Baudrillard's Postmodernism Analysis

Baudrillard makes a connection between fame and death in Simulacra and Simulation: “Death is never an absolute criteria, but in this case it is significant: the era of James Dean, Marilyn Monroe, and the Kennedys, of those who really died simply because they had a mythic dimension that implies death” (24). The myth about death is further explained as a concept that erases an individual’s mortality and transforms these icons into immortality in an art form or by the media. Replication and broadcasting make an event popular and the person attains immortality in a life on technology. James’s and Vaughan’s process, “Photograph, automobile, imitation: Such are the means to a semiotic transcendence of the life – and the death- of the organic

Postmodernism is a debate about reality and knowledge, ontology and epistemology. It is a debate about what is real and how one can know it. According to Baudrillard, all originals have been replaced by so called “simulacra” through a process of simulation. The term simulacrum is used to define an image, copy, or representation of a person or thing that has the appearance of the original but not the substance or essence of it. Baudrillard takes the concept in his argument that simulacrum is not a copy of the real but has altogether replaced it. It has become “hyperreal”, more real than the real. For DeLillo, this loss of the real began with the Kennedy assassination. As Branch in Libra puts it, what happened was “an aberration in the heartland of the real” (15). As media interferes with the daily customs of the people, the distinction between the image and the real become less and less clear which makes the point that the image seemed to replace the real. To many Americans, the Zapruder film became more than a representation of the Kennedy assassination. It became a registered event itself. DeLillo has said it in his essay “American Blood”, that “The Kennedy assassination was a home movie. It is called the Zapruder film”