Snapshot from Gerry (2002), by Gus Van Sant

February 17, Canterbury, UK – at the University of Kent, we are beginning to understand how the auditory and visual information combine to give access to a multisensory film experience. At the same time, neuroscientists are identifying sensory systems beyond the classic 5 senses, namely pain, proprioception, vestibular and temperature perception. Though it is still an on-going debate to know exactly whether these constitute autonomous senses or are subsidiary of any of the classic five senses, it has become clear to us that they are opening new and interesting possibilities to address film. They are showing us possible and different perspectives on the history of film (what if early cinema inventors had been eagerly seeking for a vestibular film experience?), but also on aspects of contemporary independent cinema (what if independent cinema has been using our vestibular characteristics to create salient body experiences that blockbusters can only achieve through multimillionaire budgets?).

In my PhD project I look into the multisensory film experience from the point of view of these new “senses”. How can a film offer a vestibular and proprioceptive experience? How can a film base its aesthetic and cinematic representation on pain and temperature?

For this year’s SCSMI conference I have, in collaboration with Professor Murray Smith, looked into Gus Van Sant’s four films (the so called death trilogy - Gerry (2002), Elephant (2003) and Last Days (2005)  + Paranoid Park (2007)) and analysed in depth how these films offer different vestibular experiences (orientation and balance), and how they allowed GVS to build a unique aesthetic that stands apart from the rest of his work.

In New York I will share with you the results of my research on the vestibular sense applied to the case study of these 4 GVS’s films. As for the rest of the senses…. you will have to wait for a future opportunity!

I look forward to seeing you in New York and hearing your feedback.

Luis Rocha Antunes

The relations, or comparisons, between the cosmic and the individual are often subtle, however, and many audiences seem to miss their significance.  Malick draws on a storehouse of Christian theology (and more broadly, the Judeo-Christian imagination), but frames the film not as a series of answers but as questions. This question-asking is also characteristic of his earlier films The Thin Red Line and The New World, both of which feature voice-over narration consisting in part of questions without clear answers.

I heard an interview with a theater manager who estimates that 5-10% of the audience walks out of each screening of the film.  Some walk out for the expected reasons.  If you demand the narrative tightness of the usual Hollywood film, you will be sorely disappointed. I suspect that others walk out because they don’t understand what Malick is doing.  If the audience misses the correlations between the representation of the family and Malick’s metaphysical interests, the film can seem an awful bore, perhaps even pretentious. Thus the reactions to the film, which won the Palm D’Or at Cannes, have ranged from the rapturous to the contemptuous.

I don’t see the film as pretentious but rather ambitious.  I admire it in the same way that I admired Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), which I first saw when I was ten years old. In fact, The Tree of Life is full of humility, in that Malick doesn’t pretend to have the answers. I remember that the famed critic Pauline Kael, who disliked Kubrick immensely, responded to 2001 with scorn, seemingly for its very ambition.  Kael seemed to think that films ought to remain in the realm of the mundane and the physical, and that Kubrick’s attempt to make nothing less than a myth of humanity was lame and pretentious.  I say that if to ask the sorts of questions Kubrick and Malick do in the medium of film is pretentious, then lets have more pretension.

I’d be interested in hearing anyone else’s reaction to the film.

Carl Plantinga

On June 27, the U. S. Supreme Court struck down a California law prohibiting the sale of violent video games to minors. Jon Stewart explained the ruling on his Comedy Central Daily Show, with an example of the kind of graphic, gruesome, and gratuitous video game violence that is now Supreme-Court-approved for sale to children. Click here to watch Stewart’s report.

Justice Scalia wrote, for the 7-2 majority:

Like the protected books, plays and movies that preceded them, video games communicate ideas—and even social messages—through many familiar literary devices (such as characters, dialogue, plot and music) and through features distinctive to the medium (such as the player’s interaction with the virtual world). That suffices to confer First Amendment protection.

Scalia acknowledged that video game violence can be extremely disgusting but opined, “Disgust is not a valid basis for restricting expression.” Click here to download the entire Supreme Court opinion.

A problem is that repeated exposure to violence, even the imaginary violence of video games, may be harmful to the healthy social development of young people. As a multidisciplinary research group associated with Harvard Medical School found, in 2008:

Compared to other boys who played video games, boys reporting frequent play of at least one M-rated title… were much more likely to get into physical fights, to hit or beat up someone, to damage property for fun, or to steal something from a store. They were also much more likely to report poor school grades, to get into trouble with a teacher or principal and to report being threatened or injured with a weapon such as a gun, knife or club. The odds of boys’ involvement in all of these behaviors increased with each additional M-rated title on their “frequently played” game list.

Some of these problem behaviors were even more pronounced among girls who frequently played violent video games. A correlation is not a cause, of course. The authors of this study were highly skeptical of claims that violent video games cause antisocial behavior, in any direct way. Even so, they conclude that there is a very disturbing pattern that turns up in countless studies of all kinds of violent entertainments. This fact cannot be swept under the rug. (Kutner & Olson, 100ff.)

There is no question that violent entertainments stir up ideas, impulses, and feelings that are associated with actual violence. Some psychologists and social scientists argue that this makes violent entertainments a significant “risk factor” for violence and other antisocial behavior (e.g., Anderson et al). If you spend a lot of time involved in make-believe aggression, they reason, particularly in your developing years, you are more likely to engage in actual aggressive behavior. Researchers who study actual violence and anti-social behavior tend to focus, instead, on social and psychological factors that ordinarily inhibit or prevent such behaviors (e.g. Collins, Grossman, Baron-Cohen). Aggressive thoughts and impulses are commonplace, they reason. In fact, most people who play violent video games are emotionally healthy and socially well adjusted. When entertainment leads to violence, whether we are talking about video games, action movies, or sports, it is because something short-circuits normal inhibitions against actual violent or anti-social behavior. The critical question is therefore not whether violent entertainments stir up violent ideas and impulses. It is whether and when they undermine or counteract normal inhibitions against actual violence and anti-social behavior. This is a question that media effects researchers have scarcely addressed.

If violent entertainments are capable of decreasing inhibitions against actual violence, it makes sense that they might just as well increase them, by making violence seem frightening or disgusting, for example, or by arousing empathy with its victims. Scholars in the humanities, including philosophers, educators, and critics, tend to suppose this is the case (e.g., Jones, Gee). They reason that engaging imaginatively with troubling, dangerous, or anti-social ideas, through stories and play, can help people cope with real-world stresses and think through the consequences of real-world behaviors. In these ways, violent stories and games can in principle serve as powerful and positive instruments of socialization. Scientific research on rough-and-tumble play in rats and primates seems to support this hypothesis (Pellis & Pellis). If in actual fact violent video games and movies sometimes have negative social consequences, by lowering inhibitions against violence, for example, the challenge is to figure out when and why, so that we can distinguish healthy and constructive forms of imaginative engagement with violence from unhealthy and antisocial ones. In this area, again, media effects research has not been particularly helpful.

The century-long scholarly and political debate about the costs and benefits of violent entertainments seems to have run aground, once again, on the shoals of strong gut reactions. Some people, including many humanities scholars, enjoy or appreciate violent entertainments, ranging from fairy tales to video games, and therefore suppose that they are in some respects intrinsically worthwhile. Other people, including many media effects researchers, find new interactive and extremely graphic forms of virtual violence particularly disturbing and distasteful and therefore suppose that they are intrinsically harmful. The truth is that video games and other violent entertainments have both positive and negative effects. Scholars and scientists need to do a much better job of discerning and explaining the difference if they wish to give good guidance to parents and public policy makers.

Justice Breyer, in a dissenting opinion in the Supreme Court decision, argues that the protection of children ought to outweigh the right to make and sell violent video games without restriction. The trouble is, we simply do not know enough to sort out the risks of violent video games to children’s social and emotional wellbeing from the manifest pleasure and other social and emotional benefits that such games may provide. Any sweeping restriction on violent entertainments risks throwing out the baby with the bathwater. Justice Breyer sees this as an acceptable risk. Justice Scalia and the Supreme Court’s majority do not.

A better option, obviously, would be to separate the baby from the bathwater. A good place to begin might be by focusing on the two neglected questions posed above. (1) When and how do violent entertainments undermine normal inhibitions against actual anti-social behavior? This relates to such matters as habituation and desensitization toward violence, dehumanization and the erosion of empathy, and when and how the boundary between the imaginary worlds of fiction and games and the real world of actual social interactions breaks down. And (2) What is the difference between engaging in imaginative violence in positive and healthy ways and engaging in it in negative and unhealthy ways? This connects to specific questions about when and how violent entertainments foster or undermine social connectedness, the acquisition of social skills, empathy, emotional health, ethical discernment, and so on, as well as to broader questions about the ways in which violent entertainments shape our cultural norms. Both humanities scholars and empirical researchers can contribute to addressing these important and still largely unanswered questions.

Works Cited:

• Anderson, Craig A., Douglas A. Gentile, and Katherine E. Buckley. Violent Video Game Effects on Children and Adolescents: Theory, Research, and Public Policy. 1st ed. Oxford University Press, USA, 2007.
• Baron-Cohen, Simon. The Science of Evil: On Empathy and the Origins of Cruelty. Basic Books, 2011.
• Collins, Randall. “The Micro-sociology of Violent Confrontations,” in Violence: A Micro-sociological Theory. illustrated edition. Princeton University Press, 2008.
• Gee, James Paul. What Video Games Have to Teach Us About Learning and Literacy. Palgrave Macmillan, 2003.
• Grossman, Dave. On Killing: The Psychological Cost of Learning to Kill in War and Society. Revised. Back Bay Books, 2009.
• Jones, Gerard. Killing Monsters: Why Children Need Fantasy, Super Heroes, and Make-Believe Violence. Basic Books, 2003.
• Kutner, Lawrence, and Cheryl Olson. Grand Theft Childhood: The Surprising Truth About Violent Video Games and What Parents Can Do. Simon & Schuster, 2008.
• Pellis, Sergio, and Vivien Pellis. The Playful Brain: Venturing Limits of Neuroscience. Reprint. Oneworld Publications, 2010.

Also, I thought that I might participate a little at long range. So I’ve posted a web essay that sets out, in less technical terms, what my proposed paper for the convention would have tried to say. The essay, “Common Sense + Film Theory = Common-Sense Film Theory?,” reflects an effort to rethink ideas about filmic comprehension that I set out in Narration in the Fiction Film in 1985. This book was one of the first efforts to explore how findings in cognitive science might help us make progress in understanding cinematic storytelling.

Please read several new posts on davidbordwell.net:

• “The Social Network: The Faces Behind Facebook,” on what we learn from actors’ eyes, when we watch movies.
• “The Eye’s Mind,” on what we learn from what our eyes do, when we look at art.
• “Watching You Watch There Will Be Blood,” (by Tim Smith), reporting some empirical findings on what we watch when we watch movies.

Three Fun Facts about Fear

1.            Fear is Forward Looking

When you put your hand on a hot stove you experience pain. Pain makes you recoil after you’ve been burnt, to prevent you from getting burnt worse. Fear, on the other hand, makes you pull back before you’ve touched the stove. It anticipates danger. It is a danger avoidance mechanism.

It is very unlikely that ants experience anything like fear, for the very simple reason that ants are not forward-looking creatures. When you tip over a stone to expose a colony of ants and they scurry for cover, although we cannot know what they are feeling, it is probably safe to say they are experiencing something like pain. When you put the rock back, the colony is still flooded with alarm pheromones, so it takes a while for the ants to get back to their usual business, but it is unlikely in the extreme that they are anticipating the possibility that the rock might be removed again. They simply don’t have the brains for that.

Frogs probably experience something like fear. For one thing, frogs exhibit forward-looking behavior. A frog will cower under lily pads with its eyes above water, scanning for danger, long after the little boy has gone away. For another, there are parts of the brains of frogs that are dedicated to this kind of response. Fear is such an effective life-saving response that it is one of the most basic and primitive “emotions” (if you will). In humans, the fear response is buried in the most primitive parts of the brain, sometimes called the “reptile brain.”

With rats, there is little question. Rats feel fear. While we can never know exactly what a rat experiences, rats’ behavior and their brain anatomy shows that they have a fear response that is very much like humans’. In fact, much of what we know about the neural mechanisms of human fear, we know because of rats. Frightful things have been done to rats, in the name of science. When rats anticipate danger (which they do) and try to avoid it (which they do), it is clearly because they feel something very much like what we call fear.

At bottom, fear is a danger avoidance mechanism. It anticipates possible harm and then prompts us to avoid it. It is forward looking. That’s why we have it.

2.            Fear Operates Independently of Awareness

When you narrowly avoid being hit by an oncoming car, you might suppose that what happens is something like this. First, you see the oncoming car. Second, you recognize the danger. Third, your body springs into action and you leap out of the way. Countless experiments show that this is not, in fact, what happens.

What actually happens is this. First, your body springs into action. Second, you see the oncoming car. Third, you recognize the danger. This sequence is so counter-intuitive that it is hard to believe. How can the body respond to a danger before the eye sees it and the mind perceives it?

The answer is that most of what goes on in the eyes and in the mind goes on beneath the threshold of awareness. When I say, “I see an approaching car,” I usually mean that I am aware of it. But the real business of perception is to navigate the environment safely without needing to be aware of it. Awareness is dedicated to those few things that we consciously think about. If we waited until we thought about the danger to get out of the way of oncoming cars, much of the time it would be too late. The primitive part of the brain that registers danger and triggers fear does so without thought and before thought. In certain important ways, it takes control of thought. That is what it is for.

The brain’s fear response does basically three things. It pushes three buttons, so to speak. It galvanizes attention and so orients the body and the mind toward danger or the possibility of danger. It prepares the body for action, by releasing adrenaline into the bloodstream and tensing muscles, among other things. And it takes control of thought, pushing danger or the possibility of danger to the forefront of awareness. This is why it is extremely difficult if not impossible to turn fear off by simply willing it away.

When filmmakers and writers create suspense and fear, they are pushing these three buttons. Horror movies and thriller novels shows that, even though it is very difficult to turn off the fear response, it is not very difficult to turn it on.

3.            Imaginary Ideas Can Engender Actual Fear

Fear is forward looking. What this means is that fear is, in a sense, always generated by an idea, by the idea of some particular danger. For example, when a rat smells cat urine, it is not the smell that makes the rat afraid. A smell cannot harm a rat. Neither can urine. But the smell of the urine triggers the idea of a cat. A rat’s idea of a cat is probably nothing like ours. It is certainly not symbolic or conceptual. It would probably be a stretch even to call it conscious. But it is an idea, nonetheless: a pattern of neural responses that prompt the rat to be on a lookout for a particular kind of predator. It is not a mere smell, in other words.

Humans’ “fear of darkness” works the same way. It is not darkness we are afraid of. Instead, darkness prompts ideas of dangers that we may not see in the darkness. Scary music also works this way. There is nothing scary about music per se, but certain kinds of music make us tense. When such music accompanies the scary ideas engendered by monster movies, for example, the music amplifies those ideas.

You might suppose that, when watching a horror movie, comfortably ensconced in a padded theater seat with a sack of buttered popcorn in your hand, you are not really afraid. But you are. Galvanized attention, tense muscles, mind focused on the possibility of harm… these are exactly the responses that scary movies produce. It is the idea of danger that triggers the fear. We use the same mental machinery to process the idea of danger whether it is danger to the self or danger to someone else. This applies even to characters in movies. We know they are just actors, of course. Still, the fear machinery churns away, beneath the level of this conscious stuff. We cannot turn this machinery off. That’s what is so fun about scary movies.

But why is this fun, really? Humans are the only creatures that actively seek out fearful experiences. We take roller coaster rides. We skydive. We go to scary movies. We even pay money to do these things. That seems irrational. Paradoxical. Why do we do it?

Three Reasons Humans Court Fear

1.            Adrenaline is Adrenaline

At the most basic level, the arousal engendered by the thought of sex is no different than the arousal produced by fear. Adrenaline is adrenaline. Adrenaline is also exciting. It produces a chemical rush in the body and the brain. Furthermore, humans (like rats) are curious creatures, hardwired to explore the environment, to play with things, to nose up against boundaries. Novel experiences produce their own enjoyable chemical kick in the nervous system.

Ordinarily, this chemical kick is trumped by the chemical kick of fear. Nobody in her right mind would jump out of an airplane, for example—unless she had a parachute. A parachute does two things. It reduces the actual danger, in ways we consciously understand. This allows us (some of us, anyway) to deliberately override our fear. And, second, even though the actual danger might still be substantial, a ripcord in the hand gives us a sense of control over the danger.

Fear by itself is no fun. It is a danger avoidance mechanism. But to experience the rush produced by fear where there is minimal actual danger, particularly when accompanied by a sense of control, can be an exhilarating experience. Well worth the price of a movie ticket, for most people.

2.            Cognitive Mastery

Speaking of control, when I watch scary movies at home, I usually have my thumb on the fast-forward button. When the movie gets too tense, I press it. This allows me to manage the level of suspense to suit my personal fear-tolerance threshold. But I get a certain pleasure from not pressing that button. This is related to the adrenaline rush I described above, but it is not the same thing. It derives as much from my ability to overcome my physical and emotional responses. It results in a gratifying sense of mastery of fear.

Skydiving takes this a step further. Skydiving involves overcoming not just fear, but actual danger. It requires not only courage, but a parachute, plus the knowledge and the skill to use it. This involves mastery of a threatening environment and control of a technical apparatus—both of which are pleasurable in and of themselves.

Since movies are not actually dangerous, most of what has been written about the pleasure of scary movies has to do not with mastery of actual danger or even with mastery of fear, but rather with the mastery of frightening ideas. This is a third kind of cognitive mastery. It is the most interesting because it is the most complex.

A movie monster is not just a dangerous creature, it also typically invokes ideas that we do not like to think about because they are repellent (putrescent flesh, spiders, deviant sexual behavior, cannibalism, etc.) or ideas that are difficult to think about because they violate our normal conceptual categories (dead yet alive, artificial yet sentient, destructive mothers, vengeful birds, and so on). By imagining something disgusting or threatening, we take a step toward comprehending it. By trying to comprehend it, we take a step toward being able to manage or control it. This is a uniquely human capacity, but it addresses a basic biological need, by helping us feel and be safe.

3.            Rehearsing Responses to Danger

Film scholars have most often explained the satisfaction produced by the cognitive mastery of fearful ideas in quasi-Freudian terms, either as a manifestation of repression or as a kind of ego affirmation. It is far simpler to explain it as an extension of our natural human capacity to manage danger by thinking about it, especially by thinking about it in social terms.

Fear is forward looking. Deliberately entertaining fearsome ideas is a way of looking far forward—over the horizon, as it were. By entertaining imaginary dangers, we rehearse responses to actual or possible dangers. In this way, we develop important survival skills. Fiction in general may serve this purpose. It allows us to take situations, including painful or sad situations such as death, and think through how we might or should respond to them.

Furthermore, the kinds of threat that appear in scary movies rarely affect individuals alone. They are social threats. They invite us to imagine social responses. A large part of the pleasure of horror is the pleasure of connecting to other people, imaginatively, through empathy with characters in the fiction, and actually, by sharing a frightening experience with other moviegoers. (In fact, most of the people who watch horror movies in theaters are young men, in groups, and young couples, on dates.) Because we are social creatures, connecting with other people gives us pleasure. Or it might be more apt to say that we find it irresistible. It is something we are hardwired to do.

So, entertaining fearful ideas is not just about cognitive mastery. It is about making connections to other people, real and imaginary, as a way of practicing social skills that are useful in coping with actual dangers. I have seen little scholarship on this social aspect of the pleasure of horror movies. It seems like a new and very fruitful avenue of research. (If there is literature on this topic out there, I would be pleased if readers would point me to it, with a comment on this post.)

Conclusion

The fun of fear sounds like a paradox. It is not a paradox at all. It stems from the fact that we are thinking creatures—creatures that use thought and imagination not just to interact with our environment but to control and shape it. And it stems from the fact that we are social creatures, dependent for our survival on the ability to make connections with other people. And most of all, it depends upon that fact that fear is forward looking. It helps creatures anticipate danger. So, here’s looking forward to Halloween.

For further reading:

Carroll, Noel. The Philosophy of Horror: Or, Paradoxes of the Heart (NY: Routledge, 1990).

Freeland, Cynthia. The Naked and the Undead: Evil and the Appeal of Horror (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 2002).

Frijda, Nico. The Laws of Emotion (Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 2007).

Ledoux, Joseph. The Emotional Brain: The Mysterious Underpinnings of Emotional Life (NY: Simon & Schuster, 1998).

The Cove documents the herding and killing of dolphins for meat in a small cove in Taijii, Japan. The filmmakers traveled to Japan, where they used digital cameras, including surveillance cameras, to record confrontations between the documentary crew and local fishermen and to clandestinely record the killing of the dolphins. When the documentary was recently screened in Japan, local demonstrators claimed that the film was anti-Japanese and that it unfairly criticized a traditional way of life.  The screening of The Cove caused a nationwide discussion of free speech in Japan. Yet the film’s critics did not question the film’s images as evidence, but rather objected to the way that the images were used in the making of a broader argument with which they do not agree.  No audiences or reviewers that I am aware of have questioned the evidentiary status of the images in The Cove based on their genesis in digital technologies. I don’t read Japanese (and am not privy to all of the discussion), but so far as I can tell, the fact that the images were produced digitally is simply not an issue.

Dolphin slaughter, from The Cove

Where can we look for some guidance about the implications of digital cinema? The philosopher Berys Gaut, in his new book A Philosophy of Cinematic Art, provides a useful guide to those implications.  This book covers many issues in the philosophy of cinema, and you can read my review here in Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews. In his book Gaut clearly details the salient issues that philosophers and film theorists have so far grappled with. What sets this book apart is Gaut’s careful attention to how the old debates about traditional cinema relate to new forms of cinema, and especially digital cinema and video games (which he calls, in a move sure to raise the eyebrows of video game scholars, “interactive cinema”).  He discusses digital cinema in relation to film as an art, language, realism, authorship, narration, and medium-specificity.

Yet despite the book’s overall good sense, on the issue of digital images as evidence, Gaut sides with the prognosticators when he claims that digital images lack credibility as evidence.  Gaut follows Flint Schier in his claim that photographs are “naturally generative,” that is, they are not purely conventional. And of course, many others have taken similar positions on the indexical nature of the photograph.  Digital images, Gaut says, can have natural generativity, but the digital image is a “mélange image” which can be made by hand, by photographic capture, or by computer synthesis (70).  He writes, “the handmade elements and computer synthesis introduce elements into the digital photograph that are capable of undetectable manipulation” (70).  How much of this can be allowed into a picture before it ceases to be a photograph?  Gaut says that we can’t tell.  His conclusion is that the rise of the digital photograph threatens photographic credibility.

This leads us back to The Cove.  Has anyone questioned the evidential status of the digital images of The Cove?  And if not, does this show that Gaut is wrong about the credibility of digital images, or that audiences for the film are simply naïve?  In my opinion, the images in the film are good evidence.  Thus I’d be inclined to say that Gaut’s claims about digital images and credibility must be wrong somehow.  Perhaps these predictions of the death of indexicality will come true at some time in the future.  But for now, it hasn’t happened yet.

Among other things, audiences believe what they see in a documentary based on more than the images themselves.  They also consider the source and the credibility of the argument.  Thus digital photographs from a credible source may have significant worth as evidence, whereas digital images presented by a known scoundrel or a politician will have less credibility.   After all, many communications that we believe have no indexical images at all, but are purely the verbal reports of journalists, scholars, and observers. If we believe them, we do so because we trust the source, or believe that relevant institutional controls are in place to check on reliability. Thus even if, at some point in the future, digital images bear no more evidentiary force than words, we will still be able to take some documentary films as reliable sources of information.  But clearly that time has not yet come.  I believe The Cove; I hope I haven’t been deceived.

References:

Flint Schier, Deeper Into Pictures: An Essay on Pictorial Representation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986).

Berys Gaut, A Philosophy of Cinematic Art (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010).