Pre Class Blog 9/26

I found both Baudrillard and Zizek’s reading to be very interesting and thought provoking. Where Zizek’s concepts were more on the virtual plane Baudrillard ideas are more tangible. What was most interesting to me was the thought of (and behind) the “image.” I know for me, and I’d would presume most people, when someone says the words “9/11” instantly the image of the two towers on fire shoot into my head. As Baudrillard says, “the impact of the images and their fascination, are necessarily what we retain, since images are, where we like it or not our primal scene” (228). Baudrillard brings up the expression mise-en-scène, which caught my attention after focusing on it in such depth for film class. It got me to thinking about the event of 9/11 and I had the realization that that is precisely what the terrorist were doing, constructing mise-en-scène. Creating a spectacle in the most fitting sense of the word. They new the media would capture and redistributed that imaging for the rest of time, to the point that it befits a symbol. “It is not ‘real’. In a sense it is worse: it is symbolic” (299). And once this metamorphosis takes place you mind has to choice but to snap back, against you will, to that image. “And it is the radicality of the spectacle, the brutality of the spectacle, which alone is original and irreducible” (229).