Assignment 4: Media Fantasies

In very different ways, both of this weeks screenings (Mullholland Dr. and Black Mirror: 15 Million Merits) might be interpreted as suggesting that there is something that our faith in media images may be somehow deceptive, untrustworthy, and unreal.  These texts have explored complex relationships between media images, human desire, and the often blurry lines between reality (the material, the solid, the honest, the trustworthy, and the true) and the simulacra (the fake, the replica, the fantasy, the insubstantial the copy, the deceptive, and the lie.)   Taken to their limit, they might suggest that we are not willing or capable to resist the power of media and media suggestion.

In Mullholland Dr., a classic story of love, death, and broken Hollywood dreams is distorted almost beyond recognition.  In David Lynch's telling, we are often unable to tell the difference between reality and fantasy, between wakefulness and sleep, between diegetic and non-diegetic information - and this epistemological confusion seems to be part of his goal in telling this story, as if commenting on the fantasies that the audience brings into the theater, and trying to subvert or destroy them.  15 Million Merits follows a more familiar plot line, but in many ways, the world that it describes is equally bizarre - a world almost totally structured by televisual programming, from which the only escape from a kind of slavery to one's TV sets is a journey to the heart of the televisual system.

The question for this week, then, is about what happens to "reality" in these two narratives.  Are these stories "realistic"?  Do they refer to the "real world?"  If so, how?  If not, why not?  Do they cause us to question, rethink, or doubt the relationship between the media image and the real world?  What happens to the real in these stories?  You may choose to comment either on Mullholland Dr. or Black Mirror (or go for the brass ring and try to discuss both!)  Feel free to bring in other texts as comparison.