optical bromide

Podcasts are fun!  Podcasts are cool!  I was going to start a podcast, but I never got around to it.  My feelings on the subject were something like this:

I don't want to be Just Another White Person!  So, that was a good excuse to find something else to do.  Perhaps someday I will return to the idea.  I have the equipment (voice, fancy microphone), and a friend willing to join in who is only half-white, and may therefore lend me some much-needed legitimacy.

Today, I submit to you the introduction statement I prepared for my podcast, which never even had a name.  It exists merely as a supposition, but I think it could have gone somewhere.

MY EPHEMERAL PODCAST INTRODUCTION

When I was a child, there was a game I would play in my own head.  I would sit or stand quietly, and I’d close my eyes, and I’d feel myself float away, up and up, away from the ground, and the air, and the colors, and the light – up until I was infinitely high above it all.  I’d be so far away from everything, I’d shut off each of my senses, one by one, until finally I’d gently bump into this indistinct bubble of…nothing.  I would touch it and lose myself, drifting away into the sensation of emptiness, letting my personality sublimate into a boundless ocean of nothing.  I’d always snap out of it after a few seconds, but the goal of the game was to see how long I could maintain that state – it was never very long.

I started playing this game when I was about seven years old, well before I could have fathomed that it might have any meaning.  I asked my mom about it once, and she told me that I was a weird kid, which was true.  It wasn’t an escape, or a meditation, or anything – it was just different, a fun game to try from time to time.

I imagine that I understand how a character in a film might feel if you imbued her with some agency.  A film character is not a person, but our minds turn them into people, much as they create personifications of the actual people we meet in our lives.  If I were to meet you, and we were to spend several hours talking and getting to know one another, each of us would walk away with a more-or-less clear picture of a person who stood for the individual we had just met.  But, inevitably, our conceptions of each other would be vastly different from each of our conceptions of ourselves.  Getting the full measure of a person takes years of attention; even then, there will always be some things that remain stubbornly locked away.  Even at that point, in our minds we merely carry a well-realized impersonation of the individual in question.

Because a character in cinema looks like a person, sounds like a person, and acts like a person, we fit that portrayal into the space in our minds we reserve for people.  We assign emotions, habits, and a personality to that deliberate conglomeration of facial expressions, gestures, costume, context, and lines.  We allow ourselves to be tricked into believing in the existence of such a person, so that we can be emotionally invested in what happens to her.  We let ourselves believe in her reality as a person, including treating her as though she has the capacity to make choices.  But she does not.  Everything she experiences and does is predetermined by the writer and director.

But, if you were to grant a character the power to stop and think about her situation, to give her life, then something very peculiar would occur.  Much like how we can never fully see into the hearts of others, the camera never fully perceives a particular scene.  The field of view is limited, the aperture points in one direction, and something is always missed, no matter how wildly the perspective changes.  Film presents a flat world and asks us to believe it has depth – we supply whatever sits outside the frame from within our own minds.

And so, a film character brought to life would soon realize how much is missing from the world around her.  She would search and, unable to find what does not exist, reach out for something more.  She would perceive the invisibly soft limit of her world in the form of the screen – she would feel that her reality only extends as far as she can perceive, and beyond that lay nothing but a great emptiness.  She may be hopeful.  She may be afraid.  She may find herself wishing that she had never woken up from the endless dream of her simpler life at all.

Whatever her reaction, she wouldn’t be able to touch the screen forever.  That would be a pretty boring movie to watch.  She would eventually have to return to her routine, and try to hold on to that sensation, that connection to whatever lies beyond, which she somehow knows is more real than her world, and contains the Truth.

There is a very famous quote often attributed to the French director Jean-Luc Godard that goes, “film is truth 24 times a second, and every cut is a lie.”  Another quote, by American director Brian de Palma, has it the other way:  “the camera lies 24 times per second.”

If two directors of the highest regard can come to such an opposite understanding of the nature of their medium, what hope do we have to make any sense out of it?  Roger Ebert considered the above contradiction, and tossed in a third perspective, pointing out Picasso’s view that “art is a lie that tells the truth.”  That was Ebert’s clever little way of admitting that he had no idea who was right, or even if anybody could be right, and I find myself in the same boat.  Neither am I equipped to serve up a metaphysical discussion on the nature of truth, whether lies can ever serve the truth, or whether directorial intent makes a difference to the honesty of cinema.

My goal is to tell you why movies are important to me.  From that, you can draw your own conclusions.