Some Thoughts on Baudrillard and the Gym
The fakery of the hyperreal
In Jean Baudrillard’s Simulacra and Simulation, the second chapter is on film. The films he names are never, in pretty much any of his books, those I’ve seen. This passage caught my attention, as it relates to my direct experience, though I have not seen the film The Last Picture Show.
Take The Last Picture Show: like me, you would have had to be sufficiently distracted to have thought it to be an original production from the 1950s; a very good film about the customs in and the atmosphere of the American small town. Just a slight suspicion: it was a little too good, more in tune, better than the others, without the psychological, moral, and sentimental blotches of the films of that era. Stupefaction when one discovers that it is a 1970s film, perfect retro, purged, pure, the hyperrealist restitution of the 1950s cinema. One talks of remaking silent films, those will also doubtlessly be better than those of the period. A whole generation of films is emerging that will be to those one knew what the android is to man: marvelous artifacts, without weakness, pleasing simulacra that lack only the imaginary, and the hallucination inherent to cinema. (p. 45)
The YMCA gym where I spent a lot of time lifting weights had three television screens in it. One was almost always playing a music channel, and a rotation of rock-and-roll related photographs would be presented, along with the song information. Often, there would be an indication that it was ‘1980s’, though the music played was often from the 1990s. The images were all faked. And they weren’t accurate, they weren’t faithful representations of 80s rock stylings. Only the guitars were the real thing. Just the props. And not even all the props: there would be stereos supposedly from the 80s, which had colors 80s stereos did not usually have—bright, early-1990s pastel pinks and blues—styles they didn’t have – doubtless, these were east-Asian off-brand plastic boomboxes produced mere months ago. I cannot speak for the clothes. The models’ makeup was not 80s but was of today. The hair was from today. All this fakery was because real 1980s styles would not have sold. Like The Last Picture Show, these simulacra of 1980s objects and situations were like the 1980s in superficial ways, but they were too fashionable. They looked too good and too familiar. It is empty, lazy nostalgia for people who are not paying attention. It is the hyperreal in the gym.