Hyperreality
is a concept based around simlations, copies of things that existed in reality
used in different contexts. These simulations of reality then become difficult
to distinguish from reality or people take these simulations to be the real, in
turn creating a cycle of simulation and simulacrum that continuously repeats
itself.
The
film industry is based entirely in this idea of simulating reality, to the
point that people often believe what happens in films is the reality because it
is the only way that they have ever experienced it. The Matrix is a film based
around the concepts and theories described by Jean Baudrillard and focuses on
the idea that people live in a world completely constructed from simulations of
reality, or what people perceive to be real. The difference between reality and
its simulations had been blurred to such a point that they had created a
program to replace what was now described as ‘the desert of the real’, quoted
in the film from Baudrillard’s 1981 book Simulacra and Simulations.
Films
surrounding the subject of war, however are what I’d like to suggest are
hyperreal in today’s society, more so than other genres, because of the way in
which these simulations of war are then accepted so readily as the reality. The
majority of films and even games produced about war have very little actual
grounding in war and show incredibly intense, over the top, explosive
depictions of battle. These tend to focus on the visual elements of war, which
they compact into (very) small periods of time, in (very) small spaces, often
all coming down to spectacular endings with a HUGE EXPLOSION. The reality is for the most part very different.
It is
even suggested by certain theorists like Jean Baudrillard and Slavoj Zizek that
the 9/11 attack on the World Trade Centres had ‘parallels with disaster movies’
and was ‘the stuff of popular fantasies long before they actually happened’.
Suggesting that the attacks were simulations of war, acted out in the form of a
terrorist attack.
Sources:
Simulacra
and Simulations – Jean Baudrillard
Media,
War and Postmodernity – Phil Hammond.
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