Skepticism Films

Knowing and Doubting the World in Contemporary Cinema

Philipp Schmerheim

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9781501320149
• eBook ISBN: 9781501310980
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

Skepticism Films: Knowing and Doubting the World in Contemporary Cinema introduces skepticism films as updated configurations of skepticist thought experiments which exemplify the pervasiveness of philosophical ideas in popular culture. Philipp Schmerheim defends a pluralistic film-philosophical position according to which films can be, but need not be, expressions of philosophical thought in their own right. It critically investigates the influence of ideas of skepticism on film-philosophical theories and develops a typology of skepticism films by analyzing The Truman Show, Inception, The Matrix, Vanilla Sky, The Thirteenth Floor, Moon and other contemporary skepticism films. With its focus on skepticism as one of the most significant philosophical problems, Skepticism Films provides a better understanding of the dynamic interplay between film, theories of film and philosophy.

1

Introduction: Skepticism Films. A Certain Tendency in Contemporary Cinema

It is another morning in the picture-perfect seaside town of “Seahaven.” The insurance salesman Truman Burbank is ready to start another glorious all-American day. Having enjoyed his breakfast cereal, a goodbye kiss from his lovely blonde wife Meryl, and some chitchat with his neighbors, he is about to jump into his car and drive to the office of the insurance company he is working for. Little does he know that in a few moments an entire star will fall out of the blue sky right in front of him—a halogen spotlight tagged as “Sirius 9 (9 Canis Major).” This is only the beginning of a sequence of events that will turn Truman’s life upside down, and within four days he will discover that he spent his entire life in a TV studio as the unwitting star of a life-long daily reality show, surrounded by actors posing as colleagues, friends, and relatives.

Meanwhile, in another part of the fictional universe of cinema, the bored computer hacker Thomas Anderson wakes from his sleep because a chat message pops up on the computer screen in his messy, run-down apartment. Little does he know that within a few moments, he will be lured by the wake-up call “follow the rabbit” into a nightclub, from where a woman called Trinity will bring him to Morpheus, an enigmatic underground rebel who confronts him with a devastating revelation: All his life, Anderson has been living in the dream world of the Matrix, a computer-generated virtual reality built by machines in order to keep him under control.

Meanwhile, in yet another corner of the boundless world of cinema, the rich playboy David Aames suffers from recurring nightmares, reminding him again and again of the horrible accident that left him disfigured before the doctors found a way to reconstruct his face. So horrible do the nightmares become that he starts to lose his grip on life, and is even unsure of whether the woman he shares it with is really the one she claims to be. Little does he know that soon he will loudly call out for “tech support,” and an inconspicuous middle-aged man will patiently tell David that he is living a dream of his own making—while he actually spent the last 150 years in cryostasis, his tormented body frozen at extremely low temperatures, his mind immersed in a lucid dream. Only within this dream can he spend a life together with Sofia, the only woman he ever loved, while actually she is already long gone and … dead.

While all these strange stories unfold, the solitary astronaut Sam Bell is counting down the last few days of his three-year stint at a lunar base, harvesting the precious raw material helium-3 on the far side of the moon for an energy company called Lunar Industries. Longing to see his wife and daughter again, his health rapidly declining, he sets out one last time to repair a broken harvester on the moon’s surface. Little does he know that within a few hours he won’t be alone anymore, waking up inside the lunar base after an accident with the harvester knocks him unconscious. But that other man who is now with him is … his own clone. And little does he know that he, Sam Bell, is only a three-year-old clone of the original Sam Bell as well.¹

A kaleidoscope of cinematic deception situations

This kaleidoscope of cinematic deception situations is merely a glimpse at a vast variety of films that confront their protagonists with revelations about the unreality of their worlds, confront them with the unpleasant insight that they, or other persons they are spending their life with, are in a very fundamental way not what they seem to be. For the protagonists of these introductory examples, the skepticist fear that the world is not real has become true: Truman Burbank in The Truman Show (Weir, 1998) lives in a TV studio world, directed by a megalomaniac filmmaker. For Thomas Anderson, of The Matrix (A. and L. Wachowski, 1999), the world turns out to be an interactive computer simulation run by sentient computer programs. In Vanilla Sky (Crowe, 2001), David Aames becomes his own evil deceiver and builds his own lucid dream. And in Moon (Jones, 2009), Sam Bell discovers that he was, in fundamental respects, ignorant about himself.

“Living is easy with eyes closed,” the Beatles sang in “Strawberry Fields Forever,” and, tellingly, this is the motto Charlie Pace lives by, one of the main characters in the TV serial Lost (2004–2010). From a philosophical perspective, the diagnosis is obvious: All these films are variations of skepticist scenarios, scenarios that support the claim or suspicion that we are not able to “know what we think we know” (Stroud [1994] 2000: 174) about the world we live in, about ourselves, or about others. They are what throughout this book I will define as “skepticism films”—dramatized, fictional narrative versions of the hypothetical thought experiments that are part and parcel of philosophical reflection on knowledge and doubt. The way in which such films play with the skepticist impetus and with traditional scenarios is at the heart of this book.

The premise of skepticist scenarios is simple: If we are unable to exclude extreme deception situations in which the entire world fundamentally differs from our most basic beliefs about it, then how can we claim to know things about our world? René Descartes’ methodological doubt in the Meditationes de Prima Philosophia (Descartes [1641] 1904) led him to the irrefutable certainty that he exists as a thinking substance as long as he is thinking, but he did not manage to derive other certainties from his cogito argument without invoking the existence of a basically good-willed Deity that assures him of the existence of a spatially extended world, and that not all of his fundamental beliefs can be false. Deriving knowledge of the world by exclusive, a priori reliance on human rational capabilities turns out to be a dead-end street. In that respect, skepticism is the outcome of a deeply rooted suspicion about the “claim of reason” (Cavell 1979a) that, as misled as human beings can sometimes be about the facts that constitute our world, in general we do “know what we think we know.”

This book claims that since the 1990s, with precursors during the 1960s to the 1980s, there has been a proliferation of skepticism films in mainstream cinema that puts into doubt the ontological status of their characters’ environments by revealing the manipulative potential of modern technology. Films from the era of early, silent, and classical cinema such as Das Cabinet des Dr. Caligari (Wiene, 1920), Rashômon (Kurosawa, 1950), Blow Up (Antonioni, 1962), or Rear Window (Hitchcock, 1954) have a tendency to explore blurred boundaries between reality and fantasy, the dreaming and waking state, truth and imagination, and therefore these are effectively films with protagonists who have lost normal contact with the world because they are hallucinating or imagining non-real worlds of their own. Skepticism films, in contrast, basically feature sane protagonists who are deceived by external forces in their world, simply unaware that they are living in a simulated, artificial, or fundamentally misinterpreted environment. Skepticism films are, if you will, a pessimistic cinematic version of fantastic literature.

The chapters that follow will investigate the manifold expressions of skepticist discomfort in contemporary mainstream films, and they will discuss Stanley Cavell’s and Gilles Deleuze’s philosophical accounts of cinema as an example of philosophies of film that directly or indirectly tap into skepticism as an intellectual resource. As will be shown, some of the skepticism films, such as The Matrix and Vanilla Sky, present core, quasi ideal-typical screenings of skepticist thought experiments, while others, such as the TV serial Lost (2004–2010), invoke skepticist ideas as merely one layer of a rich web of themes and topics. Skepticism films, I will argue, update and fictionalize philosophical doubts regarding claims to knowledge about the external world, and therefore can be functionally similar to, for instance, Descartes’ evil deceiver hypothesis, Hilary Putnam’s brains in a vat (Putnam 1981), or Robert Nozick’s experience machine (Nozick 1977)—thought experiments that are introduced as test devices for the stability of concepts of knowledge.

The following list of films underscores the impression that skepticism films are a major phenomenon in recent mainstream cinema. There are: The Matrix sequels Matrix Reloaded (A. and L. Wachowski, 2003) and Matrix Revolutions (A. and L. Wachowski, 2003), The Thirteenth Floor (Rusnak, 1999), Dark City (Proyas, 1998), eXistenZ (Cronenberg, 1999), The Village (Shyamalan, 2004), The Island (Bay, 2005), Total Recall (Verhoeven, 1990; Wiseman, 2012), The Sixth Sense (Shyamalan, 1999), The Others (Amenábar, 2001), The Game (Fincher, 1997), S1mOne (Niccol, 2002), Fight Club (Fincher, 1999), Waking Life (Linklater, 2001), and Vanilla Sky, a Hollywood remake of the Spanish-language European production Abre Los Ojos (Amenábar, 1997).

Examples of the older storytelling tradition of exploring the boundaries between real and non-real worlds are: Sherlock Jr. (Arbuckle and Keaton, 1924), The Wizard of Oz (Fleming et al., 1939), Rashômon, Blow Up, and THX 1138 (Lucas, 1971), and Welt am Draht (Fassbinder, 1973). Welt am Draht, as well as The Thirteenth Floor, is based on one of the first cyberpunk novels, Daniel F. Galouye’s Simulacron-3 (1964).

The updated nature of skepticism films is evident in the remarkable presence of virtual or otherwise simulated worlds in films such as The Matrix, The Thirteenth Floor, Vanilla Sky, Abre Los Ojos, Welt am Draht, Dark City, and Inception (Nolan, 2010). All of them tap into the trope of the computer-generated fictional universe of cyberpunk literature, which already established itself in the 1950s and 1960s as a premonition of the digital screen culture we are living in today. These films are cinematic dystopias that, again, screen a fundamental suspicion about the manipulative and destructive potential of modern technology. In this respect, skepticism films are part of a cinematic tendency toward “digital paranoia” (Rodowick 2007: 3) in which human beings are cloned as living organ donors for their rich counterparts in the real world (The Island, Never Let Me Go [Romanek, 2010]), where teenagers are thrown into a lethal battle for survival for the entertainment of decadent masses (the Hunger Games trilogy [Ross, 2012; Lawrence, 2013; Lawrence, 2014; Lawrence, 2015]), or where a devastating nuclear war or virus has left the surface of the earth almost uninhabitable (Total Recall [Verhoeven, 1990; Wiseman, 2012], Elysium [Blomkamp, 2013], Oblivion [Kosinski, 2013], After Earth [Shyamalan, 2013], THX 1138). Mainstream cinema is entertainment—but as entertai...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Series
• Dedication
• Title Page
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Acknowledgments
• 1 Introduction: Skepticism Films. A Certain Tendency in Contemporary Cinema
• Part 1 Thinking Through Cinema
• 2 Films as Configurations of Philosophical Thought
• 3 Remediating Philosophy, or: The Media of Philosophical Thought
• Part 2 Skepticism in Film Philosophy
• 4 Varieties of Philosophical Skepticism: Knowledge, Acknowledgment, and Trust
• 5 A Moving Image of Skepticism? Philosophy’s Acknowledgment of Film
• 6 A Cinema for Believers. Trust, Belief, and the Expulsion from the Paradise of Childhood
• Part 3 Skepticism Films
• 7 Varieties of Skepticism Films
• 8 Tools for Philosophical Film Analysis
• 9 (Not) Knowing My World: External World Skepticism Films. A Comparative Analysis of The Matrix, The Thirteenth Floor, and The Truman Show
• 10 Not Knowing My Self: Self-Knowledge Skepticism Films
• 11 Coda. From Doubt to Acknowledgment, or: The Philosophical Significance of Skepticism Films Revisited
• Bibliography and Filmography
• Index
• Copyright