Mak User, Baudrillard

Today I remembered my reaction to the 1997 film Titanic. More specifically, Baudrillard made me recall the response that I had to the event finally being immortalized on film: absolute terror. 

For weeks after seeing the film—viewing the (simulated) bodies; hearing the (simulated) screams; feeling (maybe not literally, but in a simulated way) the nostalgia for a time during the precipice of modernization, a time in which everything invented was thought as the most magnificent, the ‘best’ … “unsinkable,” and the (simulated) death of that nostalgia during the very moments of mass death—I had nightmares about the horrific scenes I had witnessed. 

Except I had not actually witnessed them. What struck me about our Baudrillard readings was something that rings true from my experience of not actually having experienced a landmark event of the past: the idea that this experience was somehow more real—hyperreal—than those real experiences of that time, despite being entirely imaginary and based on someone else’s (James Cameron’s) imagination of that event (regardless of how ‘scientifically based’ it was in ‘reality’). My dreams allowed me to concoct visions of reality that did not actually exist, mediated by my own experience of my personal past, present, and perspective. 

However, what I realized most clearly was that I had not imagined the Titanic in such a real way until seeing the film. Baudrillard’s commentary on the simulacra of our modern media thus resonates with my experience of the film. Like Disneyland, it is in many ways only a simulation of an event that never actually occurred as depicted; but, like the images of 9/11, it has somehow become more real to me than the actual historical event.