The Reality Effect: Film Culture and the Graphic Imperative

by Joel Black

Overview

It used to be only movies were on film; now the whole world is. The most intimate and most banal moments of our lives are constantly recorded for public consumption. In The Reality Effect, Joel Black argues that the desire to make visible every aspect of our lives is an impulse derived from cinema- one that has made life both more graphic and less "real." He approaches film as a documentary medium that has obscured-if not obliterated- the line between reality and fiction. To illustrate this effect, Black traces the uncanny interplay between movies and real-life events through a series of comparative analyses-from Lolita and the murder of JonBenét Ramsey to Wag the Dog and the Clinton scandal to Crash and Princess Diana's violent death.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781135354398
Publisher:	Taylor & Francis
Publication date:	08/21/2013
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	296
File size:	477 KB

About the Author

Joel Black teaches comparative literature and film at the University of Georgia. He is the author of The Aestheticsof Murder: A Study in Romantic Literature andContemporary Culture (1991).

Table of Contents

Introduction: The Filmed Century Before (and Beyond) Art and Entertainment The Reality Effect Reality Bites Back: Kernel Truths From Cinema Verité to Reality TV Mediating Reality: Wag the Dog to War Games The Graphic Imperative Part I: Film Culture One: Pornographic Science Missing Scenes: Coover's CasablancaIntrusive Scenes: Scorsese's Marriage ManualFreezing the Scene: Pynchon's Prehistory of FilmYour Car's Mind Two: Primal ScenesQuestioning the Woman Films Without FilmInfantilizing the Viewer Hard-core Freud The Reality of Fantasy De Palma's Wolf Man Three: Body Parts Multiple Images and Displaced Desire Split Persons and Body Doubles Shower Show: Dressed to Kill to Body Double The Erotics of Substitution: Vertigo to Body DoubleVamps and VampiresConjugal Adultery and Movie Children Part II: Filmic Events Four: Documenting Violence Serial Violence/Surveillance The Year of Filming DangerouslyHidden Figures: The Assassination Scene from Antonioni to Zapruder Surprise Executions Films that Kill Five: Telling Stories I Want You to See with My EyesScreening the Holocaust Screening Hollywood The Death of the Mind Six: Showing the ObsceneTime and the Unthinkable Releasing the UnreleasableStealing Childhood: Lolita to JonBenétDeath Imitates Art: Crash and Princess DianaWagging the Dog; Sex, Lies, and the Clinton VideotapesPart III: Film DreamsSeven: From Dream Work to DreamWorks Unreal Estate: Fake Towns, Real People Ants Wars Back to the Future: Movies, the Ride From the Moon to Mars: 2001 Then and NowThe Color of Dreams Back to the Drawing Board: Movies, the GameDream Worlds Afterword on the Afterlife Notes Name and Title Index Subject Index

Editorial Reviews

"In today's film culture, our sense of what is real is determined, conditioned, and mediated as never before by movies and the other recording media," Black writes. As he demonstrates, today everything must be filmed, and there is a widespread perception that if it is filmed, it is legitimate or true. However, special effects, not to mention the subconscious, can fake reality. Drawing on psychoanalysis, film criticism, literature, and art, Black (comparative literature and film, Univ. of Georgia) uses films to explore the way films interact with psychological and historical actualities, including Princess Diana's death (Crash), JonBenet Ramsey's murder (Lolita), the presidency (Wag the Dog), our fascination with ordinariness (The Truman Show and Pleasantville), and substitution of a false reality (The Matrix). Perhaps most significant is disclosure of a truth few others have discerned: new technologies brand the 20th century as the first filmed century and the last. This will share a shelf with Geoffrey O'Brien's The Phantom Empire: Movies in the Mind of the Twentieth Century (Norton, 1995). Recommended for film and media collections. Kim Holston, American Inst. for Chartered Property Casualty Underwriters, Malvern, PA Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information.

Library Journal

"Drawing on a wide variety of materials and methods, Black offers an erudite and intriguing book, particularly when he examines how cinematic fictions have blended with such real-life events as murder and assasination, death by car crash, pedophilia and presidential scandal...his provocative discussion is recommended for both public and acadmeic libraries collecting in media and cultural studies. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty; general readers." — Choice June 2002
"Recommended for film and media collections." — Library Journal
"Appropriately, 'virtuality' does not exist in my Spell Check, though no other concept so haunts contemporary art, media, and life. In his rich, lucid examination of 'the reality effect,' Joel Black describes the inroads made in our sense of the world by the ambiguities of representation." — Wendy Steiner, author of Venus in Exile
"Joel Black must now stand as one of America's top cultural critics. The Reality Effect moves effortlessly between the highbrow theory of Freud and Lacan and the low, low genres of pornography and snuff films, providing dazzling insights into such promoters of the 'graphic imperative' as Oliver Stone, Brian De Palma, Abe Zapruder and Reality TV along the way." — Steven Jay Schneider, New York University
"Recommended for film and media collections." — Library Journal

From the Publisher