Brooke Bumgarner, Žižek

Žižek begins his explanation with a simple comparison of everyday, well-known products that have been robbed of their malignant properties, such as beer without alcohol, what we commonly know as nonalcoholic beer. He further explains how “Virtual Reality simply generalizes this procedure of offering a product deprived of its substance: it provides reality itself deprived of its substance, of the hard resistant kernel of the Real…” (Žižek 2002, 231) which is a slight problem. The significance of this is that in essence, we understand virtual reality as reality, which it is not truly. This goes back to the big question, what is real? Žižek explains that “we begin to experience ‘real reality’ itself as a virtual entity”.

Žižek puts this notion of Virtual Reality into perspective by relating it to the World Trade Center (WTC) collapse. Media, specifically television and cinema, has been framed so that when watching a dramatic scene of action or terror, the audience’s reaction is that much deeper because the impending event feels “real”. When comparing the images we saw of the WTC, we realize it wasn’t that far off from shots we have seen before. Our obsession over the “real” in the twentieth-century was the perfect avenue for terrorists to manipulate. Žižek reasons that “the ‘terrorists’ themselves did not do it primarily to provoke real material damage, but for the spectacular effect of it” (Žižek 2002, 231). Indeed the terrorists did not fly the airplanes into the WTC to inflict actual physical damage on the buildings themselves, but rather, to elicit a response, create commotion and send a message.

What is important to understand is that Hollywood not only “stages a semblance of real life deprived of the weight and inertia of materiality… [But] Again, the ultimate truth of the capitalist utilitarian despiritualized universe is the dematerialization of ‘real life’ itself, its reversal into a spectral show” (Žižek 2002, 233). The problem doesn’t just lie in the way Hollywood stages or proposes the “real life” of America deprived of the true seriousness and weight of what it resembles, but simply, the reversal of what “real life” looks like, the misrepresentation of “real life” material.

Considering this notion of the ‘desert of the real’ we come to understand that the media images reflecting the WTC are in a sense a product or identifier with the many alarming and breathtaking scenes we have seen in many dramatic mediated scenes. It is then that we must assess the ideologies and fantasies the media has delivered us, and that which we have willingly consumed. While we panicked and were in shock, exclaiming that the unimaginable had happened, or that the impossible had occurred, we failed to realize one significant issue; “The unthinkable which happened was the object of fantasy, so that, in a way, America got what it fantasized about, and that was the biggest surprise” (Žižek 2002, 233).

Hollywood had been the proprietor of films and scenes of massive terrorist attacks and catastrophic events, while the news media was consistently filled with talk and threat of terrorism and potential attacks. On one hand, a mediated “reality” of fear was propagated as if it were not truly possible, thus, enjoyment was cultivated as citizens continued to view such scenes and encouraged it’s reproduction through consumerist actions. On the other, what was deemed as “real” became questionable and unknown, without anyone even noticing.

In the end, with no true “reality” Hollywood was asked to help address the collapse of the WTC and present it to the public. White house advisors and Hollywood executives aimed to present a collaborative war effort in the “’war on terrorism’ by getting the right ideological message across not only to Americans, but also to the Hollywood public around the globe—the ultimate empirical proof that Hollywood does in fact function as an ‘ideological state apparatus’” (Žižek 2002, 234). Once more, a concerning conclusion as the ideologies that Hollywood had perpetuated resulted in, not only ignorance but also the question of ‘what is reality?’ and how we are to act without stability of that which is real.

Žižek’s theory is best wrapped up in understanding that “it was before the WTC collapse that we lived in our reality, perceiving Third World horrors as something which was not actually part of our social reality, as something which existed (for us) as a spectral apparition on the (TV) screen – and what happened on September 11 was that this fantasmatic screen apparition entered our reality. It is not that the reality entered our image: the image entered our reality” (Žižek 2002, 234).