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Jean Baudrillard is one of the greatest artists and postmodern theorists who has played a significant role in critiquing artistic themes. Similarly, Mickey Mouse is one of the most famous cartoon mice in the world and the face of the Walt Disney Company. It was designed to represent the optimism, energy, and innocence of its target viewers. This character is extremely influential and continues to bring happiness to most of the consumers around the world. Using such artistic representations, Baudrillard demonstrates how simulations have destroyed reality. Using Modules on Baudrillard: On Simulation this essay will analyze Mickey Mouse and its corruption in reality using the various artistic examples he shows in his article.
Baudrillard starts by explaining the distinctions between representation and reality used by media and characters such as Mickey Mouse to produce what he terms hyper-reality. These characters have grown to be powerful social instruments that influence character and behaviors. For example, many people view Mickey Mouse as being a monopolistic, racist, and sexist character. The main reasoning for this argument arises from the messages and themes implied through its past movies. Mickey Mouse has contributed to putting ideas into millions of childrens minds. They have grown to become too much influential in childrens minds a fact that many people find controversial. At this point, Baudrillard argues that in the postmodern artistic culture, society has become so reliant on characters and models such as Mickey Mouse that it has lost contact with the real world. Furthermore, he notes that in some instances reality seems to mimic and follow such characters which makes such models to be powerful in that they can determine what happens in the real world. Through these movies, Disney has made billions of profits. However looking back at this character, it remains innocent since it has no say in what it represents or what it communicates.
According to Baudrillard, in postmodern culture, people have significantly lost their ability to make a sensible distinction between artifice and reality/nature. The first phenomenon that Baudrillard uses to explain this loss of distinction between simulation and reality is media culture. He argues that contemporary media such as the Walt Disney Company are concerned not just with relaying stories or information to the views, but with interpreting the societies private selves for us. In the end, this media culture makes us approach each other and the rest of the world through the lens of these often corrupted media images. He notes that today, most people no longer buy goods they see on contemporary media out of their real needs but rather because of the desires that are increasingly being commercialized by a character such as Mickey Mouse.
To advance his argument, on the corruption of the mind Baudrillard evaluates the exchange value where people think of their life in terms of money. He argues that most people today, do not think of purchased goods and services in terms of real use value but on how much it can be exchanged. Many things have lost their real value since money has become a universal equivalent where everything in society can be measured. For instance, instead of people taking time to socialize with real people, they would rather buy tickets to watch the Mickey Mouse at Disneyland.
Another approach that we can view the loss of distinctions between reality and the simulacrum is on multinational capitalism phenomenon where Baudrillard argues that capital now defines our societal identities instead of the underlying identities of the goods we consume. For example, People do not want to know what Mickey Mouse stands for but are ready to identify it with their urban culture. This phenomenon is closely related to another phenomenon of urbanization. According to Baudrillard, as societies continue to develop available land around them, they lose touch with the natural world. Every space becomes protected with urban interests instead of actual natural interests such as those of environmental conservation.
The last phenomena that is used to show the loss of distinction are language and ideology where Baudrillard posits that language has kept societies away from accessing the reality of life through false consciousness. In postmodernist culture, society has become so reliant on language and ideologies constructed by models such as Mickey Mouse to a point that they have stopped seeing the real workings of actual things around them such as the government of economic reality. For instance, people want to live the life of a Mickey Mouse and forget about their real economic and social forces.
In conclusion, Mickey Mouse and the Walt Disney Company produce a clear cut between imagination and reality. However, as shown by Baudrillard arguments, Models such as Mickey Mouse have played a great role in distorting reality. With all of the socioeconomic realities hanging around us, Mickey Mouse has managed to create an illusion and ideology of a good life that is often the desire of most of the urban regions.
References
- Felluga, D. (2015). Modules on Baudrillard: On Simulation. Introductory Guide to Critical Theory. Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge
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