Deconstruction Through a Psychedelic Experience in The Film Enter the Void (2009)

Abstract

This paper endeavors to explore the experimental film Enter the Void (2009) by Gaspar Noé. The research is conducted first by associating Deconstruction theory and the Grofian Model of the Psychedelic experience. For this purpose, an analysis of Deconstruction theory is conducted in relation to the mind bending phenomenology of the Psychedelic experience in order to assess its Deconstructive phenomena. The latter will serve as framework to analyze the character Oscar in the film Enter the Void and explore how his psychedelic experience can act as a deconstructive tool in terms of the literary aspects of narrative, setting, and characterization. It is shown that it achieves that by infusing the narrator with the unreliability of an altered consciousness, trapping the narrative in a metaficticious relationship. The latter is confined between material reality and psychedelic simulation. The potentiality of the psychedelic experiences pouring its phenomenology in the film deconstructs the setting and characters as well, by making them undecidable, between reality and hallucination.