The Cinema at the Whitney is the home for most of the films that are screened at Yale. Various film clubs and classes use the extensive archives of the Film Study Center to show 1-2 films every night of the week while classes are in session. You could have an entire film education just by attending regularly. Various dignitaries present films, there are occasional series (law and film, religion and film, even gardening and film), and frequently there are multiple film festivals each year. Everyone is welcome and every screening is free. I remember sitting in the audience one night for a film (I don’t remember which), and I struck up a conversation with a middle-aged gentleman in another row. He was a film producer, and he was telling me about the new film he had in development and how he just brought on Ridley Scott to direct. That film became Kingdom of Heaven. Other times there were preview screenings (The Royal Tenenbaums, which had different music in that version, if I recall correctly) or Q&As (Baz Luhrmann and Frederick Wiseman were two favorites).

The screening that I will remember most clearly was a nearly empty theater, a large screen, and a stunning, restored print of North by Northwest. From those opening Saul Bass titles through the hilarious closing shot of a train entering a tunnel, I was in love. I was in love with the movie, surely, deep, mad, passionate love with the story, the setting, Cary Grant, Eva Marie Saint, the dialogue – with the everything. But I was, for the first time, in love with a film projected on a screen. The boldness of the color, the depth of the images, the fluidity of the frames, the largesse, the whir, the dust lit up by the beam of light, it was all so much to love. I don’t mind digital projection, and often prefer it for recent CGI-heavy or computer-animated films, but that is compatible with loving a projected film.

One of the things to love about projected film is its simultaneous ubiquity and exclusivity. Few people who love film can afford to own film prints and projectors, so ownership is rare. Yet, screened films are ubiquitous around the world and for over a hundred years. Nearly anyone can go, yet few can hold on. It is fundamentally communal, shared by strangers, who join with you in a shared experience. That experience continues to evolve into new arenas. Sometimes this creates greater exclusivity (the 52″ HDTV with surround sound) and sometimes greater community (the standing in line before a midnight screening). But that depth of image, that softeness of the lines, that sharpness of the colors (even when monochromatic) that belong to film and which I so love now began with Hitchock and Mason and a dust cropper.

This post is part of the Film Preservation Blogathon. Please consider donating. Proceeds go toward preserving, restoring, and sharing classic films. See more posts in this blogathon at:

The Self-Styled Siren

Ferdy on Films

This Island Rod

I’ve been thinking a bit about television, and what the cool kids in media studies call “convergence.” Convergence is a catch-all term that brings under one heading the various ways in which changing technology leads to the migration of media across different platforms, the industrial processes behind these changes, and the new cultural experiences that follow. In other words, how should we think about playing a movie on a telephone?

My interest recently has been more specific. As the father of a kid a little more than a year old, my partner and I have to make a lot of decisions about what media we will let him consume, in what quantities, and at what times. Our general approach has been to err on the side of less watching for now. He basically gets to watch TV when he is getting his fingernails clipped (the kid squirms like a worm on a hook), when he is sick (he’s caught bits of Sweetgrass and The Muppets this way), and when we are visiting his television-watching cousins. He occasionally gets to watch YouTube videos of song-and-dance numbers from old movies or can pound on the iPad for some interactive app. All told, he’s spent very little time watching TV shows or movies on a TV set. But he still loves the TV.

I got a Roku player for Christmas from my in-laws, and this has become our primary means of playing music when we are at home. We all like music a lot, so it’s not uncommon for music to be playing for an hour or two each day. And when it does, it is often piped through the Roku, attached to the TV and the stereo system. The Pandora or Shoutcast information displays on the screen while we play. So when he hears music, he turns to watch the CD cover art float across the screen or see what else the TV displays while his music plays. This expectation is so engrained that he loses interest very quickly in anything on the TV that is not accompanied by music. At his age, he is too young to follow a story told audio-visually, but he can dance along to a song.

I don’t know quite what conceptual tools a fifteen-month-old has, but it’s pretty clear from his behavior that he is interested in the TV primarily for the music. He loves music and will start dancing at any suggestion of music. (Yesterday, church bells rang at 4pm and he started to dance.)

My kid won’t grow up having clearly delineated television shows, web content, and movies. “Films” will always have been an anachronistic term. Tablet computers were the nighlights keeping his parents entertained during his sleepless first few weeks. The music industry will always have had a deal with Apple, and most music the world has ever recorded will be available for a price (or the cost of an intrusive ad). He’ll be fine with that, as long as he can dance.

I doubt I could return to seeing the world that way anymore, where every gathering storm cloud could be a demon army marshalling power or the first wave of an alien encounter, but watching Close Encounters allowed me to feel that wonder and dread again. Having not watched the film since high school (prompted by the mashed potato spoof in UHF), the movie seems both very fresh to me now, but also very familiar. Now I see the story of a father and his obsession, and I note the references to North by Northwest and John Williams’ frequent allusions to Bernard Herrmann and other formal and cultural aspects that eluded me as a kid. To be able to switch back and forth between appreciation and the more primal awe that could only come through memory is an unusual but welcome mode of viewing.

Close Encounters benefits from not having so thoroughly dominated popular culture as Star Wars. The original Star Wars films, with its mystical Jedis and fantastic creatures and spirtual overtones, was at least if not more important to my childhood, but there was just no way of escaping it through my teens and twenties. The films (not just through the release of the prequels, but in their repeated invocation in pop culture) have lost the ability to draw on any of those emotions I felt as a kid. As a kid, the race through the forest in Return of the Jedi was my favorite because I grew up near woods and the placing of science fiction stories in the greens and browns of woods like I grew up near in exurban Wisconsin delighted me. (My favorite science fiction continues to employ this juxtaposition.)

I don’t feel that way often now, although I get glimpses of it occasionally. With Close Encounters, which sat dormant in my subconscious waiting to be revived with a jolt of visual and aural electricity, I was back to being that kid who was terrified but also fascinated by the bright lights outside the window and the walkway lowering from the mothership. A film may not be able to tap into that nouminal awe any more (although I would be delighted to find a film that did), but those synapses in my brain related to Close Encounters are so firmly fixed that I can experience that lovely terror again.

I stumbled across TCM, which was showing the 1954 Godzilla, which I had not seen in completion or at least not seen since I was a kid. While a pleasure to watch, I was often blocked by a hand awkwardly holding a dental instrument or the dentist leaning over to check his work. All told, about 1/4 of the time the screen was partially or completely blocked. Maybe 1/10 of the time, the noise was too loud to hear the sounds of Godzilla rampaging through Tokyo.

And I loved it.

For a while now, I’ve been thinking about the right way to watch movies. The right way to watch includes paying careful attention from the beginning, watching through in one sitting to the end (unless there is a planned intermission), listening attentively, and so on. The right way also includes watching in a format as close to the original recording as possible (film projection for film, digital projection for digital or heavy CGI), in a large theater (or other intended venue), with a respectful, attentive, engaged audience. That’s the right way. I applaud the right way. I seek out the right way.

But I also like the wrong way.

The wrong way is watching a movie while a dentist leans in to check his work. The wrong way is catching a few minutes of a movie on TV, not knowing who directed it, what it is “about,” or why it is interesting or important. The wrong way is interrupting the film every 10 minutes to pacify a screaming one-year-old who should be asleep already. The wrong way is watching 10 minutes, enjoying it or not, then switching to something else. The wrong way is flipping through YouTube clips according to the obscure logic of linked videos. The wrong way is folding laundry while watching. The wrong ways are also great ways to watch movies, ways that I have come to value more highly even as I become more refined and nitpicky about the particular values of the right way to watch.

I don’t think the wrong way is as good as the right way or that we should seek it out or anything like that. But sometimes, it is what I have, and I have learned to love it. Occasionally folks will defend watching serialized television out of order or reading only parts of books, but I’ve less often heard film watching defended this way. And while not a defense, I thought I’d lay out a couple thoughts related to watching wrongly.

1. Extrinsic factors: For me, having a young son means fewer trips to the movie theater and fewer chances to dedicate a solid 90-180 minutes to undistracted viewing at home. Watching wrongly (even if one values watching rightly) often comes about because of extrinsic factors like this. For me, the choice is rarely between watching rightly and watching wrongly; the choice is between watching wrongly and not watching at all. That’s why I don’t draw any large conclusions from these thoughts. Wrong ways can be good and interesting, but they are usually second choices.
2. Different foci: Watching wrongly often leads me to focus on aspects of the film that I might otherwise miss. While I’ve become a more careful, more studious, and more knowledgable film lover over the last decade, there is still far more to know about any given film than I could possibly take in on a single (or even repeat) viewing. Watching a random snippet often focuses my attention on the way information is presented in the frame, the way sound conveys mood or information, or something about a performance I might otherwise miss. Watching a movie in full often means setting one’s expectations according to the opening scenes and then being carried along by the story or the plotting or performances. By jumping in partway through, I’m less likely to care about anything but what I can learn about lighting, composition, or other technical aspects in that brief moment than I would if I were also watching for the more often discussed elements of the film.
3. Technology: Technology often makes these wrong ways possible, as in the YouTube clips I mentioned earlier, or catching whatever is on TCM at the moment. (Netflix works against this, assuming you always awant to watch from the beginning.) One of my least favorite things about switching from our Tivo to our ATT Uverse DVR was that I no longer can keep one DVR tuner always on TCM to catch those random moments. Something as simple as the kind of DVR can make wrong viewing possible or not. I also remember my college roommate getting a DVD player (one of the first to which I had access). We were playing around with its then-awesome features, including the shuffle mode (intended for CDs), which we discovered also worked while watching DVDs. We started watching The Fugitive out of order, according to the chapter breakdowns of the DVD, and ended up watching the whole film in a particularly odd wrong way, made possible by a change in technology.

Watching movies the wrong way is made possible by shifts in technology and often required by extrinsic factors, but it can lead to focusing on elements of a movie that might otherwise be missed. (Film instructors are, ironically, those most accustomed to watching films the wrong way since they are always cutting down clips to show their students for a particular pedogogical purpose.) So I like the wrong ways, or at least some of them. And liking the wrong ways is compatible with, and can even serve, appreciating the right way to watch films.

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.

Vampires, the stories go, are not allowed to enter a house where a human being lives. Once that person dies, they can enter. Otherwise, they must get an invitation (usually, an invitation from the human habitant) in order to enter. Some myths allow the vampire to later be expelled, others don’t. The point is, vampires are bound – physically prevented somehow – from entering a human residence.

Perhaps this says something strange about me, but I find it much easier to go along with a story about vampires than I do to go along with a story that assumes (1) that property rights are natural and (2) that property-ownership is a non-vague metaphysical relation. Allow me to elaborate.

Some folks think that I stand in an ownership-relation to my body. I own my body. By extension, when I work the common land that belongs to everyone or no one, I make that thing mine by mixing my labor with it. (Yes, it’s called the labor-mixing argument. It’s in John Locke’s Second Treatise on Government if you want the history of the idea. Homework: How did Marx exploit this principle?) I then have a natural right to whatever I’ve labored on. Slowly, by extension, and in ways that are not always clear, we extend ownership to many things that I didn’t mix my labor with. Usually, I paid for it and that makes it mine. Using arguments like these, some people see the right to own property as a natural right, one that applies to all human beings just because they are human beings. This is distinct from a legal right which is a right that applies only because the laws of the place I live say so. (More homework: Are civil right different from these two or identical to one or the other? What about human rights?)

Property rights as legal rights make a lot of sense to me. Property rights as natural rights don’t seem that plausible to me. The way to make them plausible, I think, is to say that they are natural in virtue of some aspect of human beings (or, more generally, rational agents), particularly something about the way they naturally congregate into societies.

What seems like a really bad way to argue that property rights are natural rights is to find support in either (1) the physical constition of the universe (that is in nomological law) or (2) in some broadly logical principle about objects and their relations (a metaphysical law). Nothing about my physical make-up as a member of homo sapiens logically requires that I be able to own property. And nothing about me as a physical being or as a rational agent seems to require it either (although some will disagree at this point).

All this means that it strikes me as extremely unlikely that the universe as it exists or as it would exist if there were vampires would be one that makes it a truth of the world that vampires must respect property lines. (I’m assuming a very plausible principle here: fictional worlds are like are own in every way not specifically marked as different. E.g., The world of The Vampire Diaries has gravity like ours and New York City has the same layout, but there is a place called Mystic Falls, there are vamipres, and so on.)

And while we’re at it, why the doorstop? Why not the curb? Property lines are ambiguous. And furthermore, whether or not someone lives at a place is vague (there are cases where it is not clear that I live there or I do not live there). I mean, have you ever tried to file taxes in two states? It’s a nightmare. How likely is it that there is some property principle in the universe (like gravity,or two objects can’t coexist at the same place at the same time) that is non-ambiguous and non-vague?

Vampires? I can roll with that. Ownership as a nomological or metaphysical law? That’s what bugs me.

UPDATE: I just watched TVD s1 e20, where Damon makes the following statement about threshholds, “Hotels and short-term leases are a gray area. Play it by ear.”

UPDATE 2: And to clarify, my objection is not that there can’t be vague objects in nature. (There’s no sharp border between a mountain and a valley, for instance.) It’s that even if property rights were somehow natural (which I don’t think they are), there’s no non-arbitrary reason for there to be a sharp cut-off (the doorstep/window) for something ambiguous and vague like where property lines end.

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!”)

Note to readers: The first two sections are boring background. Feel free to skip ahead to the more interesting discussion in part three, below the video.

“I once was lost.” – John Newton

I’ve not always been kind to Lost. Maybe even a little harsh. I first came to the show from my dad, who was a fan. When my brother bought him the first season on DVD, I borrowed it and dug in. I found it very effective at times, with fun mysteries about rumblings in the jungle and weird smoke and a light shining out of the ground. But those fun moments were a little too few and far between for me. The format of the first season, with its on-island stories broken up by single-episode flashbacks developing each character’s history, both made the (to me) more interesting on-island stories move too slowly and was too dependent on the acting of its cast, who (especially that first season) were of varied abilities. Locke story? Yea! Jack story? Ugh. And so on.

I would step away, then try again at various points. I would rewatch a previous season or handful of episodes when I felt the push to try again. After enjoying a season four catch-up (DVRed off of Syfy when it was still Sci-Fi) to watch season five, my wife and I just couldn’t handle the week-to-week viewing of a show we just weren’t enjoying very much. So we gave up. For good, I thought. When season six rolled around in 2010, I’d skim through my Twitter feed on Wednesday mornings, catching some reactions to the previous night’s episodes while doing my best to avoid spoilers in case I did want to dig in again.

“I’m lost in the world. I’m down on my mind.” – Kanye West

Then all hell broke loose. Friends of ours who are not particularly television addicts were rushing home on Tuesday nights for their weekly Lost viewing, but they were increasingly annoyed by the slow pace of season six. And boy, did they hate the finale. So few answers! What about this? What about that?

Honestly, it left me a little intrigued.

But also a little put out. I didn’t feel a part of this fan community. I had never watched that closely for secret signals about what was going on. (If pressed, I could probably remember half the numbers of that famous sequence.) So after the hullabaloo died down, I began suggesting to my wife that we attempt a rewatch. From what point was a tough answer, but we settled on season four. That turned out to be a pretty great choice because I loved that season on the rewatch. The on-island stories were moving along swiftly, the new cast of characters included some stronger actors with richer stories to embody, and there were lots of intriguing questions rising to the forefront. I once again lost interest in the beginning of season five. Way too much time off-island. Glacial plotting. Until it got awesome with a few episodes left. And finally, turning to season six, I realized this was a show I loved. Or rather, in seasons four through six Lost became the show I always wanted it to be: not a collection of short stories with a couple mysterious strands running through it, but a creatively, structurally, and emotionally ambitious story with strong characters who made decisions without enough information and lived with consequences that they didn’t understand.

I watched the show with my wife, apart from the fan communities that were listening to showrunner podcasts and debating clues and constructing timelines and predicting where the show was going. Other than the general sense from friends and twitter buddies (and one afternoon in which I read Jason Mittell’s Lost Wednesday posts on Antenna) I’ve been able to watch it (1) without the questions that gnawed at the show’s devotees and (2) in one relatively compact stretch. Both of these factors presumably made a difference in how I watched. But I’ll leave it to smart folks like Jason Mittell to work that out.

I’ll focus on something slightly different. I knew from others that the show’s finale was religious, but I didn’t know the specifics. (Alison Janney is some kind of angel who decides who was good and who was bad? Or something?) I also knew that people were unsatisfied that so many questions were left unanswered. At the forefront of my mind in watching season six were not questions about how the Dharma Initiative got to the island or how the donkey wheel placed people in Tunisia. I wanted to know, “Why aren’t people digging this as much as I am? Why am I loving this so much when so many friends whose television opinions I respect dislike it so much?” What follows is my (inadequate) attempt at a (partial) answer.

“We are building a religion.” – Cake

With the possible exception of Angel, which was built around the idea of redemption (what it is, why it matters, how to get it) and secondarily around the nature of prophecy, Lost is the most religious show I’ve ever watched. First, I’ll say how it’s religious, which should lead naturally into my reasons for appreciating the final season (and especially the finale) more than the more devoted fans.

• Religious Themes: Central to Lost, at least in its middle seasons, was the conflict between faith and reason played out between John Locke and Jack Shephard, respectively. This conflict became more nuanced in the later seasons, as Jack’s arc took him from “man of science” to “man who was convinced that his life had purpose, despite there being little more than a gut feeling telling him this.” Locke went from faithful servant of the island to dead. Importantly, both end up in the same place in the end, but for most of the last two seasons the show was in favor of a “reason tempered with humility of the unknown” approach that Jack came to embody and which allowed him to be the island’s savior. (Nothing in those early seasons suggested to me that Jack was a Christ-figure, but that’s how the finale played it.) There were plenty of other religious themes, including the nature of prophecy (again, parrallels to Angel), the existence and nature of free will, the role of authority, the possibility of miracles, and the search for meaning. Lost was a pretty religious show, at least from season two on.
• Religious Mythology: But Lost went beyond merely entertaining questions about religion, and built its own religious mythology. It borrowed from existing religions to create its own set of myths, symbols, and rituals. (I don’t want to play up to much the notion that “Lost fans are like religious devotees,” but lots of people set out Tuesday nights the way that religious practitioners set out their holy day.) More interesting to me is the way that Lost gloriously defied reducing any of its symbolism, imagery, and ideas to a specific religion. It probably borrowed more from Christianity than other religions, but the show really creates its own set of artifacts, heroes of the faith, and symbolism in a way that few shows attempt. It borrows liberally from other religions, but puts them to its own use in creating a mythology built on common archetypes (twin brothers, games, individual sacrifice) that has its own specifics. Protect the light at the center of the island! Turn the donkey wheel! Trust Jacob! Don’t trust Jacob! Lost created a fictional universe with a set of moral principles, focal stories, and religious perspectives that goes beyond typical world-building. (Side note:I was a little annoyed at the stained glass window in the church(?) in the finale that included symbols from various religions; this suggested a that the show was more about the unity of all religions rather than creating something new out of them, which is the reading I prefer.)
• Religious Readings: Lost also provides a unique, although obtuse entry into thinking about how people approach religious texts and the parallels for television shows with rich mythologies. Here’s four rough groupings of how people approach religious texts … and Lost. (1) There are those who expect extremely detailed, accurate, and literal reconstructions of religious texts. They might, to point to one contemporary instance, determine that Jesus Christ is returning on May 21, 2011, based on a combination of interpreting vague phrases (“rumors of war”) and interpolating from specific chronologies. They expect their religious texts to provide all the answers to all the questions they bring to it. These folks aren’t more or less religious than others, nor are they all crazies. (But those May 21 folks are a little crazy.) Perhaps the Gemara era of Talmudic commentary might represent this sort of precise, detailed approach that expects coherence. These interpreters expect a level of detail and foreground a kind of interpretation that parallels (in some, but obviously not all ways) the kind of answer-seeking that marked many Lost fans. (2) Other folks approach religious texts with a set of non-religious questions. What can this text teach us about the culture at the time? About literary form? About the sociology of religion? Similarly, some folks (the kind most likely to write books about Lost) are interested in what Lost can tell us about television, about America, about our desire for meaning and community. (3) Another set of Lost viewers is primarily concerned with the stories or the characters. They don’t care about what the island really is or whether there is a scientific explanation of Locke’s ability to walk after the plane crash. They care about these people, they marvel at their stories, and they want to know what happens to them. And plenty of folks approach the Upanishads or the Koran or the Book of Ruth as a collection of really great, emotionally powerful stories. In both cases, we can learn things from these stories, the way we learn things from any great stories. (4) Finally, some folks expect that religious texts are collections of stories, often gathered from multiple authors and even more editors, that more or less hang together, and which generally tell a coherent narrative, but do so not by filling in all the details but by leaving things so open that there are any number of ways to make it consistent. Plenty is left open to interpretation and plenty is left underdetermined because the point was never to fill in all the details but to tell parables, allegories, and other good stories that are compelling and instructive.

These groups are not exhaustive, nor are they mutually exclusive. One could easily shift perspectives and embrace the value of these (and more). I prefer approach (4), with an interest in the careful analysis represented in (1) and plenty of external questions like those valued in (2).

Ultimately, appreciating the last season of Lost is about adopting approach (3) or approach (4). The first approach will set you up for disappointment. The second is interesting, but not one that the show really cared about. (Unlike, say, 24 or The Wire, which emphasized their real-world applications.) The fourth approach is the one I most closely identify with in the interpretation of religious texts, so I think by being removed from the fan communities that emphasized (1), I tended toward this approach and was thus able to get more enjoyment out of the final season. And while the show often flirted with (1) and mostly focused on (3), the finale was really focused on (3) and, especially in those last fifteen minutes, on (4). Having spent most of the final season thinking about how little interested I was in answers of the sort that (1) expected (I could barely remember the questions), and only mildly interested in (2) and (3), I think that I was a better position to appreciate such an ambiguous finale. This doesn’t mean that the show doesn’t hang together; it may fit together as tightly and coherently as the first approach expects. But I never expected everything to be explicit, everything to be answered, everything to be tied together. (Again, this is only partly because of this taxonomy of religious reading; I was also primed by other viewers to expect a lot of questions remaining unanswered.)

Religious texts mostly don’t make things explicit when they are telling stories. (They often do that elsewhere.) They tell you parts of the story: the parts that answered someone else’s question or that portrayed a particularly resonant idea. And as in most religious texts, Lost is about people without enough information, making monumental decisions, the consequences of which they don’t understand. Occasionally the gods/God/showrunners step in with another piece of the puzzle, either directly or surreptitiously. But mostly we live in ignorance, trying to learn a little more, fitting together the pieces, knowing that ultimately even if it all fits together we’ll live most of our lives without all the pieces in place.

As in Lost, so in life.

[Having written all this now, I am interested to go and read others' interpretations of the final season and especially the finale. Perhaps I'll even update this afterwards.]

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.”

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.