Welcome to the Desert of the Real: Part 4

Rating: Null/10 (13 May 2009)

"I know I would like to make a contemporary story that finally gave a feeling of the times, psychologically, sexually, politically and personally. I would like to make this more than anything else, and it's probably going to be the hardest film to make." - Stanley Kubrick
Far from being the "hermetic" and "old fashioned" film critics labelled it, "Eyes Wide Shut" is part of a burst of similar films released between 1998 and 2001. These films - which include "The Matrix", "Vanilla Sky", "Eyes Wide Shut", "Dark City", "ExistenZ", "Mulholland Drive", "The Truman Show", "Fight Club" and "A History of Violence" - all portray reality as a hyper-real simulation in possession of a dark and violent underside. In the case of "Eyes Wide Shut", this dark underside is itself a charade.
In larger terms, these films can be seen as symptomatic expressions of the traumatic transition from the irrational exuberance of techno capitalism to post 9/11 distrust. If the 90s were a great simulation, American living the Capitalist dream, these films anticipate a dark "exterior" suddenly and violently intruding into the US's simulated "interiority". History's sad joke is that 9/11 was itself a hyper-real event, an unreal horror which played out more like a Hollywood movie than any real catastrophe. Thus, while 9/11 should be read as an "intrusion of the Real" into a "simulation" (the truth of capitalist logic revealed, the heart of Western finance exploding), it was actually swallowed by the simulation, absorbed and swiftly incorporated so that it became just another empty signifier, all truth blurred, all symbolic meaning swept away. You might say that 9/11 was the first work of post-modern terrorist art, quickly chopped up, split apart and stripped of its historical context and meaning.
And so, on one level, these cyberpunk and conspiracy films are attempts to map the unthinkable Thing that is postmodern capital. As Mark de Rozario wrote in his seminal essay on "Eyes Wide Shut": "During the bubble economy of the late 90s, capital itself seemed more than ever to correspond with Marx's famous description, as it melted "all that is solid into air". Marx thought that capital - the engine of social reality - would inevitably migrate from the realm of material goods into the "etherworld" of speculative finance. With the dot-com boom we had businesses that were composed, as near as possible, of nothing but ether. Aren't the 90s films expressions of anxieties about this apparent derealization - this sense that everything is a simulation whose existence is dependent upon our continuing to believe in it? But the opposite was the case: our belief was dependent upon capital's maintenance of the simulation. During the 90s boom, capital manufactured belief, giving rise to "New Era Thinking", the delusion that normal economic laws were suspended and that the economy was entering a New Era of uninterrupted, perpetual expansion. Such a belief structure was necessary for capital in the 90s, but was obsolesced once capital flipped into a new phase, signalled by the near-synchronised popping of the 90s bubble and the fall of the Twin Towers. Now, the belief in expansion without limits is revealed to be "just a dream" (a dream that, like many dreams, had concrete effects). "Eyes Wide Shut", with its treatment of the relationship between fantasy and capital, and its re-exploration of the conspiracy narrative, coincided with, and expressed, our waking up from the 90s "dream"."
Unlike "Eyes Wide Shut" (and Lynch's "Mulholland Drive), however, most films within this micro-genre use technology and computer generated wizardry to generate their illusory realities. "The Matrix", "Dark City", "Existenz" and "The Truman Show" are all old-fashioned parables of political resistance: they remind us that seductive images can be used to repress us and that, while we can enjoy those images to the full, we must also understand how they're actually made.
This contemporary hunger for spectacle, for CGI trickery, for hyper-aesthetics, and our increasing reliance on mediated rather than real experience, marks what philosopher Jean Baudrillard terms the "ecstasy of communication" that defines postmodern life and culture. This is the age of simulations and the simulacra, of mediated representations and reproductions, images and signs gradually taking up the place of objects and commodities. Like Kubrick's Dr Bill (Dollar Bill), this is a world in which reproductions are separated from their original time and space, commodities endlessly circulating inside the simulational model of communication. In the age of hyper-reality, the essence of the post modern moment is the admittance of the bankruptcy of the Real.
In an era of generalised simulations, in which technology is increasingly able to capture or fake the real, an opposition between the real and simulation can no longer be maintained. The Real is elusive, constantly morphing into the hyper-real.
But films like "The Truman Show" and "The Matrix" are locked at what Baudrillard calls the level of the first order of simulacra. They remain at the pre-industrial phase of "suspicion", quaintly convinced that there is a "real world" behind and beyond the circulation of simulacra. But we no longer live in the age of the spectacle. Spectacle subjected us to images, now we ourselves become images, participating in the cool hypermedia matrix, which everywhere demands participation. And so what "Eyes Wide Shut" realises is that reality is already hyper-real. There is now no meaningful distinction between reality and simulation, Real and Image, money and Bill.
9.5/10 - Note: This is less a review of "Eyes Wide Shut" than an examination of it's place within a micro-genre of similar films released in the late 90s and early 00s.