Biopics Past, Present, and Future: Erasure, Embellishment, and the Social Imaginary
Norman Klein deploys the term “social imaginary” in The History of Forgetting as a category of a built environment, the assemblage of which necessarily involves a significant erasure of a material domain. The social imaginary can also be used, however, to interrogate an individual’s belief in the continuity of self-identity. Always already in the imagined self, after all, is the rebuke of self-instigated doubt: just how much difference can a person tolerate between the “me” that others would claim to know and the cherished, even if fossilized, image one’s consciousness seems beholden to?