Baudrillard and The Matrix + Total Recall

Blog made for Digital Media Studies to catalog the research that goes into my final coursework at University of East London for the module. by HSimpson

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The Matrix (1999) Trailer 

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Total Recall (1990) Trailer

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- WIlliam Irwin, The Matrix and Philosophy: Welcome to the Desert of the Real, p.236

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Outline

A) Intro: Broad overview of Baudrillard's theories of Reality/ Simulation and Hyperreality

B) Simulation - explained with help of 2 films.

C) Hyperreality - explained with help of 2 films

D) Conclusion

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"It is that null imitation of an impossible authenticity which is produced in batches of thousands, and played and replayed again on thousands of record players"

Sean Cubitt, Simulation and Social Theory, p.85

Digital Reproduction of "the authentic" music

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"The Matrix (1999), whose title echoes both the language of simulation theory and the discourse of the internet, proposes a world very like that envisaged in the darkest of Virilio's nightmares. Slaves of the machines they created, humans are swaddled in the amniotic immobility, plugged into a virtual world which seems entirely real."

Sean Cubitt, Simulation and Social Theory, p.80-81

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"Illusion of presence depends on the absence of teh real. The illusion provided by a close-up of Clark Gable depends on the real Clark Gable being somewhere else."

Sean Cubitt, Simulation and Social Theory, p.81

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"Cypher, who decides that unreality is better than the miserable existence he has been leading aboard the resistance craft... Given the choice, a fair number of us would prefer to inhabit the glamorous world of cinema rather than the humdrum banalities of everyday life."

Sean Cubitt, Simulation and Social Theory, p.81

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"Hyperreality is marked by the 'oversimulation' of the real; the verisimilitude of the copy is of such exactitude that it negates the original"

Paul A Taylor, Digital Matters: The Theory and Culture of The Matrix, p.149

The Matrix.

(Irish Pub hyperreality reference also on p.149)

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"Hyperreality, by which Baudrillard means the absolute triumph of the copy without original, is the result of the replacement of mechanical reproduction by digital or informatic simulation."

Paul A Taylor, Digital Matters: The Theory and Culture of The Matrix, p.148

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"First, the image begins as the reflection of a basic reality, then it becomes a mask or perversion of this reality. In time (as that reality withers), it comes to mask the absence of reality and, finally, 'it bears no relation to any reality whatsoever: in it's own pure simulacrum'"

- Paul A Taylor, Digital Matters: The Theory and Culture of The Matrix, p. 146

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"... simulating is not pretending:"whoever fakes an illness can simply stay in bed and make everyone believe he is ill. Whoever simulates an illness produces in himself some of the symptoms." (Littre) Therefore, pretending, or dissimulating, leaves the principle of reality intact..."

Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation, p.3

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"When the real is no longer what it was, nostalgia assumes its full meaning."

Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation, p.6

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"... in the end the game of power becomes nothing but the critical obsession with power -- obsession with its death, obsession with its survival, which increases as it disappears"

- Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation, p.23

Power struggle - who controls reality: the aliens or the humans in The Matrix. Humans want control by bringing the captured people to their reality.

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"What every society looks for in continuing to produce, and to overproduce, is to restore the real that escapes it... Thus everywhere the hyperrealism of simulation is translated by the hallucinatory resemblance of the real to itself."

-Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation, p.23

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"Simulation is infinitely more dangerous because it always leaves open to supposition that, above and beyond its object, law and order themselves might be nothing but simulation."

-Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation, p.20