Shadow Philosophy: Plato's Cave and Cinema

Nathan Andersen

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781317805885
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophie
• Subtopic: Geschichte & Theorie der Philosophie

Shadow Philosophy: Plato's Cave and Cinema is an accessible and exciting new contribution to film-philosophy, which shows that to take film seriously is also to engage with the fundamental questions of philosophy. Nathan Andersen brings Stanley Kubrick's film A Clockwork Orange into philosophical conversation with Plato's Republic, comparing their contributions to themes such as the nature of experience and meaning, the character of justice, the contrast between appearance and reality, the importance of art, and the impact of images.

At the heart of the book is a novel account of the analogy between Plato's allegory of the cave and cinema, developed in conjunction with a provocative interpretation of the most powerful image from A Clockwork Orange, in which the lead character is strapped to a chair and forced to watch violent films.

Key features of the book include:

• a comprehensive bibliography of suggested readings on Plato, on film, on philosophy, and on the philosophy of film
• a list of suggested films that can be explored following the approach in this book, including brief descriptions of each film, and suggestions regarding its philosophical implications
• a summary of Plato's Republic, book by book, highlighting both dramatic context and subject matter.

Offering a close reading of the controversial classic film A Clockwork Orange, and an introductory account of the central themes of the philosophical classic The Republic, this book will be of interest to both scholars and students of philosophy and film, as well as to readers of Plato and fans of Stanley Kubrick.

1 Making sense of motion pictures

On faces and frames in Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange

A face you won’t easily forget appears on screen, centered, outlined sharply in the dark. It leans forward intently, so that a black bowler hat and hair below the ears frame the bright blue eyes that see you right through. It’s a young man, with a crooked half-smile, welcoming but far from friendly, with long, sharp artificial lashes fixed upon the lids of his wicked right eye. Framed just to show his head and shoulders, wearing an open white button-up shirt and suspenders, he looks straight at you, motionless but for the rise and fall of his chest. Ready and alert, shoulders relaxed, with the poise of an animal prepared to pounce, his look is a challenge: see here, pay attention, hear me out, and as the frame opens slowly to take in more of his surroundings in what we’ll learn is the Korova Milk Bar, he starts to speak. Rather, we hear a voice from no one’s mouth but that can only be his. His lips don’t move, as he raises up a glass of drug-laced milk to take a sip, but the voice’s subtle blend of threat and invitation, its confident commanding tone, can only belong to that face, which now addresses us and begins to tell his tale.

So starts one of the most controversial films of all time, Stanley Kubrick’s classic, A Clockwork Orange. The film still manages to shock for its aestheticization of sadistic violence, for its apparently casual depiction of misogyny and rape, and for making the vicious criminal at its heart its most seductive and sympathetic character. Considered by some both an indictment of youth anarchy and a critique of the politics that profits from its condemnation, it has also been held to glorify violence and to justify the contempt with which criminal youth often view the state. It was banned in Britain for a time due to reported cases of copycat crimes. Not only is it a thematic concern within the film whether life imitates art, and whether all forms of self-expression ought to be protected, but the very reception of the film intensifies these questions. On the one hand the film seems to champion freedom, against the intervention of the state, but on the other seems to offer a devastating critique of liberal tolerance. It is sometimes thought that the virtue of great works of art is to sustain multiple interpretations, that what makes them valuable is precisely that they generate argument and discussion. Before considering broader questions raised by this film, however, it is worth getting clear what occurs on its surface. What do we see and hear in the film, and in the opening sequences in particular, and how do the elements of the whole combine together to enable a cohesive experience that admits of competing interpretations and thereby poses serious questions?

Faces and frames

Films present us with image and sound. We see things – objects, places, people – moving about, doing things, and interacting. We understand what we see. For the most part, it makes sense to us. We know what the things we see on screen are, or at least what kind of things they are, and the kinds of things they do. We notice, or at least feel, the differences between different styles of camera movement. When moving images from different perspectives are joined together, one after another, we can usually tell when they’re meant to suggest a sequence of events, when they’re meant to suggest simultaneity, when they belong to different locations, or when they belong together as different perspectives on the same situation. Usually, the sounds we hear are easily linked to the images. We hear words and know who is speaking. We hear music and can read the cues to know whether it is something the characters hear as well, or whether it is music for our ears only, meant to accompany what we see, adding mood or rhythm. We make sense of what we hear and see. The specifics vary, but there are a range of repeating forms in cinema that are significant to us, both because we have grown up in a world that we’ve learned to make sense of and because a significant part of growing up in the modern world is to become familiar with moving images and their many variations.

The depiction of faces in film draws upon what we know from our everyday experience with faces, and amplifies and channels this knowledge by means of techniques and conventions of cinema. A close-up, in which just a face appears and fills up the cinematic frame, lets us witness, and sometimes share, emotions that go unspoken. A character’s eyes, and our sense of where they are looking, help us to link images together, and make sense of the space they belong to. The “shot/reverseshot” technique in cinema, for example, can show a face looking, and then cut to an image we identify as what that face can see. Voices we hear in the theater are linked to faces, and voices that we cannot link to the movements of a mouth on screen – usually known as “voiceovers” – can, but don’t always, deliver a distinctive perspective on what we see, a narrative perspective that stands outside of what is shown. The camera, likewise, never appears on screen directly. It nevertheless defines a look, a way of facing the people and things that do appear, with which we may or may not identify. What the camera does show always appears within a frame, a window, as it were, that reveals varying perspectives without varying itself, in either size or location relative to us. Musical cues, and cues as to a film’s genre, contribute to the mood in which the film is presented, and guide us in our path to making sense of the film, encouraging us to expect or accept the appearance of features of that genre. Some films bear the mark of a director, or of a producer or a writer, thereby suggesting a link between the various films to which that person or group contributed. Some films, also, make reference to themselves, or create images that suggest and encourage reflection upon the filmmaking process.

Face, image, cut, frame, movement, music, genre, perspective, narrative, voice, author, self-reference: these are some of the basic significant forms or meaningful dimensions that we take for granted in our encounters with cinema. What follows is a closer look at the opening sequences of A Clockwork Orange, that gives special attention to some of these most basic of the significant forms that cinema draws upon, and to the ways in which this film adapts familiar forms to the purpose of communicating specific thoughts and feelings. Careful attention to some of the significant forms of cinema and the ways they operate in the opening sequences of A Clockwork Orange provides a useful orientation into how this film provokes feelings and thoughts that challenge common-sense assumptions about how things are and ought to be.

Film’s philosophy – the thinking that films can provoke about basic questions regarding what is real, what really matters, and how we make sense of it – is not a matter of hidden meanings, or of esoteric interpretations, except where the films themselves are esoteric, hiding clues to their significance. Films, for the most part, present us with stories – stories about people and things, about realities or possible realities that, generally, make sense to us, in more or less the same way as anything else does. We can say what happened, who did what and when and why. At the same time, like life, we do not always draw out or make explicit what is, on the face of it, obvious; and when we do we find that what appears to be obvious is just a familiar way of answering questions that could be answered other ways. Film’s philosophy is what appears when we follow up on the questions that result from a careful attention to the meanings films present. Examining films closely, looking at what is there on screen and asking how it works, how it draws us to think and feel in the ways it does, has the effect of unsettling those thoughts and feelings. It has the effect of calling into question both the easy or obvious ways of making sense of the film and also, at the same time, unsettling easy and obvious assumptions about the kinds of realities the film depicts and that we also encounter outside the film. In some cases, at least, and clearly in the case of A Clockwork Orange, a careful look at the film will show it (or its makers) suggesting ways of thinking that resolve some of the questions its study provokes, directly or indirectly. At the very least, such films render problematic some of the more familiar or obvious answers to these questions.

First, to begin, a quick synopsis of this film. A charismatic young man, obsessed with Beethoven, skips reform school and spends his nights getting high, committing theft and acts of violence with his gang of young thugs. One night things get out of hand: he kills a woman and gets caught. Now in prison, his sentence is cut short after two years when he agrees to be the guinea pig for a new experimental treatment, a kind of aversion therapy in which he’s drugged to feel horrendously sick while watching violent films. He can’t now even contemplate harm without feeling wretched – and an unintended side effect is that Beethoven now sickens him too. After that he’s powerless, a victim to his former victims, unable to fight back. Driven to attempt suicide, he becomes a poster boy for the opposition party, who aim to discredit the current government’s flawed approach to crime. In the end, though, he’s cured from the treatment, and resumes his former life in exchange for willingness to be used by that very government against the opposition.

Returning to the opening image, what do we see and hear? We see the face, the hat, the lashes, and darkness, framed. We hear the voice, narrating, giving name to face and place. What is it to see a face? To hear a voice? To encounter a frame? To see a face is not to see an object, what is merely out there, available to one’s gaze, ready to be used and touched, assessed. To see a face is to witness the gaze of another. To see it is to see what sees, and to face a face is to see oneself seen. The surface of the face, the eyes, the lips, the brow and cheeks, shows, moreover, that the person we see is aware of being visible, aware of presenting a face, and is responsive to that fact. Muscles curl the lips into a smile or contort them to a grimace; eyes open up wide or narrow to a slit. Expressive, the face shows itself deliberately, sets the terms by which it is seen and encountered. In the face-to-face encounter, the face responds to another face by opening up, inviting its gaze, or closing off, rejecting it. Or it might show itself unaware of or indifferent to the other’s gaze or presence. Faces, usually, share the same kinds of features, and roughly the same expressive capacities. The face of the other is equal to, and can mirror or refuse, or otherwise offer a responsive rejoinder to, the expression of the first. A warm smile, for instance, invites the other not merely to look but to share a look, to share a moment, to see eye to eye. The smile announces it is glad to see you, you’re welcome in its presence, and asks for a smile in response.

What’s with this half-smile, then, here in the opening shot? It can mean lots of things, as half-smiles do. It could be a facial tic, a muscle twitch, a genetic thing. It is hard to say right away without seeing more, and to take it as a hint of sinister might just be to get it wrong. It is not, though, an isolated malice: it’s in the eyes, it’s in the incongruent lashes, in the way he knows to tilt his head so the rim of his hat just obscures his forehead, and accentuates the look. Still, it could be just a pose, and we can’t be sure just yet. A face can mask as much as reveal its attitudes on what sees it and what it sees.

To see a face is to see what sees, but also to encounter limits to vision. I see that the other sees, but what she sees I can’t be sure, even if I follow her gaze; how she sees it, and what she thinks about it, I can’t tell. She has to speak. She has to tell me. A clear picture of her perspective can emerge only through words. Then again, words, like faces, can deceive as much as reveal. More about words later, when we consider these words, the words that emerge with the same half-smile we encounter on this face.

If to face a face is to see oneself seen, we don’t face this one. It isn’t, quite, a face. We see it; it can’t see us, at least not specifically. We may feel the hint of menace, may feel ourselves seen, but know that we are not. He can’t touch us, and we can’t touch him. He’s not here where we are, but somewhere else, a space we witness but cannot share. A sequence from later in the film, set in the same bar, shows what it would be really to encounter that face, that look, that same inviting threat.

Following a wild night inciting and inflicting violence, the young man, Alex, and his gang – “droogs,” he calls them – return to the Korova Milk Bar to relax. Across the way a group of older, well-dressed folk chat casually, when the jukebox stops and the woman among them sings a lovely bit from Beethoven’s Ninth, the “Ode to Joy.” Alex listens, entranced, until the droog he calls Dim lets out an interrupting belch. Alex canes him fiercely across the leg, and Dim protests, upset. An argument ensues but not before Alex tilts his head to the woman, a smile like the one we’ve seen already, but with possibly more warmth. The woman watches him across the way, wary and concerned, unsure how to take his appreciative toast and nod. There’s real threat there, real worry in her eyes. She sees what we see, a dangerous hoodlum, a situation that could erupt in violence. We see the same, we feel its danger, but as we’re not a part of the situation there depicted, we don’t have to react. We can’t. We can close our eyes, walk away, but we are otherwise unable to affect what we see. We don’t face that face, only its moving image, framed.

To call it a moving image, though, can be misleading. I see my own image in a mirror, in a photograph, or in a drawing by my daughter, and when I do I consider the resemblance. Whether they are created naturally in a mirror or deliberately in a painting, we tend to think of images as copies or representations, bearing some likeness to that of which they are the image. Here, though, what we get in the opening frame is just Alex, with his enigmatic half-smile and bowler hat. It is not a copy, because he isn’t elsewhere, except perhaps in the pages of a book by Anthony Burgess on which the film is based. We can say it is an image of young Malcolm McDowell, all dressed up to look like Alex, but when the movie was released, at least, McDowell was largely unknown, and the film all the more effective for it. Plus, to focus on that is to lose track of the movie, to break out of its spell, as when we can’t see past a big-name actor to the role he inhabits. Caught up in the experience, we forget about all that, or are at least able to set it aside, except insofar as a familiarity with the actor’s star persona is relied upon or manages in any case to shape our sense of who he is here.

If we like, we can still call it an image, if only to emphasize that to grasp it requires imagination. To be an image at all, it must be both sensed and imagined; there are no images in complete darkness, or in the absence of someone to entertain them and make sense of them. The whole that is the film, moreover, hangs together because we hold it together, imaginatively. At each moment, we might say, we see only a passing picture frame. Without some continuity, without some link to what came before, it would be only a passing blip, we’d be lucky to notice at all. We link images together, we hold on to the past and see this image continuing the last, anticipating developments in the next. This is true not only of the visuals but also of the sounds and intimations of other sense modalities that all form part of the filmic experience. We link images and sounds together based on cues to construct an imaginative whole, in an attempt to make sense of it all. If this image is an image of someone, and the voice belongs to anyone, it is to Alex, who exists by virtue of belonging to the world of the story imagined and written down by Anthony Burgess and modified for depiction on film by Stanley Kubrick. Assuming, that is, these are the same world, and the same Alex, it is a world we can only access by making sense of those words, imagining these images. We can entertain it, but we’re not and can’t be part of it; it stands apart.

Consider how we make sense of this sequence of images: the opera singer looking, concern in her eyes, alarm creasing her mouth; Alex raises a glass, tilting his head with a cocky smile. We never see an image showing both Alex and the singer together in the same frame, let alone facing one another. We do see, previously, the woman in a wider shot with friends, surrounded by naked white mannequins like the ones surrounding Alex and his droogs. We might assume, on that basis, they’re in the same bar. These two images, though, read more specifically than that: the singer looks at Alex and friends as he raises his glass to her. We see her worried look. We see his self-confident gaze. We read: they’re in the same room and looking at each other. To see a face is to see what sees, but not what it sees. The face’s image, then, is incomplete. It poses a question: what does it see? To face the face is to have an answer: she sees me. Otherwise we must look elsewhere for the answer the film supplies here through its sequence.

We sometimes call the sequencing of discontinuous images a “cut,” so named for the fact that before the rise of non-linear computer-based editing it used to require the actual slicing of celluloid strips. It might be better to call it a “linkage” (or use the French term, montage) since its effect is to bring images together, requiring audiences to make sense of the joining. Here we see a face, looking, and then another face, looking. The images are, on their own, incomplete, and the act of imagination, which follows up on cues delivered in the cut, places them together in the same room, looking at one another, answers the question, completes the picture.

These images, all of them, even those we construe as occupying distinct imaginative spaces, appear in the same location relative to us. They all fit the same frame, in front of our eyes, the same projected rectangle, shaped of light and shadows. We call them “moving images,” because what we see inside the frame is constantly changing. Sometimes objects or people on screen appear to move with respect to the frame; sometimes it seems that the frame itself moves, changing perspective on what is there on screen. With respect to us, though, the frame remains the same rectangle, in the same place, there before us on the TV set or on the movie screen. Its borders and function remain the same as the images within are changing.

To frame is to enclose. The frame establishes ...