Before leaving for the United States, I happened to be randomly reading an eBook of Jean Baudrillard’s Simulation and Simulacra and it was amazing how his ideas (or my understanding of it, anyway) just kind of fell into place the moment I started exploring San Francisco. Let me try to explain what “simulation” and “simulacra” is so you can see what I mean.
One of the more apocalyptic consequences of the postmodern (world? condition? postmodernism? postmodernity? whatever) is the destruction of the real through the media of film and television. Traditionally, we think of art as mimesis – the image (art) as a reflection of the real (reality). Eventually, the image evolves (or devolves?) from a reflection of reality to its own pure simulacrum - the image no longer reflects reality; instead, it simulates a reality that isn’t there. And because we are constantly hounded by these simulacra through the media, we tend to mistake the real for the simulacrum. In other words, reality – or the way we think about reality – follows the image instead of the other way around.
I hope these theoretical concepts make sense as I go along. Or maybe it will be easier for me to get my point across if I begin by paraphrasing Baudrillard on America as a cinematic experience. He says that one of the charms of America is that even outside the movie theaters, the whole country is cinematic – the deserts appear like the set of a Western. There was definitely a movie-like quality to the way I experienced San Francisco. I had been there several times before, of course, but only during my last trip did I realize that the city looked like nothing I had experienced in the physical world, and everything I knew from movies. There was something about the way people moved and the way the buildings looked that made me feel like an actor walking across a movie set. I kept being haunted by a feeling that if I entered one of those pretty houses at Lombard Street, I would be greeted not by a living room but by lights and cords and a film crew moving things about behind the scenes, too busy scurrying about doing movie crew-like things to even notice that I was there. The city felt so unreal that at some point I began to wonder if there was a “real” America underneath the movie-set America I was moving in, and if that “real” America would ever be accessible to me at all.
There were also times when I waited for life to take a cinematic turn, and felt disappointment when it didn’t. At the motel Ale and I stayed in at Berkeley, the first thing I did was check under the bed to see if there were any dead bodies hidden there. The motel was far from the cheap, sleazy place I expected it to be – my first disappointment. It was clean, well-decorated, and had a flat-screen TV on the wall. And no dead bodies under the bed. (Later on, we discovered that the room cost us $130 for that one night we were there. I guess if there were any dead bodies to be found, housekeeping would have cleared it up before we even got there.) I know that the dead body under the motel bed is more of an urban legend than a scene from a movie, but the where else would my idea of the motel as a crime scene come from? That’s right, the media. Motels are often the site of movie murders, like in that John Cusack movie Identity, and I’m pretty sure I’ve seen a dead body in a motel in a CSI episode somewhere.
Another example. My friend Bobby has this apartment a couple of blocks away from the Transamerica Tower – you know, that famous pyramid-shaped building that you can easily spot on the San Francisco skyline. If you ever get the chance to hang out on his rooftop at night, you’ll be greeted with a spectacular view of the downtown area, glittering city lights and all. The first time I stepped out on his rooftop, I was left breathless by how pretty everything looked from up there. Then I said, “You know what would make this view perfect? If Godzilla or the creature from Cloverfield rose up from the Bay and started smashing everything.” I was already making an escape plan in my head and calculating my chances of survival, considering that I can’t go very far with my smoker’s lungs.
A couple of evenings later I was back on Bobby’s rooftop, this time with some of our friends from the hostel. It was their first time there and at some point, a lively discussion took place about how this would make the perfect hideout during the zombie apocalypse. Barricade the entrance to the roof then take turns guarding it, not to mention it’d be easy to snipe at any zombies who tried to enter the building. I could almost hear the moan and shuffle of the flesh-eating living dead.
There were many other instances when the events that happened to me there seemed a like something out of a quirky indie film or a badly-written Tagalog melodrama, but this narrative would become too unbelievable if I get into all of that now.
The first thing you’ll probably tell me after reading all of this is that I’ve been watching too many movies – and that is precisely the point of Baudrillard. Because of all these simulacra, “the real itself becomes organized along the lines of a disaster-movie script.” I’m not gonna lie and say that I wasn’t disappointed that a Cloverfield attack or a zombie outbreak didn’t happen while I was there. I will say though, that one of the highlights of my stay in San Francisco was my last night with Ale, which was spent in a room at San Remo. Again, the feeling that I was walking about in a movie set – our room was furnished with antiques, and to flush a toilet you had to pull a chain. Then everything happened according to the script: there was a love scene, and then the lights went off. This is where the credits roll, if credits rolled in real life.
It’s such an odd condition, to want your reality to become like an image that reflects nothing real to begin with. I wonder if this sort of thinking happens to a lot of visitors to America, if there are times when Americans view their reality in the same manner as I did, or if they expect to experience the rest of the world according to a simulacrum of their own creation.
