The Matrix is more similar to Plato’s cave than to Baudrillard’s simulacrum: the Matrix can and has to be escaped. However, Baudrillard didn’t agree, he didn’t want his ideas to be mixed up with how the Matrix was trying to represent them. Film’s authors even wanted Baudrillard to appear in one scene, walking down the street: what a nice effect it would have had on ones who knew who he was. The film mimics Baudrillard, however, it doesn’t thoroughly follow his ideas. “Welcome to the desert of the real”, says Morpheus to Neo when he first escapes the Matrix and sees what reality looks like. The film is loosely based on his ideas and its authors purposely indicate it: we even see Neo holding Baudrillard’s book Simulacra and Simulation. The Matrix, however, is the creation which is most often associated with Jean Baudrillard and his simulacra. This is The Truman Show, this is Fahrenheit 451. This is the basis for most dystopian worlds. Hyperreality is created, but it’s not dependent on reality and it’s not less real. Simulation is “the generation by models of a real without origin or reality: hyperreal”. It isn’t good because it’s good, it’s only good because it isn’t bad. We can’t say what is good and moral anymore because morality stopped being a constant: now we have to demonstrate what is bad to be able to tell what is good. Because of that we have no other way to describe things than to say what they are not: we need to demonstrate and criticize authoritarian regimes to show people what liberal democracy is. Objects lost their original meanings and there’s no way back. Thus our lives have become a constant creation of implications. We need it because it shapes our social status: what it implies is more important than what it is. These symbols, these shadows on the wall now are more important than objects casting them: we don’t need a brand new car because we can’t do with our old one. Simulacra stopped being projections of reality, they have become a separate realm of symbols which exist regardless of reality. Baudrillard though claimed that it was inescapable: according to him, simulacra have become more real than the reality itself. Secondly, he changed the concept of simulacra itself: authors before him believed that a simulacrum was something that could and had to be escaped. Firstly, in 1981 he wrote a book called Simulacrum and Simulation, the first book directly devoted to the concept. Starting from Plato, philosophers had been trying to escape this simulacrum, to become that one prisoner who leaves the cave even though they knew that other people would be ignorant to the truth and wouldn’t want to see any other reality than the one they believe to be true.īaudrillard, however, did two things. This is a simulacrum: fake reality which often seems more real than the actual one. Only the latter exists for prisoners in the cave, this is the only reality they know. There is a tree and there is a shadow of a tree. They don’t know any better, the shadows are as close as they can get to the real objects. Plato’s allegory of the cave is one of the best known examples of simulacra: people, having been chained up in a cave for all their lives and having seen shadows of real objects only instead of the objects themselves, believe that these shadows are reality. The word itself comes from Latin, meaning “similarity” and the idea was already analyzed in works of Plato and many authors after him. However, he didn’t create it, he only developed the concept. The term “simulacrum” (plural: “simulacra”) is most commonly associated with a French philosopher Jean Baudrillard. Read them, wonder, see how fascinating it is, but never take anything too seriously. By the way, I believe that when reading Baudrillard, you have to follow one rule, the same rule that applies to all philosophers. It’s not as if you can write a lot about it. Once you enter the area of philosophy, nothing is simple. I think it’s about time I wrote an entry about simulacra.
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