The Time Traveler’s Guide to Hyperreality
One Reality Doesn’t Fit All
“America is neither dream nor reality. It is hyperreality. It is hyperreality because it is a utopia which has behaved from the very beginning as though it were already achieved…[Americans] are themselves simulation in its most developed state” — Jean Baudrillard, America (1986)
If a starry-eyed time traveler from the past arrives in the next two months, I hope they end up on your doorstep instead of mine.
Even if this intrepid traveler arrived from the recent past, well-armed with knowledge of the Internet and 9/11, of snuggies and shake weights, I would be hard-up to explain the events of this election cycle to them.
Nonetheless, I will give it the old college try, as I have been taught to do for the last four years. Come in, starry-eyed time traveler, and you’d better sit down.
Donald Trump is the Republican nominee for President.
Yes, I’m serious. He’s in the top two. If this were American Idol, they would both get record contracts.
Well, it might have started as a gag, but it isn’t now. We vote in two weeks.
What? No, no flying cars. No hoverboards either, to head off that question. Focus, time traveler.
You know, this has happened before, many times — Americans (especially Californians and Minnesotans) like to elect their celebrities. You probably even remember some of them:
- Al Franken (US Senator, 2009-present)
- Arnold Schwarzenegger (Governor of California, 2003–2011)
- Fred Thompson (US Senator, 1994–2003)
- Jesse Ventura (Governor of Minnesota, 1999–2003)
- Sonny Bono (US Representative 1995–1998)
- Clint Eastwood (Mayor of Carmel-by-the-Sea, 1986–1988)
- Jack Kelly (Mayor of Huntington Beach, 1983–1986)
- Ronald Reagan (Governor of California, 1967–1975, President of the United States, 1981–1989)
I could go on, time traveler, but we might very well be here all day and I’m sure you want to catch up on what Elon Musk’s been doing for the last decade. Nope, not a perfume mogul, but good guess.
Perhaps even more to the point than Americans electing celebrities, Americans like their politicians to look and act like celebrities: a politician is expected to look the “right” way, to say the “right” reassuring or inspiring things, to elevate the office and therefore the nation to a hyperreal plane. A hyperreal plane that is a necessarily better or even utopian version of reality that lives up to the expectations many Americans have of our country as a singular beacon of democracy and moral goodness with a blindingly bright future ahead of it.
Hyperreality is itself a state of being in which a person is unable to differentiate between reality and a simulation of reality. In modern politics, hyperreality is the inability to differentiate between reality and the reality presented to us by different candidates or parties or ideologies. This crisis of simulation only grows more dire as Americans are split between two different presentations of reality, both simulations and both grounded in hyperreal imagery derived from movies, television, and other media.
This split is epitomized in the difference between Donald Trump’s conception of the United States as “a more dangerous environment than frankly I have ever seen and anybody in this room has ever watched or seen” in his RNC speech and Hillary Clinton’s consistent response that “America has never stopped being great…but we do need to make America whole again.”
These are two different versions of reality, one of an America careening toward disaster and the other of America on the verge of a near-utopian future. Is it any wonder that Americans are divided when they are exposed to two diametrically opposed versions of reality that a two-party system forces them to choose between?
The danger of our politicians acting like celebrities or even being celebrities is that they walk out of their various movies or television shows or media appearances and into our reality, inevitably confusing our sense of reality with the simulation of reality from which they have emerged. We become accustomed to accepting the fictional as the factual.
We, as Americans in an age of entertainment imagery deeply invested in presenting simulations of reality pleasing to us, find ourselves not only tempted to accept these simulations as objectively real, but are conditioned through our cultural heritage and upbringing to invest our faith and hope in fictional narratives that thereby have deep resonance in actual, objective reality. For example, the Walt Disney Company founded the Anaheim Ducks in 1993, after the success of their 1992 film, The Mighty Ducks, presumably because the American public had already been taught through the film to root for an underdog hockey team known as the Ducks.
Rather than simulations of reality taking cues from reality, reality begins to take cues from simulations of reality.
Politicians constantly claim their version of reality is the “real thing” rather than acknowledging the sea of cultural capital underlying American film and television that inevitably informs their understandings of reality (simulations of reality again conspiring to influence reality). For example, we expect candidates to wear flag lapel pins, a practice reportedly taken up by Richard Nixon in 1972 following the release of The Candidate, a movie in which a political candidate for a Senate seat wears one. Movies and television bleed into our reality and remake it in similar ways every day, making it even more difficult to differentiate between the two.
When Donald Trump says, “You’re fired,” he is dragging a reference from a simulated reality (The Apprentice, The Celebrity Apprentice) into our actual reality and confusing the two, just as he often seems to do in all manner of other cases (he’ll make Mexico pay for the wall, make “the best” trade deals, get the Chinese to take care of North Korea, etc.) Trump has no viable way of making any of these outrageous claims actually happen, but does he realize that?
When Hillary Clinton said, “Well, Donald, I know you live in your own reality,” she was precisely correct, at least to the extent that Donald Trump is a figure perhaps more deeply lodged in hyperreality than any actor-politician before or since. And Trump is an actor because he has been performing himself all his life. He has always been in the public eye, and always sought publicity and notoriety even more so than wealth. His business ventures are calculated to bring him further into the public eye, whether that means building a tower with his name on it, purchasing a sports team (the New Jersey Generals), or starring in a reality television show. He has never stopped performing the identity of the “winner,” the businessman who always gets his way in the boardroom and the bedroom.
In this performance of an identity, Trump is not alone. It is well-documented that Ronald Reagan often confirmed his sense of reality by referring to film and his experiences as an actor. When Congress was considering a tax hike in March of 1985, Reagan replied in the following terms: “I have my veto pen drawn and ready for any tax increase that Congress might even think of sending up. And I have only one thing to say to the tax increasers. Go ahead — make my day.”
This last sentence is a reference to Clint Eastwood’s hard-knuckled and homicidal SFPD inspector Harry Callahan in Sudden Impact (1983)(previously of Dirty Harry [1971]). One has to imagine that Reagan saw himself as delivering the line just as Eastwood had, defiantly staring down Congress with “veto pen drawn,” a perception almost wholly divorced from the reality of the situation. Reagan is not holding a gun to a legislative body who has taken the American public hostage, but a man in an oval office holding a pen. Alterations in tax policy are certainly important, but they should by no means be understood as a standoff that could end in the death of Reagan, Congress, and/or the American public. Such equivocations with film were as dangerous as they were common in Reagan’s presidency.
Furthermore, the racial undertones of the situation cannot go unstated: Dirty Harry would like nothing more than for the stereotypical black criminal to kill the stereotypical white woman in distress because this would make his killing of the black criminal all the more heroic and justified, upholding an entire world view and a misguided series of racial constructions in the process — Reagan’s identification with such a racially regressive figure is far from coincidence.
But consider how confused Reagan might have been if he had been playing an exaggerated version of himself all his life, always under his given name, in actual reality and in simulations of reality — what sort of horrific double consciousness identity disorder would that lead to in a human being? I think we have our answer in Donald Trump.
In many ways, Trump has tried to position himself as a successor to Reagan, both outsiders who made their name in non-political professions and who advocate for similar conservative policies, even if Trump has ditched much of the coded language that kept Reagan somewhat respectable. Trump went out of his way to select the campaign slogan, “Make America Great Again,” a clear rip-off of Reagan’s 1980 call to action: “Let’s Make America Great Again,” which is somewhat incredibly only the second-worst act of plagiarism Trump’s campaign has undertaken.
Furthermore, Trump has appropriated several other elements of his campaign from other twentieth century conservatives. From Nixon, Trump takes his law and order pledges, his claim of the support of the “silent majority” of Americans, and his “secret plan” to defeat a military opponent. From the America First Committee,Trump took on the slogan “America First.” The history of “America First” as a slogan and policy is long and torrid, but culminated in 1940 and 1941 with the America First Committee, an anti-war and anti-Semitic organization that thought highly of Nazi Germany and worked to keep the US from fighting the Axis powers.
But Trump’s parallels with Reagan run still deeper than the bits and pieces of conservative ideology he has appropriated above, both Reagan and Trump invested in a fundamentalist understanding of the world in which simulation is more real than reality.
Their professions make the nuances of this parallel still clearer — Reagan walked out of the movies, perfectly made-up and capable of reading convincingly all of the lines fed to him. Donald Trump walked out of reality TV, making it up (or at least pretending to) as he went along and engaging in the type of petty bullshit that gets ratings. Reagan gets the best (if somewhat inaccurate) lines because his identity is deeply enmeshed in Hollywood lore and he is capable of reading off of a script (teleprompter). Trump gets the worst (often wholly false) lines because he is never more himself, never more comfortable than when he is improvising, avoiding all semblance of planned thought and manufacturing (in real time) a simulation of reality for the studio audience and the audience sitting at home, puffing himself up with the bluster of a thousand “reality” TV assholes who “aren’t here to make friends.”
This begets the following question: can we consider Trump a narcissist because his entire identity revolves around the constant performance of the manufactured, hyperreal self?
The social theorist who first came up with the term “hyperreality” in 1981 later wrote a book exclusively about America called (appropriately) America (1986). In it, social theorist Jean Baudrillard thinks of apparent narcissism in American hyperreal culture in the following terms:
“This is not narcissism and it is wrong to abuse that term to describe the effect. What develops around the video or stereo culture is not a narcissistic imaginary, but an effect of frantic self-referentiality, a short-circuit which immediately hooks up like with like, and, in so doing, emphasizes their surface intensity and deeper meaninglessness.” -Jean Baudrillard, America
Self-referentiality. Imagine for a moment every product, every service (or scam) Trump has ever offered. What do they all have in common? His name. His brand. His identity stamped across them in five bold letters: TRUMP. A “frantic self-referentiality” that betrays both a surface intensity and deeper meaninglessness, a frantic attempt to assert both relevancy and existence.
Does Trump constantly refer to himself (both online and in real life) because he’s a narcissist or because he needs to constantly assert his hyperreal identity over and over again to convince himself that he really exists? If the hyperreal, simulated version of you is all that you have ever shown the world, a figment of a reality television show personality, what would it mean to actually come crashing down to reality, a world in which you can’t force Mexico to pay for a wall or force China to take care of North Korea or bully other heads of state into doing what you want?
What happens when the fundamental pillars of reality as you see it, of your very identity, start to crumble?
It would be like waking up in the morning and not speaking a language you had convinced yourself you had known all your life, or waking up and realizing you work in the mailroom rather than a penthouse office; in other words, a sudden recapitulation of self so violent and troubling that your previous (simulated) reality would be forever destroyed, and the version of yourself who inhabited it with it.
In other words, you would cease to exist.
An identity so tied into the simulated reality in which it is founded cannot exist without the fundamental reference points it is based upon. Donald Trump does not exist without his gold-plated tower, his secret plan to stop ISIS, his constant “winning,” his “infallible” business sense, his “small” loans from his father, his perfectly normal-sized hands, or any number of other defining absurdities that exist as laws of the universe in the simulation of reality he has created for himself and expects everyone else to buy into.
However, this version of Donald Trump has already begun to cease to exist. The clearest cornerstone in this unraveling came only yesterday with the announcement that future Trump hotels targeted towards younger people will go under the brand name “Scion” rather than “Trump.” This trend will only continue for Trump’s traditional businesses, the ones that suffer from being associated so directly with such a divisive figure, while his budding media conglomerate, Trump TV, only benefits from this divisiveness. This shift from business to politics/news media indicates the changing ways in which the public thinks of Trump and therefore the changing ways Trump thinks of himself — he truly became a political figure the moment people began to apply his brand to politics rather than business (Trumped Up Trickle Down Economics, anyone?), frantic self-referentiality coming to the fore in a new field and redefining Trump as a political figure rather than a business one.
That said, Trump is still as embedded in a simulation of reality as ever. When he says he’ll keep us in suspense, he forgets that this isn’t a movie or a television show. This is reality. A place in which presidential candidates accept peaceful transfers of power and accept losing so publicly for no less than the sake of our democracy, even if it causes their sense of self to crumble.
In a sense, Trump is the political candidate of our age. We, too, live in hyperreality, a world dominated by representations of our world that ring truer to us than reality. What we are experiencing is more than a crisis of facts; it is a crisis of reality itself, of failing to differentiate between what is attainable and realistic and what is the stuff of movie magic or television razzle-dazzle. The only thing that can solve this crisis of hyperreality is to accept that politics are not meant to be entertainment and must, somehow, exist in a space outside of our simulations of reality, lest we confuse the two ever again.
Even my conceit of a time traveler is skeptical of our ability to induct such a radical change in the momentum of our culture. It seems far more likely that the next version of Reagan and Trump will come along within a few decades, a candidate of Internet fame and persuasion whose talents are even better suited for our cultural propensities for six-second sound bites and selfies than those of his (or her) predecessors.
