Marxist Moments

A Marxist at the Movies (2):

 

The Hollywood Eye – What Makes Movies Work

 

          As the title of this series suggests, my concern as a Marxist is not merely a detailed account of making films; I am not a film maker myself nor even a seasoned cineaste. My principal interest lies in examining the ethos behind the enterprise.

          I want to focus initially on the first three chapters, which reach beyond film making as such. These are: (1) the Voyeur’s Eye, (2) the Vicarious Eye and (3) the Visceral Eye. Boorstin’s book on film commences with an anatomy – not of film – but of the audience.

          Simultaneously, Boorstin says, we watch movies in three distinct ways:

• The Voyeur’s way
• The Vicarious Way
• The Visceral Way

Let me give shorthand definitions of Boorstin’s three terms.

          The Voyeur represents the curious – a curiosity that must be satisfied by answers. This is the rational, ‘intellectual’ side of the viewer.

          Voyeuristic reactions:  Wow! Look at that view! / What happens next? / It’s not very realistic. / I tend to use the loo during the boring bits.

This is about storytelling and continuity – and plausibility, focused on the reality of the world we live in. The bedrock of a movie is its plausibility.

          The Vicarious represents the emotional involvement, the viewer’s psychological stake in the action (as in our experiencing emotions ‘vicariously’.)  It’s more concerned with the emotionally gripping than just the plausible. ('The heart has its reasons, which reason does not know.')

          Vicarious reactions: What she must be going through! / What a cute little kid. / He’s a real shit. / I know just how Jack feels. / I was so involved. / I like a good weepy.  This is about the emotional pull of a movie. There must be empathy with /antipathy towards / the human characters and their situations.

          Visceral reactions come from the gut, from the so-called ‘lizard’  or primitive brain. They represent our physical and basest instincts.

          Visceral reactions:  Makes me heave. / Makes my mouth water. / Ow! That punch hurt! / Made my hair stand on end. / I got a hard-on just looking at her. / I hate spiders!  The Visceral demands of the film that it engage on the most basic physical level. It should not just interest us or move us, but also ‘get’ to us. It adds ‘touch’ to the film in addition to vision, sound and story.

          Common negative reactions to a particular film:

Voyeuristic: It wasn’t realistic and the ending fell flat.

Vicarious: I never felt anything for the people, positively or negatively.

Visceral: It didn’t get to me. All a bit bloodless.

Boorstin:

Each demands a different set of film techniques, often in contradiction with the others: each has its own sort of content, its own rules of time and space, its own way of judging reality. The three compete within us as we watch. Each movie is three movies running at once.

          Much of this looks convincing but I have my doubts.

          I wouldn’t encourage film students to start off by rationalising audiences. Art students are not taught what prospective viewers want. Of course Hollywood film is an industry from the ground up. So perhaps film students should be taught like apprentices in advertising. (Some of our top directors make more money doing TV adverts.) So the book betrays its assumption that the first imperative for a movie is to get those butts on seats. First and last.

          Thus we have the ‘three V’s’ approach, redolent of a whiteboard lecture at a sales conference. Are we supposed to be examining reality here or are we taking in a sales pitch?

          In any case Boorstin is rationalising why movies work – that is, after they’ve been made and distributed. It may or may not be an effective way of teaching film craft but all the same it puts the cart before the horse. And it starts with the most notoriously nebulous factor. By contrast, Boorstin’s book is absolutely concrete about how complicated it is to put a feature film together. He stresses further on the seemingly endless re-writes and re-edits required; in some instances the makers didn’t know what the film was really about until after the first preview. Shouldn’t the ‘three Vs’ make all this easier? Not if the recipients are to be treated in a formally simplistic manner, which reminds one of Pavlov’s experiments on salivating dogs. The irony here is that the audience make-up is even more complex than the processes through which films are made.

          A principal hazard of the marketplace is that sellers don’t know for sure in advance what the buyers want or will pay for, and at what price. Peddling films – which are commodities like any other – is plagued by the same uncertainty, made hazardous by the sheer scale of investment being made in (a) creating a film and (b) devising its promotion campaign. The concept of the ‘public’ doesn’t help here, because ‘the general public’ is itself a fiction. It washes over such concrete realities as classes, education, gender experience and generations. There is the difference between watching a picture in a theatre, influenced by the reactions of others, and watching it at  home, possibly alone; there is a difference between watching a film all in one go and seeing it broken up by TV adverts (all too frequently). My entire childhood filmgoing experience consisted in arriving roughly midway through the feature, sitting through everything and then leaving when we’d reached that midway point again!  All this is not to speak of facing the vagaries of individual taste and proclivity. We only know ‘what the public wants’ when people flock to one picture and steer clear of another (after having been told not to bother by those who went).

          The ‘three ’V’s’ concept is made obsolete by – amongst other things – advances in modern neurology. We do not have one order of the ‘higher’ intellectual and moral faculties set above the other, ‘base’ order of the physical needs and primitive instincts, as was taught by Ancient Greek philosophers, the moral being that we would lead the good life by the ‘higher’ dominating or suppressing the ‘lower’. By the 17^th century we had mind-body dualism: the ‘mind’ – a spiritual entity – being one thing and the body – a corporeal one – being the other. Quite how these two are supposed to interrelate was never satisfactorily explained by the dualists, a problem that remains philosophically insoluble. Modern neurology has made great strides in showing how intimately interrelated that astonishing organ the brain is with every facet and feature of our life, body, being and thought. All are energised by need, intent and purpose, some of these in the area of consciousness. Nothing is truly separate from anything else. We contain multitudes (Whitman) which is what Boorstin intimates in the above quote.  So he is on to something here. But the packaging is outdated, and so he seems to modify his trinity when he says that we experience the ‘three V’s simultaneously. It’s a vague idea made harder to understand by the positing of three discrete ’V’s’ to begin with.

          I might put it another way: that we are creatures of purpose, and we pursue a film much as we pursue a career or a love relationship (if not on the same level of seriousness). In other words, we are an audience of purpose-driven individuals, not a bunch of reified fragments.

          In which case is it not better to commence with ‘purpose’ and the finding of purpose by a screenwriter, a director, a composer, a designer, a cinematographer, an editor and so on? If their drive is penetrating and powerful enough, is it not this that powers us in our pursuit of mastering their film? Not that it happens invariably what with so many mediocre films. Nor need it be restricted to high or intellectual art, for purpose, like all the many films – is pursued at all levels and varieties of a human life.

          In fact much of what Boorstin says in these sections is convincing and rings true about cinematic experience. Needless to say it’s based on a wealth of observing audience reactions. But for me it is hobbled by an overly abstract and ideologically dubious restricting of the richness and potential of human response and reaction. Alas such restricting may be accurate. As was once said: no one ever lost money by underestimating the public’s intelligence. Humans – treated indeed as ‘the public’ – can live down as well as up to expectations. The human individual is the social being. But ‘where there is no vision, the people perish’ (Proverbs 29:18 AV). A dysfunctional society taken as a whole can degrade individuals, when is why the point of socialism is common self-creation of a society that brings out the best in each of us, by means of our politically active determination of it.

          But wait and see. Boorstein has much to offer, and God may be in the details. We will look further in the next blog at the Voyeuristic Eye.