Plato (429-347 BCE), Baudrillard (19292007) 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• Under late capitalism, reality has been replaced
by false symbols called simulacra (images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 mapmakers; it is reality that is crumbling away from disuse.
Four Examples
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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?