Subjectivized reality

Subjectivized reality, a cinematic technique where the viewer experiences as real what is only the inner fantasy of a character, creates a disturbing empathy and transforms the film into a waking dream with multiple possible interpretations.

A new stylistic effect?

There is a stylistic effect that was, I believe, invented or at least used explicitly for the first time by the Belgian filmmaker Jaco Van Dormael in Toto the Hero (1991). An elderly character, played by Michel Bouquet, is forced to take medication in a retirement home. The scene of submission is very calm, very sad. Then suddenly we see him revolt, refuse the medication, put it in the nurse’s mouth, and push the nurse. There is something very powerful in this moment of transgression against the confinement experienced by the character, a liberation, violent but salutary. Then… we find ourselves exactly in the same place, but the character has not moved, as if what we just saw, which was nonetheless very real, had never existed. And he finishes taking his medication.

Thus, the reality we just witnessed, because nothing in the film indicated that this moment of revolt was a dream, we realize afterward that it was a dream, what I call subjectivized reality. It is very strong and very unsettling. It works on the connection between cinema and dreams. It is as if we, the audience, are suddenly inside the intimate reality of the character, because we experienced as real something that was not externally real, but was real within him.

This stylistic effect can be varied. For example, in the series Zero Day, by Lesli Linka Glatter (2025), the character of a retired American president, played by Robert De Niro, lives his daily life in his house with his few servants. A bit later, during a moment of political crisis, we see another man in his kitchen instead of his usual assistant. The former president, puzzled, asks him who he is, and we ourselves wonder if there is a conspiracy or something dangerous. But his wife tells him that this is indeed the real employee, that the previous one retired five years ago. So we have experienced the subjectivized reality of the main character.

The thickness of the film

This technique allows us to be in strong empathy with the character’s emotions. It gives the film its status as a waking dream, in which anything can happen, even the most fantasized things. This gives the film its thickness as a subjective object and not just a vehicle for telling a story.
A film can be represented as a fabric against which we rub. It is more or less rough, more or less soft, more or less clear or mysterious. The film object itself then holds mysteries, just as dreams hold their mysteries, to which all interpretations can be given.

When a film presents itself to us as an object to which we do not necessarily have to believe, because perhaps what we are seeing is only the expression of a character’s subjectivity and perhaps the reality will be quite different later, it can afford to play with us without breaking the ethics of the relationship. It can afford to deliberately hide information from us. I have often criticized this technique of information withholding for its lack of ethics and its creation of spectator dependency on information. But in the context of a film that assumes that reality is subjectivized, we do not even know if this withholding of information is not a reminiscence of the past, not a fantasy of the character, and that in fact there may be no secret information. Thus, the film assumes itself as an object of dream as much as an object of reality. It can propose itself as a playground for varied interpretations, as is the dream.

Various levels of use of subjectivized reality

This technique of subjectivized reality is therefore very profound. It can be used sparingly, as in Toto the Hero, to make us feel, to make us intensely experience the inner emotions of the character. And it can also be used structurally, throughout a film, to give it a deep mystery and make it become a mental object, as if we were in the character’s dream, with all possible shifts.

This technique is also used in a more basic way, for example, if we see a character living adventures in the Middle Ages, and then we see him wake up in the contemporary world: we immediately understand that it was a dream. It is more basic, because when we see him in the Middle Ages, we can believe that it is reality, especially if it is at the beginning of the film, but when he wakes up, he is in another context, temporal, physical, political, we see him by his costume, by the place he lives in. Thus, it was not so much a subjectivized reality as a dreamed reality, the universe of the film is not disturbed. Whereas in the subjectivized reality technique, the context does not change, it is the roles of the characters that change. The submissive old man becomes rebellious, for example, but the context is exactly the same. This brings a disturbing thickness, which is not the case with the dream from which one wakes up, which reveals itself as a simple dream: the film itself is not dreamed, it tells us that it was a dream, whereas in subjectivized reality, the film itself is a dream.