Abstract
This paper investigates the 3D digital imagery as a communicative technology that fundamentally reorganizes human perception and the political apparatus. I interpret Coraline (2009) as a gothic mediation of contemporary ideology. A landmark 3D production, the film was acclaimed as “revolutionary” for its advanced digital machinery. Yet, no study has examined the film’s specific racial politics and their disturbing implications for the brand-new ubiquitous experience of surveillance. This analysis addresses that critical scholarly omission, arguing that the films’ 3D images function as psychopolitical instruments engineered to elicit consent to surveillance. I bring Jean Baudrillard’s conception of the third-order simulacrum, which is governed by the total operationality of engineered information, into contact with the lingering legacies of historical systems of bondage and Simone Browne’s critique of racial hypervisibility. The film’s “Other World”, I argue, operates as a cybernetic control system, utilizing the matrix/code to reduce subjectivities to “informatic clones”. This mechanism constructs a seductive virtual space that normalizes the cognitive confinement inherent in the hyperreal networks it builds. By examining Coraline when 3D digital technology was new and exciting, this paper highlights a genealogy of today’s pervasive entanglement with Virtual Reality and hyperreal networks of watching and being watched, offering a new understanding of how contemporary media and platforms normalize the cognitive subjection required by the current digital regime.
Presenters
Mehran AbdollahiStudent, PhD Candidate, University of British Columbia, British Columbia, Canada
Details
Presentation Type
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session
Theme
KEYWORDS
CINEMA, HYPERMEDIA, SURVEILLANCE, VIRTUALITY, IDEOLOGY
