In one of the most interesting conversations to open up between philosophy and pop culture in recent decades, the Wachowski brothers, writers and directors of the popular science-fiction film The Matrix (1999), identified French cultural theorist Jean Baudrillard as a primary source of inspiration for their story, even going so far as to feature a copy of Baudrillard’s most famous book, Simulacra and Simulation (1994), as a prominent prop in one of the film’s first scenes and quoting the now-famous expression “the desert of the real” from the first page of that publication.
Baudrillard, however, explicitly disowned the film as a representation of his thinking, going so far as to indicate that The Matrix is the kind of film the evil Matrix programme would make about the Matrix.
Žižek famously requested “a third pill”, a pill which would enable one to see “not the reality behind the illusion, but the reality in illusion itself”. While both Žižek’s and Baudrillard’s critical perspectives effectively problematise the Platonic dualism of a naïve interpretation of The Matrix , Žižek’s recourse to the unconscious provides his psychoanalytic reading with a stable frame of reference according to which the categories of real and illusory can be discriminated
