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Magical Realism In The Lake House

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The purpose of a film is to take you from the world you currently live in and place you into a new world with a new experience. The best films take you into this new world and make you feel like it is really happening right in front of you. That is what director Alejandro Agresti did in the movie The Lake House. The two main characters, Alex Wyler (Keanu Reeves) and Kate Forster (Sandra Bullock), were residents of a lake house in Madison, Wisconsin, but lived there two years apart. What kept them in contact was writing letters transported through the mailbox. Agresti uses magic realism to show the story of the two characters in love to connect with the audience even though in reality this story could never be true. Agresti took an idea that could only be fantasy, and made it reality. As Bruce Holland Rogers states, “Magical realist fiction depicts the real world of people whose reality is different from ours.” What he means by this is, that even though the events occurring may not be real in our world, it is reality in the world the movie is set in. It also takes a lot of work to make this “reality” flow. If you just present an idea to an audience without properly supporting the facts, then there will be no belief. If you make the audience truly believe that these magical …show more content…

Rogers states, “Magical realism is a distinctive form of fiction that aims to produce the experience of a non-objective world view.” Rogers wants a movie that is not common and defies the rules of real world reality. Obviously this would fit his description since in real life two people cannot talk through a mailbox from different years. In conclusion, this was a good movie but the story could have been done a little differently, so it would not be so predictable. Overall this film would clearly fall under magic realism, due to the events that would only occur in another world’s

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The South American termed the new literary style as “lo real maravilloso.” Even up to now, there is still no agreement on a clear definition of what exactly defines a story as magical realism. However, there is common agreement on the distinction between it and purely fictional styles such as fairy tales and fables. Unlike them, magical realism has mythical or dreamlike elements injected in realistic stories. Just

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As a literary genre, Magical Realism stands with its own methodology. Not adhering to a set of certain rules, realities appear distorted, demonstrating that this style of literature strays from conventional standards of writing. With this, reality conforms to a degree wherein characters behave naturally amidst their environment, despite exposure to the seemingly surreal. Within the genre of Magical Realism, one finds that a variety of elements constitute it, each warping the text in a way of its own. By exploiting this aspect of Magical Realism, authors communicate a broader message than what is written in the text.

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