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[In cinema] you don’t try to photograph the reality, you try to photograph the photograph of the reality.

— Stanley Kubrick, as quoted by Jack Nicholson

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Dr. Ellie Anderson, host of the Overthink Podcast, drew attention in a recent episode on postmodernism to the relationship between simulacra and cinema. For the uninitiated, e.g. people with better things to do, a simulacrum in postmodernist philosophy is basically a sign removed by enough degrees from any real thing it might signify that it is empty or purely “self-referential.” I’m not going to explain what cinema is.

I will disclaim that I have not read any of Baudrillard, the father of the simulacrum idea, though even for those cursorily familiar (like myself) Dr. Anderson’s thoughts raise a significant point. America, as the land of cinema, is a world fixated on images, even to the exclusion of the things imaged. Tropes riff on tropes, films comment on films, pictures depict pictures of pictures. The advent of online video sharing has accelerated this drift of images away from reality. Some even throw around the term “meta-modern” to describe the current cultural moment of constant self-reference.

This heightening of representation to detached loftiness often gets categorized as “hyperreality.” With this view in mind, it is hard to dismiss the appearance of a common thread between the proliferation of cinema and the current cultural fascination with photorealistic generative AI and computer graphics in general. One descends from the other, bearing some mysterious genotype in common. The two have even converged at various points with the silver screen presence of deepfakes and AI-assisted VFX. In fact, many of the highest-grossing films of the last few years have evidenced a trend further from actual film, real footage, and toward purely digital, computer generated imagery constructed to imitate actual recorded frames. By way of quite bizarre example, consider the purportedly “live-action” remake of Disney’s most overrated film, The Lion King, and its new hyperreal prequel as heralds of the simulated image of an image of a real thing.

What a strange phenomenon, don’t you think? That millions of Americans huddle into dark rooms to watch simulated images of characters which simulate real things only to, through the “magic” of merchandising, avow the poignance of the images by filling their lives with plastic icons of said images. Images of images of images — at what point does such investment in images leave us completely untethered from the reality they may have once represented? At what point is the natural world, which in this case may as well just be called the real world, devoid of its valence, not cinematic or picturesque enough, too distinct and distant from the supposed representations to which we are accustomed to hold any sway?

My favorite such plastic icon in my possession is probably a movie theater promotional cup with pictures on it of Dwayne Johnson as the title character of DC Comics’ super-flop, Black Adam. My house is, apart from this, almost totally devoid of any other such superhero paraphernalia. I simply thought this weird cultural relic was kind of funny and pathetic. It’s come to serve as a ridiculous reminder that it is only people’s emotional investment in such plasticky images of computer-generated, steroid-addled pulp characters that ever makes them appear to mean anything. Devoid of that investment, such an item is an obvious joke. But plastic theater cups are far from the most insidious part of this so-called hyperreality.

The inability of men and women to relate correctly that this direction has effected would also be funny for its sheer absurdity if it was not so horrid and real. I hardly need nor want to detail what base and vile images are presently doing to the world at large, especially on the internet, but also in theaters. Forget the more abstract rift between the sexes and simply take a look at extreme cases like Japan where male fixation on mere images of images of women — hollow husks of vapid, simulated femininity —  is so severe that their national population cannot even naturally replenish itself. Again, it’s absurd enough to be funny but real enough to be tragic.

This is perhaps not so unrelated as it might seem at first from the “dog mom” phenomenon, as it might be assonantly termed, so prevalent in the United States. One of the great traits that attracts humans to dogs in the first place is their malleability, their eagerness to please, their ability to be trained. Dogs are enjoyable as pets because they are social animals, and as they spend time under the care of a human master, a cyclical dynamic becomes unavoidable. The dog adjusts to his master’s personality, and the master projects an image of his personality onto the dog. Dogs, then, can become a simulated substitute for children. Just as the young Japanese man may find a cartoonish relationship with a caricature of a woman less work than the real deal, the young American woman, as the case often is, may find a dog less work than a child. Both examples represent an individual satisfying the basic longings of life with empty, simulated substitutes, trading the realities of life for cardboard cutouts, savoring synthetic chemical flavors rather than nutritious food. Both examples demonstrate a reliance on images which are disconnected from referents to the degree that they no longer inform and orient a healthy engagement with reality.

A parasocial relationship, especially with a fiction, can never be full of love, nor can raising a mere animal even approach the legacy of molding a human being. The hyperreality of consumerism is a promise of life without the bearing of a cross, a Cain-esque temptation of acceptance with the barest sacrifice. Lifeless images cannot hear our prayers or bless our lives. Our culture seeks providence from images of images of images through the liturgy of gluttony. But bottomless hunger can only find empty food. The paradox of the narrow road is that we must willingly take up difficulty in order to find ease. The ultimate trajectory of postmodern iconolatry is that the path of ease goes down to perdition. The road paved with pleasure has an empty pit as its destination.

So, the basic question is, why are we going this way? Why do we make movies out of completely artificial images made to look real? Why do we fasten plastic to our eyes to find a reality that is virtual? Why do we train machines to resemble people and vomit up images that resemble reality? Why do we clamor for Hollywood’s constant remaking, rebooting, and regurgitating? Why do photorealistic video games shimmering across flat screens, images simulating images of real life, captivate us? Why have we erected the most complex infrastructure of information in the history of humanity just to barb our brains with an unfathomable and inescapable deluge of pictures and videos?

I think, simply, though this answer may sound crude, and it is doubtlessly not a complete answer, reality is just much harder than simulation, at least superficially. I know that’s corny, but cliches exist because they’re often true. It’s been true since Plato allegorized it with a cave until the Wachowskis’ allegorized it with the Matrix. The sunlight is blinding, the blue pill is easier to swallow. Sometimes this makes itself manifest in the one-dimensional escapism in which people become so immersed and invested in works of fiction that they lose themselves because the reality of their lives is too unbearable. Sometimes it means we try to circumvent the heavy sacrifices demanded of us by putting a plastic imitation on the altar instead by adopting a cat rather than having kids or fixating on celebrity relationships rather than forming real ones, or worse, fixating on entirely fictional character relationships. 

“Reality” television is an all-too-perfect example. There’s nothing real about it. Everyone knows there is nothing real about it. So why do the producers of such shows, and thus the viewers, feel compelled to pretend they’re real? Because it’s easier. Reality is the locus of meaning, so a pretended reality provides cheap meaning. Most people, evidently, will settle for such bargain-bin meaning. Ray Bradbury saw this as early as 1953 when he drew a predictive thread from the advent of the sitcom to a sort of proto-internet simulated “family” that dominated home life through screens and “seashells,” a remarkable prediction of the ubiquity of headphones, perhaps the pinnacle of the overlap between individualism and consumption.

Social media has taken the reality TV paradox to new heights — or depths — and revealed the staggering ability of people to forget that every scene they see online has a camera in it, or rather just behind it. The tears shed over broken relationships, various adolescent anxieties, and asinine melodrama on TikTok are not real, they are images being filmed. But the eyes that are trapped in the confines of the screen cannot see the screen or the camera, only the image rather than the reality in which the image exists. Candid moments are faked, or at least their candidness nullified by the subjects’ awareness of the camera, but the fascinating thing is that many do not care. High-fructose corn syrup is just as sweet as sugar, after all. Entertainment does not hinge on truth, only perception. 

At last, the sense of idolatry creeps in with the elevation of the image over the reality. Man is, after all, the image of God, so this kind of simulation is in fact analogous to self-worship. The exaltation of the contingent over the Absolute is the spirit of idolatry rather than the true and undefiled religion of God’s Spirit. The culture of iconolatry subjects the Objective to the subjective — examples of which fact are far too abundant to list. Such examples doubtless prove that this idolatry is indeed disorienting. If God functions, among His many other roles, like north on a compass rose, then to subvert that function is to render the world unnavigable. Images work as symbol and metaphor, whose end is to make invisible facts visible. Images detached from referring to anything, then, are like words without definitions, amounting to senseless babble and gibberish, a compass whose needle lists and meanders pointlessly.

There’s a mysterious but important connection between the kinds of images seen in cinema and dreams. It’s well documented, for instance, that people reporting their dreams as being in black and white rose with the advent of television and fell with the proliferation of color TV. Something about the unreal-reality of movies is a close match to what one sees in his mind’s eye as he sleeps. Perhaps it is their implementation of real elements as pigments on a canvas of profound incoherence. Dreams, like movies, may or may not refer to reality.

“The waking have one world in common. Sleepers meanwhile turn aside, each into a darkness of his own.” The sleepers Heraclitus describes sound an awful lot like most of us today, turning to little darknesses of our own. Chapter 1 of John’s first epistle says that walking in the light, by contrast, is part and parcel of “fellowship with one another.” Media obsession and the culture of binge consumption around us is like an addiction to sleep, a fascination with dreams at the expense of the waking world simply because the dream is more comfortable in its lurid isolation. 

The Scriptures generally discuss dreams in contexts where they require interpretation. They are mysterious, but also ominous and powerful. To discern whether or not a dream pertains to reality and draw truth from its incoherence is presented as a divine gift. Perhaps the important thing, then, is that images should not be trifled with. If we appreciate their power, we can understand their purpose. Dreams can tell deep and invisible things about the real world, but to live in the dream is to negate its purpose. If we understand the purpose of images, we can keep them in their rightful place as informative and oriented toward the glory of God rather than toward their own self-existence.

It may sound as though my point has been that movies and media are unambiguously bad and nothing more. Sometimes that is true. Still, I think that there is an inevitability in human nature to produce images, and that that inclination is capable of correctly mimicking the creative nature of the Divine. The spirit of art, perhaps, is of images that deepen our insight into reality and the Absolute, subjective elements submissive to the Objective, whereas mere entertainment can only distract from reality and, at its worst, attempt to subvert and usurp it. And even so, too much of a good thing, as they say. If we keep our cultural iconography anchored in this way, perhaps we will walk in brighter light rather than increasingly lonely darknesses.

Paul Vander Klay has put out a number of videos on the cultural significance of Hollywood images since I started writing this article, and I highly recommend visiting his YouTube channel. I will probably comment more on this topic as my own thoughts develop.