"We are saddened to announce the passing of actor Rick Dalton, best known for his roles in the TV series Bounty Law and The Fireman trilogy. Rick passed away peacefully at his home in Hawaii and is survived by his wife Francesca." These are the words of director Quentin Tarantino on the Twitter page of the podcast he co-hosts with a fellow screenwriter.
Rick Dalton: The Case
For the cinephile world, this is certainly sensational news, but it is even more so for those less accustomed to cinematography, if only for the fact that the actor Rick Dalton, who died at the age of 90, is a character in the feature film Once Upon a Time in… Hollywood (2019) which bears the directorial signature of Tarantino himself.
While some newspapers use punctuation in their headlines to reveal the fictional element of the actor's death (the film web magazine Movieplayer reports: Quentin Tarantino announces the "death" of Rick Dalton from Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, where the quotation marks do justice to the fictional event), others report it in keeping with the journalistic framework adopted whenever we witness the real passing of a famous person. This version of reporting the facts might be tempting to consider it a veritable fake news story, according to which the death of a man would appear unreal rather than surreal. However, Ex nihilo hihil fit, " Nothing comes from nothing ," as Lucretius noted, quoting Epicurus's motto: nothing is generated from non-existence, but Rick Dalton does exist and, albeit in the imagination, was generated within it, and as such, can die within it.
Tarantino at the Service of Sociology: Cinema as Projection
Indeed, if we examine the phenomenon more deeply and through a sociological lens, the outcry caused by this latter journalistic version, compared to the "fidelity" of the former, would not exist. On the contrary, there is a powerful encounter between the imaginary and the real, catalyzed by the cinematic medium. Just think of the very first film experiment by the Lumière brothers in 1896, The Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat Station, which is remembered for the anecdote that, upon its first showing at one of the first cinemas, spectators were startled by the sight of a moving train passing by, as it was profoundly realistic.
Undoubtedly a first example of an 'encounter' between reality and film image, in which one does not just view the scene, but experiences it. It is clear how an essential role in this case is assumed by sensorial perception , without which such a union would not have been able to exist, and with it a real experience, but it is also true that the perception of the world is a constitutive part of it. [1]
[1] Bourdieau in this regard considered the need for a sociology that included a sociology of social perceptions, as well as a sociology of world constructions that also contribute to the construction of the world itself (1990).
Rick Dalton and Morin
At the same time, having experienced Rick Dalton's character on screen does not exempt the viewer from experiencing his death, but in this case one is also invested by a process of strong projection and identification typical of the media functioning of modernity, which distances itself from mere sensorial perception to increasingly approach an 'identitarian' one. Kearney (1988) believes, in fact, that with the anthropocentric nature of modernity, the imaginary emancipates itself from sensorial perception , assuming ever greater autonomy, enrolling in a process of continuous self-reflexive projections and sublimations (Binelli, 2019).
An idea along the same lines as Morin (1962), who, starting from the cinematic medium itself, recognizes how its products trigger a mechanism of strong projection and identification in the spectator with what they witness. This transition was certainly accelerated by the stardom of 50s Hollywood cinema, in which the 'star' becomes an ideal type for the spectator's life, accompanying them from the film in which they are the protagonist to their extra-filmic life, also tracing (and pursuing) their private life, constructively portrayed, but spontaneously perceived.
The passage between life and imagination
The same Tarantino film in question paints a good picture of this 'star system', even though it sets the film at the collapse of this mechanism, at the dawn of the 70s when a new American (and eminently European) cinematographic season was dawning. What has remained up to today, with a certain transposition also on other media fronts, is, precisely, this process of 'approach' and projection towards the protagonists of the film products, of which this ambivalent aspect of construction and spontaneity of the scene (and behind the scenes) is an accomplice. [2]
Cinema, in this way, enables the transition from the imaginary of our life to the life of our imaginary . The spectator participates in the film, projects himself into it, and establishes relationships with its characters because they convey a certain image of life that he makes his own. In this sense, the audience makes Rick Dalton's character their own, interacts with him, learns about him and, with him, his death, so that the boundaries between the imaginary and the real become blurred, almost merging.
Castells and the simulacra
According to Castells (2001) we are, in fact, faced with a system in which reality itself is fully captured, completely immersed in a virtual environment of images in which appearances are not only on the screen through which experience is communicated, but become experience (Susca, 2022).
It follows that the spectator participates in Dalton's death, which exists as a simulacrum , understood in the Deleuzian sense of a differential copy without an original: it simulates, but without any original element. It is a differential copy that refers to another differential copy that refers to something that does not originally exist (Bertetto, 2007), but, as mentioned, exists in the imagination that coincides with the image, so that the spectator experiences it, thus witnessing a death that is both simulated and experienced.
[2] Without any tendency to liquidate the format, but rather grasping its media experience, moving away from cinema to TV, the reality format fully captures this double direction in which the scene is constructed spontaneously, the participants show themselves for what they are in their most exasperated genuineness. The performance imperative is thus combined with the more private and intimate one, which finds a safe refuge in the imagination of the spectator who projects himself onto it, as he shares with it the same human essence.
Sociology at the Service of Tarantino: Humanized Information
Complicit in this process is what Morin enunciates in the aforementioned work, dedicating a chapter to it with the metaphorical title "Communicating Vessels": the film character is divinized and simulates reality, and media information is increasingly romanticized. Now, reporting the death of an actor, who also lived in an imaginary dimension, contributes to this fictionalized turn in information, which is not limited to news reporting but also puts down on paper (or pixels on screen, today) the vicissitudes of those who inhabit the world of entertainment.
In other words, according to Morin, "While the imaginary flows into realism [...] information tends to structure the event in a novelistic or theatrical manner" (Morin op. cit.). It is thus easier to understand the image of communicating vessels used by the sociologist to explain this process: there is a continuous confluence of dimensions of spontaneity and construction , of reality and imaginary, hybridizing them.
Rick Dalton and Goffman
Explaining it with Goffman (who allegorically posited the stage as the 'performative' moment of the social actor, according to very specific frames, and the backstage as the moment of maximum spontaneity, in which he can be himself by stripping off the social mask he must follow to exist in the world), the stage invades the backstage , with a reasoned and archetypal construction of the actor according to star models that lead him to be socially recognized by the spectator. At the same time, the backstage permeates the entire scene , endowing the actor with a strongly human element that allows the spectator to identify with him.
Just as entertainment brings the extra-filmic (behind the scenes) into the pro-filmic (onstage), news media leverages this exchange (to the point of increasingly becoming a form of infotainment ) and imbues news with highly humanizing elements, even while still adhering to established journalistic frameworks. This is where we return to the starting point: the news of the death of a fictional character speaks to this dual process, all the more so if not intelligible, thus disproving the initial hypothesis of fake news.
Culture of real virtuality
It is the quintessential "spontaneous construction," but this does not mean it cannot be ascribed to the social imaginary to which it fully belongs, inhabiting it, as it shares the same life cycle and backstory with its recipient. Thus, Tarantino's work, with the death of its protagonist, reaches completion, albeit outside the pro-filmic, but becoming a continuation of it, creating a connection between the scene and the backstory, enlarging the ranks of the imaginary.
This therefore supports Castells's theory (1996) according to which we are in the midst of a culture of real virtuality, that is, a paradigm in which the imaginary, its forms and its languages, penetrate the heart of the world and make it beat to their rhythm (op.cit). The large writing on the New Beverly Cinema [Fig.2] owned by Quentin Tarantino in memory of Rick Dalton on the same day the director had made the announcement? The acid test.
Emanuela Miccoli
Bibliography
- Bertetto, P. (2007), The Mirror and the Simulacrum. Cinema in a World That Has Become a Fable, Bompiani Studios, Rome.
- Binelli, A. (2019). Images, Imagination, and the Imaginary. Richard Kearney and the Not-So-Funeral Wake of Postmodernism. Im@go magazine of sociological imagination.
- Bourdieau, P. (1990). In Other Words. Essay towards a Reflexive Sociology. Cambridge: Polity Press.
- Castells, M. (1996). The Information Age. The Society in Networks, Vol.1.
- Castells, M. (2001). The Internet Galaxy. Paris: Fayard.
- Fassari L. (2017) Beyond Realityism – A Map of Contemporary Media Experience, Sociology and Social Research, Franco Angeli.
- Goffman E. (1959), Everyday life as a representation, New York: Doubleday & Company Inc.
- Kearney, R. (1988). The Wake of Imagination. Toward a Postmodern Culture. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
- Morin, E. (1962). The spirit of the times. Meltemi Visual Cultures. Susca, V. (2022). Habiter l'imaginaire. Sociologie de la culture numérique. Im@go magazine of social imagination.
