Post Class 10/3 Memento/Baudrillard

Last night was my first time watching Christopher Nolan's, Memento. At times, I found the plot to be very frustrating and extremely confusing. By the end of the movie, I was able to make some clarifications about the story line but there were still some areas that I was questioning.
Last week we had read Baudrillard, but I did not read it carefully or critically enough. I decided to read it again this morning before class to see if I could make a better connection between the movie and the Baudrillard as a theorist.

From the discussion in class, I was able to determine that as a viewer, Christopher Nolan made us just as vulnerable as Leonard. I was not able to distinguish between reality and fantasy, between truth and lies. This relates directly to Baudrillard's argument. "To dissimulate is to pretend not to have what one has. To simulate is to feign to have what one doesn't have. One implies a presence, the other an absence" (Baudrillard, 454). The word simulate means experiencing something that is not real in order to get a feel for that experience. So for example, when training to go to war, soldiers are put into simulation tests in order to test their survival and combat skills before going off into warzones. There is however a imaginary component or an interpretation of the real. Baudrillard argues that this is where Postmodernism lays. We define our own reality, just like Barthes argued, there is a pleasure of the text. We find pleasure in this idea of simulation so much that we are willing to give up reality. One example of the simulacra, which many people have traveled to is Disneyland. "Disneyland exists in order to hide the fact that it is the "real" country...Disneyland is presented as imaginary in order to make us believe that the rest is real..."(Baudrillard, 461). The idea of Disneyland masks the fact that the outside world is out there. Another example, featured in the picture is LAs Vegas. Several buildings in the city resemble landmark pieces of architecture from all over the world.