by Colin Mcginn
Those steeped in the ways of Freudian psychoanalysis may try a very different angle: movies engage the mind because they make subliminal contact with the unconscious mind. Movies filter down into the unconscious, where they meet up with our primitive repressed desires and childhood memories. Thus it has been suggested that the screen stands for the breast as a Freudian symbol, so that the film viewer is regressing to an infantile state in which he has still not differentiated himself from the objective world, and in which he still is attached to the all-encompassing mother. The attractions of the screen mimic the comforts of the breast.4
It is hard to discuss such proposals without undertaking a full-scale discussion of Freudian theory, which I cannot do here; but I take it few people will be immediately swayed by such farfetched ideas. As the film theorist Noel Carroll remarks, if the screen is the breast, where is the nipple?5 Also, screens are flat, whereas breasts tend not to be—not to mention square and unitary. Perhaps there are unconscious fears and desires that some movies succeed in reaching, thus delivering to the viewer a psychic depth charge; but surely many movies have nothing to do with any supposed Freudian unconscious. It can hardly be that every movie plays out some Oedipal drama that pricks the viewer's unconscious. And, once again, the fact, if it is one, that certain narrative themes might mesh with the apparatus of Freudian psychology does nothing to explain what it is about movies specifically—as opposed to novels, theatre, painting, and so on—that engages us. If this were the correct explanation, then it would be hard to see why movies should stand out from these other media, quantitatively or qualitatively. Why should what is peculiarly cinematic connect so powerfully with Freudian psychical formations?
A final proposal—one made by Carroll, an astute commentator on the workings of film—is that movies offer us, by means of their cinematic devices, an unusually clear and intelligible medium.6 We do not need to learn to watch films (unlike reading), and such devices as the close-up and variable framing (moving the camera around to produce different perspectives) serve to direct the viewer's attention to precisely where it needs to go in order the follow the action. Thus movies are uniquely accessible to the viewing mind— easily digested. While I would agree that movies do enjoy this kind of narrative perspicuity, this doesn't explain their power. Something can be easy to follow and yet profoundly boring. Why should the fact that I find something highly intelligible by itself make me enthralled by it? The impact on the psyche seems to go deeper than simply ease of processing. Carroll wants to suggest that the power of movies is a matter of how they are processed by the intellect. But isn't that power primarily manifested in the emotions generated by film? We need to know how movies tap so readily into our emotions, not merely how they are cognitively accessible. For movies to have their power, it is perhaps necessary that they be readily intelligible to the audience (though some affecting films are quite puzzling); but this does not seem sufficient to explain the peculiar power that they have. It is far too general a property to do that, possessed by many other art forms to one degree or another. We need to find something unique to film, not something that comes in degrees and can be possessed by other media. When I am mesmerized by a scene in a film, it is not simply because I understand it extremely well.
MOVIES AND PLAYS
When movies began, many people felt that this new medium was doomed, nothing more than a wan simulacrum of live theatre. Instead of live actors performing in front of you, in full 3-D with natural color and sound, the cinema offered only mute 2-D monochrome—a paltry substitute for the real thing. Once the novelty wore off, audiences would dwindle, and film would retire to its true calling—as a documentary medium, perhaps especially well suited to medical education. This prediction, of course, has been spectacularly refuted. But it enables us to frame our question in a sharp way: how does cinema differ from theatre in its ability to engage the mind? Both are visual media primarily (unlike the novel), and both involve the temporal sequencing of human actions (unlike painting); so what does cinema have that theatre lacks? It is easy to see what theatre has that cinema lacks—real performers in close proximity to the audience— but what is it that cinema gives us that theatre does not? How exactly is the movie experience unlike the theatre experience, and in ways that add to its appeal? That is how I shall be framing the question, so nothing can count as a good answer to it that fails to differentiate movies from stage plays. Throughout this book, then, I shall be concerned with what is peculiar to film—that is, peculiar to the psychology of film watching. I want to understand how movies work on the mind in virtue of their specific properties, and what it is about the mind that prepares it for the influence of movies. This is an investigation into the psychology of film—specifically, film reception. I shall be concerned with this question from the perceptual, cognitive, and affective viewpoints: how we see films, what the film image means to us, and how our feelings are aroused by film. Movies engage our psychological faculties in profound and unique ways. Though movies are of relatively recent origin, they call upon ancient and deep-seated aspects of the mind; and they enjoy significant liaisons with other aspects of our experience of the world. They serve to condense much of significance into a relatively brief and isolated experience— the experience of watching a movie.
Two
VISION AND THE SCREEN
LOOKING AND SEEING
You are sitting in the movie theatre, eyes turned toward the screen. Light images are being projected onto that blank expanse—a series of stills in very quick succession, seen as movement—and these images in turn project light into your eyes. You see something. You visually attend. There is an act of looking. But what do you see, what do you attend to, what do you look at? What, in general, is your visual relation to the screen, the moving image, the actors, the characters they play? For all of these things are distinct from each other: the screen isn't the image temporarily falling upon it; the image isn't identical to the actor whose image it is; and the actor cannot be identified (literally) with the character he or she plays. So what is your visual relation to each of these entities? When, as we say, we “watch a movie,” what is going on with our eyes—with our whole visual system? This is the first stage at which the movie exerts its power over us—how it enters our eyes—and we need to know what kind of vision this involves.
It is clear enough that we see the images on the screen— those projected patterns of light. Our visual awareness represents those images, just as it does ordinary objects of sight. The images are patches of light that appear in visual consciousness, just as sunlight falling across the screen would be seen. It is less clear that we see the screen onto which the images are projected, at least once the movie starts. Before the movie starts, when the screen is blank, it can of course be readily seen (so long as the curtain is not in the way): it is just a large expanse of whitish gray right in front of you. But once the images start to inhabit its surface, it effectively disappears, covered up by the images. You certainly can't see its gray coloring. It is as if it has been covered with a coat of paint, rendering invisible what was once visible. (Television is different: here you see the screen even when the set is on, because the TV images are not thrown onto the screen.) The images themselves are what now occupy the visual field— they are straightforwardly seen. At best, the screen is seen in a secondary sense, as what “contains” the images.
But are the images that we see also looked at? We appear to be looking at something as we watch a movie—is it simply the images on the screen? I don't mean “look at” in the sense of “look toward”—the viewer's eyes are certainly oriented in the direction of the image—but in the sense of attending to them: Are we looking at them in the way we might be looking at the flaws in a piece of china or the petals on a flower—examining them, scrutinizing them, focusing on them? Are they the prime objects of our visual attention? This question has not been settled once we have decided whether the images are seen, since it is possible to see something you are not atten
ding to or looking at. I might be searching for you in a crowd, but “look right through you”: you certainly occupy my visual field and are seen by me, but I don't focus on you or single you out from everyone else. At any given moment we are seeing a great many things, only some of which we are actively looking at or attending to. So are the images on the screen something we see but don't look at?
I think the answer is clearly yes. We are not attending to those patterns of light that we are no doubt seeing; nor are we attending to the screen on which they appear. This is obvious once we think of a case in which we would say we are looking at the images—when there is something wrong with the images, say, when they're blurred or grainy or oddly colored, and our job is to correct the problem. But in the normal case of watching a movie we don't focus our attention on those fleeting patterns of light—we, as it were, look right through them. What we look through them to I shall consider later; for now I hope it is clear that we are not, in the normal case, looking at the images that we indisputably see. They, after all, are not the point of the exercise; it is what they depict or represent that interests us, whatever precisely this may be. The images are merely vehicles to direct our attention elsewhere, so there is no point in scrutinizing them for their own sake. They fade into the background, so to speak. Vision does not relate to the screen by making us look at what is (literally) on the screen, as opposed to what it is that the image on the screen depicts. Watching a movie is therefore not a matter of attending to the images on the screen, even though seeing those images is essential to the enterprise. It is a little like listening to someone speaking: you don't normally attend to the words themselves, as acoustic signals, you attend to what the words mean.
So is there no kind of looking that relates us to the images on the screen? I earlier used the phrase “look through” and noted that what we look through we don't look at (say, a window). We also speak of “looking into” as when we say that someone was looking into a pool of water (at something in the water). And it is certainly tempting to employ these concepts of looking through and looking into in application to the screen image: we look into the screen, through the images displayed upon it, and at whatever those images represent. Here is an interesting passage from the noted editor and sound designer Walter Murch: “With a theatrical film, particularly one in which the audience is fully engaged, the screen is not a surface, it is a magic window, sort of a looking glass through which your whole body passes and becomes engaged in the action with the characters on the screen. If you really like a film, you're not aware that you are sitting in a cinema watching a movie. Your responses are very different than they would be with television. Television is a look-at’ medium, while cinema is a look-into’ medium.”1 I think that Murch is onto a good point here, and I want to elaborate on the point in a way he does not. As a visual art, cinema invites the response of looking into the medium, as opposed to at it—and hence (though Murch does not explicitly say this) through the medium toward something else. We look into and through the very thing that we see—the image on the screen. The screen functions like a window onto a world beyond, through which the eye naturally and spontaneously passes. (I'm not sure about “your whole body” passing through.) There is a kind of transparency to the cinematic image, in the sense that it is a medium that effaces itself in the act of looking: it doesn't seek your attention, but is content to direct it elsewhere. It is almost as if it gets embarrassed if it becomes an object of attentive looking, as when it appears blurry or fragmented or otherwise conspicuous; it prefers to occupy the background, not be thrust into the spotlight. It says: “See me, by all means; but please don't look at me.”
This insight suggests a promising line of inquiry: what other things, in nature or human culture, are looked into rather than at? If there are such things, they will bear a significant analogy to movies, at least so far as our perceptual relation to them is concerned, and may even function as the perceptual prototype of movie watching. It should be noted first, however, that the other senses do not seem to attract the same kind of concept—we don't speak of touching into or smelling into or tasting into or even hearing into. I can listen to something, as opposed to merely hearing it, but there is no sense in the idea of listening into something— there is no auditory analogue of the idea of a transparent medium through which something else may be glimpsed or examined. The distinction between “into” and “at” applies only to the visual case. Accordingly, there is no other art form that exploits this type of distinction—no kind of music, say, that involves hearing into one sound in order to attend to another.
So, what else do we look into, and how do these things compare to movie screens? Here is a list, as exhaustive as I can make it: holes, water, windows, mirrors, microscopes, telescopes, the sky, flames, eyes, and the mind. I'll say something about each of these in turn.
THINGS TO LOOK INTO
Holes or cavities are perhaps the basic case of things you can look into: you can look into a well, say, possibly in search of something else, and you can look into a room to see if a certain person is in there. In a sense, the whole universe can be regarded as a combination of objects and holes—things in space. You can look into space, which is really just a giant hole into which everything fits (though it is not a hole in anything). A hole is a kind of visible (but intangible) nothingness—an absence of objects. A hole has no texture, though it has contours; and while you can look at a hole (as you can look at a movie image), you typically look through it to what it contains. Holes are modest creatures, content to house other entities, to which they graciously direct the inquiring eye; they don't want to be visually lingered over. In this they resemble the movie screen, which also plays host to other entities, to which it self-effacingly directs the attention of the viewer. The orifices of the body— holes in flesh—may also be looked into (though it is not considered polite to do so in normal circumstances), the eye being the most interesting example, which I will shortly consider in its own right. Whenever anything can be looked into, it is fair to say that it resembles a regular hole in some way—there is something holelike about it. The movie screen is aptly described as a portal, which is itself a hole of a certain sort (of the doorlike kind)—a hole for viewing things through. Describing the screen as a window also aligns it with a certain type of hole—the kind that appears in walls.
Water can be looked into, though it lacks the extreme nothingness of holes, but only when it is transparent or translucent—muddy water won't do. Think of being in an aquarium and gazing at the fish on display: you look into the water for the fish, but not into the fish. Or consider looking at coins at the bottom of a clear fountain: the eye leapfrogs over the liquid medium and is seized by the objects within. But it is not that the water is invisible; you see it, though it is not something at which the eye stops, at which it ceases to search. Water cries out to be looked through, used as a visual conduit. Nor do its shimmers and eddies inhibit the process; they may even add to the fascination of what is gazed upon. Similarly, the movie screen shimmers and writhes, being alive with movement and reflected light; yet, despite this activity, it is still more a medium of vision than an object of vision. The endless visual fascination of water in motion is mirrored in the fascination of the screen, which indeed can present an oceanic aspect. Water on the screen therefore comports naturally with the water of” the screen: it is as if we are seeing water in water. Underwater photography is a graphic reminder of what the screen is doing anyway—enabling us to look through it as if it were a transparent liquid. Looking through water depicted on the screen enhances the looking through that is going on when we see the screen itself—it gets the eye in the mood, so to speak, for the looking-through experience. You find yourself looking through seawater at a looming shark, say, and this aids the looking through that the screen itself invites.
Sometimes we don't see windows, in which case there is a danger of inadvertently stepping through them, but mostly we do see them, because of grime and glint
ing. Yet we don't much care to scrutinize them; we are far more interested in what lies on their other side. We gaze out through a window at the world beyond or we gaze into a window at the room that it encloses. A window is an interface between the domestic or human world and the world of nature, since windows typically occur in buildings. It is really quite amazing how much people like to look into shop windows—far more than they do at the goods that lie on their other side. The eye is irresistibly drawn to windows, either for the outside view or for the inside view—the world of danger and the world of safety, we might say. A room without a window is a dismal place. But, as it is often remarked, the movie screen is a windowlike structure: it appears as a large bright window on a dark wall, and through it we can be the spectators of an entire new world. Yet it is a one-way window, since no one on the other side can see us as we drink them in with our eyes (this connects with the voyeurism of film watching, which I will also come back to). The curtain across the screen is like a curtain over a window, and a projector is simply a device for letting in the light (though, of course, it is really the source of the light). The movie screen is like a window onto a whole world, too, not just a particular segment of the neighborhood, for the camera is infinitely flexible in what it can present through this magic window. Being windowlike, the screen pulls the eye in, sending it in search of objects of interest.
