by Colin Mcginn
Praise for Colin McGinn's
THE POWER OF MOVIES
“Concise, well-written.”
—Los Angeles Times
“Fascinating…. An intriguing rumination on the phenome non of film.”
—Film Comment
“Anyone who has ever wondered what makes movies such a compelling form of entertainment will appreciate this book.”
—OKMagazine
“Entertaining. … A lighthearted exegesis of film's hold on our imagination.”
—Fort Wayne Journal-Gazette
“McGinn asserts that films … are like dreams.… No one else has held so single-mindedly to the notion that film is a medium of mind.”
—The Nation
“Provocative.… For those who enjoy trying to understand the movie experience more deeply this book provides abundant material.”
—DeseräMorning News(Salt Lake City)
“If you just plain like movies…McGinn's philosophizing on the power of movies… may give you new ideas about how you think about them.”
—Santa Fe New Mexican
THE POWER OF MOVIES
Colin McGinn is a professor of philosophy at the University of Miami. He is the author of sixteen previous books, including The Making of a Philosopher: My Journey Through Twentieth-Century Philosophy; Space Trap, a novel; and, most recently, Mindsight: Image, Dream, Meaning. McGinn's writing has appeared in such publications as The New York Review of Books, London Review of Books, The New Republic, and The New York Times Book Review.
ALSO BY COLIN MCGINN
Mindsight: Image, Dream, Meaning
Consciousness and Its Objects
The Making of a Philosopher: My Journey Through Twentieth-Century Philosophy
Knowledge and Reality
The Mysterious Flame: Conscious Minds in a Material World
CONTENTS
Preface
One THE POWER OF FILM
Two VISION AND THE SCREEN
Three the metaphysics of the movie image
Four DREAMS ON FILM
Five REVIEWING THE DREAM THEORY
Six HOW TO MAKE A DREAM
Seven CINEMA AND HUMAN NATURE
References
Bibliography
PREFACE
Everyone enjoys a good film. But we seldom pause to ask ourselves what it is about film that makes it so appealing. What is it about film, with its distinctive form and methods, which accounts for its allure? This book is an attempt to answer that question.
The question came to my attention several years ago, when I was visiting New Orleans to give a lecture on dreams and the imagination (the steaminess seemed conducive). I had been working with the idea that our immersion in our dreams is analogous to the immersion we experience in fictional works, especially films. The idea was that our assent to what we dream might be a special case of our propensity to become involved in fictional products, allowing them to take over our minds—dream belief as fictional absorption. But then it occurred to me that perhaps the direction of illumination goes the other way too: maybe our experience of films is conditioned by our prior experience with dreams. Could it be that the allure of film is explained by the fact that films evoke the dreaming mind of the viewer? So began my inquiries into the nature of film and the way it is received by the viewing consciousness.
I soon learned that the dream interpretation of film has a history, with theorists of film sometimes mentioning the analogy. But the idea had never been fully developed and treated as a theory to be argued for and tested. Furthermore, other aspects of the film experience began to occur to me, notably the particular way in which we visually apprehend the screen, as well as the significance of the physical film image itself. Putting these ideas together is what this book is all about. I intend it for anyone interested in understanding his or her own response to cinema, as well as for people more professionally involved in movies—film students, critics, filmmakers, theorists of art. This is a subject in which analysis and theory can reveal unsuspected meanings, and I venture to suggest that grasping these meanings can change the way you watch movies. Reflective understanding of our spontaneous response to film images cannot help informing that response.
Working on this book involved the interplay between thinking theoretically about film and actually going to see movies. This is an agreeable way to work. Instead of feeling guilty about indulging my movie habit (sometimes in the afternoon!) I could regard it as serious research. Oh, I have labored long and hard in the movie theatres of the world. I invite my readers to do the same: read this book, then go to the movies, and see how the two mesh. The test is whether your movie experience is enriched.
My conversations with other movie enthusiasts have been very helpful, as I tried to probe their responses to film. I want to thank in particular Jonathan Miller, Oliver Sacks, Peter Kivy, Connor Martin, and Catherine Mortenson. I am also grateful to my agent, Susan Rabiner, and my editor, Dan Frank, both of whom made valiant efforts to save me from the pedantries characteristic of my calling (academic philosopher).
One
THE POWER OF FILM
THE MIND-MOVIE PROBLEM
The power of film is indisputable. Since the beginning of movies, a little over a hundred years ago, they have captivated audiences. We want, badly, to watch. And this power seems unique to film. As the philosopher Stanley Cavell remarks, in The World Viewed,”the sheer power of film is unlike the powers of the other arts.”1 There is something about movies specifically—whether they emanate from America or France, Britain or Sweden—which succeeds in connecting to the human psyche in a deep way. Movies carry some sort of psychic charge that no other art form— perhaps no other spectacle—can quite match.
Their power is manifested in two ways: demographically and individually. Movies simply have a larger mass appeal than any other artistic medium. Nothing draws crowds in the millions like a new movie—and this was so from the very beginning. (It is this fact that explains the colossal investment of money that goes into the movie business. What would the movie industry be like today if movies had the demographics of, say, opera or stamp collecting?) People read novels and go to the theatre, of course, but it is the cinema that really packs them in. And this mass appeal is remarkably cross-cultural. All across the world people flock to the movies, and it is amazing how easy it is for a movie from one country to cross boundaries into another, perhaps with suitable subtitles or dubbing—I once watched a Clint Eastwood cowboy film in Paris in which the tough gunslinger intoned the words “Fermez la porte” in an impeccable French accent.
There is also, at the individual level, the quality of the attraction—the sheer intensity of the movie-watching experience. From childhood on, we are all familiar with that sense of entrancement that accompanies sitting quietly in the pierced darkness of the movie theatre. The mind seems to step into another sphere of engagement as the images on the screen flood into our receptive consciousness. We are gripped. The quality of this mental engagement, the way the mind is invaded and commandeered, is something that has been evident since the early days of the silent era, when film was at its least technologically sophisticated. The moving image itself seems an object of extraordinary potency. In the movie-watching experience we enter an “altered state of consciousness,” enthralling and irresistible.
What is it about movies that explains their amazing hold over the human mind? Why do we love movies (and we do love them—thrill to their presence, romanticize them, suffer when they let us down)? Clearly, there must be something about those light projections through celluloid, on the one hand, and the nature of the human mind, on the other, that accounts for the seemingly preordained match that exists between them. How do they manage to mes
h so naturally, smoothly, and overwhelmingly? I like to call this the “mind-movie problem,” by analogy with the philosophical mind-body problem.2 The mind-body problem is the problem of explaining how conscious experience relates to the physical materials of the body and brain; the mind-movie problem is the problem of explaining how it is that the two-dimensional moving image, as we experience it in a typical feature film, manages to hook our consciousness in the way it does. How do these jumpy splashes of light contrive to strike our mind with such force? Somehow movies and the mind are suited to one another, mutually adapted—and I want to explain what it is about both terms of this nexus that makes it as charged as it is. What is it about the screen image and the mind that views it that makes the marriage between them so successful—so passionate and tempestuous, one might almost say? What is this love affair with the screen?
DUBIOUS SUGGESTIONS
What accounts for the power of film? An obvious first thought is that movies are uniquely realistic—they recreate or reproduce the very events that they record. The camera, in this view, is a device for making available, for later consumption, the very same worldly events that took place before it at some earlier time. Accordingly, what we see in the movies is indistinguishable from what we would have seen had we been there at the original shooting. Suppose you would like to see what some historical battle actually looked like to a living onlooker; well, movies enable you to have this experience without having to travel back in time and witness the events themselves or have before you armies of real actors. Movies literally recreate worldly events before our very eyes. They duplicate reality. Seeing film is just like seeing the reality filmed. And reality certainly has the power to hold our attention.
This view is inadequate for a couple of reasons. It is simply not true that the movie image literally reproduces real events. We are never fooled by a movie depiction of a battle into thinking that we are really there—or else we might head smartly for the exit. A movie is not some kind of illusion of reality, if that means something that appears just like reality itself but isn't. We never really mistake a movie image for a real object, as if thinking that Harrison Ford, say, is in the theatre with us, feet away. The power of movies cannot be identical to the power of seeing the real events; the movie's power must lie in what distinguishes it from seeing real events. The power of seeing a real battle is just a different kind of power from that of seeing a movie of a battle (though that is not to say that the first kind of power is totally irrelevant to the second). Similarly, we can readily distinguish the stage in the performance of a play from the real world, not somehow confusing the events of the play with real events. We can likewise distinguish the screen in a movie theatre from a chunk of real reality (so to speak), not taking the images before us literally to be real objects and situations. The power of cinema does not derive from its giving us the full-blown illusion of reality—as when I might actually hallucinate the presence of a monster and be genuinely afraid, having taken the illusion to be reality. It is not that in a horror film, say, I am under the impression that a living (or unliving) vampire is literally standing not ten feet in front of me, and find myself understandably riveted; I know very well that it's just a picture of a vampire. And yet I am still riveted (though in a different way).
Nor do we find movies fascinating precisely in proportion to how fascinating we find reality. Reality itself might leave us bored and indifferent, but when it comes to us in the form of a movie image it can take on life and meaning. Watching someone light a cigarette in real life can be pretty dull, but in the context of a story projected onto the movie screen our eyes and mind will be drawn in. The movie adds something to reality, and this is part of its power (later we will explore in detail what exactly it adds). It is the same with painting: the interest of a portrait is very different from the interest we take in its sitter, who may be quite uninteresting to look at. The visual arts are not in general attempts to produce twins of real people. It is not the alleged lifelike-ness of cinema that determines its interest for us, since (a) it is not lifelike in any literal sense, and (b) being lifelike is not enough to confer fascination on something. In short, the psychological power of a representation of something is not the same as the psychological power of that thing. Art, in other words, is transformative.
A different suggestion might be that movies engage our mind, not by simulating reality, but by offering us fiction. We love stories in general, and movies tell us stories in visual images instead of words on the page. Does our taste for fictional narratives explain our liking for movie narratives? We are quite aware that it is all just fiction; but fiction is what we crave, not quotidian reality. What moves us at the movie theatre is the power of the imagination.
Now it is certainly true that the fictional content of films must be part of their appeal—we like to get caught up in a good yarn—but this suggestion suffers from not specifying what it is about movies in particular that grips us so. What is it about films, as opposed to novels, that gives rise to our special engagement with them? It isn't just the story being told—indeed, we might find the story banal if it came to us in merely verbal form—it is the form in which the story comes to us that enthralls us. It is the fact that it is a story on film that creates the special power of cinema, not simply being a story told in some medium or other. If it were just the latter, then we might well prefer to stay home and read a book—which would be easier and cheaper. But what we crave when we itch to see a film is the particular nature of the cinematic experience—which includes, but is not exhausted by, the embedded narrative itself. Clearly, the experience of seeing photographic images on a screen is very different from seeing or hearing words that describe the selfsame events. We need to identify what specific properties of film contribute to the movie-watching experience. Obviously, seeing a film is not the same as hearing someone tell you the story of it!
It might be maintained that it is the ideological content of cinema that explains its sway over the minds of the audience. The movies, it is said, support and reinforce the prevailing ideology of the society within which they are made and viewed, and the population has already been brain-washed by this ideology into being mesmerized by the cinema's own version of it. The movies thus collude with the prevailing ideology, which has already wormed its way into the deeper layers of the audience's psyche. For example, a romantic comedy might reinforce sexual stereotypes, connecting with the attitudes already present in the audience. The power of cinema is thus the power of ideology.3
I would not wish to deny that movies can harbor ideological assumptions and biases—as any other art form can—and that these might well reflect and bolster similar assumptions and biases in the mind of a viewer. But this is not a very convincing account of the power of cinema. First, we again have nothing here to explain what is distinctive of film. Ideology can be foisted on people in any number of forms—speeches, advertising, literary fiction, jokes, even music—but cinema has a special kind of power for the viewer. I might find the ideology embedded in a film crude and unconvincing (for some reason the Rambo films come to mind); but the film might still engage my attention in powerful ways, because of something about film itself, as distinct from whatever ideology it might contain. Contrariwise, a film might conform to my ideological beliefs perfectly while leaving me cold. Secondly, surely it is possible for a film to embody no particular political ideology and still be a powerful viewing experience. What is the ideology of The Wizard of Oz: socialist, capitalist, colonialist, anti-witch, animal liberationist? Not everything is an exercise in power politics. So it can't be that the power of film derives from its consonance with the ideology people bring with them to the cinema. The filmic is simply not always the political. At a minimum, the power of film must have something essentially to do with the fact that films consist of moving pictures, not with the ideological baggage such pictures may or may not bring with them. (Or is there an implicit ideology even there—keep on the move, never rest, become two-dimen
sional!?)
This may prompt an appealingly straightforward response to our question—namely, people like moving pictures because they like to see movement depicted. The world around us consists of objects in motion, particularly human bodies, and what cinema achieves, in contradistinction to still photography, is precisely the depiction of movement. Isn't this why, at the dawn of cinema, people were so impressed by the new medium, in contrast to painting and photography? Movement itself can seem like the universe's most basic miracle. Imagine a totally static universe that clicked into animation after a few billion years of nothing: the new movement would seem astonishing. What cinema achieves is the manmade reproduction of the magic of movement. Like dance, movies celebrate the manifold ways of going from A to B. Moreover, not only can we reproduce the movement of things in a new form; we can also study and appreciate this movement better, by means of the close-up, slow motion, speed motion, and so on.
This theory has the advantage of drawing upon a distinctive property of the film medium—namely, that it consists of moving pictures—but it seems to me far too superficial to explain what needs to be explained. To be sure, we like to perceive movement in nature, but how much interest is there in watching a simple movement repeat itself, even a complex sequence of movements? Also, to go back to an earlier point, in watching filmed movement the viewer does not somehow mistake what she sees for the actual movement of objects—we are not under the illusion that objects are moving in front of us. Perhaps without movement movies would not strongly engage us, but movement by itself is not enough to account for the hold that movies have over the mind. The emotional resonance of film is entirely overlooked in this account. There was the charm of novelty when the moving image first came on the scene, but mere representations of movement would be a novelty that quickly wore off if there were nothing more to movies than that.