Baudrillard

Below is an excerpt of Baudrillard about Los Angeles. His writing is so beautiful, so inspiring. Los Angeles is exactly that. It's caos, you can feel it when you're in it. The people that you meet are even like that. It's too simplistic to say that they are fake, because they're not. It's like they are always on the move.

Baltimore... is influenced by John Waters' movies. Waters' early films like Female Trouble depict Baltimore's interior. The domestic urbanity that he depicts are always ridden with violence and dirt.

What would the city have to do to undo such a strong negative imagery?


Disneyland: the archetype of the simulated city. A city in which illusion becomes reality; in which the hopes and dreams of the ideal world are realized. The crowd at Disneyland is a warm one, people are friends, laughter, joy, imagination and creativity abound. No body cries in Disneyland. Just like a real city, the crowd (the population) are directed in ordered currents and flows. We follow arrows, we stand in lines, just as we drive between the painted lines of the street. Disneyland is, in miniature, the ideal American city. Rules are obeyed because there is no alternative.

Here is a city where murder, rape and adultery do not exist.
No one is pretending that Disneyland is real: even children are made keenly aware of this fact.
ëYou are about to enter the world of Imaginationí ëYou are about to enter the world of Tomorrow' Baudrillard writes that, "Disneyland is presented as imaginary in order to make us believe that the rest is real, whereas Los Angeles [is] no longer real, but belongs to the hyperreal order and to the order of simulation."

Los Angeles has become, according to Baudrillard, "a city whose mystery is precisely that of no longer being anything but a network of incessant, unreal circulation -- a city of incredible proportions but without space, without dimension.

As much as electrical and atomic power stations, as much as cinema studios, this city, which is no longer anything but an immense scenario and a perpetual pan shot, needs this old imaginary like a sympathetic nervous system made up of childhood signals and faked phantasms.