Recalling and recounting

Let's look closer into memories. In the video excerpt from Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire we have seen what we might call a trip into the past. The protagonist sees with his own eyes some events that have taken place years before. This is achieved by means of a magic device, not by some recording technology, but either way, the way the protagonist comes to witness those past events resembles a kind of highly sophisticated, multisensory holographic film playback. More interestingly, we immediately realize that we're looking at past events that are in some way recounted. We understand, at the latest when we hear Dumbledore's explanatory comment, that we have just re-experienced an episode out of his memory.

So far, so good: the scene has served its function. However, if you think about it for a moment, you'll notice that appearances notwithstanding, all this is in fact very different from memories as they work in our lives.

When you remember an episode from your past, normally you won't go through the whole sequence in minute detail. If it is a vivid memory, then you'll probably have no difficulty to invoke the mood, the general feelings you had; you're probably also able to make some key images or sounds present again in a kind of sensual way (that is, you'll see them with your mind's eye, or hear them with your inner ears); and you'll be clearly aware of spoken words and sentences, though very likely again not all of them, but some that stand out for you in your recall. For me, one of the strongest memories I have is of a particular concert given ten years ago by a violinist I admire; it was the first opportunity for me to listen to her playing live, and I can recall clearly many of the details: the way the room looked, the row in which I was seated, the setup of the stage, the orchestra, the acoustic impression I had, the excitement I felt, the way the music affected me. And yet of course when I recall this experience, I don't go through the whole of the concert, movement by movement, in sequence and in tempo. What I recall are the feeling, the general flair, and several key impressions.

If that is how memories usually work, then why can we still understand what the film wants to express (namely, that Harry has just lived through one of Dumbledore's memories)? It's because there is something of which it reminds us. But that is not a typical memory, but recounting a memory, more precisely, the recounting of a memory for the benefit of someone else who wasn't there. When I'm not just recalling a past episode for myself, but want to relate it to someone in order to help him imagine what it must have been like to have been there, then what I do must be more structured and more detailed than simply recalling the feeling, the general flair, and several key impressions. What we do then is to tell a story. We describe the surroundings; we point out the key characters, their look, words, and actions; we narrate the events in a certain order that leaves out the unimportant ones but brings the important ones into an intelligible sequence.

So what the scene in Dumbledore's office resembles is not recalling a memory, but recounting a memory in dramatized form. It's not as if Dumbledore would remember, but as if Dumbledore narrates what he can remember. The past events are brought into a story-like structure for the benefit of a listener. (Or, in fact, for both a listener and us, the audience.) True, the job is done not by Dumbledore himself but by a magical device (the Pensieve). But the structure is still the structure of telling-it-to-someone-else, not the structure of simply remembering.

Consider this: a classical flashback would have served the exact same function. We can easily imagine Dumbledore and Harry sitting in the office, with Dumbledore saying something like: "I still clearly remember, it was a few months after the war, when we were all convened at the ministry...", and then blending over into the scene of the hearing. In that case, it would have been easier to detect that we're not simply witnessing the process of remembering, but the structured and dramatized recounting of a past scene. (There is of course a reason why the magical device is used instead of a classical flashback: the Pensieve has some role to play later on in the plot, and it's introduced here in preparation of that later role.)

Thus passage into memories (as a variety of a past world) will be rather passage into a narrated version of those memories; memories themselves are too unstructured to constitute a proper destination location. (Compare this with dream worlds, which are also strictly speaking to unstable to make a good destination, but are prepared by fiction that features passage into them in a manner that addresses this difficulty; I have discussed this in an earlier post.)

Ejection and projection

I have written that fiction that includes passage into an instance of unreality highlights the perspective of the passenger, thus emphasizing an element that makes the travel metaphor seem particularly apt. There are exceptions, such as the shifted passage technique, which has the function of verifying that passage has actually happened in the world of a fiction (in our examples, these fictions were all movies). But on the whole, the perspective of the character who makes the trip is closely attended to.

A further characteristic that is sometimes in line with the travel metaphor and sometimes not is this: the character who does the trip sometimes fully departs from his world, vanishes physically, and at other times remains there, albeit oblivious of, and incapable to interact with his surroundings for the duration of the trip. In order to have some labels, let's say that a character sometimes leaves his world in the mode of ejection, and at other times in the mode of projection.

Thus in the clip from Die Einsteiger we have a clear case of ejection: the two travelers vanish from their own world for the duration of their trip. Shifted passage is used to demonstrate this to the audience; but the fact is also often referred to in the course of the movie, when the trips get more and more extensive and some characters even decide never to return from the fictional worlds they have entered. In contrast, in Dreamscape we have seen a typical example of projection (the word 'project' is actually used in the film itself as a term for the act of entering dreams of other people).

Entering dreams or memories seems to suggest projection mode more than ejection mode, perhaps because it allows closer modeling on the (real) dream state, which is very similar to projection: you're asleep, you physically remain in your room, though oblivious to your environment, and the only sense in which you're 'there' in the dream world is mentally, even though it may not look and feel that way to you while you're immersed. On the other hand of the spectrum, trips into fictional worlds and time travel seem to suggest ejection more strongly. (In particular time travel stories would struggle to use projection mode: it's rather counterintuitive to suggest that a character can be a two different times at once, whatever 'at once' can mean in this context. Remember that all passage stories, time travel not excluded, have to keep up the metaphor of traveling, and that requires a sequential personal time for the traveler, even as she jumps from one spacetime-location to the other.)

There can be hybrids: in the extract from Sherlock Jr. the protagonist doesn't simply enter the world of a movie, he dreams that he enters a movie. So we have a more complicated setup: there is the world of the Buster Keaton movie itself, then nested inside it the world of the dream, which allows passage into movies, and then again nested inside that dream world the world into which he steps when Buster walks into the movie screen. The latter is a clear case of ejection, for the in-dream-Buster vanishes from the world surrounding the movie screen when he walks in. But then there is also the dream itself, which is a case of projection. (The sleeping body of the projectionist remains visible for us, the audience, unresponsive to the surrounding world, but not physically away.) Probably the motivation for this complicated setup was a hesitation to make the movie too phantastic. It's one thing to create a fiction in which people dream (not unusual in the real world, too), but another to create one in which people walk into fictional worlds through a movie screen. (To wrap the more extravagant elements of a fiction into a dream is a time-worn device, just think of the epilogue of A Midsummer Night's Dream.)

Note that there is no difference in the experience of the passenger between ejection mode and projection mode. The passenger is immersed in what happens at the destination location. The only difference is what an additional observer would see at the origin location during the time of passage.

Yet shifted passage neither implies ejection nor projection. We have seen ejection in the clips that included shifted passage, but as I have noted, there could easily have been shifted passage in Dreamscape, where we're clearly in projection mode. Likewise, in The Dutch Master, there's no shifted passage, which I argued is by design; yet both ejection and projection might be in play here — the movie leaves it open, thus allowing both interpretations, but this very fact shows that there might be both cases in which we have no shifted passage and projection and cases in which we have no shifted passage and ejection. So the distinction between use of shifted passage or not on the one hand and projection mode vs. ejection mode on the other are completely orthogonal.

Shifted transfer

In the extracts from passage scenes in movies that I have given in my recent postings, I have identified a technique which I called shifted transfer. The idea is that when a character makes a trip into an unreal world, such as the world of a movie-within-the-movie, or the world of a painting, there may be a difference between the perspective of the character himself and the perspective of the audience. The audience can remain at the origin location while the character already has been transferred to the destination location. (The audience is transferred later than the traveler, hence 'shifted' transfer.) Thus in Die Einsteiger, we're still there, in the now empty room, while the two travelers are already inside the video film; in Sherlock Jr. we can see the large movie screen into which the protagonist has stepped even when the character himself is already inside, and thus no longer in the room which contains that screen. We have seen, though, that not every film that includes passage into some instance of unreality uses the technique of shifted transfer. In The Dutch Master, the perspective of the audience and the perspective of the protagonist who steps into an old painting remain closely tied to each other. In Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, the protagonist is drawn into a memory which is dramatized as if in a holographic 3D-film, and the point of view is strictly that of the character, there is no lingering of any kind for the audience when the character moves.

In the latter cases, the subjective element is emphasized, while in the former cases we (the audience) are more in the mode of observers, objective onlookers. This makes shifted transfer a cinematic means to achieve a double-check on whether passage has actually happened. What would you do if you were the inventor of a device that lets you enter movie or dream worlds? You would probably set up an experiment that lets you verify, from some good, external vantage point, both that the traveler has arrived at the destination and that he has vanished from the origination location. That would convince you, as the inventor, that the device does enable such a trip. Shifted passage has exactly the function to convince the audience, in exactly the same way. Where the film wants to keep the question open (such as in the stepping into a painting in The Dutch Master), shifted passage is consequently not employed. Where the subjective experience of the passenger is to be emphasized (as in the passages into memories in Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire and into dreams in Dreamscape), it's also avoided.

Passage as travel

Let's begin to clarify some notions. I have introduced the idea of traveling into an instance of unreality, such as the fictional world of a movie, or a dream. The use of 'traveling' is highly metaphorical, of course: if you travel, that means a change in location, usually going from some origin location to a fairly distant destination location; and the act of traveling itself typically takes time. Obviously, in the normal use of 'traveling', both the origin and the destination locations are places in the real world, to be reached by some means of transport. Another element of the meaning of 'traveling' has to do with what one experiences: broadly speaking, you're widening your horizon, see new and unfamiliar places, strange customs (strange, that is, to you, not to the people in the places you visit).

The trips I have illustrated in my recent series of posts can be metaphorically described as 'traveling' into an unreal world, because some of these meaning elements still apply: there is an origin location and a destination location, which is removed and distant. The process of passage itself doesn't take much time, but the trip as a whole occupies a span of time during which the passenger cannot interact with the origin location any more. There are strange and unusual things going on at the destination location, making for a new and stimulating experience. (That's the point, after all, of using passage as a dramatic device in fiction. The movies from which I have extracted some excerpts for demonstration all rely on passage to get some central plot lines going.)

There's an important difference, too. The distance between the origin and the destination is not a spatial difference, as the distance between two places in the real world is. Rather, it's the gap between the real world and an unreal world — the difference (however it is conceived) between reality and fiction, or reality and dreams, reality and memories, and so on. I have used the term 'metaphysical apartness' before: just as the metaphorical use of 'passage' and 'trip', that term also suggests some kind of gap or distance — and the gap or distance is taken to be metaphysical, that is, to be described in terms of reality and unreality (metaphysics being the study of what, in general, makes up reality).

Describing something as a journey adds another important element: it suggests a continuous, linear structure. There is a departure (possibly some preparation before), then there are the events of the trip itself, including the actual travel, the arrival at the destination location, the events there, and then in reverse the trip back with its final arrival at the origin. All these events typically form a continuous process with an ordered structure. Even more important, this structure is tied to the experience of a traveler: it only makes sense to bring events in that order with reference to someone who undergoes the process. Without a traveler from whose point of view there is a time-ordered series of events, there is no such thing as a journey.

In all the illustrations I've given, the perspective of the passenger (one or more characters in the movie) is crucial. That is why the plot usually follows the perspective of the character who undertakes the journey very closely. The only deviation from this principle is the technique I have called 'shifted transfer'.

Passage illustrated V - the shared dream

We have looked at fictions and memories; let's now examine something you get when these two are combined: dreams.

Already in 1984,[1] the movie Dreamscape had people enter other people's dream worlds, by means of a combination of technology in the sleep lab and rather obscure 'psychic' abilities of the passengers themselves. (One character learns, over the course of the film, to 'project' into others' dreams by means of pure concentration.)

Some subtle setup is going on in the dialogue before the actual trip: the protagonist mentions that the test subject (the other man whose dream he is about to join) is a steel worker; then we recognize that the projection has worked in part by the character of the setting, a construction area on top of a skyscraper. A familiar scene for a steel worker, though it's probably not something in most other people's everyday experience. The recognition is supported by a short verification dialogue after the trip back as well, when both dream subjects recall what they've experienced and it matches. (A more serious scientific verification would have both participants record their recall separately from each other, but understandably this has been contracted for the purposes of the dramatization.)

There is a rather elaborate departure sequence. The film tries to establish an authentic-looking scientific setting, drops some references to actual sleep science (such as entering REM phases), and then also visualizes the process of passage into the dream in a manner that fits descriptions of dream subjects falling asleep (such as the hypnagogic imagery, the feeling of falling through a tunnel onto the dream scene, and random sound effects). Just as all the other movies I've discussed so far (with the exception of Sherlock Jr.), there is a clear suggestion of the character being drawn into the unreal world he enters. Compared to all that, the arrival sequence is very brief — the protagonist looks around for a moment, but then is quickly absorbed in the action.

Just as before, no shifted transfer here, although we could easily imagine how it might have been staged. There could have been a shot of the scientists who monitor the sleepers, or of the sleeping characters themselves, interleaved with the dream sequence itself. Of course, there would have been little benefit to such an interruption of the dream sequence. Especially when presenting dreams, movies tend to replicate the grip they have on us in our real lives by leaving such sequences uninterrupted. (Look out for this when you next see a dream sequence in a movie: they are very rarely interleaved with any other plot elements.)

[1] That is, long before Inception; of course, the idea is much older. Dreamscape itself was based on a 1966 novel by Roger Zelazny entitled The Dream Master.

Passage illustrated IV - the dramatized memories

Let's widen the scope a little. The spectrum of unreal worlds is not restricted to those created in fiction.

Harry Potter (in Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire) encounters a magic item called the Pensieve, which can be used to externalize memories. That way, one can re-examine what one has experienced before; and it is suggested that this works without the effects of fading or distortion that our memories in the real world suffer. When Harry gets close to the Pensieve, he is drawn into the memories of its owner (Dumbledore, the headmaster of the school).

There is no interaction between the protagonist and the past world; Harry is just watching. This seems appropriate if we remember that what the movie presents us with is a memory from the past, which is supposed to be unchangeable, since it already has happened; moreover, it is someone else's memory — so it's doubly removed from any possible outside influence.

We have here short, but discernible departure and arrival sequences. Is there also a setup-recognition structure? Yes there is: Harry (and we, the audience) can recognize both the room in which the memory scene takes place and some of the key players in the scene (apart from Dumbledore himself, the camera also catches 'Mad Eye' Moody, Ivan Karkaroff, Barty Crouch, and Rita Skeeter); and Harry (and we) can do so because there was a scene earlier in the movie in which he was in the exact same room in a similar situation (formal hearing), and all the key players involved were of course introduced already in the exposition of the story. Thus we can recognize that we must be in a memory (played in a kind of holographic cinema) from several clues that were carefully prepared beforehand.[1]

There is, however, no shifted passage, and it also appears that the character is not physically away from the origin location. Harry is mentally fully absorbed in the scene which he experiences, but he remains in the room with the Pensieve. It's comparable rather to getting immersed in a dream (in which case you're still physically there, lying asleep somewhere) than to actually travel, where you fully depart from the origin location. Again, this seems appropriate if we consider the nature of the departure location; after all, this is a memory, a mental item, so it seems natural to get immersed mentally, but not drawn in physically. (Compare this with the instances in my earlier post, where the destination locations, such as scenes in movies or a painting, were fictional worlds we are supposed to imagine as 'being there somewhere'.)

[1] Strictly speaking, it would be necessary to distinguish whose recognition is the relevant one in setup-recognition-structures: that of the passenger, or that of the audience? That's an interesting question, but let's collect some more samples before we go deeper into it.

Passage illustrated III - the Flemish painting

Who says that passage into the unreal is restricted to movies as destinations? Whatever generates its own fictional world is a candidate. It could be a painting, for instance:

This is from The Dutch Master, a 1993 film that was intended as the flagship production of a collection of erotic shorts. Whatever its credentials in that genre may be, it uses an old dramatic device, namely: the interpenetration of the real world and the world of some sensually stimulating piece of art.[1] But in contrast to, say, Flaubert's 1834 novella Omphale, in this film it is not a fictional character who steps out of an unreal world into reality — it's the other way round. The protagonist, Teresa (Mira Sorvino), walks into the painting.

Passage in this case is established in a gradual buildup: when she first encounters the painting, Teresa is just fascinated and pleased by it; later on, the picture seems to come to life for short moment, and one of the characters smiles at her; then further into the film there is a scene in which she is practically invited into the picture and then walks in; after that she begins to make the passage deliberately and from her own initiative.

1) From the three excerpts in the video above, it remains unclear whether Teresa actually walks into the painting or whether she remains physically in her everyday world. In other words, the story leaves it open whether she's not simply imagining or daydreaming to be inside the painting, while physically still sitting on the museum bench.

Whenever there are other people with her in the room at the museum, the painting remains just a painting. It comes alive (and invites her in, so to speak) only when she is watching it alone. So there is no way to decide, from what the film shows, whether we are supposed to think Teresa is 'just imagining' all this, or whether, in this film, things such as stepping into the world of a painting can happen. Needless to say, in the real world, such things don't happen anyway. It's only because we're already in a story, the story of the movie, that we can even ponder the possibility. What the question comes down to, then, is whether the world of The Dutch Master is just like the real world but contains a protagonist who is prone to daydreaming, or whether that movie world is a fantasy world in which people can travel between reality and paintings.[2]

The movie artfully leaves that question open until the end. While Teresa becomes more and more involved with the painting, her real-life friends and family become more and more irritated. (Though there is a notable lack of concern; they're just irritated, nobody's really worrying.) The climax of this conflicting development is reached when Teresa disappears at the day of her wedding, leaving her fiancé, her family, and the wedding guests waiting for her in front of the church. The final sequence of the movie then suggests that she has withdrawn into the painting for good. If Teresa remains missing, that is, if she in fact has vanished from the world outside the painting, then what we've got here is a fantasy world in which passage into the unreal is possible.

2) There is no interaction between Teresa and the characters in the painting; they simply ignore her. When she is inside the painting, it's like a holographic film. She stands in the middle of what's going on, but nothing she does seems to impact the scene in any way. She's watching from inside the room, but she's still only watching. On the other hand, the physical elements of the picture do seem to impact her: when one of the characters blows some smoke from his pipe towards her, she coughs.

It's different when Teresa is outside the painting. One of the characters smiles at her and invites her into the painting with a nod; and there is also a brief scene when Teresa steals into the museum by night and it's dark, and she points the flashlight to the painting. The people in the painting act bedazzled. So the rules of interaction are frustratingly limited: The fictional characters can communicate only with her, and only when she's outside; the real-world characters can't interact with the characters in the painting at all.

There seems to be a parallel here between the indifference of the people in the painting towards Teresa and the lack of concern for her increasingly becoming distant in her everyday world. As I've observed above, none of her colleagues or her family seem really to worry, they're just puzzled. And while the narrative sometimes mentions something Teresa said or claimed, in all of the plot she doesn't utter a single word. (It's a romanticist cliché: the artist, or in this case simply the imaginatively gifted person, is estranged from her world, withdraws into a world beyond it which is associated with art and eros, but where real fulfillment isn't possible either as long as there are ties to reality etc. etc. But I don't really want to go into an interpretation of the story here. I'm only interested in the phenomenology of passage into an instance of unreality.)

3) We have now discussed two general questions: does the story involve passage into the unreal? and: what are the rules of interaction between the real and the unreal in this particular fictional world (i.e., the world of The Dutch Master)? Let's also take look at the elements of passage I have extracted in my previous postings about Die Einsteiger and Sherlock Jr.. I have identified three such elements: first, a setup-and-recognition structure; second, a departure sequence and an arrival sequence; and third, what I've called shifted transfer: the characters transfer into the instance of unreality at a different time than the audience does — while the characters have already arrived at the destination location, the audience's perspective is still at the departure location. Can we identify the same elements here, where the destination isn't a movie, but a painting?

Well, there is clearly some setup going on: the painting is explained in some detail by a museum guide, who fills the audience in on historical background and sharpens the eye for some detail that might easily go overlooked without a bit of experience. (Would you have noticed the statue of Mercury on the cupboard in the bedroom?) We also get some detail views of the painting before it comes to life, and when it does, the scene with the drunken woman rolls up once or twice as a kind of movie in a picture frame before Teresa actually witnesses it from inside the painted room. Many of these things are repeated in the passage sequences and clearly contribute to our understanding that we (together with Teresa) are now 'in the picture', thus they constitute the recognition end.

Moreover, since this is a painting we're talking about, there is a clear sense of a static frame present all the time, even when we're inside the artificial world. The number of rooms is limited to three, and most of them are already in sight at least partially from the viewer's perspective at the museum. The wooden, rectangular frames of the room and the windows, cupboards, and the like add to this sense of a mostly static, changeless room. All the animation comes from the people moving around in them. And even that seems to happen mostly in a scripted sequence that unrolls every time Teresa steps in. Thus even though she has now entered that fictional world, it is still somewhat different from the real world: it's in 3D, and it's animated — and yet it feels static and rigid to some degree.

It is more tricky to locate the departure sequence than to find the arrival sequence. That is mostly due to the gradual buildup I've mentioned. The departure sequence, I think, is distributed over several scenes in the movie. It begins when Teresa's fascination with the painting sets in and ends when she is drawn into the picture for the first time and sets her foot into the room inside the painting. The film marks the actual transfer with a simple fading of the museum setting into black, which then re-occurs on the trip back. Let's compare this with the corresponding departure sequence in Die Einsteiger, as I have analyzed it in my earlier post: it begins when the 'video integrator' device is switched on, then there is some blinking and beeping, a suggestion of the characters being drawn into the device, and finally they vanish. The corresponding marks in The Dutch Master are the first viewing of the painting, the smile and the nod of the man in the painting at Teresa, and finally her stepping in.

Compared with that, the arrival sequence is relatively short. It consists mainly of another iteration of the movements of the drunken woman (as they had happened before, when Teresa watched them from the outside). After this, Teresa makes another step forward and approaches the man with the pipe who remains seated in the room, and from that moment, we're immersed in a story that wasn't already visible on the painting when it was still frozen. The arrival sequence is over.

What about shifted transfer? This element is missing here. The perspective of the audience moves immediately into the destination location when Teresa gets up from the museum bench and the camera turns its direction into the painting. There is no discernible lingering of the audience's point of view outside. (There is no shot of the painting after Teresa has moved in, with her standing in front of the fictional characters, or some such thing.) So it seems that shifted transfer is not a necessary element in tales of passage. It might be featured, but it doesn't have to.

I think there is a good reason that this particular film doesn't use shifted transfer. I have remarked above that the movie leaves it open whether Teresa actually walks into the painting or whether she just imagines that she does. These two options are meant to remain open until the ending of the film, and shifted passage would have been a too strong indicator for one of them, shutting out the other. More precisely, if the director had used shifted passage, and the camera (and with it we, the audience) would have remained in the museum setting after Teresa had stepped in, then we would have seen either an empty museum room or Teresa inside the painting, both of which would have clearly indicated that she actually did step into the painting (as opposed to merely having daydreamed it). And that would have defeated much of the expositional strategy used in the plot of the movie. Compare this again with Die Einsteiger. There, the intention is exactly not to leave it open whether passage is possible in its fictional world. Passage into movies is the main plot device. So it's important to make it clear that it really happens.

[1] A painting that is a version of Pieter de Hooch's 'Young woman drinking', with the interior of the room very similar, but the people in the picture somewhat changed. (The painting is actually not in New York, but at the Louvre in Paris.)

[2] When the question is posed this way, some might reply that it is neither: it's a symbolic world, in which the museum, the painting, and the act of passage stand for an artistic or erotic inclination in the protagonist that is awakened. (And that may well be a sound interpretation of the director's intentions.) But even so: in order to understand a symbol, one needs first a grasp of its literal meaning, and this is what we're concerned with here. This is an investigation in the mode of phenomenology, where we're interested in the way things are presented, not in their symbolic meaning (if there is one). When we just look at what's manifestly happening (the analogue to looking at the literal meaning of a symbol), we're faced with the two options I've listed.

Passage illustrated II - the dreaming projectionist

An early forerunner of the geeks who traveled into movies in my previous post, in Die Einsteiger, is Buster Keaton, who does a similar trip in his 1924 film Sherlock Jr.

While the 1980s were a period in which the dramatic device of choice was a blinking and beeping machine, this earlier film from the 1920s uses a more traditional approach: the protagonist is just dreaming that he enters the movie world. Here's how it looks (watch until approx. 22:30):



Keaton plays the operator of a movie projector at a film theatre; he falls asleep while a picture runs and dreams that the characters in the film transform into people from his own life. He then walks up (still dreaming) to the screen and steps right into the scene that is being shown. In other words, he enters the world of the movie and starts interacting with its characters.

This is a very early example of how such a situation is staged. It's a comparatively prolonged and elaborate sequence, as the film tries to get the idea across that the main character is now entering a movie. But it includes all the elements I have discussed in my previous analysis.

Let's begin with setup and recognition. Before the actual passage happens, we are introduced to the world of the movie into which Buster is about to step. It is set in a villa and there's its owner, his daughter, and a young man (presumably her suitor). Each of the characters is briefly shown and then turns around and transforms into a person from the projectionist's world, noticed by the dreaming Buster. This is what I've called setup: elements of the destination world are introduced to us (the audience), as part of the departure sequence. Later on, in the arrival sequence, these elements are then used to show us that the traveler really has arrived there. In the case of Sherlock Jr., the plot of the movie into which the protagonist steps resumes in earnest (after a bit of slapstick comedy) with the daughter of the house and her suitor on the stage. This is supported by one or two cinematic tricks: one of them is a circle-open effect (as if we're opening our eyes to the scene); another is that the camera now zooms in so that the stage of the nested movie fills the entire frame. So far, we have watched the movie-within-the-movie on a cinema screen, with bits of the orchestra and audience visible. Now it has become exclusive: there is no intruding outside world any more, we're fully immersed in the nested picture's world. We have now moved into the recognition part: the elements that were introduced earlier, during the setup, are repeated so that we know we have arrived. (In this case, it's only we, the audience, who have arrived. Buster will follow, though he is already mentioned in absentia as "the world's greatest detective".) We witness a bit of interaction between the daughter of the house and the suitor, and then the villa's owner discovering the theft of the pearls. With the telephone call for Sherlock Jr. and Buster's subsequent appearance (not in this extract), the arrival scene ends.

Where exactly would we pinpoint the departure and arrival sequences? I'd say that the departure sequence spans the time from Buster falling asleep to the end of the slapstick intermezzo (where he is thrown into one location after the next). When he finally fades out of the picture, in the setting with the empty park bench (quite conceivably the front garden of the villa), he has entirely vanished from the surrounding setting in the movie theatre, has lost his presence in the outer movie's world, so to speak. He really has departed. The arrival sequence, on the other hand, somewhat interleaves with the departure sequence. In a sense, the arrival begins when he first steps into the frame of the inner movie. He is promptly knocked out of it again, and then needs another attempt to step in until it holds. When the departure sequence has ended, and the inner movie resumes its plot, this is made clear by the cinematic tricks I've mentioned above. A little later on (not in this extract any more), Buster appears in the role of Sherlock Jr. — at this point at the latest I think the arrival sequence is completed.

Finally, note that again there is a shifted transfer: when Buster has already entered the world of the inner movie, we (the audience) are still located with a perspective that includes both the outer and the inner world, the origin and destination locations. Only after Buster has completed the passage and is firmly located at the destination, the audience's perspective also changes to focus exclusively on the inner movie's world.

Passage illustrated I - the 'Video Integrator'

Let's start with a film I have mentioned before: Die Einsteiger. This one is in German, but I have added English captions in a couple of relevant places.

In a nutshell, this has all the elements of what I call a trip into an instance of unreality. In the film's world, there are movies (such as the Western that happens to be in the video tape recorder in this clip). Movies are instances of unreality — imaginary worlds which belong to a fiction. And one of the characters in the film is an inventor who has built a device that lets you travel into such imaginary worlds. (Just as in dozens of other movies people have invented machines to travel into the past or the future, or into dream worlds, as in Inception.) Of course we don't have a clue how the thing works. (Just as we don't have a clue how time machines or 'shared dreaming' technology work.) But whatever the technical detail, we are supposed to imagine that, in the world of this film, there is a device that lets you travel into films-within-the-film, fictions within the fiction.

How does the movie convey that such a passage into unreality has just happened? There is a lot of blinking and beeping going on, of course. More importantly, we can observe that the device is somehow acting on the two people in the scene: the funny rotating radar screen seems to be scanning them; then for a moment it looks as if some wind or airstream is ruffling their hair, as if something is drawing them towards the device; finally they vanish from the picture. Let us call this the departure sequence. Note that it is a real, physical departure. It's not just that the two travelers close their eyes and imagine (or dream) themselves into the world of the Western. We take it that they are actually, physically moved elsewhere, and that they are now 'there' (wherever 'there' is, in terms of the spatiotemporal universe we inhabit), and no longer 'here'. They have no physical presence any more in the room out of which they have just vanished. If anyone would walk into that room, he wouldn't see them. For the time of their trip, they have been 'beamed' elsewhere.

In the world of the Western, there is a counterpart arrival sequence. Beforehand, we get some idea of the basic inventory in the Western's world from the images we see on the video tape: the houses are there, some Western stereotypes are rolling off (riding, shouting, and shooting), and one of the characters who is to appear later is shortly visible: the tough guy who will insist on their hanging lights a match by scratching it on a wall (something he will repeat just a moment on, when the travelers have arrived). All this we can watch on the television screen before the departure of the travelers. Then, directly after they have vanished from the room, we can see their faces on the video screen. It is as if we, the audience, linger for a moment longer in the departure lounge while the travelers have already done their trip, verifying, as it were, that they have safely arrived, by checking up the video tape, on which we can now see them. Only then the camera moves us (the audience) into the arrival scene as well. Beginning from that point, we're all in the world of the Western, and the events there unfold now. And now, of course, the elements that were set up earlier are repeated, so that we recognize that we're now in the other world. The tough guy lights his match again, we see the houses, there are people shouting.

Thus there are several elements needed to make this kind of scene work. First, there is both a departure and an arrival sequence; second, we have a setup-recognition structure; and third, there's a shifted transfer.

(To be continued.)

Passage and nested unreality

In my earlier posts about entering the worlds of movies and the pull this exerts on the imagination I looked closer at the fascination we might feel with this idea.

So, as I wrote, the worlds of some movies exert a pull on the imagination; but there is no way to satisfy the desire, no way to go in and follow up. So what does the movie do? It 'knows' about that desire and 'satisfies' it, by giving it expression, playing it out. In the movies, everything is possible, including entering a movie plot. So in the world of a movie (such as Die Einsteiger), a device is conjured up that fulfills the desire. It's not different from many other wish-fulfilling machines (or from wish-fulfilling magic). The worlds of fiction are in part intended to act out fantasies in which desires are fulfilled. Thus the idea of a passage into the unreal is born.

Note that this is in some sense a reflective process: fiction, as it were, self-consciously exploits a desire which it itself has helped to generate in the first place. But we must be careful not to make too much out of this reflexive constellation. People in movies don't just travel into the worlds of fictions, but also into dreams, or the past and the future. It's not the reflexivity that makes this work; that's not even a necessary attribute. It is merely a spicy extra feature in the particular constellation in which the world from which departure is taken and the destination world are both instances of the same form of unreality (i.e., worlds of movies).

There seems to be one thing that is required, though. In the real world, it's not possible to travel into the world of a movie, a dream, or the past or the future. In the real world, there is no magic, and neither are there any technical devices (at least up to now) which can do the trick. And therefore we (real people) cannot make any such journey. The only people who can are fictional characters, people who are already part of the world of a movie (or other fiction, such as a novel). The starting point of any passage into the unreal must lie within an instance of unreality already. The laws that govern the real world don't allow for it (as far as we know), but the laws that govern any world of fiction can be adjusted by the creator of that world, the person who imagines it, and so an instance of unreality might allow traveling into those worlds of fictions, dreams, or the past and the future. Note that this means that passage is always a matter of going into the world of a nested fiction. There is no way into fiction; just into fiction-within-fiction.

(It's an interesting question exactly how far this can be generalized: there seems to be a passage from fiction into dreams, and the past or the future; maybe there's a path from dreams into fiction, or again the past or the future; there might be dreams-within-dreams into which we can travel from dreams. There seems to be no passage from either the past or the future to anywhere — what does this tell us about the differences between these forms of unreality?)

So when there is what I have called 'passage into the unreal', we're always talking about nested unreality— there is an outer instance of fiction (the world of the film Die Einsteiger) and a bunch of inner instances (e.g. the world of Dance of the vampires). That they are nested means that the second is, as viewed from within the film itself, a film with its fictional world. The characters in Die Einsteiger are like people in the real world in that they watch movies, put them on video cassettes (which weren't yet replaced by DVDs or Blu-rays as the prevalent medium at that time), and watch them for entertainment. They have the same idea of a movie as fiction, and of the world of that movie as a fictional world (just as I described it in my previous post). But of course, what's fiction for them is fiction-within-fiction for us, the audience in the real world, for these people are fictional characters already. And of course only because their world is a fictional world is it that people can jump into movie worlds (worlds of movies-within-the-movie); that's not possible in the real world (for all we know).

Such fiction-within-fiction is not exactly a rare phenomenon. There is nothing unusual for people in novels to read books or watch movies, or for film characters to do the same. After all, the characters in those novels or films are often intended to appear much like people in the real world, and consuming fiction is something that people in the real world do. Sometimes, fiction-within-fiction has a more substantial role to play than just making characters seem like real people. In Shakespeare's Hamlet, the Danish prince uses a play to confront another character with a story very similar to what he thinks might have been enacted by his uncle. In other words, Hamlet uses the play-within-a-play as a means of indirect communication, and something that is intended to awaken emotions and provoke a reaction.

In any case, however, this nesting of fiction-within-fiction is necessary for passage into the unreal: there is no traveling into fiction unless you are already within a fiction.

More on pull on the imagination

In my previous post on entering the worlds of movies, I noted a certain fascination we might feel with this idea. Let me expand on this a little.

Psychologically, there is certainly some trace of a wish-fulfillment dream in here, but for now, that's not the aspect I want to look into. There is also what I have called a 'pull' that is exerted on our imagination: we feel ourselves drawn into a fictional world, and this feeling of being drawn is not that of a physical dragging, nor necessarily that of a psychological grip (the movie doesn't have to be totally absorbing in order for us to feel the pull). This pull is on the imagination — we feel invited, encouraged, sometimes even compelled to begin imagining ourselves in that world, to think of things we might do in addition to those we watch the characters do, and so on. (I have said that our imagination maps out spaces of options in the world of the movie; that is one of its primary operation modes, and so it's no wonder that it eagerly follows the invitation to take any opportunity for doing so.)

Sometimes this is achieved directly, for instance when a character does something we know he shouldn't do, and we want to shout, sometimes even do shout, something like: "Don't go up there!" — because we know what's going to happen. Sometimes characters do something very unexpected, and there is a residue of things we'd like to check or review, etc. Sometimes there is teasing that isn't followed up in any way. In all those cases, our imagination gets engaged, and by that operation we have the feeling of being pulled in.

At least for someone like me (who likes to muse about the workings of fictional worlds), there is a two-fold pull of that sort in movies like the one I mentioned as an example, Die Einsteiger. One is the pull which the movie exploits: we all know the films that are the targets, those into which the characters of Die Einsteiger enter with the help of their machine; and they are popular samples which certainly have nudged our imagination themselves. (Not each of them, perhaps, but an assortment is used that will probably have something for everyone in a broad group: it includes adventure, horror, romance, and history films.) The other pull is the one the movie itself exhibits: the film is an instance of fiction itself, and in the fictional world of this instance, there is something like this machine — and obviously the imagination of the audience is encouraged to work on that idea. (What would you do if you had such a machine, which movies would you enter?)

Einsteigen

When I was a child (I remember) I watched a movie called Die Einsteiger. It was centered around a couple of geeks who were able to 'jump into a movie' by means of some technical instrument. The film was firmly in the genre of light entertainment, and the technique of entering the worlds of movies was simply used as a device for bringing in jokes and a bit of action. But I was fascinated by this core idea: what if you could simply enter a movie plot, such as that of Raiders of the lost ark or Dance of the vampires, walk around in the world of that movie, participate in the action (or wander off to some parts of it that weren't even shown in the film)?

Where did that fascination come from? Was it just childish identification with the adventurous heroes in those films? A bit of that was certainly in the mix for me, at the time. But then the fascination didn't fade away even long after heroic fantasies had (predictably) lost their appeal. So perhaps there's something more interesting to be found here. Mostly, I think, what was intriguing was this notion of crossing that border, of walking around in a world I knew didn't exist. After all, even though it didn't exist, it could be imagined, described, and even depicted in a movie. So how much of a step could it be to actually go there, to travel into it and walk around inside it? Strictly speaking, it actually can be done in fantasy only, and a movie such as the one I saw is best described as simply acting out a fantasy. But the fact remains that the idea on which this fantasy is based exerts an immense pull on the imagination. So let's have a closer look at that idea.

The world of a movie, just as the world of a novel, the past, or the future, is the world of an instance of unreality — it's not really there, but you can imagine it (including the people and events in it) to be there. Typically, this imaginative activity requires some prompting. Fiction is a paradigmatic example of what induces us to imagine such unreal worlds; but there are others, too: dreams do the same; or you can deliberately trigger it yourself in daydreams.

When we imagine the world of a movie, we fit it with as many details as is needed for the narrative. Thus Dance of the vampires will include a wide landscape in deep snow, a rustic inn, and a sinister castle where the vampires reside. It will also include a bizarre cast of characters (the single-minded professor and his fearful assistant, the selfish innkeeper and his beautiful bathing-addict daughter, and the cruel and powerful vampire chief along with his dandyish son). Once the world is stuffed and staffed with all these items and people, there is a sequence of events (the plot), with some memorable scenes perhaps standing out of the stream of what happens. What we mean when we speak of 'the world' of this movie is something like this rough inventory I've just given. We're only able to speak about it like that after we have seen the movie, of course, and that implies also that, even before that, the movie must have been realized (i.e. produced). All those items must have been created (by use of props and scenery, with the help of a camera and nowadays quite likely also computer-generated imagery); all those characters must have been portrayed (by actors), guided by a script and directed by someone with an overall vision, in order to make it coherent and detailed enough to be recognized as a fictional world on its own.

Now if such a fictional world exerts a certain pull on our imagination — if it is an interesting enough place to capture our curiosity and attention —, it seems that this creates a desire for more: we might want to re-watch the movie (sometimes several times), to re-live the experience of getting immersed in that story and its world. (Perhaps a movie makes this even easier for many people because, in contrast to a novel, the visual representation facilitates the operation of the imagination.) What's more: we might also feel that the world in which the story unfolds is so rich and fascinating in itself (aside from the particular plot) that we can easily imagine other interesting stories unfolding in it, too. In other words, we begin to imagine that more happens within the same landscape, more happens to the same characters, than the story presents. If you fancy yourself in the plot of Dance of the vampires, it's not that you simply want to mechanically play out the same role as, say the young assistant to the professor, Polanski's character, seeing the world of the movie through his eyes, re-experiencing what he must have felt. In a sense, that is what you already get from the movie. You want more. You think that you, in the place of that character, might have done something different. Perhaps you may have simply lingered for half an hour longer in this curious old castle, or spent a couple of hundred years reading through that enormous library, or perhaps you might have done something different entirely which none of the movie's characters would ever have thought of. The point is that the moment you can imagine doing something else in the world of that movie than the characters do, however minor a thing it might be, you are on the track I'm exploring here. (Your imagination has widened the space of options within that world of fiction.)

But of course, there is not much of a chance that this gigantic movie machinery will be put to use again just in order to give you that experience. (Some experience may be outside the powers of even Hollywood, anyway.) So your phantasy will probably remain just that. And this is where the idea of a device that can take you there, a device as in Die Einsteiger, begins to seem mightily attractive. (It's the same way in which a time machine begins to get a very desirable thing when you consider using it to visit some event in your past that you happen to have missed.)

So it seems there are at least two conditions to the desire to travel into the world of a movie: it must be a full-fledged world that is open for some possibly interesting activity (an activity that would be interesting enough so that you want to engage in it), and the surroundings must include options which you can't get anywhere else. (Consider: if a movie is set in the Bahamas, and the only thing that is intriguing for you is the nice, sunny beaches you see, then you wouldn't desire to be in the movie — you would simply desire to be in the Bahamas. Now unless that is so unaffordable for you that it is entirely out of the question, this is a desire that's easily fulfilled: just go there! The desire to have a movie-travel machine won't come up. It will only come into play if there is something attractive about the world of the movie itself, something you can't have by merely booking a holiday.)

Time-traveling to the sequoia trees

Vertigo (from which the visual motto of this blog comes) has sparked quite some reflection, both in discussions, aesthetic and otherwise, and in movies themselves, as intertextual references.

The most directly inspired follow-ups are of course Chris Marker's La Jetée and Terry Gilliam's Twelve Monkeys. The memorable scene under the sequoia trees in Vertigo, in which Kim Novak's character points out the dates of her birth and death (and we get the feeling that she really is possessed by a ghost in this moment, a ghost who reflects on its own former life, its beginning and end), returns in both later science fiction movies as a quotation.

The past and the future, two forms of unreality which we can become particularly desperate wishing to travel to, are never out of sight in all three films; but the two later ones are imaginative science-fiction films that use time travel whereas Vertigo was based on other motifs.

More precisely: the past and the future are expressly sought in both movies; their character as unreal is dramatized by first making them accessible (and apparently even changeable), which is made possible by the device of time travel, and then bringing them into the paradoxical shape of a story knot.

Vertigo, on the other hand, never focuses so baldly on either the past or the future. In Vertigo, the past exerts its influence in the shape of history (personal history, as in Scottie's fear of heights; family history, as in the fake Madeleine's unhappy and mad ancestor; and local history, as illustrated in the melancholic reflections in Gavin Elster's office, the San Francisco bookstore, or finally under the sequoia trees); the future looms in deceptive suggestiveness, in dreams, and in the shape of a plot which drives relentlessly towards its inevitable, tragic conclusion. Character traits and dramatic constellation have in Vertigo the function that in La Jetée and Twelve Monkeys is taken over by the science-fiction devices of time travel and story knots.

Entering dream worlds

Suppose you could enter someone else's dream just as if you were visiting a party. It's not that this is an entirely unpopular idea, there are several movies based on this notion, such as only recently Inception. But let's for the moment leave the elaborate theories presented there aside and examine the basic idea in a more simple setting.

1) Suppose, then, you could enter someone else's dream. Let's call the dreamer 'Joe'. You're now in Joe's dream. What would this be like? Would you just be at the same location, see what Joe sees in his dream? Imagine that Joe is in fact dreaming about a party, and now that you have entered the dream, you're at that party. Just as Joe, when he dreams about being at a party, it's as if he were standing in the room, together with all the other guests, hearing the music and idle chatter, seeing those people, the furniture, some food and drinks on a table, the dimmed light, the stereo in a corner... just as for Joe it feels in his dream as if he were actually there, it now also does for you. You're there with him in that very room, seeing and hearing the same things. But does this mean that you can see everything in the room, including the things that Joe isn't looking at, including the things that Joe hasn't even looked at up to now? Or is what you see restricted to what Joe sees, or at least to what he has seen so far (what his dreaming mind has, so to speak, dreamed up)? For instance, if Joe is just standing near the door, looking into the room — does it mean that all you can see is this room, or can you actually peek out the door and see what happens in the next room, even though Joe has (so far in his dream) never turned round and looked there?

We can only answer that question if we have some account of how dream worlds are built. Who decides what and who is in the room at that party Joe and you have joined? Since Joe is the dreamer, it seems that Joe's dreaming mind must do that job. The moment Joe dreams up a chair standing in the middle of the room, the moment that chair exists in the dream world. As it happens, there are three ways this can look to him. Let's say that Joe hasn't glanced at that spot before; then he either might take it that the chair has been there all the time, or he might think it just appeared out of thin air. On the other hand, if we assume that Joe has been looking there frequently and there's never been any chair, then he might notice that now, suddenly, there is a chair where none was before. (Dreams are like that, such things happen all the time.)

But what does that mean for you, the extra participant? What's going on from your point of view? It seems clear that in the third case you are observing a dream world in which there is an empty spot in the middle of the room and in which suddenly a chair appears in that very spot. But what about the two others? What if Joe has been transfixed by some events in the left part of the room and for quite some while hasn't looked at the middle of the room: what do you see when you do look there? Do you see the chair? Since Joe hasn't imagined (dreamed) it yet, perhaps we should say that you can't see it. Now what if Joe now turns to the middle of the room and calmly imagines a chair there, satisfied that it must have been there all along?

We seem to have run into a dilemma here: on the one hand, if we grant the dreamer authority about the furniture of his dream, its position and its changes of place, then we can only observe what he's already dreamed, so there is literally nothing there at any place until he brings his attention there. And presumably, when he turns his awareness somewhere else, there can't be said to be anything there as well: it's neither that the chair remains there nor that it suddenly disappears, leaving the spot empty again. Somehow, it seems, if we take this point about a dreamer's authority serious, the largest part of the dream world is undefined, for most of the time. If, on the other hand, we relax this strict adherence to the dreamer's attention (and imagination), we might enjoy a much more stable world of the dream, but it would be less clear in what sense this is still the world of that dreamer's dream.

2) At this point we might borrow a trick from the way fiction (another form of unreality) works in order to avoid this kind of trouble. No fiction describes each and every detail of the fictional world it is about — that wouldn't be possible. So what usually happens is that there is a tacit agreement between the author and the audience that the undescribed portions are filled in with appropriate assumptions. Thus if a story starts by telling us that "It was a cold, rainy autumn day in London of the year 19__", we can assume that the big city has many inhabitants who go about their lives, and that there has been a day with some weather before and after that particular day at which the story begins, while none of all this is ever mentioned, and quite probably most of it is also totally irrelevant for the narrated events. We just imagine the relevant parts and assume the rest as suitably fixed.

We mustn't misinterpret this 'filling in', however. When you read such a sentence, you may or may not visualize the streets of London in pouring rain, and to any degree of detail you like. Perhaps you'll take a moment after reading this very first sentence and bring those streets before your mind's eye, one by one, with every house clearly and to the smallest detail specified; but probably not. But then some people read stories without even picturing anything; and still they can take up the general idea of a cold, rainy day in a place like London.) In either case, none of them will have to imagine anything about the weather on the previous day, the day before the story begins, our about all the other people in the city which don't have any bearing on the story. To 'fill in' the necessary detail, then, is not to run through all the small details in your mind and fill them in. It's just to suppose that, as in the real world, there are some facts of the matter about all those things, and to be content that they would be described to us, should they be of any relevance to the story.

How can this stance of 'as close to what you'd expect unless directly specified' help us with the world of the dream party we're attending? Let's go through all the possibilities again. First, let's say Joe has looked several times at the center of the room, never noticing a chair or anything else there, but then suddenly dreams up one standing there; he thinks 'Whoops, there's a chair there!' for a moment, and then turns his attention elsewhere. For you, as an observer, the sequence would be the same: you see an empty spot up to the moment when suddenly a chair pops into existence there; you might have a similar thought about it, and from now the chair just remains standing there. Should Joe at some point turn back to see if the chair is still there and then dream its sudden disappearance, then at that moment the chair will dissolve before your eyes as well. Second, let's say the moment you enter the room you look at that center spot, whereas Joe so far has never as much as even glanced there, transfixed by the events in the left part of the room. If the room is mostly empty, then we wouldn't expect neither a chair nor anything else there, so you don't see a chair. (Of course, if the room is actually like a theatre audience with rows and rows of chairs, then we wouldn't expect a gap at this spot either, and so we would do see a chair there. It all depends on what the reasonable thing to expect is.) When Joe turns his attention to this spot, suddenly imagining a chair there, then the chair will duly appear, and for you as observer it will appear only then, even if Joe thinks that it has been there all the time. (That is, the third option above collapses into the second option — there isn't any difference between them, except in what Joe thinks; that, however, is not part of the dream world's exterior, but only of Joe's awareness of it.)

I think this approach preserves most of the authority of the dreamer while still keeping the dream world somewhat stable. Just as always in dreams, completely surprising things can suddenly happen (such as a totally unmotivated appearance of a chair in the middle of the room), but then that's just what dreams are like. However, only with this extra assumption can there be something like a shared dream world, something that both Joe can dream and you can observe. The minimum is some assumption of stability and filled-in detail. Otherwise, the whole idea of entering someone else's dream wouldn't even be conceivable.

But note that this means that Joe can be wrong about the world of his own dream in some respects: not about its present state, for that is exactly as he imagines it, and there is no way he can be wrong about that. (We still hold on to the idea of the authority of the dreaming mind. You can't be wrong about what you imagine. It is as you imagine it, by stipulation.) What he can be wrong about is what was going on before. The past sequence of dream events must be something stable, for that's not something Joe imagines, but something that he has imagined, and you have perceived. It's not something that can be up to anyone's imagination any more. It can be tracked as if it were an objective fact about the dream world, no longer a subjective element that is in Joe's imagination. (I think there is something wrong about this move, but I won't follow up with this here. I'll reserve that for a later post.)

3) So far, we have only talked about looking around, and what it would be like for you to be an observer in someone else's dream. What about exploring this dream world a little more actively? Think of that door next to which Joe is standing. Since he hasn't yet dreamed about what's behind that door, it could be anything from a yawning abyss to an ordinary floor — or perhaps it's a blind door that is fully blocked by a wall. Assuming what is most likely, we would think that if you looked behind it, you'd probably see another room that appears roughly as one would expect; you'd however step through at your peril, for if Joe focuses on it and imagines a blind door there, then you're suddenly in the middle of nowhere (possibly in an adjacent room, or falling down several stories outside — whatever the most likely scenario would be under the changed circumstance, or alternatively, if Joe dreams anything more about it, then whatever that will be).

The world of someone else's dream is an extremely unstable thing: a dreaming mind will change the surroundings all the time. Remember your own dreams: sudden changes of place, or transformations in your surroundings aren't in the least unusual.

4) This is not yet the end of our difficulties. What happens to the authority of the dreamer when it comes to interaction? Once you're not just an observer, but also take action in the dream world, there is potentially a conflict in everything that happens. Suppose you've spotted a chair in the middle of the room, and that chair is actually dreamed by Joe; now you decide to walk over to that chair and sit down on it. Suppose further that Joe's repeating nightmare is an empty chair that just remains empty however long he stares at it. But this time, you just go there and occupy it. Can we still claim that we're in Joe's dream, when this sequence of events is not something that originated in Joe's mind, when it in fact couldn't even have originated there (assuming that the nightmare pattern is relatively sticky and Joe would go through it all over again if left to his dream).

Now you might perhaps say that there is nothing unusual about this: after all, things happen to us in the real world all the time, we don't have full control over events (not even nearly). So why should a dream be different?

It should be different because dreams are a play of the imagination. You may not be able to control what you dream — in fact, most of the time, our dreaming mind plays wild spectacles for us without us having even the slightest say in matters of the program. But even though it is the arbitrariness of our dreaming mind, it is precisely the arbitrariness of our mind. It's not as if you perceive events going on somewhere. You imagine them. Thus the wildest things may happen indeed, but none of them have originated outside your imagination. There is no such thing as an independent actor, or an independent event. It's all in your head.

Intervening in someone else's dream, then, is probably best taken as indeed breaking up the dream state and fiddling with it from the outside. It belongs in the same category as noises or light effects in the sleeper's room which get through to the sleeping mind and become ad-hoc components of the dream; or talking to someone who is in the process of waking. There's decidedly an outside influence here. Sometimes, this idea is taken to the point of actual therapy: in Dreamscape, for instance, dream researchers enter others' dreams in order to figure out the deep-seated origins of nightmares (typically some repressed idea, a notion from the Freudian tradition of dream theory), and address them from within the dream. It is, as if a helping hand is extended to you from a character in your dream, only that this character is not in fact a character at all (someone imagined by you), but a real person who is projected into your dream. (Is there a way for the dreamer to distinguish between a proper dream character and an impostor, someone who came from the outside world into the dream with an agenda?) In any case, interaction is a further complication that makes the idea of entering someone else's dream a rather difficult setup. (Remember that we still haven't even discussed the question how this might be implemented: we're only talking about the phenomenology, that is, how it appears; or how it would appear, if it were actually possible to implement.)

5) Because of all this, in Inception a wholly different process of dream world creation is used.

The basic idea of the movie is that you can get into another person's dreams and there interact with that person's mind, in particular, steal some information that person wouldn't reveal to you when awake. This notion is probably inspired by the observation that dreams do visualize much of our inner lives, especially our emotional lives, which we wouldn't be willing (or even capable) to expose to others in words. Since you put your deepest secrets into pictures when you dream, you open up to spies there much more than when you're awake.

But your dream world would be much too unstable for anyone to enter it, and thus too dangerous — the plot would be infeasible. Therefore, the spies won't simply put you to sleep and then enter your dreams. Instead, they let you enter the dream of someone from the team; and the world of that dream has been pre-designed. It's not something his dreaming mind creates on the spot, it's something that an 'architect' has carefully drafted and later on explained to the team member who dreams it. Then you are invited into this world, and you start walking around in it. When you encounter a safe place, such as a bank vault, you'll picture your innermost secrets as lying there, safely. (You also 'populate' it, in the film's lingo, with projections of people you know.) The gang of thieves, who don't just know the interior of the world much better than you, but also quite probably have built in some back doors and secret shortcuts, will then 'extract' that information from the safe place, and so in effect steal it from you.

So, in other words, the way Inception solves the problem of the instability of dream worlds is by using worlds which aren't, strictly speaking, dream worlds at all. They resemble much more the worlds of a video game: they're pre-designed, not just in their layout, but also with a specific purpose in mind. You don't enter another person's dream, you enter a virtual-reality playfield. (Revealingly, the dream worlds are called 'dream levels' in Inception jargon, which is probably not a coincidence: the worlds of video games are also structured into 'levels'.) By treating dreams as a kind of shared video game, the creators of Inception have addressed an inherently complicated aspect of a world of unreality to make it plausible that you can 'enter' it, as it were, travel into it. (In this way, the film is also similar to those which play around with the notions of the past and the future, to make it plausible that you can travel there, using a time machine.)

(Side remark: This is basically a more detailed exposition of the line of thought at the end of my earlier posting on Projection, interception, and Inception.)

The hot and cold waves of unreality

I don't know about you, but I can think of at least two distinctive ways in which the realization of unreality may strike me when I'm immersed in an instance of fiction. (Let's call them the hot and the cold shock of unreality for the purposes of this blog posting: their effects are somewhat comparable to the ones you get from a hot or cold shower, respectively.) I'll use Groundhog day as example, because in that movie there are some good examples for both of them.

The lead character, Phil (played by Bill Murray), is caught in a time loop for most of the plot, in which he re-lives a single day many times: Groundhog day, a winter day in a small town, on which a yearly event happens (the eponymous groundhog predicts the weather), and about which Phil reports for a TV station. The beginning of the movie introduces Phil and a couple of other characters and sets the stage by running us through the events of Groundhog Day, beginning with the greeting by a pair of radio show hosts over the ether and ending with the crew of main characters stranded in the town for the night because it's cut off from the rest of the country by a blizzard.

Now, up to the moment when the day begins for the second time (indicated by an alarm clock that switches to 6:00 am and kicks off that same radio show announcing Groundhog Day), this could be a typical comedy without anything out of the normal. That we get into fantasy stuff such as time loops, reality repeating itself, is something we realize only then, that is, about twenty minutes into the action, when it dawns on both Phil and us that there is a systematic Déjà vu going on here.

What we, as the audience, suddenly have to do is accept that the world of the story into which we've got ourselves involved includes such strange elements as time loops — if not as a rule, then at least as a possibility. We have to perform what theorists call 'suspension of disbelief' on that element.

But the effect that I have in mind is not simply that we notice some fictionality indicator and must suspend disbelief: that we have to do always, with any work of fiction. (If we didn't, we wouldn't be able even to recognize it as fiction.) It's rather that we have to suspend disbelief more deeply, or in other respects, than we expected when we began to immerse ourselves, when we entered into the fictional contract for the first time, so to speak. Also, it doesn't depend on how strongly the fictional world differs from ours. It doesn't even have to be far-fetched fantasy stuff such as time loops. (One of the strongest instances I remember in a movie is that scene in Woody Allen's Annie Hall when his character draws Marshall McLuhan from behind a poster.) The important thing is that the way in which unreality comes in is unexpected, or unexpectedly intense — just as a hot shower sometimes can be hotter we anticipate. We recognize we have to adjust to some higher extravagance in this plot now than what we've been prepared for, just as we realize we have to adjust to a higher temperature than originally expected.[1]

So much for the hot shower; let's proceed to the cold one.

Once Phil understands the new rules of his world, he quickly becomes expert at using them to his advantage. He gathers detail knowledge about everything within the restricted circle in which he can move and act, and he realizes that there aren't any consequences to any of his actions that reach further than the next morning (not even his own death, which gets reversed at six o'clock each time just as everything else). Being a rather self-centered person, he sets out to put every selfish goal he can think of into practice. (Such as stealing money without getting caught, or tricking women into one-night stands using fake common history, shared interests, and marriage promises.)[2]

As we watch Phil gain manipulative control over the world in which he's moving, we feel that same world becoming less 'realistic', in a way which is difficult to describe: it begins to look predictable, easy to control, no longer interesting, not a challenge any more.[3] No challenge, of course, only as long as we see it from Phil's point of view — for all the other characters, the world becomes less predictable and controllable, up to the point where, seen with their eyes, unexplainable things happen.

But of course that is the reason why it looks less like reality as we know it. In our world, we share a reality with other people, and there is no asymmetry between some who can bend the rules and those who can't, no asymmetry between people in manipulative control such as Phil and others, the clueless victims of their actions. To be sure, reality places us in situations that vastly differ from person to person, but these still are differences within reality, not within two fundamentally different sorts of reality (one which repeats itself to the point of being predictable and controllable, and one which is even less predictable and controllable than usual). The world is not a puppet play (or video game) for a single person. To the extent that the world of the movie becomes one, it becomes less like the real world, and thus less complex and less interesting with it.

To put it differently, it's at least an interesting thought experiment to imagine yourself in the main character's situation, but it's not interesting at all, let alone attractive, to imagine yourself in the position of any of the other characters. This fictional world is a very one-sidedly interesting one. It only looks fascinating through the eyes of one of its inhabitants, making all the others even more into bystanders than usual (even for a movie). The same holds for character development — there is none in anyone, except again the protagonist. You may say that this, in itself, is perhaps not that unusual: works of fictions (including movies) are sometimes very strictly focused on a single character and restrict any personal development to him, or her. But in these cases, it's a question of narrative focus; what we have in Groundhog Day, in contrast, is that the whole reality of the story is set up in a way in which there is no personal history except that of the central person. The whole of reality, so to speak, is constructed around him, and consequently there isn't anything substantial in it for anyone else, which makes it a much less rich kind of world than that in many other fictions.

It's this effect, that the world in a fiction begins to lose reality and looks like a setup, that I mean by the cold shower effect. It may be rather more unpleasant than the hot shower variant, but it's deeper in a sense, because it forces us more decidedly to reflect about the nature of that fictional world with which we are confronted; thus it drives us not only to aesthetic ascent (where we start comparing instances of fiction with each other, and possibly gain some appreciation for the performance of their creators), but also more decidedly to a more philosophical kind of reflection, where we begin comparing the structure and rules of that fictional world with what's similar to (or different from) those structures and rules in the real world.

[1] In the shower, we might also simply turn down the heat a bit; nothing like that is possible with the movie's story: we can only accept and leave, which latter option would be analogous to stepping out of the shower altogether. (Clearly, as with every analogy, there are limits to this one, too.)

[2] A somewhat similar situation emerges in the thriller Next, in which Nicholas Cage plays a stage magician who can actually see a few seconds into the future; at one point he uses this ability to play out, in his foreknowing mind, a lot of variations over how to insert himself in a row between Jessica Biel's character and her nasty ex-boyfriend in such a way that she would be interested in him (as it turns out, several macho approaches don't work, but when he lets himself be knocked out by the raging guy, we wins enough of her sympathy to get her engaged in a conversation).

[3] It regains its power the moment we realize Phil cannot have his way in any matter: he won't be seducing Andie McDowell's character, and he won't be able to save the dying old man, although towards both ends he tries everything he can come up with within his almost unlimited resources. There are things outside the powers of manipulation he has gained from his almost perfect knowledge (perfect within his small circle of influence). Not surprisingly, he realizes that he must change as a person to make a difference in those matters which really matter. At the moment of this realization, and the reinstatement of power to the external world (still the world of the movie), the film also gains decidedly in depth.

Metaphysical apartness and aesthetic ascent

This continues directly my previous post on metaphysical apartness and the stage. I quoted Bernard Williams' observation that there are two different levels of what we see when we're in a theatre audience. We see both Othello strangling Desdemona and we see the actors in those two roles, acting out the events of the drama. Likewise, we're looking both at the palace in Venice and at a scenery which represents that palace. For many purposes, we can just take that scenery to be the palace. But in some respects, we can't. As Williams says, "when in a play someone sets fire to the palace, they do not, hopefully, set fire to the scenery."[1] They're not identical; they're, strictly speaking, different things.

Note that, however immersed we may be in the action when we're watching the dramatic events unfold, we are always aware of that difference. You wouldn't calmly remain in your seat if you thought that the facade of that building in front of you, just a few steps away, were catching fire for real. Likewise, if someone started strangling another person just before your eyes, you wouldn't just sit there and watch, would you?

(There is an extensive discussion in recent philosophy about how exactly unreal events like these can still trigger something resembling authentic emotions, how you could be, as in the title of one influential paper, "fearing fictions".[2] The central question here is why an emotion such as empathy for Desdemona or anger at Othello is felt in the audience but doesn't, as it would in real life, trigger any action at all. Why do emotions in the real world motivate us to do something whereas they simply leave us transfixed and immersed when we're at the theatre or in the cinema?)

In that earlier post I looked at spatial relations and the notion of a point of view. There is, however, also a connection to what I've called aesthetic ascent.

That we can see things thus in two different ways (the world of the play: Othello, the palace, the strangling vs. the real world: actors, a scenery, and acting) is a condition for making the step from immersion in the world of the play to the levels of comparison and appreciation. We can only begin to compare Shakespeare's play to other plays with similar plots, or the particular stage design to that of other productions, or these particular actors to others doing the same part, if there is some discernible difference between, say, watching Othello strangle Desdemona and watching Sir Laurence Olivier and Dame Maggie Smith acting — performing that strangling scene in act V. (It seems that Williams was able to do so; nowadays, our only chance would be on video.)

Even though the world of a fiction can have our full and undivided attention at the level of immersion in the aesthetic ascent; even if we might, for a period, use our capacities of perception and imagination exclusively following the plot of a novel, play, or movie (and, in a more general sense, even a dream, a scenario, a memory or a future plan); even if nothing about the real world occurs to us for quite some time (such as our sitting in a theatre seat or reading chair, the fact that there are other performances of that same play, different tellings of that same story, varying interpretations of what's going on or how it might sediment itself in reality) — even so we are never part of that fictional world; we're in the real world, and thus can never be in the world of an instance of unreality.

At the same time, this apartness is the basis for aesthetic ascent: leaving the level of immersion and comparing that which is going on with other, similar instances. Making this step means to switch between the two ways of looking at things Williams distinguishes: switching between seeing the palace (when immersed) and the scenery (when comparing).

[1] Bernard Williams, "Imagination and the self", in: Problems of the self. Philosophical Papers 1956–1972, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1973, 26–45, 35.
[2] Kendall Walton, "Fearing fictions", in: Journal of Philosophy 75 (1978), 6–27.