At Hanoi Train Street, the train is not symbolic. It is loud, close, and solid. When it comes through, people flatten themselves against the wall, hold up their phones, and keep looking a moment longer than seems sensible. What struck me was not that they failed to recognize the train as real. They clearly knew it was real. The strange thing was that it could remain, almost until the last moment, a scene.
That reminded me of the old story about early film audiences recoiling from the image of a train. The train on screen was only an image, yet it arrived with the force of an event.
At Hanoi Train Street, the reversal is hard to miss. Here the train is fully real, yet people meet it partly as if it were already an image.
People once supposedly reacted to an image as though it were reality. Now people can stand next to reality as though it were already an image.
Not because they cannot tell the difference. A screen cannot hit you. A train can. But perception is not only about knowing facts. It is also about what arrives first. And now, very often, the image arrives first.
Nothing about the train has changed. It is still steel, weight, speed, impact. Nothing about the body has changed either. What has changed is the order in which the mind receives the scene: first the image, then the object, then, a beat later than it should, the fact that the object is real.