Chuck Klosterman On Film And Television (9 page)

The reason I think Cruise and Reeves make flawed decisions is because they are not dealing with specific, case-by-case situations. They are dealing with the entire scope of their being, which changes the rules. I would never support the suggestion that ignorance is bliss, but that cliché takes on a totally different meaning when the definition of “ignorance” becomes the same as the definition for “existence.”

Look at it this way: Let’s assume you’re a married woman, and your husband is having an affair. If this is the only lie in your life, it’s something you need to know. As a singular deceit, it’s a problem, because it invalidates every other truth of your relationship. However, let’s say
everyone
is lying to you
all the time
— your husband, your family, your coworkers, total strangers, etc. Let’s assume that no one has ever been honest with you since the day you started kindergarten, and you’ve never suspected a thing. In this scenario, there is absolutely no value to learning the truth about anything; if everyone expresses the same construction of lies, those lies
are
the truth, or at least a kind of truth. But the operative word in this scenario is
everyone
. Objective reality is not situational; it doesn’t evolve along with you. If you were raised as a strict Mormon and converted into an acid-eating Wiccan during college, it would seem like your reality had completely evolved—but the only thing that would be different is your perception of a world that’s still exactly the same. That’s not the situation Cruise and Reeves face in these movies. They are not looking for the true answer to one important question; they are choosing between two unilateral truths that apply to absolutely everything. And all the things we want out of life—pleasure, love, enlightenment, self-actualization, whatever—can be attained
within either realm
. They both choose the “harder” reality, but only because the men who made
The Matrix
and
Vanilla Sky
assume that option is more optimistic. In truth, both options are exactly the same. Living as an immaterial cog in the matrix would be no better or worse than living as a fully-aware human; existing in a cryogenic dreamworld would be no less credible than existing in corporeal Manhattan.

The dreamworld in Richard Linklater’s staggering
Waking Life
illustrates this point beautifully, perhaps because that idea is central to its whole intention.
Waking Life
is an animated film about a guy (voiced by Wiley Wiggins) who finds himself inside a dream he cannot wake from. As the disjointed story progresses, both the character and the audience conclude that Wiggins is actually dead. And what’s cool about
Waking Life
is that this realization is not the least bit disturbing. Wiggins’s response is a virtual nonreaction, and that’s because he knows he is not merely in a weird situation; he is walking through an alternative reality. Instead of freaking out, he tries to understand how his new surroundings compare to his old ones.

There are lots of mind-expanding moments in
Waking Life,
and it’s able to get away with a lot of shit that would normally seem pretentious (it’s completely plotless, its characters lecture about oblique philosophical concepts at length, and much of the action is based on people and situations from Linklater’s 1991 debut film,
Slacker
). There are on-screen conversations in
Waking Life
that would be difficult to watch in a live-action picture. But
Waking Life
doesn’t feel self-indulgent or affected, and that’s because it’s a cartoon: Since we’re not seeing real people, we can handle the static image of an old man discussing the flaws of predestination. Moreover, we can accept the film’s most challenging dialogue exchange, which involves the reality of our own interiority.

The scene I’m referring to is where Wiggins’s character meets a girl and goes back to her apartment, and the girl begins explaining her idea for a surrealistic sitcom. She asks if Wiggins would like to be involved. He says he would, but then asks a much harder question in return: “What does it feel like to be a character in someone else’s dream?” Because that’s who Wiggins realizes this person is; he is having a lucid dream, and this woman is his own subconscious construction. But the paradox is that this woman is able to express thoughts and ideas that Wiggins himself could never create. Wiggins mentions that her idea for the TV show is great, and it’s the kind of thing he could never have come up with—but since this is
his
dream, he must have done exactly that. And this forces the question that lies behind “What is reality?”: “
How do we know what we know?”

This second query in what brings us to
Memento,
probably the most practical reality study I’ve ever seen on film. The reason I say “practical” is because it poses these same abstract questions as the other films I’ve already mentioned, but it does so without relying on an imaginary universe. Usually, playing with the question of reality requires some kind of
Through the Looking Glass
trope: In
Waking Life,
Wiggins’s confusion derives from his sudden placement into a dream. Both
The Matrix
and
Vanilla Sky
take place in nonexistent realms.
Being John Malkovich
is founded on the ability to crawl into someone’s brain through a portal in an office building;
Fight Club
is ultimately about a man who isn’t real;
eXistenZ
is set inside a video game that could never actually exist. However,
Memento
takes place in a tangible place and merely requires an implausible—but still entirely
possible
—medical ailment.

Memento
is about a fellow named Leonard (Guy Pearce) who suffers a whack to the head and can no longer create new memories; he still has the long-term memories from before his accident, but absolutely no short-term recall. He forgets everything that happens to him three minutes after the specific event occurs.
²
This makes life wildly complicated, especially since his singular goal is to hunt down the men who bonked him on the skull before proceeding to rape and murder his wife.

Since the theme of
Memento
is revenge and the narrative construction is so wonderfully unconventional (the scenes are shown in reverse order, so the audience—like Leonard—never knows what just happened), it would be easy to find a lot of things in this movie that might appear to define it. However, the concept that’s most vital is the way it presents memory as its own kind of reality. When
Memento
asks the “
What is reality
?” question, it actually provides an answer: Reality is a paradigm that always seems different and personal and unique, yet never really is. Its reality is autonomous.

There’s a crucial moment in
Memento
where Leonard describes his eternal quest to kill his wife’s murderers, and the person sitting across from him makes an astute observation: This will be the least satisfying revenge anyone will ever inflict. Even if Leonard kills his enemies, he’ll never remember doing so. His victory won’t just be hollow; it will be instantaneously erased. But Leonard disagrees. “The world doesn’t disappear when you close your eyes, does it?” he snaps. “My actions still have meaning, even if I can’t remember them.”

What’s ironic about Leonard’s point is that it’s completely true—yet even Leonard refuses to accept what that sentiment means in its totality. Almost no one ever does.

I’m not sure if anyone who’s not a soap opera character truly gets amnesia; it might be one of those fictional TV diseases, like environmental illness or gum disease. However, we all experience intermittent amnesia, sometimes from drinking Ketel One vodka
³
but usually from the rudimentary passage of time. We refer to this phenomenon as “forgetting stuff.”
(Reader’s note: I realize I’m not exactly introducing ground-breaking medical data right now, but bear with me.
) Most people consider forgetting stuff to be a normal part of living. However, I see it as a huge problem; in a way, there’s nothing I fear more. The strength of your memory dictates the size of your reality. And since objective reality is fixed, all we can do is try to experience—to
consume
—as much of that fixed reality as possible. This can only be done by living in the moment (which I never do) or by exhaustively filing away former moments for later recall (which I do all the time).

Taoists constantly tell me to embrace the present, but I only live in the past and the future; my existence is solely devoted to (a) thinking about what will happen next and (b) thinking back to what’s happened before. The present seems useless, because it has no extension beyond my senses. To me, living a carpe diem philosophy would make me like Leonard. His reality is based almost entirely on faith: Leonard believes his actions have meaning, but he can’t experience those meanings (or even recall the actions that caused them). He knows hard reality is vast, but his soft reality is minuscule. And in the film’s final sequence, we realize that he understands that all too well; ultimately, he lies to himself to expand it. In a sense, he was right all along; his actions do have meaning, even if he doesn’t remember them. But that meaning only applies to an objective reality he’s not part of, and that’s the only game in town.

It’s significant that the character of Rita in David Lynch’s
Mulholland Drive
is a woman with total amnesia, and that we’re eventually forced to conclude that she might be nothing but a figment of another character’s imagination.
⁴
It’s almost like Lynch is saying that someone who can’t remember who they are really doesn’t exist. Once your reality closes down to zero, you’re no longer part of it. So maybe that’s the bottom line with all of these films. Maybe the answer to “
What is reality?”
is this: Reality is both reflexive and inflexible. It’s not that we all create our own reality, because we don’t; it’s not that there is no hard reality, because there is. We can’t alter reality—but reality can’t exist unless we know it’s there. It depends on us as much as we depend on it.

We’re all in this together, people.

Semidepressing side note: Eight months after reading Owen Gleiberman’s review in
EW,
I woke up with another tummy ache in the middle of the night (this time at a Days Inn in Chicago). The only thing I had to read was the July 15 issue of
Time
magazine that came with the hotel room, so I started looking at the “letters” page. All the letters were about Tom Cruise (
Time
had just done a cover story on Cruise after the release of Steven Spielberg’s film version of Philip K. Dick’s
Minority Report)
. These are two of them:

My first reaction to these letters was guttural: “Since when does
Time
publish letters that are written by rival publicists?” However, as I sat there in pain, feeling as though my stomach was being vacuumed through the lower half of my torso and into the bowels of this Illinois hotel, I was struck by the more frightening realization:
These are
not
publicists!
They are just everyday people, and they are some of the people I am trying to understand reality alongside. Somehow, there are literate men in Canada who believe Tom Cruise is a respected role model and “different” from all the other actors who contribute nothing but “mere amusement.” Somehow, there are women in the Pacific Northwest who think Nicole Kidman is interesting and wonderful and an icon of single motherhood, and that little five-foot-seven Cruise is an “alpha male” (even though everyone I know halfway assumes he’s gay). These are the things they feel strongly about, because these are things they know to be true.

We don’t have a fucking chance.

1
. As opposed to this essay, which tends to be philosophy for shallow people.

2
. Unfortunately, this does create the one gaping plot hole the filmmakers chose to ignore entirely, probably out of necessity: If Leonard can’t form new memories, there is no way he could comprehend that he even has this specific kind of amnesia, since the specifics of the problem obviously wouldn’t have been explained to him until after he already acquired the condition.

3
. Holland’s #1 memory-destroying vodka!

4
. For those of you who’ve seen
Mulholland Drive
and never came to that conclusion, the key to this realization is when the blonde girl (Naomi Watts) masturbates.

I’m having a crisis of confidence, and I blame Jesus.

Actually, my crisis is not so much about Jesus as it is about the impending rapture, which I don’t necessarily believe will happen. But I don’t believe the rapture
won’t
happen, either; I really don’t see any evidence for (or against) either scenario. It all seems unlikely, but still plausible. Interestingly enough, I don’t think there is a word for my particular worldview: “Nihilism” means you don’t believe in anything, but I can’t find a word that describes partial belief in
everything
. “Paganism” is probably the closest candidate, but that seems too Druidesque for the style of philosophy I’m referring to. Some would claim that this is kind of like “agnosticism,” but true agnostics always seem too willing to side with the negative; they claim there are no answers, so they live as if those answers don’t exist. They’re really just nihilists without panache.