The Power of Movies

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The Power of Movies Page 9

by Colin Mcginn


  Then there are puppets, dolls, action figures, waxworks, stuffed animals, robots, and portraits—all reworked versions of the body. Neither the movie image nor the sculpture is much like the waxwork, which really does try to replicate (visually at least) the human body—its aim is to be mistaken for the original. The waxwork shows how different the movie is from its original—how “unrealistic” the medium is. You might mistake a waxwork for a real person at a distance, but who has ever mistaken a movie image for a real person? Puppets provide an interesting case: no one would mistake them for a real person, yet they aim for a certain kind of naturalism. They resemble movie images in respect to ventriloquism: a voice is thrown into the puppet's mouth in much the same way speech appears to emanate from the mouths of those two-dimensional puppets on the screen.

  The voice is pretty much a normal human voice in both cases, but the apparent source of the voice is a transformed human—large and flat in the one case, small and knobby in the other. The Punch and Judy show is not a million miles away from the film: patently unreal figures, of altered dimensions, spouting their lines—or seeming to. Both convey a startling animation, in the sense that we quickly forget that they are only effigies of real people; they “take on a life of their own.” And I think that both demonstrate a kinship with the uncanny—they seem to move of their own volition, despite their lack of inner agency. It is uncanny if inanimate objects begin to move as if they had a will of their own, and both puppets and movie images do this—it is as if they were alive, while clearly not being so. Shadow puppets are one kind of puppet; those shadows on the screen are another kind. The difference is that puppets preserve the mass and substance of persons, while scaling them down; the image on the screen drains persons of their corporeality while scaling them up. Still, they both involve transformations of the normal human form, which serve to highlight certain aspects of what we are. Puppets often capture our pettiness and insignificance; movies strive to capture our grandeur and uniqueness.

  What of 3-D movies? These approximate to the condition of visual illusion, analogous to the stereoscope (of which, indeed, they are an application), and as such they diminish the contrast between themselves and real objects. They do not produce in the viewer that complex collision between image seen and object represented which is characteristic of ordinary 2-D cinema. Accordingly, the experience of viewing them is very different, and not just because of those special optical lenses. The contrasts I have been insisting on no longer inform the inner nature of the experience, or they are greatly mitigated. One is tempted to say that it just isn't art, which always requires some distance between the representation itself and what it represents. The 3-D image basically spoils the aesthetic experience by ratcheting it too much in the direction of realism; it doesn't do enough meaningful transforming. It tries to be a waxwork when what we seek is a metamorphosis. Or it approximates too closely the theatre experience, with real actors before us. It is surely noteworthy that 3-D has never really caught on, especially when depicting human drama. The life of the mind is not best served by the 3-D image. If I am right about the 2-D image, this is not surprising; for the 2-D image carries its own distinctive weight of meaning, not possessed by the 3-D image. The 3-D image doesn't give us what the flat image does: a prismatic distortion, an ontological reconfiguring.

  ACTING

  Acting is in its very nature a play with the mind-body relation. What does an actor do? She pretends to be someone she is not, the character she is playing. But what does this pretense consist of? How does the actor pretend to be someone else? The answer, I suggest, is that she pretends that someone else's mind is in her body. She doesn't pretend that her body is someone else's: that would be a hollow pretense, since it so obviously is her body. The audience can see the actor's body, and they don't think she is pretending that she has a different body from her normal one. What she does is act as if that body has a different personality or character associated with it. She makes her body into a symbol of that other mind. The actor has her own personality and motivations, but she pretends that she has different ones; in other words, she pretends that the character's mind is hers. To do this requires an assumption of contingency: that this body might have housed a different mind. This must seem like a credible possibility. It has to seem possible, say, that the body of Anthony Hopkins could house the personality of Hannibal Lecter in order for this actor to play that character. We have to be convinced that that character could emanate from this body. (Here is where the art of casting comes in.) So the actor is, in effect, exploiting the contingency of the link between a particular body and the mind that goes with it. If we had no conception that the same body could express a different mind, then acting would make no sense to us. If we thought that for every body there was a unique mind, fixed and invariable, then acting would be an impossible project. Acting requires the notion of multiple minds expressed by a single body—the many characters a given actor might play. But this involves metaphysical assumptions about mind and body, to the effect that the mind's relation to the body is mutable. Maybe the reasons animals can't act (most of them, anyway) is that they have no conception that minds and bodies can be detached. To pretend that you have mental states different from the ones you actually do have requires a good deal of self-consciousness about the loose link between mind and body. In a way the actor is drawing attention to the contingency of this link, and hence bringing the mind to the attention of the audience. Acting is an exercise in metaphysics.

  As the film theorist Charles Barr says: “Film shows the substance, it cannot show the essence, but it can suggest the essence by showing the substance. It suggests inner reality by showing outer reality with the greatest possible intensity”18 That is, all the resources of cinema—lighting, makeup, camera placement, music, voice, background, the actor's physiognomy—can work to reveal the inner being of the character, and the medium itself intensifies the effect of mentality on the screen. The mind is foregrounded relative to the body, which is present to the viewer only as a wispy trace. With the body ontologically reduced, etiolated, the soul comes to the viewer in its primal form, asserting its reality in the presence of the dematerialized body. The screen actor is working with her mind, primarily; the body functions as a kind of necessary intrusion on this intimacy with the audience. The theatre actor, seen in all his bodily glory and placed at some distance from the audience, must coax his entire body into carrying the burden of his performance; his raised voice, in particular, must do a major share of the work. But the screen actor can rely on subtler intimations of interiority: if her mind is in the right place, her body will communicate what it needs to. The greater naturalism of screen acting testifies to this; the body is not something to be manipulated by the actor, as if she were its puppeteer, but automatically expresses what is going on inside. If I say that the screen actor must act as if she were an angel (or a ghost), I hope I will not be misunderstood: I mean that she must act as if her body were the very stuff of her soul. She must, in other words, overcome the mind-body dualism that is our human lot. The essential point is that the body should be recognized to enter a new state of being once it reaches the screen.

  THE INNER SCREEN

  I have suggested that the screen is analogous to consciousness; but what of the idea that consciousness is analogous to the screen? If there were a mental screen, then this would reinforce the analogy I am making, since then consciousness would build in a screen that we somehow inwardly perceive. That idea has indeed sometimes been defended, but I think myself that there is little to be said for it. The thought is that when, as we say, you see an object, you really see a purely inner item that is somehow displayed to you in your “private mental theatre.” You don't see the world “directly,” but only through the intermediary of images on your mental screen—just as with the movie screen. It is as if perception were confined to what is presented on the inner screen of the mind, with the real world hovering out of reach.

  However, the exist
ence of such a mental screen is highly questionable, and the so-called sense-datum theory of perception that leads to it is widely rejected by philosophers of perception. I won't bore my reader with an elaborate refutation of the sense-datum theory of perception; I will merely note that there is really nothing wrong with the common-sense idea that you see ordinary objects in the external world. Therefore, we need no screen on which to project those alleged mental images that are held to stand in for external objects, since the objects are capable of standing in for themselves. Moreover, what is this supposed mental screen—how big is it, what shape is it, what color is it? We never seem to catch a glimpse of it in its own right, as we can the movie screen; it is a purely theoretical postulate, having no phenomenological reality. There is, of course, something analogous to the screen in the action and anatomy of the retina, since the retina is a two-dimensional surface on which an optical image is projected from objects. But this surface has no counterpart in the experience of seeing things—it is not an element in our consciousness of things. And we clearly don't look at the retina when we see objects. The things we see are arrayed in the world of objective space and time; they need no mental screen to hold them before our gaze.

  Even in the case of mental images (which I will consider in the next chapter) the idea of a mental screen has little to recommend it. When you form an image of a black cat, say, there is no mental screen on which this image is projected— the image simply floats in its own space. If there were such a screen, distinct from the image itself, then you ought to be able to encounter it introspectively; but you have no acquaintance with any such screen. You can, of course, form an image o/a screen, but then this image would need to be displayed on another screen—and you have no image of that screen. So there really is nothing in your consciousness that compares to the screen on which film images are projected, tempting as that idea might seem at first. It would be nice for my theory if there were, but the idea seems baseless. The movie screen has some of the characteristics of the mind, at least by analogy, but the mind is not itself shaped like a movie screen—a flat surface with pictures on it. Still, perhaps it is a testament to the plausibility of film mentalism that people have sensed an affinity between mind and screen in this way. It is just that they misidentified the direction and nature of the analogy. It is not that consciousness is a movie screen internalized; it is that the screen is consciousness externalized.

  Four

  DREAMS ON FILM

  IMAGES AND IMAGES

  In the last chapter, I suggested that the screened image is analogous to the mind's representation of reality: consciousness is essentially an awareness of things outside itself, and the screen too possesses this kind of reference beyond itself. But this is still fairly general, because the mind contains states of many kinds that possess such reference—beliefs and thoughts, desires and emotions, perceptions and sensations. The mental state that most resembles the film image lies in the mind's capacity to create the mental image. By “mental image” I simply mean those constituents of consciousness that crop up when, as we say, we visualize something (see something “with the mind's eye”), as opposed to really seeing something. Visual images are a specific way in which the mind represents the world, different from sensations, thoughts, and feelings. They are also the fabric of daydreams (of course, auditory and other images may also be). Now it is a substantive philosophical question exactly how mental images differ from ordinary perceptions of things—how visualizing a face differs from seeing that face in front of you—and I don't intend to go into this fully here.1 The key difference, for our purposes, is that when you see an object with your outer eyes, you feel yourself to be in the presence ofthat object: but when you see it only in your mind's eye, there is no such impression of presence—the object could be anywhere. Similarly, when you are perceiving the movie screen, you do not feel that the people and objects depicted are actually present before you; instead, they are experienced as absent—you have no inclination to think that the actors are only a few yards away from you (though their image certainly is). The image on the screen represents an absent object, just as an image in the mind represents an absent object: the objects don't need to be therein order for you to have a visual representation of them. The hypothesis I am pursuing, then, is that the mental image is the best mental analogue for the film image. This seems preferable, say, to the idea that the film image is most analogous to thoughts, because thoughts don't have the kind of sensory character that images have (unless the thought is based on an image). The film image is inherently visual in just the way a visual image is, but a thought need not be specifically visual—it can be entirely abstract or conceptual.

  Dreams consist of mental images—images of absent or nonexistent things—and so they are suitable candidates to be the analogue of movie images. Movie images are like dream images. The aim of the present chapter will be to defend this hypothesis, but I want it to be clear how it connects with what I have been saying up to now: the dream theory is a specific type of film mentalism. Put in very broad terms, which I shall refine as we continue, the experience of watching a movie is significantly like the experience of having a dream. In more scientific-sounding terms, movies arouse in the viewer the same kinds of psychological mechanisms and processes that characterize the dreaming state. But I don't want simply to assume that movies are dreamlike, however much my reader may already sympathize with this view; I want to establish the view by an appeal to evidence and argument.

  The suspicion that there is some sort of connection or similarity between dreams and films has been around for a long time and has struck many theorists of film as well as filmmakers. Hollywood is sometimes described as a “dream factory;” there is a film company expressly entitled DreamWorks; talk interrelating dreams and movies is rampant. Here then are some representative quotations in which the dream/film association has been explicitly made. The aesthetician Suzanne Langer, in Feeling and Form, writes: “Cinema is like’ dream in the mode of its presentation: it creates a virtual present, an order of direct apparition. That is the mode of the dream.”2 Parker Tyler states that “movies are dreamlike and fantastic”3 and that “the movie theatre is a darkness, a kind of sleep in which we dream.”4 Buster Keaton actually inserted the analogy into his movie Sherlock Junior, in which a projectionist falls asleep and dreams he is in the very film he is projecting, departing his body to float immaterially onto the screen below, only to return to his prone body when the film is over and he wakes up. Pauline Kael referred to Cary Grant as “the man from Dream City” (according to Roger Ebert). These remarks hardly amount to a theory, however, and as they stand are little more than assertions of intuition rather than cogent justifications. I want to propose a set of analogies between films and dreams, articulate and defend them, and then consider some potential objections to the hypothesis that movie images are like dream images. None of this will amount to a proof in the strict sense, but I think we will see that the points of analogy are precise and illuminating, not mere vague metaphors.

  SENSORY/AFFECTIVE FUSION

  Dreams, as everyone knows, are emotionally charged; they are also sensory in character—particularly, visual and auditory. But these two components of the dream are not independent of each other: they are fused together into a seamless whole. One might almost say that a dream image is a pictorial emotion—an emotion in sensory clothes. Nothing about the sensory content of a dream seems emotionally redundant, and each emotion in it has a sensory expression. The dream images have clearly been designed to convey—better, embody—a specific emotion. Often, in waking life, our sensory experiences have no particular affective connotation— we just see and hear what is going on around us, whether it has emotional resonance or not—but in dreams the entire point of a particular item of sensory material is to manifest an emotional meaning. The faces of dream characters, in particular, seem drenched in emotional color—sometimes lovable, sometimes fearful. Dream imagery is pregnant with strong affect
: the visual is the visceral, and vice versa. It is almost as if the dream machinery's prime purpose is to find a sensory expression for whatever emotions are seething within—to transmute feeling into sensation.

  But isn't this also an accurate description of what moving pictures attempt to do? What we see on the screen is intended to engage our emotions directly. This is the sensory manipulation of emotion. A well-made film succeeds in weaving together the affective and the sensory, so that every image on the screen evokes the emotion that fits the narrative. The images convey, by means of lighting, close-ups, and editing, the emotions of the characters, and then the viewer experiences his or her emotional response to all this. The face on the screen, in particular, becomes charged with emotional significance, so that every flicker of an eyelash carries affective weight. The eyes become liquid pools of dense feeling. It is as if we are seeing the emotions of the characters, so entwined are the images and the feelings (at least when the movie is doing its job). The clasp of Trevor Howard's hand on Celia Johnson's shoulder at the end of Brief Encounter, and the images of her facial expression, along with her blithely chattering companion, seem to condense an ocean of feeling into a single sensory moment. That vision will haunt the viewer, precisely because it packs such an emotional wallop. And, of course, a film is designed to do this—to exhibit sensory/affective fusion. It is not like a novel, in which the emotion is generated by mere words— the words are not experienced as dense with emotion (though the images they evoke in the mind of the reader may well be). You do not see Anna Karenina's pain in seeing her name upon the page—those marks on paper don't look as if they are at the end of their tether. But when you see the suffering heroine's face on the screen, her emotions suffuse her features. Moreover, the distinctive techniques of cinema—as opposed, say, to the stage—greatly aid this process of sensory and affective integration. The psychological foregrounding I have spoken of works to bestow a special emotional layer on the displayed image.

 

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