I will be exploring the idea that recent cinema seems obsessed with the paranoid notion that other 'ontological' reality exists hidden alongside or parallel to the one that we experience. Films such as The Matrix and Avalon portray, respectively, Neo and Ash - protagonists who, having discovered that they are living in inferior planes of reality attempt recourse to a superior world.

    The Matrix follows Thomas Anderson, an uneasy office worker and hacker who goes by the pseudonym of Neo, contacted by a small band of enigmatic and infamous hackers that include Trinity and Morpheus, who offer Neo the opportunity to resolve his doubts about the authenticity of the reality in which he exists. Neo accepts Morpheus' invitation and is shown that the universe that he has inhabited is in fact a computer-generated simulation called the Matrix, while reality is a wasteland where humanity is in hiding after effectively loosing a war against an artificial-intelligence. In order to resist the machines, those inhabiting the simulation must first be freed, and Neo's assistance to the human resistance is crucial to this liberation. Though Neo's nemesis is encapsulated in one of the 'guardians' of the Matrix, Agent Smith, a more insidious threat faces Morpheus' team: Cypher, who Morpheus also liberated from the Matrix, yet wishes to return to the ignorance provided by the artificial simulation and who subsequently becomes an informant to Agent Smith in an attempt to secure this supposedly blissful state.

    Avalon follows Ash, a hard-core participant of an illegal virtual-reality game called Avalon, who earns her living by excelling as a warrior in the game environment. Outside of Avalon and in a dreary, disenchanted Polish city of the future, Ash finds comfort only in her relationship with her bass-hound. Her routine is interrupted by the appearance of an old colleague, Stunner, who informs her firstly that a mutual friend, Murphy, has become one of the Unreturned - game players of Avalon who are mysteriously made comatose - and secondly that he is aware of how to access an advanced level for elite players that Ash has been yearning for. Ash seeks out and locates this secret level, where she is invited by the avatar of her former lover Murphy to live permanently in this extraordinary visceral, albeit artificial, world - though first she will have to kill him.

    Both Neo and Ash share escapist tendencies - their names are pseudonyms, and they are both far more confident wearing a virtual trench coat and virtual mirror shades than being stuck in a crowd of real people. However, they take alternate paths when they find a means to access a world more real than the one that they have been asked to take for granted.

    Primarily, I will be examining how films with themes of ontological paranoia portray their characters choice "between living honestly and living in ignorance" (McMahon 166). However, the privileging of one of these binaries - authenticity over unauthenticity - is no less arbitrary and moral than Plato's valuing of ideas over forms. Unlike McMahon, who demotes this point to a footnote I would like to spend further time unravelling the complexity of the yearning for a transcendental reality - how the choice between the proverbial red pill and the blue pill is not always straightforward, and how our entry into authenticity is only the beginning. Having followed the white rabbit and found how "deep the rabbit hole goes" (The Matrix), how have protagonists reacted to their new found knowledge?

    I will first lay the foundations of such an exploration by comparing and contrasting artists, philosophers, and theologians in their endeavors to access a transcendental realm. I will then go on to explore cinema's unique capacity for promoting ontological suspicion. And finally, I will show that The Matrix appears to be a Classicalist text, while Avalon offers an ethics of authenticity based on aesthetics rather than Platonic morality where identity is privileged over reality.

    The Matrix and Avalon participate in a Platonic discourse, specifically in regard to the ideas developed in Plato's Allegory of the Cave (Plato Republic 514A-519A). Plato's allegory deals with a scenario where a group of people are held captive from their birth in a cave, and are forced to watch the shadow play of various puppets that are manipulated by hidden performers. This scenario parallels the experience of people, whose imaginations are held captive by a shadow play or a theatre production. However, the captives of Plato's cave possess no knowledge of an extra-theatrical world. Their sense that the world that they inhabit is the only world, and that the silhouettes of the shadow puppets belong in fact to real, living objects, is reinforced by their use of a common language. What is real to the characters of this scenario is for those aware of the performer's subterfuge, is fiction - truth is "nothing other than the shadows of dummies" (Republic 515c1). Plato then goes on to describe one of the cave dwellers breaking free of their confinement, and escaping into the extra-cavernous world - and world that is vastly more visceral. He dwells on this enlightened individual that returns to the cave, and who describe his findings with those he was previously imprisoned with. However, Plato argues, his disbelieving audience would seek any excuse "for arresting and killing the man who was trying to unchain them and lead them into the upper world" (Republic 516e1) - as was the fate of Socrates himself. Plato draws parallels between the world inside the cave with the immanent and inferior realm of forms that we exist in, and the world outside of the cave with transcendent and superior realm of ideas.

    The Matrix subscribes to the Platonic privileging of ideas over form: the real world outside of the Matrix allows the characters to more clearly access an authentic experience of reality. While outside of the Matrix, the characters are able to break out of the cycles of violence that have kept them caged in the endless repetition of building Zion, destroying it, and rebuilding it. Only in the real world can the choices made be free. And Avalon recalls Plato's description of souls as privy to pure knowledge until corrupted by the corporeal form that they assume at birth, when the main character Ash is parallel with the mythical figure Odin. Ash dons the Virtual Reality head-set in order to enter the virtual world of Avalon, and while there she is a different woman from the Ash that we know in reality - cocky, inventive, boisterous, and violent. Her amnesia is also applicable to her life in the world of the living - she has no family, friends, and hardly any past.

    Though both texts make philosophy more accessible, it is worth further investigation as to whether they are mere attempts to resolve the West's hang-ups with Platonic dualism. The presence in films dealing with ontological paranoia of a religious yearning for a transcendental realm, however, negates the texts as serious contenders in Philosophy and defuses the potential of such texts to stand as Existential texts (Existentialism being an atheist school of thought). Weirheim's explanation of the medieval view of people (as the universe's nexus, connecting the immanent with the transcendental, the earthly with the divine) is also applicable to The Matrix which lends itself to a reading as a Christian allegory (Yeffeth).

    Avalon, however, is more problematic - the film clearly draws from Celtic legends, Ash is disgusted by Stunner's eating, and class Real offers a means of escape, like her Arthurian predecessors, from mortality, and instead to revel in her skill and status as a seasoned, veteran warrior. Is Avalon, in light of Wertheim's parallels between religious and technical adoration, any 'better' as an Existential text compared to The Matrix?

    Avalon does appear to use Nordic mythology in the place of Christian iconography; however the theological and mythical references in Avalon are deliberate ploys to create an aura of importance around the game and the game masters. Ash could at will switch her status from Warrior to Bishop; class Real offers Ash her an experience that is far more visceral than the one she is used to, and the religious symbols are hardly treated as sacred - as the closing image of Ash pointing a gun at one of the nine sisters of Avalon suggests.

    Like Antoine in Sartre's Nausea, Ash goes through her monotonous, repetitive days, finding less and less meaning in her life. She even becomes antagonistic towards experiences that most of the people who inhabit her world consider the epitome of normal - she is disgusted by a friend's eating habits, her interaction with other people is purely utilitarian, and her lack of humanitarianism is demonstrated by her purchase of meat for her canine companion while most people eat cafeteria slops. As Avalon's director, Mamoru Oshii, suggests -

    'If you live in a world where you repeat the same action every day you may indeed be in a very empty and meaningless world.' (http://www.avalon-movie.com).

    The point may not be that Ash is trying to escape from corporeal existence. Rather, she is trying to escape from the lack of meaning. Eating biscuits while her dog eats meat does not indicate that she acquires no sensual pleasure from the consumption of food. Instead, she finds pleasure in ensuring her bas-hound is well fed.

    Like dreams and hallucinations, technology encourages us to question our own reality. Cinema, with its vivid and emotive experiences where we suspend our disbelief of the consensual reality that we usually inhabit, provides an ideal opportunity for an exploration of existential authenticity, encouraging us to ask ourselves that as cinema is to waking life, waking life is to what?

    The big screen becomes the ultimate looking glass where we achieve an even greater objectification than the Lacanian mirror. Just as we acquire a sense of identity through being the perception of our own image, so to do we acquire a greater sense of social identity when we literally see ourselves on television, or when we identify with a character in a film. Cinema makes us aware that our personal perception is no longer privileged, and this has a ripple effect through out entire ontological and phenomenological perception.

    Science fiction spearheads the critique of what is real - and the films explored in this essay "may be seen as participating in as well as criticizing in a sometimes painfully concentrated way, the technological conditions in which the phantasms are produced," and furthermore that science fiction films "undermine the ideological systems in which they function." (Melehy) This applies to Avalon, which is very much a critique of the game-playing mode of existence, of the tendency that drives creative anachronisms, and how such desires for an artificially re-constructed universe can pervade our daily lives as a response, ironically, to a sense of the all pervasive artificiality of our existence. This is demonstrated by the popularity, especially amongst young people, of the Avalon game - a game, incidentally, made illegal by people who, we imagine, are identical to those stationary, soulless characters that populate the streets of the anonymous Polish city.

    Computers are shown to have a similar potential in The Matrix, where Thomas Anderson's indulgence in a 'virtual' life, and his assumption of the pseudonym 'Neo', possibly allows him to more easily deal with the fact that he himself is simply an avatar - the manifestation of the virtual identity belonging to a human battery trapped in his womb like an insect in amber.

    Cinema can, like the Replicants in Blade Runner, help stimulate our skepticism of the nature of our own world and identity - and eventually, like Baudrillard's simulacrum, remind us that the world does not possess a true essence. Critical appraisal is necessary if we are to distinguish virtual identities that we manufacture, and those identities that are handed to us. This criticality is demonstrated by Thomas Anderson's development of his own personality independent of the one imposed in his hive-like office. The everyman Thomas Anderson leaves the collective to become the sliver known as Neo. However, for many people who enter the cinema, there is the surrendering of personal identity and the collective identification with the protagonists on the screen. The movie industry may be an instance of humans deliberately engineering and promoting bad faith on a mass scale - yet no more so than "social, education, ontological, epistemological, and political concerns" (Purcell) Cinema then is neither intrinsically a reproduction of Plato's cave, nor is it a tool to help us escape from the Platonic cave of socially constructed reality. Its potency relies on how it is approached by both film maker and film watcher.

    Conscious, malicious deceit from an external force (the conjurers of Plato's cave, for instance) seems to be a necessary element for characters to feverishly pursue their suspicions of their ontological integrity. By this argument there would be no rebel movement in The Matrix if the virtual world had been designed by benign survivors of an ecological catastrophe that left the Earth's surface uninhabitable. Mouse's monologue suggests that it is the machines' lack of definite access to that authentic reality - to the world of ideas - that makes them the enemy of humanity.

    '. You have to wonder now. How did the machines know what Tasty Wheat tasted like, huh? Maybe they got it wrong. Maybe what I think Tasty Wheat tasted like actually tasted like oatmeal or tuna fish. That makes you wonder about a lot of things. You take chicken for example, maybe they couldn't figure out what to make chicken taste like, which is why chicken tastes like everything.' (The Matrix)

    In eXistenZ, Avalon and the VR program of Thirteenth Floor are both 'games' that have had entire lives dedicated to their creation and maintenance. As the strata of nested reality increase like Russian Doles, so too does the beauty of the worlds. In such films, where the Rationalist mourns the loss of the certain, the Empiricist celebrates the gaining of the possible. However, it is often only the designers who find beauty in the white lies that they manufacture - the splendor of the Matrix, for instance, is only noted by those whose lives are also dedicated to it, such as Agent Smith:

    'Have you ever stood and stared at it, marveled at its beauty, its genius? Billions of people just living out their lives, oblivious .' (The Matrix)

    Films which contain artificial worlds within artificial worlds such as The Thirteenth Floor, Avalon and eXistenz illustrate what is to the Rationalists a nightmare scenario, yet to the protagonists it is more often than not their and the Artist's dream as illustrated by Nietzsche:

    Behind each cave another that opens still more deeply, and beyond each surface a subterranean world yet more vast, more strange, Richer still . and under all foundations, under every ground, a subsoil still more profound. (Nietzsche in Deleuze 263)

    While Plato, in his pre-Aristotelian Greece, is not prepared to concede the potential benefits of performative art as a cathartic device, arguing that the "feeling which is kept under control in our calamities is satisfied and delighted by the poets" (Republic from Art and Imitation 538), he does appear to embrace the potential use of art as a propaganda device: Plato condones the use of a medium or technology of representation, such as cinema, for the dissemination of certain ideas (Parcell). This is consistent with Plato's otherwise antagonistic attitude towards the arts where the medium is used to dramatically represent "social icons" (like 'justice' or 'courage') that do not have any clear physical manifestation (unlike 'bed'). We are seemingly content then to tolerate and even encourage propaganda, as long as the source of disinformation stems from an 'authoritive' source, and films that deal with ontological paranoia often portray a loss of faith in the authority figure relied upon for the blessing of one image of reality.

    One authority remains consistently and overtly undisputed in such films, and this is love. These films portray moments of emotional and visual vividness that leave the film before and after to appear bleached. Love becomes the ultimate recourse for the ontologically paranoid. In Blade Runner, for instance, where the photo of Rachel with her 'mother' comes to life briefly before Deckard's eyes; La Jetee where the narrator gazes across at the woman who is his only memory of the pre-war world; in Momento where Leonard Shelby pinches his wife's leg; in Avalon where Ash cooks a banquet for the love of her life, her bass-hound; John Murdoch meeting his once and future wife on the beach in Dark City; or with Neo's resurrection of Trinity in Matrix Reloaded.

    However, it is eventually revealed within the narratives that all of the moments, or the experiences of love that give the moments their potency, are myths - Rachel has no mother, La Jatee's narrator's life begins and ends with the woman on the pier, Leonard is actually poisoning his doubtful wife with insulin shots without knowing it, Ash's lover Murphy used the disintegration of team Wizard to escape to level Real, and John's memories of his wife are implanted. In the end, protagonists suffering from bouts of ontological paranoia, with even the authenticity of their romantic experiences put in doubt, are left to ask, like Truman, "'Was anything real?'" The reply they receive may well be "'You were real.'" Such films appear to reconsider the essence of what it is to be human. No longer are we the 'thinking thing' such films to suggest - now we are the thinking thing. As Mouse says on board the Nebuchadnezzar - "Pay no attention to these hypocrites, Neo. To deny our own impulses is to deny the very thing that makes us human." (The Matrix)

    He could be speaking about Plato as much as about his shipmates.

    In Avalon's closing sequence, Ash finds herself in the world that we have left out of the cinema. She stumbles psychologically blinded through a world that lacks the sepia-tones that distinguished the lifeless and depressing cityscapes in the prior scenes of the film, known as level Real. This sequence is reminiscent of Neo's rehabilitation on board the Nebuchadnezzar - yet while Neo wakes up in the desert of the real, Ash 'wakes up' to find herself in an 'oasis of the unreal'.

    Upon meeting with Murphy, her ex-lover - who also turns out to be her target - shows contempt for socially constructed reality. "Reality," he tells her, "is nothing but an obsession that takes hold of us - why shouldn't I make this (level Real) my reality?"

    Walking away from her lover's corpse to the solace of the auditorium, she muses:

    'Murphy was wrong about a lot of things, but there is one thing he may have been right about. Reality is what we choose to believe. As for who controls the game ... I choose to believe it's me.' (Avalon - Voice over exclusive to English DVD edition)

    Her apparent decision to leave waking life behind and immerse herself completely in Avalon contrasts Plato's escapee in the Cave Allegory (Republic 516c2). Plato's dignifying of the cave escapee is echoed eloquently by John Stuart Mills:

    It is better to be a human being dissatisfied than a pig satisfied; better to be Socrates dissatisfied than a fool satisfied. And if the fool, or the pig, are of a different opinion, it is because they only know their own side of the question. The other party to the comparison knows both sides. (Mill 140)

    Both Plato and Mills privilege the authentic life regardless of the standard of living that comes with that choice - as well, significantly, in reinforcing the privileging of one psychological state over another. However, Milton's Paradise Lost provides us with an image of heroism that differs from Plato's and Mill's:

    Here we may reign secure; and in my choice

    To reign is worth ambition, though in hell:

    Better to reign in hell than serve in heaven.

    (Mitlon, Paradise Lost. Book i. Line 261.)

    Ash has decided to side with Satan, choosing the lower world over the upper. The world of ideas is consequently no longer privileged over the world of forms and so the Platonic dualism is destabilized.

    Her choice illustrates Mamoru Oshii's arguably Existentialist agenda:

    I think we should decide for ourselves what the reality should be, because the identity is, obviously, already within us. It should be the other way around, from identity to reality. Our identity should allow us to create and decide for ourselves what we perceive as reality. (http://www.avalon-movie.com)

    Using the language of The Matrix, Ash appears to have taken the blue pill, and would appear to have committed "intellectual suicide" (McMahon 167). However, upon more careful examination her choice does not mirror that of The Matrix turncoat Cypher who wishes to return to the Matrix and a state of unawareness, for she does not opt for ignorance of consensual reality. Since, like Satan, Ash is privy to both the worlds, and as her decision is not a willing suspension of belief, she is not guilty of bad faith. Instead, Ash's choice is an aesthetic one rather than a moral one.

    The Matrix and Avalon depict characters who, virtually alone amongst their peers, act on their frustration with their place in Plato's cave. However, while Neo ascends towards the sun and Ash descends deeper into the earth, we are likely to agree with both of their decisions for a number of reasons.

    In spite of itself, Avalon - like The Matrix - establishes theological grounds by which to 'bless' Ash's decision. The players of Avalon, and the game-masters, are participating in a rich western myth which carries immense positive emotive weighting.

    The world that Ash escapes into is - unlike the Artificial Intelligence of the Matrix - a product of the artistic mind of people whom it is imagined have access to the world of ideas and the creation of worlds within worlds is a celebration of the human imagination. And from what we can tell, the worlds that Ash and Neo escape to are unique -while the Matrix is 'reloaded' time and again, the scorched earth is constant; and while Ash's day to day existence is repetitive and lacking in serious human interaction, level Real is one of a kind where people on the street meet each other's eyes.

    The makers of the artificial worlds in Avalon are, if not benevolent, are certainly not motivated by the same kind of malicious self-interest of the machines in The Matrix.

    Avalon is, unlike the Matrix, a game, which allows the characters to develop themselves as individuals. While the powers that be in the Matrix attempt to bring individuals in line, Avalon allows people to reach their potential in an otherwise mundane world.

    Both Neo and Ash are unique and their invitation to the superior realm in each of the narratives is indicative of their superiority over their peers. They are literally blessed by their guides, since 'Morpheus' is the god of dreams, and Bishops are high-ranking Christian clerics.

    Again, both Neo and Ash are driven by a desire to unite with the love interest of the text, Trinity and Murphy respectively, following the same path as their lovers.

    And finally, both Neo and Ash are intrinsically frail characters and their choices put them in greater control of their circumstances. Both become figures of power through their initiation into the higher realm.

    Alan. Ninesisters.Org. Available: http://www.ninesisters.org. 4 April 2004.

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    Benjamin, Walter. "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction." Film Theory and Criticism. Ed. G. Mast & M. Cohen. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979.

    Existenz. 1999.

    Deleuze, Gilles. "The Simulacrum and Ancient Philosophy." The Logic of Sense. New York: Columbia University Press, 1990.

    Fellugo, Dino. "The Matrix: Paradigm of Post-Modernism or Intellectual Poseur? (Part 1)." Taking the Red Pill: Science, Philosophy and Religion in the Matrix. Ed. Glenn Yeffeth. Dallas: Benbella Books, 2003.

    Lacan, Jacques. "The Mirror Stage." Contemporary Film Theory. Ed. Antony Easthope. London: Longman, 1993.

    La Jetée. 1962.

    McMahon, Jennifer. "Popping a Bitter Pill: Existiential Authenticity in the Matrix and Nausea." The Matrix and Philosophy. Ed. William Irwin. Chicago: Open Court, 2003.

    Melehy, Hassan. "Images Without: Becoming, Science Ficiton Cinema in the Eightees." Postmodern Culture 5.2 (1995).

    Mill, John Stuart. On Liberty And Other Essays, John Gray (ed.) New York : Oxford University Press, 1991.

    Milton. Paradise Lost. New York : Longman, 1998.

    Ndalianis, Angela. "The Frenzy of the Visible - Spectacle and Motion Int He Era of the Digital." Sense of Cinema (e-journal).3 (February) (2000).

    Nietzsche, Frederick. Beyond Good and Evil: Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future.

    Memento. 2000.

    Avalon. 2001.

    Plato. "34. Republic 514a-519a." The Plato Reader. Ed. T. Chappell. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1996.

    ---. "Art and Imitaiton: Plato, Republic." Western Philosophy: An Introduction. Ed. John Cottingham. London: Blackwell, 1996.

    Dark City. 1998.

    Purcell, Jack. Plato's Theory of Film. 1999. Available: http://frank.mtsu.edu/~jpurcell/Cinema/plato_film.html.

    Roszak, Theodore. Flicker. New York: Bantam, 1992.

    The Thirteenth Floor. 1999.

    Satre, John Paul. Nausea. Trans. Robert Baldick. Harmondsworth, Eng: Penguin, 1965.

    Blade Runner. 1982.

    Smit, Eric. Avalon Website. 2004. Available: http://www.avalon-movie.com. 4 April 2004.

    The Matrix. 1999.

    The Matrix Reloaded. 2003.

    The Matrix Revolutions. 2003.

    The Truman Show. 1998.

    Wertheim, Margaret. The Pearly Gates of Cyberspace: A History of Space from Dante to the Internet. Sydney: Doubleday, 1999.

    Yeffeth, Glenn, ed. Taking the Red Pill: Science, Philosophy and the Religion in the Matrix. Dallas, TX: BenBella Books, 2003.

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