Contemporary spectatorship values special effects as expensive form, not content

Evidence

We must, therefore, posit a kind of supplementary bonus of pleasure in the surplus of the technological image itself: since here high technology is identifiable not only in the content (the ostensible future things filmed and then screened for a jaded public) but in the process itself, the nature of this stock and equipment, the qualities of the material image and the successfulness of the “special effects,” which, as in the paradoxes of the “suspension of disbelief,” are judged by way of the negation of the negation to be not unlifelike, and thenceforth evaluated according to the millions of dollars spent in their construction (it is indeed well known that today big box-office successes are mainly obtained by new and remarkable “special effects,” while each of these new constructs is accompanied by a whole secondary publicity about its mode of manufacture, its engineers, its novelties, and so forth). “Special effects” are thus here a kind of crude and emblematic caricature of the deeper logic of all contemporary image production, in which it becomes an exceedingly subtle matter to distinguish between our attention to the content and our appreciation of the form. “Expensive form” — rather than the older “significant form” — that is surely now the watchword for these peculiar commodities, whose exchange value has in some complex supplementary spiral become a commodity in its own right. — Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic…, 826

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the earlier ‘waning of affect’ and commodity-fetishism threads; also echoes Veblen conspicuous consumption and Bourdieu’s status distinction which the passage itself names, dovetailing with a possible link to the diamond trade reputational chapters in the knowledge base. — connects to: Spectacle is money that can only be looked at — Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle, 62; Media value now centers on appearing rather than acting — Aris Komporozos-Athanasiou, Speculative Communities: Living with…, 134
• DEFINE: Defines ‘expensive form’ against the modernist ‘significant form’ — a crisp periodization marker for the reader’s core parody/pastiche project.
• SEED: Modern example the reader wants: blockbuster VFX spectacle as ‘expensive form’ — content emptied, money spent on the image’s own manufacture being the actual appeal. Could anchor the reader’s cognitive map of their own position.