The Merging of Real and Real

Avalon is a movie about virtual reality game in which the main character Ash tries to achieve the highest level possible going solo. Her struggle throughout the entire movie is to find the class that is above Class A, whether through people in reality like Stunner or people in the game. As a former gamer, I believe that the virtual reality experience provided especially in first person shooter can completely transform the way the player behaves in real life. The game Avalon makes Ash addicted because of her obsession to continuous achieve higher ranks. This shows one way of how something unreal can eventually become real. Also, the way Ash behaves in the real world is similar to the way she behaves in the game, which is to do everything alone.

In terms of how the movie is made, I was really bothered by the fact the pace was so slow. It is really difficult to retain my full attention throughout the movie. In addition, the sepia tone and high contrast of the pictures got too bland and painful to look at after some time. However, I think the sepia tone in the movie seems to suggest that Ash’s reality is not really reality at all. Or it could also mean the fact that her reality is simply different from everyone else’s. The blank pages in her King Arthur books and her keyboard without letters seems to suggest that it is an empty reality that Ash is living in. By contrast, everything in Class Real is full of color with people showing expressions to Ash. By this point, I think the film is really to challenge the audience’s perception of what is reality and what is not by asking the question: does it really matter?

The ending of the movie seemed extremely peculiar to me because it does not explain everything but simply shows a screen saying “Welcome to Avalon.” There are two explanations that I can formulate. The first is that Avalon is another class on top of Class Real and it is just the next step in an enormous cycle of the gaming world. The gaming world then, is analogous to the real world in that one can never really be the best at something; there would always be another person/thing that is more proficient at what you do. The second explanation I can come up with is the fact that Ash dies in the real world but had her consciousness transmitted into a fake world. This is because Avalon, in Greek historical terms, is a place where heroes’ spirits go to rest after they die. And when Ash finally beat the supposed most difficult level in the game, she had no more purpose in the real life. Therefore, she will forever be stuck in the virtual reality, perhaps serving as one of the game masters.

The contrast between the real world and virtual reality presented in the movie seems to suggest that individuals create their own reality and that there is only one combined experience at the end. The notion of creating a hybrid reality is further explained in Baudrillard’s Passwords. He says that even though the word “virtual” seems in everyday language to oppose “reality,” it actually helps produce reality by bringing in the imagined in a form of simulation. The ultimate product of which would be called “hyperreality.” This seems to say that individuals would eventually not be able to tell the difference between something virtual and something real, because of the two are blended. I would like to contradict his point by saying that individuals are living at different levels of reality, which I call parallel reality. It is not that one level is more real than the other or more virtual. It is simply a level we can choose to live in whether we are born into it or realize through education.