Cultural Theory and Popular Culture

Figure 9.1 An example of hyperrealism.
Jean Baudrillard 189
figure (and of significant cultural reality). If hyperrealism means anything, it cannot
with any credibility signal a decline in people’s ability to distinguish between fiction
and reality. It is not, as some Baudrillardians seem to want to suggest, that people can
no longer tell the difference between fiction and reality: it is that in some significant
ways the distinction between the two has become less and less important. Why this has
happened is itself an important question. But I do not think that hyperrealism really
supplies us with the answer.
The answer may have something to do with the way in which, as noted by John
Fiske (1994), the ‘postmodern media’ no longer provide ‘secondary representations of
reality; they affect and produce the reality that they mediate’ (xv). He is aware that to
make an event a media event is not simply in the gift of the media. For something to
become a media event it must successfully articulate (in the Gramscian sense discussed
in Chapter 4) the concerns of both public and media. The relationship between media
and public is complex, but what is certain in our ‘postmodern world’ is that all events
that ‘matter’ are media events. He cites the example of the arrest of O.J. Simpson: ‘Local
people watching the chase on TV went to O.J.’s house to be there at the showdown, but
took their portable TVs with them in the knowledge that the live event was not a substitute
for the mediated one but a complement to it. On seeing themselves on their
own TVs, they waved to themselves, for postmodern people have no problem in being
simultaneously and indistinguishably livepeople and mediapeople’ (xxii). The people
who watched the arrest seemed to know implicitly that the media do not simply report
or circulate the news, they produce it. In order to be part of the news of O.J. Simpson’s
arrest it was not enough to be there, one had to be there on television. This suggests
that there is no longer a clear distinction between a ‘real’ event and its media representation.
O.J. Simpson’s trial, for example, cannot be neatly separated into a ‘real’ event
that television then represented as a media event. Anyone who watched the proceedings
unfold on TV knows that the trial was conducted for the television audience as
much as for those present in the court. Without the presence of the cameras this would
have been a very different event indeed.