How to Blow Up Reality

David Hemmings confronts an ontological problem in Michelangelo Antonioni's "Blow-Up"

The climax of the 1966 film Blow-Up is an eloquent statement about consensus reality.

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.