Captain america: civil war (anthony & joe russo, 2016)
"If I see a situation pointed south, I can't ignore it. Sometimes I wish I could."
Things looked like they were going to get really interesting for a while there. You might not remember, but back in the late 90s this whole dialogue started up about our relationship with the real. It's easy to forget that it ever happened now. Everything got very Baudrillard on everyone. There was a lot of discussion about the rising sphere of technology and our ability to differentiate between that and our experiences outside of technology. There were movies and books and games and whatnot that went on a walk through the woods on the topic of 'what if we couldn't tell the difference between the real and the vividly imagined.'
Of course, the smarter ones amongst you will know that this is nothing new. People have been having this conversation for an awfully long time. Before there were computer games and virtual reality concepts to apply it to, there were dreams. People have dreamt forever. And it's fun to consider that we've now walked on other worlds, and conquered illnesses that have plagued humanity from the beginning, but have no idea whatsoever what dreams are about.
We can hypothesise as to what they mean. Oh, for sure. We just love speculating on a hypothesis. But we don't know.
Freud thought that dreams were a way for us to release our deep, secret desires. Desires that could not be brought to the surface when in society. And maybe that's what it is. Personally I doubt it, but nobody knows, so who cares what I think?
Anyway, the point being that it's very hard to tell the difference between a dream state and the waking state, which is much the same as that 90s question of 'reality vs unreality' that I was talking about earlier. Of course, when you wake up hindsight tells you that you were dreaming. Now that you're awake again it's easy to look back and say 'well of course that wasn't real.' But when you're in it, when you're the dreamer, this isn't apparent at all. You can find yourself in the trickiest of situations, thinking of how to get around them, and be completely unaware of the unreality of your surroundings. This conversation between the real and the vividly imagined is as old as all of our conversations.
Earlier I mentioned Baudrillard, but maybe that didn't mean anything. In Baudrillard's opinion there's no difference between going to Monument Valley, that place in the United States with a series of replicas of world-famous monuments, and going to the places (frequently) outside of the United States to see the 'real' things. Baudrillard thinks you're unable to tell the difference between the two, or that the 'difference' doesn't really matter.
But then 9/11 happened, and everything changed. That dialogue about the real vs the unreal seemed less important all of a sudden, and who's to say that wasn't true? Instead we moved on to looking at the real world around us. At the people around us. At the very real situations that we were living in. All of this was a good thing to do really. And maybe it had absolutely nothing to do with 9/11. It's hard to tell. Baudrillard himself wrote about 9/11 never actually happening, although how he meant this is up for grabs. Anyway, in a nutshell, everyone moved on.
Except that that isn't true at all. The unreal continued unabated, but our critical evaluation of it dissipated. And now we live amongst it, and nobody cares anymore.
When you're lied to there are two things you can do:
1. Argue against the lie
2. Lie back and let it wash over you
And we're kind of going for the latter.
Maybe it's because the lie is better. Living with it makes the reality of our lives better because the unreality is more appealing and having it in our lives may make the real feel better than it does without it. Is that too... abstract? An old American wearing a wig once said that real life just feels flat, and that it's only in television that you access those feelings that you think real life should have. And hey, maybe he was right.
In my dream everything is very archetypal. The TV that I'm watching is an old model, square, with an antenna that I have to move to get a better reception. Part of me can tell straight away that the interference is unusual. The image freezes, like it does with a digital interference, yet this is clearly an analogue television. But because I'm asleep I don't notice this. And, of course, I don't know that I'm asleep either. There are people in the dream too, people that I know. But they seem off. Almost as though they were being played by people who look a bit like the people I know. Then I'm at a party talking to Billy Drago, or someone who looks an awful lot like Billy Drago. I start wondering whether it's his son or not. And then I start thinking I should warn him not to go up on the roof with Kevin Costner, but then I remind myself that *that* Billy Drago who tumbled to his death is not the real Billy Drago at all, this is someone else. The real Billy Drago. And then I'm not interested in Billy Drago anymore. I'm interested in the candles on the table in front of me. They've been burning for a long while and are filled with molten wax. I dip my fingertips into the surface of the liquid gingerly. I expected it to hurt more, but I can barely feel the heat at all. Now my fingerprints are covered with wax and I start to entertain the possibility that I can make perfect copies of my fingerprints. I'm not sure what to use these for, but it sounds like fun. I peel one off and try to see if there's an imprint of my fingerprints but I'm finding it difficult to focus on small details. I blink, and move my head closer to be able to see if it's worked, but maybe it's my eyes, or maybe it's the light in here, but it seems to me that there's nothing in the mould at all. So I turn my attention to my fingertip itself, but that too is completely smooth, with no detail at all. And that's when I realise that I'm not me at all, I'm someone else. Someone who's paid such careful attention at copying me, so perfectly, that even I can't tell the difference.