Volume 1, Number 2 (July 2004)

The Matrix Decoded: Le Nouvel Observateur Interview With Jean

Baudrillard1
Translated by:
Dr. Gary Genosko (Canada Research Chair in Technoculture Studies, Lakehead University, Thunder
Bay, Ontario, Canada).
and
Adam Bryx (Graduate Student in English, Lakehead University).

The simulacrum hypothesis deserved better than to become a reality.2

Le Nouvel Observateur: Your reflections on reality and the virtual are some
of the key references used by the makers of The Matrix. The first episode
explicitly referred to you as the viewer clearly saw the cover of Simulacra and
Simulation.3Were you surprised by this?
Jean Baudrillard: Certainly there have been misinterpretations, which is why
I have been hesitant until now to speak about The Matrix. The staff of the
Wachowski brothers contacted me at various times following the release of
the first episode in order to get me involved with the following ones, but this
wasnt really conceivable (laughter). Basically, a similar misunderstanding
occurred in the 1980s when New York-based Simulationist4 artists contacted
me. They took the hypothesis of the virtual for an irrefutable fact and
transformed it into a visible phantasm. But it is precisely that we can no longer
employ categories of the real in order to discuss the characteristics of the
virtual.

Nouvel Observateur: The connection between the film and the vision you
develop, for example, in The Perfect Crime, is, however, quite striking. In
evoking a desert of the real, these totally virtualized spectral humans, who are
no more than the energetic reserve of thinking objects .
Baudrillard: Yes, but already there have been other films that treat the
growing indistinction between the real and the virtual: The Truman Show,
Minority Report, or even Mulholland Drive, the masterpiece of David
Lynch. The Matrixs value is chiefly as a synthesis of all that. But there the setup is cruder and does not truly evoke the problem. The actors are in the
matrix, that is, in the digitized system of things; or, they are radically outside it,
such as in Zion, the city of resistors. But what would be interesting is to show
what happens when these two worlds collide. The most embarrassing part of
the film is that the new problem posed by simulation is confused with its
classical, Platonic treatment. This is a serious flaw. The radical illusion of the
world is a problem faced by all great cultures, which they have solved through
art and symbolization. What we have invented, in order to support this
suffering, is a simulated real, which henceforth supplants the real and is its
final solution, a virtual universe from which everything dangerous and
negative has been expelled. And The Matrix is undeniably part of that.
Everything belonging to the order of dream, utopia and phantasm is given
expression, realized. We are in the uncut transparency. The Matrix is surely
the kind of film about the matrix that the matrix would have been able to
produce.
Nouvel Observateur: It is also a film that purports to denounce technicist
alienation and, at the same time, plays entirely on the fascination exercised by
the digital universe and computer-generated images.

Baudrillard: What is notable about Matrix Reloaded is the absence of a

glimmer of irony that would allow viewers to turn this gigantic special effect on
its head. There is no sequence which would be the punctum about which
Roland Barthes wrote, this striking mark that brings you face-to-face with a
true image. Moreover, this is what makes the film an instructive symptom, and
the actual fetish of this universe of technologies of the screen in which there is
no longer a distinction between the real and the imaginary. The Matrix is
considered to be an extravagant object, at once candid and perverse, where
there is neither a here nor a there. The pseudo-Freud who speaks at the films
conclusion puts it well: at a certain moment, we reprogrammed the matrix in
order to integrate anomalies into the equation. And you, the resistors,
comprise a part of it. Thus we are, it seems, within a total virtual circuit without
an exterior. Here again I am in theoretical disagreement (laughter). The
Matrix paints the picture of a monopolistic superpower, like we see today, and
then collaborates in its refraction. Basically, its dissemination on a world scale
is complicit with the film itself. On this point it is worth recalling Marshall
McLuhan: the medium is the message. The message of The Matrix is its own
diffusion by an uncontrollable and proliferating contamination.
Nouvel Observateur: It is rather shocking to see that, henceforth, all
American marketing successes, from The Matrix to Madonnas new album,
are presented as critiques of the system which massively promotes them.
Baudrillard: That is exactly what makes our times so oppressive. The system
produces a negativity in trompe-loeil, which is integrated into products of the
spectacle just as obsolescence is built into industrial products. It is the most
efficient way of incorporating all genuine alternatives. There are no longer
external Omega points or any antagonistic means available in order to
analyze the world; there is nothing more than a fascinated adhesion. One
must understand, however, that the more a system nears perfection, the more

it approaches the total accident. It is a form of objective irony stipulating that

nothing ever happened. September 11thparticipated in this. Terrorism is not an
alternative power, it is nothing except the metaphor of this almost suicidal
return of Western power on itself. That is what I said at the time, and it was
not widely accepted. But it is not about being nihilistic or pessimistic in the
face of all that. The system, the virtual, the matrix all of these will perhaps
return to the dustbin of history. For reversibility, challenge and seduction are
indestructible.5

Endnotes
1 Jean Baudrillard was interviewed for Le Nouvel Observateur (19-25 June 2003) by Aude Lancelin. The
Editors of IJBS are grateful to Ruth Valentini and Le Nouvel Observateur for permission to translate and
publish this interview in English http://www.nouvelobs.com. Aude Lancelin conducted the original
interview for Le Nouvel Observateur.
2 Jean Baudrillard. Cool Memories IV. New York: Verso, 2003:92.
3 Upon opening the book during the Follow Instructions scene in Neos apartment, the hollowed out text
reveals the first page of the short essay On Nihilism.
4 It was perhaps Peter Halley more than any other American Simulationist painter who triumphed
Baudrillards conceptualization of hyperreality in relation to day-glo colours. And, as he wryly notes,
Baudrillard dashed the hopes of Halley by distancing himself from claims on him. But it wasnt only
Simulationist painters who received a cold critical shoulder. As Paul Hegarty heard in a recent interview
with Baudrillard (April 2003; in his book Jean Baudrillard: Live Theory, London: Continuum, 2004), the
last ones were those symbiotic artists. They kept pestering me, saying, but you must love what were
doing. I said, hang on, this is not acceptable.
5 Gerry Coulter's essay in this volume examines this aspect of Baudrillard's writing over the past thirty
years. See Gerry Coulter. "Reversibility: Baudrillard's One's Great
Thought"http://www.ubishops.ca/baudrillardstudies/vol1_2/reversib.htm.