Be Happy to be Cured

 

He argued that the nation is filled with advertisements and sensations, but is barren of meaning. Only those who control society in order to achieve their goals provide any meaning or truths to those they primarily wish to manipulate.

Baudrillard uses Disney as an example of the "real America," and "amusement park is presented as imaginary in order to make us believe that the rest is real" (Baudrillard, 1986, p. 55). The danger of this, to Baudrillard, is that we are lulled into an unconscious state of existence because we believe the entertainments and pursuits forged for us by Disney are different than those forged for us by corporate America. In The Matrix, we see an excellent illustration of both of these concepts.

Thus, life for humans in The Matrix is for its inhabitants much the same world expressed by Baudrillard, a fake world invested with meaning by those who wish to control and manipulate. The world does not exist, only this virtual reality wherein humans are lulled into lives of blind obedience to the system. Off they go to their 9-to-5 routines, unaware all the time of what Morpheus tells Neo, "Matrix is the wool that has been pulled over your eyes" (Wachowski and Wachowski, 1999). Neo is a software engineer working in a sterile gray slot at a dehumanizing cube farm. By night he is a hacker extraordinaire. He meets the legendary hacker Trinity, who introduces him to the mysterious Morpheus. Morpheus tells Neo that the world is not what he thinks, but, instead evil forces have successfully concealed reality from humans. He also tells Neo that he is the "one," the messiah-like figure who has been prophesied as the savior of the world. Only Neo can remove the wool from the eyes of human beings and lead them to freedom. Morpheus explains that the world Neo knows is actually the "Matrix," a giant virtual-reality computer that programs every man, woman, and child. Morpheus tries to explain to Neo that when he enters the illusionary world that humans think is real, he must see others as enemies because they are still under the illusion they are in a real reality.

The Matrix picks up on Baudrillard's insistence and makes manifest the latent paranoia in his vision. In the film, virtually all of the masses are hoodwinked and complicit with a system that is total and invisible. It suggests that we are all somnambulists who mistake the narcotics of routinized sleep as wakefulness where we can exercise our freedom (p. 2).

 

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