CONSPIRACY GOTHIC

etween 1998 and 1999, four Hollywood science fiction films came out D a r k C i t y that were all telling B slight variations of the THE FILMS same story. This story is also told in at least two science T h e M a t r i x fiction novels, one from 1959 and one from 1964, as well as a three - hour German television miniseries directed by Rainer Werner Fass - binder in the early 1970s. The Thirteenth F l o o r

Simulacron-3 The Truman S h o w THE NOVELS Time Out of J o i n t World on a Wire

he essence of this story is that the hero - who is a lonesome man - dis - covers he is trapped in T an entirely artificial THE MY TH CURIOUS prison-world and must try to escape into reality. The war - COUSINS dens of these virtual prisons are aliens, robots, or bureaucrats.

I think of these films and novels as forming a genre (or sub - genre, if you prefer), and what 1. The hero, who suffers from loneliness and malaise, makes them so is how they all Blade Runner uniquely express the same story, the notices an uncanny rip in the way the children of a family all fabric of his reality. uniquely express the same genes. The Bothersome Man This is how the critic Stanley Cavell analyzed several screwball 2. He investigates the comedies from the 1930s and 1940s T h e C e l l in his book Pursuits of Happiness . rip and suspects that his world He wrote, “Let us think of the is an artificial construction Conspiracy Theory common inheritance of the members and that he is trapped and/or of a genre as a story, call it a myth. The members of a genre will be in - a prisoner. He is pursued by T h e G a m e terpretations of it, or to use antagonistic agents. Thoreau’s word for it, revisions of e X i s t e n Z i t . ” Cavell called his genre the 3. A female love interest Comedy of Remarriage. I call this passes through the hero’s Groundhog Day genre Conspiracy Gothic because all prison-world. She is from the the works involve a sense of con - spiracy, in which the protagonist is a real world and wants to help I n c e p t i o n wanted man or feels like the whole free him, but she too is re - world is against him. sisted by the agents. Inland Empire Also, these stories seem to have a lot to do with 18th- and 19th- century Gothic horror, the tales of 4. The hero tries to L a J e t é e which often involved trapped protago- reach the woman and her real nists, madness, the uncanny, and ma- M a r w e n c o l levolent supernatural forces. Gothic world, but is repelled by the literature was one of the origins of agents and by the barriers of sci-fi, as well. his prison. He suffers a crisis. Open Your Eyes The Passenger So, the work of the critic is to: 5. The hero has to rouse extract, like a genetic code, the himself to try once again to common myth from the members of Pleasantville the genre; to explain how each e s c a p e . member makes variations on the The Purple Rose of Cairo myth; to identify other works re - 6. The hero breaks free lated to the genre; and to think about what the myth and all its from his prison, reaches the The Shawshank variations mean. woman he loves, and begins R e d e m p t i o n I don’t intend this infographic fighting against the forces that to be a definitive study, but just a had oppressed him. thorough introduction. Source Code

Strange Days

Stranger than Fiction The Matrix The Truman Dark City Show Sunset Boulevard The Matrix very quickly The Truman Show is much For as impressive and has its hero realize he’s in a more about its hero becoming beautiful as the imagery and simulated prison, escape from conscious of his status as a the worlds of The Matrix and The Truman Show are, Dark it with the help of a dark- prisoner and his world as COMMENTS false. City outdoes them. haired love interest, and then The look of Dark City is begin fighting against the Whereas Neo leaves The Synecdoche, New York like Nighthawks by Edward Matrix early on, Truman malevolent forces who Hopper mixed with Metropolis doesn’t step outside his constructed the prison, all mixed with The Third Man. prison until the very final more or less by the end of If there were ever a city Act 1. scene. in which to wander around The Truman Show has Neo, even though he’s feeling mournfully alienated nothing to do with what Total Recall unhappy with his urban and spiritually adrift, it happens to its hero once he’s existence, doesn’t have to go would be that of Dark City (as reached the real world and well as the Los Angeles of through much of a struggle in reached his love interest. Blade Runner). deciding to “follow the white Instead it’s only about It’s interesting that the rabbit” and accept that his Truman as he copes with love interest of the hero is reality was false. And upon Z e i t g e i s t being in a world of illusions played by Jennifer Connelly learning of the truth of the and conspiracy, and having a and that several scenes are “desert of the real,” he does day-to-day existence that is hopeful visions of her convulse briefly, but then too comfortable and too standing at the end of a pier, overlooking the ocean on a gathers himself and is more convenient. sunny day. or less OK. The film also makes a That image of Jennifer If only everyone could so real character out of the Connelly recurs in Requiem un-neurotically react to warden of the prison, and for a Dream, which is most having the veil pulled from thus complicates why Truman definitely also a film about their eyes and having to gaze is being confined to a being lost and trapped within upon the wasteland of reality simulated reality. an oppressive city. in its all sublimely desolate The simpler situation (The image of Jennifer horror! would be that a corporation Connelly on a pier is also in Neo does struggle to has enslaved Truman and House of Sand and Fog, but accept his responsibility as a turned his entire existence there she is the character who prophet/savior figure who is into an amusing commodity. is depressed and adrift.) going to have to redeem They are doing it just for Dark City is similar to The Matrix in relying on civilization, reality, human- money, and Truman is no fantastic, mostly martial arts ity, etc. more than a factor of input. violence - of a form that to I find that struggle much Christof, on the other me resembled something from hand, is an artist with a more implausible and fantas- Mortal Kombat (hurling balls WHAT IT tic, and much less relevant vision (just like the master of energy at one another) - as LITERARY computer programmer in than the more banal struggle the means with which the Simulacron-3) and Truman and to resist the inertia that characters resolve their the studio are the materials keeps one in an inauthentic problems and express their he works with to create his MAY MEAN but comfortable day-to-day feelings. LINKS masterpiece. rut - a rut so deep it feels like That’s all well and good However, using another in the way of entertainment, a prison and makes one’s person for the sake of a work but less so in the way of world feel artificial. of art is generally considered psychological complexity and I do appreciate that in emotional truth. immoral and unethical and The Matrix it’s robots and evil, however beautiful the Dark City is more like the computer technology that is results. The Truman Show in that it is enslaving humanity and This occurs in the Edgar not until the end of the story extracting our vitality for its Allen Poe story, “The Oval that the hero is able to grotesquely rational purposes. Portrait,” which has a breach the walls of his prison. Being addicted to email, Christof-type character who Most of the film is about new gadgets, social networks, kills his wife for the sake of Murdoch trying to figure out 24-hour news, video games, painting an excellent portrait what kind of world he’s in, pornography, and other of her. who he is, and where he digital entertainment is It’s funny that The comes from. certainly a means by which Truman Show is set in Califor- The wardens of the one flees from the harder nia, and that California is the prison in Dark City are space things of life - and flees in a “real world” that Truman aliens, and thus a racial way that becomes vicious, longs to escape into. element separates them from excessive, and that weakens Would reaching 1990s the humans they are subjugat- 19 8 4 here does the idea of “Life is precious every minute But if you’re working and It’s as if the hero has to Slavoj Zizek makes much one’s willpower. California allow Truman to ing (as opposed to something ado about 9-11 and the being trapped in a And more precious with you in it busy and up using your body all reach the abyss, and then take a Conspiracy Gothic stories and more spiritual or intellectual W false reality come So let's have some fun.” day, then you more than likely leap of faith into it or over it in As for more Terminator- find a world that would will not have the energy nor the order to get to the woman. how they latently criticize from? Is it something uniquely First-World capitalism in his I feel like this song can time with which to wander down Which sounds all well and that separates a bureaucrat or modern and of the 20th book Welcome to the Desert of the actually feel less artificial, open up some of what the paths of thinking. good, but in novels like The esque Doomsday scenarios centur y? Real. Conspiracy Gothic myth means. Plato seemed to have Moviegoer or The Stranger, you a robot from a regular human Hardly. He writes, “In involving robots and comput- and that would give him more plenty of free time. Hamlet too. have protagonists who have most late-capitalist consumerist The idea of being In Thus Spoke Zarathustra, But they were also both definitely gazed down into the society, ‘real social life’ itself being). imprisoned in a theater of possibilities to, not just be an Against Nature Nietzsche described the Last aristocrats, with social relevance maw of nothingness, but after somehow acquires the features ers, I’m less concerned with shadows is discussed in the The conclusion of Dark Men as being those modern and political status (same goes having done so romance and of a staged fake, with our actor in a television show, “Allegory of the Cave” in Plato’s souls who are frightened by the for Descartes). desire and love become for them neighbors behaving in ‘real’ life that. Such a scenario would City seems very similar to Republic, which is a book that’s world and tired of living (but So what happens if you live just sort of a very sad joke, a like stage actors and but to be a real person over 2,000 years old and scared to die and watch their in a society that is so temporarily distracting extras....the ultimate truth of probably be as morally tidy as the capitalist utilitarian that of The Truman Show, but predates Christianity, health). These Last Men sustain technologically advanced and so painkiller for the despiritualized universe is the existing in a serious world? electricity, industrialism, mass themselves with, “their little wealthy that even its middle and meaninglessness of life. dematerialization of ‘real life’ World War II - everyone then it pulls a nice reversal. society, Communism, digital pleasures for the day, and their lower classes can have at least a itself, its reversal into a spectral Realizing one is a computers, the Internet, and so little pleasures for the night.” few hours (if not more) of quiet Nevertheless, part of what show.” would know who the enemy Truman crashing his on. Could this idea of being a leisure every day with which to seems really great about these There is something to this. prisoner and then having to Alice’s Adventures in A similar concept was Little Person, a Last Man with sit around and, perhaps, to Conspiracy Gothic films is these Contemporary American society was, everyone would have a schooner into the wall of the described by Descartes in the his Little Pleasures - someone think? images they each have of a does seem quite obsessed with: one, delaying death and escape the prison and resist mid 1600s in his Meditations on who is anonymous, What if you have a great character standing at the edge studio is, for my money, one unimportant, and lonely - be quantity of leisure, and are of a world or looking out to the preserving life for as long as great reason to fight, to care, First Philosophy. possible (no matter how insipid the warden is a thrilling, Wo n d e r l a n d connected to the feeling of not educated, too, but you’re a nothing that is beyond it. He wrote, “I shall then it becomes); two, surrounding of the most philosophically- being at home in the world, that loser? A nobody? A Little In the films, there’s Neo to be heroic. suppose, not that God who is ourselves with very glossy your reality is a sham and as Person? looking at the “desert of the meaningful challenge. But supremely good and the (Photoshopped) images of new, loaded and satisfyingly- hollow as the props of a film What if you’re a real.” There’s Truman crashing As Roger Ebert fountain of truth, but some evil clean, non-decaying objects and set? philosophical loser, and you his dinghy into the wall of the people; and three, constantly how many people ever in cinematic scenes I’ve ever genius not less powerful than Nietzsche thought that the don’t have a girlfriend, and you studio. There’s Murdoch buying new things to replace the complained about in his deceitful, has employed his Last Man was a spiritual don’t have any social status, and tunneling through the brick wall older things that are even their lives actually have to watched in a film (as good as whole energies in deceiving me; reaction to a modern, godless, your job is meaningless? and finding the void of outer slightly deteriorated. review of the film, The Matrix I shall consider that the and nihilistic world. What if you aim your space. There’s Douglass driving But to do all this is to, face such a situation? when Buster Keaton jumps heavens, the earth, the colors, Could conspiracy paranoia philosophical gaze onto the his car beyond L.A. and finding implicitly, be striving for a sort is just too much of a kung fu Being and Time figures, sound, and all other be another such reaction? That world and see it begin to melt, a digital grid. of perfectly predictable, These Conspiracy Gothic through the movie screen in never-decaying utopia, where external things are nought but in positing a conspiracy one is if you doubt all that there is to This is one thing movies nothing goes away, no one has action film, and just shame- positing a God-like figure who is doubt? can do really well - to let the Sherlock, Jr.). illusions and dreams of which to die, nothing has to change. stories seem somewhat the evil genius has availed omnipotent and omniscient and That probably wouldn’t audience, the “viewers,” see the A world that’s no more fully distracts itself from the The scene with Truman himself, in order to lay traps for responsible for justice and feel very pleasant, since at the world the characters of the story than a planned procession of deceptive in that they do my credulity; I shall consider injustice? end of the day you wouldn’t exist in - to see WALL-E’s dreamy images is most certainly serious psychological and and the boat is funny, myself as having no hands, no That’s what Richard have a loving wife or children or parched and ruined cityscape, to going to feel insubstantial, and honestly portray how miser- eyes, no flesh, no blood, nor Hofstadter said about American powerful friends calling on you see Deckard’s rainy, neon-lit Los unreal - “dematerialized,” as conspiracism in his essay, “The and affirming your existence Angeles. Zizek says - just like the philosophical things that are surprising, it’s completely any senses, yet falsely believing able and disconnected and The Bell Jar Paranoid Style in American and recognizing that you are a To see these worlds and to perfectly repetitive and glossy myself to possess all those visual, and it forcefully Politics.” human being and that you hear their sounds and to see world in Pleasantville. going on in a story like this. things.” It’s as if only when the dead a person can feel as a He wrote, “The paranoid’s matter to them. them at times with Descartes’ world was one world in some way threatens us expresses several ideas all at interpretation of history is It’s common to refer to a accompanying soundtrack music without mechanical or digital with death and decay, and also citizen/consumer of an distinctly personal: decisive lonely, dull life as can allow a viewer to feel the reproduction, and yet the confuses us with questions and once about freedom and events are not taken as part of “insubstantial,” as not “filled mood that is resonating within mysteries and paradoxes, and notion of a totally simulated affluent nation like the U.S., the stream of history, but as the up” with experiences that feel these fictional places, to be when we have to react to that by transcendence and when reality occurred to and consequences of someone’s will. “heavy” and “dense.” attuned to the same spiritual struggling for sustenance, by but then these stories bring preoccupied him. Very often the enemy is held to frequency that the characters in keeping close to other people those things fail and you find possess some especially effective In a lecture about Kafka the story are attuned to as you for comfort and solace and help, in these fantastic conspiracies Brave New World So what is this stuff all source of power: he controls the and teaching Kafka to see them on the screen. only then does a world feel real, yourself at a dead end. about? Feeling like everything press; he has unlimited funds; undergrads, David Foster hard, and really there. And that’s kind of sad, and magical evildoers, which and everyone around you is he has a new secret for Wallace said that many of his What about the politics of since it means that we can only The last scene of Dark influencing the mind stories are, “Radical these stories? Is it a false, fake, unreal? Feeling like really exist when life is at least (brainwashing); he has a special of course rouse the unhappy you’re losing your mind, that literalizations of truths we tend coincidence that The Republic, somewhat hard and fearsome Time Out of City is a more disturbing and your reality is turning upside technique for seduction (the to treat as metaphorical ... With which contains the “Allegory of and finite (which is like Frued’s protagonists to action. down, that you’re trapped? Catholic confessional).” respect to The Metamorphosis, the Cave,” is history’s most conclusion in Civilization and Its much less comical variation Hofstadter traces American Feeling like there is some other then, I might invite students to eloquent defense of a Discontents, namely that to exist conspiracy paranoia back to the consider what is really being rationally-planned, totalitarian in civilization necessarily entails But life is never so on the same theme. world out there you can reach Carceri d’invenzione repression and frustration). Joint late 18th century, which is also expressed when we refer to state? for that would be more real and the same time as when James someone as ‘creepy.’” Were there any Conspiracy If the world becomes easy, simple. Most days never The men discover that true and free, where you could Tilly Matthews was obsessing in Likewise with Conspiracy Gothic stories written or filmed then our existence fades. For as really be yourself, where you London about the “Air Loom,” Gothic, these films and books in Soviet states? 1984 has a lot much as it’s like heaven to be in involve any serious moral there is nothing beyond the a mother’s womb, it’s also a could fall in love, and where which he believed was a complex literalize a world that is not of affinities with the genre, but place of nothingness where you things would make sense? and devious machine that was wall, nothing beyond the “dense”, a world that is that was written as an don’t exist yet. It’s only when Time Out of Joint, like The decisions, but instead a lot of manipulating his mind and body “insubstantial” and “hollow” anti-Soviet novel. you come out of the womb and The four Conspiracy world they want to flee from. from afar. and “illusory,” in which It’s interesting that the get spanked on the bottom and Truman Show, gives a nice minor choices regarding your Gothic films from the late 1990s Matthews shouted, everyone is a phony and just title of the Fassbinder then start coping with pain and Just the vacuum of outer were all Hollywood blockbusters “Treason!” in British Parliament “acting.” adaptation of Simulacron-3 is absence and resistance that your portrait of deadening subur- pleasure and the pleasure of The Catcher in the Rye and all have fairly optimistic, in 1797 and was then committed It’s like Holden Caulfield World on a Wire, and the existence begins and you become space. happy, and convenient endings, to Bedlam asylum. in The Catcher in the Rye opening titles have a marionette someone. ban stasis, and how in that others. and aren’t the best place to go His “Air Loom” was a discovering that everyone motif, as in the hero’s reality is If there’s something that That image is, to me, a to for a complexly honest view prototype for what the around him is a robot and just a puppet world for the feels misleading to me about the Will you be nice to psychoanalyst Viktor Trausk literally phony. computer scientists who have stasis a man’s world begins to of things. Conspiracy Gothic stories, it’s nice (however grim) illustra- called “Influencing Machines,” Or Esther Greenwood in created it. this idea that there is actually a yourself? Will you be nice to Looking at the films I call which he described as a common The Bell Jar discovering that she The metaphor of puppets real world out there, and that disintegrate and feel scripted tion of philosophical skepti- delusion of paranoid is literally trapped in an and puppet masters is a good “Curious Cousins” - films that this real world will be shining others? Will you be nice to schizophrenics. enormous bell jar and being way to describe Plato’s political in some way or another tell and sunny (usually near an and fake. cism - in which you begin The Crying of Lot 49 toyed with by scientists. vision in The Republic, and also ocean, like the free land in The parts of the Conspiracy Gothic others if it entails having to Now, the point of bringing the political vision of the Grand Shawshank Redemption or The myth - could be a way to start Ragle Gumm’s day job is doubting everything in your all that up is to suggest that Something that is very Inquisitor in that chapter from Bothersome Man) and there will thinking about things. do something that you don’t there’s something in common important to the Conspiracy Dostoevsky’s The Brothers be love and a meaningful life for to sit at home and complete a world, even your own Particularly, I find between: one, being alone and Gothic stories that is missing in Karamazov (and you could read you there. One of the big ideas from enjoy very much? Will you be Synecdoche, New York to be a film unimportant in the modern the “Allegory of the Cave” is Notes from the Underground as Heidegger’s philosophy in Being existence, with the hope of that’s very illuminating, as its world - feeling like no one looks whole aspect of romantic love. what the consciousness of a newspaper number game, and Time is that to exist in a story of an out-of-sorts mean to others if it makes at you and no one needs you For Plato, the person discontented puppet is like). world - any world - implies some finding some solid ground playwright seems to be a perfect and that your life is boring and escaping the cave and reaching You could call such a necessary things. The most which he manages somehow inversion of the Conspiracy you feel better? Discipline and Punish petty; two, feeling like you’re daylight and solid reality does political philosophy a Puppet important of which are that you and something really real on Gothic myth. the victim of a technologically so alone, for his own sake, for Master State, or Puppetrism, or are mortal and that you are to win every week. Instead of its hero sophisticated conspiracy, that the sake of knowing the truth. something like that. It’s the finite. These seem to me to be which everything rests. escaping away from an all sorts of machines are looking This is like Narrative of the flip side of a conspiracy theory Realizing these things and By the end of the novel, finding some way to carry on image-world, the protagonist of at you and running the world Life of Frederick Douglass, in in that the rulers want to the questions, for better or But then you ask and you and spying on you; and, three, which a slave begins to suspect confidently assume that they with this dark knowledge is a Synecdoche, Caden Cotard, builds way towards being authentic. it’s revealed that this number being diagnosed as a that his world is false and a can actually pull all the strings worse, that a person existing doubt and you dig, and at the his own solipsistic image-world Unfortunately, the schizophrenic - as unfit to live a prison, and then has to of the world and determine how and escapes into it (just like Des day-to-day tendency is towards regular adult life out in the real physically escape, by himself, in everything will work, as if it game was in reality a means in an affluent civilization center is...nothing, a vortex, Esseintes in Against Nature, or inauthenticity, towards world, as having a fractured order to reach the free land (the were just a simple series of distracting yourself, deluding A Doll’s House Norma Desmond in Sunset sense of self, a broken sense of North) where he can continue wheels and cogs and cause and yourself, wilfully forgetting that of predicting where nuclear will face day in and day out. meaninglessness, the abyss. Boulevard). the world, of needing to be learning the truth and becoming effect. your time is short and your He does so by directing a confined to an institution. a fully free, rational, and Reading The Grand means are limited. bombs being launched from They are not very With Dark City, there is never-ending play (with funding However, I did say earlier mature person. Inquisitor can be both And this is sad, but also no real world to escape into, from a MacArthur “Genius” that because this whole However, the whole idea of intoxicating and depressing, in sort of comical, and it entails the moon by a secessionist dramatic, but they are the grant) in a warehouse (which Conspiracy Gothic scenario is in “Platonic love” - as discussed in how grotesquely it portrays many confounding paradoxes, and feeling like the phenomena and all there is for a person looks very cave-like) in Plato, then you must be able to the Symposium dialogue and humanity and fits everyone into around you, yourself included, rebel army were going to land substance of one’s days and Schenectady, New York. think about it without reference elsewhere - is that you love a two categories - one category for are enigmatically opaque and to do is transform the world Caden spends most of his to industrialism and modern life person because being around the weak idiots who desperately always sort of slipping away on earth. hours, and for that they are F i c c i o n e s adult life inside this artificial and advanced technology and all them moves you closer to truth, need to abnegate their freedom, from you, back into the past or in which they already find world, directing all the actors that. beauty, reality, and goodness. and one category for the strong ahead into the future or off into Ragle’s quiet suburban meaningful. around him as if a minor deity. This kind of love ideally makes geniuses who need to dominate the distance. themselves - however absurd He does this as his health Let’s consider this fact: you a better person and inspires and rule and gloriously suffer And this is exactly what I is decaying, his sense of reality Philip K. Dick took the title of you to transform yourself and to the pain of freedom. felt as I watched Synecdoche, New world was thus a way to trick and false and prison-like they York, and what all meaty is disintegrating, and after his Time Out of Joint from a line transform the way you exist in Whether as a puppet or a from Hamlet. the world. puppet master, it seems equally literature and art gives me to him into doing important but wife has left him and taken chew on and savor the flavors of may know it to be. Not everybody questions In the Conspiracy Gothic delusional to assume that nature their child to Europe, where she for weeks or months or years their own existence and wonders films, desiring a woman and and society can be so perfectly becomes a fabulously successful afterwards. morally repugnant work for And that scene of about whether they should exist being recognized by her is calculated and adjusted, and if The Grand Inquisitor miniaturist painter. There is no answer. There or should not exist (“To be, or essential to what motivates the that’s the case (that you can’t Murdoch waking up in the On the soundtrack to the is no solution. There is the earth’s military and not to be, that is the question.”) hero to escape his prison and predict and manipulate spirit-killing emptiness at the film is a song called “Little How does a person become like seek reality. everything), then it would mean center of all things. And what hotel bathtub at the start of Person,” the lyrics of which were this? In the stories, the female the powerful aren’t really is liberating and good and government. written by Charlie Kaufman and Simulacron-3 How does a person become love interest generally already godlike, and that the weak healthy and can turn to shit just the film is like a nightmarish go in part: detached from his life such that knows that the hero’s world is a aren’t completely puppet-like, like that. (Ragle had originally he can ask whether he should prison of illusions. She is and that being free and being a And much of our lives are exaggeration of the idea from spent dwelling on the past or I’m just a little person continue living it, such that he literally “from the real world,” master of one’s life maybe has defected to the side of the moon anticipating the future. And we One person in a sea can doubt whether it’s real or and she wants this man to be less to do with your political Heidegger of “thrownness,” of will someday die. And the H a m l e t Of many little people not? there with her, to defend and status and more to do with universe does not care about us. rebels, but then was kidnapped Who are not aware of me The Thirteenth how your presence in a world What kind of personality, protect her reality. other things - like with how you But, yet, here we are. If material circumstances, The hero then has to go on get along with others and we feel oppressed, we must seek and hooked into a simulated I do my little job psychology, mode of existing, an odyssey to reach the woman yourself, with how you deal with liberation. If we feel desire, we is just - ! - gasping, disorient- And live my little life etc. are necessary to make a and get to her world (all of the material stuff around you (if must seek love. If the world reality and forced to unwittingly ing, you’re just there and you Eat my little meals person be this way? which is nicely reversed in you’re graceful and masterful feels false, then we must seek Floor Miss my little kid and wife Leisure - quiet time - seems Synecdoche, New York, as Caden towards it, or clumsy and lazy). reality. just have to go, without a like one crucial thing to make a is sort of kicked out of his And then we settle again assist the earth government - And somewhere, maybe someday person ask such questions and marriage and love life and happy It’s a strange coincidence into a trap, or our love fades, or our reality diminishes, and the pause for reflection. Maybe somewhere far away to reflect on his existence. domestic real world by his very that the four Hollywood which is similar to what T h e I m a g e process repeats, and it repeats I'll find a second little person If your life is such that you bored and disappointed wife.) Conspiracy Gothic films all itself on all scales through all World on a Who will look at me and say have a good deal of time to just The path to the woman’s came out just a couple of years time, within every year, every happens to a war veteran in sit around peacefully, then world involves literally reaching before September 11th, which month, every day, every hour of "I know you philosophical contemplation the end of the earth, and then was the most prolific event for life, until, like the end of Source Code.) You're the one I've waited for may be one thing you can do looking beyond that to the void, conspiracy theorizing since the Synecdoche, that voice gives us Wire Let's have some fun." with that free time. the wasteland, the nada. Kennedy assassination. the command, and we die. There’s a dialectic here about the Forms and the between your life and your things that embody the Infinite Jest job being totally anonymous Simulacron-3 begins with Forms. and insignificant and dull a more innocent premise than These kinds of paradoxes (the suburbanite who is the other stories. involving infinity and regression are like the involved in no fight and no The artificial world in rattlesnakes in the desert of struggle), versus your life and Meditations on First Philosophy the novel is a virtual reality the intellect. your job being of intensely computer program created for They only strike when stressful and world-historical the sake of market research. provoked, but their bite is importance (the military In the novel, the hero venomous and can cause total wonk who is involved in an computer scientist Douglass mental paralysis. The Moviegoer interplanetary civil war). Hall is already working with Its curious to think about that sort of intellectual It’s the child’s or the this artificial world, as one of corruption and then to think its overseers (or wardens, if What about all the times infin - psychopath’s fantasy come that in Simulacron-3 and its true - those private little you will). film adaptations, there’s also Narrative of the Life of ity, fractals, recursion, and synecdochic calculations you’re tirelessly The drama comes when a theme of moral corruption, making are actually being he begins to suspect that he as the architect of the VR too exists in a virtual reality world becomes undone by his Frederick Douglass observed by the government worlds-being-nested-within-worlds show and that his world is just a power over a community of and are of absolutely global programmed simulation being little VR humanoids that he significance. can amuse himself with (this run by some other computer up in these stories? How do those You are a hero in disguise sort of decadence also occurs scientist, in some other, (as if secretly of royal blood, a to characters in eXistenZ and Na u s e a u higher, more powerful reality. Strange Days). mathematical and physical concepts prince or princess in humble Like Ragle in Time Out of The architect becomes costume) and everything you Joint, Douglass is philosophi- violent and sexually indul- relate to the Conspiracy Gothic myth do really, truly matters. cally astute and thinks to gent and repulses his The narrative arc of Time himself while in the grip of real-world girlfriend, who Neuromancer then rescues Douglass (who Out of Joint is very similar to conspiracy paranoia interest- and to creativity, madness, and loneli - was a mini VR clone of the The Truman Show, with the ing things like: architect) in order to preserve last dramatic scene being n e s s ? “I was nothing - - merely the old, good version of the Ragle finally deciding to leave a package of vital simulec- man she loved. Notes from the Underground the simulated world and enter tronic charges. Nevertheless I The possibility for a the real world. had to exist. Simple logic person to be corrupted by Ragle, however, is much demanded no less. I think, images and simulacra is something Plato would more philosophically therefore I am. But then I Has the situation of a character readily agree to, and that’s wasn't the first person to be The Paranoid Style in self-aware and contemplative also a theme of Infinite Jest being trapped in a simulated world than Truman, going on troubled by the possibility and its killer entertainment. monologues about semiotics, that nothing is real. How Interestingly, the docu- American Politics epistemology, metaphysics, about the solipsists, the mentar y Marwencol is about a man who plays with and shown up elsewhere in premodern litera - and the Gospel of John. Berkeleians, the transcenden- talists?” photographs dolls - basically Which seems appropri- When Douglass suspects his own little world of ture? Like perhaps involving a prein - ate, given that the kind of simulacra - as a means of that his world is a VR The Phenomenology of Spirit person who could begin therapy and recuperation simulation, a recursive and feeling like his reality is after a head injury. dustrial sovereign of some sort con - infinite series sprouts within dissolving is (unless suffering As for the film adapta- the novel (which also happens tions of Simulacron-3, The from mental illness) also the structing a world-of-images into which in The Matrix), i.e. the Thirteenth Floor is cheesy but The Republic kind of person with enough possibility for an endless does have a nice scene of to entrap someone else or for himself to leisure time to read philoso- nesting of one VR world Douglass in the desert beyond phy and literature, or to at within another, up and down L.A, gazing at the abyss. World on a Wire is slow least have the time to quietly forever. and stately and cheesy at times escape into? Or a deity imprisoning a ponder the basic rules by Simulacra and Simulation This kind of nauseating too, but it takes more which humans exist alongside regress is a classic philosophi- seriously the spiritual crisis of character in a dream-world of some each other in an empirical cal trope and comes up in having to accept that one’s world. Plato’s Phaedo in a dialogue world is a sham. s o r t ? The Stranger

Has the Conspiracy Gothic myth Three Dialogues between or variations of it been told in other Hylas and Philonous cultures? In the literature or folklore of East Asia, India, Africa, the Middle Thus Spoke Zarathustra East, or the Americas? T h e Tr i a l

When will someone film or write SOME The Twilight Zone a Conspiracy Gothic story with a female protagonist? QUESTIONS Welcome to the Desert of the Real I’m not trying to be paranoid, but why did the four Hollywood - What Is Enlightenment? produced Conspiracy Gothic films all get released between 1998 and 1999? The X Files

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