Wednesday, March 7, 2007

Baudrillard and "The Matrix"

Following up on Josh's post, the death of Jean Baudrillard and the obit in the Times call to mind a 2003 Adam Gopnik piece in The New Yorker about first two installments of the trilogy of movies that began with "The Matrix."

Whatever you think about the ever (too?) clever Mr. Gopnik, this is worth a read. Like the Times reporter on Baudrillard's death, Gopnik makes more than glancing mention of the ties between Baudrillard and "The Matrix," which somehow managed both to star Keanu Reeves and to liberally crib from the not quite famous French theorist's ideas and thought experiments -- not to mention Descartes's, Bishop Berkeley's, and, as Gopnik says, Nozick's, the Cathars's, etc. The notion that the world as we experience it is not real but the product of a kind of collective hallucination -- that's Baudrillard for you. Here's Gopnik:

If the French philosopher Jean Baudrillard, whose books -- "The Gulf War Did Not Take Place" is one -- popularized the view that reality itself has become a simulation, has not yet embraced the film it may be because he is thinking of suing for a screen credit. (The "desert of the real" line came from him.) The movie, it seemed, dramatized a host of doubts and fears and fascinations, some half as old as time, some with a decent claim to be postmodern. To a lot of people, it looked like a fable: our fable.

The first "Matrix" -- for anyone who has been living in Antarctica for the past four years -- depended on a neatly knotted marriage between a spectacle and a speculation. The spectacle has by now become part of the common language of action movies: the amazing "balletic" fight scenes and the slow-motion aerial display of destruction. The speculation, more peculiar, and even, in its way, esoteric, is that reality is a fiction, programmed into the heads of sleeping millions by evil computers.

And here, later in the piece, is where things really get juicy. Baudrillard, according to the Times, more or less disavowed "The Matrix," calling it the product of misreadings of his work, but he might have granted that Gopnik is on to something:

Whether it occurs in cult science fiction or academic philosophy, we seem to be fascinated by the possibility that our world might not exist. We're not strangers to the feeling that, for much of our lives, we might just as well be brains-in-vats, floating in an amniotic fluid of simulations. It doesn't just strike us as plausibly weird. It strikes us as weirdly plausible.

UPDATE
More from Brainiac: R.I.P., Baudrillard | Baudrillard and 'The Matrix' | Baudrillard obit and mailbag | More Baudrillard obits | Baudrillard and 9/11 | Re: Baudrillard and 9/11 |

Posted by Evan Hughes at 11:45 AM

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