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.)

Nested unreality is not always fiction-within-fiction

Fiction, deception, and illusion are different forms of unreality; carefully distinguishing between them helps in not being led astray in interpreting fiction that includes nested forms of unreality. In Shakespeare's philosophy[1], Colin McGinn writes about The Tempest that here "the impression of allegory is strong: the characters 'stand' for something." (143) He then goes on to interpret Prospero as standing "for the idea of the artist", intended to be "Shakespeare's representative" (ibd.).

Prospero, according to McGinn, arranges for the tempest, the romance between Miranda and Ferdinand, and generally everything that happens to all the other characters as a piece of dramatic art, as a fiction. (To use the terminology of this blog, these episodes are instance of unreality; among the various forms of unreality, they would be classified as fictional.) The storm that wrecks the ship in the beginning of the play, then, "was just a performance, giving only the impression of catastrophe, from which all the actors emerged unscathed. [...] The actors didn't know the storm was essentially fictitious, and so performed their roles with authenticity, but all along it was just a piece of make-believe." (Ibd.)

I think this interpretation confuses the way the different forms of unreality work. It's true that fiction is a game of make-believe, but it's a game that is played with asymmetric roles: there are the author, director, and actors in one kind of role (pretending to do something, performing), and the audience in another one (pretending to believe — suspending disbelief). If you and I, for example, perform a scene with a car crash on stage which we both survive, and an audience watches that performance, it's our job (yours and mine) to pretend being shaken and thrown around and the job of the audience to pretend to witness a car crash.

But note a couple of things: first, it makes sense to ask whether the characters survive the car crash in the fictional world of that scene, but it doesn't make sense to ask whether the audience gets hurt. The audience is not in that fictional world. They're only pretending to watch it. The audience, to put it somewhat differently, is apart from that fictional world. Second, in order to suspend disbelief, the audience must be aware that it's a performance that is going on, that they are presented with fiction. Fiction as a game of make-belief works only if you know that it is a game and yet play along. If you're not aware that this is what happens, it's no longer fiction, but deception (or perhaps, in some cases, illusion).

Now ask yourself who Prospero's audience is when he stages his fake storm. Is it Shakespeare's audience (the people who sit in the theatre and watch the play), or is it the group of travelers on the ship? I think it should be clear that the other characters in the play, though subject to deception and manipulation, are not the audience of a fiction. They are confronted with what is, in their world, an instance of unreality, but they're not suspending disbelief with respect to it, they actually believe in it. The travelers on the ship believe that they are caught in a storm, they're not pretending to witness a storm as if they were an audience watching it on television. In other words, the travelers on the ship are in the same situation as the characters are that you and I play in our car crash scene. In their world, what happens is a storm (or a car crash), and they have good reason to think of themselves as being in that situation. Their world is more complicated than the world of the car crash scene, of course: the storm isn't real, but a deception. (Thus it's a case of nested unreality: a deception within a fiction.) But that doesn't put them in the position of a fiction's audience. It puts them in the position of a deception's target.

It seems, then, that the audience in Prospero's drama cannot be the other characters, but it must be the audience of Shakespeare's play. But then it isn't correct that, as McGinn writes, "Shakespeare is introducing theatricality into the lives of his characters" (144). Prospero's words may be reflections of the playwright put into the mouth of one of his characters (and McGinn quotes some lines which make this plausible), but it doesn't follow that Prospero's machinations make the world of the other characters into a stage. Miranda and Ferdinand don't experience their own romance as if it was a fiction (compare with Theseus and Hippolyta watching the romance of Pyramus and Thisbe); the travelers on the ship don't experience the storm as if it was a show (compare the staged murder Claudius and his court watch). They're subject to deception, not audience to a performance.

(As a side-note: if the audience of the spectacle of the tempest is not the cast of characters, but the theatre audience, then it's also a little imprecise to speak of the tempest as "just a performance, giving only the impression of catastrophe, from which all the actors emerged unscathed." If you're sitting in a theatre audience, it's of course just a performance, and you don't expect the actors to be hurt. On the other hand, you can still ask whether the characters in the world of the play were hurt or not: did Alonzo and friends survive the storm, did your character and mine survive the car crash? And that it is just a play doesn't determine the answer to this question. It simply depends on the plot. The plot might be so that they survive; the plot might be so that they get killed. Both outcomes are consistent with the whole thing being a drama.)

[1] Colin McGinn, Shakespeare's Philosophy. Discovering the Meaning Behind the Plays. New York: Harper 2006.

The illusionist effect

Yesterday I went to a magic show, and I found there were some interesting aspects of unreality to observe from that art form. An illusionist would perform numbers such as walking through a mirror or letting a person levitate on stage. What makes these performances so thrilling?

Let's begin by noting that many of the tasks are seemingly impossible and yet they are done right before our eyes. People don't hover some feet above ground (or a table) elsewhere, they don't do so naturally, and even if you try, you won't manage to do it in the real world. What we see is an illusion. Now I'm not interested in exactly how the illusion is produced, but I take it that some combination of clever distraction and technical devices is at work here. But that's not how we perceive it. We perceive a person levitating.

1) That seemingly impossible things happen cannot be in itself the characteristic thing about illusions that we're looking for — we can find that elsewhere as well, namely in fiction.

The world of the illusionist show is not obviously a fictional world, in the way in which novels or movies create fictional worlds that are apart in time and space. Even though the magicians might sport fancy costumes and exotic names, they're not (at least not always) telling a story about someone else, somewhere else, who does magical things. They often pretend to do it in our world, in the real world. (They don't claim to really perform magic, they're open about the fact that they just pretend to do it for their show; but where they pretend to do it is the actual world.)

Compare this with similar situations in movies. If the fictional world of a movie includes the possibility of people levitating (think Harry Potter), we will probably witness some scenes in which they do. Again, the people who produced that movie have used some technical tricks to create that effect. But in the case of a movie, the thrill of such a scene is weaker (of course it depends on how the levitation is introduced and dramatized). We're used to all sorts of strange things that might go on in sufficiently phantastic film worlds. In an illusionist show, it's not quite the same. After all, everything that goes on does go on before our eyes. There are real people on that stage, and real, physical scenes and props. Moreover, time flows exactly as we know it: when people suddenly change their appearance (their costume, say) in a movie, we take it that they have been photographed at some time, then changed, and at a later time photographed in their different outlook. We don't know much about the timing of production, only about the time of the resulting film. On the other hand, when a shapeshifting magician changes into a completely different look in a mere second or two on stage, there is no such intervening time. Whatever it is exactly that happens, it really happens in those one or two seconds.

2) So it seems it's not just that we are presented with a display of something that's impossible or highly improbable — it isn't just pretended that it happens, but also that it happens under circumstances that pretend to certify that it's real (as compared to trickery). An illusionist will go some lengths about reassuring the audience that they're watching the real thing. For example, I saw a number where a woman was shot out of a cannon into a water bowl, and the magician took care to have someone from the audience write her name on the assistant's arm, so that it was very clear that the woman who was presented in the water bowl was the same one, with those unique marks on her arm, as the one who had crawled into the cannon. We might call this 'non-fiction markers', in contrast to those fiction markers (such as the introductory formula 'Once upon a time...') which signal we're entering a fictional world. A non-fiction marker is intended to signal the exact opposite: it admonishes us to situate what we're about to see in the actual world; instead of being asked to suspend disbelief, we're asked to fire up disbelief and actually equip it with all our attention and perceptive capacities. We're encouraged to believe nothing unless we've satisfied us with our own eyes that it's all real. (Even though we know it's not.)

3) If someone asks you to imagine something, you have some leeway to not do it. For example, suppose you're asked to imagine there was no blogging, that the internet hadn't even been invited. You can now wonder what the world would look like if that was the case, but then again, you don't have to. You can simply refuse to imagine such a thing. Likewise, when you're watching a movie or reading a novel, especially if it's a bad one, you may refuse to get immersed in it. You can tell yourself that this is all 'just made up', you can focus your attention on the attempted (though not quite achieved) effect which it is supposed to make but actually doesn't.

With magic, that's more difficult, because illusionist magic projects the imaginary things that go on into the actual world. Magical illusions thus stimulate imagination more thoroughly; they almost force it out. Unless you really see through an illusion (which is something a clever magician will work hard to prevent), you'll have severe difficulties to refuse imagining that things such as levitation are going on here. At the very least, you'll constantly be asking yourself how it is done. But in addition, you'll constantly be encouraged to quickly consider what you're seeing as an option. You will, that is, for a moment ask yourself whether there is really a woman hovering around on stage, or whether you're deceived; but even if you are quick to reject the first option, it has presented itself to your perception for a moment, and so it has at least as a possibility briefly existed in your mind. The space of options that exist in the world widens, even if only for a moment, to include it. And if I'm right, that contributes considerably to the illusionist effect: it widens the space of options, stimulates imagination; and it does so in a manner that's very difficult to escape while you're sitting in the audience.

Fantasy, imagination, and unreality

In a passage I find illuminating,[1] Roger Scruton distinguishes imagination from fantasy (or aesthetic interest from mere effect):

True art appeals to the imagination whereas effects elicit fantasy. Imaginary things are pondered, fantasies are acted out. [...] A fantasy desire seeks neither a literary description, nor a delicate painting of its object, but a simulacrum — an image from which all veils of hesitation have been torn away. It eschews style and convention, since these impede the building of the surrogate, and subject it to judgment. (104–105)

The defining characteristic, then, is that imagination (the operation from an aesthetic interest) creates a distance, where fantasy destroys every distance (104). And it's not just an arbitrary sort of distance, but one that comes from inserting elements that have to do with the specific capacities I described in my post about our appreciation of the craft (in products of the imagination). Since fantasy destroys the distance that is essential in imagination, no beauty and real emotion can survive in it.

Scruton illustrates that point with respect to different subject matters: one is sexual fantasy, facilitated by pornographic images: "pornography lies outside the realm of art, [...] is incapable of beauty in itself and desecrates the beauty of people displayed in it. The pornographic image is like a magic wand that turns subjects into objects, people into things — and thereby disenchants them, destroying the source of their beauty." (163)

Another one is theatre. There, "the action is not real but represented, and however realistic, avoids (as a rule) those scenes which are the food of fantasy. In Greek tragedy the murders take place off stage [...]. The purpose is not to deprive death of its emotional power, but to contain it within the domain of the imagination" (106).

Imagination, as I would put it in the terms used on this blog, engages us in the creation of unreality, whereas fantasy does no such thing for us. It leaves us in the world of reality, and quite probably in a worse way than most alternatives. Since Scruton doesn't use 'unreality' in the technical sense I do, he assigns 'unrealities' both to imagination and fantasy, but that's a difference in terminology only; Scruton's 'unrealities' of fantasy are within our world, not within any world of the imagination: "while the unrealities of fantasy penetrate and pollute our world, those of the imagination exist in a world of their own, in which we wander freely and in a condition of sympathetic detachment." (105) It's that distance which is amiss in fantasy, which is why it wouldn't qualify as unreality (produced by the activity of imagination) in my sense. Fantasy is precisely an example for what it looks like when you take imagination out of the picture: not unreality, but a de-humanized reality.

[1] In his Beauty. Oxford: Oxford University Press 2009. Quoted with page numbers in the text.

Magically illustrated forms of unreality

Here's a very beautiful illustration of some of the forms of unreality by techno magician Marco Tempest. (He uses the term 'deception' as general cover term, where I've used 'unreality' on this blog.) Enjoy.

Unreality, sedimentation, and comedy titles

Those who study the forms of unreality closely develop a keen sense of reality (as I have written in an earlier posting here).

There's probably no better example for this than Shakespeare. He put deceptions, illusions, confusions and the like at the center of many of his plays, and then explored how things would develop. (He once alludes to this technique by inserting a play-within-a-play into Hamlet, where his protagonist has much the same intention with it as his author.) And he was bold enough to openly declare this even in his titles from time to time. There's an entire vacation company having some good parties, making a few practical jokes, getting into a quarrel after a devious mind does some real mischief by creating a deceptive instance of unreality — and it's all Much ado about nothing.

Disconnect, unreality, and unhappiness

In "Leaning from the steep slope", one of the beautifully composed novel fragments in Italo Calvino's Se una notte d'inverno un viaggiatore, the protagonist acts continuously under misinterpretations of the events around him, as we can easily recognize while the story unfolds. He is spending some time in a sea town, recovering from an illness, and the people he meets, a pedantic meteorologist and a young woman with some artistic preoccupation, both pursue shady underground activities. The meteorologist seems to have a political agenda; he submerges for a few days, asking the protagonist to look after his weather instruments meanwhile, then there are some dark-looking men searching for him, and finally he meets the protagonist again in a conspirative setting. The young woman who makes drawings of sea animals is seen to visit an inmate of the local prison, and she asks the protagonist under a weak pretext to get tools (an anchor and a rope) that look suspiciously useful for an escape attempt. But none of this even enters the mind of the protagonist. (Only at the end of the fragment, when he is confronted by an actually escaped prisoner, there is 'a sudden crack' in his universe, but it's not clear which of his illusions has been shattered; or, for that matter, whether that phrase really shows that he's finally recognized what's going on. For all we know, he might shortly come up with another misinterpretation of what he sees.)

While the atmosphere of his surroundings is somewhat grey and clammy, his view of things is exceedingly pathetic. The very beginning reads "I'm coming to believe that the world wants to tell me something, through messages, signs, warnings." [1] Yet the meaning of most observations he makes would be plain with just a little common sense, and still they escape him. A little further down the text: "On some days everything I look at seems laden with meaning: full of messages which I'd have difficulty to define, to put into words, to communicate to others, but which for that very reason seem significant to me." And so an inability to perceive accurately and realistically corresponds with a refusal to come to terms with his own views, an indulgence in lofty self-talk, with the grander scheme of things serving as an excuse not to look at the details of his own life. (At some point, he states: "I'm only reporting my first impressions; for only those count.") Perhaps that sort of attitude is required for such a continuous self-deception.

It quickly becomes clear, however, that his naiveté is used and abused by both his acquaintances. Ingenious though his interpretations of the strange goings-on may be, they are far off a much more simpler reality. He is the tool both of a political underground group and a (very probably) romantically motivated escape attempt from prison. Whatever justification these may have in the broader constellation of the world of the novel, the protagonist himself isn't really acting in that world, not from his own motives, at least. He isn't, in a word, in the driving seat, he's himself just moved around by others.

(A side-note for those familiar with Calvino's book and receptive to the delights of the postmodern novel: this tale of a person driven by other people's interests is in the novel's surrounding plot read to the main protagonist, the 'reader'; and the sentence immediately following the fragment is the ironical: "Listening to someone else reading is entirely different from reading yourself. When you're reading yourself, you can take your time or quickly skim the sentences — it's you who controls the pace." It's as if Calvino wanted to drive the point home from the outside, from the guiding metaphor of the framework plot.)

It's almost a platitude to state that living under illusions isn't good; it is something like a basic premise of a good life that it must be connected to reality. Losing that connection, whether we realize it or not, is a form of unhappiness. We may not necessarily feel unhappy — it isn't unhappiness in a psychological sense; it's not a question only of a state of mind; when we talk about unhappiness here, it's about a condition of our life as such.

Among the reasons for this is that it makes us vulnerable to attempts by others to manipulate us. And being used that way is in turn bad because it means that our actions aren't for the sake of our own goals, including the top-level goal of leading a good life, but for the sake of others' goals. So in the terms I've used throughout this blog, there is a severe weakness of reflection involved here: an inability on the part of the protagonist to make sure the way his life unfolds remains in sync with reality, and in connection with his own goals. At the same time, there's failure of imagination, too. Throughout the story, the hero fails to see other's points of view. However mystical and poetical his interpretations of the world around him may sound, they're unimaginative to the extreme: failing to get a grasp on any concrete idea what might go on, producing no 'candidate realities' whatsoever, and crassly inadequate for seeing things from any of the other characters' point of view. It's others' imagination that controls him, and his own reflection that fails him.

This is a slightly revised version of an earlier posting over at my online journal.

[1] All quotes are my translations from what is already a translation into German; so I might be a little removed from the actual (or, if you will: the 'real') text.