Post 4: Imitation and Simulation, Pachelbel and Malkovich
Baudrillard, in Simulacra and Simulations,
poses many questions that go far over my head. However, sticking to the fly
paper of my cerebrum is a few embarrassingly simple examples which, at least in
my mind, help to give new dendrites the possibility of growth for the concepts
of Imitation and Simulation in further conversations of Baudrillard’s work and
other comparable concepts. I have underlined places to take note in what he
states:
Even military
psychology retreats from the Cartesian clarities and hesitates to draw the
distinction between true and false, between the “produced” symptom and
the authentic symptom. “If he acts crazy so well, then he must be mad.”
This directly took me to my first
experience with the film, Being John
Malkovich. Here’s the movie trailer to give you a little reminder if you’ve
seen it and a head’s up if you haven’t. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2UuRFr0GnHM
Even though it has
been quite a while since I’ve seen the movie in its entirety, discussion points
over the past three weeks in class have come culminated with this movie
standing out “like a sore thumb.” When does theatre get too real? (a puppeteer embodying
and controlling a “real” person instead of a puppet) Performance versus
performativity? (John Malkovich gives out a yell during sex and claims that it wasn’t
he who just made that sound. How often do we have a momentary response that is
foreign to our norm and we are surprised by in our own lives?). And this week’s
Imitation and Simulation.
Baudrillard describes representing as trying
to “absorb simulation” and describes successive phases of the image as 1. It is
the reflection of a basic reality. 2. It masks and perverts a basic reality. 3.
It masks the absence of reality. 4.
It bears no relation to any reality whatever. In the film, the puppeteer makes puppets in the
image of real people in his life. He then makes them act in ways he wants the “real”
people to behave, but won’t. This begins as a reflection of a basic reality
that become perverted as he makes them perform in ways they aren’t in real life
for the sake of his fantasy. This becomes a masking of reality as he becomes
obsessed with them and then in going down the rabbit hole in his office, into
John Malkovich’s head. When he takes his wife with him, he no longer is living
out his absence of reality but has moved to a point where his reality no longer
exists without being inside John Malkovich’s subconscious. His copy of the copy
of the copy of his experiences inside another person’s head become the
performance itself and his identity becomes skewed to the point of no return.
Extra: Here was an interesting and
seemingly scholarly article about this film that also touched on several points
consistent with our discussions thus far. Do with it what you will.
The Perverse Cosmos of Being
John Malkovich: Forms and Transformations of Narcissism in Celebrity
Culture. By Lissa Weinstein and Banu Seckin http://filmoterapia.pl/wp-content/uploads/2015/07/The-Perverse-Cosmos-of-Being-John-Malkovich-Forms-and-Transformations-of-Narcissism-in-a-Celebrity-Culture.pdf
Now for something completely different:
Pachelbel’s Cannon in D is a piece with a simple chord progression that is
repeated more times than I can count (54 times by Rob Paravonian’s count) and made
initially popular perhaps by weddings and young orchestra concerts. As a former
music teacher, I jumped for joy at my first viewing of this gem in the music
world enough to want to share it with every class that came through my door the
next day (though I had to censor it or avoid for some of the younger classes). https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=9&v=JdxkVQy7QLM
It made light of a quite boring-to-me-piece (much like Pomp and Circumstance
for a percussionist who had to play it 5th grade through 11th
grade, every year). But it went way
beyond reframing the piece in and of itself. It built a new connection for my
students. They could then see how a chord structure could connect two totally
different sets of words and melody. It gave my students, and me admittedly, a
new perspective for those times when playing a single monotonous part needs a reexamination
in order to find it’s aliveness again. It also highlighted how often a song is
iterated or recycled to make something that seems completely new. Medleys of
all sorts are out there, melding songs of similar key structure, chord
progression, and melodic pattern. This is just the tip of the iceberg, but an
example worth noting. Watching their faces light up at the discovery of the
differences and commonalities of all of these varied songs with the source in
common. It was mind blowing. In my mind, this is definitely better than the
original, but completely its own thing, like a montage of song memories wrapped
up into to a bitesize mixtape spanning several decades.
In revisiting that, I stumbled on an
additional rant. Minute 3-4 of this clip even “acts out” his dorky memory of
not being cool as the other string players taunt the cello player and leave the
stage before returning to doing some additional takes on the rant. https://video.search.yahoo.com/yhs/search?fr=yhs-pty-pty_converter&hsimp=yhs-pty_converter&hspart=pty&p=pachelbel+rant#id=3&vid=83ca628886c07451f6df275c5ee38a06&action=click
To the original question: “But is the
song ‘real’ anymore? Or just a copy of a copy of a copy? Do you think that a
piece of art or musical composition, while becoming more powerful, have somehow
lost what some would define as their artistic value? Where does Baudrillard’s
idea of power of the legitimate/good/beautiful live in a work of art?” Perhaps
the artistic value is skewed and appreciated by a different audience which does
not negate the original’s value but improves the breadth of exposure and
popularity. I would argue that this may not increase the value of the art
itself, but if it is exposed to more audience, it is given a life beyond what
may have originally been intended and therefore becomes a different piece of
art entirely.
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