Sounds between worlds: the audiovisual hyperchiasm in The Thirteenth Floor and The Matrix

Abstract

Representations of virtual reality within contemporary science fiction films have focused considerable resources, in terms of special effects, on rendering the boundary between real and virtual worlds and bodies. However, the philosophical and phenomenological significance of this partition has received little scholarly reflection. Drawing upon Maurice Merleau-Ponty's concept of the ‘chiasm’, which mediates the reversibility of subject/object relations through the intertwining of the senses, this paper hopes to explore the combination of sound and vision in the expression of what I will call the ‘hyperchiasm’ between the real and the virtual. The hyperchiasm extends the unique communicative powers of cinema as a medium to enable modes of reversibility impossible within the everyday world, and it is sound I will argue that plays a key role in expressing these capacities. The hyperchiasm also focalizes a dialectical struggle of subordination between sound and image within cinema, in relation to which I will analyze The Thirteenth Floor and The Matrix as representative of key variations.