Jean Baudrillard is one of the greatest artists and postmodern theorists to have 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 optimism, energy, and innocence for its target viewers. This character is extremely influential and continues to bring happiness to most of 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 example 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 children’s minds. These ideas have grown to become too influential in children’s 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 so powerful that they can determine what happens in the real world. Through these movies, Disney has made billions of dollars in profits. However looking back at this character, it still remains innocent since it has no say on what it represents or what it communicates.
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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—their value—but on how much they 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 Mickey Mouse at Disneyland.
Another approach in which we can view the loss of distinctions between reality and the simulacrum is through the multinational capitalism phenomenon, where Baudrillard argues that capital now defines our societal identities. 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 is 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 that they have stopped seeing the real working of actual things around them like the government or economic reality. For instance, people want to live the life of Mickey Mouse and forget about their real economic and social forces.
In conclusion, Mickey Mouse and the Walt Disney Company produce a clear-cut example between imagination and reality. However, as shown by Baurdrillard’s arguments, models like Mickey Mouse have played a great role in distorting reality. With all of the social and economic realities hanging around us, Mickey Mouse has managed to create an illusion and ideology of the good life that most urbanites seek and desire.
References
- Felluga, D. (2015). Modules on Baudrillard: On Simulation. Introductory Guide to Critical Theory. Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge
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