Between the Silver & the Screen: Cinema, TV, and the Staging of Reality
This text is about two works, one cinematic and one literary, America (1989)—a book written by Jean Baudrillard—and Asteroid City (2023)—a film directed by Wes Anderson. The two works share a likeness, as if made from a similar holographic substance. The first is about America, and the second about The Stage, but as you slowly impose one image upon the other, sliding one across the other, they start to diffract, producing a lenticular, interactive moiré; images and illusions continually jump out of the surface until everything seems to suddenly, at the point of peak phase cancellation, disappear. This text attempts to trace the photographic phenomenon, to record the interference pattern like sporesprint.
Part I — America
Jean Baudrillard’s book America diverges from his usual theoretical oeuvre, as it is quite literally just Baudrillard-en-tour, on holiday, in 1985. It is a text which documents that characteristic play of ecstasies and disappointments that we often associate with travelling, but it is an eccentric, rambling sort-of text that contains no small degree of madness, the kind of madness which duly follows revelation. It wasn’t his first time in America, by any means, and, given that Baudrillard had already published Simulacres et Simulation in 1981, he had already given a decisive verdict on the United States of America years before his trip in 1985: America doesn’t exist—it’s not real—and rather exists as a site of simulations and projections—from New York to Disneyland—which exists in order to make America seem real, but America is “more real than real,” it is hyperreal.
This is certainly the view of New York which is presented in the book in the opening, a scene in which it is hard not to imagine Baudrillard sitting on a sight-seeing bus wearing Minnie Mouse ears, holding candy floss, pointing his finger and taking photos of a plethora of dystopian simulation stereotypes that seem to have been extracted from his imagination and reproduced like a series of custom Jean-Baudrillard-themed Happy Meal Toys: ‘the man eating lunch alone on the bonnet of his car,’ (15) ‘the insomniac motel occupant,’ (60) ‘the masochist jogger foaming at the mouth,’ (36) and ‘the breakdancer in the Bronx,’ (19) all playing their roles like hired actors, as if they have nothing to do except continuously “produce the permanent scenario of the city.” (17) “New York acts out its own catastrophe as a stage play.” (22)
Yet this trip would be different, as Baudrillard would, for the first time, leave the cities and the University campuses of the East Coast, following the true America vector, West. In this book, Baudrillard seems only to talk about New York in order to suddenly stop talking about it, as it is in the massive expanses of deserts and freeways that Baudrillard will have his revelation, one that is seemingly caused by the “absolute horizontality” (2) of California, Nevada and the American West. As he is driven West, Baudrillard enters a place that is so “empty” that even “the silence is visual,” as “there is nothing for the gaze to reflect off of.” (6) There are times when it seems that there is only the desert, the road itself upon which his car drives: pure, undiluted ground. He becomes ecstatic, obsessed with ‘reading the land itself,’ reading its “geology” and “mineralogy” as a language, something which signifies. Here, he will realise that it is not just New York that is cinematic, with its Sit-Com characters, the desert itself is an on-going “Geological scenario,” (67) albeit one that precedes any Anthropo-scene:
“Geological—and hence metaphysical—monumentality, by contrast with the physical altitude of ordinary landscapes. Upturned relief patterns, sculpted out by wind, water, and ice, dragging you down into the whirlpool of time, into the remorseless eternity of a slow-motion catastrophe. […] Among this gigantic heap of signs—purely geological in essence—man will have had no significance. The Indians alone perhaps interpreted them - a few of them. And yet they are signs. For the desert only appears uncultivated. […] What is man if the signs that predate him have such power? […] Monument Valley: blocks of language suddenly rising high…” (3)
When everything is ground, there is simultaneously no ground at all, and his journey West is littered with these moments where the ground recedes completely, leaving only a sky of seemingly infinite magnitude, an “astral” America, a “pure air” that is not just defined by scale, but in “unmediated access,” as if “the influence from the stars descends direct from the constellations.” (5)
“Clouds spoil our European skies. Compared with the immense skies of America and their thick clouds, our little fleecy skies and little fleecy clouds resemble our fleecy thoughts, which are never thoughts of wide open spaces… In Paris, the sky never takes off. It doesn’t soar above us. It remains caught up in the backdrop of sickly buildings, all living in each other’s shade, as though it were a little piece of private property. It is not, as here in the great capital New York, the vertiginous glass facade reflecting each building to the others. Europe has never been a continent. You can see that by its skies. As soon as you set foot in America, you feel the presence of an entire continent — space there is the very form of thought.” (16)
In the presence of such a sky, his analyses become less political, and more concerned with a kind of scenography, a composition of sedimented layers, not just on the level of the City and its surrounding highways, but on temporal scales of Man and Earth. He conjures the impression of a Universal cosmic drama as all-encompassing as Hesiod’s Theogony, where even Ouranos is figuratively present in his association between thought and the sky, or how desire is seemingly entangled with access to the light of the stars (de sidere).
America, along with meaning in general, “seems to dissolve in the heat as the molecules in the atmosphere accelerate,” (9) leaving nothing but projections of light: “[everything] appears to be made of the same unreal substance,” like “light [which has passed] through a fine membrane.” (29) Famously, Baudrillard will, here, describe America as “a hologram,” a metaphor which bridges the luminescent appearance of America with his more holistic, structural critique of its scenography. It is a hologram because “information about the whole is present in each of the elements,” (29) whether those elements are ‘California,’ ‘BurgerKing,’ ‘the painted desert,’ ‘Hollywood,’ ‘MGM Studios,’ or even ‘Advertising’ (58); every microcosm is a monadic iteration of America. If America is holographic, then representation can no longer be separated or distinguished from reality.
Consequently—and this is precisely the revelation which drove the writing of America—if there is nothing behind the image to discover, then there is no original which is concealed beneath the surface. In other words, there is no vertical, only the horizon, only an endless surface to project upon; America is not a veil but a screen. What Baudrillard finds in the desert is not merely emptiness, but a mode of appearance: a world that does not hide its artifice because it has no other substance than artifice. The desert, like the city, like the franchises, like Hollywood, does not represent America, but projects it. In this sense, the hologram reflects a cinematic logic. America does not just resemble cinema; rather, cinema seems, for Baudrillard, to name the way America exists (as a projection). Cinema is not limited to the confines of ‘MGM studios,’ but is rather happening on all levels, which collapses all levels into one plane: “Where is the cinema? It is all around you outside, all over the city, [...] the whole country is cinematic.” (54)
“There is nothing more mysterious than a TV set left on in an empty room. It is even stranger than a man talking to himself or a woman standing dreaming at her stove. It is as if another planet is communicating with you. Suddenly the TV reveals itself for what it really is: a video of another world, ultimately addressed to no one at all, delivering its images indifferently, indifferent to its own messages (you can easily imagine it still functioning after humanity has disappeared).” (50)
If anything, the cinema found on the Television screens, and in the Movie Theatres, is a kind of parody of the ‘real cinema,’ functioning as Disneyland does in reaffirming the reality principle: the cinema doesn’t end when the film does. This experience of America seems to disrupt his compass, becoming a land he describes as both “original modernity” (like Europe has never seen, or never could be), (cf. 74, 78) and “the last primitive society.” (7) He hoped, in coming to America, to “gain some distance from Europe,” or “get a fresh angle on it,” but instead, when he looks back, he finds that Europe has “disappeared entirely.” (29) He “disappears” into “the American fiction,” (28) becoming a part of the cinema. When he says that “only Europeans can see the truth of America,” (27) it recalls those Hollywood clichés of The Truman Show, as if Europe (and everyone outside of America proper) are the audience tuning in. It also implies that inside America, you can’t see the movie in the same way that you can’t attend your own party.
“What is new in America is the clash of the first level (primitive and wild) and the ‘third kind’ (the absolute simulacrum). There is no second level. This is a situation we find hard to grasp, since this is the one we have always privileged: the self-reflexive, self-mirroring level, the level of unhappy consciousness. But no vision of America makes sense without this reversal of our values: it is Disneyland that is authentic here! The cinema and TV are America’s reality! The freeways, the Safeways, the skylines, speed, and deserts - these are America, not the galleries, churches, and culture. . . Let us grant this country the admiration it deserves and open our eyes to the absurdity of some of our own customs. This is one of the advantages, one of the pleasures of travel. To see and feel America, you have to have had for at least one moment in some downtown jungle, in the Painted Desert, or on some bend in a freeway, the feeling that Europe had disappeared. You have to have wondered, at least for a brief moment, ‘How can anyone be European?’” (114)
Part II — Asteroid City
“If it’s not symmetrical, it’s not going in the f***ing movie!” — Wes Anderson
It is in recognising the cinematic structure of America, what we could simply call its staging, that we arrive on the set of Wes Anderson’s rather poorly-rated (and thus potentially misunderstood) film, Asteroid City (2023). When viewed in relation to, or as an extension of, Baudrillard’s book America (1989), however, it appears to be very successful, as it is an incredibly on-the-nose exhibition of the staging that is inseparable from Baudrillard’s scenographical analysis of America. Baudrillard’s America is formalized by Asteroid City: the collapse of depth, the horizontality, the scenes and obscenes, the text and metatext. The way Wes Anderson builds the world of Asteroid City enriches how we understand Baudrillard’s reflections on cinema as the structure of America, or the way it appears; a world made of cinema, or structured as if it were cinema.
The opening of the film could have been written by Baudrillard himself: “Asteroid City does not exist.” To call America “a screen” is one of Baudrillard’s attempts to posit America as a place of “pure surface.” His revelation in the Mojave desert did not involve realising something in the sense of ‘uncovering a hidden essence,’ but he rather discovered an absence of essence: there is no truth, only staging. Asteroid City is a film about staging, where a certain transparency or self-awareness is utilized in such a way that it alludes to how Baudrillard might have imagined the cinematic composition of America itself, as a staged staging of staging. The opening scene of Asteroid City reveals everything from the start, like a magician giving away their tricks. Think, for example, about the backgrounds which are deliberately labelled—signs are placed upon the backcloths in relation to the camera. Everything is organized around the camera.
In this introduction, the narrator explains that the film will play out on two levels: there is a screen play—the text, the scene—set in ‘Asteroid City,’ indicated by colourful cinematography, and there is a televised documentary about the making of this play—the metatext, the obscene—set in New York, which is indicated by monochromatic cinematography. Augie Steenbeck (the fictional photographer), for example, is on the level of the text, then Jones Hall (the fictional actor who plays the fictional photographer) is on the level of the meta-text, and, on the next layer, is Jason Schwartzman, the actor who plays the fictional actor and so on. The meta-text, or the obscene, in this case is quite literally a ‘behind-the-scenes’ situation, except it is not ‘behind’ anything, it is rather lateral/adjacent. Through this horizontal staging, the film attempts to produce something like a meta-meta-text, through the flattening of these two worlds into one continuous surface. The introduction appears to instruct the viewer to not, for example, expect anything significantly meaningful to happen in either the text or the meta-text, but to expect meaning to arise elsewhere, such as through the interplay of the scene and the obscene. There is a temptation to describe this feeling in relation to what Baudrillard said about Americans inventing a civilization that “exists so close to the vanishing point,” (10) as the place where perspective and meaning recede; it’s no longer clear where you stand in relation to anything else.
To elaborate, in a screen play, as with a film, we might normally seek meaning on the level of the text, between characters in a fiction, or in the case of a documentary, we might seek meaning in the meta-text. In this case, it is not obvious where to look to find the meaning, it is somewhere in amongst all these arbitrary Hollywood clichés of a Western film (with its cowboys, its sky, its atom bomb tests and bright colourful vistas) and of a Broadway production (with the despair, monochromatic bleakness, and search for meaning). Returning to the image of the Moiré, it is the interactive or diffractive effect that appears as layers of text that converge, and the total phase cancellation, that is of interest in this film. Just as Baudrillard says of America, the viewer is positioned at the vanishing point, at the point of recession or disappearance.
In Asteroid City, there was no twist to deduce, no plot to uncover; instead we are invited to see the way the world is constructed, the staging. Structurally speaking, instead of the meta-text revealing something about the text, the text rather seems to only exist as an anchor for the meta-text. Likewise, the meta-text seems to only be there for the sake of a meta-meta-text. Every layer seems to turn over its shoulder, looking back towards or deferring to something like an ‘implied hypertext,’ which we might say is America itself. There is a scene where we see a backcloth of a desert, in front of which there is a billboard depicting the same backcloth, which itself has a billboard in front of it, which depicts another backcloth, and so on. In a sense, we are another layer of that sequence, a fiction within a fiction within a fiction, all composed to produce another fiction.
The arbitrary fictions of the text and meta-text seem to fold in on themselves: we are first told that Asteroid City doesn’t exist, so we emotionally disconnect from the lives of Augie Steenbeck and Midge Campbell, and then we are told that the ‘behind-the-scenes’ or ‘obscene’ is also edited/staged as a part of the production of the televised documentary. The role of the narrator, who speaks to the audience directly, again blurs the clear distinction between the level of the film and the viewer; we are, as such, invited into the fiction, or we begin to view ourselves as part of the fiction. We are alienated from Augie and Midge, increasingly, until they are suddenly quite relatable again. We, perhaps, don’t identify with Augie as the photographer, or as the parent who has seemingly broken down in the desert, but perhaps we grow to identify with him as this phantasmal Moiré who is caught up in all these meta-layers of a fiction. Perhaps the relatability here could be understood in terms of neurodiversity, a sort of malfunction that causes me to become alienated from myself, to feel a sense of dissociation, but this experience seems so commonplace and widespread that it’s hard not to Universalize it. To elaborate even further, in the Lacanian tradition that Baudrillard is so exposed to and caught up in, we can say that when we attempt to speak, we never quite mean what we say, and it is precisely this failure, or this gap between intention and actuality that we name the subject. This pattern appears in myriad other cultures and traditions; we contain multitudes of various personas, fictions, and it is very easy to get lost in the text. We live, now, in a kind of suspended reality, where A.I. and malicious content farms can produce material that distorts truth, showing us images that deceive us, and we’re forced to suspend belief. We can relate to Jason Schwartzman’s body basically being a screen that various identities and fictions are projected onto; Jason Schwartzman isn’t real. This is the assumption that Wes Anderson’s film makes, this horizontality or this lack of distinction between the layers that would otherwise produce the illusion of depth or verticality.
Baudrillard’s idea of America as a “pure surface” is foregrounded in Asteroid City, and in Wes Anderson’s cinematography in general, particularly in his signature use of horizontal motion. The cameras are all seemingly rigged to a Dolly that create the possibility of smooth, horizontal movement, and the sets are designed around this way of filming. Seamless, mechanical horizontality is the logic of the narrative and how it unfolds, it is the Technique that produces the World of the film which is characterized by the lateral composition of reality’s layers. This is where we might begin to understand cinema as something cosmotechnical, as a method of composing and organizing narratives. Hesiod’s Theogony seemed to structure the entire Ancient Greek world, teaching generation after generation about who they were, where they were, and what they should do. It can be argued that the Ancient Greek world spread as far as there were Ancient Greek speakers, but I would argue that Ancient Greece spread as far as did the word, the story, of which Theogony is the most all-encompassing. Hearing the story becomes an initiation into a world that is structured by the story. Baudrillard’s revelation seems to, for me, revolve around recognising cinema as the true formalization of American fiction, and thus seeing America as a cosmotechnical machine that staged a reality that was simply over-coding Europe. We’re all in America now; America is everywhere. America is a “Television that has been left on,” that we’re constantly seeing through the window of a motel room (68).
Part III — Conclusions
When thinking about cinema and cosmotechnics, where cinema is understood as a way of structuring and staging a reality or a world, The Act of Killing (2012) by Joshua Oppenheimer provides an unsuspecting example. The documentary follows former executioners responsible for genocidal violence in Indonesia. Many of these men explain that they first became gangsters under the influence of American films such as The Public Enemy (1931) or Scarface (1932), which played in local cinemas in the early twentieth century. They did not simply imitate the style of these films but internalized their narrative roles, modelling themselves on cinematic archetypes. Rising through the ranks, these gangsters became hitmen, and it was precisely this self-image which made them ideal recruits when the Suharto regime mobilized death squads to massacre communists. McCarthyism extended out of America not only through economic and military coercion but also through the circulation of images and stories. A narrative first encountered in the cinema could sediment as political reality. Just as with Theogony, a single story can initiate its listener into a larger mythological order, a world-story. In this sense television and reality begin to blur, mimicking the structure of Asteroid City, where the staged scene and the world surrounding it continually fold into one another.
When Donald Trump was first elected, there was widespread discussion of his presidency through Jean Baudrillard’s concept of the obscene. Traditionally we might say that there exists a political scene: the entire apparatus of parties, senate, presidency, the White House, media empires and so on. Alongside this apparatus stands a long philosophical tradition—from Hume and Kant back to Aristotle—which attempts to articulate politics as a higher pursuit of freedom and democracy. In this scenario Trump appears to embody another vision of politics entirely, one characterized less by symbolic mediation than by raw competition for attention and loyalty. Yet, like Asteroid City, the obscene begins to feel as staged as the scene itself, precisely because there is no deeper essence left to uncover. The spectacle of American politics is not concealing anything; rather, it renders everything immediately visible.
There is a temptation to interpret this staging in conspiratorial terms: controlled oppositions that keep political energies circulating within the same system. Figures such as Tucker Carlson, for instance, might capture segments of the conservative electorate who could otherwise defect from electoral politics altogether, reabsorbing them back into the existing structure. This is one way of thinking about staging, but it sits uneasily with the perception developed by Baudrillard in America, where the defining characteristic of the United States is precisely the absence of hidden depth. The situation begins to resemble the text by Girlaccelerated on Becoming Press discussing the Epstein files, which opens with the sober claim that no real consequences will follow from the revelations, and certainly no justice for the victims. The scandal suggests less a secret cabal running the world than a system in which abuses occurred openly because those involved understood there would be no consequences. The point is not hidden power but the absence of depth to be uncovered.
This view of staging is more consistent with the texts we are reading: a staging of staging, yes, but one that conceals nothing. Yet the moiré effect I wanted to evoke here is not strictly political or literal in nature. Like Baudrillard, the phenomenon exceeds critique of ideology. It is not fully captured by the influence of American gangster films in Jakarta, nor by theories of controlled opposition, nor even by the layered narratives surrounding Epstein and Augie Steenbeck. Each of these examples gestures toward the point, yet each remains one degree too literal an interpretation of staging.
Instead, the form that most clearly captured what I experienced as leaping out of Baudrillard’s America and Wes Anderson’s Asteroid City—the talisman, so to speak, in which the trace becomes bound—is the book Unconscious/Television (2025) by Lucas Ferraço Nassif. The book uses television to elaborate on the unconscious in a variety of ways, but its most striking example is the incident commonly called the “Pokémon Shock,” when more than six hundred Japanese children experienced epileptic seizures during an episode of Pokémon. The episode itself concerns the protagonists crossing over into the digital world, entering the interior of the computer or television. At the narrative climax—precisely when the children watching were most absorbed into the narrative—Pikachu’s thunderbolt exits the screen and seemingly triggers the seizures: through the technical apparatus of television and cinema, narrative escapes the screen and sediments as reality.
When Baudrillard writes that television is the reality of America, it is in this unconscious sense, in this blurring between texts and meta-texts. Our watching of Asteroid City, our reading of America, becomes another scene in the show we are watching. We are staged, watching ourselves watch ourselves, in a television show seen by no one, left on in a motel room. When Baudrillard wrote America in 1986, he could still suggest that perhaps only Europeans could truly see America, as if it were a geolocked broadcast. Today the claim is much harder to maintain. America has become ambient. I remember living in Cyprus and jogging past the US embassy without thinking about it at all; American politics felt distant, almost irrelevant. Now living in Berlin, America feels omnipresent. The skies of Cyprus themselves are becoming American, illuminated by the exchange of missiles between US-aligned assets—including Israel and EU countries—and Iran.
Cinema once represented reality; television now produces it.