Troperville
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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 a series of HTTP messages sent as TCP segments twisted into a form resembling a page. Believe nothing.
These are not Examples
Anime and Manga
- Washu does this to Tenchi concerning Sakuya Kumashiro near the end of Tenchi In Tokyo.
Art
Film
- 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 Simulacra and Simulation, which you can see on Neo's shelf earlier.
- No you don't. You see a projection of a film of a computer simulation of Simulacra and Simulation on Neo's shelf. None of it exists!
- Technically, you see a projection of a film of a computer simulation of Simulacra and Simulation on Neo's computer simulation of a shelf, since the shelf isn't there either.
- 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?
- "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!
Legend
- In one of the stories of the wise Japanese judge Ooka Tadasuke, is called "The Case of the Stolen Smell" where he heard the case of a paranoid innkeeper who accused a poor student of literally stealing the fumes of his cooking by eating when the innkeeper was cooking to flavor his dull food. Although his colleagues advised Ooka to throw the case out as ridiculous, he decided to hear the case. The judge resolved the matter by ordering the student to pass the money he had in one hand to his other and ruling that the price of the smell of food is the sound of money.
Literature
- Older Than Television ... In Mark Twain's story "The Mysterious Stranger", after the *ahem* friendly angel has wrought death, madness and devastation on the community, he tells the young boy/narrator that the boy is the only real thing in the universe, and that everything else - including the angel - is a figment of his imagination.
- Adapted with much Nightmare Fuel in the stop motion movie The Adventures of Mark Twain: "Nothing exists but you. And you are but a thought."
- In Dave Barry Hits Below The Beltway, Dave Barry wonders how lawyers become "people who refuse to make a simple, understandable statement about anything," and imagines a scene in law school, with a law professor holding up a spoon (possible Shout Out to The Matrix?), and turns on the electrodes attached to his students each time they say that it looks like a spoon. This is apparently the kind of response the professor wants to hear:
Student: In certain purely superficial respects, it may resemble what is sometimes called a spoon, depending of course on the definition of "spoon"; however, we intend to present expert testimony showing that there are a number of other plausible explanations, such that it cannot be determined beyond a reasonable doubt that this is a spoon, or, for that matter, not a spoon, per se, depending on who is paying us three hundred dollars an hour plus expenses. Nor have we established that, legally, that is your hand.
Law Professor: Correct. (He presses the button again anyway.)
- The novel Nineteen Eighty Four uses this trope endlessly and is one of the most basic functions of the party.
- Indeed, a relevant part of O'Brien's conversation with Winston revolves around whether the Party could, pragmatically speaking, change reality itself, with the torturer arguing that he could "float like a soap bubble" if he wanted to. After all, if Winston perceives (forcibly) such a thing, and it is on record, in what sense is it untrue? Also, it is never revealed whether Goldstein or Big Brother are real, but it is suggested that, sociologically speaking, for all intents and purposes, they are real.
Newspaper Comics
Real Life
- Also, "The map is not the territory."
- 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.
- Someone actually succeeded at selling something similar. The Xbox 360 was in low supply at the time and some crafty hoaxers at eBay managed to sell pictures of the actual console by hiding "This auction is not for a Xbox 360 game system, but instead a picture of one" within a lot of specs and praise for the console.
- A Real Life theory that the universe as we know it is a three-dimensional hologram of an n-dimensional universe composed of nothing but information. We are the shadow cast by the true shape of the universe. Referenced heavily in Warren Ellis's Planetary.
- Various philosophers and religious scholars have debated this point throughout the ages. Plato's Allegory of the Cave and the principle of Maya in Hinduism both stress this point for instance.
- This most likely explains the lack of respect most laymen have for philosophers.
- A man in Florida parked his car illegally and was mailed a picture of his illegally parked car from the police who said he had to pay a $45 fine. The man responded by mailing the police a picture of $45. The police's response? Mailing him a picture of handcuffs.
Webcomics
Western Animation
- 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
- Similarly played with in Spongebob Squarepants, where Mr. Krabs offers Squidward and Spongebob an incentive for learning the names of customers by showing them a brochure of an exotic tropical cruise. (Never mind how one can have a boat cruise underwater). After Squidward goes to ridiculous extremes to earn the cruise and ending up being thrown in prison, Mr. Krabs visits the incarcerated squid and gives him his prize... the brochure. "It was takin' up too much space in me drawer!"
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