Believing in Reality

In the film Avalon, directed by Mamoru Oshii, the main character, Ash plays a war game to escape from her real life. As I watched the film, I saw similarities to my own life. Ever since high school, I’ve been an avid gamer, sometimes spending an upwards of 50 hours in games per week. I’ve become quite skilled in most shooters, up to a point that many of my friends refuse to play with me now, since they don’t see the point of playing when they know that they’ll lose. Looking back at the time when I dedicate the majority of my time to video games, I question how I would act if I was in Ash’s world, to be in a world in which simulations are as real as life, to be able to escape to a more exciting reality and to feel something I would never be able to otherwise.

 

What is real? Avalon asks this question masterfully, many times in the film, the lines between the game and real life are blurred. Times such as when Ash visited Murphy’s husk, we the audience see the little girl that was later explained as a portal to “Class-Real.” That scene makes the audience question the boundary of the game and the real world. Later, the lines are further blurred when Ash’s dog mysteriously disappears and her book turns out to have no text when Bishop flips through them. These hold similarities to game design in which something the character won’t interact with is only implied to give the illusion of reality but not generated to save computing power. All of this may seem strange to us, the audience, but what about Ash? After all, Ash never saw the girl in the hospital, we did. She never looked at the book, to her, it’s full of texts she has yet to read, and her dog, it could have just ran away, strange, but not as strange to her as it is to us.

 

Class-Real, it sure looked more real than Ash’s reality. The question however, is what did Ash think about it? Because if Ash felt that Class-Real was more real than her world, then comes the paradox, how does she know Class-Real was more realistic if this was the first time she has experience it? If Ash was to see Class-Real as unrealistic, then another paradox arises, why would the developers of Avalon (the game) make such a level and expect the characters of Avalon (the film) to believe it as real?

 

The only way to resolve the paradox is to see Class-Real in another perspective, and what I believe to be Oshii’s true intention, the perspective of the audience. Avalon was an elaborate illusion the director used to make a point. For the first 80 minutes of the film, Oshii used film techniques to make the audience question the setting’s reality. Then Oshii changes the film, he lifted the curtain he placed throughout the film, he showed us, the audience the world we are familiar with, the one that we wouldn’t question. Oshii then unsettles audience by having Ash prove the world is an illusion, a part of the virtual world, by killing Murphy and having his body disappear. Oshii just spent a large part of his film having the audience prove the world Ash created was false, then he use the rest of the film to have Ash prove our reality to be false.

 

Baudrillard explained in Passwords that when virtual reality and reality are similar enough, the only reason virtual reality is “virtual” is because we call it as such. Oshii demonstrated this by blurring Ash’s world until we, the audience, have difficulty telling the game world from the film world. Oshii then put things in our perspective by blurring our world with the game world of Avalon, and showed us the difficulty in discerning our own world from a virtual reality.