On Film

Stephen Mulhall

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9781138796843
• eBook ISBN: 9781317633631
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

The first edition of Stephen Mulhall's acclaimed On Film was a study of the four Alien films, and made the highly original and controversial argument that films themselves can philosophise. In its second edition, On Film increased its breadth and vision considerably to encompass films such as the Mission: Impossible series and Steven Spielberg's Minority Report.

In this significantly expanded third edition Stephen Mulhall adds new chapters on the Jason Bourne films, the fourth Mission: Impossible movie, JJ Abrams' Star Trek and Star Trek: Into Darkness, and Ridley Scott's Prometheus (in which he returns to the Alien universe he created). In so doing, Mulhall reappraises in fascinating ways the central issues taken up in earlier editions of On Film: the genres of science fiction and thriller, the impact of digital as opposed to photographic modes of technology on the nature of cinema as a medium (and its relation to television), and the fate of sequeldom in mainstream contemporary cinema (with its emphasis on remakes, reboots and multi-media superhero franchises).

On Film, third edition is essential reading for anyone interested in philosophy, film theory and cultural studies, and in the way philosophy can enrich our understanding of cinema.

Part I

Introduction

The four members of the Alien series (Alien [1979]; Aliens [1986]; Alien³ [1992]; Alien Resurrection [1997]) managed to combine popular success and critical interest in a way matched by very few films produced in the last two decades of the twentieth century.¹ They focus on Flight Lieutenant Ellen Ripley (played by Sigourney Weaver) as she confronts the threat posed to herself, her companions and the human race by the spread of a hostile alien species. But this description hardly begins to capture their peculiar economy of simplicity and power – the charismatic force of Weaver’s incarnation of Ripley’s despairing but indomitable courage, the uncanny otherness of the aliens, and of course the alien universe itself, stripped of the clutter of social particularity to reveal receding horizons of mythic significance. It now seems as if it was clear from the outset that it would take more than one film to explore those horizons, and thereby to unfold the full meaning of Ripley’s intimate loathing of her foes.

But there are, of course, more specific reasons for choosing to focus on this series of films in a philosophical book on film – reasons having to do with what one might call the underlying logic of this alien universe. For these movies are preoccupied, even obsessed, with a variety of inter-related anxieties about human identity – about the troubling question of individual integrity and its relation to the body, sexual difference and nature. What exactly is my place in nature? How far does the (natural) human ability to develop technology alienate us from the natural world? Am I (or am I in) my body? How sharply does my gender define me? How vulnerable does my body make me? Is sexual reproduction a threat to my integrity, and, if so, does the reality and nature of that threat depend on whether I am a man or a woman? These are themes that emerge with quasi-mathematical elegance from the series’ original conception of an alien species which involves human beings in its own reproductive cycle, and which thereby confronts its human protagonists with the flesh-and-blood basis of their existence. This issue – call it the relation of human identity to embodiment – has been central to philosophical reflection in the modern period since Descartes; but the sophistication and self-awareness with which these films deploy and develop that issue, together with a number of related issues also familiar to philosophers, suggest to me that they should themselves be taken as making real contributions to these intellectual debates. In other words, I do not look to these films as handy or popular illustrations of views and arguments properly developed by philosophers; I see them rather as themselves reflecting on and evaluating such views and arguments, as thinking seriously and systematically about them in just the ways that philosophers do. Such films are not philosophy’s raw material, nor a source for its ornamentation; they are philosophical exercises, philosophy in action – film as philosophizing.

Furthermore, the Alien series’ interest in the bodily basis of human identity raises a number of inter-related questions about the conditions of cinema as such. For that medium is dependent upon the photographic reproduction (or, better, transcription) of human beings, the projection of moving images of embodied human individuals presented to a camera. In one frame of mind, this phenomenon can appear utterly banal; in another, it can seem utterly mysterious – as fascinating as the fact that a human being can be portrayed in paint, or that ink-marks on paper can express a thought. One might say that cinematic projections, with their unpredictable but undeniable capacity to translate (and to fail to translate) certain individual physiognomies into movie stardom, are one of the possibilities to which embodied creatures such as ourselves are subject; and we cannot understand that subjection without understanding the nature of photographic transcription as such, hence without understanding what becomes of anything and everything on film.

These questions, about the nature of the cinematic medium, are perhaps those which we might expect any philosophical book on film to address – they are what is typically referred to as ‘the philosophy of film’; and this book does indeed find itself addressing such questions in a number of places. But it does so because it finds that these films themselves address such questions – because it finds that, in their reflections on human embodiment, they find themselves reflecting upon what makes it possible for them to engage in such reflections, upon the conditions for the possibility of film. In other words, a fundamental part of the philosophical work of these films is best understood as philosophy of film.

But the series has developed in such a way that its individual members have ineluctably been forced to grapple with a range of other conditions for their own possibility. To begin with, each film sits more or less uneasily within the genre of science fiction, with more or less strong ties in any individual case with the adjacent genres of horror, thriller, action, war and fantasy movies; and, although each film can be regarded as self-sufficient, hence capable of being understood on its own terms, each succeeding film has also been created in clear awareness of its relation to its forebears. The distinctive character of each new episode in the series is thus in part a consequence of the increasingly complex nature of its thematic and narrative inheritance; but primarily it results from a commitment on the part of the series producers (Gordon Carroll, David Giler and Walter Hill) to find a new director for each episode, and preferably one with great potential rather than with an established cinematic track record. The series so far has used the talents, and helped to make or to consolidate the reputation, of Ridley Scott, James Cameron, David Fincher and Jean-Pierre Jeunet. Each episode can therefore be seen as an early step in a highly influential and acclaimed cinematic career, and hence as internally related to such original and substantial films as Blade Runner, Gladiator and Black Hawk Down, Terminator and Terminator 2, Se7en, The Game, Fight Club and Panic Room, The City of Lost Children and Amélie.

This unusual conjunction of circumstances means that a detailed study of the Alien series will allow us, first, to examine how the specific conventions of traditional film genres, and the more general conditions of movie-making in Hollywood (as opposed, say, to those in the independent sector or in Europe), can both support and resist the achievement of artistic excellence. Here, what emerges will confirm that we can and should move beyond the disabling thought (a thought that can only disable genuine thoughtfulness about cinema) that artistic excellence is necessarily unobtainable in even the most unpromising of Hollywood contexts. Second, such a study also allows an investigation into the condition of sequeldom – a mode of movie-making that has appeared to dominate in Hollywood since the late 1990s, as if American commercial cinema had returned to one of its most influential early forms of the 1930s and 1940s, but in a much more self-conscious (sometimes serious, sometimes merely exploitative) way. An important issue here is how a ‘franchise’ can renew itself over time, in part by explicitly reflecting upon what is involved in inheriting a particular set of characters in a particular narrative universe – the constraints and opportunities internal to (what, as a philosopher, I am inclined to call the logic of) that inheritance.

A third reason for studying this series is that each individual member of it is also an individual film in the series of a particularly gifted director’s work. Each such movie can thus be studied as a point of intersection between a director’s talents and artistic vision, and the narrative and thematic potential inherent in the alien universe; each film simultaneously unfolds more of the identity or individuality of its director and of its universe, as if each is made more itself through the complementarities and contrasts generated by their intense mutual engagement. In this way, we might make some progress in understanding the general significance of (the insights made available, as well as the confusions engendered, by) our desire to talk of a film’s director as its author, and hence to regard a film director’s oeuvre as possessed of a particular thematic and artistic unity.

If, then, the developments of plot and character that make up the individual substance of these films can be thought of as generated by a reflective engagement with their own status as sequels, and hence with questions of inheritance and originality, we could say that the series as a whole makes progress by reflecting upon the conditions of its own possibility. This kind of reflection is particularly demanded of any art in the condition of modernism – in which its own history (its inheritance of conventions, techniques and resources) has become an undismissable problem for it, something it can neither simply accept nor simply reject. But to make progress by reflecting upon the conditions of its own possibility is also as good a characterization as could be desired of the way in which any truly rigorous philosophy must proceed; for any philosophy that failed to engage in such reflection would fail to demand of itself what it demands of any and every other discipline with which it presumes to engage. Hence, as well as thinking of the Alien series as an exemplary instance of cinematic modernism, we might also consider it as exemplary of cinema that finds itself in the condition of philosophy – of film as philosophy.

It is because I believe that these movies can be thought of in this way – as at once film as philosophizing, philosophy of film, and film in the condition of philosophy – that I regard myself as having written a philosophy book on film rather than a book about some films which happens to have some philosophy in it. And it is this same belief that leads me to regard the films under discussion in ways that differ fundamentally from the work of most of the film theorists I came across in preparing to write them. In the course of that preparation, it became clear to me that such theorists exhibit a strong tendency to treat the films they discuss as objects to which specific theoretical edifices (originating elsewhere, in such domains as psychoanalysis or political theory) could be applied. Even the most useful of these discussions would usually begin with a long explanation of the relevant theory and turn to the specific film only at the end, and only as a cultural product whose specific features served to illustrate the truth of that theory – as one more phenomenon the theory rendered comprehensible. Of course, I have no objection to anyone making use of whatever intellectual resources they find pertinent in coming to understand a film’s power and interest – I will be doing so myself in the chapters to come.² However, the approaches I encountered seemed to me to lack any sense that the films themselves might have anything to contribute to our understanding of them – that they might contain a particular account of themselves, of why they are as they are, an account that might contribute to an intellectual exploration of the issues to which these pre-established bodies of theory also contribute, or even serve critically to evaluate those theories, to put their accuracy or exhaustiveness in question.

In short, such film theory tends to see in films only further confirmation of the truth of the theoretical machinery to which the theorist is already committed; the film itself has no say in what we are to make of it, no voice in the history of its own reception or comprehension. One of the reasons this book approaches questions about film through a detailed reading of specific films is precisely to put this tendency in question – to suggest that such films are in fact as capable of putting in question our prior faith in our general theories as they are of confirming that faith. This is, of course, just another way of saying that films can be seen to engage in systematic and sophisticated thinking about their themes and about themselves – that films can philosophize.

Reiterating such a claim about these films, these products of a lucrative Hollywood franchise in a popular commercial genre, might bring to the surface an anxiety that is very likely to emerge whenever a philosopher finds philosophizing going on in places where we tend not to expect it – isn’t such an interpretation of these movies just a matter of over-interpretation, of reading things into them that simply aren’t there? There is no general way of allaying such anxieties; whether or not a particular reading of a film in fact reads things into it as opposed to reading things out of it is not something that can be settled apart from a specific assessment of that reading against one’s own assessment of the given film (and vice versa). Certainly, to think that my readings must be over-interpretations simply because they quickly find themselves grappling with questions that are of interest to philosophers would suggest a rather impoverished conception of the intellectual powers of film and of the pervasiveness of matters of philosophical interest in human life.

Nevertheless, this anxiety does register something specific to these particular films – the fact that (in a manner I think of as bequeathed to them by one of their producers, Walter Hill) they appear to demand interpretation, and interpretation of a certain kind. From beginning to end, the Alien films present us with small, isolated groups of human beings framed most immediately against the infinity of the cosmos. Each individual’s inhabitation of the universe appears unmediated by the more complex interweavings of culture and society, those systems of signification which condition the meaning of any actions and events encompassed by them; their only carapace or exoskeleton is the bare minimum of technology necessary for their survival (whether an ore-carrying ship, an atmosphere-processing facility, a waste refinery or a covert military/scientific research station). This cosmic backdrop makes it all but impossible to avoid grasping the narrative and thematic structure of the films in metaphysical or existential terms – as if the alien universe could not but concern itself with the human condition as such (as opposed to some specific inflection of that condition, some particular way in which a given human society has adapted, and adapted to, its environment, some individual way of making sense of its circumstances).

In choosing to meet these films’ demand to be understood metaphysically, I do not take myself to be endorsing every element of that understanding (or even endorsing the understanding of philosophy as inherently metaphysical – as opposed, say, to thinking of it as aiming to diagnose or overcome the metaphysical). Neither do I take myself to be overlooking (or denying) the fact that any narrative universe designed to depict humanity sub specie aeternitatis will always exemplify a particular human way of making sense of ourselves and our circumstances – that any given metaphysics is culturally and socially specific, and hence that much of interest might emerge by asking how these films’ metaphysical ambitions relate to the particular historical circumstances of their production.

But, of course, choosing to plot those relations does not negate but rather presupposes a grasp of the relevant metaphysical ambitions; and choosing to focus exclusively upon their metaphysical register does not commit me to the view that any other focus is misplaced or otiose. On the contrary, whilst I have attempted to provide a full or complete reading of the series’ underlying (call it metaphysical) logic, in that I have aimed to establish a coherent perspective from which these films do genuinely form a series (a sequence in which each member appears as generated by its predecessor, and generative of its successor), I do not regard that reading as exhaustive or exclusive – as if its validity entails the invalidity of any alternative readings or approaches to reading, of any claims to identify another (metaphysical or non-metaphysical) kind of coherence in their individual and collective identity. The validity of any such claims rather turns, to say it once again, on specific assessments of their bearing on our specific experiences of the films themselves (and vice versa).

All that this book implicitly claims is that philosophy has something distinctive to contribute to the ongoing conversations about particular films and the medium of cinema that play such an important role in contemporary public culture. Philosophy’s voice has a specific register, one that distinguishes it even from that of film theory and cultural studies; but in making itself heard it has (and needs to have) no desire to render other voices mute.

The overall structure of (what is now Part I of) this little book takes the form of four chapters. Each is concerned with one episode in the Alien series, but each also looks in detail at other work by its director. Chapter 1 develops at some length my understanding of the basic logic of the alien universe; the other three are more preoccupied with the artistic problems and possibilities they pose, as well as the incitements and resistances they generate, for the directors who follow Ridley Scott. Chapter 4, on Alien Resurrection, functions as a conclusion that is also a prologue, since this episode in the series is itself most knowingly constructed as a meditation upon the degree to which any such series can successfully renew itself, and thus places the further continuation of the series in question whilst at the same time suggesting that its potential for continuation can survive the most thoroughgoing attempts (as, for example, in Alien³) to exhaust or foreclose its narrative possibilities.

I would like to thank Simon Critchley and Richard Kearney for inviting me to contribute a volume to their Thinking in Action series, Tony Bruce at Routledge for helping to develop and support such a worthwhile publishing venture, Philip Wheatley and Alison Baker for reading and offering comments on the book in manuscript form, and a number of anonymous readers for Routledge whose responses also helped to improve the text. The portion of Chapter 1 devoted to Blade Runner is a much-revised version of an article that first appeared in Film and Philosophy, vol. 1, 1994.

Notes

1 I explain why I do not regard the recent Alien vs Predator as a fifth member of the series in the postscript to Chapter 4.

2 As will be evident, my main source of inspiration is the work of Stanley Cavell, whose books on film include The World Viewed (Harvard University Press: Cambridge, Mass., 1971), Pursuits of Happiness (Harvard University Press: Cambridge, Mass., 1981), Contesting Tears (University of Chicago Press: Chicago, 1996) and Cavell on Film, edited by William Rothman (SUNY Press: New York, 2005), but whose philosophical reach extends much further. More occasional sources include Nietzsche, Heidegger, Sartre and Wittgenstein.

1 Kane’s son, Cain’s daughter

Ridley Scott’s Alien

Above the sparse opening credits, as the camera pans slowly from the outer rim of a planet’s Saturnian rings across the pitch black of its surface and back out to the opposite rim of those rings, the title of this film is indicated in a slowly emerging sequence of vertical strokes. It thus appears to emerge from the surface of the planet itself, the place from which the alien creature after which the film is named emerges; and it is indicated rather than spelt out, because some of its constituent letters (not being wholly compo...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Preface to the third edition
• Preface to the second edition
• Part I
• Part II
• Part III
• Part IV
• References
• Index