kleenexwoman | (no subject)

So we're doing Baudrillard's Simulations in po-mo class, and it's all about the stages of simulacra and reality not being real and all that. And the class is going "OMG! CRAZY!" and I'm thinking, "This stuff is oddly familiar." Because everyone in class has seen The Matrix and knows the "desert of the real" saying, but then there's Smiths flying about (who are Level 2 industrial simulacra, by the way), and the movie doesn't quite bother to go into the allegorial details the way Philip K. Dick has lots of paragraphs to.

My teacher says he's read some Philip K. Dick, and he can't see the thematic connection between Dick's work and Baudrillard's work. WTF? This is not like it's terribly arcane, either. I mean, Dick's entire oeuvre is made of cosmic Scooby-Doo stories, except that at the end the twist isn't "The pirate ghost was really Old Man Feeny!", it's "And the guy was a robot all along!" or "And the alien was really God all along!" or "And REALITY WAS AN ILLUSION ALL ALONG!!!"
I think he may have thought that I was implying that Baudrillard stole Dick's ideas, since Dick died in '82, one year before the book was printed, and I pointed that out when someone else said, "Well, maybe Dick read a lot of Baudrillard..."

More later because I have a Creative Writing class to go to.

Threaded | Flat

Baudrillard's pretty cool. Try Becker for decent psychoanaylsis (of the existential variety) and Lacan for psychoanalysis plus deconstructionism

Am I the last person in the world under the age of 35 or so who still hasn't seen The Matrix? I saw about one third of it over the millennial New Year before passing out on my basement floor into a pizza-and-champagne-induced coma, and I've never bothered to watch the rest of it.

You should do a project on how Dick tended to use the same plot backgrounds over and over again, with only the characters at the front of it engaging in any movement whatsoever. Zoinks!

Did I ever tell you about the Mystery Machine van that used to be in my neighborhood?