It's not, really. It's actually a metal tube. Well, a drawing of a metal tube. Well, pixels in the shape of a drawing of a metal tube.
"The simulacrum is never that which conceals the truth—it is the truth which conceals that there is none. The simulacrum is true." - Jean Baudrillard,
Simulacra and Simulation
"You never disappoint me." Hagbard said. "If they ever hang you, you'll be arguing about whether the rope really exists until the last minute." - Robert Shea and Robert Wilson,
The Illuminatus! Trilogy
When someone wants to really blow your mind, he will show you something. It can be an ordinary object or a piece of music or anything really, as long as he can see or hear it. And then they say, "This
does not exist." With this mantra, the falsity of the world is stripped away and perhaps the hidden
mask of reality is revealed. This is often an indicator of a
Mind Screw.
You are not seeing this page. There is no page. There are merely
packets of data twisted into a form resembling a page. Believe nothing.
These are not examples:
- The Matrix: "Do not try to bend the spoon; that's impossible. Instead, only try to realize the truth: There is no spoon. Then you'll see, that it is not the spoon that bends, it is only yourself."
- Which was actually inspired by Baudrillard's Simulcra and Simulation, which you can see on Neo's shelf earlier.
- Mulholland Drive: "No hay banda! There is no band. [...] And yet we hear a band." A subtle clue showing that the whole thing is Diane Selwyn's Dying Dream. Or is it?
- Washu does this to Tenchi concerning Sakuya Kumashiro near the end of Tenchi In Tokyo.
- "There is no monster."
One of the worst films of all time tried (and failed) to have a Mind Screw ending: Monster A Go-Go was about an astronaut who crash landed and mutated into a giant monster and a scientist tries to save him. Except the end revealed that the astronaut actually landed safe someplace else and the monster - gasp! - wasn't real:
"As if a switch had been turned, as if an eye had been blinked, as if some phantom force in the universe had made a move eons beyond our comprehension, suddenly, there was no trail! There was no giant, no monster, no thing called 'Douglas' to be followed. There was nothing in the tunnel but the puzzled men of courage, who suddenly found themselves alone with shadows and darkness! With the telegram, one cloud lifts, and another descends. Astronaut Frank Douglas, rescued, alive, well, and of normal size, some eight thousand miles away in a lifeboat, with no memory of where he has been, or how he was separated from his capsule! Then who, or what, has landed here? Is it here yet? Or has the cosmic switch been pulled? Case in point: The line between science fiction and science fact is microscopically thin! You have witnessed the line being shaved even thinner! But is the menace with us?
Or is the monster gone?"
- This was Joel and the Bots' response to it:
Joel: Oh, the joke's on us!
Crow: Boooooo!
- The Trope Namer: Ceci n'est pas une pipe by Magritte. And it wasn't a pipe, but a painting of a pipe.
- This is parodied in Kingdom Of Loathing with the Not-a-pipe: "You do not light the not-a-pipe, and you proceed to do something with it that is not smoking. Whatever it is, it's very refreshing, and gives you the feeling that your head has been replaced with either a window or a giant apple."
- Parodied in one of the Savannah College of Art and Design's annual sidewalk art shows. The first panel, labeled "Ceci n'est pas une rubber ducky" was a chalk drawing of a rubber ducky. The second panel, labeled "This is a rubber ducky" had a large rubber duck set on it.
- "Ceci n'est pas une peep."◊
- Also, "The map is not the territory."
- "No, much more better. It's a *drawing* of a key!"
- This troper's professor once illustrated this lesson by attempting to "sell" a chalk doodle of a house as if he were selling a real house. The key skeptical question to ask was where the house was.
- This is a penis.
- Theres a Family Guy scene where Peter wants a boat from a police auction, so he bids on a picture of a boat, then the next lot is...an actual boat
