POSTMODERN REALITY: THE WORLD OF SIMULACRA Ever since Plato and his story about the Cave and

prisoners it has become obvious that reality is something that cannot be fully grasped and comprehended by the human mind. Whenever one attempts to do so they find that there are essential pieces of the puzzle missing and from this perspective they are impossible to find, which makes the complete picture impossible to construct. There are only interpretations and perspectives of the reality, none of which can be seen to be all- encompassing and true.

American director Christopher Nolan provides his interpretation through the prism of films and is heavily influenced by the postmodern thinking and ideas regarding reality, mostly by French philosopher Jean Baudrillard. In his work Simulacra and Simulation Baudrillard claims that, living in a highly technologically advanced society we no longer have access to the real since this access has been denied to us by the media, which only provides versions of the reality, [O]ne remains dependent on the analytical conception of the media, on an external active and effective agent, on "perspectival" information with the horizon of the real and of meaning as the vanishing point1. With the lack of unmediated access to the reality we are immersed in the hyperreal, reality which is constituted of simulacra. Simulacrum does not represent the original that can be tracked down in the reality; it is an empty signifier that cannot be referred to some meaning beyond itself; it is a copy without an original. The simulacrum is never what hides the truth - it is truth that hides the fact that there is none. The simulacrum is true2. Therefore simulacra is not opposite of the real, it is not imaginary; it precedes and determines the real. Since the hyperreal deals with the signs of real [that substitute] the real3, it is impossible to draw distinction between the real and imaginary, true and false, model and copy because we are no longer able to identify either the real or the simulacrum, and therefore, The simulacrum is not degraded copy, rather it contains a positive power which negates both original and copy, both model and reproduction. Of the at least two divergent series interiorized in the simulacrum, neither can be assigned as original or as copy The
1

Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation, trans. Sheila Faria Glaser (Michigan: University of Michigan Press, 1944) 2 Ibid.,p.1 3 Ibid.,p.2

simulacrum, in rising to the surface, causes the Same and the Like, the model and the copy, to fall under the power of the false (phantasm).4 Therefore, this world of simulacra and simulation escapes clear-cut definitions and cannot be separated from the real as it is not merely its copy.

Inception and Reality The film Inception5 explores the issue of reality and how it is perceived in the todays world falling back on many premises stated in the postmodern philosophy, but mostly it relies on Jean Baurillards view of the reality. Well-crafted and intelligent, the film reflects the anxiety of whether the world we live in is real, whether there is a way we can possibly ever find that out, and challenges the definitions and boundaries of the real. The plot of the film deals with entering into ones dream in order to extract and steal information from the subjects subconsciousness, as well as planting an idea into the subjects mind, making it feel like it is their own, a process called inception, which main protagonist Cobb( Leonardo DiCaprio) and his team attempts to execute. In the dream the characters are only projections while their physical bodies are in the real world, at least that is what the characters believe. However, the dream is not imaginary, and when in dream the characters cannot easily draw distinctions between the dream and real, as Cobb explains this to his young assistant Ariadne (Ellen Page): Our dreams feel real while we're in them. It's only when we wake up we realize things were strange6. Therefore, since dreams are not easily distinguishable from the real they symbolize Baudrillards hyperreality. Also, the dreams in this film symbolize hyperreality in that they also precede the reality just like it is the case with people who come to Yusufs (Dileep Rao) pharmacy to be drugged to sleep and as an elderly man from the pharmacy says: They come to be woken up... the dream has become their reality7. This is how simulacra, that is, hyperreality functions; it annihilates the real. The hyperreal is the reproduction of the real from

4 5

Gilles Deleuze, Plato and the Simulacrum, trans. Rosalind Krauss ( Cambridge: MIT Press, 1983) Inception, directed by Christopher Nolan (2010; Los Angeles, CA: Warner Bros. Pictures,DVD) 6 Ibid.,min. 27 7 Ibid.,min. 43

the model of the real,8 but the model has no real counterpart; the dream is not a mere copy of the real life since we no longer have access to the real; it is preceded and determined by the hyperreal, which symbolizes the death of the real9 The dream, that is, hyperreality exists in its own right and the real [is] sublated in the hyperreal10 and is determined by it. Therefore, since the identity of the real is lost and since the hyperreality emerged based on the model of the real ( which does not have a counterpart in the reality) the dividing line between the former and the latter is blurred. With this absence of the distance of meaning, the gap, the difference, the smallest possible gap11 we are left with an implosion of meaning12; the meaning is lost and signifiers float freely, disattached from the signified, their reference point; the era of simulation is inaugurated by a liquidation of all referentials13 so that the signs point at themselves, they are their own reference point.

In the world where there is no meaning, no dividing line between the real and hyperreal, a world immersed in nihilism, according to Baudrillard there awakens nostalgia for the lost object and desire to reinvent the and construct the line between the real and the hyper real. In the film, this is symbolized by the totems, small objects made by the characters with which they can ascertain beyond a doubt14 whether they are in a dream or the real world. This arbitrary line between real and imaginary is discussed by Baudrillard in the example of the Disneyland. He says that Disneyland is constructed so that people would believe that the world outside Disneyland, the world they live in, is real while the world within Disneyland is unreal and imaginary. However, this is all a delusion, according to Baudrillard, made in order to save the reality principle 15 and believe that there are order, boundaries and meaning in this world. In reality Baudrillard says: [A]ll of Los Angeles and the America that surrounds it are no longer real, but belong to the

8 9

Paul Hegarty, Jean Baudrillard: Live Theory (London: Continuum, 2004) Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation trans. Sheila Faria Glaser (Michigan: University of Michigan Press, 1944) 10 Temenuga Trifonova, The Image in French Philosophy ( Amsterdam: Editions Rodopi BV, 2007) 11 Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation trans. Sheila Faria Glaser (Michigan: University of Michigan Press, 1944) 12 Ibid., p.23 13 Ibid., p.3 14 Inception, directed by Christopher Nolan (2010; Los Angeles, CA: Warner Bros. Pictures,DVD) 15 Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation trans. Sheila Faria Glaser (Michigan: University of Michigan Press, 1944)

hyperreal order and to the order of simulation16and both Disneyland and America belong to the realm of the hyperreal. In the film, the very fact that the totems are constructed by an individual makes their meaning arbitrary and, therefore their purpose and validity is unreliable and contested. This proved to be the case with Cobbs wife Mal (Marion Cotillard) who first realized that her totem is unreliable and as Cobb says she was possessed by [the] idea that our world wasnt real

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Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation trans. Sheila Faria Glaser (Michigan: University of Michigan Press, 1944)