The Film, the World and the Fantasy

I.

Whatever in film is selected is elected. Whatever is elected is exemplary. And whatever is exemplary is to be sought. Selection is description, but election gives a prescription. What in a film is selected for showing to the exclusion of all else becomes a model against which reality is to be measured and if that measurement falls short the world is found wanting.

The mechanism of selection is the conjunction of the necessary definition of an exclusive world and the definition of protagonists. An exclusive world is necessary because the telling of a story involves abstracting the locations, objects, and characters relevant to the story from the total processes of reality. The positivist novelists of 19th century France believed they must follow the nature of the characters they create in the petri dish of the world they invent as rigorously as a scientist would totally predictable molecules under his microscope. The characters would follow scientific laws as surely as those molecules. All storytelling, however, involves this 'petri dish' effect. If the whole of mundane reality is included, there is no story, but merely events. A story is created not by inclusion but by exclusion. All events that do not contribute to the destiny of the exclusive world of the story are neglected. Only events deemed significance are selected and these events are selected teleologically, that is, for a purpose, be it the end of the story or the moral of the story.

The destiny of that exclusive world is decided by characters. The actions of the characters are involved within and create the shape of the events in the exclusive world. Though there may be events not instigated by characters, such as the appearance of a tornado in Twister, the event itself is an event for its happening to characters and for what actions it provokes in those characters. Since the shape of events is decided by characters, either actively or passively, and since events are selected toward the destiny of the exclusive world, the exclusive set of characters are decisive in the fate of the totality of the world. All of the actions we see them perform are thus important, insofar as importance is defined as having an evident effect on the destiny of the world. The decisions with which they conduct their lives have importance. Their relationships with one another have importance. Their living or dying, winning or losing, loving or loathing all has importance. This is the mythologizing effect of storytelling. The characters selected are not merely people, but become models of people, types, demigods like Hercules and Jesus.

Some films and television series depict worlds where the characters are making genuinely important decisions. This is often the case in science fiction and fantasy. In Lord of the Rings, Frodo's decisions really do have an effect on the destiny of the world. In Babylon 5, most of the characters make decisions that directly affect the destiny of the world. However, films and series need not be presenting fictions of literal importance. Westerns provide a good example. Take the epic western Once Upon a Time in the West. We follow a set of central characters, Harmonica the wandering man with no obvious purpose, Jill the widowed landowner, Morton the railway owner who needs Jill's land, Frank the hired assassin who killed Jill's husband for Morton, and Cheyenne the bandit who helps Harmonica and Jill. The exclusive world of West is centered upon the destiny of the land, or more specifically, Jill's ownership of the land. The film's central characters are selected for their roles in this destiny. Their actions thereby gain importance. Yet there's no inherent importance in them, as one finds in Lord of the Rings. In the context of a non-exclusive (i.e. the real) world, Jill's ownership of the land is not an evidently important issue. Were Jill murdered or stripped of her land somehow, it might make a newspaper headline, appear an injustice, but would then be forgotten. That Frank, the sadistic gun-for-hire, ultimately loses the shoot-out to Harmonica is a supremely important event in West. It is the event that decides the destiny of the entire exclusive universe. All characters' destinies are summed up in that shoot-out. Frank and Harmonica are thus titans, two highly mythologized beings. If Harmonica wins, it is the triumph of good and justice. If Frank wins, it is the triumph of evil and lawlessness. The event is gigantomachea, the most decisive event in the moral and historical destiny of the exclusive universe. However, in the context of a non-exclusive world, it is merely a shoot-out between two historically unimportant people. The death of either might not even make a newspaper headline. There were shoot-out-deaths all the time at that historical point and there would have been nothing noteworthy about the nameless 'Harmonica' or a hitman like Frank perishing. So much for selection.

When such characters are selected, they are elected for the viewing audience to admire. (Though we loathe Frank as a person in West, he is a character and not a person; to loathe him as a person just is to admire him as a character.) Their actions are important: we want our actions to be important. We are cogniscent, however, of the unimportance of our actions within a non-exclusive world. We never have an exclusive world abstracted from the activities of our lives. Our lives take place within the total network of events that comprise a non-exclusive world. Since so few events within the non-exclusive world have effect on its progress (and progress corresponds to destiny an exclusive world), very few actions have importance. Even the actions of world leaders rarely have importance. The actions of a Napoleon or a Hitler, for better or worse, have importance, but not so much those of a Stephen Harper. So when a young classics student leaves Once Upon a Time in the West and returns home to work on his thesis investigating the perception of time in Herodotus, his dreams of becoming a classics professor are deflated, seemingly devoid of all importance. It may be what he values, but a self-interested life that pleasures itself then vanishes contributes nothing to progress. What does it matter in the 'grand scheme of things' if he teaches the classics or not? That is, what importance for the progress of the world has his pursuit of a professorship, house in the suburbs and faithful wife with whom to procreate? A drop in the ocean at best.

Save for madmen, we all know we can't make ourselves the protagonists of the non-exclusive world. The world is what it is, a mass of events in the midst of which the few events we shape are of importance (in a narrow sense, relative to the evaluator's own life rather than the world) to a very small circle of people. What we are in control of, however, is our own character. We may not be able to live the lives of Harmonica, Rhett Butler, Babylon 5's Captain John Sheridan, or Twin Peak's Agent Dale Cooper; but we compensate by imitating their personality traits. We try to live them in a personal mythology. We may aspire to adopt the work ethic of Sheridan, the detachment of Harmonica, the spirituality and kindness of Cooper. At the bare minimum, we might adopt speech patterns, a key word, or even a mannerism.

No matter how well we imitate, we never become who we imitate. It is the carrot on the stick: run as fast as we can, the exemplar is always as far ahead of us as when we began. The non-exclusive world gives us an infinity of events with no meaning, does not cut out our failures, our irrelevant moments, or moments of indignity. We never see Babylon 5's Sheridan defecating, realizing he forgot to bring wiping material and having to scamper out to find some. Imagining he occupies a non-exclusive world, such an event would likely have happened to him at some point. When we watch a series like Twin Peaks, we never see the life of the Cooper as an irresponsible teen or an unremarkable agent in the city. In the context of a non-exclusive world, surely he would have had such phases. What we see of these characters' actions is according to their dignity as important. What we see of ourselves is not filtered for importance. Alexander the Great applied all his efforts to imitating Hercules and Dionysus, following what he believed to be their footsteps into India. The Christian saints applied their efforts to imitating Jesus, performing odd ascetical practices to be as disciplined as he. They all fall short and know they do. It takes a hagiographer to make them succeed and indeed the clever Alexander employed one. The contingencies of a non-exclusive world ever impinge. Our inauthentic behaviour strains us. Our inability to achieve the lapidary excellence of the beings in fiction leave us disappointed with ourselves. We can only forget or retreat into fantasy.

The sort of locations and the sort of events that are selected also become exemplary. How events occur in the exclusive world is a description of how the exclusive world is. It is also a description of how the non-exclusive world is. Just as Harmonica is mythologized into an archetype of a man, so are other features of the exclusive world types: locations, objects, trends of actions. The typed entities of an exclusive world describe how all particular instances in the non-exclusive world of that type in the exclusive world are. However, if the instances are not according to the type, it is not the type that is questioned but the instances. In Platonic fashion, the instances are recognized as deficient instantiations of the type, which is perfect truth. The description of non-character entities and the way they affect events thus becomes not merely description but prescription. Repetition of description re-enforces the normative character. The more sources repeat a relevantly similar description, the further the non-person entities and the events particular to locations in the non-exclusive world are to be measured against those in cinema and television.

For example, '80s cinema and television presented high school as a location with a certain structure that affected events in a certain way, to wit, by segregating characters into cliques, placing the characters into classrooms and hallways with certain appearances, and giving these cliques free time with each other outside of classtime. Watching cinema and television in the '80s and early '90s describes to school-age viewers how their own schools are to appear and be structured. The high schools in the media are types particular instances of high schools should resemble. The more the particular instances resemble the types, the more truly are they high schools. Or rather, the more they feel like true high schools. However, in the non-exclusive world, there are a multitude of contingencies affecting the appearance and structure of instances of schools. Small towns will not have schools resembling those of large city suburbs. Canadian schools will differ in relevant ways from American schools, in some instances by including sections for French students. Not all high schools have football teams, cheerleaders, or any of the cliques found in '80s cinematic types. Those in such high schools don't come to the conclusion that the films are merely representing a few instances found in American cities, but that their high school doesn't measure up to the type: it is deficient. Intellectually they may come to that conclusion, of course, but the feeling toward the school is that it is a deficient instantiation of a high school.

Moreover, our particular instances of high school do not offer the experience of high school that is shown to be important to the experience of high school in cinema. The events that occur in the type are important to the lives of the important characters, conferring upon the typed events its normative character. When relevantly similar events fail to occur in our lives in the non-exclusive world, it feels as though experiences of importance are lacking in our lives. The description of the experience of school thus prescribes not just what school should be like, but what a period in life should be like. We do not feel merely that our instance of a school is deficient, but that the instance of our very lives is deficient at that moment. Not only can we not be Ferris Bueller as an important character in an exclusive world, we can't even passively experience the events, however mundane, he experiences in his school life. Our lives, we feel, are not merely unimportant, they are also deficient.

There are yet more insidious examples. Saturday morning television is punctuated with commercials for breakfast cereals that show a family type. That type consists of siblings, a mother, and a father. This family type lives in a comfortable American suburban home. This family type is moderately affluent. The sheer repetition of commercials and the repetition of the type in diverse commercials can cause many children to feel their family life is deficient. If they live in an apartment, have a single parent, no siblings, and no elegant wallpaper, their home, family, and very life deficiently instantiates the types. Scoff at affirmative action at work in cartoons and commercials as we will, it is worthwhile to present diverse types in these media for the welfare of the many children whose lives and lifestyles will be perceived as a deficient instantiations of a single, dominant type insofar as it confirms the sufficiency of alternative instantiations in the non-exclusive world.

Immersion may also re-enforce the normative character of types. Longer movies, television series, and narrative video games involve a longer period of time immersed in the exclusive world. Immersion is, of course, a form of repetition: The longer an object is on screen, the more the frame is being repeated, or at least any frame containing the object. The more one watches episodes of Twin Peaks, the more one comes to feel the deficiency of one's particular instance of a town and one's life in that town, as well as one's lack of importance in that town as the characters in Twin Peaks have importance for their town. The town of Twin Peaks is, after all, the whole exclusive world of the series Twin Peaks. There has been a recent example of just this phenomenon in the news. Many viewers of the film Avatar have come away feeling depressed over the deficiency of their lives on earth compared to the life-type in the film.

II.

Films do not directly influence behaviour. Our consciousness of our unimportance and of the deficiency of our situations prevents us from directly enacting what we see in the film. One may experiment with enactment. As the teenager who yells to her parents during an argument, "I hate you!" as she's seen so many times on television. On television, the teenager is free to flee to her room, the parents remain silent and shocked; then the scene fades to black. The enactment fails, however. Unimportance and deficiency are confirmed when the non-exclusive world fails to conform to the lapidary exclusive world. The teenager's parents do not remain silent, but respond. The scene does not fade to black, but cruelly goes on while discomfort and guilt overwhelm. The failure of the enactment of an exclusive world event in a non-exclusive world produces humiliation. Naturally we avoid humiliation. A few youthful experiments ending in humiliation condition us to avoid enactment.

What films do influence is fantasy. In an earlier paragraph I claimed that a response to unimportance is retreat into fantasy. I also argued that at most we imitate phrases, mannerisms and character traits of the characters in exclusive worlds. When these are direct imitations, they are enactments. As such they often produce humiliation when they fail to have the same effect in the non-exclusive world as they have in the exclusive world. The humiliation is worse when these enactments are detected as enactments. To escape humiliation our enactments are carried out in fantasy.

Fantasy is the mental construction of an exclusive world in which one is an important character, usually the protagonist. One's actions within the exclusive fantasy world have a direct effect on the destiny of that world, as the exclusive world is created for the purpose of one's performing important actions and the destiny of that world is co-extensive with the personal goal for which the fantasy was begun. It is an exclusive world in which one's own actions are thus supremely important, insofar as one's actions within that world define its destiny.

Exclusive fantasy worlds are comprised of our experiences with the non-exclusive world and our experiences with exclusive worlds in various media, from childhood fairytales to Tolstoy, horror stories, and pornographic videos. The latter influence the narrative structure of the fantasies, the settings, and, of course, our behaviour. Enactments do not meet with humiliation in the exclusive fantasy world. As both protagonist and author of the fantasy, one controls how the characters in the exclusive fantasy world respond to one's actions. Since the fantasy is begun to place oneself in a context of importance as an escape from the unimportance and deficiency of the non-exclusive world, one's enactments are also perceived as important actions by the characters. The mannerisms of an important character that impressed when watching an exclusive film world, but fail to impress in a non-exclusive world, impress again in the exclusive fantasy world. As a detached viewer one sees oneself as a character within the exclusive fantasy world, so one's conclusion of the impressiveness of that character is not a humiliating egotism.

As an example, a teenager who has few friends and tends not to participate in school activities watches a lot of martial arts films or animated series like Dragonball. Occasionally his fantasies will situate him as a character in an exclusive world resembling those of the media he watches. He will fantasize his character as important, triumphing over particularly power enemies using martial arts, perhaps enemies even the protagonists of the films he watches are unable to defeat. He then takes the enactment, which he tried in a very similar exclusive fantasy world to the exclusive film words, into an exclusive fantasy world resembling his life situations or involving only characters abstracted from people in the non-exclusive world. He fantasizes that he is threatened by an athletic fellow student and uses martial arts to defeat that student. Rather than the fight producing extreme discomfort, the observing characters are impressed and a potential romantic partner (a girl, let's say) is especially impressed. He will never try the martial arts in real life, as he has never undertaken to learn martial arts. He knows he is unable to fight. He probably knows fighting does not have the same effect in the non-exclusive world as it has in exclusive film worlds. However, in the narrative of his exclusive fantasy world, mirroring the exclusive film worlds, martial arts is a form of important action: it contributes to the destiny of the exclusive world by overcoming the villains and getting the romantic partner.

Films, television, and video games will all contribute potential fantasy material to the viewer. High fantasy films and RPG video games may lead to fantasies in which the young man uses magical powers to affect the destiny of the exclusive fantasy world. Horror films may lead to fantasies in which the young man uses extreme violence on monsters or monstrous humans. Alternatively, he may fantasize himself as the villain-hero in response to a romantic rejection and terrify or even kill romantic rivals and/or the source of rejection. These are all potential enactments. The genres of film need not be so extreme. He could fantasize himself as a character winning romantic interest from women using dance talent, by being witty and seductive, or any number of structures he may have seen in media.

This retreat into fantasy, however, only intensifies the feeling of unimportance when the exclusive fantasy world dissipates before the non-exclusive world. This is represented in the Chuck Norris film Sidekicks. In this film, a high school boy with asthma retreats from his unimportance and life-deficiency into fantasies. His exclusive fantasy worlds are similar to the exclusive worlds of his favourite Chuck Norris movies. The more he fantasizes, the more unimportant his real life feels. In his fantasy life he is able to mythologize himself. His fantasy is an exclusive world with himself as the protagonist. His actions in his fantasy strongly affect the destiny of that exclusive world. His actions are important. In the non-exclusive world, he is reminded continually by his peers and his gym teacher that he is of no importance. He is painfully aware of his inability to enact in the non-exclusive world what he enacts in the exclusive fantasy world. (Of course, the irony is that the film itself is an exclusive fantasy world, so he does indeed learn martial arts and enact in the non-exclusive world--which is, actually, an exclusive film world and not the non-exclusive world at all--what he enacts in his exclusive fantasy world.) The more we compensate for our unimportance and life deficiency in a non-exclusive world by retreating into an exclusive fantasy world, the more desirous we are of retreating, as the more unimportant our actions in the non-exclusive world appear in comparison to our importance in the exclusive fantasy world. The more we fantasize about affecting important events in a particular way and find ourselves unable or unwilling to effect them in the non-exclusive world.

While behaviour is rarely directly influenced by films and television, it is indirectly influenced through fantasy. On the one hand, the frustration of confining enactment-unto-importance and self-mythologizing to exclusive fantasy worlds that have no effect in the non-exclusive world and can never be actualized will produce unpredictable behaviour patterns. For instance, fantasizing violent enactments that one may never enact in the non-exclusive world may lead to overcompensation in the form of excessive meekness. On the other hand, repetition of behavioural patterns in an exclusive fantasy world can condition responses that will continue into the non-exclusive world. In The Spiritual Combat, Lorenzo Scupoli counsels Christians to fantasize actions consistant with Christian charity, such as being patient with insults and showing kindness in response. The repetition of such fantasies, he claimed, would make the actions easier to perform in the non-exclusive world. In the same way, fantasizing enactments in which one dominates others through violence may make it easier for one to be more assertive. I would stipulate, moreover, that greater intelligence, creativity, and introspection, which combine to produce a richer fantasy life, is likely to have an impact in filtering just how indirectly exclusive fictional worlds affect behaviour in the non-exclusive world; which is to say, a fantasy life acts as a filter as much as an escape.

However, the ways in which fantasies affect behaviour is merely speculation on my part. Serious and scientific study is required. Perhaps such studies have already been conducted. But the purpose of this section has been to establish that exclusive fictional worlds directly affect not behaviour in the non-exclusive world but behaviour in exclusive fantasy worlds. Those who argue that violent films create violent people have been labouring under a naive view of how exclusive fictional worlds affect behaviour. The ways in which exclusive fictional worlds indirectly affect behaviour in the non-exclusive world is for others to research.