perceive the true things; and thus it is in this ‘outside luminous’ that the real
knowledge of these things occurs. The prisoners would learn not to be
deceived by appearances that, inside the cavern, they had taken as a true
and unique reality. We can find a strong parallelism here with The Matrix
trilogy in which the humans connected to The Matrix undergo the same
phenomenon: their vision of the world is far from reality and clearly
distorted. Just as in dreams, they live in an unreal world, but they ignore the
fact that this is their condition.
Indeed, cinema is, in a sense, comparable to the act of dreaming.
Cinema and dreams are usually seen as diametrically opposed to reality when
they should be observed as dialectically linked. Cinema shares some of the
functions traditionally fulfilled exclusively by dreams as it helps our brain to
improve its operation, identifying our worries, fears and hopes. For authors
such as Jean-Louis Baudry the analogy between cinema and dreams is based
in a ‘form of lost satisfaction’ (1986: 307); indeed in cinema we find
something that ‘belongs to the sphere of the double, the phantasm, the
mirror or the dream’ (Baudrillard, 1987b: 25). Thus, apart from the obvious
physical affinity between both experiences (the darkness, the passivity, the
images), the most relevant similarity lies in what cinema gives to us: a
primary and unconscious identification with what we are seeing/dreaming.
Baudry describes it as being:
A relative narcissism, and even more to a mode of relating to
reality which could be defined as enveloping and in which
the separation between one's own body and the exterior
world is not well defined (Baudry, 1986: 312).
In this process of watching a film, the cinematographic image suffers a
double and paradoxical effect: it becomes more real than the simple
succession of images and it also becomes more ‘ours’. Cinema contains its
own reality but this reality is appropriated by the spectator who, with his
memories, experiences and personality, ‘reconstructs’ and gives a personal
sense to the (un)reality of the film. The spectator, during a specific lapse in
time, introduces the imaginary of the film into his life and the film becomes
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