Are we still in the game?

It can be difficult to distinguish between reality and fantasy. There is the gap between how one person experiences a situation and how another person experiences the same situation. There are problems of memory, and there is the often vividness of the dream world versus the haziness of the real. The vagueness of such boundaries has been good for film – it’s an endlessly fascinating topic that can be explored through so many different narratives. David Lynch does it over and over, and Cronenberg does it too, in very different ways.

In Existenz, the characters enter a game world through the use of a console that plugs directly into their bodies. In the game, there is a game, and reality gets further and further away. In the end, when we appear to have returned to a more recognisable world, someone asks, ‘Are we still in the game?’ throwing the boundaries into question yet again.

On a less fantastic, more everyday level, we tend to project a false image onto both the people and places we interact with. It is impossible to interact with a place without superimposing on to it images and desires from our own collections. In M Butterfly, Gallimard (Jeremy Irons) views both China, and Song (John Lone), through romantic colonial eyes, allowing himself to believe Song is a woman, although it is obvious she is a man. He sees exactly what he desires and not what is actually there because he wants to believe.

My favourite blending of fantasy with reality is in Steven Shainberg’s Secretary. Here, Lee (Maggie Gyllenhal)’s mundane job as a secretary is elevated to incredible heights through the fantasy life she shares with her boss, Mr Grey (James Spader). Both become the fantasy image of the other, and their interactions bring fantasy into reality, filling it with excitement and passion.

In my own life, I have someone who to a large extent fits a fantasy of mine. There is a beautiful and thrilling aura of unreality about the time we spend together which makes the relationship special. I often wonder if I can really see this person, or if, like Gallimard, I will one day be confronted with a reality I do not want to believe. And this fascinates me – the capacity we have to create a fantasy around the people in our world and ourselves. We each have a fantasy about ourselves and we then attempt to construct ourselves in that image. But what other people see is very different because they imagine us in relation to how they imagine themselves. Perhaps ‘reality’ becomes irrelevant, and the disagreements that arise between people have very little to do with a clash between reality and fantasy, but more out of a disjuncture in the construction of two different fantasy worlds.