The 3-D Experience and Hero’s Journey of Avatar

By Peter Krämer

Avatar, dir. James Cameron (2009)

Great Expectations

In April 2009, an article in the New York Times entitled ‘Fan Fever is Rising for Debut of Avatar’ opened with the following statement: 

In an old airplane hangar …, James Cameron has been working feverishly to complete a movie that may

a) Change filmmaking forever

b) Alter your brain

c) Cure cancer.

The writer was obviously having fun with these exaggerations, which were inspired by the larger-than-life persona of the filmmaker and by his many public statements about his latest project, ever since it had been announced to the press in January 2007: ‘Mr. Cameron has done his share to feed the hype with his repeated assurances that a coming wave of 3-D cinema … would have the power to penetrate the brain in a way that movies never have.’ The writer’s choice of words here is interesting, perhaps designed to evoke the colloquial term ‘mind-fuck’, while also mocking Cameron’s machismo (only a very special kind of man would want to ‘penetrate’ people’s brains). 

Yet, beyond its humorous hyperbole, the article also appeared to register a widespread and sincere belief in the possibility of radical change. Referencing both the religiosity of American society and the recent election of the country’s first African-American president, the article stated that Avatar was ‘stirring up a kind of anticipation that until now had been reserved for, say, the Rapture’, and that the film’s ‘technological wizardry is presumed by more than a few to promise an experiential leap for audiences comparable to that of The Jazz Singer, the arrival of Technicolor or an Obama campaign rally.’

When Avatar, which had originally been scheduled for a May 2009 release, belatedly appeared in cinemas around the world in December that year, it certainly told a story about dramatic change: parts of a distant moon’s ecosystem are severely damaged by the operations of a mining company; a humanoid alien tribe has to deal with the destruction of its ancestral home; for the first time in many generations the moon’s scattered tribes unite so as to be able to confront the threat; the neural network of trees, which constitutes a kind of brain for the planet’s ecosystem and is revered as a Goddess by the natives, gives up its usual practice of non-interference and helps to eject the operatives of the mining company. All of this is explored through the central storyline of one of the employees of the mining company who uses a specially grown body as his avatar in the world of the natives, then takes their side in the conflict before he finally abandons his human form for good so as to be reborn in the alien body. 

In addition to telling this complex story about dramatic change, Avatar also initially lived up to the expectation that it might in fact change cinema. In the run-up to its release, there had already been a marked increase in cinemas with 3-D projection capabilities around the world; some of this expansion had clearly been fuelled by the announcement of a live action 3-D release (almost all 3-D releases in recent years had been animated) by one of the world’s most successful filmmakers. When Avatar then went on to break all existing box office records, both in the United States and in the rest of the world, with a particularly strong performance in 3-D cinemas, there was a perception that the popular habit of cinemagoing, recently under a particularly strong threat from alternative leisure time activities, had been given a new lease of life, and, furthermore, that it had been transformed forever, insofar as 3-D could now be expected to become a new standard, rather than the exceptional attraction it had been heretofore. 

Now, if one were to claim that cinema was reborn through the 3-D technology of Avatar, which allowed audiences to inhabit cinematic space in a compelling new fashion, such a claim would constitute a curious echo of the very story the film tells about its protagonist being reborn through the avatar technology which allows him to inhabit a new body and through it a new world. Such echoing can also be observed when the circumstances of the film’s release are considered. Its original May release date derived from Hollywood’s practice to set up its major releases for a high impact before the summer holidays which will hopefully translate into a long run during these holidays. Once it became clear that Avatar would not be ready for this early date, the only obvious alternative was a release in December which would allow the film to profit from increased cinemagoing during the Christmas holidays and also set it up for consideration by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences and other organisations handing out awards in the first few months of the new year. 

Logo for the United Nations Climate Change Conference 2009

In the end, the precise release date chosen for Avatar coincided with the final stage of the UN climate change conference in Copenhagen, which was widely regarded as a catastrophic failure. Thus, as a film about environmental issues, Avatar could, in very general terms, be said to have profited from the public interest in, and intense media reporting on, climate change across 2009 which culminated on the very weekend that the film was first shown around the world. More specifically, the film’s story echoed real-life developments in at least two striking ways, first by imagining a future humanity which has destroyed the ecosystem of its home planet and now sets out to do the same on another planetary body; secondly by imagining an alternative way of life. Here, human-like beings are shown to live in harmony with nature and to achieve a kind of global unity in their attempt to defend themselves and the ecosystem they are part of against destructive forces. 

The most high profile attempt yet to achieve global unity so as to take action against global warming fails at the very moment that Avatar begins to draw audiences all over the world into its story. One might go as far as saying that, whereas politics fails to achieve global unity and bring about necessary change, this film does not only offer a vision of such unity and change, but through its impact on individual viewers and its international success also laid the groundwork for potential real-life personal change and unified global action. At the very least, a substantial proportion of the world’s population now shares the story that Avatar tells. It is conceivable that such sharing will contribute to an awareness of the shared fate of humanity and indeed of the Earth’s ecosystem, and perhaps even to the willingness to take action on its behalf. 

Audiences and Their Avatars

The title of James Cameron’s science fiction epic resonates with ancient myth and with contemporary cultural practice: an avatar is the shape an Indian God takes when walking among humans, and it is a player’s audiovisual representative in the electronic world of a computer game. In the film’s story, Jake Sully, a paraplegic ex-marine, is employed by a mining company to enter the dangerous jungle outside the fortified human compound on the distant moon Pandora. This is achieved by projecting his consciousness into an artificially grown body, which mixes human DNA with that of Pandora’s intelligent humanoid species, the Na’vi. In this way, Jake, who has come down from Pandora’s heaven as one of the ‘sky people’ - the Na’vi designation for humans - can walk among the Na’vi, and he can temporarily lose himself in the adventures he experiences in their world. In the course of the story, Jake learns a lot about the capabilities of his new body and about the Na’vi and the other life forms he interacts with, and this provides him with an increasingly critical perspective on the human world he comes from. In the end, he is willing and able to leave his human body behind so as to live permanently as a Na’vi on Pandora. The player thus exchanges what he took to be his reality for his game world; the one who came down from the sky joins the web of life on this new Earth.

Avatar, dir. Cameron (2009)

Through its mythical and gaming associations, the film’s title also comments on the very nature of the cinematic experience. As viewers and listeners, members of the audience descend from their own reality into the fictional world of the film, using its protagonist as their avatar. Like gamers, they may concentrate on learning about this world and confronting numerous challenges within it, which in turn allows them to engage with it ever more intensively. While they have no actual control over the actions of their avatar, like divine beings audience members may feel that this whole world is at their service, and that everything is ultimately organised for their avatar’s convenience. So what are the implications of Jake’s decision to switch permanently into his avatar’s body and thus stay in his gaming world? Where does this leave the audience for whom Jake is an avatar?

Similar questions are raised by the film’s opening sequence. The film begins with the camera flying over a dense forest, and a voiceover explaining that this was a recurring dream the protagonist (Jake Sully) had when he was in a veterans’ administration hospital. Given that this is a 3-D movie and that initially it was shown on the largest available screens (including many IMAX screens), the opening emphasises one of the main attractions of widescreen and 3-D technologies, namely the possibility to create a heightened sense of movement through space. Jake’s dream has been the dream such technologies have pursued ever since they were widely introduced in the 1950s. Right from the get-go, Avatar confirmed to viewers that this dream has now become a reality.

At the same time, the opening scene offers references to a particular tradition in Hollywood filmmaking. In recent decades, thoughts of war veterans and jungles are most likely to evoke the Vietnam war and in particular Hollywood’s numerous representations of that conflict in films primarily of the 1970s and 1980s. If one makes this connection, then the dream flight over the jungle landscape represents more than simply the age-old human dream of flying, or the specific desire of an injured soldier to compensate for his restricted mobility in a hospital with the heightened mobility of flight; it also entails a potential threat, because American soldiers might just start firing into the jungle, dropping bombs and setting fire to it (which of course they do later in the film).

Finally, the opening scene is presented as arising from within the protagonist’s consciousness, and it does so in two ways: first it is said to be a dream of the soldier lying in a hospital, secondly the voice-over narrator explains that it is a dream he used to have in the past; even the dream is now only available as a memory. Hence the flying scenes are twice removed from narrator’s present reality: they are memories of past dreams. Yet, for the viewers (especially those in a 3-D IMAX cinema) they take place very much in the present and may well have the power to affect them physically. There is a gap, then, between the narrator’s highly mediated connection to the flying scene and the viewers’ immediate experience of it. One might expect that this gap will be closed in the course of the film (as indeed it is). 

This expectation is also raised by the conventions of Hollywood storytelling: We can assume that, if a dream is so clearly stated at the beginning, the protagonist who has this dream will strive to make it a reality, and that eventually he will achieve this. We can also expect the distantiation created by the voice-over to fade in the course of the film, so that the sense of present tense overrides the fact that everything presented in the film is in fact a memory. In this way, then, Jake’s experience of his own dream will catch up with that of the audience. (Indeed, the voiceover of the protagonist looking back into his own past can in places be mistaken for, and is eventually dissolved into, the present-tense commentary that Jake records for his video log.)

Avatar, dir. Cameron (2009)

A Hero’s Journey in 3-D

Let’s take a closer look at the kind of change the story of Avatar focuses on. Hollywood cinema is centred on the transformation - the personal growth, psychological maturation etc. - of the stories’ protagonists.  According to script guru Christopher Vogler, filmic protagonists go on a journey (a hero’s journey) into a ‘special world’ which mirrors, in a highly exaggerated and fantastic manner, the everyday concerns of their ‘ordinary world’, and which allows them to resolve internal and external tensions and conflicts, so as to emerge from this adventure as more rounded, more socially integrated individuals. 

Films such as Avatar first establish an ordinary world for the protagonist - a world of family, community, work, which is comparable to our own world. This world is full of problems. In Avatar’s case, it is characterised by Jake Sully’s low social status, his inability to carry out his previous job due to partial paralysis and his lack of qualification for the new job he is given, his loss of the cameraderie with fellow soldiers and the initial hostility of his new boss, the death of his brother, and the absence, or active destruction, of natural surroundings. Once this ordinary world is established, the film transfers Jake to, and immerses him - and us - in, the special world of the jungle of Pandora. Cutting-edge film technology is used to make the ‘special world’ as extraordinary as possible.

How does 3-D technology function with regards to the hero’s journey? And how does the film itself reflect on that technology and that journey? It is certainly the case that 3-D effects allow viewers to immerse themselves deeply in the natural world of Pandora, and motion capture (or ‘performance capture’) and computer generated images bring its alien beings to life. However, a word of caution about the importance of 3-D for the film’s impact is in order: Both in cinemas and on DVD and television, the vast majority of the film’s viewers worldwide saw the 2-D version. And although Avatar was by far the most successful 3D-Film in history, the expectation that its success might make 3-D a new standard for Hollywood releases has not been fulfilled. Nevertheless, I want to concentrate on the particular contribution that 3-D makes to the experience of the film.

Before entering the cinema auditorium, we are given 3-D glasses, which we have to use to cover our eyes so as to be able to enter into the world of the film which is going to be projected onto the screen. If we were to refuse to wear them, watching the film would be an exceedingly unpleasant experience. Putting on the glasses reminds us of how utterly dependent our cinematic experience is on technology. It also constitutes another threshold we are crossing in the transition from our everyday world into the world of the film adventure (other such thresholds are the departure from our homes, the purchase of the ticket, entering the auditorium, the lights going out). Each threshold serves to emphasise how different our cinematic experience is going to be from everyday life. At the same time, the donning of glasses brings us closer to the people who are going to share this experience with us. Not only are we all converging on this particular cinema auditorium at this particular moment in time, but we also cement our connection by all donning these glasses, creating a uniformity of appearance. But the glasses also serve to distance us from each other, insofar as looking at each other rather than at the screen is discouraged by wearing them.

3-D IMAX cinema audience

Now, in the story of the film, after a long journey across space, a group of people arrive on a planet with a poisonous atmosphere. Before they set foot on this planet they are told that they have to wear a mask on their face which will enable them to breath. The mask is a reminder that their presence on this planet is heavily dependent on technology, and that they have moved far away from their previous existence. It also serves to emphasise their shared humanity in contrast to the natives who require no such technological support to breath. Of course, they are not required to wear the mask all the time because they can move within the man-made environments constructed on the planet; in other words, instead of wearing a mask, they can inhabit a technological construct that is like living inside a giant mask. Still, whenever they cross the threshold between their built environment (buildings as well as vehicles) and the outside world, they all have to wear the mask, which makes them look alike and also creates a distance between them, a physical barrier between one face and the next. The necessity for human characters to wear a mask thus echoes in quite a profound way the necessity for viewers of the 3-D version to wear glasses. 

At the same time, the wearing of the mask expresses the tension at the very heart of the film’s narrative: in it humans confront an environment that is dangerous to them, developing a range of strategies for how to deal with that danger. Broadly speaking, there are two strategies: first, the mask and the built environment; second, the avatar programme. Both are heavily dependent on human technology. In a surprising twist, towards the end of the film, a third strategy arises which is no longer dependent on human technology: the permanent transfer of a human mind into the avatar, brought about by the planet’s neural network. The avatar programme thus constitutes a transitional stage - inbetween the initial stage of a fundamental physical separation between humans and environment, and the final stage of full human immersion in that environment. One might even say that the avatar programme marks that moment when a cinema audience, awkwardly conscious of the glasses in front of their eyes and thus of a physical barrier between themselves and their surroundings and also of their dependence on cinematic technology, loses itself in the 3-D cinematic space their glasses allow them to see and in the story unfolding in that space, with the film’s protagonist acting as their own avatar. 

While the transition from an awareness of one’s own body, of a technological process, of the real space of the auditorium and the people in it, to an immersion in fictional space and story is typical of all cinema experiences, the 3-D technology enhances the transformative nature of this transition. The use of the word ‘avatar’ in the film’s title, and the way it is literalised in the story, marks this heightened sense of transformation by suggesting that viewers can physically enter into a different world (as gods walking among mortals, as players in a computer game). Yet, the term also is a reminder of the fact that this entering into a different world is only a partial and temporary experience (the gods will eventually return to the heavens, the players never actually leave the physical world around them and they can not play on forever). 

Avatar, dir. Cameron (2009)

All of this is mirrored in the story of the film. On the one hand, the story emphasises how physically liberating and stimulating it is for the protagonist to inhabit the avatar body (here his disability serves to heighten the difference between his everyday existence - which is, of course, characterised by a restriction on mobility similar to that of the people in the cinema auditorium - and the technologically facilitated experience of the avatar’s world - once again mirroring the viewer’s technologically facilitated experience of the cinematic world). On the other hand, this experience is constantly disrupted (initially in a planned fashion, later through violent outside interventions), and the reminders of the needs and vulnerability of the human body left behind become an increasingly important issue. The story comes to focus ever more on the nuisance and danger of having a human body, and it culminates in its abandonment. 

If the protagonist’s journey echoes that of the viewer, what are we to make of that final transformation? One might say that it simply takes the logic underpinning the cinematic adventure (the transition from the everyday world into an alternative reality) too far so that instead of heightening the vicarious experience the viewer has through the protagonist (and through the 3-D glasses), it actually serves as a painful reminder that such total transcendence of the everyday is simply not available in the cinema. Our connection with the protagonist does not go as far as physically and permanently being able to leave our regular lives and bodies behind. Of course, the film’s action ends precisely at the moment when the protagonist has achieved what is impossible for us to do: The last shot of the film is of his eyes opening and staring at us (and Neytiri - but that is another story); then the story ends (although as soon as the credits begin there is more material from the story world projected on the screen; once again this needs to be considered separately). 

When the protagonist has finally done what is impossible for us to do (to abandon the old body and permanently inhabit a new one), our connection with him has to be severed. After all we are only viewers - and the fact that he stares at us, mirroring our own staring at the screen, tells us that this is all we are, and the contrast between his uncovered eyes and our own eyes, covered by 3-D glasses, confirms our essential difference. At the same time, the protagonist’s face points forward to the moment when we remove the glasses and thus enter into a much more unmediated relationship with our surroundings again. In other words: when Jake awakens in his new body, he prefigures our imminent awakening into the reality of our own body and our actual surroundings. If Jake’s story ends with leaving behind what he has come to regard as a lesser existence, we also ultimately have to recognise that watching a film is a lesser reality than our actual bodies and social connections.

Avatar, dir. Cameron (2009

An Initial Response to Interstellar

By Peter Krämer

This is a report on my experiences with, and initial thoughts about, Christopher Nolan’s Interstellar. As I am writing this on 10 November, I have seen the film twice. The second time was yesterday, in the context of one of the regular ‘Philosophers at the Cinema’ events at Cinema City in Norwich, which included a panel discussion chaired by Vincent M. Gaine and featuring Rupert Read, Elena Nardi and myself.

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At my first viewing of Interstellar – it was the first screening on the first day of its UK release (7 November), on a huge, curved IMAX screen - I was at times deeply moved by the film, at other times simply stunned and at yet other times more intellectually engaged – and occasionally rather troubled.

Before seeing the film, I had managed to avoid almost all publicity and advertising, except for short and rather cryptic trailers, thus knowing as little as possible about its story. While watching the film, I was not just following its story and giving in to its audiovisual spectacle, but also mobilising various frames of reference within which I thought one might productively place the film. As someone who has spent several years researching and writing about 2001: A Space Odyssey (See, for example, my Introduction to 2001 here on thinkingfilm), while also having spent a lot of time last year with the films of Terrence Malick, I was bound to consider Kubrick’s film as well as Malick’s work as important reference points.

The Tree of Life, dir. Terrence Malick (2011)

Perhaps it was the appearance of Jessica Chastain halfway through Interstellar which cemented the link to Malick’s films, especially The Tree of Life, which is the first film in which I had ever encountered the actress. In The Tree of Life an intimate family drama is puzzlingly connected to a spectacular presentation of cosmic history, especially the history of life on our planet. Interstellar uses a Science Fiction story to make a similar connection between the most intense human connections and the vastness of the universe. Furthermore, the drama unfolding in the Midwestern scenes of Interstellar increasingly reminded me of Malick’s Days of Heaven – especially the image of endless fields, and the spectacle of a cataclysmic fire.

Days of Heaven, dir. Terrence Malick (1978)

There is much to be said about how Interstellar relates to the key characteristics of Malick’s work as a whole, such as the following:

1) The prominence of voiceovers

2) The use of pre-recorded classical music on the soundtrack

3) An emphasis on extreme long shots displaying landscapes, often with tiny human figures or comparatively small buildings visible within these landscapes

4) The foregrounding of the human transformation and/or destruction of natural environments (through agriculture, buildings, fire, war and chemical pollution),

5) A primary focus on American characters and/or American geography (across Malick’s work, these are increasingly put into an international context),

6) The exploration of incomplete or dysfunctional families,

7) The presence of young children and/or teenagers, often at the very centre of the story (in three of Malick’s films a voiceover associated with a teenage girl dominates),

8) The centrality of male violence,

9) References to spiritual and religious matters (these become ever more explicit and dominant across Malick’s work).

For the time being, I have to leave it to the reader to consider the many parallels to Interstellar (points 3-8) and also the glaring differences (points 1-2 and 9). I do want to note, however, that what is perhaps most strikingly missing from Interstellar is (this would be my tenth point) Malick’s detailed attention to, and celebration of, the complexity, beauty and diversity of the Earth’s living environment (exemplified by his close-ups of streams of water, low angle shots of trees etc.).

2

2001: A Space Odyssey, dir. Stanley Kubrick (1968)

Interstellar’s links to 2001 are manifold. Some of them would appear to be unavoidable, given 2001’s central place in the Science Fiction genre: spacecraft moving towards each other and docking, panoramic views of planets, trips through punctures in the space-time-continuum, the interaction between astronauts and human-like computers/robots – all of these inevitably evoke the iconic images of Kubrick’s film. There is also the overall structure of Interstellar, which is so similar to that of 2001 (although, there are also, of course, important differences): the protagonist leaves home to go on a space adventure during which most of his travel companions die; with little hope ever to be able to make it back to Earth, he then goes on an utterly mysterious journey through space and time which does eventually, and rather magically, return him home. In 2001 this journey is facilitated by the technology of an unknown alien civilisation, whereas in Interstellar it is revealed to be masterminded by humans of the distant future.

        

Throughout the early parts of the protagonist’s adventure in Interstellar, video messages from Earth serve to remind us (and him) both of his human connections back on Earth and of his separation from the people he loves. Much of this could be said, with some modifications, about the journeys of Heywood Floyd, David Bowman and Frank Poole in 2001. For example, 2001 features one videophone conversation between Floyd and his daughter on Earth, and one video message Poole receives from his parents. In both cases, the subject is a birthday (the little girl’s, the astronaut’s). The video messages featured in Interstellar also involve parents and their children, and one of the most memorable of these messages concerns a birthday (that of the protagonist’s daughter, who is reaching the same age his father was when he left her). Indeed, it eventually turns out that the ‘poltergeist’ whose messages set the film’s story about family separation and space adventure in motion, and also provide the daughter with all the information she needs to achieve a momentous scientific breakthrough, is in fact a future version of the very father who goes on the adventure.

Interstellar has multiple endings – in one the father has a final encounter, and reconciliation, with his dying daughter; in another he is on his way to the woman he has grown to love during his space adventure, the implication being that the two of them will begin to populate an alien planet. The emphasis in both endings is, more or less explicitly, on human fertility: the daughter is surrounded by all her descendants (who are now living in giant space stations), and the woman the adventurer loves is storing hundreds of embryos. The ending of 2001, by comparison, features a foetus returning to the vicinity of Mother Earth – but this foetus is not the result of human reproduction, and its future trajectory is left completely open. (Indeed, the film links this trajectory to that of the audience insofar as the film’s action ends with the foetus turning towards, and staring into, the camera.)

2001: A Space Odyssey, dir. Kubrick (1968)

Thus, the link between father and daughter is running through all of Interstellar, and the hole in their lives created by the death of the adventurer’s wife, which is mentioned towards the beginning of the film, is about to be filled (at least as far as the father is concerned) at the end. Throughout the film, the emphasis is on the need to keep the cycle of human biological reproduction going. At the same time, the whole story is shaped by the interaction between father and daughter (with a little help from humans of the distant future). By contrast, 2001 has different protagonists for its different parts, never shows the people who are separated being reunited, focuses on processes of transformation (from pre-human hominid to human, from astronaut to Star-Child) rather than biological reproduction, and shows humans (as well as pre-human hominids) to be subjected to higher forces in the universe, rather than presenting them as being perfectly able to shape their own destiny.

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Contact, dir. Robert Zemeckis (1997)

Interstellar also evokes more recent Science Fiction films which were in turn heavily influenced by 2001, notably Contact in which a mysterious message from the stars allows one woman to travel across the cosmos (in a spectacular wormhole sequence); she then encounters an alien intelligence taking the shape of her dead father. Gravity also comes to mind: a woman who has lost her young daughter tries to escape from her grief-stricken life on Earth into space, yet returns to the surface with what appears to be a renewed sense of purpose and a keen appreciation of the beauty of nature and life (cp. http://thinkingfilmcollective.blogspot.co.uk/2014/01/gravitys-pull.html). Last but not least, there is Avatar, which features humans leaving Earth to colonise another world, the inhabitants of which, it is suggested, they will destroy in the process of exploiting its natural resources, just like they killed the non-human natural world on their home planet. These three examples begin to hint at what is, at first sight, a rather old-fashioned, even retrograde thematic and narrative emphasis in Interstellar.

The main protagonist is a male adventurer, who is forced by circumstances to work the land as a farmer – which he hates (as the film repeatedly makes clear, from the very beginning to the very end). Then, a sudden shift in circumstances (NASA scientists reveal to him that life on Earth will soon become impossible and he is needed to prepare a future for humankind in space), allows him, even pushes him, to embark on the grandest of adventures, leaving behind his farming work and also his family. Despite all the communicative and emotional connections he maintains with his family, and despite a temporary return to that family, he ultimately leaves family and Earth behind. (Upon his return, he appears to have no interest in connecting with his grandchildren, and he never asks what the situation on Earth is like, now that many humans have moved into space.)

This contrasts sharply with Contact‘s and Gravity’s focus on female protagonists, the processing of the loss of family members, the enduring link with those who have been lost, and the space adventure’s ultimate purpose to enhance the protagonist’s (and indeed, potentially, everyone else’s) life on Earth. Perhaps not coincidentally, Matthew McConaughey, who appears as the female adventurer’s love interest in Contact and is excluded from the space adventure there, takes centre stage in Interstellar. Relatedly, in Gravity George Clooney plays a character that one would expect to be at the centre of a space adventure – and who then becomes a ghostly presence in the adventure of a female protagonist. Interstellar puts the male adventurer firmly back at the centre.

Gravity, dir. Alfonso Cuarón (2013)

Another curiously retrograde element of Interstellar is its exclusive focus on the United States and Americans. Both on Earth and in space, we only ever encounter Americans (Michael Caine’s performance as Professor Brand suggests that he might be a former Brit who has lived in the US for a long time). Indeed the scenes on Earth are presented in such a way that one might think that only Americans have survived the catastrophe (which appears to be a combination of war, naturally occurring – as well as perhaps weaponised - plant diseases and general environmental degradation, mainly to do with soil erosion) that has befallen life on Earth. This contrasts sharply with the global effort made in Contact to build the alien machine (although here as well Americans are absolutely central to this effort), and with the emphasis in Gravity on the international nature of space exploration (the film features the International Space Station and also a Chinese space station).

When comparing Interstellar to Avatar in this respect, we find that in James Cameron’s film the human characters also appear to be Americans – yet they are contrasted, and largely found wanting in comparison, with an alien humanoid species. Where Avatar associates Americans (and an American-identified military-industrial complex) first of all with the destruction of natural habitats and ways of life, even of Mother Earth itself, Interstellar emphasises that Americans are the only ones who can even try to save the day – through science, technology, ‘bravery’ and exploration. What is more, the mysterious force that drives the narrative in Interstellar is, as already mentioned, ultimately claimed to be a future version of humanity, or rather: the American people – whereas the story of Avatar is largely controlled by a kind of planetary consciousness in the form of Eywa who is worshipped as a goddess by the natives (See collective member Rupert Read's discussion of Avatar on thinkingfim here).

Avatar, dir. James Cameron (2009)

Going against important trends in recent Science Fiction cinema, then, Interstellar would appear to put the heroic and expansionist American male back at the centre, telling a story about the need to abandon efforts to take care of the Earth (because it is too late for these), and about the possibilities of finding alternative living arrangements beyond the Earth (in the form of huge space stations and other planets). The time travel element of the story allows for a fantastic (and deeply paradoxical) kind of self-reliance and self-help: The future version of the adventurer travels back in time to make himself go on the big adventure, and to provide his daughter with all the necessary information for her to be able, much later on, to unravel the mysteries of the universe which in turn allows NASA to launch its space stations.

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The above three sections were written before I saw Interstellar for the second time. Seeing it again on a much smaller screen and knowing exactly what to expect, I was quite detached for much of the film. During my first viewing, I was initially quite moved by Matthew McConaughey’s performance as Coop, a reluctant, yet apparently quite competent farmer, who is obviously very close to his daughter but also gets along well with his son and his father-in-law, is easy-going and patient when dealing with the challenges of everyday life (bad dreams, a daughter who talks about a ghost, a flat tire), and also has experienced great loss (an accident in the skies appears to have cut short his career as a space pilot, his wife is dead). The second time, I knew from the outset that the film was setting him up as an outward (and upward) looking, expansionist American hero, and setting him against all those who think that directly taking care of life on Earth is people’s primary responsibility. As a consequence, I felt little empathy with, and even less sympathy for, him.

Interstellar, dir. Christopher Nolan (2014)

The strange early scene, in which an Indian drone, left over from what may have been a global war, crosses his path, and he chases after it in his truck, recklessly ploughing through the fields, now came across less as a nostalgic evocation of a by-gone high-tech era and also perhaps an ominous reminder of his former life as a pilot (which foreshadowed his return to that life); instead I just saw his careless destruction of parts of the harvest which it is his responsibility as a farmer to bring in. Similarly, I no longer found his discussion with a teacher and a school administrator about the problems his daughter Murph is having at school at all humorous, because it was so obvious to me now that the purpose of this scene was to characterise those who made farming an absolute priority so as to feed the remnant of humanity that has survived, in an extremely negative manner. They deny his son what he regards as a proper university education (because what is most needed are farmers); persecute his daughter because she knows and speaks the truth whereas the new school textbooks revise history in an Orwellian fashion (claiming that the moon landings were just a hoax); and are so ignorant or deluded that (once again in an Orwellian fashion) they believe their own lies. Indeed, because of their obvious bias against science and technology (unless it is in the service of food production), he holds them – and people like them – responsible for the death of his wife, whose medical condition could have been diagnosed with an MRI scanner, if such scanners had still been around.

This negative characterisation of farmers and those who support them continues in the rest of the film. Along the way, as an audience we are invited to agree with Coop when he states that ‘we’ (human beings? men? Americans?) were meant to be explorers and adventurers, not ‘caretakers’ (this last word uttered very dismissively). There is also, from the outset, a big question mark around his son, who is – as everyone acknowledges – very good at being a farmer (although Coop thinks that he could and should aim higher). It turns out that, as an adult, he becomes so wedded to the farming way of life that he ignores the welfare of his wife and children. Even after his first child has died, he is unwilling to grant his second child and his wife, both of whom are dying from the dust in their lungs, any medical care. He is last seen in an embrace with his sister, apparently accepting her revelation that somehow their father’s bold adventure in space – rather than the work of farmers on Earth - has saved them and the rest of humanity. Afterwards he appears to be forgotten – by his sister, his father, the film.

5

Following various conversations after my second viewing of Interstellar, I also began to wonder about the father-daughter dynamics in the film (and about the absent mothers). When Coop says goodbye to ten-year old Murph, who is devastated by his imminent departure, he mentions, rather thoughtlessly, that due to the time-distorting effects of relativity, upon his return he might be the same age as she – in other words, he admits that he might be gone from her life for as long as whatever their age difference is (presumably about thirty years). Afterwards she refuses to look at him again, and she also refuses to send him video messages once he has embarked on his journey into space – until the day at which she reaches the age her father was when he left her. She does not want to reconnect with him, but merely to remind him of the fact that he cruelly abandoned her. When Coop receives the message, he is still close to the age he was when he left (due to the enormous stretching of time he experienced while landing on a planet near a black hole) – as a consequence, they no longer look like father and daughter but more like potential romantic partners.

Young Murph (Mackenzie Foy)

Adult Murph (Jessica Chastain)

In an inspired piece of casting, an impressive match is established between the facial features of the young Murph (played by Mackenzie Foy) and those of the older version (Chastain) – but, it was pointed out to me by other viewers of the film, this match also extends to an uncomfortable degree to Amelia Brand (Anne Hathaway), the woman accompanying Coop on his journey, indeed the woman he will fall in love with. At the end of the film, the dying Murph (Ellen Burstyn) tells Coop, who still has not aged very much, not to stay at her deathbed (because no parent should see a child of theirs die) but instead to return to Amelia; the way she says this strongly implies that she expects the two of them to form a romantic couple and, presumably, to have children together. So what we have here is the story of a man who loses his wife, forms a perhaps unusually intense emotional bond with his daughter (who, for a while, is the same age he is) and then gets her advice to ‘marry’ a kind of lookalike.

Amelia Brand (Anne Hathaway)

Amelia Brand’s relationship with her father also is rather peculiar. Presumably, he was instrumental in getting her a scientific education (which, the film tells us, is hard to come by). This is the foundation for her inclusion in the mission to find another planet for humans to live on. The elder Brand talks about his two plans for saving the species (Plan A: to work out how gravity can be suspended so that huge space ships can be moved off the surface of the Earth and then towards an inhabitable planet; Plan B: to establish a human colony on another planet with the help of hundreds of frozen embryos). But he is convinced that only the second plan has any chance. He thus envisions his daughter being the only adult female on another planet, growing human embryos in a vat, but also, at some point, having to raise them as if they were her own children. Of course, she is also likely to form a romantic relationship with one of her fellow explorers, most likely Dr. Edmunds, the man she loves, who is stranded on one of the planets that might be suitable for human colonisation, or, failing that, perhaps Coop, who Professor Brand knows, and clearly admires, from his days as NASA’s most gifted pilot. In other words, there is a sense that Brand gives his daughter to Coop, potentially so as to fill, one might say, the void created by his separation from Murph (and the death of his wife).

At the same time, Murph has been raised by Coop to become a scientist. After Coop, having worked out that the ‘ghost’ communicating with his daughter has left behind geographical coordinates, has stumbled on a base where NASA continues to operate in secret, Murph meets both Amelia Brand (who immediately adopts a quite maternal attitude towards her) and her father. Once Coop has left the Earth, Murph is visited by Professor Brand who eventually takes her under his wings, making it possible for her to get a scientific education and becoming his closest collaborator, indeed the person who appears to be closer to him than anyone else, so that it is she who sits at his deathbed (on which he reveals that he never believed in Plan A, thus having fully intended to send his own daughter and Murph’s father away forever). In a sense, then, Professor Brand takes over Murph from Coop so that Brand can fill the void that Coop’s departure has left in her life and she can fill the void that Amelia’s departure (and the curious absence of her mother) has left in his.

Thus, while the absence of Murph’s and Amelia’s mothers is never properly dealt with, the film shows daughters slipping into the position of their mothers and then being exchanged between their fathers, destined to become mothers themselves (at the end Murph is shown in the midst of many descendants and Amelia is closely associated with the embryos she will use to populate a whole planet, with a little help from Coop).

6

There is so much more to be said about Interstellar. One might wonder, for example, about the symbolism of ‘wormholes’ and ‘black holes’. These are ultimately used to facilitate a kind of birthing process: they allow humans to travel across the universe so as to relaunch the species on another planet; more particularly, they eventually enable Coop to return to the past so as to facilitate both his own rebirth as an adventurer and the rebirth of humankind off the Earth. Is there some symbolic connection, then, between these ‘holes’ (which are pictured as tunnels) and the female reproductive system? This would put an interesting slant on the fact that the plans of the predominantly male scientists and adventurers revolve around penetrating these holes - which requires them to be, temporarily, fully immersed in them: cosmic intercourse thus also appears to be a return to the womb; the path to rebirth would seem to be a backwards journey through a giant birth canal.

Interstellar, dir. Nolan (2014)

There are other elements in this film which could be seen as a counterweight to its emphasis on male, and masculine, agency. To begin with, there is the opening narration: an old woman (who later is identified as old Murph) starts talking about her father, directly addressing the camera. This initially suggests that what we are about to see arises from her memories and narration. Of course, she is soon displaced from centre stage by images of her father’s aerial accident and by other people remembering the old days, and it is eventually revealed that the recording we saw is on display in the reconstruction of her (and her father’s) home on a space station – yet she is first established as the storyteller behind the story we will see.

Similarly, despite the fact that the ‘ghost’ that young Murph is so curious about at the beginning of the film is later revealed to be (a future version of) her father giving her vital information, on first viewing Interstellar, we see that she is indeed the one who gets the story going. Her openness to what appears to be a supernatural phenomenon, her willingness (after getting some advice from her father) to approach this phenomenon scientifically and thus to determine that it may contain crucial information (an idea her father then picks up on when decoding piles of dust so as to get the coordinates for the secret NASA base) – these are crucial for the male adventure to come, and also for her own intellectual adventure. By returning home, as an adult, to reexamine the traces the ghostly presence has left in the room, she eventually is able to make an unprecedented scientific breakthrough which saves the lives of many thousands of people.

There is also the rather awkward moment in which Amelia responds to Coop’s accusation that her judgment about which of two remaining planets to approach is clouded by the fact that she is in love with Dr. Edmunds, who landed on the planet she suggests they go to. Instead of just claiming that she can retain her scientific objectivity despite her emotional involvement, she argues that ‘love’ itself is a powerful reality that transcends space and time and higher dimensions, and may reveal important truths about the physical universe. Although Coop decides that they should spend their remaining fuel to go to the other planet, later developments would seem to confirm Amelia’s claim. The planet they go to has no life, because Dr. Mann (!), who initiated the original project of searching for inhabitable planets, has been faking data so as to be rescued. What is more, he eventually tries to kill his rescuers in the hope of being able to relaunch humanity all on his own (with the help of nine hundred frozen embryos). This does put the masculinist, expansionist, high-tech vision underpinning the film’s main adventure in a very negative light indeed. By contrast, after Dr. Mann dies in an accident he himself is responsible for, Amelia makes it to Dr. Edmunds’ planet which does indeed have breathable air and plant life. What is more, when Coop enters the black hole (so as to give Amelia a chance to make it to Dr. Edmunds’ planet and also to explore the black hole’s inner workings), he is drawn back – presumably by his intense love - to the childhood of his daughter, which then enables him to close the temporal loop and give her the information she receives at the beginning of the film. It would appear then that love does indeed conquer all, a curiously feminine twist in what is otherwise such a macho tale.

7

Many more issues remain to be discussed with regards to Interstellar:

- the paradoxes of time travel, the idea of a completely predetermined universe and the alternative (but equally troubling) vision of an infinity of parallel universes;

- the significance of Murph’s name (Murphy’s Law being referenced on several occasions, in two variants: everything that can go wrong, will go wrong; everthing that can happen, will happen);

- the importance of faith (Professor Brand has long lost faith in making the scientific breakthrough necessary for Plan A, Amelia keeps her faith in the possibility of this breakthrough and does achieve it);

- the ability of human beings to make sacrifices for others (for their own children, for all of humankind on Earth right now, for future generations, for the human ‘species’ – there is considerable disagreement between characters in the film about who and what humans are willing to make sacrifices for).

But I will have to leave the discussion of these issues to other writers.

Interstellar, dir. Nolan (2014)

(Popular) Films as Philosophy: A ‘Wittgensteinian’ View(er)

By Rupert Read.

There has been a great deal of interest in recent years in the question of whether films can function as philosophical works, in other words, can films ‘do’ philosophy? This interest, however, seems to sooner or later inevitably founder on the following dilemma: Either the philosophical work done by films is paraphrasable, in which case ultimately the films in question are merely pretty or striking vehicles for philosophising which precedes them; or the philosophical work done by films is not paraphrasable, in which case it seems mysterious/dubious/systemically-obscure.

However, this dilemma, while in its own terms quite correct, rests, I submit, on an unjustified presumption. The presumption is that philosophical ‘work’ has to be understood (if it is to be worthwhile) as issuing in theses/theories/opinions. But there is another possibility, a possibility explored at greatest length in Wittgenstein’s philosophy: that philosophical work at its best is ‘therapeutic’, in very roughly the psychological sense of that word. Namely: that philosophy need not – and in fact should not – issue in any controversial theses or opinions, any theories, at all. Rather, it should work with a person's own presumptions, exposing them to awareness, and thus empowering them to autonomously acknowledge, justify, overcome, or transform them. It is this possibility, that the members of the thinkingfilm collective aim to explore together over the coming months and years.

My own co-edited collection Film as Philosophy: Essays on Cinema after Wittgenstein and Cavell (Palgrave, 2005, with Jerry Goodenough), and especially Phil Hutchinson’s and my essay in that collection, endeavoured in a preliminary way to develop the idea sketched above. In the present piece, I want to enter a little further into it, and into the following associated question: Is there a way to understand how some of the greatest popular films work in ways that transcend any heresies of paraphrase, transcend film theories that would subject films to their diktat, and empower the viewer to understand how the films in question can enact 'therapeutic' work upon and with the viewer? A difficulty facing the efforts to understand films as philosophical works has been their (in most cases) consistently ‘dialogical’ nature, the way that they offer different voices, and not just (as most philosophical prose works do) one voice: but this is a strength of these film-as-philosophy works - once they are understood as 'therapeutic' works.

Take films such as Mel Gibson's Apocalypto, Peter Jackson's the Lord of the Rings trilogy, Children of Men, Ingma Bergman's Persona, or Terrence Malick’s The Thin Red Line and The New World. Are these films simply disguised pieces of didacticism? Do they have a simple ‘message’, which they wrap in an emotive, elaborate, striking and pretty coating, to sugar the pill? (How could a film be a major philosophical/ethical/political work, unless it basically did this? But/or equally: how could a film be such a work if it did basically only this?)

I say not. I say that there are not only these alternatives: Instead, you (and I am speaking here primarily of film-makers; though also of film-critics) can offer up your thinking on film as an exploratory intervention designed to facilitate a 'therapeutic' process of thinking and feeling on the part of the viewer. The work - the philosophical work - is work that viewers have to do for themselves. Whatever the viewer can do for themselves, one should leave them to do for themselves…

And I submit, as the reader will have noted, that what I am suggesting is true of some of the most popular films of our time. These, and the reader's resistance to the outline case I wish to make for them here, will be my primary focus, in the present piece.

So: The Lord of the Rings film trilogy can if you wish (see below) be said to make a new philosophical ‘argument’, cutting across and beyond Descartes. But it doesn’t make this ‘argument’ in the abstract. It encourages you to experience it. In general terms: the film challenges you; you go into ‘dialogue’ with it. You go into therapy with it, much as this is the process of reading the Tractatus or the Philosophical Investigations with understanding.

Let me illustrate this point by setting out briefly how I ‘read’ the Lord of the Rings film trilogy:

The Lord of the Rings trilogy dir. Peter Jackson (2001-2003)

In Peter Jackson’s The Lord of the Rings, we see on the screen – we experience viscerally the point-of-view manifest in a pathological search for safety, for surety (most notably, we see this vividly in scenes in which one reaches for the Ring, for invisibility, for escape to a private realm that is one’s own, a realm where one can be lord and master). This desperate search for safety – for something that one can hold onto confidently – of Frodo et al results in one being ‘overpowered’ by an overwhelming dread at an ‘overwhelming’ watching, judging, heartless and destructive external agency. The search for safety results in one seemingly being confronted by absolute nemesis, with no expectation of being saved by a benevolent force – there is none as strong, or none that is willing, one is quickly convinced. That ‘God’ is onto me, and that ‘God’ is a malevolent demon; just that super-Cartesian possibility is, I am urging, lived out at the deep, dark heart of Lord of the Rings.

In fact, building on suggestions in my and Goodenough’s Film as Philosophy, and in my essay on The Lord of the Rings in my book Philosophy for Life (Contimuum, 2007), I would argue that Jackson’s analysis, building on and going beyond Tolkien’s, is far subtler and more psychologically-real than Descartes’s emotionless academic rendition of the mind ‘meditating’ upon the terrors of possible cosmic aloneness and the company one might surprisingly and regrettably find oneself keeping in that aloneness.

For Jackson, the God-awful malign demon is not a self-standing ontic thing. Rather, to be God-powerful, it needs something to complete it. It needs you, or more specifically, your fear and addictive desire and weakness. It needs your desire for power, that corrupts, that takes you from others; it needs your self-fulfilling fear of ‘it’; it needs your weakness, that would hand the power over to ‘it’ in a doomed bid to lessen the grip upon you of dread. The malicious demon (in Jackson/Tolkien) depends on you. He is not all-powerful, without the One Ring that is in your power. You are not nothing beside Him; you are just pitifully small and vulnerable in comparison, as you toss on the sea of fate. He will only become all-powerful if you try to become him, or alternatively simply give him the power he seeks.

Sauron and The Ring,  The Lord of the Rings Trilogy, dir. Peter Jackson (2001-2003)

The rationale here, and it is a profound one, is this: If God/Satan/Sauron quite simply is all-powerful, then – paradoxically – your worries are significantly tempered. For there is then no quest, no chance of escape, nowhere to hide. One can give up worrying. The mind in search of absolute safety-certainty, the mind unused to not-worrying and unwilling to risk such a state, must then restlessly pass on from the assumption of one’s absolute abjection before God. If one is infinitely less than God, then one is to some extent relieved, even if God is malign: because at least there is then nothing more one can do. One can simply sit back, and wait to be annihilated or tortured etc., safe in the knowledge that there is no way out. Belief in an omnipotent God, even if the God has an Old Testament temper or much worse, is a means to the psychological security of not actually having to go on actively worrying and acting. The mind in search of absolute safety, the mind in search of any possible threats to it will quickly, restlessly, move on: the more worrying thought that comes to one next (a thought that is common in schizophreniform mental ‘disorder’, but that is never arrived at in Decartes’s meditations) is that perhaps one does still have a part to play, that one’s actions will be consequential, that what one does or thinks next could make things even worse. 

Paradoxically, there is something even worse than abjection before an all-powerful malevolent demon: namely, the threat of a less than all-powerful malevolent demon whose power and action depends on you, on what you do and think. The ceaseless, hungry, terrified motion of schizoid thought is right here: Jackson correctly identifies and powerfully depicts a potentially-self-fulfilling threat to thought and to one’s very sense of identity more profound than – and a logical extension of – that which Descartes set out for us. This then is literature/film as philosophy, with a vengeance: Jackson’s Tolkien has taken us somewhere philosophically new, somewhere undreamt of in Cartesian philosophy.

This then is the case for seeing The Lord of the Rings as a subtler and nastier moral threat than Descartes’s demon, and thus for seeing Jackson/Tolkien as offering a philosophical corrective to Descartes, filling in the gaps in his presentation of what it would actually mean to imagine a malign demon of infinite or (better) of great power. The really disturbing, the more deeply psychologically-challenging notion, the clear and distinct idea that can unworld one, is that ‘malignity’ is quite incomplete without us, without our existentially ongoing participation. The desire for the Ring is the desire to be the Lord of the Rings (and this explains the otherwise inexplicable title of the work: because Sauron is not even a real character in the story), to become invulnerable through being all-powerful; the desire to be shot of the Ring is the desire to already be abject before such an all-powerful Lord of the Rings; both are (pathological) efforts to escape from the ordinary lived human condition of ‘limited’ always-already-embodied existence, the worst fear of which is being confronted, not with a malign omnipotent demon, but with a malign demon who can only be completed by you.

And all this, I am saying, has to be experienced to be believed. These are the kinds of thoughts that go on, even if through a glass darkly, in the intelligent viewer of these films. Only some account like this can, after all, explain their great success: because, in plot terms, The Lord of the Rings is of course a pitiful failure. See, for example this excellent Volksvagen advert’s take on the trilogy, and this offering from howitshouldhaveended.com , which makes the point just as well. It only makes sense as an essentially psychical quest. One that the viewer must engage in, for themselves…

And this, in essence, is how I would respond to a reader who said: “Haven’t you refuted yourself? How can you give ‘readings’ at all, and expect us to hear them as anything other than didactic dogmatism, if film-as-philosophy, after Wittgenstein, is essentially a matter of personal experience of the viewer?” My readings are invitations to a viewer to see the film in the kind of way I am laying out, or indeed to consider their having already seen it in such a way: i.e., in the latter case, suggestions as to why the film in question has the power that it has, if one has allowed it to have power (and has not resisted it, as people often resist popular films in particular, on prejudiced, weak grounds such as, ‘But this is mere entertainment, it can have no serious content’). The real work of the film is done on the viewer at the time, and afterward, and in successive viewings, and it is done dialectically and dialogically: the viewer is necessarily actively involved in the process and not merely lectured at (by me or by the director).

Thinking through matters such as this has been the goal of my work in film as philosophy since 2005, when my co-edited book of that name first appeared. The most notable development during that time in my own work, has been a greater effort, already somewhat-signposted in my Introduction to the book, but now somewhat delivered on, to include a treatment as philosophy of some of the most popular films in cinematic history. I am referring to films such as 2001: a Space Odyssey, Apocalypto, the Lord of the Rings trilogy of course (see above), and (most recently) Avatar. If it can be shown that even movies such as these function as philosophy, then the strength and importance of the ‘film as philosophy’ idea that my co-edited collection crystallised for the first time is/will be redoubled.

(The reader will have already noticed that I combine thinking about such huge blockbusters as these willy-nilly with ‘art-house’ classics. This I regard as a central finding of looking at films as philosophy: that the films which can be thus viewed successfully are diverse, and undercut the ‘high’ vs. ‘low’ culture divide. I will return to this point.)

Let me now then venture this: When one really understands films such as The Lord of the Rings (see the relevant chapter of my Philosophy for Life and my paper on Avatar in Radical Anthropology ), they don’t have generalised messages as such.

Take Avatar, as examined in my recent ThinkingFilm feature post, here. Its metaphors, I suggested there, are rich and open. They are not closed and simple. They involve the viewer in their development.

Avatar is a call to us all to re-enchant and to replenish and to restore the ecosystems of our fragile world. In this way, it is a quintessentially philosophical film: for it aims to cultivate in us the love of true wisdom.

Avatar, dir. James Cameron (2009)

So: these films that I am discussing are not mere disguised bits of propaganda. They essentially involve the viewer. They guide the viewer on a proposed ‘journey’ (a journey ‘mirroring’ the ‘hero’s journey’ of the protagonist(s)) – the journey is psychically individual, as well as partly collective. The specificities of each person’s journey will be different; and indeed, one may refuse altogether to take the journey (as many critics have done). Part of the way that I/we account for / give accounts of these films is inevitably autobiographical. I am allegorising my reading/viewing of these films. The ‘message’ that I speak of is thus the message for me; and everyone, each person, must in this way speak for themselves. This is not relativism; it is simply reality.

These films do not then make arguments in the ordinary philosophical sense of that word: they don’t yield premises and conclusions, etc.. As I’ve said, they rather offer (what Wittgenstein sometimes calls) therapy. This is philosophy not as theory nor as quasi-factive impersonal claim, but as a process that one must work through for oneself. It is different from the idea of philosophy to which we are accustomed; it sits ill with the idolatry of science which lies at the heart of our civilisation. So much the worse for that idolatry. It is idolatry of science and the taking of technology as a ‘neutral’ tool that has got us as a civilisation and as a species into the mess we are in. Avatar (and The Lord of the Rings, and Apocalypto) dramatises and extends the logic of this. Thus we should expect that a non-scientistic vein of philosophy, such as Wittgenstein offers, is what is appropriate to help us understand how to extricate ourselves from that mess.

Our expectation is not disappointed. These films are works, like Wittgenstein’s writing, designed to heal. But: healing, healing of one’s mind, one’s body-self, and of one’s world, is an art, not a science, and is through and through processual.

Take Children of Men: A new-born child presses a claim for care upon anyone and everyone, no matter what their filial relation or otherwise to it might be. This is the point made by this powerful film, about a dystopian future in which there are no children being born: the meaning of the film’s superficially odd title (based by the way on a line in the bible) is that any children born are children of all of us, of men as well as women.

The Children of Men, dir. Alfonso Cuarón (2006)

The film charts the journey of its central protagonist from a situation of cynicism to a situation of total care for a new-born child that is ‘not his’. The film is thus a vivid and rich metaphor for the care we all must have for the future of humankind. The newborn baby in the film directly symbolises of course the whole of future humankind, the human adventure, the human project. All who come after us are the children of all women, and all men. That is what I think the title really means...

Thus: these films are not (unlike, say, video-games) escapist. They provide an illusion of escape. Actually, they return one: to oneself and to the world, to in fact our world-in-peril. Ready to know it (as if) for the first time…

The Children of Men, dir. Alfonso Cuarón (2006)

This is what I see in these films. But again, I believe it is to a greater or lesser extent, consciously or unconsciously, what many millions of others see too. I believe that I am tapping here into the reason for the vast popular success of (most of) these films. For that success can otherwise be somewhat hard to understand: As already noted, Lord of the Rings has multiple fairly obvious flaws, including a quite basic and fundamental plot flaw; Avatar can easily be seen as a predictable and just very shiny exercise in cheese, or as a predictable ‘anti-American’ rant. Many critics have responded to Avatar either from ‘the Left’ (with cynicism and a knowing superiority to such alleged sentimentalism, romanticism and superficiality, or even with silly allegations that the film is itself tacitly racist against indigenous peoples, against the disabled, etc.) or from ‘the Right’ (with anger against the attack within the film on cultural norms, on (American) militarism, etc.). It is the critics from ‘the Right’, who are if anything slightly closer to the truth, I think, despite themselves. Avatar is shocking, in the extent to which, when one experiences it closely, (when one experiences for instance that arrow transfixing and killing one’s American/military/racist/speciesist self (Col. Quaritch), so that the world can be saved, and so that in due course Jake can be fully reborn as a Na’vi) the journey it proposes and offers takes one far indeed from one’s comfort-zone. I think that the reason why the film has been found by so many millions to be emotionally compelling – as emotionally compelling as the Na’vi themselves are, in their general emotional healthiness and expressiveness – is the kind of line of understanding of the film that I am alluding to here. People find it compelling, because of the ‘journey’ it takes them on, because of the assumptions it puts into question, because of the way that it speaks to our condition as alienated from our planetary home and from each other. And this is why Avatar was banned in China; this is why it has inspired colourful protests against the apartheid wall in Palestine; why it is inspiring the activist work of the Radical Anthropology Group and so on.

The exact same is true of Lord of the Rings; the drastic plot-flaws and unbelievable nature of the narrative end up being pluses, not minuses. They are gentle tacit ‘alienation effects’ in roughly Brecht’s sense of that word. They enhance the experience of questing that the viewer vicariously has; the psychological journey that one is taken on, into oneself, into one’s courage and resources and faith in oneself, in others and in what Aragorn calls “this good Earth.”

Evaluating for character-development, plausibility, etc. in movies such as Apocalypto, Lord of the Rings and Avatar is a complete mistake. That is not the kinds of films they are. They don’t really have characters (in the sense that a classic novel does) at all. They are myths. They have heroes' journeys, etc., and, relatedly, they have transformative effects. They are revelatory, 'therapeutic' works. That is why I think them philosophical, in spite of their appearance. Or rather: Their appearance of being non-philosophical is the very thing that enables them to be truly philosophical...

True, some of the narrative-pleasure of Lord of the Rings and (especially) Avatar comes from following what can reasonably be described as character-development in complex plot-settings. In fact, utterly crucial to these films is the audience taking a vicarious transformational journey with the heroes: Jake’s persona by the end of the film is profoundly different from what it was at the start. I am not of course denying any of this; I am suggesting that this ‘character-development’ is not the kind of thing one finds in the world of the classic novel: it is not defined by its quiddities and specificities. On the contrary: It is defined by its universal resonance. What are developed are not so much characters as great mythic ciphers – ciphers, ultimately, for the persona of the viewer themselves.

Some films then precisely don’t have 'characters', and are all the stronger for that. For instance, in Lord of the Rings, it is crucial to realise that Frodo, Aragorn, and Gandalf are all essentially the same 'character'. They are 3 versions of the same arc. That's not a criticism, it is an understanding.

Frodo, Aragorn, and Gandalf: The Lord of the Rings Trilogy, dir. Peter Jackson (2001-2003)

These films’ appearance fools one into thinking that they cannot be deep. And so they creep up on you, with an ecological depth and a cultural critique that literally astonishes. I am referring for instance to the way in which Apocalypto shocks one to the core at the end: one suddenly realises that the film is not about a bunch of human-sacrificing savages running a barbarian empire: it is about us. We have been watching a culture that we looked down upon as oppressive imperial eco-destructors: only to find with a shock of recognition that Barbarians are us. A complete process of rethinking is then necessarily undergone, and the film watched the second time around is completely different from the fast time.


Consider in this connection the following remark from John Gray’s perceptive new book, The Silence of Animals (Penguin 2013, p.9): “[B]arbarism is not a primitive form of life, Conrad is intimating [in Heart of Darkness; the point is famously riffed on by Apocalypse Now, whose title, I suggest, points forward to that of Mel Gibson’s movie], but a pathological development of civilisation.” Barbarism is not what precedes civilisation: it is what happens as a civilisation becomes decadent, and/or after it collapses. The point is also explored in Michel Henri’s book, Barbarism, and in Coetzee’s Waiting for the Barbarians (on which, if interested, see my 2011 review of Mulhall’s book on Coetzee, in MIND). But isn’t it wonderful to see it sprung on us in a novel and shocking way in a popular film?

Notice by the way the clear resemblance between these Mayan temples in Apocalypto and the border-wall (keeping out the ‘barbarian, monstrous’ south from the ‘home of the brave’) in the film Monsters - a wall that the protagonists see while standing amidst the overgrown ruins of an ancient Mayan temple. It’s not a coincidental one, in my view. Who are the monsters, who are the barbarians? This is the uncomfortable question thrust upon them by these films.

Apocalypto, dir. Mel Gibson (2006)

Some would nevertheless argue that popular Hollywood films with their action-sequences and loud soundtracks cannot be anything other than simplistic propagandistic ‘message’ films. I don't agree that an apparently-bombastic soundtrack is a sign of a film being a propagandistic film. I think those who say so have missed one of my central points about Lord of the Rings and Apocalypto (and Avatar): I think that these films work by pursuing what Cora Diamond (in relation to Wittgenstein’s Tractatus) calls 'an indirect method'. They precisely to appear to be crude, by virtue of having bombastic soundtracks etc. . That is how they then secretly work their magic. Their surface crudity is the vehicle for them to be able to do something deeper. Precisely in encouraging one to think that they aren't deep, they carve out a space for depth. In the case of Lord of the Rings: a film about psychotic madness etc. precisely needs to appear to be a film that is about a real-life epic struggle. (See my piece on the film here for more on this point). In the case of Apocalypto: the ride of the long chase in the latter half of the film slows down the process in one of realising that the film is actually not about a high speed chase in the Amazon - it is about you (us), about our culture. We should note furthermore that Avatar was successful, whereas other 3-D films with more dramatic and 'bombastic' effects have failed. I am offering a reason(s) why.

In this article I have invoked broadly-Wittgensteinian themes to defend some major popular films against the criticisms usually crudely levelled at them. However, I hope that you the reader don't get from this the wrong impression: I am by no means arguing that only these films are any good! Nothing of the sort! I am a big fan for instance of Eisenstein. I think that Herzog's Grizzly Man is a deep ecologically-interested work; I am a huge fan of Herzog. I teach on these people, and on Bergman, Resnais, Von Trier, and Malick, etc.. I accept that often it is more obvious that what I am saying in this article is true of those film-makers than it is of Gibson, Jackson, Cameron, etc. . ‘Art-films’ often/generally are more essentially open to ‘interpretation’, demanding of ‘reading’ (Though the scare-quotes are advised: the terrible danger of such words is that it can once again sucker us into the heresy of paraphrase.)

What I dispute is only the crude 'high' vs. 'low' culture dichotomy and the concomitant very silly reductivist 'logic of commerce' point ('If it makes big money then it can't be any good!') that I believe sadly makes it impossible for many students/people from being able to say "I see you" to Avatar, The Lord of the Rings, Apocalypto. These films too, I am suggesting, necessarily involve the viewer, are not merely ‘morals’ wrapped in a shiny package. They too co-perform something; they too philosophise… The difference between them and the ‘art-films’ one is encouraged to look down one’s nose from is only one of degree, not of kind, I am saying.

A final substantive point: Avatar, like a number of other major philosophical films, places centrally in itself the metaphor of awakening from sleep, from dream. Now: Neither in a dream (unless it be a shared dream - think Inception!) nor in spectatorship (which has been the traditional model of philosophy (See for instance John Dewey's critique of this in The Quest for Certainty, Minton Balch and Company, 1929) - and of film-viewing (is this partly why philosophy and film have been so well-suited to each other? That both have usually been thought of as an essentially armchair activities? If so, this I think reflects badly on both)) does one encounter real others. One doesn't encounter anything more than the kind of thing that the killer Dollarhyde dreams of, in Michael Mann’s superb 1986 movie Manhunter: oneself, glorious, reflected back at one, instead of the eyes of another. This postulation of the other only as a device to mirror the alleged glory of the self is a nightmare of egoism/solipsism:

Manhunter, dir. Michael Mann (1986)

How can it be avoided? Simple: by taking the risk, the leap of faith, necessary in actually encountering others. In meeting real, other people. This is how film can be therapeutic/transformative: by engaging one in a personal encounter which is also a shared encounter (This is one reason why, once more, it is important that we still generally see films in cinemas); by vicariously and then really throwing one into the world. This is the 'point'/task, I claim, of many of the films that I have here praised. And we can see it clearly also in Blade Runner and Inception (and Wings of Desire) and more through a glass darkly in Memento (and Manhunter). Look for it clearly (though not without great difficulty) also in Hiroshima Mon Amour, and even in Last Year at Marienbad. Other films, besides those mentioned above, which in my view clearly have this engaging therapeutic intent include Monsters (on which see Phil Hutchinson’s masterful thinkingfilm piece), District 9, Never Let Me Go, Melancholia, Collateral, 2001, and the films of Terrence Malick. Films of ‘high’ and ‘low’ culture both.

These films that I have mentioned here in this piece, indiscriminately popular and ‘art house’ works, are those that I think offer the best opportunity for broadly Wittgensteinian thinking on film. Some of them, I (along with thinkingfilmcollective colleagues) will be writing on more in the next few years. These are exciting times, for thinking film as philosophy…


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[N.B. A longer version of this article will be appearing in a special issue of the Al-Mukhatabat philosophy journal. So comments to help improve it are especially welcome! Thanks to various colleagues for comments already, including especially Peter Kramer and Vincent Gaine, and to Ruth Makoff for editorial assistance.]