The article mentions a pair studies about how we empathize with others. Apparently, the same mirror neurons in our brain fire when we eat an apple, say, as when we see someone eat an apple, or even if we read the sentence, "She eats an apple." Says neuroscientist Christian Keysers of the University of Groningen, Netherlands:Mirror neurons "transform what you see or hear other people do into what you would do yourself," Keysers says. "You start to really feel what it feels like to do a similar action."I hate to think that a process so seemingly rote or automatic could explain the fullness of why, when I was watching The Sopranos every night, I sometimes found myself, the next morning in my robe, swaggering thickly through my living room like Tony, cereal bowl in hand. Or why, on occassion, I can drop my hip to strike a contraposto pose and, despite the fact of my own soft physique, feel the lean power of Brad Pitt in Fight Club.
I'd like such connections and sensations to remain more mysterious than snapping synapses would allow which is probably why I'm a film critic and not a neuroscientist. I want to understand how the movies effect me and why, but I never really want to be able to put too fine a point on it.
Which is to say that if Godard had written "If direction is a look, montage is a mirror neuron," I'm sure that Breathless would have sucked.
11 comments:
I hear you, Paul. In fact, I think you've expressed one reason why I'm more drawn to film history than theory. Reading theory, discussing it, debating it -- it's fun and, of course, important. But the problem with it, for me at least, is that it reduces the experience of something to a series of electrochemical responses. This is one of my issues with Bordwellian cognitive film theory; it's far too schematic, too presumptive that an explanation of how we respond a film or any text suffices to explain why we respond to it.
It is indeed a fascinating topic and thankfully, film theory seems to be embracing the notion of an embodied film experience more eagerly in recent years. Obviously Vivian was a pioneer in this area. There has also been a lot of interesting work by Laura Marks in Touch and my friend and colleague Jennifer Barker - dissertation The Tactile Eye soon to be published by UC Press. In fact, it is so "of the moment" that we are actually thinking about doing our yearly colloquium next year on "The Senses."
Unfortunately, unlike Paul whose empathetic emulation seems to be triggered by decidedly cool and respectable macho popular culture icons like Tyler Durden and Tony Soprano, I find that mine tends to occur upon repeated viewing of Woody Allen films. Black soap, expressions like “la di da”, constant slouching, whining and endless pontificating about the meaning of life and the Marx Brothers? Perhaps not quite so cool and respectable...
This is a subject that has always interested me and one on which Mookie and I consistently disagree. Perhaps had I chosen film as my academic subject, I would have been drawn to theory as I find the mechanisms of the brain fascinating. I also find all the new research into the brain and genetics very compelling.
Along these lines, I pose a question: Is the mind different from the brain, or is the mind part of the brain? In a recent Time magazine article, a surgeon grappled with this question and came to the conclusion that the mind is something different than the brain, or I should say, more than the brain, rejecting the materialists’ claims that the mind is only there as a product of the brain’s physical elements.
Mookie, and it seems Paul, do not like the materialist scenario. They seem to argue that our experiences as humans are larger, more personal, more “spiritual” if you like, (or as Paul put it, “fuller”) than can be reduced by the neuroanatomists. Mookie states that looking at film experience cognitively may explain how we respond, but doesn’t explain why. But what if the how IS the why?
Doesn’t this argument really boil down to a “spiritual” take vs. a “materialist” take? Mookie claims to be an atheist, yet wants our life’s experiences to somehow be beyond the physical. I consider myself to be an agnostic, yet I find nothing depressing or offensive in the analysis of emotion and human experience as physical responses. As pointed out in a recent book by New York Times science writer Nicholas Wade, Before the Dawn, our experiences in life shape our genes, our chemistry, and our evolution just as our genes, our chemistry, and our evolution shape us.
Must then, a physical look at our responses to film, literature, music, love, etc. be reductive as Mookie states? Just because our experiences are biochemical or genetic or molecular, does it makes them less full? As an agnostic, I am open to the human experience being more than “just” physical, or at least physical in the sense that we know it so far, but if it is, what’s really wrong with that? Or should we take the lead of Iris Dement and “…just let the mystery be”?
There's a bunch to talk about here but I wanted to jump in real quick to say that my mirror neurons don't go all tingling only when I see tough guys on screen.
That said, even though I was a little self-conscious posting those two examples, they were the strongest I could think of at the time.
I feel graceful watching Gene Kelly, I fell slouchy watching Woody Allen. I'm sure there's some cross gender/sexuality identification in their somewhere as well ...
It's all cool and respectable ...
I, for one, am not thankful that film theory has embraced the body. Isn't the theoretical shift toward "embodiment" simply part of the lamentable privatization of film theory (a focus on private states, including the body, affect, and phenomenology)? Doesn't this imply the severing of theoretical and social practice? Why do "body" theorists so often talk about bodies in the abstract without displaying much interest in more specific bodies, e.g., starving bodies, laboring bodies, tortured bodies, police-brutalized bodies, murdered-by-the-US/UK bodies? More pertinently, shouldn't a focus on the body become a venue for building a commitment to universal political and personal ethics from the "ground up"? I think it can, but these don't seem to be questions that interest many people.
My embodied experiences tend to come when watching films that take place in Italy. I can't help but think of myself strolling down the streets of Rome or Firenze or in the Tuscan countryside when I watch any Italian film -- even the 1913 quasi-disaster epic The Last Days of Pompeii.
As to the materialist/spiritualist divide, I do happily consider myself an atheist, but hold close to the theist part of the definition. That is, I'm stating my lack of belief in the existence of god -- not my lack of belief in aspects of life that are not properly expressed or explained through empiricial scientific method. The problem with much science on this issue is the assumption of materialism as the ultimate reason for or explanation of anything. Thus, when a materialist explanation is offered, that it is a materialist explanation is effectively one of the reasons one should believe it. Lori and I have had several discussions about books like Before the Dawn, in which I have tried to point out the tautologies in the author's arguments.
So, yes, I think the film theory debate could be considered a part of this larger debate, materialism v. spiritualism. Paul and I seem to come down on the side of spiritualism -- not in the sense of the Holy Ghost movin' through us, but in the sense of an embodied human experience that is more than the fact of its embodiment.
RK raises an interesting point. Pasolini had some phenomenological tinges to his film theory, yet I've yet to attempt, or seen anyone else attempt, a phenomenological reading of Salo. Is phenomenology a narcissistic paradigm in film studies?
It is quite possible that discussing embodiment is narcissistic in that theorists are assuming that the affect that a particular text has on their own body is the same affect that it has on the bodies of others. However, I don't think that these theorists pass off their proposals as totalizing truths in the same way that cognitive or psychoanalytic theorists do. I think that their objective is for everyone to contemplate and not discount the lived experience of their own body while watching a film or tv show.
I agree with your general point, Michele, but wonder why some embodied experiences are addressed and others aren't. RK listed quite a few bodies that aren't presumed to be part of the phenomenological experience, or perhaps more accurately, problematize the notion that phenomonenology can be a committed theory in the same way that Marxist or feminist film theories can.
Perhaps the fact that phenomonology both is and is not totalizing prevents it from making this kind of social commitment? In the act of turning inward, of recognizing the deeply personal nature of the cinematic experience and then using that as the basis for developing a theory that could be applied to a range of experiences, does phenomenology posit such discrete experiences that no collective action is possible? Is collectivity necessarily desirable in a film theory? Which, of course, is what RK said, but perhaps not with the concern about the impossibility of harmonizing phenomenology and social action.
I should point out a few things: (1) I'm clearly not as well versed in phenomenological theory + criticism as Michele; (2) I find phenomonology actually to be a rather intriguing and inviting theory; (3) prior to this discussion, I'd begun to doodle around on the idea of reading Pasolini through the lens of phenomenology.
The point that I wanted to make was about the ethics of bodies. Material bodies are one thing that we share in common with the rest of the species; and it is because of that that we can feel compassion. (I.e., because we have a body, we can imagine how it feels for other people to be starving, to be agonized, etc.) The body, in other words, can become a focus for reconstructing a universal ethics (there, I said it).
So, the body is important. In fact, it's critical. But the problem with many theorists is that they're talking about the wrong bodies: orgasmic bodies, pierced bodies, etc. (I mean pierced with nose rings, not knives).
The worst kind of body is the "cyber-body": to the extent to which one glues oneself to a piece of metal and wire, you are correspondingly less fleshy - hence less human (in the qualitative sense). The cyber-body is a fantasy of the western world; probably not the kind of thing people in Darfur spend their time thinking about.
Post a Comment