Reality?

What is reality anymore? Today more then ever, our lives are run by the media around us. We eat, breath, live, die the products presented to us. It’s true. Every day we are consuming something. Whether it is the way we walk, the video games we play, to the $200 dollar True Religion jeans we wear, to the self improvement we undergo, to the morals we derive from a movie. How can we consume some of these things you might ask. We can because “in order to become [an] object of consumption, the object must become [a] sign.” Baudrillard [418]. This ties in the whole Saussure concept of signs. Even though these objects seem ordinary. They signify something greater: an ideal. This is how marketing comes into play because in taking an ordinary object and turning it into an ideal, that ordinary object becomes extraordinary.

The walk becomes your swagger, you style, and defines you as a person. Woe unto the person that has a poor swagger. Today, people judge more then ever and the reason is because we have become so capitalist, is has ingrained itself into our very nature. We just take a walk down the street and are immediately selling ourselves. Not literally of course, but in a figurative sense. We want to impress people, to show people how great we really are, or rather, how “uninferior” we are. The problem is that we are all selling a similar yet unachievable ideal…perfection; a concept that was born in the movies, the original mass medium that slaved the masses.

Movies united our country, giving us a common culture from coast to coast. They brought us together and gave people a connection to build a relationship off of (likely why movies are still a good first date). However, this also united everyone’s standards as well. Our uniqueness was sacrificed because we were presented with an image that was perceived as better then our current situation. Since, we have found ourselves seeking and attempting but always falling short of this beautifully deadly concept.

Nevertheless, we remain blissful addicts. This is what we know. This is how we have grown up living. What once was a job for life experiences and parents has been taken over by the rectangular prison we bind our eyes and worth too. TV, internet, movies. It’s our teacher, our judge, our friend, our dream, our drug. There is a certain “click” that goes off in our heads. Very much like Brick’s “click” in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, our alcohol is the objects being sold through media and when we consume enough, for a minute “everything’s peaceful” [75]. And then of course the feeling wears off after a time and we need to once more consume again to renew the feeling once more.

The ironic part is that the media is both the poison and the antidote. The media influences these ideals that promote self dissatisfaction and yet if you join it, they have the solution to make you better. The expensive jeans become a look of class, wealth, and power. In wearing something that is known to be cool and expensive, you take on these traits of power. The Tiffanys jewelry is quite simply Tiffanys jewelry and because it is this incredibly awesome brand, the jewelry becomes incredibly awesome (even though the quality isn’t as good as one would think). Plastic surgery has become an everyday thing in the hopes of gaining a piece of perfection. Our bodies are no longer seen whole but rather in parts due to the shift in technology. Suddenly surgeons can change any part of your body creating an even larger sense of temptation. Our bodies have become more then just ideals in advertising and movies, but they have become parts as well.

“Popular culture does not apply any brakes to these fantasies of rearrangement and self-transformation. Rather, we are constantly told we can “choose” our bodies.”
-Susan Bordo (1100)

On the other hand, the objects aren’t the only thing being sold. Sometimes it’s an entire world or person that we wish to obtain or become. Such is the case with movies, TV shows, but especially video games. There are some people that are known online simply by their game name. This world that is presented to them is so enticing that it is a place one would forgo their own world for. Everyone wants their own adventure, their chance to be unique and special because they cannot receive it in this one. Thus people crave these games, these stories that they might lose themselves and share in the experience.

This past semester I have had a lot of thoughts running through my head in response to many questions and debates brought up in class. What is popular culture? I would say what is relevant and appealing in today’s society. But more specifically, popular culture is the object the media is currently dangling in front of us, just out of reach. We are living in these dreamscapes. These places and codes found in film and television. We live through these things. In as such, these impossible standards are subliminally set in ourselves and we create another reality based on them.

“What passes for reality in any culture is the product of that culture’s codes, so “reality” is always already encoded. It is never “raw”. If this piece of encoded reality is televised, the technical codes and representational conventions of the medium are brought to bear upon it so as to make it (a) transmittable technologically and (b) an appropriate cultural text for its audiences.”
-John Fiske

Gender is just like this sense of reality. For “gender is a kind of imitation for which there is no original”. [Judith Butler] In the same sense, reality is an imitation for which there is no original. Therein lies the issue. Every sign must have a binary to be understood. In order to understand what something is, you must also know what it is not. So reality’s binary is a dream, and gender splits into masculine and feminine. Yet how do you know what is the dream and what is reality, what is masculine and what is feminine. Who defines the state when there is no real definition. The physical world is reality and strong is masculine. But is it because it is, or is it because we are told it is and therefore believe it to be.

The Matrix brought up an interesting point. Morpheus once asked Neo “what is real?” What defines our reality? Reality is basically the world we deem as real. Every definition is fairly vague giving the sense that it is up to us to decide. So what is the dream and what is the real world. Is our reality the world that we live in, or is it the media in which we escape into that defines our existence?

Seeing as we can no longer be sure of what is real and what is not, a look at something that carries both traits might finally derive an answer; that being the radical romantic comedy. “The radical romantic comedy striv[es] to interrogate the ideology of romance” (McDonald, 59) Now there are multiple definitions of ROMANCE:

1. love affair: a love affair, especially a brief and intense one

2. love: sexual love, especially when the other person or the relationship is idealized or when it is exciting and intense

3. spirit of adventure: a spirit or feeling of adventure, excitement, the potential for heroic achievement, and the exotic

Now each of these is at its core a reason to which people relate, watch, and consume the media, because they wish to find these terms of romance in their own realities, even if it means reassessing what reality is for them.

While our realities may vary upon the objects we surround ourselves with, the Radical Romance helps ground these chaotic thoughts. Reality is simply a matter of perspective. Just because the media sells it and the world endorsees it, doesn’t make it correct. Our reality is what we make of it no matter what or who try to define it. Existentialism to be exact. Because in the end we are all after Romance, and will redefine anything in the hopes of achieving it.



The Matrix. Dir. Wachowski Brothers. Perf. Keanu Reeves, Laurence Fishburne, Carrie-Anne Moss, Hugo Weaving. DVD. Warner Brothers, 1999.

Williams, Tennessee. Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. New York: Signet, 1958

Encarta ® World English Dictionary © & (P) 1998-2004 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved.

Derrida, Jacques. “Différance.”

Butler, Judith. “Imitation and Gender Insubordination”, Gender Studies, Gay/Lesbian Studies, Queer Theory

Fiske, John. "Television Culture." Cultural Studies.

McDonald, Tamar Jeffers. Romantic Comedy, Boy Meets Girl Meets Genre. London: Wallflower Press, 2007.

Bordo, Susan. "'Material Girl': The Effacements of Postmodern Culture."

Baudrillard, Jean. "The System of Objects."