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.

The Question Concerning Watchability

I have often heard a film called unwatchable. Sometimes I'd already seen the film myself. I recall watching it without hindrance. I watched the unwatchable. Of course, we know what is meant by 'unwatchable.' Or at least we think we do. There is no careful definition of the term, but it tends to mean a film is so valueless that it defeats one's attempts to watch it for edification or pleasure. I'm not trying to play ignorant. I do think it's interesting to look into this point, however: How can a film be unwatchable when I just watched it?

The answer can't be that I simply have better eyes than Mr. X nor that he was wearing sunglasses. His claim is universal in character. The film is beyond watching: it is unwatchable. He obviously does not mean it cannot be looked at, but that it cannot be watched. "To watch" is redefined in Mr. X's vocabulary. By watching he means a form of appreciation. He is asserting that it is not possible to appreciate the film as it has nothing appreciable within it. He has certain viewing standards and this film has not met a single one of them in an anywhere near adequate capacity. What Mr. X does not permit is that there are alternative forms of appreciation than the rigid standards and expectations he brings to the film. The film is not watchable due to his watching. That is, the way in which he chooses to watch the film, what he looks for and expects, what informs his total viewing experience. We can call this his viewing mode. There are, however, alternative viewing modes with which the film might be quite watchable. That's an assumption of mine at this point. But at the very least, there's no reason to think there aren't alternative viewing modes.

Let's look at a familiar instance of multiple viewing modes. Someone watches Plan 9 from Outer Space. He says it's a terrible film, yes, "But," he adds "it's so bad, it's good." This expression is used often. Of course, that's a contradiction. If it's bad, it can't be good at the same time. So the most obvious interpretation is that once a film becomes so bad it gets pushed 'out the other side' into being good. By this logic incompetent directors and miserable budgets should produce masterpieces. J. Hoberman claims that "Supremely bad movies project a stupidity that's as fully awesome as genius." This does seem like yet another contradiction. If it's stupid, it's not genius. He has reduced one set of contradictory concepts to a different set of contradictory concepts.

What I suggest is that a film with such poor craftsmanship from a storytelling and technical point of view leads the viewer to give up attempting to appreciate the film in the classical viewing mode. One is left with two options: either consider the film unwatchable and abandon it, or find an alternative viewing mode with which to appreciate it. In the case of such movies as Plan 9, that viewing mode is usually an appreciation of the strangeness that is a result of the poor craftsmanship and an amusement at the constant unpredictability this strangeness holds. It is not the failure to meet classical viewing mode standards itself that is being appreciated, nor is it the film's failure that somehow creates the film's success for another mode of viewing. Both modes were always possible. Plan 9 is a failure as a well-made film, but a success as a strange, unpredictable, and amusing film. It just took a sufficiently overwhelming failure at the classical viewing level to force one to shift to an alternative viewing mode.

The series Mystery Science Theater 3000 thrives on viewing films from this alternative mode of bemusement. Every time I've watched Mystery Science Theater, however, I found myself thinking, "This very same approach could be applied to Citizen Kane with the same results." It could. This would be perceived as a mistake, a failure to comprehend Citizen Kane on the level it ought to be, that is, a failure to view the film in the mode it is best viewed with. However, there is no reason it couldn't be done. There is plenty of material there to fuel snide comments. I bring this up in order to show that there's no need to wait for poor craftsmanship to appreciate films in alternative ways: alternative viewing modes are always already available.

"Any film, however ordinary, is infinitely complex," writes Raoul Ruiz. In every shot there's a multitude of material to look at as well as listen to. We can think about any one of those portions of the image, let our minds wander, dream about them. Our eyes can scan the image in countless ways and each of those ways offers a new viewing mode with which to travel through the film. The next shot offers another world of possibilities. The totality of a film offers such a plethora of possibilities for appreciation. Yet nearly everyone, nearly all of the time, looks for what contributes to the narrative or the themes. In the process they exclude every other possibility as mere distraction and false to the film.

It is just this point that needs explaining now. Implicit in the classical viewing mode is a limitation of appreciation to narrative, craft, and themes alone. What I call the classical viewing mode seems to be three interrelated viewing modes. It gives us a set of standards, which yield expectations about what we will see when we go into a movie. It is the default position, the way our eyes and minds have been trained to observe films since childhood. The first is narrative. We're all trained to look for a story. We have standards for what constitutes a good story. Characters have to be performing interesting actions that move them toward a predestined goal. The second is character. This is a slightly more sophisticated part of the classical viewing mode. This is appreciating character separate from narrative. It is possible to simply enjoy complex characters even in a story with scant narrative, as one must in many arthouse films. The standards of character demand depth and development in the psychology of the characters. The third and most sophisticated part is artistry. It is possible to enjoy a good story with good characters while not demanding that any particular insight be imparted. However, the classical viewing mode does have standards for artistic intention and the subtlety with which the artist's themes are to be imparted. These three modes are hierarchized in the one mode of classical viewing. If a film succeeds on the first level but not on the others, it's decent. If it succeeds on the first and second levels but not on the third, it's good. If it succeeds on all three, it's a very good film and a contender for greatness.

There is nothing wrong with the classical viewing mode itself. It does indeed reveal truths about the films. The problem is that it is not the only viewing mode that reveals truths. As cinematic history progressed, the classical viewing method came to be not just dominant, but dominant to the exclusion of all others. It is a viewing mode that excludes as it monopolizes the validity of aesthetic experience. Why might it exclude in this way? Perhaps it is a commercial explanation. The creation of genres, narrative expectations, and quality expectations--in short, the creation of the classical viewing mode's expectations--facilitates the domination of the film market. For complementing the standards of the viewing mode are standards of production: 35mm film stock, 35mm cameras, studio lighting, quality set design, quality actors, and so forth. Films that do not meet these production standards have little to no chance of meeting classical viewing standards. Yet almost exclusively studio-backed films can meet these production standards. This is the explanation offered by Ruiz. Cocteau, on the other hand, blames intellectual arrogance.

I think both Ruiz and Cocteau are mistaken. They are treating side-effects as causes. Although Cocteau is closer. If we look at the shape and texture of the classical viewing mode, I think we will see that it is just the very nature of the classical viewing mode to exclude. I said above that Mr. X, the faithful exponent of the classical viewing mode, is using a redefined version of the verb 'to watch.' It is redfined so that only the classical viewing mode counts as watching. The classical viewing mode is structured such that we naturally assume it is the only way of watching a film. That is, it perceived as the only way of revealing the truth of a film. This way is to proceed by standards. And standards on which we can agree are the only means of objectivity. Whatever is not objective is subjective and whatever is subjective reveals the truth not about the film but about the person viewing the film. It is just this intellectual apparatus that ensures the classical viewing mode its dominance, not the commercial, political, or social apparati.

When I speak of alternative viewing modes perhaps what the reader imagines is an alternative set of standards against which to judge the film. But this would still be the classical viewing mode. The classical viewing mode proceeds by standards. The standards are thought to be objective. There is much room for debate within the mode as to precisely what those standards are, of course. But giving greater importance in one's standards to cinematography than to editing is not a new viewing mode at all. This is precisely how the dominance of the classical viewing mode has been secured: we can scarcely conceive of a mode of viewing a film that does not proceed by standards.

The classical viewing mode just is this scientific approach to the cinematic art. It is an approach of quantification, of measurement, of relying upon objective standards. The cinematography is an 8, the acting is a 7, the story drags in the middle and so is a 5. Films are rated and ranked according to their ratings. Whatever is not quantifiable or cannot be demonstrated in a brief review is discarded from the record of the cinematic experience.

Alternative viewing modes appreciate without quantification. They do not rely upon standards. Here's an example. The film Out of Africa is a good film by classical viewing standards. It has an enjoyable, moving story with fascinating characters. The craftsmanship is excellent. It even has themes. However, that's not the only level on which I appreciate the film. Whenever I watch Out of Africa, I'm enrapt by the photography of Africa. Not just the photography, in fact, but the sounds, the atmosphere captured in the pro-filmic events, the actors, the sound. It overwhelms me, touches me, and calls out to me. I long to go to Africa myself and simply be there. Maybe I would stay there for ever. It's as though I belong there. It's a perfect place, despite its imperfections and dangers. It's where humanity began. It's the mother of all humans. I feel an incredible kinship to all of humanity suddenly: we are all "out of Africa." This is a true chain of feelings I experience when I watch the film. The progression looks logical, but if you think about it you will see it's very lateral reasoning. It's a combination of reasoning and feeling, with the greater emphasis on feeling. The reasoning is merely for articulation. This mode of viewing connects so well with the overall tone of the film and with its themes. But this mode of viewing does not uncover any themes itself. These feelings are not themes, motifs, or symbols. I can't prove they're there. There are no objective standards for this approach, no objective way of showing one must feel this way. Yet my appreciation in this viewing mode is still true of the film. It is not true of me, or rather not just true of me, but of the film itself. It is an aspect of the film not appreciable by the classical viewing mode. This non-objective experience can be objective truth, however counter-intuitive that appears.

That is not to say alternative viewing modes are never employed. Each form of ideological criticism has adopted alternative viewing modes. The psychoanalytic theorists look for a rich subconscious rather than a rich consciousness when they watch films. They will often appreciate the most directly populist and artless films for being truer to the subconscious features of those involved and, more generally, of the types of people involved. Slavoj Zizek, for instance, highly regards David Lynch's Dune. In the classical viewing mode, Dune is generally regarded as a failure. Many ideological critics see the debate as being a matter accepting alternative sets of standards, standards that might appeal to groups of people who were not dominant in the Western tradition. So perhaps for some ideological theorists a broadening of the classical viewing mode is all that is desired. Some more radical theorists are, however, arguing for non-objective viewing modes, totally Other modes of appreciation.

Not only that, but nearly all ideological critics criticize the classical viewing mode for one reason or another. Some marxists see the classical viewing mode, which takes pleasure in pure entertainment and art, as implicitly capitalist in its accumulation of self-interested experience. Some feminists have criticized the classical viewing mode as voyeuristic and voyeurism as inherently patriarchal. I am not so much interested in their critiques of the classical viewing mode, but it is noteworthy that they do criticize it. In order to shift to an alternative viewing mode, perhaps it is necessary for some of them to discredit the classical viewing mode. I don't see it as necessary. It is possible to recognize that truth is revealed by all viewing modes, classical included. But the issue both the ideological theorists and I share with the classical viewing mode is its exclusion of all other viewing modes as revealing aesthetic truths.

Then there is the tradition Scott MacDonald calls critical cinema. This includes queer films, feminist films, avant-garde films: whatever films cannot be received according to the classical viewing mode. MacDonald writes that when we see one of these films, it "surprises or shocks us, we are forced to question the implicit assumptions about cinema our expectations encode." It is more than that. These films are designed to be beyond the classical viewing mode's scope of appreciation. One has to either find alternative viewing modes to appreciate them or leave the films exhausted by an empty experience. Those who can't shift viewing modes will feel their time and energies have been wasted. Most people, however, adapt quickly. These films take advantage of this and re-train the eyes of their viewers. They don't just prepare one to adapt to this film alone. After watching these films, one comes to normal films with re-trained eyes. After watching Su Friedrich's Damned If You Don't, can Black Narcissus or even Sister Act ever be viewed the same way again? Or indeed films without nuns. The lessons of Damned If You Don't can with little more effort be brought to Lawrence of Arabia. Martin Arnold's films train the eyes and ears to better appreciate the kinetics and aural texture of films, amongst other things. Then there are films that recycle footage. Peter Tscherkassky's Outer Space uses footage from The Entity. One thing Outer Space does is show an alternative look at The Entity itself. Recycled footage films are almost alternative viewing modes mapped out before you.

We unwittingly employ alternative viewing modes all the time. Whenever we watch a news program or the weather, whenever we spend hours watching a sports game, we're employing alternative viewing modes. When we enjoy a movie and we don't know why. We feel we can't explain it. We can't intellectualize it or prove it. The appreciation is subjective, but we know the film is objectively good enough to warrant that appreciation. In such times, we've employed an alternative viewing mode. When we enjoy a cheesy b-movie or a poorly-dubbed, low-budget '60s kung-fu movie, we employ an alternative viewing mode. Viewing for fun, for cool fights, for ass-kicking are alternative viewing modes. Yet we chastise ourselves intellectually. If our minds wander during a film, we tell ourselves we're not watching it correctly. If our attention wanders to the airplane in the sky behind the Roman centurion, we're not watching correctly. "This craving to understand," writes Cocteau, "shuts them off from the great and exquisite imprecisions that art deploys in the solitudes where men no longer try to understand, but to feel." To watch, sometimes we must sacrifice. We must fold the wings of the intellect.

There is risk of getting stuck in two ruts instead of one. We might say, "For the avant-garde film, alternative viewing; for the conventional film, conventional viewing; anything in between is bad." It is true that films often indicate to us how best they are viewed. A feminist film is probably best viewed in that mode. Citizen Kane is probably best viewed in a classical mode of the highest order. Yet, we needn't employ only one mode of viewing at a time; we needn't constrain ourselves. "Any film, no matter how ordinary is infinitely complex." This is especially true when we watch films that are terrible by classical standards. J. Hoberman, for instance, views Plan 9 from Outer Space as an unintentionally avant-garde film. Ed Wood Jr. was not attempting to make an avant-garde film. But if the viewing mode one would apply to an avant-garde film works for Plan 9, why not do it? If one is going to watch a film, one might as well get as much out of it as possible.

Such is the danger of the classical viewing mode. When we chastise ourselves, rein ourselves in, make ourselves view in that classical way, we limit not just the film but ourselves. If we view a film as solely an objectively quantifiable experience, with its story, craft, and art reducible to the standards we have ready-to-hand, we are ourselves merely measurers of the film. We constitute the film as a atomic object, a thing constructed of parts to be analyzed as a calculable coherence of forces. And we constitute ourselves as the calculators. We objectively calculate what is of value and what isn't. This is not to say these calculations are false to the film. Measuring story, craft, and art is a legitimate and worthwhile appreciation of film. The film really is an atomic object. But that is not all it is. We are measurers. But that it is not all there is to the human being. We can be more than calculators and exploiters of the film. Cocteau says 'escapism' is "a fashionable term which implies that the audience is trying to get out of itself, while in fact beauty in all its forms drives us back into ourselves and obliges us to find in our own souls the deep enrichment that frivolous people are determined to seek elsewhere." When we view the film in ways that reveal new truths about the film, we reveal new truths about ourselves. As we constitute the film in new ways with our viewing, so do we find the many ways we are constituted. When I discover the power and beauty of Africa while watching Out of Africa, I too am enriched. I constitute the film as a revelation, a prophecy. And I become more than a calculator or an exploiter. When the devout watch The Ten Commandments on television every Easter and they're overwhelmed with mystical awe, they become mystics in regards to the film. They find new depths in the film and in themselves.

So the issue we were investigating all along should be answerable now. How can a film be unwatchable when I just watched it? No film is unwatchable. We are limited only by our own intelligence, background, intuitive and creative powers. We limit ourselves at our own peril.


Sources/Further reading

Jean Cocteau's The Art of Cinema. Trans. by Robin Buss
J. Hoberman's Vulgar Modernism.
Scott MacDonald's A Critical Cinema. All volumes.
Raoul Ruiz's Poetics of Cinema.

A Currency Model of Genre Classification

A Currency Model of Genre Classification

When inquiring over the classification of species, there are solid criteria and solid facts to produce the answer. Is a whale a mammal or a fish? Like fish, the whale lives in water. However, it gives birth like a mammal. The latter fact has led biologists to study the evolution of the whale. They found that it genetically belongs to the mammal family. That's a hard fact. Film genres can't be classified so easily. Or they can be, but there's no reason for anyone to agree with you; there's no fact of the matter. There are obviously no genetic strands linking films back to common ancestors. While there are chains of influences, each film is sui generis to some extent. So how do we go about classifying genres?

Speaking as generally as possible, there are top-down approaches and bottom-up approaches. Top-down approaches are those that begin from general principles, then apply these to concrete cases. These principles will be broad criteria with which the members of the genre can be easily picked out. It would be possible, for instance, to begin with the criterion that all horror films must be designed to produce the emotion of horror within its audience. On this account, Psycho can only be considered a horror film if Hitchcock intended to horrify the audience. If, rather, Hitchcock intended to provide thrills, then it would be a thriller instead. That works for many movies. But surely propaganda films and other genres try to create the emotion of horror as well. One might reply, "But the sole purpose of a propaganda film is not to horrify." This then excludes all films that have diluted purpose, mainly horror comedies like Young Frankenstein and higher-brow horror films like Dreyer's Vampyr, Valerie and Her Week of Wonders, Videodrome, or even Dawn of the Dead, what with its overt social commentary. With Cronenberg it's not even clear that the emotion of horror is his intention at all so much as it is a by-product of the ideas he's presenting. These would be the challenges for a top-down approach: to either refine the principles so that they conform to intuition or to refine intuition to conform to the principles, until one arrives at a point where the genre categories would capture just what one desires, no more and no less: the state Rawls called 'reflective equilibrium.'

The bottom-up approach, on the other hand, rather resembles the scientific approach outlined in the first paragraph. One does not begin from general principles. Instead, based on the actual films, one derives certain features, a set of relevant 'family resemblances', with which to identify the groups to which each film belongs. As with the scientific approach there may also be an historical aspect. This would necessarily involve bringing other media into the investigation, since the horror novel predates cinema. For sake of discussion, we'll only take account of cinema. Returning to horror, the bottom-up approach would look for relevant family resemblances that unite horror films. Let us take as our set of family resemblances the following: tendency to inspire fear and revulsion, characters who experience terror, death, and monsters. A set of family resemblances of this sort can then be taken as either sufficient or necessary for counting a film a horror film. Thus one's criteria or principles are derived from the concrete cases. To say these are necessary is to declare that any film not sharing full family resemblance is not properly of the genre; it merely has characteristics similar to this family. To say these features are sufficient to make a film a horror film but not necessary means there could be films that have some of the features and not others. This would deal with films that are only half within the genre, like Young Frankenstein. Of course, one will begin to run into problems then. If Young Frankenstein is partially horror, then why not the recent Monsters vs. Aliens? It has monsters, obviously. The challenge here is to tweak the set of family resemblances so that there are no obvious howlers. It would be silly to end up calling Titanic a horror film because of the death and the suspense experienced as the ship began to sink; the family resemblances would require tweaking for sure.

The approach I favour is, to keep in the same schema, bottom-down (I guess). I don't believe it's necessary to refer to general principles at all. Let's begin with an example outside of cinema: currency. Money is imaginary: it's pure abstraction. The currency we use are just pieces of paper or coins that indicate an amount of money. These pieces of paper have currency because just about everyone accepts them as valuable. You don't have to worry about a shop saying, "I'm sorry, but this is just a piece of paper. I disagree with you that it's worth anything." There are also cases of a currency of ideas. Take the film Ishtar. More people think Ishtar is a bad film than have ever seen Ishtar. Through the tireless efforts of the critics, Ishtar simply gained currency as a bad movie. Currency is gained through repetition and repetition of agreement to the point that there is no fear of having to defend one's position. You need never worry about defending your view that a five-dollar bill is worth something. It's not an opinion of yours, it's a commonly held view. (Granted in the case of currency there's also the authority of the State.) Similarly, you needn't worry about having to defend the position that Ishtar is a bad film. It has currency as a bad film, so if you express the view that it is a bad film most people who have heard of Ishtar will assent. It's a safe commonly-held opinion on which to rely. Comedians use currency all the time. George W. Bush has currency as stupid, Hitler has currency as evil, Ronnie Corbett has currency as short. This makes these people easy references for jokes on stupidity, evil, or shortness. Comedians require this communal assent: the audience must be on the comedian's side.

I think we have a decent notion of what currency is now. What relevance does it have to genre classification? The approach I favour toward genre classification is that whatever films have gained some currency as one genre or another is sufficient. This approach privileges practice over theory. Where the top-down and bottom-up approaches had to rely on principles of some normative character, my approach is purely descriptive. This is like a dictionary. Good dictionaries contain an "ain't" entry because it's a word people use; it doesn't matter if it's a 'proper' word or not, because it's not the place of dictionaries to tell people how to speak, but to tell people how people generally do speak. Similarly, I think of genre classifications not as telling people how to categorize movies, but as telling people just how people do categorize movies. The importance of currency is filtering out idiosyncrasies. Just as with a dictionary, not just any word anybody says gains an entry. It is only words that fall into general use that gain an entry.

One can only discover what is in currency regarding genre classifications through discourse. There is no controversy discussing The Exorcist as a horror film. You can call it such without having to defend this view. It has currency as a horror film. If horror fans and scholars of the genre can talk more or less uncontroversially about Silence of the Lambs, then it clearly has some currency as a horror film. Similarly, if they rarely or never speak of Blue Velvet in any way other than peripheral, then it seems to lack the currency. Mulholland Dr. is a film that, while sometimes spoken of as a horror film, certainly lacks currency in that it is an opinion one will usually have to defend.

This approach puts considerable faith in common intuition. However, was that not always the case? In the top-down approach, I ended by noting the theorist will have to bring intuitions and principles into equilibrium. Because what good is a theory that classifies a lot of films as horror films when nobody else is willing to accept this view, let alone make use of it? Similarly, the bottom-up approach is based on finding resemblances in films we already intuitively consider as horror. So why not circumvent the notion of principles altogether and rely on intuitions? Everyone will have their different reasons for classifying the genres of films and usually they themselves will not be explicitly relying on intuition. My approach allows all of those reasons to contribute to defining the genre. If someone can successfully defend their position that Mulholland Dr. is partially a horror film, each repetition will yield stronger currency. It's up to individual tastes to decide what has sufficient currency in discourse; to decide, that is, when disagreement with the classification proposed becomes more idiosyncratic than the classification itself.

The guiding notion behind this approach is that genre itself exists for the sake of discourse. It is a pragmatic notion for the sake of discussion in all its forms: criticism, advertising, etc.. A theory of genre that yields idiosyncratic results is without value for discussion. Discussion requires some points of agreement. As Wittgenstein rightly pointed out, one cannot have a personal language. Language is for communication and communication implies, even at an etymological level, more than one interlocutor. Genre ideally is one of those common points of agreement. While some discussions on the boundaries of genre and the location of some films within one tradition or another are fruitful indeed and even necessary, it seems to me best to rely on a currency model of genre classification, which ultimately means relying on the intuition and basic understanding of cinematic traditions the full film-discussing community possesses as a group. It's a democratic view in the tradition of Jean-Jacques Rousseau: most appropriate to a democratic medium like cinema.

Prologue to Epstein's Chute de la maison Usher

A prologue is not a review. It is to be read before watching in order to provide the tools for understanding the film.

I. Jean Epstein

Epstein originally studied to be a doctor, taking biophysics and medicine at the University of Lyons. Passionate about the arts, he turned his attention to literature and literary criticism, writing a treatise on theory of art. He included only a single chapter on cinema.

Shortly after, he turned his whole attention to cinema, publishing Bonjour Cinema (1921), his contribution to film theory when it was yet in its infancy. His theory of cinema developed throughout his career, but remained influenced by the writings of Louis Delluc.

Delluc was a disciple of Lumiere, a theorist in his own right, and worthy of some note as being perhaps the first filmmaker to treat film as a medium for art. Epstein worked with Delluc for some time before going on to make his own films, beginning with Pasteur, a biopic of Louis Pasteur.

It was after this first biopic that Epstein attempted to put his theories into practice, starting with Coeur Fidele, which showed influence primarily of Delluc and Abel Gance. Working with Luis Bunuel, he soon began adapting two Poe stories, "The Fall of the House of Usher" and "The Oval Portrait" as Chute de la maison Usher. Bunuel left production early, however, being unable to agree on how faithful to remain to Poe. Bunuel stated in an interview that Usher is all Epstein's.

II. Situation and Impressionism

Epstein's fidelity was not to the narrative of Poe's story, but to the themes and motifs. In the story, Roderick and Madeline are brother and sister; in the film, they are husband and wife. In the story, the narrator character is Roderick's age; in the film, it is a decrepit old man.

Epstein's disregard of Poe's narrative was motivated by his distaste for narrative in general. His theory of cinema was derived in part from Delluc's theory of the photogenic. Where Delluc believed that even the most atrocious film could be salvaged by a photogenic object, especially a pretty face, Epstein's view of the photogenic is more complex. For Epstein, the photogenic is the essence of cinema itself and narrative is just getting in the way. "I want films in which not so much nothing as nothing very much happens," he wrote. He wants situations rather than stories. Situations where the photogenic can be captured by the camera.

For Epstein, the photogenic is "any aspect of things, beings, or souls whose moral character is enhanced by filmic reproduction." And the only aspects of things, beings, or souls whose moral value can be increased by cinema are mobile and personal.

By mobile, Epstein means that the object is undergoing variations in space-time, that is, both space and time. Cinema has a fourth dimension that is time and any film that is not 'drawing' in the fourth dimension is a failure.

By personal, Epstein means that the object, whether a person or a thing, has significance transcending the surface, a spirit as it were; and this is a significance earned by its past and predictable future. Epstein gives the example of a close-up of a revolver, which is not just a revolver when so selected by the camera, but is revolver-character insofar as it is itself the impulse to crime, to self-defense, or to remorse for crime. Everything so selected (in a good film) by the camera is made a character thus. Or some possession with sentimental value: it has sentimental value by its history, the memories and emotions attached to it--that is its personality.

While it is only the camera lens that has the power to reveal the photogenic, according to Epstein, the camera requires a director behind it with true personality--an artist, in short. And this artist lends personality to the photogenic discoveries made with the camera. What results is that, "matter is molded and set into relief by personality; all nature, all things appear as a man has dreamed them; that world is created as you think it is... Time hurries on or retreats, or stops and waits for you. A new reality is revealed, a reality for a special occasion, which is untrue to everyday reality..."

Cinema is thus a dreamworld, for Epstein. A machine-produced dream, made up of situations. And these situations of the morally enhanced (deified, archetyped) aspects of mobile, personal reality. A film is thus like a Symbolist poem for Epstein, made up of images endowed with layers of meanings to embody absolute truths and personality; and like a Surrealist painting, magnifying the unseen, unconscious aspects of things in the image.

III. "Based on themes by Edgar Allen Poe"

Poe was an important figure to the Symbolist poets and painters, for the reason that he gave pre-eminence to the inner life of his characters much as the Symbolists sought to render reality representative of the inner. Poe's philosophy of composition involved choosing objects and situations in the real world that reflected the inner life of his characters, hence the raven in "The Raven" and the beating heart in "The Tell-Tale Heart."

Given Epstein's theories of cinema, he and Poe are a perfect match. Epstein engages not Poe's narratives, but his world of symbols, the objects that are invested with the photogenic: the oval portrait with the soul of the woman it depicts trapped inside is here Roderick Usher's obession; the pendulum of the grandfather clock is Poe's pendulum from the pit; Madeline Usher is buried in the tomb of Ligeia, and so on to much of the apparently insignificant details.

The framework of the tale, "The Fall of the House of Usher," provides the grand situation Epstein has to focus on. Enveloped in this situation are all the objects--people and things--to express a surreal dream of Gothic tropes. It is the minds of Poe, his protagonists, and of Epstein, that become the spirit of the images; for which reason did Epstein claim his film is "Based on the themes of Edgar Allen Poe." Whatever infidelities to the narrative(s) Poe constructed are balanced by the fidelity to Poe's themes and vision.

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Watch the film here: http://video.google.ca/videoplay?docid=9172687785667332165
Enjoy.

Subtextual Criticism Challenge: Epilogue

You should read this article first, as it gives this epilogue its context.
I should also note that some of the views expressed in this essay are no longer accurate representations of my position. See The Question Concerning Watchability for an exposition of my current position.

While I undertook the challenge in a spirit of amusement, I do think there is a serious point to be gleaned from it. This was by no means an ulterior motive of mine, but rather a derivative of my basic attitude towards the recent fashion in literature and film studies departments in the academies.

Since Freud, New Criticism, and finally Foucault--who drove the nail into the proverbial coffin--the death of the author has been declared complete. Freud paved the way, because he believed the author's subconscious workings more important than his conscious ones. So, for Freud, though Hamlet may be about many things, what is interesting is how it centers upon the relationship of a son to his mother and stepfather, and how this expresses Freud's various theories of the subconscious.

The problem with this is obvious. Freud invented psychoanalysis, so he already knows all of his psychoanalytic theories. If he assumes all there is to be gained by literature is psychoanalytic insight, what can he, the man who made it all up anyway, possibly have to gain from literature? So is it from the standpoint of any ideology: if you read everything into it, you're only reflecting your own thoughts back to yourself when you read--you're not learning, not improving yourself.
Come New Criticism, the emphasis shifts from the author, or the text as an expression of the author, to the text is a pure artifact. This is where notions like, "The text has a life of its own," come from. Obviously that expression is just a metaphor, since a text is not alive. The expression just means that once the text is created, its connection to its author is no more privileged than its connection to any other human being.

This conceit, also, has a fairly obvious flaw. The text's relationship to the author is one of creating mind to created object. It's an output-to-product function. The text's relationship to other readers is not creative in the least. It's a product-to-input function. This is very like conversation, where one person expresses something, another hears and understands it, and is then free to make one's own response. How ridiculous it would be in a conversation were one to declare, "Well, your words have a life of their own, so I'll analyze what you've just said in the way that feels right for me, then I'll get back to you." Art, as an expressive medium, is indeed conversational in form. To participate in the conversation fruitfully, an attitude of respect for one another is required.

Finally, Foucault took some notes from Hegel and Heidegger, adding in the notion that the ideas of human beings--what they consider to be true or false, beautiful or ugly, right or wrong--are not Platonic truths eternally one way or the other, but rather the products of historical forces beyond our control. "Truth is a function of power," argued Foucault. The dominant group, such as white, European culture in USA, is responsible for what gets considered knowledge or truth (science, e.g.), as well as for standards of beauty (the literary and cinematic classics, e.g.). This isn't a conscious decision, of course, but merely a product of history, which moves one group into power with its cultural ideas, etc..

In conjunction with the previous two points, Foucault's theories made possible all the ideological (or subtextual) criticism of the academies today. No author is believed to be thinking for himself. He's just a mouthpiece out of which flows all the subconscious motivations of his biological being and his socio-cultural, ideological milieu. Dickens didn't write to express his deep sentiments and tell an entertaining tale, he rather subconsciously wrote to reenforce patriarchal, European dominance and maybe in response to some anal fixation.

It seems like no woman leaves the academy unspoiled by feminism these days. It's a real Invasion of the Mind Snatchers. They don't think for themselves. They absorb the feminism, justify it as well as they can, and then dronelike set to reading their pre-learned theories into everything they find. Same with the psychoanalysts, the Marxists, the queer studies people, etc.. It never occurs to them that it might be embarrassing to claim a text is about something it clearly isn't; it doesn't occur to them because they've had it drilled into their heads that their view is more important as the text author's and anyone who says otherwise belongs to the old, Patriarchal, European ideology that had dominated aesthetics for so long.

Indeed, this very message of mine will be so interpreted by one of them. But what happens to the human-ness of communication, of art? What makes art human is that it's two people communicating. You can never know too many people. But life is short. With great books and great movies, you can really meet new, great people. You can learn what of their deepest selves they are expressing on the page, in the only way they could express it. However, you can also do what our ideologically-oriented f(r)iends do and look for the unconscious motivations in it all. Doing so, you remove the human element. The author is no longer a human expressing himself, the text is an artifact that is a product of socio-historical forces out of human control; read into it whatever you like, as long as it works, because it's pretty much an empty vessel. This way, you don't get to know of or learn from other humans, you never encounter them--you merely scrutinize their thoughts and words like cold, causeless artifacts, with no significance, no human connection. That's intellectual masturbation, not criticism. Or to clarify, such attempts at criticism are in fact exercises of theory and can help elucidate the theory to others who are interested in the theory, but is uninteresting for anyone trying to understand the work allegedy being critiqued.

So, what I have done in this subtextual criticism challenge is show just how ridiculous these theories are. It's not a reductio ad absurdum, of course; but the results are pretty damn absurd, aren't they?