Mediascape’s Drifter

Abstract

Today, mediascapes (see Appadurai) play a predominant role in the construction of modes of human existence. How do they determine our agency? How do they form screens for our emotions, how do they build non-negligible spaces in which our dramas play out? Do they support us or, on the contrary, do they limit us? I pose these questions in relation to Holy Motors (2012), a film by the French director Leos Carax. His film presents man’s postmodern condition as well as state of the art nowadays. The hero of Holy Motors is the absolute actor, a set of his avatars, the postmodern Proteus doomed to live and experience repeatedly a parody of “all the same.” My thesis is that mediascapes only seem to strengthen our agency. They offer us a plural existence and an easy ability to enlarge the borders between illusion and reality, but in fact, they make us part of a system of the urban “desiring machine,” they make our identities and our bodies into a sort of spectacle directed by external forces.

Keywords

• fiction
• virtual world
• holy motors
• carax