines were really super-intelligent, they would simply give Neo a more fulfilling career as a way of deterring him from his restless searching (as Weberman rightly argues they would be wise to do). Depicting a more utopian world, however, would disrupt the transparency of the mirror-function of the Matrix for its 1999 audience. The most significant theme traversing the Matrix-world, the 2199 world, and the “real” 1999 is that of technology. The first time we see Neo in the movie, he is asleep in front of his computer, listening to techno music through his headphones. The pale glow of the computer monitor, lined with the shadows of scrolling text and images, plays across Neo’s arm and face, suggesting that his very flesh is a digital effect. Of course, as we discover, this is precisely the case, as it also turns out to be the case that his sleeping in this opening shot is an allusion to his slumbering pod-enclosed body in 2199. Likewise, the cocoon of digital gadgets that surrounds Neo in this image mimics the totalized technological environment of the pod, suggesting the sense in which listening to music through headphones is different in degree, but not in essence, from receiving simulated sensations through an electrical port that plugs directly into your spinal cord. While the occipital plug presents a shocking image of the penetration of the nervous system by a technological apparatus, this image only literalizes an underlying continuity between digital impulses and consciousness that exists whenever our senses are engaged in digital stimulation. Baudrillard, describing the phenomenology of hi-fi, describes it as a kind of Matrix-world: “it is the simulation of a total environment that dispossesses one of even the minimal analytic perception constitutive of music’s charm. … Something else fascinates … you: technical perfection” (Se 30 italics in original). Of course, “charm” is not the most apt word to describe the aesthetic effect aspired to by the genre of music Neo listens to, the staple musical genre of the Matrix-world, techno music, which itself strives to replace musical “charm” with subcognitive fascination in its technical perfection. When Neo visits a club in the following scene, the techno music blares so powerfully that even without headphones, it constitutes a total digital environment that is tactile as well as auditory. But for a movie with a distinctively Luddite premise, The Matrix fetishizes the technological sensory environment represented by techno music. Not only is techno music represented as cool and hip (at the same time as it is presented as a metaphor for the technological dehumanization of pod-dwelling), but Neo’s prowess as a computer hacker is a kind of prerequisite to his ultimate ability to crack the code of the Matrix. Neo’s career as the nemesis of the machines begins, not by rejecting technology but by penetrating into it. The information scrolling across Neo’s computer screen (and his flesh) in the opening scene is about Morpheus; it contains information about Neo’s own destiny. Upon waking up, his computer addresses him personally, directing him to find Trinity and to begin his quest of discovery. Of course,

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the rebels themselves all need to be adept computer geeks in order to hack in to the Matrix and perpetrate their terrorist incursions. In Neo’s world, following the white rabbit of technology brings him into the real 2199, where he discovers the truth that technology is a transcendently malicious force. For us in the “real” 1999, however, with no real techno-dystopia to act as background for our relationship to technology, the implication of this double-valence in the question of technology—is it moral or immoral, is it a path to self-understanding or a tool of self-deception, is it empowering or castrating—remains unresolved. While Neo transcends this ambiguity by exiting his illusory 1999, we in the “real” 1999 are left with the implosion of these two options. Of “hypertechnology without finality,” Baudrillard writes, “is it good or bad? We will never know. It is simply fascinating, though this fascination does not imply a value judgment” (SS 119). In the same way that Neo is in the Matrix whether he listens to headphones or not, our world is also pervasively simulacral, making any particular Luddite pose futile and naive. One piece of technology that is very important in the Matrix mythology is the telephone. The explosion of compact cell phones, a prominent feature of the ’90s’ lifeworld, finds its way into the movie, in which cell phones are an important means of communication between people inside the Matrix and people in the real world, but a landline connection is necessary to bodily transfigure a person between the two planes. Of course, in terms of the logic of The Matrix, this detail makes no sense at all, since the wires of intramatrical landline phones are just as insubstantial as the signals sent by cell phones. This plot point does, however, suggest a significant implication about the 1990s techno-scape to its audience in the “real” 1999. As a ubiquitous symbol of technological progress, the cell phone in 1999 is in a unique position to serve as a symbol for technological progress as such, the objective correlative of the sense in which technological advancement seems to occur independently of any human decision-making process. The old-fashioned landline phones of the Matrix are capable of effectuating actual physical contact with real people in the real world, making it literally possible to “reach out and touch someone,” as AT&T advertisements used to say. The cell phone, on the other hand, provides a disorienting style of communication. When Neo is on the cell phone with Morpheus in the cubicle maze, he has no idea where Morpheus is, or where on earth he could possibly be to have an apparently god’seye-view of time and space. The placelessness of the interlocutor, moreover, redounds upon the cell phone user himself, as the question of where Morpheus might be is inseparable from the question of where Neo himself might be that his actions are so readily observable. This disorientation-effect of cell phone communication is analogous to the film’s metaphorical insinuation that cell phones strand their users in the Matrix. As a symbol of the advancing technologies of virtualization, cell phones—those same gadgets that we rely on with increasing frequency in the “real” 1999—indicate that the future reconstitution of the world as a grand neural-interactive simulation is already underway, if not already definitively accomplished, in the “real” 1999. In fact, by 2199, the machines have overplayed their hand, making themselves less powerful through their establishment of themselves as humanity’s “other,” an enemy that can be attacked. In the “real” 1999, the machines are more powerful, for there is no way of contesting

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them; they are integrated into the very texture of human reality in a way that the Matrix illusion can only simulate and metaphorize. Aside from any particular intramatrical object or event, however, the total environment of the Matrix seems to reflect back to its 1999 audience a vision of reality that suggests the deep penetration of hyperreal ontology into the very fabric of time and space. For Baudrillard, hyperreality is not something we experience when we talk on the phone or watch television; the order of simulation affects all of perception at a structural level. The Matrix’s memorable bullet-time sequences reflect that aspect of Baudrillard’s worldview that Bogard describes as a side effect of living “within the envelope of the repeated past,” namely, “time’s immolation, its journey into the digital void” (319). Not only is the bullet-time effect achieved by digitally manipulating photographic images, but the effect itself signifies the digitalized nature of the Matrix environment. This effect, though, so central to The Matrix’s marketing and legacy, has little or no meaning for the characters themselves; it exists exclusively for the benefit of the audience. The bullet-time sequence, used three times throughout the movie, involves not only the slowing of the action but also the rotation of the camera angle almost a full 360 degrees. The effect of these sequences on the audience is to pull at their sensory engagement with the film and twist the audience’s perception into the screen image. Temporally, the slow motion draws out suspense, causing the viewer to lean forward into the time-sense of the filmic action. Spatially, the traveling camera carries our visual sense into the mise-en-scène of the image, giving us a 360-degree view of the surrounding digital environment (digital both for Neo in the Matrix and for us viewing a computer-generated landscape), and also situates us bodily within the time and space of this world, creating as convincing an effect as any two-dimensional image likely could of being transported into a cinematic ontological register, or, perhaps, of having always already been inhabiting such a reality to begin with. Another thematically significant motif in the film is the pattern of concentric oscillations rippling across reflective surfaces, as in the mirror after Neo touches it with his finger or in the mirrored skyscraper facade after the helicopter crashes into it. As a physics phenomenon closely associated with holography, the motif of concentric oscillations works within the Matrix to signify the virtuality of the intramatrical environment. For us, however, the bizarre warping of images as they ripple across waveform reflecting surfaces accentuates the electromagnetic substratum of all perception, intra- and extramatrical. Implicit in this recognition is a post-Helmholtzian understanding of human perception as an essentially biomechanical phenomenon. That is, the machines have already colonized our self-understanding; we are already simulated cybernetic appliances. If it is possible to hook the brain up to an artificial electronically simulated world, it is only because our perceptual world is already electronically simulated in its very nature. Finally, the preoccupation with fate, in both the Matrix-world and the real world of 2199 reflects a Baudrillardian temporality. Fatality is the signature timesense of the hyperreal, and shares the same definition. “This is the very definition of fate: the precession of effects over their very causes. So all things happen before having happened” (FS 198). The aporia centralized around the oracle—Do her prophesies predict the future or do they cause it?—reflects a typically Baudrillardian implosion

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of cause and effect: “an absorption of the radiating mode of causality” (SS 31). In simulated time, freedom itself is only a simulacral shimmer over a surface of digitized code. While the fatal temporality of the Matrix-world would seem to diminish Neo’s heroic accomplishment (despite the movie’s theme of choice, Trinity’s revelation of Neo’s status as the One suggests that he could not have done other than he did), it does contribute to the Baudrillardian atmosphere of The Matrix’s simulated 1999. In Simulacra and Simulation, originally written almost twenty years before The Matrix, Baudrillard achieves the appropriately Baudrillardian accomplishment of seeming to defend his position against its future distortion by the narrative of the Wachowskis’ movie. Whereas Neo was able to travel from the hyperreal world to another world from which he could view the illusory quality of what he had taken to be reality, “here … simulation is insuperable, unsurpassable, dull and flat, without exteriority— we will no longer even pass through to ‘the other side of the mirror’ [as Neo does], that was still the golden age of transcendence” (125). The likelihood that the Wachowskis were familiar with this passage (and many others like it) and deliberately chose either to ignore it or to dramatize its contradiction is bolstered by the manner in which they depict Baudrillard’s book itself in the film. The movie does not show us the familiar, iconic edition of Simulacra and Simulation, the white rectangular paperback, but a strange mock-up: a blue hardcover with embossed lettering that looks about ten times as thick as the actual book. The essay to which Neo opens the book, “On Nihilism” is printed on the wrong side of the page, and, moreover, the book has been hollowed out for use as a secret storage area for illegal software. The writers seem to be fairly upfront in admitting that the Baudrillard to which their film alludes is a distorted, eviscerated simulacrum of the “real” Baudrillard. (In fact, Neo’s copy of Simulacra and Simulation is itself one of the simulated objects in the Matrix program, suggesting the accusation of many of Baudrillard’s critics that he is part of the hyperreal environment he professes to criticize.) The Wachowskis seem to be admitting their intention to stage a deceptive effigy of Baudrillardian concepts, requiring a thoughtful viewer to ask how The Matrix uses Baudrillardian ideas, rather than judging the film by whether or not it faithfully adheres to them. Considering the film as a reflection of the “real” 1999 provides a unique opportunity to observe the manner in which the movie engages Baudrillardian concerns, and encourages its audience to recognize themselves in a Baudrillardian mirror.

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Reality/Television: The Truman Show In the same interview in which Baudrillard repudiated the association between his concept of hyperreality and the narrative situation depicted in The Matrix, he also disputes the uniqueness of the Wachowskis’ scenario, observing that “there had already been other movies dealing with the growing blur between the real and the virtual: The Truman Show, Minority Report, even Mulholland Drive, David Lynch’s masterpiece” (Lancelin). Not chiefly a scholar of turn-of-the-millennium American cinema, Baudrillard can be forgiven for not realizing that Minority Report and Mulholland Drive both came out after The Matrix. His comment, however, does confer unique status on The Truman Show, not only as a movie that really had already provided a parable of hyperreal implosion before The Matrix but also, more interestingly, as a movie worthy of Baudrillard’s approbation. In recommending these three films against what he describes as the artistic failure of The Matrix, Baudrillard suggests that these films portray cinematic representations that he would be more likely to endorse. Baudrillard describes Mulholland Drive as a masterpiece in the above quotation, and in a later book he refers to Spielberg’s Minority Report to illustrate an aspect of his argument (IE 28). To the best of my knowledge, Baudrillard’s writings and interviews contain no other references to The Truman Show, but Baudrillard’s inclusion of this title in the company of these other films is enough to act as a commendation of Peter Wier’s film. The Baudrillardian character of Truman’s predicament is perfectly clear in that, as in these other films, the plot hinges on the question, “Are we in a real world?”— that query which Baudrillard identifies as “the leitmotif of our entire present culture” (IE 26). On the other hand, the ontological situations represented in The Truman Show and The Matrix are so similar that if The Matrix can be criticized for drawing too sharp a distinction between the world of reality and the world of illusion, then certainly The Truman Show is vulnerable to the same accusation. The situations depicted in both films are characterized by a sharp dividing-line between the real world and the artificial world, an ontological dichotomization that Baudrillard criticizes, insisting that “the most interesting thing would be to show what happens at the joining of these two worlds” (Lancelin). If anything, the barrier between real and nonreal worlds is much blunter in The Truman Show than it is in The Matrix. Being a cyberspacial terrain, the Matrix does not have a frontier or even a physical location, whereas Truman’s artificial world, Seahaven, is circumscribed by an enormous dome located on the outskirts of Los Angeles. As in The Matrix, stark visual cues differentiate the dream-world within the dome from the dingy real world outside the dome, affirming

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that the audience is sophisticated enough to confidently discriminate between reality and illusion. Baudrillard’s inclusion of The Truman Show in his list of films that adopt a more intricate approach to the relationship between reality and illusion, however, invites us to look more closely at that film and consider the manner in which it sets about punching holes in the dome that appears to set Seahaven apart from the rest of the world. The most obvious difference between the simulated world inhabited by Truman Burbank and that inhabited by Neo is that the Matrix is a flawless reduplication that beguiles its denizens through its technical perfection, whereas Seahaven is extremely prone to every manner of technical glitch. On the very first morning we meet Truman, a lighting fixture falls out of what is supposedly the sky, and, the next morning, his car radio picks up the frequency of the stage hands’ headset chatter. The dome, it turns out, has a long history of being infiltrated by outsiders who have attempted to communicate to Truman the truth of his predicament. This glitchiness endows Seahaven with a rough texture that keeps it from collapsing entirely into sheer illusion; it is a simulated reality that incorporates the fallibility and imperfection of the real world. Unlike Neo’s computer-engineered shadow-world, Seahaven is a human production that blends emotional and operational motivations into a hyperreal cocktail that intoxicates the actors who play Truman’s friends and family. During the opening credits, the actor who plays Truman’s wife asserts, “My life is The Truman Show,” and the actor who plays Truman’s best friend insists that “It’s all true. It’s all real. Nothing is fake. Nothing you see on this show is fake.” The actors themselves, for whom working on The Truman Show must be literally a full-time occupation, are as incorporated into the show as Truman himself, and, even though they are “in” on the big secret of Seahaven’s simulated quality, they nevertheless invest their “roles” with authentic feeling. It is ultimately Truman’s devotion to his human costars that is the most decisive attachment binding Truman to his simulacral milieu. Marlon is able to talk Truman down from his frantic paranoia by appealing to their lifelong friendship, which, aside from having been scripted, stage-managed, and globally televised, is tinged with the sincerity and the intimacy of a real human friendship. When Marlon looks Truman in the eye and tells him, “I would never lie to you,” even though we see that Christof, The Truman Show’s producer, is feeding the dialogue into Marlon’s ear, the film suggests that there is some sense in which Marlon’s words are “all true,” as the actor playing Marlon had insisted in the opening credit interview. It is true because it is not precisely Marlon (“I”) who is lying to Truman; it is true because Marlon is an actor rather than a person, and when actors say things that are not true, we do not call it lying; it is true because the reality-effect of Seahaven is so intense that it warps the standards of veracity into a new configuration. All of these interpretations coexist in a way that challenges the audience to reconcile the reality of human emotion with the absolute falsity of the simulacral context. Another prominent difference between The Truman Show and The Matrix is that The Truman Show is a comedy. Andrew Niccol’s original script for the film set the show in a simulated New York City and, with its brooding art-movie tone, apparently had more in common with The Matrix or Dark City, another urban tech-noir nightmare of simulated reality. Peter Weir’s decision to reconceive the film as a comedy while

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keeping many of Niccol’s original plot points results in a distinct conflux of darkness and goofiness that parallels the intermixing of reality and simulation in Truman’s world. Tragedy, with its horrible truths and its dire consequences, is an apt genre for depicting the dynamics of reality as it has conventionally been conceived in Western culture; the tragic hero’s duty is to sacrifice himself as an example to us mortals of the intractability of the real world. The comic hero, on the other hand, has always been a visitant from the hyperreal register, a person immune to death who walks a tightrope wire between what is possible and what is impossible. Weir’s translation of The Truman Show from tragedy to comedy resulted in the transplantation of Truman’s environment from New York City, the closest thing in the United States to a real place, to Seahaven, a town that looks like a Norman Rockwell hallucination (but which is “actually” the “real” town of Seaside, Florida, the master-planned community where most of the movie was filmed). The key stroke in this development, however, was the casting of Jim Carrey as the title character. In Carrey’s breakout performances, he is not just a comic actor, but a kind of parody of a comic actor. In Ace Ventura: Pet Detective (1994), the gags are not just jokes, they are full-body gymnastic enterprises, jokes in quotation marks, cubed, punctuated with a dozen exclamation points. The gimmick of The Mask (1994) is to supplement Carrey’s physical comedy with CGI enhancements, but these effects are more or less redundant when applied to Carrey, whose screen persona seems capable of bending reality into a cartoon without any digital assistance. It is precisely this antic plasticity that attracted Weir to Carrey for the role: “With his raw comedy and the facial contortions, you couldn’t really tell what he looked like. He was surreal” (Svetkey). Jim Carrey can be described of as the anti–Keanu Reeves. Whereas Keanu’s reserved sobriety provides a calm center around which the fantastic events of The Matrix unfold, Carrey’s freak-show eccentricity matches and even outdoes his character’s outrageous circumstances. If Truman’s personality is an absurd amalgam of exaggerated comic gestures, it is simply because he is a creature of his environment; as someone who was born to be on television, who was the first baby ever to be legally adopted by a corporation, and whose lifeworld is a television studio, it is perfectly “natural” that he would grow up to be Jim Carrey. With his constant stream of catch-phrases and one-liners, his stand-up routines in front of his bathroom mirror, and his eerily demonstrative laugh, Truman behaves exactly like you would expect a real-life television character to behave. Truman’s upbringing is reminiscent of longitudinal experiments in which wolves are raised as dogs as a way of measuring the influence of environment on personality. If the humanists are right, Truman’s simulacral lifeworld will fail to satisfy an inherent craving for freedom, dignity, and authenticity that is an essential component of the human spirit. If the post-structuralists are correct and human identity is an entirely semantic construct, then Truman’s personality should develop in such a way as to perfectly reflect the simulacral structure of his social context. While a surface reading of the film would seem to support the humanist reading—Truman does seem possessed of a deep psychology that resists his producer’s attempts to keep him on the island—Carrey’s mannerist acting style emphasizes the extent to which Truman’s deep psychology has been orchestrated by television writers. Using the classical techniques

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of operant conditioning, these writers have scripted a traumatic incident in which Truman lost his father at sea as a way of keeping the title character island-bound. Truman’s fear of water is the film’s central symbol of his subjugation to the dictates imposed upon him by his circumscribed environment. Truman’s infatuation with Sylvia, on the other hand, is presented as a sign of his disobedience to his environmental programming and an affirmation of his natural freedom. Sylvia is an actress, like everyone else in Truman’s world, but the film positions her as a window into the real world both outside the dome and inside the human heart. The sincere attachment between Truman and Sylvia, however, is itself written into the narrative of The Truman Show. Although she has been given explicit instructions not to communicate with Truman, rather than firing her from the show when she and Truman first started to make unscheduled eye contact, the producers arranged for her to occupy a study carrel adjacent to Truman’s while he is alone late at night cramming for finals. This turned out to be a brilliant reality-television strategy, since Truman and Sylvia’s subsequent date and Sylvia’s frenzied attempt to alert him to the truth of his environment became a “greatest hits” episode of the show and set a subplot in motion that develops into one of the show’s major sources of dramatic tension. Watching Truman’s memory as a televisual flashback, one of the show’s fans sighs romantically, “They got rid of her, but they couldn’t erase the memory.” The Sylvia subplot appears to have been staged for the audience in order to foreground the role of “they” in the narrative, setting up Truman as a protagonist existing in a state of dynamic opposition to his dome-world. There is a dual-referentiality in Truman’s attempt to reassemble Sylvia’s likeness out of shreds of fashion magazine advertisements. At the same time that Truman’s obsession is motivated by a primordial romantic urge, it also expresses the extent to which Truman’s desires are mediated by mass-imagery. Deep psychology and the postmodern mediascape interact in the depiction of Truman’s lost love as a media collage. It is fitting that Truman should find himself romantically attached to a media-collage girl, since his own personality is itself a patchwork of mediated gestures and longings. Strangely, Carrey’s hyperbolic acting style makes Truman’s contrived psychology more believable than it would be if the character were portrayed by a more traditional kind of actor. Carrey’s hyperbolic performance renders it plausible and even likely that Truman’s deep psychology would be just as cobbled-together as his persona. If Truman is a human being rendered as a postmodern creation, then Christof is the postmodern creator-God. A heavy-handed Christian metaphysical analogy runs throughout The Truman Show and plays a particularly significant role in the climax, in which Truman, after appearing to have died in a cruciform posture, comes back to life, carries on a dialogue with a sunbeam coming through a cloud, and passes through the sky into another ontological register. Marlon makes the analogy between Truman’s condition and the condition of the Christian soul explicit when he tries to pacify Truman’s anguished restlessness by inviting him to contemplate the majesty of the setting sun: “That’s the big guy. Quite a paintbrush he’s got.” Of course, what Truman takes to be a reference to God is alternately a double-reference to Christof, whose paintbrush is the magic of dome engineering, and a triple-reference to Peter Weir, whose paintbrush is computer-generated imagery. At the same time that

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Marlon’s comment conflates these artists (fictional and real world) with God, it also has the reverse effect of describing God himself as an artist. This effect, along with the persistent sincerity of Marlon’s inter-dome personality, keeps Marlon’s trifold allusion from collapsing into mere irony (Truman thinks he’s talking about God, but he’s really talking about Christof), and provides it with a more ambiguous, bidirectional signification, as if the movie were more intent on emphasizing the homology between Truman’s situation and the situation of the Christian believer rather than on implying an ironic contrast between the two models of reality. The Christian-allegorical theme throughout the movie as a whole serves to conflate the idea of the transcendent metaphysics that undergirds Western consciousness with the debased phoniness of Truman’s milieu. In the course of this inscription of Christian themes onto a Philip K. Dickian paranoid scenario, The Truman Show deconstructs several of the premises of Christian theology, suggesting that the hyperreality of a 24-hour surveillance society is only a logical extension of Christian beliefs into the structure of everyday life. If the Christian God did exist, he would indeed resemble Christof, a master manipulator who uses guilt and surveillance as a mode of psychological control. It is no wonder that the Truman Show Delusion is a common schizophrenic symptom in the Western world. Christianity is The Truman Show Delusion writ large, and as the master-narrative of Western metaphysics, Christian metaphysics supplies the coordinates of many people’s direct experience of the real world, whether they are practicing Christians or simply people raised in a cultural atmosphere dense with Christian premises. At the same time that The Truman Show suggests a structural parallelism between Christian theology and reality television, however, it also destabilizes the relationship between the real world and the illusory world. Typologically, Truman’s decision to leave his dome-world parallels both Adam’s act of insubordination that led to his expulsion from Eden and Christ’s act of self-sacrifice that led to his transfiguration into heaven. In terms of its Christian metaphoricity, therefore, The Truman Show suggests that, by leaving the dome-world, Truman is simultaneously heading out into the “real world” faced by Adam and Eve outside the gates of Eden and also into the ethereal realm of Christian paradise. This double-interpretation surrounds Truman’s climactic act with ambiguity and lends credence to Christof ’s admonition: “There’s no more truth out there than there is in the world I created for you. The same lies, the same deceits.” Rather than moving from the fake world into the real world, or from the real world into the fake world, Christof suggests that Truman’s step across the threshold of the dome’s exit is a lateral move from one ambiguous admixture of truth and falsity into another. If anything, the portrayal of the world outside Truman’s dome implies that Truman is heading out into a kind of reality that is even less substantial than the reality of Seahaven. The interpretation of Truman’s story as a traditionally Christian, Buddhist, or humanist tale about the capacity of the committed individual to escape the shackles of Plato’s Cave and to emerge into the true light of the real world is critically undermined by the brief glimpses the film allows us of people in “the real world”—the audience of The Truman Show—who are always seen glued to their television sets, entranced by The Truman Show not as captives under an artificial dome but as virtual participants in

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the televisual world that is coextensive with the planet earth itself. The video graphics of The Truman Show logo draw a parallel between the circle of Truman’s dome and the circularity of the earth, orbited by communications satellites and spy cameras, the only difference being that, while Truman can escape from his dome, we in “the real world” have nowhere to go aside from flipping channels to see, as Truman’s audience does after The Truman Show is over, “what else is on.” The success of The Truman Show in the world of the movie and the success of The Truman Show in theaters suggest that audiences recognize Truman’s situation as their own. Describing the first reality show family, the Louds, whose daily lives became the subject of the PBS documentary An American Family in 1973, Baudrillard explains that the concept of “Reality Television” does just as much to make reality televisual as it does to make television real. “We are all Louds doomed not to invasion … by the media and their models, but to their induction, to their infiltration” (Si 30). Like television itself and the media generally, The Truman Show serves the function that Baudrillard called deterrence. By presenting us with a world that is obviously fake, television distracts us from recognizing the artificiality of the world itself. Media images provide the impression that unreality is contained within the frame of the movie or television screen or fixed under the studio-dome, whereas the real situation is one in which television captures us not in the crude “Truman Show” mode of placing us under state surveillance but in the much more pervasive and intangible mode of turning life itself into something that exists for the sake of television. This uncanny reversibility between the unreality of the televisual-filmic image and the unreality of the spectator is addressed in the film’s opening shot of Truman performing a silly dialogue with himself in front of his bathroom mirror. The arrangement of the shot positions Truman within a proliferation of frames. The outermost frame, of course, is the frame of the film image itself, that unavoidable reminder of the movie-ness of the movie-image, the sense in which it exists in a certain sidewise reality in comparison with ordinary experience. Closely embedded within this frame is the squarer aspect ratio of the television frame, here as elsewhere throughout The Truman Show, vignetted in a way intended to refer specifically to the image’s televisual provenance. In the language of the film, this vignetting signifies shots in which our viewing of The Truman Show movie aligns with the fictional audience’s viewing of The Truman Show the television show. As such, these shots provide a kind of wormhole between the real film and the fictional reality show in a way that transforms our gaze into the gaze of a fictional audience. At the same time, the vignetting also alludes to the history of film, being a technique associated with the cinematography of the silent era. Weir’s employment of an iconic technique from the language of cinema to represent televisual vision blurs the distinction between these two media, implying that film and television share a basic perceptual structure, and that watchers of Weir’s movie share a fundamental affinity with watchers of Christof ’s television show. As in Jurassic Park, the identical titles of the film itself and the fictional attraction depicted within the film bend the experience of watching the movie into the experience of inhabiting the world of the movie. The effect of Weir’s cinematic framing of his television frame suggests the recursive reflection of a hall of mirrors (an effect that is intensified by watching the

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movie letterboxed on a television screen) and, sure enough, Truman’s opening shot literalizes this impression by adding the frame of the bathroom mirror and having Truman look out at us as if he were looking into a mirror. In this disorienting image, the typical metaphor for cinema as a mirror on reality is reappropriated and reversed, placing the film audience on the hither-side of the movie-mirror. Rather than seeing the reflection, we are the reflection: the audience is transformed into Truman’s mirror. This mise-en-scène implies a number of suggestions regarding the relationship between Truman’s world and our own. By putting the televisual-filmic audience in the place of Truman’s mirror, Weir suggests that Truman defines his own subjectivity in terms of a gaze that is not his own, but which comes from outside himself, as if the mass-media audience has infiltrated the circuit of his capacity for self-reflection, establishing a definitive entanglement of intimate self-awareness and global networks of commerce. At the same time as our privileged access into Truman’s life gives us an impression of control and power over the figure who is the unwitting subject of our gaze, we ourselves have disappeared from the equation. Truman looks right through his mirror, inhabiting a subject position that is completely unavailable to us as passive spectators. The mirror scene turns the tables on us, as if Truman were watching us on television, in a way that bestows a kind of televisual insubstantiality on those of us out here in “TV-Land,” the simulacral terrain inhabited not by people who are on TV but by people who watch TV. All the while, a readout in the bottom corner of the screen informs us that the image we are seeing is “LIVE,” indicating that the Truman’s time and our time are both elapsing simultaneously. Truman and the audience both inhabit the same temporal register of “live” television, a temporality that redefines living time in televisual terms, supplanting organic time with the time-sense characteristic of simulacral media-life. The frame of the door behind Truman positions him within yet another frame in the composition of the bathroom-mirror shot. The symbolism of the door refers to the possibility of escape from this claustrophobic space of ever more constrictive frames, even as the metaphor of cinema as an outward-directed portal suggests an

Figure 9.1  Truman situated within multiple frames.

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emancipatory alternative to the metaphor of cinema as inward-pointing mirror. The door behind Truman, however, acts primarily as another plane of circumscription, and a particularly ironic one in that, while it seems to extend the promise of escape, it only leads out into the existential frame of the dome-world. The audience, meanwhile, seeing their own reflected image in Truman’s face through the movie-television-mirror, might turn around in our seats and expect to see that same door behind us, the exit of the movie theater or our own front door, and we have every reason to suspect that the door plays the same ironic role in relation to our situation as Truman’s door plays to his. In short, it is easy to recognize Seahaven as a reflection of our own hyperreal social space. Marlin’s attempt to pacify Truman by diagnosing his unique kind of narcissism and frustration as the run-of-the-mill narcissism and frustration that are part and parcel of postmodern consumerhood hinges on a recognizable parallelism between Truman’s world and our own. Of course, Truman doesn’t know what we do, that even people whose lives are not broadcast live to a global audience every second of the day nevertheless cultivate Truman Show delusions of their own, whether in the pathological schizophrenic mode or, much more commonly and, perhaps to some extent, universally, as a background sensibility. Marlon camouflages Truman’s paranoia within the background of celebrity culture. Truman’s intuition that he is under the lens of a global camera could simply be a variety of “wishful thinking” that is familiar to all postmodern citizens. After all, “Who hasn’t sat on the john and had an imaginary interview on Seahaven Tonight? Who hasn’t wanted to be somebody?” Marlin’s graphic imagery weaves a portal between the private space of the bathroom and the public space of television in a way that recalls the opening shot of Truman through his bathroom mirror. The conflation of the common experience of dreaming of celebrity and Truman’s extraordinary circumstance operates in two directions at once. At the same time that it is an attempt to mollify Truman by making him think that he is just like everybody else, it has an opposite signification for the audience, lending credence to the possibility that we are all Trumans, that our secret dreams of celebrity indicate an inchoate premonition that we live in a fishbowl society of perpetual surveillance and control. Our toilet dreams of fame both disguise and disclose the degree to which our “real” life, the inner, private life that we conventionally cordon off as a preserve of virginal subjectivity, is always already radically infiltrated and colonized by the media, even if the cameras themselves and the rest of the Trumanizing apparatuses remain invisible. Christof, in his bereted role of Frenchified postmodern philosopher, insists to Sylvia that “The world—the place you live in—is the sick place. Seahaven is the real world.” Of course, Christof, like Baudrillard, enjoys playing on the ontological ambiguity inherent in any definition of reality, but The Truman Show as a whole does seem to support Christof ’s assertion that Seahaven exemplifies a kind of heightened reality in relation to which “the real world” appears ontologically diminished. The density of the surveillance cameras packed into the physical texture of Seahaven charge the entire space with a self-reflective quality reminiscent of self-consciousness, imparting a noospheric quality to the material space in which even the most mundane objects are transformed into seeing and seen subjects inhabiting an interlaced network of

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perspectives. This charmed space is the natural terrain of advertising, and, indeed, Truman’s entire world is an elaborate commercial in which everything is for sale. The landscape itself is permeated with the aura of the advertised commodity, Truman himself being the ultimate consumer item. For Truman, everything in Seahaven is an advertisement for his status quo. The radio news reports, the movies he enjoys, and even his personal relationships are all elements of a propaganda campaign to keep him quiescent and stationary. When Truman starts seeking the “edge of the construct” (Clover 8), everything in his world (people in wheelchairs, a crowd of runners, traffic) is mobilized to redirect him into the pathways of his habitual patterns. Truman’s hyperreal consumerscape is a vast advertisement for itself. For the home audience, however, the advertising messages of The Truman Show point not toward their own lives but into the charmed advertising space of Seahaven. By being coerced to buy the products that appear in the show, the home audience is invited to deck out their own lifeworld in a way that makes it more closely resemble Truman’s. While Truman is manipulated into remaining in the show, the audience is manipulated into a pattern of desire that yearns toward the fantasy of moving in to Truman’s dome-world. Throughout the movie, the world outside the dome is depicted only by people watching the show, as if the centripetal force designed to keep Truman in place also exerts itself on a planetary scale, influencing everyone in the world to dream of being Truman. Indeed, in this sense, Christof is right; the world is “sick”—deficient, defective, impaired in relation to the utopian fantasy of life under the dome. Christof also opines that “[w]e accept the reality of the world with which we’re presented,” and, immediately following this observation, Weir’s camera cuts to a shot of a pair of meat-head parking garage attendants watching Christof ’s interview with slack-jawed stupefaction, as if to confirm the validity of Christof ’s thesis. The suggestion in the editing is that, in the same way that Truman accepts his reality as real, the real-worlders are entranced in a similar deception. The events of the film’s narrative, however, qualify Christof ’s statement in an important way. Truman, as we discover, does not accept the reality with which he is presented, and the story of the film is his rebellion against this reality. Similarly, the parking garage attendants and all the other entranced viewers of The Truman Show do not accept the reality of their world, but direct their longings toward the world inside the television set, the world under the dome, the world of Seahaven. For both Truman and his audience, reality is something to be overcome and surpassed, but while Truman’s transcendent longing directs him out toward reality, the same longing on the part of the audience of The Truman Show pushes them away from their reality toward the magical promise of living, as Truman does, at the center of a perpetual advertisement. While Truman sails his vessel toward the real world, inspired by an actual possibility of escape from his false reality, Truman’s audience sails in the opposite direction, inspired by a parallel, chiasmic desire to abandon “reality” in favor of the siren call of the hyperreal. In the process, Truman’s audience resemble angels looking down from heaven at the world of the living, as if Truman were the only person in the entire world who is actually alive, actually capable of inhabiting a subject position, actually capable of nurturing a dream of freedom. Significantly, the movie ends with Truman poised on the threshold of

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exiting the dome, but it does not follow him outside, as if to imply that Truman’s very existence is coterminous with the dome, and that leaving the dome is an act of virtual suicide that causes him literally to cease to exist in any modality whatsoever. Although we see Sylvia racing down a flight of stairs to reunite with Truman, the movie denies us the typical Hollywood ending in which we would have seen the lovers embrace. This omission lends a further element of ambiguity to Truman’s climactic egress, as if the movement of the lovers toward one another, the movement of the simulacral subject toward a symbol of the real world, is fundamentally asymptotic and unfinalizable. Even outside the dome, as we might have learned in The Truman Show 2, Truman’s universal recognizability will certainly preclude him from ever living anything like a “normal” life in anything like a “real” world. From a twenty-first-century perspective, The Truman Show appears simultaneously prescient and primitive. Since the turn of the millennium, television has been revolutionized by the proliferation of reality-television shows in a manner that does in fact promise to turn us all into Truman Burbank. On the other hand, the clunky mechanism of Truman’s dome seems decidedly pre-Copernican as a model of what reality television would become. Although the first network breakthrough for the genre, Survivor, which debuted in 2000, restricts its cast to an island, just like Christof ’s Seahaven, as a way of containing the action within a filmable territory, subsequent innovations in the reality-television formula would dispense with the idea of confining the action to a circumscribed “stage,” however grand, and bring “reality” and “television” together in a more implosive fashion. Shows like The Real Housewives of Orange County and its many imitators invite their casts to mingle with their own “real world” milieus in a manner that lends a documentary element to the events depicted, even as it transforms the texture of everyday life into a stage for televisual spectacle. In this more sophisticated mode of reality television, Truman could go to Fiji if he wanted to—the cameras would simply follow him there. The twenty-firstcentury Truman would therefore have perfect freedom of mobility, but this mobility would no longer offer any freedom of escape from the show. The whole world would be available to him, but it would all be rendered meaningless, because the gradient of freedom and entrapment that inspired his dreams of travel would have flattened out into transvalued indifference. Such is the situation that Baudrillard described when, returning to the subject of reality television in 2005, more than thirty years after the broadcast of An American Family, he summed up “all these ‘reality-TV’ programmes, such as Big Brother, Loft Story, etc.” as spectacles in which “everything is put on view and you realize there is no longer anything to see” (IE 93).

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Recombinant Reality in Jurassic Park Donna Haraway compared living in the 1990s to inhabiting “the womb of a pregnant monster,” and so it is fitting that one of the highest grossing movies of that decade, Jurassic Park, addresses the anxiety associated with monstrous generativity. Haraway’s image evokes a correspondence between the manner in which a fetus develops according to the inscrutable dictates of its own genetic code and the manner in which contemporary reality shapes itself out of the prerogatives of its own operational logic. Haraway writes, “In the belly of the local/global monster in which I am gestating, often called the postmodern world, global technology appears to denature everything, to make everything a malleable matter of strategic decisions and mobile production and reproduction processes.” Haraway’s womb-scape is a terrain in which every aspect of existence has been preemptively constituted in terms of a monstrous plasticity—an infinite multiplicity of novel forms, each expressing a variation on the same underlying techno-scientific imperative. Jean Baudrillard described a similar condition when he asserted that “At the limit of this process of reproductibility, the real is not only what can be reproduced, but that which is always already reproduced. The hyperreal” (SS 146). Both Haraway and Baudrillard characterize the postmodern subject not as a humanist Adam, created in the immutable image of an eternally fixed God, but as a transhuman fetus, gestating in an amniotic stew of signs, codes, and artifacts and metamorphosing into some unguessable nth-generation variety of monster. As monstrous embodiments of genetic technologies, digital computation, and commercial calculation, the dinosaurs of Steven Spielberg’s 1993 blockbuster provide a compelling representation of the kind  of postmodern monstrosity described by Haraway and Baudrillard. Although the plot of Spielberg’s movie closely follows the storyline of the 1990 Michael Crichton novel on which the film is based, the power of the movie’s innovative technical effects, along with Spielberg’s adolescent admiration for the creatures that these effects bring to life, has the effect of marginalizing Crichton’s critique of genetic engineering, exchanging the novelist’s quaint humanist objections to hubristic science in favor of the filmmaker’s celebratory embrace of postmodern monstrosity. From a distance, the monsters of Jurassic Park look like dinosaurs, but Crichton’s novel makes it clear that the animals of Jurassic Park are not exactly “real” dinosaurs. Early on in the book, the paleontologist Grant asks Jurassic Park’s chief genetic engineer, Henry Wu, how the park’s scientists can tell whether the dinosaurs they produce are identical to the dinosaurs that actually existed 65 million years ago. After all, not only

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have the park’s dinosaur’s genetic material been patched together out of fragmentary strands of significantly deteriorated DNA and supplemented where necessary with DNA sequences from frogs but their genetic material has also been modified to make the animals patentable and to make them lysine dependent as a mechanism for controlling their behavior. Moreover, the park’s dinosaurs are also being hatched in the absence of the sociobehavioral and ecological context that they had evolved to inhabit. The best reply Wu can give to Grant’s query is to concede that “it is a bit of a paradox. Eventually, I hope paleontologists such as yourself will compare our animals with the fossil record to verify the developmental sequence” (114). Grant’s question seems to challenge Wu’s naive faith in the simple mimeticism of his dinosaur project, however, and in the next chapter, Wu raises the issue of the dinosaur’s authenticity to the park’s impresario and chief executive, John Hammond. The dialogue in this scene expresses the unfamiliarity of the new ontological configuration represented by the creatures to which Wu has given birth. Wu begins the conversation by insisting that “The dinosaurs we have now are real … but in certain ways they are unsatisfactory. Unconvincing” (121). Wu proposes rewriting the dinosaurs’ genome to make them conform more readily to audience’s expectations. When Hammond stands by his park’s marketing boast that “The dinosaurs we have now are real,” however, Wu interrupts him to clarify that they are “not exactly” real. “The past is gone. It can never be re-created. What we’ve done is reconstruct the past—or at least a version of the past” (122). Hammond emphatically rejects Wu’s suggestion that they reengineer the dinosaurs in the interest of safety and aesthetics: “Then the dinosaurs wouldn’t be real.” Goaded on by Hammond’s obstinacy, Wu is finally driven to articulate the exact opposite position to the statement with which he had begun the conversation: “But [the dinosaurs are] not real now. … There isn’t any reality here” (122). Wu can be forgiven for his confusion; not only is his understanding of the ontological status of Jurassic Park’s dinosaurs evolving in unpredictable ways but also the mode of being characteristic of these creatures is one that is inherently slippery and hybridized, partaking of both nature and culture, both illusion and reality, both invention and discovery. In his struggle to understand the products of his genetic engineering, Wu refers back to more primitive technologies of reproduction, such as cinema—“visitors will think the dinosaurs look speeded up, like film running too fast” (121)—and photography—“The DNA of the dinosaurs was like old photographs that had been retouched, basically the same as the original but in some places repaired and clarified and, as a result—” (122). Both analogies position the dinosaurs as mediated entities—figures at one remove from the world we think of as real. These creatures are unique among media entities, however, in that they are imaginary figures with real fangs and claws, stomping through the real world with their undeniable physical bulkiness and devastating lethality. Wu never finishes his thought on the effect that touching up a photograph has on the relationship between the photograph and reality, perhaps because Wu’s own comprehension of the novel implications of mutant ontology is still itself undeveloped. Hammond’s paradoxical insistence that the animals Wu invents for him be “real” reflects Umberto Eco’s observation that “the American imagination demands the real thing and, to attain it, must fabricate the absolute fake” (8). For Eco, the definitive

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instance of this phenomenon is the Disney theme park, and Hammond and Wu’s argument about improving the dinosaurs to increase their entertainment value seems deliberately to allude to Eco’s observation that “A real crocodile can be found in the zoo, and as a rule it is dozing or hiding, but Disneyland tells us that faked nature corresponds much more to our daydream demands … Disneyland tells us that technology can give us more reality than nature can” (44). In Crichton’s novel, Grant initially assesses Hammond’s affable persona by reflecting that “John Hammond’s about as sinister as Walt Disney” (42), and John Arnold, the systems engineer in control of the Jurassic Park’s computer network, had “helped build Disney World” (138). The reality distortion–effect that Eco associated with Disneyland’s animatronic crocodiles is amplified by the dinosaurs of Jurassic Park, which are in fact “real” animals in some sense of the word, even if they are not “exactly” the real animals they are being marketed as. The question of their reality not refers to their physical makeup (as animatronic crocs can be easily distinguished from biological ones) but penetrates to the very root of their being. Jurassic Park is therefore a kind of Disneyland raised to the nth power, in which the ontological warping perceived by Eco goes viral, permeating the flesh of the natural world itself. In this sense, Jurassic Park takes Eco’s concept of hyperreality in the same direction as Baudrillard, who interprets Disneyland not as a freakish deformity in the landscape of American reality but as a secret window into the soul of American reality itself. In Baudrillard’s formulation, “Disneyland exists in order to hide the fact that it is the ‘real’ country, all of ‘real’ America that is Disneyland. … Disneyland is presented as imaginary in order to make us believe that the rest is real, whereas all of Los Angeles and the America that surrounds it are no longer real, but belong to the hyperreal order and to the order of simulation” (SS 12). Crichton suggests a similar theory about the universalization of the hyperreal condition through John Arnold’s contention that “the entire world was increasingly described by the metaphor of the theme park” (138). It is Jurassic Park’s resident postmodern theorist, Ian Malcolm, however, who is most vocal in describing Jurassic Park in terms reminiscent of Baudrillardian analytics. According to Malcolm, “a zoo is not a model for this park. This park is attempting something far more ambitious than that. Something much more akin to making a space station on earth” (90). Malcolm uses the metaphor of a satellite to express the sense in which the environment being engineered in Jurassic Park is something outside the terrestrial bounds of the various categories—of history, gravity, understandability—that we associate with terrestrial existence. Baudrillard is fond of applying the same metaphor of an orbital habitat to describe the hyperreal lifeworld, as in his description of “The satellitization of the real, or what I call the ‘hyperrealism of simulation’: the elevation of the domestic universe to a spatial power, to a spatial metaphor, with the satellitization of the two-room-kitchen-and-bath put into orbit with the last lunar module” (EC 129). More fundamentally, Malcolm’s critique of Jurassic Park, like Baudrillard’s critique of postmodernity, focuses on the manner in which its architects have misconstrued the ontological status of their creation. “Jurassic Park is not the real world,” Malcolm insists. “It is intended to be a controlled world that only imitates the natural world. In that sense, it’s a true park, rather like a Japanese formal garden. Nature manipulated to be

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more natural than the real thing, if you will” (133). The aspiration of Jurassic Park to be more natural than nature echoes a common Baudrillardian trope according to which hyperreal entities strive to improve upon what they simulate. In a typical instance, Baudrillard characterizes hyperreality as “the truer than true, the more beautiful than beautiful, the realer than real … Imagine the true that has absorbed all the energy of the false: there you have simulation” (FS 27). It seems evident that Crichton is familiar with Baudrillard’s writing and drew on his analysis to suggest that the dinosaurs of Jurassic Park represent not just an irresponsible use of new technologies but a fundamental violation in the DNA of reality itself. In fact, Jurassic Park’s narrative juxtaposition of the common Baudrillardian themes of cloning and theme parks would be enough to signify a reference to the clown prince of postmodernism. Although the middlebrow genre of the techno-thriller that is Crichton’s milieu would seem to be far removed from the high theory of French intellectuals, Crichton’s unique gimmick as a writer has always been to provide his audience with not only a story but also an education in a subject that is slightly beyond their layman’s ken. In Jurassic Park, the narrative is interspersed with Malcolm’s lectures on the folly of “four hundred years of modern science” (285), an ongoing critique of enlightenment-era positivity that provides a crash course in poststructuralism, alongside the novel’s other lessons in genetic engineering and computer programming. Malcolm’s variety of pop-poststructuralism, moreover, is vindicated when his dire predictions about Jurassic Park come true, a confirmation whose effects are not isolated to the disaster at Isla Nublar, but which redound upon the world inhabited by the consumer of bestselling techno-thrillers. In an introduction to the novel that contextualizes the fictional narrative of Jurassic Park among historical facts about the development of commercial genetic technology enterprises, Crichton quotes an uncited “observer” who authoritatively informs us that “Biotechnology is going to transform every aspect of human life: our medical care, our food, our health, our entertainment, our very bodies. Nothing will ever be the same again. It’s literally going to change the face of the planet” (ix). The intermixing of genetic science and capitalist enterprise “has proceeded so rapidly … that its dimensions and implications are hardly understood at all” (ix). The monsters being bred on Isla Nublar, that is, are destined to escape the narrative space of science-fiction and proliferate unpredictably among us. The inevitability of the dinosaurs escaping the island—of the mutation in the genome of reality turning cancerous and metastasizing into the ecology of the mainland— reflects the phenomenon Baudrillard described as “the virulence of the code” (SS 101). “Soft technologies”—including not only cloning, but also marketing, media, and the more subtle mechanisms of capitalist enterprise—escape the laboratory and intermix with the natural world, they escape the spaces of fiction and hybridize reality, and they escape the category of otherness and reconstitute subjectivity itself. Like Baudrillard, Crichton identifies cloning as one of many technologies of virtualization responsible for splicing reality and artifice into a new ontological synthesis, a hyperreality, and Jurassic Park’s dinosaurs are really hypersaurs, entrancing their human prey with a mixture of fascination and terror in the awesome power of the latest technologies of mimesis.

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Spielberg’s film adaptation of Crichton’s novel dispenses with the introductory warnings about the imminent threat posed by biotechnology to the substance of the living world. It also eliminates the dialogue about the hyperreal status of Jurassic Park’s dinosaurs, replacing the novel’s insistence on the unnaturalness of the dinosaurs with a fervent conviction in their authenticity. When the paleontologist Grant, observing a flock of galloping dinosaurs, breathlessly pronounces, “They do move in herds,” the audience of the movie receives expert confirmation that these dinos are the real deal, appearing and behaving just like real dinos do. This explicit contrast to the skepticism expressed by the novel’s Grant is emblematic of a wider tendency in Spielberg’s movie to treat its audience to the same spectacle promised by Hammond’s theme park: Real Live Dinosaurs. Spielberg’s movie promises to do with computer animation what John Hammond’s dinosaur park had tried to do with genetic technologies in such a way that, rather than adapting Crichton’s novel, Spielberg’s movie acts as a reconstruction of Hammond’s theme park. The only difference is that, rather than constructing his monsters out of genetic code, Spielberg uses computer code, enacting the same conflation of cybernetic technologies that Baudrillard identified when he wrote of “the new operational configuration” that “Digitality is its metaphysical principle … and DNA its prophet” (Si 103). Whereas Crichton’s novel merely describes the revolutionary potential of genetic technologies to reshape the world, Spielberg’s movie actually enacts the reshaping of the world through its own unleashing of its groundbreaking computergenerated imagery. In Tom Shone’s estimation, “Jurassic Park heralded a revolution in movies as profound as the coming of sound in 1927,” and George Lucas expressed his impression in terms reminiscent of Ian Malcolm: “A major gap had been crossed, and things were never going to be the same” (both quotes are from Huls). In the same way that genetic technologies threaten to implode the coordinates of art and nature, Jonathan Crary has described the manner in which “[t]he formalization and diffusion of computer-generated imagery heralds the ubiquitous implantation of fabricated visual ‘spaces’ radically different from the mimetic capacities of film, photography, and television” (1). CGI manipulates the natural pattern of the reproduction of images in the same way that genetic engineering manipulates the reproduction of chromosomes, and in both cases, the mutation, once introduced into the world, spreads virally, so that, once the germ has been released, you will never know if the corn you are eating is GMO or whether the pictures you see are CGI. Spielberg’s Jurassic Park is a breeding ground for hypersauroid entities, one of many grounds zero in the hyperrealization of late twentieth-century consciousness. The film is not a conventional, literal adaptation, but a kind of experiential immersion into the book’s theme of runaway simulation. The plot of the novel is essentially preserved, along with the apocalyptic trajectory, but whereas Crichton’s dinosaurs embodied a hubristic folly that should never have been wrought, Spielberg’s dinosaurs are titillating, wondrous, educational, and indulgently spectacular. The critical perspective in the movie is sidelined in favor of a mood of rapt awe, resulting in a filmic experience that actually captures an aspect of the hyperreal experience that cannot be rendered through the media of theory or critique: the sense of ecstatic absorption in the hyperreal lifeworld, the unreflective immediacy of hyperreal vertigo. Whereas Crichton’s novel encouraged a skeptical attitude toward

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hyperreal technologies, Spielberg’s film endorses its audience’s passivity before its onslaught of hyperreal imagery. In this sense Jurassic Park the film provides a stark example of Baudrillard’s contention that “Film no longer allows you to question. It questions you, and directly” (Si 119). If the conventional, modernist film served as a window opening out into fictional space, the postmodern blockbuster, a genre Spielberg single-handedly invented in 1975, acts as a rabbit hole into fictional space. Several aspects typical of a Steven Spielberg blockbuster work together to achieve this effect, most notably, the simplified structure of narrative desire, the extradiegetic marketing, and the mobility of Spielberg’s camera. In Jurassic Park, each of these dials are cranked to eleven in a way that makes Jurassic Park like a Spielberg movie squared, like an immersion in an immersion, as if there were something about the monsters at the center of Crichton’s narrative that caused Spielberg to realize that his technique had discovered its perfect subject. It is also well known that producers at Universal Pictures would only agree to finance Schindler’s List (1993) under the condition that Spielberg shoot Jurassic Park for them first, hedging their gamble on a black-and-white Holocaust film with the box office bonanza assured by a Spielberg dinosaur movie. Spielberg seems to have said to himself, They want a Spielberg movie? I will give them one that out-Spielbergs Spielberg! In one of the first scenes in the film version of Jurassic Park, the lawyer Gennaro visits an eccentric Latino amber miner. This scene is not in the book and has no relevance to the plot; it is included in the film solely for the purpose of reminding us that we are watching a Spielberg movie, as if the scene were a trailer for the movie embedded within the movie. The ecstatic treasure-hunter holds his find up to the light and delivers cryptic dialogue as choral voices swell on the soundtrack with religious signification. In addition to alluding specifically to Spielberg’s Indiana Jones films, the scene crystalizes a broader tendency in Spielberg’s blockbuster films to structure their narratives around a glowing object of desire and wonder, something we want desperately to see. Jaws (1975), Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977), Raiders of the Lost Ark, and E.T. are all structured around a sublime, typically glowing object of transcendent desire. The most typical Spielberg image is the lingering reaction shot, in which a character gapes in awe at a glowing spectacle, suturing the audience into the narrative by setting up our expectations for the imminent reverse-shot. In this arrangement, the glowing object of desire is essentially the movie screen itself, and the film director holds the keys to all our aspirations like glittery objects that Spielberg dangles in front of our wide staring eyes. In Jurassic Park, rather than withholding the sublime object from view until the end of the movie as he famously did in Jaws, Spielberg produces the dinos, to Roger Ebert’s chagrin, “early and often.” This is because, in Jurassic Park, numinous entities have run rampant, escaping the confines of narrative economy and proliferating throughout the entire story. The result is that Jurassic Park feels more like a zoo than a movie. Rather than building up to a definitive climax in the typical Spielberg mode, the movie consists of a succession of Spielbergian encounters—terrifying and magical by turns—in a manner reminiscent of a real excursion through Jurassic Park. The impression that we have actually entered the fictional park is amplified by the fact that the logo for the park—the profile silhouette of a T-Rex skeleton—is also

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the logo for the movie. The result is that, with the exception of Mel Brooks’s parody of blockbuster cinema, Spaceballs, there has never been a movie that included such extensive product-placement for itself. Jaws had revolutionized the marketing of motion pictures by turning the release of a film into a multimedia cultural event, and in Jurassic Park, this trajectory from the fictional space of film to the cultural space of advertising becomes bidirectional, making the ad-scape of the film coextensive with the ad-scape of the filmgoer. When Hammond introduces his grandchildren into the story as “our target audience,” we understand that he is referring to the marketing principles of both his zoo and Spielberg’s movie. When he informs the park’s visitors and the movie’s audience that “The voice you’re now hearing is Richard Kiley. We spared no expense,” his boast applies diegetically and extradiegetically; it really is Richard Kiley. And when he introduces his park’s fictional and nonfictional visitors to the dinosaurs for the first time, his stately exclamation, “Welcome to Jurassic Park,” is clearly written for the trailers, suggesting that the entire movie is a kind of advertisement for itself. This implosion of movie-marketing into the movie itself conflates advertising and consumption into one giddy swirl of dual participation in both fictional and corporate structures. Spielberg’s numinous dinosaurs come to stand for the reality-warping effect attendant upon the postmodern collusion of the industries of production and the industries of illusion, and we are constantly reminded that our immersion into the fictional park rendered vividly real is simultaneously an immersion into a corporate economy rendered vividly fictional. The most immersive aspect of Spielberg’s blockbuster formula, however, is the three-dimensional mobility of the camera, which makes the experience of watching a Spielberg movie feel more akin to being behind the windshield of a flying car (the vehicle into hyperreality depicted in the Spielberg-produced Back to the Future) than to looking at a moving picture hanging on a wall. Spielberg has demonstrated that the same thing can be said of the American filmgoer that is said of the T-Rex: “Its vision is based on movement.” Spielberg pioneered the concept of the movie as a roller coaster by opening up dramatic space to the eye of a restlessly roving camera, and this concept has become literalized in the adaptation of Jurassic Park into theme park rides such as the Jurassic Park River Adventure at Universal Studios in Orlando. Whereas Crichton implied that Jurassic Park was like a Disney theme park, Spielberg’s Jurassic Park actually is a cloned Disney theme park. Turning Spielberg’s movie into a physical roller coaster, however, is redundant, since it already exists in the form of an amusement park ride. Whenever possible, characters in Jurassic Park occupy moving vehicles, or are running from or toward something, and if the character does not move, the camera will. When the helicopter makes its initial approach to the island, the helicopter bounces, the camera bounces, and Hammond emits a boyish “Yoo-hoo,” another trailer moment, inviting us to enjoy the physical thrills of submitting ourselves bodily to the g-forces of narrative. The 2012 3D re-release of Jurassic Park constitutes another superfluous attempt to augment the immersive experience that the movie is able to achieve sufficiently on its own merits, because Spielberg’s films and this film in particular are already fully three-dimensional and already radically immersive.

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The movie-as-roller-coaster analogy is represented in the film itself in a scene devised by Spielberg to convey the technical information about genetic engineering. Rather than having the characters talk to one another as they do in Crichton’s novel, Spielberg communicates the ABCs of DNA in the form of a cartoon movie. The animated dinosaurs in the movie-within-a-movie manage to captivate the worldfamous scientists in attendance; its kindergarten-level lesson in genetics silences their quibbles about CpG methylation and viable oocytes with its colorful whimsy, until all three scientists are staring at the cartoon dinos with the same slack-jawed Spielbergian wonder with which they behold the “real” computer-animated dinosaurs. Then suddenly, restraint bars lock into place and the movie theater is converted into a roller coaster. The educational cartoon had been intercut with footage of the real Jurassic Park laboratories, and when the screening room slides away from the movie screen, it travels in front of a window behind which can be seen the same laboratory, the real thing this time, as Spielberg’s roller-coaster movie theater has transported us from representation to reality, from mimesis to instantiation. The scientists then pursue the immersive momentum of the sequence of events, standing up from their seats to walk toward the window/movie screen and to pass directly through it and into the moviespace on the other side. In crossing this ontological divide, they imitate the journey of Danny Madigan, the child protagonist of The Last Action Hero who magically passes into the world of his favorite movie franchise. This more conventional depiction of the hyperreal encounter was released a week before Jurassic Park, but Spielberg’s movie crushed the Schwarzenegger vehicle at the box office, arguably because Jurassic Park invites audiences to actually experience the situation that The Last Action Hero merely dramatizes: the immersive plummet into the hyperreal register of being. One of the most significant changes from Crichton’s book to Spielberg’s movie is the representation of Hammond’s character. In both cases, he possesses a gift for affable banter, an impatience with technical details, and a childish delight in turning ideas into reality. Crichton’s novel gradually reveals Hammond, however, to be a criminally negligent misanthrope who is prone to saying things like, “From a business standpoint, … helping mankind [is] a very risky business. Personally, I would never help mankind” (200). Although he plays the role of loving grandfather, he expresses his true sentiments in an interior monologue toward the end of the book: “Those damned kids! He should never have brought those kids. They had been nothing but trouble from the beginning. Nobody wanted them around. Hammond had only brought them because he thought it would stop Gennaro from destroying the resort” (383). In Crichton’s version, Hammond is nibbled to death by his own procompsognathids, suffering a gruesome but richly deserved fate. In the movie however, Hammond’s character shows no evidence of being anything other than a grandfatherly Walt Disney type whose affection for his grandchildren is perfectly sincere. Richard Attenborough plays the role with a cartoonish Scrooge McDuck accent that seems as though it is selfconsciously affected by the character as a marketing gimmick, along with his white suits and his habit of speaking in slogans. But, unlike in Crichton’s novel, there is no sinister substratum supporting Spielberg’s Hammond’s persona: it is all an illusion all the way down.

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This effect is neatly depicted when Hammond introduces the DNA movie in the roller-coaster theater. In his introduction, Hammond presents himself as not simply the corporate figurehead of InGen Technologies, but as one of the attractions of Jurassic Park. Once the park opens, Hammond’s full-time job will apparently be to greet visitors at the beginning of the ride and perform a brief dialogue with a screen version of himself. As Hammond ushers his audience into the theater, the on-screen Hammond walks toward the camera, backgrounded by an enormous Jurassic Park logo. “Here he comes,” Hammond says, but then amends himself—“Here I come”—in a manner that expresses his own confusion regarding his status vis-à-vis a two-dimensional image of himself. But then it is on-screen Hammond who is confused. “How did I get here?” he asks, meaning, presumably, How did I become a two-dimensional image? In response, Hammond requests a drop of on-screen Hammond’s blood, upon which the two Hammonds reach out toward each other and, through the magic of cinema, share genetic information. Immediately, the on-screen Hammond begins to multiply until the frame is crowded with Hammonds. This short sequence manages to suggest a number of implications regarding the ontological status of Hammond’s character as well as of the Jurassic Park project as a whole. In terms of his character, the scene identifies Hammond himself as the original clone of Jurassic Park, the original font of simulation from which all the other simulacra emanate. The equivalence between the DNA in the blood of movie-Hammond and in the blood of real Hammond twists the two sides of the movie screen into each other, suggesting that reality and fiction both share the same DNA in the new world that Hammond has invented. Simultaneously, when, in response to on-screen Hammond’s question about how he managed to appear in a movie image, Hammond replies with an explanation about cloning, cinematic and genetic technologies are conflated in a way that indicates the essential similarity between Hammond’s Jurassic Park and Spielberg’s. Clearly, Spielberg’s makeover of Hammond from a villain to a simulated image person is motivated by the sympathy Spielberg feels for Hammond’s project and his identification of himself with this character. Crichton the novelist identifies with Malcolm, the hipster-geek who is always right and whose deep understanding of the

Figure 10.1  Hammond reproduced through the magic of cinema.

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physics of reality provides the structural frame for the book’s narrative. The chapters of the book are organized around Malcolm’s prophetic axioms, but Spielberg replaces Malcolm’s centrality with the presence of his own narrative markers, punctuating the narrative with “quotations” from his own work as a famous director. Spielberg’s decision to cast a man known primarily for his work as a director in the role of Hammond suggests a self-referential acknowledgment of his own sense of affiliation with the character, and throughout the film, Hammond is shown performing various moviedirectorial roles, such as hosting the film screening and watching the video-feed from the tour. The basic storyline of Jurassic Park goes unchanged—Hammond’s dinosaurs run amuck and kill people—but, in Spielberg’s version, the architect of the disaster is allowed to remain in a state of innocence, protected by the sheer two-dimensionality of his character. Hammond’s personality is too insubstantial to support any emotion as weighty as guilt, and he is represented simply as an absent-minded dreamer rather than as an amoral capitalist. Instead of getting eaten by dinosaurs, Spielberg’s Hammond receives a motherly talking-to from Ellie, the movie’s resident woman. Over comfort food, he explains to her that his only sin is an irrepressible desire to make children happy, ever since his early days as a flea-circus ringmaster. Like the book’s Hammond, he is never quite repentant, but the movie gives him a chance to defend himself in terms that the audience of Spielberg’s Jurassic Park are bound to look leniently on: “I wanted to show them something that wasn’t an illusion. Something that was real. Something they could see and touch. An aim not devoid of merit.” Hammond defends the American dreaming of men like Walt Disney, Steven Spielberg, and himself who specialize in mounting spectacles that pull illusions into the space of reality. Ellie does not contradict him on this point, she merely reminds him to be mindful of the victims of his experiment with reality, a suggestion that Hammond can easily endorse without rejecting the fundamental merit of his aims. Ellie’s weak, roundabout chastisement of Hammond culminates in an awkward, self-defeating approbation: “Alan and Lex and Tim … John, they’re out there where people are dying. So … (takes a spoonful of ice cream) it’s good.” Ellie’s concern for the deadly consequences of Hammond’s hubris is easily mollified by the creamy goodness of his gourmet ice cream, a sign that Hammond cannot really be that bad after all. The harm caused by the dinosaurs, after all, turns out to be minimal. Ellie’s right that people are dying, but of the four deaths in Jurassic Park, the lawyer’s death is played for laughs, Nedry had it coming, the black guy’s death was a foregone conclusion as a simple result of the dictates of genre, and the hunter dies in his element. Everyone else gets away with superficial injuries and big smiles on their faces, rejuvenated and uplifted by their island adventure. Spielberg’s ending contrasts sharply with the ending of Crichton’s book, which is shockingly apocalyptic. In Crichton’s ending, the island is brutally carpet-bombed, baby-eating dinosaurs have “migrated” to the mainland, and, when a Costa Rican military officer asks Grant who is in charge, Grant can only reply, “Nobody” (397) and gaze morosely out the helicopter window at the explosions consuming the island and its hyperreal life-forms. The final impression is that the mutation that Hammond and his scientists have engineered into the genome of reality has self-replicated uncontrollably, infecting the entire world with a new relationship

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to nature as the artificial dinosaurs disrupt and reconfigure the terrestrial ecology. Spielberg’s film annuls this gloomy denouement. ILM’s majestic CGI dinos are not blown up, but preserved in their state of hyperreal nature. The last dinosaur we see is T-Rex, triumphant in his new cloned form, his towering image comically captioned with the slogan “When dinosaurs ruled the earth.” Indeed, while Crichton’s novel The Lost World depicts the mysterious “Site B” as an InGen dinosaur island that had been simply forgotten about, in Spielberg’s adaptation of the sequel (1997), Site B is a location to which Hammond had the Jurassic Park dinosaurs removed and which he has since kept as a nature preserve. The plot of Spielberg’s version of The Lost World revolves around protecting the “natural habitat” of the genetically engineered dinosaurs, as if they were snow leopards or spotted owls. Rather than perverting nature in a disastrous way, Hammond has simply created more nature, and The Lost World depicts him as a crusader for the ecological integrity of the artificial nature he has concocted. Spielberg’s dinos stay on the island(s) where they are put rather than proliferating uncontrollably out into the world, indicating that, in explicit contradiction to the spirit of Crichton’s novel, someone is in charge. Spielberg is in charge, timing the suspense and action as precisely as engineers design roller coasters. T-Rex is in charge. While the novel’s Grant dispatches the velociraptors with a clever use of poison eggs, the movie relies on a climactic rescue by the real hero of the movie, the main attraction, who picks off those nasty raptors in a much more direct and visually engaging manner than the paleontologist ever could. Finally, Spielberg suggests, a strange kind of techno-evolution is in charge. In the final scene of the movie, as the survivors fly away from Isla Nublar in a helicopter, Grant looks out the window to see a pelican flying over the water. We are reminded of his earlier statement to Tim and Lex about how they will “never look at a bird the same way again” now that they have come to recognize the close evolutionary relationship between birds and dinosaurs. This final lesson is not for Tim and Lex, however, but for the audience. It is we who have had our perception reoriented; we now perceive the natural animal as a kind of descendent of Spielberg’s CGI monsters. Grant’s lesson in paleontology is Spielberg’s lesson in the neo-ontology of hyperreality, namely, that cinematic images can acquire a perceptual primordiality in relation to the natural world and to lived experience. The world we see outside, Spielberg’s final image implies, is a reflection of the cultural representations of nature that we have internalized. Our ideas about nature and even our conceptualization of “nature” as a category of experience set apart from “civilization” are defined in large part by semantic networks of texts and images. At the same time that the image of the pelican comments on the power of movies to shape our perception, it proposes a very specific attitude regarding nature. Whereas Crichton’s overriding theme in his novel is that nature is violent, unpredictable, and inherently inconceivable, Spielberg leaves us with the precisely opposite sense: the reassurance that, although dinosaurs were scary, nature turned them into picturesque and harmless birds. John Williams’s music swells, reinforcing the inspirational message that nature, left to its own devices, will filter monstrosity out of the biosphere through the civilized refinement of evolution for the benefit of mankind. In this formulation, evolution takes on its distinctly American

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meaning of anthropocentric progress: animals get better (less threatening) as time goes along, in a way that parallels advances in human culture and technology. When the shot changes from the image of the pelican to the image of the helicopter, the parallelism between the two flying entities suggests another evolutionary relationship, one between the natural flight of birds and the technologically accomplished flight of human beings. If the chthonian nature red in tooth and claw represented by the dinosaurs is vanquished by the peace and beauty of birds, the birds themselves are superseded by the technological perfection of a helicopter. All things work together toward a telos of human transcendence. The technological transcendence indicated in the final shot of Spielberg’s film by the evolution of pelican into helicopter puts an exclamation mark on the ideological undercurrent of the film as a whole. Baudrillard had famously posed the question, “Can we fight DNA?” (SED 4). The question is phrased ambiguously so as to be capable of absorbing many different meanings, but of foremost importance to Baudrillard is the question of whether or not it is possible for postmodern human beings to resist the digitization of reality in all its forms. Is there any way of putting the brakes on hyperreality, or to set up an oppositional counterforce capable of standing against the tide of progressive ontological dislocation? In Crichton’s novel, the answer is obviously No. The recombinant hypersaurs, the monstrous embodiment of computational, genetic, and capitalist codes, take on a life of their own and undermine all the efforts of the human beings to contain their ramifications. In Spielberg’s movie, however, not only does the happy ending affirm that the aftereffects of reality-manipulation are manageable but also does the shift in emphasis from the DNA technologies in Crichton’s book to the CGI technologies in Spielberg’s movie reorganize the terms of the relationship between humans and hypersaurs. Hammond was a villain because he engineered physical creatures out of scraps of real DNA. His downfall was his attempt to domesticate chaotic nature, resulting in a violent conflict between his own program and that of the animals. Spielberg, however, can enact the part of Hammond without fear of guilt or disaster because he has taken biology out of the equation altogether. As a result, the story of the failure of Hammond’s Jurassic Park is the story of the success of Spielberg’s Jurassic Park. As viewers of Spielberg’s Jurassic Park, we are privy to all of the wonder and thrill of a real trip to Jurassic Park without any of the bioethical problems or physical dangers that might have troubled visitors to Hammond’s Costa Rican island. Spielberg redeems technology by making his Jurassic Park more simulacral than Hammond’s, liberating the code from the chromosome and refashioning it as an ecstasy of electric pulses, a much more pliable stucco than a glitchy and willful filament of nucleotides. Consequently, Spielberg does not place us in an adversarial position vis-àvis the monsters of hyperreality; although the characters fight to escape the dinosaurs, Spielberg’s movie does not propose that these monsters of runaway hyperreality need to be destroyed, that “DNA” needs to be fought. Rather, Spielberg nurtures the development of this new alien life-form, purging them of blood and death through a fantasy of transcending biology altogether. In doing so, Spielberg’s dinosaurs suggest a further stage of hyperreality that Baudrillard considered in his later career, “Virtual Reality, the highest stage of simulation” (LP 44) in which “there is neither distance

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nor a critical or aesthetic gaze: there is total immersion” (LP 77). Rather than fighting DNA, Spielberg’s film constitutes a tacit collusion with the technologies of recombinant reality. As we gasp at the reality of the fictional monsters, we simultaneously intuit the hallucinatory sense that “real” perceptual experience is easily colonized by illusory spectacles. The space between spectacle and spectator collapses and, with it, the sense of any subjective position outside the virtual hyperscape. As fully immersed participants in Spielberg’s Virtual world, it is we the parkgoers rather than the dinosaurs who are the mutational progeny of Jurassic Park. Spielberg suggests as much in a very brief image that the camera sweeps past as it surveys the wreckage of Nedry’s sloppy workstation. Nedry has taped a picture of J. Robert Oppenheimer to the frame of his computer, and added a cartoon thought bubble containing a drawing of a mushroom cloud; a Post-it note caption reads, “The Beginning of Baby Boom.” Nedry’s détournement of Oppenheimer’s image conflates the invention of the atom bomb with the explosion of the postwar American population, suggesting that all boomers are genetic mutants whose human DNA has been fundamentally scrambled by the Trinity blast. Donna Haraway described a similar phenomenon in “A Cyborg Manifesto” when she reflected, “I have a body and mind as much constructed by the post-Second World War arms race and cold war as by the women’s movements” (173). Haraway is referring specifically to the post-Sputnik science education initiatives in public schools, but in the context of her argument about cyborg subjectivity, her statement takes on a wider, ontological significance. As inhabitants of the womb of postmodern society, we are the inheritors of the monstrous genome. The enormous success of Spielberg’s movie may be partly attributable to the sense in which it dispenses with Crichton’s naive warning against hyperreal monstrosity and performs a much more poignant operation of ferrying his audience into the womb of the Virtual. At the same time that Spielberg’s movie gives birth to thousands of future films in which digital effects will increasingly replace photographic images of physical objects, it takes us on a roller-coaster ride through the endless birth canal of our own postnatural becoming.1

A version of this chapter was originally published in Birthing the Monsters of Tomorrow: Unnatural Reproductions (Schillace and Wood).

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Brad versus Tyler in Fight Club In both the book and the film adaptation of Fight Club, Tyler Durden sums up Gen-X angst by explaining that “the middle children of history” have been “raised by television to believe that someday we’ll be millionaires and movie stars [“movie gods” in the film] … but we won’t, and we’re just learning this fact” (157). Tyler offers this insight as a diagnosis for the wellspring of resentment and disillusionment that motivates the acts of violence perpetrated in Fight Club and its spinoff, Project Mayhem. According to Tyler’s sociological formulation, the rage that fuels Fight Club is a result of a clash between the transcendental expectations of a media-saturated childhood—that every American child is destined for the transfiguration of mass-media celebritydom—and the crushing reality of an anonymous adulthood. This dialectic of an illusory unreality coming into conflict with a brutal baseline reality informs the entire structure of the Fight Club narrative. It underscores the oppositionalism between the Narrator (real) and Tyler (illusory), as well as that between the subversive community of Fight Club (real) and the inauthenticity of surrounding culture (illusory) and that between the reality of primal violence and the illusory lifestyle of “versatile solutions for modern living.” The consistency of this dynamic inspires Slavoj Žižek’s suggestion that the thesis of Fight Club is that “liberation hurts” (Rasmussen) and underscores the standard reading of Fight Club as a Nietzschean celebration of authentic Dionysian energies pitted against the self-deception of rationalism and order. In the film version, however, Tyler’s diagnosis of fin-de-millenial malaise is complicated by the fact that Tyler’s words are coming out of the mouth of Brad Pitt, an actor who emerged from obscurity to become a millionaire and movie star, the epitome of the fulfillment of television’s allegedly false promise. The mixed message embedded in this contrast between the indictment of the American dream expressed by Tyler and the achievement of the American dream personified by Brad is an example of a tension that runs throughout the film itself, which articulates a radically anticorporate jeremiad in the guise of a big-budget, massmarketed corporate product. The director and writers of Fight Club demonstrate a keen self-awareness concerning the contradictory nature of their undertaking, and the casting of Brad Pitt in the role of the narrator’s schizophrenic alter ego is a semantic gesture alluding to the structural schizophrenia in the corporate/anticorporate ethos of the movie itself. Palahniuk’s novel does not suffer from this particular anguish. As an unpublished writer working as a diesel mechanic in the mid-’90s, Palahniuk had no reason to

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grapple with the complication that his screed against corporate conformity would be compromised through any confederation with corporate sponsors. The novel Fight Club shares the utopian politics of the neo-Situationist collective, the Cacophony Society, with which Palahniuk was affiliated while he was writing the book. Groups like the Cacophony Society, which thrived in Palahniuk’s Portland, the Adbusters Media Foundation, headquartered in Vancouver, and the more politically conscious grunge bands such as Pearl Jam and Soundgarden would eventually succeed in directing popular disenchantment into political activity, culminating in the Direct Action Network’s coordinated protest against the 1999 WTO Ministerial Conference in Seattle. Within the context of the political climate of the Pacific Nothwest in the 1990s, Fight Club can be read as an effort to mobilize the predominantly apolitical twenty-something anomie immortalized in Vancouver-based writer Douglas Coupland’s Generation X and the music of the Seattle-based rock band, Nirvana. The fisticuffs of Fight Club and the terroristic acts of Project Mayhem may seem senseless, but, in Palahniuk’s novel, they are presided over by a Tyler Durden who is introduced as a wise Buddha figure. The novel introduces Tyler’s character in a surreal scene on a nude beach. The Narrator observes Tyler gathering logs from the beach and arranging them into a structure that the Narrator describes, but cannot comprehend. The Narrator’s first interaction with Tyler is to ask him the meaning of this apparently random configuration of debris. Tyler explains that he has constructed a sundial that, for one minute of the day, casts a shadow that is shaped exactly like a hand. “The giant shadow hand was perfect for one minute, and for one perfect minute Tyler had sat in the palm of a perfection he had created for himself ” (23). This Tyler is a cross-legged– sitting guru whose apparent madness is guided by a method of pursuing a utopian aspiration. Similarly, Tyler also shapes the apparent aimlessness of his pugilistic and terroristic projects toward a vision of perfection. In a line that does not appear in the movie, the Narrator explains that Tyler’s goal in organizing Project Mayhem “was to teach each man in the project that he had the power to control history. We, each of us, can take control of the world” (113). The deletion of the nude beach scene from the movie is consistent with a number of other alterations in the narrative that serve the purpose of de-utopianizing Palahniuk’s novel. The other most significant change in the story is the ending. While Palahniuk was writing Fight Club, he did volunteer work escorting terminally ill patients to support groups, and this experience influenced his depiction of the support groups that the Narrator attends as therapy for his own spiritual emptiness in the beginning of the novel. The members of these support groups play a critical role in the climax of the novel, risking their own lives to enter a building rigged with explosives to dissuade the Narrator from blowing himself up and/or shooting himself. Marla’s statement that she and the support group members understand the danger they are putting themselves in for the Narrator’s sake constitutes “a total epiphany moment” (195) for the Narrator and acts as the emotional turning point that alleviates his psychic conflict, causing him to resolve to shoot Tyler instead of himself. In the movie, however, the support group patients exist primarily as objects of pity and derision, disappearing from the story altogether once Fight Club has been established. The movie’s omission of

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this redemptive turn is amplified by other alterations to the ending. Whereas in the book, the Narrator seems to have subconsciously sabotaged Tyler’s plan to bomb an office building, a sign of a lingering similitude of self-control, the movie ends with the successful accomplishment of the demolitions. The final chapter of the book finds the Narrator in a hospital that he imagines to be heaven, and ends with the Narrator’s resolve to continue resisting the forces of psychic fragmentation that Tyler had come to represent. The movie omits this epilogue, concluding with the spectacle of Tyler’s exploding skyscrapers accompanied by the piercing strains of “Where is My Mind?”, The Pixies’s hymn to psychic fragmentation. The adaptation of a transgressive novel into a commercial film is always attended by the anxiety that the movie will appear to be a watered-down, sanitized, or even censored forgery of the original text. This risk must have seemed particularly acute for the adaptors of Fight Club, which levels such a violent critique not only at massproduced corporate products but also, more specifically, at the propagandistic effects of mass-media. It was arguably in an effort to preempt such a criticism of the movie that, rather than softening the message of Fight Club, the film adaptation pushes the extreme anarchism of the book into a bottomless nihilism, extending the book’s cynicism to a terminal degree. Project Mayhem engages in acts of what the Situationists called détournement and what Adbusters calls “meme warfare.” “Liberating” billboards, posting “subvertisements,” and disrupting the daily patterns of consumer behavior are incursions intended to take people “outside market-structured consciousness long enough to get a taste of real living” (Lasn 106). It would be easy to imagine either Palahniuk’s or Fincher’s Tyler saying the same thing. Tyler constantly appeals to the authenticity of visceral experiences. The acts of violence he oversees are experiments in “real living.” In both the book and the movie, the Narrator states that “You aren’t alive anywhere like you’re alive in fight club” (42). Even though the Narrator says that Fight Club turns the volume down on “the real world” (40), it is understood that the reason the volume of “the real world” is so adjustable is that the public world of corporate employment was only a recording to begin with. This ironic reversal emphasizes the duality implied in both the novel and screenplay between the unreal world of daytime capitalist identity and the brutal real world of subterranean combat. The nihilistic turn in the film itself, however, is to nullify this dialectic by implying that Tyler Durden, selfproclaimed docent of the real world, is himself a trickster with a distinctly cinematic ontology. The casting of Brad Pitt in the role of Tyler is the quintessential gesture through which the movie announces its intention to one-up the transgressive mood of its source novel. Whereas Guy DeBord denounced the “Society of Spectacle,” Fincher’s Fight Club nihilistically suggests that the denunciation of the spectacular society itself is merely an extension of the spectacle. In this development, Fincher’s Fight Club follows the trajectory described by Baudrillard, who has remarked on his own Situationist roots. Baudrillard’s writings share the Situationists’ formulations of the influence of mass-media and the coded nature of the spectacular environment. Steven Best explains, however, that “Baudrillard soon rejected the Situationist analysis as itself bound to an obsolete modernist framework based on notions like history, reality, and interpretation, and he jumped

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into a postmodern orbit that declared the death of all modern values and referents under conditions of simulation, implosion, and hyperreality” (42). In the same gesture, Baudrillard rejected the Marxian utopianism that undergirds the Situationist critique, concluding that “the universe is not dialectical: it moves toward the extremes and not towards equilibrium; it is devoted to radical antagonism, and not to reconciliation or synthesis” (SW 185). In Baudrillardian terms, the Situationist concern that “actual reality has been eroded by the overdeveloped commodity economy” (DeBord 24) is stunted at the second phase of the image, that in which “the image masks and denatures a profound reality” (SS 6). Palahniuk’s novel carries forward its Situationist inheritance, but also invests it with an appetite for destruction that reverses the ’60s-era idealism characteristic of that inheritance. Fight Club the novel is a vast statement of negation. Not only do Tyler and the Narrator negate the values of capitalist society but also they negate the values of life itself, embracing pain, death, and despair as strategies for “hitting bottom.” Ultimately, the Narrator even negates the negationism itself represented by Tyler, shooting himself in the head in an act of negativity gone hyperbolic. All of the energy of this runaway negationism is fueled by an obsession with absence: absent fathers, absent authenticity, and absent self-understanding propel the dark momentum of Fight Club. This preoccupation with absence suggests Baudrillard’s description of the second phase of the image: “the image masks the absence of a profound reality.” In the book, however, this mood of negationism does not amount to nihilism; the absurd terrorist acts of Project Mayhem, like the self-destructive compulsion of the main character(s), are a desperate attempt to resurrect the profound reality that is so conspicuously absent in the world of Palahniuk’s novel. “It’s Project Mayhem,” the Narrator explains, “that’s going to save the world. A cultural ice age. A prematurely induced dark age. Project Mayhem will force humanity to go dormant or into remission long enough for the Earth to recover” (116). The Narrator expresses a strategy of leaping into the black hole of absence and negation as a way of recovering an original Eden of profound reality. Significantly, this speech does not appear in the movie, which never articulates any political aspiration as lofty as saving the world, even ironically. Rather than articulating a conventional critique of consumer culture, Fight Club the movie adopts the fatal strategy of pursuing the logic of Baudrillard’s fourth phase of the image in which “it has no relation to any reality whatever. It is its own pure simulacrum” (SS 1). This development can be discerned in the manner in which the movie represents Tyler’s utopia. Scraps of Tyler’s utopian vision, which the book’s Tyler proposes both before and after the Narrator’s statement about saving the world, are edited together into a sequence in which the movie’s Tyler imagines a world in which “You’ll hunt elk through the damp canyon forests around the ruins of Rockefeller Center. You’ll climb the wristthick kudzu vines that wrap the Sears Tower, and you’ll see tiny figures pounding corn and laying strips of venison to dry in the abandoned carpool lane of some abandoned superhighway.” Detached from the objective of allowing the Earth an opportunity to recover, the movie Tyler’s monologue places the emphasis on the destroyed cities rather than on the resuscitated ecosystem. In his analysis of this scene of the film, Philip E. Wegner relates Tyler’s “primitivist nostalgia” (125) to similar sentiments in

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other dystopian fictions, but Wegner’s observation that the “visual presentation [of this scene] recalls the interview with a T. S. Eliot-quoting Colonel Kurtz in Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now [(1979)]” (125) suggests more compellingly that Tyler’s vision has more in common with the psychopathocracy of Brando’s Kurtz than it does with the Golden Country of Orwell’s Winston Smith. The allusion to Coppola’s film in this sequence of Fight Club underscores the implication that Tyler’s utopian vision is a narcissistic projection rather than a strategy of ecological regeneration. At the same time, this intertextual nod refers us to Baudrillard’s observation about Apocalypse Now that, rather than articulating a critique of the Vietnam War, the movie itself constituted “an extension of the war by other means. … The war became film, the film becomes war, the two are joined by their common hemorrhage into technology” (SS 59). Both Coppola and Fincher’s films face the dilemma that any conventional kind of critique their films attempt to level at imperialist or consumerist ideologies will itself be absorbed into those ideologies. But Baudrillard goes on to conclude that Apocalypse Now actually achieves a successful critique of contemporary geopolitics because, in its very hyperreality, the film “retrospectively illuminates what was already crazy about this war, irrational in political terms.” The hyperreality of the film exemplifies the hyperreality of a wider cultural situation characterized by “a lack of distinction that is no longer either an ideological or a moral one, one of good and evil, but one of the reversibility of both destruction and production, of the imminence of a thing in its very revolution” (60). The strategy of blending a celebration, critique, and an extension of war makes Apocalypse Now a potent representation of the manner in which the postmodern condition has scrambled traditional signposts of value. Key to Coppola’s mad concoction is the presence of Marlon Brando—procured for the thenastronomical salary of 3.5 million dollars—to invest the primitive, inaccessible Kurtz with the technological mass-familiarity of Don Corleone, Stanley Kowalski, and the tabloid identity of “Brando” himself, illuminating the id-like recesses of Conrad’s Heart of Darkness with the twinkle of cinematic celebrity. In Fight Club, Fincher achieved a similar effect by spending a then-respectable 17.5 million dollars (which turns out to have been almost half of Fight Club’s domestic box office gross) to cast Brad Pitt as Tyler Durden. Pitt was able to attract one of the largest salaries in Hollywood in 1999 despite his uneven history as a lead actor. None of his movies had been a great box office success; his most recent film, Meet Joe Black (1998), had been an outright flop, with Pitt’s performance as a personification of death receiving a share of the blame; and, indeed, his top-billing in Fight Club did not prove enticing enough to make that movie a box office success either. But Pitt has always enjoyed the kind of celebrity that is not tied to his appearances in any particular film. Pitt’s screen persona blends together Robert Redford’s boyish grin, Paul Newman’s charm, James Dean’s obligatory squint, and early Brando’s famous pout. But Pitt’s resume lacks anything like what Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969), Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1958), Rebel without a Cause, or A Streetcar Named Desire (1951) were for those actors. Rather, Pitt rose to fame as a result of a bit part in Thelma & Louise (1991), in which he played the avatar of a female fantasy of anonymous male attractiveness. His success in this bit part was a reflection of his

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ability to channel an archetypal image that both men and women recognize before they ever lay eyes on Pitt himself. By 1998, “Brad Pitt” was a household name indicating the ideal of masculine sexual attractiveness, as demonstrated by the prominent use of his name in that capacity in Billboard’s number three song of that year, Shania Twain’s “That Don’t Impress Me Much.” Unlike his predecessors Brando, Dean, and Newman, whose origins in the Actors Studio encouraged them to practise acting as a study in depth psychology, Pitt is more of a celebrity than an actor, and a celebrity’s ontological status is rooted not in the profundity of the unconscious but in the stark superficiality of proliferating surfaces. Moreover, the collective recognition of Pitt as an ideal of masculine attractiveness works to elevate him beyond the tabloid variety of celebrity to equate him with a Platonic principle. As Roland Barthes said of Greta Garbo, Brad Pitt’s “singularity [is] of the order of the Concept” (538); he is a literal “movie god,” a visible apparition representing the manner in which the iconography of consciousness itself is populated with preexisting two-dimensional images. The casting of this idealized entity in the role of Tyler Durden is a key component of the manner in which Palahniuk’s social critique has been reimagined in Fincher’s film. The master-conceit of the novel, that the characters that we know as Tyler and the Narrator are actually one character using “the same body, but at different times” (155), is sustainable because of the nature of the medium of prose. Because novelists rarely provide thorough physical descriptions of their characters, a reader is accustomed to having an imprecise mental impression of what a novel’s characters look like and, as a result, Palahniuk’s mirror-trick is easy to pull off. Palahniuk’s Narrator even reports that “Tyler and I were looking more and more like identical twins” (105), which makes sense in retrospect, because they were always the same person. Obviously, the first hurdle the screen adaptors faced was the fact that a movie does not have the porous visual quality of prose. A movie takes place in a surface world of absolute visibility, where nothing can exist that cannot be seen. Tyler cannot be faceless and, moreover, he cannot have the same face as the narrator, because that arrangement would give the game away to the audience as well as to the Narrator. The screen writers’ dilemma results from the fact that the film medium is limited, strangely, by its inability to withhold information—its inability to not see. The writers must have seized on this paradox, so appropriate to the antienlightenment mood of the source text, as the inspiration for their decision to cast Pitt. If we have to make Tyler Durden visible, they might have said, we will give him the hyper-visibility of Brad’s archetypal celebritydom. The movie replaces the novel’s ambiguous blending of Tyler and the Narrator with a visual opposition. In an interview, Edward Norton recalls that “We decided early on that I would start to starve myself as the film went on, while he would lift and go to tanning beds; he would become more and more idealized as I wasted away” (Said). The movie’s Tyler explains to the Narrator (and the audience) why Tyler looks like Brad. “All the ways you wish you could be? That’s me. I look like you wanna look, I fuck like you wanna fuck.” As an expression of the Narrator’s deepest aspirations for himself, Brad’s Tyler contributes an ironic twist to Palahniuk’s Tyler. It turns out that Tyler represents not only the Narrator’s dreams of freeing himself from mental enslavement to consumerist society but also, paradoxically, his dreams of having baby-blue eyes

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and washboard abs, of looking like someone who spends a lot of time lifting weights and going to tanning beds, who looks, in short, like Brad Pitt. Linking Tyler Durden to Brad’s celebrity image of fashion-model photogenic-ness completely contradicts everything that Tyler Durden supposedly stands for, yet, in the spirit of nihilist anarchy, there is a distinctly Durdenesque quality to the filmmaker’s subversive choice, which is actually a kind of perverse subversion of Palahniuk’s subversive novel, a kind of reverse détournement. The voice denouncing mass-media culture is coming out of the very face of that culture. This irony, however, also articulates a devastating critique of naive models of countercultural resistance, suggesting the depth to which even our fantasies of resistance are always already colonized by mass-cultural influences. As if to explicitly communicate to the audience that the filmmakers are intentionally drawing on Pitt’s celebrity status to make an ironic point, the background of one shot includes a marquee advertising Seven Years in Tibet, a Pitt vehicle from 1997. The suggestion is that Brad Pitt exists as a celebrity in the diegetic world of Fight Club, and may even literally be the model for the Narrator’s idealized self-projection. In the DVD commentary, Edward Norton explains that the filmmakers had planted another marquee advertising Norton’s film The People vs. Larry Flynt (1996) in the same scene, but it had been blocked by a bus and did not make it into the film. This is perfectly appropriate, because the Narrator’s character exists in a permanent state of occlusion throughout the story, subordinated in every way to the cinematic charisma of his alter ego. Norton himself, although he appears in every single scene in the movie, took in one seventh of Pitt’s salary and received second billing. Similarly, Norton’s Narrator character gets all the dregs of the life he shares with Tyler. Tyler gets all the sex, power, swagger, and understanding, while the Narrator does not even get a name. In lieu of a name, the Narrator identifies himself by a series of pseudonyms, all drawn from movies: Cornelius, Rupert, and Travis. Cornelius, the simian scientist from The Planet of the Apes (1968), is an obvious choice, since he is a kind of prototypical “space monkey,” Tyler’s term for pioneers of the posthuman. Cornelius is a movie-creature who represents the transcendent possibility of fast-forwarding evolution to reveal new possibilities for human being. The allusions to Rupert Pepkin and Travis Bickle, Robert DeNiro’s characters in Martin Scorsese’s films The King of Comedy (1982) and Taxi Driver, respectively, refer to two other space monkeys, movie-people who have sought (and, arguably, found) transcendental, posthuman possibilities in the merging of their own personalities with the circuits of the mass-media. In this context, the Narrator’s other proxy-name, Tyler Durden, is an extension of his pattern of compensating for his anonymity by identifying himself with images of people from the silver screen, and so it is fitting that the Narrator should hallucinate a Tyler who looks like a famous movie star. None of these movie references appear in the book, but Fincher and the Fight Club screenwriters are clearly developing a cinematic aspect of Tyler’s identity that is present in Palahniuk’s novel. The scene at the nude beach, with its allusion to the ephemeral shapes of light and shadow, suggests that Tyler himself is a sort of optical effect. Correspondingly, Fincher’s visual palate draws our attention to the dynamics of light and shadow through its neo-noir chiaroscuro that, like all noir cinematography, tends

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to suggest the cinematic ontology of perception itself. Palahniuk’s novel also draws out the metaphorical implications of Tyler’s job as a film projectionist to establish an analogy between the deceptiveness of the cinematic image and the deceptiveness of perception and consciousness. The Narrator’s description of how seamlessly Tyler switches reels is interpolated with fragmented dispatches of the Narrator’s business travel itinerary “You wake up at SeaTac … You wake up at Willow Run … You wake up at Krissy Field” (16–18). The juxtaposition suggests that consciousness might be just like watching a movie—the illusion of consistency masks a hidden truth of disjointedness. The Narrator’s sense of a continuous identity is a trick of film editing. Similarly, Tyler’s prank of editing pornographic frames into family films—a prank that goes consciously unnoticed but which causes “[p]eople [to] feel sick or [to] start to cry [without knowing] why” (21)—clearly proposes another metaphor for the manner in which Tyler has been subliminally edited into the Narrator’s consciousness. Tyler’s projectionist job is included in the book entirely for the purpose of establishing this metaphor. For the film adaptation, however, Fincher seizes on the meta-filmic possibilities opened up by Tyler’s quirky night job, building it into the master-trope of the movie as a whole. The movie officially introduces Tyler in a sequence that begins immediately after that character’s memorable request to the Narrator to “hit me as hard as you can.” The image freezes on a close-up of Brad, accompanied by the Narrator’s invitation to tell us a little about Tyler Durden. The freeze-frame captures Brad with an expression of bright-eyed mischievous intensity. With his butterfly collar and with accent lighting framing his jawline and highlighting his facial structure, his hair tousled to perfection, the image is the ideal Brad Pitt glamor shot, a perfect visual representation of Brad Pitt as a celebrity face. After lingering over this image, the scene cuts to a shot of the lens of a movie projector. By cleverly adjusting the depth of field, Fincher’s camera carries us into the lens of the movie projector to see the image on the actual strip of film being projected, which turns out to be a frame from a pornographic movie depicting a semierect penis. Fincher’s adaptation of Fight Club follows the book in playing with the terminological witticism of conflating psychological and cinematic “projection,” but, because it is a movie instead of a book, Fincher’s appropriation of this metaphor undergoes a complex involution. The book asked us to consider the relationship between cinema and consciousness from a safe distance, and as it related to the particular situation of the Narrator. The movie, however, not only articulates the relationship between movie and mind but also actually enacts it, sweeping the audience itself up into this ontological mirror game. Rather than being in on the joke as Tyler projects his subversively reedited movies to unwitting spectators, we ourselves are now in the position of the unwitting spectators. The movie interrupts our study of the lineaments of Brad’s cheekbones to plunge us into the rabbit hole of the apparatus that generates this image, deconstructing it by exposing the technological infrastructure responsible for weaving the moving illusion of the filmic image, but only by framing this infrastructure within another equivalent cinematic image. When we cut away from the penis image, we are in the editing room with Tyler. His editing of the strip of film is itself represented in a slickly edited sequence—a second of

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Figure 11.1  A freeze-frame captures Brad Pitt’s celebrity glamor. the guillotine snipping the celluloid strip on the editing block, a second of the scotch tape being tugged out of the dispenser, a second of Tyler depressing the splicer—which draws our attention to the fact that this deconstruction of the image is in fact highly artificial and has itself been deftly manipulated by the very trickster who is supposedly being deconstructed. On the one hand, the movie invites us to recognize Brad’s face as a sublimated variation of what Baudrillard called “the phallic instrumentalization of the body” (SED 109–10). The movement through the camera projector from the still image of Brad’s face to the filmstrip frame of a pornographic penis suggests that Brad’s face is, fundamentally, a fetishistic representation of the male body as an expression of a “phantasmic cut” (102) that separates a body part from any existential continuity—the body enframed as an absolute commodity. Fight Club does not let us rest at this comfortable distance, however. In détourning the cinematic experience of its own audience, Fight Club abducts its viewers into an acknowledgment of their own participation in the oscillation of images between the movie screen and our lived experience. Retroactively from this editing room scene, the Fight Club audience may realize that they have already been victims of Tyler’s cinematic trickery. Repeat viewers of Fight Club usually come to perceive the two appearances of “subliminal Brad” that precede Tyler’s physical introduction into the diegetic narrative. In a symbolic atmosphere in which castration is such a predominant threat—Bob has had his testicles surgically removed, while the police commissioner and then the Narrator are both directly threatened with the same form of dismemberment—Tyler enjoys the ontological status of being invulnerable to this danger because he exists in the form of a cut phallus. His subliminally spliced-in image is the equivalent of the penis that Tyler cuts and splices into movies with “celebrity voices” (Brad Pitt, Edward Norton, Meat Loaf). By drawing this equivalence between the dismembered penis and the image of Brad Pitt, the film implies that the reason Tyler Durden is so free of castration anxiety is that he is himself a “phallic effigy,” always already castrated, “a fetishistic object to be contemplated and manipulated, deprived of all its menace” (102). The movie’s spokesmodel for agency and authenticity is a passive object, a celebrity image, which nonetheless asserts a viral kind of potency, editing itself into consciousness in a manner that is both aggressive and coy. The opening seconds of the movie reinforce this impression. Following the

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20th Century Fox logo, the movie launches into a CGI representation of the interior of a brain. As the virtual camera races along the axons and leaps across synapses, the credits appear, bubbling up through the brain space as the celebrity names—Pitt foremost, but also Fincher, Norton, Carter, Loaf—materialize and recede as if they were neurotransmitter molecules. Diegetically, we are inside the Narrator’s brain, but it is the audience that sees their own celebrity-infested brain mirrored back to them in this sequence, just as the subliminal Brads are directed at us, over the head of the Narrator, who does not diegetically see them. Another variation on the subliminal Brad is the one that appears in a crowd of waiters on a television in the Narrator’s hotel room. When a physical Brad appears in a crowd scene traveling in the opposite direction from the Narrator on an airport walkalater, it is as if these subliminal cinematic images are starting to punch through into the Narrator’s reality. Of course, the reverse turns out to be true—the Narrator’s phantasmal celebrity-projection is leaking out of his brain and into his perceptual environment—an inversion that is itself subordinated to a more implosional sense in which Tyler’s ability to edit himself into the Narrator’s (or our) consciousness discloses the cinematic quality of the Narrator’s consciousness itself (as well as of our own). The manner in which Brad Pitt’s image is manipulated as celebrity icon throughout Fight Club has the effect of problematizing a simple reading of Tyler’s character as an advocate for a profound reality. One of the movie’s parallels to the subliminal Brads is the image of a nude male Gucci model whose black and white photograph is backlit (like a film image) on a bus stop shelter that Tyler and the Narrator walk past. The presence of this advertising image of the male body as enframed instrumentalized phallus suggests a manner in which our daily lives have been détourned by invisible Tylers, splicing subliminal pornographic images into the margins of quotidian awareness. As they pass the bus shelter, Tyler and the Narrator do not seem to notice the image consciously, but it does accompany (and, perhaps subliminally inspire) a speculative conversation about how the “real” world represented by Fight Club shares imaginative space with the simulacral world of media celebrity. The Narrator asks Tyler, “If you could fight any celebrity, who would it be?” The Narrator’s answer, that he would want to fight William Shatner, is the punch line of the scene; the audience easily relates to the irony of identifying the science-fictional space voyager James T. Kirk as a masculine role model, as well as with the extent of a hyperreal celebrity culture that has fated the actor William Shatner to forever be identified with his fictional alter ego. The Narrator, with his own penchant for identifying himself through science-fictional alter egos, identifies himself as a typical media consumer through his answer, an inhabitant of the hyperreal mediascape that has made Kirk/Shatner such a common father figure. It is Tyler’s answer that goes deeper, however, since Tyler answers the question from the perspective of the media image itself. Tyler’s response, that he would want to fight Ernest Hemingway, expresses his position within a fictional frame of reference. The image of Tyler Durden fighting Ernest Hemingway is a conceptual pun that draws on Harold Bloom’s thesis of an oppositional relationship between successive generations of writers to situate Palahniuk’s novel within the literary tradition of sullen twentysomethings reaching back through Norman Mailer, Henry Miller, and going back

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to Papa. Tyler’s answer is a subtle wink to both Tyler’s own provenance as a literary character and the celebrity status of authors like Hemingway and Palahniuk whose fame rests on their ability to generate compelling models of masculine personalities negotiating their castration anxiety. In his response, Tyler explicitly comments on his own genealogy as a literary character, speaking as a personification of the very mediascape of which the Narrator is a consumer. When Tyler and the Narrator board a city bus immediately following this conversation, they encounter the same Gucci advertisement, again cinematically backlit. Paralleling Tyler’s movement over the course of the film from a subliminal presence to an object of consciousness, the Gucci model becomes a subject of explicit commentary in both the Narrator’s voice-over monologue and his conversation with Tyler. As the camera cuts to the advertisement, the Narrator reflects, “I felt sorry for guys packed into gyms, trying to look like how Calvin Klein or Tommy Hilfiger says they should.” As if to validate this sentiment, the Narrator confers with Tyler, asking him, “Is that what a man looks like?” Tyler scoffs, cryptically equating “selfimprovement” with “masturbation.” Tyler’s aphorism, however, backhandedly affirms an anterior assumption that the project of looking like a Gucci underwear model is a viable path to “self-improvement,” a mixed message that is underscored even more deliberately by the fact that Tyler himself, thanks to Brad Pitt, has a fashion model’s body, as the film continually reminds us. The very next cut after the conversation about the Gucci model is to a fight scene in which a bare-chested Brad Pitt flexes his glistening muscles under a light that is expressly positioned to highlight the contours of his arms, chest and abdomen as he subdues an opponent. When he stands up after the fight, the light plays across his clearly gymnasiumed physique, his pants ride low on his hips, and his shoulders are thrown back, as he strikes the same contrapposto pose as the model in the Gucci ad. The irony of the Narrator asking his imaginary friend what a real man looks like is amplified by the fact that his imaginary friend is himself modeled after the same hyperreal standards as the media images that he defines himself in opposition against. Baudrillard had critiqued a world in which everyone had fallen “under the sign of behavior models inscribed everywhere in the media or in the layout of the city. Everyone falls into line in their delirious identification with leading models, orchestrated models of simulation” (SED 78). The Narrator’s attempt to resist the models of simulation represented by a fashion model (and really, what is a naked model modeling aside from the principle of simulation itself?) takes the form of a parallel “delirious identification” with his fashion-model alter ego, an ironic inversion that demonstrates the deep complexity and ambivalence of the relationship between the urban consumer-citizen and his ambient mediascape. In both the book and the movie, the Narrator’s discovery that Tyler is a subconscious projection of his own repressed desires is accompanied by a parallel decision to attempt to thwart Tyler’s terroristic agenda. In both the book and the movie, the death of Big Bob is presented as the crucial event that causes the Narrator to pivot from being an ardent supporter of Tyler to pitting himself against his alter ego, but the Bob subplot masks a more fundamental dynamic in the story, suggesting that Tyler is only attractive so long as he is not a figment. Tyler’s seductive appeal had always been the promise that he

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would provide a model of how to be a “real man” in a world characterized by unreality. In this way, the crisis in masculinity dramatized in Fight Club is depicted as a symptom of a more widespread crisis in reality, and Tyler’s real manhood presents itself as the solution to the emasculating torpor of life on “Planet Starbucks” where everything is a “copy of a copy.” Both Palahniuk’s book and Fincher’s movie are structured around the irony of an unreal character acting as a spokesman for reality, and, in both versions, the Narrator responds to Tyler’s betrayal of his faith with the intention to neutralize Tyler’s power by, as the book puts it, “rush[ing] around and undo[ing] the damage” (166) that Tyler causes and plans to cause. In the book, the Narrator’s new oppositional stance against Tyler is a victory for repression and the reality principle. The Narrator’s punchdrunk slide toward “hitting bottom” is suddenly replaced with more conventional priorities such as securing a hetero-normative relationship with Marla and preventing the senseless destruction of life and property. As in Lacan’s mirror stage, the Narrator’s recognition of Tyler as a specular image of himself results in the establishment of the categories of the Imaginary and the Real. Indeed, once the book’s Narrator discovers the true nature of Tyler, holes begin to appear in the efficacy of Tyler’s personality. In chapter 26, space monkey cops have the Narrator pinned down, ready to castrate him, but when the Narrator wakes up in chapter 27, he is still intact. This unexplained warp in the story suggests that all of Project Mayhem may itself be an unreal hallucination. The failure of the Parker-Morris building to explode at the novel’s climax is another indication that Tyler has been effectively neutralized by the establishment of specific boundaries between the real and the unreal. In the movie, however, the space monkey cops only fail to castrate the Narrator because, in a scene that is self-consciously cloned from a hundred other action movies, he manages to grab a gun from one of the cops’ holsters. Edward Norton’s absurd ad-libbed threat that the next one who moves is going to get a “lead salad” indicates that, rather than dissolving into unreality, the Tyler fantasy is devolving into something much stranger, a kind of cinematic pastiche that bends the Narrator’s reality into a kind of cinematic hyperreality. Similarly, the final scene of the movie, in which Tyler’s demolition project brilliantly succeeds, establishes that Tyler’s power is not diminished despite the fact that he has been revealed to be a figment. The image of the exploding skyscrapers is perfectly cinematic. Tyler and Marla, viewing the spectacle through the floor-to-ceiling windows of another skyscraper, seem to be watching a movie. The Narrator and Marla reach out to hold hands as they watch, responding to the falling buildings as a romantic and aesthetically powerful work of art. No narrative concern is directed toward the real consequences of what the success of Tyler’s plot will have for Marla, the Narrator, and the anonymous urban polity of Fight Club because this image exists as total spectacle, devoid of consequences—personal or political. As such, it is Tyler’s masterpiece. The corny rationalizations that the Narrator proposes to explain Tyler’s political motivation for this act of terrorism (“If you erase the debt record, we all go back to zero”) are clearly superfluous. Blowing up the skyscrapers is fundamentally an aesthetic spectacle of détournement, on par with splicing pornographic frames into family films. Of course, the film makes this analogy explicit by interrupting the shot of the falling towers with an interpolated shot of “Tyler’s cock.” Like the explosion of the

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towers, this last gag suggests that Tyler is not dead, neither as a result of being discovered to be a figment nor as a result of the Narrator’s self-inflicted gunshot. Once Tyler has tinkered with the reel of the Narrator’s life, his influence is everywhere, infiltrating all corners of time and consciousness. By imagining Tyler as a personification of cinematic influences, the movie has incorporated Tyler’s identity into its very structure as a movie. Metaphorically, this dynamic articulates a representation of the manner in which contemporary media consumers are psychologically embedded in the media imagery they consume. Whether the Narrator follows or resists Tyler, his ultimate ontological status is still that of a character in a movie that Tyler is directing and editing. This implication is made distinctly clear when the Narrator, realizing that he and Tyler are the same person, flashes back to a series of previous scenes from the movie with the Narrator taking Tyler’s place and speaking Tyler’s lines. One such scene shows Tyler addressing his philosophical aphorisms to the camera, even as the strip of film seems to slip off its sprockets. Performed by Brad Pitt, this scene reinforces the interpretation that the movie is depicting Tyler as an explicitly cinematic entity—the scene reveals the mechanical substructure that undergirds Tyler’s identity and beliefsystem. But when the Narrator’s face replaces Brad Pitt’s in this sequence, the same cinematic ontological frame is transplanted onto the supposedly “real” character. Such details accumulate to suggest that the Narrator himself is a cinematic entity, sharing the same ontological ground as Tyler. All of his painful manic attempts to transcend, or to de-transcend, hyperreal consumerism have made for a memorable movie, but have not done anything to make the Narrator more real than he could ever possibly have been, given the ontological parameters of his existence. The aestheticized destruction of the urban skyline in the final scene of Fight Club recalls Baudrillard’s assertion that “terrorism itself is only a gigantic special effect” (FS 62). In Fincher’s film, Brad Pitt’s Tyler Durden personifies the implosion of politics and entertainment, of terrorism and the media, and of activism and spectacle that Baudrillard identifies as characteristic of the late twentieth century. The casting of Brad Pitt in the role and, more importantly, the manner in which the film weaves Pitt’s status as a celebrity icon into Fight Club’s semantic texture, reorganizes the psychological and political implications of Palahniuk’s original narrative. Psychologically, the movie collapses the distinction between the real Narrator and his unreal alter ego, replacing this duality with an all-consuming sense of hyperreality in which the Narrator has been abducted into a cosmos ruled absolutely by a celebrity “movie god.” Politically, Fincher’s film reflects the observation of the Critical Art Ensemble that “Knowing what to subvert assumes that the forces of oppression are stable and can be identified and separated—an assumption that is just too fantastic in an age of dialectics in ruins” (12). With celebrity-Tyler genetically implicated in the entire fabric of reality, and with the psychology of the Narrator populated by images from the corporate massmedia, there is no possibility of staging any traditional kind of dialectical political struggle. As Baudrillard stated of Apocalypse Now, Fight Club challenges conventional political narratives by illustrating “the immanence of a thing in its very revolution.” In mirroring this abyss of simulation, Fincher’s film suggests a more challenging political paradigm than the conventional oppositional model that brought Marxist-situationist

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activists to the streets of Seattle in 1999 to protest the WTO. In adopting Baudrillard’s nihilistic variation on situationism, the movie extends Tyler’s philosophy of “hitting bottom” to political agency itself, replacing the utopian aspirations of Marxism with the fatal strategy that “there is no liberation but this one: in the deepening of negative conditions” (FS 223). This is indeed a bleak conclusion, but in the same way that Baudrillard’s playfulness as a writer imbues his nihilistic prose with a mischievous sense of fun, Brad Pitt’s glowing hyperreality as a celebrity endows his performance as Tyler with an ironic glee. A month after the release of Fight Club, Pitt appeared in a cameo role as himself in Being John Malkovich (1999), another film that uses cinematic celebritydom as a metaphor for the strange kind of fun that can be had with the subversion of ontological categories. In the twenty-first century, as the fin-de-siècle spirit of hyperreality gave way to a new decade of war and terror, Pitt still appeared in roles that emphasize his celebrity identity—Ocean’s 11 (2001), Ocean’s 12 (2004), and Mr. and Mrs. Smith (2007), in particular—but these films are entirely lacking in ironic content; these are movies devoted to the worship of Pitt as a movie god, as opposed to movies like Fight Club or Being John Malkovich that use celebrity actors to stage surprising confrontations with celebrity deification. More recently, Pitt has turned away from roles that allude to his own celebrity status in order to develop his talents as a “serious” actor in movies like Babel (2006), The Curious Case of Benjamin Button (2008), Tree of Life (2011), and Moneyball (2011). More fundamentally than his movie roles, however, Pitt’s celebrity consists of the manner in which “subliminal Brads” have been edited into the lifeworld of contemporary American consumers. The fact that he occasionally appears in movies is incidental to his more pervasive cultural presence as a tabloid fixture. Boosted into the tabloid pantheon by a love triangle (Brad—Jennifer—Angelina) that promised to be a second coming of the legendary Eddie—Debbie—Liz sensation of scandal sheet lore, the subsequent stability of Pitt’s relationship with Angelina Jolie has solidified his status as a perennial fixture in the supermarket aisle firmament. His activities as a philanthropist, green activist, producer, and father of a large and photogenic family all follow this trend toward viralization that has always been immanent in Brad’s particular mode of celebrity. Despite its underwhelming box office performance, Fight Club remains the movie for which Pitt is most well known, at least according to the Internet (Fight Club appears as the first movie result in a Google search for “Brad Pitt Movies,” Tyler Durden was named Empire Magazine’s number-one greatest movie character, etc.). The cult response to Fincher’s movie and Pitt’s performance, still noticeable more than a dozen years after the movie came out, suggests that Fight Club’s critique of image-culture—and its critique of that critique—remain relevant. The enduring hyper-celebritydom of Pitt himself continues to reinforce the manner in which his most popular role deploys the actor’s fame as an element of its bleak representation of a society lost in a mirror-world of simulation.1

1

A version of this chapter was previously published in _Deconstructing Brad Pitt (Schaberg and Bennett 78–93).

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Hamlet, Hamlet, Hamlet Shakespeare was a hot commodity in the 1990s. Shakespearian film adaptations have been a perennial genre since the invention of the cinema, and the bard’s plays have always enjoyed a privileged cultural status, but Shakespeare attained a popular currency in the 1990s reminiscent of an American, postmodernized version of Victorian bardolatry. Indeed, Harold Bloom, one of the few literary critics to enjoy some modicum of popular celebrity in that decade, argued the case for a “secular religion” of bardolatry in his 1998 book, Shakespeare: Inventing the Human. That same year, Shakespeare in Love (1998) won the Academy Award for Best Picture, representing the high-water mark of this phenomenon. The ’90s’ wave of Shakespeare movies was set in motion by the success of Kenneth Branagh’s production of Henry V (1989). Interestingly, Henry V was released in the United States on November 8, 1989, the day before the Berlin Wall fell, marking the symbolic beginning of “the Long ’90s.” Throughout this period, Shakespeare’s plays become the subject of Hollywood studio films with surprising regularity, as big budget adaptations such as Much Ado about Nothing (1993), Othello (1995), Richard III (1995), Twelfth Night (1996), Romeo  Juliet (1996), Titus (1999), and A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1999), and as quirky reinventions such as Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead (1990), Prospero’s Books (1991), My Own Private Idaho (1992), Looking for Richard (1996), O (1999), and 10 Things I Hate About You (1999). The most commercially successful and culturally visible such reinvention of this period is certainly Disney’s The Lion King (1994). Although Shakespeare is not credited as one of the three screenwriters of The Lion King, nor is he (let alone Saxon Grammaticus) listed as one of the seventeen people credited with devising the “story,” the movie self-consciously employs its loose analogy with the narrative of Hamlet as a source of gravitas and cultural significance. A cluster of more literal adaptations of the bard’s preeminent masterpiece also appeared over the course of the Long ’90s: Franco Zeffirelli’s Hamlet (1990), Kenneth Branagh’s Hamlet (1996), and Michael Almereyda’s Hamlet (2000). This surge of interest in Shakespeare in the 1990s is somewhat surprising, considering that the decade also saw the rise of challenges to the literary canon and its perceived overrepresentation of dead white males. Bloom’s endorsement of bardolatry is in fact a reaction against this cultural movement away from “great writers” and toward a more pluralistic and subjectivist approach to canonicity. It is strange that the patron

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saint of the English literary canon, William Shakespeare, and the most canonical of his works, Hamlet, enjoy such widespread popularity during the same period. The phenomenon is open to many interpretations. It may simply represent a last burst of nostalgia for our “great writers” before they are officially cast down the memory hole of the twenty-first century. Even if that is the case, however, it reflects the agility with which Shakespeare’s plays manage to dodge the bullets of the culture wars by being so alien, so multilayered, and, finally, so enchanting that, although their author may be dead, he does not seem definitively white nor definitively male. In the heteroglossic communities of Shakespeare’s dramatis personae, in his plays’ lack of ideological, political, or religious consistency or even coherence, and in the human universality of his themes, as well as in the editorial ambiguity of many of his most significant works, Shakespeare seems to confound the very idea of canonicity at the same time as he embodies it. This ambivalence is itself a defining feature of Shakespeare’s cultural meaning—his ability to straddle thresholds of sexuality, gender, race, and identity— and, in this sense, he is a surprisingly apt figurehead for the politics of cultural diversity that influenced academic and public discourse throughout the 1990s. Liminality itself is one of Shakespeare’s most abiding preoccupations, whether in the form of the gender play of cross-dressing, in the existential crossings of ghostly visitation, in the psychological waverings of his characters’ thoughts, or in his ontological challenges to a realist metaphysics, as epitomized in the expression, “All the world’s a stage.” As every student of Shakespeare knows, the bard played liberally with the double meaning of the Globe as signifying both the real space of the physical earth and the representational space of the stage. While plays like A Midsummer Night’s Dream explicitly narrativize the blending of separate spheres of reality, all of Shakespeare’s characters are preoccupied with social role-playing and with the theatrical character of the real world. Shakespeare’s dialogue has a way of sounding sincere and stagey at the same time; it presupposes a stage-world of poet-performers that is both outrageously stylized and, somehow, intimately resonant, as attested to by the enduring popularity of these 400-year-old texts. In this sense, the cinematic Shakespeare boom of the 1990s is of a piece with the trend represented by classics of 1990s hyperrealism such as JFK, Pulp Fiction, and The Matrix that variously dramatize the postmodern condition as one in which “stage” and “world” collapse into each other. Shakespeare movies transport their audiences into an ontologically ambiguous Shakespeare-scape, a place that is starkly unreal in its elaborate speech patterns, but which nonetheless exerts a force of reality as a result of its cultural familiarity and, perhaps, because of its more intangible poetic allurements. Of all Shakespeare’s plays, not only Hamlet is the play with the reputation of being the definitive Shakespearian work but also it is the play that most directly structures itself around the interrelationship between reality and the representation of reality. The centerpiece of Hamlet is The Mousetrap, the play-within-a-play which, in blurring the line between the reality of the King and the representation of the Player King, provokes a real-world effect in the narrative of the play (exposing Claudius’ guilt) while simultaneously evoking the melodramatic theatricality of Hamlet’s narrative as a whole. The question of Hamlet’s madness is another important feature of the play

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that suggests the manner in which reality and representation bleed into each other. Hamlet seems at times to feign his antic disposition, and at other times to be fully in the grip of it. It is as if Shakespeare is suggesting that Hamlet’s simulation of madness is tantamount to being mad in reality or, perhaps more precisely, that Shakespearian madness, as a state that tends toward the visionary, is capable of undermining the distinction between reality and representation. Although Hamlet seems to recover his wits in the final act, his simulacral madness has infected Ophelia with a devastatingly real bout of madness. This “shuffling” between reality and representation characterizes the central image of the play, the usurpation of King Claudius, who is simultaneously the real king and the fake king. The real fake King oversees a realm of surveillance and insincerity where “seems” has completely vanquished “is” as the predominant mode of being. In the ontological climate of Hamlet, baits of falsehoods yield carps of truth, directions find indirections out, a recreational wager may reveal itself to be a lethal duel, life itself is a thin veneer over a grinning skull, and death is a dream from which it is impossible to awake. The enduring appeal of Hamlet is that it seems endlessly amenable to infinite interpretations. The text itself is no more about hyperreal ontology than it is about Freudian psychosexuality, Bloomian Anxiety of Influence, or neo-Darwinian statusnegotiating. Hamlet’s quintessence is to be about whatever an audience wants it to be about. Because of the play’s plasticity, the Hamlets that have been staged and filmed act as Rorcharch blots indicating the concerns and perspectives of the cultures that have produced them. The most prominent cultural significance of Hamlet throughout most of the twentieth century has been the manner in which the text had been co-opted by psychoanalysis as a dramatization of the Oedipus complex. Freud sketched out his diagnosis of Hamlet in his seminal work, The Interpretation of Dreams, and the Freudian interpretation of the play achieved official institutionalization in Laurence Olivier’s 1948 adaptation. Olivier’s Hamlet, like Freud’s, focuses on the psychological riddle of Hamlet’s inability to “make up his mind.” Its preoccupation with Hamlet’s psyche is depicted in the tracking shots during which the camera roams through the halls of Elsinore as if it were wandering through the gates and alleys of Hamlet’s consciousness. The ubiquity of fog and shadows situates the film in the space of cinematic expressionism and surrealism, visual styles that evince historical and metaphorical affinities with psychoanalysis. Olivier’s answer to the question of Hamlet’s indecisiveness is the same as Freud’s—ambivalence about his sexual feelings for his mother—as indicated by the film’s visual motif of the royal bed, as well as by Olivier’s decision to cast as his mother the actress Eileen Herlie, a woman more than ten years younger than he. Despite the tenacity with which the Freudian paradigm has attached itself to Hamlet, a distinct change is observable in the three film versions of Hamlet that were released during the Long ’90s. Freud and Olivier are focused on the question of Hamlet’s psychology: Who is he, and why does he act the way he does? Although each of the Hamlets from the end of the century allude in one way or another to the oedipal theme, the preoccupation of the films themselves shifts from a concern with Hamlet’s psychology to a concern with his ontology: a shift from who Hamlet is to what Hamlet is. Thinking of Hamlet as a what rather than as a who has the effect of collapsing

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the character into the text. Rather than thinking about the character’s motivations, the ’90s’ films interrogate our motivations for returning so obsessively to this text. Zeffirelli, Branagh, and Almereyda’s Hamlets focus on the “whatness” of Hamlet—as an archetype, as a text, and as a cultural condition. Each of these adaptations develop the hyperreal theme that is originally present in Shakespeare’s text in a way that reflects the “form and pressure” of a postmodern, post-Freudian age. Zeffirelli’s rendition of Hamlet is a workmanlike production. Its Elsinore is conventionally gloomy; like most Shakespeare movies, it presents a kind of “greatest hits” montage of famous scenes and lines from the play; and the familiar twentiethcentury oedipal motif achieves its most vivid representation when Mel Gibson mounts Glenn Close and simulates intercourse with her to the rhythm of Shakespeare’s pentameter. Unlike Olivier’s Hamlet, however, where the oedipal dynamic between Hamlet and Gertrude is a running theme throughout the film, in Zeffirrelli’s Hamlet, the overt oedipalism is limited to this one scene. As a result, the scene feels more like it is quoting “the oedipal theme in Hamlet” rather than dramatizing it. The most distinctive feature of Zeffirelli’s Hamlet, however, is the casting of Mel Gibson in the title role. Zeffirelli has said that he identified Gibson as a promising candidate to play the melancholy Dane after seeing Gibson in the role of Martin Riggs, the suicidal action hero in Lethal Weapon (1987). At first glance, this sounds like an unlikely leap of associations from the genre of Hollywood action movies to that of Elizabethan tragedy. Hollywood action heroes and Shakespearian characters are separated from each other culturally and historically, not to say linguistically. And in fact, Gibson does seem a little out of place amid the properly Shakespearian actors, as if he were inhabiting a different genre of narrative than they. Rather than trying to mimic the poise and diction of his classically trained costars, however, Gibson gives full vent to his action movie instincts. Whether he is punctuating the line “that one may smile and smile and be a villain” with vigorous sword thrusts against the castle wall, kicking a stool out from under Rosencrantz while brandishing a skewer, or, most notably, hamming it up throughout the climactic fencing contest, Gibson muscles his way through the story with a violent energy that sets him apart temperamentally, psychologically, and, indeed, generically, from the other characters. This generic schism between Hamlet and his milieu is a central tension of the play itself. Of the many explanations that have been proposed to explain Hamlet’s indecisiveness, one of the most convincing is that he is a character in the wrong play—a Renaissance satirist unexpectedly plunged into a medieval ghost story. Shakespeare appropriated a blood-and-guts tale of revenge and cast an anachronism as its main character; the college at Wittenberg that Hamlet attends would not be founded until 1502, hundreds of years after the events of Hamlet’s story supposedly take place. Naturally, this time traveler from the future demonstrates skepticism about the revenge metanarrative in which he discovers himself to be a character, as well as about many of the other conventional attitudes that make up the social climate of his contemporaries. Zeffirelli’s film foregrounds this theme of Hamlet’s generic out-of-jointness with his narrative environment through its casting of Gibson as Hamlet, a choice that parallels Shakespeare’s decision to cast Hamlet as Amleth. The result is that the explanation

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for Hamlet’s hesitation that comes across in Zeffirelli’s Hamlet does not seem rooted in Hamlet’s psychological relationship with the people around him, but rather in the ontological disconnection between himself and his setting. The most apparent reason for Hamlet’s reluctance to kill Claudius in Zeffirelli’s Hamlet is simply that Hamlet is having too much fun enacting his role as Mad Max/Martin Riggs. The ghost’s command has freed him from the obligation of having to pretend to like his uncle, and, correspondingly, to all of the ties—to Ophelia, to Gertrude, to his future Danish subjects—that otherwise would have constrained him. He is now at liberty to indulge his idiosyncratic flair for playwriting, wordplay, and swashbuckling. The spirit of fun Gibson brings to the role—the athleticism, charisma, and mischief—jumps out of the rest of the movie in a way that is very faithful to the truism that Hamlet the character has always transcended Hamlet the play. Gibson’s performance in Zeffirelli’s Hamlet emphasizes Hamlet’s identity as a character—a character whose unique fascination is largely a function of the manner in which he is set apart generically from the rest of his story. Instead of dwelling on Hamlet’s subjective psychology, Zefferelli’s action movie Hamlet foregrounds the question of Hamlet’s conflict of fictional genres—a question that was indeed probably more important to Shakespeare himself than psychological theories of motivation. This emphasis on the textual nature of Hamlet’s identity constitutes a hyperreal premise that identity itself, rather than being an essential entity as conceived by modernism and psychoanalysis, results in fact from a particular intersection of literary genres. The issue of Hamlet’s textuality is also a guiding principle in Branagh’s production, which promises to deliver the complete, uncut Hamlet, the way you were supposed to read it in high school, in an unhurried 4 hours. Branagh’s is a voyeur’s Hamlet, with the entire text spread out in bright lighting and crisp set design. If any production is going to be able to see through the shadows of Hamlet’s dark psyche and illuminate the heart of his mystery, this must be the one. Branagh’s audacious devotion to “the complete text” reveals corners of Elsinore that a Hamlet film buff may never have seen before— the back story about Fortinbras and Old Norway and Polonius’s chat with Reynaldo, for example—and restores sweeping passages of dialogue that had been atomized into sound-bites in Olivier and Zeffirelli’s films. The first shot of Branagh’s Hamlet—the name of the play and the character carved in stone—announces Branagh’s intention to present a monumental Hamlet, a definitive Hamlet for the ages, and the production’s bid for this stature begins with the implicit value of textual comprehensiveness: the complete Hamlet is the complete Hamlet. The play’s the thing. The only problem is that, as Branagh knows, there is no such thing as the complete Hamlet. The two most canonical texts of the play, the Second Quarto and the First Folio, contain so many discrepancies that only 200 lines are identical in both. Most published versions of Hamlet are stitched together from these two sources. Then there is the infamous First or “Bad” Quarto, which was originally thought to have been a hastily pirated version, but now is being reexamined as a possible traveling company script. In fact, there is no evidence that Shakespeare ever thought of his plays as definitive monuments. He seems to have made no attempt during his long retirement to publish his collected works, nor to edit his masterpieces to reflect his

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authorial intention. Shakespeare wrote for the theater, not the anthology, and the needs of theatrical productions evolve; what works one night may have to be hastily rewritten for another audience, or in light of shifting political sensitivities, or simply on a whim. To the extent that there is any true Hamlet, it exists in shreds and patches— as a multiplicity rather than as a monument. A striking example of Hamlet’s textual ambiguity is the speculative ur-Hamlet, a missing play of unknown authorship that appears to have been a kind of first draft. This textual mystery in the source history of Hamlet shares an eerie correspondence with the narrative dynamics of the play itself, which is also haunted by the ghost of a vanished ancestor, even as the mystery of Hamlet’s textual identity provides an unmistakable parallel to the enigma of the character’s identity as an incoherent personality. As both a text and a character, Hamlet is in the position of Baudrillard’s fourth stage of simulation: a copy that has lost all relation to any original. Branagh’s production seems to intentionally court the paradox of being the definitive version of something that never existed. The hall of mirrors in the royal court evokes the illusory nature of the ceremonies and soliloquys that take place there, and the nineteenth-century palace itself, in wrenching the story out of both Elizabethan and medieval frames of reference, provides a lush visual setting for the film that is both richly convincing and self-consciously stylized and artificial. The production wears its textual completeness, like its visual ornateness, on its sleeve, as if it were being frank about the fragility of its painted display. As a result of the very fullness of Branagh’s script, Hamlet’s character, rather than coming into clearer resolution, becomes more ambiguous as different temperaments seem to seize him in different scenes, frequently in rapid succession and without warning. More selective approaches to Hamlet’s script are able to shape the narrative to develop a specific interpretation of Hamlet’s story and character, but Branagh’s kitchen-sink approach manages to capture in a way no movie Hamlet ever has the sense in which Hamlet as a character is defined by his collagelike nature, his contradictions, and his inconsistencies. Branagh supplies a memorable filmic expression of Hamlet’s characterological incongruity in the way he films Hamlet’s “How all occasions do inform against me” soliloquy. As Hamlet’s words crescendo to a fervent pitch of resolution, the camera cranes further and further away until Hamlet, screaming furiously about the dangerous bloodiness of his thoughts, is reduced visually to an insignificant speck. This camera work expresses the sense in which Hamlet’s resolute words contrast with his narrative situation: he is being passively led hundreds of miles away from the object of his revenge. In his previous scene, he was content to satirize Claudius with words rather than stab him in the belly, and, upon returning to the play, he evinces a contemplative mood that seems to have only a distant relation to his personality up to this point. These riddles of Hamlet’s character are always a part of any production of Hamlet, but Branagh’s complete text version highlights the degree to which these discrepancies in Hamlet’s character are a result of the patchwork nature of the texts that constitute him. Rather than a psychological explanation for Hamlet’s bipolar melancholy-mania, Branagh’s production evokes the impression that the mystery of Hamlet’s complexity is a result of his identity as a composite text, comprising different scenes from different productions never necessarily intended to

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fit together. To the extent that Hamlet is our personification of modern subjectivity, Branagh’s Hamlet suggests that personality itself is an amalgamation of texts, and that our perceived reality itself results from an interaction of diverse representations. This sense that Hamlet exists as a collage of disparate texts is rendered much more explicitly in Almereyda’s Hamlet, Hamlet 2000, in which the title character is depicted as a video artist specializing in montage pieces. The casting of Hawke himself in the role of Hamlet refers extratextually to Hawke’s status as a Hollywood stand-in for the Generation X audience. The film that cemented Hawke’s identity in this regard, 1994s Reality Bites, also qualifies as another iteration of Shakespeare’s Hamlet. In Reality Bites, Hawke plays Troy, a philosophy student who wrestles with the possibility that the human condition consists of “a random lottery of meaningless tragedy and a series of near escapes.” A climactic scene in the movie consists of an argument about whether Troy is Hamlet, Yorick, or some fusion of the two. The movie’s grafting of Douglas Coupland’s Gen-X sensibility onto William Shakespeare’s revenge tragedy elevates the slacker credo espoused by Troy into a philosophical ideal with an esteemed literary precedent. At the same time, this Shakespearian referentiality combines with Ethan Hawke’s spokesmodel attractiveness and the movie’s rom-com generic formula to suggest that the character of Troy is simply a collage of texts. Reality Bites articulates this suggestion most clearly through its own iteration of the play-within-a-play, a cheesy MTV-style reediting of the characters’ story that has been compressed into sound-bites, test-marketed, and given the mawkishly hip title, “Reality Bites.” Before having seen the movie, a filmgoer would likely assume that the title of the movie Reality Bites refers to a specific distinction between the la-la land of the slacker characters and the “reality” of the outside world. Upon viewing the film, however, the audience learns that the word “Reality” in the title refers not to “reality” itself as some free-standing ontological category, but to the title of a pilot for a television show that is depicted as the epitome of media distortion. The “reality” of the movie’s title, that is, is an antireality, a nonreality. Furthermore, by giving the movie the same name as the television show that represents the corporate falsification of the characters’ stated anticorporate ethos, the filmmakers insinuate that the film itself is its own corporate falsification, and that the entire movie should be read through the lens of irony, the definition of which plays a prominent role in the film’s screenplay. The film’s pat happy ending can be read ironically as an instance of the characters’ story being hijacked by Hollywood editors. If there is any authenticity in the movie at all, the movie insinuates, it is in Lalaina’s documentary footage of her friends hanging out and talking about old television shows. The search for reality in the hyperreal image-scape of the 1990s sends us back into these video tapes, back into these television shows. Hamlet 2000 picks up where Reality Bites left off, sifting through the media images in search of a way of representing postmodern consciousness. The first time we see Hawke’s Hamlet in Hamlet 2000, he appears on video, delivering his “What a piece of work is man” soliloquy in the form of a web confession. His editing station is surrounded by a literal collage of photographs and images, and the movie itself contains so many clips of other movies that it resembles a montage itself. In Almereyda’s adaptation, the theme of the identity of Hamlet as a text completely

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overwhelms the theme of the identity of Hamlet as a character. To the extent that the movie does provide explanations for Hamlet’s personal behavior, they are all bound up in his status as a consumer of images. The most obvious reason Ethan Hawke’s Hamlet never gets around to killing Claudius is that he is too busy watching movies, including movies of himself. He delivers his “To be or not to be” soliloquy in a video store, a turn of mise-en-scène that conflates the existential concerns of the speech with the choice of movies on display. Hawke’s Hamlet’s movie-watching is a kind of substitute for self-consciousness. “Action” is impossible for Hamlet because it is nothing more than one genre among many in a video store. Hamlet’s supreme choice—To be or not to be?—has been ironized to the point of absurdity, as the choice of whether or not to kill yourself is equated with the choice of whether to rent Lost in Space (1998) or Liar Liar (1997) (two of many 1990s movie titles legible on boxes on the shelves). Another explanation for Hamlet’s inaction is thus that he is terminally jaded by the sheer surplus of filmic images and that he has lost his sense of what is real and what is filmic. A suggestion to this effect appears in the very first scene, when Hamlet’s “What a piece of work is man” soliloquy is accompanied by images from the Gulf War. As Baudrillard’s “war that did not take place,” the Gulf War signifies the collapse of conventional registers of reality and representation as they relate to postmodern war and to the postmodern condition in general. The position of this footage in the montage, accompanying Hamlet’s wonder at the divinity of the human animal, ironically undercuts the sentiment expressed in the dialogue, establishing a videomediated malaise at the heart of Hamlet’s paralysis. But more than simply watching videos, the Hamlet of Hamlet 2000 seems possessed of a video-mediated consciousness. Hamlet’s video soliloquys represent his selfawareness as taking place through the medium of the camera and screen. He does not just speak his soliloquys; he records them or views them. His obsessive viewing of these videos suggests a structural parallel between the structure of Hamlet’s mind and the structure of video footage, which can be infinitely rewound and replayed. His mind is a video screen, one in which the footage from his own home movies is spliced together with footage from a bottomless archive of other movies. That these

Figure 12.1  Hawke’s Hamlet in the video store.

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two sources of footage blend together easily becomes evident in Hamlet’s Mousetrap video collage, which uses stock footage of a saccharine 1950s nuclear family threesome to represent Hamlet’s impression of life before Claudius. This patently artificial imagefamily stands in for Hamlet’s real memories of his childhood in a way that implies that Hamlet’s basic concept of what a happy family should look like is concocted out of a library of video images of happy families. At one point, Hamlet watches a video of John Gielgud performing Hamlet, a clear indication that the movies do in fact speak to him on a very intimate level about his own reality. He is simultaneously being Hamlet and quoting Hamlet, like a video cassette that is both being played and replayed. Hamlet cannot do anything precisely because he is Hamlet, helplessly playing out a scenario written 400 years ago. This sense that Hawke’s Hamlet is a character in a movie receives yet another twist when, after Hamlet tells Ophelia that he loved her not, the scene briefly cuts away to an image of an airplane flying through the sky. This poetic interpolation is reminiscent of a technique Hawke’s Hamlet would employ in one of his arty montage films, suggesting that Hamlet is a character in his own movie. In all of these ways, Hamlet 2000 emphasizes the ontological nature of Hamlet’s dilemma: his pathology and his genius are both presented as effects of the usurpation of his reality by a hyperreal image-scape. Almereyda’s Hamlet follows the trend represented by Zeffirelli’s and Branagh’s Hamlets of focusing on the textuality of Hamlet rather than the deep psychology of the character. All three are movies about Hamlet the time-honored masterpiece as much as they are about the melancholy prince. In the process, these ’90s’ Hamlets extrapolate a hyperreal premise that has always been an intimately embedded component of the play’s thematic organization. Hamlet has always been trapped between genres, spread out among disparate texts, and confounded by the slippery relationship between reality and representation. The Hamlet who is a mascot for the Long ’90s is not the Hamlet who is burdened with a tortured inner self but the Hamlet who is a play of shifting shadows and perspectives, a kaleidoscope of allusions, and a master of simulation capable of blending performance and sincerity together with a consummate seamlessness.

Prospero’s Books The theme of ambiguous ontology runs throughout the works of Shakespeare, but it is in The Tempest that this motif receives its fullest and most complex treatment. Throughout the drama, characters continually doubt their senses, question whether they are awake or dreaming, and wonder whether the people they encounter are real or phantasmal. Prospero, our guide through the drama’s ontological labyrinth, repeatedly warns us to avoid taking reality too literally, most notably in his “cloud-capp’d towers” speech and in his concluding address to the audience. The tradition in Shakespeare scholarship that conflates the bard himself with the main character of his last self-authored play encourages us to see in Prospero’s ontological skepticism a hint to Shakespeare’s own

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philosophy—simultaneously an aesthetic and an ontological one—in which theatrical representation and experiential reality share an underlying identity. Unlike the many more conventional adaptations of The Tempest, Peter Greenaway’s Prospero’s Books focuses on the conceptual rather than the narrative structure of the play. While Greenaway’s film does recapitulate the play’s story from beginning to end, the prevailing mood that informs the production is an atmosphere of hyperreality. John Gielgud plays a Prospero who is a textual, theatrical entity, bound in a Möbius-strip condition of being both character and author. The arrangement of the film around the volumes in Prospero’s library emphasizes one of the play’s most startling metaphors of hyperreality: that it is out of his books that Prospero has managed to conjure up the reality in which he lives. Moreover, the film as a whole, in its dense allusiveness to the history of European arts and sciences, implies that the consciousness of the Western imagination is itself embedded in an elaborate, hyperreal fantasy that has always been marooned on Prospero’s island. The casting of an iconic thespian in the role of Prospero is a time-honored cliché, but Greenaway’s film one-ups the cliché by having Gielgud read the parts of the play’s other characters as well. This dispersal of Gielgud’s famous voice throughout the play’s dramatis personae is one of the most prominent stylistic oddities of Greenaway’s adaptation, and it has multiple effects on the overall impression of reality conveyed by the film. Most immediately, it underscores Greenaway’s conflation of Prospero as a character in the play and as a writer of the play. Shakespeare anticipated postmodernism by several hundred years in The Tempest’s insinuation that the art practised by Prospero, the arrangement of his revenge and of Miranda and Ferdinand’s relationship, is akin to the art practised by writers and directors of theatrical productions. With his palate of spells, his familiarity with the backstage mechanisms of his performance space, and the deft proficiency of his stage-manager, Ariel, Prospero is able to spellbind the people around him into rapt captivity, and, in Hitchcock’s phrase, to play them like a piano. The parallelism established by the play between Prospero’s magic and Shakespeare’s artistry suggests that the condition of dreamlike befuddlement that overwhelms the visitors to Prospero’s island also bewitches the play’s audience. Shakespeare’s fiction has the magical ability to escape the world of make-believe and enchant real human beings with its strange power to twist reality and illusion into an ambiguous third state that is both and neither. Prospero’s Books builds on this theme by explicitly positioning Gielgud’s Prospero as the writer of The Tempest, not only by depicting him writing the play’s dialogue in flowing script but also by having him read many of the other character’s lines. In the play’s exposition scene, in which Prospero speaks to Miranda for the first time about the circumstances of how they came to be exiled, Gielgud reads Miranda’s lines in unison with the actress who plays Miranda, emphasizing the extent to which Miranda is a passive partner in the father-daughter relationship. Throughout the dialogue, Miranda is actually shown to be asleep, as if the conversation were taking place in a dream. In the play, Prospero withholds and imparts information to Miranda in a way that reflects his use of knowledge as a source of power, and this power of information is followed by his more surreal but no less magical power to cause Miranda to fall asleep when Ariel arrives. Greenaway’s decision to film Miranda as magically

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asleep throughout her first scene foregrounds Shakespeare’s theme of sleep as an arena of ambiguous reality and establishes Prospero as an artist whose medium is dreams. At other times, Gielgud’s is the only voice delivering dialogue, as in the opening scene of both the movie and the play, the “tempest” scene that gives the play its name. Whereas in the play, this is an ensemble scene performed by at least five characters along with an unspecified number of mariners, Greenaway depicts Gielgud’s Prospero alone in a bath á la David’s Marat, and in a book-lined study, á la van Eyck’s Saint Jerome, reading and writing all of the parts himself. Rather than the tone of comic panic presented in the first scene of Shakespeare’s play, Greenaway uses this first scene to establish the theme of gleeful illusion-weaving that the film will go on to elaborate. The first line of Shakespeare’s play, “Boatswain,” is presented not as the urgent appeal of a doomed ship’s master but as a curious phonological and graphological artifact, spoken and written multiple times as if for the purpose of accentuating the word’s strangeness. As he repeats the word over and over again, Gielgud laughs exuberantly, delighting in the word as a simple pair of syllables, stripping the word of signification and giving it over to a kind of verbal music, a pronouncement of the power of the voice itself to create, to fill a room with sound, and to assert a human presence. As Gielgud splashes with childlike delight in the creative urge represented by the play’s dialogue, a muse-like Ariel urinates in an endless stream, bringing together a number of images that connect the play’s water imagery to the theme of free-flowing imaginative power. Prospero is simultaneously a character in a play, the writer of the play, and an actor in the play. In his final monologue, Prospero’s appeal to the audience for their applause is not so much a break with his character as a revelation that his character has been an elaborate, self-conscious performance. Indeed, the very source of Prospero’s magic is precisely his ability to leap across ontological planes, to be simultaneously in the story (as a character), in control of the story (as a writer), and also in some third dimension that is neither fictional nor meta-fictional, but which is rooted in Prospero’s recognition of the illusory nature of all of human perception (like an actor, who, being the embodiment of some writer’s conception, is literally “such stuff as dreams are made on”). Greenaway seizes on this surprisingly contemporary-sounding effect in Shakespeare’s play and extends the premise to encompass himself as the film’s director. Indeed, Greenaway’s “voice” is just as pervasive in Prospero’s Books as Gielgud’s. In characteristic defiance of the popular culture’s cinematic aesthetic, according to which a director is required to subordinate his or her artistic vision to the dictates of narrative, Greenaway’s signature directorial effects are not only present in every frame of the film but also actually overwhelm Shakespeare’s story to such an extent that an audience unfamiliar with Shakespeare’s play (and with the various Romantic and postmodern commentaries on Shakespeare’s play) would find it impossible to follow the narrative. The presence of Shakespeare’s original text in Greenaway’s film is both all-pervasive and illegible, like the over-written text of a palimpsest. Greenaway’s fondness for long, elaborate takes, dense arrangements of human figures, and painterly allusiveness, along with his visual experimentation and deliberate narrative pacing, fills the film with the director’s distinctive presence and refracts the signification of the film’s central magus not only to refer to Gielgud, Shakespeare, and Prospero but to include Greenaway as

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well. In defiance of a realist ontology according to which real artists create illusory representations of reality, Prospero’s Books depicts a hyperreal condition in which the art and the artist both inhabit a shifting landscape of ontological indeterminacy. Of the many devices Greenaway uses to make Shakespeare’s play into his own film, the most conspicuous is the interpolation of the twenty-four eponymous books. The famous dictum from Godard’s Le Petit Soldat (1963) that “cinema is truth at 24 frames per second” audaciously asserts that image-making technologies constitute the bedrock of postmodern perception. The resonance of the quotation results from the sense in which Godard both asserts a realist faith in the possibility of truth, while simultaneously redefining this realist value by displacing it from the domain of direct experience into the domain of mediated images; the representations become the reality. In characteristic fashion, Greenaway’s appropriation of Godard’s remark as a structural principle for Prospero’s Books applies the sentiment expressed in the quotation to the film itself (implying that this elaborately choreographed cinematic artifact is itself a statement of “truth”), while simultaneously extending this idea to envelop not only cinematic representation but literary representation as well. While there is a realistic sense in which cinema does tell the truth (it uses light to record the existence of physical objects), books, especially works of fantastic fiction such as Shakespeare’s The Tempest, bear no direct relationship to any realist definition of “truth.” The search to find what kind of “truth” is embodied in a work of fantasy fiction cannot come to rest on anything as solid as a visual image; it continues to penetrate into an ontological labyrinth where truth resides not in what is visible or even in what is actual, but in moods, ideas, states of consciousness, and dreams. There is certainly a sense in which this psychological maze is the foundational truth of human existence, but to acknowledge as much is to abandon an Enlightenment faith in an objective reality in favor of a dreamscape of true lies. Greenaway’s Prospero inhabits just such a dreamscape. Greenaway’s emphasis on Prospero’s books as the source of the magus’s power corresponds with Caliban’s assessment in the play (“Remember/first to possess his books, for without them/He’s but a sot” [III.ii.99–101]), but it also represents a statement about the foundational role played by literacy to all Western cultural achievements. In Greenaway’s film, Prospero has used the magic of his books to build a “poor cell” that is a dizzying collage of classical, renaissance, romantic, and postmodern allusions and motifs. Like Crusoe, he has modeled his island exile after the cultural values of his native land. The magic power of his books, however, has allowed Greenaway’s Prospero to create a reality that is like Renaissance Milan as it would be depicted in one of Umberto Eco’s Californian wax museums, with iconic images jumbled together, anachronisms abounding, scales magnified, and the whole panoply staged as an elaborate spectacle. Prospero’s ability to conjure up such a world out of his twenty-four books reflects the “real magic” of literacy to stock consciousness with imaginary contents, to transfer knowledge and techne across temporal and spatial distances, and, ultimately, to transform reality itself into a reflection of the content of books. Greenaway’s script teases out a nuance that is present in Shakespeare’s play, in which Prospero’s style of book-magic exists in contrast with the nature magic of the witch Sycorax, whom Prospero has bested and

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displaced. The play’s backstory suggests that the abstract knowledge represented by literacy has conquered the embodied knowledge of nature, and Greenaway depicts Prospero’s island as one in which all natural forms have been subordinated to the artistry of the magus (Shakespeare/Prospero/Greenaway/Western civilization). As dense and busy as Greenaway’s images tend to be, nothing is ever left to chance; every detail of the composition is always tightly controlled. Greenaway’s images are painterly not only or even primarily in their direct or stylistic allusions to famous paintings, but more importantly because the ontology of his tableaux has more in common with oil painting than with photography because of Greenaway’s rigorous dominion over every brushstroke that appears in his film. Every nuance in the world of the film is meticulously orchestrated by Greenaway/Prospero; it is a world of total mind, a phantasmic mindscape that even reaches out to include other people. Prospero and Greenaway use their respective forms of magic to transform the island’s resident spirits (in Prospero’s case) and a large cast of film extras (in Greenaway’s) into sprawling neoclassical tableaux. In the introduction to his elaborate screenplay for the film, Greenaway explains that most of the architectural and painterly styles he borrows for the purposes of adorning his island exile “are historical or contemporary to [Prospero’s] life, but being a magician he can also slip time and borrow and quote the future” (12). This is a roundabout way of saying that the world elaborately staged in Prospero’s Books is not uniquely that of a seventeenth-century Milanese, but that of a seventeenth-century Milanese as seen through the imagination of a twentieth-century Renaissance man. Greenaway, the real-world filmmaker, and Prospero, the fictional magus, collaborate across ontological boundaries to build a fantasy world that turns the raw materials of light and time into a visionary landscape in which reality and representation coalesce into a third order of being: a hyperreality. The iconography of the imagery itself, drawing so heavily on allegorical and classical motifs, suggests the manner in which the history of Western art is itself a precession of signs that relies more heavily on recycling and reiteration than on invention. The Renaissance, conventionally understood to be the comingof-age of Western Europe, is itself an elaborate project of reiterating the forms and philosophies of the classical world, famously rediscovered through key texts of ancient scholarship. European civilization, like Prospero’s island, popped up out of pages of written texts in the same way that the illustrations in A Bestiary of Past, Present, and Future Animals come to life and crawl out of the book, or the way that the buildings in A Book of Architecture and Other Music fold into shape as the book opens, echoing in their Piranisi-esque forms the buildings that Prospero has constructed around himself. While the reality engendered by Prospero’s books is frequently rich and beautiful, it is also strewn with scenes of horror. During the long credit-sequence tracking shot that introduces us to the texture of Prospero’s magic world, Prospero strides regally past the progeny of his craft, including figures drawn not only from Veronese and Botticelli but also from Hieronymous Bosch and other visionary torture-scapes. For a minute or so during Prospero’s tour of his domain, Michael Nyman’s stirring score fades out, and, as Prospero walks majestically past a series of tableaux that advance from lightning-lit

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arrangements of classical figures associated with drowning to firelit images of “John White” Indians, the soundtrack plays the ominous sounds of the thunder from the storm and the percussive sounds of mechanical clanking. Greenaway’s camera passes just as indifferently as Prospero’s person past the violence and Orientalism that constitute the dark underbelly of the world they have brought into being. At the same time that the film celebrates and revels in its pageantry of extravagant spectacles, the very formality of the artist’s tableaux, the fanatical precision and single-mindedness that is evidenced in their studied complexity, suggests a mania for power that we also see reflected in the less admirable traits of Prospero’s personality. The same books that have made him a masterful technician and artist have also made him a controlfreak, a colonizer, and a crypto-fascist. The insinuation, understated in The Tempest but pronounced in Prospero’s Books, is that the Western imagination itself is stranded in a hall of mirrors of its own invention, so dazzled by the Faustian power granted by its vast library of representations that it is unable to perceive the systemic oppression implicit in its structure. Shakespeare provides a simple, if nihilistic, solution to this dilemma of Western consciousness: Drown the books. The height of Prospero’s accumulated wisdom is expressed in his conclusion that the ultimate lesson that he has learned from the books is that the books need to be destroyed. Prospero’s renunciation of his power and his island kingdom to return to the bourgeois banality of the mainland recalls such landmark statements of postmodern negation as William Gibson’s electronic selferasing poem Agrippa or the last chapter of Toni Morrison’s Beloved. This rejection of the books is of a piece with Prospero’s decision to pardon his usurpers; both decisions rely on a rupture with history, a commitment to present realities rather than to the representations forged in the past. Greenaway’s film identifies Prospero’s decision to forgive the conspirators as a turning point in the narrative. Once released from the grip of Prospero’s grudge, Alonso, Ferdinand, and the others finally speak in their own voices, rather than being over-voiced by Gielgud. Even Caliban gets a reprieve, suggesting that an integral part of Prospero’s enlightenment is his determination to release control over others in order to allow them to express their own perspectives and independent identities. In this gesture, the film seems to be making a definitive break with the hyperreal ontology of its preceding scenes. Rather than a reality entirely determined by the orbital, solipsistic representation of representations, the emergence of other voices suggests a path back to a consensual, social reality that is a collective enterprise. This emerging social realism, however, is quickly extinguished when Prospero, having destroyed his books, turns to the audience to deliver his final monologue in which he reestablishes the sense that everything that has happened over the course of the story, up to and including the part where other people spoke in their own voices, has all been an effect of his artistry. Greenaway amplifies this ontologically subversive gesture in Shakespeare’s play by arranging to have the filmic image of Gielgud speaking Prospero’s final soliloquy recede into a black backdrop. As Prospero exposes himself as an actor, the director exposes the actor himself as a cinematic illusion, invisibly manipulated by the whimsy of a more distant magus. Greenaway, however, has not given up his power,

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and therefore has not heeded the “moral” of The Tempest that Western technocratic bibliotopia needs to be disavowed and dismantled. Greenaway even rewrites the ending of the story so that, although 23 of Prospero’s books are destroyed, the 24th and 25th books, The Complete Works of William Shakespeare and Prospero’s own manuscript of The Tempest, are rescued from the water by Caliban. On the one hand, Greenaway’s decision to have Caliban rescue these books is less nihilistic than Shakespeare’s wholesale renunciation of the power represented by Prospero’s craft. Greenaway seems to suggest that some texts should be saved—that there are some artifacts of Western literacy that have redeeming value and that the project of Western civilization itself is not to be condemned irrevocably. On the other hand, Caliban/Greenaway’s rescue of these volumes suggests that Prospero’s spell has not really been lifted. Whereas Shakespeare’s play announces a clean break with Prospero’s magic, Caliban and Greenaway smuggle a seed of this magic out of the movie and into the world. This twist in the story reflects the historical circumstances of the publication of Shakespeare’s plays. Shakespeare himself seems to have been content to let his own complete works drown in the sea of history, making no effort to have his plays published. He may have agreed with Prospero that personal and cultural salvation lay in the unwriting of books rather than the endless production of them. That Shakespeare’s plays survive is due to the work of various Calibans and Greenaways who fished his scripts out of the water and, seven years after the playwright’s death, compiled the First Folio. As a result of their labors, Shakespeare’s plays have had a profound influence on the imagination of the West and of the world. Harold Bloom has even gone so far as to propose that Shakespeare’s plays are responsible for “inventing the human,” speculating that the worldview that informs our social reality is itself an aftereffect of Shakespeare’s representations of fictional people. Greenaway’s ending therefore is a truer reflection than Shakespeare’s of the extent to which the magic of representation has proliferated beyond Prospero’s island to usurp any notion of direct experience and become the baseline reality for contemporary consciousness.

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Ambiguous Origins in Star Wars: Episode I—The Phantom Menace The tagline for Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace (1999) reads, “Every generation has a legend. Every journey has a first step. Every saga has a beginning.” The central premise of the promotional campaign for the prequel was that Episode I would transport fans deeper into the story, back to the origin of a narrative that is well underway by the time represented in the “original trilogy,” which had actually begun, audiences learned, with Episode IV. The prequel series, that is, promised to be more original than the original Star Wars movies, opening up a perspective in relation to which the movies that were released in 1977, 1980, and 1983 were actually derivative of the movie that was being newly released in 1999. Contributing to this involuted temporality is George Lucas’s frequently made assertion that computer graphics technology of the late 1990s had finally made it possible for him to realize the vision he had imagined for the original Star Wars movies, but which he had been unable to bring to the screen because of the limitations of conventional cinematography. In addition to taking us back to the origins of the story, therefore, The Phantom Menace also promised to reveal a film that was closer to Lucas’s original vision for the look and feel of the Star Wars universe. In both the cases of the narrative structure and of its creative development, therefore, The Phantom Menace contradicts the commonplace assumption that originality and temporal precedence always go together. The Phantom Menace is an original that came after its copy, and in this sense, it is consistent with a wider trend in late twentieth-century culture that problematizes the classical definition of originality. Some challenges to the conventional concept of originality include Harold Bloom’s contention in the 1970s that poets invent the work of the poets by whom they are influenced, the deconstructionist position that privileges the circulation of signs and tropes over the individual creation of thoughts and attitudes, and the postmodern historiography that represents “the past” as a construct that is continually being reconstructed in present time. In its own way, The Phantom Menace participates in this cultural reevaluation of the temporality of origins and originality. Baudrillard is another writer whose thinking has been influential in recharting the topography of origins for a postmodern age. His description of simulation as “a copy without an original” is of a piece with the pervasive theme of temporal inversion that characterizes his philosophy. The classical idea of an origin is that it acts as a kind of tent-peg in linear time, holding down an apparatus of unidirectional forward progress

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through the force of its ability to connect a present circumstance to an original, past-bound event. The idea of an origin defines a circumstance as an effect of a specific cause and simultaneously characterizes reality itself as a terrain where individual effects trace back in a direct line to their corresponding causes. Baudrillard’s writing employs reverse temporalities, fatalistic aporias, and a radical flattening of the historical dimension in a way that makes the notion of an origin completely obsolete. Rather than picturing human beings against a backdrop of a receding history, Baudrillard challenges his readers to confront the absolute present of postmodern culture in which historical depth dissolves into currents of simultaneity, recurrence, reversal, and paradox. In Baudrillard’s hyperreal time-sense, origins lose their transcendental status as stable reference points to become undifferentiated counters in the exchange of semantic circulation. Several popular films of the late twentieth century depict a Baudrillardian temporality in which origins become enfolded into the circulation of causes, most notably Chris Marker’s La Jettee and Terry Gilliam’s 1995 homage to Marker’s film, 12 Monkeys. In various ways, the films of the Back to the Future, Terminator, and Bill and Ted (1989 and 1991) franchises also experiment with this trope of going back in time to alter the present in ways that warp past and future into a paradoxical Möbius strip of ongoing interactivity. Although George Lucas’s story does not employ a time-travel device, the entire conceit of staging an epic prequel to Star Wars works a similar temporal inversion in the experience of the film viewer. The term prequel itself had been film geek jargon since 1979 when Butch and Sundance: The Early Days inspired the neologism, but The Phantom Menace introduced the word into the common parlance. While there is much that a prequel has in common with a sequel—both perform variations on the thematics of their root films—a prequel takes place in a kind of narratological shadow of its original, whereas a sequel is free to spin out into an unwritten future. A prequel can never escape the narratological pull of the future story that has already taken place. Interestingly, this strange temporality of prequel-dom is the topic of a conversation that takes place in the opening scenes of The Phantom Menace. When Obi-Wan reports a sense of “elusive” unease, Qui-Gon Jinn counsels his Padawan, “Don’t center on your anxieties, Obi-Wan. Keep your concentration here and now, where it belongs.” The anxiety troubling Obi-Wan is certainly the vague dread that they are in the opening scene of an epic disaster that is preordained to end in utter, galactic catastrophe. Rather than existing in a state of transcendental self-sufficiency, these original actors, the characters of the prequel, are in thrall to events that happen thirty years later in narrative time. In this fatal time-sense, the origin is nothing more than a debased pre-extension of the future. The audience knows what Obi-Wan dimly senses, that the characters in The Phantom Menace, although they believe themselves to be original actors, are actually puppets of a future that is common knowledge to the movie’s Boomer and Gen X audiences. The ontological structure of a prequel undermines the originality of origins by representing originary characters and situations as subservient to a fate that is beyond their understanding. This sense is reduplicated throughout the plot of The Phantom Menace, in which characters are routinely manipulated by other characters in ways that render questionable their capacity for free will. The Trade Federation leaders

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are easily manipulated by Darth Sidious; Amidala is easily manipulated by Palpatine; Boss Nass is easily manipulated by Amidala; and Qui-Gon easily manipulates Boss Nass, Watto, and the Jedi Council into doing what he wants them to do. Ultimately, it is George Lucas who is making everyone’s decisions for them, and so characterological motivation in The Phantom Menace is determined not by psychology but by teleological narrative forces that are completely external to the individual actors. This strange ontology of the story accounts for the movie’s disjunction between what the story appears to be about and what it is really about. The Phantom Menace appears to be about a wise old man who befriends a cherub-cheeked Christ child and succeeds in his quest to assure a bright future for the boy. In its context as a prequel, however, Qui-Gon is a headstrong dupe, the Christ child is actually an Antichrist, and the outcome of the old Jedi’s compassion and faith is a generation of genocide and tyranny. These two storylines can coexist simultaneously in the movie simply because questions of decision making do not pertain to the movie’s characters, whose decisions are handed down by the necessities of the future storyline. This theme of fatality starkly differentiates the Star Wars that came out in 1977 from the Star Wars of the prequels. What people loved about Star Wars in 1977 was its representation of an escapist fantasy-space where anything was possible. A ragtag assortment of dreamers, space pirates, wizards, robots, and aliens drove fast and chased adventure in an open-ended playground of infinite wish-fulfillment. This emancipatory dream-dimension receives its fatal blow in The Empire Strikes Back, in which the climactic tragedy turns out to be that, while Luke Skywalker thought he was chasing his dreams into the future, he had actually been circling back into an encounter with his origins: his mortal enemy is his father. The trap continues to close in in Return of the Jedi, when it is disclosed that Leia is really his sister, signifying a universe that is getting increasingly claustrophobic and inescapable. For all the expansiveness of its space-scapes, The Phantom Menace plays out entirely in a tight-knit chamber-galaxy of interweaving characters and locations fated to the tedious confinement of a cosmos in which, as Qui-Gon explains, “Nothing happens by accident.” Rather than bringing us closer to a magically potent origin, then, the Star Wars prequels reveal an origin that is inert and derivative. Qui-Gon’s advice to his Padawan that he should focus on the “here and now” and avoid dwelling on the future at the expense of his mindfulness of the present moment, however, provides a compelling counter-point to the fatalistic time-sense. Despite being narratively subordinated to the movies that already exist, The Phantom Menace and the prequel series generally have an uncanny ability to shape the meaning of the story that the audience already knows. This is literally true in the case of changes Lucas made to the original films—the replacement in the remastered edition of Return of the Jedi, for example, of the ghost of old Anakin with the postprequel Hayden Christensen Anakin. In this case, the prequels do manage to exert an agency of their own, a Marty McFly-esque ability to alter events in the past tense by manipulating events in the pluperfect tense. For the most part, the storyline follows the narrative lines of force that had been laid down by the 1977–83 films, merely filling in the details with which attentive viewers of Star Wars were already familiar, mounting depictions of such staples of Star Wars prehistory as the Jedi Council, the Old Republic, and Obi-Wan

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and Anakin’s friendship. In certain plot points, however, The Phantom Menace actually performs an unexpected rewiring of the earlier films, most notably in its revelation that, in addition to being the father of Luke and Leia, which we knew, Anakin is also the “father” of the droid C3P0, which no viewer would have guessed. One might suspect that the very reason Lucas included this plot point into The Phantom Menace was out of rebellion against the oppressive drudgery any writer would feel at simply scripting out a story that has already been told. With this stroke, Lucas demonstrates that prequels are not necessarily entirely at the mercy of their ontological status; they can “strike back” with their own surprises, so that now, any fan of the Star Wars franchise who takes this plot point seriously will pay a very different kind of attention to the scenes in The Empire Strikes Back in which Darth Vader and C3P0 share screen space (this is the only movie of the 1977–83 sequence in which the paths of these two characters cross). Indeed, Lucas invites a rereading of the supposed insignificance of C3P0 to the story, so that Darth Vader can be regarded as a character driven to violence and evil by the loss of his childhood toy. Qui-Gon’s description of midi-chlorians as the biological basis for the Force is a similar detail from The Phantom Menace that cannot help propagating backward (or forward) into the rest of the narrative. It is not surprising that both of these plot points were met with extreme derision and even hostility by Star Wars fans, whose familiar Star Wars galaxy had suddenly been altered in unexpected ways by narrative energies welling up from a new temporal bedrock. In these acts of narratological subversion, Lucas’s film exemplifies that, just as the so-called origin is actually a derivative by-product of the present, so the present does not have any transcendental status as the “origin” of the past. The present is no more sacrosanct than the past; the time-sense of prequel-dom has relativized both the past and the present, dislodging both from a linear continuum and giving them over to a temporal geometry characterized by bidirectional symbiosis. The tug-of-war between the past story and the future story bends the entire narrative into an uroboros, a self-referential treadmill-world that is disconnected from our own reality not only by distances of time and space (“A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away”) but also by an alien temporality and ontology of characters enmeshed in a flat tautology; they do what they do because they are who they are, like Pirandello’s characters in search of an author. Indeed, the significance of the narrative as a whole relies on our understanding of events that are not discussed at all in the movie because they take place in the characters’ future. When Qui-Gon introduces Obi-Wan to Anakin, he does so with a bravura that applies not to the present moment of their situation but that speaks over the character’s heads to the audience, the only consciousness in the Star Wars galaxy capable of grasping the full significance of this piece of dialogue. When Jabba the Hutt emerges to greet the cheers of the audience at the pod race, he is simultaneously receiving the applause of the fans of Return of the Jedi, who are supposedly thrilled to be treated to this cameo appearance of a favorite character. When Sebulba uses the word “poodoo” as an expletive, attentive fans of Return of the Jedi understand that the phrase “bantha poodoo,” which the subtitles had translated as “bantha fodder” in 1983, actually means something having to do with the other end of the Tatooinian beast of burden. The Phantom Menace

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uses the meta-cinematic device of subtitles to direct this in-joke over the heads of the characters and outside of the Star Wars universe altogether to speak directly to the film’s earthbound audience. This moment and many others like it throughout Episode I refer neither backward nor forward, nor to anything in the universe of the narrative, but out into the transdimensional hyperspace of the movie screen window. 1977’s Star Wars was a film-buff ’s mash-up of a handful of specific films (The Hidden Fortress [1958], The Searchers [1956], The Dam Busters [1955], Flash Gordon Conquers the Universe [1940]), but more broadly, it wove itself together out of generic conventions from samurai movies, Westerns, Second World War flicks, and sword-and-sorcery sagas. In this sense, the Star Wars universe has always been characterized by an extradiegetic referentiality that points to constellations of cinematic predecessors. The Phantom Menace obeys the same genre-splicing logic as the 1977 film—the podrace sequence at the center of the movie is an extended homage to Ben-Hur (1959), and Episode I makes sidewise allusions to Metropolis, Gunga Din (1939), and dozens of other classic films. But The Phantom Menace applies a hyperreal twist to its familiar emphasis on postmodern allusiveness in that the film it most obsessively alludes to is its own postquel: Star Wars Episode I is a distinctly post–Star Wars movie. This is the case not only in Episode I’s obvious narrative relationship to the other Star Wars films but also in the DNA of its identity as a genre film. Like so many other sci-fi blockbusters that have been released since 1977, it is the kind of movie that wears its debt to Star Wars on its sleeve in its entire approach to the project of filmmaking. The fact that The Phantom Menace both is a Star Wars movie and is like a Star Wars movie gives it an intensely navel-gazing quality, one which blurs the lines between originality and derivativeness. In the process, the prequel/postquel duo comes to orbit one another like a binary star system, leaving behind referentiality altogether to reflect only each other in a bottomless mise en abyme. In this closed circuit, the concept of origins gives way to cosmos of circumstances that have always been and will always be the case—a hyperreal world of absolute surfaces. This quality of ambiguous or impossible origins is communicated most comprehensively in the use of Computer Generated Imagery throughout The Phantom Menace. Until the mid-1990s, one of the most salient ontological characteristics of the filmic image had always been the real-world referentiality of the photographic subject. No matter how manipulatively film had employed illusory techniques to seduce and mislead its audience, photographic film carried the conviction of being a witness to real-world people, places, and events. By generating photorealistic images that have no correlation to any real-world referents, however, CGI revolutionizes the ontological structure of the filmic image to detach it from any real-world reference points. CGI is the apotheosis of the principle that Baudrillard identified in baroque stucco and postmodern DNA—the epitome of simulation run amuck and substituting the concept of origin for an ecstasy of code. Indeed, it was the CGI “hypersaurs” of Jurassic Park that convinced Lucas that computer animation had become sufficiently advanced for him to sculpt an entire film out of this infinitely malleable substance. In this sense, it is very directly the case that The Phantom Menace owes not only its technological origins but also its conceptual origins to CGI and its promise of inventing a world ex nihilo.

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CGI is so ingrained in The Phantom Menace’s DNA that its glowing unreality saturates every moment of the film. Not only does almost every shot in the film contain at least some CGI elements but also the spectral mood of existing in a computergenerated virtual reality permeates even those elements of the film that are genuinely photographic. One of the most striking features of the 1977–83 trilogy was its use of dramatic geographical location shoots to create a sense of otherworldly terrains. These geographical sites ground the fantasy of the Star Wars narrative to physical landscapes in a way that lends a real-world tangibility to the far-flung worlds of Tatooine, Hoth, and Endor. This sense of embodied space is completely absent from The Phantom Menace. Whether the characters in Episode I are standing on Tatooine, Coruscant, or Naboo, they always look as if they are standing apart in some air-conditioned netherspace. Of course, this is exactly what they are doing. In promotional interviews for The Phantom Menace, the cast regularly spoke about the novelty of being required to act in a vacuum of green screens with only a vague impression of what their characters were really supposed to be experiencing. Naturally, this disjunction between the actors’ environment and that of the characters is translated into the film as an uncanny sense of displacement and disjunction between the photographic characters and the computergenerated cosmos. This all-pervasive effect reinforces the sense that the characters are participating in a story that is beyond their comprehension, and that their acts have a significance that originates somewhere other than their embodied situation and personal psychology. Indeed, The Phantom Menace can be read as a film about a cosmos where individuals completely lack what Heidegger called Dasein, being-inthe-world. They somehow occupy space, but they do not dwell in it. They participate in the narrative, but they do not generate it or sustain it; their existence takes place in a virtual reality simulation that runs parallel to them, in the background or in the foreground, but which does not intersect with them in any way. The movie’s personification of this effect is Jar-Jar Binks, the most prominent CGI character in The Phantom Menace. Because Jar-Jar is composed of the same digital substance as the rest of the movie, he is the only major character who seems fully at home in the CGI world. His Buster Keaton-esque physical comedy routines require him to bodily interact with the actual “things” in the world of the movie in a much more complex way than can be said of any of the movie’s human characters. His ostensible clumsiness provides countless opportunities for him to demonstrate his capacity to inhabit something that actually resembles embodied space, even if the reason for this resemblance is precisely that neither he nor his physical environment exists at all, or that they both exist on the same ontological plane constituted by digital code. This may be one of the reasons that Jar-Jar is so widely despised. The Star Wars fan-base has been outspoken in its derision of the clumsy Gungan, but, in doing so, they only follow the cue of the movie’s human characters, who routinely deprecate Jar-Jar and treat him with contempt. The enlightened Jedis who believe in the connectedness of all living things refer to Jar-Jar dismissively as a primitive life-form, and Anakin, Jar-Jar’s supposed target-audience, similarly belittles him. Although C3P0 received similar treatment in the 1977–83 trilogy, the fact that he was a physical object who shared space, tactility, and haptic presence with the other actors

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lent a friendliness to the characters’ teasing that is not evident in the treatment of JarJar by the human characters in The Phantom Menace. Because he exists in a different ontological register, the human characters never establish any empathy with Jar-Jar, and, if anything, they seem to resent him for being more “at home” in the world of the movie than they are. Jar-Jar is an indigenous resident of this CGI world, as suggested by his and the other Gungans’ portrayal as Indo-Caribbean “Gunga Dins,” whereas the human beings are offworlders and interlopers. In this context, the humans’ derision of Jar-Jar is comparable to the derision colonizers have historically expressed for native peoples. To the extent that Jar-Jar does receive any gratitude for his important role in facilitating a military alliance between the Gungan and human populations of Naboo, it is as a delegate in the contingent of Gungans who receive an award from the humans in an elaborate ceremony in the movie’s final scene. This scene, the capstone of the movie, appears to epitomize the movie’s project of uniting photographic imagery and computer animation, with the CGI Gungans marching in to meet the humans and puppets on the hither side of the ontological boundary. The scene is more effective, however, as an expression of the disjunction between these two realms in that the framing and composition of the shots keep the CGI characters and real-world characters from appearing in the same shot, and even when Amidala and Boss Nass hold the glowing orb simultaneously, where their hands should be touching, they simply overlap, providing visual proof that while a political alliance may have been achieved between the Gungans and the humans, the ontological alliance between their two dimensions is still merely an aspiration. Moreover, by centering the final swelling tableau of the movie around Boss Nass’s triumphant acceptance of the award, the movie suggests that the victory of the film as a whole goes to the CGI characters whom Boss Nass politically and ontologically represents. The award itself is a glowing orb of the type that could only exist in CGI space, and Boss Nass is clearly much more comfortable holding it than Natalie Portman; it really belongs to him, as does the entire structure and essence of the movie itself. The human beings and puppets—the photographic depictions of

Figure 13.1  Boss Nass and his CGI tribe celebrate their victory over the humans and puppets.

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entities that can trace their origins back to real things in our human world—look on passively as they are upstaged by the triumph of characters who signify the absence of intraworldly origin. This final scene is the crowning expression of the tendency throughout the film of the CGI-scape to upstage the human characters. Exposition scenes regularly take place against elaborate and visually dense backdrops that are vastly more compelling than what the characters are saying. This effect is amplified by the woodenness of the movie’s dialogue and the flat acting style of all of the movie’s human performers. In action scenes, the human beings disappear inside a cloud of elaborately detailed movement that has the compositional quality of a Jackson Pollack painting. Backgrounds and peripheral details are, paradoxically, the real heart of The Phantom Menace, a condition that reflects George Lucas’ temperament as a filmmaker. Lucas’ famous impatience with living actors and his tin ear for human speech are of a piece with the Neoplatonist principles espoused by philosophers of the Force. “Luminous beings are we,” Yoda asserts in The Empire Strikes Back, pinching Mark Hamill’s arm with his puppet fingers to clarify, “not this crude matter.” In this sense, Jar-Jar Binks is the epitome of Lucas’ vision of the true self: a being existing as pure light, liberated from the material world, and without origin, end-point, or any other markers of temporality. Lucas’ artistic project in The Phantom Menace is to depict a world in which “crude flesh” is dramatically subordinated to immortal luminosity. That luminosity— represented visually as a hyper-lucid brightness of primary colors—saturates every frame of The Phantom Menace, arguably to the detriment of the film’s bid for digitally achieved realism. The lines are too sharp, the visuals are too crisp, to simulate the experience of human sight. In the mid-’70s and early ’80s, when George Lucas’s Star Wars characters traveled through hyperspace, Eco also wrote his essay, “Travels in Hyperreality” and Baudrillard developed his definition of hyperreality as “the product of an irradiating synthesis of combinatory models in a hyperspace without atmosphere” (SS 2). For Lucas in the ’70s, the “hyper” prefix was almost certainly inspired by mathematical ideas rather than semantic ones, but the Lucas of 1999 has managed to stage his movies in a semantic hyperspace in which the texture of perceptual experience itself dissolves into the signification of “a copy without an original.” This computer-animated dimension, furthermore, is one in which the creative mind itself is completely liberated from the constraints of any external reality. As the proponents of CGI proclaim, the only limits to what can be represented are the limits of what can be imagined. Where previous generations of artists had contended with the logistical exigencies of their materials—the veins in a block of marble, the metrical demands of a sonnet, the unique timbre and range of a singer’s voice, for example—sculptors working in CGI are artists who have transcended matter altogether to work in the medium of pure mind. Challenges associated with the material demands of the art form had always been particularly acute for filmmakers, who, in addition to having to work with complex and costly technical instruments, also regularly rely on intricate networks of finance, talent, and marketplace trends. The history of movie-making is largely the history of how film makers have adapted to these conditions in the same way that the history of sculpture is the history of how artists have learned to manipulate

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physical matter. That tolerances and parameters of an artistic medium are an essential component of the creative process itself is an artistic principle that emphasizes the embodiment of the artist and the physical there-ness of the world. Lucas’s project of dispensing with this principle is consistent with a Neoplatonist ontology that sees the world and the mind as antagonists rather than as partners. The creative spirit of CGI as Lucas employs it is similar to the irrational exuberance characteristic of 1990s financial markets, which suggested that conventional economic laws had been superseded and that infinite economic growth was now possible. “Now that we had developed digital technology,” Lucas explains in a typical interview, “I was free to do basically anything I wanted” (“Interview”). In The Phantom Menace, the conventional rules of filmmaking and cinematic aesthetics have both been blasted into hyperspace, and the audience finds itself thrown into a new kind of artistic experience without precedent or context. This theme of ambiguous or impossible origins also pervades the narrative of The Phantom Menace, which is set in motion by a trade dispute, as we are told in the first paragraph of the opening crawl. The commodity being traded, however, is never identified, and, although there is sign of great wealth in the palaces of Naboo, there is never any indication of any economic activity of any sort. The resulting impression is that Lucas is not depicting trade in the Adam Smithian sense, the trading of goods and services, but trade in the Baudrillardian sense—free-floating value that exists without reference to any object as an ecstasy of circulation—presenting an economic parallel to the temporality of Episode I’s prequel-ness. A similar effect characterizes the movie’s depiction of political power. Darth Sidious, representing all the shadowy and unscrupulous qualities of power, exists in stark contrast to Senator Palpatine, who represents the smiling, seductive public face of power. That both faces belong to the same person is never officially revealed in the film, in which the question, “Who is Darth Sidious?” is handled as if it were some fiendishly clever mystery. The movie does not “reveal” the mystery, and it does not even try very hard to conceal the mystery, because it assumes in advance that we already know the answer, that Palpatine is Sidious, both because we know that Palpatine is played by the same actor who plays the Emperor in Return of the Jedi and, more fundamentally, because, as good postmodern hyperreal post-Lewinsky citizens, we know that Palpatine is always Sidious, that power is a free-floating structure with its own laws of reality in which conventional, realist, psychology-based explanations of human behavior are superseded by obvious mysteries. Palpatine/Sidious’s duplicity is in fact echoed by Amidala’s shell-game with her own identity. One minute, she is the queen, speaking and acting as the queen, and the next minute, she is one of a batch of identical handmaidens, but then—wait—the real queen is the real queen after all. If the queen had not revealed herself, would the words that the handmaiden spoke in the guise of the queen carry the force of law? And how would it ever be possible to know whether your duly elected queen were really herself or a simulation? The real queen/simularcral queen binary interacts with the Palpatine/Sidious binary to blur the lines between the shadowy hologram and the living face of power, suggesting that they have both collapsed into one another, generating one mystery in which the solution is obvious (Palpatine is Sidious), and another mystery in which the solution seems somehow beside the point (Padme is

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Amidala). These are the only kinds of mysteries that can exist when origins have gone hyperreal, since conventional mysteries are organized around an original moment that has been lost and must be recaptured. The most important origin story The Phantom Menace claims to tell is the story of where the protagonist and antagonist from the 1977–83 movies came from: What are the origins of Luke Skywalker and Darth Vader? The first question is answered with a biological rejoinder: Luke came from a mommy and a daddy who had sex. But rather than representing this answer with a convincing representation of human sexual reproduction, Lucas presents us with the relationship between a postpubescent woman and a prepubescent boy. This romance at the center of the film is The Phantom Menace’s uncanniest representation of an impossible or ambiguous origin. In the same way that the movie depicts a trade dispute without an object of trade and a mystery without any secret, it stages a romance in which the very idea of a romantic connection between the romantic leads inspires a primitive psychosexual aversion as a violation of a fundamental human taboo. Sex or even the potential for sex should not exist between Jake Lloyd and Natalie Portman, as anyone who has grown up in a human community can instinctively understand. And yet, here it is, at the center of the movie. To contend that in ten years, he will be eighteen and she will be twenty-eight, so that makes it okay, violates the basic rule of movie-making, which is, what you see is what you get. When the male romantic lead meets the female romantic lead, we expect an erotic spark, however faint. In The Phantom Menace, Lucas’ script suggests a romantic connection (Anakin: “Are you an angel? … I’ve heard the deep-space pilots talk about them. They live on the moons of Iego.”), but Lloyd’s delivery is so prepubescent, and Portman’s response so noncommittal, that only a deviant would read any eroticism into the encounter. In response to our expectations of a love story, the audience gets not only a cold shower but also a feeling of general ickiness into the bargain. Indeed, this pedophilic element in The Phantom Menace may account for the fact that so many critics of the film voiced their displeasure through the meme, “George Lucas raped my childhood.” The film performs a similar maneuver when it comes to the question of where Darth Vader came from. Sex, with all of its deep connections to conventional models of origination, is sidestepped by the intervention of Immaculate Conception. Anakin was “conceived by the midi-chlorians.” Anakin is literally the first male of his line; he is his own origin. He comes from nowhere for no reason. If he has any paternity, it is bacterial in nature, a plot point that coincides with another origin story told in The Phantom Menace, the origin of the Force. Lucas has said that Episode I’s explanation for the Force—that it is generated by unicellular organisms that live symbiotically in human cells—was inspired by the discovery that the mitochondria of eukaryotic cells evolved from symbiotic interactions with prokaryotes. In establishing this parallel, Lucas equates the mystical energies of the Force with the biochemical energies of cellular respiration. Although fans have complained about what they perceive as a crassly materialistic reduction of a transcendental idea, it would be just as accurate to say that the parallelism does just as much to transcendentalize biology as it does to biologize transcendence. In both gestures, the typical argument that mind is a property

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of matter or that matter is a property of mind phases into each other to suggest a new synthesis of magic and reality that is both and neither. At the cellular level, Lucas’s characters represent an implosion of magic and technology, mind and matter, illusion and reality organized according to a symbiotic interrelatedness in which each is each other’s origin. This is one of several instances in which The Phantom Menace explicitly refers to symbiosis as a conceptual schema that eliminates the coordinates of origin and end-point. Anakin is literally the personification of this ontological and temporal symbiosis. All of these games with origins are subsumed in the meta-level circumstance that The Phantom Menace is a movie about the origins of evil that does not depict any evil. We have to take a minor character’s word for it that “the death toll [on Naboo] is catastrophic,” because the film never shows us any scenes of such catastrophe, leaving it open for question whether the report is even true. In the battle at the end of the movie, although we know that many Gungans must have been killed in their clash with the much better-armed Federation army, the film shows no dead Gungans among the wreckage of the battle droids. The movie employs Darth Maul as a disposable devil intended to stand in for evil, but this is a switcheroo of the Amidala-Padme variety. The “evil” face of this story is really pudgy-cheeked Anakin. This would be a compelling narrative device if there actually were a hint of evil in Anakin’s character, but Jake Lloyd is as effective as a crypto-villain as he is as a romantic lead, which is to say, not at all. In this sense, The Phantom Menace dramatizes Paul Hegerty’s explanation that, for Baudrillard, “Simulation, or hyper-reality, is relentlessly positive and positivist—everything ‘is’, and its realness is a test of its goodness” (63). Evil is invisible, nonlocalized, without origin or identity, an effect of the movie that augments its viability as a commentary on Baudrillardian ontology. Even the title of the movie seems to play with the ambiguity of the nature of evil (Is the titular phantom menace Anakin, Darth Maul, or Darth Sidious? Is the “phantom” of the movie (possibly the holographic image of Darth Sidious) the “menace” of the title? Or is the apparent “menace” merely a “phantom,” just an illusion or a red herring, distracting us from a (possibly less phantasmal) menace, for example, the moppet Anakin?). The frequency with which the movie raises such questions—at the narrative, conceptual, and cinematographic levels—establishes The Phantom Menace as a film that bears a close relationship to the kind of postmodern semiotics associated with late twentiethcentury philosophy and with Baudrillard in particular. The 1977–83 trilogy, released at the height of pop-psychoanalysis (Star Wars came out in the same year as Annie Hall [1977]), hews so closely to Freudian theory that it is possible to perceive a oneto-one correspondence between the three movies of that trilogy and the oral, anal, and phallic stages of Freudian psychosexual development. It is consistent with Star Wars-ian architecture, therefore, that The Phantom Menace, released at the height of pop-Baudrillardiansim (Episode I came out in the same year as The Matrix), should engage this late ’90s’ preoccupation just as intensely.

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Looking for the Real: Schindler’s List, Saving Private Ryan, and Titanic The predominance of a hyperreal aesthetic in 1990s movies exists alongside a countertendency of films that attempt to return the cinema to the purposes of realism. One of the most remarkable features of the cinematic history of the ’90s is the rising popularity of independent films that were assumed to be more “authentic”; the emergence of African American filmmakers who became charged with telling the truth about inner-city life; the success of revisionist epics such as Dances with Wolves (1990), Unforgiven, and even a revisionist Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1992), which sought to revisit traditional Hollywood subjects from a more “historicized” point of view; and grand historical productions such as Schindler’s List, Saving Private Ryan (1998), and Titanic, which sought to depict as truthfully as possible the historical incidents they represent. Each of these strategies of realism, however, cannot evade the hyperreal cultural environment. Many of the most successful independent films of the period, including El Mariachi (1992), Memento (2000), and even Pulp Fiction itself, are hymns to hyperreality, suggesting that independent cinema is not synonymous with realist cinema. The promise that Spike Lee and John Singleton would reveal to suburban moviegoers the truth of ghetto life had more to do with white expectations than with the visions of these black filmmakers. Sharon Willis has critiqued the manner in which “[a] few black male directors were given cultural authority as ethnographic native informants, as if an experiential frame guaranteed the ‘authenticity’ of their representations of the black community” (48), and argues that the attempts of white audiences and reviewers to read films like Boyz in the Hood (1991) and Jungle Fever (1991) as documentaries obscures and diminishes the actual accomplishments of these films. Revisionist epics begin from a philosophical assumption that the popular understanding of history is rooted more in film history than real history, that the vast majority of our racist myths about Native Americans, for example, or our romanticized notions of the Old West are the products of Hollywood rather than of historical memory. The revisionist solution is to revise popular attitudes by making more “realistic” movies, but of course, this involves a mirror game of vanishing origins; the revisionist movies are even further away from the “truth” than the Cowboys-andIndians shoot-’em-ups of yore, precisely because the revisionist films earnestly profess to be representing reality. The simplistic Hollywood formulas of racism and violence are not eliminated from these movies, but simply made to return in other forms.

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In  Dances with Wolves, the racist stereotypes of Native Americans are divided into the noble stereotype represented by the Sioux and the savage stereotype represented by the Pawnee. Unforgiven attempts to demythologize the glamor of frontier violence, but actually reinforces many of the stereotypes about the Wild West that it critiques. Schindler’s List, Saving Private Ryan, and Titanic distinguish themselves from many of the other historical epics of the 1990s such as Braveheart (1995), Amistad (1997), and Gladiator (2000) due in large part to the way these former films engage the theme of representation itself as a moral dilemma. In his response to the televising of the Holocaust documentary Shoah (1985), Baudrillard went so far as to assert that the televisualization of the atrocity amounted to the “perpetuation [of Auschwitz] in another guise” (SS 50). By becoming the subject of a mass-marketed television event, the victims of the Holocaust, Baudrillard claimed, were being exterminated a second, even more definitive time, like the bodies in the mass graves of Płaszów in Schindler’s List that are exhumed so that the remains can be cremated. In this postmodern variety of genocide, “One no longer makes the Jews pass through the crematorium or the gas chamber, but through the soundtrack and image track, through the universal screen and the microprocessor. Forgetting, annihilation, finally achieves its aesthetic dimension in this way—it is achieved in retro, finally elevated here to a mass level” (SS 49). Although Baudrillard’s language is extreme, the moral danger is real: mourning and reverence depend upon a necessary absence. Presenting the Holocaust as an object for mass-consumption, however well intentioned, caries the risk of sensationalizing, trivializing, and routinizing the event, but, more than any of these concerns, the overarching risk is that an obscure and powerful absence will be replaced by the bogus familiarity of a simulacral presence. Baudrillard’s animus in his denunciation of Shoah is directed particularly at the medium of television. He makes an exception for “the cinema,” which, he claims, “is still blessed (but less and less so because more and more contaminated by TV) with an intense imaginary. … That is to say, not only a screen and a visual form, but a myth, something that still retains something of the double, of the phantasm, of the mirror, of the dream, etc.” (SS 51). While Baudrillard leaves the door open for the possibility that a cinematic representation of the Holocaust could evade the in-built banalization inherent to television, Claude Lanzmann, director of Shoah, has denounced Schindler’s List in language that recalls Baudrillard’s critique of Lanzmann’s film: “When you see Schindler at work, having dinner with German officers or SS-people to implicate them in the story, these figures certainly appear corrupt, but at the same time, they are not wholly unsympathetic in their beautiful uniforms. This is, exactly, the problem of the image, of the picture. ... In fact, I fail to see how actors could convey deported people who had suffered months, years of agony, misery, humiliation and who died for fear.” Lanzmann concludes that “images kill the imagination,” and he accuses Schindler’s List of leveling a relentlessly pictoral approach to its subject that results in the same kind of “annihilation” Baudrillard had accused Shoah of perpetrating. Other critics have accused Schindler’s List of “substituting celluloid representations [of the holocaust] for real events” (Horowitz 123), and have even echoed Baudrillard’s contention that the Holocaust film is an

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extension of Nazism itself: “if people follow the prompting of the film, they will recreate the conditions that made fascism possible” (Gibson). The debate over how, or even whether, the Holocaust should be represented is as old as the Holocaust itself, and Spielberg certainly was aware that his film would meet with these kinds of critiques. Whether one concludes that Schindler’s List is a significant testament to the memory of the Holocaust or a cinematic failure amounting to a desecration of this memory, it is clear that Spielberg addressed the problem of representation throughout the film with the intention of preempting the criticism that he was handling this sensitive material naively. Spielberg’s use of black-and-white cinematography, most conspicuously, acts ambiguously as both a token of authenticity and an admission that the material is being deliberately aestheticized. On the one hand, the Holocaust would not look “real” in color. The Holocaust happened in black and white, as far as postwar audiences are concerned, not only because the atrocity was documented in the most available filmic format of the mid-1940s, black-andwhite films and photographs but also because the starkness and inhumanity of the Holocaust is suited to the emotional moods of expressionism and noir. That is, there is both an archival and a psychological authenticity to the black and white of Schindler’s List. On the other hand, the decision to film the movie in black and white, a radical proposition in the 1990s, especially for a director who established his celebritydom on the manipulation of dazzling displays of color such as those in Close Encounters of the Third Kind and Raiders of the Lost Ark, affiliates Schindler’s List with the genre of the art film, a genre characterized by self-reflexive artificiality. The same black-andwhite photography that makes Schindler’s List resemble a newsreel or an educational filmstrip (an effect amplified by the informational blocks of text that appear at the beginning of certain scenes of historical significance) also causes it to appear as a highly stylized homage to De Sica and Murnau. Cinematographically, Schindler’s List announces that it is telling the truth and that it is telling a fiction in the same gesture. If this is a contradiction, the contradiction inheres not in the film itself but in the conflicted mind of a culture at large that believes in the independent existence of The Real that is the object of memory, history, and past-ness, while simultaneously relying on mediated representations as a privileged form of access to this Real. Contemporary awareness of the Holocaust (the twentieth century’s most convincing metaphor for The Real) is dependent on the photographic technology of the decade that witnessed it, and these photographic representations of the Holocaust share mental and ontological space with other black-and-white images, such as those of mid-century film directors. Media act as both a bridge to the past and a wall behind which the past lies hidden, but the most persuasive analogy for media would be that they act to denature the membrane that conventional language imposes between the real and the imaginary. This paradox, pertinent to the philosophy of memory and time in any age, seems particularly prominent in our age, when the visual record of historical events is so compelling and omnipresent. In its very cinematic texture, Schindler’s List both enacts and challenges this conflicted relationship between media and memory. Spielberg’s focus on filmic vision itself as a central theme and quandary in his Holocaust movie is established in the opening sequence. The fire of a match emits

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the first light registered on the film, as if the match were sparking the film itself into existence in a way that recalls both the creative power of fire to illuminate and to create a space for story-telling and ritual and the destructive power of fire to annihilate, an implication present in the very idea of starting a holocaust movie with an image of fire (“Holocaust” being Greek for “a thing wholly burnt”), and then rendered explicit when the smoke from the candle dissolves into the smoke coming from a locomotive engine bringing Jews to the ghetto (a motif later picked up again when smoke is shown billowing from the crematoria smokestacks). The light of which the movie itself consists is associated with this creative and destructive fire, even as the intoning of the Kiddush, recalling the creation of the world in six days, suggests that the human condition itself is an effect of this same ambiguous light. When the candle burns out at the end of this sequence, the image transitions from color to black and white, establishing this blackand-white vision as a way of seeing in the dark, the way the human eye uses rods to see in black and white when there is not enough light to stimulate the color-sensitive cones. The dark that Spielberg’s camera allows us to see into is not only the vanished past but also a moral darkness so opaque that it defies ordinary human vision. The character of Schindler himself as he appears in the movie may also be conceptualized as another optic device, a kind of lens through which Spielberg attempts to represent the unrepresentable. Spielberg’s Schindler probably should not even be thought of as a character in the traditional sense, but as a vector of approach to an impossible object, a device employed by Spielberg in the same way that astronomers use the light from visible objects to detect the presence of a black hole. Spielberg’s introduction of the title character in the film faithfully captures the mood of the opening paragraph of Keneally’s historical novel: “In Poland’s deepest autumn, a tall young man in an expensive overcoat, doublebreasted dinner jacket and—in the lapel of the dinner jacket—a large gold­on-black-enamel Hakenkreuz (swastika) emerged from a fashionable apartment building in Straszewskiego Street, on the edge of the ancient city of Cracow, and saw his chauffeur waiting with fuming breath by the open door of an enormous and, even in this blackened world, lustrous Adler limousine” (13).

In Spielberg’s introduction, we do not get the chauffeur or the limo, but, like Keneally, Spielberg presents Schindler as an aggregation of signs of wealth, of capital, and of consumption: his fine cufflinks, his wad of cash, and, of course, his Nazi pin. Like Marty McFly in Back to the Future, Schindler is introduced not as a person but as a construct, a collage of signifiers. While Keneally uses this sequence as a starting point for a nuanced examination of the historical Oskar Schindler, however, Spielberg proceeds to develop his presentation of his movie-Schindler as a construct not only in terms of his clothes and jewelry but also in terms of the very way that he inhabits the space of the movie. Spielberg finally shows Schindler’s face in the next scene at the culmination of an expertly orchestrated sweep of the camera through a crowded room where the dancers and the cameraman work together to contribute emphasis to the reveal. The light and shadow fall across Schindler’s face in perfect noir fashion, and the music, supposedly diegetic, pauses for him to speak. The movie is announcing his identity not as a victim

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Figure 14.1  Noir Schindler. of history, in the manner of the Jews, but as an essentially cinematic figure. As if to drive home this impression, Spielberg edits the scene in which Schindler introduces himself, simultaneously to the elite society of Cracow and to the audience, around the pictures taken by roving photographers at the nightclub. Spielberg’s Schindler wins his way into the Nazis’ hearts and into ours because of his quintessentially photogenic nature. He becomes the center of all the Nazi photographs for the same reason that he is the center of Spielberg’s movie: because he is something fun to look at. Spielberg’s bribe to the audience is that they will be allowed to continue to look at Neeson’s winning visage as compensation for having to bear the sidewise images of unutterable horror that are occasionally reflected in the character’s gleaming surface. The optical nature of the Schindler figure is not just a motif in the movie but also a narrative strategy. Schindler’s List seems in many ways like two movies: the story of the Jews and the story of Schindler. One is a story of utter depravity and suffering, the other is a tragicomic melodrama, and they never quite come together. Schindler shares scenes with the Jews, but he never quite shares space with them. While the Jews are subjected to ultimate degradation, Schindler never gets a scratch on him and remains well coifed and handsomely poised throughout the film. At several points in the film, Spielberg cross-cuts sequences that illustrate the contrapuntal dynamic that inheres between Schindler and the Schindlerjuden, such as when Schindler’s remark that “things could not be better” cuts to a ghetto-resident’s lament that “things could be worse,” or when Schindler’s playful dalliance with a showgirl intercuts with Helen’s brutal beating at the hands of Goeth. The tilt of the camera looking over Schindler’s shoulder and down at the Jews, or looking up from behind the Jews’ shoulders to look at Schindler, emphasizes the physical incongruity between them, highlighting the radical imbalance of power that inheres in their relationship: they are vulnerable to death and humiliation, and he always has the option of walking away scot-free. They are utterly, existentially reliant on him, whereas to Schindler, the Jews are luxury items that he has used his vast wealth (derived from their slave labor) to accumulate. The power dynamic, in fact, perfectly mirrors the relationship between the camera and the subject of photography. The camera is always “free” to film or not film, to film this subject or that subject, and to

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remain untouched by whatever it films, however atrocious. The subject of photography, conversely, exists or is annihilated according to the camera’s caprice. This dynamic is illustrated most memorably in the scene in which Schindler views the liquidation of the Cracow ghetto from horseback atop a hill, scanning the conspicuously cinematic panoramic view with the same pitying helplessness as Spielberg’s camera. Schindler, indeed, is just as instrumental to the fact that American audiences can see these events as the camera itself. Schindler’s redemptive story and his charismatic leading-man aura are prerequisite conditions to the fact that a Holocaust film can be produced by a major American production studio, directed by a beloved American director, and consumed by an American mass-audience. By foregrounding the cinematic provenance of the story, through both the aestheticized cinematography and the constitutionally photogenic nature of the film’s protagonist, Spielberg folds a debate about cinematic representation into the elemental structure of Schindler’s List, allowing his film to be read as both a representation of the Holocaust and a statement about the nature of representation itself. Spielberg presents a final illustration of this aspect of his movie in the epilogue, in which elderly Holocaust survivors appear holding hands with the actors who portrayed them in the film. This cooperation of living witnesses and dramatic performers concludes Schindler’s List with an explicit articulation of the mutual codependence of reality and representation in the memory of a hyperreal culture. Schindler’s List also sets a pattern that Spielberg repeats throughout his other two historical epics of the mid-1990s, Amistad and Saving Private Ryan, of approaching the atrocities of the past through the lens of an exceptional case of redemption. Stanley Kubrick challenged the premise that Schindler’s List could even be considered a Holocaust film: “Think that’s about the Holocaust? That was about success, wasn’t it? The Holocaust is about 6 million people who get killed. Schindler’s List is about 600 who don’t” (quoted in Goldmann). Similarly, one could say that slavery is about 60 million people who get killed, while Amistad is about sixteen who do not, and that the Second World War is about another sixty million people who get killed, whereas Saving Private Ryan is about one who does not. Clearly, this is a deliberate strategy that Spielberg pursues in what can be seen as a trilogy of films devoted to probing the question of how to represent the unrepresentable savagery of the not-too-distant past. Of the three films, Saving Private Ryan is the most explicit in its interrogation of the ethics of plucking a needle of survival out of a haystack of mass-death. Throughout the film, the characters debate the very question of whether there is any sense or justice in rescuing a narrative of salvation out of a story of all-pervasive devastation, as if Spielberg were intentionally using this film to respond to the criticism of Schindler’s List by Kubrick, whom Spielberg has always publicly idolized. The soldiers charged with the eponymous task of saving Private Ryan are unanimous in their assessment that the task is a meaningless “public relations” stunt that has been ham-handedly engineered by the forces that control their fates (the top brass, in their capacity as soldiers, and the writers and directors, in their capacity as fictional characters) to pretty up the gruesome face of war, rather than to address the war’s realities. Their mission is successful in the double sense that they save Private Ryan as an individual and that the movie’s moral center, Captain John Miller, comes to conclude that “saving

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Private Ryan” was actually a worthwhile undertaking. The open-ended debate about the value of the single lost sheep amid a continent of butchery, however, remains a source of anguish in the semantic texture of the film itself, as epitomized by Old Ryan’s doubt in the final scene about whether his happily ending story of survival means anything against the unhappily ending stories demarcated by the Normandy American Cemetery and Memorial’s 170 acres of graves. As a film, Saving Private Ryan is not so much a defense of the “Spielbergian” technique of describing atrocity through the narrative of an exceptional case of salvation (“Saving the Schindlerjuden”, “Saving the Amistad Captives”) as it is an inconclusive questioning about how to proportion the values of despair and hope in the way that we remember the past. Like Schindler’s List, Saving Private Ryan employs cinematic and characterological devices to establish itself as a movie that is more about the representation of the past than it is about the past as an objective value. In the same way that Schindler’s List uses a frame of bookending Jewish rituals filmed in color (the intoning of the Kiddush at the beginning and the placing of stones on Schindler’s grave at the end) to create a sense of separation between the story and the telling of the story, Saving Private Ryan also situates its main narrative in the frame story about Old Ryan visiting the Normandy Cemetery with his family. Old Ryan’s son carries a camera around his neck in the opening scene of the frame story, but when he holds the camera up to take a picture of this emotional moment in his elderly father’s life, he receives a reproving glance from his wife and sheepishly lowers the camera. The wife’s look and the son’s reaction wordlessly establish their agreement (reluctant, in the son’s case) that this moment in Old Ryan’s life is too important to diminish it by aestheticizing it through a camera’s lens. The act of taking a picture threatens to desecrate the living moment by putting a temporal and ontological distance between the photographer and the scene he is photographing, and the son’s guilty conscience in the face of his wife’s reproach suggests that he recognizes that taking his dad’s picture is a selfish act of symbolic parricide, a pushing of his father into the mass-grave of the past, even as it pretends to be an act of respect and commemoration. Saving Private Ryan thus addresses the perils of photographic representation in its first few minutes and sets itself the problem of how to allow itself to give itself over, in the following twenty minutes, to one of the most brutally graphic depiction of warfare in all of twentieth-century cinema. The vector that allows Spielberg to pass through this shift in moral sensibilities from the prim reserve of the son’s un-snapped photo to the all-out visceral carnage of the Normandy invasion sequence is Old Ryan’s role as the central consciousness in which the movie’s Second World War scenes take place. When Old Ryan comes to stand in front of Captain Miller’s grave marker, the camera moves in to an extreme close-up of his eyes. According to the conventional language of cinema, the audience should expect the next scene to represent Ryan’s memory of the war. Instead of Ryan’s memory, however, the next scene, and the rest of the movie’s main story, is seen from Captain Miller’s perspective. Ryan does not even show up in (what appears to be) his own memory until half-way through the film. As a result of this cinematic sleight of hand, the movie implies that its combat scenes should be understood not as a window

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into a direct observation of past events but as a kind of informed reconstruction, based on the memories of a veteran who was in the Second World War, although not in the specific battle represented, and supplemented with memories of film footage of the Second World War–era combat. Whereas Janusz Kamiński’s black-and-white cinematography of Schindler’s List established an aesthetic distance between the history of the story and its filmic representation, the cinematography of the battle scenes in Saving Private Ryan (also overseen by Kamiński) uses desaturation and tight shutter angles to suggest that we are seeing plausibly authentic footage of historical events. These apparent differences of technique, however, share the common feature that they both direct the audience’s attention to the technology of cinematic image-making. Combined with the narrative cue that we are witnessing Ryan’s reconstruction of Miller’s experiences, the movie suggests that the representations of the Second World War found in documentary footage play a key role in the stylistic quality of Ryan’s attempt to reconstitute the memory of his fallen comrade. Old Ryan is the writer, director, cinematographer, and all of the other creative personnel involved in the production of the movie’s main story, the journey of Tom Hanks and his squad from the beaches of Normandy to the streets of Ramelle. In this way, Saving Private Ryan presents a model of memory that closes the loop between personal memory and motion-picture images by assuming a relationship of mutuality between these two modes of knowing. This mutual relationship between the experiences of war and moviegoing is articulated in one of the key source texts of Saving Private Ryan, Stephen E. Ambrose’s 1992 oral history of the 101st Airborne, Band of Brothers, which Spielberg and Hanks would go on to adapt into an HBO miniseries in 2001. Although Ambrose’s book only makes brief mention of a soldier from the 101st, Fritz Niland, who was removed from the combat zone after his three brothers all died in the same week of fighting (103), Band of Brothers presents a picture of WWII infantry life as a bittersweet mash-up of abiding friendship and violent death that the film aspires to recreate in its own idiom. Ambrose’s book may even be the same book that Upham intends to write about “the bonds of brotherhood that develop between soldiers in war.” In Band of Brothers, Ambrose quotes Glenn Gray: “War as spectacle, as something to see, ought never to be underestimated,” and concurs that “the human eye is lustful; it craves the novel, the unusual, the spectacular. War provides more meat to satisfy that lust than any other human activity” (227), with the possible exception, Ambrose might have added, of movie-making. As Paul Virilio has argued, there is a close relationship between the technologies of war and cinema, both of which rely not only on lines of sight, trajectories, movements of bodies and apparatus, and the achievement of optical supremacy over an expanse of territory and personnel but also on the production of a “magical spectacle” (War and Cinema 7) arranged to “captivate” (War and Cinema 8) its spectators. A motif in Ambrose’s book is the manner in which cinematic imagery influences both soldiers’ perception of combat (“He thought to himself, This is just like the movie All Quiet on the Western Front [(1930)]” [146]) and veterans’ memories of warfare (Richard Winters, one of the veterans Ambrose interviews, reflects, “Years later, in the movie Doctor Zhivago [(1965)], I saw troops crossing snow-covered fields, being shot into by cannon from the edge of the woods, and men flying through the air. Those

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scenes seemed very real to me” [215]). Correspondingly, Old Ryan’s pseudomemory of Captain Miller’s D-Day experiences is represented through a bravura cinematic sequence, and the virtuosity of which is so visceral that it is easy to believe that veterans seeing this film unawares on the big screen in 1998 were stunned and disturbed by the scene’s realism. A typical infotainment newspaper story from that summer reports that “Since the debut last month of Steven Spielberg’s harshly realistic movie, more World War II veterans have been forced to confront the violence and horror of their war. And, as a result, more of them have been visiting counseling clinics for veterans” (Halton). The key to the “realism” of this scene, however, lies not primarily in the historical accuracy of the uniforms, weapons, or landscape (plenty of films have presented the Second World War using this traditional kind of realism), but in the way the scene is filmed. The camera participates in the action, running, swimming, and cowering alongside the soldiers. Blood and dirt spritzed across the lens, along with Kamiński’s persuasive simulation of 1940s-era film stock, contribute to the sense that we are seeing this scene through the mediation of a physical apparatus. Intercut with more conventionally cinematic shots such as close-ups and panning shots, this opening montage combines documentary and narrative film techniques, braiding the realityeffect of the one with the fantasy-effect of the other to concoct a hyperreal tour de force that is so compelling, precisely because it capitalizes on the sense in which postmodern memory already exists in the form of a collage of representations. The mystery of how narrative and history interact to generate memory is highlighted through another mystery sustained throughout half the film: What did Captain Miller do before the war? The soldiers’ ongoing speculation in this regard lends thematic emphasis both to the answer—it turns out that he is a teacher of English Composition—and to the hidden quality of the answer. In this way, the screenplay foregrounds the role of the writer and his creative act of representing reality through language and narrative while simultaneously insinuating that this foregrounded writer nevertheless exists in a state of self-concealment. The creative artist creates realistic effects by disguising his artistry, but this self-concealment is itself a deliberate aesthetic effect. In their most important scene together, Miller coaches Ryan in the art of using narrative to aid memory. When Ryan bemoans his inability to “see” his brothers’ faces, Miller teaches him to compose his memory in the form of a sentimental anecdote. The resulting yarn Ryan spins about a sordid instance of rural violence and misogyny clearly does serve the purpose of providing Ryan with a rich canvas on which to paint his joyful memory, even as an audience cannot help assuming that various nuances and perspectives (i.e., that of Alice Jardin, whom Ryan crudely characterizes as “a girl who just took a nosedive from the ugly tree and hit every branch coming down”) are being omitted or foreshortened for the sake of narrative effect. Ryan takes Miller’s impromptu tutorial in English Composition to heart, and when we see him fifty years later at the Normandy Cemetery, we can assume that he is using this technique of story-telling memory to reconstruct Captain Miller’s wartime experiences, and that what we see as the main story of Saving Private Ryan is the result. Moreover, by depicting Ryan as a stereotypical all-American corn-fed white boy (“We had a thousand kids like you,” Miller tells him), the film implies that the mass-audience is composed of Private Ryans,

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and that his pseudomemory is a reflection of our own. The movie’s message—that Ryan has to “earn” the sacrifice of all of the soldiers who gave their lives on his behalf—is obviously intended to speak to the mass-audience of Private Ryans in 1998 who, the movie suggests, owe their lives and their freedoms to the soldiers who have died in America’s wars. As portrayed by celebrity Matt Damon, furthermore, Private Ryan acts as an ambassador to Generation Y, impressing upon the grandchildren of the Second World War veterans the importance of remembering the war, in whatever idiom is available to their media-saturated cohort. In this gesture, Saving Private Ryan puts itself forward as a mnemonic device capable of devoting the techniques of narrative cinema to the perpetuation of historical memory. The influence of Saving Private Ryan on the representation of war in subsequent films, and particularly on the visual style of twenty-first-century video games such as Call of Duty, has been profound, ensuring that Spielberg’s film continues to play a decisive role in the manner in which the Second World War and war itself are represented in media discourses and remembered in the collective consciousness. If it seems counterintuitive that the techniques of fiction should play such an influential role in the way we remember the historical past, we need only remember the pronouncement of Captain Miller: “We’ve crossed some strange boundary here, and the world has taken a turn for the surreal.” Standing among the Max Ernst-esque landscape of a bombed-out French town, Captain Miller annunciates the birth of the postmodern world out of the rubble of the Second World War. The global spasm of mid-century bloodshed created the modern world in its image, not only technologically and geopolitically but also psychologically and ontologically. In the face of Auschwitz and Hiroshima, the nature of the kind of world human beings thought they lived in—the kind of physical reality, the kind of moral reality, the kind of linguistic and representational reality—undergoes a radical transfiguration into an undefinable nether-state that remains a contested mystery up to and beyond the century’s end. Lost in the shadow of the all-pervasive but incomprehensible memory of the Second World War, we are like the singer in “Tu Es Partout,” the Edith Piaf song that Saving Private Ryan features in the downtime before the final battle sequence. The singer’s enraptured lament expresses the voice of citizens of postmodern society, surrounded by devices, ideas, and images from the Second World War: “I see you all over the sky, I see you all over the earth. … Even life itself only represents you.” The prominence of this song in the lead-up to the film’s climax alludes to the manner in which our postwar experience is permeated with representations that have taken the place of a vanished reality in the aftermath of a planetary bloodletting so unimaginable that it has fundamentally reconfigured the basic coordinates of human perception. The ambiguous relationship between historical reality and cinematic representation is also a central theme in the highest-grossing film of the twentieth century, James Cameron’s Titanic. Rose gives voice to this duality when, following a computer-graphic simulation of the sinking of the Titanic that serves as a kind of preview of what the audience knows to expect at the end of the film in a more fully realized CGI rendition, she thanks the scientist for his “forensic analysis,” but insists that this representation fails to capture the phenomenological “experience” of the event itself. Rose’s distinction parallels Cameron’s own description of how his deep-sea dives to the wreckage of the

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Titanic influenced the way he constructed the film. “I took two things away from the experience,” Cameron explains. “One, get it right. Do it exactly right. We’ve got the real ship on film—everything else has to live up to that level of reality from this point on.  … But there was another level of reaction coming away from the real wreck, which was that it wasn’t just a story, it wasn’t just a drama. It was an event that happened to real people who really died. Working around the wreck for so much time, you get such a strong sense of the profound sadness and injustice of it, and the message of it. … So it sort of becomes a great mantle of responsibility to convey the emotional message of it—to do that part of it right, too” (Schultz).

As a result, the soul of Titanic is divided between these two priorities: a fanatical fidelity to objective historical precision on the one hand, and, on the other, an attempt to convey a more ambiguous kind of historical truth, one that cannot be excavated in any conventional sense. Cameron is on solid ground with his first objective. He is a master technician who has made a brilliant career out of engineering complex cinematic spectacles, and the ontology of cinema as a technical process is consistent with the technology of this “forensic” mode of thinking about reality as a precise arrangement of perceptual coordinates. In this sense, reality is that which is filmable. The second objective, however, confronts Cameron with the mystery of how to film that which is by its nature unfilmable, the “emotional message” of a historical event. Like Schindler’s List and Saving Private Ryan, Titanic employs a frame-narrative to situate its historical reconstruction in a particular ontological register. By setting up Rose’s story as a story rather than as the story, Cameron is able to imbue her narrative with a conceptual background that relativizes her representation and invests it with a sense of being something other than a “forensic” reenactment. Most conspicuously, the framing device allows us to witness the story from two points of view at once. As the scenes move back and forth between the Keldysh and the Titanic—both boats floating in the same spot on the unchanging landscape of the mid-Atlantic—our understanding of what is happening on each boat is influenced by the perspective of what is happening on the other boat. The movie’s central example of this doubleperspective is the sinking of the Titanic, which we see twice: first as a piece of computer animation on the Keldysh, and then, of course, as the movie’s culminating spectacle. The computer simulation is necessary for helping us to understand the physics of why the Titanic sinks the way it does. Having seen it, we are in a much better position than the characters scurrying around on the sinking craft to understand what is going on. Even Jack, who always knows everything, shouts out his bafflement at why the vessel is sinking in such a dramatic and frightening way. We, however, understand, because we come from the future. Our future perspective is also a theme throughout the texture of the whole film, which bristles with the dramatic irony attendant upon our foreknowledge of what lies in store for the movie’s characters. When Jack crows that he and his buddy are “the luckiest sons of bitches in the world” for having won their Titanic tickets, or when the on-board congregation sings a hymn that supplicates God’s protection for “those in peril on the sea,” we get a joke that is lost on the characters,

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a perception that separates us from them, even as it makes us feel connected to them in a new way, as if they were our children or our pets, playthings of forces that they do not understand, but that we do. This proleptic sense of “unbeknownst to them” saturates the film’s depiction of the bright and detailed world of the ship. When the camera runs lovingly over the fresh paint and gleaming fixtures of Titanic, what it is really showing us is the imminent destruction of everything it beholds. Like Sarah Connor in Cameron’s Terminator 2, the audience of Titanic sees everything from the perspective of its imminent destruction, a temporally fractured point of view that fundamentally alters the ontological status of everything in these scenes. The result is a kind of perceptual distance that aestheticizes Rose’s narrative, allowing its forensic elements to share space with the kinds of “emotional” effects associated with fiction. Old Rose’s narrative is reported as the “truth” of the event, but, like Old Ryan, she “remembers” scenes where she was not present, making any straight-forward assessment of her veracity problematic. The script even establishes her present forgetfulness—she forgets that her daughter and Captain Lovett had just met on the deck. The skeptical crew of the Keldysh takes this slip-up as a sign of her untrustworthiness as a witness, but the movie uses this detail as a point of contrast to set off the vivid precision of Rose’s memory of that one 48-hour period 90 years ago. Where Lovett and his crew of scientists are intensely focused on attending to the forensic details available in the present, the intensity of Old Rose’s present is subordinated to a vivid, photorealistic impression of the past. The intense experience of being on the Titanic, attempting suicide, falling in love, and participating in an epic disaster remains fixated in Old Rose’s mind as a kind of heightened reality—what Jean-Louis Baudry has called the “more-than-real” (770) impression characteristic of both movies and dreams—both of which phenomena are invoked in the film as analogies for Rose’s memory. Old Rose begins her narrative by saying, “Titanic was called the ship of dreams. And it was, it really was.” This insistence on the oneiric nature of her impression of Titanic is sustained through Young Rose’s statement that cubist paintings are like “being in a dream,” and through her later reference to Freud. Although her memories, like Cameron’s movie, are exact in their relation of the “forensic” details of Titanic, the script permits a certain skepticism regarding her reliability when it comes to her memory’s representation of Jack. Jack’s character is the most problematic aspect of Cameron’s movie. He is introduced into the movie with a cringe-inducing cliché (“when you got nothing, you got nothing to lose”) and his personality is a succession of hackneyed aphorisms and noble deeds. Leonardo DiCaprio throws himself into the role with full-bore earnestness, but Jack’s failure to convey a sense of interiority or psychological depth is a result of a script that requires him to play the role of a teen girl’s heartthrob rather than that of a fully realized human being. If it is true that the unprecedented box office success of Titanic was due to repeat viewings by teenage girls, it is likely due to Cameron’s success in representing not only, or even primarily, the reality of the sinking of the Titanic but also a more deeply seated “reality” of girlhood desire. Cameron’s movie interweaves the story of Titanic as it would be told by a maritime historian with the story as it would be told by a daydreaming fourteen-year-old girl in a way that recalls his intercutting of actual footage of the

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sunken Titanic into the plan of his narrative film. The end of the movie drives home this parallelism between Rose’s memories as reported in Titanic and her dreams of her adolescent love affair; when she falls asleep on the Keldysh, she reconvenes with the characters from her narrative, as if they were all residents of her dreams, an impression reinforced in the first lines of the song that accompanies the end-credits, Celine Dion’s “My Heart Will Go On”: “Every night in my dreams, I see you, I feel you.” In addition to representing Rose’s memory as a dream, Titanic also frames Rose’s memory within a cinematic context. Rose’s memory is a love story–disaster film mash up (Cameron pitched it as “Romeo and Juliet on the Titanic” [Realf]) that announces its cinematic provenance through its elaborate assortment of generic conventions. Moreover, in the media climate of the film’s release, the whole cinematic project of Titanic seemed calculated to represent a self-referential pun. As the budget for Cameron’s film swelled to make it the most expensive film of all time, the inevitable response was the prediction that the film was intent on bringing down upon itself the same fate suffered by its namesake ocean liner: box office disaster on an epic scale. Cameron’s gambit resembles a self-conscious effort to conflate the cinematic spectacle of his movie with the historical recollection of the famous ship, as if to stage a deliberate commentary on the interpenetration of cinema and cultural memory. The movie’s runaway financial success does not necessarily scuttle this analogy; it simply reflects that Cameron’s movie supplies the story of both Titanics with a happy ending. Not only is Titanic the film a success but also the story of Titanic the ship—which is conventionally and understandably remembered as a full-scale disaster of utter human buffoonishness and unredeemably pointless wastage—is rewritten as a bittersweet and inspiring tale of undying love. The opening shots of the movie itself also invite a meta-cinematic perspective. Titanic opens with faux–1912 era film footage of the Titanic’s maiden departure, with crowds of passengers and well-wishers waving to one another in silent, grainy, slowmotion sepia. As the apparently old-timey camera performs an unlikely tracking shot above the heads of the crowd, we pass over the shoulder of a cameraman recording the event with a hand-crank camera, which, of course, is stationed in place on a tripod. The presence of this cameraman, one of the first images in the movie, alerts the audience to a representational ambiguity. What appeared at first to be 1912-era footage is actually footage of that footage. We are not in the place of the cameraman who appears on camera, seeing events in which we ourselves are embedded; rather, we are one step back ontologically, looking out from a present perspective thinly disguised through a trick of cinematography as a contemporary witnessing. The double-perspective suggested by the pairing of Cameron’s 1997 camera and that of the cameraman living in 1912 (who happens to be bearded like a Titanic-era Cameron) articulates a parallax between the objectifying gaze of the present and the truth of a lost past, aiming at a truth calculated in reference to both moments but located in neither node specifically. When Rose starts telling her story, we see the same footage again, tracking over the heads of the crowd as Titanic prepares for its departure; only this time, the panorama is presented in the crystalline hyper-clarity and brilliant color of computer-enhanced imaging technology. Once again, we pass behind the 1912 cameraman, but this time, the movie seems to articulate a deliberate statement not only about the role of motion

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picture technology in mediating our relationship to the past but also, specifically, in the ability of advancements in this technology to recreate the past in a way that is more vibrant and compelling than contemporary archival footage. The bearded cameraman in these sequences is the first instance of what turns out to be a series of prominent Cameron stand-in who populate the film. Obviously, Captain Lovett, the deep-sea explorer obsessed with the wreckage of Titanic is one such figure. Not only does his mission aboard the Keldysh recapitulate Cameron’s own explorations of the sunken ocean liner but also the moral deficit represented by his treasure-hunting approach to this project and his ultimate recognition of his moral failing in this regard reflect Cameron’s own negotiation of his double-objective of balancing forensics and phenomenology. Jack is clearly another crypto-Cameron. When Jack draws Rose naked, it is Cameron’s hand we are seeing with the pencil, evoking the theme of “the hands of the artist” as a synechdoche for the creative process itself. Jack is also a natural director, who spends most of the movie “directing” Rose about what she should do and how she should do it. The historical characters of Thomas Andrews, the ship’s builder, and Captain Edward John Smith are also reflecting the role of Cameron as writer-producer-director of Titanic, a figure invested with the tragic responsibility of the Daedalian technician. The proliferation of these figures invests Titanic with characteristics that are both dreamlike (in the way that dreams can split a single figure into a prismatic array of representations) and self-referentially cinematic. At every turn, we are confronted with characters who encompass a range of attitudes regarding the power of science, art, and technology to be either sublime and life-affirming (Rose and Jack soaring on the prow of the mega-ship) or apocalyptic and death-bound. We might even read the contrasting fates of the twin Titanics—as a ship, it is a disaster; as a disaster movie, it is a phenomenal success—as indicating a fundamental ambivalence in the movie’s representation of cutting-edge technology as a tool for moving into the future and remembering the past. The Titanic itself has long been a metaphor for technological hubris, so it is natural that Cameron’s movie would propagate its own metaphorical language of deep oceans, doomed pursuits, a floating social microcosm, and frustrated treasure hunters to tell its story, again self-consciously cultivating a symbolic network of associations reminiscent of the semiological texture of dreams and movies. Titanic’s ultimate assessment of its own aspiration to recreate the past is communicated through the handling of one of the movie’s most blatantly symbolic objects, Rose’s priceless diamond necklace. In the final moments of Titanic, the Heart of the Ocean, the jewel that represented the real truth of history, that object the quest for which holds the frame-narrative and the main story together, slips into the sea, never to be found, a pronounced metaphor for the unspeakability of history and the futility of trying to grasp it in any physical or visual way. Schindler’s List, Titanic, and Saving Private Ryan are all preoccupied with the problem of how historical remembrance is perpetuated, transformed, enhanced, and undermined in a culture that uses cinematic technology as a form of prosthetic memory. In this undertaking, these movies exemplify an emergent ontological paradox noted by Baudrillard in the cinema of the late ’70s: “Concurrently with an effort toward an absolute correspondence with the real, cinema also approaches an absolute

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correspondence with itself—and this is not contradictory: it is the very definition of the hyperreal. Hypostasis and specularity” (SS 47). The closer the cinematic technology gets to recreating a perfect simulation of the external world, the closer the movies get to becoming a real world of their own; the closer James Cameron gets to representing the Titanic itself in all of its finely wrought physical and emotional detail, the more his movie becomes a thing unto itself, a perfect fusion of instantiation and nullification. All three of these movies self-consciously address this fundamental duality between reality and representation. All three historical dramas invoke framenarratives and other cinematic devices to both remind us and try to make us forget that what we are watching is a cinematic reconstruction rather than a documentary. Spielberg is painfully aware that he is manipulating fake Holocaust victims and fake Second World War soldiers as a way of trying to conjure up our sympathy for the real victims and soldiers. Spielberg and Cameron both announce their awareness that they are trying to entertain us with what are inescapably tragic stories, and they are aware that the latest cinematic technologies are much more capable of making historical events look “real” to a modern audience than the actual film footage that recorded the actual events. All of these circumstances entail both a moral danger and an ontological danger. If the fake is more real than the real, then do not we risk disgracing the memory of the people whose stories we want to tell, even as we are engaged in the telling of them? That is the moral danger. But, even more penetrating is the ontological slippage: If artifice is more capable of eliciting our sympathies than reality, then what does that suggest about the artificial nature of all human sympathy? If artificially reconstructed images are better at preserving memory than any more “real” artifacts or narratives, then is not it the case that memory itself—even the most sacred and profound memories that we associate with our war dead and the victims of historical atrocities—is nothing more than a projection of fictional imagery? Although Spielberg and Cameron’s approaches to these problems may be paradoxical or even incoherent, their engagement with such questions lends depth and resonance to their representations of history.

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That’s Cryotainment! Postmortem Cinema in the Long 1990s At the beginning of American Beauty, the Academy Award–winning film for Best Picture of 1999, Lester Burnham’s introductory voice-over informs the audience that “In less than a year, I’ll be dead. Of course, I don’t know that yet. But in a way, I’m dead already.” Lester’s statement characterizes his death as both imminent and immanent: the physical death in his near future mirrors a more fundamental psychological death that characterizes his suburban midlife despair. Moreover, Lester is only able to appreciate the connection between these two kinds of death from his unique perspective as a person who has died, yet who is able to provide voice-over narration for his story. Dead-Lester’s uncanny mode of being is explained at the end of the movie: “I had always heard,” he explains, “that your whole life flashes before your eyes the moment you die. For one thing, that second isn’t a second at all. It stretches on forever like an ocean of time.” What appears to the living as the moment of death is experienced by the dying man as an anamorphic, asymptotic dimension of existence that is both set outside of the flow of time and embedded in time. Speaking from this strange dimension through the magic of film, Lester mounts a critique of middle-class American values that derives urgency and authority from Lester’s magical status as a figure glowing with the prophetic force of his imminent/immanent death. Lester’s position as a quasi-dead figure situates him in an unusual kind of ontology that both separates him from the realist-time-sense of the movie’s other characters and provides him with a singular perspective from which to examine the hypocrisy and desperation of the society in which he lives/lived. As remarkable as Lester’s postmortem situation is, it is one he shares with a number of other protagonists from other movies of the Long ’90s. Jacob’s Ladder (1990), Dead Man (1995), The Sixth Sense (1999), Waking Life (2001), The Others (2001), and Vanilla Sky all portray characters who come to realize over the course of their narratives that they are existing beyond their own deaths. Collectively, these films constitute an array of perspectives concerning what the possibilities of the postmortem condition may turn out to be. Although death in the Western world is typically represented as a solitary, apolitical act, each of these postmortem movies uses the death-perspective to articulate a social critique. In Jacob’s Ladder, Dead Man, and The Sixth Sense, the postmortem perspective discloses the secret barbarism within, respectively, the American military, American history, and American society. In Waking Life, The Others, and Vanilla Sky, the characters come to understand the postmortem condition

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as emancipatory, constituting possibilities for psychological and social transformation. In a Baudrillardian context, the popularity of these postmortem films during the Long ’90s might be explained in terms of the similarities between the postmortem hero and the hyperreal subject, both of whom are swept up in a distorted and paradoxical timesense with its own rarified ontology. At the same time, by foregrounding the subject of death, these movies violate the hyperreal imperative that death and the dead be “thrown out of the group’s symbolic circulation” (SED 126). The postmortem hero exemplifies Baudrillard’s assertion that, despite the attempt of the hyperreal order to eliminate death from the system, “Death is always … the symbolic extermination that haunts the system itself ” (SED 5). Whereas Baudrillard is generally pessimistic about the possibility that any force could be powerful enough to “fight DNA”—to constitute a site of resistance against the order of simulation—he proposes that “Perhaps death and death alone … belongs to a higher order than the code” (SED 4). By providing audiences with access to the perspectives of dead characters, these subjective ghost stories attempt to occupy death as a higher ground from which to stage critical incursions into the political conscience of fin-de-millennial culture. The most famous narrative to exploit the subjective temporality of the postmortem protagonist is Ambrose Bierce’s 1890 short story, “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge,” beautifully rendered as a short film in 1962 by Robert Enrico. In both the story and the film, Peyton Farquhar, a captured Confederate informer, is being hanged from a bridge when the rope snaps, plunging him into the river below. Farquhar makes a daring escape, eventually finding his way back to his home and his wife, when suddenly, the fantasy ends, Farquhar’s neck snaps, and his body swings from an unbroken rope over Owl Creek. Enrico’s film alters details of Bierce’s short story in ways that allude specifically to the startling temporality of the “Owl Creek Bridge” scenario. Bierce’s story tells us that Farquhar could hear the ticking of a watch as he waits for the fatal order. Enrico seizes on this detail and reorients its significance. Seconds before his hanging, Farquhar’s memories of his wife are interrupted by one of the only lines of dialogue in the movie, an officer’s command to “take his watch!” The inclusion of this transaction serves to draw attention to the manner in which the conventional, mechanical, objective variety of time represented by a timepiece (or a movie camera) is stripped away from Farquhar, plunging him, literally, into a purely subjective timesense. Enrico’s emphasis on the unique temporality of Farquhar’s postmortem experience suggests the different time-senses characteristic of film and prose narrative. Readers are accustomed to recognizing an elastic relationship between the time it takes to read a story and the amount of time that elapses in the narrative. It may take a reader minutes or hours to read about the nuances of a single impression or of an instant of consciousness. In this sense, although Bierce’s treatment of Farquhar’s postmortem adventure does play a trick with narrative, it does not play a trick with time in the same way that the film version does. In a film, we expect our time to elapse in the same way as that of the characters. Cuts may bring ellipses into scenes and narratives to abridge events for the audience’s convenience, but we expect that as long as we see a character doing something on screen, it is taking exactly the same amount of time in

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movie world for the character to do what he is doing as it takes us in the real world to watch him doing it. Manipulations of this expectation, such as slow-motion or highspeed photography, distort this expectation and thereby confirm its tacit existence. But in Enrico’s film, what kind of reality does the escape story take place in? It can only be the hanged man’s imagination—a burst of dreamlike narrative that takes hours to transpire in experiential time, but which must have resulted from an instantaneous spasm of neural activity. The suggestion that death might open a portal into another kind of time—a subjective time of personal struggle and wish-fulfillment—creates a new kind of narrative space. Farquhar fleeing his executioners inhabits a hyperreal dream-space that mimics the texture of the real world (the water is wet, the rocks are hard), but which is in fact entirely psychological, and in which time only seems to pass. In “Owl Creek Bridge,” however, this peculiar style of temporality is represented as nothing more than a cruel joke played on both the character and the audience. Both are jerked back suddenly with the recoil of the noose into “real” time, a world and an identity that have been entirely unaware of and unaffected by the daring exploits of the hanged man. Farquhar himself is spared any insight into the truth of his situation. If his fantasy ends abruptly, at least his consciousness seems to be extinguished in blissful obliviousness. Jacob Singer, the main character of Adrian Lyne’s 1990 film Jacob’s Ladder, is not so lucky. Rather than a wish-fulfillment fantasy, Jacob’s postmortem life is a nightmare; a hellish inferno designed specifically to make Jacob’s life so miserable that he will welcome death. In the few hours that elapse between the time that Jacob is stabbed by a bayonet in Vietnam and the time that he eventually expires on a field hospital cot, he hallucinates an entire postwar life in which he has divorced his wife, taken up with another woman, and rejected his academic career to become a postal worker. The movie presents this postwar existence as the baseline reality in the same way that a first-time reader or viewer of “Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge” naturally assumes that Farquhar is successfully making his escape. In Enrico’s Occurrence, the audience shares the time-sense of the dying man as his fantasy of escape extends a single moment into a 20-minute odyssey. In Jacob’s Ladder, the 2 hours the audience spends watching the movie corresponds with the amount of time it takes Jacob to bleed to death, allowing the audience to share the time-sense of Jacob’s dying body. One of the aspects of the story that misleads the audience into accepting the reality of Jacob’s postwar existence is how embedded this life seems to be in an entire history of events that we assume to have transpired between the time Jacob was in Vietnam and the time we encounter him in ’70s’ New York City. It is a convention of narrative film that we only see the slices of life that we are shown; we are meant to fill in the absent details with assumptions about what must have happened before or between the scenes that appear in the film. In the same way that the biophysics of film viewership relies on the persistence of vision to connect one frame of a film to the next, the narrative logic of film relies on the audience’s psychological acceptance of object permanence: that just because we do not see something does not mean it did not happen. But in Jacob’s Ladder, this assumption is turned against us, because all of the details of Jacob’s postwar existence are fabricated out of Jacob’s own dying mind; they have no history or context. There is no indication

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that Jacob’s girlfriend Jezebel, his chiropractor-cum-priest Louie, or even Jacob himself exist outside of the scenes that appear in the movie. Once we realize that Jacob’s postVietnam reality has this apparitional quality, we realize that we are experiencing these scenes in the same way as Jacob, and in a similar time-sense. We ran through the woods with Farquhar, sharing the temporality his escapist fantasy of freedom. That movie swept us away into the temporality of the dream, the way we expect all movies to do. But in Jacob’s story, the audience shares Jacob’s deathbed. We share the temporal experience of the dying body, even as we receive glimpses into Jacob’s mysterious and terrifying visions of the beyond. By aligning the time-sense of the audience with the dying American soldier, the filmmakers use the experience of time to emphasize the historical situation in which Jacob dies. Jacob dies in Vietnam, killed, we learn, we think, by his own comrades as a result of a psychosis induced by drugs slipped to them by the US government. Jacob’s personal journey of coming to grips with the death of his son and the dissolution of his marriage takes place alongside a parallel narrative about his investigation into a government conspiracy to ply soldiers with an experimental hallucinogen. Is the army conspiracy narrative simply a red herring to provide a false explanation for why Jacob is having his hallucinations? After all, if everything that is happened to him since he died in Vietnam is a postmortem fantasy, then the hippie chemist who explains to Jacob about the army experiment that he was subjected to must be a part of this hallucination, and according to the ordinary rules of dream-experiences, he cannot bring in to Jacob’s solipsistic death-delirium true information from the outside world. The metaphysical explanation of Jacob’s infernal visions—that Jacob is being purged of his attachment to the earth—seems to be cancelled out by the political explanation— that he is suffering the traumatic aftereffects of his victimization by powers that are entirely terrestrial, although not necessarily less malevolent for that. And yet at the end of the movie, Jacob dies in the medical tent in Vietnam, appearing to confirm that the demons really were demons and that perhaps the political plotline is intended to represent only another demon. In this reading of the movie, our political anxieties and our perception of worldly injustice become etherealized; they do not exist in themselves but rather represent a metaphysical condition. The hippie chemist was just another Boschian monster sent to spook Jacob, the only one who represents a late twentieth-century style of boogieman as opposed to the medieval style of Jacob’s more manifestly grotesque tormentors. And yet, one of the revelations at the very end of the movie is that Jacob was in fact bayoneted by one of his own fellow soldiers, appearing to confirm the hippie chemist’s narrative. But then we see that he dies in Vietnam, implying that he never could have actually met the hippie chemist. But then again, after Jacob dies in the movie’s final scene, a title card explains that the army allegedly did in fact use BZ on unwitting soldiers in the Vietnam War. This apparently nonfictional, seemingly extratextual assertion snaps us back into the political reading of Jacob’s story, inviting us to read the movie in psychological rather than ontological terms. Adding yet a further convolution of this hermeneutic spiral is director Adrian Lyne’s own statement outside of the movie that “nothing ... suggests that the drug BZ—a super-hallucinogen that has a tendency to elicit maniac behavior—was used on

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U.S. troops” (Hartl). Such deliberate indeterminacy situates the entire narrative in an impossible space between fiction and history, just as Jacob is caught between life and death. Jacob’s Ladder enacts the ontological disorientation it dramatizes by bringing Jacob’s postmortem experience out into the real world and binding it up in an uncanny way with recent American history. Bruce Joel Rubin’s original screenplay for Jacob’s Ladder included elaborate hellscapes and a finale in which Jacob fights a monstrous demon. Adrian Lyne’s instinct was to embed Jacob’s purgatorial condition within the structures of social and historical reality. In Lyne’s film, indeed, it becomes a dark running joke that the hellish quality of real-world New York makes it difficult for Jacob to decipher the truth of his predicament. The demons are plausibly disguised as homeless people. Jacob’s girlfriend argues persuasively that “New York is full of creatures,” a misshapen and vaguely subhuman population of damned souls. Jacob’s fellow veterans suffer from symptoms that resemble the posttraumatic disorders of combat veterans whose only encounter with hell has been as soldiers in the US military. Indeed, the Vietnam War itself frames the narrative as the ultimate example of a hell that is entirely terrestrial and anthropogenic. Jacob’s hell is our post-Vietnam reality, long stretches of dread punctuated by spasms of posttraumatic shock, as if contemporary American history has been unfolding in the subjective dream of a body that is still bleeding to death in Vietnam. By aligning the temporal experience of the viewer with Jacob’s body dying in 1971, Jacob’s Ladder invites us to experience the post-Vietnam USA as a ghoulish flashforward, a time in which the basic ontological categories of existence and nonexistence and past and future have been undermined as a result of a lethal spasm of internecine violence, the national trip “right down the ladder—right to the base anger” that the US government deliberately brought about. It is we who have been living in a posthumous delusion without realizing it. It is our contemporary American history that takes place in a kind of ghost-time, an echo of traumatic aftereffects that is experienced as a hell of subjectivity. The same year, 1990, also saw the release of another movie based on a Bruce Joel Rubin screenplay and featuring a dead protagonist, the wildly successful supernatural romance, Ghost. Although Ghost bears a family resemblance to Jacob’s Ladder, it differs decisively in its representation of time. After Sam Wheat is killed, he continues to inhabit the world of the living. He is invisible and he no longer occupies space, but he is a conventional ghost-story type of dead person because he exists in objective, social time. While training Sam to exert agency in the physical world, the mad subway ghost counsels Sam to “give it time. What else have you got?” Indeed, Sam has no body and no voice; he exists exclusively in the dimension of time. He spends his death hanging around on the periphery of scenes played out by the living, and when the audience does not see him, we are intended to assume that he continues to exist, pacing around and looking out the window. Even the soundtrack emphasizes the predominance of conventional temporality, repeatedly crooning, “Time goes by so slowly, and time can do so much.” The fact that Sam can walk through doors and walls but not floors suggests that, although he is nonphysical, the temporality he shares with the living characters acts as a common “ground.” Although Sam’s ghost chases his murderer for

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a few seconds without realizing that his body is lying dead on the pavement, it is not a true Peyton Farquhar moment, because time is elapsing. His wife can be heard crying and pleading even over the course of his short surreal hallucination sequence; the keening of his wife grounds Sam’s experience in the unfolding of social time. Because he exists alongside the living characters in “real time,” Sam is not prone to the kind of ontological vertigo that characterizes Jacob’s situation. His afterlife is not a subjective world unto itself; it takes place in the workaday world of sex and money. Consequently, Ghost has more in common with The Invisible Man (1933) than with Jacob’s Ladder or the other “subjective” ghost stories. Jim Jarmusch’s Dead Man, however, does portray a similar style of postmortem temporality to that experienced by Jacob. On the narrative level, it seems that William Blake, the main character of the film, dies as a result of two gunshot wounds sustained over the course of the story, but on a more figurative level of this extremely figurative movie, it is clear that William has been dead since the very first scene. We first see him as a train passenger traveling from his hometown of Cleveland into the American frontier. The surreal style of the scene, fading in and out on increasingly ragtaglooking clusters of fellow passengers, establishes a disorienting sense that is sustained throughout the movie of fading in and out of consciousness. A glimpse at his watch in this opening scene suggests that William is as confused as the audience by the hypnotic sense of confused temporality evoked by Jarmusch’s camera work. This opening scene is intruded upon by the Charon-like figure of the locomotive’s stoker, his figure black with soot, who challenges William to explain why he has come “all the way out here to hell.” When William explains that he has been offered a job at Dickinson’s Metalworks in the town of Machine, the stoker tells William menacingly that Machine is the “end of the line” and that he is “just as likely to find [his] own grave.” Later, this sentiment is confirmed by Dickinson himself, who tells William that “the only job you’re going to get here is pushing up daisies from a pine box.” The Native American Nobody asks William, “Did you kill the white man who killed you?”; insists that William must be dead because “William Blake” is a dead poet; and sees a peyote vision of William’s face as a death’s head. But it is the stoker’s first line of dialogue—the first line of dialogue in the film—that creates the most haunting impression of postmortem temporality, “Doesn’t this remind you of when you were in the boat?” The question is disorienting because the stoker implies a familiarity with William’s memory that even William himself does not seem to have. In the final scene of the movie, when William drifts out to sea in a canoe as part of a Native American funerary ritual, the audience may assume that this canoe is the boat that the stoker was referring to in the movie’s first scene. The stoker’s question conflates the ride in the boat at the end of the movie to the ride on the train in the beginning of the movie, and associates both with a memory that William is supposed to have had, a memory which in this context seems like it must be the memory of dying. The entire movie, from beginning to end, is thus framed as an extended journey through the experience of death, even if we do not realize it until the movie’s final scene. Even more deliberately than Jacob’s Ladder, Dead Man employs William’s postmortem perspective as a vehicle for social critique. William’s death fugue carries

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him not into an abstract metaphysical plane but into a thoroughly demythologized American West. Conventional Westerns have always employed the iconography of the frontier as a metaphorical field in which to stage representations of characteristics and conflicts that are considered to be foundational to the American body politic. The typical Western celebrates the establishment of American law and order in a hostile wilderness. Jarmusch’s appropriation of this iconography, however, turns this metanarrative on its head; the hell that William Blake travels into is the hell that white Americans have brought into existence. The connection between William’s personal existential status and the brutality characteristic of the founding of the United States is made startlingly clear at the beginning of the film when the stoker’s ominous reference to William’s grave is abruptly interrupted by the sound of gunshots as William’s fellow train passengers rush to the windows to shoot at herds of buffalo. Over the rifle fire, the stoker tells William that the US government boasts that it accomplished the death of a million buffalo in the previous year. William descends into a land of death that is American made. The violence that American settlers direct outwardly toward the buffalo, toward the Native Americans, and toward each other is represented as a symptom of an inward death, a death in the heart of the American soul. In the town of Machine, we see a coffin shop, a merchant selling piles of animal hides, casual gunplay, and piles of animal and human skulls. The town itself is filthy and loathsome, centered around Mr Dickinson’s factory, which raises an extremely Blakean smokestack to the sky. Mr Dickinson’s office is filled with taxidermied animals, and he also has a human skull on his desk. His name may recall, in contrast with the Romantic optimism of the English poet William Blake, the morbid reveries of America’s premier poetess of death, particularly her own postmortem visions in poems such as “I heard a fly buzz when I died” and “I felt a funeral in my brain.” More than anything else, however, Jarmusch’s American hell is a land of guns, which are carried by just about every character. When William asks Thel why she keeps a loaded gun under her pillow, she replies, “Because this is America.” Instantly, magically, as soon as Thel’s gun is introduced in the narrative, her lover bursts in on William and Thel in bed, shooting Thel and William fatally with a single bullet through both their hearts (although William, being already dead, manages to pull through this episode), and giving William a chance to use the gun to kill the lover. It is as if Thel’s gun itself has brought death into the story. The juxtaposition of Old West history from the nineteenth century, golden-age Western cinematic iconography from the postwar era, and contemporary Tarantino-style profanity-laced banter throughout Dead Man suggests that gun violence is a social constant in American life. A priest’s comment that the ammunition he sells has been “blessed by the Archbishop of Detroit” seems to nod anachronistically at that city that became notorious for gun violence in the late twentieth century, drawing a straight line between the slaughter of Indians and buffalos in the nineteenth century and the preponderance of gun violence in contemporary America. Nobody, the Native American who acts as William’s spirit-guide out of the hell of American violence, refers to bullets as “white man’s metal,” and his refrain, “stupid fucking white man” provides a running critique of the American character. Nobody is uniquely positioned to achieve a critical perspective on the white man because he exists

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beyond the borders not only of white society but also of Native American communities as well. He explains that he was an outcast from birth in his own tribe because his mother and father came from different tribes, and the mixture “was not respected.” Nobody’s outsider status became much more pronounced when he was captured by English soldiers and paraded around Europe as an example of a primitive savage. While in Europe, Nobody absorbed English language and culture, but upon returning to his people, this background marked him as alien, and his stories of what he saw in his travels made him the mockery of his incredulous kinspeople. As a result, he has named himself Nobody, a wanderer loosened from all human ties. It is this status, furthermore, that makes Nobody available to be William’s spirit-guide, suggesting that Nobody is capable of traveling not only beyond the bounds of human communities but also beyond the frontiers of life itself, inhabiting a liminal position in common with the postmortem protagonist. As William and Nobody travel further away from Machine, the presence of Native Americans becomes more prominent. William sees apparitional indigenous people spying on him from the treeline, an unseen Native American shoots the Indiankiller Cole with an arrow, William stumbles into Nobody’s domestic quarrel, which is carried on in untranslated dialogue, and the climax of the movie brings William into a Makah village. Nobody leads William’s soul out of the hell of white America and into the natural beauty of Native American culture. William and Nobody’s postmortem fugue becomes associated with Native American communities, which themselves, in the wake of their virtual elimination at the hands of white American frontiersmen, inhabit a kind of postmortem register of being. William’s Native American funeral makes him an honorary Native American, paralleling his nightmare vision of an American hell with the tragic postmortem perspective of the slaughtered animals and human beings who have been the victims of Manifest Destiny. The most commercially successful of these postmortem movies is M. Night Shyamalan’s The Sixth Sense. In Shyamalan’s film, the main character’s ability to see and communicate with dead people gives him a unique perspective into American history and its influence on the present. The story is set in Philadelphia, and Shyamalan underscores that city’s association with the founding of the United States to frame the entire movie as a political allegory. In history class, Cole is taught that Philadelphia is one of the oldest cities in the country, that it served as the nation’s capital, and that even the very building the school occupies has a notable history. When the teacher asks if the students are familiar with the history of the school building, Cole uses his special insight to inform the class that “they used to hang people here.” The teacher responds that Cole is incorrect; the building was “a legal courthouse. Laws were passed here, some of the first in this country. The whole building was full of lawyers, lawmakers …” But Cole persists: “They were the ones that hanged everybody.” The scene contrasts two versions of American history, the official schoolbook story of law and order and the repressed under-story of violence and death. The teacher’s eagerness to keep the under-history repressed takes on a personal dimension when Cole uses his knowledge of secret history to expose the teacher’s own past as a stuttering social outcast. Official history relies for its aura of authority on the active repression of a point of view that recognizes victimhood and oppression. Cole remembers differently—he

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sees differently—than the other people in his world. He sees the haunting under-reality that is all around us but invisible. Dead people are quickly shunted out of the frame of hyperreal society, as Baudrillard explained. We bury their stories along with them; we bury their points of view. The American dream that was born in Philadelphia began with the Founders’ desire to liberate themselves from all obligations toward the dead. Thomas Jefferson expressed the spirit of the Founders in his assessment that, “I set out upon this ground which I believe self-evident, ‘that the earth belongs in usufruct to the living’; that the dead have neither power nor rights over it” (Lewis 16). But Cole’s gift allows him to realize that the dead do not go away simply because we bury them. From Cole’s perspective, American reality is crowded with corpses from all strata of American history. Cole is haunted not only by hanged colonials and a wrongfully tortured alleged horse thief but also by a ’50s’ housewife driven to suicide by her stifling marriage, a ’70s’ teenager accidentally shot in the head with his father’s gun, and a bicyclist freshly killed in a traffic accident. Cole’s world is crowded with the victims of many varieties of American death. Even Philadelphia’s civic statuary of settlers and Indians seems to suggest the presence of more ghosts, voiceless victims whispering at the periphery of our national consciousness. At the level of its narrative, The Sixth Sense represents the postmortem presence of dead people, but at the level of its narration, it casts the audience in the position of one of these troubled specters. Like Jacob’s Ladder, Shyamalan’s film aligns us with the point of view of a dead man while simultaneously deferring our awareness of this situation until the climactic twist ending. Shyamalan is more deliberate than Lyne in his use of filmic conventions to represent a postmortem style of temporality. In a recurring scene, Dr Malcolm, from whose perspective the story is mostly told, pulls at a basement doorknob and discovers that it will not open. His hand moves to his pocket, supposedly for the key, and the scene cuts directly to a shot of his legs walking down the cellar stairs. We do not see him open the door, but a first-time viewer of the film will automatically assume that Malcolm did in fact open the door; we simply did not see it because we are used to not seeing everything that a character is supposed to have done in a narrative film. We fill in the gaps between scenes with our own expectations and assumptions. As part of the twist ending montage, however, we see the same doorknob, only from a wider angle, exposing the fact that the door has been blocked off by a low table. The audience, along with Malcolm, has been deliberately misled by the tricky framing of the doorknob shot and the editing of the sequence into thinking that Malcolm has been moving in the normal way through space and time, when in fact, it must be the case that he was spatially transposed immediately from one side of the door to the other with the same immediacy with which the audience perceives the edit from one scene to the next. A similar trick is used throughout the film to mask the truth of Malcolm’s condition through the conventions of filmic story-telling, as when a scene begins with Malcolm and Cole’s mother sitting together. An audience seeing the shot begin this way reflexively makes the assumption not only that Malcolm and Cole’s mother have been talking about Cole but also that they are both aware of each other’s presence, and Malcolm himself appears to be duped by the same misperception. Even more brazenly, Shyalaman’s script includes a metanarrative commentary on the nature

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of the movie’s conceit in Malcolm’s tongue-in-cheek coin trick. Malcolm conceals a penny in one of his hands, performs some corny magician gestures, and then tells Cole that the penny has moved to his other fist. Using the same “magic,” Malcolm transports the penny into his breast pocket and then back into the original hand, where it is “magically” revealed. Cole seems unimpressed, but we later see him showing the same trick to one of his peers, suggesting that something about the routine intrigues him. The routine is a metaphor for the movie, with Malcolm playing the role of the penny. Malcolm’s movements from one place to another are only simulacral; they exist only to the extent that we go along with the audacious conceit of the trickster. Like Cole, we see through the penny-trick instantly, but the joke is on us, and on Malcolm himself, because we fall for the same joke on the level of the film as a whole. The illusion of movement is intentionally manipulated to make Malcolm seem more alive than he really is. We allow ourselves to assume that Malcolm is actually moving from one place to another based entirely on the manner in which Shyamalan’s camera structures our expectations. The placement of this penny-trick scene in the immediate aftermath of Cole’s argument with his history teacher emphasizes the role that active deception and passive assumptions play in our understanding of our own social and political reality. The gag in which every parent at a school play watches the performance through a video camera implies that America has become an entire culture that sees reality through the conventions of film. Elsewhere in the movie, a dead girl uses a video tape to expose her murderous step-mother, Cole’s nemesis Tommy Tomassino appears in a cough syrup commercial depicting a perfect commercial family, and Malcolm’s widow mourns by falling asleep to home movies of her wedding. The final image in the movie is an image from one of these home movies, implying that when Malcolm is done in limbo, he dissolves into the heaven of existing as a filmic image. This running motif of filmic images provides commentary on the manner in which our understanding of death and life—of our history as well as of our present—is mediated both through cinematic technologies themselves and, even more fundamentally, through the kind of selective framing and editing of perception for which cinema provides such a potent metaphor. We are a society of filmmakers, seeing what we want to see, training our lenses on what we wish to think of as reality. We willfully avoid recognizing not only the fact of death (the classic Beckerian “Denial of Death”) but also the claim that the generations of dead have on us. The first scene of The Sixth Sense is organized around a plaque that Malcolm has received from the mayor of Philadelphia in recognition of his service to the city as a child psychologist. Malcolm has achieved officially sanctioned success as the premier diagnostician of the archetypally American city by explaining to the disturbed youth of America that their psychopathology stems from personal causes, principally parental divorce. Like Cole’s history teacher, Malcolm is the guardian of the dominant social narrative that defines psychological suffering as a personal matter traceable to conflicts in the patient’s immediate family. He pinned Vincent Gray’s problems on the failure of his parents’ marriage and tries to make the same connection with Cole. But Malcolm comes to discover that the psychopathology of America’s children goes much deeper than mere personal problems. Both of these children are haunted by an

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intergenerational trauma, the echo-effects of past generations of American violence. Malcolm’s blindness to his own existential condition is paralleled by his blindness to the true etiology of American horror, and both kinds of blindness are bound up in his confused sense of his own temporality. Malcolm confesses that he “just can’t seem to keep track of time” and he is unable to discern that Cole’s watch is broken. The manipulation of Malcolm’s time-sense becomes a critique of the manner in which we remember our own history. Like Cole’s ghosts, we only see what we want to see. We avoid seeing lacunae. We invent explanations that favor our inherent prejudice (that we are alive, that we are capable of communicating with other people). We are being misled by deliberately manipulative editing to think that we are alive, safely on the positive side of the binary—that we are the investigator, the psychologist, the adult, the giver of help—when in fact we realize with a shock that, along with Malcolm, we were the ones in need of help, we were the ones being psychologized and investigated; we have been dead all along. The perspective of death transports us into solidarity with the haunted specters of American history and culture. The viewer is one of Cole’s ghosts, caught in a postmortem routine of oblivious behaviors. Through assuming Malcolm’s point of view, we have passed from sympathizing with the dead to identifying with them. We leave our own skins to participate in the shock of experiencing the dead’s sense of displacement. Our shock is theirs at having suddenly been bumped out of the temporal order. If we are looking for advice about how to make the most of our postmortem condition, we might turn to Richard Linklater’s film, Waking Life. This 2001 film provides a particularly intriguing representation of the postmortem genre due to the manner in which it compares and contrasts with Linklater’s signature movie, 1991’s Slacker. Slacker and Waking Life both follow a roving camera as it comes into apparently random contact with a series of articulate and eccentric characters who deliver quirky monologues on abstract subjects. The postmortem perspective of the later film, however, completely reorganizes the political consciousness of the later movie. In Slacker, the political message articulated in various forms throughout the film is that the only viable critique of late capitalist culture is “withdrawing in disgust.” We are told that the winner of every election is the majority of Americans who choose not to vote. The black man who rails against the state and the system is reduced to selling Mandela tee-shirts. The only ostensibly holy object in the movie is Madonna’s pap smear. The man who drives through town spouting a political wake-up call through his roof-mounted megaphone is only one of many images on somebody’s video camera. The camera itself represents the limit of political action, because its mute all-encompassing two-dimensionality constitutes the ultimate frame of reference. In Waking Life, on the other hand, the psychedelic rotoscope animation scrambles the objective point of view of the camera, reorganizing the ontology of the cinematic image as transformative rather than reductive. The film comments specifically on this transcendent potential of the cinematic art through its inclusion of Caveh Zahedi’s monologue on Andre Bazin. According to Zahedi, Bazin described film’s capability to capture what Zahedi (although not Bazin) calls “holy moments,” and Zahedi and his interlocutor attempt unironically to experience the ecstatic plenitude of pure being.

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The unnamed protagonist, who watches Zahedi on a screen in a movie theater, and, by extension, the audience, are invited along in search of this holy moment, not only in this scene but also throughout the film itself. The earnestness of this quest for the sacred is a far cry from Madonna’s pap smear. Like Slacker, Waking Life includes a sequence in which a motorist shouts an angry political diatribe from a megaphone mounted to the roof of his car, but in Waking Life, this act of resistance is not reduced to the absurd pointlessness that characterizes every scene in Slacker. Rather, the angry motorist is swept up into the kaleidoscopic beauty and creative energy of Waking Life’s hallucinatory tapestry. The ranter in Slacker is another local nutjob, another American crazy bouncing around with purposeless violence; the corresponding figure in Waking Life is represented as another in a series of thoughtful critical voices. The departure of Waking Life from the nihilism of Slacker is grounded in the postmortem condition of the film’s unnamed protagonist. Early in the movie, the protagonist receives instructions from none other than Richard Linklater, traveling incognito, to go to an intersection at which, upon arrival, the protagonist is hit by a car. The rest of the movie (and possibly this opening sequence as well) takes place in what one character describes as an infinitely extended subjective dream-time between the death of the body and the death of the brain. Another character speculates that “After death, your conscious life would continue in what might be called your dream body. It would be the same dream body you experience in your everyday dream life, except that in the post-mortal state, you could never again wake up.” It becomes increasingly clear that our protagonist is not only dreaming, but dead. Rather than severing him from notions of engagement, responsibility, and future-directed possibility, however, our protagonist’s first postmortem encounter is with a professor explaining the enduring relevance of existential philosophy. It is as if the release into postmortem consciousness and the consequent release from conventional representations of time and space generate a domain in which human responsibility and meaningful existence can be examined. Rather than considering death and dreaming as states that are estranged from social reality, Waking Life conceptualizes these as outside spaces in which socially and psychologically transformative experiences can be realized. Indeed, many of the philosophical ideas expressed throughout the film root themselves in some version of the postmortem perspective. Eamonn Healey describes the evolution of a “neohuman” race of human beings who will be free of the constraints of conventional biology. Akilu Gebrewold looks forward to a utopian transformation of consciousness that will celebrate multiplicity and marginality. Ryan Power’s spoken word poetry ecstatically announces, “Now my final departure is scheduled. This way out. Escaping velocity.” We learn that Kierkegaard’s last words were, “Sweep me up!” A young woman describes a recurring dream in which she is an old woman on her deathbed reflecting on her life. Another woman describes her life from the death-perspective: “That’s what I loved the most, interacting with the people. Looking back, that’s all that really mattered.” All of these perspectives have in common that they imaginatively summon the postmortem perspective as a way of reevaluating the existential possibilities of life itself. The deathdream is represented not a terminal dead end of quietism and despair but, in the words of one character, an opportunity “to interrupt the continuum of everyday experience

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and all the normal expectations that go with it.” Several references to the millennial moment mark Waking Life as representing the high point of promise for the hyperreal period. The new millennium is a metaphor for the wide-open potential of leaving the old reality behind and launching humanity into a utopian realization of our most optimistic dreams. The scrambled readout of the protagonist’s digital clock disorients conventional modes of temporality, representing the postmortem condition as an emancipatory opportunity to imagine a new kind of American dream. In Alejandro Amenábar’s The Others, the postmortem condition is initially represented as anything but emancipatory. Convinced that her children suffer from severe photosensitivity and living in fear of her own migraine headaches, Grace Stewart lives in a self-imposed prison of darkness and silence. The complex system of locks and keys that shut all natural light out of the house provides a compelling metaphor for Grace’s mechanisms of repression. While she works feverishly to eliminate light and noise from her household, what she really wages battle against is the horrifying knowledge that she is dead, having killed her children and herself in a fit of madness. Her neurotically protective attitude toward her children is a postmortem extension of her having literally smothered them in life, but it also constitutes a ritual whereby she keeps herself smothered in the silent darkness of self-deception. The Others represents Grace’s postmortem condition as a hell of willful ignorance. The fact that we know very little about Grace’s prepostmortem life, however, and absolutely nothing about the impulse that caused her to murder her children, keeps the story from being simply a character study and positions the narrative as an examination into the psychopathology of repression itself. The film begins with Grace telling the Bible’s creation story. “Now children, are you sitting comfortably? Then I’ll begin. This story started many thousands of years ago, and it was all over in just seven days.” This opening line suggests that the narrative of the movie we are about to watch is actually a creation narrative, an investigation back into the origins of human identity. Like The Sixth Sense, The Others manipulates the postmortem perspective to stage a critique of the ways in which human beings lie to themselves to avoid acknowledging a truth that they perceive to be threatening. One such locus of self-deception is introduced along with the opening line, the discourse of biblical literalism. Grace drills her children in religious dogma as obsessively as she drills her servants in the maintenance of sound and light repression. Her faith, however, is represented as another key that she uses to keep the door between life and death closed and locked. When the servant Mrs Mills opines that “sometimes the world of the dead gets mixed up with the world of the living,” Grace counters the threat to her psychic barriers by insisting that “the Lord would never allow such an aberration. The living and the dead will only meet at the end of eternity. It says so in the Bible.” Grace teaches her children that they will be condemned to limbo if they lie, but the audience, along with Grace herself, comes to realize that she is actually existing in a limbo that is maintained by her own lies. At the end of The Others, when the curtains that blocked the sunlight out of the house are removed and Grace finally accepts the truth of her postmortem condition, she tells her children “I don’t know if there is a limbo. I’m no wiser than you are.” The revelation of the truth that Grace had been repressing results, paradoxically, in Grace’s

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acceptance of uncertainty. In addition to the tempering of her religious dogmatism, Grace’s understanding of her postmortality involves a reorganization of perception that decentralizes her privileged position. Grace’s anagnorisis revolves around her understanding that she has been the ghost—the other—all along, and that the figures she had taken to be ghosts are actually living people who have a kind of existential priority over her. Grace’s stiff British reign over her home on the Crown Dependency of Jersey and the air of supremacy with which she relates to her Irish servants are also premised on a self-centered worldview that is destabilized when her children and her servants prove to be more adept than Grace at negotiating the reality they inhabit. At the end of her story, Grace is able to stand in the sun with a look of serenity and confidence because she has been able to accomplish a kind of self-othering, accepting her marginalized status as a ghost in the same way that she has accepted the limitations of her own wisdom. Grace’s salvation relies on her willingness to redefine the rigid boundaries that she had circumscribed around the categories of life and death, self and other, and belief and doubt. Although Grace passes through a much more hellish ordeal than the protagonist of Waking Life, both movies ultimately suggest that seizing ownership of the postmortal moment can be an empowering and transformative act. In 1997, Amenábar cowrote and directed Abre los Ojos, another postmortem reverie, which was then remade in 2001 by Cameron Crowe as Vanilla Sky. As in The Others, Amenábar’s earlier film uses the idea of the postmortal condition as a way of challenging the protagonist’s epistemological certitudes. Cesar, the central character, lives in a world of appearances. He wears his good looks as a shield between himself and the world, making it a point of pride that he is so attractive to women that he never sleeps with the same girl more than once. As his best friend points out in an early scene, Cesar’s success with women is a barometer of the superficiality of the world they both inhabit. When Cesar falls in love with Sofia, it is while looking at the photographs in her apartment, and one of the games they play on their first date is drawing caricatures of one another. In both cases, the role of appearances in their relationship is emphasized. It is initially sweet but ultimately creepy that Cesar is unable to draw a caricature of Sofia because her essence corresponds exactly with her outer appearance. In chilling contrast with the warmth, humor, and vibrancy that Penelope Cruz brings to the role of Sofia, the script presents Sofia herself as a woman who exists completely as a surface, a quality that does indeed make her the ideal romantic partner for Cesar. She makes money by performing as a living statue in a Madrid park, and she plays the role of a coin-operated automaton while in bed with Cesar. Cesar flirtatiously chastises Sofia when they first meet, telling her that she should be ashamed to be an actress because actresses misrepresent their emotions, but after Cesar’s accident, when his face is grotesquely disfigured, she loses interest in him, seeming to verify the accusation that Sofia’s affection was always only skin-deep and that she herself is a representation of the fickleness of the world of appearances. When Cesar is disfigured, the world of appearances turns against him. Not only does his own disfigurement exile him from the glamorous world of beautiful people but also his appearances themselves go haywire when Sofia begins to take on the appearance of the femme fatale Nuria and when Cesar’s own face flashes back and forth between handsome and disfigured.

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We ultimately learn that the immediate explanation for the glitches in the fabric of Cesar’s reality is that he is dead and frozen in a cryotube somewhere in Arizona. What he imagines to be his life is actually a virtual life overseen by technicians who are somehow tricking his dead brain into dreaming. Some reservoir of guilt, however, has caused Cesar to “invent [his] own hell” by turning his dream into a nightmare. As in many of the movies discussed in this chapter, the postmortem condition in Abre los Ojos encourages a radical skepticism about the basic principles according to which we perceive reality. In targeting the vice of superficiality, Amenábar’s movie is both a critique of consumer society and a philosophical critique of a rationalist epistemology. Cesar’s boast, “I only believe what I see” invites error, not because (as in a religious critique) the realist remains ignorant of invisible forces but because perception itself is unreliable. The death-dream state is the movie’s master-metaphor for the unreliability of perception, but the very first scenes of the film establish that you do not have to be dead to be deluded by your senses. In the very first shot of the movie, Cesar looks at his clock. It assures him that he is firmly able to locate himself in a space and time the reality of which is affirmed by social consensus. But when Cesar drives out into the heart of downtown Madrid, it is deserted. The social consensus has vanished, causing Cesar, unnerved, to check his watch again. The watch seems again to declare that he is in human time, but humanity itself is nowhere to be seen. Of course, it turns out to have been just a dream. But when Cesar wakes up “for real,” sees the same clock with the same readout, goes through the same steps of his morning ritual, and heads out into the crowds, there is a fundamental difference embedded within the similarity between the dream sequence and the “real” sequence. The readout on the clock, Cesar’s image in the mirror, and the crowds of other people all seem spectral and insubstantial. Cesar’s psychologist makes a point of asking why Cesar chooses to begin his account of his own story with this oneiric preamble, and the audience can put the same question to Amenábar. In both cases, the answer is that, even before Cesar dies in the story, in the first half of the film before the “splice,” Cesar is preoccupied with the haunting sense that appearances are fundamentally deceptive. The naive empiricist is deluded by a false definition of reality, causing a fundamental misunderstanding of what may be possible for human nature and human society. Only when Cesar “opens his eyes” to the dreamlike nature of perception itself will we be able to “overcome [his] fears and regain control.” When Cesar’s dream-state depicts the miracle procedure that restores his good looks, Cesar reports, “it looked like science fiction,” leading us to suspect that some tropes from that genre might have insinuated themselves into the texture of Cesar’s dream. Cameron Crowe seizes on this suggestion and elaborates it into a major theme in his version of Amenábar’s film. Whereas Cesar’s dreams are an extension and reworking of his memories and his desires, David’s postmortem fantasy draws heavily on elements of popular mass-culture. Several subtle touches in Abre los Ojos suggest that cinema is an apt metaphor for the postmortem dream-state—on the last night that they see each other in reality, Sofia suggests that the next time they meet, they could go to the movies; Cesar reports, “My dreams were coming true, like in the movies”—but Crowe’s remake elaborates this point in order to advance Crowe’s own opinions about

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the significant role played by mass-media in the psychic landscape of postmodern consciousness. In Abre los Ojos, Cesar’s psychologist was a representation of Cesar’s father; in Vanilla Sky, David’s psychologist is a representation of Gregory Peck playing Atticus Finch in To Kill a Mockingbird (1962). David’s romantic memories with Sofia are patterned after the cover of The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan. His relationship with his friend and girlfriend are patterned after Jules and Jim (1962), and Sofia even wears a Jeanne Moreau overcoat. Indeed, part of the pitch that Life Extension uses to encourage people to sign up for their “lucid dream” cryogenic service is that the postmortem dream will be experienced “with the feeling of a great movie, or a pop song you’ve always loved.” When David finally “dies” at the end of Vanilla Sky, his entire life is represented as a video montage that edits together home-movie footage from his childhood with clips from rock concerts, movies, and television shows. Far from a critique of the extent to which David’s mind is colonized by media images, however, Crowe’s nostalgia for the cultural artifacts to which he alludes limits the extent to which his version of the story can act as a critique of an image-based culture. David’s psychologist attempts to denounce “cryotainment” as a cynical capitalist scheme to commodify life and death, but his protestations are quickly brushed aside as self-serving rhetoric projected from a vacuum: the psychologist does not even exist. Cesar’s face had been smashed into a cartoonishly grotesque send-up of Lon Cheney’s The Phantom of the Opera (1929); but David, possibly as a result of Crowe’s unwillingness to disfigure Tom Cruise’s iconic mug, is significantly less disfigured. Sofia, the image-girl who was such a disturbing fusion of alluring appearance and inner vacancy in Abre los Ojos, is treated much more sympathetically in Vanilla Sky. She tried to call David after the accident, but could not get through, and she readily accepts his invitation to get together despite his altered appearance. Although Crowe’s film follows Amenábar’s film scene for scene and sometimes shot for shot, Crowe’s fondness for the image-world of popular culture causes his film to enact a celebration of consumerist-spectator values rather than a critique. The explicit representation of the postmortem lifeworld as a product of the entertainment industry doubles back on the film Vanilla Sky itself. If the similarity of reality and dreams causes Cesar to wonder if even his real life is really real, in David’s world, both reality and dreams are subsumed into Vanilla Sky’s self-reflexively cinematic quality. While the narrative of Crowe’s movie softens the paranoia of Abre los Ojos (Sofia really is who she seems to be; the postmortem condition is an opportunity to live inside your favorite albums and movies), the overall atmosphere of Vanilla Sky is one in which the characters are irrevocably stranded in the hyperreal register of existing as characters in a movie. If an ordinary movie is a representation of life, than Vanilla Sky is a representation of a representation, a hyperreal construct that recalls the simulated lifeworld of David, not only as a head in a pan in the twenty-second century but also as a rich jerk partying with holograms in his penthouse apartment. The celebrity presences of Tom Cruise and Cameron Diaz, each of them playing to type, allude to the total edifice of contemporary Hollywood cinema, and Cameron Crowe, as a celebrity auteur, makes his own presence heavily felt in the platitudinous dialogue (“You can’t have the sweet without the sour”, “The little things. There’s nothing

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bigger, is there?”), clichéd commentary on the commercialization of rock and roll, and his signature use of popular music on the soundtrack. In this context, when Crowe cues up Peter Gabriel’s ubiquitous “Solsbury Hill” for the scene in which David and Sofia draw caricatures of one another, it is as if Crowe is hinting that this scene constitutes his own directorial self-caricature. The re-casting of Penelope Cruz as Sofia is a constant reminder that Vanilla Sky is an echo of an earlier film, but making her a more sympathetic character, rather than humanizing the eerie automaton from the original film, has the effect of flattening her even further and in a more fundamental way: she becomes the stereotypical Cameron Crowe heroine, a product of Hollywood artifice. By accepting an epistemology in which dreams and memories share psychological priority with mass-media images, Crowe proposes the possibility that a character can be dead and frozen, yet simultaneously live on in a luminescent, two-dimensional film-world. Crowe’s film ultimately enacts a critique of a world of appearances that is more fundamental than Amenábar’s because Crowe’s characters are condemned not just in the narrative but also in their entire being to an unreal world from which there is apparently no escape. David, however, does in fact find an out. He is assured that if he jumps off the top of the Life Extension skyscraper, he will be able to exit the movie and to be resurrected into some brave new reality that he knows nothing about, a future that takes place beyond the margins of the Hollywood movie, a future in which all of his pop culture references will be ancient history. As in Abre los Ojos, the protagonist’s leap out of the movie is a leap of faith into the transformative power of the will and the imagination to break with an insubstantial present and penetrate into a more foundational register of being. It turns out that we are familiar with the future reality that David jumps into. Although Vanilla Sky was released three months after September 11, 2001, when David looks out at his dream-simulation of the Manhattan skyline, the twin towers still stand, clearly outlined on the horizon. When he wakes up, the towers will not be there. David will wake up from his dream-state into our post-9/11 temporality, a “real” time of historical crisis. In this time of catastrophe—military, ecological, financial—the postmortem subgenre has become less prominent as the specter of a

Figure 15.1  Tom Cruise leaps from his simulacral world into our “real” one.

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subjective postmortal dream-state appears less apt as a cultural metaphor. In the early twenty-first century, the postmortem discourse is dominated by the figures of the zombie and the vampire, characters who are tragically, inescapably bound to a globally consensual temporality. In the heyday of post–Cold War, pre-9/11 hyperreality, however, postmortem films responded to a sense on the part of their writers and audiences that they were living beyond the death of a previous existence. Phillip E. Wegner has described the Long ’90s as a “Life between two deaths,” but for Lester Burnham, Jacob Singer, William Blake, Malcolm Crowe, and these other postmortem protagonists, the epoch is actually a death between two deaths. Between the time they die as bodies and the time they die again as souls, they exist in a purgatorial netherworld characterized by simulated appearances, scrambled binaries, and anamorphic temporality. These qualities make the postmortem state a fitting metaphor for the hyperreal condition, even as these postmortem movies leverage the transgressive semantics of death to resist and reassess the meaning of this condition. Despite their focus on the subject of death, there is nothing particularly morbid about any of these movies. Rather than representing the postmortem condition as a release from social responsibility, with surprising consistency the subgenre of postmortem cinema uses the new temporal possibilities of postmortality to provoke social awareness. In his study of the repercussions of 9/11 on film and television, Wheeler Winston Dixon explains that “something has been lost in the aftermath of 9/11; the reality of destruction and physical violence has been made concrete and immediate. The deaths we witnessed when the twin towers fell were staged, but they were real—real suffering, real pain, and real loss” (24, italics in the original). Wheeler’s analysis suggests that “what has been lost” in the rubble of ground zero is our hazy cultural atmosphere of hyperreality. Indeed, it is easy to perceive that the heyday of hyperreal exuberance that characterizes the popular cinema of the 1990s has run its course by 2002. As we have already observed, the two Matrix sequels, both post-9/11 productions, become less interested in the phantasmal space of the cyberworld and direct their narrative energies toward the war between men and machines that is playing out in reality. The childish fantasy of Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace is succeeded by the operatic tragedy of the two sequels (2002 and 2005). Pierce Brosnan’s tongue-in-cheek James Bond is replaced by Daniel Craig’s scowling alcoholic, a bitter realist in a tragic world (2006, 2008, 2012). The signature films of the first decade of the twenty-first century—Children of Men (2006), No Country for Old Men (2007), and There Will Be Blood (2007)—depict pitiless existential landscapes of stark survivalism. Even the popular fantasy franchises of the ’00s—The Lord of the Rings (2001, 2002, 2003), Harry Potter (2001–11), The Dark Knight (2005, 2008, 2012), Twilight (2008–12)—take place in a narrative atmosphere characterized by moral obscurity, random violence, and irreversible consequences. Nevertheless, for all the dramatic effects 9/11 and its turbulent aftermath have had on the popular imagination, and as tempting as it may be to scholars of recent history to count 2001 as the first year on a new calendar, it is equally necessary to realize that many of the issues that defined the first decade of the twenty-first century—terrorism, globalization, and cybercommunications—have their origins in the final decade of the twentieth century. Baudrillard cautions us that

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9/11 and subsequent events are not to be characterized as “a reappearance of history or a Real irrupting in the heart of the Virtual.” Contemporary news stories “do not constitute events in history, but beyond history, beyond its end” (LP 126). The popular meme that 9/11 represents a return of the real may be dangerously misleading, giving us a false sense of groundedness when in fact we still inhabit a cultural condition in which fiction and reality continue to play mirror games with one another.

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Filmography 10 Things I Hate About You. Dir. Gil Junger. Buena Vista Pictures, 1999. 12 Monkeys. Dir. Terry Gilliam. Universal Pictures, 1995. 2001: A Space Odyssey. Dir. Stanley Kubrick. Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, 1968. Abre los Ojos. Dir. Alejandro Amenábar. Live Entertainment, 1997. Absolute Power. Dir. Clint Eastwood. Columbia Pictures, 1997. Ace Ventura: Pet Detective. Dir. Tom Shadyac. Warner Bros. Pictures, 1994. Air Force One. Dir. Wolfgang Petersen. Columbia Pictures, 1997. Alexander. Dir. Oliver Stone. Warner Bros. Pictures, 2004. Alien. Dir. Ridley Scott. 20th Century Fox, 1979. Aliens. Dir. James Cameron. 20th Century Fox, 1986. Alien3. Dir. David Fincher. 20th Century Fox, 1992. Alien Resurrection. Dir. Jean-Pierre Jeunet. 20th Century Fox, 1997. All Quiet on the Western Front. Dir. Lewis Milestone. Universal Pictures, 1930. Altman, Robert. “One on One with Robert Altman.” The Player. Dir. Robert Altman. New Line Home Video, 1992. Videocasette. American Beauty. Dir. Sam Mendes. DreamWorks Pictures, 1999. The American President. Dir. Rob Reiner. Columbia Pictures, 1995. Amistad. Dir. Steven Spielberg. DreamWorks Pictures, 1997. Annie Hall. Dir. Woody Allen. United Artists, 1977. Any Given Sunday. Dir. Oliver Stone. Warner Bros. Pictures, 1999. Apocalypse Now. Dir. Francis Ford Coppola. United Artists, 1979. L’Arivée d’un train en gare de la Ciotat. Société Lumière, 1895. Armageddon. Dir. Michael Bay. Touchstone Pictures, 1998. Babel. Dir. Alejandro González. Paramount Vantage, 2006. Back to the Future. Dir. Robert Zemeckis. Universal Pictures, 1985. Back to the Future Part II. Dir. Robert Zemeckis. Universal Pictures, 1989. Back to the Future Part III. Dir. Robert Zemeckis. Universal Pictures, 1990. Band of Brothers. Dir. Phil Alsen Robinson et al. HBO, 2001. Basic Instinct. Dir. Paul Verhoeven. TriStar Pictures, 1992. Being John Malkovich. Dir. Spike Jonze. USA Films, 1999. Ben-Hur. Dir. William Wyler. Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, 1959. Born on the Fourth of July. Dir. Oliver Stone. Universal Pictures, 1989. Boyz in the Hood. Dir. John Singleton. Columbia Pictures, 1991. Bill and Ted’s Bogus Journey. Dir. Pete Hewitt. Orion Pictures, 1991. Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure. Dir. Stephen Herek. Orion Pictures, 1989. The Brady Bunch Movie. Dir. Betty Thomas. Paramount Pictures, 1995. Bram Stoker’s Dracula. Dir. Francis Ford Coppola. Columbia Pictures, 1992. Braveheart. Dir. Mel Gibson. Paramount Pictures, 1995. Brewster McCloud. Dir. Robert Altman. Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, 1970. Butch and Sundance: The Early Days. Dir. Richard Lester. 20th Century Fox, 1979. Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. Dir. George Roy Hill. 20th Century Fox, 1969.

248

Filmography

The Cable Guy. Dir. Ben Stiller. Columbia Pictures, 1996. Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. Dir. Richard Brooks. Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, 1958. Children of Men. Dir. Alfonso Cuarón. Universal Pictures, 2006. The China Syndrome. Dir. James Bridges. Columbia Pictures, 1979. The City of Lost Children. Dir. Marc Caro and Jean-Pierre Jeunet. Sony Pictures Classics, 1995. Close Encounters of the Third Kind. Dir. Steven Spielberg. Columbia Pictures, 1977. Collateral Damage. Dir. Andrew Davis. Warner Bros. Pictures, 2002. Commando. Dir. Mark L. Lester. 20th Century Fox, 1985. Conan the Barbarian. Dir. John Milius. Universal Pictures, 1982. Cube. Dir. Vincenzo Natali. Cineplex Odeon Films, 1997. The Curious Case of Benjamin Button. Dir. David Fincher. Paramount Pictures, 2008. The Dam Busters. Dir. Michael Anderson. Ass. British Pathé, 1955. Dances with Wolves. Dir. Kevin Costner. Orion Pictures, 1990. Dark City. Dir Alex Proyas. New Line Cinema, 1998. Dave. Dir. Ivan Reitman. Warner Bros. Pictures, 1993. The Day After. Dir. Nicholas Meyer. ABC Circle Films, 1983. Dead Man. Dir. Jim Jarmusch. Miramax Films, 1995. Deep Impact. Dir. Mimi Leder. Paramount Pictures, 1998. The Deer Hunter. Dir. Michael Cimino. EMI, 1978. Delicatessen. Dir. Marc Caro and Jean-Pierre Jeunet. Miramax Films, 1991. Deliverance. Dir. John Boorman. Warner Bros. Pictures, 1972. Die Hard. Dir. John McTiernan. 20th Century Fox, 1988. Doctor Zhivago. Dir. David Lean. Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, 1965. Ed Wood. Dir. Tim Burton. Buena Vista Pictures, 1994. The Empire Strikes Back. Dir. Irvin Kershner. 20th Century Fox, 1980. E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial. Dir. Steven Spielberg. Universal Pictures, 1982. eXistenZ. Dir. David Cronenberg. Dimension Films, 1999. Fight Club. Dir. David Fincher. 20th Century Fox, 1999. A Fistful of Dollars. Dir. Sergio Leone. United Artists, 1964. Flash Gordon Conquers the Universe. Dir. Ford Beebe and Ray Taylor. Universal Pictures, 1940. Freaks. Dir. Tod Browning. Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, 1932. Get Shorty. Dir. Barry Sonnenfeld. Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, 1995. Ghost. Dir. Jerry Zucker. Paramount Films, 1990. Ghost in the Shell. Dir. Mamoru Oshii. Manga Entertainment, 1995. Gladiator. Dir. Ridley Scott. DreamWorks Pictures, 2000. The Godfather. Dir. Francis Ford Coppola. Paramount Pictures, 1972. The Good, The Bad, and the Ugly. Dir. Sergio Leone. United Artists, 1966. Gunga Din. Dir. George Stephens. RKO Radio Pictures, 1939. Hamlet. Dir. Lawrence Olivier. Rank Film Distributors Ltd., 1948. Hamlet. Dir Franco Zeffirelli. Warner Bros. Pictures, 1990. Hamlet. Dir Kenneth Branagh. Columbia Pictures, 1996. Hamlet. Dir. Michael Almereyda. Miramax Films, 2000. Heaven and Earth. Dir. Oliver Stone. Warner Bros. Pictures, 1993. Henry V. Dir. Kenneth Branagh. Curzon Film Distributors, 1989. The Hidden Fortress. Dir. Akira Kurosawa. Toho Company, Ltd., 1958. Inception. Dir. Christopher Nolan. Warner Bros. Pictures, 2010.

Filmography

249

Independence Day. Dir. Roland Emmerich. 20th Century Fox, 1996. The Invisible Man. Dir. James Whale. Universal Pictures, 1933. It’s a Wonderful Life. Dir. Frank Capra. Liberty Films, 1946. Jacob’s Ladder. Dir. Adrian Lyne. Tri-Star Pictures, 1990. Jaws. Dir. Steven Spielberg. Universal Pictures, 1975. La Jetée. Dir. Chris Marker. Argos Films, 1962. JFK. Dir. Oliver Stone. Warner Bros. Pictures, 1991. Johnny Mnemonic. Dir. Robert Longo. TriStar Pictures, 1995. Jules and Jim. Dir. François Truffaut. Janus Films, 1962. Jungle Fever. Dir. Spike Lee. Universal Pictures, 1991. Jurassic Park. Dir. Steven Spielberg. Universal Pictures, 1993. Kindergarten Cop. Dir. Ivan Reitman. Universal Pictures, 1990. The King of Comedy. Dir. Martin Scorsese. 20th Century Fox, 1982. The Last Action Hero. Dir. John McTiernan. Columbia Pictures, 1993. The Last Tycoon. Dir. Elia Kazan. Paramount Pictures, 1976. Lawnmower Man. Dir. Brett Leonard. New Line Cinema, 1992. Lethal Weapon. Dir. Richard Donner. Warner Bros. Pictures, 1987. Liar Liar. Dir. Tom Shadyac. Universal Pictures, 1997. The Lion King. Dir. Roger Allers and Rob Minkoff. Buena Vista Pictures, 1994. The Long Goodbye. Dir. Robert Altman. United Artists, 1973. Looking for Richard. Dir. Al Pacino. 20th Century Fox, 1996. Lost in Space. Dir. Stephen Hopkins. New Line Cinema, 1998. The Lost World: Jurassic Park. Dir. Steven Spielberg. Universal Pictures, 1997. The Man who Shot Liberty Valance. Dir. John Ford. Paramount Pictures, 1962. El Mariachi. Dir. Robert Rodriguez. Columbia Pictures, 1992. M*A*S*H. Dir. Robert Altman. 20th Century Fox, 1972. The Mask. Dir. Chuck Russell. New Line Cinema, 1994. The Matrix. Dir. The Wachowski Brothers. Warner Bros. Pictures, 1999. Matrix Reloaded. Dir. The Wachowski Brothers. Warner Bros. Pictures, 2003. Matrix Revolutions. Dir. The Wachowski Brothers. Warner Bros. Pictures, 2003. McCabe and Mrs. Miller. Dir. Robert Altman. Warner Bros. Pictures, 1971. Mean Streets. Dir. Martin Scorsese. Warner Bros. Pictures, 1973. Meet Joe Black. Dir. Martin Brest. Universal Pictures, 1998. Memento. Dir. Christopher Nolan. Summit Entertainment, 2000. Metropolis. Dir. Fritz Lang. Paramount Pictures, 1927. Midnight Express. Dir. Alan Parker. Columbia Pictures, 1978. A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Dir. Michael Hoffman. Fox Searchlight Pictures, 1999. Minority Report. Dir. Steven Spielberg. 20th Century Fox, 2002. Moneyball. Dir. Bennett Miller. Columbia Pictures, 2011. Mr. and Mrs. Smith. Dir. Doug Liman. 20th Century Fox, 2007. Much Ado about Nothing. Dir. Kenneth Branagh. The Samuel Goldwyn Company, 1993. Mulholland Drive. Dir. David Lynch. Universal Pictures, 2001. Murder at 1600. Dir. Dwight H. Little. Warner Bros. Pictures, 1997. My Darling Clementine. Dir. John Ford. Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation, 1946. My Fellow Americans. Dir. Peter Segal. Warner Bros. Pictures, 1996. My Own Private Idaho. Dir. Gus Van Sant. Fine Line Features, 1992. Natural Born Killers. Dir. Oliver Stone. Warner Bros. Pictures, 1994.

250

Filmography

Nixon. Dir. Oliver Stone. Buena Vista Pictures, 1995. No Country for Old Men. Dir. Joel Coen and Ethan Coen. Miramax Films, 2007. O. Dir. Tim Blake Nelson. Lionsgate, 1999. An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge. Dir. Robert Enrico. Janus Films, 1962. Ocean’s 11. Dir. Steven Soderbergh. Warner Bros. Pictures, 2001. Ocean’s 12. Dir. Steven Soderbergh. Warner Bros. Pictures, 2004. Othello. Dir. Oliver Parker. Columbia Pictures, 1995. The Others. Dir. Alejandro Amenábar. Dimension Films, 2001. Pandora’s Box. Dir. G. W. Pabst. Süd-Film, 1929. The People vs. Larry Flynt. Dir. Miloš Forman. Columbia Pictures, 1996. Le Petit Soldat. Dir. Jean-Luc Godard. Les Films Impéria, 1963. The Phantom of the Opera. Dir. Rupert Julian. Universal Pictures, 1929. The Planet of the Apes. Dir. Franklin J. Schaffner. 20th Century Fox, 1968. Platoon. Dir. Oliver Stone. Orion Pictures, 1986. The Player. Dir. Robert Altman. Fine Line Pictures, 1992. Pleasantville. Dir. Gary Ross. New Line Cinema, 1998. Predator. Dir. John McTiernan. 20th Century Fox, 1987. Primary Colors. Dir. Mike Nichols. Universal Studios, 1998. Prospero’s Books. Dir. Peter Greenaway. Cine Electra Ltd., 1991. Pulp Fiction. Dir. Quentin Tarantino. Miramax Films, 1994. The Purple Rose of Cairo. Dir. Woody Allen. Orion Pictures, 1985. Raiders of the Lost Ark. Dir. Steven Spielberg. Paramount Pictures, 1981. Rambo: First Blood Part II. Dir. George P. Cosmatos. Tri-Star Pictures, 1985. Raw Deal. Dir. John Irvin. De Laurentiis Entertainment Group, 1986. Reality Bites. Dir. Ben Stiller. Universal Pictures, 1994. Rebel without a Cause. Dir. Nicholas Ray. Warner Bros. Pictures, 1955. Reservoir Dogs. Dir. Quentin Tarantino. Miramax Films, 1992. Return of the Jedi. Dir. Richard Marquand. 20th Century Fox, 1983. Richard III. Dir. Richard Loncraine. United Artists, 1995. RoboCop, Dir. Paul Verhoeven. Orion Pictures, 1987. Rope. Dir. Alfred Hitchcock. Warner Bros. Pictures, 1948. Romeo  Juliet. Dir. Baz Luhrmann. 20th Century Fox, 1996. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead. Dir. Tom Stoppard. Cinecom Pictures, 1990. The Running Man. Dir. Paul Michael Glaser. Tri-Star Pictures, 1987. Saving Private Ryan. Dir. Steven Spielberg. DreamWorks Pictures, 1998. Scarface. Dir. Brian DePalma. Universal Pictures, 1983. Schindler’s List. Dir. Steven Spielberg. Universal Pictures, 1993. Scream. Dir. Wes Craven. Dimension Films, 1996. The Searchers. Dir. John Ford. Warner Bros. Pictures, 1956. Se7en. Dir. David Fincher. New Line Cinema, 1995. Seven Years in Tibet. Dir. Jean-Jacques Annaud. TriStar Pictures, 1997. Shakespeare in Love. Dir. John Madden. Miramax Films, 1998. Shoah. Dir. Claude Lanzmann. New Yorker Films, 1985. Showgirls. Dir. Paul Verhoeven. United Artists, 1995. The Sixth Sense. Dir. M. Night Shyamalan. Buena Vista Pictures, 1999. Slacker. Dir. Richard Linklater. Orion Classics, 1991. Solaris. Dir. Andrei Tarkovsky. Visual Programme Systems, 1972.

Filmography

251

South Park: Bigger, Longer, and Uncut. Dir. Trey Parker. Paramount Pictures, 1999. Spaceballs. Dir. Mel Brooks. Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, 1987. Star Wars. Dir. George Lucas. 20th Century Fox, 1977. Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace. Dir. George Lucas. 20th Century Fox. 1999. Star Wars Episode II – Attack of the Clones. Dir. George Lucas. 20th Century Fox, 2002. Star Wars Episode III – Revenge of the Sith. Dir. George Lucas. 20th Century Fox, 2005. Strange Days. Dir. Kathryn Bigelow. 20th Century Fox, 1995. A Streetcar Named Desire. Dir. Elia Kazan. Warner Bros. Pictures, 1951. Taxi Driver. Dir. Martin Scorsese. Columbia Pictures, 1976. The Terminator. Dir. James Cameron. Orion Pictures, 1984. Terminator 2: Judgment Day. Dir. James Cameron. Tri-Star Pictures, 1991. Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines. Dir. Jonathan Mostow. Warner Bros. Pictures, 2003. Terminator: Salvation. Dir. McG. Warner Bros. Pictures, 2009. Thelma & Louise. Dir. Ridley Scott. Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, 1991. Them! Dir. Gordon Douglas. Warner Bros. Pictures, 1954. There Will Be Blood. Dir. Paul Thomas Anderson. Paramount Vantage, 2007. Thieves Like Us. Dir. Robert Altman. United Artists, 1974. The Thirteenth Floor. Dir. Josef Rusnak. Columbia Pictures, 1999. Titanic. Dir. James Cameron. Paramount Pictures, 1997. Titus. Dir. Julie Taymor. Fox Searchlight Pictures, 1999. To Kill a Mockingbird. Dir. Robert Mulligan. Universal Pictures, 1962. Top Gun. Dir. Tony Scott. Paramount Pictures, 1986. Total Recall. Dir. Paul Verhoeven. Tri-Star Pictures, 1990. La Totale! Dir. Claude Zidi. AMLF, 1991. Touch of Evil. Dir. Orson Welles. Universal Pictures, 1958. Tree of Life. Dir. Terrence Malick. Fox Searchlight Pictures, 2011. True Lies. Dir. James Cameron. 20th Century Fox, 1994. True Romance. Dir. Tony Scott. Warner Bros. Pictures, 1993. The Truman Show. Dir. Peter Weir. Paramount Pictures, 1998. Twelfth Night. Dir. Trevor Nunn. Fine Line Features, 1996. Twins. Dir. Ivan Reitman. Universal Pictures, 1988. Unforgiven. Dir. Clint Eastwood. Warner Bros. Pictures, 1990. U-Turn. Dir. Oliver Stone. TriStar Pictures, 1997. Vanilla Sky. Dir. Cameron Crowe. Paramount Pictures, 2001. Wag the Dog. Dir. Barry Levinson. New Line Cinema, 1997. Waking Life. Dir. Richard Linklater. Fox Searchlight Pictures, 2001. Wall Street. Dir. Oliver Stone. 20th Century Fox, 1987. Wargames. Dir. John Badham. MGM/UA Entertainment Co., 1983. The War Room. Dir. Chris Hegedus and D. A. Pennebaker. Cineplex Odeon Films, 1993. Welt am Draht. Dir. Rainer Werner Fassbinder. Janus Films, 1973. Westworld. Dir. Michael Crichton. Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, 1973. Žižek, Slavoj. The Pervert’s Guide to Cinema. Dir. Sophie Fiennes. Mischief Films, 2006. DVD.

Index 12 Monkeys  56, 196 Abre los Ojos  236–9 Actors Studio  170 Adbusters  166, 167 advertising  7, 11, 43, 47, 149, 157, 174–5 Air Force One  85, 87, 98 Alamereyda, Michael  179, 185–7 Alien  19–23, 28, 33, 34 Alien3  19–20, 26–30, 31, 33, 34 Alien Resurrection  19–20, 28, 30–6 Aliens  19–20, 23–6, 28, 33, 34, 56 All the King’s Men  95 Altman, Robert  40, 75, 117, 119–28 Amenábar, Alejandro  235–6 American Beauty  223, 240 American Family, An  91, 146 American President, The  85, 91–3, 95 Amistad  208, 212 apocalypse  13, 50–64 Apocalypse Now  169, 177 Armageddon  85, 98 Attenborough, Richard  158 Back to the Future  7–18, 23, 62, 157, 196, 210 Back to the Future, Part II  8–10, 14–18 Back to the Future, Part III  8, 14–18 Ballard, J. G.  48 Band of Brothers  214 Barthes, Roland  170 Basic Instinct  41–2 Baudrillard, Jean on aesthetics  101–3, 105, 137 on cloning  31 on death  106, 113, 116, 224, 231 on Disneyland  18, 153 on driving  12–13 on hyperreality  3–4, 19–20, 23, 27, 39, 45, 50, 74, 83, 89, 111, 127, 134, 151, 199, 205

and Matrix, The  4, 129–40, 141–2 on movies  17, 118, 156 on nuclear power  13 on obscenity  85–6 on psychoanalysis  14, 22 on resistance  33, 35–6, 61, 133, 162–3, 177–8 on seduction  108 on semiotics  104, 173, 203 on September 11, 2001  240–1 and situationism  167–8 on technology  28, 54, 138 on television  91, 133, 146, 208 on time  7–9, 46, 51–2, 56, 135, 139–40, 195–6 on war  82, 93, 169, 186 Bazin, Andre  233 Being John Malkovich  178 Benning, Annette  91–2 Berlin Wall  1–2, 179 Blake, William  228 Bloom, Harold  179, 181, 193, 195 Borges, Jorge Luis  3, 16, 41, 46 Branaugh, Kenneth  179, 182, 183–5, 187 Brando, Marlon  169, 170 Brooks, Louise  108 Brooks, Mel  98, 157 Bush, George W.  4, 95 Caldicott, Helen  58 Cameron, James  19–20, 24, 30, 50, 52, 56, 64, 65, 66, 67, 70, 71, 216–21 Canetti, Elias  7 capitalism  21, 25, 26, 136, 162 Capra, Frank  9, 43, 75, 90 Carrey, Jim  143 Carroll, Lewis  3 Carville, James  97 celebrity cameos  65, 75, 123–4 cell phones  97, 103, 126, 138 Christianity  115–16, 144–5

254

Index

Clinton, Hillary  87–8, 91–2, 95 Clinton, William Jefferson  3–4, 83, 85–99 Clinton Chronicles, The  89, 91, 98 cloning  2, 14, 31, 154, 159 Close, Glenn  182 Cold War  1–4, 13, 57–8, 70, 84, 102, 163, 240 Commando  37, 39, 66–7 computer generated imagery  2, 130, 139, 143, 155, 161, 162, 199–203, 216, 219 Coppola, Francis Ford  169 Coupland, Douglas  166, 185 Creed, Barbara  19 Crichton, Michael  151, 153, 154–5, 157–60 Crowe, Cameron  236–9 Cruise, Tom  238 Cruz, Penelope  236, 239 Damon, Matt  216 Dances with Wolves  207–8 Dave  85, 89–91 Dead Man  223, 228–30, 240 DeBord, Guy  167 Deep Impact  85, 98 Deleuze, Gilles  122 DeLillo, Don  2, 78–9, 119 Diaz, Cameron  238 DiCaprio, Leonardo  218 Dick, Philip K.  40, 42, 48, 58–9, 89, 145 Dickinson, Emily  229 Disney, Walt  158, 160 Disneyland  18, 39, 118, 153, 157 Douglas, Michael  91, 92 Eastwood, Clint  17, 38 Ebert, Roger  9, 10, 14, 116, 156 Eco, Umberto  39, 44, 65, 66, 103, 152–3, 190, 202 Eisenhower, Dwight D.  77 Ellis, Brett Easton  117 Empire Strikes Back, The  195, 197, 198, 200 Enrico, Robert  224–5 Faulkner, William  110 Fight Club (film)  116, 165–78

Fight Club (novel)  165–8, 170, 172, 175–7 Fincher, David  20, 26–9, 167, 169–72, 176–8 Flowers, Gennifer  97 Ford, Harrison  87, 98 Foster, Vince  98 Fox, Michael J.  10, 92 Freud, Sigmund  13–14, 28, 102, 181–2 Garbo, Greta  170 genetics  28–36, 48, 151, 154–5, 158–9, 162 Ghost  227–8 Gibson, Mel  182–3 Gibson, William  192 Gielgud, John  187, 188–9, 192 Giger, H. R.  23 Gingrich, Newt  2, 92 Godard, Jean-Luc  190 Goldberg, Whoopi  125 Gosse, P. H.  46, 48 Gould, Stephen J.  46 Great Gatsby, The  95 Greenaway, Peter  188–93 Gulf War  2, 3, 4, 93, 95, 186 Hamlet (1948 film)  181, 182 Hamlet (1990 film)  179, 182–3 Hamlet (1996 film)  179, 182, 183–5 Hamlet (2000 film)  179, 182, 185–7 Hamlet (play)  179–87 Hanisch, Carol  85 Haraway, Donna J.  33–5, 151, 163 Hawke, Ethan  185–7 Heart of Darkness  169 Heidegger, Martin  53, 200 Hemingway, Ernest  174–5 Henry V  179 Hitchcock, Alfred  122, 188 Holocaust  54, 156, 208–12, 221 Independence Day  85, 98 Jacob’s Ladder  223, 225–7, 231, 240 James Bond  67, 68, 130, 140 Jarmusch, Jim  228–9 Jaws  156, 157

Index Jefferson, Thomas  231 Jeffords, Susan  1, 37 Jetée, La  56, 196 Jeunet, Jean-Pierre  20, 30 JFK  4, 73–9, 81, 84, 89, 90, 91, 180 Jolie, Angelina  178 Jurassic Park (film)   4, 146, 151, 155–63, 199 Jurassic Park (novel)  151–8, 160, 162–3 Kael, Pauline  15 Kamiński, Janusz  214, 215 Keitel, Harvey  113 Keneally, Thomas  210 Kennedy, John F.  74–5, 77, 87, 89 Kermode, Frank  51 Kline, Kevin  90 Kroker, Arthur  113, 115 Kubrick, Stanley  21, 212 Kurasawa, Akira  7 Lacan, Jacques  20, 106, 176 Lang, Fritz  26 Lanzmann, Claude  208 Last Action Hero, The  16, 64–5, 158 Lee, Spike  207 Lethal Weapon  182 Lewinsky, Monica  94, 95, 203 Linklater, Richard  233–4 Lion King, The  179 Lloyd, Jake  204, 205 Long Goodbye, The  117, 119 Lost World, The (film)  161 Lost World, The (novel)  161 Lucas, George  20, 66, 155, 195–205 Lynch, David  141 Lyne, Adrian  225–7 McDonald’s  97, 105, 106 McLuhan, Marshall  128 Madonna  26, 68, 70, 233, 234 Man from Hope, The  87–9, 92 M*A*S*H  117, 119, 122 Maslin, Janet  16, 73n. 1 Matrix, The  4, 39, 47, 66, 78, 87, 114, 116, 129–40, 141–3, 180, 205, 240 Matrix: Reloaded  130–1, 240

255

Midnight Express  20, 73, 80 Midsummer Night’s Dream, A  180 montage  77, 79–82, 185 Morrison, Toni  192 MTV  73, 87, 185 Mulhall, Stephen  19–20, 61 Nabokov, Vladmir  30, 119 Natural Born Killers  73–4, 79–84 Neeson, Liam  211 Niccol, Andrew  142–3 Nietzsche, Friedrich  165 Nixon  78, 84 Norton, Edward  170–1, 173–4, 176 nuclear weapons  7, 12–13, 24, 50, 57–8, 63, 70, 163 Nyman, Michael  191 Obama, Barrack  4 Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge, An (film)  224–5 Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge, An (short story)  224–5 Olivier, Lawrence  181, 182 Oppenheimer, J. Robert  163 Oswald, Lee Harvey  75–6, 79 Others, The  223, 235–6 Palahniuk, Chuck  165–8, 171–2, 174–7 Piaf, Edith  216 Pirandello, Luigi  65 Pitt, Brad  165, 167, 169–78 Planet of the Apes  171 Plato  129, 145 Player, The (film)  40, 75, 117, 119–28 Player, The (novel)  117–19, 124–7 Portman, Natalie  204 Primary Colors  85, 95–8 Prospero’s Books  188–93 Pullman, Bill  98 Pulp Fiction  4, 81, 96, 101–16, 180, 207 Raiders of the Lost Ark  1, 156, 209 Reagan, Ronald  1, 3, 8, 10, 98–9 Reality Bites  185 Reeves, Keanu  143 Reservoir Dogs  104, 106, 113

256 Return of the Jedi  1, 4, 195, 197, 198, 200, 203 Reynolds, Burt  110n. 1, 123 Rhames, Ving  90 Robbins, Tim  125 Roberts, Julia  123, 128 RoboCop  40–1 Roosevelt, Franklin Delano  91 Rope  122 Rubenstein, Diane  85, 96 Rubin, Bruce Joel  227 Running Man, The  37–8 Russell, Bertrand  46, 48 Sagan, Carl  58 Saving Private Ryan  207–8, 212–16, 217, 220–1 Schindler’s List (film)  156, 207–13, 217, 220–1 Schindler’s List (novel)  210 Schwarzenegger, Arnold  1, 37–40, 49–50, 59–62, 64–7, 70–1 Scorsese, Martin  171 Scott, Ridley  19–20, 30 Seinfeld  20, 103, 104 September 11, 2001  1, 71, 130, 131, 239–41 Shakespeare, William  79, 179–93 Shane  98 Shatner, William  174 Shoah  208 Showgirls  41–2 Shyamalan, M. Night  230, 231 Singleton, John  207 situationism  166–8, 177–8 Sixth Sense, The  223, 230–3, 235, 240 Slacker  233–4 Sobchack, Vivian  120–1 Sontag, Susan  38 Sound and the Fury, The  110–11 Spaceballs  98, 157 Spielberg, Steven  66, 141, 151, 155–63, 209–16, 221 Stallone, Sylvester  1, 37 Star Wars  3, 20, 73, 195, 197, 199, 202, 205

Index Star Wars: Episode I – The Phantom Menace  195–205, 240 Stephanopoulos, George  88, 92, 95, 97 Stone, Oliver  73–84, 89, 90 Stone, Sharon  45 Tarantino, Quentin  30, 81–3, 96, 101, 103–4, 107–16 Taxi Driver  4, 17, 20, 171 techno music  53, 137 television  3, 12, 37–8, 42, 47, 75–6, 80, 83, 102, 109, 111–12, 133, 146–50, 165 Tempest, The  187–93 Terminator  37, 50–61, 64, 196 Terminator 2: Judgment Day  38, 50–64, 218 terrorism  70–1, 166, 168, 176–7, 240 Thelma & Louise  169–70 Thomspon, Lea  14 Thurman, Uma  109 Titanic  4, 207–8, 216–21 Tolkin, Michael  117–19, 124, 127 Total Recall  38, 39–50, 64, 87, 94, 130 Touch of Evil  122 Travolta, John  95, 96–7, 107, 111 True Lies  38, 50, 65–71 Truman Show, The  4, 11, 75, 87, 91, 116, 130, 141–50 Unforgiven  207–8 Union of Soviet Socialist Republics  1, 3, 58, 77 Vanilla Sky  130, 223, 236–9 VCR  11–12, 17 Verhoeven, Paul  39–42, 45, 47 Vietnam War  1, 24, 77, 82–3, 110, 169, 225–7 Virilio, Paul  44, 52, 214 Wachowskis  129, 140 Wag the Dog  85, 93–5, 97 Waking Life  223, 233–5, 236 Walken, Christopher  110 Walkman  11, 52–4 War Room, The  88–9, 97, 98

Index Wayne, John  38 Weaver, Sigourney  29, 30, 31, 34, 35 Weir, Peter  141–3, 146, 149 Welles, Orson  7, 122 Whedon, Joss  30 Williams, John  161 Wolfe, Tom  117

Wood, Robin  1, 24 World War II  199, 212–16, 221 Zeffirelli, Franco  179, 182–3, 187 Zemeckis, Robert  8, 10, 16 Žižek, Slavoj  19–20, 132, 133–4, 165

257