the

Reality Effect

the

Reality Effect
Film Culture
and the

Graphic
Imperative

Joel Black

ROUTLEDGE
NEW YORK & LONDON

for Linda, a fighter

Published in 2002 by
Routledge
270 Madison Ave,
New York NY 10016
Published in Great Britain by
Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park,
Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group.
Transferred to Digital Printing 2010
Copyright 2002 by Routledge
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or
utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now
known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording or in any
information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from
the publishers.
Design and typography: Jack Donner
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Black, Joel, 1950The reality effect: film culture and the graphic imperative / Joel Black.
p. cm.
ISBN 0-415-93720-5 - ISBN 0-415-93721-3 (pbk.)
1. Realism in motion pictures. 1. Title.
PN1995.9.R3 B59 2001
791.43'612-dc21
2001019642
Publisher's Note
The publisher has gone to great lengths to ensure the quality of this reprint
but points out that some imperfections in the original may be apparent.

Truth becomes fiction when the fiction's true;

Real becomes not-real where the unreal's real.
-Cao Xueqin, The Story of the Stone

Contents

introduction

The Filmed Century

Before (and Beyond) Art and Entertainment

The Reality Effect

Reality Bites Back: Kernel Truths

From Cinema Verite

11

Reality TV

to

15

Mediating Reality: Wag the Dog to War Games

The Graphic Imperative

part one
one

24

film culture
Pornographic Science

35

Missing Scenes: Coover's Casablanca

35

Intrusive Scenes: Scorsese's Marriage Manual

Freezing the Scene: Pynchon's Prehistory of Film
Your Car's Mind

two

20

56

Primal Scenes

61
61

Questioning the Woman

64

Films without Film

Infantilizing the Viewer
Hard-core Freud
The Reality of Fantasy
De Palma's Wolf Man

66
69
78
81

48
52

three

Body Parts

85

Multiple Images and Displaced Desire

Split Persons and Body Doubles

85
87

Shower Show: Dressed to Kill to Body Double

89

The Erotics of Substitution: Vertigo to Body Double

Vamps and Vampires

98

Conjugal Adultery and Movie Children

part two
four

93

103

filmic events
Documenting Violence

111

Serial Violence/Surveillance

111

The Year of Filming Dangerously

118

Hidden Figures: The Assassination Scene

from Antonioni to Zapruder
Surprise Executions
Films that Kill

five

121

130
135

Telling Stories

145

"I Want You to See with My Eyes"

Screening the Holocaust
Screening Hollywood

151
154

The Death of the Mind

SIX

145

158

Showing the Obscene

163

Time and the Unthinkable

163

Releasing the Unreleasable

169

Stealing Childhood: Lolita and JonBenet

Death Imitates Art: Crash and Princess Diana

169
174

Wagging the Dog: Sex, Lies, and the Clinton Videotapes

187

film dreams

part three

From Dream Work to Dream Works

seven

Unreal Estate: Fake Towns, Real People

Ants Wars

197

201

Back to the Future: Movies, the Ride

203

From the Moon to Mars: 2001 Then and Now

The Color of Dreams
Back

to

218

afterword on the afterlife

223

229

name and title index

subject index

281

206

213

the Drawing Board: Movies, the Game

Dream Worlds

notes

197

271

215

Introduction

The Filmed Century

The twentieth century is on film. It's the filmed century. You have
to ask yourself if there's anything about us more important than
the fact that we're constantly on film, constantly watching
ourselves. The whole world is on film, all the time. Spy satellites,
microscopic scanners, pictures of the uterus, embryos, sex, war,
assassinations, everything.
-Don DeLillo, The Names

Before (and Beyond) Art and Entertainment

Now that the twentieth century is behind us, what does it mean to refer
to it as the filmed century-the first century to be documented, from
start to finish, on film? How significant is it that all sorts of events are
being graphically preserved as never before, that phenomena of all kinds
never previously recorded are now showing up on film, from newly
discovered galaxies at the edge of the universe to PET and CAT scans,
sonograms and mammograms, and confessions by heads of state about
their sex lives? "Like no previous generation," writes James Gleick, "we
see our history in our mind's eye: Neil Armstrong stepping onto the
moon; Lee Harvey Oswald taking a bullet in the gut; the century's
cyclonic hurricanes and mushroom clouds."! If "much of what the
world knows about the last 1,000 years it has learned from artists," does
the fact that the twentieth century was the first century not only to be
subjectively and symbolically rendered in one of the traditional representational art forms (literature, sculpture, the graphic arts), but also to
be objectively registered by the ostensibly more accurate audiovisual
media mark a sea change in culture and human history?2 Have the relatively new recording technologies somehow altered what we take for

The Reality Effect

reality, so that reality is no longer what it used to be? And if so, how is
such a transformation itself to be documented?
If answers to these questions aren't readily available, it's because the
twentieth century's definitively filmic nature-entailing a peculiar mix
of reality and artifice, high and low culture-has yet to be generally
acknowledged. Ironically, the impact of film on culture may have been
more widely recognized before the advent of the academic discipline of
film studies, and even before the medium's appropriation by the arts and
the entertainment industry. For film came into being, after all, in the
middle of the recording revolution, midway between photography and
phonography. Even before the medium was invented, as Siegfried
Kracauer noted, the forerunners of film theory took it "for granted that
film would continue along the lines of photography" and "looked
forward to what we have come to label newsreels and documentariesfilms devoted to the rendering of real-life events." This "insistence on
recording,"3 and the original cinematograph's scientific purpose of
documenting movement over time, was rooted in the "most basic theoretical understanding of film realism ... the view that photographic
images, unlike paintings or line drawings, are indexical signs: they are
causally or existentially connected to their referents."4 Yet despite this
early recognition of cinema as a recording technology, it quickly became
clear that the movies' chief-and certainly most lucrative-purpose
would be that of entertainment, and that for a movie to be entertaining
it must be "different from real life."5 And so by the middle of the
century, despite the continued emphasis of critics such as Kracauer and
Andre Bazin on "the photographic nature of film" and on its ability to
reproduce physical reality, cinema's scientific origins were largely
forgotten as film increasingly came to be regarded as a representational,
illusionist medium for the primary purpose of entertainment and the
secondary purpose of art. 6
The "film-as-art idea" gained wide currency especially in the 1950s,
after the breakup of the studio system and the rise of independent filmmaking.? As film studies programs began to take their place in the academic curriculum, movies were treated much as literature and the fine
arts had been-as a coded discourse that could be analyzed either sociologically (as a form of cultural production and mass entertainment for
the purpose of indoctrination, diversion, or subversion), or else aesthetically (as a formal construct with its own internal laws and organization
that made every film a world unto itself). The tendency among film
scholars and critics to treat "cinema" primarily as an art form, and even
to consider the director a kind of artist or auteur, grew out of an effort
to legitimate movies as more than just a popular form of entertainment.
Yet this formalist, film-as-art approach tended to downplay, and some-

Introduction

times even to reject outright the traditional realist conception of motion

pictures. Even if, as Noel Carroll claims, contemporary theorists reject
"the notion that film is a slice of reality" but "nevertheless agree that in
its standard uses, film imparts a realistic effect to its viewers," this is no
more than "a psychological effect" whereby "film gives the impression
of reality narrating itself; film causes an illusion of reality; or film
appears natural."8 Reacting against the strong reality claims of classical
theorists, contemporary theorists thus reduce the "reality effect" of film
to psycho logistic "realistic effects," ignoring the degree to which film,
adopting the recording technologies of the photograph and later the
phonograph, shapes and fixes the very notion of reality itself by registering seemingly objective, indexical images of the world-as-it-is. 9
By shifting the emphasis from content to form, theoretically trained
academicians brought a new sophistication to film studies, but they also
tended to limit the field's object of study to cinema as art and entertainment at a time when visual media were coming to pervade every sector
of modern life. IO For mass culture, by its very nature, "is that content
which alters form"-form being increasingly mediated in any case by
cinematic technology)l As a recording medium, film "gravitate[sJ
toward the expanses of outer reality-an open-ended, limitless world
which bears little resemblance to the finite and ordered cosmos"
conventionally depicted by the representational arts. 12 Far from being
explainable or even containable by formal analysis, the explosion of
content in mass culture has steadily made its way into both mainstream
and independent art films, where it has been steadily challenging and
altering conventional notions of form and representation. Even as older
literary critics such as Harold Bloom lament the "tyranny of the
visual"13-the decline of literature in a culture increasingly dominated
by TV, movies, and the Internet, and the corresponding subordination
of the writer's status to that of "content providers," -the new recording
media (and even newer digital media) have forced a fundamental critique
of literature and the other representational arts, showing them to be
grounded in "the analogue technologies of print culture" and to be
dependent on "a depth model of interiority" and on "relations of resemblance between the interior and surface" and ultimately between mind
and soul.14 Over the span of a century, a whole new range of reality
effects deployed by the recording media have swiftly supplanted the
"neutralized ... hallucination[sJ," as Friedrich Kittler calls them, of literature and the representational arts-"the soul, the inner self, the individual: they all were only the effects of an illusion."15
The impact of the new generation of postrepresentational reality
effects has yet to be gauged-those produced by the twentieth-century
recording technology of cinema, which at least continue to engage the

The Reality Effect

eye, ear, and other senses, and those that we can expect to be produced
in the twenty-first century by virtual-reality technologies that bypass
the aesthetics of sensory perception altogether and feed directly into the
brain as the "technologically induced hallucination[s]" of "machinic
vision."16 But we need not anticipate future developments. The eye and
other senses are already habitually overstimulated and overwhelmed by
the formless explosion of mass cultural "in-formation" filtering down
from the new media technologies with their drive toward hyperindexicality into more conventional forms of cinematic and other visual experience. Consider the vastly expanded content made possible by new
cinematographic techniques (instant replay, slow motion, time-lapse
photography, digitalization) and by the enhanced graphic displays of the
new technologies (video media and video games, the Internet, spy satellites, surveillance cameras). And we shouldn't forget those exhibitionistic Web-cam sites (e.g., JenniCam, Web-Dorm.com) that enable anyone
to turn their lives into reality TV or EdTV (as in the 1998 movie of that
name), so that everyone can peer into the most intimate-but more
often the most banal-moments of their lives.
It used to be that only movies were on film; now the whole world is.
More than ever, visual technologies seem intent on striving for what
Kracauer called "the status of total record." And not only does it seem at
the start of the new century that everything is on film or video (although
it is unclear, given the unstable nature of videotape and other recording
media that began replacing film at the century's end, how long this
recorded material will remain viewable),17 but thanks first to video and
then the Internet, scenes that were never shown before-from natural
disasters and human atrocities to sexual intimacies and ecstasies-are
now public spectacles that are instantly shown everywhere.1 8
The fact is that film is the medium of modern mass culture. Not
only is it consumed by the masses more than any other medium, but in
no other commodity does mass culture itself provide the content to the
degree it does in film. One need only think of all the product placement
in movies, the tie-ins with fast food, soft drinks, and sports cars that are
increasingly transforming blockbuster films into nonstop advertisements, and the increasing instances of cross promotion in the wake of
media megamergers. 19 So ubiquitous and influential are the movies in
film culture that they are no longer just movies, but have expanded into
other modes of entertainment such as video games and thrill rides using
the latest animatronics and 3-D technology. At Hollywood's Universal
City, after a ride that immerses you in the world of blockbuster actionadventure films such as Jurassic Park or Back to the Future, you can tour
one of the nearby studios where tomorrow's movies are currently in
production. The visit itself is a back-to-the-future time trip or time loop

Introduction

in which families share fantasies by taking rides based on past movies

and previewing movies that may end up as future fantasy rides.
Faced with the impact of movies and visual media on mass culture,
some critics have gone from the extreme of treating film exclusively as
an elitist art form to the opposite extreme of considering it merely as a
form of mass entertainment. Neal Gabler may be right that movies and
popular culture have overwhelmed American life, but his 1998 book
Life the Movie (which is really not about movies but about how
American life has assumed the characteristics of the generic motion
picture) gives the impression that mainstream movies are the only kind
of film affecting viewers.2o Left unexamined are art and documentary
films and their influence on commercial movies. Terry Gilliam's Twelve
Monkeys (1995), for example, was based on Chris Marker's 1962 experimental film La jetee, while Penny Marshall's 1990 movie Awakenings,
about Oliver Sacks's experiences with "sleeping sickness" patients, relied
heavily on a 1973 documentary made for British television, even duplicating some of the scenes. (One of Sacks's original patients who appears
in the documentary was actually filmed in a scene with Robert De Niro
for the Hollywood feature, but the scene was ultimately cut-possibly,
Sacks speculated, because the producers "thought real patients weren't
authentic enough. ")21 Gabler's study of the impact of fictional movies
on American culture and consciousness to produce a surreal cultural
landscape glaringly omits the role of nonfictional film in what has been
called the "Century of Reality"22-not only classic documentaries such
as Nanook of the North and Triumph of the Will, but also memorable
newsreel footage of World War II military campaigns and early nuclearweapons tests, filmed and taped records of the Vietnam and Gulf Wars,
and unedited amateur footage such as Abraham Zapruder's home movie
of John F. Kennedy's assassination or George Holliday's videotape of
Los Angeles police officers beating Rodney King. And with the growing
reliance on satellite surveillance and security camera footage, the presence of a human operator behind the camera has become increasingly
superfluous. Such graphic, evidentiary instances of cinema verite cannot
be reduced to mass entertainment, although they are often quickly
appropriated by the commercial media.
When Time magazine published a special issue on "The Columbine
Tapes" at the end of 1999, the casual reader may well have assumed the
tapes in question to be the video record provided by the Colorado high
school's security cameras of the massacre eight months earlier. After all,
the issue's cover featured a photograph, captioned "The school-cafeteria
surveillance video," showing Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold armed with
automatic weapons, stalking fellow students. Yet the focus of the special
report was the five home videos the assailants had secretly made in the

The Reality Effect

months before their murderous rampage in which they discuss their

attack. In the controversial tapes, which parents of two of the slain
victims sought to keep from being televised, Harris and Klebold not
only referred to the computer game that inspired them ("That fucking
shotgun is straight out of Doom"), but also planned their attack on the
school as a movie with, in Harris's words, "a lot of foreshadowing and
dramatic irony." Klebold envisioned directors "fighting over this story,"
with Harris suggesting "Tarantino ... Spielberg" as likely possibilities. 23
There could be no clearer illustration of late-twentieth-century film
culture than this combination of various recording media-surveillance
and home video, computer games and movies-whose involuted interplay produced such a surreal sequence of events. Not only did Harris
and Klebold model their rampage on the movies, but they could only
imagine their "story" becoming a reality when it became a film in its
own right. As the reclusive writer Bill Gray observes in another DeLillo
novel, Mao II: "Everything around us tends to channel our lives toward
some final reality in print or on film. "24
On the one hand, film is largely responsible for shaping the virtual
state of reality that increasingly surrounds us; on the other hand, this
same medium is also capable of making us aware of our mass-mediated
condition by revealing it to us. Certain movies usually classified as
artistic or entertaining fictions actually exploit and explore mediarelated issues by presenting actual events in unsuspected, illuminating
ways. This is the case with many of the films discussed in this study.
Rather than focus either on art films or on mainstream movies per se, I
want to call attention to cinema's vital affiliations with the nonartistic
domains of science and technology (e.g., forensic analysis and police
surveillance) as well as with such marginal and manipulative forms of
entertainment/indoctrination as advertising, politics, and pornography.
I suggest that conceptions of film as solely an artistic or entertainment
medium are only part of the story, and certainly not the most significant one. How could they be when it's increasingly the case that what
winds up on film is not only the artistic vision of filmmakers, and not
even "the movies" themselves, but "the whole world"?
We may take it as a sign of the times that the passage from DeLillo's
The Names cited at the beginning of this introduction is even more
relevant today, when the twentieth century is over, than it was when it
appeared in 1982. It's also revealing that the observation "the whole
world is on film" is not made in a film or in real life but uttered by a fictional filmmaker in a novel. The fact that a statement about the filmic
nature of reality happens to be made in a book rather than in a film at
first seems self-contradictory, a postmodern version of the ancient liar's

Introduction

paradox. And yet the statement's novelistic context actually illustrates

what it says: we're so caught up in the media of moving images that we're
unable to understand what's happening to us in these media. The only
way to begin to grasp the implications of the insight that "the whole
world is on film," and even to articulate that insight, is to turn to the very
medium that has largely been superseded by the movies. For it may be up
to "books to record," as Kittler writes, "how that which is written in no
book came to pass ... Pushed to their margins even obsolete media
become sensitive enough to register the signs and clues of a situation."25
A reliance on literature's outmoded verbal perspective would seem to be
all the more urgent at a time when literary works are routinely adapted to
the screen (yet another instance of the world becoming film) and when
they are themselves increasingly adopting cinematic techniques in the
genres of the film and graphic novel. Only by staking out a vantage apart
from the primarily visual medium of film can the verbal medium of literary and critical discourse reflect and comment on film as something more
than escapist entertainment, or as something other than an art form that
presents alternative views of the world. 26 As the fictional filmmaker in
DeLillo's novel elliptically declares,
Film is more than the twentieth-century art. It's another part of the
twentieth-century mind. It's the world seen from inside. We've come
to a certain point in the history of film. If a thing can be filmed, film is
implied in the thing itself. This is where we are.

The Reality Effect

Virtual reality, O.K. You know what virtual means? O.K., it is like
really real. So virtual reality is practically, totally real. But not.
-Jennifer Jason Leigh as Lois Kaiser
in Robert Altman's Short Cuts

Not only is film more than a medium of art or entertainment, then, but
it plays a key role in shaping viewers' notions of "reality" itself. As a
result, it is often no longer meaningful or even possible to categorize
movies into the traditional dichotomy of fictional films and documentaries-or "nonfiction films," as they're now called. More than ever,
big-budget fictional entertainments invoke real historical references
(Forrest Gump, Titanic) or even prehistoric references (2001: A Space
Odyssey, jurassic Park), or they implicitly claim documentary status for

The Reality Effect

themselves (Schindler's List, Amistad). Meanwhile, so-called docudramas freely adulterate historical fact with far-fetched conspiracy theories,
as in Oliver Stone's JFK. Moreover, while special effects once allowed
filmmakers to present glimpses of the unreal world of dreams (Un chien
andalou, The Wizard of Oz, Spellbound), today's sophisticated effects
are increasingly used to produce a heightened illusion of reality itself
(crashes, disasters, wars, space travel, etc. )-of truth as visible spectacle,
of reality as anything that is filmable, or, borrowing from recent French
theorists, what I call the reality effect.27
This is not at all to say that movies are becoming more "realistic,"
more like real life; if anything, they tend to be less credible and plausible
than ever.28 But they are certainly more graphic-more physical and
explicit-which is an entirely different matter. We need to recognize
film as being first and foremost a "literalist medium" whose nature is to
make things explicit-to reveal or display the world in an evidentiary
sense that is beyond the capability of traditional representational or art
media. 29 It's becoming a commonplace to hear commentators remark
that "literalism has been gathering force," that a "renewed embrace of
explicitness has ... spread all over the ur-American realms of merchandising, TV, [and] the mass market,"30 that "the arts have never been
more probing or explicit,"31 and that "the media are more explicit than
they've ever been."32 Such observations demonstrate a growing awareness of and concern with film's unique status as a recording medium
versus a representational one.
As a graphic medium, film doesn't literally make things "real," of
course. Documenting actual objects, characters, and events (referential
realism), or even making objects, characters, and events seem real
(perceptual realism), is altogether different from making them explicit,33
Nevertheless, the visual media are increasingly called upon to provide a
record of reality, and some literalists have adopted the extreme view that
only what can be filmed exists, or at least can be known with certainty.
Thus, in 1999 the Kansas Board of Education decided to remove evolution and the big-bang theory from the state's science curriculum on the
grounds that these phenomena have not been directly observed or
recorded and thus are open to doubt. Such radical skepticism is rooted
in a faith in graphic realism fostered by film culture whereby events
must be confirmed by eyewitness testimony or photographic evidence.
Ironically, the visual evidence of evolution required by the Board of
Education (which reversed its decision in 2001) was not long in coming:
alarmed parents were already beginning to observe the increasingly early
onset of puberty in their daughters. Here was what seemed to be graphic
evidence of human evolution-a significant change in the biological
development of the species, or at least in the rate of its development, that

Introduction

was happening within a single generation. At a loss to account for the

earlier occurrence of puberty, researchers have cited biological, environmental, and even psychological factors (obesity, chemical pollution, and
the "absent father theory"). The fact that more girls at age eight or
even younger are showing secondary sexual characteristics associated
with puberty-budding breasts and pubic hair-has understandably
concerned parents. They worry that their daughters' precocious sexual
development will only make them more susceptible to the ever more
graphic, market-driven, and youth-oriented media. Yet some researchers
suspect that the media's graphic imagery may not merely opportunistically target early puberty, but may actually trigger it. "Can visual images
also have a biological effect?" asks Marcia Herman-Giddens, author of
the 1997 study that called widespread attention to the early puberty
phenomenon. "Does constant exposure to this sort of thing act as a
premature trigger? I certainly think we need to find out." If HermanGiddens's suspicion of the media's influence on sexual development
were to be verified (she repeatedly invokes the Pavlovian image of someone salivating at the sight of slicing open a juicy grapefruit as an
"example of how what you see can have a biological effect on your
body"),34 then the mass appeal of Britney Spears may turn out to be the
most literal example to date of life imitating art.
The Kansas Board of Education and Britney Spears underscore the
two-pronged nature of the reality effect: on one hand, the recording
media are called upon to establish the truth of (or to cast doubt on)
scientific theories about the world; on the other hand, the recording
media are capable of giving reality to fictions and fantasies by producing
a vivid, graphic semblance of truthfulness. To be sure, this sort of reality
as effect is quite a different matter from the effect of reality-the sudden
and often violent impact of the physical and historical world on the
pseudoreality of film and the other media. But one must always consider
the more subtle and permanent effect that the graphic media may be
exerting upon real life.
The paradox that extreme graphic realism is rarely real is concisely
expressed in Heidi Dawidoff's observation that "life isn't itself graphically realistic to our minds. We are always altering (coloring and discoloring) experience by means of memories, fantasies, and feelings." Thus,
sex as it is presented in pornography is unrealistic (and in Dawidoff's
view, not "sexy") because it "becomes more plainly physical than it ever
really is."35 This paradox pertains to the full range of recorded imagery,
from adult movies to children's animation (not to mention pornographic
animation of the sort found in Japanese hentai-the ultimate example of
the reality effect in which the "innocent" medium of children's cartoons
is twisted, bent, and warped to depict graphic "adult" sexual behavior).

10

The Reality Effect

"Technologically speaking," acknowledges the supervising technical

director for th~ 1999 state-of-the-art computer-animation feature Toy
Story 2, "the closer you get to trying to do something that's really, accurately human, the farther away it's actually going to be. "36 And we
shouldn't forget the genre of horror movies in which this paradox is
particularly evident-namely, in the way that all manner of special
effects are used to produce the illusion of "realist horror. "37 As movies
use special effects to produce increasingly vivid sensations, they actually
tend to become less lifelike. Directors of big-budget films find themselves caught in a double bind. Ever more talent and resources are
devoted to making artifice seem natural, the nonvisible appear visible,
and the realm of the imaginary come across as convincing and credible.
In an increasingly artificial and visual world, nothing must appear to be
unreal, meaning that nothing must be left unseen.
Having come into being and come of age during the recording revolution, film now stands to be at once superannuated and supercharged
by the digital revolution, much in the way sound recordings have. 38 The
transition from the photographic to the digital image-a virtual visual
effect and not "a physical inscription of any this-has-been"39-is already
evident in the movie industry, where the task of filmmaking has shifted
significantly from the production (recording) to the postproduction
phase (editing, special effects). One only has to compare the number of
closing credits at the end of today's feature films with those from twenty
years ago to realize the degree to which special effects have come to
dominate commercial filmmaking. The displacement of the conventional
recording apparatus by computerized digital technologies has, as one
commentator has noted,
further diminish[ ed] the traces of photographic, indexical contingency
in the final product. Not only can "mistakes" made during shooting be
"corrected" and recorded effects be maximized, but on the very level
of production live-action images and sounds can be generated independently of any referent in the outside world. 40
Whereas special effects were formerly reserved for isolated scenes except
in the case of full-length animated features, such effects are now
routinely used throughout the entire picture. Portions of many films are
routinely transferred from film to video for digital editing and color
corrections and then back to film, and entire movies are now being shot
in digital format or digitally edited years after their original release. 41
This conflation of the recording and representational processes enables
filmmakers to introduce special effects more easily, effectively, cheaply,
and quickly-immediately after shooting the image, or even in place of

Introduction

11

shooting the image. A growing number of science-fiction and actionadventure films, such as the Star Wars series, Terminator II, and Jurassic
Park, don't just use special effects; they are special effects.
As the postproduction phase has steadily infiltrated the recording
process, the contingency of the audiovisual trace has given way to the
wholesale generation of an entire Lucas-world of image and sound
effects without worldly referents. The advent of digitalization, morphing, and "Flo-Mo" (the technique popularized in The Matrix, which
allows filmmakers to shoot scenes at normal speed while slowing down
or freezing portions of the surrounding action), has enabled FX artistry
to replace "actual" recorded elements in the mise-en-scene. There is
now little to keep George Lucas-who used over two thousand digitally generated shots, or 90 percent of the movie, in his 1999 Star Wars
prequel, Episode I: The Phantom Menace-from doing away with
actors altogether, and replacing them with animatronic robots and fully
digitalized characters. In the Lucasian spectacle of carefully programmed digitalized effects, as little as possible is left to chance, to the
contingencies of real life, and to the vagaries and verities of the
recorded image.
Reality Bites Back: Kernel Truths
As commercial animation, action-adventure, and sci-fi movies leave the
medium of recorded film behind in order to devote ever greater shares
of their budgets to digitalized special effects, raw footage is coming to
playa greater role in low-budget, independent cinema. Instead of using
special effects to alter, enhance, or simply dispense with recorded
images, noncommercial filmmakers have devised innovative ways of
presenting the unedited film record of the real itself, recontextualizing it
through a variety of what might be called" general effects."
We may note, for example, how fictional movies have increasingly
adopted the long-standing documentary practice of using archival
photographs and films. In a number of recent foreign features the narratives are motivated by some piece of unedited footage. The trend can be
traced back to Antonioni's 1966 film Blow-Up, with its story of a
photographer who records a murder in a public park but doesn't realize
it until he develops and enlarges the pictures he has happened to shoot.
In more recent movies the segment of raw film footage is depicted as
being rare and elusive, as in Harvey Keitel's Balkan odyssey in Ulysses'
Gaze to recover an early documentary film that has been presumed lost.
The piece of raw footage may be life-threatening: Ziad Doueiri's 1999
feature West Beirut focuses On the perils of two Lebanese boys who try
to develop some home-movie footage they have shot with a Super8

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The Reality Effect

camera during the 1975 civil war. In recent Iranian and Chinese cinema,
where the roles in fictional stories are often played not by professional
actors but by individuals playing themselves, the distinction between
fiction and nonfictional cinema has become especially blurred. 42
The convention of documentary footage within fictional films is
more than an instance of modern cinema's self-consciousness and selfreflexivity. The presence of some prized, elusive piece of raw footage in
movies functions much like the pea that keeps the princess from falling
asleep; in the feature films mentioned above, the documentary footage is
a kernel of "truth" around which the cinematic fiction persistently
circles. 43 And as in the fairy tale, it is the girl's hyperawareness of the
pea hidden beneath all those mattresses that marks her as a true princess,
so these cinematic fictions derive a semblance of authenticity from the
documentary kernels at their core. 44
As the story in fictional films may be centered on a kernel of raw
film footage that provides a semblance of documentary truth, so documentary filmmakers who are unable to directly record their subject
incorporate whatever existing filmed footage is available. Thus they
routinely incorporate still photographs to establish the actuality of
events that may have taken place before the invention of motion
pictures. 45 And as with kernel documentaries in fictional films, the found
footage used in documentary films is often incomplete or biased, and
requires some form of metadocumentary (or metafiction) to complete or
correct it. Indeed, archival images in documentary films frequently serve
as a point of departure for quasi-fictional scenes that reenact or rei magine historical events. Thus in his 1999 film Wisconsin Death Trip, director
James Marsh staged some of the real-life horrors documented in Michael
Lesy's 1973 book about the rural farming community of Black River
Falls, Wisconsin. In the 1890s, many of the town's mostly immigrant
population either went mad or turned violent after being hit with a triple
whammy of economic depression, freezing temperatures, and a staggering infant mortality rate caused by diphtheria. Based on Lesy's compilation of vintage photographs of the town's haunted citizens (Diane
Arbus-like portraits taken by the town photographer, Charles Van
Schaik) and newspaper clippings about the town's murders and suicides
(read in the film by Ian Holm), Marsh re-created grainy reenactments of
Black River Falls's more sensational crimes. These black-and-white
"silent-movie tableaux vivants" are juxtaposed with color sequences of
present-day Black River Falls; the effect is less to point up the obvious
differences between life in the town in the 1890s and in the 1990s than to
suggest the unexpected similarities of the two periods. 46
Whereas Van Schaik's portraits and late-nineteenth-century newspaper accounts provided the kernel truths in Wisconsin Death Trip that

Introduction

13

Marsh used to stage his reenactments of actual past crimes, the kernel
truths in The Blair Witch Project-the mock horror documentary
released the same year-were pure fabrication. This surprise, lowbudget hit passed itself off as a homemade documentary about witchcraft made by three film students who mysteriously disappeared in the
Maryland woods. Actually, the movie was made-rather than found-in
the woods, its grainy, jerky footage shot by the actors themselves. The
directors, Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sanchez, who reportedly made
the movie for under $60,000, fabricated a Blair Witch mythology that
took on a reality of its own, thanks to the numerous Web sites that
sprang up, ostensibly devoted to investigating and debating the mystery,
but ultimately serving to promote the film long before its commercial
release. Driven by a combination of clever marketing and fortuitous
Internet buzz, The Blair Witch Project (or "Sales Pitch Project," as it was
dubbed by critics) proved far more profitable than its big-budget, hightech competitors.
In a year of movies saturated with special effects, The Blair Witch
Project appeared all the more "special" by rejecting such gimmicks. Yet
at least contemporary movies such as The Phantom Menace or The
Matrix, for all their high-tech wizardry, never pretended to be documentary accounts of actual events in the way that The Blair Witch
Project did. As a result, this most "realistic" -looking of films exceeded
all its high-tech competitors in fakery. Even as it appeared to dispense
entirely with special effects, the movie was a special effect from start to
finish, "wholly created by the production process," in which "grainy
equals real, immediate," and "the jerk of a video camera or the crackle of
a scratchy vinyl record has come to stand for the truer reality behind the
process. "47 In its avowed avoidance of artifice, The Blair Witch Project
succeeded in turning the general effects associated with the recording/
distribution process into a special effect of the sort normally introduced
in the representation/production phase. Movies such as the Star Wars
films, which employ the most advanced FX technology to create realistic visions of made-up worlds, are in the end merely products passively
watched by the viewer. The Blair Witch Project owed its success less to
the finished product-the film itself-than to the unpredictable, interactive promotional process leading up to and following its release, a
process that involved numberless chance exchanges on the Internet by
individuals having no direct connection with the film. "This isn't a
movie," critic Stuart Klawans declared, "it's an item of business news,
about one of those gazillionaire-producing Internet stocks."48 The next
logical step in this Internet-driven marketing process was soon evident.
In what has been called "the most remarkable movie-promotion
gimmick ever created for the Web," two pre-release online trailers for

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The Reality Effect

Steven Spielberg's 2001 film AI contained subtle clues leading the initiated user into "a nameless puzzle-and-adventure game, with (so far)
nameless designers, presented through a vast collection of sites portraying an entire universe of the future." As Charles Herold comments,
"The 'A.I.' game would be fascinating even if the movie didn't exist."
Such intense interactivity in real life, triggered by (and feeding back
into the promotion of) a fictional film, is a good example of what I call
a filmic event, an increasingly prevalent phenomenon in film culture.
Paradoxically, the rash of filmic events triggered by the intensifying
interaction between the filmic record and real life may be signaling the
marginalization of the film product itself. After several millennia of the
representational, illusionist arts, the past century and a half of recording
arts has produced a public dream world of real virtuality-"the use of
factual material to satisfy the need for a fictional world." The moviemediated twentieth century is turning out to be a brief, transitional stage
on the way toward the kind of transpersonal, virtual reality that a fully
interactive technology is bound to achieve-"the use of fictional material to simulate a factual world. "49 Signs of this transition were already
clearly visible in 1999: besides the AOL-Time Warner merger in that
year and the exodus of several prominent movie moguls from Hollywood to Silicon Valley, where they joined Internet entertainment startups,50 for the first time sales of video games surpassed the domestic
box-office gross of movies. 51 Often video games are modeled on, or
aspire to, the same level of dramatic realism of the movies. 52 Some critics even regard video games as surpassing film as a "mechanism which
equips the child to take his fantasies and turn them into reality."53 Costing far less to produce than commercial films and often bringing in twice
the revenue, interactive media will almost certainly continue to outperform noninteractive media (i.e., movies as well as books, paintings, and
the other representational arts) in the indefinite future. Media critic Bob
Schwabach predicts that interactive video games will force passive
movies "into obscurity, a future entertainment category subsidized by
taxes and private charity and viewed by a select audience, much like
opera and ballet today." Schwabach ridicules attempts to produce interactive movies, and remains dubious about the success of such gamebased 2001 films as Tomb Raider, Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within, and
Resident Evil. 54 And even if movies continue to thrive, film won't: 1999
was also the year in which a full-length movie (The Phantom Menace)
was first exhibited in a digital format, anticipating the time when highdefinition digital cameras and projectors will make the bulky, expensive,
and fragile medium of film obsolete. And as Darren Aronofsky's 1998
film 1t inaugurated an era of made-for-Internet movies by becoming the
first feature-length movie offered for downloading over the Web, it

Introduction

15

seems likely that the twentieth century will turn out to be not only the
first filmed century, but also the last.
From Cinema Verite to Reality TV
The networks not only remain enthusiastic about the reality genre,
but the next iterations are all about one-upping the others.
-Ben Silverman, the William Morris Agency

The media's growing influence in the digital age would seem to support
the claims of critics such as Jean Baudrillard and Paul Virilio about the
"crisis in the reality principle," and has led a number of commentators
to lament the gradual disappearance and ultimate loss of "reality"
itself. 55 For some, the problem goes back six thousand years to the earliest media technology, writing, which heralded the separation of signs
and things that caused reality to become increasingly symbolic and
virtual. 56 Others, such as James Carey, call attention to the fact that
reality is increasingly being coopted, "preempted," "defined," and
"restricted" by ever more powerful global media conglomerates that
debase news and history into mindless diversions. 57 Such critiques of the
media and information technology are valid as far as they go, but they
overlook several key matters. By calling attention to the media's distortions of reality, they give the impression that there is some independent
state of affairs "out there" that can be objectively verified. Yet as
philosophers from Vico onward have insisted, human reality is always a
construct and has been so since the earliest poets came up with supernatural explanations for natural phenomena. If anything, the recording
revolution of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries has worked to
stabilize meaning and limit interpretation rather than promote rampant
invention and distortion. (Of course, this could all change with the digital revolution now under way, in which fabricated images are capable of
simulating indexical records.)
Then there are claims such as Neal Gabler's that entertainment now
plays such an overwhelming role in people's lives that reality hardly
"seems to count ... After all, when life is a movie, who needs reality?"58
On the contrary, reality is never more in demand than it is in our global
mass-mediated film culture, where it has become, in Carey's words, "a
scarce resource." And while reality has never been more in demand, it
has also never been more at issue. Reality in liberal, democratic, massmediated societies no longer is self-evident, but is constantly contested
and up for grabs. It isn't merely that movies compete with reality;
rather, movies compete with other movies (and studios with other

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The Reality Effect

studios) in rendering an authentic-that is, graphic-view of reality.

Thus in 1998, for example, the movies Deep Impact and Armageddon
both took up the hot new post-Cold War scare of an asteroid hitting the
earth, while Saving Private Ryan and The Thin Red Line presented
directors Steven Spielberg's and Terrence Malick's strikingly different
accounts of American soldiers' experiences of World War II, and Antz
and A Bug's Life offered the DreamWorks and Disney/Pixar studios'
competing computer-animated visions of the anthropomorphized world
of insects.
Besides the rival views of reality presented by different movies is the
competition in our "mixed media culture" between movies and other
media, such as TV, video, and the Internet. 59 An entire sub genre of
movies has emerged, from Network to Quiz Show, critiquing the impact
of television on daily life. While the protagonist of the 1998 movie The
Truman Show is the unwitting star of a real-life TV serial and the two
1990s teenagers in Pleasantville become the unwilling captives of a 1950s
black-and-white television drama, Ed of EdTV is only too eager (at least
at first) to allow himself to become the star of a real-life soap opera. In
each case, the medium of television is presented in all its contrived artificiality-especially in its pretense as reality TV to give viewers a direct
glimpse of life. Yet movies critical of television do precisely what they
fault television for doing: they present themselves as a transparent lens
through which we watch the absurd interaction unfold between the artificial medium of TV and "real life." Film's own status as an artificial
(and artificing) medium goes unexamined in these intramedial movies
that critique TV as a mediating agency standing between viewers and
(one particular view of) reality. Watching these movies about TV, we are
led to forget that we are watching a movie, and more precisely a movie
fiction. When the protagonists Truman and Ed renounce their fake TV
world for real life, no acknowledgment is made that "real life" in these
movies is nothing but another media fiction-that of The Truman Show
and EdTV themselves.
Even as these end-of-the-century films critique television as an artificial medium, a case can be made that movies themselves have historically
been a fantasy medium and that it is in fact TV that has led the way in
presenting the real in all its gritty, graphic immediacy.6o Whereas cinema
verite uses the pretense of documentary to dramatize events or fabricate
a story in order to present a thesis or to convey some deeper truth, reality TV documents "actual" events that are intrinsically dramatic, sensational, and voyeuristic (car chases and crashes, man-made and natural
disasters, feuding spouses, even surgical operations).61 The fact that the
phrase "reality TV" has largely displaced "cinema verite" is itself revealing: in contrast to the immediacy of television, movies only offer a staged

Introduction

17

(after)image of reality, reality as an effect. Yet as media researcher Sandra

Ball-Rokeach asks of infotainment TV, "in what sense is it reality
programming? ... These shows desensitize the audience to the fear and
the emotions [of actual chases and shoot-outs]. The fictional police
dramas are sometimes more 'real' because they give you that context.
You get a much more subtle understanding of character instead of just the
action."62 Arguing along similar lines, Lincoln Kaplan points out that
fictional police and courtroom dramas on television "are more effective
in framing important legal choices than most of what [the real-life cable
channel] Court TV broadcasts. In an era when 'reality' TV blurs the line
between nonfiction and fiction by recreating events, what people see on
[fictional television dramas] gets closer to the truth-especially since the
events they stage are often taken from the news. "63 Once again, what is
graphic and documentary is not necessarily real or true. The so-called
"caught-on-video" footage of reality TV is marked by its own artificial

J.

verite aesthetic (shaky camerawork, static and technical glitches, time

codes, and other aesthetic techniques that suggest that the footage was
not studio-produced) ... [Reality TV's] claim of realism is not achieved
by stripping the imagery of all mediation to somehow reveal an
unadulterated "reality" -an impossible feat. In fact, it tends to require
more mediation to assert that these images are real. 64

Narrative filmmakers might think twice before emulating the dubious

realism of reality TV. Still, the fact that a number of filmmakers are
striving for television's nonfictional edginess suggests that "reality" still
counts for a great deal in the movies, and that film has a deeper commitment to, and connection with, the "real world" than formalist critics
suspect.
Nowhere is television's vaunted realism more dubious than in the
new genre of "reality shows" flourishing at the turn of the century.
Many of these popular American products are not even original, but
recycled European imports. The number one U.S. TV program Who
Wants to Be a Millionaire was a British quiz show that ABC first
acquired as a summer series. After its success (and the fiasco of Fox's
prime-time, publicity-driven special Who Wants to Marry a MultiMillionaire), three networks vied for the rights to the Dutch program Big
Brother (another losing proposition, it turned out), in which a group of
young people is confined to a house loaded with cameras and microphones that record their every move. The CBS summer-of-2000 blockbuster Survivor, in which sixteen contestants were stranded on (and
gradually eliminated from) a jungle island near Borneo, was originally a
Swedish hit. In that version, one cast member committed suicide after

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The Reality Effect

receiving a negative vote. If Los Angeles Times television columnist Brian

Lowry is right, more deaths can be expected as these ratings-driven
shows continue "to push the envelope farther and farther in order to
make them interesting"65-and, we might add, in order to pursue an
elusive reality which must appear ever more violent and graphic.
Not only did reality shows have the potential to be immensely
popular with audiences, but they were far cheaper to produce, and
therefore far more profitable, than sitcoms and crime dramas. As a partner at one talent agency remarked, "Game shows and reality shows will
occupy real estate previously rented to fictional entertainment
programs."66 As of this writing, plans are already in place for a televised
worldwide scavenger hunt; an American version of the European show
Jailbreak, in which a group of contestants compete to be the first to
break out of a high-technology prison; and a show in which a group of
people live in an environment approximating conditions on Mars.
There's even a newall-out space race for the new century: NBC's deal
with Russia to broadcast a contest in which the winner is sent into space
aboard a Russian rocket was followed up by negotiations between the
other major networks and NASA for a show in which twenty contestants train with the space agency for the chance to spend a week aboard
the new International Space Station. 67
While the hegemony of the Hollywood movie industry is threatened by far cheaper independent films and video games, the reign of
costly fictional programming on TV has been put in jeopardy by the
grounds well of inexpensive "reality shows." Clearly the term is an egregious misnomer. The fact that such shows are unscripted hardly makes
them real. The ubiquitous presence of television cameras and film crews,
and above all the actors' awareness that they are being filmed, undercuts
the pretense of reality that informs the film The Truman Show or, for
that matter, a TV program such as Candid Camera-"shows" in which
the subject is genuinely ignorant that he or she is on film and is being
seen by millions of knowing viewers. But while shows such as MTV's
The Real World continued to cling to the pretense of presenting people
as they are, the new breed of hyperreality shows has dropped this
conceit once and for all. The over-the-top, soap-opera stories contrived
by the World Wrestling Federation's Vince McMahon have given up any
"pretense that wrestling was real." Far from making the sport seem
more legitimate and lifelike, McMahon introduced "a second layer of
unreality" by alternating the rounds with a lurid, behind-the-scenes
glimpse into his own dysfunctional family. In John Leland's words,
"here was something to believe in: the candidly, honestly fake."68 But
McMahon seriously misgauged matters when, instead of the honestly
fake, he attempted to bring a new level of realism to the hallowed insti-

Introduction

19

tution of professional football. The XFL, or Extreme Football League,

was expressly created in 2000 for a new generation of viewers who
appeared to be steadily losing interest in the increasingly artificial spectacle of NFL games. By placing cameras and microphones everywhereon the field and off the field, in the players' helmets, and in the locker
rooms-the XFL promised a glimpse into the behind-the-scenes reality
of the game. Such realism couldn't compete with the over-hyped spectacle of the NFL, and the XFL folded after only one season.
If viewers of the common run of reality shows willfully suspend
their disbelief to the point that they can believe the "candidly, honestly
fake," what's to stop them from doubting the documented truth?
Indeed, while a surprising number of people are disposed to believe
photographic "evidence" of UFOs and other fantastic phenomena,
others reject filmed evidence of the moon landing or the liberation of
the death camps at the end of World War II. Straightforward, undoctored amateur recordings of sensational events, such as the Zapruder
film of JFK's assassination or the Holliday video of the Rodney King
beating, not only fail to show "what really happened," but actually
provoke more controversy than if they hadn't been made and hadn't
become part of the public record. 69 Such seemingly accurate but ultimately ambiguous and inconclusive recordings have contributed to the
skeptical attitude that many feel toward the documentary media today.
Others, meanwhile, are disposed to accept whatever they are shown in
the movies, regardless of its veracity or even its authenticity, as long as
the special effects are sufficiently spectacular and graphic.
More than ever, film audiences are in need, if not of a new hermeneutics of suspicion, then of a code of cinematic literacy that will allow
them to maintain a healthy skepticism in the face of ever more spectacular special effects. An innovative media criticism is called for that can
expose the ways that film distorts the world in the process-and under
the pretense-of documenting it. Of particular interest in this regard are
a line of narrative films from the second half of the century-from
Hitchcock's 1958 Vertigo to Antonioni's 1966 Blow-Up and Neil
Jordan's 1992 The Crying Game-that thematize the pitfalls of credulity
and stress the need to doubt visible evidence in the primarily visual
medium of film. "You can't believe everything you see" ran the advertising tag for Brian De Palma's 1984 film Body Double, while the ads for
his 1998 Snake Eyes warned, "Believe everything, except your eyes. "70
It's as if filmmakers increasingly find themselves in the role of sorcerer's
apprentices, wielding a medium whose seductive power has become so
great, thanks to ever more realistic special effects, that they actually
need to remind their supposedly media-savvy audiences to suspend not
their disbelief but their belief. Yet it may be too much to expect such