Nothing is Real

Everything is Permitted, in the Blair Witch Project (1999)

Hoopla or hoo-hah, it's all the same to me. Hoopla is clearly a more American kind of idiom, whereas hoo-hah is distinctly European. You can imagine Bertie Wooster or Billy Bunter or Alan Partridge using the latter phrase, but not so much the first. Just as you couldn't imagine Woody Allen favouring the second. Or Jerry Sienfeld. Etc. Not that it matters much. In a more or less real or unreal world, in which a sense of grounded reality is ever more attenuated or circumscribed by the particular media through which you personally choose to define or shape your own version of reality or unreality, it still comes as a shock to realise or to be told that Nothing Is Real. And Everything Is Permitted. Which, when you've satisfied yourself that that memorable slogan wasn't coined by Guy Debord or one of his Situationiste Internationale cohorts before he purged them for insufficiently rigorously adhering to the SI program as defined by he alone but rather by an obscure mid-century Serbian novelist, seems like a bit of an asshole's creed, or edge-lordy kind of manifesto. Especially when you further consider that it's the kind of thing that fuckwits get tattooed on their torsos, in Latin translation. And when you understand that it indeed originated in that mid 20th century Serbian novel's use of supposedly ancient texts to attribute it to the leader of The Assassins. And further consider it's similarity to the oft quoted and even more oft misunderstood Crowley dictum Do What Thou Wilt Shall Be The Whole Of The Law. Which may or may not be an injunction to self-actualise, and may equally or equally may not have been intended as the green light libertarian apologia to end all green light libertarian apologias. But who cares? Much of the drive and impetus of late 20th century philosophical thought derives from the relativism rendered intellectually acceptable through people not generally fully understanding the implications of that relativism, its meaning, most of it having been formulated in French, a notoriously slippery language. But structuralism, and then post structuralism, handmaidens via art movement mutation to the ever growing appeal of gallic existentialism, also borrowed heavily from Nietzsche, who appropriated the phrase for use in his own rigourous and demanding philosophy, which resulted, in his syphilitic and febrile brain and behind his luxurious moustache, in an intuitive grasp of the full meaninglessness of life. Which is to say, then, that it's not so much an asshole's, or even an assassin's, credo, as it is a recognition that God being dead 'n all, what we actually do in life doesn't matter all that much. Easy enough to say or to think when you're on the beach, or under the paving stones. But notwithstanding that sense of meaninglessness, the true existentialist's credo includes the apparently paradoxical notion that every individual must take responsibility for their own actions despite those actions having no inherent meaning, meaning being a humanist or merely cultural construct. 

But, and this is the question that doesn't strictly require an answer, how does that help us to live a good life, even assuming a good life is in itself inherently desirable (spoiler: it is), despite that life being inherently meaningless? Well, it helps us in that it arms us with the philosophical ballast to do the unthinkable - ie: turn off, turn over or tune out. Change the channel. Challenge yourself. Timothy Leary, befuddled in his thinking as all drug addled people tend to be, wrote that it was necessary to take a chance, every single day if need be, on the chance encounter, the unscripted, non-cliched interaction. With people who look like they might not be sheeple (not his word, because that self righteously self congratulatory formulation hadn't yet been invented) and therefore open to the glorious spontaneity of being invited to share their neuroses with perfect strangers. Because there are no, you know, strangers, just people with whom you've not yet made friends. This fatuous notion, as expressed by the Lord Mayor of LSD himself, is as good a reason as any to lay off the drugs, kids! If everyone did drugs, instead of just a privileged and spoilt few enlightened and entitled hipsters with nothing at stake, imagine how soon, how quickly and how catastrophically society's glued together infrastructure would come unstuck! Huh? Just imagine!

There was much hoopla, or hoo-hah, associated with the turn of the millennium, groundbreaking and pioneering found footage horror film The Blair Witch Project. This hoopla, or hoo-hah, wasn't so much to do with the film's narrative as with it's promotion, which blurred the real and the unreal in hitherto unconceived of ways. There's a way in which the much ridiculed (by the misinformed) film can be seen as metaphorically exploring the same addiction theory territory as that of the main proponent of the concept of addiction as control, specifically Bill Burroughs, for whom addiction was famously the ultimate control mechanism of an overbearing corporate fascist state. In this context, the three student film maker representatives of civilization become more and more unglued and come more and more unstuck the further they advance into the forest (or the subconscious, armchair psych fans). Or further, to further explore the metaphor, into their various addictions. Heather, addicted to the rush of being in charge and taking the lead role in the expedition, but catastrophically temperamentally unsuited to the role. Mike, addicted to the illusory comfort of being the baby of the group and acting out, petulantly and wilfully getting rid of the map, thereby ensuring the utter certainty of their descending further into the labyrinth. Josh, addicted to the illusory glamour of being the rebellious asshole of the group, and punished by being the first to lose everything, including (apparently) his life. But they all eventually lose themselves, and their lives, due to the unutterable certainty of these addictions leading them to their destruction. 

The genius of the film, it has been written many times, lies in it's confluence of the real with the unreal, where everything is permitted. The three protagonist actors play versions of themselves, the characters named for the actors. The promotional material for the film famously, or infamously, treated the events depicted therein as real, really real rather than merely "real", and intimated that the actors, like the characters they play, did indeed disappear, presumed dead. The actors, at considerable cost to their mental health and subsequent ability to build conventional careers (the very least they were entitled to expect, given their utterly brilliant, mesmerisingly real performances) were obliged to go along with the deceit, and pretend to be dead. Heather in particular suffered at the hands of idiots and misogynists in the film's audience who were incapable of recognising that the character's irritating nature was an integral element of a brilliantly judged performance rather than reflecting the personality of Heather the actor. The film as Event, rather than it's narrative unfolding, although that too treats the real as unreal and vice versa, invented itself as hyper-real "event". In the narrative itself, though, is there a witch? Yes. And no. Maybe. Who cares? It's the project that's the important bit. The  blurring of the project's real and unreal nature is the film's truly prescient achievement. Today's political spectacle of the absurd, in which if I say a thing's true then it's true, no questions asked or at least welcomed, that approximates but fails to ultimately resemble real life, also gains it's strength and weird hallucinatory power from a willed confusion that positions truth not as a discrete concept but as an agreed fantasy. Of course narrative films have at their best always been dream analogues, the better the film the stronger the analogue, and the nearer to a transcendental truth that might therefore potentially take us, but this was probably the first time in the incipient reality-neutral (ie: internet mediated) world that a film's depicted reality wasn't necessarily what it really wanted you to believe it was. To some extent, in the twenty odd years since the project, the extent to which you can suspend your disbelief that in situations of extreme danger someone would go on filming, or where was the footage ultimately cut together if really "found", the whole found footage sub-genre has through the law of diminishing returns categorically run out of steam. Alternatively, in it's relentless insistence on the mutability of the idea of the real and of the unreal, it represents the form most obviously still very much in lockstep with the political realities of the age in which we now live or don't live.