The Matrix makes explicit reference to the work of Baudrillard, especially the 1983 essay "Simulacra and Simulations". Baudrillard assumes the proliferation of images in advanced capitalism, with the expansion of commodities and the relentless advance of technologies of visualization and simulation. In the essay, Baudrillard describes a movement from "representation" (of something real) to "simulation" (with no secure reference to reality). This movement from representation to simulation changes the relation between sign and referent, so that we lose the connection, once presumed to exist, between sign or image and the reality to which both were thought to refer. To develop this argument Baudrillard asks us to think about situations where the simulating sign or image usurps the priority of the reality it is supposed to "serve":
1: the perfect map as that which duplicates the extent and every detail of the territory of an "empire" (in a Borges parable): as the empire decays, the fragments of the map shows bits of its former grandeur
2: the patient who simulates symptoms of madness so well he/she is declared to be mad
3: the infantile simulation of reality and history that is Disneyland: it secures the (comparative) "reality' of Los Angeles
4: the simulation of a hostage drama turns real when a hostage dies of a heart attack and the police shoot
5: the image is supposed to help believers worship God; but they come to rely upon these images so much that they become the true object of worship; therefore iconoclasts (in the Byzantine Empire) attack the images as an usurpation of the priority of the true God
Here are several key passages of Baudrillard's argument:

''Whereas representation tries to absorb simulation by interpreting it as false representation, simulation evelops the whole edifice of representation as itself a simulacrum. These would be the successive phases of the image:
1 It is the refleciton of a basic reality.
2 It masks and perverts a basic reality.
3 It masks the absence of a basic reality.
4 It bears no relation to any reality whatever: it is its own pure simulacrucm.
In the first case, the image is a good appearance: the represenation is of the order of sacrament. In the seond, it is an evil appearance: of the order of malefice. In the third, it plays at beaing an appearance: it is of the order of sorcery. In the fourth, it is no longer in the order of appearance at all, but of simulation. "(170)

"Thus perhaps at stake has always been the murderous capacity of images: murderers of the real; murderers of their own model as the Byzantine icons could murder the divine identity. To this murderous capacity is opposed the dialectical capacit of represenations as a visible and intelligible mediation of the real. All of Western faith and good faith was engaged in this wager on represenation: that a sign could refer to the depth of meaning, that a sign could exchange for meaning and that something could guarantee this excahnge--God, of course. But what if God himself can be simulated, that is to say, reduced to the signs which atttest his existence? Then the whole system becomes weighteless; it is no longer anything but a gigantic simulacrum: not unreal, but a simulacrum, never again exchanging for what is real, but exchanging in itself, in an uninterrupted circuit without reference or circumference. (170)

When the simulation wins a new kind of autonomy, the territory disappears behind the map: "The territory no longer precedes the map, nor survives it. Henceforth, it is the map that precedes the territory--precession of simulacra--it is the map that engenders the territory and if we were to revive the fable today, it would be the teriotry whose shreds are slowly rotting across the mapy. it is the real, and not the map, whose vestiges subsist here and there, in the deserts which are no longer those of th Empire, but our own. The desert of the real itself." (166)

But perhaps the whole fable of map and territory is now useless. "No more mirror of being and appearances, of the real and its concept; no more imaginary coextensivity: rather, genetic miniaturization is the dimension of simulation. The real is produced from miniaturized units, from matices, memory banks and command models--and with these it can be reproduced an indefinite numbers of times. It no longer has to be rational, since it is no longer measured against some ideal or negative instance. it is nothing more than operational. In fact, since it is no longer enveloped by an imaginary, it is no longer real at all. It is a hyperreal: the produce of an irradiating synthesis of combinatory models in hyperspace without atmosphere."(167)

*All quotes are from the 1983 text, Simulacra and Simulations from Jean Baudrillard: Selected Writings, (Ed. Mark Poster, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1988)

Questions for considering the conjuction of Baudrillard and The Matrix
1: How does The Matrix develop the idea that the apparently real is nothing more than a simulation (images with no reference in the real)?
2: Does the film re-instate an idea of a grounding reality behind the hyperreal simulation? or does it finally undermine any stable idea of reality? is there a third alternative?
3) What is the role of film as an illusionistic medium for visualizing the opposition simulation/ reality?