Review: Moving Viewers: American Film and the Spectator's Experience by Carl Plantinga; Violent Affect: Literature, Cinema, and Critique After Representation by Marco Abel; Doubting Vision: Film and the Revelationist Tradition by Malcolm Turvey

Abstract

After almost a century of theory, scholars and critics still disagree about basic questions posed by the moving-image media. What’s now called classical film theory, inaugurated by Vachel Lindsay and Hugo Munsterberg, looked for cinema’s medium-specific properties and debated the merits of “realist” and “formative” perspectives, while the 1970s theory boom, propelled by Marxism and psychoanalysis, looked for ideology in every image and false consciousness in every splice. Recent years have brought a cultural-studies turn, a film-philosophy turn, and a cognitive-psychology turn, but these developments have only emphasized that the basic questions remain unsettled. And with luck they’ll stay that way, because efforts to resolve them are sometimes livelier and smarter than the movies that raise them. Three new books focus on issues related to perception, representation, and affect or emotion in film. Working from very different perspectives, they share a lack of interest in psychoanalysis and other twentieth-century relics, gravitating instead toward the incremental approach called for by today’s post-theory theorists. The title of Carl Plantinga’s monograph, Moving Viewers, indicates the author’s aim, which is to think about how popular films elicit emotional reactions from moviegoers, balancing theoretical abstraction with attentiveness to how actual audiences actually think and feel when they watch movies. He describes his approach as “cognitive-perceptual,” an unwieldy but useful term. As the first word implies, he looks at pleasure, fantasy, and desire through the lens of cognitive rather than psychoanalytic theory. Unlike many cognitive film theorists, though, he tempers his rejection of the psycho analytic unconscious with acceptance of a “cognitive uncon scious,” through which, he argues, ingrained patterns of perception, affect, and response help generate and shape our emotions. Emotions themselves are “concern-based construals” in Plantinga’s vocabulary, meaning they are judgments that relate to the concerns we bring to the real-world situations we encounter (55). Applying all this to the multiplex, Plantinga acknowledges that movies are by nature “conventional, expressive, exaggerated, or otherwise manipulated” versions of reality (62), but argues that they nevertheless call upon patterns of perception and response that we use in our real-world activities. In Alien (1979), for example, momentary “surprise and shock” naturally arise when the villain pops abruptly into view, while more complex and far-reaching emotions such as “suspense, anticipation, and curiosity” sustain our attention for longer periods, joining with the short-term effects “to create the contours of the particular experience offered by the film” (70). Moving beyond the multiplex, moreover, Plantinga observes that popular narratives of many kinds have therapeutic and communal functions similar to those of films, since they too body forth “virtual solutions to traumatic problems,” thereby facilitating “distributed or social cognition” (226). Rather than formulate a sweeping theory of cinematic emotion, Plantinga says he wants to craft a phenomenological account of the many heterogeneous pleasures that movie-viewing entails. One of the most interesting questions he asks is why moviegoers flock to a picture like James Cameron’s crowd-pleasing Titanic (1997), wherein scenes of exotic travel, exciting melodrama, and youthful romance give way to detailed depictions of existential terror, piteous loss, and the extinction of thousands of lives, including that of the movie’s charismatic hero. Why would these elicitors of “negative emotion” attract a huge global audience? Launch ing into his discussion on a page adorned with Titanic heroine Rose (Kate Winslet) weeping copious tears at the death of Jack (Leonardo DiCaprio), her shipboard lover, Plantinga notes that Cameron could have emulated many other films by operating in a “distanced mode” that replaces “strong sympathies for characters” with a more “critical, sometimes humorous, and occasionally cynical perspective” (171), as in Bringing Up Baby (1938), Star Wars (1977), The Hunt for Red October (1990), and Memento (2000). Far from being distanced, however, Titanic clearly belongs to the fleet of “sympathetic narratives” that strive to elicit such feelings as sadness, compassion, and longing. The secret of appealing to audiences with negative emotion is to represent unpleasurable events in such a way that pain and loss are turned into entirely different qualities, which in Titanic take the form of “quasireligious, ritual affirmation of the proposed transformative power and transcendence of romantic love and self-sacrifice” (173). Plantinga’s Film Quarterly, Vol. 64, No. 4, pps 73–76, ISSN 0015-1386, electronic, ISSN 1533-8630. © 2011 by the regents of the University of california. All rights reserved. Please direct all requests for permission to photocopy or reproduce article content through the University of california Press’s rights and Permissions website, http://www.ucpressjournals.com/reprintinfo.asp. DOI: 10.1525/fQ.2011.64.4.73