Alternative Worlds in Hollywood Cinema

Resonance Between Realms

James Walters

• Verlag: Intellect Books
• Jahr: 2008
• ISBN:
  9781841502526
• Auflage: 1
• Thema: Medios de comunicación y artes escénicas
• Thema: Artes escénicas

The use of alternate realities in cinema has been brought to new heights by such recent films as Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and Donnie Darko. Alternative Worlds in Hollywood Cinema is the first book to analyze these imaginary realms, tracing their construction and development across periods, genres, and history.
Through an analysis of such landmark films as The Wizard of Oz, Vanilla Sky, and Back to the Future, James Walters reveals how unconventional worlds are crucial to each film's dramatic agenda and narrative structure. This groundbreaking volume unifies decades of divergent work by film scholars and points the way towards a new theoretical framework for understanding fantasy in the context of popular film. Alternative Worlds in Hollywood Cinema will be an essential resource for film studies scholars and movie buffs alike. "The book is very readable... an important area of film study. The most original aspects of the book are the close readings of the films discussed and how these readings cohere across a single thesis."—Pat Brereton, Dublin City University, author of Hollywood Utopia

1

ESTABLISHING CONTEXTS

There are certain critical debates already in motion within film studies that inform and augment a study of alternative worlds in film. However, such arguments rarely deal with the convention of the alternative world as a sustained point of interest or investigation. Indeed, most of the critics and theorists to whom I will be referring in this chapter are engaged in a much wider consideration of the nature of film and film narrative. Nevertheless, an awareness of these wider critical positions is pertinent to my study as films whose stories incorporate alternative worlds do not – cannot – exist in isolation from the countless other films that do not. There would be little profit in insisting that any category of film we might choose is entirely discrete, as such a rigidly confined attitude can only invite legitimate challenge and contradiction, thus undermining the stringency of the argument. Perhaps this would be especially true of the categories I am concerned with, which are observable across genres, styles, tones and periods of film-making. Self-evidently, by including an alternative world or worlds within their stories, the films I refer to do not reinvent the principles of cinematic storytelling. They do not cease to resemble other movies and remain as comprehensible (or potentially incomprehensible) as any other film. Indeed, the very fact that these films avoid stretching the boundaries of credibility and coherence to breaking point – that we do not reject them out of hand despite their narrative departures from established realities – should be a matter of some importance. This leads to the suggestion that there are traits discernible within narrative cinema generally that allow for, or provide opportunity for, the creation of alternative worlds within a film’s broader fictional world. It is intended that an engagement with those more general traits, expressed through the critical attitudes covered in this chapter, will lead to a better understanding of alternative worlds as they occur in the films discussed.

Working from this perspective, and integrating the study of alternative worlds into wider discourses surrounding narrative cinema, necessarily draws attention to existing debates that detail and analyse some of the more general attributes that worlds in films possess. This area of enquiry has itself hardly benefited from sustained analysis, a fact acknowledged by those who attempt such an enterprise. Yet, an awareness of the rules, conditions and characteristics of created worlds in film can serve to position the device of the alternative world in a wider context, making it continuous with certain patterns and tendencies in narrative cinema that have been observed and debated.

Even before investigating debates surrounding the nature of created worlds in film, however, it is worthwhile to revisit the work of certain critical theorists who concern themselves with cinema’s ability to create worlds at all. In order to evaluate descriptions of the fictional worlds as created and formed, we might first attend to the event of their creation and, thus, their form as they appear to us. This line of inquiry brings forth debates surrounding the event of the world film, and thus forms a stage before a consideration of the nature of worlds as created in film, which in turn represents a stage before a consideration of alternative worlds, as created in film, takes place. With this progression in mind, I will address each stage accordingly in this chapter, beginning with the broadest and wide-ranging.

The Event of the World in Film

Edward Branigan has endeavoured to explain some of the processes that are at work when we watch films and, indeed, this is a main purpose of his book Narrative Comprehension and Film.¹ At a point in this work, Branigan turns his attention to an area he determines as ‘Story World and Screen’.² Adopting an approach founded in part upon some of the guiding principles of cognitive science, he states that: ‘Narrative in film rests on our ability to create a three-dimensional world out of a two-dimensional wash of light and dark’.³ At once, Branigan concerns himself with the form of the cinema screen, its two-dimensionality, but goes on to highlight the viewer’s role in interpreting that apparent flatness as essentially three-dimensional, creating a textured world. His emphasis on the spectator’s interpretative processes is consistent with his position, influenced by the field of cognitive science, well established in the study of film by the time Branigan’s work appeared in 1992. The audience’s interpretative process as he describes it is self-evident, perhaps indisputable, and film-makers would appear to have sought to exploit this almost from the beginning of cinema. For example, whilst various writers have challenged the authenticity of accounts that describe audiences’ terrified reactions at seeing the Lumière Brothers’ 1895 film, Arrivée d’un train en gare à La Ciotat (Arrival of a Train), for the first time,⁴ there is no denying that this film makes early reference to the cinema audience’s inclination to create three-dimensional worlds from two-dimensional images, so that a train moving towards the camera apparently connects with the audience’s world-making cognitive process as outlined by Branigan: it looks like a train travelling towards the audience. The fun for some audience members may or may not have rested upon the make-believe notion that the three-dimensional world of the film could penetrate our real, three-dimensional world, regardless of the two-dimensional screen that separates them, rather than any serious belief in the possibility.⁵ This is different, I think, from the effect elicited in us when we watch a film made from the placement of a camera in a moving roller coaster carriage. It would seem that our potential reactions here – apprehension, excitement, disorientation and others personal to the viewer – derive from the involuntary sensation of actually being on the ride, of being within the film world. At the very least, the passage of a train across a diagonal axis from background to foreground highlights the extent to which we have assumed the existence of a world in three-dimensions. In this way, the mere fact that we can speak intelligibly about the foreground and background of a shot is perhaps the most arresting proof that we understand the world to extend beyond the screen, three-dimensionally.

Branigan further distinguishes that ‘Light and sound in narrative film are thus experienced in two ways: virtually unshaped on a screen as well as apparently moving within, reflecting and issuing from, a world which contains solid objects making sounds’.⁶ Here, Branigan makes clear the duality, as he sees it, of the cinematic image: the fact of its two-dimensionality allied with its simultaneous illusion of a real three-dimensional world ‘moving within’. Duality is a useful term here, as we are surely always aware that we are watching a projected, two-dimensional image and yet instinctively accept the cinema’s convention of three-dimensionality. The images have been captured in the real world, and that realness remains intact as they are projected for us in the darkness. Branigan’s observations here are perhaps familiar to the point of becoming unremarkable, yet the interpretive principles of cinema spectatorship he describes are fundamental to the advent of worlds created in film, and central to our accepting them as worlds.⁷

Branigan’s assertions mark a contribution to existing debates surrounding the existence of ‘worlds’ in films. Stanley Cavell, writing twenty years earlier, had already concerned himself with the nature of the filmed world and, particularly, the viewers’ relationship to that world as they experience it, as it appears on (or within, or beyond) the screen. As he moves towards defining precisely what is at stake for the viewer when images are projected onto a cinema screen, Cavell lays out some of the contrasting features of painting and photography.⁸ Cavell moves away from Bazin’s celebration of photography as having ‘freed the plastic arts from their obsession with likeness’ as he considers this perspective to be suggestive of an implicit competition between painting and photography, as though ‘painting had wanted something that photography broke in and satisfied’.⁹ He takes this position to be somewhat fanciful and, instead, details the differences between the worlds that painting and photography depict. Of particular interest to Cavell is the fact that the world extends beyond the area captured by the camera’s lens in photography, whereas that same principle cannot be applied to a painting: ‘You can always ask, of an area photographed, what lies adjacent to that area, beyond the frame. This generally makes no sense asked of a painting…A painting is a world; a photograph is of the world’.¹⁰ Here we find a thematic correlation between Cavell’s account of the photograph and Branigan’s account of cinema. Both writers concern themselves with matters of space and distance, but while Branigan is interested in the three-dimensional depth of the cinematic world, Cavell articulates the existence of an ‘implied world’ that extends in every direction beyond the scope of the camera’s lens that has ‘captured’ a section of that world. It becomes clear, therefore, that Cavell’s theory of the ‘implied world’ in photography enriches an understanding of cinematic worlds, that the camera which produces a photographic ‘snapshot’ of its world is implicitly related to the camera which produces a filmed section of its world. As with photography, we are invited to attend to the existence of a world around the camera, outside of the section framed and recorded onto film.

For Cavell, however, a key distinction exists between the photographic image and the cinematic. This definition occurs when Cavell turns his attention specifically to the screen in cinema: he finds that it has no border or frame around it, as pictures and paintings do, but is itself a frame. The frame in cinema is more versatile than that of a photograph or painting as the camera moves or adopts different positions and distances; in this way it is ‘indefinitely extendible and contractible’.¹¹ But Cavell finds the screen to be important in other ways relating to the film’s world and the viewer’s relationship to that world. He chooses to view the screen not as a surface which supports an image (he rejects this notion by contrasting it with the canvas in painting that literally does support its image) but instead as a barrier. He asks: ‘What does the silver screen screen? It screens me from the world it holds – that is, makes me invisible. And it screens that world from me – that is, screens its existence from me’.¹² For Cavell, this first ability to render the viewer temporarily ‘invisible’ is a crucial facet of cinema and his proposition leads him to later define the way in which ‘movies reproduce the world magically…Not by literally presenting us with the world, but by permitting us to view it unseen’.¹³ Cavell’s conclusions here represent an acknowledgement that the world in film, the world beyond the screen, is a (fictional) world. The world beyond the screen might even appear as ‘real’ as the one we experience everyday but the key distinction is that we are not required to be part of the world beyond the screen – are not in any case able to be – and that gives the filmed world a special quality and an attraction that separates it from our experienced reality. Therefore, Cavell’s description of the screen as a barrier between two worlds is fundamental as it symbolizes the ontological borderline between the two spaces.

Cavell tells us finally that ‘The screen overcomes our fixed distance; it makes displacement appear as our natural condition’;¹⁴ his observations up to this point regarding the cinema’s ability to grant a viewers’ invisibility having prepared the way for such an appraisal. Writing thirty years later, Deborah Thomas would appear to concur with Cavell’s position and further explore it in her analysis of spaces in Hollywood cinema.¹⁵ Thomas asserts that:

When I examine my own experience of watching a film, it feels to me as though I am positioned at the boundary produced by the screen (or by the extended virtual screen), not myself, ...