The Power of Movies

by Colin Mcginn

  Perhaps our willingness to entertain sensory/affective fusion in the case of movies is preconditioned by our acquaintance with it in our dreams: we can so readily respond to it in the cinema because we are so familiar with it in our nighttime consciousness. It is as if the viewer's mind is saying: “Oh yes, I know what this image on the screen is trying to do—my dream images do it to me every night.” Just as the dream machinery picks a specific sensory content in order to make an emotional point, so the filmmaker selects his image with the same kind of aim in mind. My own dream machinery is very good at picking visual images that tap into my fear of heights, giving me some harrowing nights between the sheets, but a good action director will mimic this very talent when trying to elicit like emotions in the film viewer. It is easy for the viewer to accept this interpenetration of the seen image and the expressed emotion. The screen comes alive with feeling because of its ability to suggest the mind in visual terms. The kind of seeing we experience in the cinema is emotional seeing—the seeing of emotions with emotions. Eye and heart are locked inextricably together, just as they are in dreams. This is not disinterested, clinical seeing, but seeing charged with feeling.

  The ability of cinema to imitate the sensory/affective fusion of dreams is a large part of its power over the viewer's mind—its power to engage and penetrate the viewer's consciousness. Dreams reach to our deepest emotions by means of sensory representations; and so do movies. The invention of moving pictures was largely the discovery of how to depict human feeling, in all its movements and vicissitudes. The still image, either in painting or in photography, could capture a time slice of emotion, a frozen moment of feeling, but only the moving image could capture the inherent dynamism of human emotion, its flows, swerves, and surges. When the image on the screen transforms and flows, it mirrors the ebb and flow of emotion, the lulls and rushes that characterize emotional consciousness. The moving screen image captures as much the movement of emotions as of physical bodies. We speak of being “moved,” and the word “movies” can equally connote this type of inner movement. The role of music in film is worth considering here. In dreams emotion comes with the territory; there is no such thing as an affect-free dream. Nor is it that the dreamer must himself supply the emotion merely suggested by the sensory material of the dream; the emotion is woven into the dream itself. But in viewing a film the audience must bring emotion to the screen—and this process does not always come off. It is not that in the very act of seeing the images the viewer thereby has the appropriate feelings; there are certainly affectively inert films. The film must work to achieve its emotional power. It doesn't have an emotional content as a result of its very structure, as a dream does. In short, you can't dream without feeling, but you can watch a movie without feeling. It is true that movies achieve their emotional effects very easily, perhaps precisely because of their ability to imitate the dream state; but it would be an exaggeration to say that the audience's emotional involvement is integral to them, a sine qua non. Granted this, movies would do well to boost their affective power by whatever means come to hand. How are they to create an emotional soundtrack, so to speak? The answer is contained in the question— by adding a musical soundtrack. For music is clearly the most reliably guaranteed medium for the creation of emotion in the human breast: play a person a tune and he is putty in your hands. Add volume, Dolby sound, and you have a surefire emotion-generator. Now couple this with the images on the screen, as well as the usual voices and noises of a film soundtrack, and you have a powerful device for pumping emotion from the movie to the audience. Music takes up the slack left by the bare image as a vehicle of feeling. The images in a dream are clearly controlled and directed by the emotional requirements of the dream; the music in a film works to signal the emotional undertow of the film, as well as to manipulate the audience's feelings. The music tells the audience what to feel, and it makes them feel it. It therefore functions to create an emotional soundtrack. The dream comes with emotion built in; film music works to supply just such an emotional dimension. Thus music aids sensory/affective fusion, by boosting the affect and weaving it into the spectacle. In effect, it makes the film experience more dreamlike.

  We know very little, if anything, about the function of dreams, but it does seem clear that they can provide emotional catharsis—release, purging. This is obvious when the dream is of the wish-fulfillment kind, but even an anxiety dream can be seen as releasing pent-up fears. Emotions are inherently energetic, even explosive, and they seek an outlet; dreams seem to offer one type of outlet (sports might be thought to offer another). But isn't it also true that movies have a cathartic effect? Isn't one reason that we go to movies that they permit the expression of emotions that may be taboo or at least not catered to in our ordinary life? Horror films are a good example of this function—nameless fears, childish anxieties. You don't need to be a Freudian to believe that emotions are often repressed and seek an outlet. By producing visual images in narrative form, with an emotional theme, movies and dreams convert those repressed and free-floating emotions into visible form, giving them shape and definition. The visual becomes a way for the visceral to channel itself, thus allowing for release. Both film and dream serve, not just to represent and express emotion, but to open the emotional valves—to let emotion flow freely (and perhaps safely). Both concretize the emotions and thus give them a chance to manifest themselves in a form that allows for catharsis. Catharsis needs a medium if it is not to be totally directionless; movies and dreams both, in similar ways, provide just such a medium. You may come out of both feeling shaken and disgusted, angry or depressed, but at least you got that off your chest. Romantic longings are frequent subjects of dreams and films, and it is hard to avoid the suspicion that they are so because of their pressing and exigent nature—we just have to give them free rein somewhere.

  SPATIO-TEMPORAL DISCONTINUITY

  In ordinary waking consciousness the transition from one place or time to another is continuous—you have to pass through all the intermediate times and places. You can't just jump from one spatiotemporal location to another, as if all the places and times in between didn't exist. But in the movies this is precisely what happens: the camera can record a given scene and then leap to another place and time entirely. A film splices together all these scenes, without bothering with the intermediate locations. This is quite unlike ordinary perception, which lacks this kind of flexibility (the closest we come to it is falling asleep in one place and waking up in another, while having lost track of time). The space of movies is fractured, discontinuous; and time does not flow in its usual measured manner. Yet this is a visual world, a world of perceived situations (unlike, say, the novel). The narrative structure of film is basically the sequencing of distinct and discontinuous spatial viewpoints. Rudolf Arnheim writes: “The period of time that is being photographed may be interrupted at any point. One scene may be immediately followed by another that takes place at a totally different time. And the continuity of space may be broken in the same manner. A moment ago I may have been standing a hundred yards away from the house. Suddenly I am close in front of it. I may have been in Sydney a few moments ago. Immediately afterwards I can be in Boston. I have only to join the two strips together.”5

  These abrupt jolts of camera position, pieced together according to narrative dictates, raise a question: how do we manage to take them in stride? So much violence is done to our normal ways of seeing things that you would think our minds would rebel. We ought to be saying: “Hey that just isn't how the world works—it simply makes no sense!” But we seem to go with the flow, or the lack of it. Why? Here is Walter Murch, addressing the question of why cuts work:

  At the instant of the cut, there is a total and instantaneous discontinuity in the field of vision … It is all the more amazing because the instantaneous displacement achieved by the cut is not anything that we experience in ordinary life … So why do cuts work? Do they have some hidden foundation in our own experience, or are they
an invention that suits the convenience of filmmakers and people who have just, somehow, become used to them? Well, although “day-to-day” reality appears to be continuous, there is that other world in which we spend perhaps a third of our lives: the “night-to-night” reality of dreams. And the images in dreams are much more fragmented, intersecting in much stranger and more abrupt ways than the images of waking reality— ways that approximate, at least, the interaction produced by cutting. Perhaps the explanation is as simple as that: we accept the cut because it resembles the way images are juxtaposed in our dreams. In fact, the abruptness of the cut may be one of the key determinants in actually producing the similarity between dreams and films. In the darkness of the theatre, we say to ourselves, in effect, “This looks like reality, but it cannot be reality because it is so visually discontinuous; therefore, it must be a dream.”6

  Suzanne Langer is onto a similar point when she observes: “Dream events are spatial—often intensely concerned with space—intervals, endless roads, bottomless canyons, things too high, too near, too far—but they are not oriented in any total space. The same is true of the moving picture, and distinguishes it—despite its visual character—from plastic art: its space comes and goes!7 Both authors, then, are drawing an analogy between the discontinuous way space is represented in movies and the way it is represented in dreams. In dreams we find ourselves undergoing sudden shifts of position, of one geographical location to another, or sometimes coming abruptly nearer to an object or person. The dream is a sequence of scenes, stitched together according to narrative rules, but often contemptuous of ordinary spatial and temporal continuity. And this suggests, as Murch remarks, that our ready comprehension of such discontinuities in film may have its basis in our prior acquaintance with like discontinuities in dreams—we have been in such bizarrely broken worlds before, as recently as the previous night. Indeed, it is just such fragmentation that causes films and dreams to converge psychologically. Films put the mind in the same kind of state that dreams do, by virtue of their similar narrative ways with space and time.

  Both variable framing and montage have analogues in the realm of dream experience. Variable framing is simply the ability of the camera to adopt different perspectives on the same scene, farther or nearer, off to the side, etc. These jumps correspond to like variations in how we depict things in our dreams—now seeing someone from a distance, now finding ourselves up close. Montage is simply another name for editing, but has been held by some (notably by the Russian director and film theorist Sergei Eisenstein) to be the very essence of the movie art—that which gives it its distinctive character.8 For montage allows the filmmaker to impose his own imagination on photographically recorded reality, and to juxtapose images never found together in nature but possessing emotional or symbolic significance (as it might be, a wretched prisoner and a caged bird). This capacity for imaginative sequencing is surely a mark of the dream: images are strung together which have never been encountered together in perceived reality but which form a nexus of meaning for the dreamer. This enormous freedom of sequencing is certainly a notable similarity between the two, as is the expressive potential of such sequencing. The invention of montage is, in effect, the discovery of how to make dreams from celluloid—by cutting and splicing. Sequencing of experience is taken out of the hands of nature and put into the hands of a creative agent—a filmmaker or a dream generator. If you set out to invent a technology that imitated the way scenes succeed each other in dreams, then surely the moving picture, with its unlimited capacity for montage, would be the technology of choice.

  Nobody teaches you to dream. You don't take Elementary Dreaming in kindergarten, and your parents don't drill you in the art of dreaming. Dreaming comes naturally to us, but it is clearly not a simple matter: a dream is a complex mental product, and it is not a mere copy of ordinary experience. As the cognitive scientists say, you have a module for dreaming—a special-purpose psychological device, based in brain tissue, whose output consists of spatio-temporally fractured sensory/affective narratives. Since the possession of this module is not the result of learning, it must be innate. Your genes must contain instructions on how to construct and process dreams. Dreaming is not unlike language in this respect: there is also a human instinct for language, an innately based language module.9 Indeed, in a loose sense, dreaming contains a kind of “grammar”—a set of rules for constructing dreams. In any case, dreaming is instinctual— unlike, say, doing your taxes or knowing the succession of American presidents. It is certainly not like reading and writing, which require a laborious process of explicit instruction; so dream narratives are not like literary narratives. Even the laziest student will dream profusely, no effort required; but reading and writing a novel, say, is a major undertaking. Yet both are complex narratives.

  What about movies—do we need to learn how to perceive and interpret them? Not really, even though some movie devices may depend upon learned conventions—as, say, with entering a person's thoughts by means of moving the camera toward his or her eyeball and going into a fade. For the most part, movie watching is effortless and instruction-free—you just need to observe a rapt child in front of a movie screen to see that. Those strange discontinuities we call cuts do not present a hard problem of learning for the child. No manuals or textbooks need be consulted. Somehow the mind of the child is in tune with movie structure, and this seems to occur spontaneously. Why? In watching a movie a child is exploiting the cognitive machinery already made available by the dream mechanism. The child has to learn to read before a literary narrative can be processed, but watching a film requires nothing much beyond the capacity to dream. We don't need to master conventions in order to interpret pictures, so photography— including the moving picture—can be processed on the basis of the innate capacity to perceive. But the fractured character of the sequencing of these images also poses no special educational challenge because of its antecedent presence in the dream. The “grammar” of films recapitulates the “grammar” of dreams, which is written into the genes.

  REALISM AND FANTASY

  When we describe something as dreamlike we often mean that it bears little or no relation to reality—that it is entirely a product of imagination. Thus we distinguish imagination from perception and locate dreaming in the imagination. To be dreamlike is then taken to mean being fantastic, in the sense of a mental product that is divorced from the mundane world. In this way of thinking, my claim that movies are like dreams may appear implausible, for surely many films are “realistic”—historical epics, domestic dramas, and romantic comedies. Not all films are fantasy films. Isn't there something irreducibly documentary about film? After all, as I argued in the previous chapters, we do see real people when we watch a film—there is a realism to film that cannot be denied. How can films be both dreamlike and realistic?

  The answer to this question should be obvious: in that sense dreams are not dreamlike, either! For it is simply not true that dreams are always totally divorced from reality, mere fantastic ravings with no input from the dreamer's ordinary waking life. On the contrary, as Freud was not the first to point out, dreams are generally firmly rooted in the normal life of the dreamer—his experiences, concerns, and obsessions. We generally dream about people we know, in situations like those of real life, and with emotions bearing an intelligible relation to our daytime emotions. What the dream does is elaborate on these familiarities—it takes them as a starting point and weaves a fictional narrative around them. I recently had a dream in which I met Vladimir Nabokov and had a very pleasant conversation with him about his great novel Lolita. I was happy to show off my detailed knowledge of his text, and together we perused a highly embossed edition of the book that looked like it had been typeset in a medieval monastery. There are obviously clear elements of fantasy in this dream, but equally clearly it is based on my admiration for the author and the fact that I often teach a course in which Lolita is studied. What a dream does is combine memory with imagination, in abo
ut equal proportions. Moreover, during a dream there is nothing “dreamlike” about it—there is no sense that we are dwelling in a land of fantasy. On the contrary, even the most bizarre dream strikes us, while dreaming it, to be the purest reality: dreams don't seem like dreams—not at the time anyway. Dreams appear real, and parts of them are indeed drawn from real life. It is therefore essential to the dream theory of cinema that films should not seem like dreams. If they did, they would not be experienced as dreams are—as a piece of reality. Films are indeed generally experienced as unlike dreams, but so too are dreams experienced as unlike dreams. The categorization of a dream as a dream is a retrospective matter; it is not part of the dream experience itself. Surrealism has muddied the waters here. When you look at a surrealist painting or watch a surrealist film sequence (such as Salvador Dali's dream sequence in Alfred Hitchcock's Spellbound), you have the impression of something fantastic and removed from waking reality—melting watches and all that. But this is not what a dream feels like from the inside—as I say, it feels real. The surrealist image at best captures what a dream seems like in recollection—or at least an artist's rendering thereof. So the point of the dream theory of movies is not to maintain that all movies are like surrealist paintings; it is, on the contrary, to maintain that films have the thudding reality that is so typical of the dream worlds we experience ourselves as occupying. Dreams seem real, not surreal. Nor are dreams experienced as symbolic, in some Freudian or other sense. (Whether they are in fact symbolic is another matter.) Dreams strike us, in having them, as literal depictions of a real world—even when they consist of entirely fantastic people and things. This, indeed, is an essential part of their power. A good dream painting would strike the viewer as totally real while being actually fantastic— which is probably impossible. Only the sleeping mind, with its preternatural credulity, can interpret the wildly imaginary as if it were solid fact.