Truman has no idea what unscripted life is like, or that there is a world beyond the world of the television program, or that the woman playing his wife is an actress who does not love him. Of course, Truman is understandably upset when this deception is revealed and the film chronicles his attempt to break free of his televised prison -- but the genuineness of 'real life,' in contrast to the soundstage remains an open question. After all, even the 'real world' inhabitants are often more transfixed by Truman's false life on television than their own. The Matrix is another exercise in hyper-reality: in the film, the hacker Neo-discovers that the real world is not 'real' at all but is rather a creation of villains known as Agents who have implanted the reality of the 'matrix' into the minds of all humanity, and live off of their bodies as parasites. In this...
The hyper-real world of the matrix is actually more real and impactful than the lived existence of the dwellers. Not only has the simulacrum transcended and replaced the real -- it actually has a longer and more durable existence than the real, from the perspective of most of the inhabitants. As in the Truman Show, the created alternative universe has so impinged upon and dominated what is real; it has rendered the real meaningless.
Simulacrum: What is neither real nor a copy? The simulacrum subverts the common notion of what constitutes a copy vs. An authentic artifact (Camille 31). In the common, classical ordering of priorities, the 'real' is what comes first, followed by the copy. The copy affirms the real, and the worth of the real, rather than negates it. A good example of this can be seen in art forgery. The worth of
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