PH2224/GEK2040

Philosophy & Film

SF & the Silver Screen

John Holbo

Lecture 1

Speculation:

From Eye to I

Let’s start with the preposition/proposition problem.

Philosophy of/in/through/out of/Film

Christopher Falzon’s Philosophy Goes To the Movies. But one concern might be: if we just look to films to ‘illustrate our ideas’, we will end up with more of a Philosophy Comes Out of the Movies kind of product.

SF as

‘Fiction of Ideas’?

1. Are the ideas in SF film really that good?

2. Is it good for fiction to be ‘idea’-based?

A lot of SF - especially film - has tended to be sort of, well, dumb.

Perhaps the makers do not demand much of audiences. (Or maybe the audience hasn’t demanded much of makers.) How can you hope to tell the difference between us and them?

If you can’t tell this from this?

(They were worried the audience would think the film was about steak sauce, so

they changed the ad campaign.)

Critics often say great literature can’t be just ‘illustrated ideas’ (as Vladimir Nabokov mocked Orwell’s 1984.)

Here’s a concern coming from the other direction.

“Henry James had a mind so fine that no idea could violate it.”

- T.S. Eliot

(Eliot once complained that people read too much H. G. Wells on the train.)

We’ll worry about definitions more in the weeks to come. But suppose we said - science fiction is really speculative fiction. And then we advertise film as an especially good medium for speculating - for seeing, that is.

“I do eyes. Just eyes.”

“Last night I was in the Kingdom of Shadows. If you only knew how strange it is to be there. It is a world without sound, without colour. Everything there - the earth, the trees, the people, the water, the air - is dipped in monotonous grey. Grey rays of the sun across the grey sky, grey eyes in grey faces, and the leaves of the trees are ashen grey. It is not life but its shadow, it is not motion but its soundless spectre.”

- Maxim Gorky (1896)

So should philosophy go to the movies …

or shouldn’t it?

Plato’s Cave as an allegory for a cinema is clear enough. Bunch of people in seats, watching shadows on a screen. Ideally, philosophy should not ‘go to the movies’ - per the title of Falzon’s book. It ought to escape from the movies.

To become more rational.

To become more mature.

To become free.

To become enlightened.

We’ve got a hero …

Who will wake up, painfully …

Journey through darkness …

… to light.

Intolight

Realize the true nature of reality by ignoring the evidence of his senses …

On the way, he will defeat some cool, Cartesian-style deceiving demons …

But in many ways the Platonic picture is reversed.

For one thing the world outside isn’t exactly sunny. “Welcome to the desert of the real.”

“I hate this place. This zoo. This prison. This reality, whatever you want to call it, I can't stand it any longer. It's the smell, if there is such a thing. I feel saturated by it. I can taste your stink and every time I do, I fear that I've somehow been infected by it.” – Agent Smith

And the rational minds are rather sinister. (Who is it who wants to escape from the cave, exactly?)

Reason is potentially sinister because science is sinister because science is associated with machines.

It’s all footnotes to Plato. Still, this never occurred to Plato (who didn’t really focus on technology.)