What about Jacob’s Ladder?
At the dénouement, it is revealed that Jacob never made it out of Vietnam; his body is shown in an Army triage tent just after he died, with a now peaceful look on his face.
I’ve only seen it once years ago and definitely thought “WTF was that?”
Yes, when I saw it, I decided I would have liked it much better if I’d left right after the stair-climbing scene.
But everything that happens within the Matrix happens – it’s only a veil that gets lifted (and that veil is lifted at the end of the first act).
Well…yeah. It would an extremely difficult thing to “pull off” without seeming mocking or lazy.
I’ve seen worse endings in major works (see: Infinite Jest). And I’ve seen writers / directors who are very interested in breaking the fourth wall. It seems like somebody would have at least tried to get away with this – and from the thread, it seems like there’s at least a few close calls.
The Usual Suspects actually might be on the nose exactly what I was thinking in my head as it seems my interpretation of the “truth” of the story was off.
There’s the movie eXistenZ, where everything up to the final scene was part of a game, or maybe it wasn’t. It may have been partly inspired by Philip K. Dick’s The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch, since it makes a reference to it (when the characters eat food from Perky Pat’s). The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch is maybe the weirdest of Dick’s novels, where it’s hard to figure out what reality you’re supposed to believe in. There are all sorts of screwing around with reality in Dick’s works
Not necessarily. Could just be the autistic kid saw those shows and incorporated them into his fantasies. Like fanfic, but without all sex.
There are various opinions about what the ending of St. Elsewhere means, as you can see in the link I gave to the Wikipedia entry on Tommy Westphall.
The Thousand And One Nights.
How about the episode in Star Trek: TNG where Picard lives his entire life as a citizen of another species, only to find at the end that it was all fabricated so that the race would not be forgotten?
Which actually contains stories within stories within stories.
I love it and even I’m not sure I want to try and unpick it. Let’s pencil it into the “Yes” column for now.
At that, how about Rashomon?
“Once upon a time, the following happened.”
“Uh, it didn’t happen like that; it happened like this.”
“You’re both incorrect; here’s how it actually happened.”
“I saw the whole thing, and it happened quite differently.”
If one of 'em is right, we’ve spent much of our time watching in-context fiction. If none of 'em are right, we’ve spent that much more time watching in-context fiction.
Craig Clevenger wrote a book entitled Dermaphoria where the main character suffers a brain melting drug overdose and his mind rearranges certain relations so he gets his history leading up to the overdose all jumbled up. The lost love he thought he was tracking down is actually the name of the street or something. All the things he thinks he knows have the same sort of symbolic relationships he thought they had, he just got the objects wrong. I forget the specifics; It’s been a while since I read it.
Just remembered one, but it’s one that really pisses people off, so I’m going to spoiler the whole thing. I’ll give you a hint, it’s a work by C.S. Lewis
The Great Divorce is revealed to all be a dream in the end. Literally a dream. He wrote an awesome story about what hell, purgatory, heaven and such might actually be like. A very believable story. But because it was pretty heretical to traditional Christian interpretation, he just tacked on a “and then I woke up to sirens blaring” ending for no reason other than to provide some cover for himself. “oh well I wasn’t actually writing about heaven, hell and purgatory! It was just a dream!” UGH
I always had a different interpretation
He awoke in wartime Britain. It was a real experience and waking up was being transported back into hell.
The webcomic Order of the Stick seems to exist in a limbo state where it’s not entirely clear whether the characters live in a universe that happens to have comic and narrative rules as real as our laws of physics, or if they’re simply self aware that they’re in a comic.
Also, one of the proposals for SCP-001 on the SCP Foundation website is that their universe is a very fragile universe that shifts and bends based on the whims of a bunch of horror writers (i.e. us). In this case, it’s rendered effective by the fact that they realize we’re writing their universe, and they’ve also taken preparations to be able to defend themselves if we try to end their universe.
I don’t think there’s anything in The Great Divorce that would be considered heretical.
This may come too close to the “it was all a dream” trope, but in John Cusack’s movie Identity…
[spoiler]
Most of the action and most of the characters aren’t real. Most of the characters are just manifestations of an insane man’s multiple personalities. Each of the personalities is competing for control of the man’s mind. [/spoiler]
300, while in a broad sense true as seen, the description of the fights/battles was probably made up/greatly embellished.
{The movie 300 you didn’t watch the actual battle…but a storytellers telling of the battle}