(855) 4-ESSAYS

Type a new keyword(s) and press Enter to search

False Reality vs. the Real World


             It seems as though Neo is surrounded by the darkness of uncertainty and every single clue is like a spectrum of light, shed to illuminate his way to the center of the maze. The beginning scenes in the movie seem dark, somber and very ambiguous. Even the audience is presented to this darkness from the first moment of the movie, where there is absolute darkness. The bright light right after the title indicates the introduction to the incredible speed and strength that can only be reached in a surreal world, the Matrix - the first clue to the puzzle. This bright light serves as a foreshadowing to the future scenes. This is one of many cinematography techniques used in the movie, when Neo is introduced to the Matrix for the first time and he is surrounded by white blank space. This is when Morpheus gives Neo a glimpse of reality. The outside world is scorched by constant wars; the sky is covered with a dark curtain of clouds with no sun in sight. There is not one living thing to be seen for thousand and thousands of miles, all there seems to be is just miles and miles of lifeless desert with a few survivors down deep under the ground near the core of the earth. Morpheus shows Neo the true history of mankind and the twist of fate that the progress in creating the artificial intelligence has brought upon human race. People are no longer in charge of computers, but vice versa. It is here that Neo is introduced to this light of knowledge, which is hard for him to accept and puts him in denial.
             The idea of light indicating knowledge can be related to Plato's "Allegory of the Cave". Plato gives us as an example people living in the cave knowing nothing but the walls of the cave, "Here they have been from their childhood, and have their legs and necks chained so that they cannot move, and can only see before them, being prevented by the chains from turning round their heads." (Plato 277). When one of them is exposed to "light" of knowledge and tries to share his experience of the outside world, others ignore him.


Essays Related to False Reality vs. the Real World

1. Berkeley And Humes Views On The Vulgar Vs. The Philosophical

What is the relationship between philosophical and vulgar ideas in the writings of Berkeley and Hume? For as long as philosophy has existed, the paradigms of the intellectual thinkers and the common men have come into conflict. Philosophers have often been accused of living in ivory towers, positing theories, which, while they may seem semantically and/or logically possible, seem a wholly unpractical way for anyone to regard life when they are living, as Hume says "away from their desk." Both George Berkeley and David Hume recognized the chasms between the worldview of these two classes, and b...

  • Word Count: 2581
  • Approx Pages: 10
  • Has Bibliography
  • Grade Level: Undergraduate

2. Song Vs Book

... Vs Book When Ella Fitzgerald sang the hit single, "It's Only a Paper Moon," she never expected it to go as far as it did. It is metaphorically rich & full of symbolism. It has meaning to all that have lost the love, or never actually felt the warmth of true love in a lifetime. It shows the ... "as phony as can be." She tried simply to give up, but her love and infatuation for the affection dwarfs her perception of reality. This insanity leads her to keep false hope for the destination of true love. It is all but coincidental that Tennessee Williams uses this to say when furthering ... s...

  • Word Count: 1257
  • Approx Pages: 5
  • Grade Level: High School

3. Reality Vs. Illusion

"In a sense, no doubt, the separation of the "true" from the "false," the "real" from the "illusory," has been the task of thought at all times." (Willey 22). We are helped in this task to form a definition of reality by the philosophers Plato and Heracleitus, who each have contradicting views on the subject. Their views revolve around the realness of ideas and forms in relation to the realness of physical objects. Of the ancient Greek philosophies about reality and illusion, Plato's are the most detailed. In Plato's Theory of Forms, there is the 'World of Appearances' and the 'Intelligible Wo...

  • Word Count: 957
  • Approx Pages: 4
  • Grade Level: High School

4. Emerson, Thoreau, and the Nature of Metonymy

... caution, concerned that the various dichotomies that have come to organize critical conceptions of Thoreau in contradistinction to Emerson--the empirically or ecologically concrete vs. the imaginatively or rhetorically abstract, the literal world vs. the figural word--reduce a complexity that obtains in the contexts and concepts with ... "the central axiom in its critical theory" a "direct contradiction" of the claims of "poststructuralist" theories reducing the world to language. "Ecocriticism responds," Newman argues, "by insisting on the independent reality of the nonlinguistic mate...

  • Word Count: 9971
  • Approx Pages: 40
  • Grade Level: Undergraduate

5. Mill vs. Marx in Notions of Freedom

Freedom is the enjoyment of personal liberty, of not being a slave nor a prisoner. The enjoyment of civil rights (freedom of speech, freedom of assembly etc ). (Webster's Encyclopedic Dictionary, 1988) Although freedom is the ultimate goal of both Mill and Marx, their concepts are different and the implementation in a free society is very much in conflict. "Mankind are greater gainers by suffering each other to live as seems good to themselves, than by compelling each to live as seems good to the rest. " (Porter/Mill, p511) Mill is focused on the individual. "Communism is a real and necessary...

  • Word Count: 2147
  • Approx Pages: 9
  • Has Bibliography

6. The New Jim Crow

... and must turn to illegal forms of work to do so. This further perpetuates the black criminal stereotype. However, the public doesn't know the real story or the black woman's background. This woman had to plead guilty, just so she can ... In Irwin's The Jail, he described a four-stage process of identity transformation facing detainees: disintegration, disorientation, degradation, and preparation. The abrupt shock of the arrest, the accompanying loss of free will, the immediate severance of meaningful contact with the outside world, and the complete loss of ... the rights of the people on...

  • Word Count: 6384
  • Approx Pages: 26

7. Macbeth - Appearance Vs. Reality And Destruction

William Shakespeare's Macbeth is a play outlining the fall of the tragic hero. Macbeth's downfall was not caused by any single cause, but by many underlying causes working in unison. The influence of Lady Macbeth, the Weird Sisters, and even Macbeth himself lead to his downfall. Primarily, Macbeth's own ambition and deceit serves as the downfall as slowly the shift is made in which the evil influences, which were predominately external, begin to shift to the internal workings of Macbeth himself. At the beginning of the play, the Weird Sisters are preparing to meet with Macbeth, and the importa...

  • Word Count: 1143
  • Approx Pages: 5
  • Grade Level: High School

8. On the Beach and The Road

... vs Indirect Threats In the human heart, danger represents fear, stimulating either a selfless or selfish response. The role of different types of danger drives humanity to react in a particular way, and in the two apocalyptic novels, On the Beach by Nevil Shute and The Road by Cormac McCarthy, the ... . Both novels depict the repercussions of the reckless ways people have tampered with technology or mismanaged societies. Because the characters are overwhelmed by their morbid circumstances, they often struggle with the ability to tell what is real from imaginary. In Shute's novel, the char...

  • Word Count: 1772
  • Approx Pages: 7
  • Has Bibliography
  • Grade Level: Undergraduate

9. The Power of King Lear

... Bradley's attempt to state the moral of the play on p. 260: "The good are seen growing better through suffering. . . . The judgment of this world is a lie; its goods, which we covet, corrupt us. . . . Let us renounce the world, hate it, and lose it gladly. The only real thing in it is the soul, with its courage ... in act 4, scene 6, see Lowenthal, "King Lear," 407-9. 12 See, for example, Knight, who speaks of Lear "penetrating below the surface shows to the heart of human reality" here (Wheel of Fire, 192), or Derek Traversi, An Approach to Shakespeare (Garden City, N.Y.: Anchor Books, ...

  • Word Count: 8939
  • Approx Pages: 36
  • Grade Level: High School

Got a writing question? Ask our professional writer!
Submit My Question