Fake Blood

FAKE BLOOD begins by firmly establishing the real-life credentials of its two protagonist film-makers, and then explores, within the framework of a fictional documentary or mockumentary, a question related to the extent to which movie violence influences real-life violence. However, by the end of the film, there are still enough connections to the real lives of the protagonists that there is plausible deniability as to whether this is really a work of fiction and not an actual documentary of real-life happenings, after all.

There is a relatively recent movement in the arts and in philosophy which has been proposed as a successor to modernism and its successor movement postmodernism, and which has been called meta-modernism. Before connecting it to FAKE BLOOD, let me briefly summarize it.

Whereas modernism in fiction is grounded on an essentially idealist worldview according to which there are definite values and certainties in the world which, for example, permit us to consider things as definitely "right" vs. "wrong" or "good" vs. "bad", postmodernism is grounded in a worldview according to which all these values and certainties are based on narratives we make up in our minds, and our goal should be to "deconstruct" these narratives in order to reveal how we mistook a particular story about reality for reality itself.

The problem with modernism is that sometimes the values and certainties it espouses do indeed turn out to be more problematic than recognized at first, even to the extent that deeper reflection or revelation of new facts may lead to a complete reversal, such as when we realize that something we thought was was an unmitigated "good" turns out to be an unmitigated "bad" (and vice versa), and we can never be sure that for any value or certainty we hold, such reversal, which implies that we were mistaken, won't happen. The problem with postmodernism is that it is self-defeating: applied to itself, it has to also be considered just a narrative, which leaves the question open of whether beyond this narrative there are not definite values and certainties, after all.

Since the beginning of the 21st century, several candidate movements have been proposed to succeed postmodernism, of which one of the most prominent is meta-modernism. The basic idea is that elements of both modernism and postmodernism are combined in a single work, so as to, in a sense, transcend either approach. Often, this combination takes the form of an "oscillation": for instance, a work may explore a question based on the assumption that there is a set of definite certainties and values (modernist), then deconstruct these (postmodernist) in order to reveal that the question can be regarded to be based on assuming a different set of certainties and values (modernist again), and there may be multiple cycles like this which indicate that, ultimately, neither approach is adequate.

Okay, so what does all this have to do with FAKE BLOOD?

The central question the film explores is "do makers of violent movies have an obligation to the audience?".

This question assumes, at minimum, that there is a definite answer: either they have an obligation or they don't, and whichever answer we arrive at has to necessarily presume a set of certainties about "how things really are" and values which determine the importance of each "thing that really is" to the answer. This is a thoroughly modernist point of view.

They ask various people and obtain different opinions and insights. One raises the issue that movies which depict violence in a bloodless way might actually have a more harmful effect on real-life violence because they hide its literally bloody implications from the audience. Another concludes that, if there is such an obligation, then makers of romantic comedies have an even greater obligation because the fantasies they present are ultimately more harmful to the audience if mistaken for reality.

They eventually contact two people connected to what is purported to be a real-life crime case, the murder of a drug dealer's sister, in order to explore the question in greater depth.

The postmodernist deconstruction begins when the movie presents a re-enactment of the murder which it then reveals to be a re-enactment because it shows "behind the scenes" footage of it. This is our clue that the account of the murder we were just given is merely a narrative of reality, not reality itself.

As they delve deeper, they discover that the narrative is completely inconsistent with the court records of the case. But since the court records are also just a narrative, should they not be treated with the same kind of skepticism? Here, the movie veers back to a modernist approach by treating the new narrative as a true account of reality.

A break-in into the apartment of one of the protagonists, interpreted with this new understanding of reality and entailing a re-assessment of one of the people involved in the murder, leads the main characters to go into hiding, only to find out eventually that their interpretation of the break-in was wrong.

The new interpretation seems definite, quite in line with a modernist conception of the world again, except that, in order to accept it, we have to take a set of assumptions for fact, and the protagonist this time is quite is explicit that he has constructed a new narrative based on an incomplete set of facts: a body is found with a note connecting it to the protagonist, but there is no footage, confession or other explanation as to what "really" happened, and the protagonist essentially says "I believe this is what happened", as opposed to the movie showing us what actually happened.

Thus, all we are left with in the end is an explicitly stated belief about reality, instead of either a pretense to a claim about reality, or a pretense to deconstructing a claim about reality. This is how FAKE BLOOD transcends both modernist and postmodernist approaches in a meta-modernist way.

In keeping with this approach, the movie ends such that it maintains plausible deniability about whether it is a work of fiction or a work of fact, unlike other comparable works where the question is settled in a definite manner, such as works in which a semi-fictional characters dies, in contradiction to our understanding that, in reality, they are alive.

Lastly, I am not sure to what extent the film-makers set out to implement such theoretical ideas in this movie, but I think that spending any appreciable amount of time thinking about what is real and what is merely a narrative about what is real leads to the conclusion that while we may not be absolutely certain about what reality is, we can be certain about what we believe about reality and be explicit that our certainty only extends over it being a belief. In this age of misinformation, which has fostered countless conspiratorial cults, such as flat earthism, moon-landing hoaxism, Qanon and others, this is a natural fallback position that can help protect us from false narratives. I believe that this also provides the context against which the rise of meta-modernism in the early 21st century has to be considered. In that light, FAKE BLOOD's meta-modernist approach can well be regarded as reflecting the current Zeitgeist.