amy: Un-Real(ity). Blow Up.

What are we looking for? If we look for hate in the world, it's there. If we look for love, it's there too. Can we ever find meaning? Is reality truly out there?
The film Blow-up seems to be the work of a philosopher-artist who is playing around with the big questions that existence brings about.

The director pulls in the ideas of perception and twists them with circumstance to create a mental fog for the viewer. The recurring symbol of disappearance adds to this dream-like spaciness the movie projects. Lacking music, the movie's eerie silence leaves the viewer questioning the mind of the protagonist and wondering if his mind is playing tricks on him.

First, the photographer-protagonist lackadaisically strolls through the park, almost not sure what to do with his silver-spooned life, taking pictures of whatever he finds interesting. He perceives within himself; he cannot see past the game that is his life. Still within himself, the girl who wants his photographs is of little importance to him. Only when he begins to blow-up the pictures does he start to experience some sense of reality, some sense of something larger than himself.

Reality is constantly taken away as quickly as it is given to the photographer. He tries to lay hold of this purposefulness, but is again drawn back into the narrow perspective of those around him. The first case happens when he is about to go to the police to report a murder, yet he becomes distracted by the open offer of the two young girls. To me, it seems the longer he strays away from his purpose, the more it escapes him.

This brings the viewer to the disappearing nature of everything the photographer thought to be a reality. As he puts off trying to confirm his reality through others' perceptions, the more his concrete evidence fades. Because he does not act upon the reality of the situation, the idea of it seems to slip through his fingers. When he lets the worried woman leave him, he sees her twice more disappear in front of him. When he leaves his photographs, they are stolen from him and he is left with the blurriest blown up picture. When he leaves the body in the park at night, it is gone by morning.

To enhance the concept of perception, the director purposefully keeps the climaxes of appearance and disappearances in silence. This adds to the idea of perception. Is the protagonist crazy? Did he just imagine the whole scenario? Perhaps it is his dream or a wild trip?

The very end of the movie leaves the viewer in that final scene contemplating his own perception of reality. After the photographer's "adventure," the director depicts life without meaning by the protagonist participating in the miming of a tennis game. In my opinion, when I see him walk away from the camera and disappear, it seems that he is walking back into his life without meaning. Without purpose, he might as well be a mime acting out a fake game of tennis because everything is hollow: it is an unreality.