The Power of Movies

by Colin Mcginn

  The important point is that a dream is really an ingenious hybrid of fact and fiction. It is suspended between two poles, wherein it achieves its delicate balance of real and unreal. One pole is remembered reality—ordinary experience imported into the dream landscape. The other is creative imagination—what the dream machinery does with remembered reality in the way of elaboration and distortion. It is part reproduction and part recombination. Here are the familiar people, the familiar places, the familiar tasks; but they are imaginatively recombined, producing strange and bizarre situations. I once dreamed that my wife took three paces in our waterlogged front yard, with each step sinking deeper into the mud, until at the third step she completely disappeared into the ground. This was all solid documentary stuff—the yard can become a complete bog—except for the fact that she so dramatically vanished. And, of course, it all seemed shockingly real at the time. The dream content is invariably this mix of known reality and conjured unreality— a distorted echo of the real.

  A movie, too, is essentially a hybrid form, a mix of reality and fantasy, fact and fiction. The camera plays the role of memory, importing a literal record of reality into the proceedings—it stamps the film with the mark of authenticity (so it is unlike a cartoon). Because of the camera's memory—its storing of images of real things—it can inject into a film elements drawn from the real world, so that it is essentially documentary in its mechanism. The camera is, after all, just a dumb recording device. What lifts the products of the camera above mere reproduction is the way it is handled and its images sequenced. A movie is, at base, photography plus montage—and these components have their precise analogues in the memory and imagination that characterize dreaming. What a film presents to an audience is therefore the same sort of blending that a dream presents to a dreamer: first, reality reproduced; second, reality reconfigured. The mental faculties that go into producing a dream include perceiving/remembering and imagining; but producing a film involves the same basic combination—the camera as perceiver and retainer, with editing as the method of recombining. In calling movies dreamlike, I am not neglecting their roots in photographed reality; on the contrary, I am insisting on this element of their content, because dreams too are firmly rooted in perceived reality.

  From this perspective, we can see that there is no conflict between a realist and an expressivist view of film. Yes, the movie is a medium that makes direct contact with reality, in virtue of the mechanism of its production; but it is also a vehicle for expressing the imaginative vision of the filmmaker. The film is a story told in images, a fiction woven from shards of reality: it both reproduces the world and reimagines it. But this mixture of realism and expressivism is precisely characteristic of the dream; and indeed the two working together are what power the dream: the dream is rooted in perceived reality, but it is also the expression of the dreamer's own imagination—a creative filtering of emotion. The fact that the film image results from mechanical recording in no way negates the status of film as a creative medium, no more than the fact that dreams use images from waking life negates their status as creative products of the human mind. Both types of experience gain authenticity from their reproductive component and imaginative satisfaction from their creative component. They defamiliarize the familiar, bestowing a kind of glowing freshness upon it, a creative glaze, but they do so only because they stubbornly retain and celebrate the familiar.

  Some directors trade on the bipolarity inherent in film. They see that the essence of film is reality reimagined and they build upon it. Alfred Hitchcock and Steven Spielberg delight in finding the extraordinary in the everyday. What begins as a sullen and routine road trip, all gas stations and mangy motels, turns into a phantasmagoria of psychosis and shock (Psycho). An ordinary night in a suburban home, co-cooned in the comfortable bathos of bourgeois life, finds an undeniable alien from outer space loitering around the house (E.T.). The mundane is seen to harbor the extravagant; fantasy worlds adjoin the tin and tarmac of quotidian being. This conjoining of the reassuringly familiar (if numbing) world of everyday life with the startlingly fantastic worlds of inner space (psychosis) and outer space (extraterrestrials) marks these two directors’ work. This is nothing more than a reflection of the twin principles of cinema itself—realism and fantasy. Cinema takes the everyday and bathes it in fantasy, so that the viewer is made to see the world anew: imagining with the eyes, as you might say.

  EXPRESSIVE NARROWING

  Language contains enormously flexible modes of expression. A novel can call upon the full range of these resources to describe characters and scenes. We take this for granted, but it is really quite remarkable. A novel might begin: “Mary used to think a lot about love, lying like a starfish on her bed.” Here we have a use of the past tense, to inform us of Mary's previous actions and thoughts, a psychological ascription of a particular content to those thoughts, and a metaphorical description of her specific style of lying on the bed, suggesting perhaps a certain abject longing. All this within a mere fifteen words. Language can tell us directly what a character is thinking and feeling; it can refer us to the past and future as well as the present; and it can liken one thing to another for literary effect. Contrast this with what the pictorial image can convey and not convey: all we could muster to start a film about Mary would be a shot of her lying on her bed, limbs akimbo. To indicate that this was a habit of hers we would have to repeat the shot a number of times, and to reveal her thoughts we would need recourse to speech, either voiceover or conversation; the metaphorical associations of the word “starfish” would be unavailable to us. The visual image can only take in what is happening now to the outside of a person; it cannot go straight inside to the mind and range back and forth through time. To achieve these effects it must resort to indirect methods, such as flashbacks and flash-forwards. The directness and economy of language are not available to the visual image. Nor can it easily abstract away from irrelevant features of a scene to give us an isolated detail. The visual image always offers up a totality of details.

  The camera records all that is in front of it at the time of filming, whereas language allows us to describe a far wider range of conditions. A picture may be worth a thousand words, but a mere dozen words can often convey what no number of pictures can convey. The inherent restriction to the exterior present of the photographic image can be described as expressive narrowing. It is not that this is necessarily a defect; it may well be that the focusing on the present that it allows provides an especially dense and rich representation of what is happening now. This kind of point has an immediate bearing on the question of adapting literary works for the screen, and indicates some of the likely problems (as Jonathan Miller has pointed out),10 such as conveying the metaphorical texture of a novel or exploring in detail the mental life of the characters. The representational powers of language make it a different kind of medium from film.

  Is it not also true that the dreaming consciousness is likewise confined to the present tense? The dream deals with events as they happen now; there is no reference to the past and the future. In ordinary waking consciousness we have three tenses working simultaneously: we experience the present and form thoughts about it, but we also, through memory, have thoughts and feelings about the past, and on top ofthat we have expectations about the future. Normal human consciousness is a stew of tenses, as the present evokes the past and foreshadows the future. We are often admonished to live more in the present, the presupposition being that we also typically live in the past and the future. Our consciousness is a complex, shifting interweaving of past, present, and future. But in the dream our consciousness is stripped down to the present: we don't find thoughts of the past and future mingling with thoughts of the present. It is all very contemporaneous. There is, in other words, expressive narrowing with respect to tense. Perhaps this is part of the reason why dream experience seems so intense—the present is undiluted by the past and future. Dreaming is very much of the moment and in the moment. If this i
s right, then dreaming and movies have a further property in common: the focus on the present time. Both are imagistic, after all, and the image cannot exceed its inherent expressive limitations. There is a kind of crude immediacy to the way both dreams and movies represent the world, in contrast to the multilayered sophistication of language. To put it another way, you don't, in dreaming, find your mind wandering from what is currently assailing it to thoughts of what you were doing yesterday or might do tomorrow; you are fully caught up in the present. In this way your mind is as temporally fixated as the camera. The question of dreams and psychological ascription is a little less straightforward. It is true that in dreams you have images of people's bodies and these images do not directly reveal what is true of them psychologically; so the dream is like film in this respect. But it is also true that you don't seem to infer the mental states of your dream characters from their behavior. How, then, are the mental states of dream characters represented in dreams? This question takes us to the topic of the next section.

  OTHER MINDS

  In ordinary life a human body looms into your visual field and your task is to figure out what is going on in the associated mind. You do so ultimately by observation of the other person's behavior, including his speech. Your knowledge here is inferential: you infer from the person's behavior that he is in such-and-such a mental state, and you may infer wrongly—as when you infer, say, that the person believes the money is under the mattress when he is in fact lying about it and believes no such thing. But when you read a novel the author simply tells you about the mental states of her characters, and she is the ultimate authority. The author stipulates what the mental state of her characters is, she doesn't have to discover it; and you can rely on her stipulation. Thus, if the author informs you that Mary used to think a lot about love, you know that Mary used to think a lot about love—you don't have to infer it from her behavior. There is no other-minds problem about fictional characters, as there is about real people, no problem of how to be sure that they have the mental states they are represented as having; and the basic reason for this is that fictional characters have the characteristics, mental or physical, they are said by their author to have. Real people, by contrast, may not have the mental states they purport to have; it is always a mere hypothesis that they have the mental states you think they have. Fictional characters have no narrative-independent being; they are as they are narrated to be, and we readers know their minds by knowing what the narrative says. There is none of that unsatisfactory business of making shaky inferences from the person's external behavior. It is literally inconceivable that, contrary to Tolstoy's assertions, Anna Karenina never loved Vronsky anyway.

  But how does it stand with the minds of characters in dreams? How do we know their minds? One possibility is that we dream of bodies exhibiting certain behavior and then we infer what the underlying states of mind are: you know that a certain figure has malicious intentions toward you in your dream because you observe his behavior and interpret it as menacing. But that, surely, is wrong: rather, the malicious intentions are given in the dream. What you do is dream that the character has malicious intentions—this is a matter of stipulation within the dream. Hence you just know what the mental states of the characters are, because that is simply what the dream declares them to be. It is rather as if you are having a daydream and stipulate within it that someone has amorous feelings in your direction; you cannot be wrong about this, because the character is, by hypothesis, a fictional character of your own creation, who simply has no reality beyond what you endow her with. So there is really no problem of knowing other minds within dreams: the minds of dream characters are as evident as their bodies.

  Most of this is quite obvious, but it has some interesting consequences. It means that there is psychological foregrounding within dreams: the minds of others are laid open for the dreamer to see, part of the dream's furniture, so to speak. The dreamer is living in an environment of other minds, as palpable as the bodies that pulse therein. It is not a matter of conjecture what the people in my dream are thinking and feeling (unless, of course, I stipulate that this is so); it is as obvious as anything else about the content of the dream. There is no sense in which the minds of the characters are less accessible than their bodies—just as with the characters in novels. But, further, there is a kind of union of mind and body in the dream, in that the two are precisely tailored to one another: the body I dream of is designed to express the mental states my dream specifies the person to have, and the mind is fully reflected in the body. The faces of the people in dreams are transparent portals to their minds; they are souls made flesh. The distortions we often find in the bodies of people we dream of are typically the result of modifications designed to express whatever the prevailing psychological profile may be. The usual gap between mind and body is closed in the dream: the physical matter of the body has dissolved into a plastic material more suitable for expressing mentality.

  This must remind us of the notion of the spiritual body, as discussed in chapter 3. This is the notion of a body moved as close to the mind as it can be without ceasing to be a body. The bodies of dream characters are schematic, symbolic, and mentally saturated. They are products of the imagination. These are bodies that form no impediment to knowledge of other minds—they are not epistemological barriers to be surmounted. Instead, they are the living expression of personality, souls incarnate. Thus dreams afford us a kind of psychological presence not found in our ordinary perception of the heavy, fleshly bodies of real people. But then, given what I said in chapter 3 about movies and the spiritual body, there must be a kinship between the experience of the dream and the experience of a movie: both offer us this enhanced psychological presence, this mental foregrounding, this dematerializing of the body. In both we experience the sense of intimate acquaintance with the interior life of others. We feel ourselves to be in the immediate proximity of other minds, as if minds are shining out at us. The body has been systematically transformed into a vehicle for the expression of mind. Emotions, in particular, seem to reach right out to us, as if exerting a magnetic force on our minds. The usual asymmetry between knowledge of our own mind and knowledge of other minds is abrogated or diminished; now the minds of others are as transparent as our own. When we watch a film, therefore, the experience mimics the kind of mental acquaintance that characterizes the dream—other minds exert a kind of direct pull over our own. The shell of the corporeal body has been cracked, and the white nut of human consciousness gleams in the light. One might almost say that other minds merge with one's own.

  MOVEMENT

  J. Allan Hobson, the doyen of sleep science, reports that experiences of movement are very frequent in dreams, and the subject's motor cortex is detectably activated (despite the sleeper's own passivity). Such movements are commonly associated with corresponding emotions, as with a dream Hobson reports of parachuting: “The impending doom of such dream movement is typical and suggests not only the co-activation of anxiety in the limbic brain, but also the generation of unfamiliar or intrinsically impossible movement patterns at the level of the brain stem itself, where the neurons controlling body position in space are located.”11This observation can be confirmed by every reflective dreamer: we are all extremely familiar with the way dreams incorporate movement in their content—flying, running, falling, traveling, and so on. Dreams are hyperkindic—we are always on the move in them. I myself am forever dreaming of hazardous car journeys in which for some reason I find myself driving a car from a position where I can't even see the car I am driving! Thwarted journeys and impeded motion are staples of the anxiety dream, as unprecedented freedom of motion, such as flying, can accompany elation dreams.

  We never seem to sit still in our dreams, do we? And all this frenetic movement is interwoven with corresponding emotions. The transformation of the body is often implicated in this, as the body becomes light as air when it takes flight. Dreams are replete with sensations of our own motion, as well as sens
ations of ordinary objects.

  You know where I am going with this: what is a motion picture if not an extravaganza of movement? Just think of all those pratfalls, car chases, fights, journeys, and dances you have seen at the flicks. Especially with today's special effects, movement has never been more richly explored in movies. The Matrix movies are elaborate hymns to hurtling, leaping, and speeding. Dance is uniquely suited to film, as I noted in the previous chapter, because film can accentuate its freedom and lightness. In movies human bodies are super-active, antigravitational. And even when the main trunk is comparatively motionless, the eyelids may still massively open and shut in the close-up. All this movement is connected to emotions—fear and anxiety, euphoria, desire. The movie art is largely the science of converting feeling into action, making movement the bearer of emotion. But then the analogy with dreaming is obvious: both strongly stress the sensation of movement. In both the level of movement goes up a notch, compared with that of ordinary life; the static is shunned. The space of film, like the space of dreaming, is essentially a motor space, a space through which human bodies and other objects move. Therefore, the movie experience taps into the same states of mind and brain that characterize dreaming; the excess of motion simulates the dream state.