This is a phrase uttered by the character of Morpheus in a scene from the film Matrix (1999). Slavoj Žižek also quoted it in the title of one of his books, in which he recalled Jorge Luis Borges’ fable about cartographers who, wanting to be extremely faithful to reality, ended up creating a 1:1 scale map that ended up covering the real geography they wanted to represent.
Reality and its representation, reality and its mediatization are some of the great themes that keep us busy. But today we are not proposing great philosophical reflections (or perhaps not explicitly), but we want to point out two works that explore these themes.
The first is The Girl Chewing Gum (1976) by John Smit, in which a scene that takes place in a bustling London street is “directed” by a voice-over… Until in the last few minutes we see that perhaps it is not exactly like that.
The second is the film Synecdoche New York (2009), directed by Charlie Kaufman, which tells the story of a theatre director who is increasingly alienated from his own existence. Unexpectedly, he receives an extraordinary grant that allows him to create a total work of art, which he sees as the pinnacle of realism and honesty. In some abandoned warehouses, the author creates a mammoth work, which never stops growing and ends up mimicking the city of New York and all its inhabitants… until the director’s voice-over says “Cut!” And no, this is not a spoiler…
