Travels in Hyperreality

Fra filmen 'Surrogates' (2009)

Nedenunder er et citat fra Umberto Eco's 'Faith in fakes'
kapitlet: Travels in Hyperreality, The Fortresses of Solitude

"Holography could prosper only in America, a country obsessed with realism, where, if a
reconstruction is to be credible, it must be absolutely iconic, a perfect likeness, a "real" copy
of the reality being represented.
Cultivated Europeans and Europeanized Americans think of the United States as the home
of the glass-and-steel skyscraper and of abstract expressionism. But the United States is
also the home of Superman, the superhuman comic-strip hero who has been in existence since
1938. Every now and then Superman feels a need to be alone with his memories, and he
flies off to an inaccessible mountain range where, in the heart of the rock, protected by a
huge steel door, is the Fortress of Solitude.
Here Superman keeps his robots, completely faithful copies of himself, miracles of
electronic technology, which from time to time he sends out into the world to fulfill a
pardonable desire for ubiquity. And the robots are incredible, because their resemblance to
reality is absolute; they are not mechanical men, all cogs and beeps, but perfect "copies" of
human beings, with skin, voice, movements, and the ability to make decisions. For
Superman the fortress is a museum of memories: Everything that has happened in his
adventurous life is recorded here in perfect copies or preserved in a miniaturized form of
the original. Thus he keeps the city of Kandor, a survival from the destruction of the planet
Krypton, under a glass bell of the sort familiar from your great-aunt's Victorian parlor.
Here, on a reduced scale, are Kandor's buildings, highways, men, and women. Superman's
scrupulousness in preserving all the mementoes of his past recalls those private museums,
or Wunderkammern, so frequent in German baroque civilization, which originated in the
treasure chambers of medieval lords and perhaps, before that, with Roman and Hellenistic
collections."