The hyper-realism from the film Inception

Have you seen Inception, a science fiction film written, produced, and directed by Christopher Nolan? Starring Leonardo DiCaprio, Ellen Page, Michael Caine and others, the film is about a thief who extracts information from the unconscious mind of his victims while they dream. Unable to visit his children, Cobb is offered a chance to regain his old life in exchange for one last job: performing inception, the planting of an idea into the mind of his client's competitor. That is an action and very interesting film because it gets your attention for more than two hours and in the end is not possible to tell all the history of the film, the content is superficial. The film is edict like a browser: you keep on going and coming back from many scenarios and there is no much content, just action.

That reminds me the hyper-realism of Jean Baudrillard, where the Truth and reality are mediated and interpreted to an extent that culture cannot longer distinguish reality from fantasy. Baudrillard terms this blurring of mediated experience and reality “hyper-reality.” Hyper-reality is a result of systematic simulation, a process in which symbols are increasingly utilized to replace actual objects and experiences. Icons or signs are stand-ins as simplified and clearer emulations of reality. Easily comprehensible and recognizable signs mask and ultimately replace the actual thing or experience, becoming more “real” than reality itself. Contemporary culture has become one of reality by proxy in which “everything is therefore right on the surface, absolutely superficial. There is no longer a need or requirement for depth or perspective; today, the real and the imaginary are confounded in the same operational totality, and aesthetic fascination is simply everywhere.” (1019).

As reality is increasingly obscured, signs lose their connection to what they initially represented (as seen is Andy Warhol’s Campbell’s soup cans, for example). Further removed from their original meaning, signs and symbols become imitations of facsimiles and reality and fiction dissolve into indistinguishable imitations. Baudrillard considered this culture of hyper-reality an advanced stage of life-as-art: “it manages to efface even this contradiction between the real and the imaginary. Unreality no longer resides in the dream or fantasy, or in the beyond, but in the real’s hallucinatory resemblance to itself.”(1018).

What’s more, the speed of which we can experience art and culture has created a continuum and/or distortion of time and spatial relativity. For instance, the pace of which we live expressed in our art. Pop culture iconography, movies, and modern art are a testament to the blistering pace that we are moving as a society, mentally. Instant access to news and having the “world” at our fingertips also adds to the dimension of a hyper/distorted cultural age. Movie editing, news editing, and live “reality” castings have created massive relative distortions where time lapses through the lens in ways that was not fathomed before or even experimented with in post-modern movie making.

http://jenesaisquoi.posterous.com/

Baudrillard, J. (1994). “The precession of simulacra”, from simulacra and simulation.

Baudrillard, J. The hyper-realism of simulation.