A French Philosopher Talks Back to Hollywood and 'The Matrix'

May 24, 2002 By BRENT STAPLES

The French philosopher Jean Baudrillard seemed to fight off
a yawn when I asked him recently about the celebrity that
has come to him through "The Matrix," a futuristic
cyber-thriller that hit the screen three years ago and
became one of the hottest movies of all time. Before this
movie, Mr. Baudrillard's dense little book "Simulacra and
Simulation" was studied mainly by cloistered graduate
students and theory-heads. Because "The Matrix" cribbed
from the book for its dialogue and gave a full-screen shot
of the title, "Simulacra and Simulation" has become a cult
hit, even though it is difficult to pronounce and not easy
to read. The book's profile is likely to rise even higher
when the first of two sequels hits the screen next year.

Most writers would swoon over product placement like this.
But Mr. Baudrillard was unimpressed when we conversed by
e-mail recently. He noted that the film's "borrowings" from
his work "stemmed mostly from misunderstandings" and
suggested that no movie could ever do justice to the themes
of this book. This sounds like a parody of a French
intellectual, but it also happens to be true. "Simulacra
and Simulation" is a tightly argued manifesto against a
world in which humans increasingly appear as props in front
of a computer-generated backdrop. Anyone who's read the
book will find it hard to watch "Spiderman" or the latest
"Star Wars" episode without being perpetually conscious of
how the digitalized action scenes overshadow the human
actors. Mr. Baudrillard sees the obsession with virtual
reality not as mere amusement, but as an attack on the
basic distinctions between the "true" and the "false," the
imaginary and the real.

This apocalyptic message owes something to the work of the
science-fiction writer Philip K. Dick (1928-82), a cult
figure who wrote extensively about the moral problems that
result when the distinctions between the natural and
synthetic began to blur through cloning, artificial
intelligence and android technology. Mr. Dick foresaw a
future in which synthetic beings were mass-produced to be
used as soldiers, assassins, Stepford-style love slaves and
synthetic families next door, manufactured to keep settlers
company when humans colonize other planets.

His most widely known novel, "Do Androids Dream of Electric
Sheep?" - made into the wildly successful film "Blade
Runner" - centered on synthetic beings that escape
servitude to pass as human, only to be tracked down and
"retired" by a bounty killer. Hollywood's indifference to
the moral fine points was evident by the way it changed the
plot. The bounty killer in Mr. Dick's novel returns home to
a realistically problematic marriage and a flesh-and-blood
wife. In the movie, he falls in love and runs away with a
synthetic woman manufactured by a firm whose motto is "More
human than human." Since "Blade Runner," erotic involvement
between humans and androids has evolved into a new form of
soft-core cinema porn.

The hero of "The Matrix," played by Keanu Reeves, has the
dignity to decline when offered an intimate digital
encounter with a virtual blonde. This is a nice touch - and
one of many references to Mr. Baudrillard's theories - but
not enough to keep the movie from succumbing to the techno-
and cyber-chauvinism that the philosopher hammers away at
in "Simulacra and Simulation."

The movie portrays a Baudrillardian future in which
tyrannical, hyper-intelligent machines have enslaved the
human race and connected all the humans by cables to a
computer matrix where they live in a virtual reality that
only a few suspect to be false. The revolutionaries recruit
a select few who participate in a cyber-war to overthrow
the machines and restore civilization to its rightful place
in the "real world."

The "real world," however, appears almost not at all in
this movie. The heroes spend nearly all their time with
their brains wired into cyberspace, where their virtual
selves run up and down walls and leap effortlessly from one
skyscraper top to another. Despite its anti-cyber rhetoric,
the movie dwells mainly in the digital sphere, where the
distinction between the real and the imaginary is blurry
indeed.

The advance publicity on the next "Matrix" film talks about
more special effects, suggesting that the real world that
the heroes set out to save may have been placed permanently
on the back burner. Given the success of digitalized movies
like the "Star Wars" series, the merely real could soon be
viewed as too boring to appear on film at all.

http://www.nytimes.com/2002/05/24/opinion/24FRI4.html?ex=1023334626&ei=1&en=2fefa028671eb565