In HSC module C, you are required to find TWO pieces of related material to compliment your elective, either "History and Memory" or "Conflicting Perspectives". 

Sarah Polley's "Stories we Tell" (2012), examines the nature of narratives and truth through the seemingly truthful medium of documentary. 

Australian movie critique, Margaret Pomeranz says this about the film, Her latest film is a combination of home movie and documentary, a fascinating blend of forensic search for the mother she lost to cancer when she was eleven. She interviews siblings, half siblings, her father, friends, to try to figure out this fey creature that was her mother Diana, actress, casting director, who after meeting fellow actor Michael, abandons her first marriage and the children of that union. Diana was a restless soul and despite loving Michael, craved excitement outside the confines of her marriage.

The self referential documentary is a pastiche of family interviews, talking heads, resurrected home movies and grainy dramatizations of events.  The narratives of the three levels are interconnected and often hard to tell apart because the movie emphasizes ambiguity. 

Level one is "documentary-like" footage. Polley composes this level with a static lens in high definition focus. tatic lens,  in focus

In level two Polley uses a hand-held camera, shaky, and mobile; the shooting style is informal. The look is intentionally filtered, muddled, containing black strips and clarity imperfections to make it appear vintage and old—representing the past.

The meta-narrative. The story of the making of the documentary itself and films the process of its filming. Intentionally blurry , out of focus,  muddled and unclear.

When Polley was asked: You've expressed some hesitance over the term "documentary" because of the ethical judgment calls in how people are portrayed. Do you feel the same way about adaptation, if not about the characters then just the author's intent?
 The feeling of being unfaithful to it is a very difficult one, and just to adapt it into a screenplay does require some translations. It's hard to know where your ethical lines are, in the same way that I think making a true story or one about people you know -- just by telling a story, there has to some kind of construct around it. It's not going to be completely objective -- no matter what -- and there's a lot of ethical responsibility in terms of how you're presenting people to the outside world. Because for a lot of people, that's the only context in which they'll know these people.

This documentary would be suitable related material for both Conflicting Perspectives and History and Memory. 

Module B has two main concepts; 

a.INTERPRETATION: this encompasses an explanation of how you personally,respond to the text and its features, an analysis of the meaning and how it is conveyed, and an evaluation of the impact of the text on you and others.

b.TEXTUAL INTEGRITY: relates to the text’s capacity to have enduring value. A text has integrity when all of its features - such as its structure, form, language, content and ideas - synthesise to create a text that continues to resonate for responders in a range of contexts. 

WHAT CAN I DO TO IMPROVE MY RESULTS?
1.Develop a unique thesis. This will create a point of difference between your essay and others. 
2. .Use your thesis as the binding notion for ALL paragraphs. 
3.Engage personally with the text and demonstrate your interpretation through an evaluation of a variety of interpretations. 
4.Within each paragraph you must have some technique analysis. Dramatic, structural or language features specific to a shakespearian play are preferred. 
5.Have you discussed the text in reference to it’s “textual integrity”?
6.Do not merely rely on referencing critics or productions but demonstrate a critical appreciation of Hamlet which should be gleaned from an evaluation of the perspectives of  others in light of a personal response to the play. 

WEAKER RESPONSES:
1.Are descriptive and rely on recount to advance a narrow point of view.
2.Textual references are obvious (‘To be or not to be” OR Claudius praying scene)) and not developed enough
3.Lack a unifying thesis and consequently lacking in cohesion.

The brilliance of Hersey’s journalism is that it vividly personalises the atomic destruction of Hiroshima. When the temptation might have been to lapse into emotive superlatives and sensationalism, Hersey’s style is measured, understated and clinically objective. As the work is so character driven, Hiroshima signalled an intensification of challenges to modernist assumptions of progress. The attrition of the Great War, the mechanised and bureaucratised slaughter of a generation, brought teleological assumptions increasingly into question. Modernism’s affirmation of historical positivism, of a metanarrative of technological innovation and human ennoblement, was always qualified and tentative. As the twentieth century brought manmade calamity after calamity modernists redoubled their scepticism. In 1939 the renewal of global conflict was even more mechanised, more ideological and more explicitly eugenicist, culminating in the annihilation of civilian populations and the industrial, methodical extermination of a people.

The closing chapters of the Second World War sent a shockwave through modernist thought that would eventually result in deconstruction and postmodernity, beginning with a renewed questioning of critical assumptions. When the Frankfurt School cultural theorist Theodor Adorno returned to Europe after the war he contemplated the agony of Europe and concluded that “to write a poem after Auschwitz is barbaric.” Adorno was thus moved not simply by horror but because, intellectually, the death camps brought the project of civilization into question. What might the canon represent, what values remained if human reason and human genius could devise such inhumanity? Paradoxically, scepticism of the canon came to pervade texts we might consider central to the Cold War canon. In John Hersey’s Hiroshima, we are told that “in the first moment of the atomic age, a human being was crushed by books.” The culture of the Cold War would be increasingly suspicious of itself: metatextual, self-reflexive and deconstructivist.

Adorno may have felt that poetry was inappropriate to the aftermath of war, but he was nevertheless inspired to publish volumes of criticism. With the loss of faith in science as an absolute good came a further, philosophical dilemma. Human history was demonstrably not a grand narrative of eternal progress. Indeed, Adorno maintained that:

Universal history must be construed and denied. After the catastrophes that have happened, and in view of the catastrophes to come, it would be cynical to say that a plan for a better world is manifested in history and unites it. Not to be denied for that reason, however, is the unity that cements the discontinuous, chaotically splintered moments and phases of history — the unity of the control of nature, progressing to rule over men, and finally to that over men’s inner nature. No universal history leads from savagery to humanitarianism, but there is one leading from the slingshot to the megaton bomb. It ends in the total menace which organized mankind poses to organized men, in the epitome of discontinuity. It is the horror that verifies Hegel and stands him on his head. If he transfigured the totality of historic suffering into the positivity of the self-realizing absolute, the One and All that keeps rolling on to this day—with occasional breathing spells — would teleologically be the absolute of suffering.

If we focus on the single affirmation, that “no universal history leads from savagery to humanitarianism, but there is one leading from the slingshot to the megaton bomb”, then we can see the philosophical rupture caused by the detonations over Hiroshima and Nagasaki. We can also see the significance of Hersey’s textual transmission of this dilemma in his extended essay, Hiroshima.

Hiroshima brought a human dimension to the devastation of the atomic bomb. In a cool, understated, and for that reason all the more poignant style, he recreated the Hiroshima bombing form the standpoint of six survivors. Hersey did what no one else had done: he converted the Japanese enemy into recognisable himan beings.

Hiroshima is a novel that grapples sincerely with a problem many other writers in various ways have sought to minimize, even explain away: namely how do we think of ourselves as citizens, as people, on a planet over which hover all manner of weapons whose control, much less inner workings, partake of a complexity that makes anachronistic older notions of accountability?

Hersey’s skill as a war correspondent was used instead to humanise the ‘faceless Asian horde’, to present the decision of high command as arbitrary and cruel; yet Hersey managed to retain a sense of detachment. Yavenditti characterises Hersey’s work as a masterpiece of understated realism, the “contrast between the apparently objective simplicity of his prose and the enormity of the phenomenon he described made Hiroshima all the more graphic and frightening for most readers.” Both the objectivity and simplicity are demonstrably more “apparent” than actual. Hersey’s choice of subjects, for instance, presented the American audience with sympathetic characters: doctors, priests, mothers. Hersey had found his interviewees through missionary contacts, so the sample is more accidental than intentional. Still, the sample was as opportune as much as it was opportunistic. The structure of Hiroshima was also intended to elicit an empathetic response: the mundane details of six lives are interrupted by an eruption, clinically described, followed by a surreal sequence of flight and survival and a period of feverish recovery and sickly regrowth of weeds and keloid.

Literary theories were developed as a means to understand the various ways in which people read texts. The proponents of each theory believe that their theory is the theory, but most of us interpret texts according to the “rules” of several different theories at one time. All literary theories are lenses through which we can see texts. There is no reason to say that one is better than another or that you should read according to any of them, 

but it is sometimes fun to “decide” to read a text with one in mind because you often end up with a whole new perspective on your reading. What follows is a summary of some of the most common schools of literary theory. These descriptions are extremely cursory, and none of them fully explains what the theory is all about. But it is enough to get the general idea. 

This type of perspective focuses on the activity of reading a work of literature. Reader response critics turn away from the traditional idea that a literary work is an artifact that has meaning built within it; they turn their attention instead to the responses of individual readers. Through this shift of perspective, a literary work is converted into an activity that goes on in a reader’s mind. It is through this interaction that meaning is made. The features of the work itself—narrator, plot, characters, style, and structure—are less important than the interplay between a reader’s experience and the text. Advocates of this perspective believe that literature has no inherent or intrinsic meaning that is waiting to be discovered. Instead, meaning is constructed by readers as they bring their own thoughts, moods, and experiences to whatever text they are reading. In turn, what readers get out of a text depends on their own expectations and ideas.

This type of criticism focuses on the activity of reading a work of literature. Reader response critics turn from the traditional conception of a work as an achieved structure of meanings to the responses of readers to the text. By this shift of perspective a literary work is converted into an activity that goes on in a reader’s mind, and what had been features of the work itself—narrator, plot, characters, style, and structure—is less important than the connection between a reader’s experience and the text. It is through this interaction that meaning is made. Students seem most comfortable with this school of criticism.

Tyson explains that "...reader-response theorists share two beliefs: 1) that the role of the reader cannot be omitted from our understanding of literature and 2) that readers do not passively consume the meaning presented to them by an objective literary text; rather they actively make the meaning they find in literature". In this way, reader-response theory shares common ground with some of the deconstructionists discussed in the Post-structural area when they talk about "the death of the author," or her displacement as the (author)itarian figure in the text.

Typical questions when approaching a text from a “reader response” perspective:

• How does the interaction of text and reader create meaning? 
• Do the sounds/shapes of the words as they appear on the page or how they are spoken by the reader enhance or change the meaning of the word/work? 
•  How might we interpret a literary text to show that the reader's response is, or is analogous to, the topic of the story? 
• What does the body of criticism published about a literary text suggest about the critics who interpreted that text and/or about the reading experience produced by that text? 

The word formal has two related meanings, both of which apply within this perspective. The first relates to its root word, form, a structure’s shape that we can recognize and use to make associations. The second relates to a set of conventions or accepted practices. Formal poetry, for example, has meter, rhyme, stanzas, and other predictable features that it shares with poems of the same type. The formalist perspective, then, pays particular attention to these issues of form and convention. Instead of looking at the world in which a poem exists, for example, the formalist perspective says that a poem should be treated as an independent and self-sufficient object. The methods used in this perspective are those pertaining to close reading, that is, detailed and subtle analysis of the formal components that make up the literary work, such as the meanings and interactions of words, figures of speech, and symbols.

TYPICAL QUESTIONS

• How does the work use imagery to develop its own symbols? (i.e. making a certain road stand for death by constant association) 
•  What is the quality of the work's organic unity "...the working together of all the parts to make an inseparable whole..." In other words, does how the work is put together reflect what it is? 
•  How are the various parts of the work interconnected? 
  
• How do paradox, irony, ambiguity, and tension work in the text? 
  
• How do these parts and their collective whole contribute to or not contribute to the aesthetic quality of the work? 
• How does the author resolve apparent contradictions within the work? 
  
• What does the form of the work say about its content? 
  
• Is there a central or focal passage that can be said to sum up the entirety of the work? 
  
• How do the rhythms and/or rhyme schemes of a poem contribute to the meaning or effect of the piece? 

QUESTIONS TO ASK YOURSELF:

What is the nature of discovery?

What is the impact of discovery?

How is experience and attitudes toward discovery linked to context?

How might the text affirm or challenge assumptions and beliefs about discovery?

The Board of Studies usually runs with a theme throughout the paper, so think about the 'sub-types' of discovery -  familial discovery, historical discovery, inter/cultural discovery, place, relationships.

The Board of Studies almost always opens the paper with a visual text. 

What follows is a guide as to how to tackle the most common text types. 

 
VISUAL TEXTS

Typically 2 mark questions

• What does the text say about discovery?
• Where can I provide textual evidence to support my answer?
• You can analyse anything in the visual (including the written text)
•  Textual features (symbolism, colour, proxemics, vector lines, salient image, facts, figures and statistics, inclusive language, imperative / declarative statements

POETRY

Typically 2-3 mark question

·      Start with the ideas first, then provide textual references

·      Literal and figurative levels of meaning

·      Poetic devices (imagery – simile, metaphor, personification / symbol / repetition, anaphora / rhythm / sound imagery / tone

PROSE

Typically 2-3 mark question

·      Usually HOW style questions

·      What does the text say about discovery and HOW is it shaped through form and features.

·      Focus on ideas first

·      Textual features.  (form – 1st, 3rd person – limited, omniscient, setting, characterization – are the characters dynamic or static? Symbols / motifs, figurative language, point of view, imagery)

NON FICTION

Typically 3 mark questions

•  What does it say about discovery? Ideas first
• Then textual references / features
• Factual recount of personal experience

·      These texts are often cause and effect texts

·      Contrast / comparison are often used in these texts – they are about characters, place.

Take key words and phrases for your quotes. Don't spend time rewriting whole chunks of text. 

TYPES OF QUESTIONS

·     There is no one way to answer the question, but generally there are two pathways  (techniques-based approach or concept-based)

·      Allow enough time for the 5 mark question

WHY type questions

o   Why is the sense of discovery important to the character (identity the type of discovery and then support answer from the text and explain why it is important)


How  type questions

o   Denoted by words such us explore, explain, analyse, compare, contrast and the word ‘how’ in the question

o   First: identify type of discovery

o   Then: explore, explain, analyse how the text presents this meaning with textual references


 Question (e)

o   Typically 5 marks – 1/3 marks

o   Allocate adequate time and write a reasonably lengthy response

o   Choose or write on 2 texts from a-d

o   Idetify key terms in the question

o   Involve synthesis or comparison

o   Must include textual references

o   As long as it answers the question, you CAN recycle what you have used in the previous questions.

Literary theories were developed as a means to understand the various ways in which people read texts. The proponents of each theory believe that their theory is the theory, but most of us interpret texts according to the “rules” of several different theories at one time. All literary theories are lenses through which we can see texts. There is no reason to say that one is better than another or that you should read according to any of them,

but it is sometimes fun to “decide” to read a text with one in mind because you often end up with a whole new perspective on your reading. What follows is a summary of some of the most common schools of literary theory. These descriptions are extremely cursory, and none of them fully explains what the theory is all about. But it is enough to get the general idea.

What are Literary Perspectives?
Literary perspectives help us explain why people might interpret the same text in different ways. Perspectives help us understand what is important to individual readers, and they show us why those readers end up seeing what they see. One way to imagine a literary perspective is to think of it as a lens through which we can examine a text. No single lens gives us the clearest view, but it is sometimes fun to read a text with a particular perspective in mind because you often end up discovering something intriguing and unexpected. While readers typically apply more than one perspective at a time, the best way to understand these perspectives is to employ them one at a time. What follows is a summary of some of the best-known literary perspectives. These descriptions are extremely brief, and none fully explains everything you might want to know about the perspective in question, but there is enough here for you to get an idea about how readers use them.

 

Past HSC


2012:

An individual’s perceptions of belonging evolve in response to the passage of time and interaction with their world.
In what ways is this view of belonging represented in your prescribed text and at least ONE other related text of your own choosing?

2011:

Explore how perceptions of belonging and not belonging can be influenced by connections to places.
In your response, refer to your prescribed text and at least ONE other related text of your own choosing.

2010:

‘An individual’s interaction with others and the world around them can enrich or limit their experience of belonging‘
Discuss this view with details reference to your prescribed text and ONE other related text of your own choosing.

2009:

‘Understanding nourishes belonging. A lack of understanding prevents it.’
Demonstrate how your prescribed text and ONE other related text of your own choosing represent this interpretation of belonging.

General

1. You have been invited to speak at the book launch of a new collection of texts entitled Belonging in Our Society. In your speech, explain and assess the ways in which belonging is represented in the texts in the collection
2. You have been invited to write an article for a teenage magazine called Youth and Belonging. In your article, analyse the ways in which belonging is represented in the texts you have studied.
3. What do you think are the most powerful influences that impact on an individual’s sense of belonging? (Independent 2009 Trial)

How belonging creates a sense of identity

1. To what extent do different groups to which we belong define who we are you’re your answer refer to your prescribed text and two texts of your own choosing.
2. Claude Levi Strauss once said ‘being human signifies, for each one of us, belonging to a class, society, a country and a civilization’ explain this statement with close reference to your prescribed text and a variety of supplementary texts of your own choosing in 1000-1500 word essay
3. Belonging to a community of group has a significant impact on an individual’s sense of self. ’ Discuss this statement, focusing on how the composers of the texts you have studies represent belonging
4. Belonging to a certain entity is the result of a particular identity. Discuss.
5. ‘Belonging is the cornerstone to finding identity in an individual’. To what extent is this true of your texts?
6. Belonging has been said to shape our identity. How does our sense of belonging shape who we are as individuals? (Total Education 2009 Trial)
7. “Individuals have to first construct themselves, independently, before they can be a part of other things.” Is this your understanding of belonging?.

Belonging and Conformity

1. Membership of any group requires obedience. Rules and conventions are the cornerstone of acceptance.
   What is the relationship between belonging and rules? In your answer refer to your prescribed text and two texts of your own choosing.
2. Belonging is not always a good thing. What disadvantages are there for individuals and society in belonging? In your answer refer to your prescribed text and two texts of your own choosing.
3. Belonging relies on both conformity and individuality.
4. The larger the crowd, the less the individuality. Draw upon your study of Belonging to examine this assertion. (ETA 2009 Trial)

Personal Response

1. To what degree has studying the concept of ‘belonging’ augmented your understanding of yourself, of others, and of the world?
   In your answer, refer to your own prescribed text and at least three other related texts of your own choosing.
2. To what extent have your perceptions of belonging been influenced by the texts you’ve studied? In your answer, refer to your prescribed text and two other texts of your choosing.
   1. NOTE: this was the question provided in the BOS sample HSC paper
3. How has your study of belonging changed you?

Difficulty/duality of belonging/not belonging

1. The challenge to belong may be resisted or embraced. How is this explored in your prescribed text and ONE other related text of your own choosing? (CSSA 2011 Trial)
2. “Despite an individual’s desire to belong to a group or community, this not always possible.” How do the texts you have studies represent the processes and results of belonging and/or not belonging?
3. Belonging to a group or community can provide opportunities and disappointments. To what extent do the texts you have studies support this idea?
4. Belonging is a struggle.
5. Belonging can be self-fulfilling and self-destructive. Explain the relevance of this statement with close reference to the texts you have studied.
6. In our quest to belong we will experience both opportunities and disappointments.
7. ‘Belonging creates dilemmas”. Discuss this statement in relation to your study.
8. “Not belonging is a far more difficult road to travel than that of belonging”. How does your prescribed texts and TWO other texts of your own choosing explore ideas of belonging and not belonging?
9. People experience a sense of belonging in varied and complex ways. How is this explored in the texts you have studied? (CSSA 2009 Trial)
10. Belonging and not belonging is determine by the relationships a character has with others and the world. (Hills Grammar 2010 assessment).
11. Belonging always comes at a price. Does your study of Belonging support this idea? (ETA 2009 Trial)
12. How do composers show us of the value of belonging, or indeed not belonging, in a variety of situations?
13. Is a sense of belonging or not belonging more powerful in the texts you have studied?

Need to Belong

1. Belonging is a fundamental part of society. Discuss this idea with reference to the core text and with at least two of your related texts
2. Belonging is an instinctive human need in all of us.
3. The need to belong marks us as human and it is such connections that lead to fulfilment.
   After studying belonging, to what extent do you agree with this statement? In your answer refer to your prescribed text and two text of your own choosing.
4. The need to belong marks us a human and it is such connection that lead to fulfilment.
5. Our desire to belong is universal, but expresses itself in different ways.
6. “The human spirit craves a sense of belonging”. To what extent do the texts you have studied support this idea?
7. “Our lives are shaped by our sense of belonging”. Discuss the extent to which belonging shapes our lives.
8. ‘Connecting with others is the cornerstone of personal contentment.’ To what extent do you agree with this statement?
9. The basic human need to belong directs our thoughts and actions. How do your prescribed text and two texts of your own choosing explore ideas of belonging and not belonging.

Belonging and Relationships:

1. “Relationships are important in finding a sense of belonging”. Discuss in relation to your study of belonging.
2. An individual’s sense of belonging emerges from the connections made with people, place and community.
3. By building connections, we create a source of stability and belonging. (CTHS 2009 Half Yearly)

Belonging and Perspectives:

1. How are perceptions of belonging shaped by personal, cultural, historical and social contexts?
2. We search for a place to belong, not realising that it’s our perceptions and attitudes and not the place that allow us to belong.
3. “Belonging is dependant on the perspective of the individual”. Discuss this statement with particular focus on how the composers of texts represent perceptions of belonging.
4. Attitudes towards belonging change over time. How have the texts you have studied explored shifting attitudes towards belonging? (ETA 2009 Trial)

Other

1. More than anything else, belonging is about finding a sense of place in the world’ Do you agree? Argue your point of view, referring to the texts you have studied
2. Belonging is dynamic, process driven and complex. Using the concepts of journeys and change, create an argument which synthesises the three concepts mentioned above.
3. Family traditions counter alienation and confusion. They help define who we are; they provide something steady, reliable and safe in a confusing world.
4. An individual’s sense of belong is determined by external forces. To what extent do you agree with the statement? (CTHS 2010 Trial)
5. ‘A sense of belonging requires an understanding of one’s past.’ To what extend is this notion of belonging explored in your prescribed text and two related texts? (BGHS 2010 Trial)
6. “Acceptance is the start of belonging.” Evaluate this statement in relation to the representation of belonging in the texts you have studied. (2009 Cheltenham Girls HS Trial)
7. ‘When we understand what belonging means, we gain personal insight and empathy for others.’ To what extent both texts you have studied support this idea?

A typical post-modernist piece, this film, instead of a genuine blockbuster is reflective of the New Hollywood filmmaking practices and of the entire cultural climate of its time.

The film, being reflective of the problematics of the postmodern condition in contemporary culture and life, raises the crucial question of the direction New Hollywood has taken towards the spectacular and the glitz of show-business.

This phenomenon reflects a fundamental shift in the notion of consumption in our consumer society, which as Featherstone points out, is no longer “considered as a mere reflex of production” but has assumed a central role to “social reproduction” (75); that is, the term consumer culture does not simply signify the increasing proliferation of products as commodities, but also the fact that cultural activities themselves are permeated by a consumption of signs and images.

…the term consumer culture points to the ways in which consumption ceases to be a simple appropriation of utilities, or use values, to become a consumption of signs and images in which the emphasis upon the capacity to endlessly reshape the cultural or symbolic aspect of the commodity makes it more appropriate to speak of commodity signs. The culture of a consumer society is therefore held to be a vast floating complex of fragmentary signs and images, which produces an endless sign-play which destabilize[s] long-held symbolic meanings and cultural order. 

The premise on which the imaginative screenplay of The Truman Show depends reflects the commodification of culture itself as explained above. Everything in the televisual setting of “The Truman Show” is on sale, not for its use-value but for its exchange value; items like the Elk Rotor Mower or the Mococoa drink on the Truman catalogue are sold because they appear on the Show, but what is actually on sale is life itself; for the audience of the “Truman Show,” Truman’s life is the hottest commodity. It is so announced right from the beginning of the film. Peter Weir begins the movie with talking-head close-ups of Christof, Marlon and Meryl who offer off-hand remarks on the quality of their show, allegedly speaking to their audience, but actually addressing directly the film spectators. In the technospeak, characteristic of the slightly exaggerated expedience of most advertising discourse, Christof claims in the opening lines of the film:

We’ve become bored with watching actors giving us phony emotions. We’re tired of pyrotechnics and special effects. While the world he inhabits is in some respects counterfeit, there is nothing fake about Truman himself. No scripts, no cue-cons. It’s not always Shakespeare, but it’s genuine. It’s a life.

There is a point hidden in Christof’s remark above about people being tired of “phony emotions” and “pyrotechnics” and “special effects,” which is an indirect indictment of the spectacular entertainment offered by the contemporary blockbuster. The implication being made is that what people really need is genuine human experience that cannot be catered for by the obviously contrived contemporary (cinematic) fiction of special effects; an “authentic” experience that only live television can offer. They have hit the jackpot capitalizing on the public’s starving for authentic human experience.

Marlon (as Louis Coltrane) and Meryl (as Hannah Gill)6 also speak in a similar vein, stressing the real-life experience emitted as a result of Truman’s spontaneity: “It’s all true, it’s all real. Nothing about it is fake, it’s merely controlled.” But we, the actual film viewers, as well the television audience within the film, know that Truman’s life is manipulated, that “The Truman Show” is exactly like the countless docu-dramas and real-life soap operas we gorge daily on our own TV screens.

Peter Weir’s self referential film-within-a-film structure encourages responders bemusement as they watch the reactions of the “real people” onscreen, the fictional audience of the television show. As Chris Bolton says, “A handful of them become familiar. The man who never seems to leave his bathtub; the parking garage attendants who would rather watch the show than retrieve your car; the patrons and employees at a place called “The Truman Bar,” where it seems no one ever thinks or talks about anything else”.

This increasing reliance on fabricated rather than real experience highights what Baudrillard terms an “ecstasy of communication” that defines postmodern life and culture. This is the age of simulations and the simulacra, of mediated representations and reproductions, images and signs that have taken up the place of objects and commodities in the fabric of social, everyday life. To Baudrillard, the simulacrum “means an image, the semblance of an image, make-believe, or that which conceals the truth or the real”.

Renee Magritte captions an arrangement of paint on canvas (1928) with the denotative words, “Ceci n’est pas une pipe.” (This is not a pipe). This can further support Baudrillard’s hypothesis on the “Simulacrum”. Our eyes tell us it is a pipe because we are used to decoding images, colour and perspective; but it is not a pipe for it cannot be smoked.

The process in which representations of things come to replace the things being represented is called “simulation”.  Baudrillard coined the term “simulacra”, meaning that signs have no relation to reality; they simulate a simulation:

In the age of hyperreality, the essence of the postmodern moment is the admittance of the bankruptcy of the real, “when the real is no longer what it used to be” (Baudrillard]. Hence this premium on the real and lived experience in live presentation, which as Denzin remarks,

“…only underscores the extent to which the ‘aura’ that previously surrounded lived experience, like the ‘aura’ of the ‘original’ work of art [as defined by] Benjamin (1955/1968: 223), has been erased. They have both become reproductions, separated from their original time and space, they have now become commodities which circulate inside the simulational model of communication.”

Baudrillard’s theory of communication helps trace “the three historical orders of appearance where images and signs changed their relationship to reality” in western culture, as Denzin explains:

These orders of appearance are:

(1) The Counterfeit, the ‘dominant scheme of the “classical” period, from the Renaissance to the industrial revolution,’ where signs reflected and then perverted a basic reality, art imitated life (Baudrillard 1988a: 83);

(2) Production: the dominant scheme of the industrial age, where signs masked the absence of a basic reality, as in the age of mass reproduction;

(3) Simulation, the reigning ‘scheme of the current phase,’ where signs now bear no relationship to any reality.

Arguably, The Truman Show is reflective not only of the postmodern condition of hyperreality, but it can also be conceived as playing up with the three-stage evolution of the sign in the history of representation:

(1) Counterfeit, in its sense of being a nostalgic narrative of the ’50s. Truman’s world is such a faithful representation of a period that appears as if “freshly-scrubbed”. It is always fair weather on Seahaven island, the streets are spotless, the people are smiling—a heavenly paradise. As Richard Corliss observes, “the film’s light is so soothing, beckoning a near life-experience. Its cool glow is so intense, you may feel you’re getting a gentle tan as you watch the film” Admiring an incredibly fabulous sunset Marlon exclaims: “That’s the Big Guy. Quite a big paint-brush he’s got.” As a period piece (of the ’50s), with a realism observed to the tiniest detail, Truman’s world is perfect: art imitating life. But since it never ceases being a reproduction or a copy, it offers by definition a perverted picture of an era, so dear to a hippie-generation of filmmakers that keep on revisiting it in nostalgia narratives.

Incidentally, nostalgia films have been given special attention by postmodern theorists as symptomatic of “a society that has become incapable of dealing with time and history”. However, others maintain that such films, whether mainstream or self-reflexive, “do more than colonize the present in a way that symbolizes an inability to ‘focus on our own present.’ More than that, Lash continues, “such non-discursive, figural texts problematize and make unstable the very ability to represent, hence capture the ‘real’.” “They appropriate,” Denzin adds, “the residual past through pop images which simultaneously mock the past and the present”.

 (2) Production. Truman’s story is so refreshing and riveting that as Anthony Leong puts it, it ends before we have the chance “to explore the logistical nightmare of running such a television show. Actors’ demands for higher salaries, rehearsals, story development, what the cast members do outside the show”, let alone the manpower and the finance that the production design of such a gigantic project requires. Christof controls the 5000 hidden cameras and other sophisticated electronic equipment from the control room, strategically placed on top of the dome, on the moon of Truman’s universe. When we consider the immensity of the network and the dissemination of visual information around the globe, we are left with a sense of time and space fragmentation, and an electronic space can not be inhabited. It denies or prosthetically transforms the spectator’s physical body so that subjectivity and affect free-float or free-fall or free-flow across a horizontal / vertical grid. We find ourselves in an existential limbo, trying to recuperate from a pervasive sense of derealization, effected by the impact of the electronic image upon our subjectivity. This decentering of the self in the two-dimensional, spatio-temporal fluidity of electronic space is perfectly conveyed in cinematic form by Peter Weir.

In just a single shot he manages to combine the spatio-temporal co-ordinates of three textual levels: in the True-talk interview the camera captures, in the same frame, Sylvia looking at Christof on her TV screen, which includes an insert small “window” of Truman having breakfast. Thus, narratively speaking, we are presented with three distinct ontological levels: Truman’s world at the hypodiegetic level, subject to the gaze of Sylvia’s and Christof’s world, as they occupy the diegetic level, and a hyperdiegetic or metadiegetic level, effected by the gaze of Christof’s panoptic tower, a gaze which controls both the hypodiegetic and the diegetic worlds, and coincides with that of the actual spectator. Thus this welter of different perspectives and perceptual sites signals an uncertain subject position vis-a-vis narrative space and time; as spectators, we are confused in our engagement with the world, say choosing between the comfortable stability of the Seahaven utopia and the flat, free-floating, disembodied space of network communication.

After the screening of The Matrix on its first release, a dear cousin of mine, film connoisseur and avid fan of classical movies, spontaneously made the following comment: “This is an entirely new cinema to me!” If anything, The Matrix is a clear marker of cultural change. A film with state-of-the-art production values like this is bound to elicit in us the belated realization of how slow our response has been to the cultural products of an entirely transformed film industry, that of New Hollywood. My cousin’s casual and unwitting remark reflects the embarrassment felt by both professional critic and layman alike in coping with contemporary movies, especially when we still tend to approach New Hollywood products with the standards of the Old Hollywood cinema. Because of our adherence to tradition, we still tend to look for those classical values of “development”, “coherence” and “unity” in narratives only to find with disappointment that narrative plots become thinner, that characters are reduced to one-dimensional stereotypes and that action is carried through by loosely-linked sequences, built around spectacular stunts, dazzling stars and special effects. Narrative complexity is sacrificed on the altar of spectacle as today’s blockbusters turn out to be nothing but calculated exercises in profit-making, all high-concept, high-gloss and pure show. Similar cries of warning about the loss of narrative integrity to cinematic spectacle have been voiced at different periods, usually at times of crisis or change in the history of the American cinema. One could cite, for example, Bazin’s disdain at the “displacement of classicism” by the baroque style, marking the end of the pure phase of classical cinema.1 His coined term, “superwestern, ”designates the “emergence of a new kind of western”, that, according to Bazin, “would be ashamed to be just itself, and looks for some additional interest to justify its existence—an aesthetic, sociological, moral, psychological, political, or erotic interest.” Similarly, in 1957 Manny Farber, taking his cue from Bazin’s superwestern, laments the “disappearance of this [classical] production system and the closing of action-oriented neighborhood theaters in the 1950s”. He claims that directors like Howard Hawks “who had flourished in ‘a factory of unpretentious picture-making’ were pushed towards artistic self-consciousness, thematic seriousness, and big-budget spectacle “. A decade later, Pauline Kael too expresses her fears at the disintegration of filmic narrative which she attributes to the abrasion of traditional film production in general. She laments not only the emphasis on “technique” “purely visual content,” and “open-ended, elaborate interpretations” of the experimental and innovative art film of the New American Cinema, but as Krämer puts it,

…she was equally critical of the experiences facilitated by Hollywood’s mainstream releases. The lack of concern for coherent storytelling on the part of producers and directors in charge of the volatile and overblown process of filmmaking was matched by the audience’s enthusiastic response to spectacular attractions and shock effects, irrespective of their degree of narrative motivation.

Voices of dissatisfaction were heard at another major turn in the history of Hollywood, that is in the late 1970s, when the “unprecedented box-office success of Jaws (1975) and Star Wars (1977), signaled Hollywood’s aesthetic, cultural and industrial re-orientation towards movies with more emphasis on special effects and cinematic spectacle”. Unlike the classical movies produced on the assembly line under the studio regime (films that respected narrative integrity and refined story ideas into the classical three-act of exposition, complication and resolution), the products of New Hollywood, says critic Richard Schickel, seem “to have lost or abandoned the art of narrative.... [Filmmakers] are generally not refining stories at all, they are spicing up ‘concepts’ (as they like to call them), refining gimmicks, making sure there are no complexities to fur our tongue when it comes time to spread the word of mouth”. Contemporary cinema has come to depend so much on shrewd marketing and advertising strategies that its pictures, as Mark Crispin Miller points out, “like TV ads, ... aspire to a total ‘look’ and seem more designed than directed”.

The difficulty that critics nowadays face with films like The Matrix and the new situation in Hollywood, is not only unlike the layman’s inability to assess “any recent Hollywood film as a discreet textual artifact that is either ‘better’ or ‘worse’ than the artifact produced under the studio regime;” It has also to do with regarding “the textual form of recent Hollywood as expressive of changed production circumstances that lead to a different kind of textual artifact”. In other words, as we move on in our globalized, high-tech age, it is becoming increasingly difficult to regard any single movie as a self-contained, autonomous text. On the contrary, as Eileen Meehan contends, it has become imperative to look upon any New Hollywood mainstream release “always and simultaneously as text and commodity, intertext and product line”.