It's Not Just a Dream
IT'S BLU-RAY
The eternally recurring goal of consumerism has always been to transmute its luxury items, through the magic of marketing, into necessities ("must-haves"), ideally well in time for the holidays. Every new toy, no matter how expensive or superfluous, dreams of this canonization, of earning a seat in the golden halls of Household Ubiquity alongside the microwave, the clock-radio, and the electric toothbrush. But this sainthood is short-lived: by the time our newest necessity has secured its place among the gods, the consumerist wellspring has already issued forth a new gadget for the upper tiers of the nouveau-riche to show off to their friends, a gadget that will eventually shove its predecessor off Olympus and into oblivion. Unlike music or TV shows, outdated household appliances have little nostalgia value, so even their ironic reappropriation is unlikely—they are forgotten; the cycle begins anew.
Nowhere is this narrative of necessity and obsolescence more prevalent than in home entertainment, an industry that is unnecessary by definition even if utterly necessary in practice. In recent years, in fact, the incessant augmentation of one's home entertainment system with new TV's, new speakers, and remote controls that close the shades, instead of being merely in the service of entertainment, has become a form of entertainment in its own right. That is, you don't just have fun watching videos; you have fun fussing over your whole setup, yelling at the cable guy, fighting with your family over what to watch, and any number of tried-and-true methods for forgetting the fact that you are eventually going to die. Because of this, the home entertainment gadget's moment in the limelight is especially brief. DVD, despite having only been around for less than a decade, has completely dethroned VHS as reigning king of home-video formats. And, inevitably, the industry has already introduced its newest bid for the crown—Blu-ray: the next generation of home video.
For several years, Blu-ray vied with rival format HD DVD for the title. The battle ended almost exactly a year ago, when Toshiba decided to stop making HD DVD products, and a host of other companies followed suit. There is a whole complex of theories as to why Toshiba settled on Blu-ray, none of them particularly interesting or meaningful. I have my own interpretation: it's all in the name. There is no overarching qualitative difference between the formats—the distinctions are all in the minutia of the product specs. Both formats use an ingenious new technological insight: the laser that reads the disc is blue rather than red. Since blue light has a shorter wavelength, the disc has the space for a lot more information—this is the sort of achingly elegant solution that makes engineers weep with joy. The crucial difference between HD DVD and Blu-ray, then, is that, while the former is named for the service it provides (that is, high-definition video), the latter is named for the technology that facilitates that service. While "HD DVD" merely declares itself an unqualified improvement over the generation that preceded it (what generation doesn't?), "Blu-ray" contains the story of how it gained the upper hand. My feeling is that someone at Toshiba, on some level, knew how much we Americans love stories, especially good underdog stories where the scrappy young upstart rides into town to kick out the fat old plutocrats. The video player itself is now the hero of the drama that used to take place on the TV screen.
So enough about the format war; what, after all, is the true appeal of high-definition video, other than the always obvious conspicuous consumption? What deep buttons are marketers pressing to get consumers to buy higher and higher resolution screens? A long and involved Disney Blu-ray commercial with the tagline "Magic in High Definition," which began appearing on Disney DVD's around the holiday season, provides some revealing hints. The commercial suggests that, now that the uplifting story has migrated to disc player mechanisms, the movie itself is nothing more than a pleasurable sensory experience. It begins by commanding us, with a voice like God on Mount Sinai, to "Imagine a magical world of home entertainment/Where the movies look sharper/The stars shine brighter/And the action feels closer," where the movies and games are "beyond anything you've ever seen." Disney Blu-ray, it promises, will transmute this induced daydream into reality. Bear in mind now that this "magical world" is not even the simulated world in the TV screen, but so far only the hypothetical scenario in which you own a Blu-ray player, which will be made flesh as soon as you go out and buy one; now even this act of purchasing is beatified with Disney magic. The commercial goes on to proclaim Disney Blu-ray "The Ultimate Cinematic Experience." The epidemically overused "Ultimate," understood in its true sense, denotes that Blu-ray is the highest possible rung on the ladder—home entertainment has finally awoken to Universal Self-Consciousness.
The commercial ends with the tagline: "IT'S NOT JUST A DREAM; IT'S BLU-RAY," which is to say that Blu-ray is not just equal but actually superior to your dreams. Theodor Adorno, in "The Culture Industry," writes of film that "[t]he more densely and completely its technique duplicates empirical objects, the more easily it creates the illusion that the world outside is a seamless extension of the one which has been revealed in the cinema." The films of Adorno's time, through their faithful replication of reality, made reality seem like a continuation of the film world. We've come a long way since then: the high-definition image, clear beyond the limits of human eyesight, makes reality and even dreams seem like a paltry, blurry imitation of itself. It seems Disney Blu-ray commercial, to use the language of Nietzsche's The Birth of Tragedy, is trying to cash in on our desire for the Apollonian, "that consummate immersion in the beauty of mere appearance." But Blu-ray has thrown the Apollonian realm of "forceful and pleasurable illusions" into the maw of the voracious American consumer. Like food, "mere appearance" has transformed from a necessary survival mechanism to a tool for self-pleasuring.
The text of the "Magic in High Definition" commercial is accompanied by Hollywood-epic music and interspersed with a rapid-fire montage of clips from all of the Disney movies of the past few years: High School Musical and Cars and National Treasure, blended indiscriminately. At one point in the commercial a series of consecutive clips show different characters from different movies making the same gesture, as if to say "What is important is the sensory experience of watching a movie in high-def; which movie you watch is irrelevant—they're all more or less the same." This illuminates another factor in the allure of Blu-ray: the quantification of everything. When capitalism becomes a cultural system, everything takes on the appearance of currency: calories, test scores, Twitter followers, etc. Any item with a value that is not objectively quantifiable, such as a movie, is simply made equivalent to every other item in its class. There are differences between the Disney Blu-ray movies, but they are as incidental and irrelevant as the differences between two Big Macs or two nickels. But if the movies are all fungible, Blu-ray itself handily proves the quantity of its own value: the Disney Blu-ray commercial boasts of "pristine 1080p high-definition picture/And up to 7.1 channels of high-definition surround sound," securing, at least for now, an unassailable position. In its explanation of the "revolutionary" blue-laser technology, the commercial mentions that Blu-ray "offers 5 times the storage space of a typical DVD," illustrating the triumphal statistic with a trippy computer animation showing five DVD's being subsumed into one Blu-ray disc. Capitalism, we see, follows us to even to the depths of our private lives; this has been true for a while, but today it's becoming more and more overt.
We have seen the way Blu-ray bears the hidden image of the cultural moment on which it has been loosed. The other Disney Blu-ray commercial, entitled "Fractured Family Tales," provides a nauseatingly lucid glimpse into the vanishing real life of the consumer; the text of the commercial is worth quoting in full:
There once was a family that was quite divided,
Distracted by activities, not united,
But when Disney Blu-ray arrived they were drawn together
With interactivity, games, and movie-watching pleasure.
Those home and away share a new family tradition:
Interactive fun in high definition!
The family was restored to a place of laughter,
And there they lived, happily ever after.
Disney Blu-ray: Bringing Families Together
In other words, by buying a Blu-ray player and gorging yourselves on pleasing images, you will reverse the breakdown of the family and the decline of America. To go through all that is disturbing about this commercial could easily fill another article, but I will say one thing: what's really disturbing is not the feeling that watching movies together is a family boding activity, or even idea that buying something will make your family bond, but rather the fact that the "fractured family" is a now a marketing demographic being exploited by advertisers. The very capitalism that drove the members of the nuclear family to withdraw into their own private spheres, in imitation of the division of labor, comes back in disguise to cruelly torment them with empty promises of "magical" reunification. The fairy tale is not the movie but your life. And so, even this brand new challenger for the throne is obsolete the moment you use it and realize that it didn't do what the commercial said it would.