by Colin Mcginn
Mirrors also are scarcely ever looked at—their entire purpose is to reflect objects other than themselves. We look into the mirror and beyond it, at our face and body, as if the mirror weren't there (though we know it is). Mirrors may serve our vanity; they have none of their own. It is virtually impossible to look at a mirror, unless it has defects; the eye bounces off the surface toward what it so slavishly reflects. A mirror provides a literal re-creation of something else—it is a device for doubling. It takes reality and re-presents it, gives it another chance at being, reincarnates it. A mirror is simply another way for the eye to see reality, enjoying only a vanishing existence of its own. Mirrors hide behind their own reflective power. And, of course, much the same can be said of the movie screen: it reflects what was earlier before the camera, a vision of reality, rather than intruding upon our visual consciousness itself. I see the movie screen, as I see the mirror I am looking into, but I look at the reality reflected or represented in it. Of course, it is a kind of delayed-action mirror, since the events reflected are not occurring at the time of the viewing; nevertheless, the screen works to convey to us a reality other than itself. The eye is working in much the same way when it takes in the movie image as it is when gazing at a reflection, in that it engages in an act of looking into—bouncing off a surface in the direction of what the surface portrays.
Microscopes and telescopes have more of a technical than a metaphorical relation to the screen. You look into the lens of the apparatus (transparent glass, like the window) and gaze upon the enlarged object of sight. The lens magnifies what comes within its scope, giving us a close-up of the object. The lens is not normally looked at or attended to; it is merely the means by which an object comes under our scrutiny with altered dimensions. This enlarging effect is, of course, a mainstay of the movie screen: the greatly magnified figures, the facial close-up, the new proximity of eye and object. By looking through an enlarging optical apparatus we are treated to a different visual perspective on the world, in which the natural limitations of the human eye are transcended, offering us a newly intimate relationship to nature. There is something startling about this perspective, sometimes disturbing, as normal-sized objects are rendered gargantuan. What we are looking at, by looking into the apparatus before us, is the world as it might be seen by another type of being, with more acute vision than ours. And this is a kind of magical effect, as if conferring a godlike power on our perception of reality. Not only does the screen let us look through it to a world not our own; it presents that world in startlingly magnified dimensions and detail, adopting the position of microscope. And we don't have to move at all: the enlarged world is brought to us, at a safe and convenient distance. When we see the world on a movie screen, it is as if we are seeing it with microscopes attached to our eyes. Thus we are magnified, enhanced, along with reality.
The sky is as old a friend to humankind as the earth itself: when did humans not gaze up into the sky? Day and night, the sky is one of the most entrancing of visual objects. Over millions of years our eyes have evolved with the sky as their primordial companion, always hanging there, waiting to be seen. Surely, the human eye is as adapted to the sky as it is adapted to anything, limited as its viewpoint is. Clouds, stars, and birds are among the objects the sky offers our visual system. We look up into the sky and look at these objects, laid out before us in an infinitely expansive medium, bounded only by the line of the earth's surface. Think of the absolutely trillions of times a human being has looked into the sky and noticed the objects within it, and reflect on what the eye has become because of these innumerable visual acts. Well, it is that eye that now finds itself confronted by a rather recent invention, the movie screen. And just as it has looked into the sky over eons of time, now it is called upon to look into the movie screen.
We can note two things about this development. First, the eye is doing now what it has been doing, and doing expertly, for millennia—it is good at this looking-into business. The sky has taught the human eye how to look into things, and the movie screen is just a fresh turn on an ancient skill. Looking into the screen is therefore natural to us, despite the recency of the technology. Secondly, whatever aura of mystery or fascination attaches to the sky—and surely a lot does—will transfer itself by analogy to the screen: it too will strike us as an entity of mythic proportions, as a repository of wonders. The sky always reminds me of our tiny place in the universe, the vastness in which we shudder and strive, both friendly and hostile, acutely unending. If the movie screen inherits even some small percentage of this awe, it will be invested with a significance it would be hard to overestimate. And the looking into that it invites must surely resonate with the looking into that the sky so primordially evokes. It is not surprising, from this perspective, that films so often open with a shot of the sky, since this introduces from the outset the basic mechanism of looking into, which is critical to the success of the film: the viewer's attention must be taken off the screen and onto what it transmits. And what is more visually gripping than the sight of an object flashing across the sky? The screen is tapping into these ancient and deep-seated aspects of our visual human nature, exploiting them for its own purposes. As an extra piece of evidence for this analogy between sky and screen, consider what may not be a coincidence of nomenclature—the use of the word “star” in both connections. There are the stars of the blackened night sky, arrayed and twinkling, aloof, distant, not shrinking from our awestruck gaze—the celebrities of the heavens; and there are those effects of light in human form, flitting across the capacious screen, remote yet intimate, shining, perfect—the film stars that equally populate our imagination. I venture to suggest that the use of the word “star” in application to film actors derives from its use to name the denizens of the night sky, and not vice versa. Then whoever it was who first employed that astronomical term in application to human beings must have been thinking of the stars of the sky, and hence analogizing sky and screen. As we wait for Venus to make its nightly appearance, bright and reassuring, changeless, so we wait for our favorite film star to wander into camera range and so fulfill our desire to have him or her in close proximity, shining just for us. And what is the role of the mighty sun in all this? Why, the all-powerful Director in the Sky, author of numberless epic sequels, repelling our curious gaze—he around whom everything revolves. The ancient Greeks identified the stars with the gods, not preposterously given their limited cosmological knowledge; now we make that identification for the heavenly bodies of Hollywood (among other notables). The sky is where we expect divinity to reside, and the screen is the sky rendered manageable. If we could project movies onto the massive dome of the sky, I don't doubt we would find it more satisfying (if somewhat uneconomical) to watch them that way. In any case, the eye's capacity to look into the movie screen has its precedent in our visual relation to the sky.
Fire has not been with the human race for as long as the sky, but it has had a pretty long run. And gazing into flames is no doubt an ancient pastime (usurped somewhat by television). We can see strange and fascinating patterns there, projections of our own fears and longings, as we bask in the congenial warmth. Flames are a medium we can look into, in hopes perhaps of finding something else (the meaning of life, whether the crops will survive). Here is Walter Murch on flames and films:
The mid-twentieth-century pessimism about the future of cinema, which foresaw a future ruled by television, overlooked the perennial human urge—at least as old as language itself—to leave the home and assemble in the fire-lit dark with like-minded strangers to listen to stories. The cinematic experience is a recreation of this ancient practice of theatrical renewal and bonding in modern terms, except the flames of the stone-age campfire have been replaced by the shifting images that are telling the story itself. Images that dance the same way every time the film is projected, but which kindle different dreams in the mind of each beholder.2
I am not sure that there is really a contrast with television here—the fi
re just seems smaller on the TV than on the movie screen—but I would agree that there is a similarity between gazing into the flames while one's imagination runs riot and gazing into the screen, where also the imagination is actively recruited. Both consist of flickering light— volatile, mobile, and suggestive—and both seem to refer the mind to things beyond themselves. “Look into me,” both seem to say, “and I will show you marvelous things.” Is it any surprise, then, that fire should be such a recurrent motif (or gimmick) of motion pictures? We are simply seeing on the screen what the screen itself mimics. And is it too much to suggest that the movie screen might also mimic some of the comfort and security provided by the warm and pleasant fire, as well as containing a hint of danger? Certainly, there is a gap left by the retreat of the open communal fire from human life, and maybe cinema steps in to fill it (as well as doing many other things). I myself have a great fondness for open fires, the bigger the better, and I am also quite fond of movies.
I have so far spoken of the eye as it engages with the screen, but there is also the matter of the eye on the screen—and the relation of the looking-into concept to the seen eye (as opposed to the seeing eye). For we certainly do speak of looking into a person's eyes, despite the relative solidity and opacity of the anatomical organs in question. True, eyes are glassy and aqueous, like windows and water, but they are also round and nuggetlike, a far cry from sky or fire. Looking at a person's eyes is very different from looking into them, and the former is done usually only by ocular professionals. When I look into your eyes, what is it that I am looking at? You, of course—I am looking at you. And I am looking at a very significant part of you—the part often designated “the soul,” the eyes being commonly said to be the window to that entity. I am seeing your self. So I am looking at something other than your body—I am looking at something psychological in nature, the “I.” No such sighting of the self is possible if I look into your nose or ears—just very unsoul-like grunge. Only the organs we call the eyes seem to afford us a glimpse of the self. When the lover gazes into the eyes of his beloved, he is greeted not merely by a pair of glistening orbs but by the very pith of the person he loves—so, at least, we suppose; that's what it feels like. The eye is, as it were, an inlet through which the self within can escape the opacity of the human body—the point of maximal psychological openness. Securing or avoiding “eye contact” is all about this exposure of the self through the eyes. As social beings, needing to read each other's psychology, we are adept at this kind of looking into—at reading the mind off the eye. In the geography of the human body, the mind sails closest to the eye, and we are gifted observers of this phantorn vessel. Looking into the sky and looking into the eye must be our most basic exercises of the capacity to look into things.
The very capacity we use to interpret the screen we use to interpret a person's eyes. Thus the screen resembles the eye. The reflective twinkling eye finds its analogue in the reflecting surface of the lit screen—predominantly because both are not objects to be looked at, but into and through. And what do we become aware of as we look into the screen? The persons depicted, of course—those psychologically charged beings. As I look into the screen, I become aware of the motivations, beliefs, and personalities of the individuals depicted, just as I become aware of these things when I look into a person's eyes. I look through the screen to the souls, so to speak, with the screen a mere vehicle, a means to an end. Also, as before, it is not merely that the screen itself resembles the eye; the eye is also one of the great subjects of the screen. Indeed, I would go so far as to suggest that it is the great subject of cinema. The act of looking into is common to both screen and eye, and hence the appearance of the eye on the screen invites the very capacity called upon by the screen itself—what we might call the “look-into reflex.” Once the camera homes in on the eye, suitably lit and positioned, we are ineluctably drawn in through the barrier of the screen—we are in “look-into mode.” The screened eye commits us to an act of double looking into: first into the screen itself and then into the eye on the screen (equivalently into the image of the eye and then into the eye imaged). By this time the screen has dissolved before us, fading into its role as vehicle. The screen has no call on our attention, and only the rude jolt of imperfection in the image can snap our attention back from the depicted world—a most undesirable rebound. The screened eye is perhaps the most reliable way for a film to bind us to the looking-into mode of visual reception. The viewer's eye becomes entranced by the eye on the screen, into which it looks, and the pattern of images disappears—seen but not attended to. This use of the depicted eye is one of the most powerful tools of film in evoking the ancient reflex of looking into, upon which the effectiveness of cinema depends. It is the eye on the screen that most powerfully annihilates the screen for the viewer, to put it dramatically.
Finally, there is the mind as something to be looked into. I don't mean to suggest that we can literally peer into each other's minds—that is the sort of thing that believers in telepathy and the like subscribe to. But we do naturally conceive the mind in a way that makes it the sort of thing that could in principle be looked into. We seem comfortable with the notion of looking into one's own mind, as when we say: “I looked into myself and didn't like what I saw there.” And it is also common to describe God's access to human minds in this way—he can see right into them, right through them, so that no secrets can be kept from his prying gaze. I know your mind by inference from your body—by how you behave—but God's vision can see straight into your soul, so that for God the mind is something that submits to being looked into. When God, as we say, looks into our mind, he is able to look at what it contains—those petty motives or self-serving beliefs. So the mind is being conceived as a kind of medium (like water, to which it is commonly compared—the “stream of consciousness” and all that) in which items of interest can be discerned and scrutinized, if the viewer has eyes of the right penetrative power. The body, by contrast, cannot be looked into, being substantial, solid, and opaque (I am not speaking of the orifices here). No doubt this is all very metaphorical, but it does correspond to something in our conception of what the mind or soul is—a containing medium. If so, there is an analogy between the mind and the screen, so that when we look into the screen it is (metaphorically) as if we are looking into a mind.
Because of this commonality, we might say that the mind is part of the connotation of the screen—what it suggests, the associations it has (no doubt implicitly); and similarly for the other entities I have cited as displaying the look-into property. Once again, this is reinforced by the fact that part of what the screen displays is mental in nature—that is, the psychological states of the characters depicted. We are confronted by minds on the screen (I shall defend this fully in the next chapter), and the screen itself works in a way analogous to the mind, in that it is the kind ofthing that we tend to conceive in terms of the notion of looking into. And, of course, the eye of the actor directs us toward the mind of the character portrayed, so that the screen in effect offers us three things that can be looked into: itself, the eye, and the mind. The looking-at part of the total visual experience starts to seem, if not marginal, then not at any rate the distinctive crux of what watching a movie is. Movie watching is all about acts of looking into, one piled on top of another.
It might be objected to all this that the screen cannot be looked into in the same way other things can be, because it is a flat, two-dimensional surface—how can we look into something that has no depth or thickness? That would be like looking into a page or a tabletop. To be looked into, an entity needs to have depth, as holes, water, sky, fire, and eyes have depth. I take it the answer to this objection is obvious (and the case of mirrors might already have suggested it): the screen does not literally have the third dimension, but in a representational way it does. Depth is coded into what we see, apparent from the properties of the two-dimensional images on the flat screen (one object looks farther away than another when it cor
responds to the smaller of the two images). Thus the eye is able to move through this virtual third dimension, to encounter the three-dimensional objects depicted on the flat screen. It is indeed doubtful that without this impression of depth the image on the screen could elicit the look-into reflex; but with it the screen is able to conduct the eye beyond itself. This is just to say that the cinema succeeds in creating a semblance of a real three-dimensional world—our ordinary space is very much present in the image. Rather like the flatness of mirrors, the flatness of the screen is therefore no impediment to its being looked into.
OTHER ARTS
Do any other visual art forms involve the type of looking I am calling looking into? Answering this question will enable us to determine whether this type of looking is distinctive of film. The arts we need to consider are theatre, painting, photography, television, sculpture, and architecture.
Theatre, quite clearly, requires no looking into, except in relation to the actors’ eyes; but the medium itself—actors on a stage—no more calls for looking into than ordinary people in a room do. Of course, there is the space of the stage, but the objects before the eyes—props and human bodies— are not in any way transparent entities that we look through. The audience looks at these things, not through them; there is no analogue of the screen as a traversable medium standing between the eyes and objects. So the visual relation we have to the staged play is of a very different nature from that which obtains between the viewer and the cinema screen; the visual system is differently engaged in the two cases, despite the fact that both at some point involve actors moving through space. The eye is not drawn through the events on the stage as it is through the images on the screen; the eye reacts differently to the actors on the stage and the images on the screen, though both are what are immediately seat. In short, we look at the stage actors but not at the movie images. We could say that visually speaking, theatre is a present medium while cinema is an absent medium. Cinema is self-effacing while theatre is self-affirming. The cinema screen is there to be transcended; the stage is the primary object of attention. The screen confronts you with something it wants you to ignore; the stage wants to hold your attention on itself.
