Allegory of the Cave

Obviously, I haven't been posting much lately. It's been a rough month after everything that happened during production of the film and afterwards. I suppose it's all forced me to re-evalute... everything. What I thought I wanted, what I thought we were doing, what I thought was happening. But I guess in hindsight everything turned out to be quite different... perception and reality.

My experiences as of late remind me of Plato's Allegory of the Cave. In this famous parable, a cave is inhabited by "prisoners", who are chained to their seats and forced to watch a wall in front of them. Behind the prisoners is a fire and people, whose shadows are cast on the wall for the prisoners to see. The sounds of the people behind the prisoners echo in the cave. Since the prisoners can only see the wall and hear the echoes, they believe that the shadows and sounds are the only reality -- there is nothing else -- only the shadows and echoes. They have no concept of what could be creating the shadows.

The story continues and the prisoners are eventually freed from their shackles. For the first time they would now see the fire and the people behind. But they would not recognize them as real because they had never experienced the people before -- only the shadows. They would still believe the shadows to be more real. Even looking at the fire would temporarily blind the prisoners and they would choose to turn back to the shadows on the wall because it's what they know and are comfortable with.

Finally however, Plato suggests that if the prisoners were dragged out of the cave and into the sunlight they would eventually have to face reality. It might take a long time for them to acclimate, but eventually they would see more and more things around them and then they would understand "reality."

But of course, this all leads to a whole lot of questions about what would happen to the prisoners once released. Won't they suffer in learning the "truth?" Might they be happy living in ignorance in the cave? Or maybe even when faced with the facts, they would be incapable of dealing with it.

I'm trying to keep everything that happened last month in perspective, but I keep thinking about the Allegory of the Cave. And in some strange and twisted way it feels like a parallel to what's happened to me recently. Especially in the context of "shadows" and "echoes" and our experience shooting the film inside Changi Hospital. I feel like a refugee of the cave.... I've experienced something outside the realm of the cave... and I want to share the experience... but it will be impossible to convince those remaining in the cave of my experience, because it is something they themselves have never experience. It's frustrating and frightening and makes me sometimes wish I'd never left the dark cave. But even though the people in the cave don't believe what I've experienced... it doesn't make it any less real.