related to the fears of losing control over our life provoked by the
development of technology, and this often leads to the creation of virtual
worlds in which the perception of reality and unreality is confused. SF films
such as Total Recall, eXistenZ, The Lawnmower Man, The Matrix, Abre los
Ojos, Dark City and The Thirteenth Floor are perfect illustrations of these
fears and the pessimistic predictions of our society.
Science has always endeavoured, with theories and with the use of
technology, to explain and question the nature of reality and the way we
perceive it. Scientists such as Hugh Everett III discovered in 1956 that reality
may not be the product of universal laws of perception as we can only
experience ‘one world’ consciously, and so named his theory the ‘Many
Worlds Theory’.26 The Many Worlds Theory is useful to apply to the
experience of SF protagonists such as Neo, César, Quaid and Allegra Geller,
and simultaneously the experience of the spectators of these films. According
to this theory, there is a coexistence of different worlds, different realities.
Technological virtual worlds are only an alternative and, concurrently, visual
technologies in cinema, the diegetic worlds that we perceive on the screen,
are just a different level of (un)reality. Both of them cannot be defined as
opposed to reality but at a step removed from the natural world.
With their arguments and questions, films of the SF genre denote the
social and ideological changes in the concept of reality and, in this sense, we
can observe a problematization of reality, the coincidence of various levels of
reality in some of the SF films released in the last two decades. In this way,
in The Matrix we see a computer generated life, the battery life of the pods
and the life in the ‘desert of the real’. Total Recall juxtaposes the ideal
reproduction of the character’s life with the reality of his existence, and this
is interwoven in a way that the fact of who he is is completely indiscernible
for him. And in eXistenZ we can perceive diverse and simultaneous virtual
levels (when the protagonists play virtual games inside games) together with
the reality of the computer users. In eXistenZ, the perception of the
boundaries between virtuality and reality shift and alter in such a way that
26 See Giobran (1999).
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