The name is absent

Modernism had clearly differentiated and autonomized the
roles of signifier, signified, and referent. Post-modernization
on the contrary problematizes these distinctions, and
especially the status and relationship of signifier and
referent, or put another way, representation and reality
(Lash, 1990: 12).

According to postmodernism, behind surface and simulation there is nothing;
there is emptiness in the representation. Postmodern cinema is based around
simulation, (un)reality, substitutes and virtuality. This is a paradigm that
contrasts it with modernity and its obsessive search to discover hidden
referents under (un)reality. Indeed, in postmodernity the images and signs,
the representation of the objects have achieved a similar standard to the
referents, the objects that contribute to the configuration of our lives
(Baudrillard, 1974: 32-33). In Jameson’s words:

If there is any realism left there it is a ‘realism’ which is
meant to derive from the shock of slowly becoming aware of
a new and original situation in which we are condemned to
seek History by way of our Pop images and simulacra of that
history, which itself remains forever out or reach (Jameson,
1991: 71).

The image that we can see in Jameson’s vision of postmodernism is
similar to Lacan’s endless chain of signifiers, which culminates with no
reference in the world of experience and produces emptiness, despite the
fulfillment of images. The conclusion is that technology has, in our current
time, an effectiveness never experienced before to (re)create (un)reality
from representations. In this sense, films like The Matrix trilogy, Dark City,
Total Recall and eXistenZ appeal to the perfect simulation of reality; the
ultimate virtual technology that provokes inestimable consequences in our
lives when we do not know if we are living in the representations. Apart from
a common concern across their plots, some of these films coincide in having
an astonishing level of performance in which the visual spectacle works
together with the story, mutually reinforcing each other in their coexistence
and generating a cinema with a figural connotation. In these films the

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