The film version, made six years later, is Debord's attempt to illustrate his text, further develop his ideas, and provide concrete visual examples of the kinds of things he wrote about. For Debord, contradiction is a holy grail: the spectacle that we all live is built upon a foundation of irreconcilable opposites, and to see these contradictions is to understand the absurdity of modern society. It is a complex, dazzling polemic, with a distinctively French dialectical wit and a proclivity for punning language, reversals of meaning, and contradictory ideas. The book The Society of the Spectacle was first published in 1967 and a year later became a key text of the May 1968 student uprisings in France. The society of the spectacle is the world itself and everything in it, a mass delusion in which virtually everyone is imprisoned, an endless cycle of repetitious labor and the empty ritual "pleasure" of vacations or weekends. Debord's spectacle is a politicized proto- Matrix vision in which invisible forces conspire to create an artificial reality that is utterly committed only to its own continuation. In examining the "spectacular" foundations of modern life, Debord acknowledges and discusses the usual meanings of "spectacle" entertainment, advertising, consumer fetishism, the commodification of sexuality but goes even further by suggesting that the visible world itself has become the spectacle that blinds us to the true state of things.
His dense, dialectical book, and the film of the same name that he made in 1973, posit an approach to cultural reality that can best be thought of as political science fiction. And yet, there is a sense that the full implications of Debord's radical understanding of the conditions of reality has hardly been understood or acted upon. To some extent, these ideas have been thoroughly absorbed into radical and leftist thought in the 40 years since Debord first published his seminal 1967 tract Society of the Spectacle.
The arguments of the Situationist Guy Debord, as radical as they were at the time he first made them, might today seem somewhat familiar and even blasé, on their surface at least: culture is a distraction from material reality it is in the interests of societal elites to keep the masses docile workers are alienated from the results of their labor in industrial society.
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