triggered by an attempt to obtain inaccessible simulacra wanes, the modern subject must
compulsively continue to exchange signs hopelessly longing for a different result in the form of a
type of enduring happiness.
V.
Femininity in Hyper-Real America and the Hegemonic Role of Celebrity Culture
Lisa’s meteoric rise to fame in “The Hobbit” also reveals the hegemonic apparatuses that
maintain hyper-real fictions which have buried true femininity under an avalanche of symbolic
representations. In this vein, this episode of South Park is a scathing critique of American
culture and the hegemonic role of celebrities in the promotion and transmission of simulacra.
Although very few people will ever have access to the simulated glitz and glamour of Hollywood
that has seduced global society in addition to hiding unheralded economic inequalities of epic
proportions, this grandiose vision has become the new opiate of the masses. Ensnared by a
hyper-real fantasy that even celebrities themselves are not actually living, the new ‘American
dream’ is inseparable from the world of simulation. Representations of female beauty are an
important part of this chimerical utopia because they represent a billion-dollar industry that has
been exported to even the most remote areas of the planet.
Numerous critics including Gyorgy Toth, Jaap Kooijman, Andrew Koch, and Rick Elmore
have noted that Baudrillard identifies the United States as “the land of hyperreality […] a
country where the simulation of experience in film, television, museums, theme parks, and
monuments is irrevocably replacing the ‘real’ and ‘objective’ facts of the past, works of art,
human relationships and geographic locals” (Toth 199-200). Expressing his fears that reality is
under assault on a global scale from the American, hyper-real dream and the simulated utopias
that it represents, Baudrillard boldly asserts, “Il n’y a pas pour moi de vérité de l’Amérique […]
Ce qu’il faut, c’est entrer dans la fiction de l’Amérique, dans l’Amérique comme fiction. C’est
d’ailleurs à ce titre qu’elle domine le monde. Chaque détail de l’Amérique fût-il insignifiant,
l’Amérique est quelque chose qui nous dépasse tous…L’Amérique est un gigantesque
hologramme” ‘For me, there is no truth about America […] What we have to do is enter into the
fiction of America, into America as fiction. It’s by way of fiction in this respect that it (America)
dominates the world. Every detail about America is insignificant, America is something that
goes beyond all of us….America is a gigantic hologram’ (Amérique 31-33). In Amérique,
Baudrillard argues that this seductive paradise where everyone supposedly has the opportunity to
live the simulations that flood their screens, if they obey the summons to consume, has been
99