Image, Difference, Vanishing: Some Thoughts on VFX and The Post-Screen
Jenna Ng
I wrote my latest book, The Post-Screen Through Virtual Reality, Holograms and Light Projections: Where Screen Boundaries Lie (Amsterdam University Press, 2021), on screens and screen boundaries. The book argues that contemporary screen media present increasingly imperceptible boundaries, whereby the image potentially becomes indistinguishable from the viewer’s actual surroundings. This, then, is the post-screen: a state of critical attention to the delimitations of screen media and the ensuing problematization of relations between image and object; an intensifying evolution of the virtual and its role in defining media consumers and their realities; and an era of screen media marked by the disappearances of differentiation between subject and object. It is also a point in media history – as in not the history of media, but history and media. Or the correlation between media invention and significant cultural, social and political change, where media become “a discursive object – an object to think with.” (Lister et al 1992, 110) As with the camera obscura in the eighteenth century with respect to perspective; photography in the nineteenth century on the role of automation; or cinema in the twentieth century on the meaning of documentation, the post-screen thus points to how the erosion of screen boundaries exposes a different epistemological space of life, death, actuality, virtuality, truth.
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In being this new imagination for the virtual, the post-screen is also entirely about VFX. As screen demarcations shift and lie (in both senses), a new regime of relations emerges between not only viewers and screens, but also – as is the heart of VFX – images and reality, and images and viewers. In its discourse on between-ness, the post-screen is also of difference – that quality of limbo which relies on relation, existing not as a thing but as against something. VFX thus resonates with the post-screen as representation which pushes the realness of image against reality. It constructs a real external reality in image and sound, and in so doing eliminates boundaries of difference between the virtual and the actual. Therein lies the post-screen encapsulated as both special effect and discombobulation of the real.
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The 2019 Spider-Man film, Spider-Man: Far from Home, presents a neat epitome of this convergence. Its villain, Mysterio (or Quentin Beck, as he is also known; played by Jake Gyllenhaal), is not an antagonist with the usual superhuman powers. He is, of all things, a special effects whiz. His powers for evil lie in his ability to fool everyone, including Spider-Man (played by Tom Holland), with large-scale, realistic, multi-sensorial holographic illusions created from Augmented Reality (AR) projectors mounted on flying drones. These illusions surround and follow Spider-Man as he moves, not seemingly contained within any kind of screen or framing boundaries. The film’s twist is thus that simulation itself becomes an antagonist. The real threat is not the usual death and destruction wrought by the villain, but the bewilderment and disorientation in being unable to distinguish between the actual and the virtual. Spider-Man’s traditional vanquishing of the villain is thus untraditional – it is of the post-screen: to defeat Mysterio, Spidey has to first break his enemy’s illusions. Only by mastering the discernment between illusion and reality – only by breaking the post-screen – could Spider-Man triumph, slaying Mysterio and restoring order by re-asserting the diegesis’ “reality” against the special effects illusions.
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Figure 1: Spider-Man triumphing by differentiating between the actual and virtual Mysterio
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Difference thus drives the central stakes in both VFX and the post-screen as critical statements of today’s conditions of truth and reality. Media are – and have always been – the systems which push and interrogate how users sense and apprehend, and, in turn, establish the terms on which they receive information, truths and values. On the flip side, media also become the core of the corruption of those information, truths and values – the misinformation, disinformation, mistruths and untruths which colour contemporary times. In other words, our terms of information changed as media themselves changed and, qua the post-screen, changed in terms of how they set, establish, guard and police the boundaries of difference. In turn, this extinguishment of difference asserts a new kind of virtuality, one that is neither a second order of the actual nor even simulacra in terms of its distance from the originating referent. Rather, it is a virtuality that is internalized – that meshes with, dissolves or folds into the actual to create different kinds of ghosts. Media today are thus not of representations, but internalizations. There is no full circle of, for instance, Virtual Reality from the panorama in terms of the extinguishment of difference; what we now face (and are hit with) is an internalized mediascape against which, like the viral contagion of our present, there is no escape.
As such, today’s crisis is not just the contestation of the real against illusion or the unreal. Rather, it is the disappearance of difference without positive terms as a moment of media history, or a history of uncertain values in which we are still currently interned and internalizing. The post-screen thus engenders not only no more cinema, but also no more media: we may now think of everything as cinema, or as image, or as virtuality. That thinking is not in the sense of “no more cinema” as Bazin had meant it, whereby he flipped the illusion of reality to reality itself in cinema’s borderless zone of the unreal against the real. Rather, our conclusion today is that the terms of reality and illusion no longer have their old semantic values as they did when shot across the screen’s boundaries; they are no longer related in the ways they used to be related. In the VFX of the post-screen, reality and illusion are not counters or opposites of special effect to each other. Where difference without positive terms has disappeared in the internalization of the image is the emergence not of another reality, but another regime of truth values that has returned on the far side of media history. This is no return of, say, the prelapsarian, which only speaks of a nostalgic return; this is a return of another notion of history out of a profound internalization of the shit storms, the dis/misinformation and the post-truth of current politics – a return of the positive in the most scurrilous and outrageous of styles. VFX and the post-screen are thus also mental models for signalling this disappearance of difference, if a different kind of vanishing – a dis-appearance that is constructing, even as I write, this moment of media history.
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The Post-Screen Through Virtual Reality, Holograms and Light Projections: Where Screen Boundaries Lie (Amsterdam University Press, 2021) is now available at https://www.aup.nl/en/book/9789463723541/the-post-screen-through-virtual-reality-holograms-and-light-projections.
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