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Sheila Murphy, Josh Morrison

Dredd-full Mimesis: Traversing the Hollywood Fantasy

Armed with an arsenal of new media technology, Hollywood creates visual effects
sophisticated enough, paradoxically, to make possible the believable representation of impossible
worlds. Digital media theorist Sean Cubitt contends this unprecedented level of visual immersion
indicates mass cultures abandonment of confronting social reality (Cubitt 245). The 2012 film
Dredd, however, depicts American society decades in the future, barely surviving an irradiated
planet on the virtue of highly futuristic technology. Unlike many visual-effects-heavy Hollywood
films, which tend to delve into optimistic, dream-like worlds, Dredd depicts a distinctly
nightmarish vision of a society plagued by crime and violence. Dredd demonstrates that a
fantasy world is not necessarily a complete escape from reality. Instead, Dredds digital
projections are still entangled with the social conditions which Hollywood movies typically opt
to disguise with fantasy. Dredd augments real social conditions with digital effects to
demonstrate an alternate world which critiques the efficacy of a technologically advanced
consumer capitalist society.
Since the late 1980s, Hollywood has increasingly populated its filmic worlds with
computer-generated mise-en-scne and navigated them with digitally manipulated cameras. In
affecting this industrial shift, Cubitt contends, digital technologies promise to elevate fantasy
worlds above the troublesome everyday world...they cajole us to step inward into miniaturized
infinities bracketed off from the real world (247). Dredd commands entrance into its world
with the authority of visual spectacle. The world this invitation beckons to, however, is paralyzed
in a state of social, environmental, and legal atrophy.
Cubitts analysis of Hollywoods digital cinematic practices accounts for Dredds
negative fantasy. Unlike a physical change of scenery, initiation of the digital spectacle induces

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Sheila Murphy, Josh Morrison

an intrapsychic event that percieves itself between psyche and virtual world (251). This
intrapsychic event presents a contemporary reconceptualization of mimesis, the notion of
representing or imitating the real world. Whether inspiring splendor, or inciting horror as in the
case of Dredd, any and all of these insular, digitized dream-spaces create a cathartic
environment upon which to displace social anxieties about contemporary society (251-252).
Dredds Mega City One, a futuristic, technologically advanced fictional American city, is a
digital semblance of modern society which attempts to negotiate social apprehensions towards
the governing logic of consumer capitalism.
Cultural critic Slavoj Zizek also writes about the decrementing of substance from social
reality as late capitalist market practices accelerate. Social habituation, rather than real desire,
motivates consumption, which must necessarily be a primary social habit in contemporary
society because it is a symbolic repetition and reaffirmation of the social practices which fuel
capitalism. Necessary to maintain the social order, yet personally unfulfilling, consumption
creates a psychological rift between individual consumer and the social reality and set of
symbolic practices of their culture. Hence, ideology is not a centralized apparatus of power as
Cubitt suggests, but rather a decentralized, fluid constituent implicit to social patterns of
behavior (Zizek 14-17). Hollywoods attempts at digital mimesis may be better understood as a
cultural impulse to project desires which go systemically unrealized or unfulfilled onto a fantasy
world. Moreover, the more profound the psychological rift between the social body and the
existing order of social reality, the greater instinct to sign and interpret codes which threaten to
rupture the existing social structure, perhaps even risking an encounter with The Real - which
Zizek defines as a visceral encounter with knowledge-experience which transcends
comprehensibility, or symbolic definition, (Zizek 17).

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Sheila Murphy, Josh Morrison

Zizeks theory of ideology as fluid does not invalidate Cubitts reading of Hollywood
film, but rather explodes the possibilities for interpreting digital mimesis. If reality and unreality
are understood as two potentially overlapping cultural maps of concepts which mediate the
visceral, pure experience of The Real, then Dredd is not just a mimetic body of fantastic
symbols, it also contains elements of The Real which must necessarily be diluted with unreal
images precisely because it is real, that is, on account of its traumatic/excessive character, we
are unable to integrate it into (what we experience as) our reality, and are therefore compelled to
experience it as nightmarish apparition (Zizek 19).
Dredd portrays a dark, twisted fantasy embodying the malignant excesses of a
militarized society too quick to exhaust its resources before considering the consequences.
Futuristic shots of robotic news feeds depict a frustrated mass of oppressed citizens who suffer in
an irradiated city ravaged by the excessive nature of greed and overconsumption. The film reenvisions a multitude of contemporary technology and media interfaces in order to depict Mega
City One - news cast footage, drone surveillance monitor displays, and a digitally composited
mise-en-scne model city highly similar to urban design plans for major metropolitan cities. By
highlighting the pitfalls of contemporary consumer capital society. Judge Dredd, a cybernetically
enhanced legal enforcer, serves as the agent of justice who promises to save this world from
anarchy.
Dredds narrative structure follows cybernetic legal enforcer Judge Dredd as he
confronts drug-dealing kingpin Ma-Ma. The simple plot, which traces Dredds pursuit of Ma-Ma
through a skyscraper littered with set-pieces built around the visual spectacle of futuristic
weaponry, obviates any larger social implications inferred at the films outset by positioning MaMa as the source of all violence and lawlessness that occurs on-screen. When Dredd finally

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Sheila Murphy, Josh Morrison

confronts Ma-Ma at the films climax, the narrative structure has already redefined the stakes, the
moral fate of Dredds universe, as Ma-Mas defeat. Moreover, the narrative progression follows
a hyperreal journey up a futuristic and militarized bunker where the legal system must dethrone
Ma-Ma at the pinnacle in order to legitimize the existing order and reinstate balance.
When Judge Dredd finally condemns Ma-Ma to death, injecting her with the drugs she
distributes and throwing her off the top of the skyscraper. She falls through a digitally
composited cloud representing her hallucinations with a psychotropic panoply of color. Ma-Mas
fall cuts between long shots from her side to close-ups of her terrified face. The close-ups have
been digitally manipulated using match-move cameras above and beneath the actress face in
order to allow for slow-motion cameras that track vertically down a skyscraper - an impossible,
hyperreal shot which serves to increase the spectacle of this battle as a visual negotiation of
capitalist ideology. Ma-Ma falls to her death from the very skyscraper Dredd pursues her up and at the apex of both the narrative and vertical progression, Dredd defeats the source of evil,
restoring Mega City Ones law over anarchy. The psychotropic, vertical, and bloody death invites
awe at the majestic power of spectacle, whose apolitical correlative is self-subjugation (Cubitt
264). Dredds combined narrative and visual strategy, based on Cubitts reading, functions to
scapegoat an abject social group - criminals, represented by Ma-Ma - as the sole cause of social
dysfunction, while also depoliticizing the legal elites hegemonic status.
At the level of character development, however, Ma-Ma actually is far more
psychologically complex than Judge Dredd. While Dredd symbolizes the classic, testosteronefueled action hero with little need to talk about his past, Ma-Ma, on the other hand, grew up a
prostitute abused by a drug lord and abandoned by the legal system. An expository sequence,
composed of several medium close ups, shows Ma-Ma tortured - a CGI scar slices across her

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Sheila Murphy, Josh Morrison

face at the end of the sequence, robbing her of her natural beauty, and angering her to the point
of violent retaliation. While Ma-Mas character functions as a vehicle for anxious propaganda
against the criminal figure for most of the film, her psychological profile and the visual sight of
her transformation from fearful, tortured woman to scarred, hateful anarchist indicates the violent
excesses of a legal system unable to protect its citizens until they themselves become the next
wave of criminals. Judge Dredd is as responsible as Ma-Ma for the systemic crime on Mega City
One because he arbitrarily invokes the law without any consistent ethical basis and frequently
harms the public he ostensibly serves.
Dredd is not a mimetic fantasy divorced from reality, but rather a battleground of
symbolic coordinates from both the real world and Hollywoods factory of digital effects. The
social and environmental damage to Mega City One stem from consumer capitalisms violent
and excessive nature. Although Judge Dredd is the films protagonist, his actions are as ruthless
and destructive as any of the deviants from the legal and social order. Ma-Ma is not an external
antagonist towards the capitalist order, but rather a manifestation of the social ills which an
authoritarian and exclusionary system creates. Hence, although Judge Dredd defeats Ma-Ma in
an attempt to restore order to the system, he has created massive collateral damage, increased the
publics fear of legal agents like himself, and done nothing to abet the systemic pattern of social
degradation within Mega City One.
Dredd oscillates both between depictions of real society and a digital mimesis, and
consequently, between the symbolic coordinates of fantasy and The Real. Rather than resisting
escapism, perhaps the means of social change lie in over-identifying with, or traversing the
fantasy (Zizek 18). As Ma-Mas intoxicated and fatal plunge from the heights of Mega City One
demonstrate, perhaps the only way to penetrate the visages of ideology are through a traumatic

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Sheila Murphy, Josh Morrison

engagement with our symbolic environment. As Ma-Ma falls down Mega City One in a
psychedelic haze, she sees the perpetual violence of the city around her, and Dredd, emblematic
of the governing social order, at the top of the system. Similarly, audience engagement with
Hollywoods digital semblance of reality need not be an escape from social subjugation, but
rather an opportunity to identify and problematize the systems ideological interpolation. Is it not
through dreams, after all, that we envision new ways to inhabit the world?

Works Cited
Cubitt, Sean. "Technological Film." The Cinema Effect. Cambridge, MA: MIT, 2004. 24572. Print.
iek, Slavoj. "Passions of the Real, Passions of Semblance." Welcome to the Desert of
the Real!: Five Essays on 11 September and Related Dates. London:
Verso, 2002. 5-33. Print.