by Colin Mcginn
I am not saying here that the impulse to watch such scenes is necessarily immoral or shameful; it may indeed be argued that this kind of “voyeurism” is essential to all dramatic art, displaying nothing more reprehensible than the desire to know the deepest secrets of human nature. I am simply saying that the essential structure of voyeurism—the unreciprocated gaze into the private world of the other—is amply catered to by the cinematic medium.
Three
THE METAPHYSICS OF THE MOVIE IMAGE
THE STRUCTURE OF THE IMAGE
The image on the screen has, and is seen to have, various distinguishing properties: it is flat, square, made of light (colored or black-and-white), thrown onto a screen by a projector, and it moves. (It also has the property of being composed of a succession of still photographs, rapidly presented, but this fact about it is not apparent to the spectator.) These properties constitute the nature of the medium, its physical parameters. When we watch a movie, we register these properties of the medium in our consciousness, even if we do not attend to them. What is the significance of this for the movie-viewing experience? What, if anything, do these properties of the medium mean to the spectator? They must surely inform the aesthetic experience; but do they have any wider meaning— do they stand for anything, and if so, what? We see the images in a certain way in virtue of their nature, but do we also think of them in a specific way? Is there a meaning to their form?
I am going to assume that it is at least a plausible hypothesis that movie images have some kind of meaning in themselves (as distinct from what they are images of). This hypothesis needs to be tested in the light of plausible suggestions about what such meaning might be. I believe, as many others have, that the human mind often works by association and analogy, so that the impact of some particular phenomenon upon the mind cannot always be confined to the local physical characteristics of the phenomenon in question—how the stimulus strikes the senses purely in terms of its physical properties. Often, the stimulus will conjure up associations in the viewer's mind, based on its similarities to other things—as when we find that a red, red rose is like a lover's lips. The human mind works metaphorically, linking one kind of thing with another, so that one thing comes to have the power to suggest the other. These associations may be said to be implicit in the sense that the viewer could not readily articulate them; that may be what a theorist succeeds in doing when she thinks systematically about the phenomenon in question. Whether the theorist's efforts in this direction are worthwhile depends on the recognition they evoke in the viewer's mind—whether the theorist has succeeded in making explicit (and vivid) what was only implicit before. Has the theorist produced an illuminating account of the associations that implicitly inform the viewer's response to the viewed phenomenon? Put differently, the object of inquiry—in this case the movie image— is hypothesized to have certain connotations, and the task is to excavate these connotations: articulate them, systematize them, make them into a theory. So the question becomes what the connotations might be of the physical properties of the movie image that I listed at the outset. That is what I mean by the meaning or significance of the image. Of course, there might be no meaning at all, but my working hypothesis is that there might well be, and I propose to defend various ideas as to what the meaning is. The reader must decide whether these ideas illuminate his or her response to the medium of film.
We need to say more about the formal properties of the image in order to know what associations these properties might have. To describe the image as flat is something of an oversimplification. It is not flat in the strict geometrical sense that it has absolutely no depth. Even a patch of light is made of something—namely photons—that gives it some thickness, however minute. But, yes, to all intents and purposes we can describe it as physically flat. It is not two-dimensional in every sense, since it represents depth. The height and width of the image are not merely representational, but are real properties of the image, corresponding with (but not identical to) the real height and depth of what is depicted. The depth of the image, however, is entirely virtual, and is seen to be. We are not under the illusion that the screen has genuine depth (as a stereoscope can produce just such an illusion, as with 3-D films); rather, we interpret various cues on the screen as representative of a depth that isn't really before our eyes—particularly, the relative size of the image. Still, we see the image as flat in the sense that it gives no impression of ordinary perceived depth: everything on the screen seems equally far away from us as viewers.
The rectangularity of the entire screen image is obviously not seen as rectangularity in the world projected, but is rather an artifact of the circumstance that the image has edges that cut off the remainder of the photographed world.
In no sense is this shape imposed by us on the world depicted in the film; it is strictly a property of the medium. The world is understood to extend endlessly beyond the boundaries of the image.
An image made of light is devoid of texture, is perceived as insubstantial, and has the weightlessness of light. The light on the screen is not seen as some kind of pigment that stains or coats it but as a strictly temporary inhabitant of its surface, instantly removable. The light shifts constantly, effortlessly, leaving no trace of its previous incarnation, and seems as infinitely malleable as anything perceptible could be. The light plays over the surface of the screen, as it may play over rippling water, touching it softly and briefly. This light comes from a distant source, the projection room, and is cast through space onto the screen, which intersects it, only thus producing anything that can be construed as a representation of reality—otherwise it is merely an amorphous suspended beam. The intersection of beam and screen is what conjures the movie image into existence, as the ethereal collides with the solid.
The movie image is a moving image in two senses: (i) the light patches themselves are seen to move across the screen, and (2) they depict the movement of real objects. Patch A moves across the screen to become nearer to patch B, and we see this as a man moving closer to a woman. The pictures themselves move, and they also represent movement in the things they depict. A picture in an art gallery may also move, as when it is carried from one room into another, and there can in principle be movement of parts within the picture frame; but it does not represent movement by moving. (So the title “moving pictures” for cinema is not quite accurate—it is not the fact that the pictures themselves move that is so important, but that they can convey a sense of movement in what they are pictures of.) In any case, movie images are active, animated, sprightly—they get around.
SHADOWS
Now, is there anything that movie images, so characterized, remind you of? What else do you know that is flat, mobile, ethereal, and an effect of light? Shadows—particularly shadows of people. True, shadows result from the absence of light rather than its presence, but they are still creatures of light—weightless, projected from a light source, insubstantial, flat, and changeable. Your shadow is very much like a photographic image of you thrown onto a screen, especially if the image is black-and-white. It's shaped like you, moves like you, even talks like you. Isn't a shadow play a kind of precursor or prototype of movies? A shadow is a sort of image of its original—nature's photography, as it were— and it has the ability not only to move itself, but also to represent movement in something else. If the shadows of people and objects could be peeled off them, rearranged, stored in a can, and then projected onto a screen, then we would have a crude form of the film art. In a sense, people have been watching movies for millennia, as their shadows cavorted about them.
Shadows, in virtue of being similar to movie images, are among the associations that such images have—part of their connotation. It has sometimes been suggested, indeed, that Plato's allegory of the Cave, in which spectators are condemned to look at the shadows of objects and not the objects themselves, is not so far from a description of a modern movie audience: both are worlds of two-dimensional images, capable of enacting (witho
ut being) the behavior of real things, and perhaps equally seductive in substituting for reality itself. Movie images are shadows of the screen, but with much more detail. They are shadows cast on celluloid and then held there in perpetuity. Watching a film, then, we are subliminally reminded of the shadow world that exists all around us outside the theatre.
The shadow of a person is often taken to be a kind of immaterial double of the person, so that stepping on a person's shadow is taken in some cultures to be impolite or worse. Shadows are often regarded as eerie or uncanny, in their ambiguous status as perceptible yet insubstantial—like ghosts are supposed to be.1 They have the form and manner of persons, but they are two-dimensional replicas of persons, tricks of light. We do not confuse them with persons, but we can see persons in them. They can “take on a life of their own,” especially if projected by a skilled shadow actor. In other words, they have some of the attributes of persons and not others—particularly not their materiality. If you can imagine aliens consisting solely of shadows, with their own consciousness and intelligence, then these beings would have some of the attributes of persons as we know them while lacking others—they would be a lot lighter, to start with. The shadow is a potent symbol of the flesh-and-blood human being that wholly eliminates the material aspect of human beings. The shadow is a textureless, flattened being which nevertheless retains humanlike characteristics. But doesn't this sound exactly like a description of a movie image of a person?
What I want to propose, then, is that the movie image has some of the meaning possessed by shadows. The hypothesis is that the movie image (of a person) gives us a dematerialized human being—a replica of a person in immaterial form—and that this generates certain associations in the mind of the audience. The movie image incorporates a dematerializing transformation—a process that subtracts the meat of the body and replaces it with splashes of light. The material is thereby rendered immaterial.
CARTESIAN SELVES
Here we must bring that old movie buff Rene Descartes into the discussion. Descartes split the human being into two entities, one material, the other immaterial—the body and the mind, respectively. The body is a substance with mass and bulk, a three-dimensional occupant of space, a physical organism. The mind, by contrast, lacks these attributes, being constituted by thought: it is a weightless, intangible being, existing alongside the material body. And the mind is what the person essentially is—what / am (I merely have a body). Thus the essential self can in principle be extracted from its bodily vehicle, as it is in the afterlife; it can be stripped of the materiality proper to the body. Descartes's immaterial mind is, in effect, the soul as conceived in many religious traditions. The whole point of the soul, so conceived, is that it is not made of meat—solid, chunky stuff— but is constituted by something rarified and incorporeal, which is not even organic in nature. It is what would be left of a human being if you took all the materiality away—pure spirit, as it were. The Cartesian self is anti-matter, in the sense that it is ontologically opposite to matter. The self is revealed in its true colors only when the human being is dematerialized, as it will be after bodily death.
Now it is hard not to be struck by an analogy here— between the person as manifested in the movie image and the person as conceived by Descartes. In both cases the self is rendered in immaterial form: the image on the screen is immaterial and so is the Cartesian self. Both offer us the dematerialized self, the self without bulk and mass. Nor is the Cartesian conception just the fantasy of an eccentric philosopher; it is part of a long and deep tradition of human thought and culture, and has some claim to be embedded in our ordinary “folk psychology.” It is the way people naturally think of the mind as distinct from the body: we are instinctive dualists. Now let me rush to add that this does not make it true. It is a very controversial question whether anything like Descartes's dualism is actually a correct description of what we are (those calling themselves materialists would deny this). But it is not controversial that this is the way people naively think of themselves, at least implicitly; it is part of the normal human conceptual scheme. It corresponds to the ways of thinking we naturally bring to the world, and it certainly seems suggested by the way we normally experience mind and matter. If so, it exists in our conceptual scheme to be evoked. My hypothesis, then, is that the movie image evokes this primitive dualism. When we watch a movie, seeing those immaterial images dance before us, we are tacitly subscribing to the Cartesian conception of the person. We recognize that the movie image is in some ways closer to the real nature of the inner self than the flesh-and-blood body is, in virtue of their shared immateriality. We have no difficulty accepting the movie image as a particularly good depiction of the person—apt, faithful, revealing. The material body, by contrast, belongs to another category of being entirely—the world of bulk and solidity. The movie image accentuates and highlights the self as an immaterial entity.
Light is crucial to this effect. The image on the screen is composed of light. Light is, first, light—weightless, free of gravity, preternaturally nimble. It shares with Descartes's version of the mind an immaterial nature. We feel gravity on our bodies, but we have no sensation of gravity operating on our thoughts and feelings—the mind feels weightless and also remarkably nimble (which is faster, light or thought?). Light is also illuminating—revelatory, clarifying, knowledge-producing. But this is how we think of the mind—it is the mind that sheds light on things. The mind is what reveals the world to us. Not surprisingly, there are many metaphors connecting light and the mind: we speak of illuminating thinkers, of bright people, of reflecting on things, of incandescent genius, of being struck by a thought as by lightning, of a sparkling mind, of the mind as a searchlight or laser beam, of a face as lit from within, of the lights going out (death), of a dull or lackluster mind, of being dim, of having a dark or shadowy character. We conceptualize the mind in these images of light and its absence, showing that we find an affinity between light and mind. But the movie image is purely a creature of light and hence taps into this association: part of its connotation is the light/mind analogy. Thus it seems particularly appropriate for the representation of persons and their mental states, because of its metaphorical power. Light is used to suggest and convey the mind.
FILM MENTALISM
These reflections encourage the doctrine I shall callßlm mentalism. This is the theory, broadly stated, that there is a significant analogy between the screen image and the mind. Probably the first proponent of film mentalism was Hugo Munsterberg, the Harvard psychologist and philosopher, in his path-breaking 1916 book The Photoplay. A Psychological Study, written as movies were still finding their feet.2 Summing up his theory, he writes:
But the richest source of the unique satisfaction in the photoplay is probably that esthetic feeling which is significant for the new art and which we have understood from its psychological conditions. The massive outer world has lost its weight, it has been freed from space, time, and causality, and it has been clothed in the forms of our own consciousness. The mind has triumphed over matter and the pictures roll on with the ease of musical tones. It is a superb enjoyment which no other art can furnish us.
No wonder that temples for the new goddess are built in every little hamlet3
Earlier in the book he had written: “That idea of space which forces on us most strongly the idea of heaviness, solidity and substantiality must be replaced by the light flitting immateriality.”4 And in a later essay, entitled “Why We Go to the Movies,” Munsterberg writes that “the photoplay expresses the action of the mind as against the mere action of the body… The inner mind which the camera exhibits must lie in those actions of the camera itself by which space and time are overcome and attention, memory, imagination, and emotion are impressed on the bodily world. The photoplay of the future, if it is really to rise to further heights, will thus become, more than any other art, the domain of the psychologist who analyzes the working of the mind.”5
Munsterberg's idea, simp
ly put, is that the movie mimics the mind's processes by containing analogues of key psychological functions: the close-up mirrors attention, the flashback is memory, the flash forward is imagination or expectation—all this combined with that “light flitting immateriality.” What we see on the screen is a kind of imitation of consciousness, a modeling of our inner landscape. Bruce Kawin expresses a similar idea in Mindscreen when he says: “All films are mentally presentational, regardless of whether they ‘redeem physical reality’ The mind reaches out to film and finds its own landscape, a version of its own process.”6 Thus when mind and movie come into contact, it is like one mind finding another; we see ourselves in film— our very consciousness stretched out before us. Moreover, only cinema provides this kind of mental analogy—not theatre, not painting, not sculpture. The movie screen is consciousness externalized, reified. It is as if the movie screen had a mind of its own.
I have stressed the Cartesian underpinnings of this analogy between film and mind—the movie image as recapitulating the mind as Descartes conceived it. But actually this is only a stepping stone to an improved version of the theory, in which Descartes's immaterial mind is replaced with something rather different. For there is a crucial dis- analogy between the Cartesian self and the movie image— namely, that the former has no spatial dimensions while the latter has two. We can see the flat image on the screen, despite its intangibility, but in no way can the Cartesian self be seen—it has no spatial reality whatever. It is like an extensionless point, devoid of both size and location. Not so the image of a person on a movie screen—size and location are strenuously apparent. Admittedly, the screen image is closer to the Cartesian self than the three-dimensional body is, geometrically speaking, because two is closer to zero than three is (if we are counting dimensions); but still there is a vast ontological gap between the extensionless Cartesian self and the 2-D movie image—and this gap shows up in the fact that one can be seen while the other cannot. So the analogy appears faulty.