The film’s elliptical narrative is not quite unlike
Baudrillard’s own writing style. Both call into question reality, what reality
means, the questioning of certainty and fact…
…Some realities: the sky is up; the sun is hot; gravity
makes things fall to the ground. How do we know they’re “true”? We learn
through repetition and we come to believe facts. Reality is equated with truth.
Postmodernity frequently calls this into question. Baudrillard offers the
(sometimes criticized) idea of hyperreality. To have the real you must also
have the imaginary. If we are in a period where all we have is the imaginary,
then we’re no longer in the real. The hyperreal. Hyperreality is used in
semiotics and postmodern philosophy to describe an inability of consciousness
to distinguish reality from a simulation of reality.
How does Leonard make his reality? There’s the repetition of
pictures and tattoos. Is Leonard’s reality hyperreality? Where does personal
reality fit in? What about Teddy, Natalie, and all these people who are feeding
Leonard’s reality? The basis here is perception; perception can be understood
as a basis of postmodern thought. In the film, the image (e.g., a photograph)
is an area of existence of meaning. It’s a signifier, but the meaning is
untrue. Leonard inscribes meaning over and over; think of this as parallel to
the revision of history. We privilege written history, the inscription. Leonard
places his faith in the sign of the real instead of the real.
The Polaroid as sign is already once removed from the
person. But Leonard is two removed, because he has to rely on what he’s written
about the sign of the real for the real. He never has or knows the original; he
never has that moment of authenticity. The person is then relegated to the
simulacrum; the copy without the original. The Polaroid is simulacrum.
Leonard wants to believe in his constructed reality. We want
to believe our history. For Baudrillard, Disneyland is presented as the
imaginary; the imaginary is simulacrum. Is Leonard’s immediate world (the one
he creates himself) a Disneyland? (Fontierland is a copy without an original.
The original never existed!) How does the film caution us about the blurring of
factual people and fictionalized history? -dc
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