The Reality Effect: Film Culture and the Graphic Imperative

It used to be only movies were on film; now the whole world is. The most intimate and most banal moments of our lives are constantly recorded for public consumption. In <em>The Reality Effect, </em> Joel Black argues that the desire to make visible every aspect of our lives is an impulse derived from cinema- one that has made life both more graphic and less "real." He approaches film as a documentary medium that has obscured-if not obliterated- the line between reality and fiction. To illustrate this effect, Black traces the uncanny interplay between movies and real-life events through a series of comparative analyses-from <em>Lolita</em> and the murder of JonBenét Ramsey to <em>Wag the Dog</em> and the Clinton scandal to <em>Crash</em> and Princess Dianas violent death.