Sierra Dague Core Response 4

Technically, it isn't a pipe : r/technicallythetruth

Reading Doss’s excerpt on Elvis imagery really got my mind churning. I personally haven’t spent much time thinking about Elvis. Before this class, the closest I came to watching an Elvis movie was Forrest Gump. In fact, I can’t recall ever seeing a live video of him before. Most of what I knew about Elvis was his music and his impersonators. After he was on screen for about five minutes I couldn’t help but think that he seemed more like an impersonator to me than the real thing– which is certainly a hefty luggage to unpack after this week’s reading. 


I’d like to linger on Doss’s quote: “Jean Baudrillard posits that Americans have entered an ‘age of simulation’ where ‘signs of the real’ are understood as ‘the real itself.’” Certainly, Doss complicates this statement and I would like to as well. But it did make me think about the art inserted above. “This is not a pipe.” It’s not. It’s a painting of a pipe (or a digitalized clipart of a painting of a pipe), which is not a pipe itself. Certainly, they contain similarities– mainly in how they look and possibly in what they represent– but are not the same. 


I can’t help but compare this painting of a pipe to the images of Elvis. The images are based on true aspects of himself (For example, those who image Elvis as a kind philanthropist do have evidence for this. They just are giving more weight to it than, say, his drug addiction and materialism.) So, too, is the painting rooted in truth. It just will never be able to fully encapsulate the entirety of the pipe. 


I’m not entirely sure what to make of this train of thought but am fascinated by it and hope to extract more meaning out of it in the future. Elvis’s fans make for an amazing case study of the power of subjectivity. Each fan’s bias, past, personal experiences, and values completely mold their framework for viewing and understanding Elvis. So even though there is only one Elvis (sorry impersonators) there are perhaps as many images of Elvis as there are fans. Because no two people will be able to image a star in the exact same way. 

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