Cinema and the Cerebrum

It’s not that you can’t reason with the masses; it’s that you can’t reason with the visual media we use to reach them. Visual media, and moving pictures in particular, do not lend themselves to complexity of thought, or, in particular, to thought at all. This is not to say that thought-provoking films and images don’t exist, but they exist in spite of their media, not because of them. Film finds itself better used by the polemicist than the intellectual: Jean-Luc Godard’s tendency toward filling his movies with lectures is a case in point; in opposition we see Leni Riefenstahl’s propaganda, which can be understood almost completely without a single word coming into play. Even the seemingly subtle masters of the form are more likely to produce emotional punches than provoke rational discourse: Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner is frequently noted as asking profound questions, but it asks maybe three or four of those in its almost two-hour running time, and it asks far less of the viewer than the Phillip K. Dick novel upon which it is based. Even Stanley Kubrick failed, by his own admission, to successfully address the issues brought up in Anthony Burgess’s A Clockwork Orange.

The intellectual content of movies, at least that which isn’t expressed through the standard narrative techniques familiar from theater, exist in and are created from the juxtaposition of images. Eisenstein recognized this early on: that meaning could be created beyond the juxtaposed images themselves through the act of juxtaposition. Montage does not discount the meaning in the images themselves, but the moving picture doesn’t often allow the kind of interaction with an image that a static picture invites. A still photograph, painting, or sculpture, creates a distinct relationship between the viewer and the work. There is a boundary of surface and space that eventually forces the viewer back into herself, the moment of contemplation. Cinema, with its incessant images in motion, tends to cloy the senses and therefore demands increasing levels of sensation in order to reach its numbed audience. The viewer becomes invaded as much as she invades; contemplation, the movement back into the self, becomes increasingly difficult.

The basic problem of making moving images mean, and not merely emote, can be seen in what television has done to the electoral process. Even if Barack Obama had wanted to discuss complex solutions to difficult issues, he would not have had the chance: there just isn’t time until the next question, the next image, the next segment. Radio, which is slightly more “literary” and certainly more verbal, has become the new medium of the mind, such as it is. And even it is extremely time-sensitive, unable to maintain the close audience/author relationship of text.

All this is well known—nothing I’ve written here hasn’t been observed before. But what is even more interesting is how current trends in visual media are to substitute something even more primeval than emotion into their communications instead of any intellectual content. Orwell approached this idea with the concept of “ducktalk”: ideological blather so devoid of substance that its delivery resembles the quacking of a duck. What we go for now is pure gut-(re)action, the physical movement within of tension, the simple stimulation of some basic vestige of the lizard-brain. We wish, after all, not to feel, as that might make us aware of our actual state. We wish to avoid the subversive possibility of compassion—both our corporate minders wish to avoid this and we ourselves do. All we really ask of our mass media is that they force us to react, that they check to make sure our reflexes are still functioning, like a doctor’s little rubber hammer.

So numb we are in our little felt-walled cubicles and our commutes, our savage layoffs and our abstract wars, that we seek entertainment that elicits only the most simple of reactions. The broad comedy, the slasher flick, the graphic war movie, all circumvent the most problematic human attributes, feeling and thought, and place us back into the cognitive state of the mayfly. Thus atrophied, the two distinguishing sensibilities of higher-order creatures are easily dismissed so that we can more efficaciously ignore the inhumanity and alienation of what we do: obeying idiots, “serving” the customer, eating empty calories out of Styrofoam clamshells.

These media have not really caused the end of a civilization predicated on a literate populace, but they have marked it. For certainly it is possible to create great and thoughtful works both cinematic and televisual. Our lives as led make the lowest and worst of these compelling. Some of the best television consists almost entirely of just two people talking, like what Bill Moyers has done on PBS over the years. But what percentage of the 200 some-odd cable channels provide this? And many of the best movies ever made move slowly enough for the viewer to ask questions—the films of Abbas Kiarostami come to mind—and ask either directly or through the trials of their characters important questions about life, love, morality, jazz. But how many of the movies most people see would have any plot at all if it weren’t blown from place to place by big, orange explosions? The latest Batman movie may be a good movie, but do most people see it for its finer points, or do they just want to gut the dead guy who plays the Joker?

All this may also be why some of the better films and TV shows these days are satires or allegories: we let them exist because they work on a gut level that rarely infects the intellectual level on which they also work. They can be “read” by those who are capable and willing, and the rest can just enjoy the dick and fart jokes.

It’s no surprise, either, that the World Wide Web became popular only when it became the Web, that is, when it became visual. The strings of text that populated BBSs and listservs had a limited appeal, and anyway, it was hard to do hardcore porn in ASCII. Hypertext led the way, of course, by giving people the ability to gut their way through webpages; the destination was always clicking through, not hassling with content. Thus the user has the illusion of control, of exercising judgment, of “interacting.” But what is created in the mind of the user by this is debatable, and real change occurs in the mind when intellectual work is done. Blogging offers some hope, and the numbers who fall away from it every day offer hope as well since those who have something to say and some compulsion to say it may have a chance to be read in the aftermath of the collapse. But it, too, rarely encourages a sustained reading, being more about pith than wit, quirk than commentary.

The best of the moving-image media stick with the viewer not in terms of the trauma of their imagery, but because of their ability to expand, improbably, what the viewer is able to imagine.