Hyperrisible

I don't normally have a reason to mention television here, or even to watch it, but there is a lunatic soap opera that I sort of watch with my as yet somewhat teenaged daughter called Pretty Little Liars, featuring four high school girls dressed like society matrons (the skinny kind) who have been persecuted for some time by cell phone messages and other communications signed A, the pseudonym masking the identity of a cruel and demented supervillain who seems [jump]

to know every detail of their lives at all times and uses various kinds of blackmail to get them into different near-catastrophic situations from week to week.

Anyway there was an interesting case of language abuse in last night's episode, the season's dénouement and finale, when A was at last unmasked—she turned out to be Hannah's former best friend Mona, which I spotted at least three weeks ago, although my daughter pooh-poohed it as too obvious. The explanation for Mona's remarkable abilities was so bizarre I had to go online to see if I had really heard it correctly, and it seems I had; I quote Jacob Clifton at Television Without Pity:

the reason A seemed to be omniscient and omnipresent is because Mona is a mental genius whose adrenaline spikes were keeping her in a constant state of hyperreality.

YEAH! That's why! I am not making that up! The reason A is magic, the show explains, is because A IS LITERALLY MAGIC. I love that so freaking much. It puts me -- this show -- it puts me into a state of hyperreality. I can see you right now as you are reading this! I hid a doll under your bed that has instructions and a key to open a secret snowglobe in a storage locker off the interstate! I know what you did last Saturday!

Reading the lines at conman speed, they had unloaded on millions of fans what must be the worst mystery resolution since The Murders in the Rue Morgue. In fact far worse than that one, since it violated not only all the laws of biology but physics as well.

But there's more! Mona's secret supervillain lair is located in a dark and customer-free motel run by a shy and stammering but clearly psychopathic amateur taxidermist, where I began to realize that there are a lot of—umm—cultural appropriations in this script. Jacob caught the Hitchcock movie here (Hannah even took a shower, spied on by a menacing silhouette, though she did in fact survive), but missed, I think, a name in the motel's register: Vivian Darkbloom (this was, in fact, the fake-ID alias used by the murdered mean-girl Alison, but I either missed that episode or failed to hear). Which reminds me that I've definitely seen one of the girls carrying a copy of Lolita more than once, but can't remember which one, suggesting that it might have been two different girls.

And then where do you think that "hyperreality" came from—Star Trek? It comes from another text on the cusp between modern and postmodern ("a way of characterizing what our consciousness defines as 'real' in a world where a multitude of media can radically shape and filter an original event or experience", says Wikipedia), essays à la manière de Roland Barthes by the clown prince of semiotics, Umberto Eco, known in English as Travels in Hyperreality (1986).

So what's going on here? Do you suppose a good PhD candidate working her way through the scripts of Pretty Little Liars would find an intricate web of references to this-and-that central literary moment making the scripts themselves a monument of poststructural ludic intertextuality? Or is it just a bunch of hypermedicated Brown and Williams graduates throwing fragments of what they remember from comp. lit. like spaghetti against the wall to see if it sticks? Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, I submit—both?

Hyperreal New York, in Las Vegas. From a really great example (click!) at disinfo.com.