Simulation Proliferation and the City Essay examples -- Essays Papers

Simulation Proliferation and the City Mr. Hand wears all black, is tall, thin, and pale. He floats around a dark city and ends far too many lines with a creepy self-affirming â€Å"yesss.† In Dark City (Alex Proyas 1998) we see over and over again indications of the tropes and repetitions that make up the urban/filmic imagination. Not quite vampires, not quite grey aliens, not quite business men, not quite religious, not quite serial murderers, Mr. Hand and the other Strangers seem to be archetypal characters of the city. Is the imagination a domesticating function, territorializing wild occurrence and happenstance into termed rearrangements of what has come before? Or is it an explosive and infinite fountain of creativity? Modern metropolises and imagination present themselves together in such films as mutually helpful tools for inspecting one another – but my effort is to use the city to discuss several imaginations. As is only obvious enough from one city dweller talking to another, imagination (m oreso than representation or memory) is home to the ever changing city. Conversely, however, the city enables a specific citified imagination, with its own structure and economy. To begin, though, I want to interrogate, as a point of departure, the philosophy of fantasy in a highly commercial, idyllic, anti-city movie. Those lucky children of the 80’s witnessed the depiction and eventual summarization of the relation between fantasy, imagination, fiction, story, and control in the politico-creative manifesto, The Neverending Story (Wolfgang Peterson 1984). In the movie, Sebastian (a somewhat troubled young boy) reads a book (whose unfolding is the main content of the screen) and is then implicated in the collapse of a fantas... ...gination can be spoken of as a discourse that is ultimately just about itself: it is only by imagination that one imagination is to discover anything about the next – yet this ethereality is not only not troubling for the stability of simulation, but itself stabilized by the overproduction of simulacra such that its processing is pressured into sheer reactive creativity. The strikingly bizarre and symptomatically fascinating point, though, is why imagination might have almost anything at all to do with simulation, but this is just the predominant strength of an imagination over its inscription, by representation, into broader circulating winds of reality: its apparent nihilism. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- [1] Ã… ½iÃ… ¾ek, Slavoj. â€Å"Passion in the Era of Decaffeinated Belief.† Thy Symptom Issue 5, Winter 2004.