The Purple Rose of Cairo *****

When we read the Cave Allegory from Plato’s “Republic” we all think of the movies; when Woody Allen reads Plato it leads to a movie.

In the “Purple Rose of Cairo” Wood Allen creates a movie within a movie, showing you scenes from a fictitious black and white depression era movie (also entitled The Purple Rose of Cairo) because his heroine can’t help but watch it over and over again. For her it is escape and an impossible inspiration. According to the fictitious movie, the purple rose of Cairo is supposed to grow in a pharaoh’s tomb - the expression of a perfect love. Of course no rose is purple and flowers do not grow without light. It is an impossible inspiration. It’s all Plato’s fault.

According to him our relationship to the truth is dreadful. We are like people chained facing a wall in a cave, behind them a fire, and between the fire and their benches men parading objects whose shadows project upon the wall. Hankering for the truth, the viewers take shadows for reality. But Plato has another important point. Although our sense of reality is shadowy at best, we are only capable of understanding anything, thanks to a set of ideals which are beyond real experience. The impossible inspiration guides us through our shadows and intimates that there is more.

The movies are all that counts for the heroine of “The Purple Rose of Cairo”. Her chains are the miserable life to which she is subjected by the depression of the 30’s and her abusive husband. After too many hours in a theater watching her new favorite movie, about people with ideal life styles, one of its characters impossibly leaves the screen, and while comically attempting to establish himself in the real world, falls in love with her.

Screen characters running free in New Jersey, is bad for the movie business. So the actor who played the role is enlisted in the task of capturing his shadow and returning it to the screen. When he also falls for our heroine she has the ultimate Platonic choice: perfection or reality. Which would you choose?