Plato (429-347 BCE), Baudrillard (1929-2007) and The Truman Show

Plato’s Cave

Plato’s Cave and the Truman Show

• What similarities can you find between Plato’s allegory and The Truman Show?

• What differences?

Creative Writing• Using Plato’s Cave as an example, write your

own version of Plato’s Cave using The Truman Show as a model.

• You may like to structure your dialogue as follows:- Inside the cave = Truman happy in Seahaven- Release = Truman’s realisation that something is “not right”- Return = Truman’s escape.- What happens when he leaves Seahaven? Does he see the light, or enter a bigger cave?

Jean Baudrillard 1929-2007• Under late capitalism, reality has been replaced

by false symbols called simulacra (images pretending to be the real thing eg. Woman’s Day covers) and simulations (eg. Fire drills, flight simulators). Can you think of a simulation you experience everyday?

• At one time images would claim to represent a reality already present. eg,. A renaissance painting of God.

• We are now witnessing a “procession of simulacra” – a series of images that do not claim to represent reality, but offer themselves in its place. eg,. Disneyland, arguably Bush’s “War on Terror”

Iconoclasts – those against the creation of images to represent God

• Baudrillard claims one of the motivations of the iconoclasts was their fear that simulacra might evoke in people the “destructive truth…that ultimately there has never been any God, that only the simulacrum exists…”

Disneyland as example

• Baudrillard claims that in Disneyland can be traced all the values of America exalted in comic strip form.

• Disney exists to conceal the fact that it is the real America which is Disneyland. It is “presented as imaginary in order to make us believe that the rest of the country is real.”

• Also that the “adults” are “out there” in the real world to conceal the fact that the country is essentially run by children.

• How can Baudrillard’s theory of Disneyland be related to The Truman Show and its audience?

The result: The negative

• “It has created a class of consumers who…wish to feel unique while resembling everyone else in their possessions.”

The Positive

• This consumerism has eliminated “class” or “caste”. However, people are instead valued in terms of the things they own.

Three Orders of Simulacra in History

1st: Premodern period. Sign or image clearly represents a real idea eg. A painting of God. Uniqueness of items marks them as irreproducible.2nd: With modernity or the Industrial Revolution (1760-1820) distinctions between signs and images and the real break down due to the mass production of items which are turned into commodities.3rd: Simulacra bear no relation to reality. They come before the original.

An Example of the 3rd Stage

• A great empire created a map that was so detailed it was as large as the empire itself. The actual map was expanded and destroyed as the empire itself conquered or lost territory. When the Empire crumbled, all that was left was the map.

• In Baudrillard's rendition, it is conversely the map that people live in, the simulation of reality where the people of Empire spend their lives ensuring their place in the representation is properly detailed by the map-makers; it is reality that is crumbling away from disuse.

Four Examples• Contemporary media including television, film, print, and

the internet, blurs the line between products that are needed (in order to live a life) and products for which a need is created by commercial images. Consumption anxiety blurs the line between need and want.

• Exchange value, in which the value of goods is based on money rather than usefulness, and moreover usefulness comes to be quantified and defined in monetary terms in order to assist exchange.

• Multinational capitalism - separates produced goods from the plants, minerals including the people and their cultural context used to create them.

• Urbanization, which separates humans from the nonhuman world, and re-centres culture around production systems so large they create alienation.

• How can these 4 examples be seen in The Truman Show?