But what is it that distinguishes being and semblance? It isn’t materiality, as Coraline is able to touch the beings and things of the World Within. For the differentiation we have two options: (a) the difference we’ve sketched above between fulfilment and deprivation; (b) the difference between openness and confinement. They both relate to each other, as they pertain to an overcoming of narcissism.

What does Coraline renounce in renouncing the World Within? It is the wish for the perfect family, but not the family itself. In fact, the happy ending of the movie is one of a return to the family, but through the abandonment of the narcissistic wish to remain a child. The child is in the centre of attention, it lives within the comfort of the family’s care, and the family’s task is (seemingly) solely to fulfil its desires. In returning to the family as a grown-up, Coraline no longer takes up the role of the protected child that lives in a fulfilled world. She steps out into the ‘real world’ that is indifferent her, and that therefore seems to follow a logic of deprivation. Religious conceptions can in that regard be seen as attempts to ‘familiarise’ the universe — the subject is God’s child, just as it was for its family. Through such a parallelism, the subject can remain narcissistic, as not only the family seems to exist for it, but the whole universe. Following Freud, this amounts to an infantilisation of the subject, which is unable to face a world without purpose: “Men cannot remain children for ever; they must in the end go out into ‘hostile life’” (FI, p. 49)

Yet, this ‘negative’ lesson corresponds to a ‘positive’ one that results from (b). The world of the family — or of religion — might be purposeful and warm, but it is also limited and confined. To fulfil Coraline’s wish, the Other Mother didn’t need to create a whole world, she only needed to create what is pertinent to Coraline’s wish: her home and its immediate surroundings. Everything else, as we’ve seen in the opening paragraph, remains in the state of pure whiteness [3]. The wish, then, will always create a confined territory that excludes everything that doesn’t belong to it. If we wish for something, everything else ‘disappears from view’. Its world is reductive and limited. The ‘escape’ out of the prison-like World Within would then not amount to a refutation of the wish, or of imagination itself, but of escapist tendencies of the imagination and of entities that promise a safe haven from the dangers of reality — be it the family or religion. Reality, as harsh as it might be, is at the same time vast and does not subjugate us to any metaphysical entity or structure.

The differentiation between being and semblance, as a way to separate the ‘false’ from the ‘real’ would then amount to sharpening our wits to perceive structures that try to trap and incorporate us into a machinery, and to find fissures where openness shines through. Imagination not only has the potential of entrapping us in artificial fantasies, but also of allowing us to act creatively in a world without a predefined meaning or sense.