Is this Real, or Am I Crazy?

A great question.

Great stories are based on a great question. One of my favorites is “Is this real or am I crazy?” Movies ask this question, creating a mystery the audience has to figure out.

Often, it’s a debate between science and faith.  Science is about the tangible, verifiable physical world. Faith is about the supernatural, intangible, meta-physical world.

Few story genres debate science and faith better than than Sci-Fi. Mulder and Scully debated it on X-Files for nine seasons. Morpheus offers Faith to Neo in the form of a red pill in the Matrix. Jack and Locke have been debating purpose, fate and the supernatural on LOST for six seasons. Their relationship even inspired an episode title: Man of Science, Man of Faith.

Though different stories offer different answers to this debate, what drives the story is always the quest for truth. And sure enough, truth comes along and rocks their world. The desire for truth makes us question everything we believe and takes us on incredible journeys that can be both exhilarating and heartbreaking.

In the new trailer for the movie Moon [June 12], an astronaut, Sam Rockwell, is on a lonely lunar mission. He struggles with the question, Can he believe what he sees? “Is this real or am I crazy?” I love it when the computer sympathetically suggests, “Perhaps you are imagining things?”

[qt:http://movies.apple.com/movies/sony/moon/moon_h.480.mov 480 216]

[Trailer options at the apple site...]

This is Jenn’s first contribution. Welcome!

It is the near future. Astronaut Sam Bell is living on the far side of the moon, completing a three-year contract with Lunar Industries to mine Earth’s primary source of energy, Helium-3. It is a lonely job, made harder by a broken satellite that allows no live communications home. Taped messages are all Sam can send and receive. Thankfully, his time on the moon is nearly over, and Sam will be reunited with his wife, Tess, and their three-year-old daughter, Eve, in only a few short weeks. Finally, he will leave the isolation of “Sarang,” the moon base that has been his home for so long, and he will finally have someone to talk to beyond “Gerty,” the base’s well-intentioned, but rather uncomplicated computer.

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