The point doesn’t seem to be that we don’t believe what is happening is real, but rather that the way the story is told (and now the special effects which influence the realness of the way the story is told) seems to be more influential over how we respond to the story.
Some of the new fictional media even threaten to blur the line between the real and fictional worlds that we experience--some of it may have even made that line irrelevant. That is, we have not come to any conclusions as to whether or not we are able, imaginatively, to enter into fictional spaces in the same way that Neo enters the Matrix. And as Neo is told repeatedly, “you can’t be told what the Matrix is, you have to see it yourself.” Neo has to choose the red pill in order to experience this very different reality for himself. This is similar to the fact that I will never have the same experience or emotional response when someone tells me about a movie or a novel as when I see it or experience it for myself. Is it even possible that we, as viewers, could have the same sort of access to our fictional spaces that Neo had while he was in the desert of the real? Kendall Walton suggests that we experience fictions psychologically, in similar ways as children do physically when they play their games of make-believe. That would imply, however, that we really are able to enter into a fictional space in a way that is relevantly similar to the way Neo enters the reality that is the Matrix. Although we do not physically enter into another space, being able to explain the resulting emotional effects by saying that it is a cognitively similar experience would relieve us of the burden of explaining why we respond to things we believe not to be “real.” That is, if the experiences are cognitively similar, a “belief in the reality of” or the clear distinction between “real” and “unreal” becomes not just blurred but irrelevant.
Don’t misunderstand however. It is clear that we do not have to believe what is going on in the film in order to be affected by it. In fact, we cannot believe what is happening if we are to have an emotionally appropriate (aesthetic) response. This is especially true when it comes to tragedy or horror. Generally, we are not amused by others’ tragic lives nor do we derive pleasure out of watching people chased, stalked, or murdered. But in the context of a fiction, we often enjoy these things. We can enjoy them, however, if only we do not believe they are happening. We can enjoy watching Neo fighting Morpheus, after Neo has learned through a programmed computer simulation of a combination of martial arts, only if we know that neither of them is really being hurt. This goes even further with the kinds of special effects that The Matrix employs since what the viewer sees is what it would be like if time slowed down or even stopped. Since we know that this can’t happen, or it at least isn’t part of our experience we can still allow it to influence our response to the movie. (The bounds of these situations are also being stretched by the media with a new genre of voyeuristic television shows like Surivivor, Real World, and Big Brother. We may even get to the point where we do want to know the presentation is “real” in order to derive aesthetic pleasure out of it.)
The Matrix makes a number of clever and important references to Alice In Wonderland. Alice had many of the same problems in facing her strange new reality as did Neo. From the very beginning, Neo (still Thomas Anderson at that point, outside the rabbit hole) was told to follow the White Rabbit (tattoo), which ultimately led him to the reality. Once Neo arrived, Morpheus said to him, “I imagine right now you are feeling a bit like Alice--tumbling down the rabbit hole.” These explicit references make it clear that the kind of experiences the creators of the film were allowing Neo to have are parallel to the experiences that the viewers have of the film. As viewers, we watch and become increasingly more involved in the new reality that Neo experiences and we acclimate to the different reality at the same time Neo does. Since Alice in Wonderland is a fiction we are nearly all familiar with, we are taken (the viewers of the film and Neo at the same time) into a new wonderland of our own.
When we enter into a fictional world, or let the fictional world enter into our imaginations, we do not “willingly suspend our disbelief.” We cannot willingly decide to believe or disbelieve anything, any more than we can willingly believe it is snowing outside if all visual or sensory cues tell us otherwise. When engaging with fiction we do not suspend a critical faculty, hut rather exercise a creative faculty. We do not actively suspend disbelief, we actively create belief. As we learn to enter into fictional spaces (and I do believe this is something that we have to learn and that requires skills we must practice and develop) we desire more and more to experience the new space more fully. We want to immerse ourselves in the new world, just as Neo begins to immerse himself in the real world outside the Matrix. To do this we can focus our attention on the enveloping world and use our creative faculties to reinforce the reality of the experience, rather than to question it.
How does technologically sophisticated fiction, more and more like “real” events, produce emotive responses? Some argue that we have to understand the way emotions work in response to real events in order to understand how we respond emotively to fiction. This may not be the way to go, however, as it seems that the belief requirement that is missing from our interactions with fictional situations does not prohibit us from profoundly similar experiences physically and phenomenologically. If we feel the same and have relevantly similar emotional responses, why cannot the experience be said to be real? In many ways it can, but we are now getting into an area where fictional spaces and real spaces overlap and even unite. In the same way, the two worlds in The Matrix begin to overlap and unite. At one point, after Neo has been shaved and placed in his new digs, Morpheus takes him into an all white room. Neo is surprised to find that he is dressed the way that he would have been earlier. Morpheus explains to him that this is his “residual self-image” and that it is the “physical image of your digital self.” Neo’s old self-image crosses over from one world to the next. Similarly, Cypher can’t seem to give up the taste and texture of steak, even though he “knows” it isn’t real. Our knowledge of what is real and what isn’t real doesn’t necessarily change the way we behave or respond to these things. We may have to face the possibility that the line that divides appearance and reality (in the Matrix and in our own lives) is not as clear as we once thought it to be. We may even need to actively make that line disappear in order to make sense of our interactions with fictions.
In “reality,” we make judgments about people and situations without having full information all the time must do this just to be practical, since the time it would take to gather all the information we assume would he prohibitive to living our lives. We fill in the gaps of knowledge with guesses and prejudices of our own. Thus, reality may not be as “real” as we tend to think of it, since we do a fair amount of the construction on our own. We do the same with fiction, as we assume those we read about have had relevantly similar human lives, that they function as flesh and blood humans unless otherwise noted, and we assume that they live in a world that works physically in the same way as does ours. In both cases, in reality and with fiction, we are given a skeleton structure of what is happening, and we use our imaginations to fill in the details. With fiction, the structure is carefully constructed so we are given nearly all the relevant information. In reality, on the other hand, the information we use as a basis to construct a coherent understanding of a situation is not given to us in a carefully constructed way. Rather, we pick up certain details and make a comprehensible story of our own, using our own prejudices and biases, working necessarily from our own perspective, which is determined largely by our culture. If this is the case and we do have to create and fill in significant parts of our own realities, we are in a sense, making up our own stories these stories are our lives. Roger Schank explains in his book on narrative and intelligence that:
We need to tell someone else a story that describes our experience because the process of creating the story also creates the memory structure that will contain the gist of the story for the rest of our lives. Talking is remembering . . . But telling a story isn’t rehearsal, it is creation. The act of creating is a memorable experience in itself.
We create meaning and memory through the hearing and telling of stories. Thus reality is more like fiction in terms of story creation than we originally thought, and the question of whether or not we must have a belief requirement in order to have a justified emotion seems now to be misguided.
Even if we do create our own stories to be reality (or our realities as stories) we still have a belief component missing from our assessment when we experience fictional simulations. If I believe that I am walking across the street, whether the cars are fictional or not, I am able to assess that I am in some mortal danger if I stay too long. If I make this assessment while playing a virtual reality game, I am not physically in any danger. Understanding how narrative undermines the distinction between reality and fiction does, however, make the paradox disappear in a certain sense. That is, the problem that we respond differently to fiction and reality no longer holds because the distinction between them has changed. If we put the fiction distinction aside and look to what it is that connects our understanding of both, namely how we comprehend narrative, we can begin to work with a more unified problem, one that will not always, ultimately, lead us to a paradox.
I am not suggesting that fiction and reality are the same or even that they are at times indistinguishable. There is a clear distinction between the epistemologcal (knowing what is real) and the ontological (the existence of things as they are) that will forever differentiate those for us. But what I am suggesting is a much stronger emphasis on how we make sense of both--that is, through narrative and story-telling. The way the story is told, or how it is that we create the story and make sense of it is similar for both fiction and reality. If it is the narrative that we are ultimately responding to, then it does not matter how we construe the emotions to work in response to real experiences and fictional ones--this is a false dichotomy that will continue to leave us in a paradox.
Further, if it is the narrative that we respond to, and the narratives are getting better or at least more vivid through technological developments, then it would make sense that we have increasingly stronger affective responses even though we “know” what we see or experience is not “real.” With the current state of the technology, especially with the kinds of special effects The Matrix provides, we are able to more fully experience both worlds and respond emotively to both. By moving the focus of the debate away from the belief requirement needed for “justified” emotions and understanding the role of stories more fully we can connect the divergent spaces of the real and the representational. We can further see how it is that we function in similar ways to the characters in The Matrix. Neo experiences a new reality as we experience it along with him in parallel ways we never before imagined.
- Sarah Worth
