Although Eco insists that his collection of essays [Travels in Hyper Reality] is not a book on semiotics, it really is; or, at least it is a book about signs in the sense of channels of information that increase one's knowledge of something. Thus holography is a sign of America's obsession with the replication of the real; Hearst's San Simeon and Disneyland are complementary aspects of California's fantasy landscape; jeans promote “epidermic self-awareness” by encouraging a sense of the exterior. Film is a natural subject for semioticians, and it is a medium in which Eco has shown an increasing interest. In what will probably be the most famous essay in the collection (but far from the best one), he approaches Casablanca semiologically, yet his analysis fails to explain the movie's perennial fascination.

Basically, Eco does what literary critics, especially myth critics, have traditionally done: he analyzes a text in terms of themes, motifs, and levels of meaning, except that he replaces the simplicity of an earlier vocabulary with terms like intertextual archetypes, combining two entirely different concepts (literary and psychological) into one that is essentially superfluous. Hence he sees Casablanca in terms of Märchen motifs (the clipper to Lisbon as the Magic Horse, the letters of transit as the Magic Key, America as the Promised Land) and plot details in terms of the various generic elements incorporated into the script (spy movie / propaganda movie/ action movie). His most interesting essay is on Saint Thomas Aquinas, in which he asks and answers the perennial question, “What would the angelic doctor be doing if he were alive today?” Eco believes he would be writing commentaries not on Aristotle, but on Marx and Freud. Although Eco is always fascinating to read, and there are some provocative pieces here (notably a breakdown of the term Middle Ages into ten components), there is also a sense of déjà vu.