- Cruising the Hyper-Real Highway:Edgar Wright's Baby Driver
edgar wright's baby driver (2017) is a film filled with heightened visual splendor. In it, the titular character progresses through a three-act structure that utilizes familiar narrative tropes from various genres. It combines classical design with codes of art cinema in such a way as to be both intentionally artificial and "winkingly" self-reflexive. Baby Driver's characters inhabit an unreal world, one bending itself to the diegetic soundtrack of its protagonist. Wright's leveraging of bold stylistic choices within genre, narrative, and formal filmic aesthetics leads to instances where the artificial pushes to the forefront. Viewing the film through the lenses of Baudrillard's concept of the hyper-real and genre (most notably, the car chase film, the gangster film, the musical, and fantasy/magical realism) permits a deconstruction of Baby Driver's unique approach to world-building, which emerges as a poststructuralist and postmodern commentary on film spectatorship.
Baudrillard's Simulacra and Simulation, published in 1981, is one of the paramount media-culture theory texts of the twentieth century, a treatise that focuses on how signs and signifiers have replaced reality with a form of simulation. Baudrillard's work heralded the removal of "the subject, political economy, meaning, truth, and the social … [until] models and codes determined thought and behavior … [and] individuals abandoned the 'desert of the real' for the ecstasies of hyperreality" (Kellner 297). More specifically, Baudrillard writes about this transformation, noting that "in this passage to a space whose curvature is no longer that of the real, nor of truth, the age of simulation thus begins with a liquidation of all referentials—worse: by their artificial resurrection in systems of signs" (Baudrillard 146). This meditation on a shared cultural experience no longer being rooted in reality—but rather constructed through simulacra—leads to spectators engaging with texts that no longer elect to present "the real" but rather present the "hyper-real." His work is a logical extension of Guy Debord's The Society of Spectacle, first published in 1967, which itself argued that "representations of reality through images had gradually led to a dissimulation of reality—and implicitly, to society's alienation from it" (Arva 62). At the risk of oversimplifying these fundamental theoretical concepts, Baudrillard and Debord are commenting on visual culture/representation and its effects on supplanting a spectator's reality. The traditional narrative film (classical Hollywood cinema) is constructed through its formal elements (cinematography, mise-en-scène, editing, sound, and narrative) to develop a diegesis usually representative of a spectator's world. However, a film such as Baby Driver emerges in violation of classical Hollywood cinema's tenets. Its self-reflexive [End Page 48] and artificial nature welcomes an open recycling of genre and narrative tropes, further abstracting the spectator's ability to recognize the diegesis and foster identification. Baby Driver is, arguably, a postmodern film about postmodern film.
On Spectacle and Other Attractions
On its surface, Baby Driver is a typical actionadventure film. It features a young, charismatic protagonist named Baby (Ansel Elgort) who has an astounding gift for driving getaway cars for a nefarious crime boss (Kevin Spacey). Baby routinely defies the odds (and occasionally the laws of physics) to shepherd an ever-shifting crew of criminals to safety after armed holdups. Baby is fueled by music. He constantly listens to a collection of iPods that have been stolen from the various cars he has hijacked. The eclectic music emerges as a defense mechanism. It drowns out the ring of his tinnitus, the result of a childhood tragedy where his parents were killed in a car accident, with Baby in the back seat. However, for all of the traditional genre elements underpinning the film's narrative engine, Baby Driver's appeal lies in its unique stylistic approach.
Let us pause to analyze the elements of style in the film's opening credit sequence. The sequence begins with an up-angle shot of a skyscraper. This stressed angle eschews clarity, not serving as a proper establishing shot to situate viewers spatially and temporally. Instead, graphics appear—yellow parallel lines—superimposed along the center column of the...