Analysis #5: The Matrix and Simulacra ( Postructuralism and Postmodernism)

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  The Matrix can be considered one of the most famous movies throughout Hollywood.  The main character, who leads a double life, has finally found his calling.  By day he is an average computer programmer, but by night, he transforms into Neo, a hacker who has been prophesized as “the one”.  Neo constantly questioned his reality and he soon begins to find himself targeted by the police and ultimately must save humanity from destruction.  Morpheus, another computer hacker, shows Neo the real world where machines have taken over humanity and imprison the minds of the people with a simulated reality known as the Matrix.   In Baudrillard’s “The Precession of Simulacra”, we can find the same ideas that have been presented in this film. 

 The film pushes the boundaries even further when we see that Neo has a copy of Baudrillard’s book, Simulacra and Simulation where Neo hoards money and other important computer files.  Baudrillard describes that our current society has replaced everything that we know about reality with symbols and signs that our human experience has become an imitation.  Just like in the film, Neo has been presented with a reality that has been taken over by machines with the ultimate goal of ruling society in an artificial world.  Baudrillard states, “It no longer has to be rational, since it is no longer measured against some ideal or negative space.  It is nothing more than operational” (1557).  This can be related to the film because the machines are not rational beings and their only goal is to destroy all signs of humanity, especially Neo.  The movie explores the relationship between what is reality and simulacra.  Nothing in the world of this film is “real” it is only presented as a simulation created by artificial intelligence.  The machines survive by enslaving human beings and use their bodies as batteries to continue to live.   Baudrillard also states, The second inaugurates an age of simulacra and simulation, in which there no longer is any God to recognize his own,  nor any last judgment to separate true from false, the real from its artificial resurrection, since everything is already dead and risen in advance” (1560).  Morpheus refers to the real world that does not exist in the Matrix as the “desert of the real”, a reference that is straight from Baudrillard’s work.  The Matrix is a place where we are unaware of our reality and we cannot separate the “truth from false, the real from its artificial resurrection” because it has been designed to take control over all the things that is a reminder of reality.  When we replace reality with symbols and signs, what we then perceive as reality becomes just a simulation.  The Matrix has been replaced with signs and symbols which push Neo to leave his current reality and enter a reality that is based on simulation.  The Matrix is neither true or false, it is a collection of machines that have been set up in order to create a reality that does not exist.  Baudrillard also states, “It is no longer a question of a false representation of reality, but of concealing the fact that the real is no longer real, and thus of saving the reality principle” (1565).  Neo constantly enters the Matrix that eventually to him, the actual reality before the Matrix will no longer exist and “the real is no longer real”.  He will be living in a simulation that he constantly tries to destroy in this trilogy, that ultimately leaves him fighting the real from the unreal. 

Works Cited:

Baudrillard, Jean. "The Precession of Simulacra". The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism.
W.W. Norton &  Company; Second Edition. New York, 2001. Pages 1558-1566, Print. 
Baudrillard, Jean. "Philosophy and The Matrix" YouTube. 27 March 2008. Web.