The Fall

We had just been talking about postmodernism in class when I watched this movie from the director of The Cell. The storyline involves a little girl with a broken arm and a suicidal actor who seems to be paralyzed from the waist down. In order to trick her into getting more pills so that he can finally do the deed, he makes friends with her. He tells her an epic story with an eclectic cast of characters including himself as a masked bandit. Eventually the girl is added to the cast as well as one of the nurses from the hospital and the reality/unreality of everything is complete.
This movie really brought to mind the things we had been talking about in class concerning boundary confusion. The boundary between fantasy and reality are inextricably mixed. To Alexandria, the story is nearly as real or possibly more real than her normal life. For her, the existence of the people in the story is conflated with her view of real life. This wouldn’t be so unusual for a child whose grasp on reality is clearly not as firm as that of an adult, but the story seems to take on an unusual amount of power over Roy as well. There is one particular scene that seemed to be trying to give away the film’s secret. When Alexandria first goes to see Roy, she finds herself looking at a pinhole camera version of a horse and carriage through the keyhole in a door to the hallway. She gazes through the keyhole seeing the horse outside the door (in reality) then steps back only to find that an upside-down image of the horse has followed her inside and is being projected on the wall beside her. I think this scene is meant to prepare the audience for the boundary confusion that is to come by mixing inside and outside, image and actuality.