Escaping the Cave: On
Film, Reality, and Civic Education
Introduction
PATRICK J. DENEEN, GUEST EDITOR
T
he most lasting and famous image in Plato’s
Republic (Basic Books, 1968) occurs at the
beginning of book 7, when Socrates compares
the situation of unenlightened human beings to
that of prisoners trapped in a cave:
Make an image of our nature in its education and want of
education, likening it to a condition of the following kind.
See human beings as though they were in an underground
cave-like dwelling with its entrance, a long one, open to the
light across the whole width of the cave. They are in it from
childhood with their legs and necks in bonds so that they are
fixed, seeing only in front of them, unable because of the
bond to turn their heads all the way around. Their light is
from a fire burning far above and behind them. Between the
fire and the prisoners there is a road above, along which see
a wall. . . . See along this wall human beings carrying all
sorts of artifacts, which project above the wall, and statues of
men and other animals wrought from stone, wood, and every
kind of material; as is to be expected, some of the carriers
utter sounds while others are silent. (514a–515a)
Among the many profound explications of this allegory,
Plato’s strange and disturbing image has struck more than
one reader as an uncanny ancient rendition of a movie the-
ater. In the Allegory of the Cave, Socrates seems to be
straining to create a picture with which nearly all modern
humans are familiar and comfortable, that experience of
entering a movie theater through long and anonymous hall-
ways, into the darkness of a large chamber where all must
face forward and a light source from behind—the projec-
tor—casts images, flickering lights and shadows, on a
screen in the front of the room. For the period of time they
sit in this “cave,” spectators suspend doubt, believing what
Patrick J. Deneen is an assistant professor of politics at
Princeton University. He is the author of The Odyssey of
Political Theory as well as essays on ancient and American
political thought.
69
they see to be real, often to the point of cheers or tears, of
pity and fear. Yet the cave Socrates describes is a place from
which all should desire to escape. The modern movie the-
ater is a place we frequently elect to escape to. Moviegoing
is among our favorite forms of release, stolen moments dur-
ing which we forget the real to embrace the fictional as real.
For many, the movies represent an unreality in some
respects more apparently real than unenchanting daily real-
ities. Most of us have encountered people who believe
movie characters to be real people, or the stories portrayed
to be true. Filmmakers are well aware of this tendency to
confuse movies and reality, a confusion that was itself por-
trayed comically and caustically by Woody Allen in The
Purple Rose of Cairo. In that film, set during the Depres-
sion, a forlorn housewife regularly visits the movie theater
to escape the grinding reality of her daily existence. She
longs to live as lavishly and romantically as the actors on
the screen. One of the actors, a dashing adventurer named
Tom Baxter, literally comes off the screen to fulfill her
wish, although he discovers reality is more inconvenient
than life in the films, as when there is no fade-out during an
impassioned kiss. Meanwhile, the movie stalls without
Baxter, causing the actors to wander around the screen wait-
ing for his return, and creating discontent among the audi-
ence (one woman in the audience says, “I want what hap-
pened in the movie last week to happen this week.
Otherwise what’s life all about anyway?”). This prompts
Hollywood’s leaders to descend on the small town to
demand Baxter’s return to celluloid. We thus watch a pro-
jected image about projected images that come to life and
enter our reality, although that reality is in fact only an
image on a screen. We laugh at the conceit, all the while not
a little trapped by it ourselves.
Plato’s allegory, by contrast, appears to delineate a radi-
cal division between the real and the illusory. Yet, upon
reflection, Plato works on several levels as Woody Allen
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does. We read of reality by means of an allegory about a
cave, related by a character in a dialogue, Socrates, who
was in fact a real historical person but whom we know
about largely from Plato’s dialogues. To discuss the nature
of true reality by reference to Plato’s (or was it Socrates’?)
allegory is already to confuse reality with unreal images,
stories, and words. Plato was aware that true escape from
unreal reality was impossible: nearly every one of his dia-
logues is a play in which fictionalized real characters effec-
tively reveal the way that philosophy is illusory, most of all
when it maintains the conceit that escape from the illusory
is a real possibility. At the same time, the explicit content of
the dialogue also points to the insufficiencies and conven-
tionality of the wholly illusory, and thus does not permit
complacent contentment amid the wholly unreal. Plato’s is
a standing challenge to see anew, even if what we see is not
always “real.” It challenges us, when in the cave—as we are
most, if not all, of the time—to attend carefully to the
images that pass before us, to discern the ways those images
might on the one hand merely reinforce our cave-induced
assumptions, and alternatively—in the hands of a master
puppeteer—challenge those assumptions from within (in
precisely the way that Plato does). At the same time, we are
reminded never to forget that they are images, albeit images
that are an inextricable part of our reality at some level.
It is from several approaches, perspectives, and angles
that the following essays seek better to see some of the lead-
ing images—movies—of our own cave, America. Each
essay, in its own way, is concerned with escape, one of the
core elements of the American Dream that is so aptly cap-
tured and so often conveyed by the act of moviegoing as
well as within the movies themselves. Escape is portrayed
through the ability to create for oneself a wholly new char-
acter or self (as in the case of W. C. Fields); by means of the
movement to the West (as captured in the films of John
Perspectives on Political Science
Ford); as seemingly meaningless entertainment, within the
confines of a cavelike disco (as in The Last Days of Disco);
or as the restless drive to move ever away from any
encroachments that might limit the ultimate aim of escape
itself (as in American Beauty). At the same time that each of
these essays implicitly points to the confluence of the
American Dream, moviegoing, and the films themselves,
each is also aware of the perils of this dream of escape,
knowing that reality imposes constraints, demands, and lim-
its, even while holding out profound rewards for that accep-
tance of such limitations. If one could create oneself anew,
what self could we deem as finally real? If the wild West
represented the possibility of escape from civilization, as
portrayed by John Ford, does it not also simultaneously
affirm the need for civilization by means of a figure who
enforces law and order and who comes to embrace his new
community? If disco represented a form of escape from the
indignities of young urban professional life, does it not also
present a forum in which relationships and commitments
might form, from which disease and despair might arise,
and in which grace might be possible? And if the ultimate
escape is a form of solipsistic individualism, would not the
cost to our own humanity as expressed in community, fam-
ily, and integrated selfhood be too great? Each of these
essays suggests the promise and limits of escape within a
medium so often devoted to, and itself representing, escape.
It is odd, surprising, encouraging, and almost inconceiv-
able that movies—that ultimate escape—might teach us
much about escape, about reality, about things true and
imagined. Yet, the essays here help to show us how to see
images for what they are and what they are not, how in the
cave we can learn much about ourselves by attending close-
ly to the images on the wall, how the image of the cave itself
is a form of teaching about the real—that reality beyond the
cave that we never really leave.