The name is absent

nightmare when he has an accident: his inability to accept his consequently
disfigured appearance drives him to commit suicide and, with the help of
technology, he leaves his body frozen while his brain is fed with a virtual pre-
selected future. These are the facts that will not need a rational explanation,
although they are not necessarily illogical. Thus, maintaining a link with an
unusual perception of the familiar, SF manages to make credible the
incredible, justify what our reason points to as a hypothesis or present a
world that only responds to speculation.

In parallel with the narrative structure and tricks of the SF genre, its
visual technology, the image, is also perfectly adapted to the believe/doubt
structure. On one hand, it reproduces a credible (sometimes future) real life,
the ‘believing element’, and on the other hand it astonishes the spectator
with optical tricks and spectacular images, the ‘doubt element’. Indeed, in SF
it is not possible to speak about content eluding the form and vice versa,
because each element contributes to and depends on the other; in fact
‘spectacle and speculation sum up the two dimensions of the genre’ (King,
2000: 7). SF explores a fundamental objective: to satisfy the spectator about
the creation of credible (un)real worlds. The genre is developed between the
spheres of the real and the imaginary (Gatto, 2000), and therefore requires a
special relationship between both dimensions. Indeed, we are thus reminded,
once again, that SF cinema perfectly illustrates the (con)fusion of reality and
unreality. Reality is revealed in films such as The Matrix, Total Recall and
Lawnmower Man ‘through’ fiction. SF represents ‘the sublime’ and the
‘suture’ of the real and imaginary, and, in the process, provides satisfaction
together with the simulation of undesired and probably terrible experiences.

This is actually a recurrent idea in Dick’s stories. The ideas of this
famous SF writer have been adapted into several films that have been
released in the last three decades such as Blade Runner, Total Recall,
Minority Report (Spielberg, 2002) and A Scanner Darkly. His main ideas can
be summarized in the existence of a simulation or perceptual trick, a fictional
reality that may be under someone else’s control. The idea of false
consciousness, an intentional deception, is combined with the belief that to
be in control of reality and its representations is the only way to re-conquer

- 99 -

<<   97   98   99   100   101   102   103   >>

More intriguing information