Tuesday, November 24, 2009
Simulacra in Film
Posting from a class reaction paper.
For a change, I thought I’d take a different tack for this week’s paper, and discuss film. I feel that Baudrillard’s observation that Los Angeles is fed by Disneyland, like a power station, is reversed. The media coming out this city feeds on its own decentralized power, through writers and producers in love with their own perceptions. I saw Thom Andersen’s obsessive Los Angeles Plays Itself immediately before I moved here, which addresses how we have encountered this city before we arrived here, through characters and scenes floating in fictional movies that have become our reality. I knew Los Angeles through Michael Douglas in Falling Down, navigating south central Los Angeles, in all its supposedly foreign glory; Charlton Henston rocketing through the streets in Omega Man; the starkly-lit Bradbury Building in Bladerunner; and the LA river chase scene in the cult punk flick Repo Man, which paints the city as a wasteland of mundanity, full of, as Harry Dean Stanton (as Bud) put it, “ordinary fuckin’ people. I hate em,” as they pursued drug dealers, aliens, and money. I learned that Los Angeles in films was an urban wasteland: unearthly, dangerous, and complex.
Anderson shows us how much reality has dissolved behind a veil of simulacra, and there is indeed no underlying ground left. Polanski’s Chinatown in 1974 set Los Angeles remains among LA’s most memorable film appearances, despite that it is a fiction, woven from various myths and personalities that resonate with the audience. The antagonist is frequently ephemeral, as the plot revolves around a water dispute. The plot was even built on a myth of the founding of Los Angeles on water stolen from the Owens river valley. The gritty film noir Los Angeles films might refer to corruption and greed in the city’s past, but are merely dealing in symbolic touchstones. As Andersen narrates, “there once was a city here, before they tore it down and built a simulacrum.” The Los Angeles that has been propagated is gone, replaced by a false edifice, while the city itself has shifted and grown beneath it. The city has been defined by its rapid growth, and recent immigrants change the city before it has time to be illustrated.
Still, entertainment needs fodder, and the mill is always churning, squeezing every last location in Los Angeles County. Dexter, ostensibly taking place in Miami, is shot on-site in southern California, particularly in my city of Long Beach, which despite its size (500,000 people), is typically acknowledged only as being part of Los Angeles… Long-Beach-plays-Los-Angeles-plays-Miami. Visible throughout the series are the marina, El Dorado park, and the beach next to Shoreline Drive with the building in the opening scene of Die Hard. Even though my hair stylist came home to find a note on her door from Dexter producers to see about renting her house out for a shoot, there is no way to, as Baudrillard posits, “inject the real” (p. 22) to battle amorphous media entities. Michael Bay quite literally destroys downtown Los Angeles in Transformers, which is strangely treated with no irony. “The challenge of simulation is never admitted by power” (p. 21), and with our Governator, how could we? Our state is literally run by a media creation.
Unlike the comparatively united front of Disney, which has a location in southern California, Los Angeles is playing shades of itself, fractured narratives of truths, myth, and complete fictions rooted in geographic locations that have only the pretense of reality. There is nothing to inject, because nothing can be injected – truth has been subsumed by the entertainment mill in an ongoing hegemonic process.
The most affecting film I’ve seen on the effects of post-modernism and globalism is Chris Marker’s Sans Soleil. Shot on a low budget and using stock footage alongside hand-held shots taken worldwide (particularly in Asia), he does not so much peel away the layers of the post-modern onion vainly in search of that “ground” that Andersen does, so much as examine the way globalism and media collapse space and time. Sans Soleil follows on themes raised by La Jetée: time as a cause of history is questioned through image series. Here he goes further, searching for a way to disembed (as Giddens would have it) imagery from their political and social meanings. He here takes inspiration from Tarkovsky’s Stalker, referring to The Zone. In Marker’s interpretation of The Zone, here a digital video filtering system, authorship is disembedded , released to be appropriated in art. Marker demonstrates the new meaning footage can have when processed and deployed in a different space or time, although his conclusions are elusive. Certainly, according to Marker, using images of a past as a history presents a dangerous over-simplification (Montero, 2007). As Butler observes, released from concerns of the subject, “agency is always and only a political prerogative” (p. 163). Perhaps in Marker’s Zone, images are searching for a context, reversing the typically causal connection of context determining images, much as La Jetée plays with narrative by questioning time. This raises similar questions as Butler’s example of critiquing Powell’s euphemisms for bombing in Kuwait, removing the subject to open up questions of victimization and meaning in an intensely communication-based context.
Ironically, given Baudrillard’s concept of “museumification,” the most real place I’ve been in Los Angeles presents myth as scientific fact alongside historical iconoclasts and oddities. The Museum of Jurassic Technology, housed in an unmarked building in Culver City a stone’s throw from Sony Pictures, is positively sincere in its desire to inject reality back into its subjects. Here, bats can fly through walls, you can cure stammering by eating mice on toast, and horns can grow from human heads. Yet, there is also a rather comprehensive set of dioramas on the history of trailer parks, and upstairs, the rather intense (and complete[!]) collection of paintings of dogs from the Russian space program can be found next to the tearoom. Even the bathroom has real flowers, which I can’t help but feel is a gesture to the real. Authorship is here revered, but it is also inconsequential, likely a lie you must critique to be part of the experience. You begin to question everything. Is that machine that has been out of order for two years deliberately presented as broken? You are permitted to discover and evaluate, to pick up and touch, as the space is “to be traversed, not penetrated,” as Barthes puts it. It’s refreshingly not entertainment, edu-tainment, or a game – these are genuine exhibits that play with the idea of museumification and interrogate the real, ostensibly just outside the door in the city of Los Angeles.
Montero, D. (2007). Film also ages: time and images in Chris Marker's Sans Soleil. Studies in French Cinema, 6(2), 107-115.
For a change, I thought I’d take a different tack for this week’s paper, and discuss film. I feel that Baudrillard’s observation that Los Angeles is fed by Disneyland, like a power station, is reversed. The media coming out this city feeds on its own decentralized power, through writers and producers in love with their own perceptions. I saw Thom Andersen’s obsessive Los Angeles Plays Itself immediately before I moved here, which addresses how we have encountered this city before we arrived here, through characters and scenes floating in fictional movies that have become our reality. I knew Los Angeles through Michael Douglas in Falling Down, navigating south central Los Angeles, in all its supposedly foreign glory; Charlton Henston rocketing through the streets in Omega Man; the starkly-lit Bradbury Building in Bladerunner; and the LA river chase scene in the cult punk flick Repo Man, which paints the city as a wasteland of mundanity, full of, as Harry Dean Stanton (as Bud) put it, “ordinary fuckin’ people. I hate em,” as they pursued drug dealers, aliens, and money. I learned that Los Angeles in films was an urban wasteland: unearthly, dangerous, and complex.
Anderson shows us how much reality has dissolved behind a veil of simulacra, and there is indeed no underlying ground left. Polanski’s Chinatown in 1974 set Los Angeles remains among LA’s most memorable film appearances, despite that it is a fiction, woven from various myths and personalities that resonate with the audience. The antagonist is frequently ephemeral, as the plot revolves around a water dispute. The plot was even built on a myth of the founding of Los Angeles on water stolen from the Owens river valley. The gritty film noir Los Angeles films might refer to corruption and greed in the city’s past, but are merely dealing in symbolic touchstones. As Andersen narrates, “there once was a city here, before they tore it down and built a simulacrum.” The Los Angeles that has been propagated is gone, replaced by a false edifice, while the city itself has shifted and grown beneath it. The city has been defined by its rapid growth, and recent immigrants change the city before it has time to be illustrated.
Still, entertainment needs fodder, and the mill is always churning, squeezing every last location in Los Angeles County. Dexter, ostensibly taking place in Miami, is shot on-site in southern California, particularly in my city of Long Beach, which despite its size (500,000 people), is typically acknowledged only as being part of Los Angeles… Long-Beach-plays-Los-Angeles-plays-Miami. Visible throughout the series are the marina, El Dorado park, and the beach next to Shoreline Drive with the building in the opening scene of Die Hard. Even though my hair stylist came home to find a note on her door from Dexter producers to see about renting her house out for a shoot, there is no way to, as Baudrillard posits, “inject the real” (p. 22) to battle amorphous media entities. Michael Bay quite literally destroys downtown Los Angeles in Transformers, which is strangely treated with no irony. “The challenge of simulation is never admitted by power” (p. 21), and with our Governator, how could we? Our state is literally run by a media creation.
Unlike the comparatively united front of Disney, which has a location in southern California, Los Angeles is playing shades of itself, fractured narratives of truths, myth, and complete fictions rooted in geographic locations that have only the pretense of reality. There is nothing to inject, because nothing can be injected – truth has been subsumed by the entertainment mill in an ongoing hegemonic process.
The most affecting film I’ve seen on the effects of post-modernism and globalism is Chris Marker’s Sans Soleil. Shot on a low budget and using stock footage alongside hand-held shots taken worldwide (particularly in Asia), he does not so much peel away the layers of the post-modern onion vainly in search of that “ground” that Andersen does, so much as examine the way globalism and media collapse space and time. Sans Soleil follows on themes raised by La Jetée: time as a cause of history is questioned through image series. Here he goes further, searching for a way to disembed (as Giddens would have it) imagery from their political and social meanings. He here takes inspiration from Tarkovsky’s Stalker, referring to The Zone. In Marker’s interpretation of The Zone, here a digital video filtering system, authorship is disembedded , released to be appropriated in art. Marker demonstrates the new meaning footage can have when processed and deployed in a different space or time, although his conclusions are elusive. Certainly, according to Marker, using images of a past as a history presents a dangerous over-simplification (Montero, 2007). As Butler observes, released from concerns of the subject, “agency is always and only a political prerogative” (p. 163). Perhaps in Marker’s Zone, images are searching for a context, reversing the typically causal connection of context determining images, much as La Jetée plays with narrative by questioning time. This raises similar questions as Butler’s example of critiquing Powell’s euphemisms for bombing in Kuwait, removing the subject to open up questions of victimization and meaning in an intensely communication-based context.
Ironically, given Baudrillard’s concept of “museumification,” the most real place I’ve been in Los Angeles presents myth as scientific fact alongside historical iconoclasts and oddities. The Museum of Jurassic Technology, housed in an unmarked building in Culver City a stone’s throw from Sony Pictures, is positively sincere in its desire to inject reality back into its subjects. Here, bats can fly through walls, you can cure stammering by eating mice on toast, and horns can grow from human heads. Yet, there is also a rather comprehensive set of dioramas on the history of trailer parks, and upstairs, the rather intense (and complete[!]) collection of paintings of dogs from the Russian space program can be found next to the tearoom. Even the bathroom has real flowers, which I can’t help but feel is a gesture to the real. Authorship is here revered, but it is also inconsequential, likely a lie you must critique to be part of the experience. You begin to question everything. Is that machine that has been out of order for two years deliberately presented as broken? You are permitted to discover and evaluate, to pick up and touch, as the space is “to be traversed, not penetrated,” as Barthes puts it. It’s refreshingly not entertainment, edu-tainment, or a game – these are genuine exhibits that play with the idea of museumification and interrogate the real, ostensibly just outside the door in the city of Los Angeles.
Montero, D. (2007). Film also ages: time and images in Chris Marker's Sans Soleil. Studies in French Cinema, 6(2), 107-115.
