sure that this is the definitive awakening? As Descartes considers, given that
when we are dreaming we think that we are living something real, is it
possible to find any criteria to distinguish the reality from dreams? Descartes
uses the figure of a ‘malicious demon’ to represent the manipulation that can
be suggested in the confusion of reality and unreality, and the idea of being
manipulated whilst we are in our dreams. Indeed, in The Matrix, Morpheus
questions Neo in the same way when he is introduced to the virtual world of
The Matrix and explains the unreality of his life:
Have you ever had a dream, Neo, that you were so sure was
real? What if you were unable to wake from that dream? How
would you know the difference between the dream world
and the real world?
Today, the same question can be applied to visual virtual technology: how
can we differentiate the virtual world from reality? What is perhaps useful is
the reflexive, Cartesian and convincing thought that we create in order to
demonstrate to ourselves that we are indeed awake, in the ‘real world’. After
this, our life proceeds as normal. But what would happen if we were still
dreaming? Total Recall and eXistenZ end with the same open question,
related to virtuality in their case, when the characters, unsure of the level of
(un)reality they are inhabiting, ask if they have abandoned the artificial
world of bits.2
1.2. Jean Baudrillard: Simulacrums and Hyperreality.
A propos the cinema and image in general (media images,
technological images), I would like to conjure up the
perversity of the relation between the image and its
referent, the supposed real; the virtual and irreversible
confusion of the sphere of images and the sphere of reality
whose nature we are less and less able to grasp (Baudrillard,
1987b: 13).
2 In Total Recall Quaid queries: ‘I just had a terrible thought... what if this is all a dream?’ Similarly one
of the protagonists in eXistenZasks of the rest of the players: ‘Hey, tell me the truth. are we still in the
game?’.
- 16 -