DBA123, post class 2/17

Going back to a topic we discussed thoroughly in class, “Does reality actually overstrip fiction?” I left class thinking a lot about this concept.

I believe that this statement is true in the sense that reality is more powerful, meaning it affects us more, but fiction is something we enjoy more. In fictional situations, we see and hear about happenings that seem a little far-fetched to actually happen to us. For example, two people meeting after years of separation “by fate” right after one of them decided to not go through with their wedding (Serendipity), or on the flip side, a husband framing his own wife of his murder to get out of a sticky money situations (Double Jeopardy). When we watch movies we get lost in them and forget about our reality. We just sit back and compare our relatively normal lives to these fictional situations. Whereas, if anything like this happened for real, our fiction begins to become real and we are then personally affected by either a good or bad situation. Therefore, I feel reality will always outstrip fiction because we actually live with the consequences or rewards of our actions. Fiction just takes possible occurrences and elaborates on them; we let ourselves enjoy them, but not let ourselves get too hopeful or too paranoid about this happening to us. Being realistic is too powerful for us to take fiction seriously.

As class continued, we discussed Baudrillard’s “Successive Phases of Images.” Good was described as reflecting reality, whereas evil was explained as masking and denaturing reality. I would say this contributes to the reality outstripping fiction argument. Fiction on many occasions, takes reality and keeps it familiar but, warps and manipulates it, taking it out of context. I believe this further proves fiction will always be around and something we want to see, but reality will always overpower fiction.