USING CINEMA & COMBATING THE HYPERREAL

In utilizing cinema for social change it is crucial to recognize the hyperreality of today’s global audiovisual culture. The realm of the hyperreal (i.e., reality-based TV shows, Hollywood movies, Disneyland, TV commercials, and other excursions into ideal worlds) is more real than real, whereby the models, images, and codes of the hyperreal come to control thought and behavior. In pedagogy of cinema the facilitators of “cinema for social change” must teach against such hyperreality. In the postmodern age, individuals flee from what Baudrillard called, “desert of the real” for the ecstasies of hyperreality and the new realm of computer generated motion pictures, and technological experience. What is at stake is the loss of meaning and spirituality of humanity. Hollywood has contributed greatly to this condition and pedagogy of social change must pay close attention to Hollywood.

Morin’s writings coupled with Giroux and Dewey is instrumental in this inquiry to articulate a theory that explicates cinema of commodification and thus allows the audiences to use such knowledge for social transformation.Hollywood entraps citizens of the globe in a play of images, spectacles, and simulacra, that have less and less relationship to an outside, an external “reality,” to such an extent that the very concept of the social, political, or even “reality” no longer seem to have any meaning. The media (e.g., cinema) saturated consciousness is in such a state of fascination with image and spectacle that the concept of meaning itself dissolves. With evaporation of meaning, the potential opposition to commodifying Hollywood is also in danger of disappearance.