Simulacra

I noticed when I first saw The Matrix that the book Neo hides his discs and money in is Simulacra and Simulations, by Jean Baudrillard. At the time I had no idea who Baudrillard was, or what Simulacra and Simulations is about. I recently had to read it for a class and I loved it because it has in its theory a plot outline of The Matrix.

When Morpheus says, "Welcome, to the desert of the real", it comes straight from Baudrillard's theory that reality is interspersed here and there. He calls it, "The desert of the real itself." Baudrillard is obsessed with the manifestation of the real, so much that his world is a cyclical system of reality that imitates, repeats, and reiterates everything so much that it's hard to tell when reality comes around, or if there ever was a reality to begin with. The false reality is given to us in "matrices" through a "perfect machine" designed to blindfold us to the truth...that there is no truth. Anyway, for anyone who is interested in The Matrix, you should read this, maybe you already have, and I am way behind here...oh well. I enjoyed writing this.

It's worth reading alone for his description of Disneyland. "It is meant to be an infantile world, in order to make us believe that the adults are elsewhere, in the "real" world, and to conceal the fact that real childishness is everywhere, particularly among those adults who go there to act the child in order to foster illusions of their real childishness." He also says this, "Moreover, Disneyland is not the only one. Enchanted Village, Magic Mountain, Marine World: Los Angeles is encircled by these "imaginary stations" which feed reality, reality-energy, to a town whose mystery is precisely that it is nothing more than a network of endless, unreal circulation: a town of fabulous proportions, but without space or dimensions."

I'm not saying I buy into this stuff. There are certainly absurdities to be found in Baudrillard, but it's interesting simply because it explains The Matrix better than anything else I have encountered.