Maya III

When one feels the urge to be flashy in order to sell better, illusions are born. The magician Méliès wrote, produced, directed, edited, and acted in fantastical worlds that exalted reality to the point of impossibility—creating illusion. Everything seemed possible to the spectators. A web of illusions and expectations was projected into the collective unconscious; a business was established. Georges Méliès died poor, but many imitated his work and turned it into an industry.

The World granted Cinema the power (and the responsibility, as Spider-Man would say) to produce illusions. It wasn’t an accident—war and poverty were a dime a dozen, and cinema cost just a few cents. One could be the protagonist of The Crowd by King Vidor for an hour and forty-four minutes, and then go back to being just another face in the audience. Time came to life. I imagine that Cinema’s eternalizing phenomenon transmuted reality into something more confused, more dead. Cinema responds to the World in its own way.

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The correspondence between Cinema and the World produces illusions. The images on the screen are projected onto the spectators and fix in their eyes and memories the false impression of reality. Kennedy waving from his car, and Oswald surrounded by police in hats, are not real people or memories—they are images, and because of cinematic illusion, we witness their assassinations. In the same way, illusion can grant a movie star a life beyond herself and turn her into the fantasy of millions of aroused teenagers.

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From Sunset Blvd. to Mulholland Dr., passing through F for Fake, Cinema has traced the hidden story of the industry. Lies, tricks, and magic are its bullets, its accidents, its women. Aware of the speculative bond between cinema and money, Wilder, Lynch, and Welles have exposed this traffic through a dark mirror—seeing without being seen. Their images return to us an unnoticed gaze, promising to unmask the illusion behind the industry. What is the flip side of the coin?

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For every coin circulating among people, there is said to be a gold equivalent (in cartoonish bars inside some massive vault), but it wouldn’t be surprising if it were all just paper, words, promises—because money has a ghostly existence, it is purely symbolic. One coin refers to another, and so on ad infinitum. In other words, gold is neither bread nor life. Cinema maintains a vicious relationship with a ghost, with a dead symbol. It is the Yin force: earth, darkness, the bull, and the body—it is the reality that weighs upon the Idea. Perhaps the illusion so feared by the Buddhists is the same vision, half divine, half profane, that springs from the flickering light of the projector when Cinema becomes what the Shaivites call maya.