Embodied Metaphors in Film, Television, and Video Games

Cognitive Approaches

Kathrin Fahlenbrach

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9781138850835
• eBook ISBN: 9781317531203
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Television

In cognitive research, metaphors have been shown to help us imagine complex, abstract, or invisible ideas, concepts, or emotions. Contributors to this book argue that metaphors occur not only in language, but in audio visual media well. This is all the more evident in entertainment media, which strategically "sell" their products by addressing their viewers' immediate, reflexive understanding through pictures, sounds, and language. This volume applies cognitive metaphor theory (CMT) to film, television, and video games in order to analyze the embodied aesthetics and meanings of those moving images.

Part I Metaphors and Narrative Meanings in Moving Images

1 Visual and Multimodal Metaphor in Film Charting the Field

Charles Forceville

DOI: 10.4324/9781315724522-1

1 Introduction: A Very Short History

Lakoff and Johnson (1980), anticipated by Ortony (1979), fundamentally changed the study of metaphor by claiming that “metaphor is primarily a matter of thought and action and only derivatively a matter of language” (1980, 153). From then on, metaphor was no longer one of a series of tropes that could enhance or embellish the aesthetic meaning of a poem or the persuasive power of speeches (as had been its primary claim to fame since Aristotelian times), but one of the essential conceptual tools for human beings to make sense of the world. Metaphor now also began to attract the attention of psychologists and cognition scholars. “Metaphor studies” became something of a discipline in its own right, spawning numerous papers and book chapters, monographs, and conferences, and two journals (Metaphor and Symbolic Activity, later called Metaphor and Symbol, since 1986; and Metaphor and the Social World, since 2011).

A logical consequence of accepting Lakoff and Johnson’s “conceptual metaphor theory” (CMT) was that researchers should not only investigate verbal expressions of conceptual metaphors but also consider their non-verbal and partly verbal manifestations. Within the CMT paradigm basically two strands of research of this latter variety developed. One strand focused on metaphorical gestures in, and in interaction with, spoken communication (e.g., Müller 2008; Cienki and Müller 2008; see also Kappelhoff and Müller 2011). The other strand examined metaphors in static pictures, initially in advertising (e.g., Forceville 1994, 1996), later also in the cartoon genre (e.g., El Refaie 2003; Teng 2009, Schilperoord and Maes 2009; Bounegru and Forceville 2011), comics (e.g., Forceville 2005; Abbott and Forceville 2011), and in branding and logos (Koller 2009; see also Pérez-Hernández 2013). For many years, film scholars did pay little attention to metaphor. Of course, Eisenstein had long ago developed a keen interest in metaphor, considering it a key tool to make politically appropriate persuasive points; however, his views did not feed into contemporary metaphor theory (but cf. Rohdin 2009). More recently, Giannetti (1972) mounted a plea that “film metaphor” is not a contradictio in terminis; unfortunately, he uses the term as more or less equivalent to “trope” in general, or even to “non-literalness.” From the 1990s onwards there was some scattered work on metaphor in film. Whittock’s (1990) monograph on the phenomenon contains many suggestive case studies and pertinent considerations but fails to present a clear-cut categorization of types, and moreover, like Giannetti, takes the label “metaphor” in a very broad sense (see Forceville 1996, 60–64 for more discussion). Within cognitivist film studies, Carroll (1994, 1996) eloquently promotes the possibility of metaphor in film. After my relocation to a film department, I began to extend my metaphor research from static ads and billboards to commercials (e.g., Forceville 2007, 2012) and feature films (e.g., Forceville 1999; see also Coëgnarts 2015). Over the past decade other scholars, both in film studies and in cognitive linguistics, have entered the field.

The budding interest in film metaphor is an exciting and promising development. But to ensure that this research is compatible with earlier research on metaphor, it is essential to agree on the terminology adopted as well as to chart some pertinent dimensions of metaphor’s “behavior” in movies as distinct from its behavior in other media. Such will be the brief of this chapter. Inevitably, its general character prevents anything approaching exhaustive treatment; but hopefully it will guide film scholars to explore film metaphor’s various aspects in more detail. The structure of the chapter is as follows. In section 2 I will explain some of the basic terminology. In section 3 the distinction between monomodal and multimodal metaphor will be defined. Section 4 will present a few case studies. The continuum from creative to structural/embodied metaphor constitutes the focus of section 5. In section 6, I will devote some thoughts to the thorny question “when is something a metaphor?” A factor that strongly influences both the construal of metaphor and its interpretation is the genre to which a film supposedly sporting a metaphor belongs, so this issue deserves some reflection (section 7). Whereas metaphor has currently the status of “master trope”, we should not be blind to other tropes that may have filmic manifestations (section 8). The chapter ends with some thoughts for further research (section 9). Two cautions end this introduction. First, I will take the liberty of re-using examples I have analysed in previous work. Second, given the limited space available, I present my views without many nuances and discussion of exceptions.

2 Terminology

“The essence of metaphor is understanding and experiencing one kind of thing in terms of another” (Lakoff and Johnson 1980, 5) is a convenient characterization of the trope, if only because it does not privilege its verbal variety. Of the two “things”, one is the literal term—what the metaphor is about. In older theories this literal term was called its “tenor” (Richards 1965) or “topic” or “primary subject” (Black 1979). The second “thing” is the figurative term, in older theories called “vehicle” (Richards 1965) or “secondary subject” (Black 1979). However, due to the pervasive influence of Lakoff and Johnson’s CMT, the most commonly used terms are nowadays “target” and “source”, respectively. So in “life is a cone of ice cream”, “you are a Pinocchio”, “writing a book is practising for a boxing match” (John Irving), “life”, “you”, and “writing a book” are the targets and “a cone of ice cream”, “Pinocchio”, and “practising for a boxing match” the sources of the metaphors. When analysts think they are confronted with a metaphor, their first task is to assess what is its target and what its source. This is crucial: the target pertains to the phenomenon the metaphor is about, whereas the source pertains to the phenomenon that the target is compared to. In language, we are often helped by grammar to distinguish between target and source: in metaphors that already manifest themselves in an “A is B” form—as in the examples above—the target coincides with the grammatical subject, and the predicate signals the source. But by no means all verbal metaphors have this form. A metaphor can “hide” in the verb, for instance (“he conquered her with roses”, “the river smiled”). For something to be labeled a metaphor, the analyst should always be capable of construing the “underlying” target-is-source or a is b (successful woeing is conquering, a river is a person); to distinguish the underlying conceptual structure of the metaphor from its surface manifestations, it has become the convention to print it in small capitals). A drawback of this conventional noun-a-is-noun-b formulation is that it favors a static understanding of the metaphor, whereas it is in fact actions done by, or to, or with the source that are mapped onto actions done by, or to, or with the target. Given this dynamic character of metaphor (Cameron et al. 2009), the formulation a-ing is b-ing may be more appropriate. Another drawback is that the choice of how to verbalize A and B is not always self-evident, and not necessarily neutral; this is something the analyst needs to be conscious of when deciding on an a is b formulation.

If a metaphor in film involves visuals—as it often, but not necessarily, does—the underlying metaphorical a is b has to be construed to an even larger degree than in the case of its linguistic manifestations. The reason for this construal (a process that analysts are supposed to perform consciously, but that film lovers presumably do subconsciously, if at all) is that there is no shorthand visual equivalent for the copula “is”. Because target and source play fundamentally different roles in the metaphor, they cannot be reversed. In verbal metaphor theory, the eternally used example here involves surgeons and butchers. The point is that in a given context, “that surgeon is a butcher” can never be reversed into “that butcher is a surgeon”. This irreversibility applies in visuals and film no less than in language (Forceville 2002, contra Carroll 1996).

Target and source are both part of semantic networks: each of them evokes a host of associated elements, emotions, and attitudes. For this reason, metaphor analysts often refer to the target domain and the source domain. Interpretation of a metaphor boils down to “mapping” one or more features (or a structured set of features) from source domain to target domain. Black (1979) discusses this interpretation process in terms of “projecting” features from source onto target.

Visual metaphors can be of different types. The first is the “contextual” type: the source of the metaphor is not depicted, but suggested by the visual context of the target. The second is the “hybrid” type: target and source are physically merged into a single—usually non-existing—gestalt. The third is the “simile”: target and source are saliently juxtaposed, without having been manipulated.¹

But film has at least one other way of visually cueing a metaphor, namely by creating similarity between two “things” via the way it depicts them: for instance by using, for these two things, the same unusual camera movement, the same salient color (filter), the same marked angle, the same editing pattern, etc. Note that (created) similarity between two things is a necessary criterion for construing a metaphor, but not a sufficient one. Similarity can be cued for many other reasons than for the creation of a metaphor.

Mode/Modality

When examples of metaphor are given in the film literature, they are usually of a purely visual nature. But although the “moving image” aspect is arguably the most defining aspect of the medium, and although there are specimens that consist of moving images alone, most films convey their meaning in combinations of moving images, sound, music, and language—the latter allowing for both spoken and written varieties. Film, therefore, is a “multimodal” medium par excellence, as it can draw on several modes/modalities (both terms are used). This has consequences for the ways in which metaphor can manifest itself in film, so that some attention must be paid to the notion of “mode”. “Multimodality” is quickly growing into a discipline in its own right, but unfortunately there is no generally accepted definition of what counts as a mode. For practical purposes I stick to the following, somewhat idiosyncratic, list of modes: (1) visuals; (2) spoken language; (3) written language; (4) sound; (5) music; (6) gestures; (7) touch; (8) smell; (9) olfaction (see Forceville 2006a for more discussion). If we ignore cinema experiments involving (7)–(9), film can draw on modes (1)–(6). Once this is accepted, it makes sense to distinguish between monomodal and multimodal metaphors. The former are “metaphors whose target and source are exclusively or predominantly rendered in one mode” (Forceville 2006b, 383, e.g., both in language, or in visuals); the latter are “metaphors whose target and source are each represented exclusively or predominantly in different modes” (ibid., 384, e.g., a visual target and a musical source, or a verbal target and a sonic source).

3 Some Examples

One of the most famous examples of film metaphor is the cross-cutting between armed soldiers pursuing the people and butchers slaughtering cattle in Eisenstein’s Strike (USSR 1925). The butchers and the cattle in the source domain correspond with the soldiers and the people in the target domain, respectively; what is mapped is the cruelty or indifference of slaughtering cattle/being slaughtered as (innocent) cattle. Because the butchers-and-cattle are not part of the story, the source domain is non-diegetic. This makes the metaphor salient; after all, there is no reasonable way to make sense of the butchers and cattle other than by considering them to function as the source domain of a metaphor. This choice for a non-diegetic source domain of course fits in well with Eisenstein’s overtly political filmic message. Technically it would be a monomodal visual metaphor of the simile type. Another often-quoted film metaphor is Chaplin’s fade from a crowd of workers coming out of a metro station to a herd of sheep in Modern Times (Chaplin, USA 1936); here, too, the source domain in this simile-type metaphor is non-diegetic (see Rohdin 2009 for more discussion of this workers are sheep metaphor).

An example of a visual metaphor of the hybrid type is the machine is moloch sequence in Fritz Lang’s Metropolis, discussed by Carroll (1994, 1996), who labels it “non-compossibly homospatial”: the metaphor is triggered because a hybrid metaphor merges elements of two phenomena that cannot, in the real world, simultaneously occupy the same space. Two caveats are in order: a title card giving us the label “Moloch” is an extra—although not indispensable—cue for the viewer to construe the metaphor, which thereby acquires multimodal overtones; and the metaphor is focalized by a char...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Series
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Figures and Tables
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: Embodied Metaphors in Moving Images
• Part I Metaphors and Narrative Meanings in Moving Images
• Part II Metaphors of Perception and the Senses in Moving Images
• Part III Metaphors of Emotion, Expression, and Mind in Moving Images
• Part IV Interactive Metaphors in Video Games
• Conclusion
• List of Contributors
• Index