![]() ![]() In the fifteen-year window from 1999 to 2014, no aspect of interpersonal civilization changed more, to the point where Caitlyn (formerly Bruce) Jenner attracted more Twitter followers than the president (and the importance of this shift will amplify as the decades pass-soon, the notion of a transgender US president will not seem remotely implausible). In 1999, it was almost impossible to find any example of a trans person within any realm of popular culture by 2014, a TV series devoted exclusively to the notion won the Golden Globe for Best Television Series. These events occurred during a period when the social view of transgender issues radically evolved, more rapidly than any other component of modern society. The younger Wachowski (Andy, now Lilly) publicly announced her transition in the spring of 2016. In the years following the release of The Matrix, the older Wachowski (Larry, now Lana) completed her transition from male to female. But what will still be interesting about this film once the technology becomes ancient and the philosophy becomes standard? I suspect it might be this: The Matrix was written and directed by “the Wachowski siblings.” In 1999, this designation meant two brothers as I write today, it means two sisters. If you talk about The Matrix right now, these are still the two things you likely discuss. It was also well received by critics, most of whom focused on one of two qualities-the technological (it mainstreamed the digital technique of three-dimensional “bullet time,” where the on-screen action would freeze while the camera continued to revolve around the participants) or the philosophical (it served as a trippy entry point for the notion that we already live in a simulated world, directly quoting philosopher Jean Baudrillard’s 1981 reality-rejecting book Simulacra and Simulation). When The Matrix debuted in 1999, it was a huge box-office success. But their metaphysical despair came from the idea that the image didn't conceal anything at all. One can live with the idea of distorted truth. ![]() ![]() If they could have believed that these images only obfuscated or masked the Platonic Idea of God, there would have been no reason to destroy them. This is precisely because they predicted this omnipotence of simulacra, the faculty simulacra have of effacing God from the conscience of man, and the destructive, annihilating truth that they allow to appear - that deep down God never existed, even God himself was never anything but his own simulacra - from this came their urge to destroy the images. It is no longer a question of a false representation of reality (ideology) but of concealing the fact that the real is no longer real, and thus of saving the reality principle.īut what becomes of the divinity when it reveals itself in icons, when it is simply incarnated in images as a visible theology? Or does it volatilize itself in the simulacra that, alone, deploy their power and pomp of fascination - the visible machinery of icons substituted for the pure and intelligible Idea of God? This is precisely what was feared by Iconoclasts, whose millennial quarrel is still with us today. Disneyland is presented as imaginary in order to make us believe that the rest is real, whereas all of Los Angeles and the America that surrounds it are no longer real, but belong to the hyperreal order and to the order of simulation. But this masks something else and this "ideological" blanket functions as a cover for a simulation of the third order: Disneyland exists in order to hide that it is the "real" country, all of "real" America that is Disneyland (a bit like prisons are there to hide that it is the social in its entirety, in its banal omnipresence, that is carceral). Marin did it very well in Utopiques, jeux d'espace ): digest of the American way of life, panegyric of American values, idealized transposition of a contradictory reality. Whence the possibility of an ideological analysis of Disneyland (L.
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