Imagining From the Inside

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Film Theory and PhilosophyRichard Allen and Murray Smith

Print publication date: 1997Print ISBN-13: 9780198159216Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: Oct-11DOI: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198159216.001.0001

Imagining from the Inside

Murray Smith

DOI: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198159216.003.0019

Abstract and Keywords

This chapter shows the elaboration of the thought theory of emotionalresponse. It focuses on the role of imagining from the inside, or centralimagining, in generating empathic emotions. The book discusses therelationship between central imagining and the contrasting form ofaccentral imagining in which we simulate belief in the events andcharacters of the fiction. The difference between imagining that somethingoccurs (impersonal, or acentral imagining) and imagining experiencing thatoccurrence from the inside (personal, or central imagining). The presence ofsuch self- directed emotions in this way enriches or enhances the overallexperience of fiction. The chapter goes on by discussing certain techniqueslike the point-of-view shot.

Keywords: thought theory, emotional response, empathic emotons, accentral imagining

Close to the beginning of Dead Calm (1989), directed by Phillip Noyce, acharacter climbs on board a deserted boat drifting on a calm sea. He looksaround cautiously, accompanied only by the gentle sound of the boatscreaking wooden frame. The calm is broken by a loud noise; our protagonist(John Ingram, played by Sam Neill) turns his head to see a large, heavypulley swinging directly towards himor more precisely, directly into hisface. We know this because his sight is rendered for us through a POV shota shot which mimics the optical point of view of a character. And in thisPOV shot, the pulley flies fast and directly at the camera. My reaction tothis shot on a first, unprepared viewing, was a visceral flinching, as if the


pulley were about to clock me in the face. (Informal testing on various friendsand audiences suggests that my reaction is not idiosyncratic.) As such, thesequence seems emblematic of the ability of films to create the illusion thatI (the spectator) am a character in the story world, faced with the dilemmasand experiences of (in this case) the protagonist; or, more cautiously, that Iam brought to imagine from the inside the characters experience. In morecommon parlance, I may be said to empathize with the characterthough,as we will see, there are subtle distinctions which the term empathy (in itseveryday sense) glosses over.

Informal commentary on the cinema, as well as more formal theorizingabout it, has often supported the idea that films can astound and terrorizein this way because of their purportedly unrivalled capacity for perceptualand cognitive illusion. In this chapter, however, I will not be concerned withthe notion of illusion; it has been defended, and, to my mind, much moresuccessfully criticized.1 Nevertheless, there are residual questions about thepower of cinema, raised acutely by the kind of experience I recount above,which still have to be answered. The two questions I will focus on here are:what is the place of imagining a character from the inside in engaging witha fiction? And, what is the function of POV, and other striking devices likesudden movements and loud noises, with respect to imagining a characters (p. 413 ) experience from the inside in our engagement with cinematicfictions? In the course of addressing these questions, I will also be reflectingon certain arguments regarding imagination and emotional response in mybook Engaging Characters.2

The idea of imagining from the insideindeed, the phrase itselfis one thatcrops up in the work of both Kendall Walton and Richard Wollheim, and bothaccord it an important place in their accounts of imagination, representation,and art. Walton, for example, cashes in his notion of participation in afictional story in terms of imagining the events and actions of the story fromthe inside. Wollheim argues that to imagine from the inside is to imaginecentrally, a phenomenon he contrasts with acentral imagining, in whichone imagines a situation from no-ones standpoint.3 Gregory Currie makesa similar distinction between personal and impersonal imagination.4 Forboth Wollheim and Currie, imagination is a matter of simulation: to imagineis to simulate having beliefs, attitudes, emotions, etc, other than thoseone really possesses, running our normal mental processes off-line,disconnected from their normal sensory inputs and behavioural outputs.5And just as there is a difference between, on the one hand, believing thatsomething is the case, and, on the other hand, believing that one sees or


hears or otherwise experiences some event, so there is a difference betweenimagining that something occurs (impersonal, or acentral imagining) andimagining experiencing that occurrence from the inside (personal, or centralimagining).6

For Wollheim, when we imagine from the inside, either we ourselves oranother person (or character) can be the protagonist of our imaginativeprojectI could, for example, imagine myself climbing on board the Victory,or I could imagine being Nelson and climbing on board the Victory. Waltonwonders whether imagining from the inside can amount to imagining beinga person or character other than oneself in this sense. He suggests that thereis something intrinsically self-referential about imagining, just as there isabout intending.7 Imagining from the inside another person or charactersexperience has to be routed through, as it were, a self-imagining; Ratherthan imagining oneself to be Eddie or a frog, the spectator might imaginehaving perceptual experiences of certain sorts, ones one takes it to befictional that Eddie or a frog is experiencing.8 A distinct though relatedworry of some theorists is a certain scepticism regarding the depth ofthe feelings we are said to share with a character when we adopt them asa protagonist, that is, imagine what we take to be their experience fromthe inside. Empathy and imagining being seem to imply a kind of totalreplication of a characters experience, and to some, such a replicationseems unlikely.9 However, as we will see, to imagine from the inside doesnot require such a total replication of a characters experience at a givenmoment. To use more of Wollheims terminology, central imagining can be (p. 414 ) more or less plenitudinous. In David Mamets Homicide (1991),for examplea film I will be discussing in more depththere are momentswhen the film invites us to imagine a characters embarrassment, withoutinviting us to imagine the throbbing sensation he presumably feels from arecent blow on the back of the head. Imagining from the inside is frequently perhaps even necessarilypartial.

These differences aside, Walton and Wollheim agree that imaginingexperiences from the insideincluding but not limited to imaginingperceptual experiences, like seeingis an important aspect of ourexperience of representational art. Alex Neill has also made a strong casefor taking this kind of imagining very seriously, in the context of our actualinteractions as well as those with characters in fiction films. Among othersupporting arguments, Neill points out that simulating what we take tobe the beliefs and other mental states of other personsimagining fromthe inside, in other wordsis a basic part of our capacity to understand,


predict, and explain the behaviour of others.10 If this is true, it would bebizarre if imagining from the inside, or empathizing as he calls it, did notplay some role in our experience of fiction films. Currie, however, in spiteof his incorporation of these arguments concerning the pervasivenessof simulating-the-states-of-others, argues that such imagining is only ofperipheral importance in our experience of fiction films. In particular, hecontends that the role of imagining seeinga species of imagining fromthe insidein relation to our experience of fiction films, has been muchoverstated.11 Thus, there are both marked differences and similarities inthe accounts of imagination provided by Currie, Walton, and Wollheim.All acknowledge, however, the existence of imagining from the insidea phenomenon that I will also refer to, depending on which of the variousaccounts is uppermost at a particular point in the argument, as centralimagining and personal imagining.

Two Clarifications

In Engaging Characters, I advance a framework for the analysis andunderstanding of character, identification, and emotional response tocinematic fictions (much of the framework also applies to fictions in general).Although this framework incorporates both imagining from the insideorcentral imagining, as I call it thereand POV, I am not satisfied that it gotthese matters quite right. So I will indulge in this essay in having anothergo. My analysis of character engagementthe phrase I use to denote allthose aspects of interacting with a fiction which bear in some way on thecharacters of the fictionbegins with Wollheims distinction between centraland acentral imagining.12 Engaging with a fiction, I argue, typically involvesboth acentral and central imagining, though any central imagining that we (p. 415 ) engage in is ultimately framed by acentral imagining. In a typicalfilm viewing, we might centrally imagine this characters experience atthis point in the film, that characters experience at another point; and atother points we may be imagining the scenario outside any charactersperspective, that is, acentrally. Moreover, our experience of the film asan emerging whole must be understood in terms of acentral imagining: Imight imagine from the inside Ingrams experience of the pulley swingingtowards him, but as I continue to watch the film my knowledge of the largersituationIngrams wife Rae stranded on another boat with a madmanwhile Ingram climbs on board the deserted shipsupersedes my imagining,from the inside, that moment in Ingrams experience. My central imaginingsare, to adapt a term from Nol Carroll, assimilated into a broader, acentralperspective on the situation.13 And this kind of overarching knowledge,


of the experience of several characters in disparate locations, cannot beimagined from the inside. Central imagining might be prompted locally, butour global response is acentral. Engaging with fictions thus involves a mixof central and acentral imagining. What is less clear is the precise place andfunction of the central imagining, and the degree to which textual structure(in which I include everything from large-scale narrative structure to theminutiae of stylistic usage at a particular point in the film) determines thenature of our imagining; these are the issues I aim to clarify here.

In my account of character engagement, I posit three levels of narrationalstructure under the rubric of acentral imagining: recognition (theidentification and assignment of traits to characters); alignment (therevelation of the actions and psychological states of characters); andallegiance (the evaluation of characters, especially morally but in other waysas wellaccording to notions of taste, for example). Under the rubric ofcentral imagining, I posit three processes: emotional simulation (simulatingthe emotional states of a character by imagining their experiences from theinside), affective mimicry (mimicking the affective states of characters in aninvoluntary fashion, prompted by facial and vocal cues),14 and autonomicresponses (reacting in reflex fashion to represented events in the sameway as a character does-as, for example, in the startle response, in whichwe jump at sudden loud noises or rapid, unexpected visual movements).There are two respects in which the description I have just given benefitsfrom conceptual clarificationconcerning the relationship between textualstructure and psychological process, and concerning the relationship amongsimulation, mimicry, and autonomic responses.

As I set this framework out in Engaging Characters, the distinction betweentextual structure and psychological process is blurred, or rather treated asif the two were always identical: that a particular kind of textual structuredetermines a particular kind of psychological response (note the impliedequivalence, in the preceding paragraph, in describing acentral (p. 416 )structures and central processes). In some cases this is true. Since thestartle response is hard-wired, so long as we are functioning normally, aloud bang on the soundtrack will inevitably result in a startled reaction.Also, if a film-maker wants to make the viewers experience of the storyworld match that of a deaf character, and he removes all diegetic soundfrom the soundtrack, then he has determined that aspect of the viewersperceptual experience (as in particular scenes in Abel Gances Un grandamour de Beethoven [1935] and Joseph Lewiss The Big Combo [1955]).But with respect to higher-level psychological processeslike central


imaginingtextual structure does not, at least not in all circumstances,wholly determine psychological process. Of course, textual structure directsand constrains our responses: minimally, a film must align us to somedegree with a characterthat is, provide us with knowledge of a charactersactions and felt experienceif our central imagining is to be motivatedor authorized. But there is nothing in the Dead Calm sequence whichdetermines that it will be centrally imagined by the viewer, even if there iscasual evidence that this happens for some viewers. So, rather than arguingthat there are two sets of textual structures which neatly match up withtwo distinct types of imagining (central and acentral), I now argue that all ofthe textual devices and structures (recognition, alignment, allegiance, andany other ones we may posit) represent for us the events of the narrative incertain ways, which may then trigger either acentral or central imagining (orindeed certain other psychological responses, which are not appropriatelylabelled imaginativebut that takes us on to the second clarification). Iwill, however, argue that certain kinds of textual structure may foster orpredispose us to imagine in one way rather than another, as distinct fromdetermining the nature of our imaginative response.15

The second clarification concerns the relationship between central imaginingand the concepts I connect with it: emotional simulation, affective mimicry,and autonomic responses. In a review of Engaging Characters, Berys Gautwrites: Central imagining is held to include not just simulation of othersmental states, but also mimicry, affective and physical, and autonomicresponses, such as being startled. But mimicry need not involve exerciseof the imagination, and autonomic responses certainly cannot, or else theywould not be autonomic.16 Gaut is quite right to spot some fudging here.So I would now recast the relationship among these concepts, and thephenomena they describe, in the following way. Emotional simulation isessentially a species of central imagining, which focuses on our imaginingsof the emotional states of others, rather than the entire range of possibleembodied experiences. Affective mimicry and autonomic responses are notforms of imagining, for the reasons Gaut states, but they are appropriatelyconnected with central imagining and simulation because they oftenfunction as aids or prompts to such imagining and simulation. (p. 417 ) Theyare examples of textual devices which foster central imagining, withoutmandating it. Jumping at a loud bang or a sudden movement, or mimickingan expression rendered in close-up, are not imaginative but autonomic andsub-intentional responses; but along with other aspects of the film, they mayhelp us to imagine vividly, from the inside, some situation or experience. Thisis a point I will expand on below, with some examples.


What about POV? Where does that textual device fit into this thicket ofstructures and imaginative responses? As part of the effort in EngagingCharacters to resist vague claims about how we identify with characters inwatching films, I argued against the widely accepted view that a, if not the,primary function of the POV shot is to inculcate identification between thelooking character and the spectator.17 This still seems to me to be correct.However, there is something to the intuition that POV is connected withidentification, beyond the minimal concession that such shots necessarilyforge perceptual access (that is, they allow us to see what a character seesfrom the spatial position of the character). I will argue that POV shots canfunction as powerful prompts to central imagining, though not in quite thesame way as devices prompting mimicry and autonomic reactions. If we lookat how POV shots work in context, this will become clear.

POV shots typically work in a two-part structure involving not only a POVshot but a reaction shot. The POV shot itself shows us what the characteris looking at, from her spatial location; the reaction shot tells us something(often quite a lot) about the nature of the characters attention to the object(the facial expression of the looking character typically gives us at leastsome indication of the psychological state of the looker: interest, anger,fear, or whatever). And of course, the context of these shots in the largernarrative will usually allow us to specify further the subjective state of thecharacter.18 What the POV shot itself doesand does in a way that no othershot can-is to render certain aspects of visual experience. By so renderingthe visual experience of a character, the POV shot is apt to prompt us toimagine seeing as the character does (imagining seeing being, once again,a specific type of central imagining). Moreover, as part of a larger sequenceinvolving complementary reaction shotsand shots of other sortsthe POVshot plays a role in developing multifaceted alignment with a character:a situation in which we have not only perceptual access (the POV shotshows us what we are to imagine a character sees), but a sense of what thecharacter thinks and feels (through the reactions shots, and indeed the waythe shots are edited, juxtaposed with music, and so forthin short, the waythe whole is expressively orchestrated). In such cases, the POV shot worksto promote central imagining as a part of a larger structure of multifacetedalignment.19 This formulation gives POV its due, recognizing its unique role (p. 418 ) with respect specifically to imagining seeing, without falling into thefallacy of POVthe assumption that POV shots somehow wire us directly intothe mind of a character. This fallacy arises from abstracting the POV shotfrom its context, and assuming that it works in glorious isolation. The factthat the POV shot can act as a prompt to central imagining only in context


differentiates it, as a device, from those that prompt mimicry and autonomicreactions. Though all three devices tend to foster central imagining, mimicryand autonomic responses do not require this kind of contextualization.

Now, I think, we can begin to see how the sequence from Dead Calmmight solicit central imagination so effectively. It develops just this sort ofmultifaceted alignment, and enhances it through devices which are apt totrigger autonomic and mimicking responses. Ingrams approach to the largerboat is rendered by an alternation of POV shots and reaction shots, showingus how the bow of the boat looms up into his vision, and how the bright sunforces him to squint as he looks up at the rigging. We are given a precisesense of what he sees and hears, and because we have also been restrictedto what he knows about the boat, our thoughts about the boat are likelyto match his in many respects. As he climbs aboard the boat, a mediumshot follows him from behind as he moves cautiously along the deck, theframing gradually tightening into a close-up. At this point the sudden loudthump is heard from off-screen, causing Ingram to swing around and face thecameranaturally enough, facially expressing shock/ apprehensionat thesame moment that we start in our seats. Cut to the POV shot showing thepulley swinging directly into the camera, and so rapidly growing larger in theframea visual correlate to the shock of the sound. Cut back to the previousframing, showing Ingram ducking fractionally before the pulley swings intoview, again filling the frame. The sequence thus confronts us with a barrageof techniques designed to evoke, and invite us to centrally imagine, Ingramsexperience (which are nevertheless probably found to be more compelling asa prompt to central imagining by some spectators than others).

I have concentrated on this sequence from Dead Calm because it uses POVwithin a structure of multifaceted alignment, as well as drawing on affectivemimicry and the startle response, in a particularly telling fashion. I shouldadd, though, that neither POV nor any other individual device is essentialto the prompting of central imagining. A POV shot is not essential to theprompting of central imagining because the target of the central imaginingmay not be a perceptual state, but, for example, an emotional state. POVmay be particularly effective in rendering how a character sees, and soenabling our imagining from the inside how the character sees, but it isnot particularly useful in evoking, say, a characters joy or humiliation oranxiety. Emotional simulation certainly does not need a POV shot in order tobe prompted.20


(p. 419 ) Homicide provides a pertinent example of this sort of case.Detective Bobby Gold has been distracted from a case in which heis enthusiastically involved, by another case involving an old Jewishwoman who has been murdered in her candy store, situated in a blackneighbourhood. The family of the woman believe the murder to be anact of anti-Semitic persecution, and their fears are heightened when thedead womans daughter-in-law believes she hears a gunshot outside theirapartment. Against his will, Gold is compelled to investigate this incident,in large part because he is (by birth, rather than practice) a Jew. Angeredby what he believes to be the paranoia and undue influence of the Jewishfamily, he reluctantly and sceptically checks around their apartment. At onepoint, he takes a call from his partner regarding the other case, in a roomwhich he believes he alone occupies. The narration of the film maximizes oursubjective access to Gold, through framing and dialogue; it also restricts usto his range of knowledge, as in Dead Calm. Along with the fact that Gold hasbeen presented sympathetically up to this point, this strategy predisposesus to centrally imagine Golds emotionshis frustration and anger at thedemanding and entitled attitude of the Jewish family. All of this occurswithout the use of POV shots or shock effects (though affective mimicrythe involuntary, low-level mimicking of Golds expressions, and thus of theaffects they expressmay again play a role here). We will return to thisscene from Homicide after considering the implications for my argument ofanother view of imagining in the cinema.

Currie on Personal Imagining and Pov

Gregory Curries recent study of film overlaps in many places with my ownstudy, particularly with respect to the role of imagination in our experience ofcinema. However, while there is a significant degree of convergence betweenour arguments with respect to imagination and POV, some of the details ofCurries argument tend to pull in just the opposite direction to the revisionsand refinements of my argument discussed above. I want to examineCurries argument, then, as the strongest argument against the kind ofposition I have set out above, in which central imagining plays an importantrole in our experience of films, and in which POV plays an important role inprompting one variety of such imagining, namely, imagining seeing.

Curries contrast between personal and impersonal imagining is, as we haveseen, very similar to the contrast between central and acentral imagining.One of Curries most controversial proposals concerns in particular imaginingseeing. To imagine seeing something is to imagine seeing something from


some particular vantage-point in the story world. Currie argues, (p. 420 )correctly in my view, that a widespread assumption in film theory is thatviewing a film involves imagining seeing from the perspective defined bythe cameras position. The Imagined Observer Hypothesis, as he calls it,has been regarded as a major factor in the power of cinema. What we areto imagine seeing is given directly to us by the cameras field of vision; thisdirectness accounts for the sense of immediacy that is (purportedly) theunique possession of cinema.

Currie argues that this is a seriously mistaken view, and suggests insteadthat our experience in the cinema is defined by perceptual but impersonalimagining.21 Our imagining is perceptual in that it depends primarily on ourvisual capacity to recognize objectswe recognize a shot of a horse usingthe same capacity we would use in recognizing a real horse. However, thefact that the imaginative prompt is visual, and perspectival, does not meanthat we must imagine that the position from which the object is representedis occupied by an agent, and that we are to imagine from the inside thatagents perceptual experience.22 As Wollheim remarks, in a way that chimesvery much with Curries argument: mental imagery, taken in isolation,abscinded from the thoughts and intentions that motivate it, is no sure guideto the mental processes of which it is the vehicle.23 In short, perceptualimagining does not entail imagining seeing.

Another distinction Currie makes, apparently of less significance, is thatbetween primary and secondary imagining. Primary imagining is simplyimagining what is true in the fiction. In Anna Karenina it is true that Annacommits suicide; in Dead Calm it is true that our protagonist almost getshit in the face by a pulley. Secondary imagining refers to imagining thatwe undertake in order to work out what we should imagine is true in thefiction. This comes into play where what we are primarily to imagine is theexperience of a character.24 Where a fiction focuses on the quality of acharacters experience, imagining what the character thinks and feels isoften integral to the process of working out what is true in the fiction, sincenot everything is or indeed can be literally spelt outfor aesthetic as well aslogical reasons:

What the author explicitly says, and what can be inferredthere from, will constrain our understanding of the charactersmental state. It will set signposts and boundaries. But if theseare all we have to go by in a fiction, it will seem dull andlifeless. It is when we are able, in imagination, to feel as thecharacter feels that fictions of character take hold of us. This


process of empathetic reenactment of the characters situationis what I call secondary imagining.25

This seems to me persuasive in and of itself; but it is not clear how thiscoheres with Curries larger claim that imagining in response to films isoverwhelmingly impersonal imagining.26 For it is clear from the quotedpassage that secondary imagining is, or at least typically is, personal (p. 421 ) imagining (and might therefore involve imagining seeing, whichis a species of personal imagining). So the question is: how does Curriereconcile the importance he attaches to personal imagining (under theguise of secondary imagining) here, with his argument that spectatorshipin the cinema is characterized by impersonal imagining? (This echoes, ofcourse, one of the questions posed by this essay as a whole, as much tomyself as to Currie: if we grant that experiencing fictions involves bothtypes of imagining, how are they related?) Moreover, there is something oddabout tagging empathetic re-enactment (central imagining, in my terms)secondary, given the important role Currie gives it in the passage quotedabove. Here central imagining is integral, rather than merely instrumental(as the adjective secondary implies), to the power of at least a certain kindof fiction. And this worry applies to fictions in general, not merely cinematicfictions, as the hierarchy between primary and secondary imaginings isone that applies to all fictions. Currie may underestimate the importance ofpersonal imagining to fiction in general, not merely to fiction films.

What about the role of POV with respect to imagining in the cinema? In thesection where he most explicitly focuses on POV, Currie argues that it hasbeen accorded an unduly high value in film theory, and that the conceptof POV has become overextended as a result of the mistaken applicationof a psychologistic principle to filmthe principle that the content ofthe cinematic image is [standardly] to be interpreted as the content ofsomeones visual experience27a close relative of the Imagined ObserverHypothesis. Perhaps recognizing the widespread assumption that POVshots instil identification between the looking character and the viewer,Currie seems to be awarethough he never states thisthat the POVshot might be seen as a counter-example to his cinema-as-impersonal-imagining thesis. If we were to identify with a character on the basis of a POVshot from that characters vantage-point, that would surely mean that wewould imagine seeing the diegesis from just that vantage-point. So Currieis eager to demonstrate how the subjective content of the POV shot canbe accounted for by sole reference to the characters experience, not to


our own. Discussing the POV shot in Spellbound in which we see Dr Bruloffthrough the bottom of a glass as Ballantine drinks from it, Currie writes:

We are not required to imagine that we see Dr Brulofffrom Ballantines perspective or any other. In general,subjective shots function to help us imagine what a charactersexperience is like, not to imagine ourselves being thatcharacter and having that experience.28

In short, theories of cinema which place POV at the centre are barking,indeed positively climbing, up the wrong tree.29

It is not surprising that Currie should find such theories so uncongenial. (p.422 ) If we look at his argument against the Imagined Observer Hypothesis,we find an example of POV (from Hitchcocks Vertigo (1959)) as anaccepted challenge to his theory. The shot is one of Hitchcocks celebratedsimultaneous dolly-zoom combinations, in this case rendering the vertiginoussensations of Scottie (James Stewart) as he peers down the convent stairwell.Currie admits that this is a case of imagining seeing, but the force of theexample is held in check by the fact that it is an extraordinary case thatcannot be made the basis of a theory of cinema.301 do not think it can either,but I think it raises more problems for Curries theory, and more issues ofinterest, than he grants.

What is it about the shot that makes Currie accept this as an example ofa film fostering imagining seeing? Presumably it is the unusual play withperspective within the shot, given that elsewhere, when he discusses POVshots, he stresses their failure adequately to mimic perception (and so fosterimagining seeing).31 The queasy sensation (which results from a shrinking ofapparent depth while size remains constant) so effectively renders Scottiesexperience, he implies, that it would be foolish to argue that the shot doesnot instil or at least encourage imagining seeing (and imagining experiencingvertigo). But it is not clear why or how the zoom-dolly effect is in principledifferent from the framing of a shot from a characters position in terms of itsability to render effectively a visual experience. Surely the zoom-dolly effectis no more an exact replication of how vision appears to one experiencingvertigo than is a POV shot an exact replication of ordinary vision. Whydoes the zoom-dolly effect give the effect of a vertiginous experience32and the framing of a shot from a characters position not give the effect ofseeing from that position? Without an argument demonstrating that onecan distinguish the two cases, there is nothing to stop us generalizing fromCurries own description of the effect of the shot from Vertigo, to POV shots


in general.33 Combining the minimal, and I think incontestable, claim that thePOV shot provides information about a characters visual experience (whata characters experience is like), with Curries own arguments about theimportance of secondary personal imagining, the implication that POV shotsmay foster imagining seeing seems inescapable. And once POV shots areaccepted as being capable of fostering imagining seeing, the notion that itis only extraordinary shots which achieve this begins to look suspect (evenif we define POV shots very strictly, and exclude partial and metaphoricalPOV shots, as he urges we should).

In the last few paragraphs, I have been arguing that POV shots representa problem for Currie because they seem so readily and well explainedby the Imagined Observer Hypothesis (even if other types of shot arenot). The reader might conclude from this that my argument about POV isbeing mounted not only for its own sake, but in order to rehabilitate theImagined (p. 423 ) Observer Hypothesis. This is not my goal here, even ifthere clearly are problems with Curries wholesale rejection of imaginedseeing. I can afford to be agnostic on this question, because the correctness(or otherwise) of Curries critique of the IOH does not, in fact, affect myargument concerning the important place of central/personal imagining infilm, nor of the role of the POV shot in fostering imagining seeing, odd asthis may seem. If the IOH is correct, then there is clearly no problem withmy argument on imagining seeing and POV: imagining ourselves seeing asthe character sees on the basis of a POV shot just becomes a subtype ofthe general form of cinematic imagining, that is, imagining that we are anobserver seeing from the vantage-point of the camera.

Perhaps more surprisingly, if the IOH is wrong, my arguments about POVand imagining seeing can still be sustained. This is so because there is away of reconciling the rejection of the Imagined Observer Hypothesis, andthe apparently incompatible claim that POV shots encourage us to imagineseeing what the character seesthough it involves a most serpentine (andunparsimonious) series of connections. It works like this. Films provide uswith visual and aural representations. These prompt perceptual imagining(as defined above, 420). On the basis of POV shots, we may then engage insecondary, personal imagining, including imagining seeing what a charactersees. (This then feeds back into primary, impersonal imaginingimaginingwhat is true in the story world.) So, Curries framework allows for imaginingseeing, and being prompted to do so by POV shots, but not directly, and onlyinstrumentally.34 These two routes from POV shots to imagining seeing canbe summarized in the following way:


IOH true: POV shot # imagining seeing

IOH false: film # perceptual imagining # secondary imagining,e.g. imagining seeing

To recap the argument so far: central imaginingor what Currie refers toboth as personal imagining and empathetic reenactmentseems to playa more significant role in our appreciation of fictions than Currie overtlyallows for two reasons. First, because secondary imagining is not merelyinstrumentally important for determining what is true in the fiction, butintrinsically important in many fictions (fictions of character). This applies tofictions regardless of the medium in which they are told. Secondly, in relationto specifically filmic fictions, POV shots may play a role in fostering imaginingseeing. And this remains true whether we regard this as happening directly,or indirectly through a circuitous series of connections. For both POV shots infiction films, and fictions in general, may foster personal imaginings, even ifthe Imagined Observer Hypothesis is in general wrong. Moreover, as part of astructure of multifaceted alignment, POV shots may also foster a richer formof personal imagining than merely imagining (p. 424 ) seeingimagining acomplex of actions, thoughts, and feelings, as in the sequence from DeadCalm.

Why Bother with Acentral Imagining, then?

So central/personal imagining is an important kind of response we have to atleast fictions of character. Imagining a character from the inside is a majorpart of the appeal and interest of such fictions. This is rarely the whole story,however: responding appropriately to such fictions involves both central andacentral imagining, interwoven with one another. The concept of centralimagining is necessary but not sufficient in understanding our experience offictions of character. The difficulties of claiming that central imagining aloneprovides an adequate conceptual framework can be summarized by notingthat fictions of character typically provide us either with too much, or withtoo little, information for central imagining to be sustained throughout theduration of such a fiction. Let me explain this perhaps mysterious statementwith some more examples.

The development of the sequence from Homicide discussed earlier isinstructive in this regard. We left Bobby Gold talking on the phone with hispartner, cursing the Jewish family. To be exact: fuck em and the taxes theypayeh, not my people baby, fuck emwith so much anti-Semitism thelast four thousand years we must be doing something to bring it about.


As Gold utters these words, he shifts his position and the granddaughterof the murdered woman is revealed to be sittingstill unbeknownst toGold in the room. Now, if we have been brought to imagine from theinside Golds feelings up to this point, as suggested by the earlier analysis,something occurs here which complicates this. In place of the exclusivealignment with Gold, the film momentarily, if minimally, provides us withmore information than Gold possesses, by revealing the granddaughterto us before Gold becomes aware of her presence. In doing this, the filmfocuses our attention on the clash of perspectives between Gold and thegranddaughter, on the dramatic irony of the situation, and as such elicitsacentral imagining.35Homicide is entirely typical in this respect. In eitherminor or major ways, fictions always break absolute alignment betweencharacter and viewer.36

If Homicide demonstrates the way in which a film might demand somethingother than a centrally imaginative response by giving us too muchinformation, a film like Dead Man Walking (Tim Robbins, 1996) shows howproviding too little information can have a similar effect. Part of the powerof the film lies in the way that it inculcatesif it is successful imaginingfrom the inside aspects of Mathew Poncelet (Sean Penn)s experience, as hewaits on death row convicted of murder. It is indeed an (p. 425 ) unsettling,but potent and fascinating, experience to imagine awaiting execution. Partof what we imagine here is Poncelets feeling of utter powerless-ness in theface of a system that seeks his execution, in spite of what may be injusticesin his treatment. But again we come up against the limits of the concept ofcentral imagining, on its own, as an analysis of our experience of fictionsof character. For much of the duration of the film, Poncelet denies that hemurdered either of the two victims. He admits to assaulting them, but claimsthat the trigger was pulled by his older associate. This older associate hasplea bargained his way off death row, Poncelet claims, by dishonestly layingthe blame on him. Given our knowledge of the American justice systemincluding preconceptions derived from other dramatized representations ofit, like the earlier film J Want to Live! (Robert Wise, 1958)this is plausible;at least, it is as plausible as the possibility that Poncelet is lying. Given thatthis aspect of the fiction is in doubt, we cannot just imagine centrally whatit feels like to be Poncelet, because we do not know for certain what beliefswe should be simulating. At the very least, our central imagining is severelycircumscribed by this lack of certainty. Of course, one way in which wemight try to puzzle out what really happened is through central imaginingon the basis of what we do know about him and the events surrounding themurders, which increases as the film continues (this is what it means to say


that imagining from the inside functions instrumentally). But, so long as weremain in doubt over major questions (did Poncelet shoot one or both of thevictims? did he rape the female victim? has he deluded himself into believingthat he did not?), our central imagining must be partial, tentative, andtemporary.37 In this way, central imagining in the context of our experienceof fiction should not be taken to amount to imagining being, if that isdefined as a complete replication of the experience of a character. So longas we are attending to the fictionrather than using it as a jump start for aprivate reveriewe will always be brought back or deflected from sustainedand deep central imagining.38

There is no single logical, psychological, or aesthetic formula whichwill tell us what the right balance of acentral and central imagining is,either as something an artist aims to elicit or as a perceivers elicitedresponse. Consider, though, as a contrast to both Homicide and Dead ManWalking, Larry Clarks kids (1996). One of the reasons that this is suchan uncomfortable film to watchat least, for adults to watchis that itdoes everything it can to evoke the mindset of a group of manipulative,selfish, sexist, immature teenage characters. In evoking the values andattitudes of this group, in large part through multifaceted alignment withthe main characters Telly (Leo Fitzpatrick) and Casper (Justin Pierce), thefilm encourages us to centrally imagine (some of) their experiences. Thefocus on these characters is not unrelievedin terms of alignment, the filmalternates (p. 426 ) between Telly and Jennie (Chloe Sevigny) (a girl thatTelly has seduced and infected with AIDS), as she discovers her condition,numbs herself with drugs, and attempts to track Telly down. Nevertheless,one feels imaginatively trapped within a narrow and distasteful mindsetin watching the film; and if we centrally imagine the states of mind of theteenage protagonists at least part of the time, this sense of claustrophobiais intensified. Dead Man Walking evokes the terror of the murderer on deathrow, but also the sorrow and righteous hatred of the victims parents, andthe compassion and forgiveness of Helen Prejean (Susan Sarandon). kidsrestricts itself almost wholly to teenage libido, fear, and desolation.

How one evaluates these different films and the manner in which they elicitdifferent forms of imagining is an issue that I cannot hope to resolve here.By way of conclusion, however, it is important to note the general valueof central imagining where it occurs, no matter how partial, tentative, andtemporary. One facet of its value is that the force of dramatic conflicts isenhanced if we centrally imagine the perceptions, thoughts, and feelings ofthe characters involved. I do not mean by this that acentral imagining cannot


lead to intensely felt emotions, as intense as any we might experiencethrough central imagining. Rather, I mean that central imagining adds aqualitatively different kind of emotionan imagined, self-directed emotion,rather than an imagined, other-directed emotion; imagining being on deathrow and dreading ones own execution, rather than imagining (from theoutside, acentrally) Mathew Poncelet and his plight. Such emotions arecrucial to the larger psychological and social value of fictions: we come toa better understand of both ourselves, and others, through such centralimagining. As Walton puts it, In order to understand how minorities feelabout being discriminated against, one should imagine not just instances ofdiscrimination but instances of discrimination against oneself; one shouldimagine experiencing discrimination.39 The presence of such self-directedemotions in this way enriches or enhances our overall experience of fictions.The emotions of central imagining add yet more zest to the already emotion-laden broth of acentral imagining in which they float, though they do notmake a soup alone.

Notes


Notes:

Thanks to Richard Allen, Paisley Livingston, Carl Piantinga, and Greg Smithfor grappling with and commenting on earlier versions of this essay.

(1) . Over the last decade, a number of deflationary accounts of the power ofcinema have been developed, which reject the idea that cinema standardlycreates an illusion of reality, the efficacy of the illusion being its sourceof power. See, for example, Nol Carroll, Mystifying Movies: Fads andFallacies in Contemporary Film Theory (New York: Columbia UniversityPress, 1988); Gregory Currie, Image and Mind: Film, Philosophy, andCognitive Science (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995); and myown remarks in Film Spectatorship and the Institution of Fiction, Journal ofAesthetics and Art Criticism, 53: 2 (Spring 1995). In the chapter followingthis one, Malcolm Turvey questions the cogency of my alternative accountof emotional response to the fiction film, so I should say a word here byway of response to his argument. Turveys intricate conceptual analysisof seeing, inspired by Wittgensteins remarks on the subject, certainlyraises a number of astute and pertinent questions for the thought theoryof emotional response to cinematic fictions. I will restrict myself here to abrief comment on what seems to be the underlying point of disagreementthat is, on the relationship between perception and cognition. ThoughI accept that the phenomenology of seeing in different contexts is verydifferent, as Turveys analysis suggests, I find the radical separation ofperception and thought implicit in his chapter hard to swallow. What wesee in a cinematic fiction is surely constantly contextualized by the kinds ofthoughts we have about what we are seeing: whats that character lookingat off-screen? Why is she smiling all of a sudden? Whats that strangeobject at the top of the screen? (Oh, a microphone, thats a mistake.) Theseare all things that we have to work outthink aboutin the course ofsimply understanding a film. (So perhaps understanding a film is rather likeWittgensteins description of seeing a schematic figure in various ways,which demands imagination (445).) Moreover, if seeing a (fictional) world in


a film is sufficient to explain why we might respond emotionally to what wesee, presumably seeing something is in general sufficient for an emotionalresponse to it. But surely our seeing thingsin reality or in representationsjust does not exist in isolation from various cognitive activities (thoughts)which accompany them. I might (i) see someone shot on the sidewalk infront of me, (ii) see my nephew firing a toy gun at a friend, (iii) see a filmin which someone gets shot on a sidewalk, (iv) encounter a happening inwhich I see someone get shot on the sidewalk, and then realize that thisis a fiction. In all of these cases, we see something; but that hardly seemssufficient in explaining exactly how we respond (emotionally) to what wesee, which involves contextualizing and interpreting what it is that we see.Turvey seems to acknowledge these sorts of differences in his discussionof fiction at the end of his chapter, in which he argues that such differencescan be adequately captured in the language of behaviour. The commitmentto psychological explanation itself, then, seems to be the crux of Turveysobjections to the thought theory. In spite of this disagreement, Turveysarticle is valuable even for cognitivists in pointing up the need to clarify howimaginative activity and the spectators physical perception of the concretecinematic image are integrated (435), as Turvey puts it.

(2) . Murray Smith, Engaging Characters: Fiction, Emotion, and the Cinema(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995).

(3) . Richard Wollheim, Painting as an Art (London: Thames: Hudson, 1987),103.

(4) . Both are influenced in making this distinction by Bernard Williams,Imagination and the Self, in Problems of the Self (Cambridge: CambridgeUniversity Press, 1973)

(5) . Currie, Image and Mind, 144. For another relevant discussion ofsimulation in relation to films, though in connection with what I am callinghere acentral imagining, see Richard J. Gerrig and Deborah A. Prentice,Notes on Audience Response, in David Bordwell and Nol Carroll, Post-Theory: Reconstructing Film Studies (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press,1996).

(6) . Currie, Image and Mind, 166; Wollheim, Painting as an Art, 103.

(7) . Kendall L. Walton, Mimesis as Make-Believe: On the Foundations of theRepresentational Arts (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1990),28.


(8) . Walton, Mimesis as Make-Believe, 344; cf. 34. On this issue, Wollheimsposition varies somewhat. Painting as an Art, 103, seems to argue for thepossibility of imagining being in a way that Walton excludes; On Art andthe Mind (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1974), 82, however,articulates a more cautious position, akin to Waltons if not identical with it.

(9) . Richard Allen has made this point to me.

(10) . Alex Neill, Empathy and (Film) Fiction, in Bordwell and Carroll, Post-Theory, 17594. See also my own Engaging Characters, 968. For importantdiscussions of simulation, see Robert M. Gordon, The Structure of Emotions:Investigations in Cognitive Psychology (Cambridge: Cambridge UniversityPress, 1987), ch. 7, and Alvin Goldman, Liaisons: Philosophy Meets theCognitive and Social Sciences (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1991), ch. 1.

(11) . Currie contrasts his position with those of Walton and Wollheim inImage and Mind, 169.

(12) . Roughly, and in more commonplace terms, empathy and sympathy.Using these more commonplace terms, however, can create confusion.

(13) . Nol Carroll, The Philosophy of Horror; or, Paradoxes of the Heart (NewYork: Routledge, 1990), 956.

(14) . For a recent study which finds evidence for what I am callingaffective mimicry, as an element of the larger phenomenon of emotionalcontagion, see Lars-Olav Lundqvist and Ulf Dimberg, Facial Expressions areContagious, journal of Psychophysiology, 9 (1995)1 20311.

(15) . Carl Plantinga raises a related a question regarding textual structureand psychological response: while allegiance is something the spectatorlends the character, alignment and disclosure (or what Smith callsrecognition) are more or less functions of the film more than activitiesof the spectator (this volume ch. 16, n. 30). There is a strong intuitiveplausibility to the idea that our responses on the level of allegiance aremore variable and less textually determined than are our responses on thelevels of recognition and alignment. However, I think this intuition arisesfrom the greater pragmatic difficulty of controlling a perceivers responseson the level of morality and emotion, not from an ontological difference inthe type of response. That is, the maker of a film will just as surely attemptto determine our moral and emotional response to a character (finding astar attractive, for example), as they will attempt to control which character


we attend to at a given moment (an aspect of alignment) or what traits weperceive in a character (an aspect of recognition, or disclosure). And thiswould include cases where the text deliberately allows ambiguity abouta characters moral statusthis would be comparable, on the level ofalignment, with a device (like wide framing and deep staging) that allows usto determine which of several points of action to attend to. In other words,texts may attempt to marshal our responses to greater and lesser degreeswith respect to all three levels of textual structure, allegiance no less thanalignment or recognition.

Though I recognize the intuition that drives Plantingas proposal, to acceptit would be to make an untenable distinction between aspects of the textwhich are just immutably there, and require no response on the perceiverspart, and aspects of the text which depend entirely on the perceiversresponse, with the text providing only the most minimal prompt (allegianceis something the spectator lends the character). Every aspect of textualstructure requires some form of psychological response, though of coursesuch responses range from the reflex to the highly reflective.

(16) . Berys Gaut, 0review of Engaging Characters, British Journal ofAesthetics, 37: 1 (Jan. 1997), 967.

(17) . The position I argue against is exemplified by, for example, PaulMessaris, Visual Literacy: Image, Mind, and Reality (Boulder, Colo.: WestviewPress, 1994), 33, 137, 157.

(18) . Edward Branigan, Narrative Comprehension and Film (London:Routledge, 1992), ch. 5 (esp. 145, 157); and Nol Carroll, Toward a Theoryof Point-of-View Editing: Communication, Emotion, and the Movies, PoeticsToday, 14: 1 (Spring 1993), 12341.

(19) . Cf. Walton, On Pictures and Photographs, this volume, 63.

(20) . Cf. Wollheim, Painting as an Art, 183.

(21) . Currie, Image and Mind, 185.

(22) . This mounts a challenge to the notion of illusory identification at aneven more general level than my own thesis, in that it questions not only theidea of identifying with characters in the story world, but the idea that weimagine looking at the fictional world directly (regardless of whether or not a


given shot can be assigned to a character). See also Curries comment, in hischapter in this volume, n. 19.

(23) . Wollheim, Fainting as an Art, 103.

(24) . Currie, Image and Mind, 153. Again there is a parallel here with myown framework, in which I argue that central imagining may function as amechanism for determining what is to be acentrally imagined.

(25) . CurrieIbid. 153.

(26) . Except in the case of certain extraordinary shots, an aspect ofCurries argument I discuss below.

(27) . CurrieIbid. 193.

(28) . CurrieIbid. 17980; my emphasis.

(29) . See also Curries sceptical remarks on POV and identification,Currieibid. 1746. Curries sympathy for the realist ontology associated withAndre Bazin and Maurice Merleau-Ponty is evident here; prescriptivism aside,compare his attitude to subjectivity in cinema with Merleau-Ponty, The Filmand the New Psychology, in Sense and Nonsense, trans. Hubert L. Dreyfusand Patricia A. Dreyfus (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1964),58.

(30) . Merleau-Ponty, The Film and the New Psychology, in Sense andNonsense, trans. Hubert L. Dreyfus and Patricia A. DreyfusIbid. 1701.

(31) . The shot representing Ballantines POV, like most shots of its kind, isquite unrealistic because it fails to capture the binocular nature of ordinaryvision (Merleau-Ponty, The Film and the New Psychology, in Sense andNonsense, trans. Hubert L. Dreyfus and Patricia A. Dreyfusibid. 180 n. 18).See also 195.

(32) . Merleau-Ponty, The Film and the New Psychology, in Sense andNonsense, trans. Hubert L. Dreyfus and Patricia A. DreyfusIbid. 170.

(33) . Indeed, a footnote at the end of the passage analysing the nature ofour response to the POV shot in Spellbound states that in order to imagineappropriately concerning the characters experience, we may have toimagine having that experience ourselves, thereby engaging in a simulationof the characters experience (Merleau-Ponty, The Film and the New


Psychology, in Sense and Nonsense, trans. Hubert L. Dreyfus and Patricia A.Dreyfusibid. 180 n. 19). This is in direct contradiction of his earlier statementthat Watching this shot does not incline me in the least to imagine myselfdoing or being either of these things (175). Confusion over the status ofsecondary imaginingwhether it should be regarded as integral or merelyinstrumentalseems to be the source of this contradiction.

(34) . On this account, cinematic fictions are no more (or less) likely toprompt imagining seeing than are written fictions, because secondaryimagining can take off just as well from symbolic imagining (prompted bywords) as from perceptual imagining. The counter-intuitive nature of this lastclaim may count as another reason to be sceptical of the framework thatlead us to it.

(35) . This should not be confused with the idea that we suddenly cease tohave an emotional response to the scene; rather, the claim is that we ceaseto experience an empathetic emotion (simulating or imagining the emotionalstates of a given character) but instead experience sympathetic emotionsemotions based on judgements of the characters, but not simulating theiremotions (as, for example, in pitying a deluded or ignorant character, orbeing repelled by a happily violent character).

(36) . In addition to the shift away from exclusive alignment with Gold thatI discuss in the main text, something else happens here that, arguably,undermines central imagining. Though Gold has been presented as a likeablecharacter up to this point in the film, his anti-Semitic diatribe may wellprovoke a moral aversion in the spectator which hinders or blocks centralimagining. See Richard Morans discussion of the phenomenon of resistanceto imagining beliefs and attitudes which in some way offend or repel us, inThe Expression of Feeling in Imagination, Philosophical Review, 103: 1 (Jan.1994), 95106.

(37) . This accords with Waltons argument that one need not imagine eitherthe conjunctions or the implications of the things that one does imagine(On Pictures and Photographs, 62; see also Neill, Empathy, 187). If I amcorrect that partial central imagining is not only possible, but typical, atleast in the context of engaging with fictions, this poses another problemfor Curries rejection of the Imagined Observer Hypothesis. Currie citesshots from extraordinary locations, like outer space, as anomalies for theIOH. For is it plausible that we imagine floating in an oxygen-less vacuumwhenever we see an establishing shot of the earth as seen from space?Currie is surely right to suggest that it isnt. If partial imagining is the norm,


however, to imagine seeing from a vantage-point need not involve us inimagining breathing etc. from that vantage-point. In other words, suchshots would no longer count as problems or anomalies for the IOH. Currieconsiders but rejects the idea of imagining seeing cut off from imaginingthe concomitants of the vantage-point in question, but he does not considerthe other factors which, I believe, make the idea of partial imagining acompelling and necessary refinement of our understanding of imaginativeengagement with fictions.

(38) . By deep I mean fully plenitudinous, in Woilheims jargon: see 41314, above. This is related to an aspect of Woilheims account of centralimagining as it applies to painting. Wollheim argues that in coming toimagine from what he calls the internal spectators perspective, the (real)external spectator ceases to attend to the surface of the canvas, and thusto an aspect of the experience of viewing paintings which is indispensable(twofoldness). Wollheim argues that it is because of this danger thatthe same paintings which foster central imagining also contain devicesfor breaking the hold of such imagining, and return us from imaginationto perception (Painting as an Art, 166). The parallel, then, between myargument here and Woilheims is that in each case there is more to theexperience than central imagining accounts for either dramatically,in terms of the perspectives of other characters and the narrator, orperceptually, in terms of an awareness of the facticity of the representation.

(39) . Walton, Mimesis, 34; see also Neill, Empathy, 189, 192.

Imagining From the Inside

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