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Hyperreality: The Authentic Fake
By Rachel Merkhofer, posted October 15, 2007
What is hyperreality?
Hyperreality refers to a replica of something that never actually existed, or an image that is more real than the thing it’s supposed to represent. Media images of celebrities or politicians can be hyperreal, as can replicas that give people access they wouldn’t otherwise have, like statues of famous people in a wax museum when visitors wouldn’t normally be able to interact with the museum’s subjects at all. Scholars have theorized about what kind of effects hyperreality may have on American culture. Some scholars who have written about hyperreality are Jean Baudrillard, author of Simulations, Umberto Eco, author of Travels in Hyperreality, Daniel Boorstin, author of The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America, Neil Postman, author of Amusing Ourselves to Death, and Shawn Parry-Giles, author of Constructing Clinton: Hyperreality and Image-Making in Postmodern Politics. Here are a few definitions of hyperreality, in their words:
“It is the generation by models of a real without origins or reality: a hyperreal” (Baudrillard 2).
“The American imagination demands the real thing and, to attain it, must fabricate the absolute fake” (Eco 8).
“With our unprecedented power to magnify the images and popularize the virtues of heroes, our machinery only multiplies and enlarges the shadows of ourselves” (Boorstin 76).
“Hyper-realism is often spoken of as something that involves images and is assumed to be more real than real where the ability to discern the real from the unreal or image becomes impossible and in many ways insignificant” (Parry-Giles).
Examples of hyperreality
Disney World. Eco describes how it’s possible to see fake crocodiles at Disney World, and in the same day go on a cruise in the Everglades to look at live crocodiles. You may never even get a good look at any crocodiles on the cruise, but the crocodiles at Disney World are always cooperative. Other aspects of Disney World similarly provide a more accessible version of Polynesia, or New Orleans, or the Caribbean (Eco 44).
Las Vegas. The Las Vegas skyline combines recreations of monuments that wouldn’t actually exist in the same place. It’s a replica of a fantasy world, and it also provides scaled down access to places that would normally have to take many trips to see—the Eiffel Tower and Venetian canals and pyramids all at once. According to Postman, “Today, we must look to the city of Las Vegas, Nevada, as a symbol of our national character and aspiration” (3).Historical Displays. Baudrillard describes the scene at the caves at Lascaux, a site of famous cave paintings in France. The real caves are closed to visitors, so visitors must look at a reconstruction nearby (Baudrillard 18). Similarly, archaeological materials may be mixed with replicas in museums, blurring the line between the real and the simulated. The replicas give visitors access to historical information they wouldn’t otherwise have.
Television Dramas. The The West Wing episode “Isaac and Ishmael” serves as an example of a representation that blurs the line between real events and fiction, says Parry-Giles. The episode tries to explain why the United States might have been attacked on September 11. Accordint to Parry-Giles, “I encountered many people who said that they finally had a clearer sense of why the U.S. was attacked because The West Wing provided a lot of clarity to the issue. The show dealt with a real life situation. The producers were trying to enter the conversation about 9/11. Did it matter that it was a fictionalized show? What in the show was real and what was not?”
Reality TV. Reality shows aren’t just a recent phenomenon. Baudrillard describes a show called “An American Family”—in 1971, the Loud family were filmed for seven months, and the 300 hours of footage were turned into a TV show. “The producer’s trump card was to say: ‘They lived as if we weren’t there,’” says Baudrillard(50). It’s hyperreal because as long as the cameras were there, the family could never live as if they weren’t there (Baudrillard 50), making the show is a representation of a reality that couldn’t exist without the cameras. The same principle applies to any of the current reality shows that have cameras following people all the time.
Effects of hyperreality
While hyperreality is an old idea, its effects remain relevant today. One danger of hyperreality is that people may look to hyperreal images as role models, when the images don’t even represent real people. This can cause people to strive for an unattainable ideal, or lead to a lack of healthy role models. Boorstin cautions against confusing celebrity worship with hero worship, which is bad because “we come dangerously close to depriving ourselves of all real models. We lose sight of the men and women who do not simply seem great because they are famous but who are famous because they are great” (48). He bemoans the loss of old heroes like Moses, Ulysses, Aenas, Jesus, Caesar, Mohammed, Joan of Arc, Shakespeare, Washington, Napoleon, and Lincoln (49), who didn’t have press agents to help construct a hyperreal image of themselves.
The creation of hyperreal images has also changed the way people look at political candidates, according to Postman and Parry-Giles. “There is always a dimension of the hyper-real involved in the process of image-making and the public sphere,” Parry-Giles says, which affects the way people see political candidates. For example, she says that there’s no way of knowing whether President Bush is “really a ‘good old boy’ from Texas,” or if he purposefully created that image before entering politics. According to Postman, “Television politics has added a new wrinkle: Those who would be gods refashion themselves into images the viewers would have them be” (135). When the image is of a celebrity, it is easier to say that it’s not important, because it’s only entertainment. But if hyperreality is changing the way people vote, that’s a profound effect on American society.
Baudrillard futher explains how the hyperreal can cause real effects, stating that if someone tries to put on a “fake hold-up,” it will still cause real consequences: “a police officer will really shoot on sight; a bank customer will faint and die of a heart attack; they will really turn the phoney ransom over to you” (Baudrillard 39).
According to Boorstin, “We have used our wealth, our literacy our technology, and our progress, to create the thicket of unreality which stands between us and the facts of life” (Boorstin 3). And the effect hasn’t decreased since Boorstin did his writing. “If anything, with computer technology, it has become even more difficult to discern the real from the image, making such distinctions in many ways even more meaningless,” says Parry-Giles.
Sources:
Baudrillard, Jean. Simulations. New York: Semiotext[e], 1983.
Boorstin, Daniel J. A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America. New York: Vintage Books, 1992.
Eco, Umberto. Travels in Hyperreality. Orlando: Harcourt Brace & Company, 1986.
Parry-Giles, Shawn. Email to the author. 10 October 2007.
Postman, Neil. Amusing Ourselves to Death. New York: Viking Penguin Inc., 1985.
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