This time, he chooses Disneyland as his metaphor, which he says is “a perfect model of all the entangled orders of simulation.” Though a French philosopher (and there is an added layer of difficulty in deciphering his texts considering they have been translated from French to English), Baudrillard was fascinated by how all this played out in America. Living in this world of ‘signs of the real’, we no longer know exactly what is real and what isn’t, and are in fact living in the ‘hyperreal.’ With the influx of technology-primarily TV and mass media-“signs of the real,” those references we use to say we live in a real world, have been substituted for the real itself. It is this world that we are currently living in, says Baudrillard. This map engulfs the real world, so much so that “the territory no longer precedes the map, nor survives it.” This, Baudrillard states, creates the ‘hyperreal’: “a real without origin or reality.” In this story, Borges imagines an empire where cartography has become so detailed that they have created a map with 1:1 scale. The easiest way to explain this is to use Baudrillard’s own metaphor: Jean Luis Borges’ short story ‘On Exactitude in Science’. In this essay collection, the philosopher proposes that reality no longer exists and has been replaced by the ‘hyperreal’. However, his most influential treatise was 1981’s Simulacra and Simulation-the book that actually appears in The Matrix. His first work to center on the postmodern condition was Symbolic Exchange and Death in 1976, in which he first introduced readers to his ideas of ‘simulation’, ‘simulacra’, and the ‘hyperreal’. Jean Baudrillard was a French philosopher who became synonymous with postmodernism in the late 20th century. Look even further, and the franchise becomes a vivid, on-screen portrayal of Baudrillard’s thesis-so much so that you could even say the movie coins a new genre of “virtual philosophy.” From the directing style to the philosophy, The Matrix as a franchise is a foray into Baudrillard’s postmodern mind-but it’s perhaps most apparent in the first film. When he opens the box, the interior is turned to an essay from Simulacra titled ‘On Nihilism’, in which Baudrillard argues that “the universe, and all of us, have entered live into simulation.” Humanity’s nihilism (and isn’t Neo the archetypal nihilist human?) “has been entirely realized no longer through destruction but through simulation and deterrence.” The irony here is that if Neo had bothered to read this, he would have had an inkling of what Morpheus (Laurence Fishburne) will reveal to him later. The cover of Simulacra and Simulations even appears in the first Matrix film-Neo (Keanu Reeves) keeps his floppy discs for clients in a box stamped with the treatise’s title on it. We know that the Wachowskis were interested in Baudrillard’s work. Neo (Keanu Reeves) stores his illicit floppy discs in a copy of Jean Baudrillard’s Simulacra and Simulation in The Matrix (1999).
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |