Mental Ginger

Lincoln Blvd and Rose Ave

As this is my first visit to The Manic Room, I will start slowly. Perhaps this post is a response to the last post, containing an answer to the question posed, "Who is going to crack through our oblivion?" I also envision this writing as a "how-to." Before I launch fully into the substance of this writing, let me give you a preview of the how-to that will be contained herein: following reading this essay, you will be able to listen to "Smells Like Teen Spirit" as you've never heard it before.

I begin with a brief anecdote. I remember sitting in the parking lot of a local laundromat at Rose and Lincoln in Venice, California. Considering what comes next it, it must've been 2004. Looking across the lot, I saw a blue Ford Aerostar minivan, a child sitting in the shotgun seat, windows rolled down, his mother not there. The child was listening to the radio. As it was the summer of 2004, of course he was listening to "Hey Ya" by the Outkast.

The song had just begun and the child was already bored. It was the end of the summer and clearly he had heard the song hundreds of time. I watched him flip through the radio stations, pausing for a second on each station to hear the endless dribble issuing forth from mainstream radio. The child cycled through the entire dial and returned to you "Hey Ya." I literally watched him shrug and the begin bobbing his head to what is arguably the catchiest tune of this generation. [continued after the jump]

Down the Rabbit Hole...

In my previous post—yes! I know it’s been a while—I remarked on the centrality of Baudrillard’s notion of hyperreality in The Matrix, the most successful film by the Wachowski brothers—er…siblings. The film was a commercial success and, as many commercial successes will, became the target of much criticism. Admittedly, some of the acting just isn’t very good…and, yet, the film is so good as to more than make up for what is normally a crippling deficiency in filmmaking. But more to my point is that some of the criticism misses the key point of the film, indeed of most science fiction: SciFi isn’t about the Future or the Alien or the Technology or the Other—it’s about us, here and now.

Ya see, intellectual critics of The Matrix—and, to be clear, I am defending only of the first film, and not the sequels, which strike me as not much more than a money grab—like to argue that the Wachowskis misapply Baudrillard’s theory.  They argue that the movie asserts a “real world,” one which Neo can see with his “real eyes,” one to which Morpheus—in an unforgiveable act of bad faith—misapplies the Baudrillardian term “the desert of the real.”  Maybe they are correct.  The movie relies upon notion of “good guys” and “bad guys”: Neo—the messianic “one”—is the messenger of Truth; the “good guys” aim to bring humans back to a reality. And, of course, notions of objective morality, truth, and reality are quite inconsistent with just about any post-structural theory, Baudrillard’s included.  But bear with me for a moment as I attempt to delineate how the film—upon reflection—works to offer a Baudrillardian critique of our culture. [continued after the jump]