We Live in Reality…Or Do We?

As I was watching the film, I found myself thinking at multiple and various moments that “this has got to be one of the most bazaar movies I have ever seen.” — not discrediting that the movie actually is bazaar, this was a narrow and surface level thought for me to have in regards to the greater message. When we began discussing the movie afterwards, I found myself thinking “…yo, this is actually pretty deep...” which is actually more of an accurate thought to have when we legitimately start to pick apart whats “real” and whats not.

Plato’s hierarchical scheme of reality, I believe, inserts well into the way that ExistenZe was played out. You realize once you get to the end of the movie, that it’s possible that not one scene was acted out in the “common physical world” outside of the game TransendenZe ….but then again, were there scenes that took place outside the game? This plays into Plato’s idea that if there is only one creator of something, then no one else can replicate what was created because in the creating of something, what came first was the idea. The idea gave birth to creativity. So, without an idea, the creativity wouldn’t have been known, and without the creator, there wouldn’t have been that idea. Therefore, the players of Transendenze are literally playing into the idea of the game — which is what we do in our physical world — to the point of not knowing what’s real and what’s not, because we have chosen to follow after someone’s idea of something.

On a side note, during our discussion I starter thinking about our physical world. And then I had this idea of “sub worlds”. For example, a person born into a family of billionaires is born rich and have anything they could want, while a person born in the slums of Liberia is born rich in malnourishment where getting what they want requires an immense amount of labor. These are literally two different realms of reality — worlds that are lightyears apart. Both of their perspectives in terms of the way that they see life are polar opposites. The construct of our realities have a lot to do with the world that we are born into, or the ideas that are adapted over time. Going back to the film ExistenZe we saw the characters adapt to the world that the game offers, so much so, to the point that the viewer is left wondering, “what’s really, real” and “how are we supposed to differentiate between what’s reality and what’s not?”

The ideas of what we believe in all originated somewhere at some point. I believe that falling in line with Plato’s hierarchical scheme of reality is appropriate to equate this film, and assumes that we create what’s reality to us when we believe in the ideas presented to us.