Captain Outrageous, Baudrillard/Zizek

Finally a bit of reading that doesn't entirely fry my brain. Though I've just read the two short pieces, not the long Baudrillard. Nonetheless. Compelling stuff. This concept of altered reality is nothing new though now better and quite articulately explained. through both "The Spirit of Terrorism" and "Welcome to the Desert of the Real" I found myself making the same type of notes: the genre of horror and the scary movie trope.

How many times have you found yourself driving down an unfamiliar and more than likely relatively isolated road late at night and thought to yourself or said aloud as a joke, "This is how scary movies start". Or, how many of you have had something happen that shakes your world as you know it and you find yourself saying something along the lines of "I can't believe this is happening, this is like a bad movie." ? I believe that to a certain extent this is what Baudrillard and Zizek are trying to convey.

As some might remember from CMC 100, the genre of horror is roughly defined as the scary possibility actually coming true, your worst fears becoming your reality. In these "reality" shattering moments such as September 11th, our real world and the 'horror' world that is depicted for us onscreen intertextualize themselves before our very eyes: still on screen. For the majority of us who weren't in Manhattan, the "desert of the real' is truly in its purest possibility, unfathomable because we weren't there. For that selection of us, what we saw was, as the authors call it, a "spectacle" on TV, a scene of destruction and disaster that literally could have come out of the movies. This splits into two areas, one by each author.

The first is the idea of the image as presented by Baudrillard. Baudrillard says that the "real" is "superadded" to the image which creates a "bonus terror". He says that "reality is jealous of fiction, that the real is jealous of the image which can be the most unimaginable. So not only is the image of the WTC being hit or going down scary, it is basically super-scary because it is real: the genre of horror- the scary becoming reality, becoming true. The second is the idea of the Hollywood movie from Zizek. Just as Zizek says that "the distance which separates Us from Them...is maintained: the real horror happens there, not here" the scenes repeated on the news on our TV screen kept us separated though the catastrophe was in our own country. The scenes couldn't be more spectacle, couldn't be more out of a movie, especially, as Zizek points out, because we pretty much wrote the plot.

If you have ever heard of "The Secret" you have heard the idea that you put out into the universe is what you recieve. I suppose that after years of catastrophe and worst case scenario movies simulating the destruction of American monuments through terrorist actions ("Independence Day" as Zizek examples) America's "reality" got what it had been asking for; or, to put it more lightly as Zizek does "fantasized about". Through some uncanny connection, Hollywood has predicted reality. The genre of horror depicting the worst possible fear becoming true turned into a genre of reality on September 11th. What's somewhat disturbing is, that while we can accept the outcome in the movies, the idea of it actually happening to us (partly due to the othering and detachment of societies) was "the biggest surprise".

We learned in CMC100 about how the news and other basic mediums create an outside "other" where things might be happening but it doesn't matter much to us because its happening "over there". Just like when you go to see a scary movie its happening to someone else. You could almost say America held its head a bit too high when it came to the "late-captialist consumer city" image of a country functioning like that Californian paradisio. You could almost laugh that a critical discourse on a terrorist attack can be translated into the empty trope "I can't believe this is happening, this is like a bad movie". The truth is its sad and disturbing because the realm of depicted reality and actually reality is officially intermixed.

Like any sort of prank show you see when the unexpected target has their temporary world shattered by something they truly weren't expecting because after all that kind of stuff only happens on prank shows, you laugh because, as Dr. Casey elaborated for us regarding reality, "you just can't write that sort of stuff". When it comes to America and the September 11th attacks, we wrote it ourselves.