Introducing Phiction, a monthly newsletter
Baudrillard, Slack, Naomi Watts, and finding meaning in hyperreality
Welcome to Phiction! I am Micah Cash, a 22-year-old writing student from Tulsa, Oklahoma living in New York City. That’s all you need to know about me, and as for this newsletter, consider the post that follows as a sort of mission statement.
No Hay Banda
There is a scene in David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive that lives rent-free in my head. Wide-eyed protagonist Naomi Watts wanders into an old-timey theater in LA with her amnesiac friend who has adopted her nickname, Rita, from a Rita Hayworth poster. The theater is called “Club Silencio” and features a charismatic, creepy emcee who alternates between Spanish and English in his vague pronouncements about reality and illusion.
“No hay banda. There is no band.” This is a not-so-subtle hint at what comes next, the scene that is burned into my mind’s eye.
The performance is so raw, so real, that the reveal you know is coming (“it’s all recorded”) still manages to be shocking and effective. What I’m interested in here is Naomi Watts’ face at 2:40, when she realizes (along with the viewer) that her eyes and ears have deceived her. Things are not as they seem.
Hyperreality
David Lynch has almost certainly read Baudrillard, a French theorist who coined the term hyperreality. From the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy:
[Baudrillard’s] postmodern universe is one of hyperreality in which entertainment, information, and communication technologies provide experiences more intense and involving than the scenes of banal everyday life.
Individuals flee from the “desert of the real” for the ecstasies of hyperreality (e.g., media simulations of reality, Disneyland and amusement parks, malls and consumer fantasylands, TV sports, virtual reality games, social networking sites, and other excursions into ideal worlds).
The result is “an over-proximity of all things, a foul promiscuity … open to everything and [living] in the most extreme confusion.” In Baudrillard’s famous formulation, “Illusion is the fundamental rule.”
Don’t worry, that’s all the postmodern theory I’m going to bore you with. But I think Baudrillard was on to something (remarkably, he first wrote about hyperreality in 1981), and it has something to do with why I can’t stop thinking about that scene from Mulholland Drive.
This feeling, call it the Naomi Watts face, is unsettlingly familiar, at least for me. It’s the feeling that the modern world is too bloated for any intelligent synthesis. It’s what F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote in This Side of Paradise:
Life is too huge and complex. The world is so overgrown that it can’t lift its own fingers, and I was planning to be such an important finger.
It’s how I feel when the stock market reaches new highs on the same day that new coronavirus cases do. Or when I reach the end of a heartwarming TV ad only to see the logo of some brand completely disconnected from the content of the ad. Or when my roommate and I receive a debt collection notice in the mail and the language is so vague that even after several close readings and Google searches, we can’t tell if it’s real or a scam. Or when I learned, recently, what Slack stands for:
Perhaps most acutely, it’s how I have felt in random, everyday situations since the COVID-19 pandemic rearranged our lives. I find myself walking into the grocery store or boarding the subway when I’m suddenly struck by how strange it is that we are all breathing into masks, scared to come within six feet of each other. Like, if you just stop to smell the roses for a second, there is something peculiar about the way things turned out. Something that demands explanation.
Meaning
This essential strangeness is not polite to talk about. But it’s also a springboard for reflection. Only once our easy, familiar preconceptions about the structure of the world have been probed, and if necessary, destroyed, can we think about new ways of living. If this sounds political, that’s because it is (one undeniable lesson from 2020 is that everything is political now). But this newsletter will not be about politics, at least directly.
Baudrillard hypothesized that the glut of information and image and spectacle would have a singular effect: the loss of meaning. That’s what this newsletter will be about: meaning, and where we find it individually and communally. To some, especially in my parents’ generation, the answers are obvious: faith, purposeful work, identity, family & friends, et cetera. It can be difficult to discuss these subjects in certain circles without seeming cliche or retrograde, and this newsletter will attempt to speak earnestly about traditional sources of meaning and how they remain vital.
Another way to think about meaning, though, is meaning as the explanation that the peculiarities of the world demand. Count me among the many who are rightfully skeptical of the ability of traditional sources to provide that type of explanation. We want something more fundamental, more contemporary, more suited to the kind of world that produces the Naomi Watts face. I find this type of meaning in the wonder of big ideas, specifically in three areas of interest: Philosophy, Physics, and Fiction (Phiction, if you will). I am not an expert in any of these subjects, but I’ve studied them enough that I hope to be able to take the ideas of experts and make them understandable and relatable to my audience. Each month, I will write a reflection like this one, focused on some topic from these areas and how it reveals meaning in the world, with special emphasis on the ability of these disciplines to sift through the noise of hyperreality and reveal what’s behind the curtain with a fresh, unorthodox perspective. Much of this will be drawn from outside sources, including clear writers and thinkers of history and contemporary culture, and media (high and low).
At the end of each newsletter, I will share a few recommendations of particularly good content I’ve consumed…
Recommendations
This recent essay in Harper’s by the novelist Ann Patchett, about an unlikely friendship set against the backdrop of the pandemic, might be the best thing I read this year. It’s funny, surprising, expansive, and ultimately, uplifting. And my Mom loved it.
Reveal, a podcast by the Center for Investigative Reporting, has a new eight-part series called American Rehab that uncovers the wild history of a nationwide addiction treatment center. The story is stranger than fiction, ranging from cults to country music to Ronald Reagan to rattlesnakes. But what kept me listening was the professionalism and perseverance of the journalists who host, tracking down every lead, landing incredible interviews, and eventually uncovering a deeper and darker reveal than they ever expected.
In a year where it was difficult to keep sustained attention on anything, I enjoyed four books that imitated quick bursts of attention with their form. Dept. of Speculation by Jenny Offill (a novel), So Many Olympic Exertions by Anelise Chen (a memoir incorporating sportswriting and self-help), The Shapeless Unease by Samantha Harvey (a genre-defying meditation on the author’s bout with insomnia) and Who Killed My Father by Edouard Louis (a deeply personal polemic on the French political system) are each composed of a long series of brief snippets, quotes, thoughts, stories, statistics, etc., some as short as one sentence and some as long as a few pages. I found this style of collage pleasurable to read and still plenty able to convey larger themes and coherence.
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Thank you so much for reading, please reach out with any comments, questions, or concerns, and Happy New Year!
Micah
Well done. Thoughtful. The depth of intellect and perception is what I would expect from a member of the Cash family--Murray, Goldie, Jamie and Sharon--not Johnny.