The Business of the Hyperreal
the ubiquity of imaginary places
Posted Apr 13, 06:18 pm in branding, epistemology, experiences, hyperreality, postmodernism
At one of the big casinos in Las Vegas, you’ll find an elaborate scene that perfectly captures the beauty of Venice. There, you can sit aboard a slow-moving gondola with your sweetheart, while a mustachioed Italian man quietly ferries you from dock to dock. All the while, the gentle aroma of Ciabatta bread wafts through the air, and the warm sound of a concertina drifts through the background. The entire experience is one that perfectly reconstructs the feel of Venice.
The only thing is, if you went to the actual Venice, you would never have an experience like this. You can ride a boat in the real Venice, but it won’t be romantically quiet, there won’t be the smell of Ciabatta bread, and Rossini won’t be playing. Instead, it would smell like bilge, the ferryman will be hurrying to get you to your destination because he can make more money if he gets more passengers, and the only sound you’ll hear is the sound of water splashing all over your clothes.
Yet, despite this apparent artifice, you can identify this scene as Venice. It’s impossible to mistake it for anything else. This scene in Las Vegas recreates the idyllic, popular conception of Venice, the Venice that resides in our minds. This Venice is a place that does not exist in real life. It is a composite of pieces of our collective consciousness. It’s all the things we’d expect to see, hear, smell, and sense in Venice, but which don’t really coalesce in this way when you’re actually there.
This concept is known as hyperreality. It’s such a strange concept, but it’s one we’re all intimately familiar with in some way, because hyperreality has been sold to us in so many ways, and on a daily basis. Disney World has been described as the ultimate expression of hyperreality— and it’s one of the first vacation spots that many children around the world go to, and it creates many people’s impressions of other countries. Some of our most enduring perceptions about what romantic relationships are ‘supposed’ to be like and the way we’re ‘supposed’ to act in them stem from the way we’ve seen them in movies. The way we think women are supposed to look (including such things as ideal weight and flawless complexions) are rooted in heavily-touched up photos that have little to do with reality, but everything to do with a reconstructed, idealized reality.
The reason I bring all this up is that the other night, I went to a bar that I had never been to before. The moment I walked in, I felt like I had been transported somewhere else. The decor was somewhat anachronous; there were antique-looking green Victorian style chairs arranged around dark, ovular wooden tables, the walls were filled with bottles of obscure beers and liquors I’d never heard of before, the wood-framed bar looked like it was from another era entirely. The ambiance generally reminded me of what I imagined a somewhat upper-crust English pub would be like in the 1950s, where corpulent, monacled gentlemen might tease their handlebar mustaches and puff away at their tobacco pipes while perusing the Sunday Times.
We see places that try to re-create themes from popular consciousness somewhat frequently. Think of T.G.I. Friday’s, a corporate restaurant chain whose walls are covered from top to bottom in weird, rustic nostalgia that manages to both capture the oddest fringes of Americana while presenting it all as a completely normal and commonplace series of images (when was the last time you ate dinner next to a 20ft long wooden swordfish wearing a Brooklyn Dodgers baseball hat— besides the last time you were at T.G.I. Friday’s, that is?). Oddly, this forced aesthetic of post hoc historification and semiotic mythmaking is comforting for many people. But that’s a particularly extreme example; I’ve been to plenty of Mexican restaurants that try to simulate the experience of being in small-town Mexico with the aid of huge murals; townscapes replete with children playing in the street, lifesized buildings painted on the restaurant walls, and pastel-colored senoritas standing on flowered balconies and under large arched doorways.
But something unsettled me about this bar I was at. There was a shaggy green carpet underfoot (which incidentally is not the type of flooring you typically want in a crowded bar), and the place had the musty smell of genuine antiquity. This place, it seemed, really had been around since at least the 1950s (a notion confirmed by the menu).
And then it struck me what had been bothering me. The sum total of my lifetime experience with these sorts of themed pubs had been with re-creations and remodeled versions— never with the real thing. And now, here I was at the real thing! My impression— and expectations— of what a place like this was supposed to be like was based entirely on hyperreal simulacra of it, pieced together from such places as spy movies, books, television shows, and other themed establishments. When you see the “real” version of a hyperreal place, I tend to think that you’re not really prepared for it because it has a way of defying your rather unrealistic expectations of it— which creates the very bizarre problem of something authentic ostensibly lacking authenticity.
If your image of something is based on an idealization of it, how can the real thing ever hold up? An idealization usually means that the gaps are all filled, the blemishes smoothed away, and the diffuse themes that define a place or idea are effectively condensed into a consistent, concrete, and easily digestible series of images; such simulacra allow you to imbibe prevailing themes very quickly, where by contrast the “real thing” typically takes some time for your mind to synthesize into a overarching gestalt.
The implications of this are curious. What does this mean in a world filled with images— manipulated, editorialized, and spread across the globe through various digital channels? These images will form our impressions of the world around us, whereas in the past, our own experiences were what defined our understandings of the world. Will everything we ever see in real life from here on out be a replication of something we’ve seen in a movie first? Which is the real when the fake is our first experience, and hence the first real to us? And what does all this mean to our interpretations and expectations of reality and our interactions with the world and our peers?
And now that I step back a bit and reflect on my experience at the bar, I have to face an unusual epistemological question: how do I know that this place I was at was a “real” bar that was essentially unchanged from the 1950s?
Yo Dude, TGIFuckface is hyperreal, alright,
hyperREAL SHITTY!
I guarantee you it is genuine GREASY DIARRHEA.
Bowels do not lie.
— Yo Dude · Jul 16, 01:10 am · #
Your comment is on the mark, dear sir. This is not a restaurant that I choose to frequent.
— Rahul · Jul 16, 11:28 am · #