REVIEW:Don Jon:Reading Through Baudrillard - Welcome to the Desert of the Real

DO NOT MISS THIS FILM

And Starring Joseph Gordon-Levitt

Neo had this book in his desk drawer in THE MATRIX

Don Jon is a movie on how we get to THE MATRIX.

It takes awhile but you have fun doing it.

Dirty Sexy Dancing.

Scarlett is hot, hot hot and she won't put out. At least not until she gets what she wants first.
Him.
Into her interfaced fantasy.

Happy Ending Romantic Fantasy

Dirty Sexy Laptop

JGL has been sensitizing himself to feel erotic looking at porno. He is becoming Pavlov's dog, salivating to the bell, - whoops, the nekkid bod and ass of the porno queen of the moment. He jerks off thus reinforcing himself for his gaze on the porno queen - or princess. His sexual responses are conditioned to the Barbie porn videos, not a real life Barbie. Just a simulacrum in Simulated Reality, and he goddamn well prefers her or her Barbie sisters. And his responses are now Hullian prepotent responses. 

Joseph Wolpe, M.D. Father of Behavior Therapy.

See any theory can be used against you.

Mark Tansey - Still Life 
Aside here: Mark Tansey is giving us the GREAT 21st century Foucauldian CUT in art history
Still Life is a painting of this movie without a happy ending.

Fuck real life. Gimme the simulacrum willya.

The Wondrous Julianne Moore
Enter Julianne Moore, a REAL woman. Who wants real?
Who wants intimacy?
Gimme that porn star willya.

No victim's body,no criminal, no crime scene,no capture,no punishment
The Perfect Crime
What Baudrillard is saying here is that our reality is stolen from us in homeopathic doses. That way we will not notice it so infinitesimal will those doses be. And we will never know when the boundary blurs, when we lose reality, when we are in Simulated Reality, and when we can't get back. As Jon learns when he can no longer close his eyes, masturbate to his own fantasies, make them up. His imagination has been stolen from him. His ability to contemplate has been stolen from him (Walter Benjamin folks.) His mind has been stolen from him. His life has been stolen from him. And he doesn't even know it.
The Perfect Crime

Jean Baudrillard, the Bear and the Screen

This embracing of Simulated Reality is our greatest danger according to Baudrillard. When Simulated Reality is total then we will be in Virtual Reality. Think Hunger Games here: The Districts are Reality, The capitol Panem is Simulated Reality, The Games are Virtual Reality. So who the hell wants reality. Gale didn't. Katniss does but then she really had her fill, an excess, didn't she. 

We are all interfaced with the media of our culture. How we fall in love, the courtship, the rituals, the wedding, they marriage, the children, the dog, the house, the mortgage, and so it goes as Vonnegut would say. We are no more free than our pet dogs. We have been conditioned to want what they want us to want. And conditioned to get it the way they want us to get it. How we fuck has been conditioned recently by porn. So we now fuck like porn stars. (Did I do OK honey? Did you get off? Performance anxiety eh.)  So we do. We obey them. To do this we Inscribe our bodies (Nietzsche's Inscription of the Body) to fit the template of normality, we think the way we have been taught to think, we do not even have the words to free ourselves from this. Sex is empowered to do this to us. We got rid of repression -  we thought so anyway -  but what is this? And we are embracing it as fast as we can learn how. 

Who will intercede? Who will give us the intervention we need? Who will be our Julianne Moore? And our prepotent responses will undergo spontaneous recovery in the future. Pavlov again, the great one.

Welcome to the Desert of the Real! - Morpheus quotes Zizek

Here's what Joseph Gordon Levitt said about his movie Don Jon:

I wanted to talk about how the media influences people's expectations, Gordon Levitt says. Pornography is a huge, huge part of our media culture. The message Don Jon is trying to bring to light - and make fun of - is reducing people, especially women, to nothing but sex objects. It happens in music videos, TV shows, movies, and magazines, and so many commercials. Whether it's rated X or approved by the FCC to sell Doritos, the message is the same.

Entertainment October 4, 2013 #1279

___________________________________________________________________________

Let me tell you it is so much more than what he thinks it is. It is a fictionalized account of Jean Baudrillard's The Perfect Crime

The title is taken from a short story by 
Jorge Luis Borges.
wiki on Borges

It was almost all map for Jon.

I am going right over to hitRECord.org to tell him so.

THE HOST REVIEW: Reading Through the Paintings of Mark Tansey

OK I'll try Albert

Bob7 commenting on a review of The Host HERE:  http://www.hitfix.com/motion-captured/review-andrew-niccol-hammers-another-nail-in-his-own-careers-coffin-with-witless-the-host

Maybe Niccols hates systems. Truman Show deplores reality TV. I haven't seen his other movies, but maybe he's protesting bad cultural and political behemoths. Maybe's he's warning society what will happen if these systems rule our lives and thought, just like Truman Show way before reality TV became prevalent, explored its popularity and its effects. Just saying.

March 28, 2013 at 7:29PM EST Reply to Comment

THE HOST is more and more disturbing the more you think about it. Every scene is framed as a cliche. The screenplay presumably approved by Meyer is composed of ready-mades. There is not one original sentence in it. Each gesture is preprogrammed.The editing is unsurprising, the plot the same.

Mel - a - nee/ Steph - a - nee  Do you believe this Lacanian reading?

What is surprising is that there is nothing surprising in the entire movie, except the ubiquity of cliches as "floating signs", but I can't figure out why they are there.  The seduction between Melanie and Jared is produced, which means there is no perception of seduction. The same is true of Wanderer - Wanda - with  Ian. Both have a playing/kissing scene in the rain. There is a dance scene outside with Melanie and Jared jitterbugging. Wanda in the caves takes a bath and she raises her hands in a sensuous move, or it is supposed to be sensuous. Are you getting the boredom just reading this. Stephenie Meyer's standard GAZE with strange contact lenses, the incest between species, is all predictable from Twilight. 

The music is syrupy romantic 1950's slow dance music. Telling us how romantic the scene is to be experienced. You listen in astonishment not quite able to believe you are hearing this.

Who was responsible for this?

A diversion into Baudrillard:

The Simulacrum According to Deleuze and Guattari

From Copyright no.1, 1987, pp. 90-97.
There is a seductive image of contemporary culture circulating today. Our
world, Jean Baudrillard tells us, has been launched into hyperspace in a kind of
postmodern apocalypse. The airless atmosphere has asphyxiated the referent,
leaving us satellites in aimless orbit around an empty center. We breathe an
ether of floating images that no longer bear a relation to any reality
whatsoever.

1 That, according to Baudrillard, is simulation: the substitution of
signs of the real for the real.

2 In hyperreality, signs no longer represent or refer
to an external model. They stand for nothing but themselves, and refer only to
other signs. 

(As Vija Kinski says to Eric Packer in Cosmopolis, "Money is talking only to itself.") Meaning "money" is only sign now.


So what is going on?

Niccol wrote The Truman Show coming out of the gate long ago. Here's Zizek on The Truman Show:

The ultimate American paranoiac fantasy is that of an individual living in a small idyllic Californian city, a consumerist paradise, who suddenly starts to suspect that the world he lives in is a fake, a spectacle staged to convince him that he lives in a real world, while all people around him are effectively actors and extras in a gigantic show. The most recent example of this is Peter Weir’s The Truman Show (1998), with Jim Carrey playing the small town clerk who gradually discovers the truth that he is the hero of a 24-hours permanent TV show: his hometown is constructed on a gigantic studio set, with cameras following him permanently. Among its predecessors, it is worth mentioning Philip Dick’s Time Out of Joint (1959), in which a hero living a modest daily life in a small idyllic Californian city of the late 50s, gradually discovers that the whole town is a fake staged to keep him satisfied... The underlying experience of Time Out of Joint and of The Truman Show is that the late capitalist consumerist Californian paradise is, in its very hyper-reality, in a way IRREAL, substanceless, deprived of the material inertia.

So it is not only that Hollywood stages a semblance of real life deprived of the weight and inertia of materiality — in the late capitalist consumerist society, “real social life” itself somehow acquires the features of a staged fake, with our neighbors behaving in “real” life as stage actors and extras... Again, the ultimate truth of the capitalist utilitarian de-spiritualized universe is the de-materialization of the “real life” itself, its reversal into a spectral show.

The Aliens have inhabited the bodies of the humans and taken over the planet Earth to save it and us from ourselves. Everything is peaceful and utterly boring, emotionless and cold. It is Simulated Reality. When we go to the caves where the humans are hiding out it is about the same. The young stud types are competitive, the older woman (Francis Fischer) hostile to Wanda and her difference, Uncle Jeb (William Hurt) is predictably protective of her, her little brother Jamie is a typical rather stupid child. The dialogue as boring as in the Simulated sci fi city, the CGI all hard edges and clean, sparkling bright in the city and curved and darkly mysterious in the caves.

(You can read my first reaction to this film that is like everyone else's HERE )

And then it begins to be clear just what Niccol is up to. The humans in the caves are also in Simulated Reality. There is no real. We are in the Matrix. Only the Desert is real so we are reminded of Morpheus's welcome to Keanu, "Welcome to the desert of the real!" Niccol is revealing Simulated Reality to us, our own and our reality to come - all of it simulated.

Every actor is behaving as stage actors and extras.

And then I get it, but only because I heard a presentation on Mark Tansey's work a month ago and was intrigued enough to pursue his paintings further. 

Derrida Queries de Man

MARK TANSEY BY JUDI FREEMAN

What does it mean to make pictures about pictures in 1993? ...When Mark Tansey elected to make pictures about pictures, his was a strategy of confronting the predilection of critics of the late 1970's for minimalism and other forms of abstractions. - Judi Freeman

And BTW reproductions of Tansey's paintings are impossible. Detail is blurred and frustrating. Tansey himself has refused reproductions to become available for authors. It is obvious that he is saying we must see the originals if we want to see them at all.

Which is exactly in line with what his art is saying. He is confronting us with the simulacra that is engulfing us today. When Pap pics of Rob Pattinson walking like a Muybridge motion study and a fan phone camera shot is far more treasured than a gaze at a loved celebrity.

I saw this in Venice in 1972 as I watched the Japanese tourists so busy photographing the city that they never looked at it. Never saw it. I laughed at them. What astonished me then is mainstream today all over.

Andrew Niccol has made a film about films.

Niccol has done with film what Tansey has done with painting.

Niccol has made a film composed entirely of cliches. No fancy costumes to entice us, No cleavage, no faux passion we could mistake for real, music to tell us how to feel that doesn't at all, no real plot twists to surprise us, no face porn to squeeze emotions out of us, no exploitation of the audience to mask the emptiness of mass filmmaking, of film as "empty sign."

ZIZEK

STILL LIFE - MARK TANSEY

Now what can we say about Meyer?

We know she has said in an interiew that she preferred Jacob to Edward. She wants Bella to remain human because if Bella changes, she enters Simulated Reality. 

Is Meyer in on this game strategy? I really can't say, as it is ambiguous to me. Does she or doesn't she know what Niccol did?