From: Alexander 'Sasha' Chislenko (sasha1@netcom.com)
Date: Sat Jul 18 1998 - 16:13:25 MDT
A few points to the inspiring discussion of this inspiring film:
The whole thing is very familiar to any person who once lived
behind the Iron Curtain.
Instead of staged personal accidents (father's death) the Powers
manufacture lots of stories about accidents that happened with
other people in their attempts to overstep territorial or behavioral
boundaries, and even if you are really free and smart, and suspect
that you are being fooled, there is no way to find out what of all this
is actually true and to what extent...
I knew many people who, once the door with the sign "Exit" appeared
in the wall, didn't take that step as they didn't feel enough strength and
courage to face whatever it is outside (and this out of very few people
who were actually looking for the door). Practically all those who made
it out created a comfortable limited suburban nest in the new world, and
still feel attached to the artificial culture of their first artificial world.
Nobody starts looking for the doors out of the new world. It's scary.
NOBODY.
(Any other former dissidents from the communist block on this list?)
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It may be even more difficult to experience unintentional deceit.
If you are fooled on purpose on a small piece of land by a small group
of people who occasionally slip, you can discover it. But what do you
do if you are surrounded by millions of people who stay within some
idiotic boundaries (they are behavioral/cultural so that you can't even
see them) and have created a culture that not only justifies, but glorifies
these boundaries, and they all keep showing those boxes of cereal to
each other, and you can't extract a confession of deceit from them
even if you torture them - because they sincerely believe that this *is*
real life.
So transcending the collective unconscious insanity of the mundane
seems a lot harder than getting out of a generally comfy and somewhat
leaky movie plot.
I saw a similar film in about 1987 in Russia - it was Polish, called
"New Amazons", or "Sexmission". Exmission" means "Expulsion,
or exile In Polish as I was explained. A scene of hitting "the end of
the world" - there, a painted "after-nuclear-holocaust" dome - was
almost identical. The film was heavily censored (I couldn't find a full
version since), but still enough was left for the bitter irony of the
situation to stare into the face of the viewer sitting under the dome
of the theater, and then another one, a bit larger... Still, not visible
enough for the middle-aged wives and friends of the Soviet colonels
who posed as my fellow AI researchers in the Academy of Sciences,
and accompanied me to the movie (one of them used her connections
to get the tickets) to see anything related to *them*.
Did anybody notice that in the end the huge full moon was hanging in the
sky close to the Sun? It looks nice of course, but even a school astronomy
textbook could teach one that this can't happen. Somebody told me that
Truman may have been taught some fake astronomy so that he feels
comfortable in a photogenic world, but I am not sure - anybody has other
interpretations of this scene?
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Alexander Chislenko <http://www.lucifer.com/~sasha/home.html>
<sasha@media.mit.edu> <sasha@lucifer.com> <sasha1@netcom.com>
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