The Matrix; Contesting Reality

“Welcome, to the Desert of the Real" says Morpheus, quoting Jean Baudrillard's Simulacrum and Simulacra, a book seeking to examine the relationships among reality, symbols, and society involved in constructing an understanding of shared existence. A post-modern book about the decay of reality and it's replacement with simulated images- The idea of a copy without an original. Enter, The Matrix;  A movie about reflection, and perspective, truth and illusion.

"If real is what you can feel, smell, taste and see," Explains Morpheus in the 'loading program' scene, "then 'real' is simply electrical signals interpreted by your brain." This is one of the big questions of the movie. Morpheus explains to Neo that what makes something real is the perception of it. If reality is subjective then what is the difference? This concept traces it's inspiration back to philosophy. In his Allegory of the Cave, Plato contends that a person born and raised (trapped their whole lives) in a cave, only able to see the wall in front of them, would regard the shadows they glimpse ahead of them as real, and would have no expectation of there being a world outside of the cave. Why would they? They've never known or seen anything else, not the merest idea. It's the basic idea of the Matrix, how do we know what real is, how do we define it? How do we know what our reality really is? In Plato's experiment, a prisoner taken outside of the cave would look out unto the world and be overwhelmed, his eyes having to adjust to sunlight for the first time. In Plato's Analysis of the Sun, the sun is a metaphor for "the nature of reality, and the truth concerning it". The solution to ignorance is enlightenment, and light itself is truth. Neo is trapped in a false reality created by a computer program in the same way that the chained prisoners in the cave are. Both of these revolve around the metaphysical question of what is and isn't real. So when Neo wakes up for the first time and sees reality he says "My eyes hurt," to which the answer is "Because you've never used them." There is a similarity in the way that both the prisoner and Neo must accept.

Jean Baudrillard’s Simulacra and Simulation:
Near the beginning of The Matrix Neo stashes his illegal software inside a hollowed-out copy of a book by French postmodern philosopher Jean Baudrillard titled Simulacra and Simulation. This is one of the principal inspirations behind the movie. "The entire concept of the Matrix films could be interpreted as a criticism of the unreal consumer culture we live in, a culture that may be distracting us from the reality that we are being exploited by someone or something, just as the machines exploit the humans in the Matrix for bioelectricity."  sim·u·la·crum: an image or representation of someone or something. an unsatisfactory imitation or substitute. The Matrix is a simulacra of life. "the Desert of the Real" is what people call the outside world- one completely different from the simulated world.