I will dedicate my discussion of Baudrillard's Simulacra and Simulation to the medium of film since we like to associate The Matrix with this particular theorist. Baudrillard makes the opening statement that "It is no longer a question of either maps or territories. Something has disappeared: the sovereign difference, between one and the other, that constituted the charm of abstraction." A modern Surrealist or Abstract expressionist film is blase precisely because the collective conscious has given up with distinguishing between the map and the territory, so high art abstraction is now in the realm of mundane everydayness. As an example, I can't help but think of Jan Švankmajer's Lunacy, a regurgitation of every conceptual dinosaur of Western ideology all mashed into an intentionally indecipherable film; more on the film can be found here and here. Although the film doesn't look at all like our reality, the tropes bring reality to mind and their chaotic orchestration is about as annoying as a traffic jam.
The documentary film is instead more in vogue having achieved commercial status this century for the first time ever, and signifying a new interest in the closest to the sense of unmediated real that the film industry can come up with. Producer of Voices of Iraq Eric Manes explained that "Without Iraqis as the directors, we would have seen Iraq and its people only through the filter of Western eyes. We certainly would not have had the access or the emotional intimacy that was captured in the film." Benjamin, who is en route to Baudrillard, might disagree with Manes in the sense that it takes creating, distributing, and utilizing vastly intricate equipment as well as having a huge tech crew on hand to offer the average American a chance to view real Iraq. The reality, free of mediation, we are looking for when we seek a documentary is made possible precisely through media, the more technologically advanced, the less mediated the story feels. But the nature of any simulation offers us the kinds of emotions much like the unmediated real does. Manes substitutes the Western director with the Iraqi and we all then surmise that it is much closer to the real so long as Iraqis are directing.
Film critics speak of the camera lens as though it were literally a human eyeball attached to a memory, much like our own eyes and brains work as humans. It is as though the camera lens itself is not a medium, but a true Iraqi perspective in its own right. Baudrillad takes the logic of personifying our technological communication channels a step further into abstraction asserting that there is no real, only simulacra; or the real and the simulation of the real are both equally true. The hyperreal is what we get when the simulacra precedes the territory.
Film does a fine job of this. The real is a desert until the simulacra sows the soil on location. Once we have access to a concept through media, we can begin to impose a multitude of meanings, eventually cultural value, and ultimately posterity. America's illegal occupation of Iraq isn't real to the extent that American masses feel "emotional intimacy" until we have what we consider as credible access, the documentary film in this case. We may begin to talk on deeper critical levels of the occupation and the state of Iraq with some more credibility now that we have had some experience with Iraq after having seen the film. The hand held DV cameras and documentary replace the physical country of Iraq in this sense, which is fine because we still see the kind of positive results over on the American end as if a rush of people took flights to the military bases and interviewed the locals: we see emotional intimacy and open fervent discussion from a broad audience, without the danger of even more people standing in the middle of a violent illegal occupation and civil war environment.
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