Post Class for 2/23

In class on Tuesday we had an interesting discussion about “Simulacra.” Places like Las Vegas and Disney World imitate the real in order to create a fantasy world in order for people to feel like they can escape from the pessimism and exist in the optimism even if it is imitating the real. We all have our own personal reality and the fact that many people grew up with Disney makes it a touchy subject to analyze but in my opinion you can still enjoy Disney even if you know the history behind it. This is only because of the feeling we attach with it that are hard to detach, the feelings of childhood or sharing memories with family and friends that you went with. It symbolizes a place that exists only in the movie that people love to escape to when the world gets too “real” and we realize the Terror of it all. I looked up more on Simularca and found this quote, by Anthropologist Eric Higgs who expressed worry that “the boundary between artificiality and reality will become so thin that the artificial will become the centre of moral value.” This quote connects to Baudrillard and or look on how replicas like the ones in Disney and Las Vegas are more convenient for people than them actually visiting the real thing, therefore when more people are seeing the artificial copy it becomes their idea of what the real looks like because they might not have access to go to Paris for example and see the real Eiffel tour. The hyper-real is something important to think about because when we see something and don’t know how to describe what it is like sometimes we can only make connections to it from relating it to movies that we have seen that have been that visually amazing because that is what we know to compare it to.

When we mentioned the new Movie Avatar it relates to this need to escape from reality because in the movie it has this amazing world called Pandora that is so pure and untouched by technology or any ounce of war until our planet goes there and sets up camp in order to drill for an expensive rock. It shows how our most of our world has become taken over by technology and the need to always have the new and upcoming thing, like the rock they are trying to get their hands on. This is why so many people got depressed after this movie more than others because not only was it almost three hours, but when you saw it in IMAX 3-D it was like a ride you were in and experiencing the visually stimulating world of Pandora and some people felt like it was sad how far our world has come from being so in touch with nature instead of being in front of our computer screens and the tranquility that the native people of their world experienced. Here is the link that involves the description of the after-effect of the film. http://www.cnn.com/2010/SHOWBIZ/Movies/01/11/avatar.movie.blues/index.html