In this blog post, I wanted to continue our class discussion in making connections between what we discussed in terms of creating a context in the Rodney King case and reality versus representation. I was thinking back this morning to a comment one of my group members made this week: Trump, in discussing the Kyle Rittenhouse video, and White, in defending King, employed similar methods of arguing that “all the proof is in the video”. It struck me that two individuals, arguing about who is at fault but with polar opposite causes and beliefs, pointed out that the significance in action lies in the film, not the interpretation. The phrase “you all see what I see” is in this case incorrect, as interpretation is the summation of the image and context, together. 

Building off of this, I wanted to touch on Ailee’s comment in class yesterday, when she said that for something to exist as reality, it has to be represented first. The films of Kyle Rittenhouse or King suggest to the viewer that there is a reality outside this representation. However, I’m thinking about how to combine all these layers and upon each other: the film is a representation that there is a reality, but the representation depends on contextualization to generate an interpretation. 

In terms of the dynamic between representation and reality, I wondered if their relationship could be tied to the statement, “If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound”? According to Ailee and Mitchell’s reading, one would believe that a tree wouldn’t make a sound because there was no one in a close enough distance to create a representation of the tree, in the form of a video, memory, descriptive writing, ect. Can this same dynamic be applied to the emergence and virality of  police brutality videos? For our society, there is a standard that a reality has to be represented in order to be accepted as occurring? Thinking about it in this way makes me upset and angry, in that representation is “needed” before reality is legitimized.