, i

THE EVIL DEMON OF IMAGES

Iean Baudrillard

A propos the cinema and images in general(media images, technological images), I wouldlike to conjure up the perversity of the relationbetween the ini'age and its referent, the supposedreal; the virtual and irreversible confusion of thesphere of images and the sphere of a realitywhose nature we are less and less able to grasp.There are many modalit ies of this absorption,this confusion, this diabolical seduction ofimages. Above all, it is the reference principle ofimages which must be doub-Eecll f,nis Bfrateey byrneans ttf which they atwa-ys qppear to refer to areal world, to real objects, and to reproducesomething which is logical ly and chrono-logically anterior to themselves. None of this istrue. As simulacra, images precede the real tofthe extent that they invert the causal and logica| -korder of the real and i ts reproduct ion, l 'Benjamin, in his essay 'The Work of Art in theAge of Mechanical Reproduct ion' , a l readypointed out strongly this modern revolution inthe order of production (of reality, of meaning) bythe precess ion , the an t ic ipa t ion o f i t sreproduction.

It is precisely when it appears most truthful,most faithful and most in conformity to realitythat the image is most diabolical -- and our

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t4 Tlu Euil Demon of Images

technical images, whether they be fromphotography, cinema or television, are in theoverwhelming majority much more 'figurative','realist', than all the images from past cultures.It is in its resemblance, not only analogical buttechnological, that the image is most immoraland most perverse.

The appearance of the mirror alreadyintroduced into the world of perception anironical effect of trompe-l 'oeil, and we knowwhat malefice was attached to the appearance ofdoubles. But, this is also true of all the imageswhich surround us: in general , they areana lysed accord ing to the i r va lue asrepresentations, as media of presence andmeaning. The immense majority of present dayphotographic, cinematic and television imagesare thought to bear witness to the world with anaive resemblance and a touching fidelity. Wehave spontaneous confidence in their realism.We are wrong. They only seem to resemblethings, to resemble reality, events, faces. Orrather, they really do conform, but theirconformity itself is diabolical.

We can find a sociological, historical andpolitical equivalent to this diabolical conformity,to this evil demon bf confiiimitt;-in the molGinbqhAyfA.ux-pflbe_ neasgeq who are also V=ry goodat complying with the models offered to them,who are very good at reflecting the objectivesimposed on them, thereby absorbing andannihilating them. There is in this conformity aforce of seduction in the literal sense of the word,a force of diversion, distortion, capture and

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ironic fascination. There is a kind of fatalstrategy of conformity.

A recent example may be found in WoodyAllen's film, Zelig: in trying to be oneself, tocultivate difference and originality, one ends upresembling everyone and no longer seducinganyone, This is the logic of present daypsychological conformity. Zelig, on the otherhand, is launched on an adventure of totalseduction, in dn involuntary strategy of globalseduction: he'begins to resemble everythingwhich approaches him, everything whichsurrounds him. Nor is thie the mimetic violenceof defiance or parody, it is the mimeticnon-violence of seduction. To begin to resemblethe other, to take on their appearance, is toseduce them, since it is to make them enter therealm of metamorphosis despite themselves.

This seductive force, this fatal strategy, is a kindof animal genie or talent -- not simply that of thechameleon, which is only its anecdotal form. Itie not the conformism of animale which delightsuB; on the contrary, animals are neverconformist, they are seductive, they alwaysappear to resul t f rom a metamorphosis.Precisely because they are not individuals, theypose the enigma of their resemblance. If an ranimal knows how to conform, it is not to its own /being, its own individuality (banal stratery), but Ito appearances in the world. This is what Zeligldoes too with his animal genie he is-polymorphous (but not perverse); he is incapableof functional adaptation to contexts, which istrue conformism, our conformism, but able to

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ThehtilDemondlmoges

seduce by the play of resemblance.. Savages dono less when they put on the successive masks oftheir gods, when they 'become' their successivedivinit ies -- this is also to seduce them. It is ofcourse against this strategy of seduction thatpsychiatry struggles, and it is what gives rise tolhe 4agrcal infatuation of the crowds for Zelig(in German, Selig means 'blessed').

The remarkable thing about this film is that itleads astray all possible interpretations. Thereis thus also a seduction of interpretation, withthe complicity of certain intellectuals, as well asa polymorphous montage technique whichallows it to ironically adapt to all possibilities.

More generally, the image is interesting not onlyin its role as reflection, mirror, representationof, or counterpart to, the real, but also when itbegins to contaminate reality and to model it,trhen iF gntr=c-onfdims ki iealiti ttie better to{g.1@t it oi bettei still: when it uppropriates@_e_nds, when it anticipates it to@ iAl no longei tias timA to b-eproduced as such.

t tl, .",lr ut, -lt*bes- le.qgreecinematographic and televisual, but war as weJt.n-hasTGn

=sanmm waais-tEe contlnuTlion of

politics by other means; we can also say thatimages, media images, are the continua[ion ofwar by other means. Take Apocalypse Now. rCoppola made his fi lm the-saii"-*aV-tne IAmericans conducted the war -- in this sense, it Iis the best possible testimony -- with the same Iexaggeration, the same excessive means, the

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TIuEuil.Demonof Imagu

same monstrous candour . . . and the samesuccess. War as a trip, a technological andpsychedelic fantasy; war as a succession ofspecial effects, the war become frlm well before itwas shot; war replaced by technological testing.For the Americans, it was above all the latter: atest site, an enormous field on which to test theirweapons, their methods, their power.

Coppola does the same thing: he tests the powerof intervention of cinema, tests the impact ofcinema become a vast machine of special effects.In th is sense his f i lm is very much theprolongat ion of war by other means, thecomple t ion o f tha t incomple te war , i t sapotheosis. War becomes fi lm, f i lm becomeswar, the two united by their mutual overflow oftechnology.

The real war was conducted by Coppola in themanner of Westmoreland. Leaving aside theclever irony of napalming Philippino forests andvillages to recreate the hell of South Vietnam,everything is replayed, begun again throughcinema: the Molochian joy of the shoot, thesacrificial joy of so many millions spent, of sucha holocaust of means, of so many diff iculties,and the dazzling paranoia in the mind of thecreator who, from the beginning, conceived thisfrlm as a world historical event for which theVietnam war would have been no more than apretext, would ultimately not have existed -- andwe cannot deny it: 'in itself ' the Vietnam warnever happened, perhaps it was only a dream, abaroque dream of napalm and the tropics, apsycho-tropic dream in which the issue was not

18 Tluhtilhrnon{Imag6

politics or victory but the sacrificial, excessivedeployment of a power already filming itself as itunfolds, perhaps expecting nothing more thanconsecration by a superfilm, which perfects thewar's function as a mass spectacle.

No real distance, no critical direction, no desirefor any 'raised consciousness' in relation to thewar: in a sense this is the brutal quality of thefi lm, not to be undermined by any anti-warmoral psychology. Coppola may very well dressup his helicopter captain in a cavalry hat andhave him wipe out a Vietnamese village to thesound of Wagner -- these are not critical, distantsigns; they are immersed in the machinery, partof the special effect. Coppola makes films in thesame manner, wi th the same nostalgicmegalomania, with the same non-signifyingfury, the same magnified Punch and Judy effect.One can ask, how is such a horror possible (notthe war, properly speaking, but that of the film)?But there is no response, no possible judgement.

\ ttre Vietnam war and the film are cut fiom theI same cloth, nothing separates them: this film isI part, of the war. If the Americans (apparently)I lost, the other, they have certainly won this one.Apocalypse Now is a global victory. It has acinematographic power equal and superior tothat of the military and industrial complexes, ofthe Pentagon and governments. Nothing isunderstood in relation to war or cinema (at leastthe lat ter) unless one has grasped thisindist inguishabi l i ty which is not theideological or moral indistinguishability of goodand evil, but that of the reversibil i ty ofdestruction and production, of the immanence of

The0uilDennnof Images 19

something in its very revolution, of the organicmetabolism of every technology, from carpetbombing to film stock...

As forthe anticipation of reality by images, theprecession of images and media in relation toevents, such that the connection between cau6eand effect becomes scrambled and it becomesimpossible to tell which is the effect of the other --what better example than the nuclear accidentat Harrisburg, a 'real' incident which happenedjust after the release of The China Syndrome ?This film is a fine example of the supremacy ofthe televised event over the nuclear event whichitself remains improbable and in some senseimaginary.

Moreover, the frlm unintentionally shows this: itis the intrusion of TV into the reactor which as itwere triggers the nuclear incident -- because it isthe anticipation and model of it in the day to dayworld: telefission of the real and of the real world-- because TV and information in general are akind of catastrophe in Ren6 Thom'e formal,topological sense: a radical, qualitative changein an entire system. Or rather, TV and nuclearpower are of the same kind: behind the 'hot' andnegentropic concepts of energy and information,they have the same dissuasive force as coldsystems. TV is also a nuclear, chain-reactiveprocess, but implosive: it cools and neutralisesthe meaning and energy of events. Thus, behindthe presumed risk of explosion, that is, of hotcatastrophe, the nuclear conceals a long, coldcatastrophe -- the universalisation of a system ofdissuasion, of deterrence. I

n TheDtilDemon{Images

The homology between nuclear po\i ler andtelevision can be read directly in the images.Nothing resembles the command and controlcentre of the reactor more than the TV studios,and the nuclear consoles share the sameimaginary as the recording and broadcastingstudios. Everything happens between these twopoles: the other core, that of the reactor, inprincipal the real core of the affair, remainsconcealed from us, l ike the real; buried andindecipherable, ult imately of no importance.The drama is acted. out on the screens andnowhere else.

Harrisburg, Watergate and Nefrlorft form thetrilogy of The China Syndrome -; art inextricabletrilogy in which we cannot tell which is the effector the symptom of the others: is the ideologicalargument (the Watergate effect) only thesymptom of the nuclear (the Harrisburg effect)or the informational model (the Network effect)?-- is the real (Harrisburg) only the symptom ofthe imaginary (Network, The China Syndrome )or vice versa? Marvellous indistinguishability,ideal constellation of simulation.

The conjunction of The China Syndrome andHarrisburg haunts us. But is it so involuntary?Without examining any magical links betweensimulacrum and reality, it is clear thal TheClina Syndrom.e is not unrelated to the 'real'

accident at Harrisburg, not by a causal logic butby those relatiq4_s of c@nEn-a tofy -. w _h i c \ t I U k_.t h e-re-al, .--m o-d e ls-_A t-t_ds-ifr[lacra: the induction of the nuclear incidentffiarrisburg by the film corresponds, with

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TheEuilhmonof Imoges 21

disquieting obviousness, to the induction of theincident by TV in the film. A strange precessionof a film before the real, the most astonishing wehave seen: reality conesponding point by point tothe simulacra, even down to the suspensive,incomplete character of the catastrophe, whichis essential from the point of view of dissuasion:the real so arranged itself, in the image of the@,ul;il;n or .aia-E#aprr..

-

;' -"r *;.rnf" "r";, ;;" .n"'ia urrr.r,take, to reverse our logical order and see ?heChina Syndrome as the real event andHarrisburg its simulacrum. For it is by thesame logic that the nuclear reality in the filmfollows from the television effect and Harrisburgin 'reality' follows from the cinema effect of TheChina Syndrorne.

But the latter is not the original prototype ofHarrisburg; one is not the simulacrum and theother the reality: there are only simulacra, andHarrisburg is a kind of simulation in the secondilegree. Tne?d

-is i-nd e ed- alhai n-ie aCti on i Fu t- t,

fs not-tffie nuVTeoV-CEafi iaction but thai of tlrcffi-thE-sirnul aticin m-\r;hiCh al t the€miffofihe real is effectively engulfed, not in aspectacular nuclear explosion but in a secretand continuous implosion, which is perhapstaking a more deadly turn than i t t theexplosions which presently lull us.

For an explosion is always a promise, it ls ourhope: see how much, in the film as well as at,Harrisburg, everyone expects it to go up, thatdestruction speak its name and deliver us from

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Thefuilhnwtdlmog*

this unnameable panic. from this invisiblenuclear panic of aifA$63!on. Let thb 'core' of thereactor expose at last its glowing power ofdestruct ion, let i t reassure us as to theadmittedly catastrophic presence of energy andgratify us with its spectacle. For the problem isthat there is no nuclear spectacle, no spectacle ofnuclear energ-y in itself (Hiroshima is past): it isfor this reason that it is rejected -- it would beperfectly accepted if it lent itself to spectacle likeear l ier forms of energy. Parousia ofcatastrophe: substantial boost to our messianiclibido.

But that will never recur. What will happen willnever be explosion but implosion. Never againwill we see energy in its spectacular andpathetic form -- all the romanticism of explosionwhich had so m sottra[ oTTevoln-ffin -- but-only ahG-td-.-"gfofFfuulecra-ahd its distillation in-Eomeopafhicdos6sln6-the cold systems of information.

What else does the media dream of if not raisingup events by its very presence? Everyone deploresit, but everyone is secretly fascinated by thiseventuality. Such is the logic of simulacra: nolonger divine predestination, but the precessionof models, which is no less inexorable. And it isfor this reason that events no longer have anymeaning: not becausThe,rnselves, but because they have been precededby models with which their own process can onlycoincide.

For some time now, in the dialectical relation

TheEuilfumonof Images 23

between reality and images (that is, the relationthat we wish to believe dialectical, readable fromthe real to the image and vice versa), the imagehas taken over and imposed its own imrnaneril,'' . ' - t * _ -_- -

. g p_ECtEETe l: lo .gi c; * a n- _im rno-ra L lqe1g_ *i t h b u tdepth, beyond good and-efrll-bevoildlruth andfalsity; a logic of the extermination of its ownre_f9r_en!, a logic of the implosion of meanirig inwhich the message disappears on the horizon ofthe medium. .In this regard, we all remainincredibly naive: we always look for a good usageof the image, that is to say a moral, meaningful,pedagogic or informat ional usage, wi t [outseeing tlat the image in a sense revolts againstthis good usage, that it is the conductor neitherof meaning nor good intentions, but on thecontrary of an implosion, a denegat ion ofmeaning (of events, history, memory, etc.). I amreminded of Holocaust, the television series onthe concentiation carnps. l-

&rgg$1ng the extermination is part of theexfilerminA6on itself. That forgetting, however,is still too dangerous and must be replaced by anartificial memory (everywhere, today, it is-_--rF---

artit icial mernories which obliterate people'smemor ies , wh ich ob l i te ra te peop le f rommemory). This artif icial memory replays theextermination -- but too late for it to profoundlyunsettle anything, and above all it does so via imedium which is itself cold, radiating oblivion,dissuasion and extermination in an even moresystematic manner, if this is possible, than thecamps themselves. TV, the veritable finalsolution to the historicity @TFe

"ews are Ta-cycled not-througl-"tte crematory

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24 ThtEuilDemonof Imnges

ovens or the gas chambers but through thesound track and images, through the cathodetube and the mic ro-ch ip . Forget t ing ,annihilation thereby achieves at last an aestheticdimension -- nostalgra gives them thir finalfinish.

Henceforth, "everyone knows", everyone hastrembled before the extermination -- a sure signthat "it" will never happen again. But in effectwhat is thus exorcised so cheaply, at the cost of afew tears, will never recur because it is presentlyhappening in the very form through which it isdenounced, through the very medium of thissupposed exorcism: television. The same processof forgetting, of liquidation, of extermination, thesame annihilation of memories and of history,the same inverse, implosive radiation, the sameabsorption without trace, the same black hole asAuschwitz. They want us to believe that TV willremove the mortgage of Auschwitz by raisingcol lect ive consciousness, whereas i t is theperpetuation of it in a different guise, under theauspices not of a site of annihilation bq!-a*ndiu* oT"Tssnasifi.

What everyone fails to understand is thatI fo locaust is above al l (and exclusively) ateleuised event or rather-qbjed (Mcluhan'sfunlainenl-al-iulewFicE-rnustnotbeforgotten).That is to say, it is an attempt to reheat a coldhistorical event -- tr

-6vent of-eold systems, those cooling systems ofdissuasion and exterminat ion which weresubsequently deployed in other forms (includingthe Cold War, etc.) and in relation to the coldI

The cold light of television is inoffensive to theimagination (even that of children) since i! qoI on ger--ggrr !5r s any i m asin aryJorlhe -si mple

, - : : : ; : ;

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TluEuilDemanof Images

masses (the Jews no longer even concerned bytheir own death, eventually self-managing it, nolonger even masses in revolt: dissuaded untodeath, dissuaded even of their own death). Toreheat th is cold event v ia a cold medium,television, for masses who are themselves cold,who will only frnd in it the occasion for a tactilechil l and a posthumous emotion, a dissuasiveshiver, which sends them into oblivion with akind of aesthetic good faith.

reason that it is no longqrygry_i.mqge.

has a magnetic effect. The TV image is only ascreen. More than that: a miniatur izedterminal located in your head and you are thescreen and the TV looks at you, goes through youlike a magnetic tape a tape, not an image.

Thus, proper ly speaking i t is Holocaust thetelevision film which constitutes the definitiveholocaust event. Likewise, with The Day Afterit is not the atomic conflict depicted in the filmbut the fi lm itself which is the catastrophicevent.

In this sense the TV image has to be placed inopposition to the cinema, which still carrig! a1t"-mfe n Sa-imasinab,

- AI tho u gh i t i s crintamin; te d

more and more by TV, the cinema is sti l l animage -- that means not only a screen and avisual form but a myth, something that bglg_.tgsto the sphere dfThe

-tlouHe,-The-phenta-sm, the

m@ td:. FloThin-g-of -tharin-fh.e

TV image, which doesn't suggest anything and

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26 TheEu.ilDemnnof Images

This fi lm should inspire a salutary terror, itshould dissuade by the spectacle- of terror.However, I don't see anything as a result of thisfi lm. The slides at the New York Museum ofNatura l H is to ry move me much morep-rofoundly: you can shiver at the ice age and feelthe charm of the prehistoric, but hlre I feelneither the shiver nor the charm of nuclearpower, nor even suspense nor the final blindingf lash.

Is it a bad film? Certainly. But isn't it ratherthat all this is unimaginable? Isn't it ratherthat, in our imaginary, nuclear conflict is a totalevent, without appeal and with no tomorrow,whereas here it simply brings about a regressionof the human race according to the worit naivestereotypes of savagery? But we already knowthat state, indeed we have barely left it. Ourdesire is rather for something which no longertahes place on a human scale, for some anterioror ulterior mystery: what wil l the earth be l ikewhen we are no longer on it? In a word, wedream of our disappearance, and of seeing theworld in its inhuman purity (which is preciselynot the state of nature).

But these l imi ts, these extremes that weimag ine , th is ca tas t rophe can i t bemetaphorised in images? It is not certain thatits mythical evocation is possible, any more thanthat of our bio-molecular destiny or that of thegcnetic code, which is the other dimension, thecorollary of the nuclear. We can no longer beaflected by it -- proof that we have already beenirradiated! Already to our minds the catastrophe

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TlwhtilDernonof Imagu 27

is no more than a comic strip. Its f i lmicprojection is only a diversion from the realnuclearisation of our l ives. The real nuclearcatastrophe has already happened, it happensevery day, and this fi lm is part of it. It is it Iwhich is our catastrophe. It does not represent /it, it does not evoke it, on the contrary it shows {that it has already happened, that it is already Ihere, since it is impossible to imagine. I

For al l these reasons I do not bel ieve in apedagogy of images, nor o@ii"rron#o frtclevisfnffi a Ti al e c ti cbetween image and reality, nor therefore, inrespect of images, in a pedagogy of message andmeaning. The secret of the image (we are sti l lspeaking of contemporary, technical images)must not be sought in its differentiation fromreality, and hence in its representative value(aesthet ic, cr i t ical or d ia lect ical) , but on thecontrary in its 'telescoping' into reality, itsshort-circuit with reality, and finally, in theimplosion of image and reality. For us there isan increasirrgly definitive lack of differentiationbetween image and reality which no longerleaves room for representation as such.

This collusion between images and life, betweenthe screen and daily l i fe, can be experiencedeveff i t ordinary manner.Especially in America, not the least charm ofwhich is that even ofiIside the cinemas the whole

,991"t,ry_g cross"tfre'atdsffiSt?Tn; the metropolis is acontinual screen of signs and formulae. Life is atravell ing shot, a kinetic, cinematic, cinemato-

j6 0'f '

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Tlu Duil Dem.on of Imnges

graphic sweep. There is as much pleasure inthis as in those Dutch or Italian towns where,upon leaving the museum, you rediscover atown in the very image of the paintings, as if ithad stepped out of them. It is a kind of miraclewhich, even in a banal American way, gives riseto a sort of aesthetic form, to an ideal confusionwhich transfigures l ife, as in a dream. Here,cinema does not take on the exceptional form of awork of art, even a bri l l iant one, but invests thewhole of life with a mythical ambience. Here itbecomes truly exciting. This is why the idolatryof stars, the cul t of Hol lywood idols, is not amedia pathology but a glorious form of thecinema, its mythical transfiguration, perhapsthe last great myth of our modernity. Preciselyto the extent that the idol no longer representsany th ing bu t revea ls i t se l f as a pure ,impassioned, contagious image which ef facesthe difference between the real being and itsassumption into the imaginary.

All these considerations are a bit wild, but that isbecause they correspond to the unrestrained filmbuff that I am and have always wished toremain -- that is in a sense uncultured andfascinated. There is a kind of primal pleasure,of anthropological joy in images, a kind of bruteTaSErTa"tid n

-u n encumbEre cl-5f ae sthe ti c, mor al,

social or polit ical judgements. It is because ofthis that I suggest they are immoral, and thattletrl'lsda-mmte '

This brute fascination for ilnagcs-,-above andbeyond-Ell rnoril or social determination, is alsonot that of dreaming or the imaginary,

TlwE.uilDemonof Imngw 29

understood in the traditional sense. Otherimages, such as those in painting, drawing,theatre or architecture, have been better able tomake us dream or imagine; other modes ofexpression as well (undoubtedly languagemakes us dream better than the image). Sothere is something more than that which ispeculiar to our modern media images: if theyfascinate ts so iluCE-it-G noT-bec-a-riEe they arLs i tes o f the . p roduc t ion o f mean ing andrepresentation -- this would not be new -- it is onthe contrary

'because they are s i tes of the

disappearq,nce of meaning and representation,sites in which we are caught quite apart fromany judgement of reality, thus sites of a fatalstrategy of denegation of the real and of thereality principle.

We have arrived at a paradox regarding theimage, our images, those which unfur l uponand invade our dai ly l i fe images whoseproliferation, it should be noted, is potentiallyinfinite, whereas the extension of meaning isalways limited precisely by its end, by its finality:from the fact that images'ult imately have nofrnality and proceed by total contiguity, infrnitelymul t ip ly ing themse lves accord ing to anirresistible epidemic process which no one todaycan control, our world has become truly infinite,o r ra th er ex p o 4 9 nTfif! y. _{-n_e-g!S_o f:i1n a ge s .

.' I t i s

caught up in a mad pursui t of images, in anever g rea ter fasc ina t ion wh ich is on lyaccentuated by v ideo and digi ta l images. Wehave thus come to the paradox that these imagesdescribe the equal ilqprql$lity i&l-t E_qL-;-i---_-----;_---4_-

tne rma-gu3rY_.

l-

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TheEuilDemanoflmoga

For us the medium, the image medium, hasimposed i tsel f between the real and theimaginary, upsetting the balance between thetwo, with a kind of fatality which has its ownlogic. I call this a fatal process in the sense thatthere is a definitiiElhmanence of the image,without any possible transcendent meaning,without any possible dialectic of history -- fatalalso in the sense not merely of an exponential,linear unfolding of images and messages but ofan exponential enfolding of the medium aroundi tsel f . The fatal i ty l ies in th is endlessenwrapping of images (l iterally: witho'ut end,ffi) which leaves images noother destiny than images. The same thinghappens everywhere today, when production hasno des t iny apar t f rom produc t ionoverdetermination of production by itself -- whensex has no destiny other than sex -- sexualoverdetermination of sexuality. This processmay be found everywhere today, for better andfor worse. In the absenqe !f rql3g_g{lhq gggle,things becorne caugFf upln m:imeEes 5ec-ome more real than _6_e-p-ah.-c-iuema-1;rtselt Decomes more clnema f,nan clnema, rn a-lilrrd--of veiti go in' which

-(tb remrn TolUr-initial

problem, that of resemblance) it does no morethan resemble itself and escape in its own logic,in the very perfection of its own model.

I am thinking of those exact, scrupulousset-pieces such as Chinatown, The Day of theCondor, Barry Lyndon, 1900, AII the President'sIl,Ien, the very perfection of which is disturbing.It is as if we were dealing with perfect remakes,with extraordinary montages which belong

TlwEuilDemonof Images 31

more to a iombinatory process (or mosaic in theMcluhanesque sense), with large photo, kino orhistorio-synthetic machines, rather than withreal films. Let us be clear: their quality is not in Iquestion. The problem is rather that they leave Ius somehow totally indifferent.

Take The Last Picture Show. You need only besufficiently distracted, as f was, to see it as a1950s or ig inal ' product ion: a good f i lm ofmanners and . the ambience of small townAmerica, etc. A slight suspicion: it was a littletoo good, better adjusted, better than the others,w i thou t the sen t imenta l , mora l andpsychological t ics of the fi lms of that period.Astonishment at the discovery that it is a 19?0sfi lm, perfectly nostalgic, brand new, retouched,a hyperrealist restitution of a 50s frlm. There istalk of remaking silent f i lms, doubtless betterthan those of the period. A whole generation offilms is appearing which will be to those we haveknown what the android is to man: marvellous,flawless artifacts, dazzling simulacra whichlack only an imaginary and that particularhallucination which makes cinema what it is.Most of those that we see today (the best) arealready of this order. Bany Lyndon is the bestexample: no better has been made, no better willbe made, but what exactly? Evocation? No, noteven evocat ion but s imulat ion. Al l the toxicradiat ion has been f i l tered out, a l l theingredients are present in precise doses, not asingle mistake.

Cool, cold pleasure which is not even aesthetic@t:j ffislfi nal-

_p l.e a s uie'

32 TlrcEuiJDemonof Images

equational pleasure, pleasure of machination.Weleed filtthink of Visconti (The Leopard,Senso, etc. , which recal l Barry Lyndon incertain respects) in order to grasp the difference'not only in style but in the cinematographic act.With Visconti, there is meaning, history, asensual rhetoric, dead moments, a passionategame, not only in the historical content but infhe direction. None of that with Kubrick, whocontrols his film like a chessboard, and makeshistory an operational scenario. Nor does thisrefer back to the old opposition between finesseand geometry: there meaning was sti l l in play,*eanittg was at stake. Whereas we are enteringinto a.t era of frlms which no longer havemeaning properly speaking, large syntheticmachines with variable geometrY.

Is there already something of this in SergioLeone's westerns? Perhaps. All registers tendin t l r is d i rect ion. Chinatown is the detect ivestory redesigned by laser. I t is not real ly aq.r"ition of perfection. Technical Perfection.canbelong to the meaning, and in this case it isneither nostalgic nor hyperrealist; it is an effectof art. Here, it is an effect of model: it is one ofthe tactical reference values. In the absence ofany real syntax of meaning there are onlytaitical values in a complex whole in which, forexample , the C IA as . an a l l -PurPosemythological machine, Robert Redford as apolyvalent star, social relations as necessaryieferences to history, and technical uirtuosity as-a necessary reference to cinema are alladmirably combined.

ThzEuilDemonof Images

Cinema and i ts t ra jectory: f rom the mostfantast ic or mythical to the real ist ic andhyperrealistic.

In its present 'endeavours cinema increasinglyapproaches, with ever increasing perfection,absolute reality: in its banality, in its veracity, inits starkness, in its tedium, and at the sametime in its pretentiousness, in its pretention tq_!ethe real, tfr.e immediate, tffi ,rtr-.ie.tint4-,wtricfri s

-th e m a ct d e 5 [

- o f e n t e r p i-i s-e s-(i-n-Lh e

- d a m e w a y" tha t tlie'-p ra te ntio ri' - o-f- -firrn-Cti o n a li s t d e s i gn to

designate, as the highest degree of the objecl., theform in which it coincides with its function, itsuse-value, is properly an insane enterprise). Noculture has ever had this naive and paranoiac,this puritanical and terrorist vision of signs.Terrorism is always of the real. Simultaneouswith this attempt at absolute coincidence withthe real, cinema also approaches an absolutecoincidence with itself. This is not contradictory:i t is the very def in i t ion of the hyperreal .Hypo typos is and specu la r i t y . C inemaplagiar ises and copies i tsel f , remakes i tsclassics, retroact ivates i ts or ig inal myths,remakes silent f i lms more perfect than theoriginals, etc. All this is logical. Cinema isfascinated by itself as a lost object just as it (and,we) are fascinated by the real as a referential inperdi t ion. Previously there was a l iv ing,dialect ical , fu l l and dramat ic relat ionshipbetween cinema and the imaginary (that is,novelistic, mythical unreality, even down to thedelirious use of its own technique). Today, thereis an inverse negative relation between thecinema and realitv: it results from the loss of

33

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I

(

34 TluEvil'Detnonoflmagx

specificity which both have suffered,. Cold.oll"g., cool promiscuity, asexual engagementof tw-o cold media which evolve in asymptotic line

I towards one another: cinema attempting toI abolish itself in the absolute of reality, the real\atready long absorbed in cinematographic (or

J televised) hyperreality.

Translated by PauI Patton and PauI Foss

IIIIIIIIIIIl.'