Note.

A few days ago, having run across the Le Nouvel Observateur interview with Jean Baudrillard on the Matrix series, I was cursing the fact that I don't speak French. Well, David, who not only speaks French but quite evidently is French, has done us a generous favor by translating that interview. (And I need to rig my email program so that it reads something like, "Le samedi, 28 juin 2003, à 02:03 Europe/Paris, David Hudson a écrit:" Doesn't that just beat "you wrote:" hands down?)

Reading the interview, it's pretty clear that Baudrillard thinks the Wachowski brothers have made a fundamental "mistake" by, if my reading is anywhere near on target, creating the very sort of "dream, utopia, phantasm" they set out to blow the lid off of. His reaction to the movies is, in fact, pretty much what William Merrin thought it would be. He's the prof who wrote "'Did You Ever Eat Tasty Wheat?': Baudrillard and The Matrix" for the journal Scope a few months ago. A clip:

The Matrix represents, therefore, precisely that form of film-making that Baudrillard does, or would, oppose. Here the technical capacities of the medium are the point, and the advertised star of, the film, and a technologically produced hyperrealism dominates its aesthetics as we linger scopophilically upon the quality of the film and upon its look; upon the cybernoir tones, shades, and metals of the fashion and technology on display. Arguably the stars of the film for our identification are not Neo and Morpheus but their clip-on shades, leather coats, machine guns, and mobile phones. This is film itself as a techno-chic object of consumption; as style, statement, and pure sign-object. And if it is possible to identify so completely with the shade-adorned, VR enhanced, kung-fu-programmed and hyper-armed video-game characters, do we not thereby lose the right to side with Neo in defence of the "100% pure, old-fashioned, home-grown human"? Shouldn't we really be rooting for the machines?

Oddly enough, as I type this, Lorenzo Taiuti has just posted a similar (and briefer) argument to the Nettime list (the post is still too fresh to appear in the archives).

Even so, I wonder if all three - Baudrillard, Merrin and Taiuti - aren't missing out on a bit of the fun the Wachowskis seem to be having. In a book like America, for example, Baudrillard himself comes very close to not only describing the cinematic nature of reality in the US but also to celebrating it. The "dream, utopia, phantasm" of the world the Wachowskis have created, mixing and matching elements from the simulacra that appeal to them most, is seductive, and that's part of the point. If you find yourself tempted to root for the machines, excellent. Then they've done a fine job of avoiding the pitfall of sketching a straightforward and sterile pro-humanist tract.

Anyway, I'll leave that hanging for now to point out that it is Gay Pride Weekend and, on a fluke and at the last minute, we got in touch with some terrific people and threw something together. Just wanted to thank the quick wits of Annalee Newitz, Gary Morris, Owen Thomas and Brad Erickson here, too.

Do keep an eye, by the way, on that list of "Recent Reads" over there on the right. Hope, for example, that you haven't missed Tom Tykwer's fine article on Punch-Drunk Love. And hell, let's make the title of that film the theme for the whole weekend.



Posted by dwhudson at June 28, 2003 2:40 PM