This Bacardi Limon ad (2002) presents layered worlds reflected in its miror - the fantasy of the bar scene and the fantasy of the dream girl who exists almost outside of the bar - it's as though one fantastical world is framed by another. The viewer is invited to participate merely by stepping into the 'pleasures' of the glass. Is this not a copy of a relationship that has no original?

I was reading Baudrillard's piece in Lemert's social theory reader that discusses Disney (524-529) where he says, "It is no longer a question of a false representation of reality (ideology), but of concealing the fact that the real is no longer real, and thus of saving the reality principle." This commentary works very much along the same lines of this ad and others we have seen. We become so lost in the fantasy vertigo of these images - in interpreting them to suit our desires and thus fallling into their worlds, that they become part of our constructed 'reality.' Baudrillard also talks about the "successive phases of the image" - and the way that our realities are "perverted," "masked," and then made "absent" until there is "no relation to any reality whatever; it is its own pure simulacrum" (527).

written by Kristin Juelson

http://it.stlawu.edu/~global/glossary/baudrillard.bacardi.html