Unanswered Questions

Invisible cities are all around us. This is the point that Italo Calvino emphasizes through his aptly titled Invisible Cities. He makes it clear that every society created, whether fictional or real, is an attempt at the perfect place, a heaven on earth. Waking Life, an entirely different piece, is an animated movie where the main character talks to several people trying to understand our life, the present society, and the nature of things. Though at first they seem to explore different subjects, we soon come to realize that they, in fact, overlap.

Through the course of Waking Life the main character meets a handful of interesting people, all with personal reflections and theories on different aspects of life. One such philosopher is a man in a bar, shown in this picture. Represented in a medium-wide shot that follows the rule of two thirds, the camera is angled at ¾ front and eye level. The composition of this shot helps us do two things: it both identifies us with the man and it makes us pay attention to what he is saying. The background is not distracting, it doesn´t take our attention away from the speaker, and because it is almost like we can look straight into his eyes it does not feel like he is any better than us. If anything, he is merely opening up to us and expressing his every thought.

This particular person has interesting ideas, talking about the advances over time. There are none, he states. This is a clear contradiction with what the large portion of the human race believes, where the improvements and achievements of humans are boasted. Technology and wisdom has largely improved, they claim, and they have taken us from a Stone Age to the way of live we know today. In complete disagreement, this man says we are “at best, super chimpanzee level”, believing that we are deceived in our perception of what is advantage and development. Waking Life also poses such an idea with Continuous City No. 2. Named Trude, it is a city that essentially looks the same as any other, giving the illusion that you have already been here. The truth is, you have. Because although you don´t feel in a place where you´d be eager to return, there is no escaping it. Trude is everywhere, it is every single city in the world. The only thing that changes is its name, applying the same idea of repetition, of stability, of monotony, as the man in Waking Life. Nothing changes, but we all believe it does. It is only another illusion in our daily lives.

A different moment of Waking Life introduces another man, this one in a very particular situation. As seen on the shot to the left, he is burning himself. The shot, portrayed in an extreme wide shot, frontal and high angle camera direction, is interesting mainly because of two things. The first is obvious. A man is burning. The second lies in the two men seen on the left, simply because they are half-heartedly staring at a man who is probably dead by now, a man who committed suicide right before their eyes. And what was their reaction? None at all. They simply watched, not wanting to help out.

This shot is best understood when what happened before it is seen. The man now burning was talking to our main character, angry at the media and the government. Both are allies of the evil in our world, he says, because the government does not let us be free while the media promotes the evil in the world. He is also believes that we all do our share in making the world a hypocritical place. People often speak against the horrors of wars, disasters, of depressions, but they actually give us a sense of pleasure. Sure, we may feel sorrow, he states, but “man wants chaos…he´s gotta have it”. The shot above is then a perfect representation of his ideas: although the two men do not want to help, they can´t take their eyes off the carcass. Invisible Cities introduces a city of the dead called Eusapia. Its inhabitants, though the most inclined to enjoying life and having free will, is most known because it is often copying what the dead do. Each time the dead innovates, so do the living. They are then twin cities, meaning that the city that so ardently loves life closely resembles death. Sound familiar? These explanations show that the human race has deceived itself in other aspects. This time, it´s our sense of compassion, of cooperation, our will to live peacefully. These values do not exist, they are merely another myth created over time.

What is real? Very few things, if you choose to believe Invisible Cities and Waking Life. Most of our realities, whether they are a society, a custom or a habit, they are all fantasies of ours. If most of what we live is a lie, an illusion, invisible, then what do we live? Is there really a purpose to our being here? And what is the role model we need to follow? These pieces are effective in solving mysteries, but they open many more. If anything, they leave the reader or observer in a pensive mode, unsure of the next move. They don´t even know where they stand. It´s no wonder many choose to live in the dark.