Inessentials

Chapter one in Film as Philosophy: Thinking on Screen. More on the project here.

Wartenberg opens the book with synopses of three films, Rashomon, Blade Runner, and Crimes and Misdemeanors. All three films, he claims, “pose philosophical questions and even take stabs at answering them” (2). He uses this claim to make a very nice point: “This suggests that one cannot really understand these films without thinking about the philosophical issues they raise.” This is surely true, but it’s not true in a way that will help Wartenberg’s thesis, particularly, since fundamentally philosophical concepts undergird all sorts of practices and conversations. (You fill your car with gas because you believe the gas causes the car to go, even if you realize that formulation of causation is problematic.)

The clarified thesis that Wartenberg will defend is set off against two “extreme” claims. In answer to the question, “To what extent are films capable of actually doing philosophy?” one could make the strong claim that “films are capable of actually doing philosophy in something like the sense we think of the classical texts of the Western tradition – such as Plato’s Republic and Descartes’ Meditations on First Philosophy – doing philosophy.” Against this, there is the opposite pole that “film is a medium that is very adept at popularizing philosophical issues but lacks the capacity to actually produce original philosophy itself.” Wartenber’s thesis is a moderate form of the former: “films can do philosophy.”

I was disappointed in how Wartenberg then attempts to unpack his “moderate” thesis. First comes a strange digression in which he argues that since films are a popular art form, and philosophy addresses widespread and basic human questions, then films would address these issues to reach a wide audience. (I simply don’t see how that follows in the general case, nor does it seem obviously true in the specific case.) But Wartenberg is building toward the clarification of his thesis: “films are capable of giving philosophical ideas a liveliness and vivacity that some may find lacking the written texts of the tradition” (4). This is an odd place to go because it is a moderate form of the thesis that Wartenberg is not defending: that films are popularizers of philosophical ideas, but do not themselves do philosophy. A few pages later, he will make this same mistake in summarizing his analysis of The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, which he argues embodies a philosophical idea “by providing vivid examples that make it clear what the stakes are in an otherwise quite abstract philosophical debate” (8). Again, this is a version of the “opposite pole” thesis: that films contain ideas, whereas Wartenberg wants to defend a moderate version of the other thesis: that films do philosophy, not just present ideas.

So when Wartenberg gives his most forceful statement of his thesis yet on page 9, nothing he has said to this point supports or clarifies this thesis instead of the one he dismisses. Here is his real thesis:

I will show that films not only have the ability to illustrate philosophical claims or theories in way that provides general illumination, but I will show that films can make arguments, provide counterexamples to philosophical claims, and put forward novel philosophical theories. … Sometimes, to put my thesis provocatively, philosophy can be - and has been – screened, that is, shown to us in what we see while watching and listening to a moving picture.

So far, he has set up the first half of that thesis (which even his opponents grant), but nothing yet for the more provocative half of the thesis, which is also what I am hoping to reach an opinion about.

A few final observations on this opening chapter.

• I was disappointed that Wartenberg argues that films can be just as philosophically interesting as great novels, which assumes that novels are philosophical and puts films on the same footing (5). I am someone who believes films are on the same footing as novels, but wants to be convinced (in both cases) that the art form can sustain philosophy. He defends the (to me) less interesting half of the claim.
• Wartenberg will try to overcome three objections to his thesis (8). Explicitness: Films lack “the means for articulating the conceptual structures necessary to embody” a philosophical position. Generality: Films are about specific instances; philosophy works at a different level of generality. Imposition: Films don’t do philosophy; what philosophy is found in films is brought to it and imposed on it by a philosophical informed viewer.
• Wartenberg wisely notes that his thesis in no way entails that everything passing as “philosophy and film” or “philosophy and popular culture” is worthwhile or interesting (10).
• He makes a nice observation that changes in technology have allowed for multiple rewatches of films. From this he says, plausibly, that this has led filmmakers to make films that are intended to be watched more than once. But then he concludes that this explains partly “the increased frequency of philosophical films, for the philosophical content of a film won’t reveal itself completely on a first viewing” (11). Even if this is true (and I’m not sure that it is), he has done nothing to this point to show that there are in fact more philosophical films recently.
• He distinguishes the claim that a film is “a work of philosophy” from the claim that a film “philosophizes.” The former is stronger, since a film can philosophize (his example is the novel The Brothers Karamazov) without being a work of philosophy full stop (12). It’s the latter (weaker) claim that he defends. In my introductory post, I often used the former phrase, which I will try to avoid going forward.
• He will focus on Hollywood or mainstream films instead of foreign or art films partly because he doesn’t want to be seen to be focusing only philosophy in a loose sense that many philosophers will grant is being done in a film like The Seventh Seal (9-10). This is probably a good idea; it should help keep the (undefined) use of “philosophy” more narrow.