RodRigo Manzde Paula RaMos1
Abstract: The purpose of this essay is to apply Max Horkheimer’s and Theodor Adorno’s concept of culture industry and Jean Baudrillard’s concept of simulacra - or the loss of real - in the interpretation of Fred Schepisi’s movie, Six Degrees of Separation.
This study will point out how the movie illustrates these concepts by portraying fiction-al and yet refiction-alistic individufiction-als’ lives, conveying thus a criticism on the post-modern life style under the strong influence of values imposed by the media.
Keywords: Adorno. Horkheimer. Culture Industry. Baudrillard. Simulacra.
S
ix Degrees of Separation tells us a story that takes place in New York and is centred on the encounter, and its further developments, between Paul, a poor, brilliant and am-bitious young con man, played by Will Smith, and a high-society couple of money-cov-eting art dealers, Ouisa and Flan Kittredge, played respectively by Stockard Channing and Donald Sutherland. We do not know much about Paul’s background, but it is safe to assume that he is a poor African-American young man who is trying to change his life seeking social and cultural ascension by creating a new image for himself; a socially seductive image of an intelligent, well cultured and educated young man, son of a re-spected and influential Hollywood actor and director, Sydney Poitier.One night, Paul meets Trent Conway, an MIT student who gives him detailed information about people from his social circle, and who teaches Paul how to behave as one of them in exchange for sexual favours. Thus, by submitting himself to a process of commodification of his body, Paul gets the information necessary for him to build him-self a new image. For that, he learns details of high-society people’s lives, their manners and their speech variant, and memorises culturally curious anecdotes and facts. All this to be able to simulate a different person, to become someone who would be accepted by the high circles of society, one that would belong to it. Around the 22 minute-mark of the movie, in his first encounter with the Kittredges, Paul is asked by Geoffrey, a rich politician from South Africa, how it feels being “black in America”, to what he responds saying he does not feel American nor black. This shows how radically different is the image he is trying to construct.
The image created by Paul is one feature of the movie that can exemplify Bau-drillard’s concept of simulacrum. For the philosopher, an image or a sign has four suc-cessive phases:
1 English undergraduate student at the University of São Paulo. E-mail:
rodrigomanz@
gmail.com
cinema it is the reflection of a basic reality
it masks and perverts a basic reality it masks the absence of a basic reality it bears no relation to any reality what-soever: it is its own pure simulacrum.
(BAUDRILLARD, 2010, p. 1560) Paul creates an image that belongs to the third phase, since he masks the ab-sence of a basic reality behind his image by sustaining it with forged facts that correspond to the real world. He is very convincing in telling stories of his alleged father, a public and admired figure whom he knows by reading his biography; he knows many details of the Kittredges and other acquainted families and explains with eloquence his alleged thesis about The Catcher in the Rye. According to Bau-drillard (2010, p. 1558), “To simulate is to feign to have what one hasn’t.”, and that is exactly what Paul does. He simulates hav-ing money, influence, academic education and even an identity dissociated from the social status of his skin colour. Around the mark of 28 minutes and 40 seconds of the movie, Paul gives a speech about imag-ination and how it is God’s gift to help humans cope with reality and with them-selves. Again, that is what he is doing; by making use of his ingenuity, his imagi-nation and the information he got from Conway and from books, Paul manages to live a completely different reality. Will Smith’s character intelligently endues his new identity with values and symbols of the culture industry which Geoffrey and the Kittredges admire and hold as glam-orous. Besides his flattering character, politeness, erudition and famous father,
Paul seduces the high-society trio by of-fering them the part as extras in the al-leged cinematographic production of the successful Broadway musical, Cats, an icon of pop-culture. Even though we find out later in the movie that Flan dislikes Cats, he is fascinated with the idea of par-ticipating in its success, even if just as an extra. Peter Barry says that Baudrillard is concerned with:
‘the loss of the real’, which is the view that in contemporary life the pervasive influence of images from film, TV and advertising has led to a loss of the dis-tinction between real and imagined, reality and illusion, surface and depth.
The result is a culture of hyperreality, in which distinctions between these are eroded.(BARRY, 2009, p.84) In that sense, Paul is not the only one creating images; the Kittredges also do that. They build up an image of an art loving, sophisticated and happy family around themselves when, in fact, their real interest lies in money. Their chil-dren, whom they barely know, do not like them. So strongly do they believe in the roles they play that they do not see themselves for what they really are.
However, after Geoffrey agrees in rais-ing the offer for a Kandinsky’s paintrais-ing (35 minute mark), the Kittredges get elat-ed with the prospect of making money.
Their happiness is so that Ouisa says,
“Who said ‘when an artist dream, they dream of money’? God, I must be such an artist.” and Flan compares Geoffrey (the source of the money) to God. This scene reveals their true selves; the art and
cul-ture they possess and know, for them, are just a commodity, simply a mean to enrich themselves with status and capi-tal. Their fascination with pop-culture, their covetousness for profit by selling art, and the sophisticated image they use as a facade for their business enclose the Kittredges in the system of Adorno’s and Horkheimer’s culture industry; a culture that reduces art into a commodity, that creates and recreates homogenized so-cial values and relationships, enthrall-ing the individuals’ consciousness, con-tributing for maintenance of the status quo. The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism explains that:
The production of such art is also complicit with what Adorno and his fellow German social critic Max Horkheimer called the ‘culture indus-try’, meaning the constellation of en-tertainment businesses that produce film, television, radio, magazines and popular music – all phenomena creat-ed by mass technology in which the lines between art, advertising and propaganda blur.(LEICHT, 2010, p.
1107)
By the end of the movie, Ouisa wakes up from that hypnotized state thanks to her experiences with Paul.
She then comes to the realization of how empty her life had been, how it was re-duced into a quest for money and pres-tige to maintain her life style. Even her experiences with Paul had become a commodity in the form of an anecdote to entertain and attract more buyers.
On the other hand, Paul uses illusion to
change his status quo and ascend socially, but he does not want money; even with all his cunning he only takes the neces-sary to get by. It seems that what he re-ally cherishes are the experiences he has and the things he learns. He also seems to enjoy defying society’s values just as he does with the place or status imposed onto him. For example, when he goes to a fancy restaurant with Rick and asks him to dance. He is defying and criticis-ing the conservatism of those bourgeois in a much similar manner to that of the modernist artists in the beginning of the twentieth century. This is in consonance with:
[…] [what] Adorno would assert on many occasions, [that] the only legiti-mate form of art that can do some jus-tice to the immense suffering in the world is the autonomous art of mod-ernism, which, through its apparent detachment from reality, critiques the world as it is, holding up the prom-ise of a better future.(LEICHT, 2010, p.
1107)
The greatest advantages in using the concepts of culture industry and sim-ulacra when analysing Six Degrees of Sep-aration lie on the fact that they are at the central topic of the movie and are com-plementary to each other. The first con-cept explores the simulating capability of signs, which is the essence of the later, to create illusions that alienate their sub-jects from reality, depriving them of con-sciousness and criticism and imposing specific social roles and models. Howev-er, the movie shows us, by Paul’s
exam-cinema ple, that human power of abstraction
and imagination can also be used, ac-cording to philosophers such as Ni-etzsche and Adorno, in a critical, enlight-ening and liberating way. Y
References
BARRY, P. “Post-Modernism”. In:
Beginning Theory: an introduction to Lit-erary and Cultural Theory. Manchester University Press, 2009.
BAUDRILLARD, J. “The Divine Ir-reference of Images”. In: The Norton An-thology of Theory and Criticism. London:
W. W. Norton & Company, 2010.
LEICHT, V. B. The Norton Antholo-gy of Theory and Criticism. London: W. W.
Norton & Company, 2010.
SCHEPISI, F. Six Degrees of Separa-tion. Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Studios Inc., 1993.