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.

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.

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.

Community is fundamentally about the difficult necessity of forming and maintaing social groups, how they shape individual identities, and how they force a person to embrace new ideas and abandon old ones. Shirley’s religious convictions are tested, Jeff’s proclaimed moral relativism is shattered, Abed’s social skills are stretched, Britta’s self-righteousness is excoriated, and so on. Fundamentally, the show values human connections over almost any other ideal. Pierce, a generation older than anyone else in the group crystallizes this problem beautifully.

At first it seems that Pierce is simply out of touch with a younger generation, but over the course of a season and a half it has become clear that Pierce has never learned how to be a friend. Perhaps because he came to have his fortune early in life and on his own, he never saw himself as having peers, which may be one of the bases for friendship. (I’m really tempted to analyze all of Community’s relationships based on an Aristotelian taxonomy of friendship, but I’ll spare you. Perhaps just glance at this.)

In any case, Pierce plays a central role in the life of the group. Firstly, he is a “ghost of Christmas future” to prevent Jeff Scrooge from pulling out of all human relationships that are roughly equal. Both Jeff and Pierce entered the show only able to use people for their own advantage. Jeff is consistently caught between that old way and a new way in which he gives of himself for these other people. Jeff can still change, although the logic of the show isn’t settled enough to say whether the creators think he will. Pierce can’t change, without some character-breaking life conversion. (The connections between Jeff and Pierce probably go deeper. For instance, Noel Kirkpatrick of Monsters of Television suggested to me that that there similarities are further shown in their attitudes towards Annie.)

Secondly, Pierce represents the difficulty of people of different generations becoming friends. Perhaps the Pierce character is sometimes too convenient in throwing together stereotypes of a generation (self-made, casually racist) but the show at least attempts to find ways of fleshing out his character, even if some of those have been dead-ends. The character is limited in how much it can be fleshed out, but it is limited for good reason: Pierce has become so ossified in his personality that there is not much possibility for change. That, again, is a (possible) difference between he and Jeff.

Compare this, for a moment, to the portrayal of an older generation on two other very good shows, Parenthood and The Good Wife. In both cases, the shows created a parental figure so despicable that nearly every other character (and, in turn, the viewer) can’t help but despise them: Zeek Braverman (Craig T. Nelson) and Jackie Florick (Mary Beth Piel). These two characters served a single function on the first season of their shows. Zeek is the patriarch and the single largest problem in the lives of each of the now-adult children are how they were formed by his overbearing persona. Jackie is the prim, judgmental mother-in-law who is supposed to draw additional(!) sympathy for the embattered Alicia Florick. Both of these shows had to work extra hard in their second seasons to find some reason for us not to hate these characters, but they had dug themselves a huge hole at the outset.

I point to these other (very good) shows to demonstrate just how hard it is to write interesting older characters, and to point out that Pierce in the first season was a leg up on comparable (albeit dramatic) characters. (Good luck finding a sit-com where an older character isn’t just a horny boss or a dotty aunt or Betty White/Fred Willard in a cameo.) Pierce isn’t just a plot-mover (although like any character he has been used that way at times, notably on “Advanced Dungeons and Dragons”), he’s a legitimate member of the group whose story arcs are as central and important as any other character on the show (with the possibly exception of Jeff, who is the de facto lead in the ensemble).

Put another way, on Community the “Pierce problem” is the same as the Jeff problem and the Annie problem and the Troy problem: how much are they willing to give up to be a part of this group? Some episodes a character like Pierce or Abed or Britta mostly just pushes the story along, but that’s the nature of an ensemble show.

I don’t care if Pierce becomes even angrier, even meaner, even more recalcitrant, because sometimes that happens to people. If Community were ever to have a Pierce problem, it would be that the character is no longer funny, which on a sit-com is the only real problem you can have that doesn’t involve Charlie Sheen.

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).

What I can give you are some brief thoughts on the films I rated highest upon watching. I haven’t returned to most of these, so I would expect some to change. (There were sound problems in the theater for Winter’s Bone, which might get bumped up to an A. I suspect Mother would rate higher, as well. Inception, which I did see twice, dropped from an A- to a B+ on second viewing.) As it is, no film struck me as having enough richness and few enough flaws to get a perfect A, a grade I seem more willing to give to older films than newer ones (an issue I’m still pondering).

Enough. It’s time for the results. Here are my fourteen favorite films of 2010, as well as two “solid Bs” that didn’t get nearly enough love from critics.

Group: A-

Winter’s Bone, Debra Granik: Exquisite specificity of place and character, beautifully rendered. Its plotting borrows from film noir, but it’s real strength is giving us a character (Jennifer Lawrence’s Ree) and a place (rural Ozarks) rarely seen in film. This is why we need an independent cinema.

Scott Pilgrim vs. the World, Edgar Wright: Maligned for failing to develop sufficiently its female characters and for being too long (I’ll concede the second point), SP is one of the finest examples of how a talented director can carefully develop a story through every tool at his disposal. Nary a shot is wasted in this tightly constructed film. A joyful viewing experience.

Shutter Island, Martin Scorsese: Another film that polarized critics, I found SI to be a glorious revival of a cinema of mood, feeling, and visual acuity. The plotting isn’t great, and it has a couple scenes too many, and (like another hit this year) the final reveal is unimportant and distracting. I often find Scorsese to be cold, but there is a warmth that comes through the purity of this vision, and I love the film for it.

Exit Through the Gift Shop, “A Banksy Film”: Setting aside whether the film itself is a hoax (another distraction), Exit is a superb character study of a man who sets out to record the world, then finds himself pulled into and pushed to the front of it. Hilarious, tense, thought-provoking … isn’t this what we want from our movies?

Catfish, Henry Joost and Ariel Schulman: A film with far more interesting things to say about on-line culture and its effect on human interaction than the perfectly fine but bizarrely overrated The Social Network, Catfish is another superb documentary that hits a wider range of emotional responses than nearly any scripted film this year. What I love most about it, though, is the way it introduces the viewer to how Facebook and other social media services work through smartly linked visuals. The editing achievement of the year.

Group: B+

Inception, Christopher Nolan: It has nothing interesting to say about dreams or the subconscious, but it is a damn fine heist film.

Mother, Bong Joon-ho: Another genre-blasting achievement from the world’s most exciting director.

127 Hours, Danny Boyle: Dizzying, subjective, smart filmmaking with some stupid miscalculations in the final third.

The Ghost Writer, Roman Polanski: Sharp, spare direction and two fine performances from Olivia Williams and Pierce Brosnan make up for a so-so script.

Toy Story 3, Lee Unkrich: Some days it seems the folks at Pixar understand filmmaking better than anyone on the planet. The studio as auteur?

The Secret in Their Eyes, Juan José Campanella: A fine film about passion and restraint, with one exquisite chase scene done in one long take.

True Grit, Joel Coen and Ethan Coen: It’s nice to see the Coens expand beyond the limits of their vision of the universe by pursuing a new limitation: genre conventions.

Joan Rivers: A Piece of Work, Ricki Stern and Anne Sundberg: A solid documentary about a fascinating figure that doubles as a meditation on gender, the ethics of entertainment, and hard work.

Underrated Films from Disreputable Genres

Knight and Day, James Mangold: I appreciate that some people can’t get past Tom “The Grin” Cruise and enjoy a straight-up action flick, but that’s too bad because this was a solid piece of filmmaking. We all say we want coherent action set-pieces, so why don’t we go see films that give them to us? And are we so far beyond the Hollywood star that we can’t enjoy the star-driven picture any more?

Letters to Juliet, Gary Winick: When we watch TCM we swoon over these pictures, so why don’t we support the few that are still made today? Amanda Seyfried and Vanessa Redgrave gave two of the best performances of the year, but we’re not supposed to say so because this is a romantic drama of the European excursion variety.