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| David Hemmings confronts an ontological problem in Michelangelo Antonioni's "Blow-Up" |
The London fashion photographer played by David Hemmings has
discovered a murder. But because no one else will believe him, his discovery
has no weight and no point. The murder never happened.
At the film’s finish, the photographer sees a crowd of rowdy
young people dressed as mimes. Two of them play tennis with an invisible ball,
while the others watch raptly, their heads moving from side to side. The
photographer watches too. When the “ball” sails over the fence, one of the
players gestures for him to throw it back. He does, and as the camera moves in
on his face, we hear the sounds of a tennis ball being hit back and forth. The
tennis game becomes real because everyone seems to believe it is.
Not so far-fetched, really. We’ve seen that very process at
work. In 2003, for example, despite thin or nonexistent evidence, the emotionally
overwrought American public chose to believe that Saddam Hussein had weapons of
mass destruction and ties to Al Qaeda, and to go to war on that basis. The fact
that both those claims have subsequently and definitively been proven false has
not changed the minds of many people. They still believe those lies, merely
because they and others like them want to.
For many people, sadly, factual evidence is nothing more than
something to which you pay lip service.
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