My parents now have a high definition television and I notice the same thing on their TV. No one in real life looks like that. It's as though camera definition has surpassed the reality it's chased the past 70 years and now created Supereality. Which is impossible.
You cannot create something super--something beyond reality--and have it exist in this reality. Reality is real. If it is beyond reality then it is fake. And, something that is fake cannot be real. It is a contradiction.
Something superreal can only belong to a superreal universe. Which is why you can dream or believe in something beyond reality. However, once it exists in this world, it becomes real. This is the case with all inventions.
To a person living in the 19th century, an aeroplane was superreal because it only existed in idea. The moment the idea was made into a functioning machine, however, it immediately lost the distinction of being super and became part of our reality.
Meanwhile...
Higher definition means less ambiguity. It is stripping away falsehoods and unclarities to make something more sharp, precise, and clear. This could go on in miniscule amounts into infinity. Take a pie, for instance. Let's say we want to define with the highest precision what's in this pie. First, we take one piece of the pie and strip away all the excess. Then, we break that piece down into cherries and crust. Those get broken down into fruit, sugar, flour, butter, and all the other ingredients. Those ingredients get broken down and it goes on until you're splitting atoms and pieces of atoms for ever and ever.
In this case, high actually means low (which is intersting in its own right), but when it comes to high definition TV, they're actually ADDING MORE, not less! Yes, the rate of skipped frames in lower, and yes there is an improved aspect ratio that leads to a clearer (more defined) picture. However, the human eye has a threshold. You can only make things so defined before the eye can no longer tell a difference. This means television companies needed to come up with a detectable visual difference in order to get you to buy their new-and-improved higher definition TVs. This is where all the additional filters, color correctors, color enhancers and things that make all those people on TV look so much better--better than real life, in fact--come in to play.
It's no different than any other industry out there. The food industry waxes their apples and plumps their chicken breasts because they know they sell better. Meanwhile, aestheticians from our thriving beauty industry plump our apples and wax our lips beause we know how important it is to sell ourselves as well.
Still...
While recently watching Meet Me in St. Louis I couldn't help marvelling how lovely the picture was. The scene where Judy sings "Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas"...breathtaking. I daresay no one's skin has ever looked better than when filmed in Technicolor. Beautifully rich and saturated colors, elegantly soft lines... This is how I want me life to be: saturated, full of color, musical, defined enough to know what's going on, but soft enough to be dreamy.
Perhaps there is something to living life less defined. An ability to blur out the imperfections; appreciate room to smudge; let the little things go.
We let realism have its day in the 70s and 80s and, overall, it was a bit dreay and grey. We need one or the other. The difference is, we used to soften someone rough around the edges. We did our best with the imperfections we were given. The flaws were still there, just not in focus. Blurred until appealing. Nowadays, flaws are focused so intensely we simply remove them altogether. We pluck them out with filters and Photoshop. Giving the illusion they were never there to begin with.
Dreamy is one thing, but false is another.
I have some beautiful flaws. I try to blur them out, but I'll let you see them if you'd like. Perhaps one day I won't have to blur so much. Until then, I'll have to muddle through somehow.
