a little bit of the hyperreal & postmodernism.
It’s tempting to end with “The Selby is representative of so many things it shouldn’t be” kind of deal. It shows women in a somewhat exploitative light. It shows the rise of commercial culture and obsession with style, borne out of wanting “stuff.” Everything ends up commodified, anyways (thanks, Adorno & Horkheimer). It shows the delicate balance between highbrow and lowbrow and what just ends up being nobrow. What does that leave us with?
It leaves us with, regardless of everything else, the fact that the shots are beautiful. They’re entertaining. They’re fascinating. Yet it needs to be noted that photographs have the ability to “exaggerate experience” and “create believable imagistic fictions.” (Ewen 40) This is the heart of photograph’s power; this is how they depict and transmit style. The “realities” that we’re aspiring to, that we see in these photos - aren’t realities. They’re real like Disneyland is real (Shaviro-style, not Braudillard). Don’t worry about the crumbling economy. Don’t worry about swine flu. You’re going to die of something anyways, whether it be stress from the former or pneumonia related to the latter. Just enjoy looking at other people’s stuff. What Shaviro said about Disneyland applies to The Selby too - “[n]ow everyday banality can have the shattering intensity of a full-blown psychosis.” (17) And what are these pictures but everyday banality? Most teenagers’ rooms are going to look like this at some point, whether it be blamed on finals or stress or if they embrace their daily and habitual inner slob.
So, this means for us: we’re aspiring towards the fake. Jean Baudrillard, you may have been using a map/territory metaphor, but fast-forward a couple decades and The Selby is the hyperreal. There’s no more “mirror of being and appearances, of real and concept” (3) because these aren’t “real” in the way we want them to be real. We want these fabulous lives full of stuffs to exist so that one day we can have these fabulous lives too, but they don’t. Isabelle McNally is a teenager - where are the pictures of the ramen noodles? Let’s even assume that, being as she’s the daughter of famed restraunteur Keith McNally (mastermind behind Pastis and Balthazar), she has access to foodstuffs that normal teenagers can only dream of. Still, where’s the mundane, the banal, like her iPod charger? That weird wire thing that came with your cell phone that you’re not really sure what it does but keep it anyways just-in-case? These things aren’t there, because these pictures are a perfectly crafted “reality.”
