Over the last 200 years, a paradoxical fear of deception has grown in the fields of art and popular culture – modes of expression that are traditionally dedicated to creating illusory, artificial worlds. More and more, fiction is expected to reflect what we perceive to be reality and, simultaneously, to indicate to viewers that they are dealing with deceptive strategies. But what if fabrications are not devoid of truth? What if art and popular culture, with all their fakery, can critically and convincingly tackle individual or political predicaments? And what if, as Jacques Lacan put it, truth has the structure of a fiction?

Deception in Modern Art and Hollywood pursues this topic on several levels. It explores the philosophical implications of ‘being in the know’ and the fear of deception within the theoretical frame of Hegelian dialectics and Lacanian psychoanalysis. Meanwhile, a Marxist theoretical tradition – from Theodor Adorno to Fredric Jameson and Louis Althusser – is used to conceptualize the broader historical, social and political implications of these ideas.

Ranging from the late nineteenth century to the present day, this exciting text takes psychoanalytic and Marxist theory to classic Hollywood themes of appearance, mediation, indirection and deception. It presents a novel understanding of our ongoing, entangled affair with moving images, and the emancipatory messages that they contain.