Reality?

Once again I seem to be finding elements of the class in everything that I watch, whether it is high brow (ish) or low brow. The themes seem to find their way, in some manner or another, into almost everything.


The most recent film in which caught my attention was "Pan's Labyrinth." It is a great movie, I absolutely recommend it to everyone, especially if you have any interest in Spanish or the civil war that took place there. It is about a little girl who has grown up in the midst of a war, has dealt with abuse from her step father, and who loses a mother. In order to cope with the horrors surrounding her, she creates her own little world in which she is a kind of hero. I think it ties in really well with the theme of Life as Myth and Dream. For her, it is very real. However, for everyone else it is simply fairy tale talk. It begs the question, what is real? Is a world that has been constructed by one's mind but still effects one greatly real? Or must it be something that is agreed upon by everyone? If that is the case, is there such a thing? For the little girl, life was what she imagined. Although most people would call her delusional or say that she is living in a dream world, are we all not to a degree?

A low brow television show was the next place that I found a questioning of reality. In one episode of CSI a man is accused of murdering his brother, and when questioned about it the man tells a heartbreaking story. Moments later his entire story is shown to be a lie. He then goes on to create a different reality through the use of his words and imagination. Pretty much all of what he says does not hold true to the evidence that has been collected, and at one point one of the officers says, "Well you are just one fistfull of lies wrapped in another." The murderer's response is, "It's the truth, I swear to God, even if it never really happened." This reminded me of the theme Life as Fiction and Language. Although his lies were uncovered, people make up or embellish on stories every day. Such "lies" may not have actually occurred, but by telling someone they did, and making them believe that they did, the lies become an actual part of someone's reality.

This is something that I have been thinking about a lot as well. If a good portion of everyone's "reality" is based on what others say or what they see in the media, but a good portion of that is biased and not wholly "truthful," than what is real? Nobody's realities can be real if they are based significantly on things that never occurred or occurred in a different way. If there are a number of witnesses to a crime, it is guaranteed that all of them will have seen and will recount something slightly different. If there was an absolute truth or reality, than how can this be the case? So many people take what others tell them to be an exact truth, but I think that one must always keep in mind that it is not. One must always question the reality of others, and even one's own reality because after all, it is just as biased as everyone elses.