There was a bit of dialogue in the movie Free Guy between Lil Rey Howery’s character Buddy and Ryan Reynolds’s Guy that went something like this:
“… so what if I’m not real? I am sitting here with my best friend, trying to get him through a tough time. Even if I’m not real, this moment is. Right here, right now. This moment is. what’s more real than a person trying to help someone they love?”
The line sat with me for days, in a gnawing your guts tangling your innards kind of way.
There’s nothing particularly profound about it. It’s corny, contrived, hackneyed, cliched. But this is a season of banality, and I am prone to existential despair, so this bit of bumper sticker wisdom rang deep.
After all, it takes a lifetime wasted to appreciate the present moment.
The moment is the thing we feel, the tingle in our follicles, the thumping between our ribs, the pulse shooting down our neural pathways to engender exhilaration or despair. If they’re the outcomes of a simulation or a dream, so what?
Which brings me to the Matrix Resurrection. I disliked it for many reasons, but it was the strawberry scene that marked my fracture. It’s an odd parallel to Cypher’s steak, but my perspective has changed.
Age has made me wary of ‘reality.’
Is it the flesh and steel that makes us, or the memories they forge? And if the memories touch us so, why does it matter if they’re weaved by machines while we slept in a battery box?
#00117F 