I feel as though the title really says it all. I recently sat down to record a podcast about My Dinner With Andre, one of my favorite movies. As I rewatched it to take notes, I realized that it struck quite close to some themes from Baudrillard’s Simulacra and Simulation. Interestingly, both the movie and Baudrillard’s work were released in 1981, which makes me wonder if there was something in the water.
Before I go on, you should probably watch My Dinner With Andre, there are a lot of ways to do so online (many are very low-cost!) and it’s a great movie and worth your time. You can read this without reading Simulacra and Simulation, as the concepts I was struck by are described below (but I certainly recommend it!).
I’ve been wrangling with what I think of simulation theory for a while. It’s honestly the biggest reason I no longer identify as an atheist. I know I can’t prove that we aren’t in a simulation. If there’s even one iota of a chance that I think it might be a simulation, that means it has a creator. Thus, certainty fails me, and I fall back into agnosticism.
I don’t think there’s a god, but I’m ultimately not certain.
But that’s not exactly what Baudrillard is talking about with simulacra and the like. Baudrillard’s argument is that our reality has been replaced by symbols and signs, and what the philosophical implications are (if any) of us living in this not-reality.
The collision of these two pieces in my mind happened as I watched Wallace Shawn walk through the streets of New York to his narration. I realized that what I was watching wasn’t My Dinner with Andre — it was Wally’s, and even then, it wasn’t. Because we weren’t at his dinner with Andre at all, but a retelling—or, for my purpose, a simulation of it.
Nothing could make it more obvious than first person narration. We had our ideas of who Wally was—and who he was meeting—before we laid eyes on Andre. Once I realized it was a simulation, I quickly reminded myself of the phases from Baudrillard’s work, and quickly found a meme that summarized it:
- The first is that it’s basically a picture of an actual thing. A representation of a truth or reality.
- The second is that it is a distortion or a pervasion of that basic reality.
- It masks / perverts the absence of a basic reality.
- It bears no relation to any reality whatsoever.
And here’s the meme:
But what Baudrillard argues happens is eventually all these simulacrum replace the realities that they were meant to mask, and we live within them (Twin Peaks fans should feel a little Twin Peaks tingle here, right? The dreamer who dreams and lives within a dream, except Baudrillard is arguing (I think) that we are also replacing ‘reality’ with our dream.)
And I think he’s saying basically that the reason that the simulation of the place called America can exist is because we have Disneyland, a simulation that allows us to believe that the reality of America is elsewhere.
Let me back up for a second. He references a story by Borges, about a kingdom that created some maps. The story, called ‘The Exactitude of Science‘ is a paragraph long and worth the read:
On Exactitude in Science
Jorge Luis Borges, Collected Fictions, translated by Andrew Hurley.
…In that Empire, the Art of Cartography attained such Perfection that the map of a single Province occupied the entirety of a City, and the map of the Empire, the entirety of a Province. In time, those Unconscionable Maps no longer satisfied, and the Cartographers Guilds struck a Map of the Empire whose size was that of the Empire, and which coincided point for point with it. The following Generations, who were not so fond of the Study of Cartography as their Forebears had been, saw that that vast Map was Useless, and not without some Pitilessness was it, that they delivered it up to the Inclemencies of Sun and Winters. In the Deserts of the West, still today, there are Tattered Ruins of that Map, inhabited by Animals and Beggars; in all the Land there is no other Relic of the Disciplines of Geography.
—Suarez Miranda,Viajes devarones prudentes, Libro IV,Cap. XLV, Lerida, 1658
So you have this whole group of people whose entire lives were lived on the map and not within the Empire, and after the fall of that Empire, all that was left was the map – referring to nothing, yet infused with its own meaning and truth. Yet, because we aren’t living in the real, reality is slipping away, and the illusions we hold to ourselves are having an impact on us.
Living in a simulation, in a world full of lost references to truths long eronded, gives us an existential form of ‘sim sickness’ and is a state of ‘hyperreality.’ This loss of reference is, essentially, a death of authenticity and the real. Forever replaced. We’re disconnected, and left yearning for a thing that is removed from reality.
If you’re thinking “living like that must be bad for you” my goodness you are correct. And those symptoms range from the loss of authenticity, the lack of feeling of purpose, of being passive and allowing content and ideas to just fed to them, feelings of fragmentation and alienation, and the erosion of the sense of self.
If you’ve seen My Dinner with Andre, you are going to know exactly where I’m going with it, because this echoes / rhymes with some of the later-stage conversation Wally and Andre have. Andre even says it during the famous electric blanket conversation – what happens when we’re able to live beyond something like the seasons themselves?
Baudrillard and Andre both refer to modern life as a kind of prison, where the reality of experience is so far outside our grasp we can’t conceive it. Andre early stories, in which he is chasing down a truth of pure being, indicates that he is grasping for something real beyond ‘simple’ being – or cravings for comfort.
Some of their conversations hit directly to some of Baudrillard’s points. In one part of their conversation, Andre likens New York to a prison that is created in the minds of those who live there, making the prisoners the wardens and architects of their own prison as well. In another, he says “We go to parties or dinners like that all the time. And these evenings are really like sort of sickly dreams, because people are talking in symbols—everyone is sort of floating through this fog of symbols and unconscious feelings: No one says what they’re really thinking about; they don’t talk to each other; because I think people are really in some sort of state of fear or panic about the world we’re living in, but they don’t know it. . .”
And that’s sort of the crux of it, right? That we’re so removed from our reality that we’re not able to connect with it or each other and instead just float through the world, making our lives a liminal space between nothingness. That sometimes the pursuit of goals themselves can turn our brains off as we are ‘on autopilot, focused on these goals and plans which are also not reality.’
Andre and Wally talk about the importance of art and theater, how they are used to connect to reality, while also commenting that if done wrong it can be used to deaden the audience in a different way. It asks the questions that we’re still seeking answers to – Do we have to take people to Everest in order for them to wake up to the reality of the world? Are we so far gone?
Wally just can’t believe that is what it takes. “But I mean, the main thing, Andre, is, why do we require a trip to Mount Everest
in order to be able to perceive one moment of reality? Is Mount Everest more real than New York? Isn’t New York real? I mean, I think if you could become fully aware of what existed in the cigar store next door to this restaurant, it would blow your brains out. I mean, isn’t there just as much reality to be perceived in a cigar store as there is on Mount Everest? What do you think? I mean, / think that not only is there nothing more real about Mount Everest,I think there’s nothing that different, in a certain way. I mean, reality is sort of uniform, in a way…”
Andre’s response to Wally’s increasing worried and stressful response to the state of things is to say “Well, I agree with you, Wally, but the problem is that people can’t see the cigar store now.” (Phase / Stage 4).
What’s incredible is how much these two works still have to say about our current state of existence.
“…that this is the beginning of the rest of the future, now, and that from now on there will simply be all these robots walking around, feeling nothing, thinking nothing. And there will be nobody left almost to remind them that there once was a species called a human being, with feelings and thoughts. And that history and memory are right now being erased, and that soon no one will really remember that life existed on the planet.” That sure sounds like a simulated life to me.
Of course, then he starts talking about UFO’s.
Look, I’m not the brightest person in the world, but there’s obviously a truth that both of these pieces are bringing to the table that still rings true to this day. I think it’s the same core of truth, if not identical certainly a similar philosophical concept that they are striking at.
At the end of Simulacra and Simulation, Baudrillard goes into the nihilism that living in our post-modern reality leads us towards. But I prefer to think of it this way: in a world where nothing may matter nothing is truthful, and it all might be going to hell, I can just as well determine what matters to me.
Other Resources / Original Inspirations:
Simulacra and Simulation, Baudrillard
https://www.thelivingphilosophy.com/p/baudrillard-simulation
