Are the things we imagine real? Galaxy Quest

After a class on philosophy and literature in which we looked at how Alison Lurie’s novel Imaginary Friends plays on the contrasts, and the interrelations, between the real and the imaginary, a student presented me with a video ofGalaxy Quest. This is a lightweight comedy, but it is as full of ontological twists and turns as Lurie’s book, and just as funny.

For the first few minutes, we’re watching a lame episode of a TV show of the Star Trek genre: the starship whooshing around the galaxy looks like something out of a cornflakes packet; its interior seems to be made of plywood and aluminium foil; the acting is terrible, and as for the dialogue ... This, we learn, is an excerpt from a long-cancelled series now being shown at a convention for science-fiction fans. But among all those human fans dressed as aliens is a band of real aliens, disguised as humans dressed as space-travellers. Mistaking the TV show for “historical documents”, they have come to Earth to beam up the courageous crew to their spaceship – a real, working version of the plywood-and-foil Protector – to help them fight off the evil Sarris.

And so a bunch of washed-up actors find themselves really in space, and really fighting aliens with, as the cover of the video puts it, “no script, no director, and no clue”. In a marvellously Platonic moment, Captain Taggart tries to explain to the Thermian leader that the TV series wasn’t a documentary, but entertainment: the crew members are actors, not astronauts, only pretending to be space travellers. The Thermians are nonplussed: they’ve heard of deception; is the captain telling him the TV show was lies? But somehow the TV “heroes” grow into their parts, save their alien friends from disaster and become real heroes.

What is the difference between the real and the imaginary? Isn’t that TV spaceship, after all, a real imagined spaceship, even though it’s not a real spaceship? Is fiction really just lies or, despite its literal falsity, something different? Sometimes, now, I use this movie as a way of prompting students to think about philosophical questions like these.