Avalon

Perhaps the most pivotal scene for an interpretation of the rather ambiguous ending of the film is when Ash comes home to her Bloodhound, seemingly her only remaining connection to the “real” world, and prepares a meal for him before his sudden and unexplained disappearance. Especially when considered in light of the earlier sequence of her first exiting the warehouse that serves as an access point for Avalon wherein the figures around her seem two dimensional and static the “reality” of the world outside the game is much less reliable. Therefore, if the entirety of the movie takes place in some form of simulated reality the movie perhaps reverses in direction: instead of Ash “jacking in” (to borrow a phrase from The Matrix, which was published only two years before) and moving to higher and higher levels of simulation she is in fact exiting into reality as we, the audience, perceive it: modern, static, capitalist, relatively safe. The film seems to support this as she moves onto level Special A which has no time limit, appears to be secure and affluent, and whose color palate finally moves away from the sepia which has so heavily draped the film up to that point.