Sonia Front

Cinema had undoubtedly been influenced by postmodernist undermining of traditional notions of reality, yet no less significant was the emergence of digital cinema in the 1990s. Its divorce from photographic base has further problematized the notion of reality and increased cinema’s potential to manipulate space and time, and to produce virtual worlds. The new reality the viewer is confronted with in film is quite often the mindscape of the protagonist, presented as a navigable terrain that can be mapped, controlled and reinscribed. However, the growing sense of virtuality and incorporeality characteristic of the digital age requires a revision of the definition of human identity. Duncan Jones’s »Source Code« proposes its own formula of identity as it does not completely reject the body but treats it as a host for consciousness. In the course of the protagonist’s anti-terrorist mission in the source code, a computer programme through which he can navigate an eight-minute slice of the past, his consciousness is transferred into another man’s body to create multiple realities that impact the actual world. »Source Code« thus calls for an expansion of the notion of reality in the media-dominated world to accommodate not only the physical but also the mental realm. In its philosophical reflection on the new identities in cyberspace, the film prompts to ask the question whether the protagonist’s personhood is continued after the transfer of consciousness. The paper is going to look into philosophical theories that can be applied to answer that question.

Sonia Front, PhD, is Assistant Professor at the Institute of English Cultures and Literatures, University of Silesia, Poland, where she teaches film and contemporary literatures in English. She publishes on contemporary film and postmodernist British literature. Her latest publication is a monograph »Shapes of Time in British Twenty-First Century Quantum Fiction« (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2015). Her research interests include time and temporality in postmodernist fiction and digital cinema.