Organize a fake holdup. Verify that your weapons are harmless, and take the most trustworthy hostage, so that no human life will be in danger (or one lapses into the criminal). Demand a ransom, and make it so that the operation creates as much commotion as possible - in short, remain close to the "truth," in order to test the reaction of the apparatus to a perfect simulacrum. You won't be able to do it: the network of artificial signs will become inextricably mixed up with real elements (a policeman will really fire on sight; a client of the bank will faint and die of a heart attack; one will actually pay you the phony ransom).
In answer to the question of what, exactly, is a simulacrum, the author presents this scenario. What he is describing is an attempt at creating a simulacrum of reality: a fake crime scene in which everyone actually involved knows it to be faked. The premise of Baudrillard’s philosophy is that the society has reached a point where it has become increasingly difficult if not impossible—and this written before the 2016 election!—to distinguish between what is genuine reality and what it is artificially constructed reality.
Stupefaction when one discovers that it is a 1970s film, perfect retro, purged, pure, the hyperrealist restitution of 1950s cinema.
The stupefaction being described here is the revelation that Peter Bogdanovich’s B&W film The Last Picture Show was made in the 1970’s rather than the 1950’s which it purports to simulate. According to Baudrillard, this film stands alongside such others as Chinatown and Barry Lyndon as supreme achievements in the art of the simulacrum; the simulation of another time and place is so close to perfect as to almost be undetectable.
The whole scope of advertising and propaganda comes from the October Revolution and the market crash of 1929.
Advertising prior to these paradigm-shifting moments in history was primarily relegated to simply conveyances of necessarily information about the specific product at hand. In the years since, advertising has consistently evolved away from the transmission of useful information into propagandistic creation of simulation of social reality. Everything that can be advertised has been transformed into an object used to construct a simulacrum of a utopian existence. It is no longer the product itself that is being advertised, but how that product works to fit into a simulated creation of an idealized self.
Disneyland is presented as imaginary in order to make us believe that the rest is real, whereas all of Los Angeles and the America that surrounds it are no longer real, but belong to the hyperreal order and to the order of simulation.
For Baudrillard, nothing manifests everything he is saying about the simulacrum more than Disneyland. (Except, perhaps for Disney World). It is the place in America where the greatest attempt has been made to impose a reality that is accepted as reality so willingly and with such gusto. What is most remarkable for the author is the way that people willingly accept the constructed reality of Main Street USA within the confines of the amusement park, but seem not to notice that so much of what takes places outside those confines is equally and every bit a false construction.
Coppola makes his film like the Americans made war - in this sense, it is the best possible testimonial - with the same immoderation, the same excess of means, the same monstrous candor . . . and the same success.
Francis Ford Coppola once famously—and not without controversy—said that making Apocalypse Now was the Vietnam War. Of course, it is ridiculous beyond all extremes to compare the experience of making a war movie with the war which inspired it, but Baudrillard is agreement with him to a certain extent. Symbolically speaking, Apocalypse Now is the clearest refinement of the spectacle of the simulacrum possible. It is a falsity lent the credence of truth by virtue of being an exhibition of the underlying falsity of the truth upon which it is based. The Vietnam War was a web of lies sold to the public as a fiction that even today many people accept as reality.
The simulacrum is never what hides the truth- it is truth that hides the fact that there is none. The simulacrum is true.
The simulacrum itself is not deceptive; it is the idea of truth that conceals the absence of a real truth. The simulation, in a way, is the reality.
