Examples Of Plato's Cave Allegory

1727 Words7 Pages
In relation to Plato’s cave allegory and how people perceive films and how they are constricted to not being able to look deeper and see the true meaning behind the film, Nancy Bauer comments that ‘We are imprisoned in our own consciousness, consigned either to go on watching the wall of shadows or to shut our eyes’ (Bauer, Nancy. 2005) with this statement she is setting her argument that as the audience of a movie we are confined to only see the shadows within the ‘cave’. When watching a film it is a very on sided event leaving the viewers with no aspect of change they see what comes up on the screen confining the viewer to watch the ‘shadows’. However now the postmodern era allows films to connect with the audience at higher levels and break…show more content…
Plato’s condemnation of the mimetic imagination alludes to Stanley Kubrick’s postmodern film, A Clockwork Orange (1971) (WANGEN, Mike, 2012. Stanley Kubrick’s a Clockwork Orange as an illusion to Plato’s Mimetic Imagination.) Fight club (1999) and the cave allegory in a sense run in a parallel line with each other, for example, the protagonist played by Edward Norton is used with his views of reality and how he perceives life. Later on in the film we find out that he has split himself into two different personas causing him to be schizophrenic, in which he befriends his alter ego who reveals him to a whole new world within society. Edward Norton’s character becomes enlightened to a whole new world as to when the film first started out. Extremely similar to the allegory of the cave, at the end of the movie the character played by Edward Norton started to realise what was causing reality to be hidden from him much like the shadows of the cave and it was his alter ego Tyler Durden played by Brad Pitt that was projecting the shadows in his cave and finally comes to reality with the realisation that he is in fact two people sharing one body. During the first part of the film you notice Brad Pitts character keeps appearing allowing the audience to subliminally interact with this use of splicing and connect the two together…show more content…
This notion is created in the film when the protagonist is sharing his knowledge in the dream world to Ellen Page’s character, like when the freed prisoner from the cave goes back to spread his awareness of the new world of truth which was originally first hidden from them. On the other hand some prisoners choose not to believe there is another reality, take Mal from the film for example she showed her belief when she gets rid of her totem and chose to be stay in what she thought was reality as she lost her way and forgot how to distinguish dream state from real life. This link to the prisoner who do not want to see believe there is more to what we can see in falling slave to her

More about Examples Of Plato's Cave Allegory

Open Document