Baudrillard and Zizek - Andrea Luongo

Jean Baudrillard, author of The Spirit of Terrorism, begins his essay by stating, “In all these vicissitudes, what stays with us, above all else, is the sight of the images” (228).  In both Baudrillard and Zizek’s essays, the two authors focus primarily on the images of the September 11^th terrorist attacks, and the images from that day that made the events all the more real.  I found both of these short articles to be extremely powerful pertaining to their content, because even to this day, eleven years later, it is still difficult to imagine the extreme terrorist actions that took place in New York City.  This idea, that the reality of September 11^th was so unimaginable that it took images and video clips to understand and come to terms with what happened, is what both Baudrillard and Zizek state in their essays.  As Baudrillard states, “We might almost say that reality is jealous of fiction, that the real is jealous of the image…It is a kind of duel between them, a contest to see which can be the most unimaginable” (228).  This idea was something that had never crossed my mind until stated by Baudrillard. 

What helped to connect, even more, was the idea of reality being so seemingly fictitious that it is almost unimaginable.  This idea came from Zizek’s essay Welcome to the Desert of the Real.  In his essay, Zizek states, “That is the rationale of the often-mentioned association of the attacks with Hollywood disaster movies: the unthinkable which happened was the object of fantasy, so that, in a way, America got what it fantasized about, and that was the biggest surprise” (233).  This quote by Zizek is so powerful, because it illustrates the idea of what he comments on earlier in the essay as “the Other.”  The fact that these horrific actions that we see in blockbuster movies would never happen to us, unlike the countless times it has happened to others.  These movies such as Independence Day, once represented the unimaginable which is why they garnered so much attention.  Now, however, that these seemingly foreign and unimaginable events happened to our society, the line between reality and fiction has become blurred.

My media example of this would be the Colorado shooting that occurred this summer during a midnight premier of The Dark Night Rises.  The reason this example fits so well with what Baudrillard and Zizek state in their essaies, is because it was announced after the shooting that Gangster Squad – a movie that will be released next year, starting Emma Stone and Ryan Gosling – featured a scene during their trailer where a movie theatre was being held up at gunpoint.  After the shooting, the movie had to be re-edited to take out the movie theatre scene, because while no one ever thought it would be relatable to reality, the fictional scene became all the more real.Gangster Squad Shooting