Popular Culture Review Volume 30, Number 2, Summer 2019 | Page 195

Popular Culture Review 30.2
inability to distinguish between reality and its representation will demonstrate that banal commercial simulacra whose only purpose is to generate revenue shape romantic conceptions of love and amorous desire in Western civilization that are grounded in chimerical fantasies . With the publication of his landmark essay The Stars in 1957 , Morin became “ one of the first academics to take popular culture seriously ” ( Montuori 5 ). Specifically , Morin probes the hegemonic role of the Hollywood star system in the incessant creation and dissemination of lucrative signs promoting an idealistic concept of love inextricably linked to a vast array of cosmetic products . Morin offers concrete examples that illustrate how our tenuous grasp of anything real that exists outside of this ubiquitous realm of simulation has been eroded by our unending consumption of these contrived images . Morin posits that actual couples try to mold their partners into the shape of the imaginary , cinematic archetypes that fuel their hyperreal reverie . Morin explains that Hollywood simply invented the notion that an ideal lover “ closes her eyes when being kissed ” ( 80 ). Heavily influenced by Morin , Baudrillard expands his theories reaching the radical conclusion that global society has entered into an “ acute crisis of simulation ” in which all semblance of meaning has been withered away by this avalanche of signs that now stands in for the real ( 48 ). For Baudrillard , the “ nectar of simulation ” has commodified every facet of the human condition including the search for love and companionship ( Cline n . p .).
Both thinkers contend that the “ Hollywood star system ” is a by-product of what scholars such as Fredric Jameson , Michel Husson , and Francisco Louçã commonly refer to as the crisis of late capitalism ( Montuori 5 ). In a changing economic landscape in which “ all of the basic needs of the masses have been satisfied ,” the capitalist paradigm predicated upon
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