Ricardo Martinez

Allen wrote a similar fiction, "The Kugelmass Episode" (his book, "Side Effects"), which is hilarious at the time of being provocative. All of which reminds me of a graduate-school discussion about Nietzsche's "The Origin of the Greek Tragedy": for the ancient Greek audiences, there was not clear distinction between them and what was happening at the stage. In psychoanalysis, there is a term called "projection" that illustrates this matter. Particularly in movies, people project their mental fantasies into movie actors and plots. The depressed female character in "The Purple Rose of Cairo" projects her fantasies and wishes into the movie's main character. As in real life we project out wishes onto one another, the character reacts to the same mental projection with a projection of his own, this is into the same female. The movie is also humorous, this is when there is what a critic called a "Pirandellian" reaction from the rest of the movie's characters, who are left like in an existential vacuum by the emergence of the main character from the silver screen, and they do protest about it loudly. This movie has always seemed to me a metaphysical proposition: what is reality? Can there be a reality independent of our psychological projections? This movie is therefore an affirmation, an affirmation of the worth of imagination if not to transform, at least to make reality bearable.