words and, in Lacanian terms, we can say that it was necessary to reconcile
the real and the symbolic to understand its consequences (King, 2005: 18).
The (un)reality of films was superseded by reality on 9/11 and therefore
cinema required a different kind of perception to offer to the spectators as
the boundaries of imagination became altered. Baudrillard anticipated this
situation a few years before saying that: ‘There is an escalation of the true,
of the lived experience. And there is a panic-stricken production of the real
and the referential’ (1994a: 12-13). Indeed, Baudrillard (1987a: 104) points
out that our society only knows itself and the world around through the
reflections that come from the camera’s eye. Thus, this is an unreflexive-
Americanized knowledge: as the production credits of many of the texts
discussed in this thesis attests, because a vast amount of films, television
productions and videogames are generated in America, it follows that what
we perceive is a somewhat (unavoidably) ‘American reality’. Moreover, this
America of today is a place where things only need to ‘appear’ credible in
order to ‘be’ credible; it is the ‘desert of the real’ of today and an ongoing
example of the emptiness of representations (Baudrillard, 1988a).
We are witnesses to the rise of a new regime of signification that
reconfigures the culture from its foundations. In this sense, Martin Barbero
(2002: 81) affirms that what the technological revolution introduced into our
society is not only a considerable number of new machines, but, more
importantly, a new way of relating to the symbolic process. In other words,
the most relevant consequences of technology are not the apparatus, the new
devices, but the new modes of use of language and perception. The real
impact of new technological inventions is produced in intangible elements:
in(side) our selves, in the way that we interact with our environment, with
(un)reality. This is the consequence of the dominion of the audiovisual
experience over typography and the belief in the image as a legitimate way
of transmitting knowledge. As Peter Greenaway points out ‘we have achieved
the end of the supremacy of the text and we are entering now in the time of
the image’ (Constenla, 2008). Therefore, we need to learn how to perceive
and understand the image and its (un)reality.
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