@ftp901
Baudrillard’s hyperreality depends on the function of the simulacrum, which is just a simulation or image without an original model or a thing to represent. A sign which signifies nothing. And according to him, the simulacrum now precedes the reality it’s supposed to have come from. So he might say that a dream (as in Inception) no longer represents or even simulates (i.e., pretends to represent) reality, but instead the dream ‘engenders’ or produces the alleged reality around it.
It’s fitting then that in the film, the ‘inception’/birth of an event or image in an individual’s dream takes immediate effect on the external and so-called ‘real’ world. More than that, really, because the entire ‘reality’ of the diagetic world in the film is like directed and maybe even constructed by events that are ‘happening’ on a subconscious and totally not-physical level.
Nolan also demonstrates this somewhat cleverly by putting what is roughly the last point of the movie (i.e. chronologically) at the beginning. The film starts on that island or wherever it is, and we eventually find out much later that this first scene is yet another dreamed-up limbo world where Saito has been chilling for some decades (the dream has supplanted his former reality here, etc.). And it serves as an easy example of the simulacrum or unreal preceding and thus significantly informing/shaping what follows: ‘reality.’
Baudrillard was something of a fatalist and talked about the end of reality. I don’t know that the film goes that far, but it certainly intends to confuse viewers and render the dream world of the film at times indistinguishable from the real world of the film (e.g. the ambivalent spinning top at the end which is supposed to signify whether we’re in a dream or in reality, and it seems like it might topple but we never find out, so we don’t know whether this is yet another dream or just a fundamentally shaken but still in-tact kind of reality for Cobb, and we pretty much have to just literally guess as to what’s real and what’s not real in the film, much like in ‘real’ ‘life’), and this is certainly Baudrillardian.
Of course it gets especially confusing with the topic of dreams though because dreams are already mere simulations of reality. Meanwhile the narrative of the film has people further infiltrating and manipulating dreams whose original relation to reality is already unclear. And so if ‘real dreams’ (oxymoron?) existed before inception, they obviously don’t anymore because they have now been, like, tampered with and manufactured to some degree and are thus even less representative of what is supposedly real. They become pretend dreams, simulations of dreams (which themselves are simulations): essentially just simulations of simulations, or dreams of dreams (within dreams within dreams…). However you say it this is basically what Baudrillard is talking about with hyperreality.