The Ontological War

Recently I saw Steven Soderbergh’s 1989 film Sex, Lies, and Videotape for the first time. I’ve never paid much attention to movies in the past, but as much as I can recall now Sex, Lies is the most ontologically sensitive and insightful movie I have ever seen.

I’m going to use it as the framework to explain a wide range of mostly increasing realself ideas and emotions, in a series that might eventually be more than 25 posts. Many of the posts here so far have pointed out why it is wrong to reject one’s realself and realself life. But for the first decade I spent thinking about ontology, I spent very little time thinking about people who had stopped increasing their degrees of realself, other than noticing that they had and the reasons for it.

Realself ontology is about increasing one’s degree of realself, and that’s what increasing realself people spend their time doing; they shouldn’t get side-tracked by all the people who aren’t having much success ontologically.

Getting back to the movie, in most cases the four main characters respond as men and women who are at their degrees of realself would respond, but in a few places I thought, “someone at that degree of realself would never say that (or do that).”

Graham (James Spader) is at the highest degree of realself of the four, and he says what may be the quintessential ontological statement: “I don’t have the slightest idea who I am.” Obviously, Graham has not reached the degree of realself where he has become fully conscious of his realself’s existence within himself, but he is still much more his realself than the others.

Ann (Andie MacDowell) is the most interesting of the four because throughout the film she shows, by far, the greatest increase in degree of realself. Most of the future posts will be about her and will explain what she is experiencing ontologically.

Cynthia’s (Laura San Giacomo) degree of realself is harder to pin down: sometimes she appears to be mostly her socialself or even a decreasing realself, but at other times she shows that she is sensitive to realself emotions and thoughts.

John (Peter Gallagher) is being his socialself almost entirely, and if he experiences any changes ontologically they will probably be in the direction of his decreasing his degree of realself even more.

The posts in this series will have their own tag, “Sex Lies and Videotape” (without the commas), and so in the future if anyone wants to find all of them, use that tag in the list in the right sidebar. For new readers of these posts, the definitions of many of the terms, such as “socialself ”and “degrees of realself,” are in the Ontological Glossary.