Removing the Experience: Simulacrum as an Autobiographical Act in American Splendor

This article articulates how American Splendor's filmmakers deploy postmodernity and the seemingly antithetical logic of the simulacrum as the central means of documenting the real-life experiences of Harvey Pekar. Paradoxically, the film also attempts to reveal how these experiences necessarily continue to exist outside the simulacrum, in an affective realm.