WRITING WELL AHEAD of time, I won’t hazard any guesses as to how
Election Day turns out, but I will predict that one expression
which survives the campaign, along with (unfortunately) “the 47
percent,” will be Bill Clinton’s “alternative reality.” He was
speaking, as you may remember, at the Democratic convention in
Charlotte about what he insisted, not entirely without reason, was
a Republican caricature of the Democrats as people who “don’t
really believe in free enterprise and individual initiative [and]
want everybody to be dependent on the government.” I don’t mind
telling you that his words made me sit up and take notice. Could it
be that old Slick Willie was calling on both sides for rhetorical
disarmament in the ever more surreal war of hyperbole that American
election campaigns have become? Alas, no. For he then proceeded to
create, without any apparent sense of irony, an exactly
complementary caricature of Republicans as people who believe that
“every one of us in this room who amounts to anything, we’re all
completely self-made.”
In reality, if I may borrow an old-fashioned term, he was
bestowing a sort of official recognition on the rhetorical status
quo, in which all realities are alternative—alternative,
that is, to the real kind. It’s only what we might have expected
from our 42nd president, who was the founder and formerly chief
practitioner of postmodern politics. The late Senator Daniel
Patrick Moynihan is supposed to have said that “You’re entitled to
your own opinions; you’re not entitled to your own facts.” That is
Oldthink. Now, you’re entitled to your own facts, and that has had
the curious effect of making opinion obsolete. Thus the so-called
Fact Checkers of the media routinely treat opinion as fact—most
often in the course of dismissing opinions they don’t like as
contrary to fact, or as lies. And that, in turn, has gone far to
make actual lies, licensed by the presumed right of everyone to
construct his own reality, the common currency of the campaign,
particularly on the Democratic side.
Not to open a whole new campaign of my own in my ongoing war
against fantasy, but isn’t this regrettable state of affairs more
or less what we would expect from people steeped in the popular
culture of the last 30 or 40 years? Culture is upstream of
politics, as someone has said, and alternative realities of the
political sort follow naturally from those in fiction, theatre, and
movies, those that have proliferated like crabgrass and taken over
the cultural lawn (to change the metaphor). Even if some brave
author were to come forward with an attempt to re-establish the
link between art and the reality it was once supposed to imitate,
the world would treat his portrait of reality as just another
alternative version of it, like all the rest. Movies have led the
way to the breeding grounds of fantasy and are now virtually all
examples of it.
I find it amusing that criticism of a movie like Rian Johnson’s
Looper, which is about time travel between two equally
repellent futures, centers on how nearly Joseph Gordon-Levitt’s
prosthetic nose has been made to resemble the real one of Bruce
Willis, who plays his future self, a retired assassin named Joe.
The two men may or may not be plausibly time-altered versions of
each other, but there is nothing at all plausible about the
characters they play or the worlds they inhabit. Plausibility of
that sort is no longer expected or even wanted in postmodern
movies, of which Looper is a good example. When the
critics finished commenting on Mr. Gordon-Levitt’s nose, they went
on in learned fashion to cite as many as they could of the
picture’s allusions to other movies. Movie-world is now its own
alternative reality, and comparisons between films of the same
general type have taken the place of comparisons between any of
them and non-filmic reality.
The plot of Looper is far too complicated to go into
detail about, but a crucial element of it plays with our
expectations about the central hypothetical of an older man somehow
permitted to return to the past and give the benefit of his
knowledge and experience to his younger self. At one point,
future-Joe actually says to present-Joe: “Don’t do it, you
idiot”—though he is presumably able to remember that he has already
done it. Yet which of us has not engaged in similar futility? It
almost looks as if the movie is going to make a realistically human
point about our ability, or inability, to learn from
experience—perhaps a comic one like that of a great Czech time
travel movie of the Cold War era called Tomorrow I’ll Wake Up
and Scald Myself with Tea that only showed once on Western TV,
on the BBC in 1982, and is remembered by its fans (of whom I am
one) on that occasion like a form of time travel itself. But
Looper’s human moment turns out to be a po-mo tease and a
red herring to distract us from the surprise ending, which depends
for its surprise on its unrealism.
No, I take that back. Anyone familiar with the conventions of
the “dystopian” cinema that I discussed in these pages a few months
ago (see “Look Back in Hunger,” TAS, May 2012) and that
Looper is obviously intended to be a part of might well
see the ending coming, though I confess I did not. It may be
implausible—to say the least—from the point of view of those of us
whose tastes were formed by old-fashioned realism, but it makes
perfect sense within the terms of the alternative reality which is
a collaborative product of our movie fantasists. That reality is
not merely idiosyncratic, in other words, but part of a shared
vision among mostly left-wing writers and filmmakers of a nightmare
world in which evil, as we of the non- or pre-alternative reality
would term it, has become the norm.
In spite of their fantastical style, these writers and
filmmakers really do imagine to have important points of contact
with the world they live in, a world in which (as they suppose) the
fantastical evil of the One Percent is thought to blight the
existence of the ninety and nine percent who are less fortunate—or
perhaps only less evil. Although the third of Christopher Nolan’s
Batman movies, The Dark Knight Rises, which dominated the
summer box office, was thought by some to have a conservative take
on this alternative reality—perhaps because benevolent billionaire
Bruce Wayne could hardly escape his fate as a congenital member of
the One Percent—it is still the same world. The pessimism with
which evil is supposed to render the good and the decent so
helpless that only superheroic intervention can save them is only
heightened by the patent unreality of such intervention.
THERE ARE OBVIOUS SIMILARITES between this lefty fantasy of evil
predominant and that which has been purpose-built for the
presidential campaign: an alternative reality in which Mitt Romney
is portrayed as a dangerous “extremist,” one of the evil rich
keeping the rest of us down, and one who is also bent on waging a
“war against women” by taking away their birth control devices.
Those of us who do not share this fantasy find it almost impossible
to accept that members of the Obama campaign really believe in it,
but the fantastical quality of the popular culture has accustomed
them, almost without their being aware of it, to believe similar
things. Such is the power of the mimetic assumption, inherited from
3,000 years of Western culture—the assumption that art is an
imitation of reality—that even when we create avowed fantasy, we
can’t help ourselves from seeing it as, somehow or other, analogous
to reality. In such cases, however, it is reality that must adapt
itself to the fantasy. That’s how it becomes “alternative.”
The habits of fantasy tend to run in familiar grooves, which
also helps them to bend and shape our ideas of reality. I have no
more wish to read J.K. Rowling’s new adult novel, A Casual
Vacancy, than I did her teen Harry Potter tales, but judging
from accounts of it that I have read, I guess some similar urge
caused her to write what one critic describes as “500 pages of
swearing, rape, drug abuse, suicide, drowning, self-harm,
pseudonymous internet denunciations, domestic violence, acne and
meetings of the parish council.…After more than a million words of
Harry Potter, J.K. Rowling has contracted Tourette’s Syndrome.” It
sounds to me as if she has merely escaped from one sort of fantasy
into another, and both sorts were already there, waiting for her to
exploit them: the Harry Potter sort in the largely unfamiliar (to
Americans) British school stories of a generation or two ago, and
the Casual Vacancy sort in the pessimistic worldview of so
many contemporary fictional and cinematic productions that we don’t
even recognize it as a fantasy anymore. But the great liberating
effect of postmodernism, first in culture and then in politics, is
to make us care no longer whether it is a fantasy or not.
