HYPER-REALITY: BLURRING DEMARCATION BETWEEN SCIENTIFIC REALITY AND FICTION IN THE MOVIE “DR. STRANGE”; A MULTIMODAL ANALYSIS

Abstract

The present research aims at investigating hyper-reality through multimodality in the movie, “Dr. Strange”, a scientific-fiction based on the Marvel Comics character of the same name. It’s a story of a surgeon who gains a new lease on life when a sorcerer trains him under her supervision to master mystic arts and manipulate time dimension and space. The research explores how hyper reality blurs the boundaries between physical reality and virtual reality. According to Baudrillard, “Hyper-reality is the reduplication of replicas of a real without origin or reality. These hyper-real effects are created through representations in the images portraying the virtual world as a real-world through different cinematic techniques” (Baudrillard, 1988). These representations are made in form of codes and signs in the words and images. The study provides a deep insight into visual narratives operating in each image/frame. It shows how the movie is particularly designed to recreate the world of illusions to have effects on the viewers. The study analyzes the visual narrative through systemic multimodal that how different metafunctions in visual narrative create hyper reality, and how it confuses the audience to the point that they fail to differentiate between the physical world and fictional world. This research has been conducted under a multi-modal approach of visual semiotics by Kress and Theo Van Leeuwen to identify the metafunctions. The research will be effective to understand and learn the application of systemic multimodal analysis of images in movies based on comics.