Baudrillard similarly writes of a hyperreality, where the "real" is
no longer engaged in a structural tension between itself and its artifice.
The real and the artificial have, in the post-industrial proliferation
of the commodity sign and simulation, imploded upon each other. He writes,
"Today everyday political, social, historical, economic etc, reality has
already incorporated the hyperrealist dimension of simulation so that we
are now living entirely within the "aesthetic" hallucination of reality...there
is no longer any fiction that life can possibly confront, even as its conqueror".6
Again, "The hyperreal...effaces the contradiction of the real and the imaginary.
Irreality no longer belongs to the dream or the phantasm, to a beyond or
a hidden interiority, but to the hallucinatory resemblance of the real
to itself".7
This 'aestheticization of everyday life' is fully assimilated by the
world portrayed in The Big Lebowski. The Dude is confronted
by a plethora of characters whose very selves are fabricated by the commodity-signs
they consume and use to display themselves and orient themselves to others.
Roger Ebert, in his review of the film, makes the point that 'here, in
a film set at the time of the Gulf War, are characters whose speech was
shaped by earlier times: Vietnam (Walter), the flower power era (the Dude)
and Twilight Zone (Donny). Their very notion of reality may
be shaped by the limited ways they have to describe it'.8
The film is full of a hyperreal display of self, where a character such
as John Turrturro's paedophile can reinvent himself as a purple-suited
bowling celebrity known as 'The Jesus', where a man living off the wealth
of his dead wife can fabricate himself as an all-American self made millionaire,
and where the Dude can unreflexively 'dig the style' of a man who appears
to have chosen to write himself as a Hollywood western style cowboy, complete
with a penchant for saspirrella. Jameson's concerns for the oppositional
status of modernist traditions of art find their realisation in the characters
of Maude Lebowski, a feminist performance artist, and her acquaintance
Knox Harrington, a video artist. In the context of the film the production
of modern art appears to be merely another 'life style' choice, complicit
with the swamping of all facets of life with the aestheticized commodity
signs of late capital.
The Dude inhabits the hyper-aesthetisized, post-industrial world described
with concern by Jameson and Baudrillard with a seeming nostalgia for a
feudal historical epoch, when signs referred to a well-policed social reality;
when millionaires were millionaires and cowboys were cowboys. The anxieties
which would plague a modern, anxieties of distinguishing the real from
the appearance, seem to elude the Dude, whose experience appears to be
that of Jameson's and Baudrillard's archetypal pomo schizophrenic; he swims
in the hyperreal like water in water, unaware of any vague anxieties about
the artifice of his environment, or the inauthenticity of Baudrillard's
'aesthetic hallucination of reality'.
