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Monday, May 21, 2012

Kristen Stewart, Helena Bonham Carter, Princess Beatrice and Michel Foucault: Deconstructing What?

This Is Not A Dress
Kristen Stewart at the Premiere in London
of
Snow White and the Huntsman
Magritte's Painting and Foucault's Essay
Kristen Stewart is not wearing a dress. She is wearing a SIGN, a "floating sign" but what is it saying? This is a "dress" NOT to be worn to a banquet, a fashionable ball, a social soiree, none of these. This is a "dress" to be worn only on the RED CARPET. It is not a dress. It is not a counterfeit of a dress. It is not a copy of a dress. It is a simulacrum, pure floating sign circulating.

Stewart is the "wittiest" of actresses when she dresses for the public. Her dresses are "signs" and it is up to her viewers to decipher what she is saying for them. 
This Is Not A Premiere Outfit
Helena Bonham Carter Alice In Wonderland Premiere

Helena Bonham Carter has dressed in "Halloween"costumes for the Red Carpet to say what she wants. Both are  choosing a different, more seductive way to deconstruct Red Carpet celebrity dressing.
Miley Cyrus at iHeart Radio Music Festival 2013

This is definitely NOT a dress.

This Is Not A Hat
Princess Beatrice did it with her hat at the recent Royal Wedding.

I think Stewart, Bonham Carter, Princess Beatrice, Magritte and Foucault are all saying FUCK YOU to stupid rules.

Edit: The Red Carpet appearances take place in simulated reality just as a video game does. A genealogy of premieres will reveal this. What used to be an opening has now become a red carpet affair. I am not sure when this Foucauldian "cut" occurred and am not interested in finding out. But it is here to stay, at least for a little while. The Red Carpet is not a counterfeit of an opening (a first), nor a copy of a premiere.  It is a copy of a copy having no original: It is a simulacrum

A Red Carpet affair becomes a piece of simulated reality. There is nothing real about it. It is "produced seduction" which has nothing to do with seduction, nothing at all. 

While in this piece of simulated reality, - and real people are milling around, eating, having heart attacks, falling in love,etc.-  as in a video game, one wears costumes that one buys or are donated for publicity purposes, to play a character. Celebrity dressing for "simulated reality" involves expensive costumes to assume a character, a simulacrum, in this video game which is simulated reality. 

The Red Carpet fangirls are squealing over a piece of expanding simulated reality that is stealing the REAL from all of us. When simulated reality becomes total, we will all be in Virtual Reality, i.e. a video game. We will all be in eXistenZ.

And last but by no means least since this is where I learned it, Diane Rubenstein's 

This Is Not a President: Sense, Nonsense, and the American Political Imaginary 


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