The Triumph of Unreality

Mar 05 2001

Disney has just opened its newest theme park, alongside the venerable Disneyland in Anaheim, Calif. Called California Adventure, it's a simulacrum of the Golden State, complete with faux Sierras, a mini Golden Gate Bridge and a Sunset Boulevard that reaches no beach. It's a pure expression of the preference for the packaged, pristine representation of reality over the grimy, inconvenient real thing.

Of course you needn't go to a theme park to find phony reality. This is the era of reality TV shows like Survivor II, the pseudo-football league XFL and the aerial car-chase channel. The Truman Show - a 1998 movie in which a naive fellow's entire life is broadcast on worldwide television - now looks prescient. The media's self-absorption and our fascination with choreographed spectacle have overwhelmed the brief moments of actual, unrehearsed news that set the whole news-gathering machinery clanking in the first place. It's now a given: The blurring of reality and entertainment has infected just about all of American culture.

It's not just the media-entertainment complex, of course: Washington also has a distinct feel of unreality about it these days. We have a president who seems bent on producing a sequel to previous Republican administrations, complete with many of the same actors and most of the same policies. Then there's the ex-president, whose casual relationship to objective truth continues to feed the unquenchable public thirst for scandal and malfeasance. Politics, once a matter of blending showmanship with statesmanship, has become stagecraft.

Even the cold realism of the markets has given way to subjectivity: Expectations now matter more than fundamentals, analysts pore over the sayings of Alan Greenspan like archaeologists deciphering hieroglyphics, and earning reports are as carefully scripted as the latest episode of Ally McBeal. Unreality has not just permeated public discourse in American society; it has triumphed.

This year marks the 40th anniversary of Daniel Boorstin's The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America, which remains the seminal work on the triumph of unreality. America, Boorstin said, is living in an "age of contrivance," besieged by the "menace of unreality" and dominated by pseudo-events: occurrences whipped up "primarily for the immediate purpose of being reported or produced." A more apt description of a typical news day in 2001 is hard to imagine.

What Boorstin could not foresee was the power of new technology to foster contrivance and pseudo-events over dusty reality. When any fool can film himself and his friends leading their inconsequential lives, post it on the Web and call it "entertainment," and when so-called news sites like ABCNews.com serve mainly as gateways to infotainment programs like Good Morning America, it's obvious that technology continues to blur the already fading lines between real life and the simulation thereof.

And what that means is: Get over it. To bewail the inauthenticity of modern life is to mourn a dam that burst a long time ago. But it also provides a business opportunity: Economic laws dictate that as authentic, unadulterated experience becomes scarcer, it becomes more valuable. Someone, somewhere, is at this moment crafting a business plan that involves getting people to pay for experiences once considered a routine part of that lost country, reality.

It'll make a great movie.