Some Thoughts After a Reverie

I realize at this moment that what I want to describe has already passed.  That is, I have been preoccupied with the lingering aftertaste of a mood, a state of consciousness, an "affect," an imagined relationship or identification between a real representation (that is, any experienced representation of something fictive and not a fictive, or hypothetical, representation) and a possible "reader" (in a loose and generally agential sense, cf. moviegoer, listener, sports fan, believer, student, citizen, etc.).  Let's call this "state" a reverie, for the sake of a certain economic pleasure in choosing a term, and less for its descriptive accuracy.  I witnessed such a phenomenon twice this week--once at secondhand, once in propria persona.  Both instances were induced by movies--the first case being Wim Wenders's Paris, Texas, the second Ridley Scott's Blade Runner.  Now I have to confess my filmic neophytism:  I had never seen either of these splendid films before this week.  But what I am interested in pondering for a second, if I am permitted, is not the film an sich, the film qua film, but, as Wallace Stevens calls it, the "just after" the blackbird's beautiful inflections.  The state of transport, of intoxication, of a-maze-ment (yes, I was in a maze this morning, until I reached Starbucks, when the dream evaporated) that any so-called Kunstwerk may provide.  Unexpectedly.  That's the part I want to emphasize--the seemingly spontaneous, but (and emphatically paradoxically) arbitrarily fated nature of this anti-Brechtian "Vertrauenseffekt" (my provisional alternative to the "Verfremdungseffekt"), or "confidence effect."  An affect of believability, of something on the verge of manifestation.  A dream so vivid that you reach out to touch it and when you do you find that you are groping the alarm clock beside your bed.  A movie, a song, a book that makes the real unreal and the unreal real.  Now, perhaps being sick heightens this "Vertrauenseffekt," and boy have I been hackingly and wheezingly delirious over the past few days.  But still, I think there is some kind of synchronic, synergistic force going on at these moments of "Vertrauenseffekt" that can be equally generative of critique as "Verfremdung."  In other words, I am thinking of Deckard's thinking of Rachael's (the replicant's) "constructed" memories as somehow artificial.  And how the film enacts, or enables, the realization of these "arti-facts."  Or, in general, false pictures and/or memories becoming real by being received and absorbed into some form of consciously lived experience.  Now I am not willing to take a Voigt-Kampff test about this, but my speculations only lead me to believe that in this familiar "afterglow" of the text--the path it sets us on which, if we follow quickly and intrepidly enough, might lead us to some type of anthropophany, the brief moment when "things" i.e. ideas, images, forms, beliefs about ourselves and our world are developed--is some critical magic, or insight.  It is vital to preserve that image, that afterglow, that residue before it vanishes completely.