From our discussion of Lyotard last
class, I have started to make more sense of his concepts. Lyotard is a large
supporter of modernist art and the way he takes on realism is through the lens
of cinema vs. painting. He thinks that in our society, cinema is challenging
the notion of the real. He is begging the question of what cinema is doing to
our perception of reality and what is being destabilized by cinematic
productions. He poses another idea about our destabilization of reality because
in order to understand our current art forms (cinema), we must interject
meaning in the distance/gap between the actors of the film and ourselves. He is
talking about exactly what Macherey explained to us earlier. Today television,
movies, Broadway plays and musicals are all destabilizing our notion of the
real through this gap that we fill, almost fantasy like.
In our
society, you can easily go up and ask someone whom they aspire to be and many answers
will be some sort of celebrity icon. We fantasize about the lives of these
actors in the roles that they play on the screen, which leads to fantasies of
realism. Often when I am watching my favorite character on television, Emily
Thorn from ABC’s Revenge, I make
connections between the crazy and risk taking life she leads in the Hamptons
and I question if her tactics of taking down members of a society for Revenge
is at all possible. In the sense, I am fantasizing the real. Belief in the
stability of the referent leads to these fantasies of the real, and media is a
huge factor to the destabilization of our notion of reality.
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