Aiming for the Point of No Return
Travels through Baudrillarian America
Sebastiaan Knoops
MA Dissertation American Studies
LAX999M20
1459864
Supervisor: Prof. Dr. W.M. Verhoeven
Where the others spend their time in libraries, I spend mine in the deserts and on the roads. Where they
draw their material from the history of ideas, I draw mine from what is happening now, from the life of
the streets, the beauty of nature.1
In 1985, French philosopher Jean Baudrillard set out on a journey across America in an attempt to gain a
greater understanding of a society that was very much unlike his own. To Baudrillard it seemed that
Americans lived in a different universe, with a completely different mode of perception. He published
his findings after his return to France, and America has since become a seminal text in the field of
American Studies. Yet, if one asks any number of students of the University of Groningen American
Studies program to summarize Jean Baudrillard’s America, chances are that very few will give the same
answer. The text is a culmination of much of the cultural theory which forms the bedrock of the
American Studies program, yet the beautiful but complex prose and deep metaphorical elements
employed by Baudrillard prevent many students from grasping the essence of America. Baudrillard
writes in a vivid, visual style about his subject. For Baudrillard, the physical appearance of the landscapes
and locations he encountered on his journey are as important as the behavior of Americans
themselves—indeed they are often intrinsically linked in his writing. Even though visuals play an
important role in his analysis, the reader is left with little visual documentation. Nothing more than a
paltry eight photographs can be found throughout the text.
Aiming for the Point of No Return: Travels through Baudrillarian America is an audiovisual
journey through the United States to find the real-life examples of what Baudrillard discusses in
America. In doing so, this documentary does justice to the visual style that readers of the book were,
until now, left to experience in simple black and white text. Simultaneously, the audiovisual
1
documentation of these real-life locations, landscapes and people will help foster a greater
understanding of their function within Baudrillard’s theories on American society which will in turn
provide clarity to those who may have trouble fully understanding the analyses put forth in America.
Baudrillard describes many locations and landscapes in the text—too many to fit into any
reasonably timed presentation. Furthermore, many of the examples used simply do not make for “good
television.” While they certainly satisfy the minor musings that Baudrillard often takes time to share
with the reader, most would simply needlessly detract from the main focus of this film. The twenty-four
year bridge of time between the writing of America and undertaking of this project has also rendered
many of Baudrillard’s observations on 1980s America too dated for use in Aiming for the Point of No
Return. The various locations and landscapes in Baudrillard’s text have been whittled down to six scenes,
each employing a landscape, location, or individual to analyze and explain the main arguments in
America. In some cases, existing examples provided by Baudrillard have been expanded through imagery
and sound and supplemented with existing analysis from the text. Other locations have received a
similar treatment with added analysis from the author to clarify the very subtle and poetic words used in
the original text. Still other scenes are based on new material very much relevant to the original subject
material.
Briefly put, Baudrillard argues that America is a hyper-reality functioning as a utopia that “has
behaved from the very beginning as though it were already achieved.”2 It is a perfect simulacrum, where signs no longer refer to the signified. America seems to exist in a different universe, where the
difference between the real and simulation is indeterminable. This unique society does not labor under
the traditional burden of a referential system of signification—such as facts and history. It is an intensely
consumerist society in which the sign value of objects trumps all else. This liberation has fostered a
2
setting in which Americans are free to construct society as they want it, without the limitations that
other societies—Baudrillard refers to the European variety—impose on themselves. As a result,
Americans think and act like no other humans before them.
The first scene after the introduction presents us with the seismic shift in mentality we
encounter as we cross into America. It explains the concepts of simulation, the monopoly of the sign in a
consumerist society and the American way of approaching history. It sets up the basic theory that most
viewers of the film will already be familiar with and brings it to life with tangible examples. This section
of the film borrows equally from examples given by Baudrillard as well as those introduced by myself.
The second and fourth scenes delve into the metaphysical analysis that Baudrillard likes to employ.
Elements of space and speed as metaphors of the characteristics true to the perfect simulacrum
dominate the visuals in these two chapters. Both rely heavily on the visuals employed by Baudrillard
that lend to the unique character of Baudrillard’s writing in America. Scene three is a portrait of a true
utopian. The American utopian is a creature altogether different from the melancholic variety found in
Old World Europe. He believes wholeheartedly in his goal and harbors no uncertainty as to its feasibility.
This scene is the first to illustrate the liberation of hyper-reality in detail. Returning to the notion of the
perfect simulacrum, the fifth chapter deals entirely with an aptly named Californian hamlet named
Pioneertown. This seemingly insignificant bend-in-the-road presents us with the perfect example of the
invisible and above all irrelevant line between the real and the imaginary in contemporary American
society. While Pioneertown does not feature in America, it does serve its purpose in advancing a
concept often abstract and hard to grasp for many readers of the text. The sixth and penultimate scene
examines more closely the liberation brought on by hyperreality and the utopia achieved as introduced
in scene three. The brilliance and monopolistic power of the sign are presented in one of the purest
known as Las Vegas. While the desert city is briefly mentioned in America, this scene goes more in depth
to uncover the simple genius behind the success of this metropole.
Author’s note: the section of the text that continues below concerns itself with very specific elements of
the above mentioned six scenes. This segment is intended to function as a form of deeper analysis to be
read following the viewing of Aiming for the Point of No Return. Any reader wishing to view the film
without having been spoiled of much of its content should stop reading at this point and continue only
after watching the film.
Scene I: New York
Even though many thousands of miles separate America from Europe, the two societies have had a
certain bond for hundreds of years. Europeans like to think that they are similar to Americans, but in
reality a massive fault line runs between the two societies. As Baudrillard puts it, “there isn’t just a gap
between us, but a whole chasm of modernity.”3 On the other hand, every European can immediately name at least one little (but usually significant) detail that annoys them about Americans and their
country. Europeans mock America’s version of (non)culture, creating the illusion that American society is
easy to pin down and deconstruct. Yet it is only when we allow ourselves to look at America without a
critical European judgment that we can get a sense of the true America. This society does not give much
for our cultured culture, we are restrained by historically and culturally predetermined bonds.
I step out of my car, turn my head and read the message screaming at me from a giant billboard
by the impossibly straight, lonely desert road: “The New Look of Drinkability.” Alarm bells ring in my
3
European head: this is ridiculous! Do they think they can win me over that easily with such non-sensical
garbage? What is drinkability? And how can an existing taste, if that is what they are referring to, look
new? Alas, I have fallen into the common trap that every European, no matter how hard he tries, will
encounter at some point during his stay in America. For such protest only arises in the head of a
European judging America society through European eyes. The ad writers that conjured the message on
this billboard are not stupid—they know what works and what does not. Americans have no problem
with such slogans. For Americans believe in facts, but not in their facticity. As Baudrillard writes, “[i]t is
in this belief in facts, in the total credibility of what is done or seen, in this pragmatic evidence of things
and an accompanying contempt for what may be called appearances or the play of appearances […] that
the Americans are a true utopian society, in their religion of the fait accompli, in the naivety of their
deductions, in their ignorance in the evil genius of things.”4 Such a mindset requires a completely different mode of thinking. It is this way of thinking that forms the giant chasm between Europe and
America.
Baudrillard references to Octavio Paz when he writes: “America was created in the hope of
escaping from history, or building a utopia sheltered from history […].”5 Indeed many of the new Americans that landed on the shores of their new home had little reason reflect longingly upon the
history of persecution that they had fled from: “By exporting itself, by becoming hypostatized across the
sea, the ideal purged itself from history, took on concrete reality, developed with new blood and
experimental energy.”6 America is the original version of modernity. It is the original version of modernity because they are the first to disconnect the power of history. Discarding the past and living
only for the future, America has no history. I walk through the lovely Cloysters in Upper Manhattan.
These old buildings, shipped over from Europe, seem so suggest a celebration of history. A sign on the
wall next to me informs me that up to ten percent of the ceiling above me is in fact authentic. Alarm
bells quietly start ringing in the back of my head. The rest of that ceiling was most likely fabricated
somewhere along the New Jersey Turnpike. Europeans scoff at the idea of shipping four hundred year
old buildings across an ocean and then reconstructing them. It completely destroys the value that they
had in the Old World. Their referencing back to hundreds of years of history which seemingly endowed
those aged bricks with a sense of importance is now suddenly gone. Americans see this very differently.
Truth and beauty are instant, not accumulated over centuries. While Americans certainly have a strong
recreational interest in the past, it is not a predetermining factor in their mode of thinking: “Tomorrow is
the first day of the rest of your life.”7 In America, unlike Europe, the past does not dictate the present: “America is the original version of modernity […] America ducks the question of origins […].”8
From the very beginning of this society’s existence, the traditional European referential system
has been disconnected. The sign does not refer to the signified. When the referential system of
signification is not in place, Americans are at liberty to restructure the meaning of signs. This is why
history does not have to mean anything, why a five thousand dollar handbag is a highly coveted fashion
accessory, why drinkability does really have a new look. This is why America is a hyper-reality, and why it
has always been and always will be a utopia to those who form a part of it.
This is not to say that Europe and America are mirror opposites. The referential system of
signification is showing signs of wear in Europe. Here too, we see the increasing power of the sign over
the signified. As noted before, an all-powerful sign allows it to be reinvented into anything. In such a
situation, reality implodes into simulation. Baudrillard acknowledges the fact that Europe, too, has seen
simulation as a result of the ever growing intensification of our consumption-based societal mores. Yet it
is America, as the most consumerist society on Earth, which attracted Baudrillard. It was here that he
7
Baudrillard, America, 11. 8
could find the ideal subjects for his analysis of a post-modern consumerist society. In this hyper-reality
he found the perfect form of simulation: the simulacrum.
Scenes II and IV: The Desert and Los Angeles
“Why is LA, why are the deserts so fascinating? It is because you are delivered from all depth here – a
brilliant, mobile, superficial neutrality, a challenge to meaning and profundity, a challenge to nature and
culture, an outer hyperspace, with no origin, no reference points.”9
Part of what makes Baudrillard’s observations so unique is his choice to transcend the traditional
boundaries of thinking. For Baudrillard, the scope of his observations was not limited to those usually
held by cultural anthropologists. While great open spaces and freedom of mobility often appear in
analyses of American culture, Baudrillard looked beyond their traditional meaning and found in them
metaphors to help explain the hallmarks of hyper-reality.
The wide, empty deserts of the Southwestern United States provide the perfect physical
representation of American culture: “the fascination of the very disappearance of all aesthetic and
critical forms of life in the irradiation of objectless neutrality.”10 So too do the massive urban sprawls such as Los Angeles: cities so large and decentralized that they too are deserts. For Baudrillard, America
is the end of culture. It has evolved to a point where it has no meaning. America is the end of seduction,
for there is nothing left to charm with: the disappearance of all aesthetics. It is in these deserts that he
found the perfect embodiment of this notion in emptiness and speed.
America is also the only primitive society, and why not? Many readers of America may see this
as a belittling comment, yet it should not be construed as such. Baudrillard admires the way in which
9
Baudrillard, America, 124. 10
Americans abstain from history: “Tomorrow is the first day of the rest of your life.”11 The ease of mobility and speed in the deserts form an endless circulation of signs. The coming and going of these signs reflect
the amnesia of the hyper-reality. Speed is the “[t]riumph of forgetting over memory, an uncultivated,
amnesic intoxication.”12 Like the mental snapshots from a ride on a freeway, the past is discarded rapidly. As a society with no history, America is the only primitive society on Earth.
The freeways of Los Angeles take on a whole new identity in America: “The city was built here
before the freeway system, no doubt, but it now looks as though the metropolis has actually been built
around this arterial network.”13 The freeways are blood vessels that enable the speed and motion which symbolize the amnesic character of American society. To Baudrillard, driving is the best way to gain any
understanding of America: “[…] the point is to drive. That way you learn more about this society than all
academia could ever tell you.”14
The skeletal structure of Los Angeles freeways and the vast emptiness of the deserts: for
Baudrillard the physical appearance of America paints a picture of the society that inhabits it.
Scene III: Leonard Knight
Leonard Knight is a very old man. He has lived alone in the desert for more than twenty-five years. He
does not have a house, or running water, or electricity. He sleeps in the back of an elaborately painted
flatbed truck that provides little protection from the harsh elements. When I first meet him under the
blazing heat of the midday California sun, he has just returned from his daily bathing trip to a local
irrigation canal. He is seventy-eight years old and frankly, taking his physical condition into account, it is
a small miracle that the man is still alive living under such strenuous conditions. His existence has all the
hallmarks of that of a hermit. Yet he is one of the most intelligent and happy individuals I have ever met.
Intelligence and complete bliss rarely go hand in hand. Often, intelligence brings a person to think about
the world and everything that is wrong in it. That person, obviously, is not a utopian. Leonard, however,
is. He is one of the most happy and intelligent people I have ever met because he is happy, and smart
enough to know it and keep it that way. He is completely content because he has achieved all that he
wants. Like all American utopians, he took an ideal and made it a reality. He has always wanted to wake
people up to the fact that God loves them unconditionally, and he has created a giant monument to that
love in the middle of the desert. He set up camp on a barren piece of land twenty five years ago and
built that monument out of adobe and hay, then painted it in bright colors and squeezed words of
scripture and “God is Love” onto every square inch of his cathedral-sized canvas. Leonard is a deeply
religious man, but not an orthodox theologian. He spends his days spreading the word of God, but he is
not a missionary or evangelical. He simply enjoys being helpful and informative. As Baudrillard writes,
“Americans are people of conviction, convinced of everything and seeking to convince.”15 Leonard is simply convinced of the power of God’s love, and wants to help you and me by reminding us of it. There
lies no “evil genius” behind his motivations. Only when you think as straightforward as Leonard can you
call yourself a utopian.
America is the end of desire. It is the end of desire because utopia has been achieved. Leonard
and his fellow Americans took their ideals and turned them into reality. America is the end of longing
and hope, because Americans like it just the way it is. Of course, Americans want better health care or a
fatter pay check. But to them America is still the greatest society on Earth. For Baudrillard, the desert
once again stands as a perfect metaphor for this facet of American society. Everything in the desert
seems to be still or suspended. In the land with no desire, everything is perfect just the way it is.
15
Scene V: Pioneertown
Just as Baudrillard imagines the freeway being there before Los Angeles, he sees the screen as being
there before America. Everything about America suggests it was invented with the screen in mind. As
Baudrillard writes, “It is not the least of America’s charms that even outside the movie theatres the
whole country is cinematic […] To grasp its secret, you should not, then, begin with the city and move
inwards to the screen; you should begin with the screen and move outwards to the city.”16 What Baudrillard is trying to bring across is that the difference between the real and simulation (cinema) is
both invisible and irrelevant. Pioneertown is the perfect example of this proposition. It is home to only a
few hundred people, tucked away in the dry and scratchy hills of Southwestern California. Pioneertown
was once a movie set for Westerns far removed from Hollywood. Instead of making the long commute
every day, the actors decided to live in the town. When we watch one of the many hundreds of Western
movies and television shows recorded in Pioneertown, we must ask ourselves this: are we watching
scenes of actual, everyday life in the town, or a scripted (simulated) event? Should we see the people on
our screen as actors or inhabitants? The answer is that it is impossible to be certain, and this is a central
hallmark of the perfect simulacrum: if the simulation cannot be identified with any certainty, then as a
consequence, neither can that from which it is differentiated: the real.
In Europe, cinema is what you pay money for to see in a theatre. In America, it is all around you.
No wonder that Americans think so differently than Europeans: “Along with flux and mobility,”
Baudrillard explains, “the screen and its refraction are fundamental determinants of everyday events. A
fusion of the kinetic and the cinematic produces a different mental configuration from our own.”17 In Europe, we concern ourselves with whether or not we can distinguish between the real and simulation.
We cannot make sense of things if we do not know which one of the two we are dealing with. In
16
Baudrillard, America, 56. 17
America that distinction is irrelevant. Americans care little for invisible authority such as history.
Americans will believe things as long as they can see them. That is why the distinction between the real
and simulation is not relevant: if is in front of their eyes, they believe in it. Far from calling Americans
naïve, we should be asking ourselves why we place the real in such high regard and dismiss the rest.
Look at what America has achieved with its liberated mode of thought. Men of conviction such as
Leonard Knight: blissfully happy utopians who live life the way they want to, knowing that the maximum
is always attainable. Places such as Pioneertown that thrive by doing simply what feels right. Refusing to
stop and wonder whether it would make sense to live in a movie set: they just do it—and they are happy
as a result. Then ask what Europe has gained by chaining itself to so many rules and conditions.
Scene VI: Las Vegas
Las Vegas is America’s testament to the power of the sign. It is the strongest example of what can be
achieved in the simulacrum. When signs no longer relate to objects, they can be reconstructed to mean
anything. The power of such free-minded reconstruction has turned Las Vegas from a dry and dusty
field, which was rightfully avoided by most people, into one of the world’s greatest tourist attractions. I
check into the lobby of my hotel, and as I leave for my room the receptionist dutifully hands me a flyer
promoting the celebrity hypnotists performing at the hotel. “Hypnotizing nightly,” it reads. Down the
strip I walk, past Manhattan and Paris—reconstructed in the form of hotels. “Party like it’s Paris,” reads
a sign on the Eiffel tower. Why travel to all these cities across the globe when you can have it all in one
place? All that it took for Las Vegas to thrive was a combination of irresistible signs to attract people
from across the world. There is nothing seductive about these signs: they quite literally tell you that you
will become very rich and have many beautiful women at your side—for a few dollars of course. Visitors
signs on offer in “Sin City.” Nowhere else on Earth could the magic of American hyper-reality be copied
effectively. Many have tried, all have failed. How appropriate then, that the official City of Las Vegas
slogan reads: “We did it our way!”
Conclusion: The End of Culture and Maintaining an Open Mind
America is the end of culture. Culture as we know it in Europe does not exist here. America does not
treat culture as if it were some special world, to be placed on a higher pedestal. There is no minister of
Cultural Affairs here like there are in Paris and Rome. “Here in the US,” Baudrillard writes, “culture is not
that delicious panacea which we Europeans consume in a sacramental mental space and which has its
own special columns in the newspapers—and in the people’s minds. Culture is space, speed, cinema,
technology.”18 In Europe we hold on to culture as a lofty and extraordinary world. In America, only that which can be touched and experienced is taken seriously: “Culture […] sacrifices all intellect, all
aesthetics in a process of literal transcription into the real.”19
We should not make the mistake of importing our own values into the equation. Americans
think in a radically different fashion—incomparable to our own. When we dismiss the Cloysters in
Manhattan, Las Vegas, or Leonard Knight building away in the heat of the desert we are defeating
ourselves. Likewise, we must not see the end of culture in America as barbaric or naïve: “If it is the lack
of culture that is original, then it is the lack of culture one should embrace. If the term taste has any
meaning, then it commands us not to export our aesthetic demands to places where they do not
the end of culture and meaning, enjoy the freedom it brings. We must see how far we can go. We must
Bibliography
