Hollywood, despite (or perhaps because of) its never-ending Quest for Bucks, always manages to show us what's on our minds, however distortedly, clumsily, and even meretriciously. Right now, and for the past few years, Hollywood has been telling us that we're growing less sure about the distinction between appearance and reality--that as technology saturates more and more of our daily lives, we are worried that life may be a put-up job, a plot, a game, a show.

Don't tell me you don't think new technologies of communication haven't made life less real. E-mail does not directly convey the physical actions of its sender, as old-fashioned letters do. Likewise with faxes. So many screens bring us so much information so quickly that it is undigestable, intellectually and emotionally. We know more and understand less, we react more and reflect less, we do more and accomplish less, we hear more and listen less, we look more and see less, we go more places and travel less, we talk more and say less. We generalize more and specify less; at least I seem to.

This being one of those specious pop-crit propositions that will lose whatever impact it may have in the process of being closely argued, I won't argue it. I'll just line up the suspects and offer brief commentary.

• The Truman Show. Obviously Exhibit A, right down to the hero's name, which is, among other things, an updating of Everyman. The hero gets wise to the manipulated artifice of his life and breaks through--literally--to a real existence.

• The Game, especially in the scene in which Daniel Schorr, on television, in what looks like an ordinary newscast, addresses the hero directly. At the end, Michael Douglas breaks through the manipulated artifice that his life has become to a real existence. Or does he?

• The Matrix. This movie posits that we may all be more or less dreaming our lives while insectoid technobots feed off our essence, or something like that. It says that if we happen to be Keanu Reeves, we can take a pinch of martial arts hoodoo and a touch of Buddhist disdain for appearance and break on through the manipulative artifice of our lives to a real existence. 

• Pleasantville. Two young people get stuck in a TV artifice of life and must break through it in order to get back to their real existences. Wrinkle: The girl likes the TV show life better, but only after it has been made "real" by her and her brother's um, reality.

• The Thirteenth Floor. Haven't seen it--one can waste only so much of one's time, after all--but I'm sure it fits right in.

• A recent episode of TheX-Files. Mulder and Scully are captured by a subterranean fungus that gives them chemically generated delusions of real life while feeding off their essences, or something like that. They have to "wake up" two or three times before they break back through to real existence. This show was stolen from TheMatrix, I am convinced. Also from the Gatorade commercials that are in black and white but use chartreuse and other nauseating colors to suggest sweat and blood; the fungus is a purulent treasury of liquid chartreuse. 

• Bulworth. A man breaks through the artifice of his political and personal lives and finds, however briefly and tragically, a real existence.