A successful mod photographer in London whose world is bounded by fashion, pop music, marijuana, and easy sex, feels his life is boring and despairing. But in the course of a single day he unknowingly captures a death on film.
In Blow-Up, the climax comes when the hero joins in a tennis game in which players hit a non-existent ball back and forth over the net. It is his symbolic acceptance of the unreal and irrational—recognition that he can no longer distinguish between illusion and reality. Millions of viewers identified with the hero in that moment.
— Alvin Toffler: Future Shock (1970)
