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Excerpt
Although, neither The Matrix nor The Truman Show exhibit direct allusions to the medium of film itself, such as can be seen in Jean Luc Godard’s seminal piece of French New Wave À bout de souffle (1960), or in the ironic title of Michael Nickles’ This Is Not A Film (2003), there are repeated examples within both The Matrix and The Truman Show of a conscious self-awareness of the socio-political ideology (the “postmodernity,” if you will) surrounding the placement of these films in time and space. The authors, directors and producers know that these films are postmodern texts depicting and often exploring postmodern philosophies. The Matrix very clearly depicts Lyotard’s “incredulity towards the meta-narrative” (Kaye p18) in its 
rejection of our perceived reality as the only reality, while Fredric Jameson’s definition of the postmodern as “the cultural logic of late capitalism” (1984) can be seen represented in the commercial success of The Truman Show in The Truman Show. The most literal example, however, of this cultural self-referentiality emphasizes the works of Jean Baudrillard. In The Matrix the young computer hacker Neo (Keanu Reeves) picks up a copy of Baudrillard’s “Simulacra and Simulation” showing the cover clearly to the camera (0:08:27). This single example demonstrate a conscious interaction between the film directors, the Wachowski brothers, and the cultural theory propelling their art. However the artistic tip-of-the-hat to Jean Baudrillard becomes a much deeper exploration into postmodern ideology as Neo opens the book revealing that it is hollowed out – a simulation of itself. Further compounding the metaphor, Neo removes several 
computer disks from the hollowed out book. The computer disks themselves being a form of simulacra, a symbolic representation of the information they contain, information that does not exist outside of the disk itself and can only exist because of the disk. During this early scene the audience has no way to know how grand this metaphor is.
The hollowed out book used to hide information or objects, has a long lineage in popular culture, from films such as The Shawshank Redemption (1994) and V for Vendetta (2006) to
Flannery O’Connor’s novel Good Country People (cited in Williams, p5) and Robert Ludlum’s The Janson Directive. Here the Wachowski brothers, utilize an already popular semiotic, a signifier of hidden meaning, to expose their own self awareness. Furthermore the imagery contains an irony in the choice of book. In his paper “Mastering the Real” G. C. Williams suggests that the typical book used for such an allusion is The Bible. Williams proposes the use of “the wrong book,” is a conscious choice designed to defeat the audience’s expectations and even to imply an equivalence (p5).