I don't think it's always a clear-cut distinction. Do we ever see the real world eXistenZ is happening in? I can't tell. But does it matter? Think future shock: a world that keeps changing as you live in it. It's a different sort of test, but the characters question their assumptions. And I think the toughness the characters develop has to come from within. Its cause is different, and its structure may be different, but somewhere, maybe still behind the curtain, the real character is there.
Maybe I should compare eXistenZ to The Matrix. Yes, it is possible to wonder why we assume the mundane reality is real, but do we ever know that the world Neo starts in is real or unreal? We know he experiences an unreal version of that world, with all the stunts and special effects and bullet-time, but is it the world he started in? It would make about as much sense if he's goofing off at his desk, starting a web-game during a coffee break, and that game starts with escaping the bad guys.
Why does he never try to go back to the people he knew?
]]>Back to SUCKER PUNCH briefly: I think that the over-arcing problem with it is that the intent of the movie far outstrips the talent of the creators. It desparately wants to be something that it doesn't quite manage to become, and in failing, then presents a message that is substantially different to that intended. I don't necessarily think that it's sexist, but it also fails to be feminist too, and winds up as a typical male fantasy landscape presented as the ultimate escape for the female psyche (I'm fairly certain that most -- not all, I'll grant -- women do not fantasize about dressing in skimpy outfits and firing big fucking guns).
]]>Pars 2, lines 8 and 9 - If anyone wishes to claim that some women do not enjoy running about in skimpy outfits and waving BFGs or BFSwords around could they please have a look on DeviantArt's Cosplay fora first?
]]>In response to your para #2, I hope you noticed that I was carefuly to include a caveat to my generalisation, just to indicate that I'm well aware that it was a generalisation and therefore subject to exceptions.
]]>Pata 2 - I was just adding a pointer to a location where there are photos of women indulging in those activities as evidence that some do, so any predudice that exists is on the part of people who do not accept that women do these things voluntarily.
]]>(Aargh! I've accidentally appropriated this aging thread into a movie discussion.)
]]>And what underlying themes can we deduce from this I wonder :p
]]>"themes in the movies are accidental rather than deliberate "
"one can read anything you want into them"
Maybe the movie makers were aware that once something gets complicated and vague enough you can read multiple meanings into it. Pop lyrics are sort of like that, too. Most of the slangy monosyllables could be interpreted many ways. "Love" for example is basically a variable, "that person, place or thing I am extolling", that can be solved for as in an equation or riddle.
Between vague movies and cipher lyrics there seems to be an art to creating fertile ground for projection. It seems to be harder to do in print (though not impossible, judging by the Stoker analysis in the Vampire thread). Just the act of putting everything in words AND story may demand a certain amount of clarity that makes reading into verbal fiction more difficult, and thus makes it harder to give such fiction the quality of being creatively readable.
So movies can be intentionally vague pointed. But I think The Matrix does have one clear moral. This world may be an illusion, and if it is then what is important is to deal primarily with the hidden truth, even if the illusion is nicer.
Dangerous stuff.
The unreality of the context in which the violence occurs is intended to detoxify it, saying, "You only act like this under very unreal conditions." Unfortunately, some people are amazingly unable to detect a difference between real and unreal conditions.
In Alien, on the other hand, there is no real interplay of real and unreal. Once you enter the one fictional world you stay in that one and there is never any excuse to behave inhumanly. Violence is engaged in when the apparant reality unequivocally demands it.
I don't get any kind of implication about reality and unreality from Sucker Punch. It has three layers rather than the 2 in The Matrix. One of the unrealities is VERY unreal (the battle scenes) and one is so nearly real you think it IS the real world at first(the version of the asylum with the nasty dances). But it doesn't seem to do anything with any of it. This isn't fertile ground for many deep interpretations, its just kind of inexplicable.
]]>Thirteenth Floor
You might like the original novel, Daniel Galouye's "Simulacron-3" from 1964.
Galouye's description of what we now call "virtual reality" and what it might be commercially useful for was very good, decent story too. When I re-read it a few years ago, I was hard put to remember it had been written in 1964.
]]>It passes the Bechdel test, but the DVD cover sort of hints at how significant that is.
Get your eye-candy here. (Yes, that is Gina Torres, and none of them are dreadfully top-heavy.)
(And for our more perverted readers: Tank Vixens!)
Filming a live-action version would depend on finding a blonde bimbo who can manage to say "socio-political ramifications" with a straight face and a sexy voice.
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