by Colin Mcginn
The first feature film I ever saw, The Wizard of Oz, is about a dream: the main color section simply is Dorothy's dream. Her house hurtles through space, hoisted by a tornado, lands in Munchkinland, on top of an unfortunate witch, and there she begins a journey along the yellow brick road. As she dances down the road, red ruby slippers sparkling, the movement never ceases, with flying witches, a stumbling straw man, an ambling lion, a halting tin man, and airborne monkeys. The entire film has the hyperkinesis of the dream, even ending with a balloon flight. The theme of an anxiety-ridden journey, full of obstacles and delays, is utterly dreamlike—and, of course, it is a dream. This emphasis on movement is typical of nearly all films; it belongs to their intrinsic appeal. The exaggeration of movement found in Asian martial-arts films is part of the same tendency— magnifying movement to dreamlike levels of intensity. Perhaps we accept such a palpable lack of realism because our dreams too violate realism when it comes to motion. We are really quite familiar with flying bodies because they are among the routine realities of the dream world; it is only in the waking hours that bodies move so frustratingly slowly and carry such dead weight. The dematerialized body is a far fleeter thing.
GENRES
Think of Arnold naked. He, the Terminator, has just materialized from the future, and he crouches in a parking lot without a stitch on. He walks into a biker bar, attracting many a disapproving and incredulous stare, there to be threatened by a big tough leather-clad bruiser (“Bad to the Bone” pounds in the background). Instead of being thrashed, as you might naively expect, he stops the bruiser's fist in his open hand and crushes it till the bones crack. He then takes the vanquished guy's clothes and calmly exits, ready to begin his appointed Terminating. It's classic Schwarzenegger— but it's also classic dream material. Haven't we all had a dream of inappropriate nakedness, of turning up at school or work improperly clad? We feel an obscure anxiety, not quite sure what we are doing wrong, only to realize that no one else is thus attired. That is Arnold the Terminator, an innocent robot from the future, not clued in to human conventions of robot couture. But he doesn't cringe and collapse: he reverses the situation completely, imposes his superhuman power on his tormentor, and comes out of the encounter with a nice new set of duds. He goes from anxiety dream to the most flagrant wish fulfillment—from weakness and vulnerability to overpowering strength. He gives us both types of dream in one scene.
Dreams no doubt come in many categories, but surely the principal two are anxiety and wish fulfillment. There are feel-scared dreams and feel-good dreams, nightmares and pleasure domes. We are relieved when we wake from the former and disappointed when we wake from the latter. Both are fantasies, exercises in unreality. Why we have such dreams is hard to say, but it is a fact that we do. This raises the question of whether movies divide into categories in a similar way: do the genres of movies match the genres of dreams? The nightmare finds its obvious counterpart in the horror film, with its monsters, psychopaths, and vicious littie insects. I often have insect dreams, and films about an insect menace particularly creep me out. But the huge popularity of horror films, from the very first days of cinema— from Nosferatu to The Exorcist to The Ring—testifies to their deep resonance in the human psyche. Movies seem uniquely suited to the making of horror films, as if this is part of their destiny, and the similarity between movies and dreams makes this intelligible: movies by their nature are like dreams, and nightmares are a salient type of dream. The way that movies as a medium seem to dabble in the supernatural—with their dematerializing tendencies and violation of the laws of nature—makes them naturally adapted to the depiction of ghosts, vampires, werewolves, and all the rest. The horror film, in its many forms, is an enduring and immensely popular genre of film; it answers to the lowbrow in all of us, the shivering, childlike, irrational dreamer. Surely, this is the area of overlap between dreams and movies that has been most self-consciously exploited by filmmakers—they know they are putting nightmares up on the screen. The kind of terror they evoke is not the rational terror of ordinary waking life—wars, crimes, accidents—but the irrational fantasy terror of dream life. I doubt that if we never had nightmares, horror films would engage us in the way they do now. Hence the retort many a parent has made to a distressed child: “It's only a dream” or “It's only a movie.”
The feel-good dream also has its movie counterpart. Many dreams involve the realization of our wishes. The romantic comedy or simple love story, in which all's well that ends well, clearly echoes the dream of romantic fulfillment, chaste or otherwise. But pornography, more or less hard, finds a ready partner in the sex dream, also one of the most common and well attested. The gratification of the sexual impulse is clearly something that both movies and dreams are particularly good at. The porno flick is simply the wet dream on celluloid—let's make no bones about it. Here the genres of film and dream match up neatly and precisely. In the case of violence, the situation is interesting, because the real theme of so many violent films is actually the empowerment of the powerless—think here of Clint Eastwood's High Plains Drifter, which carries a strong whiff of the dreamlike about it. In a dream you may be assailed by ruthless and vicious aggressors, and when the dream is of the feel-good variety it ends with you managing to assert yourself over them—they end up vanquished. You may do a fair amount of damage in your dreams, in overcoming the bad guys—it's not always pretty. But this is the theme of numberless revenge movies: the weak are abused, made victims of unjust violence, but they, or their no-name savior, in the end visit righteous retribution on the evildoers. I could cite many examples of this theme, but Sergio Leone's Once Upon a Time in the West stands out, a film in which Charles Bronson delivers a beautifully contrived comeuppance on the spectacularly nasty Henry Fonda. This kind of righteous violence is pure wish fulfillment—the desire that evil shall be put down and justice be done. (That it is often oversimplified does nothing to reduce its psychological power.) So there is a match here between the wish-fulfillment dream and the movie of justified vengeance.
THE BASE SELF
Movies have never been, with rare exceptions, a highbrow medium. They rejoice in the visceral, the gaudy, and the vulgar. And this has been held against them by critics who prefer the still gray matter of the brain to the whirling kaleidoscope of the screen. To be sure, there have been art-house movies, with big words in them, and obscure plots, and little in the way of rush and throb; but this has always been a minority taste—movies today are as philistine as they have ever been. Movies revel in sensation and emotion (often the cruder, the better); deep abstract thought is not their thing. They are a sensory (and sensational) medium, inarticulate, nonverbal, dazzlingly in love with spectacle (the circus is not dissimilar). Brutality and disorder, death and destruction— these are their frequent themes. There is nothing more cinematic than the sudden shock of a fearsome predator lunging into the screen, eliciting a gasp of surprise from the audience. Even a “sophisticated” filmmaker such as Ingmar Bergman deals in raw emotion, conflict, and violence of the spirit. This is surely why those of a certain cast of mind have always disapproved of the movies (as they have rock music and, before that, jazz). They rightly sense the anarchic flow of some of our most—what shall I say?—basic emotions (I won't say “animal” because animals don't in general enjoy explosions and knife fights). They correctly discern that movies don't as a rule engage the higher mental faculties.
However, I am here not to condemn this trait of film, but to explain it. Sleep science has shown that the brain is selectively activated during dreaming: the parts that control sensation, emotion, and movement are as active as they are in the waking state, but the parts that sustain reasoning and self-reflection are dampened down. Thus J. Allan Hobson writes: “We can see that, when the brain self-activates in sleep, it changes its chemical self-instructions. The mind has no choice but to go along with the programme. It sees, it moves, and it feels things intensely but it does not think, remember, or focus attention very well.”12 La
ter he says: “The reason that dreams are so perceptually intense, so instinctive and emotional, and so hyperassociative is because the brain regions supporting these functions are more active. The reason that we can't decide properly what state we are in, can't keep track of time, place, or person, and can't think critically or actively is because the brain regions supporting these functions are less active.”13 Now these results from the study of the dreaming brain must pique the interest of the student of film, for they are eerily reminiscent of what is obviously true of film. Just as the higher intellectual and critical faculties are diminished during dreaming sleep, so the movie watcher is operating at a psychological level at which the higher mental faculties are not in play or are in abeyance. The parts of the brain that are most active in movie watching are connected to sensation, emotion, and movement; and these crowd out the more abstract conceptual functions of the brain. If we call the parts of the brain that are responsible for sensation, emotion, and movement the SEM brain, then we can say that in movie watching it is the SEM brain that is primarily recruited; the critical and reflective faculties are (largely) offline.
Here I want to bring in the idea of the “base self”—the self that is childlike, instinct-driven, and sensation-fixated. This I distinguish from the critical self, which is reflective, language-driven, and conceptually fixated. (Think Jekyll and Hyde, roughly.) My hypothesis is that the base self is uppermost in the dreaming state (the self subserved by the SEM brain) and is also calling the shots in the movie theatre, while the critical self takes a well-earned rest. To put it more pointedly, the crassness of movies is a function of the brain regions that are activated during them, which overlap with the regions of the brain that are active during dreaming sleep. Can we explain the lowbrow character of movies by the fact that it is the dreaming brain that is primarily activated by them? As the physiology of sleep tells us, the brain can be selectively activated, with some parts active and others quiescent. According to the present hypothesis, in the movies the brain likewise shifts its patterns of activation. The preoccupations of the sleeping brain—fear, appetite, wish, and delirious fantasy—are also the preoccupations of the mass movie audience. The movies chemically alter the brain in the direction of its dreaming mode: that, at any rate, is the hypothesis. During sleep the SEM brain wakes up, as it were, and with it the base self, while the critical self snoozes; I am suggesting that something similar might be true for the state of semisomnolence known as watching a movie (later I will consider whether the fact that the movie viewer is technically awake alters the picture).
Unfortunately, there is no hard scientific proof as yet that the brain is functionally similar in the dreaming and movie-watching state; the empirical work simply hasn't been done. I commend this as a research project for some eager young sleep scientist. But from ordinary observation it seems tolerably clear that the brain of the movie watcher must be functioning differently from how it does in ordinary situations: the sensory stimulation from the screen is quite different; the emotions are typically aroused and coursing, though not leading to the usual behavior; the imagination is strongly activated; the body is still; the attention is absorbed; you are not usually thinking about that broken pipe or the stock market or early retirement. Also, there is a sense that one's own psychic landscape is being explored, sensitive areas probed, shameful truths exposed. Dreams and movies are both voyages into the land of unruly emotion, excavations into the self (the base one). There is a sort of psychic clarity to both, a heightening of perception. Leonardo da Vinci reportedly asked, “Why does the eye see a thing more clearly in dreams than when awake?”;14 and the same thing can be said about movie watching. In both states the varnish comes off reality; there is the feeling of truths being revealed. Just as people's dreams are keys to their real selves, their deepest longings and anxieties, so their taste in movies tells you a lot about them. Is this why people are often ashamed of the kind of movie they like? One person might speak of his “weakness” for horror films or soppy romances. Another might be a sucker for patriotic war films. Quentin Tarantino obviously can't get enough of acrobatic violence. And how many people do you know who will proudly confess to a passion for the Death Wish series? I personally can watch almost anything with vampires in it—or Denise Richards suitably attired.
Let me add one small piece of anecdotal evidence. It is said that Ludwig Wittgenstein used to like to go to the flicks after a particularly grueling philosophy seminar; sitting in the front row, he would revel in the latest American gangster film or cheesy western. Since Wittgenstein was an unusually intense thinker, with a fierce critical intelligence, one might surmise that the movie experience afforded him some release from this part of his brain—it effectively shut down the part where he did his excruciating philosophical thinking. The Wittgenstein SEM brain could then enjoy a holiday from its overactive critical duties. And I have to say that I experience movies in just this way myself. There is nothing better after a hard day of philosophical thinking and writing than a “mindless” movie; I can almost feel my brain shifting its chemical balance, the neurons rearranging themselves. It can be hard to shut down the severe critical self, and movies work to push it aside in favor of more elemental concerns. The base self must have its day. Dreams and movies put us in touch with parts of ourselves that may not have much outlet in the civilized and restrained world we mainly inhabit.
THE MIND'S LAWS
The laws of the actual physical world are not the laws of the movie world; the movie world conforms rather to psychological laws. The movement of the camera mimics the directing of attention, and the sequencing of scenes respects the psychological needs of the narrative, not the constraints of space and time (spatio-temporal discontinuity is really psychological continuity).15 The succession of film images is driven by psychological forces, not physical ones. Psychological association and narrative necessity govern the way that cinema shows us the world. The laws of film are psychological laws, of the kind manifested in dreams, not physical laws. In dreaming the mind leaps from image to image, pursuing its own inner logic, dancing to its own tune; and movies do much the same thing—they arrange reality to suit the demands of mind. If we think of a dream as a kind of inward composition, then dreams and movies can both be said to follow the laws of the mind. Both involve the compacting of feelings into sensations, according to the dictates of the mind's own agenda. If the mood calls for a sudden release from gravity, or instant aging, or otherworldly beauty, or a man becoming a beast, then movies and dreams will perform the necessary magic. They don't give a damn that these things are physically impossible; all they care about is that they are psychologically indicated. “Magic” is, indeed, one of the stock words used to describe the workings of film, thus suggesting a freedom from natural law; but a similar magic is wrought every night in our dreams, which likewise flout the laws of nature regularly. This is why neither is just a recording of reality; they are a reshaping of reality, according to psychological requirements. They are products of the imagination, and the imagination is not constrained by what nature throws its way.
This independence from natural law also gives to dreams and films a marked sense of freedom. In both we can see the human will at work, following its own peculiar (and sometimes obscure) logic. There is no slavish adherence to the senses, but free creation—the mind in flight, so to speak.
There is exhilaration to both, as if we can leave the world of law-governed matter behind. And movies frequently exploit this sense of exhilaration, particularly in flouting the laws of motion. Movies and dreams suggest possibilities, options, and radical renewals—assertions of human free will. In both we gain mastery over the world of matter, since it is still that world that we are reshaping—we see our own will dominate the sequence of events. The prisoner can always dream; and there is always the movies to go to when the daily grind gets too much. (Is it an accident that America defines itself by freedom, dreams, and movies?) If the central existential conflict of human life
is between inexorable natural law and human spontaneity, then dreams and films are strikes in favor of the latter. They are human freedom made visible (as music is human freedom made audible). If only we could be star and director of our own life movie!
ABSORPTION
The dream holds the mind in a viselike grip, with no possibility of the mind wandering. While you are dreaming about swimming in mud, say, you cannot find yourself contemplating other things, such as what to do about the sagging gutter in your roof. But, of course, in real life you can easily be swimming in mud (well, water) and be thinking about your gutter problem: your mind can wander from what you are currently perceiving and you can still be perceiving it. Yet in dreams there is no room for this kind of inattentiveness—your attention is riveted to the content of the dream, even when it is relatively banal. Your mind is all there, in the moment, with nothing to distract it. So the dream has a unique hold over your attention, relentlessly sucking it in: it is attention dependent, in the sense that you cannot be having a dream you are not attending to—no attention, no dream.16 Perhaps this is why dreams seem so vivid and overpowering, so utterly commandeering—they gobble up all the attention. That giant sucking sound you hear in your sleep is your dream drawing all the attention to itself. Because of this attention dependence, there cannot really be any periods during which the banality of the dream permits your attention to wander to more interesting topics. For it thus to wander, the dream itself would have to disappear. It isn't that dreams are just so fascinating in their content that you can't take your mind off them; it's rather that they cannot exist without the mind on them. Dreams have the power to erase everything from your mind but themselves.