What is real?
Many TV-series (particularly scifi-series, which are very dear to me) have an episode where the hero has to question what's real and what's not. In the more extreme cases, the hero starts to have flashes where he or she is actually locked in a mental institution, and everything that has thus far happened in the show has been a figment of imagination. This is strengthened by people in the institution knowing about the series chronology, about vampires (Buffy the Vampire Slayer) or aliens (Smallville).
In Smallville Clark Kent finds himself in a such a situation. He is shocked to find that Jor-El is infact a brand of soap, and Oliver Queen (a.k.a. Green Arrow) is the name of the hospital worker administrating his medicine.
Buffy in turn finds out she has been in the mental institution for six years - since the series started - and both her mother and her father are expecting her to come out of it. All that has happened in Sunnydale is just dreams in a sick woman's mind. It makes it even worse that the series questions itself: "sick girl who's in mental ward or super-girl who battles vampires - which sounds more insane?" to paraphrase from memory.
This annoys me on three levels; first it ridicules fans who have invested time to the series chronology. It highlights the built-in ridiculousness of the more absurd parts of the series mythology (hero's super strength, origin story, being centre of the world). Also, for stories to work we have to believe in them, believe in the rules of the world; these is-the-hero-insane stories beg the question is that time well placed.
On second level, the stories don't end well. The mental ward is often thought to be in "our" reality, where there are no Kryptonians or vampires. It is inherently more "real" than anything in the series itself. After you introduce the ward, you also have to explain why the ward was just the figment of the hero's imagination. Otherwise we get to the "it was just all a dream" scenario, the most effect way to lose interest of the watcher.
In Smallville, Martian Manhunter explained how the ward was infact a psychic attack by hostile force, who tried to overtake Clark's mind by showing him that he was mad.
In Buffy, just the opposite is done; at the ward Buffy's mother explains how the friends in Sunnydale are not friends at all but traps that keep her comatose in the real world. The episode ends with Buffy asking forgiveness from her friends - and then cut to the ward where the doctor diagnoses Buffy comatose and we are shown parents weeping. It wasn't a trick, or an attack.
On third, and less popular culture-level these episodes beg the question about life itself. If we interpret the world solely by our senses, and our senses are processed trough our brain - how can a person decide if she or he is hallucinating? A person tells you that you are hallucinating - do you trust the person? Or if two different things claim that the other isn't real - how can you make an educated choice between the two?
This isn't just about me pondering TV-series. I have a friend who sees hallucinations. Doing pretty well with them too, as I gather. Takes medication for it. When my grandmother gets sick, she regresses one year at a time back to her childhood. Mother is going to get me soon. Who are you? Why are you here Uncle? Back from America? When her body gets better, her mind gets better as well, and again she knows who I am..
And while I don't have anything of that magnitude, I do get blackouts when I rise or make sudden moves, during which my ability to see or keep my balance greatly diminishes. They take up to 30 seconds and when my mind clears it always hits me how much on the mercy of few wirings I am. My whole world - literally - is hosted inside a lump of meat. And the distinction is so hard to make; am I living in the world or is the world living in me?
[ To talk about am-I-crazy scenarios, here is a good wiki-link about it taken to it's extreme; Tommy Westphall.
The mental ward or it's variation has also been used in Star Trek: TNG, Star Trek: DS9, Lost, Stargate SG-1, Stargate Atlantis and Charmed. ]
Accordingly,
ReplyDeleteseeing that our senses sometimes deceive us, I was willing to suppose that
there existed nothing really such as they presented to us; and because
some men err in reasoning, and fall into paralogisms, even on the simplest
matters of geometry, I, convinced that I was as open to error as any
other, rejected as false all the reasonings I had hitherto taken for
demonstrations; and finally, when I considered that the very same thoughts
(presentations) which we experience when awake may also be experienced
when we are asleep, while there is at that time not one of them true, I
supposed that all the objects (presentations) that had ever entered into
my mind when awake, had in them no more truth than the illusions of my
dreams. But immediately upon this I observed that, whilst I thus wished to
think that all was false, it was absolutely necessary that I, who thus
thought, should be somewhat; and as I observed that this truth, I think,
therefore I am (COGITO ERGO SUM), was so certain and of such evidence that
no ground of doubt, however extravagant, could be alleged by the sceptics
capable of shaking it, I concluded that I might, without scruple, accept
it as the first principle of the philosophy of which I was in search
Rene Descartes
It is one thing to know you exist (and that was what Descartes so cleverly proved) and quite something else to prove that WHERE you exist is what you see. Descartes claimed (as I recall) that COGITO ERGO SUM would mean that there would be someone who would do everything more perfectly than a mere human, and that someone would be God; and God would not be evil (because then he would not be perfect and thus not God) and thus what you see is what you get.
ReplyDeleteI'm not sure I buy principles #2 and #3.
(Tried looking for info on Buffy's ending on the Wiki, but couldn't find anything that resembled what you said...)
ReplyDeleteI agree that the brain-in-a-vat plot device sucks when used as you describe. I didn't even like it in Matrix. It's a sort of deus ex machina. Plot too improbable? Too many weird things happening? Can't think of a better ending? Hallucinations to the rescue!
It's not all that bad, though - see Alice in Wonderland, for example.
Speaking of Descartes, he did "bootstrap" reality by proving that God existed, and that he must be benevolent, and so would not allow any demons to trick us. Well, at least not a lot...
As for hallucinations in the real world. It is scary to think how our consciousness and perception and whatnot are basically constructs of a material brain, and are just as fragile. I recall a scene from The Animatrix, which was very powerful - in the recounting of the Matrix's history, they showed a scene where the machines studies the humans. The scene had a long line of humans strapped to a wall, with electrodes in the back of their brains. Each one of them has sudden changes in facial expression, laughs, cries, talks. It's a gruesome scene to behold, since the machines have found a way to trick the human mind so completely as to make reality itself a moot point, a way that might perhaps be available to us in the future.
The above mentioned episode of Buffy was "Normal Again", which was 17th episode of the sixth season. There were seven seasons et al, so this was not the final episode. The other mentioned episode was Smallville's 12th episode of sixth season, "The Labyrinth".
ReplyDeleteI could have mentioned this in the text, but it did not occur me.