Seeing is believing.
Good magician will convince you that they're not hiding anything during their routine
then proceed to blow your mind with a twist you don't expect.
Movies trick us all the time.
It's what they do.
Moviegoers are sophisticated enough to tell when we are seeing a character's dream and not reality
But it's a question if you are watching something imaginary
you have to first believe it is real
Why does it seem real when it is all artificial?
There are movies that show you the truth, and then tell you that it was a deliberate lie?
Sometimes they leave you wondering if it was a lie or not.
The academic term is misdirection, but if you don't know the term, it's a lie.
Movies are not always meant to be taken literally
But we can take movies figuratively
There is a famous sequence in Tarantino's 'The Hateful Eight' where a character tells a story of how he sexually
humiliated and then killed a man.
What's not in question is that he is clearly telling this story as a provocation?
But what is ambiguous, is if that memory ever took place?
But Tarantino opted to film it in a convincing, realistic way.
The sequence looks real and compatible with the rest of the film.
So if this incident never happened
what did I just watch?
Is it a false flashback?
This could be the imagination of the man being provoked
or it could be the imagination of the man telling the story.
Also, Quentin Tarantino is known for being a director who directly addresses his audience.
In 'The Hateful Eight' there is even a brief moment where his familiar nasal voice tells the audience a key plot point
"Somebody poisoned the coffee."
It could be read simply as the imagination of the director's.
In many of these examples
the story we see is from the perspective of a character whose grasp of reality is unreliable.
In 'A Beautiful Mind's' hotly-debated desk scene
the main character's schizophrenic delusion takes the form of a destructive roommate.
People are quick to justify that this is actually the main character, John Forbes Nash, who pushes this desk out the window.
And that it actually happened because of these two people who saw it.
But if you believe the roommate isn't real why do you think the two witnesses are?
When we see something on screen, our natural instinct is to accept that it is real.
Some directors really get a kick out of messing with our heads.
Martin Scorsese brilliantly insinuates that events in his films may be either real or a cinematic lie.
At the end of 'Taxi Driver,' Travis Bickle should either be dead or in prison
But not only is he alive, still a taxi driver and called a hero, he is desired by the woman of his dreams.
Who previously spurned him.
Scorsese directs the closing scene in a way that feels surreal.
The labored uneducated speaker that reads a letter in voiceover
is clearly far removed from all the confident New York voices in the film.
But the fact that Scorsese used his own parents as characters in the clippings is not merely an in-joke, but a clue.
It draws attention to the central question: Is this really happening?
The disembodied camera moves over a series of clippings as if guided by an omniscient force:
the director's vision.
I always thought the ending of 'Taxi Driver' was unbelievable
a dream
the way Cybil Shepherd's alluring gaze in the rearview mirror
beckons Travis to take her back, her dreamy eyes float in a swirl of diffused lights and soft edges
as the certainty of their consummation seems finally inevitable.
Is this all in Travis's head?
When are we in the head of a character and when are we not?
In part three. I'll continue the essay "I'll Believe It When I See It."