REEL REFLECTIONS

WHAT IS REAL?

David Greiser

The phrase What is reality? was the dope-addled, anarchic cry of the 1970s comedy troupe “Firesign Theatre.” Those of you who don’t remember them probably got better grades in college than I did.

Reality, someone has said, ain’t what it used to be. How do we know what is real? Film itself invites the question, since in the very act of watching a movie we suspend our involvement in the real world for two hours or so. We temporarily leave the “real world” and enter the “reel world.”

In a postmodern context, reality itself is up for grabs. The so-called subject-object distinction in which reason and innate common sense help us to determine what is objectively “real” has been discredited, first by modern philosophy and now even more by postmodern thinking.

Once movies let you know clearly when their subject matter was “real” and when fantasy. “The Wizard of Oz” contained a predictable opening in the real world, followed by a clear transition to a dreamworld (signaled by a shift from black and white to color and a montage of wavy dreamlike images), and concluded with a firm return to the real, black-and-white world.

Today film makers relish blurring the distinctions between reality and imagination. They have been exploring the intellectual quandary of what is truly real (and whether it truly matters) for several decades. Several films can be used as markers of this shift of perspective.

“The Purple Rose of Cairo,” Woody Allen’s 1986 romantic comedy about every film lover’s wish (“What would happen if the leading man became real?”) was one of the first and most pleasant films to approach our subject. Mia Farrow plays a brow-beaten wife who escapes to the movies to forget her pain. As she sits in the theater, the main character in a film literally leaves the film to pursue her, leading her to utter the great line, “I’m in love with a wonderful man. He’s smart, funny, charming, intelligent—of course he’s fictional, but you can’t have everything.” As is typical of Woody Allen, “Purple Rose” explores its serious themes with a joke.

Later films explore the question in more serious tones. One of the most popular of these in recent years is M. Night Shayamalan’s “The Sixth Sense.” Through the use of careful editing the viewer does not realize until the end of the film that nearly the entire story is a near—or after—death experience. (Careful viewers of the film will pick up clues to this effect on subsequent viewings, which may have been part of the point.)

In an earlier column I made reference to the “The Matrix” (1999), in which the main character finds out half way through the film that his entire life up to that point has been a dream induced by evil beings. A sequel to this popular cyber adventure is due out late this year, and advance web notices promise that this theme will be developed more fully.

A darker but more psychologically powerful exercise in reality-bending is David Fincher’s flawed but intriguing “Fight Club” (1999). The main character, played by Ed Norton (called simply “The Narrator,” for reasons that become clear as the plot unfolds) discovers that a mysterious stranger (Brad Pitt) who introduces him to the brutal world of young men beating each other to pulps is actually the shadow side of his own personality.

One more kind of film explores the imagination-reality nexus—this is film which does not resolve the matter at all. “Mulholland Drive” (2001), directed by David Lynch, is a good recent example. Here there are two characters named Rita and Betty, but by the end of the film we aren’t sure if they are two people or one. There are several plot lines developed in the film, yet by the end we do not know if any of them has actually “happened.” Each story works in and of itself, but together they do not add up to a coherent story, nor are they supposed to. Yet the whole film is so mesmerizing it is hard to stop watching. One writer, reacting to the dreamlike quality of “Mulholland Drive,” said, “This is a movie to surrender yourself to. If you require logic, see something else.”

That could well be a motto for a great deal of contemporary cinema. In a world in which reality itself is increasingly mysterious, the makers of films serve as philosophers leading the way. And while I continue to watch and appreciate what they produce, I keep my old copy of “The Wizard of Oz” by the VCR—just for sanity’s sake.

—Dave Greiser’s real world—he thinks—is Souderton, Pennsylvania, where he is pastor of Souderton Mennonite Church.