by Colin Mcginn
The point is well taken. What we need is not the wholly disembodied Cartesian self, unperceived and unlocated, but the idea of the spiritual body. In fact, we have already encountered this idea in our discussion of shadows: it is not the soul as such, conceived entirely nonbodily but the idea of the dematerialized body. This body can be seen (though not touched) and it has a kind of spatial presence. It is the kind of body we associate with the idea of ghosts and angels, phantoms of one kind or another, spectral presences in human form. This is the idea of the human body with the material stuffing taken out of it, transformed into something impalpable. Again, I am not saying that there are such things in reality; I am speaking only of what populates the human imagination—myths, fairy tales, fevered hopes and fears. This is an idea that clearly has some hold on us, that insinuates itself into our thoughts, whether we believe in the reality of such things or not—and the vast majority of the human race has believed and still does. The film image of a person is analogous to this notion of the spiritual or dematerialized body.
This claim is congruent with how we perceive figures on the screen, and it is not surprising that other authors have hinted at it. Christian Metz, the French film scholar, writes that on the screen “the perceived is not really the object, it is its shade, its phantom, its double, its replica in a new kind of mirror.”7 Parker Tyler, the American film writer, speaks of the screen's “natural translation of bodily substances into illusory and formal ectoplasm”8 and remarks that screen actresses often strike us as “the mirages of souls incarnate, their own shadow selves, rather than real women.”9 He also refers to this “ungirdling of the illusion of flesh, this demonstrating of the invisible existence of spirit independent of matter.”10 On the topic of cartoons, Stanley Cavell observes that
what is abrogated is not gravity (things and creatures do fall, and petals are sometimes charmingly difficult to climb up to) but corporeality. Their bodies are indestructible, one might almost say immortal; they are totally subject to will, and perfectly expressive… They are animations, disembodiments, pure spirits… Beasts which are pure spirits, they avoid, or deny, the metaphysical fact of human beings, that they are condemned to be both souls and bodies. A world whose creatures are incorporeal is a world devoid of sex and death, hence a world apt to be either very sad or very happy11
What are the chief characteristics of the spiritual body? When an angel appears before you, how do you expect his or her body to strike you? Not solid, certainly: there will be no tangible bulk, no footprint, and no physical trace. Odorless, too: the spiritual body has no smell, and it cannot occasion a reaction of disgust. It is idealized, both in its beauty and in its powers. It has no insides—intestines, blood, or internal organs. It cannot be damaged by ordinary contact with corporeal things. Nothing about it is redundant; everything serves a purpose. Above all, as Cavell notes, it is unified, not an uneasy amalgam of soul and body like mortal humans; there is no schism lying at the heart of its being. Connectedly, there is no part of it that is outside the control of the individual whose body it is: everything is subject to the will of its owner, so that disease and malfunction are not part of the deal. Nor are bodily pleasures. It is a recognizable version of the human body—it has the human form, it is isomorphic with the corporeal body—but it has had some of the less desirable aspects removed. There is no alienation from a body like this, no division into me and it. It is the body as transformed into another type of material, an immaterial material. There is something wondrous and magical about it; it is thrilling to behold. It is a body without the ignominy of flesh. There is nothing animal about it.
This description of the spiritual body corresponds closely to the way the body of the actor on the screen strikes us. What we see on the screen is a kind of idealized and transformed replica of a real person: weightless, odorless, unified, and marvelous. And just as the spiritual body is conceived as mind incarnate—what mind would be if it were to achieve perceptible form—so the screen image gives us the human form as a repository of human feeling and thought. This is the human form infused with spirit. It is the soul in the guise of matter, taking the form it must if it is to appear to human eyes at all. Instead of being an amalgam of soul and body, with the body calling the shots, the spiritual body promises us a type of existence in which soul is dominant, in which the body is the servant of the mind—in which, indeed, the Cartesian divide no longer obtains. Accordingly, if the movie image evokes this association in the viewer's imagination, even if only implicitly, it brings with it an entire train of ideas and sentiments that will resonate deeply in the receptive viewer. The movies constitute a kind of enchanted enactment of life governed by the spiritual body—the body of the soul, so to speak. In the flattened image, rendered in light, we see the human frame in this transformed and elevated state, in a form expressive of the soul's reality.
Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray can be seen as a kind of premonitory parable about this power of moving pictures. What Dorian sees in the portrait, after making his pact with the Devil, is precisely his soul clothed in pictorial form—the soul itself, as it really is, not concealed behind a bodily exterior. His own three-dimensional body is now completely unexpressive of his soul: nothing about Dorian the person can be gleaned from inspecting his body. But the state of the soul in the portrait is immediately evident to the viewer; the portrait acts as a window to the soul, not a shield behind which it can hide. What Dorian sees there is his spiritual body, the body that his soul really possesses— and pretty foul it is. His soul has been transported from three-dimensional space to two-dimensional art, and thereby rendered visible. But this is exactly what movies strive to achieve: the transparency of the soul to the view of the audience in the form of a two-dimensional image. And the two-dimensional image is a better vehicle for this than the humdrum body—it is simply more similar to the soul than the fleshly body is. The image is designed to reveal the soul, and it has the right formal properties to do so. The life of the soul is better conveyed by the image than by the corporeal body that sits so uneasily next to the soul. From a Cartesian standpoint, indeed, the corporeal body is positively misleading when taken as representative of the soul— a kind of sensory illusion—since the soul is another kind of being entirely. But the movie image is a more apt stand-in for the soul, for the reasons I have enumerated.
THE FACE
The face is the central locus of the spiritualizing transformation I am talking about. The face is where the soul shines through most clearly. Here is Roland Barthes on the face of Greta Garbo: “Garbo offered to one's gaze a sort of Platonic Idea of the human creature, which explains why her face is almost sexually undefined, without however leaving one in doubt… The name given to her, the Divine, probably aimed to convey less a superlative state of beauty than the essence of her corporeal person, descended from a heaven where all things are formed and perfected in the clearest light.”12 In Film as Art Rudolf Arnheim rhapsodizes thus:
Consider the face of a blond woman in a film shot: the color of hair and complexion approximate to each other as a curious pale white—even the blue eyes appear whitish; the velvety black bow of the mouth and the sharp dark pencil lines of the eyebrows are in marked contrast. How strange such a face is, how much more intense—because unconventional—is the expression, how much more attention it attracts to itself and to its expression … Anyone who has noticed how unreal most film faces appear, how unearthly, how beautiful, how they often give the impression of being not so much a natural phenomenon as an artistic creation—towards which, of course, the art of make-up helps considerably—will get the same pleasure from a good film face as from a good lithograph or woodcut. Anyone who is in the habit of going to film premieres knows how painfully pink the faces of the film actors appear in real life when they come on stage and make their bows after the performance. The stylized, expressive giant masks on the screen do not fit beings of flesh and blood; they are visual material, the stuff of which art is made.13
> Even allowing for the fact that these remarks were made in the black-and-white era, they still ring true: all the effects of lighting, makeup, and magnification contrive to create a transformed reality: the face as the soul configures it. The glassy sparkle of the eyes aids this ascendance to the spiritual, by focusing attention on something so palpably removed from the dull and heavy flesh of the body. Eyes on screen manage to achieve a kind of transcendent life of their own, as pure pools of living light. The face on film is not so much a mask adopted as a mask removed—to reveal the true lineaments of the soul beneath.
BLACK-AND-WHITE
The actor-director Peter Ustinov famously quipped that he filmed Billy Budd in black-and-white “because it is more realistic.” The paradox here is that reality, of course, is not black-and-white. But Ustinov was not speaking of physical reality; he meant mental reality. Now mental reality is presumably colorless—thoughts and feelings are not objects with color (even though we may feel blue, or red-hot with rage)—but it may yet be true that black-and-white better captures the distinctions and motions of mental reality. First, it distinguishes mind from nature, so that we see that human drama is not just one more natural happening: black-and-white is a way of marking off the representation of mind from the representation of matter. Logically, it would make sense to make a film in which the human characters appeared in black-and-white and the background of their actions was filmed in natural color—then the distinction between mental and physical reality would be visually marked. Secondly, black-and-white seems to correspond nicely to the drama of the mind, with its sharp contrasts, its highs and lows, its combination of light (good) and dark (evil). Black-and-white is psychologically realistic (ethically too—along with those inevitable shades of gray). The subtraction of color from the face aids its transformation into the soul, enabling us to forget that it was just an ordinary human visage that looked into the camera. In David Lean's superb film Brief Encounter the faces of the lovers, etched in merciless black-and-white, show every turn of intense feeling, every sharp moral quandary, every shade of tragedy. The bleakness of their predicament, and the stark clarity of their understanding, is perfectly captured by the chromatic austerity of the image. The soul shows its true colors in black-and-white. Color can seem like a distraction from what is going on inside, despite its appeal to the superficial eye.
DANCE
Now I see Fred Astaire dancing elegantly into the frame. The thing about Astaire is, he's light, super-light. His body is not some sagging concession to the force of gravity. It is antigravity It mocks gravity. The Astaire body is hardly a body at all: it always comes sheathed in an impossible elegance, with never a muscle flexing or a sinew tensing. It is fully an instrument of its owner's will. Fred dances like an angel, literally. His human body has been transformed, by his skill and the magic of cinema, into a sprite, a pure expression of grace and dexterity. This is why it is so exhilarating to watch him dance: he simply doesn't seem human—or rather, he seems ideally human. Only a dematerialized body could treat space and gravity as he so effortlessly does. In a certain sense, then, dance is the essence of cinema—the most visible assertion of its ability to transform the human body. When Astaire starts to move, he releases the potential of the medium—he becomes what the image suggests that he might be, a shimmering incorporeality He lives up to his light-constituted appearance. Freedom of movement, after all, is one of the prerogatives of the disembodied— flying angels, wafting ghosts, levitating genies. Astaire is of their happy band. His body is without mass and drag, a creature of pure movement. This ideal of dance is what the movie image itself aspires to be—a weightless vehicle of free motion.
Slow motion likewise frees the screen figure from the constraints of normal movement, rendering it weightless and exempt from physical law (speeded-up motion works similarly). In these special effects the human body takes on some of the privileges of the immaterial realm (if such there be)—it is no longer shackled to its own bulk and density. And don't we, at least in some moods, yearn for release from materiality, with its heaviness, its mutability, its mortality? (Isn't that, ultimately, what dance is all about?) The sheer inertness of matter—its essential mindlessness—can seem repulsive in itself. We want to overcome the alienation we naturally feel from our own bodies, which can seem so remote from our inner selves. We seek “annulment of the flesh.”
We don't want to feel that we are made of the same stuff as the objects around us—as if we were nothing very special, ontologically. Movies offer us a transformed reality in which the body is stripped of its material bonds and becomes united with our essential nature as centers of consciousness.
CHURCH AND CINEMA
If spiritual bodies, analogous to angels, confront us on the screen, then is watching a movie anything like a religious experience? A darkened, gloomy interior; a wall blazing with light; tales of good and evil; reigning gods; a trancelike state; music; an audience—what am I talking about, a church or a movie theatre? The film theorist Dudley Andrew writes: “What of the tales told of medieval crowds weeping before a new stained-glass window or being literally entranced within the space of a new cathedral. If cinema has taken over this powerful function of art, we have come a great distance from ‘Art as Technique.’“14 Architecturally, movie houses and churches are not dissimilar, particularly with regard to the piercing of gloom by luminous pictures: the screen or the stained-glass window. Those windows are super-bright patterns of light, typically telling stories of some sort, and receiving the upturned gaze of the devotee. They tell of a world beyond and give off an aura of the supernatural. They afford visual pleasure, treats for the eye. They also transform the human body into a creature of light and radiance, as well as representing such spiritual entities as angels and prophets (as well as demons). Looking at them (or into them) is surely remarkably similar to the look invited by the movie screen. And the experience is not entirely visual; there is also a soundtrack to accompany these spiritual sights. There are hymns and sermons, organ music, chanting, just as there are words and music to fill out the visual narrative of the screen. You gaze enchanted at the glorious mosaic of glass as the plangent organ music accompanies your vision; you are transfixed by the screen as the soundtrack thunders or murmurs its message. (There is meant to be no talking, but occasionally you cannot resist a sideways comment.)
Psychologically, there is an emotional stirring, a sense of great themes, a moral focusing, and sometimes a state bordering on trance. The congregation may become so caught up in the moment that they wail and weep, overflowing with emotion; but so too in the cinema audiences have been known to faint and cry out—emotions run high there too. The power of both places to induce a trancelike state hardly needs emphasis. Both can bring their attendees to a state of transport and self-forgetfulness, seizing them at the core. Exiting the establishment can be felt as a kind of cleansing, as if dangerous energies have been released. There is even something analogous to the conversion experience that can affect the movie viewer: people often speak of the profound impact of a particular film on their worldview Movies can be ethically and politically powerful, as much as any harangue from the pulpit. The intensity of the cinema and the church experience (at least on some occasions) is not to be denied. And both places seem alive with spirit, the body taking second place.
In both a cinematic and a religious experience you are surrounded by and enveloped in a complete world. Sight and hearing are fully occupied. It is not like being in an art gallery or watching television, where the object of your attention is one thing among many. You are in a space whose entire point is to fully engage your attentive faculties. This provides a total immersion in the proceedings—you melt into the screen, you are taken over by the religiosity of the place of worship. You are, as the English say, “sent.” The enormous contrast between the world inside these spaces and the humdrum world outside serves to insulate you from what is not of the moment. For the duration, you are in a different zone of reality entirel
y, where all the normal rules seem suspended. Everything seems focused on the inner life of man, even though the world presented is preeminently a visual world. Souls flit across the screen, stirring your own soul, as souls are also the subject matter of the religious service. In church or cinema you enter into a new relationship with yourself and other people, a new level of consciousness. (Not that it is always that inspiring: there are banal and artless movies that leave you cold, as there are dull and tedious church services.)
Religion has always been concerned with processes of transformation, more or less miraculous: not just sudden religious conversion, but water turning into wine, bread becoming flesh, flesh becoming spirit (in the afterlife), God becoming man, angels turning into devils, the sick becoming whole. The notion of radical transformation seems essential to religious thinking. These transformations regularly take the form of transubstantiation, or the turning of one kind of substance into another. We clearly have a fascination with such radical alterations in a thing's nature (as the alchemists obviously did in their desire to turn base metals into gold). The movies present us with just such transformations. The idea of bodily transformation is rife in movies: people into monsters (vampires, werewolves), flesh replaced by metal (Robocop), children into adults and vice versa, men into women, ordinary men into supermen, people into ghosts, and so on. And then there is the general transformation of the solid substantial body into the spiritual body that I discussed earlier—a kind of analogue for the process of immortalization. Both religion and movies are fixated on these kinds of magical or quasimagical transformations. They implement what we can only imagine. They outdo the transformations of mere nature (caterpillars into butterflies, rock into lava, life into death, etc.). A part of us still yearns for that primitive prescientific worldview in which anything can happen if the supernatural forces are aligned just right. I have already mentioned our tendency to deify the actors and actresses of Hollywood. Parker Tyler refers to them as “those modern vestiges of the old Greek divinities” and “the enlarged personnel of the realistically anthropomorphic deities of ancient Greece,” noting that they are “fulfilling an ancient need, unsatisfied by popular religions of contemporary times.”15 He is surely onto something right here. It is no great stretch to see in our contemporary culture of celebrity, in our worship of the stars of the tinsel screen, a reversion to pagan religions, with their casts of gods and goddesses, often petty and embattled, fodder for obsessive speculation, larger than life, but always shiningly divine (“You look divine in that dress!”). Old-style religion had many gods, of distinctly human aspect, not all-powerful, representative of many human types, yet still divine, still to be worshipped and placated, still a cut above. The very nature of the screen image encourages this deification—the transformation it effects in the normal human body. It takes mortal aging flesh and converts it into ageless columns of dancing light. It takes the smelly human animal, all armpits and bodily fluids—hairy meat, basically—and transforms it into an Ideal Being: radiant, glistening, and sublime. No wonder these divine entities prompt our worship. The tabloids are our version of the ancient Greek myths—and are no doubt just as mythical. Perhaps the movie theatre is more like the village gathering around the raging fire, with thumping drums, witch doctors, and incantations to the gods, than the relatively staid precincts of Christian churches. Polytheistic and pagan, full of violence and conflict, sexual passion and hunger for power, the movies approximate more closely the religion of our wilder forebears: not the decorum of the stained-glass window, but the volatile violence of the bonfire. The body count of the average Hollywood blockbuster certainly equals the human sacrifice of even the most extreme pagan religious cult.
