Inessentials

Vague spoilers for The Tree of Life and more specific spoilers for Meek’s Cutoff

I just finished Kelly Reichardt’s wonderful, challenging Meek’s Cutoff, a film with more ideas informing each sequence of shots than any other I can recall seeing recently. It manages to find pure cinema in the act of negating so many of the things that we typically expect from films (e.g., dialogue, clear narrative arcs established early and conclude late, scenes with a beginning, middle, and end). It also serves as an anti-western, unsettling any clearly defined good guys in white hats or bad guys in black hats or headresses, forcing the viewer to watch events unfold from the edges, with the women and children and cattle.

What I find myself focusing on the day after is the film’s profound take on the Tree of Life, which received a different treatment by Terrence Malick this year within the film of that name. Malick’s The Tree of Life really is about life, about its beauty, its origin, its eventual eschaton. The Tree of Life is soteriological, that is, it is concerend with the nature of the soul or spirit, and Malick seems particularly interested in noting how it develops in a human life, especially in the crucial early adolescence when he apparently thinks choices become morally significant and (if this is when the soul develops) a human being becomes a person. Malick wants to show us the beauty of life, from birth to the afterlife. A tragedy begins the film, and prompts the question “Why?” Malick suggests that the only way to answer this question satisfactorally would be to understand the entire history of the universe, which would give us insight into God, the only one who could answer this question. Unfortunately, God turns out to be as inscrutable as any other person, so Malick’s theodicy (explanation for why there is evil) is ultimately a combination of aesthetic considerations and an appeal to mystery. But the tragedy, which the film takes as a launching point for larger questions, is ulimately a tragedy because it is the (perhaps temporary) end of a life, and life for Malick really is beautiful, worthwhile, and perhaps even sacred.

Reichardt gives us the other aspect to the Tree of Life. The first spoken words in the film, I believe, were of a prepubescent boy (comparable in age to Malick’s central character for much of his film) who reads from Genesis 3 about Adam and Eve being forced from the Garden of Eden. I haven’t matched up the dialogue, but here is the passage I think he reads,

And the LORD God said, Behold, the man is become as one of us, to know good and evil: and now, lest he put forth his hand, and take also of the tree of life, and eat, and live for ever: Therefore the LORD God sent him forth from the garden of Eden, to till the ground from whence he was taken. So he drove out the man; and he placed at the east of the garden of Eden Cherubims, and a flaming sword which turned every way, to keep the way of the tree of life.

For Reichardt, the imagery of the Tree of Life is the imagery of banishment, of work without reward, of the impossibility of Eden. Like the first couple banished from Eden, the characters in Meek’s Cutoff are intimately connected to the ground, but the ground is cursed, it is without the life-sustaining water that could keep them going. (And when they encounter water early on, even that poses a danger, since they must ford the river.) We could talk further about the ways in which Meek’s Cutoff plays on the various curses of Genesis 3, most notably the more significant impact on women. But returning to the Edenic imagery, Meek at one point refers to their destination as a “Second Eden,” which suggests that the struggle is ultimately a struggle to return to that original state. But of course, the film never gives us Eden, it gives us only the slow struggle to stay alive, a life not filled with beauty but with pain and suffering without any clear reward. (For all the beauty of the film, not a single character seems to notice the beauty of where they are, only the dangers.)

The closing scene of Meek’s Cutoff shows the travellers finding a tree that they hope signifies water and thus life. To this point, though, the film has undermined the travellers’ confidence in each of their guides (Meek and the nameless Indian), and they are left yet again wondering if they should follow their new guide. The question is only partially whether this tree is the Tree of Life, which marks the entrance to Eden (more specifically, the Second Eden that Meek promised), since in Reichardt’s vision, we have no guide we can trust and no reason to think the next stage will be any less painful or fruitless than the last. Even if this is the Tree of Life, it is not a trustworthy sign of hope because it is not ultimately a sign of life, but a reminder of the toll that the mythical banishment from Eden had on humans, especially women.

Chapter four in Film as Philosophy: Thinking on Screen. Earlier posts: overview, chapter one, chapter two, chapter three.

I have an occasional “joke” I pull out when the conversation turns to teaching philosophy. It’s a dictum about how the laziest form of teaching philosophy to undergraduates is screening The Matrix. Putting The Matrix on your intro to philosophy syllabus is a likely sign that you’ve given up completely, you are trying to connect with your youthful audience but don’t know how, or you don’t watch many movies.

Between inchoate undergraduate essays, professors’ weak attempts to make culture references, and lazy teaching, the film has become so ubiquitous that is probably the leading cause of eye-rolling among academic philosophers. Another essay on Cartesian skepticism and The Matrix? More fill-in-the-dots connections between The Matrix and Christianity or Buddhism? So scanning Wartenberg’s book before I read it, it struck me as either extremely daring or extremely naïve for him to include an entire chapter on The Matrix as philosophy, the film that has probably generated more faux-profound navel-gazing that gives philosophy a bad name than any other artifact of popular culture.

It was not encouraging, therefore, to read the first sentence of chapter four. “It is tempting to credit the Wachowski Brothers’ film, The Matrix (199), with ushering in an era of brisk philosophical activity focused on film” (54). Replace “brisk philosophical activity” with “insipid pseudo-intellectualizing” and you’ll have a better sense of my philosophical acquaintances’ attitude toward the film. That’s not to say that good philosophy inspired by the film can’t be done or that it hasn’t been done. Perhaps the most influential and respected philosopher of mind writing today, David Chalmers, wrote a lengthy article about the philosophical underpinnings of the film. But that is seen as the exception rather than the rule. Regardless, let’s clear away our prejudices and predispositions as best we can, set aside judgment for the moment, and see what arguments Wartenberg can offer for why The Matrix helps us better appreciate the way that films can philosophize.

Philosophy. Deep. Whoa.

This chapter focuses on how films can philosophize by providing thought experiments. There are two conditions on a thought experiment, says Wartenberg, following the work of Tamar Szabo Gendler: there is an imaginary scenario, and this imaginary scenario “needs to play a role in a broader argument about a philosophical claim, principle, or theory, adding or withdrawing support to the item in question” (57). Fiction films easily meet the first condition. But how can they do the second?

To begin, note the wide variety of roles that thought experiments have played in philosophy: counterexamples, establishing a possibility, demonstrating impossibility, establishing necessary connections, confirming a theory, and theory building. (He gives extended examples from the history of philosophy for each of these kinds.) Then, examine a particular fiction film to see if it has done any of these. According to Wartenberg, The Matrix does this by updating the Cartesian skeptical thought experiment replacing Descartes’ evil demon with malevolent computers (67).

He focuses on a particular reading of The Matrix: that it updates the Cartesian thought experiment by drawing attention to itself as a film and the way that the deception occurring within the matrix is similar to the deception occurring when one watches a film like The Matrix (72). In both cases, one becomes deceived about reality by a projection that simulates reality. This is ultimately the purpose of the skeptical hypothesis presented by The Matrix, to get the viewers “to think about the role that computers and other devices with screens — films, video and DVD players, etc. — have come to play in our lives” (75). I’m not going to object to this (rather simplistic, I think) take on the film, since I have a more direct objection to this reading’s role in Wartenberg’s larger argument.

The second, more difficult, constraint on a philosophical thought experiment is that it play a role in a broader philosophical argument. Does The Matrix do that? Wartenberg does not attempt to show that there is some on-going filmic or cultural conversation about skepticism or screens that The Matrix participates in. That would have been one way to show that a film can be part of a philosophical argument. Instead, he attempts to focus on the film’s narrative structure to show that The Matrix is embedding the thought experiment in a philosophical argument or making a philosophical point. His interpretation thus hinges on the importance of the film’s early sequences in which the viewer does not yet know that he or she is watching a matrix-scenario within the film’s world rather than the film’s world itself. He asks us to compare The Matrix to a different, imagined film called The Matron that is similar to The Matrix but in which we are always aware that Neo’s experiences are within the matrix. The Matrix uses the skeptical scenario to make a philosophical point, says Wartenberg, because it allows the viewer to undergo the same realization as Neo, and thus leads the viewer to raise the same questions about what is real that Neo confronts.

I find his argument that The Matron would not be successful because we would always be aware of Neo’s position vis-a-vis the matrix completely unpersuasive. In fact, watching the crew of the Nebuchadnezzar watch the matrix would more successfully underline an emphasis on the relationship between screens and skepticism than does The Matrix. Not only do I not find Wartenberg’s emphasis on narrative structure helpful in showing how a film can (removed from any context whatsoever) engender a specifically philosophical awakening in its viewers comparable to what Neo allegedly experiences within the film, his argument actually convinces me that The Matrix could have been more successful had it adopted the approach of The Matron if that was what it was trying to do. Clearly The Matrix is supposed to play off the long history of skeptical scenarios and give us little “a-ha!” revelations. But that’s a far cry from a clear, sustained thesis about skepticism (or skepticism and screens).

I’d like to think there is a fiction film that attempts to contribute to a philosophical debate and does so successfully. The Matrix is not that film.

Other observations:

• “What’s unique about The Matrix [compared to the novel Atonement], however, is that it deceives viewers about their perceptual beliefs, for, while watching the initial segment of the film, they believe themselves to be perceiving a real, albeit fictional, world when all they are perceiving is the illusory world of the Matrix” (72). I hope Wartenberg is not suggesting that The Matrix is unique among films in this way, since there are so, so many films that use this same device. That’s why Serenity had to up the ante by making no less than three reveals to start the film.
• Classic skeptical scenarios that are supposed to be imagined, like that in the first two of Descartes’ Meditations, are built on there being no differences whatsoever between the skeptical scenario and our naïve percpetion of the world. (Descartes later denies this is true, but the argument gets going from this starting point.) But as I remember The Matrix (it’s been a few years), there are distinctive elements in the matrix that underline its difference from the real world (glitches that produce déjà vu for instance, ability to control events in ways that defy physical laws.) In other words, without some serious interpretation to show why this is an important new direction for skeptical hypotheses, it seems like the film really doesn’t care to emphasize that utter indistinguishability of the matrix-world and the real-world. This distinction further breaks down in the sequels, of course, but I’m willing to set that aside. It still doesn’t make sense to me as a truly skeptical hypothesis.
• Yet again, I’m tempted to say that the choice we’re presented is between “films can’t philosophize” and “films can only (or so far only) philisophize poorly.” It’s like the old debate between whether bad art is art at all. (“Thomas Kinkade isn’t art!” “Yes, his paintings are art, only they’re really, really bad art!”)

Chapter three in Film as Philosophy: Thinking on Screen. Earlier posts: overview, chapter one, chapter two.

First, a confession. Although I’ve expressed skepticism about whether films can do philosophy, I have used films while teaching philosophy to help students connect to ideas. In one case, I used the example from this week’s chapter, Charlie Chaplin’s Modern Times, to help students find ways into Marx’s thought. Wartenberg makes many of the same connections to Marx that I drew out in class. However, I intentionally avoided making any implications about whether Chaplain intended his film to be understood this way, or whether the film was itself Marxist, or whether the film makes any arguments. Instead, I tried to show that there were parallels between how Chaplain presented the life of the factory worker and Marx’s critique of how capitalist systems dehumanize and alienate workers and left it at that.

Wartenberg sets out to convince me and other readers that we should not be so down on the illustrative aspects of films. Put simply, when a film illustrates a philosophical idea or argument, it counts as doing philosophy. Oddly, this argument is directed at some of his allies, those who say that films do philosophy, but who deny that illustrating an idea or argument counts as philosophy (which includes Christopher Falzon and Stephen Mulhall). This makes the chapter a bit unwieldy, since he takes on opponents on two fronts: both those who deny that films can do philosophy and those who assert that films can do philosophy, but all of whom deny that illustrating a philosophical theory would count as doing philosophy. In Wartenberg’s words, “I shall argue that films that illustrate previously articulated philosophical positions can, despite their status as illustrations, make a contribution to our understanding of the philosophical position that they illustrate” (32).

This leads to my favorite section of the book so far. To understand better what it means to illustrate a philosophical position and why this could itself be philosophy, Wartenberg attempts to do what no one, perhaps, has done before: provide an philosophical analysis of illustration. Although admittedly sketchy and underdeveloped, it’s exciting to see a philosopher wrangle an idea a previously untouched idea. Here’s a sketch of his sketch, leaving out all the juicy bits:

1. Illustrations “are always illustrations of something else.” So “intentionality” is “a mark of illustrations” (39). E.g., an illustration of the fence-painting scene from Tom Sawyer.
2. Some illustrations become “iconic representations” and are thus as essential to the book as the text (40). “This suggests that we should be wary of assuming that illustrations are less important or significant than the texts they are designed to illustrate” (41). E.g., John Tenniel’s illustrations of Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. He also suggests Winnie-the-Pooh and Harry Potter as other possible examples. I think Quentin Blake’s illustrations of Roald Dahl’s books would be another fitting example. Importantly, this claim is used to support Wartenberg’s thesis that “The fictional world of the book is constituted by both the written text and its illustrations” (41). This is a key step in his argument for the possibility of imagistic arguments.
3. More exciting still, Wartenberg turns to birding books, where “the illustrations are integral to the books’ purpose, for they convey a great deal of information that is not ascertainable from the written text alone” (42). This is a pretty fantastic example, as it shows how illustrations can be integral to a book’s purpose. In my notes, I wrote that an example from fiction might be James Thurber, whose illustrations are not only integral to the feel of his books, but (if I remember) occasionally are necessary to understand the short stories.
4. A final category of illustration are those that are eventually treated “as independent works of art” (43). E.g., Marc Chagall’s illustrations for Daphne and Chloe.

All of this discussion of illustration is not intended to show that films are philosophy because they fall into one of the categories of illustration of philosophical ideas; rather, Wartenberg’s aim is to show that being an illustration does not mean that the illustration is “subordinate to that which it illustrates” or should be denigrated for being an illustration (44). In other words, if films are illustrations of philosophical ideas, that does not disqualify from being being philosophy.

Wartenberg then turns to Modern Times as an illustration of “Marx’s theory of the exploitation and alienation or estrangement (Entfremdung) of the worker in a capitalist economic system, a view that forms the core of his philosophical critique of capitalism” (44). After a brief lesson from Eisenstein about symbolic montage, Wartenberg proceeds to relate key scenes from the film along with how these scenes illustrate specific Marxist critiques. The conveyor belt sequence shows that the objects control the workers. The lunch sequence shows workers becoming commodified. And so on.

Wartenberg’s point is that visualizing a metaphor (or, presumably, an idea or an argument) “makes it more concrete” (50). And this can be an instance of philosophy, since its specificity is not objectionable (argued for in the last chapter) and its illustrative nature is not objectionable (argued for in this chapter). He also suggests that there might be two original contributions to Marxist philosophy contained in the film: “To the more obvious idea of a body becoming mechanical, Modern Times adds the notion of a mind so rigidified by routine that it also becomes a mere mechanism, seeing only evidence of patters it has been required to search for and recognize” (51). (This is a reference to the bolt-tightening movements being extended to non-bolts.) But even if there is nothing philosophically original in Modern Times, it still counts as doing philosophy. Just as philosophers are doing philosophy when the explain some philosophical theory (in, for instance, a published journal article), “cinematic illustrations of philosophical theories play an important role in transmitting the ideas developed by philosophical theories to a wide audience” (53).

Am I persuaded yet that films do philosophy? Not quite. I concede (as Wartenberg expects) that films illustrate philosophy. He anticipates the objection that illustrations qua illustrations are subordinate to the texts they illustrate and handles it quite nicely. But his treatment of what philosophy is extends to treating much of what philosophers do as non-original contributions to philosophy (which allows him to say that film’s non-original, illustrative contributions to philosophy also count as philosophy). He claims that ”…most philosophers philosophize without making original contributions to the discipline,” and that “…it is generally agreed that historians of philosophy are doing philosophy, even though their work is rarely taken to make an original contribution to philosophy itself rather than a contribution to our understanding of its history” (44). Wartenberg and I have very different views of our (shared) field of philosophy (and our shared sub-field of the history of philosophy). I think that my work in the history of philosophy is itself philosophy and is an original contribution to philosophy. In fact, if it weren’t original, it wouldn’t be philosophy. (Original here, doesn’t mean “never been said before” but “makes moves that originate with the author.”)

In other words, it seems to me that Wartenberg lowers the bar of what counts as philosophy in a way that allows in film.

Additional observations:

• Wartenberg continually refers to Chaplin’s character as “Charlie.” This isn’t in the film, is it? I thought the film left him unnamed (which would be more fitting of Wartenberg’s general reading of the film).
• From page 32: “Charlie Chaplin’s 1935 masterpiece, Modern Times.” From page 44: “Charlie Chaplin’s 1936 masterpiece, Modern Times.”

Chapter two in Film as Philosophy: Thinking on Screen. Earlier posts: overview, chapter one.

This chapter responds to three general objections to the possibility that films are philosophy. Wartenberg calls these objections “a priori” because “they do not refer to actual films, but make general claims about what films cannot do” (16). This is an unfortunate way of putting it because more than one author he responds to includes the discussion of an individual film in their general argument. But the point is clear enough. Before turning to his analysis of particular films and how they do philosophy, Wartenberg will address three objections that try to deny that possibility from general considerations.

The explicitness objection

The first objection is that “film lacks the explicitness to formulate and defend the precise claims that are characteristic of philosophical writing” (16). A film may brush up against philosophical ideas or arguments, but those will always be in the background. Wartenberg focuses on an argument by Murray Smith that “works of art are inherently ambiguous, but not so philosophical texts” (17). Wartenberg responds in two ways. First, “Just because an argument is philosophical, it need not be unambiguous” (20). Second, “just because an argument is implicit, it does not therefore have to be imprecise” (19). Wartenberg is probably right on both of these points. But what do they tell us? They respond to Smith’s (alleged) conflation of implicit and imprecise. But that is only one reason to make the explicitness objection. Besides claiming that implicit arguments are automatically imprecise, one could also say that failure to make one’s arguments explicit often signals that one is not primarily interested in making a philosophical argument. Or that implicit arguments are often ones that a person is not aware they are making. Or that implicitness is a mark of an assumption rather than an argument. All of these point to a general claim that one mark of philosophical argumentation is that it is presented as such. Regardless of whether it is posed in dialogue form, or geometrical form, or standard prose style, philosophical arguments are marked as such. Films seem to lack such marking. Now, I don’t want to make too much of this altered explicitness objection, partly because I don’t want to beg the question against films as philosophy and partly because I’m not especially confident in it. I just wish Wartenberg had done more than address a particular argument and paused to address other ways that the explicitness objection could be raised.

The generality objection

This objection does attempt to point out a characteristic of philosophical argumentation that is absent in film. Specifically, “the abstractness and generality of the issues that characterize philosophy” are absent in film, especially narrative fiction film (21). Wartenberg looks for parallels with other disciplines. He concedes that a filmic recording of a person doing mathematics would not itself be a film doing mathematics; so too a recording of a person doing philosophy would not be an example of a film doing philosophy (22). However, he claims that history is a discipline in which films can contribute to its field of knowledge. Using the examples of With Babies and Banners and The Labor Wars, he claims that documentary films have made arguments within the field of history. I don’t know how controversial that claim is, but his explanation strikes me as more controversial. “The reason that history could be screened was that narrativity provided a link between film and history” (24). In other words, both history and film use narratives, which is enough common ground for films to contribute to the field of history. His goal is to find a similar link between film and philosophy. He claims to have found this in the method of the thought experiment, but we’ll have to wait until Chapter 4 to get the details on that.

The imposition objection

Finally, Wartenberg considers the objection that “films can be used for philosophically interesting purposes,” but this is not something the film does, rather it is a prompt for a philosopher to use the film in a philosophical way (25). Wartenberg agrees that this can be a problem for philosophical interpretations of a film, but this is a problem for those interpretations and it would be wrong to characterize all philosophical interpretations as impositions. I am with Wartenberg in his response here, with one caveat. This objection gains force if it is combined with the explicitness objection to claim that philosophers read into films there own interests that are at best implicitly and therefore inchoately contained in the narrative. But I’ll concede that the burden of proof is on the objector to show that this objection always holds.

Final observations

• Wartenberg is not interested in Stanley Cavell’s approach to the philosophy of film that would identify the essential features of film and philosophy and show that they overlap (27). Wartenberg is correct that Cavell’s reading of the history of philosophy and of film are both idiosyncratic. Cavell is also open to charges that his focus is too narrow (skepticism, moral perfectionism). Instead, Wartenberg advocates a “local” approach that addresses individual films and is empirical in its approach (28).
• Wartenberg sidesteps offering a definition of philosophy quite nicely. He offers three conceptions (“a discipline that addresses a rather limited set of what are often termed ‘eternal questions,’” “a discipline that asks questions about other disciplines,” and a “methodological” approach that focuses on “ways of addressing topics” rather than subject matter) (29-30). He will address all three; the third through the structure of the book and the first two through individual chapters.
• The early pages of this chapter were burdened with an unfortunate attempt to accuse his critics of rehashing a Platonic divide between reality and art. There’s no obvious link between “the relegation of art to a realm of reality inferior to that reserved for philosophy” (as in Plato) and the claim that “film lacks the explicitness to formulate and defend the precise claims that are characteristic of philosophical writing” (16). His argument is in no way improved when he tries to claim that Smith epistemic critiques repeats a false divide in Platonic metaphysics (17).
• An important caveat to the response to the imposition objection. Wartenberg says, “For a philosophical film interpretation to be at least prima facie plausible, it needs to posit a meaning that the filmmaker(s) could have intended. If it does not do so, then it would make sense to say that while the interpretation is philosophy, the film is not, at least on that interpretation” (26). I think this will bother other readers more than it bothers me, since I have no principled objection to an author’s intent playing an important role in limiting legitimate interpretations of a text. I just thought I’d flag this passage for those who do object.
• I can’t say I’m any more convinced after this chapter that films can be philosophy. At most, I’m bothered that the objections to film as philosophy haven’t been more forcefully or carefully stated. But of course, I’m relying here on Wartenberg’s characterization of his opponents, so I can’t say whether there are better arguments out there. If anything, I’m shifting toward a position that I’ve been flirting with for a while: films can do philosophy, but they’ve only done it (can do it?) badly.
• In the coming chapters, we’ll get to discuss individual films, which should be more interesting to my seven readers.

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.

As a philosopher (or better, a professional academic philosopher in training) with an interest in film, it was probably inevitable that I would eventually have to engage one of the big debates in the still small field of philosophy of film: Can movies be works of philosophy?

When philosophers do philosophy, it is usually either in dialogue with others or in the solitude of one’s mind and typically results in a presentation (spoken word, perhaps a few slides) or a publication (written word, usually a journal article but occasionally a book or blog post). In each of these cases, philosophers convey concepts in words. Those works of philosophy that are produced are fundamentally verbal. This doesn’t mean there couldn’t be other ways of doing philosophy, but they are far less common. Here’s one now-accepted example: Logicians have come to realize that there could be a completely visual language (think: advanced Venn diagrams) in which one could establish the rules of logic and derive logical results without the use of either a natural language or an artificial, symbolic language. In an analogous way, could one use the “language” of film to do philosophy?

We certainly think of some films as being “philosophical” in the generic sense in which we often use the term when we mean “thoughtful” or “reflective” or “left me thinking about its interesting themes after I left the theater.” These could be sci-fi films like The Matrix or 2001: A Space Odyssey, art house fare like Rashomon, or any other genre or classification of film. There’s no good reason to discontinue this use of the term, but the question I am asking is narrower.

We also think of some filmmakers or individual films as being particularly “philosophical.” For example, Woody Allen’s name is sometimes offered up as an example of a philosophical filmmaker. I suspect that sometimes “philosophical” is used as a sort of honorific term that can be used to identify an intelligent or creative director or writer. I want to be careful to avoid using the term this way. Woody Allen is no more or less great a filmmaker if we determine that he is or is not doing philosophy in his films. Annie Hall is no less funny, sophisticated, or rewarding if we ultimately decide that it is not a work of philosophy. When I argue later that Allen is or is not doing philosophy in his films, I hope it is understood that this in no way marks his films as any less great than they are. The same goes for Charlie Kaufmann, Terrence Malick, and everyone else who makes intellectually stimulating films.

My point is this: We can use “philosophical” in a broad sense to mean “intellectually engaging” or “concerned with long-standing questions.” Or we can use it in a narrow sense, the sense that I plan to use it, to mean the sort of careful, rigorous argumentation, in dialogue with other texts, that seeks to defend or refute a conclusion about any of a range of traditional issues. This is what I mean when I ask if movies are philosophical or if they can be counted as works of philosophy.

Because I want to explore this question further, and could use a little social prompting to keep me going, I thought I would read and publicly respond to Thomas E. Wartenberg’s Thinking on Screen: Film as Philosophy. From what I can tell (I’ve only glanced through it), it argues for the thesis that films do count as works of philosophy. He provides both general arguments and individual case studies. It also seems the most direct answer to the question I am forming.

I am putting this out here so that you can read along with me if you like. (Book club!) From the bits I have read, the book is written in a very readable style that should not be too off-putting to those not used to the density of most philosophical writing. It’s also fairly short. If that seems too much, you can read my comments as I read along. My goal is to give comments on each chapter as I read, with a new post showing up every 5-7 days or so. (I am dissertating on something not at all film-related, so I’ll be reading slowly.)

At the outset, I should note that I am disinclined to say that films can be works of philosophy. As wonderful as my experiences at the movies have been, I don’t think that I have ever seen a film that argued for a conclusion in a philosophically sophisticated manner. Part of why I am engaging Wartenberg is that he thinks films can be works of philosophy, and I am looking for the best arguments for that thesis that I can find. (We philosophers are a perverse bunch. We are much more interested in the arguments against the positions we hold than the arguments for them.) Part of me wants to be persuaded by Waternberg. I would love to say that Solaris or The Thin Blue Line is a philosophical achievement and not just a cinematic one, but I am not ready to say that.

Yet.

I tried a little experiment this year. I wrote down (okay, typed out) every film I watched this year, the date I watched it, and assigned it a letter grade. Grading films like that is sadly reductive, but it was a first step toward externalizing and therefore crystallizing my reactions. (I filled in some of 2009 from memory and from my Netflix history.) I had hoped to write brief two- or three-sentences responses for each film, but I didn’t succeed there. Perhaps in 2011.

I’ve found the practice to be instructive in many ways, but most of all it has been fun. Now as we leave a movie theater, my wife wants to know what my grade is going to be, and I ask her grade. How dare I give True Grit a B, she tells me, since it was easily an A- at least. (Much like what happened to Kelli Marshall, I was talked into a B+.) One of the joys of watching film is the company of the people we watch it with, and most of my cinema experiences this year have been with my wife, whose taste fortunately overlaps a great deal with mine.

I watched 170 films in 2010, roughly one every two days. And if I counted correctly, I watched over 50 films with a 2010 release date. That means there are still a lot of films, including many critical favorites I didn’t see. No Dogtooth. No I Am Love. No Certified Copy. No Sweetgrass. But you can see grades for all the films I did watch here (sortable by release date).

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Very mild spoilers for 127 Hours and Unstoppable

One of the many remarkable things our brains can do is to relate information received through one sense to information received through another sense. My brain coordinates the sound of my fingers tapping on the keys of my Macbook as I feel the pressure of each finger pressing down as I see the backs of my fingers move slightly. My brain takes these pieces of information, received through different sensory apparati and gives me an all-in-one story about what is happening to me. Pretty cool.

In cinema, two senses are stimulated directly: seeing and hearing. We have our other senses engaged (smelling the popcorn, feeling the pressure of the cushion against our backs), but the filmmaker is limited to two senses to tell her story. But sometimes a really talented (or lucky) filmmaker is able to use our brain’s coordinating ability to use those two senses to engage the other senses.

In the wildly uneven but occasionally brilliant film 127 Hours, Danny Boyle tells the story of Aron Ralston (James Franco) who ventures alone into the Utah desert, slips in a crevice, and has his arm pinned by a boulder. Then begins the 127 excruciating hours as he struggles to survive and free himself. My favorite moment of the film happens shortly before that moment when his arm becomes pinned. As Ralston walks through Blue John Canyon, Boyle shoots Franco’s hand lightly running along the cliffside, scraping his fingers over the hard, grainy surface. It’s one of the really pleasurable moments of the film. It not only uses the close-up style that Boyle favors throughout the film (often to a very different effect), but it nicely establishing the challenge that lies ahead, suggesting the firmness and immobility of the physical location Ralston is entering. I found it particularly thrilling, though, for also giving us that unique moment of pleasure when we become so transfixed by a movie that the feel of a physical object against a character’s hand elicits the sense memory of grainy, rough, hard in us. We are used to feeling emotions that echo a film character’s emotions, but to elicit the memory of how things feel by engaging vision and hearing is truly wonderful.

Tony Scott delivers a similar pleasure in the runaway train thriller Unstoppable. The first act is filled with shots of trains moving slowly, switching tracks, engaging breaks. With some really terrific sound editing, Scott manages to reinforce in the viewer* that these are large, heavy, metallic objects. (*See how naturally we use visual terms for film reception, even when describing sound?) Again, this helps the viewer anticipate not only the magnitude of the future events, but it elicits the momentary pleasure of recognizing the sheer physicality of these multi-ton objects. When a character’s limb gets pinned (more parallels!) by these massive objects, we’ve already established through screeching breaks, thumping metal, and clanging bells the unforgiving, metallic nature of these objects and our own memories of encountering their force. Despite reminding us every 10 minutes that the film takes place in Pennsylvania, Scott does very little to give us a sense of what this place is like, but he does an excellent job of reminding us what these train cars feel like.

Recording images and sound, arranging them, and projecting them back to us in a way that engages our other senses. Yet another way in which movies are, to use the common word, awesome.

As those who follow me on twitter have noticed by now, I’ve been intrigued by the way that Carlos has blurred the lines between film and television. Carlos is a docudrama about Carlos the Jackal, the infamous assassin, terrorist, revolutionary, mercenary, myth, and public enigma. Carlos was produced for French television by the highly respected filmmaker Oliver Assayas. It aired this week on the Sundance Channel over three nights, running over 5 hours in total. Although produced for French television and aired on American television (before a shorter theatrical cut hits a few theaters), it was almost completely ignored by television critics, while being hailed as a masterpiece by many film critics. What’s going on here?

Carlos, it seems, is a mini-series. The Sundance Channel calls it “an epic 3-part miniseries.” The Internet Movie Database calls it a “TV mini-series.” But this television mini-series is being ignored by television critics while being discussed by film critics. For support, notice that Metacritic has Carlos listed as a film, and all twelve reviewers are primarily film critics. Sites that do both film and television criticism, like The A.V. Club, have Carlos filed under film. Furthermore, film critics are largely discussing Carlos as a film, with only a brief mention that it was made for and originally aired on French television. (Andrew O’Hehir at Salon.com is the only film critic I’ve found who calls Carlos a mini-series and the only one to at least attempt to make a connection between film and television.)

Why have television critics ceded this highly praised mini-series to the film critics? I’ve got a few ideas.

1. The death of the mini-series While once a key component of television programming, mini-series have largely fallen by the wayside. It’s been a long time since North and South, Lonesome Dove, and Brideshead Revisited. Television criticism has grown exponentially in recent years, but this has occurred after the demise of the mini-series, so there is almost no precedent for television writers reviewing these sorts of events.
2. The HBO phenomenon And what precedents there are for television critics reviewing mini-series have been almost exclusively historical dramas like Band of Brothers and John Adams on HBO. But HBO has recently been airing a number of made-for-TV films that have been reviewed as films by film critics. Temple Grandin is one recent example. HBO intentionally situates itself apart from television, as in its famous slogan, “It’s not TV, it’s HBO.” That makes it easy for film critics to make forays into television.
3. Oliver Assayas There are also elements of Carlos in particular that make it more attractive to film critics. For instance, the filmmaker is a former film writer turned writer and director, and he is regarded by many as one of the most creative and talented filmmakers working today. So when Assayas does television, it gets film critics’ attention, just as Spike Lee’s HBO documentaries did.
4. Film festivals Carlos did screen at a couple film festivals in its full-length version, including the influential New York Film Festival. So while the theatrical version of Carlos, not yet released, is not the version being reviewed by critics (at least in the current round of criticism), its mini-series version has been screened a couple times in American festivals.
5. Filmic predecessors There is also a precedent for critically lauded films to have their origin in international television. Most famously, Krzysztof Kieślowski’s The Decalogue, made for Polish television in 1988, was screened at some art house theaters in the US, often as a part of film festivals, and then later revivals. More recently, The Best of Youth, made for Italian television, came to US theaters. (I saw it over two glorious nights at the Oak Street Cinema in Minneapolis; it remains one of my favorite film-going experiences.) So film critics have some familiarity with European television that is screened in US theaters.
6. US-centrism of television critics Finally, as the last point suggests, while film critics are decidedly international in their criticism, television critics remain a pointedly US-centric bunch. A few will venture into Canadian television or the highly praised British sit-coms and anthologies, but television criticism in the US remains firmly rooted in the history of television in the US. It is not yet an international effort.

What difference does all of this make? I believe that it matters how we watch television and film, and good criticism address the medium through which the content is delivered. Understanding why Carlos was shown on the Sundance Channel (spun-off of the Sundance Film Festival) instead of on network television or HBO matters. Appreciating how our experience of Carlos can be different if we watch it in a movie theater or on a television matters. Knowing that Carlos is available on-demand on your television before it is released in theaters matters. Placing Carlos in the context of French television as opposed to American television or international film festivals matters. Calling a television mini-series “cinematic” (as a compliment) matters. And, perhaps most importantly, situating Carlos in the context of the television mini-series can lead to a different set of questions and assessments than situating it in the context of French cinema.

When only film critics review Carlos, we miss half of the potential entry points into analyzing an important piece of … television? cinema? art?

UPDATE: In his interview with Sam Adams of The A.V. Club, Oliver Assayas addresses a few of these points. A couple things to note. 1.) He was frustrated that the “film” (his term) could only be shown on French TV. 2) He says it “exists simultaneously” on television and film outside of France. 3) Because it was essentially green-lit as three television movies, he had a larger than usual budget.

What’s the last thing the world needs? Another blog post about Christopher Nolan’s Inception, of course. Yet, nevertheless, I have succumbed to the need to purge these thoughts from my (conscious) mind and implant them in yours. Beware, moderate spoilers ahead. I see no way to talk about this film without assuming you have seen it. I try to talk about other films in a non-spoilery way.

Marge Simpson gets psychoanalyz

Most of the debate about Inception (beyond, “does it work?”) has dealt with Nolan’s views of dreaming and the subconscious. A lot of the criticism of the film has focused on Nolan’s rather chaste view of the subconscious and his failure to capture what dreams are like and their relevance to cinema. First, it’s notable that there’s no sex in anyone’s subconscious here. We have one very modest kiss, a couple slinky dresses, and that’s about it. This isn’t exactly the untamed wilderness of lust and desire that people (especially Freudians) associate with the subconscious. There is some violence, but no passion for violence; just violence that is necessary for the mission. Second, dreams make little sense once you’ve left the dream world, but Inception works so very hard to make sense that it’s clear you are supposed to leave the film thinking that it all works. Third, there are filmmakers who push us toward portraying the unease and bizarreness of dreams filmically (David Lynch being an obvious example), but Nolan simply misses all of this. Fourth, many have theorized that experiencing a film is like experiencing a dream, and that films can play to this aspect of our experience, but Nolan fails to do this. Most film edits are like the leaps our brains make while dreaming, for instance. And films can exploit this, perhaps most directly by drawing attention to themselves by employing dream imagery. Inception, it’s been argued, fails to do any of those things that would make it seem dream-like or draw attention to the film as a dream. (I’ve previously argued that Gone with the Wind used dream imagery in this way.)

I don’t mean to rebut these criticisms directly. What I want to say instead is that these criticisms have missed an important aspect of what Nolan is doing. Nolan is not exploring the subconscious and not exploring dreams per se, he is exploring the tension between control and chaos (a theme that runs through most of his work) and using dreaming and the subconscious to further his interest in how we learn to control the world around us (or in this case in us). Three points to consider: 1. Nolan is a controlling director. 2. Chaos and control is an important theme in Nolan’s films. 3. Inception is far more concerned with control over the subconscious/dreaming than with the subconscious/dreaming per se.

First, it is important to note that Christopher Nolan is a “controlling” director, by which I mean that he is a director who works out ahead of time all or nearly all of what will be filmed (scripting, storyboarding, etc.) and the filming comes last. (I know, I know, postproduction comes last, but that’s still been worked out ahead of time). These directors are interested in each detail of the frame, what goes where, and in every aspect of filmmaking because they want to control as many aspects of the production as possible to as fully realize their vision as possible. Other examples of this kind of director include Alfred Hitchcock and Jean-Pierre Jeunet. Other directors are more open to filming moments as they occur to them (like Ingmar Bergman’s famous closing shot in The Seventh Seal), or leaving pieces of the film open to interpretation (like the blindfolding of the sheep in Luis Buñuel’s The Exterminating Angel), or working without a script (like Wim Wenders attempted on Wings of Desire). These directors (at least some of the time or for some of the film) try to capture something that is happening in the moment, something that cannot be planned, something spontaneous. This is why it is so odd to see the spontaneous, captured-in-the-moment shot of the fly walking across the camera lens from Truffaut’s Jules and Jim show up Jeunet’s Amelie, since these two films are polar opposites in terms of the sort of control I am talking about. Of course all directors exert some control; we consider Truffaut an auteur, after all, which would be difficult if he had no control at all over his films! I’m just trying to point to two different tendencies among directors. Nolan is the craftsman control, the planner, the preparer. And that’s an important way in which he is engaged with controlling his films.

Second, the theme of chaos and control runs throughout Nolan’s films. I’ll mention just the two that I have watched most recently (which are also his two most well known and most loved films), Memento and The Dark Knight. Memento not only exhibits the sort of supreme directorial control that I talked about in the last point, it is also the story of a man struggling to gain control over himself and his world while he has the unusual condition that he cannot form new short-term memories. We watch in each scene (especially the black and white “forward” scenes) as he tattoos himself with important things to remember, as he makes notes to himself, and (in one crucial scene) controls his future action by manipulating these physical reminders. We slowly come to realize over the course of the film that the other characters are each trying to control the protagonist in unique ways, exploiting the ways in which he is not able to control himself. Memento is, among many other things, a battle for control.

I don’t see much need to harp on the ways that The Dark Knight continues this theme of control. The film (in some disappointingly direct exposition) states the theme of chaos and control quite clearly. The Joker represents chaos. He destroys and terrorizes for the joy of the chaos. Batman tries to bring order to the chaos, tries to help the police and district attorney’s office gain control over the city, because only with this control can there be peace. Batman, though, is a conflicted figure because he tries to bring control by operating outside the bounds of society. He uses his own sort of chaos to help bring control, and thus cannot be an accepted member of society. (This plays into the trope in Westerns that the gunslinger is necessary but cannot remain in the civilized society, captured most beautifully, I think, in Shane.) The Dark Knight is about the relentless struggle between chaos and control and the extent to which at least some of us must become chaotic in order to keep things in control.

Nolan is a “controlling” director and his films engage in the question of how we control the world and the struggle between control and chaos at an individual and societal level. Let’s turn now to the most important point: Inception is far less concerned with how we dream or what the subconscious is really like than it is with how we can control them. Most reviews I’ve read haven’t dealt with this. (Caryn James is one exception.)

The characters in the film are very interested in how much control they have, and how much they are willing that control over to the others. See, as one example, the exchange capture in this TV teaser, dubbed “Control.”

Being in control versus out of control runs throughout the film. It’s spoken of more frequently, I think, than even the question of whether we are dreaming or awake, partly because the question of whether we are dreaming or a wake only matters (in the film) insofar as it affects how much control we have over what happens and what steps we need to take to gain control. Totems are necessary to keep a (literal and figurative) grip on whether you are dreaming so that you can maintain control. Mal loses control over her life because of the inceived (?) idea that the world she experiences is not the real world. This idea matters because she loses her control over herself. When Ariadne enters the shared dream world for the first time, she realizes that knowing you are in a dream can give you control over that dream (visualized beautifully by the city of Paris folding in on itself).

The story of Inception is largely one of control as well. The son who will control his father’s empire. The competitor who wants to control the world’s energy supply. The competitor’s attempt to control the son. And, since this film is in its heart a heist movie, learning to control one’s opponent through sleight of hand (or sleight of dream, in this case) is central to pulling off the heist. From the second scene, where we see Cobb controlling Saito to break into the vault (which he does by noticing Saito’s uncontrolled reaction of glancing in the direction of the safe). When Saito realizes later that he was in a dream within a dream, he wrests control back from Cobb. We could easily run through the whole film talking about how characters struggle against one another for control, how they must cede control by entering into one another’s dreams (which is, after all, very similar to the way we cede control to a film when we enter that darkened theater), and how they must learn to control their dream states.

It is this concern with control, I think, that makes Inception feel like a film that is all ego and superego, and no id. The film is not about the chaos, not about the uncontrolled, except for where it overwhelms us. Like Leonard in Memento or Bruce Wayne/Batman in The Dark Knight, Cobb has learned to control himself amidst the chaos of his own mind. Even his own subconscious is ordered: he takes an elevator to visit his memories/fantasies, which is a rather silly but sort of neat technique to define and control what seems uncontrollable. Just as Nolan attempts to exert a masterful level of control over his films, his characters are struggling to control their own minds and their immediate surroundings. And far less than in The Dark Knight, the characters of Inception do control the chaos. The chaos is never gone, but it can be controlled. Leonard will never control his memory condition, only learn to control what he can with it. Bruce Wayne must always become out-of-controlled society Batman to maintain control-within-society. But Cobb can go furthest in actually controlling himself.

One of the great mistakes of the film, I think, is the closing shot, because it leaves people talking about only that last scene, which is really one of the film’s most sophomoric elements. “Am I dreaming?” is not a question that is very well addressed by the film, so to leave the film on that question is disappointing. The characters are too busy running through the machinations of the clever plot to do any real work on answering that question. That’s not the sort of question that can be addressed by a zero-gravity fight scene or an imagining of one’s subconscious as a James Bond film. The question of how much control we have over ourselves is a question that can be addressed by the story, and that may be the only intellectually engaging question the film can handle. (The film is far better as a heist film than as a philosophical meditation on the subconscious or dreams.) It’s a question that is well suited to Nolan as a director, because his style and the themes he has been exploring for a decade have all been pushing toward this question of control. So a finely tuned, enormously complex, carefully explained heist plot is the right sort of film to address the question of control, but not the question of “what are dreams?” or “am I dreaming?”

A shared experience, carefully crafted to be as believable as possible, occasionally drawing attention to itself as a dream, always steeped in the images and formulas of genre that involves a remarkable level of control – yes, it’s both the world of Nolan’s Inception and our experience of it.