Postmodernism

After watching the trailers of “War Games” and “Wag the Dog”, I could identify some of the characteristics of Postmodernism presented by Mary Klages.
 

“War Games”, for instance, clearly illustrates one of the features of postmodern culture- the lack of distinction between game and reality. Here, a boy finds a back door into a military central computer in which reality is confused with game-playing, possibly starting World War III.  Similarly, the film “The Matrix”, presents the audience with a new and different reality, i.e the “true” nature of people’s reality. The film creates a world which becomes more “real” than the real world, making the audience think, as Klages states, that the “real world” is itself a constructed hyperreality.

The concept of hyperreality is also presented in the film “Wag the Dog”, in which a war is “fabricated” in order to cover-up a presidential sex-scandal. In this case, a false reality is presented as true, i.e the “real” reality. What appears in the screen becomes more real than what is actually happening in the world. And this idea is clearly related to Baudrillard’s concept of simulacrum- the fact that the world has been replaced by a copy world, where people passively take that copy as the original. As Baudrillard suggests what’s on T.V. IS what is “real”, is the only reality we can know. We can’t be sure whether that reality is “really” happening.