“Disneyland is a perfect model of all the entangled orders of simulacra.”
Disneyland is the ultimate metaphor for describing what Baudrillard means by simulacra. Disneyland does this by taking the recreation of a façade to extremes. Main Street, USA and other areas within the park (this is especially true when extended to occupy that section of EPCOT at Disney World in which entire nations and cultures are simulacra) are simulated so effectively at the level of facade that once visitors exit them it actually becomes more difficult to view the reality of similar locales in terms of being authentic. Disneyland has succeeded in forcing tourists to replace the reality in their minds with a simulation.
TV: Destroyer of Sodom and Gomorrah
God’s wrath is no longer the fire from heaven that makes death the wages of sin. Today, the red eye of the TV camera that tells performers they are being filmed is the fire capable of laying waste to those who commit sin (whether imagined or real). The author makes the connection between the red fires of wrath and the ability of TV to deliver judgment:
"Because heavenly fire no longer falls on corrupted cities, it is the camera lens that, like a laser, comes to pierce lived reality in order to put it to death."
King Kong
King Kong is the author’s rich metaphor for how consumer society has drained the last vestiges of myth from contemporary humanity. The long literary tradition of the beast and the hero is one in which the hero slays the beast and thereby saves society from lapsing back into the uncivilized. The story of Kong is one in which the hero captures the beast and rather than slay it, attempts to transform it into just another money-making commodity. Kong rebels against that and proves by his unwillingness to be so tamed that it is from man that civilization must be saved.
“History is our lost referential, that is to say our myth.”
This reference to history as myth is specific and direct. The simile is not to draw a comparison between history not being real or only slightly real or fact which has been altered. History as myth is referenced here specifically to manner in which filmmakers take history and rearrange it as a composition to treat contemporary concerns of the audiences.
The China Syndrome
What happens when history is mythologized is the creation a simulacrum itself. In some cases—far more than one might imagine—the simulation manages to take on a greater sense of reality than the history itself. For Baudrillard, this concept is realized not just to the degree of being a prime example, but of being a terrifying example in a movie that is not even a fictionalization of a historical antecedent, but was released almost concurrently alongside a real life analogue. The China Syndrome was released less than two weeks before its nightmarish scenario of a nuclear meltdown became reality at Three Mile Island. As such:
“The China Syndrome is a great example of the supremacy of the televised event over the nuclear event which, itself, remains improbable and in some sense imaginary.”
