World-Building as a Coping Mechanism and the Hypo-Real Essence of Hyperrealism

Abstract

The practice of world-building in contemporary media, despite appearing to be a novel practice, has existed, in one form or another, from the period of Greek civilization. Inter alia, the mise-en-scène is indubitably one of the more important aspects of visual world-building which, in contemporary media, seems to be so ubiquitous that it is nearly impossible for a media consumer to eschew this media phenomenon. In fact, it could be argued that with the advent of a postmodern society that prioritises sign-value in lieu of the exchange and use value of a product, and since everything, including works of art, are reduced to products meant to be consumed in this technocratic neo-capitalist world, fictional worlds, whose only currency seems to be their sign-value, have now become powerful enough to dethrone the storytelling practice that had been the staple of fiction films and television programmes so far. In this paper, I intend to focus on the proliferation of fictional worlds in media as a symptom of climate crisis where various spectacular virtual worlds are striving themselves to imitate the bygone natural environment by means of various visual effects including CGI. My endeavour is to explore the nature of realism and existence (or quasi-existence according to Lapointe) in these fictional worlds as well as a visual paranoia concerning the very nature of this fictional reality. I would also make an attempt to adumbrate a pattern amongst the plethora of media content where world-building is present in some form, based on their speculative eschatological representation of the world in near or distant future and by doing so, I intend to show that even though there exists an overarching presence of criticisms directed towards the rapacious nature of techno-capitalism or capitalism in general, only a handful of such texts are actually reflecting on the contemporary ecological problems.

DOI: 10.46700/asssr/2025/v7/i2/157