Hyperreality from Baudrillard's Perspective: A Formal Reading in Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse (2023) film

Abstract

This study provides a methodological framework for exploring and understanding Hyperreality theory from Baudrillard's philosophical perspective. It opens up possibilities for understanding the relationship between animation and Hyperreality theory in a postmodern context. Animation is a visual space based on representation and simulation that transcends reality. By analyzing the film Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse (2023), the study focuses on examining the relationship between the Spider-Man characters and their relationship to the original reference by analyzing the visual style of the character design and analyzing how it gradually breaks down to the hyperreality and simulacra stages, while studying visual effects analysis helps to reveal how the visual representation breaks away from the reference and transcends it towards a closed system that acquires its meaning through other visual signifiers in the film. The study adopted an interpretive qualitative approach, incorporating both exploratory and descriptive elements, based on the development of an analysis tool from the literature review that was integrated with Ervin Panofsky's three-level approach to visual analysis: descriptive, analytical, and interpretive, to examine the formal dimensions of visual style in character design and visual effects and then determine the order of simulation degrees. The results show that Spider-Man: Across the Spider- Verse (2023) reveals new dimensions of Hyperreality theory as it embodies the concept of hyperreality and simulacra through multimodal characters that are separated from their original reference and become independent models, and the visual effects no longer simulate objective reality and transcend it to produce their meaning through a closed system of visual signs (i.e., within the film).