Brad Bolman

Simulacra and Simulation, published in 1981, is a book that has had a rather impressive track record for reasonably accurately and concretely predicting pop cultural developments. There’s inevitably confirmation bias, but it provides credibility for the claim that Baudrillard was the great science fiction (SF) philosopher.

The hologram, perfect image and end of the imaginary. (Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation)

The Tupac appearance at Coachella as a hologram demonstrated that, more than anything else, if Baudrillard was wrong about the increasing collapse of “reality” into simulation, it’s only because we haven’t let enough time pass by. Here we have deceased Tupac performing — living, as if lending credence to the long-running joke that he is not even dead: he keeps releasing new material. The capitalist dream: the dead as productive. No life necessary to circulate, no consumption: pure excess. Tupac performs with his still-living contemporaries — using images of the formerly living, specters of a different time for their own profit. His re-incarnation is supposedly a dream of Dr. Dre’s — embracing his name, his false profession. His reincarnation is the dream of every record executive: musical necromancy. Why sign new talent? Just copy the old.

The closer one gets to the perfection of the simulacrum (and this is true of objects, but also of figures of art or of models of social or psychological relations), the more evident it becomes (or rather to the evil spirit of incredulity that inhabits us, more evil still than the evil spirit of simulation) how everything escapes representation, escapes its own double and its resemblance. (Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation)

Not really Tupac, a zombie Tupac for our zombie political culture — and now a zombie popular culture, too. Like the wax dolls of Madame Tussaud’s taken to a new limit: not content to just see and feel the dead and famous, but to EXIST WITH the dead. There’s something wrong that the crowd can sense. Holographic Tupac as the absolute example of the dissolution of creativity. Current hip hop can no longer produce exciting talent: resurrect the dead. The cryogenic frozen Walt Disney dream for music. Less aesthetic pleasure than functional pleasure.

Here, the same with The Artist?

One talks of remaking silent films, those will also doubtlessly be better than those of the period. A whole generation of films is emerging that will be to those one knew what the android is to man: marvelous artifacts, without weakness, pleasing simulacra that lack only the imaginary, and the hallucination inherent to cinema. (Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation)

Trotting out the same tired genres to convince us they still bring joy. More importantly, to convince us we are still capable of joy, still the same as before. That we can find beauty in simple pleasures. Give it all the awards: like a retrospective for the past itself, for an entire era. In reality, it partly exterminates the past. Las Vegas in cinema: signs, instantly recognizable, yet pointing at nothing. The absolute simulacra of the past. The Artist is the original without a copy. A remembrance of what was lost? Lost to whom by whom?

Cinema plagiarizes itself, recopies itself, remakes its classics, retroactivates its original myths, remakes the silent film more perfectly than the original, etc.: all of this is logical, the cinema is fascinated by itself as a lost object as much as it (and we) are fascinated by the real as a lost referent. (Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation)

There is no longer a real, only The Artist. Only holographs of Tupac. The Wachowskis took The Matrix from Baudrillard: perhaps mining Baudrillard is the perfect place to find another cold million. A million that cannot be anything but cold. “The Matrix is surely the kind of film about the matrix that the matrix would have been able to produce.” Baudrillard seems to be the philosopher only the simulation could produce.

This artificial memory will be the restaging of extermination – but late, much too late for it to be able to make real waves and profoundly disturb something, and especially, especially through a medium that is itself cold, radiating forgetfulness, deterrence, and extermination in a still more systematic way… (Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation)