Experiments in Film and Philosophy [1 ed.] 9781032075822, 9781032075815, 9781003207764, 1032075821

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Experiments in Film and Philosophy

Christopher Falzon argues in this book for a new way of understanding film as philosophy. Inspired and informed by the work of Michel Foucault, Falzon shows how a motion picture can operate not simply as a thought experiment but as a form of experience-centred, experimental reflection. It is film’s ability to show viewers things that challenge their way of thinking, giving them experiences that can make them think differently, that gives the film its status as philosophy. Through these cinematic experiences, not only cultural norms and presuppositions but also cinematic conventions, and even established philosophical positions, can be interrogated and questioned. Experiments in Film and Philosophy explores three films in the light of this new way of thinking about philosophy and film: Jean-Luc Godard’s Breathless, Rubin Östlund’s Force Majeure, and Jonathon Glazer’s Under the Skin. It will be of interest to advanced students and scholars interested in the current debates about the relationship between film and philosophy. Christopher Falzon is a Visiting Fellow in Philosophy at the University of New South Wales, Australia. He is the author of Foucault and Social Dialogue: Beyond Fragmentation (Routledge, 1998), Philosophy Goes to the Movies, Third Edition (Routledge, 2014), and Ethics Goes to the Movies (Routledge, 2018); co-editor of Foucault and Philosophy (2010) and A Companion to Foucault (2013).

Experiments in Film and Philosophy Christopher Falzon

First published 2024 by Routledge 605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10158 and by Routledge 4 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2024 Christopher Falzon The right of Christopher Falzon to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. ISBN: 978-1-032-07582-2 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-032-07581-5 (pbk) ISBN: 978-1-003-20776-4 (ebk) DOI: 10.4324/9781003207764 Typeset in Times New Roman by Apex CoVantage, LLC

Contents

Acknowledgements

vii

1

Thought experiments Null, bold, and radical views  5 Narratives and thought experiments  7

2

Philosophical experiences Historical counter-narratives and philosophical experiences 18 Philosophical experiences versus thought experiments  28

18

3

Film and philosophical experience Film narrative and visual experience  35 Cinematic counter-narratives and experience-centred ­reflection  41

35

4

Objects of cinematic reflection Critique of ideology  45 Cinematic self-critique  56 Film and philosophy in dialogue  60

44

5

Breathless – the experimental self Free spirits  64 Film experimentalism  71

64

6

Force Majeure – the force of circumstances Confronting experience  82 Ironic redemption and the lives of others  90

81

1

vi  Contents 7

Under the Skin – a sense of the other The alien other  100 Becoming human  103 Gendered relations  111

8

Concluding remarks

98

118

Appendix124 References125 Index133

Acknowledgements

I am grateful to the Department of Philosophy at Hong Kong University, and the School of Philosophy at the University of New South Wales, for the opportunity to present early versions of some of these chapters in their respective seminar programmes, and to be able to benefit from the comments of those who attended. The opportunity to try out some of these ideas was also afforded to me by the Cinematic Ethics workshops run by Robert Sinnerbrink and Lisa Trahair at ­Macquarie University and the University of New South Wales. Some of the material contained in this book has been published previously in a different form. Chapter 5 is a heavily reworked version of a chapter ­published in Paris at Dawn, Paris at Midnight, edited by Alistair Rolls and Marguerite ­Johnson (Bristol: Intellect, 2021). Chapter 6 reworks an article on Force Majeure published in Film-Philosophy 21(3), 2017. I would like to thank my editor at Routledge, Andy Beck, for his continuous support and encouragement over many years now. I would also like to thank the two anonymous readers to whom Routledge sent an early version of the manuscript, for their tremendously helpful editorial comments. I am also indebted to Timothy O’Leary and Joe Mintoff, who looked over the manuscript and provided invaluable advice, comments and suggestions for improvement. This book is dedicated to Penny Craswell.

1 Thought experiments

On a warm summer’s day in Paris, Michel, a petty criminal on the run after ­gunning down a traffic cop, stops in front of a cinema on the Champs-Élysées. The film that is playing is The Harder They Fall (from 1956, Humphrey Bogart’s last film). Michel looks admiringly at the poster and lobby cards for the film. Quietly, he mutters the name of his hero, ‘Bogie’. We see a shot of Bogart’s face in the window, and then cut back to Michel’s face. Michel performs the gesture of his screen idol, rubbing his thumb back and forth across his lips, all the while staring intently at the photo. A family is sitting on the balcony at an upmarket ski hotel in the French Alps, having lunch, chatting. On the opposite mountainside, an avalanche begins. The father, Tomas, reassures his family that it is just a controlled avalanche, but as the avalanche shows no sign of slowing down, panic erupts on the restaurant balcony. Amidst the chaos, Tomas’s wife, Ebba, shields the kids, but Tomas grabs his phone and runs off-screen. The screen goes white, then clears; it was only ‘avalanche smoke’, it seems. Restaurant staff move in to check that people are alright. Tomas returns, asking if everyone is okay. The family sit down at their table again and continue eating, only now in silence. On a windswept beach somewhere in Scotland, a woman watches a swimmer emerge from the ocean. They are alone except for a family further down the beach. The family’s dog is swimming in the rough surf. Suddenly, there is the sound of screaming. The dog is in trouble. A woman is swimming out, trying to rescue the dog. Now she is also in trouble. Her husband dives in after her, leaving their baby on the beach. The swimmer runs back into the ocean to rescue the husband, who immediately breaks free and goes back into the water to try to save his wife. The woman on the beach watches the tragedy unfold impassively. Then she walks down to the swimmer, who is lying exhausted on the sand. She picks up a rock and strikes him with it, and then drags him off the beach, leaving the drowned couple’s crying baby to its fate. These are three scenes from three very different films, Jean-Luc Godard’s Breathless (1960), Ruben Östlund’s Force Majeure (2014), and Jonathon ­Glazer’s Under the Skin (2013). One is a classic of the mid-twentieth-century French New DOI: 10.4324/9781003207764-1

2  Thought experiments Wave, a sunny Parisian film noir. The others are more recent, early twenty-first century, a comedy-drama with the most unheroic of heroes, and a science-fiction film almost completely free of sci-fi paraphernalia and special effects. These films are diverse in location, content, and tone, but this book is about how they can be thought of as having something in common, namely a certain philosophical significance. Now as they stand, the scenes themselves don’t seem to have any particular philosophical import. Of course, they are just particular scenes; we are not getting the full picture in any of the cases. Still, it would be easy to think that no matter how much of a film is revealed, it is not really going to make much difference to this assessment. In the end, aren’t movies essentially escapist entertainments, diversions, more a refuge from philosophical reflection than a vehicle of it? Isn’t that, famously, why Wittgenstein would head out to the movies, to escape from the torment of philosophising? Part of the task here is to talk about the very idea of a film having philosophical significance, about ways in which philosophy can be said to ‘come into the picture’. Not that this is a new topic, or a novel suggestion. There has been philosophical speculation about film almost from its beginnings, around the start of the twentieth century (see Sinnerbrink 2013). By the end of the twentieth century, there were theorists like Stanley Cavell and Gilles Deleuze to be reckoned with (see Cavell 1979; Deleuze 1986, 1989). And since the turn of the twenty-first century, there has been a considerable amount of discussion and writing about the philosophical significance of film in Anglo-American philosophy. Interestingly enough, much of this recent discussion can be dated from the appearance of the 1999 film The Matrix, directed by the Wachowskis. This was a singular moment in the history of cinema that inaugurated ‘an era of brisk philosophical activity focused on film’ (Wartenberg 2011, 55). Here was a blockbuster film that was not only visually audacious and stylistically cool but also seemed to be posing philosophical questions. It offered the exciting scenario of a humanity that has been enslaved by invading machines, turned into a power source for their operations, all the while kept docile by being fed a virtual reality that makes them think they are living ordinary lives in an ordinary world. The viewer could ask themselves how they could be sure they themselves were not in some kind of matrix simulation, taking for reality what was in fact an unreal fabrication. This is a recognisably philosophical kind of question, concerning what it is possible to know given the possibility that one could be globally deceived, subject to an all-embracing delusion of some sort. One reason such questions are so recognisably philosophical is that they have been posed in well-known philosophical writings, and in remarkably similar terms. The seventeenth-century thinker Descartes, something of a singular moment in the history of philosophy, starts his Meditations on First Philosophy by asking questions about what we can know on the basis of similar scenarios of global deception. In his first of his meditations, Descartes reflects on whether it is possible for him to know anything, given that he has often found he has been

Thought experiments  3 mistaken even about matters that he formerly thought were certain. He surmises that he might even be mistaken about matters relating to his most immediate circumstances. How can he be sure that he is really sitting by the fire, writing, given the possibility that he might at this moment be asleep in bed, dreaming that he is awake and wondering about whether he is dreaming? He then moves to a more radical scenario, asking how he can be sure that his entire lifetime of experiences hasn’t been conjured up by some powerful external agency, a god, or evil demon bent on deceiving him. Such speculations may have had a long history prior to Descartes, but it was Descartes who invoked them at the beginning of modern philosophical thought. They have proceeded to haunt thinking ever since, and they seem to be getting the full cinematic treatment 300 years later in The Matrix. The philosophical discussion and writing about film kicked off by The Matrix was of a quite distinctive sort. It was not simply traditional philosophy of film, philosophy reflecting on the nature of film, aiming to spell out what film is, whether it is an art, how it differs from other arts, and so on. It extended to what might be called philosophy through film, an exploration of philosophical positions, arguments and issues as they emerge in and through narrative fiction films. This was not only a new way of approaching films but also offered the prospect of making philosophy itself, which has largely retreated into the academy, more accessible to a wider audience. Numerous books duly appeared in the bookshops, devoted to relating films as well as television shows to philosophy in this manner. One of the earliest of these appropriately enough was The Matrix and Philosophy (Irwin 2002). What these writings have in common is that the films are discussed in connection with various existing theories, positions and arguments in the philosophical literature. These positions provide a standpoint for thinking about the film and interpreting its narrative, and the film, in turn, provides a pretext for a consideration of the philosophical issues involved, or at the very least, a vivid illustration or dramatisation of the relevant philosophical position or argument. Along with this sort of discussion, a further kind of question quickly arose. Can films be more than just handy illustrations, resources, or pretexts for philosophy? Is it possible for films to engage more substantively with philosophy? In other words, can there be such a thing as cinematic philosophising, film itself doing philosophy, film as philosophy? Significant texts exploring this possibility, at least in Anglo-American philosophy, include Stephen Mulhall’s On Film (first edition 2002), Daniel Frampton’s Filmosophy (2006), and Thomas Wartenberg’s Thinking on Screen (2008), which have all argued strongly in support of the view that films can indeed be said to do philosophy in some sense. Debate over the idea of film as philosophy has continued since (see for example Smith and Wartenberg 2006; Livingston and Plantinga 2008; Mullarkey 2009; Sinnerbrink 2011; Carel and Tuck 2011; Cox and Levine 2012; Thomson-Jones 2016; Rawls et al. 2019; Elsaesser 2019). But at this point, tired of the debate, we might be

4  Thought experiments tempted to return to the general objection to this enterprise mentioned at the beginning. Is there really anything to be gained by trying to see films as doing philosophy in some way? Why try to reduce the lively, visceral art of film to a version of the bloodless, argument-driven reasonings of the philosopher? Let films be films, enjoy them for what they are, essentially escapist entertainments. Use them to spice up your dry lectures if you must, but otherwise get on with the serious business of philosophising in the usual manner. However, this kind of objection is itself worth thinking about because it reveals certain assumptions not only about the nature of film but also about the nature of philosophy. Indeed, this is what makes the film as a philosophy issue so interesting – it raises basic questions about the nature of both film and philosophy. This book is another consideration of how film might be thought of as doing something philosophical, distinguished in this case by how it construes the philosophy side of the formula. My basic contention is that there is a false dichotomy operating in the idea that film must either be reduced to bloodless, abstract, argument-driven reasoning or is something essentially foreign to philosophical reflection. To think that these are the only alternatives presupposes that philosophy itself can only be understood as bloodless, argument-driven reasoning. In this book, I aim to explore another alternative: that film is capable of engaging in another kind of philosophical reflection, one that has been liberated from the straitjacket of a rationalism that considers that philosophy is only able to proceed through abstract reasoning and argument. I should explain my use of the term ‘rationalism’ here, as it has a very specific meaning in philosophy, usually referring to the epistemological view that downplays the role of sense experience, and holds that we can attain important truths about the world through reason alone. I  am using it in a more general way, to characterise philosophy that proceeds primarily via argument, and also, that is broadly concerned with establishing general truths or unchanging essences beyond change and transformation. That being said, this is also a style of philosophising that, like rationalism in its more conventional philosophical sense, disdains experience and particularity in favour of ‘armchair reasoning’, abstraction and generalisation. This rationalist, argumentative view of philosophy has been a feature of philosophy’s self-understanding since Plato. It is how philosophy is traditionally understood to be done, to the point where it seems a little scandalous to suggest anything otherwise. Exploring the idea that film can engage in a form of philosophical reflection thus gets us thinking not only about the nature of film and what films are capable of but also about what counts as philosophical activity. Of course, what counts as philosophy is a very large question, but it becomes more manageable if discussed in connection with the specific issue of films’ philosophical capabilities. In this book, the result will be a fairly broad-brush characterisation of what philosophising might involve, but it is a characterisation that will be enough to help us to develop a more successful understanding of the film-philosophy relation.

Thought experiments  5 In pursuing the question of what counts as philosophy, I will argue that there have been many movements that go beyond the rationalistic form of philosophical reflection within philosophy itself. Indeed, even philosophers of a rationalist persuasion are unlikely to think that philosophy consists only in abstract reasoning and argument. Even Plato himself, as we will see, is not entirely a Platonist in this regard. There have also been some significant movements in this non-rationalistic direction in recent philosophy, especially in the so-called continental tradition. To some extent, the distinction between the different forms of philosophising maps onto the distinction commonly made between analytic or Anglo-American philosophy on the one side and the continental European variety on the other. However, it also has to be noted that the geographical distinction implied here has become almost completely useless as a marker of different philosophical styles. For example, we have the twentieth-century American pragmatist Richard Rorty taking an avowedly anti-Platonic line, explicitly opposing what he calls ‘argumentative’ philosophy with a non-argumentative, ‘narrative’ form of philosophising (see Rorty 1984, 1985). Meanwhile, Edmund Husserl, the founder of phenomenology, is a continental thinker who sees philosophy as a Platonic search for essences. But it is certainly the case that movements against rationalist philosophising were especially prominent in twentieth-century European philosophy, and in the next chapter, we will be looking at one of the key figures in this connection, the French thinker Michel Foucault. I  am going to argue that in his own philosophical practice, which is a ‘historico-critical’ reflection pursued through a certain kind of historical narrative, he provides a model for a non-rationalistic form of philosophical reflection that can also be pursued outside of written philosophy; and in particular, that can be pursued in a cinematic context. Later, in Chapters 3 and 4, we will explore how film itself might be understood to engage in this form of reflection, and different ways this form of reflection can be pursued in a cinematic context. We will then be in a position, in Chapters 5, 6, and 7, to talk about the philosophical significance of the films mentioned at the start of this chapter, Breathless, Force Majeure, and Under the Skin. These films will in turn serve to demonstrate and illuminate the different forms this cinematic mode of philosophical reflection can take. To get things underway, let’s begin with a few more words about the recent discussion of film as philosophy. Null, bold, and radical views We can identify three main positions that have emerged in the course of this discussion and arrange them in a spectrum in terms of the increasing ‘boldness’ of their claims. At one end of the spectrum, there is what has been called the ‘null view’ (Cox and Levine 2012, 8). This is the position we have already encountered, the idea that film is anything but philosophy, that it is philosophy’s ‘alien other’, more a distraction from philosophy than anything else. At best, on this

6  Thought experiments sort of view, films might provide handy or popular illustrations of philosophical problems or positions that are properly developed by philosophers, and thus have some pedagogical use, but that’s about it. If you want to do real philosophy, forget about films and go back to the written text, the proper place for philosophising, where arguments can be articulated and positions formulated and defended. Opposed to this null view, mid-way along our spectrum, is what might be called the ‘bold position’, expressed by Stephen Mulhall, in the first edition of On Film, his book on the Aliens films. As Mulhall says there, ‘I do not look to these films as handy or popular illustrations of views and arguments properly developed by philosophers’. Films, Mulhall argues, are capable of ‘reflecting on and ­evaluating .  .  . [philosophical] views and arguments, as thinking seriously and systematically about them in just the same ways that philosophers do’ (Mulhall 2002, 2). On this view, films can function as fully fledged, autonomous philosophical works, able to do pretty much anything that can be done in the traditional written context, in terms of reflecting on and evaluating philosophical views and arguments. Bold though this claim is, it is not the boldest position in this spectrum of views. At the other end of spectrum from the null view is what can be called the radical position, what Robert Sinnerbrink has dubbed ‘film-philosophy’ ­(Sinnerbrink 2011). This is the view that films offer the possibility of going entirely beyond philosophy in its traditional written form, engaging in a new, and distinctively cinematic form of philosophical reflection, pursuing forms of intellectual inquiry that traditional philosophy, working within written language, cannot. This is philosophising understood as a purely filmic achievement, a form of philosophising that is unique to the cinematic medium. An example of this radical position, or at least a view that comes close to it, is Daniel ­Frampton’s notion of ‘filmosophy’, developed in his 2006 book of the same name. Frampton argues that film ‘does thinking, rather than just provoking thinking’ (2006, 95). Both the events in a film and the ways they are presented represent acts of thinking performed by the film itself. Moreover, this is a nonlinguistic, ­non-conceptual, image-based form of thinking that enables film to pursue lines of philosophical inquiry beyond the capacities of language-based forms of thinking. As Frampton puts it: ‘Film possibly contains a whole new system of thought, a new episteme’ (11). It lies ‘[a]t the end of philosophy, beyond (or rather outside of) philosophy’s capability’ (184). Certainly, he finds some intimations of this thinking in the history of philosophy, particularly in the more ‘poetic’ or ‘imagistic’ writings of Nietzsche, Heidegger and Deleuze. However, he sees this as philosophy ‘attempting to escape from its own literal confines’ as a written enterprise, ‘towards the “imaging” of its problems’ (183). In short, Filmosophy makes the claim that language is not essential for philosophising, and as one commentator succinctly puts it, ‘claims that films can philosophize, and can do so with their own means of expression which extend beyond philosophy as a linguistic activity’ (Schmerheim 2008, 110).

Thought experiments  7 In this book, I take one of the versions of the bold position and push it further towards the radical end of the spectrum. This is the position articulated by Thomas Wartenberg in Thinking on Screen, which in terms of the spectrum of views sketched earlier, amounts to a moderate version of Mulhall’s bold position. Wartenberg himself has characterised his position as a moderate conception of film as philosophy, by which he means that there are definite limits to what films can achieve philosophically (Wartenberg 2016). Film might not be able to do everything that is done in traditional written philosophy, but it can nonetheless do some of the things that can be done there. In particular, as Wartenberg notes, there are ‘specific techniques that filmmakers can employ to do philosophy on film, most centrally the thought experiment’ (Wartenberg 2016, 166–167). Essentially, fiction films can be understood to do philosophy by functioning like philosophical thought experiments. The view I  am pursuing is a radicalisation of Wartenberg’s position, but it could also be described as a moderate version of the radical position. It is not the radical position that films offer the possibility of a distinctively cinematic form of philosophical reflection that goes entirely beyond philosophy in its traditional written form. It is more moderate, in that it is the idea of a cinematic form of reflection that resembles forms of reflection undertaken within written philosophy. However, it is more radical than Wartenberg’s position, in that these forms of philosophical reflection are understood as going beyond philosophy as traditionally undertaken. By ‘traditionally undertaken’ here is not meant philosophy as written, but rather, written philosophy insofar as it involves the rationalistic, argument-bound style of philosophising that owes a good deal to Plato. The forms of reflection in philosophy that go beyond this style are the anti-Platonic currents mentioned earlier, the movements against rationalist philosophising that were especially prominent in twentieth-century European philosophy. Narratives and thought experiments To get to my moderate version of the radical position, we can start by saying a bit more about Mulhall’s bold position, and how we might get from there to Wartenberg’s moderate version of the bold position. Mulhall’s idea of films as able to think about philosophical views and arguments ‘in just the same ways that philosophers do’ suggests that what is done in the traditional verbal form can be done just as well in the cinematic medium. There are two things that immediately suggest themselves in relation to this view. First of all, it’s not clear that films have the capacity to do a number of things traditionally seen as part of philosophical practice, in particular, to organise or assess their content in terms of arguments, with premises and conclusions. This is the core criticism of the idea of film as philosophy, the in-principle objection that ‘film does not give reasons, make arguments, or draw conclusions’, and so ‘cannot be understood as “philosophical” in the proper sense’ (Sinnerbrink 2011, 117). If philosophy

8  Thought experiments is thought of as necessarily involving rigorous argument, it is surely something best undertaken in a verbal medium, a written text; and film is not really going to get a look in. Secondly, by the same token, if we question the idea that philosophising can only happen if argument is going on, that argument is a necessary, inescapable part of philosophising, then there is nothing to stop film doing other things that might be considered part of a philosophical practice. And perhaps even doing them better than they can be done in the traditional verbal medium. But if a film’s philosophical activity doesn’t involve organising or assessing its content in terms of arguments, what could it involve? It’s useful to approach this question indirectly by going back to the null view, the idea that film is completely foreign to philosophical reflection. There are a number of reasons one might take this view. First of all, films make their points in the realm of action and appearance, which is surely no place for reflection, argument or rational debate. This contention is closely related to what might be called the Plato’s cave argument against the idea of film as philosophy. In the Republic (Plato 1993, 514a–517a), Plato asks us to consider the situation of prisoners kept shackled in a cave from birth. If all they ever saw were the shadows of things cast on the cave wall, wouldn’t they mistake these flimsy shadows for reality? Plato thinks those who rely on the senses for knowledge are like these prisoners; and philosophical enlightenment, true insight into the world and ourselves, requires turning away from the senses, using our reason instead to look beyond appearances to the underlying reality. So here, Plato devalues sense experience and visual images, as unreliable sources of knowledge. The threat of deception here has a social component as well. The shadows that the prisoners are seeing are not even being cast by real things but by mere effigies of things, eidola or simulacra, that are being carried to and fro by people on a walkway behind them. The implication is that those who uncritically accept the images and representations presented to them as reality are also susceptible to being tricked and manipulated by those who control the images and representations they are taking for reality. It has often been pointed out that cinemas are uncannily like Plato’s cave, their audiences sitting in the dark, transfixed by images projected before them onto a screen. The similarities between the cinema and Plato’s cave have not gone unnoticed by film theorists. Robert Stam suggests that the cave myth has haunted theoretical reflection on cinema (Stam 2000, 10; see Baudry 1976; Wartenberg 2007, 15). Most importantly for present purposes, a cave-like cinema does not sound like a venue for philosophical enlightenment, quite the opposite in fact. And as Stam and others have pointed out, in some of the more extreme ­Marxist theory of the 1960s and 1970s, this is just how the cinema was viewed, as a high-tech version of Plato’s cave, a place where flimsy simulations are routinely mistaken for reality, and a powerful instrument for social conditioning and manipulation. Films were said to be forms of ‘bourgeois illusionism’, their content entirely determined by the ‘dominant ideology’ of the time. Cinema was condemned in its totality as a form of indoctrination, seducing audiences into

Thought experiments  9 accepting as reality what were merely ideological representations (see Stam 2000, 138–139; Wilson 1986, 1; Cox and Levine 2012, 5). On this sort of view, film stands as entirely alien to philosophy, or at least to the Marxist theory that provides insight into the true nature of society. This concern with film as a form of ideological indoctrination might now seem rather old-fashioned, partly because Marxism does not have the theoretical currency it once had, and partly because the cinema is no longer the privileged site for the dissemination of visual images that it once was. Beyond the appearance of television, along with video and DVD recording technology, the rise of computer and internet communication technologies has meant a vast proliferation of screens and screened images, which have left the movie theatre and entered into every part of life. The cinema now only plays a small and ever-diminishing role in the dissemination of visual images, and we are also much more likely to access films outside the traditional context of the movie theatre, on home televisions, computer screens and phones. Yet the Platonic misgivings that underlay the Marxist condemnation of cinema have not gone away. They have reappeared in more recent concerns that in the current high-tech, computerised world of virtual reality and media saturation, we are interacting more and more not with things but with images and representations of things, and as such are increasingly susceptible to propaganda, deception, and manipulation from politicians, corporations, and the media companies themselves. As the screen has infiltrated every aspect of our lives, the worry now is that the entire world has become a kind of cave, a place of illusion and indoctrination, its captives further from the truth than ever before. In this connection, it may be part of the peculiar philosophical appeal of The Matrix that it not only harks back to the classic scenarios of global deception, which could be Descartes’s dream argument or evil demon hypothesis but might equally be Plato’s cave scenario, but also suggests how these old philosophical speculations might that be relevant for thinking about the new world of internet communication and virtual reality. The film itself alludes to this connection, including a reference to one of the best-known commentators of the modern communication age, Jean Baudrillard. The film’s hero uses a hollowed-out version of his book Simulacra and Simulation to hide illicit computer discs. Baudrillard himself came from a Marxist background and offers what seems on the face of it to be a radicalised version of the Marxist critique of media as ideological distortion and indoctrination. He goes so far as to argue in Simulacra and Simulation that we are no longer being confronted by a veil of ideology that distorts and misrepresents the real world, but now have to contend with an order of pure simulation or simulacra, in which the symbols and significations of media and culture bear no relation whatever to reality and refer only to one another (see Baudrillard 1994). Although Baudrillard was formulating these ideas in connection with the mass media and the culture of twentieth-century consumer society, they seem even more relevant to the age of online communication and virtual reality. And

10  Thought experiments The Matrix cannily draws this connection, indicating the new opportunities for global deception that these contemporary technologies make possible. That said, it should be noted that there is some question as to whether Baudrillard can be interpreted in quite the way the film implies, as offering a vision of global delusion in the manner of Plato and Descartes. Here we are in the fortunate position that Baudrillard himself was able to see the film and to comment on it, and he thought that The Matrix grievously misrepresented his thought: ‘[t]he most embarrassing part of the film is that the new problem posed by simulation is confused with its classical, Platonic treatment. This is a serious flaw’ (Lancelin 2004). By Platonic treatment is presumably meant the old idea that people are being taken in by a veil of ideology that hides and distorts what is really going on. But what then is Baudrillard’s own position? At times he seems to be implying that there is no reality at all outside of the simulacra, and that the simulacra have become the only reality and the image has somehow usurped the real. Such a view evokes the suspicion that epistemological concerns about what it is possible to know are being confused with metaphysical claims about what actually exists. Yet it has to be said that Baudrillard himself never explicitly makes such a claim. His view seems to be rather that there is no longer a straightforward distinction between the real and the virtual, that what we are now confronting is not simply a misleading representation of the real, but a reality in which the virtual plays an integral role and has real effects. In Paul Patton’s characterisation of Baudrillard’s position, ‘we live in a hyperreality which results from the fusion of the virtual and the real into a third order of reality’ (Patton 1995, 11). The second reason one might take the null view and consider that film is completely foreign to philosophical reflection is that, whereas a philosophical treatise usually relies on arguments to move forward, film typically advances by way of narratives. A narrative can be defined broadly as the telling of some (fictional or true) event or sequence of events, in which the events are connected in a meaningful pattern of some sort. It can also be understood more actively as a way of organising and making sense of these events, joining them into a pattern that allows us to comprehend their significance (see Wartenberg 2007, 22–23; Thomas 2016, 4). Film’s reliance on narrative might be thought to count especially against its being able to engage in a philosophical activity because narratives feature particular events, situations, and characters, whereas philosophy aspires to generality and universal truths. That is why it requires reasoned argument, in order to transcend the particular and to establish general conclusions. It may be noted that a similar argument can be made against the idea of literary fiction as philosophy. Even though literary fiction is undertaken in a verbal medium, insofar as it involves narratives concerning particular events and characters, there is no place for philosophy. That films insofar as they are narratives remain mired in the particular is another in-principle kind of objection to the idea of film as philosophy, discussed by Wartenberg in Thinking on Screen as the ‘generality objection’

Thought experiments  11 (Wartenberg 2007, 20ff). As an in-principle objection it implies that there is another ­feature, beyond the reliance on arguments, that is to be considered essential to the ­philosophical enterprise, namely a concern with identifying general principles, universal truths, or the unchanging essences of things lying beyond change and transformation. This is certainly another feature of what we have been calling the rationalistic form of philosophical reflection, and it too can be traced back to Plato. For Plato, philosophy is a search for the essential nature of things, for what makes a thing the thing that it is, that which is shared by all things of that kind. Many of Plato’s dialogues feature Socrates looking for the nature or essence of various kinds of things, such as justice (the Republic), knowledge (Theaetetus) or piety (Euthyphro). In addition, Plato thinks that these essences actually exist, as eternal, unchanging Forms in a realm beyond the world of everyday experience. Nowadays in this spirit, we are more likely to speak instead of general concepts, basic classes, or categories employed in thinking about things, and consider an important task of philosophy to be conceptual analysis, determining the essential nature of our concepts, the necessary and sufficient conditions for their application. We can thus see Plato as laying down some of the philosophical attitudes that ultimately inform the null view of philosophy as film, the idea of film as the alien other of philosophy. In Plato’s Republic, these attitudes find expression in a condemnation of art and artists. Two attitudes in particular are crucial here. First of all, as we’ve seen, Plato devalues sense experience and visual images, as unreliable sources of knowledge. That is a message of the cave – the prisoners are taken in by mere shadows because they rely on their senses, not reason. The search for truth, the real business of philosophy, requires turning away from the sensed world, in order to access the really real – which is to say, general principles that Plato thinks actually exist as eternal, unchanging Forms in a realm beyond the world of everyday experience. Here philosophy is understood to be concerned not just with generality and universal truths, but with unchanging Forms that exist in an otherworldly realm, beyond the messy, changeable everyday world. For Plato, the things we experience through our senses are just imperfect copies of these Forms. Secondly, Plato devalues the narrative as a source of insight and knowledge. This is narrative, especially in the form of myth. Plato devalues ­non-argumentative myth in favour of the argumentative discourse of philosophy. Myths are cast as false, unbelievable stories concerning particular events and characters, whereas philosophy, which aspires to the rational apprehension of generality and universal truths, must rely on argumentative discourse. Greek philosophy in general can be thought of as resting on the pre-Socratic rejection of narrative explanations of phenomena, mythological stories about gods, the poetic tales of Hesiod and Homer, in favour of rational discourse, principled argument, and logical proof – the so-called transition from mythos to logos. Philosophy emerges, as Wartenberg puts it, ‘when abstract principle begins to rival narrative as a way of

12  Thought experiments understanding the place of human beings in the universe’ (Wartenberg 2007, 21; see de Freitas 2004). These two attitudes, which are present in Plato and can be taken together as reflective of his rationalism, inform his repudiation of the representational artists – specifically the poets and playwrights – later in the Republic (see 595a–602b). As Iris Murdoch notes in The Fire and the Sun, in cave terms, the artists who depict the world of experience correspond to those with the least grasp on reality, the prisoners who mistake the shadows on the cave wall for reality (see Murdoch 1977, 5). Their artistic representations are doubly removed from reality, being merely copies of copies of the Forms. The artists also go wrong in relying on narratives, rather than reason. For Plato, ‘a poet, if he is to be a poet, must compose fables, not arguments’ (Phaedo 61b). The poet’s narratives threaten rational discourse because they are grounded in the mess of the particular, whereas philosophy aspires to generality and universal truths. So, the artists will be banned from Plato’s ideal republic; and we can be pretty sure there won’t be any cinemas either. Plato’s suspicion of the artists also connects with the social part of the cave’s message. The artists are like the bearers of the effigies, the simulacra, that are casting shadows on the cave wall. Their purpose is to trick the cave dwellers into taking the appearances they project as the real thing. As Adriana Cavarero puts it, employing a pleasing cinematic metaphor: ‘Plato’s message is quite clear: the cave is Athens, the prisoners are the Athenians, and inside the projection room, next to the Sophists and the artists in general, is most certainly Homer as well’ (Cavarero 2002, 48). However, Plato’s rationalistic view of philosophy can be questioned, and it is called into question by some of Plato’s own philosophical practices. Whatever his official pronouncements about the shortcomings of art as a vehicle of philosophy, Plato is himself an artist, a poet, a playwright. He writes dramatic literary dialogues that are ‘artful and indirect, and abound in ironical and playful devices’, as Murdoch points out (1977, 87). Although Plato devalues myths, he often uses them. In the Republic, traditional myths like the story of Gyges (359d–360b) and invented ones like the myth of Er (614a–621d) are used to convey abstruse philosophical ideas or ‘noble lies’, socially useful beliefs, to a non-philosophical audience (see Partenie 2009). And for all his hostility to the senses and narrative, Plato uses narratives, often featuring striking, highly visualisable scenarios, to make philosophical points. One of the most famous of these is the story of the cave with its strange prisoners. If you think you gain knowledge from your senses, he seems to be asking, consider the possibility of a setup like the cave, where you are systematically deceived. In such a situation, you wouldn’t be able to see through the deception with your senses alone (see Jarvie 1987, 48). So, Plato makes his argument using a fictional narrative that evokes a particular situation, presents a hypothetical scenario, and to that extent is not dissimilar to a work of literary fiction. Narratives of this sort have in fact been plentiful in

Thought experiments  13 philosophical texts since Plato’s time, and are nowadays referred to as thought experiments. The terminology of the thought experiment, which became widespread in Anglo-American philosophical discourse in the early twentieth century, courtesy of physicist and philosopher Ernst Mach, somewhat obscures that what we are dealing with here is a narrative, an imaginative story. Nonetheless it does highlight that what is taking place in these narratives is a kind of experimentation. This is not the physical experimentation of the empirical sciences, putting theories to the test by going out to see if events actually occur as the theory predicts. Rather, it is the ‘armchair’ conceptual experimentation that puts philosophical theories or claims to the test by constructing imaginary situations, possible scenarios, to determine whether the theory or claim applies. In the reading of Plato’s cave as a thought experiment, the claim that you gain knowledge through the senses is put to the test by envisaging a possible scenario of global delusion. In that situation, the senses would not be sufficient to provide you with knowledge. Along with Plato’s cave, Descartes’s scenarios of global deception, his dreaming, and evil demon hypotheses can be regarded retrospectively as thought experiments. They bring into question the claim that I  can rely on what my senses are telling me for knowledge by considering the possibility that I might be dreaming, or that my whole lifetime of experiences is the fabrication of some malevolent, all-powerful demon. If these were so, it would make no difference to what I experienced, but my senses would not be giving me knowledge. Moving away from epistemological concerns, another example is political philosopher Robert Nozick’s experience machine scenario (1974, 42–45), which calls into question moral theories like hedonism and hedonistic utilitarianism that suppose humans to be motivated to seek pleasure above all else, by asking whether we would really want to plug ourselves into an experience machine that would give us a lifetime of happiness that would nonetheless be completely unreal. The misgivings that this prospect tends to evoke suggest that the supposedly universal hedonistic or utilitarian principle does not necessarily apply in all circumstances, and that values other than pleasure are in play. Thought experiments can also operate in a more constructive fashion, helping to confirm a theory, to identify fundamental principles, to establish the minimal conditions for something’s being the kind of thing it is, or to determine what is essential to a concept. In this constructive spirit, another political philosopher, John Rawls, argues for the principles that should structure society through a ‘veil of ignorance’ thought experiment. He thinks about what principles an individual in an ‘original position’ prior to society would choose if they did not know what position they themselves would end up having in that society. In Rawls’s theory, the original position plays much the same role as the ‘state of nature’ does in the social contract thinking of Thomas Hobbes and others (see Rawls 1971, 136ff ). All this has implications for how film might be regarded from a philosophical point of view. That films operate in the realm of the visual, of action and appearance, and rely on narrative, need not necessarily preclude them from doing

14  Thought experiments philosophy. Indeed, to put this more positively, insofar as a film offers something like a narrative thought experiment, it can be seen as capable of engaging in philosophy. This is the core argument put forward by Wartenberg, in Thinking on Screen – that it makes sense to see some fiction films as working in ways that thought experiments do, questioning philosophical assumptions by posing counterexamples that challenge a way of thinking, as well as exploring what is essential to a concept, and providing confirmation for a theory; and in that regard, as capable not only of illustrating philosophical ideas and themes but also of doing philosophy. In short, ‘fiction films can function as philosophical thought experiments and thus qualify as philosophical’ (Wartenberg 2015a; see also 2007, 67). We have already seen a cinematic scenario that is strongly reminiscent of a classic philosophical thought experiment, The Matrix’s vision of humanity enslaved by malevolent machines, being fed a virtual reality making them think they are living ordinary lives, which recalls especially Descartes’s evil demon scenario. Wartenberg follows up on this, arguing that The Matrix can be seen as doing philosophy by updating Descartes’s deception hypothesis, to get people to think about the role that computers and virtual realities play in their lives, through a thought experiment involving global deception by malevolent machines that is analogous to Descartes’s own evil demon thought experiment. (Wartenberg 2011, 75) This is the second general point I want to pursue here. If we reject the idea that philosophy can only proceed by way of argument, there’s nothing to stop film doing other things that might be thought part of philosophical practice. Thought experiments seem to fit the bill here, as a practice undertaken within philosophical discourse that is not an argument, and which can be envisaged as going on in film. A standard line of objection to Wartenberg’s view has been to argue that film narratives are too different to philosophical thought experiments to be considered doing philosophy in this way (see Wartenberg 2011, 19–21). There are certainly many differences between film narratives and the thought experiments that appear in written philosophical texts. For example, whereas philosophical thought experiments are usually austere and sketchy, the film narrative is richly detailed; where philosophical experiments focus on concepts rather than people and don’t engage the audience, cinematic narratives give access to characters, actions and extended stories, involving the audience in their characters’ lives and fate. And unlike even literary narratives, films don’t just describe these things but show them in detail, especially faces, gestures and conduct, communicating their significance directly to the audience (Cox and Levine 2012, 11–12, 88). One can argue that the narratives constituting philosophical thought experiments are articulated in this sketchy, austere manner because the philosophy employing them isn’t interested in the story as such, but in exploring general concepts and abstract ideas through the story. And given this, it might be thought that the relative richness of the film narrative is at the very least irrelevant to the proceedings, or even positively impedes them, the mass of particular detail

Thought experiments  15 getting in the way of the exploration of general concepts. However, this is not a decisive objection. For one thing, you could turn the argument around and argue that the austerity of the philosophical thought experiment can itself be problematic. Inasmuch as one is trying to envisage a possible situation, invoking a situation that is entirely stripped of detail, colour, and context, in which the participants are no more than impersonal ciphers, might be thought to diminish the usefulness of the situation being invoked. In its abstractness, the envisaged situation can seem far-fetched and contrived, remote from any possible human reality, and thus hard to take seriously or see as relevant. On the same basis, it could be argued that the relative richness of the film narratives means that they can sometimes make better thought experiments, portraying situations that are more relatable, realistic, and plausible. In these terms, Cox and Levine, for example, argue that ‘thought experiments are sometimes (not always) better run in cinematic form than in the deliberately thin and context- free form typical of philosophical writing’ (Cox and Levine 2012, 12). Additionally, one could argue that for all their austerity, the narratives of philosophical thought experiments are nonetheless often dramatic, highly visualisable scenarios that sometimes even have a cinematic quality about them. That is certainly the case with Plato’s cave, and Descartes’s sceptical conjectures, the dream, and evil demon arguments. It is unlikely that their authors, ­arch-rationalists though they might be, would have been blind to the dramatic character of these scenarios. Indeed, they are patently taking advantage of it. As noted earlier, Plato for all his rationalism and hostility to art chooses to write dramatic literary dialogues in which stories like the myth of the cave sit quite naturally. As for Descartes, as Sarah Bakewell points out, despite being someone who ‘advocated pure reason and swore enmity to tricks of the imagination’ Descartes also ‘used every novelistic device in his power to play on the reader’s emotions’ (Bakewell 2010, 140). The first chapter of his Meditations is not a dry intellectual exercise but a dramatic descent into a night of confusion and uncertainty, troubled by strange dreams, with an evil demon lurking in the darkness. Given this, it is not surprising that scenarios similar to those envisaged in these thought experiments have actually appeared in films, with full advantage being taken of their dramatic character. And along with these scenarios, the philosophical considerations raised by these scenarios have also been hinted at as part of the dramatic structure of the film. Mention has already been made of The Matrix, which can be seen as amongst other things dramatising Descartes’s dream and evil demon thought experiments, and also invoking the sceptical implications of those thought experiments. The character Morpheus, who is trying to wake up the film’s hero from his globally deluded state, alludes to the Cartesian concerns raised by the film’s narrative by asking him: ‘have you ever had a dream, Neo, that you were so sure was real? What if you were unable to wake up from that dream? How would you know the difference between the dream world and the real world?’ In connection with

16  Thought experiments Descartes’s dream argument, there are also films like Paul Verhoeven’s 1990 Total Recall, and Christopher Nolan’s 2010 Inception. In both these films, the hero of the piece at a certain point immerses themselves in a dream state, respectively, a virtual ‘holiday on Mars’ and the dreams of others as a form of industrial espionage. In each case, this raises within the film the question as to whether the happy ending each character eventually arrives at might not in fact be part of an ongoing dream. Moving to moral concerns, it has been argued by Christopher Grau that Michel Gondry’s 2004 film Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind can be seen as portraying a version of Nozick’s experience machine thought experiment, a ‘reverse experience machine’. This is courtesy of the film’s Lacuna Inc, the company that offers its clients the prospect of undergoing a memory-removal process that will increase their happiness by eliminating painful memories. The implications of the experience machine scenario, the way it calls into question the view that what we seek and value above all is happiness or pleasurable experience, become central to the film’s plot. As the film’s hero is undergoing the memory-removal process, he realises that he does not want to lose the memories of his ex-lover, no matter how distressing they might be (see Grau 2006). Wartenberg offers a broadly similar analysis of the film in Thinking on Screen (2007, 76ff). However, before we go too far down this path, there are some further objections to consider to the idea that films themselves can be understood as doing philosophy in this way. Murray Smith (2006) argues against Wartenberg that while films can incorporate philosophically interesting thought experiments, a film can never really be said to do philosophy this way because film and philosophy have different ‘structuring interests’. Whereas philosophy presents thought experiments in which philosophical concerns, for example, epistemological issues concerning what one can know, are at the forefront, in films it is artistic concerns, dramatic or comic ones, that dominate, and these are going to override any philosophical concerns. There is certainly something to this. In The Matrix, for instance, once our hero escapes from the matrix simulation into the apparently real world, no further questions are raised about the reality of his surroundings, even though it’s very clear that global deception is possible. Why? In the end, because this is not a philosophical treatise, it’s a film that needs to get on with the story. However, as Wartenberg points out, Smith’s argument here still concedes the possibility that a film might incorporate a philosophically interesting thought experiment (Wartenberg 2007, 16–17). A potentially stronger objection to the film as thought experiment view of film as philosophy comes from Tom McClelland (2011). Arguably, what makes a thought experiment’s narrative philosophical is that it is located in the context of a philosophical argument. Philosophical thought experiments typically involve a fictional narrative and an explicit argument that makes use of that narrative, giving the narrative its precise philosophical meaning. But this becomes an objection to seeing films as philosophising through thought experiments, because if

Thought experiments  17 nothing in the film corresponds to an explicit argument, aren’t we just left with a narrative with no particular philosophical significance? Even if a film appears to the interested onlooker to be posing a provocative thought experiment, the film itself does not usually provide explicit directives as to how to interpret its narrative. Literature would seem to have an advantage over film here, since it often has an authoritative narrator who can guide the reader in reading the narrative in the required way. Certainly, as noted earlier, a film can contain hints about or allusions to the philosophical significance of its narratives, as for example in Morpheus’s allusions to the Cartesian dream argument in The Matrix. But Morpheus’s speech falls a long way short of giving the film’s narrative the precise philosophical meaning the dream conjecture has in Descartes’s discussion. There, inserted into the overall argument, it calls into question the reliability of what the senses tell me about things in my immediate vicinity at any particular moment, and is part of a series of increasingly radical sceptical arguments culminating in the evil demon hypothesis, which calls into question the reliability of one’s whole lifetime of experiences, along with basic mathematical reasoning. As far as films themselves philosophising goes, perhaps the best one could say is that, instead of films philosophising through thought experiments, a film ‘can behave as an invitation for its audience to engage in a philosophical inquiry that treats events in the film like thought-experiments’ (McClelland 2011, 20). The film provides a narrative that sheds light on some philosophical issues, but the audience provides the argument and conclusion that incorporates the narrative into a full philosophical exercise.

2 Philosophical experiences

It seems that the film as a thought-experiment view of film as philosophy has its limitations. If what makes a narrative a philosophical thought experiment is that it is located in the context of a philosophical argument, it is not clear that the film itself can be seen as philosophising in these circumstances. However, a more radical way to proceed would be to question the idea that philosophy can only proceed by way of an argument, and to suggest that narratives can have philosophical significance in themselves, insofar as they embody a form of philosophical reflection that is distinct from the traditional argument-centred kind. In this chapter, we will look at the continental philosopher Foucault, whose philosophical practice, a ‘historico-critical’ reflection pursued through a certain kind of historical narrative, arguably provides a model for a narrative-based form of philosophical reflection that can also be pursued outside of written philosophy, and in particular, that can be pursued in a cinematic context. Historical counter-narratives and philosophical experiences There is no doubt that a film narrative can be incorporated into, or at least brought into connection with, an explicit philosophical argument that treats that narrative as a thought experiment. This is certainly one way that films can connect with philosophy. However, in this situation, the film is not itself doing anything philosophical, but is instead a resource for the philosophy that is going on elsewhere, at the level of the explicit philosophical argument. The film’s significance as a thought experiment is entirely borrowed from the context of philosophical argument in which it is being used, even if some films lend themselves more readily to this usage than others. This raises the further question: is this all films can be, a handy resource for philosophy? Can’t they themselves ever be said to be doing something philosophical? But regarding this more ambitious possibility, the stumbling block seems to be the old problem that doing philosophy requires argument, and films proceed through narrative. Wartenberg himself, while advocating for the idea of film as philosophy, seems to go along with the idea that philosophy necessarily involves argument. But, he DOI: 10.4324/9781003207764-2

Philosophical experiences  19 argues, films not only present narrative thought experiments but can also make arguments, and there is at least one sort of argument that films are well-suited to make, ‘the presentation of a counterexample to a philosophical thesis by means of a thought experiment’ (2007, 76). However, while it is certainly possible to argue that a film can present a thought experiment that provides a counterexample to a philosophical thesis, it remains unclear that films themselves can be said to be making an argument, which implies that they have the capacity to organise or assess their content in terms of arguments, with premises and conclusions. To argue that a film narrative might itself be construed as a kind of argument invites the objection that this is simply an attempt to impose philosophical significance on an essentially non-philosophical medium. This is the essence of the so-called imposition objection to film as philosophy, another of the general objections to the idea of film as philosophy that Wartenberg himself identifies and discusses in Thinking on Screen (see Wartenberg 2007, 25ff). We will return to the question of the differences between narrative and argument shortly. Here we seem to be running up against the most basic objection to the idea of film as philosophy that films do not have the capacity to organise their content in the form of arguments. However, a way to get around this obstacle would be to question the very idea that philosophy can only proceed by way of argument, and to suggest that narratives can have philosophical significance in themselves, by virtue of embodying a form of philosophical reflection that is distinct from the traditional argument-centred kind. While Wartenberg himself rejects the idea that philosophy can proceed narratively (2007, 77), it is useful here to go back to his initial argument for understanding films as philosophy. He first of all argues that films can contribute to history, because one method that historians use to present their research in history is narrative. A narrative is used to make sense of the world, providing the scaffolding that joins historical events in a pattern, allowing us to comprehend their significance as parts of an extended story. Given this, Wartenberg argues, films can do history, not just in the sense of compiling documentary footage, but also editing it into a narrative. He gives as an example Lorraine Gray’s 1979 documentary With Babies and Banners, which tells the story of a strike against General Motors in the 1930s (Wartenberg 2007, 23). Before going on, a few comments about this line of argument are in order. It is quite true that the writing of history has been conceived of as a form of storytelling since antiquity. More precisely, as Luc Brisson argues, history, like philosophy, emerged in opposition to the mythical narratives. But whereas Plato, at least in his official pronouncements, rejected narrative in favour of argument, and devalued visual experience, history embraced a different kind of narrative. From Herodotus and Thucydides on, historical narrative was distinguished from the poet’s mythical narratives by virtue of being based on eyewitness reports. From this point of view, myths could be dismissed as unverifiable, as fables, mere stories (Brisson 2004, 10–11; Curthoys and Docker 2006, 13; cf Partenie 2009, 4). Even after the emergence of history as an academic discipline in the nineteenth

20  Philosophical experiences century, with the ‘scientific’ emphasis on primary sources and rigorous principles of source-criticism, narrative has remained the way of linking events and making overall sense of them. It may be noted in passing that a further aspect of narrative becomes visible in the idea of the historical narrative, as opposed to the mere story. Whereas the mere story is a fictional narrative, presenting a fabricated or hypothetical scenario, the historical narrative is a non-fiction narrative, a framework that enables us to organise and comprehend observed facts. We will come back to this distinction between fictional and non-fictional narratives in Chapter 3, but it is not significant at this point. So, Wartenberg argues, narrativity provides a link between history and film, making it possible for films to screen history, and this opens the way to the idea that films can also screen philosophy because philosophy also uses narratives, in the form of thought experiments. It is this latter connection, between film and philosophy, that has come into question, insofar as the film narrative lacks an argument context that might seem indispensable to philosophising. However, I want to suggest that if we accept that films can do history, a stronger connection between film and philosophy can be established by considering the possibility that a historical narrative might itself serve as a means of philosophising, a ‘historico-critical’ form of reflection. A  film able to screen such a historical narrative could then be said to be doing philosophy. This would in turn give us a way of thinking about the narrative fiction film in particular as a means of philosophising, not just as a thought experiment but as a form of reflection akin to the historico-critical reflection within philosophy. So first of all, how might a historical narrative serve as a means of philosophising? In the modern period, a number of thinkers have turned to history as an avenue for philosophical reflection, including G.W.F. Hegel, Karl Marx, and Friedrich Nietzsche in the nineteenth century, and Michel Foucault in the twentieth century. For present purposes, the most useful of these is Foucault. Foucault’s books are often histories, reflecting on how features of our present, like the modern prison, or conceptions of sexuality, have emerged historically. However, he does not turn to history simply for the sake of doing history. His interest is in thinking critically about ways of thinking and practices that are taken for granted in the present, for example, that criminals should be punished by being locked up, or that sexuality is central to who we are. Typically, although these forms of thinking and practices are widely accepted, they are starting to be contested or resisted by segments of the population. Reflection on how these practices and forms of thinking have emerged historically is intended to assist those who resist by challenging the idea that there is anything timeless, universal, or necessary about them, opening up the possibility that they might be modified or reinvented, that we might change the way we think about and do things as a culture. At the time Foucault’s work provoked questions about whether what he was doing could be regarded as philosophy. This certainly isn’t philosophy in ­Plato’s sense, which is concerned precisely with establishing timeless, universal

Philosophical experiences  21 principles, in the form of the ideal Forms. Foucault’s thinking is very much opposed to philosophy in this sense. Nonetheless, he can be seen as pursuing, through the use of history, another quite traditional philosophical task, that of interrogating the presupposed or taken-for-granted in our thinking (see O’Leary and Falzon 2011, 4). The aim here is not to establish universal rules or principles, but to escape imprisonment in fixed, dogmatic forms of thinking, to open the possibility of thinking differently. This is in fact another way of interpreting ­Plato’s cave story, as an image of philosophy as the questioning of taken-for-granted beliefs, identifying unreflective ignorance with enslavement and philosophy with liberation. It is perhaps the ultimate Platonic irony that Plato’s cave story might give support to an anti-Platonic philosophy. Foucault sums up his approach as a ‘historical ontology of ourselves’. As he puts it, by grasping the historicity of ruling forms of thought and practice that take themselves to be timeless, necessary and universal, we can ‘separate out, from the contingency that has made us what we are, the possibility of no longer being, doing, or thinking what we are, do, or think’ (1997, 315–316). This is rather different from the version of philosophical history put forward by Hegel. Hegel also insisted on the historical character of our forms of thinking; but he interpreted history in terms of timeless, universal principles. This is because for Hegel, history is on the face of it opposed to the philosophical project, which he understands in a Platonic way as being concerned with the Truth that ‘does not fall within the sphere of the transient, and has no history’, whereas history tells of ‘that which has at one time existed, at another time has vanished’ (Hegel 1995, 8). This is philosophy understood in the traditional, Platonic manner as aspiring to universal, timeless truths, beyond the historical world of change and transformation. Hegel resolves this apparent conflict between philosophy and history by affirming the ‘Reason of history’. History is no mere ‘collection of chance events, of expeditions of wandering knights, each going about their fighting, struggling purposelessly’ (Hegel 1995, 19; see also Lloyd 1984, 5). It has an underlying direction and purpose, and everything that happens can be understood to be contributing to the realisation of that purpose, even if this is not immediately apparent to individual subjects. This is also the story of the human being as a finite being in the midst of history who comes to realise that although they seem to be at the mercy of historical circumstances, they are in fact behind everything that happens. In the form of Reason or Spirit, the personification of Plato’s Forms in a humanity conceived as a kind of collective rational subject, they are the real protagonist of history. This recognition is played out in historical practice. History becomes an extended narrative in which Spirit undergoes self-loss and becomes alienated from itself, and then returns to itself, recognising itself in history as society becomes progressively more organised in conformity with rational principles. So this is a narrative with a happy ending providing a resolution of the complications that have arisen for the main character earlier on, not unlike a conventional Hollywood film.

22  Philosophical experiences As such, although Hegel turns to history, historical events are never really appreciated in their historical particularity. They are only understood insofar as they are subsumed to an overarching narrative of progress, the progressive selfrealisation of Spirit. The result is a profoundly unhistorical history. The central principle of Hegel’s system, Reason or Spirit, may be being comprehended in its historical development, but since all historical events are themselves being interpreted in terms of this principle, this Subject itself remains ultimately unhistorical. And since history has been subordinated to Spirit, this subject in comprehending history only comprehends itself, and as Foucault puts it, the ‘diversity and movement of history’ is absorbed into a ‘totality fully closed upon itself’ (Foucault 2000, 379). Ultimately, Hegel’s immediate successor Marx does not depart from this script. The Absolute Subject is replaced by ‘species-being’, collective labouring humanity; and history as a process of spiritual self-realisation is replaced by Marx’s view of history as humanity’s development, in the course of progressive transformations of the division of labour, from an initial state of primitive communism, its fall into alienation under class society, and its return to itself with the overcoming of alienation and the establishment of the classless society (see Foucault 1972, 12–13). Foucault is not pursuing a Hegelian history, nor is he pursuing what he calls a ‘history of the past in terms of the present’ (1991, 31). This is something like Hegel’s closed, ultimately unhistorical vision of history, but here history is subordinated to the ‘present’ rather than to an abstract philosophical principle like Spirit. The present in this context is the ‘anonymous, socially sanctioned body of rules that govern one’s manner of perceiving, imagining, judging and acting’ (Flynn 2005, 34), the largely unconsciously held values, practical norms, and forms of understanding presupposed or taken for granted by a more or less coherent group at a certain time, and which enable members of the group to make sense of the world and themselves. This is not a completely homogenous or systematic framework of thinking grounded in some ultimate principle, but a looser and more diverse assemblage, although there will be structures in that certain norms and forms of understanding will typically be dominant, and others more marginalised. And rather than simply being intellectually entertained as a series of explicit rules or propositions, they will be embodied in the actions and practices of individuals, as pre-reflective habits, internalised by individuals in the process of their growing up, inculcated in them through social and cultural conditioning, informing their identities, who they are, the roles they play and the stance they take towards the world. Through a history of this present, and of ourselves in this present, Foucault seeks to call into question the presupposed or taken-for-granted in our thinking. The aim here is not to completely dispense with a framework of norms, principles, and forms of understanding. Some such framework is necessary for us to function, to think and act coherently, and to make sense of the world. As the Hegelian picture suggests, the problem arises if we see the world only in terms

Philosophical experiences  23 of this framework. Then, ironically enough, the very framework that enables us to make sense of the world becomes a prison that limits our thinking, blinding us to anything that does not fit into that framework. We can see thought becoming imprisoned in its own ruling categories in this way in the phenomenon of ‘confirmation bias’ in science and politics, prominent in pseudo-science and conspiracy thinking, where you only acknowledge what confirms your existing beliefs and values, and edit out or creatively reinterpret anything that is inconsistent with them, anything that might challenge them or require you to rethink them. It’s a comforting way of thinking that seems entirely justified in that there’s an abundance of evidence for your views, in fact, everything you see confirms them, but your thinking has become rigid and circular. Such closed thinking seems to be the special gift of the new online communication technologies, which readily push users into filter bubbles in which they only encounter material that has been curated for them by the algorithms designed to match their existing interests and views. Rather than being connected to others, people never encounter genuinely alternative views. In relation to the internet, this is not the Platonic problem, that the internet is a place of illusion and indoctrination, in which the participants mistake illusory images and representations manufactured by others for reality. Rather, the problem is that the algorithms determining one’s internet experiences ensure that we only come across that which confirms existing thinking, interests and desires, resulting in the hardening of existing views and the arresting of development that comes from genuine engagement with the views of others, perspectives that might challenge our thinking. We encounter a world tailored for our easy consumption, a world that it is difficult to see beyond or opt out of. Indoctrination and manipulation of the consumer are still going on, insofar as they are in turn being steered into pursuing those ideas, wants and interests that conform to the categories and valuations built into the algorithms curating their experience. This is particularly relevant to film in the current environment, insofar as the process taking place through the multiple screens of the internet world is also seeping back into the original screen, into movies. It is no longer simply that films are being dictated, changed or re-edited on the basis of test screenings, fan pressure, or even social media backlash to trailers. In his discussion of the contemporary internet, Justin Smith points out that it is now common for Hollywood movies to be ­test-marketed ‘using third-party companies that track the eye motions of the test audiences as they are watching the screen, in order to determine by quantitative means what sort of images and motions succeed best in capturing a viewer’s attention’. The result not surprisingly is that ‘these movies will be absolutely unable to challenge the viewer in any way, to cause the viewer to grow in heart or mind by exposure to something new and unexpected’ (Smith 2022, 49–50). Instead, one gets easily consumable, untroubling but also increasingly generic films. Coming back to the question of history, to criticise the idea of a history of the past in terms of the present is not to say that turning history into a continuous

24  Philosophical experiences narrative that validates its starting point does not have its uses. In relation to one’s own personal history, for example, we don’t so much remember as construct our personal histories, turning our memories into a continuous story with ourselves as the central character. Our life becomes a journey rather than a series of accidents. We tend to smooth over incongruencies, rearrange timelines, invent scenarios and omit details that are at odds with our present self-understanding, but rarely notice we’ve done so until we see ourselves in a video, or hear someone else’s version of events (see McCraney 2012, 176). This kind of creative recollection confirms our present self-understanding and may be the real ‘memory basis’ of personal identity, our sense of being the same person over time. John Locke’s view that personal identity depends on there being a sameness or continuity of memory has always been plagued by the problem that memories themselves are notoriously unstable and unreliable. Creative recollection turns this unstable material into a coherent, self-affirming narrative. This creative selfinterpretation is clearly useful for affirming and preserving our sense of self, our identity. However, it also means we are forever teetering on the edge of self-deception. It is but a short step for creative self-interpretation to turn from a useful strategy for preserving our sense of self into a refusal to face up to inconvenient truths and disturbing realities about ourselves and our situation. The cost of this self-deception is that we sacrifice any meaningful connection with reality, as well as alienating those close to us, who can no longer share our understanding with the world. A history of the past in terms of the present, this closed, circular, thinking in relation to the understanding of the history of one’s culture, in which the past comes to be seen in terms of present-day ideas, values and perspectives, is selfdeception writ large, cultural self-deception. Once again, we cannot do without some such framework of norms and perspectives in order to make sense of the world, and one’s view of the past is inevitably going to be influenced by one’s current framework. It would be naïve to suppose that we can simply stand outside the standpoint of our present in order to attain a ‘purely objective’ understanding of the past, the aspiration of a responsible ‘scientific’ history. A naively empiricist history that claims to be simply disclosing the truth of the past fails to recognise the role of interpretation and organisation in the understanding of the historical record. But the problem arises if the past comes to be viewed entirely in terms of present-day ideas, values and perspectives. Historians themselves talk about needing to avoid the ‘fallacy of presentism’, anachronistically introducing present-day ideas and perspectives into depictions or interpretations of the past. From this point of view, history becomes the reassuring narrative of progress, serving only to confirm present-day ideas, values and perspectives, which are themselves being treated as if they were above history, timeless and universal. This is evident, for example, in the progressivist histories that emerged during the eighteenth-century Enlightenment, in which the past is presented as a story of inevitable progress from barbarism to enlightenment, culminating in

Philosophical experiences  25 the present enlightened age; or in the triumphalist narratives in which a nation’s history is understood as ‘the taming of the Wild West’, or bringing civilization to a ‘terra nullius’. As Mark Poster puts it, such history ‘gives support to the present by collecting all the meanings of the past and tracing the line of inevitability through which they are resolved in the present’ (Poster 1984, 74). These selfserving, often officially sanctioned histories, even if they are useful in building or reinforcing a sense of national identity, also edit out or creatively reinterpret any inconvenient elements in the historical record that don’t fit into the narrative of progress, anything that might disturb this comforting story, and thus undermine the present that it supports. Historical truth in general requires not only the framework of norms, categories, and forms of understanding constitutive of our present that enable us to make sense of the world but also the willingness, even the courage, to acknowledge the disturbing ‘otherness’ of the past, the extent to which it is a ‘foreign country’ in relation to the present. And a history that brings the otherness of the past to the fore in this way is in a position to critically reflect on, rather than simply validate, the ideas, values, and forms of thinking presupposed in the present. This is what Foucault is interested in, not a history of the past in terms of the present, but a ‘history of the present’ (1991, 31) that uses history to question the taken-for-granted in our current thinking. Without supposing we can simply stand outside the orienting norms, values, and beliefs of the present, this involves turning to the past precisely insofar as it does not simply reflect who we are in the present. In the face of self-serving narratives of continuous development and inevitable progress, Foucault’s histories instead bring to the fore that which is ‘other’, strange and surprising, in the historical record: that which has been overlooked or excluded, different ways of doing things that not simply dismissed as barbaric or unenlightened, historical events in their particularity rather than merely parts of a larger continuous process, the accidents, and contingencies in seemingly inevitable historical developments. Foucault describes his histories as constructing a ‘counter-memory’, recalling what has to be forgotten, marginalised or passed over in order to turn history into a comforting narrative of progress culminating in the present. Mindful of the narrative character of history, we can also think of them as counter-narratives. The term ‘counter-narrative’ has gained currency in recent times, often being applied to local or specific discourses that stand in opposition to an encompassing official or progressivist narrative. The reference here there is to Jean-François Lyotard’s petits récits, the ‘little stories of those individuals and groups whose knowledges and histories have been marginalized, excluded, subjugated or forgotten’ (Peters and Lankshear 1996, 2) or more neutrally to ‘stories impacting on social settings that stand opposed to (perceived) dominant and powerful master- narratives’ (Lueg et al. 2021, iii). Here, however, the term refers to the Foucauldean histories of the present that run counter to and subvert prevailing narratives of historical progress, by highlighting elements that those narratives have excluded or

26  Philosophical experiences marginalised. For Foucault, the construction of such ‘counter-memories’ represents a ‘transformation of history into a totally different form of time’ ­(Foucault 1998, 385). It is still a history, but no longer one that culminates inevitably in and gives support to the present. By breaking the past off from the present and demonstrating its foreignness, these histories deprive present forms of thought and action of support from this quarter, stripping them of any historical necessity or inevitability, showing them to be ‘historically singular’, contingently emergent, and hence potentially able to be modified in the ongoing process of history. It should be emphasised that while Foucault is critical of a naively empiricist history, this isn’t a view that ‘abandons objectivity’ and ‘reduces history to narratives’, as some historians complained. For example, Richard Evans, in In Defence of History, argued that Foucault was part of the postmodern assault on objective truth, for whom history is merely ‘a fiction of narrative order imposed on the irreducible chaos of events in the interests of the exercise of power’ (Evans 1997, 196). On that view, there is no historical truth outside of the stories we tell; the truth of history is relative to the narratives we are imposing on events. This is what has been called the ‘Rashomon effect’, after Akira Kurosawa’s 1950 film Rashomon, in which four participants in an event give competing stories of what happened. For some commentators, this film was about the relativity of truth, about there being no truth outside the stories we tell. Kurosawa himself insisted that his film was really about people’s capacity to deceive themselves, with each participant giving a self-serving story of what happened in which they appear in the best possible light (see Jarvie 1987, 306–307). And similarly, Foucault’s approach doesn’t reduce history to a mere ‘fiction of narrative order’ as Evans suggests. On the contrary, it aims to counter the tendency to interpret history in a self-serving way, from the standpoint of one’s present. It looks instead for the otherness in history that can disrupt a comforting narrative of historical progress and bring one’s present into question (see Falzon 2013, 289). So, we have the idea of a historical narrative, or rather, counter-narrative, that can serve as a means of critical reflection. And this historico-critical reflection has some general features that make it especially useful for present purposes. First of all, it is anti-Platonic, in the sense that it departs from philosophy as the search for timeless, universal principles, turning to historical counter-narratives in order to challenge forms of thinking that are being treated as if they were timeless and universal. Secondly, and this is another anti-Platonic feature, it is an experience-centred form of reflection. Here I  am drawing on the analysis Timothy O’Leary gives of the notion of experience in Foucault’s work in his Foucault and Fiction. This is not necessarily visual experience, but rather experience in the sense of an encounter with something that does not simply reflect and confirm our existing way of thinking, but confronts and disturbs it, as when one speaks of ‘having an experience’. This is experience as the singular, ‘limittranscending, challenging event’ (O’Leary 2009, 6–7), the kind of experience that disturbs one’s forms of understanding, the ‘limit experience’ that ‘has the

Philosophical experiences  27 function of wrenching the subject from itself, of seeing to it that the subject is no longer itself’, as Foucault rather dramatically puts it. This can be contrasted with another, more mundane sense of experience in Foucault’s thinking. In a 1978 interview, in response to a question about differences between his approach and that of phenomenology, Foucault suggests that phenomenology is content to describe everyday lived experience, and the forms of understanding in terms of which the subject makes sense of that experience (see Foucault 2000, 241). This is experience as the long-term, relatively stable background experience we share with our culture and time, embodying the shared norms of thought, action, and feeling through which we ordinarily make sense of the world and themselves. It is, in other words, the experience of one’s present and oneself in the present, and it is this that is being confronted and disturbed by experience in the first sense, experience as a limit-transcending, challenging event. Foucault says he first encountered these limit experiences in the philosophy of Nietzsche, but also in literature. Many of the works that functioned to convey this disturbing experience were works of literature, not only Bataille and ­Blanchot, but also ‘works such as Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot, the stories of Jorge Luis Borges, the novels of Raymond Roussel, and the poetry of Stéphane Mallarmé’ (O’Leary 2009, 2; Foucault 2000, 246, 247). Subsequently, he would seek to induce these experiences through his historical works. In his interview, he goes on to say that he has always understood his historical books to be experiences that disturb, ‘direct experiences aimed at pulling myself free of myself, at preventing me from being the same (Foucault 2000, 242). Later he speaks of them as ‘experience books’ which aim to produce transformation, as opposed to a ‘demonstration book’ that aims to establish truths (see Foucault 2001, 25–42). In terms of the picture being developed here, the disturbing experience is the ‘otherness’ of the past that Foucault’s histories of the present seek to bring to the fore, disrupting the story of history as progressing comfortably to the present. By invoking the unexpected or out of the ordinary, these historical counter-­narratives challenge our current forms of thinking, making it difficult for us to carry on thinking as before. They present us with an experience that does not just reassuringly confirm our presuppositions but is able to confront and challenge them. This can also be called a philosophical experience, philosophical in the sense of bringing into question the taken-for-granted in one’s thinking, with the potential to make us think differently. Finally, and this directly follows on from the previous point, this is an experimental form of reflection. It is experimental in the broad sense that one’s guiding presuppositions and principles are being put to the test of experience, the experience that does not simply confirm one’s existing framework of thinking but challenges and disturbs it. The encounter with a challenging experience can also be construed as a test or trial that we undergo, with the attendant danger of failure, of not passing the test and needing to revise our presuppositions in the light of the disturbing experience. In this connection, it is worth noting that, as O’Leary

28  Philosophical experiences points out, experience and experiment once meant the same, and that they share the Latin root expereri (to try, to test), which is itself linked to the word for danger (periculum) (O’Leary 2009, 7). However, it should be emphasised that this is a philosophical form of experimentation, in the sense that what is under scrutiny here are not so much empirical hypotheses as forms of thinking, the general forms or principles in terms of which we make sense of the world and ourselves. Foucault characterises his historico-critical reflections as experimental in this sense. The aim is not to establish or clarify the general forms underlying our thinking, and so determine the limits of what we can legitimately think and do. What is being tested, ultimately, is what can be changed in our own thinking. It is a ‘historico-practical test of the limits we may go beyond’ (Foucault 1997, 316). Philosophical experiences versus thought experiments With this notion of an experience-centred, experimental form of philosophical reflection pursued through a narrative that foregrounds the limit-transgressing event, we have travelled some distance from the idea of the thought experiment with which we started. The question that can now be asked is, how in the light of this experience-centred reflection should we view the traditional philosophical thought experiment? How does it differ from experience-centred reflection? The argument so far has been that narratives embodying an experience-centred form of reflection can be said to have philosophical significance in themselves, whereas in the traditional thought experiment, the narrative only acquires its philosophical significance by virtue of being employed in an argument of some kind, serving as a resource for philosophy. We can now flesh out this latter point by saying that with the traditional thought experiment, the narrative acquires its philosophical significance by virtue of serving philosophical activity understood in rationalist terms, as proceeding via argument, and as broadly concerned with establishing general truths or unchanging essences beyond change and transformation. This is the rationalist, Platonic conception of philosophy discussed earlier, philosophy understood as an argument-driven search for the essential nature of things, for what makes a thing the kind of thing that it is, and which is shared by all things of that kind. In Plato’s language, we are looking for the ideal forms of things, or in more contemporary terminology, the necessary and sufficient conditions for the application of concepts. Identifying the conditions for applying concepts requires reflective work, because we can have concepts without having a clear idea of the conditions for applying them. Indeed, the framework of concepts through which we ordinarily make sense of the world, our ‘conceptual scheme’, or what in Foucault’s work is referred to as the ‘present’, is far from being an explicit and clearly defined system of concepts that has been established and developed through some careful analytical process. On the contrary, it is more a ramshackle assemblage of largely unreflected-upon norms

Philosophical experiences  29 and forms of understanding that have typically been absorbed in the process of growing up. In the kind of philosophical reflection that seeks to analyse and clarify the conditions for applying concepts, it is common to see the use of a hypothetical approach (see Schick 2020, 58). Here we formulate a hypothesis about the conditions for the application of a concept, in the form of a definition, and test that hypothesis to determine whether the conditions are necessary or sufficient by seeing whether they apply in various envisioned situations. If the proposed definition is adequate, it should apply in all situations. If one finds a situation where it does not hold, we need to reject or revise the definition. This is the method famously employed by Socrates in the Platonic dialogues to test proposed definitions of things like justice, knowledge, or piety. In each case, he gets someone to offer a definition, say that justice, or moral rightness, is sticking to certain rules like giving back what is not yours. Then he shows the definition to be inadequate, by finding cases where sticking to rules like giving back what is not yours does not amount to justice. If, for example, you borrow a weapon from someone and then they go mad, it would not be right or just to give back their weapon. In this case, one can reject the proposed definition, or revise it to try to make it more adequate. For Plato, the aim is to arrive at a true and universal definition of the thing under consideration, a definition that holds in all possible situations, thereby establishing the thing’s essential nature or form. Some such approach has been a prominent feature of the analytic or AngloAmerican brand of philosophy since the first half of the twentieth century, with some analytic philosophers seeing conceptual analysis as being essential to and definitive of the concept of philosophy itself (see for example Jackson 1998). Here the main task of philosophy is deemed to be that of determining the essential nature of concepts, the necessary and sufficient conditions for their application, for something’s being a member of the class of things denoted by the concept. Here also, discovery proceeds not through empirical investigations but through arguments, and the thought experiment is very much a creature of philosophy so understood. As a recent characterisation of the enterprise has it, philosophy ‘is not a species of empirical enquiry, and it is not methodologically comparable to the natural sciences (though it is comparable to the formal sciences). It seeks the discovery of essences. It operates ‘from the armchair’: that is, by unaided (usually solitary) contemplation. Its only experiments are thought-experiments, and its data are possibilities (or “intuitions” about possibilities)’ (McGinn 2012, 4). Unlike experiments in natural science, then, there is nothing empirical about thought experiments. They are concerned with concepts. They describe possible situations in which a concept should apply or a condition should be met, in order to explore and test concepts and theories. Theodore Schick provides a clear overview of the role of the thought experiment in this context. Generally speaking, if a philosophical theory can be understood as identifying the essential nature, the necessary or sufficient conditions

30  Philosophical experiences for the application of a concept, thought experiments test such theories by determining whether the conditions identified are indeed necessary or sufficient. If it turns out that the concept doesn’t apply or the condition isn’t met, there’s reason to believe that the theory is mistaken. As such, ‘[e]very thought experiment is part of an argument that usually has the form of denying the consequent or affirming the antecedent’ (Schick 2020, 101, see 98–119). It is evident here that the narrative that constitutes the thought experiment is getting its philosophical significance by virtue of being part of an argument that aims to support or challenge some conceptual analysis. The narrative has no philosophical significance in itself, except in the sense that the language in which it is typically articulated is coloured by the argumentative context in which it is employed, which is why thought experiments are usually austere and sketchy, stripped of detail and context, concerned with concepts rather than people, uninterested in involving the audience, and so on. Philosophical reflection as experience-centred reflection undertaken through narrative or more precisely, counter-narrative, as I am suggesting is exemplified by Foucault’s work, represents a departure from this way of thinking. It is still philosophical reflection in the broad sense of being concerned with interrogating the presuppositions, the concepts, or general principles behind our thinking. But it departs from the traditional rationalist approach in that it is not concerned with the discovery of essences, the essential nature of concepts. It shares the view of the later Wittgenstein, who in his mature thought argued, against both the Platonic project, and his own earlier philosophical approach which emphasised definition and analysis to an extreme degree, that in practice most concepts are in fact indeterminate and lack a precise definition. As Wittgenstein put it, ‘[w]e are unable clearly to circumscribe the concepts we use; not because we don’t know their real definition, but because there is no real “definition” to them’ (Wittgenstein 1958, 25). In other words, there is no set of necessary and sufficient conditions that defines the concept, no common essence or nature shared by things of a certain sort, by virtue of which they are things of that sort. Wittgenstein himself no longer talked of definitions but of family resemblances that things of a certain sort share with one another. Instead of operating from the armchair, seeking to explore the concepts, ideal forms or general categories that exist independently of or in advance of all possible experience, experience-centred reflection remains defiantly empirical, while still being concerned with understanding general forms of order and classification. It is looking to experiences that challenge the ruling concepts and categories that give form to one’s thinking, and which raise the possibility of thinking differently. Thinking differently does not imply the complete rejection of these ruling concepts. Insofar as concepts can be understood as basic categories of thinking that enable us to make sense of the world, we could not think at all without some sort of conceptual framework. But what is being rejected is the idea not only that concepts have an essential nature, but also that the conceptual

Philosophical experiences  31 framework is something timeless and unchanging, above the world of change and transformation. Concepts are very much part of this world, and what this means is that they are subject to time and change, that they are historical. This was already an insight of Nietzsche, one of the most strident of the modern anti-Platonists, who railed against the predilection of philosophers like Plato to dehistoricise concepts, envisaging them as eternal, unchanging essences, thinking that in doing so they were honouring them, when in fact they were killing and stuffing them, turning them into ‘conceptual mummies’ (Nietzsche 1968, 35). For Nietzsche, ‘Only something which has no history is capable of being defined’ (Nietzsche 1989, 80). With regard to moral notions in particular, rather than looking for the timeless essences of notions like justice, Nietzsche offered a historical account of how basic moral concepts like good, bad and evil, have sprung up, developed, and changed, challenging the view that the existing form of morality is absolute and to be accepted as given, and showing that it is not the only morality possible. Large differences between them notwithstanding, Foucault very much follows in the footsteps of Nietzsche in this respect, in that he provides histories of the present, historical narratives, or more precisely, counter-narratives, that bring into question the ruling concepts and categories giving form to one’s thinking and acting, challenging the idea that there is anything timeless, universal, or necessary about them, in order to open the possibility of thinking and acting differently. The most important difference with rationalistic, argumentative philosophising is that in experience-centred narrative reflection, the philosophical import of the narratives involved does not lie in their being enlisted in arguments but is to be found in the narratives themselves, insofar as they bring to the fore these challenging experiences. This is not to say that the proposed form of reflection precludes argument. As a case in point, in his histories, Foucault acknowledges that he makes use of ‘the most conventional methods: demonstration or, at any rate, proof in historical matters, textual references, citation of authorities, drawing connections between texts and facts, suggesting schemes of intelligibility, offering different types of explanation’ (2000, 242). But the concern is to use these methods to construct a historical counter-narrative that brings to the fore the limit-transgressing event, the experience that challenges existing forms of understanding. This is how we can understand statements like the following, in the introduction to the second volume of the History of Sexuality: The studies that follow like the others I have done previously are studies of ‘history’ by reason of the domain they deal with and the references they appeal to; but they are not the work of a historian. . . . It was a philosophical exercise. . . . The object was to learn to what extent the effort to think one’s own history can free thought from what it silently thinks, and enable it to think differently. (Foucault 1985, 9)

32  Philosophical experiences The philosophical activity here clearly does not preclude the argument through which the narrative is constructed, but insofar as constructing a narrative does not necessarily involve argument, it is conceivable that the philosophical activity could proceed without reference to an argument. Compare this with the thought experiment, where the context of an argument is necessary for the narrative to function as a philosophical thought experiment. This new approach does not even preclude the kind of philosophical reflection that concerns itself with illuminating or clarifying the framework of concepts, categories or general principles in terms of which to make judgements about the world. Indeed, Foucault sees Kant’s version of this kind of reflection, the ‘transcendental critique’ that determines the underlying conditions of possibility for knowledge and morality, as introducing one of the great critical traditions in modern, post-Enlightenment thought. The tradition of historico-critical reflection, which Foucault sees himself as working in, is the other (Foucault 1988, 95). However, the historical, or more broadly experience-centred, approach, while not precluding the analytic kind of reflection, does require it to be seen in a certain light – as not so much discovering the essential nature of concepts in the Platonic manner, as attempting to turn the relatively vague and even contradictory concepts ordinarily presupposed in our thinking into a system of clearly defined principles or categories, which will then be able to be applied to produce an orderly picture of the world. In practice, people do not need to wait for philosophers to tidy up the concepts and principles that give form to their thinking and actions. They do not need to have clearly and distinctly defined concepts in order to use them successfully. This is especially evident in an area like ethics which, as James Griffin reminds us, ‘appears early in the life of a culture’ and does not wait on philosophers to provide it with foundations and the trappings of a theoretical science (Griffin 2015, 1). In general, forms of thinking and practice seem to emerge organically out of practices themselves, in the course of usage, without the help of philosophers. So on this view, analytic reflection is not a process of discovery so much as reform, refinement or distillation. Thought experiments are narratives pressed into service in arguments dedicated to this task. One might imagine thereby making partial reforms in a particular area, even establishing a completely homogenous or systematic framework of thinking, perhaps ordered by some ultimate principle. This would certainly enhance the organisational power of our framework of thinking, and its capacity to structure and make sense of our experience. However, while this reformist project is appealing from the point of view of replacing the messiness of life with a neat, orderly picture, by the same token, it runs the risk of subordinating our appreciation of the world to a theoretical picture that is blind or insensitive to the messiness and richness of life, a reality that tends to elude abstract categorisations. Mistaking a theoretical picture for reality is an error that goes back to Plato. By contrast, the experience-centred approach is more interested in highlighting the messiness of reality in relation

Philosophical experiences  33 to our ordering categories, the way in which experience persistently overflows the categories that are supposed to contain it, and on this basis brings them into question. Some of the differences between an analytic approach that makes use of thought experiments, and an experience-centred approach can be illustrated through a brief consideration of phenomenology, which we have already encountered a few times. In discussions of thought experiments, Husserl, the founder of phenomenology, is often cited as a continental thinker who offers an approach that makes use of thought experiments to establish the essential nature of concepts (see e.g. Schick 2020, 101). However, the situation with phenomenology is a little more complicated. Phenomenology is another movement in twentiethcentury continental philosophy that seeks to contest rationalist thought, at least in the form of a ‘static’ Platonism of hypostatised ideas subsisting in a separate realm, turning instead to the inspection of concrete experience (Husserl 1962, 80; see Kim 2019, 273–274). For Husserl, philosophy begins in the ‘bracketing’ or suspending of our ordinary assumptions about the world in order to attend to things as they actually appear to us, the ‘phenomena’. However, he also continues to see philosophy as a search for essences, and so requires the phenomenologist to go beyond particular experiences to discover the essential structures of experience. In order to discover these essential structures, the phenomenologist must perform the ‘eidetic reduction’ that brackets the particular and contingent features of an experience in order to reveal its essence. So I might experience a dog with white paws and amber eyes, but not all dog-experiences share these features. The essential structure of dog-experiences will consist in those features that a dog-experience must have in order to qualify as such an experience. Getting to this requires what Husserl calls ‘eidetic variation’, in which one imagines the thing one experiences as having different features, to find out whether changing a particular property, such as imagining the dog’s black paws, destroys its identity as a thing of that type. If it does not, then that particular property is not essential to it. The alternate scenarios, which Husserl calls ‘free fancies’, are thought ­experiments in the precise sense outlined earlier. One imagines different situations in order to reveal the essential structures of what one is experiencing. Husserl also notes that this is a procedure that involves fiction, hypothetical situations, and so he is able to say that ‘fiction is the source from which the knowledge of “eternal truths” draws its sustenance’ (Husserl 1962, 181–184; Romdenh-Romluc 2011, 8–9). We can compare this with the phenomenological approach taken by Jean-Paul Sartre, at least in the early stage of his career. Sartre discovered Husserl in the course of writing his debut novel Nausea, and it is possible to see him as enacting a kind of Husserlian bracketing in the novel, progressively suspending ordinary ways of thinking about the world in order to return to the ‘things themselves’. However, Sartre has a different approach to experience to that of Husserl. He is

34  Philosophical experiences not interested in going on to establish essential structures of experience. Rather, his efforts are entirely directed towards challenging the forms and categories through which he formerly made sense of the world. As the narrative unfolds, the main character, Roquentin, finds his ordinary ways of thinking about the world, the categories that he used to appeal to in order to make sense of things, becoming increasingly questionable. He comes to see them as a mere ‘veneer’, concealing a brute reality that escapes all meaning. Thus, Sartre, at this stage of his career, is pursuing a phenomenological agenda that has some affinities with the experimental, experience-centred form of philosophical reflection being pursued by Foucault. There is a similar attempt to challenge ruling categories and forms of thinking in the light of experience. One key difference is that for Sartre, the challenge of experience is seen to justify the complete rejection of all such forms of thinking in terms of which we make sense of the world, leading to the revelation that the world is absurd, utterly meaningless. For Foucault, in contrast, the challenge of experience leads not to complete dismissal but rather the possibility of modifying the forms through which we make sense of the world. The other feature of Sartre’s picture worth noting here is that with Nausea, he is pursuing his philosophical agenda outside of traditional philosophy, in the realm of literary fiction, a very deliberate move on his part. At the time of the book’s writing, as he said in a later interview, ‘I did not want to write books of philosophy. . . . I wanted the philosophy I believed in and the truths I should attain to be expressed in my novel. . . . Fundamentally I wanted to write Nausea’ (de Beauvoir 1984, 142–143). So here Sartre pursues his philosophical reflection not primarily through arguments in ‘books of philosophy’, but through a literary narrative in which the character Roquentin undergoes a series of compelling and increasingly revelatory experiences, interspersed with reverie and reflection on his part (see Falzon 2005, 107). I want to suggest that the kind of experiencecentred reflection being undertaken in Foucault’s philosophical histories can similarly be pursued outside a philosophical text. And, most crucially for present purposes, this experience-centred philosophical reflection can be undertaken in a cinematic context. The task now is to give some content to this suggestion, to understand in general terms at least what this sort of reflection is going to look like in the context of film.

3 Film and philosophical experience

In my discussion of film’s philosophical capabilities so far, I have made some broad claims about the nature of philosophy, and the different ways philosophical reflection might be understood to proceed. This consideration of the varieties of philosophical reflection is necessary in light of the main objection to the idea of film as philosophy, this being that philosophy requires arguments, and films can’t do arguments. They are simply the wrong kind of medium for that kind of activity. Against this, and drawing on the work of Foucault, I argued that philosophical reflection need not necessarily proceed through abstract reasoning and argument, that it can also be understood to proceed narratively, in the form of an experience-centred, experimental form of philosophical reflection, pursued through a historical counter-narrative. Since this second kind of philosophical reflection does not necessarily proceed through demonstrative arguments, it is not exclusively confined to the traditional written context. It can be pursued outside written philosophy, and I claim, it can be undertaken in a cinematic context. The topic I will pursue in this chapter is how this experimental or experience-­ centred reflection might be pursued in a cinematic context, particularly in the context of narrative fiction film. Exploring this view of film’s philosophical capabilities requires some consideration of the nature and workings of film. As with questions about the nature of philosophy, the nature of film is a large question, but it becomes more manageable if discussed in connection with the specific question of film’s philosophical capabilities. The following discussion of film is undertaken in light of this concern, aiming to give some sense of the nature of film insofar as it has a bearing on the idea that films can be said to philosophise through an experience-centred, narrative form of reflection. Film narrative and visual experience As mentioned in the previous chapter, in Thinking on Screen, Thomas Wartenberg argued that film can contribute to history. This is because one method that historians use to present their research in history is the narrative that joins historical events in a pattern, allowing us to comprehend their significance as parts DOI: 10.4324/9781003207764-3

36  Film and philosophical experience in an extended story. As such, films can do history, not only by compiling documentary footage, but editing it into a narrative. Given this, it seems plausible to suppose that if a film were to screen a Foucault-style history, a historical counternarrative that brings into question the underlying presuppositions of a present form of understanding, and this history was understood to be a form of philosophical reflection, the film could be said to be engaging in philosophy in the form of this historico-critical kind of reflection. Indeed, I would argue, the film that Wartenberg mentions as an example of film contributing to history, the documentary, With Babies and Banners (1979), has elements of this historico-critical reflection. As Wartenberg suggests, this account of a strike against General Motors in the US in the 1930s does history in the sense of editing documentary footage, and interviews with surviving participants, into a narrative that tells the story of American women in the union and labour actions of the time (2007, 23). But what is significant for the present discussion is that it is also a retelling of a historical episode that has usually been portrayed as a maleonly affair, with the role of women omitted. And that omission is not just an accidental oversight, but reflects a systematic tendency in representations of the past, to render the past in a manner that privileges a male point of view. As such, the film not only provides a factual correction, but challenges the standard male-centred history, along with the cultural presuppositions of the present that inform that sort of history. In particular, it challenges the tendency to privilege male agency in the public realm. A history that acknowledges only the male agents in historical events only serves to confirm such cultural presuppositions in the present. To that extent, it presents a historical counter-narrative that brings to the fore something that has been largely ignored or written out of the proceedings in standard histories, the contribution of women to the labour movement. So understood, With Babies and Banners presents us with a narrative that embodies a philosophical experience, one that challenges an existing way of thinking and contributes to our thinking a little differently, and not only about the past but also in the present. Moreover, these points are by no means specific to the historical documentary, but can be taken to apply to documentary more generally. We can plausibly speak of non-historical documentaries that are not only informative but also transformative, potentially changing the way one thinks. A documentary can do this insofar as it shows the viewer things that their existing way of thinking has prevented them from seeing, or has motivated them to turn a blind eye to. Documentary-maker Victor Kossakovsky, whose Gunda (2020) makes a case for veganism by showing farmyard animals simply living their lives, captures this idea in his comments on the film: That’s why cinema exists: not to tell you a story but to show you things that you cannot see, did not want to see, or chose to ignore. Every day, people choose to ignore what they know about how the food came to the table. (Aftab 2021)

Film and philosophical experience  37 In the face of such challenging experiences, one is potentially led to think about the presuppositions in one’s thinking that made that blindness possible in the first place. The next step is to extend this model of philosophical reflection to fiction films, bearing in mind that narratives pertain to fictional as well as real events; and also, that being fictional here does not simply equate to being false, any more than a thought experiment or a novel is false simply because it is hypothetical. Here a brief detour into questions of truth and falsity in connection with film will be helpful. It may be noted that much of what is going to be said here about truth and falsity in connection with fiction film as opposed to documentary will also be applicable to the literary-fictional as opposed to historiographical narratives that were discussed in the previous chapter. The first thing to consider is that a fiction film could perhaps be said to be false, in the sense that the specific events portrayed never actually take place outside of the film, but it is in fact quite odd to speak of the film as being false in this sense. Why is this? Because it is of the very nature of the fiction film that it does not claim to be portraying actual events, that the specific events it portrays only take place as part of the film’s narrative. So, the non-occurrence of these events outside the film does not imply falsity, a failure, or shortcoming on the part of the film. In this regard, the fiction film can be contrasted with the non-fiction documentary, which does aim through its narrative to record real events, to truly portray the world outside the film. A documentary can thus be false. It would indeed be a failure, a flaw, if the documentary portrayed events that never actually took place. A fiction film is only true in this way in the sense that the film truly records some actors performing on a constructed set, or in a real location that is being used as a set. If it is viewed like that, the fiction film becomes a kind of documentary, a record of the specific performances and the location as it was at the time. But if so, it is only indirectly a documentary, a documentary in spite of itself, so to speak. That is not its main aim, which is to visually portray its narrative, to tell its story. And the actors, sets and locations have all been co-opted to that end, turned into elements in the film’s narrative world. Within this world, what characters might say about events portrayed in the film might be true or false, but this does not apply to the film itself. All of this indicates that it is essentially meaningless to speak of a fiction film as false in portraying events that have not taken place outside the film. Or at least, that kind of falsity only becomes meaningful in hybrid fiction-documentary forms like biopics and docudramas, or in historical films fictionalising actual historical events, all of which can be legitimately criticised for falsifying their subject matter in the interests of a good story. That a fiction film cannot be meaningfully said to be false or indeed true in this straightforward sense, since it does not set out to portray specific events in the world, contributes to the idea that it is a world unto itself, standing apart from the world, an ideal object with its own internal coherence and necessity, each part explained and supported by the structure of the whole. In eighteenth-century

38  Film and philosophical experience aesthetic theory, this self-sufficiency became the mark of the artwork, with Goethe announcing that the work of art does not imitate anything, but is a ‘little world in itself’, with its own laws (see Shiner 2001, 125). However, even if it is a world unto itself, a fiction film is not hermetically sealed, absolutely self-­sufficient. It is relatively autonomous, a fictionalised version of the actual world that it displaces, but the actual world nonetheless indirectly influences it. The fiction film can thus be said to have indirect truth in relation to the wider world, insofar as the world portrayed in the film ‘rings true’ or resonates with our broader experience of the world. Some content can be given to this idea of resonance in terms of the notion of a shared cultural present discussed in the previous chapter, the idea of a long-term background experience of a culture and a time, embodying commonly held norms of thought, action, and feeling through which we as a culture ordinarily make sense of the world and themselves. A fiction film will typically incorporate the norms and forms of understanding prevailing in the cultural present out of which it emerges. Audiences sharing these cultural presuppositions will be able to relate to the world the film evokes, and to the characters inhabiting that world. The film will, in turn, mirror norms and forms of thinking prevailing in its audience, confirming their general expectations about the world and human behaviour. This does not mean however that fiction films are condemned to do no more than reproduce and confirm whatever happens to be the dominant or prevailing norms and forms of thinking in the culture it emerges from. Many films do this, of course, reinforcing existing ways of thinking, but this cannot be said of all films. Some films are critical, subversive. And that is to say, a fiction film can also resonate with our broader experience in a different way. Insofar as it does not simply recycle cultural presuppositions but portrays a limit-transgressing event that challenges the cultural presuppositions embodied in its narrative, the film can draw attention to uncomfortable realities and inconvenient truths that challenge our cultural presuppositions, and which for that very reason, we may tend to miss, ignore or turn a blind eye to in our ordinary lives. In this manner, a fiction film, like a documentary, can show us things that we ‘cannot see, do not want to see or choose to ignore’. It reminds us of their presence in our broader experience, and we are able to confront these disturbing features of our experience indirectly, through the dramatic context of the fiction film. In this way, the film can serve as an avenue for critical reflection on the presuppositions of the culture out of which it emerges. To explore this in more detail, it will be useful to look more closely at the relationship between narrative and visual experience within the fiction film, as opposed to the documentary. Generally speaking, in the fiction film a narrative is being articulated in a visual, or more strictly speaking, an audio-visual medium. The narrative could also be articulated in a different medium, such as the rich literary language of the novel. Employing a different medium does not have any bearing on the fictionality of the film or novel, which has to do with the narrative

Film and philosophical experience  39 having primacy over the medium in which it is being portrayed or realised. It has primacy in the sense that the events portrayed are dictated by the narrative. So the fiction film shows us a visual world that is being dictated by the narrative, in which we are being shown what we need to see in order to follow the unfolding story. The visual images are subordinate to the narrative, primarily serving as means to the end of realising and advancing the story. In the same stroke, visual experience is being transformed into a narrative, an extended story that in the film world typically has the classic Aristotelian structure of beginning, middle, and end (even if, as Godard famously pointed out, not necessarily in that order). The end provides some sort of resolution to the complications and conflicts that have arisen for the characters at the beginning. This imposed narrative movement from beginning to end distinguishes the film from real life, which is usually ‘all middle’, repetitive rituals and routines, ‘repeat performances’ that are without drama (see Berger 1997, 162). Films that impart a narrative direction to life, sending their characters on a journey, giving them a history, a beginning, and an end, offer a more heightened, concentrated, and directed experience than the banal, repetitive, uncinematic life we ordinarily inhabit. They thus become an other place to which we can escape or be transported to. This sense of escape from the everyday is arguably part of what film critic Pauline Kael was getting at in her famous characterisation of film as ‘the opening into other, forbidden or surprising kinds of experience’, which is ‘what draws us to the movies in the first place’ (Kael 1970, 105). However, while film in general may present a heightened experience in relation to ordinary life, this is not yet, or not necessarily, film as critical by virtue of portraying the limittranscending, challenging event that disrupts and potentially transforms familiar ways of viewing the world. Film in general could perhaps be said to represent a limit-transcending, challenging event in the sense of being the new art-form that burst upon consciousness a little over a hundred years ago, permanently changing cultural experience. But as far as individual films are concerned, not all films are critical in this experience-centred manner. Something further is involved, namely the film’s internal portrayal of the challenging experience. The reference to the two elements within film, narrative and visual experience, in this discussion reflects what film theorist V.F. Perkins in Film as Film identifies as the distinctive ‘dual power’ of the film medium: to not only ‘ “possess” the real world by capturing its appearance’ through photographic representation but also ‘shape it into an ideal image, ordered by the filmmaker’s will and imagination’ (1972, 60). Films do not just record photographically but also shape photographic recordings and organise them into a coherent narrative, using the various techniques that are specific to the cinematic medium (or at least were until the advent of television): editing, framing, the close-up and tracking shot and long take, deep focus, sound and music, and so on. Different accounts of the nature of film have variously emphasised one or other of these features. Some theorists, like André Bazin, emphasised as film’s

40  Film and philosophical experience essential characteristic the capacity to possess the real world photographically, to objectively record the real, whereas others like Sergei Eisenstein saw editing as the real essence of cinema. But as Perkins makes clear, neither of these alone is adequate. Editing requires photographic records to work with, and cinematic visualisation is more than just the photographic recording of events. Or at least, it was a key point in the evolution of the new cinematic artform when films ceased to be the static, documentary-style recordings of reality they had been at the beginning, in the Lumière brothers’ 1890s ‘actualités’, the short films of workers leaving the factory, a train arriving at a station, and so on. Very soon, pioneers like Georges Méliès, D.W. Griffith, and Eisenstein began to actively shape, edit, and frame what was being recorded in order to tell a story. This characterisation of film in terms of dual powers applies to film in general, but as Perkins suggests, depending on which of the two aspects, photographic representation or cinematic construction is dominant, a spectrum can be envisaged with the realist documentary at one end, and the entirely constructed cartoon at the other, with narrative fiction film in a compromise position between them (Perkins 1972, 60–61). In these terms, we can say that in the documentary, what is dominant is film’s power to possess the real world photographically, to record and capture reality. In addition, this is a reality that ideally has itself been minimally interfered with, staged or contrived. Capturing that reality photographically is dominant here in that any narrative into which the documentary footage is edited is primarily a means to the end of revealing that reality, making sense of the documentary material, in the same way that a historical narrative provides a scaffolding in terms of which to apprehend and make overall sense of the historical events. In a narrative fiction film, in contrast, it is the narrative that is dominant, and the images, edited and organised through the various cinematic techniques, are primarily a means to the end of realising and advancing the story. Certainly, the narrative fiction film is also photographically recording reality, but again in contrast with the documentary, the narrative very much determines the reality that is being recorded. Locations are turned into sets for the staging of the story’s action, and actors transform themselves into characters who can play the required roles in the story being filmed. Within the category of narrative fiction film, further distinctions can be made in terms of the degree to which the narrative dominates over the recording of reality. The degree of domination determines whether the fiction film is closer to the entirely constructed cartoon or to the realist documentary. On the one hand, the narrative fiction film approaches the state of the cartoon in the highly constructed, special effects-heavy science-fiction, fantasy or superhero saga, typically featuring superhuman, fantastic or alien characters and exotic, futuristic or otherworldly locations. The possibility of portraying the ‘out of this world’, making use of special effects, was recognised very early on in the history of film, in the magical realisations of Méliès. His A Trip to the Moon (1902) is not only one of the earliest narrative fiction films but also the first science fiction film.

Film and philosophical experience  41 On the other hand, narrative fiction film approaches the state of documentary in the spare, stripped-down, realist film. The realist fiction film presents straightforward, unembellished portrayals of the lives of ordinary people in everyday settings, often using non-professional actors or even non-actors. This austerity is evident for example in the Italian neo-realist films of Roberto Rossellini and Vittorio di Sica that were so admired by Bazin, for whom these films exemplified film’s power to capture reality (see Bazin 1971). At the same time, even the most realist film, insofar as it remains a fiction film, involves a reality that has been inflected and shaped into a narrative, and relies on particular cinematic techniques, such as the long take, deep focus, and invisible editing identified by Bazin, to achieve its realism (see Bazin 1999). And even in the most constructed, effects-heavy film, the cinematic techniques through which the images are organised into a narrative usually contrive to be invisible, to not draw attention to themselves. Generally speaking, the fiction film strives to hide its artifice, to conceal the extent to which it is a fictional construction, in order to present the viewer with a visual reality, to generate a ‘reality effect’. That a film will sometimes do the opposite, calling attention to its fictional, constructed character, which happens as we will see in Godard’s Breathless, is very much the exception that proves the rule. Cinematic counter-narratives and experience-centred reflection We are now in a position to see more clearly how the experience-centred, ­historico-critical form of reflection might be undertaken in the narrative fiction film. As we’ve seen, in a historical documentary where the visual material is dominant, and organising it into a narrative provides a means of accessing that material, the organising narrative can take the form of a counter-narrative that brings to the fore material that is typically ignored or passed over in the standard histories of the events, challenging the cultural presuppositions behind those histories. In the narrative fiction film, where the narrative is dominant, and the images are primarily a means to the end of realising and advancing the story. something similar is possible. The narrative that is being visualised can also take the form of a counter-narrative that foregrounds the challenging experience, the visualisation of which will include limit-transgressing events that call the narrative’s presuppositions into question. These narrative presuppositions will include norms and forms of understanding that prevail in the cultural present out of which the film emerges, and which are embodied in the film’s narrative. We will come to a more detailed consideration of these narrative presuppositions in a moment. One thing it is important to emphasise from the outset is that it is not the visualisation of the narrative per se that makes a fiction film critical in this experience-centred way. If that were the case, every fiction film would be critical. A film can be a richly detailed visual experience that is entirely uncritical in this sense. Rather, what makes a narrative fiction film critical is that it is

42  Film and philosophical experience the visualisation of a counter-narrative, a narrative that foregrounds a particular kind of experience, experience in the sense of the limit-transgressing, challenging event. In both cases, documentary and fiction film, the critical work the film undertakes turns on there being a counter-narrative, and preserving the narrational element is where the position being developed here departs from what was characterised earlier as the radical position in the film as philosophy debate. Daniel Frampton, who in Filmosophy argues for a uniquely cinematic form of philosophical reflection that goes beyond what is possible in traditional written philosophy, and which can only be undertaken in film, emphasises the role of ‘cinematics’, the specifically cinematic means of expression or visualisation, in film’s critical philosophical work. He criticises what he sees as the undue emphasis on narrational aspects of film in film-philosophical studies: ‘So much writing within the area of “film and philosophy” simply ignores cinematics and concentrates on stories and character motivations’ (2006, 9). The overall position I am arguing for here is a moderate version of Frampton’s kind of position. That is, based on an expanded understanding of what philosophy does, I  envisage the possibility of a cinematic form of reflection that resembles forms of reflection that can be undertaken within written philosophy, but which goes beyond philosophy as ‘traditionally’ undertaken. This involves a different estimation to Frampton’s of the role of cinematic visualisation, vis-a-vis narrational aspects of film, in the expanded understanding of the critical philosophical work the film is doing. Certainly, there is no disputing that the techniques of cinematic visualisation, which in the narrative fiction film are subordinate to the requirements of the story they serve to realise, still have a degree of autonomy vis-a-vis the narrative they are realising. In crucial ways, the narrative is subordinate to the techniques of visualisation. After all, the fiction film’s story can only unfold in a way that is visually accessible, in the realm of ‘action and appearance’, although the techniques of cinematic representation ensure that a great deal can be visualised in this way, including ‘internal’ states and emotional lives. As a result, the film can control the access its viewers have to the events that constitute its narrative. It may grant them only limited access, or even mislead them as to what is going on. Moreover, it is possible for what is being visualised to exceed what is required to advance the narrative, or even to bring the narrative to a halt with a viscerally affecting image that defies narrative logic, as happens regularly in the films of David Lynch, for example (see Vass 2005). Given the degree of autonomy that visualisation has vis-a-vis the narrative even in a narrative fiction film, it is certainly conceivable for a narrative that is in itself entirely conventional to be rendered visually in a way that subverts the story being told. George Wilson discusses a number of such subtly critical films in Narration in Light, such as Fritz Lang’s You Only Live Once (1937), a film that undermines any straightforward interpretation of the narrative it is portraying by

Film and philosophical experience  43 repeatedly tricking the viewer into making mistaken judgements about what they are seeing (see Wilson 1986, 18). In such cases, the film would indeed be engaging in a form of experience-centred reflection that is purely cinematic that could only be undertaken in film. However, my point is that there is nothing inherently conservative about narrative, any more than there is anything intrinsically critical or subversive about cinematic visualisation. The visualisation may be doing no more than progressing the narrative; and it can be the narrative that is doing the critical work, in the form of a counter-narrative that foregrounds the limittransgressing event. In this case, I’m suggesting, the film is engaging in a form of experience-centred philosophical reflection that is not exclusively cinematic in nature, that can also be pursued in other contexts where narratives figure – in literature, and in the sort of written philosophy that is not of the ‘rationalist’ persuasion. There is an important proviso regarding this last point. Even if experiencecentred reflection is not a uniquely filmic achievement, Frampton’s radical position, there is still an argument for saying that film might have an advantage over written philosophy in terms of engaging in this form of critical reflection. This is partly to concur with Cox and Levine’s claim in Thinking Through Film that film can sometimes provide a nuanced investigation of fundamental features of experience beyond what is possible in written philosophical texts (Cox and ­Levine 2012, 12). This seems entirely true, but a point of clarification is ­necessary regarding this sort of claim. Any limitations written philosophical texts themselves might have in investigating experience cannot be because of the written medium itself. Experience can be richly invoked and explored in written form, for example in literature and in historico-critical philosophical writing. My claim is that films have an advantage over written philosophy in this regard not simply because films can richly evoke experience, something that is possible within written philosophy, but because, unlike written philosophy, films are unable to organise or assess their content in terms of arguments, with premises and conclusions. They cannot proceed in a rationalist manner. In other words, the very aspect of film that seemed at first to preclude the possibility of film as philosophy, its inability to reflect in terms of rigorous argument and abstract principle, turns out to be an advantage, given the revised, non-rationalist notion of what can count as philosophical reflection.

4

Objects of cinematic reflection

We have been developing the idea of a form of critical reflection that can be pursued outside of written philosophical discourse, in a cinematic context. I have argued that an experience-centred, experimental form of philosophical reflection can be pursued in film, in relation to the cultural norms and conventions prevalent in the society from which the film emerges, and which inform and find expression in characters and story. The object of this reflection might be called the film’s ideological content, with the proviso that this is not a Marxist notion of ideology. With this proviso, experience-centred, experimental reflection in film can be characterised as a critique of ideology. In addition, there are at least two more important ways in which this experience-­centred reflection can be pursued in a cinematic context. First of all, it can be pursued in relation to the norms or conventions constitutive of the film’s own identity as an art-form. This is film as experimental in the traditional sense of the term, challenging specifically cinematic norms and conventions in form and content. Such cinematic self-critique can be found to some degree in many films, but it is particularly to the fore in avant-garde experimental film. It can also be distinguished in that it does not necessarily proceed through narrative, but can be undertaken in films that go so far in their experimentalism as to dispense with narrative altogether. Secondly, this experience-centred form of reflection can be brought to bear on philosophical notions, positions, and arguments as they have been developed and articulated outside of film, in the traditional written context. Here, cinematic reflection takes its place as part of a dialogue between film and philosophy. This dialogue can take a number of forms. It may involve a film being used as an example or illustration of problems or positions that have been developed in the philosophical literature. Alternatively, it may involve the film narrative being interpreted as a kind of thought experiment. Finally, it may involve cinematic experience-centred reflection being brought into connection with philosophical positions and arguments as they have been developed in written philosophical discourse. In terms of the overall discussion here, this last possibility completes the circuit, so to speak, linking film, understood as pursuing a form of reflection DOI: 10.4324/9781003207764-4

Objects of cinematic reflection  45 that can be undertaken outside of written philosophical discourse, back to philosophical positions and arguments that can only be properly articulated in the traditional written form. It is in terms of exercising experience-centred reflection in these various ways, as ideological critique through counter-narrative, as cinematic self-critique, and in dialogue with philosophy, that I will be exploring the philosophical significance of the three narrative fiction films mentioned at the outset, Breathless, Force Majeure, and Under the Skin. But before we turn to the consideration of these films, a little more needs to be said about these two new ways of pursuing ­experience-centred reflection, as cinematic self-critique and through dialogue with philosophy, and there are also some additional features of the notion of experience-centred reflection as a critique of ideology that it will be useful to keep in mind. Critique of ideology In the first instance, then, this experience-centred form of reflection can be undertaken in relation to the film’s ideological content. As already indicated, this statement needs to be qualified in that this is not the monolithic notion of ideology to be found in classical Marxist theory. It is rather Foucault’s notion of ‘the present’, the shared assemblage of norms and forms of understanding taken for granted by members of a culture, through which they make sense of the world at any particular time. This is congruent with what Wilson, in Narration in Light, described as ‘the vast range of more or less unconscious habits of perception, attention and attitudinal formation which have been unknowingly inculcated through social and cultural conditioning’, informing people’s identity, the roles they play and the stance they take towards the world (Wilson 1986, 13). These pervasive, habitual norms and forms of thinking find expression in films in various ways. They can be expressed directly, in the standpoints that characters espouse or at least imply in their attitudes and actions. They can also find expression indirectly, independently of the subjects involved, in the way various kinds of characters are positioned or treated in the course of the narrative, whether they are made central, endorsed, demonised, marginalised, or even conspicuously left out in the course of the story. These individual and narrative standpoints can in turn become fixed and ossified in the cinematic language, in formulaic narrative developments, tropes and devices, or stereotypical characters, of which more will be said in a moment. As the set of cultural norms and categories taken for granted at any particular time, the present is normally more or less invisible to those who participate in it. It is the unthought background of their thought and action, like water to a fish, or air to a dove. In films, this background can sometimes become visible as a bygone present in a film that is not just historically but culturally dated. In the culturally dated film, attitudes and ways of behaving that have altered over time,

46  Objects of cinematic reflection and which now appear as quaint, strange, ‘incorrect’ or problematic, are taken for granted by the characters in the film, and go unquestioned or are even happily endorsed in the film’s narrative. The present is also visible in contemporary historical dramas that ‘read the past in terms of the present’, anachronistically importing modern attitudes into the past they portray. This is something that is doubly evident in dated historical films that read the past in terms of their present, where the anachronisms are themselves reflective of a bygone present. Similar things might be said about science fiction film depictions of the future, insofar as the future that they envisage typically says a great deal about their present, and this is especially obvious if it is a bygone present, which will be reflected in quaintly old-fashioned depictions of the future. There is a sense of course in which all films are of the present, the present in the broad sense of our modernity, film being the quintessentially modern art. But films are also of their particular present, with a history that is marked not only by changes in cinematic style and technique, but also shifts in ideological content and outlook, over the last hundred years or so. Moreover, cultural difference ensures that not all filmmakers inhabit the same present at the same time. There are the different presents of Hollywood, of French New Wave, Bollywood, and so on. In telling its story, a film may simply confirm, reproduce, or reinforce the dominant norms and forms of thinking of the present out of which it emerges. It thereby offers a familiar and reassuring experience for the viewer, one that confirms and reinforces their cultural presuppositions. And this is not automatically something problematic. After all, these presuppositions inform who we are and where we stand, and enable us to make sense of the world. We need the cultural norms we have acquired through socialisation in order to function as coherent agents, and also to understand one another. And a film has to embody to some degree the norms of the culture from which it emerges, and of the audience for which it is intended, if it is going to be a coherent work, and to be intelligible to its viewers. As Perkins puts it, ‘[i]f we could rid ourselves of knowledge and our customary patterns of thought, we could not make sense of a movie’ (1972, 72). The filmmaker relies on a degree of shared understanding in order to communicate meaning to the audience. Nonetheless, while these norms are enabling, they also set limits to what it is possible for particular sorts of individuals to think or do. In that regard, they can be thought of as limits to freedom, not external obstacles but internal limits or what might be called ‘positive constraints’ ­(Patton 1989, 263). And by implication, they set limits to the sorts of films that can be made, or at least to the sorts of films that are readily intelligible to audiences because they confirm and reinforce norms and forms of thinking prevalent in a culture. At the same time, it is not the case that films can only ever reproduce existing cultural norms, any more than individuals only ever reproduce the norms they acquire in the course of their socialisation. That is to buy into the exaggerated social determinism, visible in the older-style Marxist account of film discussed

Objects of cinematic reflection  47 in the first chapter, where the content of films is understood to be entirely determined by the society’s ‘dominant ideology’, and the individual is similarly reduced to an ‘ideological dupe’, completely programmed by institutions and the media (including films). This view of individuals as purely passive products of social conditioning, merely internalising and perpetuating prevailing social norms, fails to recognise the manner in which individuals quite ordinarily, in the course of their development, actively engage with the norms they have acquired, sometimes finding them limiting or constraining, and in varying degrees moved to contest, work around, seek to modify or rethink them. It is because individuals do so that the norms of a culture are not simply reproduced, that they change over time, and that we can speak of cultures having a history. Similarly, to dismiss films in their totality as merely reproducing existing norms is to ignore the empirical reality, the experience of films themselves. It is to fail to differentiate between more or less critical films, to see that films sometimes give the viewer access to experiences that challenge the norms, boundaries, and identities prevailing in a culture, even as they draw on them, and in so doing enact a critique of ideology in the revised sense of the term. So on this view, while films may not be able to operate in complete freedom from their cultural context, they can stand in a critical relation to it, questioning presuppositions of the culture out of which they emerge. These more critical films will not offer a reassuring experience to the viewer, one that simply confirms and reinforces the dominant presuppositions of the culture. Rather, they will call attention to or remind us of disturbing realities and inconvenient truths that cannot be readily contained within prevailing forms of thinking; and which, to the extent that we are committed to those forms of thinking, we are ordinarily motivated to ignore, or to interpret in ways that make them less threatening. They will show us what we usually do not want to see. These challenging experiences may range from relatively singular experiences that disrupt the individual’s ordinary ways of making sense of the world, to whole points of view that have been marginalised or excluded from the cultural mainstream. This potential for not only reproducing but also criticising the culture from which it emerges is evident, for example, in the historical fiction film. Its portrayal of the past will inevitably rely on norms and forms of understanding prevailing in the cultural present in which it is made, enabling it to portray a world that is intelligible to its present viewers. To that extent, all historical fiction films are anachronistic, but this does not mean such portrayals only ever reflect and confirm their present. They can also call attention to aspects of the past that challenge present forms of thinking. I  mention this in particular because some of these issues come up in the 1975 interview in Cahiers du Cinema entitled ‘Film, History and Popular Memory’ (Foucault 2018), one of the few direct encounters between Foucault and film. As Dork Zabunyan notes, the Cahiers interviewers saw Foucault as offering an alternative to a restrictive, mechanistic Marxism, at a time when the journal was trying to distance itself from the dogmatic Marxist

48  Objects of cinematic reflection phase it had just gone through (Zabunyan 2018, 5). The particular theme the interviewers wanted to address was the then topical question of representations of the period of Occupation and the Resistance in mid-1970s French film. They mentioned, in particular, Louis Malle’s Lacombe, Lucien (1974), as a film that challenges the historical narrative that wartime France was a nation united in heroic resistance against the German occupation. This narrative was cultivated especially by the post-war Gaullist government, which wanted to portray de Gaulle as the embodiment of the Resistance and hence of French people. Postwar French cinema became party to this, with films that focused on the role of the Resistance, along with official censorship of storylines that suggested there was also collaboration. After 1968, however, films appeared that began to question this narrative, including Lacombe, Lucien, which focuses on the story of a collaborator. Now this might be seen as a textbook case of a fiction narrative drawing attention to aspects of reality that disrupt the official story of how the world is to be understood, and at a certain level, the film clearly does this. However, the Cahiers critics wanted to go further, and argued that the film nonetheless sent out another problematic message, that was never any popular struggle, only collaboration. The problem, as they saw it, was whether it was possible to maintain something like a memory of wartime struggles without falling back into a ‘Gaullist heroization’, to tell a different story of the Resistance that might circumvent its being co-opted in this way (see Maniglier 2018, 42–46). Foucault agrees with his interviewers that histories can support present arrangements but also work in a critical way in relation to them, and that historical film is one of the areas in which this ‘battle for and around history’ can be pursued. The intention in this case he sees as being ‘to suppress what I have termed “popular memory” and also to impose and propose to people a framework for interpreting the present’ (117; see Maniglier and Zabunyan 2018, ix–x). Elsewhere Foucault speaks of his historico-critical reflection as involving a rediscovery of the ‘historical knowledge of struggles’, the memory of hostile encounters that have been confined to the margins of knowledge (Foucault 1980, 83). A number of general points can be made about this critique of ideology through counter-narrative. Firstly, in film, this critique can be undertaken on two levels, in relation to a character, and at the level of narrative itself. In the first instance, it can be undertaken in relation to received social norms insofar as they are embodied and expressed in the attitudes, feelings, and actions of individual characters, which can be brought into question in the course of the narrative, through a counter-narrative. Thus characters may find themselves confronted by behaviours, their own or that of others, that challenge their sense of who they are and where they stand, as happens repeatedly in Force Majeure for example. So that is experience-centred critical reflection on the character’s view of the world and themselves. In addition, critical reflection through counter-narrative can be directed towards cultural norms and presuppositions insofar as they are

Objects of cinematic reflection  49 expressed at the level of the narrative itself. As mentioned, the story of the film is generally being told from a certain point of view, even if there is no explicit narrator. This is the point of view expressed in the narrative, manifest in the way the narrative deals with different characters and their views, privileging and endorsing some, marginalising or disvaluing others. The narrative point of view is also silently present in the exclusion of certain characters, groups and viewpoints from cinematic representation. Thus, in film history, the main character is almost invariably a heroic male, even in a family setting, women who are promiscuous or unfaithful are likely to be punished in some way, and so on. A film can challenge norms expressed at the level of its narrative, by treating its characters in ways that run pointedly counter to these patterns. In the context of film history, for a film to feature a heroic male in a family setting who is anything but heroic, or to have the promiscuous woman make it to the end of the film unscathed – both of which happen in Force Majeure as we will see – becomes positively subversive. This challenging of narrative norms is also a case of film critically reflecting on itself insofar as it plays a role in reproducing or perpetuating social norms of the present out of which it emerges. In so doing, film is able to challenge not only these norms but also film’s complicity in reproducing and perpetuating them. This is the critical film both as a critique of the culture out of which it emerges and as cinematic self-critique. And while this is not to reduce film to nothing more than an instrument of ideological indoctrination, in the manner of older-style Marxist theory, it is an acknowledgement that film can play a ‘normalising’ role, to borrow another term from Foucault. Nonetheless, on this view, films are also capable of questioning prevailing cultural norms. It is important to note that the cultural presuppositions internalised by individuals, informing their understanding of the world and their role in it, can include thinking that pointedly ignores, or is blind to, social influences on the individual. This is the individualist thinking, prevalent in modern liberal societies, in which one takes oneself to be a sovereign individual who owes nothing to social influence, an essentially asocial being who can and should determine themselves independently of social norms and conventions. In film, this individualist thinking is often manifest in the heroic central character who thinks and acts as a strong, autonomous individual, a law unto themselves, contrasted with the ordinary members of the community who are typically relegated to being mere ‘types’ who follow the rules and play predictable social roles. Certainly, like films themselves, individuals are not reducible to a mere product of social determination; but nor, however, can they be considered completely autonomous or self-made. They always remain conditioned to some degree by the social world they are engaging with. To that extent, in critically reflecting on this individualist thinking, the challenging experience a film invokes may be instances where the character is, in spite of their self-understanding as a free spirit or a law unto themselves, shown to be under the influence of their surrounding culture. But critique can also extend to questioning the kind of anti-individualist thinking that

50  Objects of cinematic reflection sees individuals as nothing more than products of their social circumstances, or as having a pre-ordained role in an unchangeable culture. There, the challenging experience a film invokes can be instances where characters challenge or transform the norms of their culture, even if they happen to be drawing on them. As we will see, Breathless provides an example of a relatively nuanced critique of individualist thinking along these lines. The second thing to note is that the viewer of the film is not the passive, indoctrinated subject of the older-style Marxist account, who like the prisoner in Plato’s cave mistakes the flimsy simulations they are being presented with for reality. In the Platonic tradition evidenced in the older-style Marxist account, getting viewers to take for reality what is merely a construction, an illusory representation of reality, is of course an important part of what is wrong with art and artists. Plato is well aware of the power of artistic representation in this regard, the capacity of art to hypnotise and seduce its audiences. Nonetheless, it needs to be emphasised that in general, the viewer is entirely aware that what they are watching is a fiction, a fabrication, in which experience has been transformed into an organised narrative, and at the same time, the narrative has been turned into a visual reality, made concrete as the story unfolds before the viewer’s eyes. At the same time, it is as a concrete visual reality that the film is primarily encountered by the viewer, a reality that the viewer does not simply eavesdrop on but to an extent participates in, emotionally relating to the characters and events being portrayed. However, we are not witnessing here a clash of incompatible attitudes. The so-called paradox of fiction – how is it that we can get emotionally involved with fictional characters and events that we know are fictional? – is not really a paradox if it is recognised that the film is being accessed at different levels. For the viewer, the film is first and foremost encountered not as something they know to be fictional, but as a concrete visual reality. We do not so much ‘willingly suspend our disbelief’ as willingly believe, enter into a world, immerse ourselves in the reality the film presents. This is rather like J.R.R. Tolkien’s notion of the imaginative literary work as a ‘secondary world’, an internally consistent world that the viewer can enter. The reader believes that what they encounter is true within the secondary world they are inhabiting (see Tolkien 1997, 132). Similarly, for a film to work, the viewer must believe that what they see is true within the secondary reality of its fictional world. We also know the film to be fictional, certainly, but this is only something we know explicitly when we withdraw from it, either because something jarring has happened in the film to break its spell on us, or when we stand back and reflectively acknowledge that what we are watching is ‘only a movie’, a recording of actors performing, a fictional construct requiring a whole arsenal of cinematic techniques. Standing back in this way is something we might perhaps do during a film to distance ourselves from confronting images, such as when a horror film becomes particularly scary. But this removed, disbelieving state is not how one ordinarily watches a film, which is why a suspension of disbelief is then required in order to get back into

Objects of cinematic reflection  51 the film, to continue to watch it. We have to forget that we are watching a film in order to re-access its world. This is the general state of film-watching; one normally watches a film by forgetting one is watching a film. The movie becomes the world, at least temporarily. And films usually facilitate this immersion by not calling attention to their fictionality or to the cinematic techniques through which their reality is being contrived. From a Platonic point of view, this immersion in the cinematic world would amount to no more than a sidelining of one’s intellectual, critical faculties, in favour of uncritical emotional involvement, a highly questionable move. The problem for Plato here is not only epistemological but moral. This is specifically in Plato’s sense of being moral, which involves having a proper balance of the internal elements of the psyche or soul, meaning that reason has to be on top. In the properly ordered soul, reason is very much the dominant element, and the senses, desires, and passions are subordinate to and under the control of rationality. In terms of this understanding of the structure of the human soul, the problem with the poets is that they appeal to the senses and incite the passions, seducing the lower, inferior parts of the soul. They do not engage the audience’s higher, rational, critical capacities, and in fact impede their progress towards the rational apprehension of the truth, which for Plato means getting to know the Forms behind mere sensory appearances (see Plato 1993, 605c–607a). Here, Plato’s suspicion of the senses can be seen to carry over into a negative view of the emotions, as enemies of reason and knowledge. A more recent figure to espouse this Platonic kind of suspicion of the arts is the twentieth-century playwright Bertolt Brecht. Brecht made a concerted attack on theatre that tried to produce the illusion of reality and to evoke a cathartic emotional response in the audience. He dubbed this kind of theatre ‘Aristotelian’, reflecting the very different view of art, and also emotion, that Aristotle pursued. For Brecht, the viewer, seduced by theatrical illusion, and emotionally involved in the action before them, is not in a position to make objective judgements about the situations being portrayed (Brecht 1966; see Gruber 1987; Curran 2003). In this critique, Brecht was influenced not only by Plato but also by Marxist thinking, through which his Platonic critique of stage illusionism became the idea that ‘illusionist theater tended to reproduce the dominant ideology and induce the spectators to identify bourgeois ideologies with reality’ (Kellner n.d.). This is very reminiscent of the older-style Marxist condemnation of cinema, also inspired by Plato, in which cinema was dismissed in its totality as bourgeois illusionism, a form of indoctrination, seducing audiences into accepting as reality what are merely ideological representations. Moving beyond his critique of theatrical illusionism, Brecht also attempted to produce theatrical works that would disrupt the illusion of reality, and in Marxist terms, break people’s identification with these ideologies. In short, they would enact a kind of critique of ideology, in the traditional Marxist sense. To this end, Brecht advocated the use of various distancing techniques, of alienation or defamiliarisation devices, including

52  Objects of cinematic reflection having actors stepping out of character to lecture the audience, and stage designs exposing lights and ropes to call attention to their construction. The aim of these devices was to remind the audience of the artificiality of the theatre performance, to limit their emotional involvement, and to encourage them to think about the real world reflected in the drama. There are two general points that can be made in relation to Brecht’s account. First of all, the kind of view of art I am arguing for here, in opposition to the Platonic and Marxist view of art as mere illusion, seduction and indoctrination, has more in common with the Aristotelian view of literary art that Brecht rejects. Aristotle sets out his views in Poetics, written a generation after Plato’s Republic, as very likely a riposte to Plato’s condemnation of art and artists – though it is an ironic circumstance that whereas Plato is the literary artist who condemns art, Aristotle, who defends the literary arts, writes here in a dry, rather ‘scientific’ way. To briefly sketch out Aristotle’s position, he might be seen as the first to explore the idea of ‘suspension of disbelief’, particularly in connection with the theatre (see for example Worth 2000). While he agrees with Plato that art is a form of mimesis, an imitation of reality, he does not regard it as an illusory representation that distances us from reality, but as a genuine form of knowledge. Poetry and tragedy bring us closer to understanding general features of human nature and behaviour, placing characters in narratives in which these features can be portrayed and also put to the test. And where Plato thinks that art’s incitement of emotion at imaginary events only encourages the lower, emotional, and desiring parts of the soul at the expense of reason, Aristotle for whom emotions play a more positive role in the virtuous rational individual, sees art, in the form of tragic drama, as providing the spectator the opportunity for catharsis, the opportunity to experience and cleanse themselves of the dangerous emotions of fear and pity (see Aristotle 2013). The view I am pursuing here differs from the Aristotelian view in that it is less concerned with art as a means of clarifying and refining one’s understanding of morality and the emotional life, and more as a means of confronting us with something strange that challenges and undermines our perception of the world, our way of thinking. Secondly, Brecht’s idea of a critical theatre that incorporates alienation devices in fact calls into question the Platonic and Marxist accounts of art as indoctrination and the viewers of art as dupes. First of all, it implies that a theatrical presentation is not limited to seducing the viewer into accepting as reality the world it portrays, but can incorporate a reflective, critical dimension, calling attention to its own status as a construction. These considerations also apply to film. Although films do not ordinarily call attention to their fictionality, it is certainly possible for them to incorporate Brechtian-style alienation devices that remind the viewer they are watching a film. That is part of film’s capacity to reflect on its own nature as film, cinematic self-critique. This is something that we will see amply demonstrated in Godard’s Breathless, for example. In addition, the effectiveness of these devices implies that viewers are capable of taking a relatively

Objects of cinematic reflection  53 sophisticated attitude towards the dramatic spectacle or the film that they are watching. As already noted, even if the film viewer is ordinarily absorbed in a film, they are always capable of standing back and explicitly acknowledging they are watching a film, a fictional construct. And this movement can be prompted by the film itself, reflectively calling attention to its fictionality. In short, it can be part of the cinematic experience itself. Even with regard to our ordinary, supposedly unsophisticated immersion in film, that it is always possible for us to stand back from a film no matter how immersed we might be, and acknowledge that what we are watching is ‘only a movie’, suggests that even unreflective immersion or participation involves a certain distancing on the part of the viewer. It is never the case that we completely lose ourselves in the film, taking as real what is an illusion. Such a complete belief in the imaginary filmic world would be akin to madness. Once again, it is necessary to insist that the viewer of a film is never really like the prisoner in Plato’s cave, simply accepting as reality what is before them. Rather, if the behaviour of young children is anything to go by, ordinary film-watching is already a sophisticated form of distanced engagement that needs to be learnt, and something that young children are not yet masters of. For the cinematically sophisticated adult, the reality encountered in the film is not simply experienced as real. A film may take us inside a burning house, but we do not get out of our cinema seats and try to escape from the inferno. This brings us to a further complication regarding the viewer’s relationship with the film. While we may not feel moved to flee from a cinematic inferno, we can see the danger that the burning house poses for the characters who are trapped in it, and insofar as we identify with those characters, we can be concerned for their fate, and hope they get out in time. Generally speaking, in watching a film we are not merely experiencing events, but various characters experiencing events. The characters directly confront the events on the viewer’s behalf, and enable the viewer to experience the events in an indirect, removed way. In this manner, the viewer both participates in the film, insofar as they identify with characters, taking on their point of view, and maintains a distance from it, insofar as the viewer’s experience of the events the film portrays is mediated by the characters. In the latter case, the viewer is also removed from and observing the characters experiencing the events. Moreover, a film can emphasise one or other of these aspects in the way it portrays its events to the viewer. Broadly speaking, there are two ways a narrative fiction film can present its reality. It can do so from the point of view of a character, evoking a character’s subjective viewpoint, privileging their perspective in the telling of the story. The viewer can be brought to experience the events and other characters in the film from a character’s point of view in a straightforward way through the use of cinematic techniques such as close-ups and point-of-view shots. The character’s perspective can also be conveyed more indirectly and discreetly, in the way events and characters are presented, or by

54  Objects of cinematic reflection confining what is shown to only what the character could know. However it is done, to that degree the viewer is aligned with the character’s viewpoint, and also limited to knowing what they know. Alternatively, the reality of the film may be presented objectively, in the sense of not being from any particular character’s point of view, although this portrayal will still be from the point of view of the narrative, which is reflected in what reality is being disclosed in the film. In this case, the viewer’s experience of the events and characters portrayed in the film is still being mediated by the film’s narrative. Nonetheless, the film’s reality is being disclosed independently of any particular character’s point of view, and to that extent, the viewer enjoys a relatively objective, god-like view of what is going on in the film. The viewer is also in a position to know more than any particular character might happen to know. To speak of two distinct ways a film can present its reality is to leave aside all the ways that films can undermine this distinction between subjective and objective presentation, reframing a seemingly objective perspective as in fact subjective, or systematically blurring the distinction between the two. Objective presentation is no doubt the default position here, with the camera as the invisible third-person narrator. In most films, evoking what characters themselves see and hear, their subjective point of view, happens only occasionally, against the background of a largely objective, impersonal presentation of events (see Thompson and Bordwell 2008). Nonetheless, it is certainly possible for films to portray their world largely from a particular character’s point of view, as, for instance, in Alfred Hitchcock’s Rear Window (1954) where the audience has little opportunity to disengage themselves from a wheelchair-bound James Stewart’s viewpoint. This distinction between subjective and objective forms of presentation does not straightforwardly map on to the distinction made earlier between highly constructed and austerely realist kinds of narrative fiction film. In a highly constructed film, what is to the fore is film’s power to shape the reality it records. And for such a film to be able to portray its shaped reality as being from a character’s point of view enables the portrayal of highly subjective realities. But this does not mean that a highly constructed film cannot present its reality in an objective manner, as independent of any character’s standpoint. In the austerely realist film, which portrays ordinary people in everyday settings in an unembellished way, what is to the fore is film’s power to objectively record reality. For a film to portray this reality in an objective, observational way, independent of any particular character’s standpoint, is certainly to enhance this realism; but this is not to say that a realist film could not portray its austere reality as being from a character’s point of view, such that the world and other characters appear to them in this impersonal, objective way. This device, which evokes the subjective perspective of an outsider, an alien, is used with great effect in Under the Skin, as we will see. This distinction between subjective and objective modes of presentation has implications for the viewer, who participates in the film insofar as they identify

Objects of cinematic reflection  55 with a character, and also maintains a distance insofar as their experience of the events the film portrays is mediated by the character. Briefly put, subjective presentation enhances the viewer’s participation, objective presentation increases their distancing. When a film brings the viewer to experience the events and other characters of the film from a character’s point of view, aligning the viewer with them, the likelihood is that the viewer will be emotionally invested in that character and their fate, more likely to be fearful for them, hopeful that they succeed, apprehensive on their behalf and so on – in short, caught up in the drama of their situation. To the extent that the reality of the film is presented objectively, independently of the point of view of the characters, the viewer is more likely to be emotionally distanced from them, able to observe their dramas coolly, even find pleasure or comedy in their trials and tribulations. This is the idea that ‘life is a tragedy when seen in close-up, but a comedy in long-shot’, variously attributed to Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton. Where the film’s reality is presented objectively, the viewer will still be participating in the film at the level of following the narrative through which the characters play out their dramas and experience their trials and tribulations, but they will be emotionally distanced from the characters themselves. However, the viewer’s relationship with the character is not always so straightforward. A film can contrive to align us with a character that for other reasons we have no sympathy with or even an active antipathy towards, as when a film gets us to see things from the point of view of its villain. We can find ourselves sympathising with the character despite ourselves. Or a film can put us in the position of observing a character in a removed way, dispassionately, even finding comedy in their difficulties, but nonetheless also feeling a kinship with them, even if only intellectually. These considerations regarding how the viewer comes into the picture and how the film presents its reality to the viewer have a bearing on how film might evoke a disturbing experience, one that challenges norms expressed in a character’s attitudes and actions. Generally speaking, the critical film provides the viewer with an ‘experimental subject’ to undergo the disturbing experience on their behalf. In doing so, the film both gives the viewer the opportunity to participate in the experiment, to encounter the challenging experience through the character, and distances the viewer from the proceedings, insofar as the encounter with the experience is mediated by the character. Moreover, we have seen that a film can present its reality to the viewer from the point of view of a character, or more objectively, giving the viewer a god’s-eye view of the proceedings. This multiplies the ways a film can present its challenging experience to the viewer. For example, insofar as the viewer is not aligned with a character, and can know more than they do, the film can evoke a challenging experience that is not apparent to the character themselves, that they may be blind to or self-deceptively refusing to acknowledge. We will see something like this in Breathless. Or, a viewer can enjoy a god’s-eye perspective, even finding comedy in a character’s predicament, but nonetheless recognise a kinship with them even if just a general

56  Objects of cinematic reflection sense of shared humanity, and appreciate even if only intellectually the challenge the character’s experience poses to their shared point of view. This scenario will be found in Force Majeure. Alternatively, the film may align the viewer with a character whose viewpoint is alien to them, so the viewer is directly confronted by the disturbing experience, as we will see in Under the Skin. One last general point must be made here. Given that what we are discussing is primarily an experience-centred form of critique, through counter-narrative rather than argument, the challenge to narrative presuppositions can take the form of humour, playfulness or irony, as well as downright subversion. One argument against thinking of films as philosophising, noted in Chapter  1, has been that in films, artistic concerns, dramatic or comic ones, are going to dominate, and will necessarily override any philosophical concerns. The underlying assumption here is that artistic concerns are inevitably going to be at odds with philosophical ones, or at best distractions from the real work of philosophy. However, dramatic or comic considerations would only be at odds with philosophical ones if philosophical reflection were understood as exclusively proceeding through rational argument. If, however, we think of philosophical reflection as an experience-centred reflection through counter-narrative, this reflection might not be impeded by, but actually be pursued through, drama or comedy, irony, or playfulness. Ironically, the recognition that, whatever his official pronouncements on art, Plato himself is an artist, a playwright, a poet, whose favoured dialogue form is ‘artful and indirect and abounds in ironical and playful devices’, itself amounts to a philosophical experience vis-a-vis philosophy, challenging the rationalistic self-understanding of philosophy right from the start. Cinematic self-critique Films that engage in the critique of ideology, as understood here are experimental in the broad sense that they involve putting the ideas and principles that structure one’s thinking to the test of the challenging experience. At the same time, this experience-centred cinematic reflection can be directed not only towards the film’s social or ideological content but also towards norms or conventions that are constitutive of its own identity as an art-form, as cinema. This is film as experimental in the narrower sense of interrogating existing cinematic norms and conventions that are taken to define film’s ‘nature’. This cinematic self-interrogation can take a number of forms, highlighting different aspects of film in the process. It can involve challenging narrative conventions associated with particular genres of film like science-fiction or horror, or subverting norms relating to cinematic technique, such as the traditional practice of continuity editing. It can also involve more radical departures from conventional film practice, even dispensing altogether with narrative or any attempt at representation, in the process drawing attention to basic features of the film medium such as light and movement. This experimentalism is present in any film that departs from a

Objects of cinematic reflection  57 conventional cinematic structure or established practice, no matter how minimally. With all such departures, films realise possibilities of the medium that go beyond the limits of existing cinematic forms or practices, in the process challenging the limits of what has hitherto been regarded as cinema, or a certain form of cinema, or proper cinematic technique, as well as challenging the viewer who may dismiss what they are being presented with as nothing more than transgressions or violations, or change their minds about the rules of the game, modifying their thinking about what counts as cinema, particular forms of cinema, or the right way of doing things. The idea of the experimental is of course associated with film in the idea of the avant-garde experimental film. Experimental films in this traditional sense are films entirely or largely given over to this self-interrogating activity, exploring the very limits of cinema at every moment. From the early abstract films of Marcel Duchamp or Man Ray, to the so-called structural films of the 1960s and 1970s, they offer a cinematic experience that radically departs from conventional narrative film. Structural film, a cinematic form of artistic minimalism, made a point of dispensing with narrative altogether. In this spirit, Andy Warhol’s minimalist epic Empire (1964) featured eight hours of black and white silent footage of a static view of the Empire State Building. Another much-cited work in this genre, Ernie Gehr’s short, Serene Velocity (1970), used a series of zoom shots from a static camera to compress an entire night into twenty-three minutes of movement up and down a university basement hallway. Since these films abandon narrative altogether, they are not portraying a challenging experience through a counter-narrative; rather, they are the challenging experience, directly challenging the viewer’s cinematic sensibilities. Given that conventional understandings of what counts as film are being challenged in a fundamental way here, these films easily lend themselves to being characterised as doing something philosophical. They are manifestly questioning what counts as film, challenging the viewer to think about their basic assumptions about what constitutes a film. This understanding of the philosophical import of experimental film in terms of its involving experience-centred reflection may be contrasted with understanding this import in terms of the film working as a thought experiment in the traditional sense. In the latter case, as has been argued, the film has been co-opted to serve in an argument aiming to identify the necessary or sufficient reasons for the application of concepts. This appears to be what is going on in Noel Carroll’s argument, in ‘Philosophising through the Moving Image’, that an experimental film like Serene Velocity can be understood as a form of philosophical critique that ‘explores the conditions of possibility of the artform or medium of which it is a member’ (Carroll 2006, 176). That is, the film can be envisaged on the model of the traditional thought experiment, ordinarily employed by philosophers in defence of conceptual analyses regarding the necessary or sufficient reasons for the application of concepts. In this case, the concept in question is the notion of film itself. For Carroll, the starting point in thinking about Serene Velocity is

58  Objects of cinematic reflection that ‘everyone will agree that it is an instance of cinema’ (179). The question then is: what is it about it that leads us to categorise it as an instance of cinema, especially since it discards so many of the features we might ordinarily think to be part of something’s being a film? The film at least presents the impression of movement, and since we still regard it as a film, it can be taken to be advancing the idea that movement is the minimal condition for something’s being a film. So on Carroll’s view, Serene Velocity is doing philosophy by playing a role in the conceptual analysis of the notion of film, as a thought experiment making an argument supporting the identification of movement as at least a necessary condition for something’s being a film. Now there is no question that one can employ an experimental film in arguments seeking to establish essential attributes or necessary conditions for something’s being a film, but I would argue that this is not so much a matter of film doing philosophy as philosophy making use of film to do philosophy. Like the traditional thought experiment, the film is getting its philosophical significance by being employed in an argument, in this case in support of a certain conceptual analysis of film. This seems to be indicated in Carroll’s own discussion in that, in support of his view of the philosophical significance of Serene Velocity, he speaks of philosophers being ‘entitled to deploy thought experiments argumentatively in defense of their conceptual analyses’ (180). The importance of the larger philosophical context in conferring this significance on the film is also indicated by Carroll’s remark that the philosophical import of Serene Velocity, in illuminating the conceptual structure of film, will be immediately apparent to ‘those who followed the conversation of avant-garde experimental film’, as opposed to ‘most average filmgoers accustomed exclusively to the mainstream, narrative commercial cinema’, who are simply going to be at a loss if confronted by such a film (181). I would suggest that it is possible to construe the philosophical import of a film like Serene Velocity differently, as more closely connected with what the film itself is doing, and also, with the confusion that most average viewers accustomed to the mainstream would likely experience in being confronted by such a film. That is, rather than being used in arguments designed to refine the concept of film, the film can be seen as challenging the viewer’s idea of what counts as film. Focusing on this aspect, the starting point is not universal agreement that Serene Velocity is an instance of cinema, the issue being to clarify what makes it so. Rather, the starting point is the question of whether, given its many departures from the established norms, we are still willing to regard it as a film. The answer depends not on how closely the film cleaves to some notion of what a film essentially is, but on how willing we are to adjust our thinking about what counts as film. This view seems more closely aligned with what the film itself is doing, given that what it is doing most of all is challenging the established rules and ways of doing things in film, testing the limits of what counts as film, looking to re-evaluate the rules of the game in a fundamental way. It is through such

Objects of cinematic reflection  59 experimentalism that the very notion of what counts as film comes to change and evolve over time. A parallel might be drawn here with avant-garde art, from Duchamp’s 1917 signed porcelain urinal to the minimalist and conceptual art of the 1960s and 1970s. Experimenting with unorthodox artistic forms, such art can be seen as art reflecting on what constitutes art. This is the feature of minimalist and conceptual art emphasised by Jean-François Lyotard, in whose philosophy of art, art becomes a form of philosophising (see Lyotard 1991). For Lyotard, the great appeal of avant-garde art is the manner in which it disrupts expectations and conventions. He draws attention to the way in which, in this sort of art, the existing rules of the game are not being automatically applied. Rather, the artworks are re-evaluating the rules, questioning the established rules for producing art. To that extent, the artwork becomes a philosophical activity, challenging its own nature, posing in its very existence the question: what is art, what counts as art? Here too, the philosophical concern is not the traditional one of determining the necessary or sufficient conditions for something’s being an artwork, identifying the essential nature of art, so much as experimentally testing the limits of what counts as art, looking to re-evaluate the rules of the game. The artwork is asking the viewer whether what they are currently looking at is art at all, challenging them to either dismiss it as a travesty, a mockery of art, or to rethink their understanding of what constitutes art. The avant-garde experimental film, similarly, may be seen as testing the limits of what counts as art, looking to re-evaluate the rules of the game, and challenging the viewer to rethink their understanding of what counts as a film. At the same time, it would probably be an exaggeration to say that the avantgarde work in any of its forms completely overturns the rules of the game, or represents creation ex nihilo, for if so there would be nothing to identify it as an artwork of any kind. In connection with film, even the most outrageously experimental film has to have something in common with films that everyone would indeed agree are instances of cinema, or questions over whether it still deserves to be counted as a film given its perversity could not even arise. By the same token, such experimentalism is by no means confined to the genre of avant-garde experimental film. A film may be experimental in a more limited way, such that while we are never brought to question whether what we are watching is a film, and there is much that is recognisable as conventional filmmaking, cinematic norms and conventions are nonetheless being challenged, particularly in relation to genre. As we’ll see, Breathless is a commercial film that is also remarkably experimental, robustly challenging cinematic conventions relating to both genre and film technique. Force Majeure and Under the Skin, while not particularly innovative in terms of technique, still challenge conventions around genre conventions. Through this more limited experimentalism, film can still pose questions about the nature of film, and so will potentially contribute to incremental changes in film language and content. It is through such incremental change that

60  Objects of cinematic reflection the conventions of film form and genre gradually evolve and change over time. As has been noted, film may be a distinctively modern artform, but it also has a history; and it has a history precisely because films do not simply stick to repeating existing formulas, genre conventions or techniques. Film and philosophy in dialogue Finally, this experience-centred, experimental form of critical reflection may be brought to bear indirectly on philosophical arguments, ideas and positions as they have developed and been articulated outside of film, in the context of written philosophical discourse. To retrace the discussion to this point, we have been exploring the idea that film narratives can be said to have philosophical significance in themselves, as counter-narratives embodying an experience-centred form of philosophical reflection that is distinguishable from the more traditional, argument-centred kind. I  argued that this is a form of reflection that does not require a context of philosophical argument or discourse in order to be conducted. Consequently, there need be no reference or allusion of any sort to established philosophical ideas, positions or arguments in the film itself for this kind of reflection to be taking place in it. Nonetheless, it is possible for a film narrative to enter into a relationship with philosophical ideas, positions, and arguments as they have been formulated in the philosophical literature. The interaction between film and philosophy can take a number of different forms. We have already touched on some of them in the discussion. First of all, the film may serve as a handy example or popular illustration of problems or positions that have been developed in the philosophical literature. In this spirit, the film might be seen as providing an illustration of the existentialist notion of freedom, an example of utilitarian moral reasoning, or a demonstration of informal logical fallacies. Pretty much any existing philosophical position or theme can find a purchase in film in this way. Here, the film is purely a resource or pretext for the philosophy, and on what was referred to earlier as the ‘null’ position regarding philosophy and film, this is the only philosophical significance a film can ever have. However, this is an unnecessarily restrictive view. At the very least, even if the film is viewed merely as providing some kind of illustration of an existing philosophical theory or position, it cannot be said that it has no ‘say’ at all in the matter, that it is simply being imposed upon. It quickly becomes clear that some films work better than others for this sort of purpose. Moreover, there are clearly other ways in which film and philosophy can connect. A second possible kind of interaction between film and philosophy involves the film narrative being interpreted as a kind of thought experiment, on the model of thought experiments within philosophical discourse. The idea of film as thought experiment has been explored in particular by Wartenberg, though we are taking the McClelland view that a film narrative needs a context of philosophical argument, an explicit argumentative framework that is making use of the narrative,

Objects of cinematic reflection  61 in order to acquire its philosophical significance as a thought experiment. Yet even if we accept this point, this is still a way in which film and philosophy can be connected. As noted earlier, the film provides a narrative that sheds light on some philosophical issue, and the audience provides the argument and conclusion that incorporates the narrative into a full philosophical exercise. And although the film itself is still primarily a resource for the philosophy here, it has some ‘say’ in the matter, being more or less amenable to this usage. This is the idea that, as McClelland puts it, ‘a film can behave as an invitation for its audience to engage in a philosophical inquiry that treats events in the film like thought-experiments’ (McClelland 2011, 20). Moreover, films being rich in detail can contribute by offering more plausible scenarios than the austere, artificial narratives typically to be found within philosophy texts. This is the Cox and Levine point that, ‘Thought experiments are sometimes (not always) better run in cinematic form than in the deliberately thin and context-free form typical of philosophical writing’ (Cox and Levine 2012, 12). Finally, film understood as reflecting in an experience-centred manner, the more radical idea of film as philosophising I am arguing for here, can be brought into connection with philosophical positions and arguments as they have been developed in written philosophical discourse. Experience-centred reflection, which can be undertaken both within written philosophy and outside, in cinematic form, represents an alternative to the rationalistic thinking that tends towards abstraction and generalisation. It is in a position to interrogate concepts and principles that are being presented as universal, necessary, essential, or inescapable. Here the philosophising film is not reliant on a context of philosophical argument for its philosophical significance, which derives from its working as a counter-discourse that foregrounds the challenging experience. It is no longer merely a resource or pretext for written philosophy, but can be said to philosophise independently. At the same time, film as this relatively autonomous form of philosophical reflection can be brought to bear indirectly on philosophical positions and arguments that have been developed in written philosophical discourse. It can enter into a kind of dialogue with the written philosophy. Insofar as films foreground challenging experiences and evoke situations in a richly detailed way that brings out their epistemological, moral or social complexity, they can offer correctives to philosophical thinking; especially thinking that has become lost in abstraction and over-generalisation and has succumbed to a rationalism that disdains experience and particularity. Films can show a reality that is more complex or messier than an abstract theory can allow for. In this way, the experience-centred, experimental form of critical reflection can be brought to bear indirectly on philosophical arguments, notions and positions that have been developed in the context of written philosophical discourse. My conclusion here echoes Cox and Levine’s claim in Thinking through Film that ‘film can sometimes offer nuanced investigation of fundamental features of our experience, well beyond the ordinary achievements of written philosophical texts,

62  Objects of cinematic reflection and in doing so robustly refute hollow and simplistic ways of understanding life’ (Cox and Levine 2012, 12). In effect, this is an extension of experience-centred cinematic reflection, turning it from a form of reflection within the film, to a form of reflection through film on philosophical positions and theories. The film here can be seen as operating like a limit-transcending, challenging event in relation to the philosophy, showing up the limitations of philosophical positions by calling attention to a reality, psychological, moral, or whatever it may be, that they are unable to capture. This is the verdict, for example, in Grau’s analysis of Eternal Sunshine, that the film can be understood as showing ‘the poverty of the classical utilitarian perspective by making us aware that moral reality is significantly more complex than such utilitarian theory can allow’ (Grau 2006, 128). This kind of engagement between film and philosophy will be explored in more detail in connection with the three films we are shortly going to be turning our attention to. We will see how Breathless, Force Majeure, and Under the Skin provide useful critical perspectives on a number of positions in the philosophical literature, including the abstract notion of moral agency that can often be found lurking in moral philosophy, and Sartre’s heroically self-determining but abstractly asocial existentialist individual. It should be emphasised that these claims about the philosophical work of film in no way depend on assumptions about the intentions of those involved in making the film. We do not need to suppose that Eternal Sunshine’s makers ever intended to offer an examination of hedonistic utilitarianism. Generally speaking, a film is never simply the realisation of a pre-existing intention, of a vision in the mind of a god-like creator. Not only does a director always direct in collaboration with others, but the film that emerges is the result of an extended dialogue between the filmmaker along with their collaborators, and the emerging work. In this process, artistic decisions may be made and executed, but the results will in turn influence the decisions that are made. This is not to completely deny the role of human agency in the making of the film, or the idea of the director as a dominant figure amongst those making the film. It is not even to deny the possibility of the figure of the auteur – the idea promoted by Godard’s fellow New Wave pioneer François Truffaut in his 1954 essay ‘A certain tendency in French cinema’ (Truffaut 1976), of the filmmaker whose films are an expression of their personal vision and individual style. Rather it is to insist that even with the most auterist director, the film is making the director at the same time the director is making the film. There is a dialogue going on between the filmmaker and their film. Far from the film being the realisation of a pre-existing vision, a director only discovers their individual, signature style in the process of making their films, and even unintended results and happy accidents can become integral features of the films that are being made. A film will thus have its own life distinct from the filmmaker, something that the filmmaker helps to realise as much as creates, and it will not simply be reducible to the intentions of the maker. Moreover, as Cox and Levine point out, films often let viewers see more

Objects of cinematic reflection  63 than their creators intended. Like other artworks, they suggest, ‘films have lives and meanings of their own which will vary over time and are relative to a degree to particular audiences’ (Cox and Levine 2012, 15). Given all this, the philosophical significance of a film can be assessed largely independently of any authorial intention. We do not need to require that the filmmakers themselves intended to portray or address a philosophical view or position. They may very well be seeking to, but that is a separate question we can ask, after the event. It is necessary, however, to qualify the claim that the film’s meanings ‘will vary over time and are relative to a degree to particular audiences’, or at least to emphasise the ‘relative to a degree’ part. Audiences, like the filmmakers, have a dialogical relationship with films. Viewers will certainly come to the film with their own perspectives, including philosophical perspectives, and the film will have different philosophical meanings for different audiences at different times, but the meaning of the film is not wholly determined in this way. Films are clearly more receptive to some philosophical interpretations rather than others. One final point by way of conclusion is to reiterate the point made right at the start of this discussion, that in this account of film as philosophy, film is not being understood as doing philosophy in a completely new way, engaging in a distinctively cinematic form of reflection, pursuing a form of intellectual inquiry that traditional philosophy, working within written language, cannot. That was the radical position on film as philosophy in the spectrum of positions outlined in the first chapter. What I am articulating here is what I have characterised as a moderate radical position. I argue that film embodies the possibility of going beyond not written philosophy as such, but rather, a certain kind of written philosophy, philosophy as understood in rationalistic, Platonic terms. There have been movements away from that kind of philosophising, forms of avowedly anti-Platonic, experience-centred reflection, within written philosophy, especially in twentieth-century continental philosophy. In the present discussion, Foucault’s historico-critical reflection has served as the primary model for this non-­rationalistic kind of philosophising. In turn, we can say that the present discussion is an exploration of the possibility of an anti-Platonic understanding of film as philosophy drawing on Foucault, a possibility that Foucault did not himself explore to any great extent. So much for the preliminaries. Armed with this understanding of film as philosophy, we can now turn to a more detailed examination of Breathless, Force Majeure, and Under the Skin, in order to explore the ways in which these films engage in a kind of philosophical work.

5  Breathless – the experimental self

Jean-Luc Godard’s New Wave classic Breathless (À bout de souffle) is famously the film that broke and rewrote the rules of filmmaking, ushering in a whole new era in cinema. It was also a commercially successful film, one of the few New Wave films to do well at the box office. Nonetheless, it is for its experimental character that the film is best known. It is experimental in the traditional sense of a film that challenges cinematic norms and conventions in form and content, the very norms and conventions constitutive of its identity as a film. That is to say, it engages in the kind of cinematic self-critique that has been identified in this discussion as one form of experience-centred cinematic reflection. This is not however the only kind of experimentalism going on in the film. Breathless engages in experience-centred reflection on a number of levels. Beyond questioning the conventions of cinematic art itself, the film also engages in a critique of ideology, in particular a critique of the highly individualistic thinking embraced by its two main characters. Beyond this, the film can be seen as engaging critically with philosophical positions, notably the Sartrean existentialism that was prominent in the French intellectual and cultural scene in the immediate post-war period, but also, as will become apparent, the Marxism that was competing with existentialism at the time. In the discussion here, we will start by looking at the film’s engagement with existentialist philosophical ideas, and then work our way, via a consideration of the film’s ideology-critical aspects, to its distinctive cinematic experimentalism. Free spirits The film itself tells a relatively simple story, one that was originally suggested to Godard by fellow director François Truffaut. Petty criminal Michel Poiccard (Jean-Paul Belmondo), who idolises Humphrey Bogart, steals a car in Marseilles and drives it to Paris. On the way, he is stopped for speeding and shoots the traffic cop. In Paris, he steals money from an old girlfriend, meets American Patricia Franchini (Jean Seberg) an aspiring journalist who he likes, on the Champs-­ Élysées, and tries to collect money from a friend to fund an escape to Italy. DOI: 10.4324/9781003207764-5

Breathless – the experimental self  65 A good third of the movie is set in Patricia’s hotel room, with Michel trying to convince Patricia to sleep with him, and to come with him to Italy. She learns that he is on the run after being questioned by the police. After driving Patricia to Orly airport to interview a famous novelist, they head down to a Swedish model’s apartment in Montparnasse. When it looks like the trip to Italy is a real possibility, she betrays him to the police, and lets him know she had done so. Instead of running away, he waits around. When the police arrive, a friend throws him a gun in an attempt to save him. The police shoot him dead. At the centre of the proceedings are our protagonists, Michel and Patricia, by turns charming and unpleasant, engaging and amoral. Both Michel and Patricia consider themselves free spirits, self-determining individuals, unfettered by social norms or conventions. Michel is a criminal who breaks all the rules in order to satisfy his desires. He shoots cops, steals cars, mugs people, pilfers money from old girlfriends, and does whatever he wants to get what he needs. He is annoyed by anything that gets in his way or even slows him down a little. Like Michel, Patricia is very concerned to preserve her freedom. This is evident in her relationship with Michel. She says to him: ‘I want you to love me; but at the same time I want you to stop loving me – I’m very independent you know’. While she likes Michel, she also wants to maintain her independence. This seems to be the main reason why she betrays Michel to the cops in the end, because she feels that her independence will be threatened if they become a proper couple and go off to Italy. So she informs on him to stop that happening, and also to prove to herself that she does not love Michel. As she tells him: ‘I stayed with you to see if I was in love with you . . . and since I’m being cruel to you, it proves I’m not in love with you’. With its two heroically self-determining central characters, it is easy to see Breathless as showing us the world according to existentialism. This philosophy is very much part of the historical context out of which the film emerged. When Paris-born Godard, absent from Paris during the war years, returned in 1949, he arrived in a city where existentialist philosophy was all the rage. Under the impetus of Jean-Paul Sartre’s writings, particularly the monumental treatise Being and Nothingness, along with novels and plays, existentialism had entered into public consciousness, offering a vision of human beings as capable of creating themselves, of giving their existence meaning and purpose. The philosophy of existentialism was Sartre’s positive response to the meaninglessness glimpsed in his pre-war novel Nausea. As mentioned in Chapter 2, the novel’s hero Roquentin encounters various disturbing experiences that bring his ways of making sense of the world into question. He comes to understand this as the revelation that there is no reason or justification for either the world or one’s own existence, that both are fundamentally meaningless, pointless, and absurd. As he says at one point, [I]f I knew the art of convincing people, I should go and sit down next to that handsome white-haired gentleman and I should explain to him what existence

66  Breathless – the experimental self is . . . here we all are, all of us, eating and drinking to preserve our precious existence and there’s nothing, nothing, absolutely no reason for existing. (Sartre 1965, 162) We may want to quibble with Sartre’s readiness to so thoroughly dismiss all frameworks for making sense of the world, and dispute whether he is entitled to see the world as so entirely absurd and meaningless in this way (see Falzon 2005). Nonetheless, the idea that all the old frameworks had broken down and that life was essentially absurd found a ready audience in those who had experienced the chaos and upheaval of the war years. At the same time however, and this was also no doubt part of existentialism’s appeal for a war-weary population, Sartre, along with his fellow existentialists Simone de Beauvoir and Albert Camus, seemed to be offering the possibility of a positive response to this situation, and one that was profoundly self-affirming. For Sartre, the proper response to the collapse of meaning should not be to fall into nihilism and despair, but to recognise that it is human beings alone who give meaning to the world. The human subject could now take centre stage as the sovereign creator of meaning and purpose. We can choose the goals and values that give our lives purpose and meaning. Thus, by the time of Being and Nothingness, Sartre had come to understand experience through the framework of a subject that invests the world with meaning and significance through its free choices. This is to a certain extent a reversal of the position in Nausea, a return to the organisation of experience through meaning-giving rules and categories, albeit freely chosen ones that could be changed at any moment. But it also makes of existentialism a profoundly optimistic philosophy, one that sees people as capable of taking complete responsibility for their existence, of creating it for themselves from the ground up. And in light of this vision, the collapse of the old world could be seen as a tremendous opportunity for people to construct a new world and a new future. With this, Sartre was also offering an exhilarating vision of human freedom. We are absolutely free to ‘make ourselves’, to choose the sort of person we want to be. There may be aspects of ourselves that are determined, our ‘facticity’ or situation, but morally, in terms of our values and goals, we are free to create ourselves. There is nothing in our situation that can determine what we are or do; we are always free to choose ourselves in relation to our situation. On his return to Paris, Godard could scarcely fail to become aware of Sartre and existentialist thinking, and he found the encounter enlightening. As he later recalled, ‘I had encyclopaedic tendencies. I wanted to read everything. I wanted to know everything. Existentialism was at its peak at the time. Through Sartre I discovered literature, and he led me to everything else’ (quoted in Brody 2009, 18). Godard is also reported to have frequented the St Germain des Près area, including the Café de Flore, and other cafes that were popular with Sartre and his followers (see Fairfax 2017). At the same time, he was immersing himself in the city’s film culture, watching a huge number of movies at the ‘ciné-clubs’ that had

Breathless – the experimental self  67 popped up around Paris. Here he met other future New Wave directors, including Truffaut, Claude Chabrol and Jacques Rivette. In the 1950s, Godard turned to film criticism, becoming along with Truffaut and others a regular contributor to the Cahiers du Cinéma movie journal, which had been founded in 1950 by the film critic and theorist André Bazin. And the influence of Sartre was evident here as well. As Daniel Fairfax notes, ‘much of Godard’s critical writing was imbued with the outlook and vocabulary of the existentialists’, although interestingly, when Godard explicitly invoked Sartre’s name in his writings, he tended to distance himself (Fairfax 2017; see Yla-Kotola 1999, 149). For example, in ‘Defence and Illustration of Classical Construction’, a 1952 Cahiers piece criticising Bazin’s views on film editing, as being less important than film’s capacity to photographically capture reality, a view that had been influenced by Sartre’s phenomenological approach, Godard finds time to also criticise Sartre for exercising a pernicious influence over film critics (Godard 1972, 30). At the end of the decade, Godard wrote and directed Breathless, the result, he said, of ‘a decade’s worth of making movies in my head’ (quoted in Andrew 1987, 4). After attending a screening, Sartre reportedly said ‘it’s really very beautiful’, though the brevity of the response leaves his full views on the film ultimately mysterious (see Brody 2009, 73). Nonetheless, although there is no explicit reference to Sartre or existentialism in Breathless, the film certainly seems to be imbued with the spirit of Sartrean existentialism; not only as an expression of the artist’s freedom to rebel against traditional ways of doing things and to create their own world but also as a film that celebrates individual self-determination in an absurd world. On this reading, Michel and Patricia are heroic existentialist subjects, creating themselves in the absence of any external support or determining influences. Pursuing this line of interpretation, Hubert Dreyfus has suggested that Michel is one of the enlightened few who recognise that the values and justifications that ordinary people cling to in order to give their lives purpose and meaning are just illusions. He no longer looks for justifications for what he does. He knows that there are none to be found. As Dreyfus notes, this is a way of understanding the significance of the word on the wall of his old girlfriend Liliane’s apartment, ‘pourquoi’ (‘why?’) spelt out in cigarette packets – as posing the existentialist question: Why do anything, if there is no objective reason or justification for anything one does? Michel also seems to be taking advantage of the lack of any externally dictated meaning to create his own meaning for himself. He invents his life and his past as he goes along. He claims that his grandfather drove a Rolls, that his father was a brilliant clarinettist, and that he can only stay at the Claridge, an expensive hotel, amongst other things. As for Patricia, Dreyfus suggests that she differs from Michel in that where he takes the breakdown of meaning as an opportunity to freely invent himself, freedom for her is primarily negative, freedom from anything that might tie her down, such as becoming part of a traditional couple with Michel (see Dreyfus 2012).

68  Breathless – the experimental self There are however some questions that can be raised about this reading. To begin with, to see Patricia as primarily pursuing a negative kind of freedom is surely to underestimate the extent to which she is creating a different kind of life for herself. She clearly does not see herself as bound by the constraints of a traditional female role, living instead a relatively liberated life in a foreign city. It also underestimates the extent to which Michel can also be said to be seeking a negative kind of freedom, freedom from anything that gets in the way of his plans. He just wants to be able to do what he wants to do, without regard for other people. ‘Never mind the pedestrians’, he says at one point to a taxi driver, ‘step on it. That’s all I ask’. And: ‘Don’t use the brakes. Cars are made to go, not to stop!’ Godard, in one interview, referred to Michel as ‘a bit of an anarchist’ (Godard 1987, 165), but this is clearly not the progressive sort of anarchism that aims to abolish the state and replace all forms of government authority with free associations of individuals and groups. Michel is not interested in bettering society, or promoting freedom for other people, only in his own freedom. Some of the more Marxist-oriented critics at the time seized on this, decrying Godard’s film as bourgeois or right-wing anarchism, a reactionary celebration of the individual who revels in their individuality, to the exclusion of broader social issues (Martin 2003). For these critics, the film also represented a failure to appreciate the extent to which individuals exist in social relations and are shaped by them. These were also the sorts of criticisms being made of the followers of Sartrean existentialism by their biggest rivals on the political scene at the time, the French Communist Party. Even if one wants to dispute the extent of the influence of existentialist philosophy on Breathless, or the extent to which Patricia and Michel can be seen as specifically existentialist subjects, there is no doubt that the characters see themselves as free spirits, individuals essentially unfettered by social norms or conventions. In this, we can recognise, if not Sartrean existentialism, at least a certain way of thinking that is a distinctive feature of modern liberal societies, of which existentialism is a particularly robust expression. In this ‘ideology of individualism’, one takes oneself to be first and foremost a sovereign, self-contained individual and only secondarily a member of a society; that is, an essentially asocial being who can and should determine themselves independently of social norms and conventions. But now a different kind of question arises. Is this individualism, whether understood in existentialist or more broadly liberal terms, being celebrated in the film, or in fact being challenged by it? The latter is a reading of the film that has been pursued by film scholar David Sterrit (1999, 56ff). On Sterrit’s account, far from celebrating the idea of the self-determining individual, the film calls it into question and lays bare the influences that have gone into the construction of the characters. The film actually reveals that they are dependent on their cultural milieu for important elements of their seemingly anarchic personalities.

Breathless – the experimental self  69 For example, Michel seems to have acquired his tough-guy persona at least in part from exposure to American films. This is the significance of the scene referenced at the beginning of this book, in which Michel stops outside a cinema, the Cinéma Normandie on the Champs-Élysées, which is playing Bogart’s film The Harder They Fall. We see Michel looking admirably at Bogart’s face on the movie poster, and performing his Bogart gesture, rubbing his thumb back and forth across the lips, a gesture that he makes throughout the film, every time he passes a mirror. Another of his persistent habits, making faces, suggests that he exists in a web of social role-playing. For her part, Patricia seems to be drawing her persona from European high culture. She compares herself to the Renoir poster in her apartment, and sees Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet as role models for her and Michel. She also has the habit of making faces and gestures, again suggesting involvement in social role-playing. Overall, Sterrit suggests, far from being free spirits, both Patricia and Michel seem to be caught up in roles that existed long before they came on the scene. They themselves are largely blind to this, though Michel does seem to have a moment of self-awareness, in the car as they are driving down to Montparnasse and his final rendezvous with the police, when he says fatalistically that ‘informers inform, burglars burgle, killers kill, lovers love’ (see Sterrit 1999, 60). So on this second reading, the film can be seen as challenging the notion of the sovereign, self-determining subject. It is overtly questioning the cultural presuppositions of its characters, showing that far from the free spirits they imagine themselves to be, they are in many ways the products of their particular cultural milieu. As such, the film’s narrative can be seen an experimental ­counter-narrative, highlighting experiences that challenge the self-understanding of its protagonists. The challenging experience here is the characters’ own behaviour which betrays their dependence on their cultural milieu, behaviour that does not however directly trouble the characters themselves because it appears to lie beyond the limits of their self-awareness. One can say that in this instance, the viewer has an epistemic advantage over the film’s characters, being able to see aspects of their behaviour that the characters themselves are blind to. They know things about the characters that would be challenging for the characters themselves, were they to become aware of them. It is clear that, although the film is inviting the viewer to become involved in its story, to relate to the characters and to participate in the experiment, the viewer nonetheless also enjoys a certain distance from the film’s proceedings, and from its ‘experimental subjects’, which they are simultaneously in a position to observe. This is not, however, the end of the story as far as the film’s critique of ideology is concerned. Even if Breathless questions the idea of the self-determining individual, it can also be seen as bringing into question an anti-individualist view to the effect that the characters are nothing more than the products of their cultural milieu. Here once again it is the characters’ behaviour that constitutes the

70  Breathless – the experimental self challenging experience, only this is now insofar as they are behaving in ways that challenge the view that they are merely social products. While they certainly acquire certain roles from their cultural context, they are also actively taking them up, performing them, and we feel we know them through these performances. Thus, the Bogart tough-guy image may be there in the culture, in the American films that flooded into Parisian cinemas after the war, but Michel is actively drawing on this image, using it to fashion a distinctive style of living for himself. He even acts out his tough guy death after being shot by the police, melodramatically drawing it out as he staggers along the Montparnasse street, and after finally falling to the ground, closing his own eyes at the end. He makes the tough-guy role his own. Patricia also, in trying on various masks, is striving to be her own person. She refuses to be bound by the constraints of a traditional female role, living instead a relatively liberated life in a foreign city. She longs for independence despite the gendered constraints and expectations she encounters, not just from Michel but in all her social and professional dealings (see Young 2011). And in the film’s final scene, standing over the recently departed Michel, Patricia not only takes up his Bogart lip-rubbing gesture, but because the gesture is noticeably different when she does it, she also makes it her own. It is a final, defiant expression of her independence as she stares directly into the camera, before turning away at the very end (Andersen 2019, 176). So, the suggestion here is that along with the counter-narrative that brings into question the characters’ self-understanding as free spirits, there is also in effect a counter-counter-narrative in the film, calling into question the idea that the characters are no more than the products of their social milieu. Here, the characters are no longer just experimental subjects. They have become experimenting subjects, performing their ‘experiments in living’ before our eyes. For the viewer to appreciate this is not to return to a naive affirmation of the characters’ own self-understanding as free spirits. Rather, it represents the development of a more sophisticated understanding on the viewer’s part, an acknowledgement that these characters are not only culturally influenced but also actively appropriating and transforming their cultural influences, making them their own. The viewer still has an epistemological advantage over the characters in the sense of having access to an experience of cultural determination that challenges their selfunderstanding, but the characters now also have an advantage over the viewer, insofar as they are able to represent an experience that calls into question any attempt to understand them as no more than products of society. The film thus has the potential to enlighten the viewer as to the limits of a purely deterministic interpretation. Overall, Breathless’s anti-individualism can be construed as an at least implicit challenge to existentialist philosophy, insofar as the latter embraces this individualism and views the individual as an essentially asocial, self-contained being who can and should determine themselves independently of social norms and conventions. In its anti-anti-individualism, the film can also be seen as at

Breathless – the experimental self  71 least implicitly challenging Marxist thinking, or at least the Marxism that tends towards a crude social determinism in which the individual is nothing more than an ‘ideological dupe’, completely programmed by institutions and the media. At the philosophical level, this anti-individualist view was a feature of the Marxism that was prominent in post-war French thought, and which was also fiercely critical of existentialism’s ‘subjectivism’, its perceived failure to appreciate the individual’s involvement in social relations. Breathless challenges a deterministic Marxism by showing how the characters do not simply reproduce but actively transform the cultural norms they internalise. The characters may indeed be influenced by their milieu, but they are also making something of the way they have been made. Acknowledging this further level of potential critique in the film has a special significance, given the later assessment that would be made of the film by Godard himself. The later, stridently Marxist Godard would himself repudiate Breathless, decrying the film as ‘fascist’ for its perceived refusal of the reality of social relations, and its propagation of the myth of an existence outside those relations (see Godard 2014, 28; McCabe 1980, 33–34). But there is a sense in which the film is already, in advance, calling that sort of criticism into question, and thus challenging its own author. We will return to the consideration of Godard’s later reassessment of his film, along with the director’s relationship to their own production, in a moment. Film experimentalism Beyond the experience-centred critique of ideology in Breathless, a critique that translates into an at least implicit critical engagement with both Sartrean existentialism and a deterministic Marxism, there is now the third sort of experiencecentred reflection to consider, the purely cinematic experimentalism for which the film is best known. That is to say, the reflective experimentalism that puts presuppositions to the test of experience is exercised not only in connection with film’s ideological content, along, at least implicitly, with these developed philosophical positions, but also in relation to norms and conventions that are constitutive of its identity as a film. In Breathless, these lines of experimental reflection in fact run parallel to one another. Just as the film’s characters both internalise and transform the norms of their cultural context, the film relates in a similar way to the norms constitutive of its identity as a film, not only internalising them from film history but also making them its own. In particular, just as Michel appropriates references from the movies in fashioning his seemingly anarchic personality, the film draws on conventions from the history of film in fashioning its story. These are not only conventions of film technique but also genre conventions, particularly those of American noir crime film that provide elements for the plot and characters. In that regard, Breathless is a thoroughly traditional film, steeped in film history. But just as Michel transforms the norms that he appropriates, Breathless is also the experimental film

72  Breathless – the experimental self that breaks all the rules, in which ‘anything goes’ as Godard put it (1972, 173). Godard said that he wanted to tear up the rule book of French cinema, which he thought was being stifled by conformity. In this regard, the film not only breaks with the traditional, well-made French cinema, the conventional, studio-bound films that the French movie industry was turning out in the fifties, the ‘tradition of quality’ as Truffaut derisively called it in his 1954 Cahiers essay ‘A Certain Tendency in French Cinema’. It also takes its distance from the Hollywood cinema that it is so lovingly drawing on. In the end, it is a film that breaks from film as such, film as it had been practiced hitherto, bringing something new to film language. This is why it is possible to both speak of Breathless as part of film ­history, and to speak of film history in terms of there being a ‘before and after Breathless’, or as Truffaut put it: ‘[T]here is cinema before Godard and cinema after Godard’ (Truffaut 1994, 24). An obvious place where the film challenges norms of film technique is in its famous jump cuts, in which a small portion of film is cut out at seemingly arbitrary points within a scene. As a result, the action in the scene leaps from one moment to another, giving the film a jagged, nervy quality. Here the film breaks with the discreet continuity editing that had been the norm in film since the days of D.W. Griffith. In addition, as Dudley Andrew points out, the film features a good deal of rough and ready editing, such as jarring juxtapositions of shots, where the direction of movement is suddenly reversed, or there is an abrupt change in scale (see Andrew 1987, 11). This might give the impression that the film is all cinematic hyperactivity, but there are also long periods in the film where Michel and Patricia are just talking or playing around, and Godard lets the camera run on in extended takes. This includes Patricia and Michel’s stroll down the Champs-Élysées; the long sequence, taking almost a third of the film’s running time, in Patricia’s hotel room; and the sequence in the Swedish model’s Montparnasse apartment towards the end. Dramatically not a lot happens in these scenes. The plot effectively comes to a halt, but the scenes are nonetheless compelling to watch. We seem to be seeing something very natural, spontaneous, uncontrived, a realistic portrayal of two people talking in real time. It’s not for nothing that Godard described the film as ‘a documentary on Jean Seberg and Jean-Paul Belmondo in a film by Jean-Luc Godard’ (Godard 1987, 166). This documentary-style realism is another part of the film’s challenge to the existing conventions of narrative fiction film, particularly as represented by the ‘tradition of quality’. Technological developments such as the hand-held camera and faster film stock liberated Godard from the studio and allowed the film to be shot in natural locations, out in the street or in cramped hotel rooms, with minimum artificial light. The camera could also be hidden for the street scenes, so as not to be noticed by the passers-by. The result of this is a naturalistic, documentary-­style portrayal, not only of the characters but also of the city they inhabit. The film reveals late 1950s Paris in its everyday reality, the ordinary life of a city in all its grittiness, energy, and spontaneity. The soundtrack also

Breathless – the experimental self  73 contributes to this documentary realism. Often it just consists of the natural sounds of Paris life, the car horns, engines, brakes, police sirens, and other noises typical of a large modern city. A small qualification is needed here. For the actors to be audible above the din of the city, the film had to be shot mute and then sound and dialogue dubbed in afterwards in the studio. So there may still be natural city sounds, but they are being intentionally applied; and this is even when they sometimes drown out bits of dialogue, as sometimes happens in the hotel room scene (see Van Ruymbeke 2013; McCabe 2003, 119; Brody 2009, 75). This is to say that even in the most realist film, there is contrivance. Nonetheless, Breathless remains a strikingly naturalistic portrayal of Paris, and this is another way that Godard breaks with the older French cinema. Along with the other New Wave filmmakers, Godard wanted to get away from the artificial-looking, studio-shot portrayal of the city. Now, instead of the studio we are going to have the street, and instead of extras, ordinary Parisians going about their business. This is not to forget that, for all its documentary-style realism, the film also draws heavily on cinematic conventions, especially conventions of American noir films. In his critical writings for the Cahiers du Cinéma, Godard championed westerns and B-grade noir crime drama films (Usher 2014, 25). The Cahiers critics in general were enthusiastic advocates of American film, of Hollywood directors like Alfred Hitchcock, Howard Hawks and Nicholas Ray, and ‘low-brow’ films like westerns and films noirs (though both Truffaut and Godard use terms like ‘B movie’ and ‘gangster film’ rather than film noir). Breathless features some very obvious elements from the noir world. Michel is the amoral hoodlum who commits a crime, wants to get out of town to avoid the cops who are after him, and dies at the end. As Godard put it, ‘as my avowed ambition was to make an ordinary gangster film, I had no business deliberately contradicting the genre: he must die’ (Godard 1972, 174). Patricia is another recognisable noir figure, the femme fatale who brings about the male hero’s downfall, even if she is more pursued than pursuing. The film itself alludes to its sources. It is dedicated to Monogram pictures, American producers of low budget gangster films, westerns, and horror films. And there are many allusions to American films in the film itself, on movie posters or playing in cinemas. As mentioned, this appropriation of elements from Hollywood film is also paralleled within the film, particularly in Michel’s behaviour. Along with a general obsession with American culture (he only ever steals American cars), Michel has fashioned his personality around Bogart’s tough-guy movie persona. This appropriation of Hollywood film elements is yet another way that Breathless distances itself from the older French cinema and announces its status as a New Wave film. As Barbara Mennel puts it: ‘The film’s aesthetics cite film noir of the B-category in stark contrast to the studio-based, high-production value, star-driven, literary adaptation of French cinema that came before the New Wave’ (Mennel 2008, 78). However, and once again in a way that parallels Michel’s behaviour within the film, Breathless also subverts its Hollywood borrowings,

74  Breathless – the experimental self making them its own. Michel may have to die at the end, but Godard also has no problem ‘contradicting the genre’. If a Hollywood noir would be likely to have the pursuit plot front and centre, with a subordinate romance, Godard turns this on its head, making the relationship between Michel and Patricia central, and turning the police pursuit almost into an afterthought (see Galvin 2015). Another important part of that subversion is Godard’s setting his noir plot in an everyday, naturalistically portrayed Paris. An American film noir would have had Michel hanging about in dimly lit nightclubs and shadowy alleyways, or walking the dark, rain-slicked streets. As James Monaco points out, Breathless is a film noir set in the city of light, mostly in daytime and in the middle of summer (Monaco 1980, 118; see also Levy 2010; Ezell 2014). This is also, as mentioned, a very ordinary, commonplace Paris, and the realistic urban setting has the effect of showing up the artificiality of the Hollywood elements. As one commentator puts it, ‘Breathless is an orchestrated dialogue between two worlds – a world of stylized Hollywood romanticism, and the everyday world of banal, uncinematic life. The film is Godard’s idea of a fast-paced Hollywood gangster movie transplanted to the Paris streets’ (Heller 2010). In this mundane setting, we cannot take the noir plot entirely seriously. For example, in one sequence where the cops are following Patricia, hoping she will lead them to Michel, and she loses them by ducking into a cinema, this movie-style cops and robbers routine looks unrealistic and comical played out on the bustling Avenue Mac-Mahon. Or again, in Patricia’s tiny hotel room, Patricia and Michel are shown doing mundane things, washing up, teasing one another, chatting about music and literature; but when we cut to a composed frame of the two kissing in sunglasses, it is a Hollywood movie kiss that looks particularly posed and artificial. In all this experimentalism, Godard is challenging both the idea that film is a simple recording of reality, and the manner in which narrative fiction films typically work to hide their artifice, to conceal the extent to which they are fictional constructions, to generate a ‘reality effect’. Breathless explicitly demonstrates the way film constructs its reality by calling attention to its own fictionality. As we have seen, this is achieved in part by placing the film’s noir narrative in the distinctly un-noirish setting of an everyday Paris in the middle of summer, highlighting its artificiality and making it hard to take the plot seriously. Even the film’s characters don’t take the plot too seriously, abandoning the story altogether for significant stretches of time, spending a large portion of the movie just chatting and playing around in Patricia’s hotel room. We are also reminded of the film’s artificiality by the obtrusive editing that makes no attempt to conceal itself. There are the jump cuts and jarring juxtapositions of shots, and a couple of times Godard uses the incongruous iris camera effect, reducing the image to a pinpoint size to close a scene, a technique borrowed from the silent cinema era. Godard sometimes has the characters break the fourth wall and directly address the audience, as Michel does while driving down to Paris at the start of the film: ‘If you don’t like the sea, if you don’t like the mountains, if you don’t like the

Breathless – the experimental self  75 town, get stuffed’. This is a distancing effect of the kind that Brecht employed in connection with the theatre, the result being that ‘[t]he audience can no longer have the illusion of being the unseen spectator at an event which is really taking place’ (Brecht 1964, 91). Indeed, Godard seems to be the first significant filmmaker to use Brechtian distancing techniques in his work. He appears to have been directly influenced by Brecht in this regard, modifying these techniques for the cinema, and in later films, he explicitly acknowledged Brecht’s influence, referencing him by name in La Chinoise for example (see Uhde 1974, 29). In drawing attention to his film’s constructed character, especially through the use of obtrusive editing devices like the jump cuts, Godard is distancing himself from his mentor Bazin, the founder of Cahiers. For Bazin, as we have seen, what was most important about film was its capacity to photographically capture reality. That, rather than editing, was of the essence of cinema. For Bazin, film editing techniques ‘serve mainly to falsify reality by breaking up space and time’. Godard in contrast refused to turn his back on editing. His disagreement with Bazin on this point was played out in the pages of the Cahiers, while Godard was still a film critic there. Mention has already been made of Godard’s 1952 piece, ‘Defence and Illustration of Classical Construction’, which was an early critique of Bazin’s views on editing. December 1956 issue featured an article by Bazin called ‘Montage Interdit’ (‘Editing Forbidden’) and one by Godard, ‘Montage, mon beau souci’ (‘Editing, my Fine Care’). There, he argued for the importance of cinematic devices like editing, as able to express psychological reality through its spatial discontinuities (Brody 2009, 14, 28). In Breathless, both these aspects are evident. The element of photographic realism is evident in the film’s naturalistic, documentary-style portrayal of its characters and their city. At the same time, the film makes obvious use of editing devices like the jump cuts, and not only to speed up the action and impart a nervous energy to the narrative, reflective of a fugitive’s life on the run, but also, as has been noted, as a way of reminding the viewer that they are watching a movie, a fictional construction. Not that the film’s realistic, documentary-style portrayal of life is in conflict with its artificial, constructed cinematic elements. On the contrary, in calling attention to its constructed, cinematic elements, the film’s realism is in fact enhanced, even radicalised. Breathless is the narrative fiction film that goes so far in its realism as to call attention to its fictionality. Indeed, as a number of commentators have noted, this is a new kind of anti-realist realism, ‘a realism that grows from a cheerful acknowledgement that cinema is in fact cinema’ (Sterrit 1999, 6). For Godard, as Gabriel Rockhill puts it, ‘(t)rue realism . . . is not simply the attempt to perfectly capture the world as it is. It is the effort to mobilize the true power of the cinematic apparatus to reveal the reality that film itself is an artifice’ (Rockhill 2010, 115, emphasis in original). And as Nathan Andersen points out, precisely in calling attention to its fictionality, the way in which it is just a movie, the film comes across as more realistic,

76  Breathless – the experimental self more honest, more authentic (Andersen 2019, 142). Andersen also draws attention here to the influence on Godard of the documentary filmmaker Jean Rouch. In cinema vérité documentaries like Moi un Noir (1958), Rouch highlighted the element of artifice involved even in documentary filmmaking, acknowledging the presence of the camera. Moi un Noir also made pioneering use of the jump cut. For his part, Godard reportedly thought of calling his film Moi, un Blanc (see Andersen 142ff; Brody 2014). Subsequently, he would express the view that ‘fiction is interesting only if it is validated by a documentary context’ (Godard 1972, 192). This cinematic ‘hyper-realism’ is very different to the slick Hollywood filmmaking where we are supposed to forget that we are watching a film, to be taken in by the illusion. It is the opposite of someone like Hitchcock, who is a master of discreet audience manipulation. Nonetheless Hitchcock himself was not averse to disrupting the illusion a little, making regular cameo appearances in his films. This became a signature feature of the Hitchcock film, to the extent that Hitchcock had to make his much-anticipated appearance as early as possible to avoid the audience becoming distracted from the story. And there is a Hitchcock touch in Breathless along these lines. After the long hotel room interlude, where the story effectively comes to a halt, we see Patricia and Michel pull up in a car opposite Patricia’s workplace, the New York Herald Tribune office. The man in dark glasses reading the paper and suspiciously checking Michel out, then running off to find the cops, is Godard himself. Yet even here, Godard is subverting cinematic norms. His cameo appearance is made not in order to disrupt the narrative, in the Hitchcockian manner, but rather to get it back on track. He is alerting the cops to Michel’s presence, and also for the first time to the existence of Patricia, who has now been identified as Michel’s accomplice. The chase can thus begin again, now with Patricia as well as Michel in the frame. In various ways, then, Godard breaks with conventions of film form and content that had been constitutive of ‘proper’ filmmaking to that point. This is cinematic experimentalism in the classic sense. Breathless is not a radically experimental film, in the sense that we would never question whether what we are watching is a film. It is in many ways a thoroughly traditional film, steeped in film history and technique. Godard has clearly watched a great deal of film, especially Hollywood film, in the Paris cine-clubs, and Breathless reflects the influence of a whole history of film and film technique. The film is clearly drawing on existing cinematic norms, including the conventions of American film noir cinema that provide elements for the plot and characters. Yet for all that, Breathless also remains a quintessentially modernist, experimental film, the one that famously tears up the rulebook of cinema. In this experimentalism, the film represents a limit-transcending experience, deeply challenging the conventions of traditional cinema to that point. In terms of film history, Godard’s film was a cinematic experience that permanently modified film language, enlarging the sense of what could count as a narrative fiction film.

Breathless – the experimental self  77 The extent to which it did so may be seen by comparing it with the 1983 American remake, directed by Jim McBride. The remake relocates the action to Los Angeles and swaps the nationalities of the lead characters Jesse and Monica, making the male American and the female French, but also seems to remove most of what made the original film so original. Indeed, if the original Breathless subversively remakes American film, the American remake subverts Godard’s film radicalism and turns Breathless back into a more or less conventional Hollywood film. Despite more recent efforts to highlight transgressive elements in the remake, the film is much more effective in highlighting the transgressive elements of the original, by virtue of their absence in the remake (see Mazdon 2000, 84; Evans 2014, 309). Mostly gone is the original film’s cinematic experimentalism, its adventurous editing, distancing effects and hyper-realism in favour of a largely conventional telling of its basic story. This was, it should be emphasised, entirely by design. As the director McBride himself says, ‘we went out of our way to try to tell the same story with the same characters, but in a very different, more conventionally Hollywood kind of way’ (Stewart 2013). Also missing is the way the original film interrogates its central characters’ belief that they are free spirits, pointing to their dependence on their cultural milieu, including tough-guy Hollywood movie characters, but without reducing them to mere products of their milieu. This is replaced in the remake with characters who are themselves closer to Hollywood movie character types, and who also exist in a very familiar hierarchy in relation to one another. The film is largely told from the point of view of the male anti-hero, the rebellious outsider whose pop-­culture references serve only to feed his narcissism, tough-guy bravado and hyper-­masculinity, all of which go unchallenged in the film. The female lead occupies a more marginalised position, as the responsible student briefly attracted to the rebellious bad boy and the life of danger, but who in the end seems only to exist in the film as the object of the male character’s fantasies. Precisely because it returns to conventional cinematic norms, the remake serves to highlight the extent of the original’s originality. It may be the case that, as film theorist Dudley Andrew puts it, ‘Godard, for all his belief in authenticity, doubts the possibility of radical originality’, and that ‘the theme of the film, like the essence of its hero, is the futile struggle to be original’ (Andrew 1987, 12). There is no doubt that Godard’s film is in many ways influenced by cinematic history and tradition. But I would argue that the film, for all its reliance on inherited material, remains a film of prodigious invention, and that invention lies in the manner in which it transforms the cinematic norms it draws on. Again, there is a parallel here with what is going on in the film itself, the way the film’s characters both draw on and transform the norms of their cultural milieu. Their individuality lies in the way they make something of the way they have been made. Like Michel with his Bogart tough-guy image, Godard is actively drawing on his sources, turning them to his own purposes. Godard’s own label for what he is doing in Breathless was ‘a cinema of reinvention’. As

78  Breathless – the experimental self he puts it, ‘what I wanted to do was to take a conventional story and remake, but differently, everything the cinema had done. I also wanted to give the feeling that the techniques of film-making had just been discovered or experienced for the first time’ (1972, 173). Something that might be thought to diminish Godard’s originality is the way some of the most distinctive features of Breathless, particularly its use of jump cuts and its overtly contrived aspect, may not have been originally intended by the director. The well-known story regarding the jump cuts is that these were only done for practical purposes, that the film’s original running time turned out to be too long, but rather than follow the advice of fellow director Jean-Pierre Melville (who has a small part in the film), to cut out unnecessary scenes, Godard went through and cut out bits of film within scenes that seemed to him to lack ‘vigour’ (see Brody 2009, 68). And Godard is on record as suggesting that, like the jump cuts, the film’s contrived aspect was not originally intended. Though his avowed ambition was to make a normal film, ‘[o]ne never does exactly what one intended. Sometimes one even does the opposite. . . . I realized that [Breathless] was not at all what I  thought. I  thought I  had made a realistic film like Richard Quine’s Pushover, but it wasn’t that at all’. The film turned out looking disingenuous because, Godard says, he ‘didn’t have enough technical skill’ (Godard 1972, 175). These revelations might be taken to undermine any attempt to see the film as an expression of a free artist’s creative vision; and indeed to undermine Godard’s status as an auteur, which is to say, the director who so dominates and shapes their film’s narrative, in accordance with their personal vision and individual style, that they can be regarded as the film’s author. The idea of the film ­director as auteur was popularised by the Cahiers critics, particularly Truffaut (see T ­ ruffaut 1976; Staples 1966–1967), and the Godard of Breathless is often seen as epitomising this sort of figure. However, even if it is true that some of the most distinctive and memorable features of Breathless were not originally intended by him, or were introduced as a response to issues that only became apparent in post-production, this only makes the film a good illustration of the idea that the filmmaking process typically involves not the straightforward realisation of a pre-existing vision, but a kind of dialogue between the director and the emerging film. Even with the most auterist director, the film can be said to make the director just as the director makes the film. Far from undermining Godard’s originality, Breathless demonstrates how even unintended results can be transformed into integral features of a film, and become part of the director’s signature style. As such, it is ironic that Godard would subsequently, after 1968, become critical not only of the individualism of the film’s characters but also of his own role as the rule-breaking New Wave auteur. Interpreting both his characters and his own film-making through the lens of a doctrinaire, deterministic Marxism, he would come to agree with those Marxist critics who, at the time of the film’s release, argued that Breathless was a reactionary celebration of the individual

Breathless – the experimental self  79 that failed to appreciate the extent to which individuals exist in and are shaped by social relations. For his own part, as Andrew notes, the later Godard abandoned all vestiges of commercial filmmaking in the climate that produced the events of 1968. In his subsequent Dziga Vertov Group period, he recanted the aesthetic libertarianism that had made Breathless complicit, he intimated, with Michel Poiccard’s right-wing anarchism, and thus unwittingly an effect of bourgeois capitalist ideology. (Andrew 2014) During this period in which he formed the aforementioned group, named after a 1920s Soviet filmmaker, with some other radical filmmakers, Godard worked collectively, and refused to give his personal signature to the films being made. There are some interesting parallels with Sartre here. Sartre, who himself moved in a Marxist direction in his later thinking, would do something similar, coming to view his earlier, highly individualistic existentialism as an ‘ideology’ (Sartre 1963, xxxiv). For the later Sartre, we are all formed by the cultures in which we are born, our class position, sex, race, language, and so on. At the same time, the later Sartre is also critical of crudely deterministic forms of Marxism, and strives to articulate an existentialist Marxism – one that, while acknowledging the force of social circumstances, also holds on to the notion of human freedom. Sartre’s position, as he puts it in a late interview, is that human beings can always make something out of what is made of them. This is the limit I  would today accord to freedom – the small movement which makes a totally conditioned human being someone who does not simply render back completely what his conditioning has given him. (Sartre 1983, 35) And this ‘small movement’ is arguably already visible in Breathless. As noted, while the later Godard might want to repudiate his film as a reactionary celebration of the individual at the expense of an acknowledgement of the social, it is already implicitly calling into question a heavy-handed, deterministic Marxism that reduces the individual to a mere product of their social circumstances. Within the film, this questioning is inherent in the way it shows its characters not simply reproducing but actively transforming the cultural norms they appropriate, making something of the way they have been made. At the level of the film itself, this critique is inherent in the film’s creative relationship with its inherited material, the way it simultaneously draws on and challenges cinematic conventions. In the process, Breathless reinvents cinema, and permanently changes cinematic language. The later Godard might want to repudiate his own role as the rule-breaking New Wave auteur, but his debut feature film is a permanent monument to the capacity of film to transform and reinvent itself.

80  Breathless – the experimental self On this reading, then, Breathless provides a clear demonstration of the way narrative fiction films can invoke challenging experiences that bring into question their structuring presuppositions, not only the conventions internal to the cinematic art-form, the experimentalism for which it is best known, but also the cultural presuppositions shared by the film’s central characters. This ­interrogation also extends to an engagement with philosophical positions that have developed in the written literature, in particular Sartrean existentialism, but also Marxism, both features of the intellectual scene in mid-twentieth-century Paris, the milieu in which the film appeared. In these various ways, the film can be seen to be doing philosophy, in a manner akin to the historico-critical reflection that can be undertaken within philosophy, a form of philosophical reflection that is distinguishable from the more traditional argument-centred, Platonic form.

6  Force Majeure – the force of circumstances

The 2014 Swedish comedy-drama Force Majeure, written and directed by Ruben Östlund, is another film that engages in experience-centred, experimental reflection on a number of levels. Most prominently, it can be seen to be engaging in a critique of ideology, in the expanded sense we have been considering. It is a story in which the cultural presuppositions of its characters are very much being put to the test of a challenging experience. In Breathless, the challenging experience was primarily behaviour the characters undertook that was at odds with their self-understanding as free spirits, and which they themselves were largely blind to. In Force Majeure, the challenging experience is something the main male character Tomas is all too aware of, an experience that confronts him from outside and tests his sense of himself. This is the experience not only of a nature that has ceased to be a domesticated, safe space and become a threatening ‘other’ but also of his own less-than-heroic behaviour in the face of this crisis situation. This is not to say that he doesn’t do his level best to turn a blind eye to what he has done, to pretend that it has not taken place. What becomes very evident in the film is the way in which the limit-transcending experience represents a threat or danger to the thinking that it transcends. What is particularly under threat here is not so much the character’s physical existence as his existence as a moral being. At the film’s heart is his failure to live up to the norms and values constitutive of his identity, and of what counts as a ‘proper man’ at a certain moment in European culture. Later, a similar experience of less-than-heroic behaviour will put the main female character, his wife Ebba, to the test. In addition, she will encounter another kind of challenging experience, the experience of another person whose lifestyle departs from her own, who lives comfortably in accordance with significantly different norms and values, implicitly calling into question her own way of living. The film, therefore, challenges the ideology and the cultural norms that define ‘proper’ male and female behaviour, especially within the traditional nuclear family. In addition to the very direct challenges being posed to the moral and social identities of its characters, Force Majeure also brings into question certain philosophical positions, including a certain notion of the individual to be found in DOI: 10.4324/9781003207764-6

82  Force Majeure – the force of circumstances philosophy. This is the kind of subject often to be found lurking in moral theory, the abstract agent whose moral life seems to be confined to developing choiceguiding arguments. The film’s characters are revealed not as these rational choicemaking machines but as multi-faceted, complex agents with commitments to often conflicting ideals and norms that structure their choices and actions. Like all of us, they are vulnerable beings who are engaged in a perilous encounter with the world and in permanent danger of falling short of their defining ideals. Finally, Force Majeure also goes a little way towards questioning norms and conventions constitutive of its identity as a film, and thus in being experimental in the traditional sense of cinematic experimentalism. It does not go anywhere near as far as Breathless in this regard, and indeed, it is something of a stretch to think of it as experimental in this sense. Nonetheless, it does challenge certain genre conventions, especially around the stereotype of the cinematic male hero, and what can be called the ‘domestic action film’ genre; as well as the ‘promiscuous women must be punished’ convention. And insofar as these cinematic conventions ultimately reflect or reproduce cultural norms concerning proper male and female behaviour, this is also an extension of the film’s ideology-critical reflection on these norms, as well as on the complicity of film itself in perpetuating these norms. So, a number of forms of experimental, experience-centred reflection can be found in Force Majeure, and exploring them is going to be the focus of this chapter. Confronting experience The setting of the film is an upmarket ski hotel, where good-looking, well-to-do couple Tomas (Johannes Bah Khunke) and his wife Ebba (Lisa Loven Kongsli), along with children Harry and Vera, have checked in for their skiing holiday. As they settle in, exterior night-time shots show the snow ploughs preparing the slopes, and we hear the muffled noise of charges going off to trigger controlled avalanches. This is a secure, circumscribed world, where nature itself is being domesticated so that it will pose no danger to the pampered hotel guests when they come out in the morning, and larger moral, political and environmental issues are being held at bay. The film’s primary challenging experience erupts out of the supposedly domesticated ski-slopes the next day. The family is sitting on the hotel restaurant balcony, having their lunch. On the mountainside opposite, another controlled avalanche begins. The snow cascades down the slopes, everyone pulls out their phones to take videos for their social media feeds. Tomas reassures his family that it is just a controlled avalanche, but as the avalanche shows no sign of slowing down, panic erupts on the balcony. Amidst the chaos, Ebba shields the kids, but Tomas grabs his phone and runs off-screen. The screen goes white for a few seconds, then clears. It was only ‘avalanche smoke’, it seems. There was never any real danger. Restaurant staff move in to check on the diners, Tomas returns, asking if everyone is okay. The family sit down at their table again and continue eating, only now in silence.

Force Majeure – the force of circumstances  83 The rest of the film is about Tomas, his wife, and some friends who join them at the hotel, all trying to come to terms with his behaviour during the avalanche incident. This attention is called for because Tomas has fallen considerably short of what one might expect of him, abandoning his family to save himself (and his phone). In portraying his behaviour, the film is directing our attention to an area of experience that is very much at odds with our ordinary expectations about how people should behave. The film’s writer-director has said that Force Majeure was inspired by the question ‘how do human beings react in sudden and unexpected situations, such as a catastrophe?’ (Östlund 2014). The interest here is in examining people’s reactions not physiologically or psychologically but as moral subjects, ostensibly committed to certain ideals and values that define who they are and where they stand. Extreme, confronting circumstances are like experimental situations that put people as moral subjects to the test of experience, determining whether they are really able to live up to their defining ideals in practice. Failure in these circumstances is more than just an epistemological matter, the refutation of a position by way of counter-example, or the falsification of a hypothesis through a disconfirming instance. It is a self-betrayal, and an occasion for guilt and humiliation. In advance of such testing experiences, the not-merely-epistemic question arises in one’s own case – do we really know how we would behave in extreme, confronting circumstances? One might in this spirit ask questions like: How would I have behaved as an ordinary citizen in Nazi Germany? Envisaging such a scenario brings to light certain assumptions or hopes on our part. We might think that we would probably have behaved, if not heroically, at least decently, that we would have acquitted ourselves reasonably well. We might even imagine that there is some kind of ‘moral instinct’, an essential goodness in ourselves, and that we would have done the right thing regardless of how bad things were. And we’re likely to identify with those, like Oskar Schindler or Sophie Scholl, who did stand up under terrible circumstances, who resisted and behaved nobly. All of which is to say, it is possible to construe this hypothetical scenario in a way that confirms our image of ourselves, even if, as historian Timothy Snyder points out, it requires us to believe we are somehow inherently morally superior to the vast mass of Europeans of the 1930s and 1940s (see Snyder 2015). On the basis of such comforting assumptions, it is also easy to condemn those who just went along, or who turned a blind eye to what was happening. But it does not take much to make us realise that we can’t be so sure how we would behave in such extreme circumstances. In the end, no a priori reasoning is possible here. It is an essentially empirical question, one that waits on experience. And this is a dangerous experience, because there is the risk that we might very well fall short of our values and ideals, betraying everything we imagine we stand for. Indeed, the very same historical scenario provides ample evidence to suggest that this is quite likely, showing as it does how few heroes there actually were in such circumstances, how many people just went along with things

84  Force Majeure – the force of circumstances or pretended they weren’t happening. History itself challenges our complacent assumptions and becomes an occasion for reflection, and quite possibly the realisation that, as Snyder puts it, we may not be so far from Hitler’s world after all, that it is really only ‘time and luck’ that separate us from National Socialism (see Snyder 2015). We may come to understand that we are very lucky indeed not to have been put to the test of such circumstances, as far as maintaining our sense of ourselves as basically decent types is concerned. Getting through life with our dignity more or less intact requires a good deal of what philosopher Thomas Nagel calls ‘circumstantial moral luck’ (see Nagel 1979, 35), an idea that we will return to later on. The challenging experience that drives these reflections thus turns out to be not just the catastrophic or extreme situation, but also how people behave in such situations. This is the full scope of the experience invoked in Force Majeure. The danger to Tomas’s moral identity is being posed not just by the controlled avalanche that seems to have gone wrong but also by his unfortunate behaviour in the circumstances. In invoking this experience, the film alludes to real-world experiences of this sort, including a ferry disaster that is referenced explicitly in the film’s dialogue. Stories of heroism in disaster situations, or the ‘women and children first’ ethos that is associated especially with the Titanic, no doubt fuel the inspirational films that play a role in mythologising such events. The ­director however has said that he drew on reports indicating that the reality is that in maritime disasters it’s usually ‘every man for himself’, with women and children having a significantly lower survival rate. He also drew on statistics about the high divorce rates after aeroplane hijacks and reported that a key inspiration was a personal story about a friend who could not believe her husband ran away and left her when a gunman opened fire (Östlund 2014; Lattanzio 2015; see George 2012). The film also draws inspiration from the larger world of internet communication and social media networks, and in particular from YouTube which is, amongst other things, a handy archive of disgrace and humiliation. Many of the film’s scenes were directly inspired by YouTube videos, from ‘Worst Man Cry Ever’ to ‘Idiot Spanish Bus-Driver Almost Kills Students’ (see Comeback Company n.d.). Its most iconic scene draws on a clip of people sitting at an outdoor restaurant filming an avalanche tumbling down the mountain. As the director says, ‘I was interested in the three seconds where it goes from ‘wow, beautiful’ to nervous laughter to total panic’ (see Lucca 2014; Roberts 2014; Lattanzio 2015). Here is a clear instance where, rather than cinema simply being displaced and rendered redundant by the wider world of internet communication, film is appropriating elements from that world, enlisting them in critical reflection. And this critical reflection is not simply the debunking of certain content as ‘fake’, but its employment in a meditation on the human condition. In an interesting continuation of this cross-fertilisation between film and the wider, media-saturated world, an edited excerpt from the film’s avalanche scene, with Tomas fleeing,

Force Majeure – the force of circumstances  85 itself turned up as a viral video in mid-2019, purporting to be the shaky mobile phone recording of a shocking real event. It was quickly denounced as a fake, its movie provenance established: ‘thankfully it’s just a movie’ (Novak 2019). However, this relief may be premature. According to the present analysis at least, something’s being fictional does not equate to its being false; and this particular fiction film is calling attention to some inconvenient truths about people’s behaviour in extreme circumstances. If the film evokes the dangerous experience, it also distances the viewer by offering an experimental subject to endure it, the hapless Tomas. The actor, Johannes Khunke, reported in an interview that it was not an easy role to play, finding it challenging to play such a ‘weak character’. Nonetheless, he evokes his character’s discomfort and humiliation superbly in expression and posture. Again there are allusions to specific real-world events. Khunke says that ‘[the director] sent me pictures of devastated men, like the golf player Tiger Woods when he was confronted with the fact that he was a sex addict. We were inspired also by the captain of Costa Concordia, the one who flew from the ship’ (Orange 2015). The viewer is also removed from the proceedings by the film’s voyeuristic, observational approach, featuring long static shots and objective framing in which we are not encouraged to align ourselves with any particular character’s point of view. The camera itself seems to have adopted an objective ‘view from nowhere’. There are even bathroom scenes where we are directly behind Tomas and his family, who are standing, brushing their teeth in front of a large mirror, and yet uncannily, the camera cannot be seen. Unmoored from any particular perspective, we observe these characters and their behaviour as if they were laboratory rats in a maze. The minimalist design of the upmarket ski hotel where the film is set contributes to the general clinical atmosphere (see Bibbiani 2014; Roberts 2014; Lattanzio 2015). However, the viewer is not entirely removed from the proceedings. Certainly, as the actor notes, few would want to identify with such a weak character as Tomas. And no attempt is made in the film to make the character sympathetic. Indeed, the film displays his mounting discomfort with considerable relish. At this level, however tragic things might be for Tomas, the film is a comedy of discomfort and humiliation, and frequently hilarious. Even so, the film does not simply hold its main male character up to ridicule or contempt. Instead, we increasingly come to see Tomas as standing in for us, even if this remains an intellectual rather than emotional kinship. The film gets us to think about what we would do in such circumstances, and to contemplate the possibility that we might not be so different to Tomas. This movement towards self-reflection is initiated in the film itself, as Tomas’s wife Ebba, and other characters, struggle to make sense of Tomas’s actions, and think about how they themselves would have reacted in the situation, as well as speculating about human nature in general. Here the other characters are effectively acting as surrogates for the audience, though, of course, we are also observing them, just as much as we are observing

86  Force Majeure – the force of circumstances Tomas. Thus, on the one hand, we are separate enough to observe and take pleasure in Tomas’s discomfort, the film invoking schadenfreude like the YouTube videos that have inspired it; and on the other, to the extent that we come to see the experiment we are observing as speaking to our own condition, we are able to appreciate that the discomfort and misery we witness could just as easily be ours, and that the last laugh may be on us. In trying to come to terms with Tomas’s behaviour, the other characters consider his conduct from a number of angles. His conduct comes up as a topic of discussion at two dinners, one that the couple has on the evening of avalanche incident with Ebba’s new friend Charlotte (Karin Myrenberg) and her latest skiinstructor conquest, and the other the following evening. The latter is the more extended dinner scene with Mats (Kristofer Hivju) and Fanni (Fanni Metelius), old friends of the couple who have arrived at the ski hotel in the meantime. In the first dinner, it is Tomas who introduces the story, saying that they finished skiing early that day ‘because we had some kind of experience’; but omitting the key detail of his own behaviour, which Ebba supplies to Tomas’s embarrassment. In the second dinner, it is Ebba who insists on recounting the whole incident, right to the bitter end. As the details come out, both dinners prove to be uncomfortable, not only for their dinner companions but for the increasingly abject Tomas. There are at least two ways in which Tomas’s behaviour might be interpreted, interpretations that are articulated by characters in the film, and which also include general thoughts about the human condition that recall philosophical positions. First, there is the attempt to see it as a more or less instinctive reaction to a quickly-developing situation, scarcely intentional at all, almost a reflex. That’s what Charlotte suggests at the first dinner: ‘isn’t this a situation that comes really quick? How do you know how to react?’ This idea is also pursued independently by Tomas’s friend Mats during the discussion at the second dinner. He suggests that in situations like these, you’re not always aware of what you do. For humans and animals alike, being confronted by a dangerous situation triggers a survival instinct, a primitive desire to escape. In this he also offers a face-saving way out for Tomas; in this sort of situation, someone might not be able to live up to their values, through no fault of their own. As a case in point, he mentions the 1994 Estonia ferry disaster where, he says, people survived by trampling over dead bodies, knocking down children and old people; they did terrible things and had to live with what they’d done, but you can’t punish them for these crimes, because they are in the grip of a primitive instinct. One might go a little further along these lines and argue that our civilised, moral selves are at best a veneer, and that in a crisis when social order breaks down it’s our real nature that emerges, a nature dominated by the drive for self-preservation. Here there is an at least implicit reference to positions articulated in philosophy, inasmuch as this view recalls the account of human nature formulated by Hobbes in his political philosophy. For Hobbes, human beings are by their very nature

Force Majeure – the force of circumstances  87 selfish, egoistic and self-seeking. They are essentially machines programmed to do whatever will ensure their survival, a view of human nature that Hobbes uses to justify the need for a government, since if all social authority were removed and people lived in a state of nature, free to do whatever they wanted, the result would be a ruinous ‘war of all against all’. Individuals, doing whatever would ensure their survival, would ironically creating a situation where they would be under constant threat of being killed by others. Ebba has a different view of Tomas’s behaviour. She can’t identify with anyone who would ‘trample on their own kids to survive’. Her problem is that ‘my natural focus is on my children, while Tomas’s natural focus is away from us’. Her character is centred on her children, and she is certain she would never do what Tomas has done, even unthinkingly. Her view seems to be that in this unthinking, supposedly natural action, Tomas has revealed his real character, and it is not a very admirable one. In terms of philosophy, her view is more like Aristotle’s ethical position. For Aristotle, being good is not a matter of thinking how to behave before acting; nor is an action undertaken without thinking necessarily outside ethical consideration. Rather, the good person is precisely the one who does not have to think. Being good involves practicing being good until one has cultivated the habits of goodness, the habitual behaviours constitutive of one’s character. The same presumably applies to being a bad person. As such, an unthinking action, especially if part of an ongoing pattern of behaviour, can reveal your character. That certainly seems to be Ebba’s interpretation, that Tomas’s action reveals him as a person who ‘loves himself and his phone more than he loves his wife and family’ (see Baggini 2015). But neither of these views of Tomas’s behaviour seems quite able to capture or make sense of his actions as presented in the film; and in turn, questions can be raised about the philosophical views that these interpretations recall. Tomas himself is horrified by his conduct. He cannot accept Mats’s way of viewing his behaviour, as a purely instinctive response that he could not help, and so cannot be blamed for. In the end, even Mats cannot accept it. He bristles when, after the excruciating dinner, his girlfriend, later on, suggests that he might very well have behaved the same way as Tomas did in a similar situation. In relation to ­Hobbes’s philosophical view that we are essentially beings who seek to survive, it seems clear that human beings who are in any way developed as persons want to do more than just live; they want to live a certain sort of life. It is similarly hard to see Tomas’s lapse along the Aristotelian lines suggested by Ebba, as simply as revelation of his ‘real character’ from which the mask has slipped. The problem with the idea that someone has a ‘real character’ of any sort, whether good or bad, being consistently disposed to respond in certain ways across different situations, is that such all-embracing conceptions of character confer too much unity to the person’s behaviour. It seems an ordinary fact that people will often exhibit quite inconsistent and conflicting patterns of behaviour. They can be kind and generous in some situations, selfish in others. Some have gone further in

88  Force Majeure – the force of circumstances this direction to argue that a global idea of character such as Aristotle presents is simply a myth, a philosophical abstraction. According to ‘situationist’ views, which come out of social psychology, the features of one’s situation are a more important determinant of behaviour than any supposed ongoing character (see for example Appiah 2008, 38ff). However, this situationist view doesn’t quite capture Tomas’s behaviour either. He does not simply respond to situations but stands in a certain relationship to the actions he undertakes. As far as the avalanche incident is concerned, he is far from content with how he behaved on that occasion. He says later that he ‘hates the person who materialized’ and can’t forgive him. It is not so easy, therefore, to just abandon the idea of an ongoing character in favour of a diversity of behaviours that emerge in reaction to different situations. It remains the case that Tomas is utterly mortified by what he has done on this occasion, that he has fallen short of an ideal. It’s an action that is violently at odds with his conception of himself, where this might be understood as a set of norms and ideals that he is striving to realise in his actions, the moral identity or standpoint in terms of which he can reflect on and weigh up the choices and actions he undertakes. It seems to more accurately capture Tomas’s situation to say, not so much that he has a certain character but that he is aspiring to be a certain sort of character, to embody certain ideals in his behaviour. As such, it is understandable that Tomas initially tries to pretend the incident never happened. We could see this as just another level of failure in his part – he not only has failed to live up to his own ideals but also is too cowardly to face up to what he has done. But arguably people do this sort of thing all the time, at least to some degree. They reinterpret, or edit out and selectively ignore things they do, in order to preserve their sense of who they are. No one is a hypocrite to themselves. Again, none of this implies that we should take a reductive path and view the character ideal as an illusion, hiding a real diversity of behaviour. Rather, the reality of this character ideal is manifest precisely in the way in which, even if we don’t act in conformity with it, we try to interpret our behaviour as being consistent with it. Imposing a self-affirming narrative on our behaviour is a tool of personal identity, how we are who we are. Nonetheless, there remains an element of self-deception in this, and there are limits to how far one can reasonably go to paper over cracks between ideals and actual behaviour. At a certain point, selfdeception must turn from a useful strategy for maintaining our sense of self, to a craven refusal to face up to what we have done. The cost of this degree of selfdeception is that we sacrifice any meaningful connection with reality, as well as alienating those close to us who can no longer share our understanding of the world. That’s where Tomas seems to be, refusing to acknowledge the behaviour his wife is all too aware of, even taking refuge in a kind of perceptual relativism: ‘I don’t share your interpretation though you’re entitled to your opinion’ – until, at the second dinner, he is confronted with evidence captured, ironically enough, by his beloved phone. He was filming the avalanche at the time, and Ebba insists

Force Majeure – the force of circumstances  89 they look at the footage. It becomes clear that the person holding it is running away: ‘We can even hear your boots clattering, Tomas’, she points out. If this experience represents a challenge to an individual’s moral self-­ understanding, it is also an occasion for reflection on the social role that Tomas identifies with. This is not just ‘masculinity’ but something like being the leader of the family, the patriarch in a nuclear family who protects his wife and children. This is a particular form of masculinity that emerged relatively recently, when the nuclear family became the dominant Western family unit around the mid-twentieth-century. Sociologist Talcott Parsons argued that the nuclear ­family unit consisted of two clear social roles for men and women; the man was the ‘instrumental leader’ whose responsibilities were the welfare and economic stability and the protection of the family members. The woman was the ‘expressive leader’ responsible for the emotional and physical care of all within the family unit (see Parsons 1959). It is the role of instrumental leader that Tomas aspires to, and others, particularly his wife, expect of him; and part of the shame and humiliation he feels is as having failed to live up to it. It is a very conventional notion of proper manhood, one that now appears dated, but it is a role nonetheless. And without simply dismissing it, the film is suggesting that there may be unrealistic expectations associated with it, unrealistic cultural expectations that have been internalised. Tomas’s friend Mats implies as much when he tells Tomas that part of the problem is the cultural ideal of heroism – ‘the image we have of heroes, the pressure to be heroic. The truth is, when reality is staring you in the face, few of us are heroic’. This is also a very conventional sort of role in cinematic terms as well. Here we are touching on the film’s experience-centred questioning of norms and conventions constitutive of its identity as a film, cinematic experimentalism in the traditional sense. In film history, the main character has typically been the heroic male, even in a family setting. Here’s the director again: ‘If you look at the most conventional way of telling a Hollywood story, it goes like this. There is a family living in peace. Suddenly, there’s an outside threat. The man has to use violence – he doesn’t want to, but he has to, he’s forced to. And when he’s used violence, killed the bad guys, the family can go back and live in peace’ (Lucca 2014). This is the standard scenario in what might be called the ‘domestic action film’, its protagonist combining the family man with the male action hero in order to appeal to both men and women (see Gallagher 2006, 67). With its less-than-heroic family man, Force Majeure resists this conventional scenario, challenging the cinematic stereotype of the male hero just as Tomas’s failure challenges his self-image as a ‘proper man’. In so doing, the film is also questioning cultural norms around the notion of proper manhood that find cinematic expression in the stereotype of the male hero, and the domestic action genre; and indeed film itself insofar as it plays a role in perpetuating these norms. In a moment, we will see how the film also challenges the conventional cinematic treatment of promiscuous women which perpetuates cultural norms around ‘proper female behaviour’.

90  Force Majeure – the force of circumstances Ironic redemption and the lives of others Returning to Force Majeure’s narrative, being forced to confront his behaviour leads Tomas to a crisis. The next evening finds him wallowing in self-pity in their hotel room, his wife looking on, astounded by this display. He confesses to a whole pattern of less-than-ideal behaviour, though in an oddly third-person way: ‘I get that you’re disappointed in the person who materialized. I’m really disappointed in him too. I hate him . . . can’t forgive the guy’. She is not the only victim here, he says: ‘I’m a victim too . . . a bloody victim of my own instincts’. He ends up blubbering face-down on a bean bag, with Ebba, seemingly unmoved by these histrionics, telling him to pull himself together or he’ll wake the kids. The children duly awoken, come out of their bedroom and try to console their father, physically pulling a reluctant Ebba over to participate. For Tomas this is perhaps the low point in the film. However, on the final day something miraculous happens. The family, skiing together one last time, run into poor conditions with visibility almost zero. It’s reminiscent of the avalanche smoke earlier on. Is history about to repeat itself? Everyone is worried. Tomas says that he will go first and check things out, but once they start skiing Ebba gets separated from the others. Now, rather more heroically than before, Tomas tells the kids to stay put and goes off in search of her. Shortly after, he returns carrying a smiling Ebba. He has saved his family from a dangerous situation, and redeemed himself in their eyes, reclaiming his patriarchal role as protector of the family. On the face of it, this might seem to be a surprisingly conventional way for the film to end. The character who loses his or her dignity in the beginning but redeems themselves before the film ends is another familiar cinematic scenario. So the question arises – is this ending just a failure of nerve on the film’s part, a late reversion to a cinematically stereotypical form? And not only that, is this not an engineered happy ending that comes at the cost of a naive reaffirmation of the identity that had been so compromised by the avalanche episode, representing a failure on the film’s part to follow through its critical examination of moral and cultural norms relating to male identity? I want to argue that this is not the case. To see this, however, it will be necessary to delve a little more deeply into Tomas’s apparent redemption, which turns out in fact to be heavily ironic. But first of all, there is more to say about the film. Force Majeure is not quite finished at this point, and it has a few more dangerous experiences in store for its characters, particularly Ebba. In the final sequence, the film suggests that no one is immune from the possibility of betraying themselves, not even Ebba. Ebba certainly acquitted herself well in the avalanche incident, but she also insisted that she would never abandon her children. She is confident that she can live up to her own character ideal as caring wife and mother, or in terms of social role, in Parson’s terms, the ‘expressive leader’ responsible for the emotional and physical care of all within the nuclear family unit. However, after Tomas’s apparent redemption on the ski

Force Majeure – the force of circumstances  91 slopes, as the family is leaving on the hotel bus, along with everyone else, the driver drives badly down the tight hair-pin bends, braking sharply at each retaining wall, seemingly threatening at every turn to send the bus plummeting into the ravine. Now it is Ebba who panics and abandons the family. She leaps from her seat and demands that the bus driver stop to let her out. This time there is no condemnation from those around here. Everyone is quite happy to follow suit, and there is a general scramble to leave the bus. Yet it is a telling moment, in that Ebba has shown herself capable of much the same thing as Tomas. Despite her confidence that she would always put her children first, she too is unlucky enough to be exposed to a situation that makes her betray herself. This is not simply a matter of the film trying to bring Ebba down to Tomas’s level. Rather, the film is pointing towards a more general conclusion that no one, not even Ebba, is immune to the possibility of betraying themselves. Ebba is shown to be in the same boat as Tomas. And the dangerous experiences foregrounded in the film don’t just challenge one person’s moral identity; nor just a certain conventional notion of proper male, or for that matter proper female, behaviour. They raise questions about the moral agent as such, calling attention not only to the complexity of our moral lives but the kinds of subjects we have to be in order to have such lives – creatures who are not the abstract subjects of moral philosophy, whose moral life seems to be confined to developing choiceguiding arguments, but agents with commitments to certain character ideals and norms that structure their choices and actions, engaged in a perilous encounter with the world, in permanent danger of acting in ways that conflict with their defining ideals. This susceptibility to failure does not represent a flaw on our part, something that can or ought to be remedied. Rather, it is ‘simply part of our condition as human beings’ (Wartenberg 2015b). One of the ways this constitutional vulnerability to worldly vicissitudes has been acknowledged within philosophy is in the notion of moral luck introduced by Thomas Nagel and Bernard Williams, the recognition that luck plays a significant role in determining a person’s moral standing (see Nagel 1979; W ­ illiams 1981). Ordinarily, we don’t morally judge people for what is due to factors beyond their control, yet on reflection, we seem to do it all the time, since such factors are constantly present. These factors bring into question the sovereignty of the moral agent who is being judged. We might condemn people who behaved poorly in Nazi Germany, but they were unlucky enough to be caught up in historical circumstances that imposed a severe test on ordinary people, circumstances that we who judge them wanting are lucky enough not to have had to confront. Not surprisingly, philosophers committed to the traditional notion of a moral subject in rational possession of itself have resisted such an assessment. As Nagel notes in his discussion of moral luck, Immanuel Kant in his moral philosophy tried to rigorously exclude everything outside the agent’s control, everything that might make us go astray, from the realm of the ethical. For Kant, the consequences of action, instincts, desires, feelings, inclinations, and even

92  Force Majeure – the force of circumstances character have no bearing on the moral status of what one does. The action is stripped down to its morally essential core, ‘an inner act of pure will assessed by motive and intention’ (Nagel 1979, 31). In that inner realm at least, it is possible to be in complete control, to exercise pure agency and be the unconditionally good will. But this immunity to failure comes at the cost of the moral agent being reduced to an abstract point, removed from involvement in the world, and from anything that might intelligibly motivate its actions. To be a recognisable moral agent, it seems, we have to live and act in the world; and insofar as we do, we are unavoidably susceptible to the possibility of failure. As we have seen, this constitutional vulnerability to the possibility that we might fail to live up to the person we aspire to be is one of the things suggested in Force Majeure. However, the film also calls attention to the necessity of character ideals, the norms we seek to live up to in our actions. These character ideals too are part of our condition, insofar as we are anything like a developed human being, a person. We need some such framework of norms and values in order to be able to make choices and act, to function as coherent moral agents. As Charles Taylor points out, to lose or not have such a ‘horizon of evaluation’ would amount to an identity crisis, in which we would no longer know where we stand, and be unable able to function as a coherent agent. This is also why ­Sartre’s existentialist idea of the radically self-choosing agent, the absolutely free spirit who chooses even the frameworks in terms of which they choose through wholly unsupported ‘radical choices’, is untenable. Having no orienting framework would not be a radical liberation in the way Sartre envisages, but rather, ‘the most total self-loss’ (see Taylor 1985, 34–35). In affirming the need for a framework in terms of which to choose and act, the film is implicitly criticising the extreme Sartrean notion of individual self-determination. At the same time, Sartre does draw attention to something else about our existence as moral agents that is more defensible, and which can be said to be amply borne out in the film. We may not be able to behave in the radically free way that he suggests, choosing ourselves in our totality ex nihilo, we may indeed need to have some relatively fixed framework of norms in order to be able to function as choosing agents, but Sartre does highlight that we cannot think of ourselves as having a definite nature, an essence or fixed character that determines how we will behave in any given circumstance. This is akin to the idea that people have some kind of ‘moral instinct’ or essential goodness, which ensures they will do the right thing regardless of how challenging their circumstances might be. In the end, there is nothing that can absolutely guarantee what we will do on any occasion, not even a consistent pattern of good behaviour up to that point. The same of course can be said of bad behaviour. In ‘Existentialism is a Humanism’, Sartre expresses this in the idea that there are no heroes or cowards as such, people who are born heroes or cowards, essentially heroic or cowardly. There are only people who have acted in a heroic or cowardly way in particular situations in the past, and there is always the possibility that the coward will give up cowardice, and

Force Majeure – the force of circumstances  93 the hero will stop being a hero (Sartre 1975, 360). The film similarly takes this ‘anti-essentialist’ stance, drawing attention to the ever-present possibility of finding oneself in situations where one is unable to live up to one’s defining values. With this in mind, we can now return to Tomas’s redemption on the ski-slope, which seems on the face of it to be a surprisingly conventional cinematic development, not to mention a jarring affirmation of the male role, patriarch of the nuclear family, that the film had been questioning up to this moment. For these very reasons, it is hard to believe this is a naïve restoration. The director himself notes that whereas in a conventional film ‘the character that loses his or her dignity in the beginning will redeem themselves before the film ends’, in his films ‘everyone loses their dignity, and they don’t get it back’ (Lucca 2014). We can conclude that Tomas’s restoration should not be taken at face value, though perhaps it is not simply ironic either. It reflects a recognition that people need some identity or standpoint in order to function. This need for a moral identity is evident from Tomas’s initial refusal to acknowledge his behaviour, so desperate is he to maintain his self-understanding, and it is also apparent from the abject state he is reduced to once forced to confront what he has done. His sense of self severely challenged, he is reduced to a blubbering mess, no longer able to function. He cannot pull himself out of this state, but luckily others need him to be the man he was. In the scene where he lies crying in the hotel room, the children piling on top of him can be seen as appealing to him to be their father again, and demanding that their mother help in the process. This is perhaps the turning point for Tomas, and also for Ebba, who at the end of the day also needs the old patriarchal Tomas back. The next day on the ski slopes, he has a chance to redeem himself, to perform his heroic gesture, rescuing his wife and carrying her triumphantly out of the fog to their waiting children. One can easily imagine that this whole scene has been orchestrated by Ebba to show the children that their father has returned. Certainly, according to the director, ‘Ebba is leading Tomas to be the leader of the family again’ (Bibbiani 2014). At the same time, the restoration is ultimately ironic in that as even Tomas with his monumental powers of self-deception must be aware, the episode has revealed the fragility of his identity, the way that like all ‘proper men’ he is playing a part, and one that he can only carry off because others want or need him to play the role. So it is indeed the case that Tomas doesn’t quite get his dignity back. Almost everyone else in the film can also be said to lose their dignity. Not just Ebba but everyone on the bus panics, and scrambles to get off. While they congratulate one another on having escaped the incompetent bus-driver, there is also the embarrassment at having panicked, not to mention the realisation that they now face a long walk down the mountain, and are likely to miss their flights home. In the midst of this, we can see Mats and Tomas making comical efforts to reassert their challenged masculinity. Mats, still smarting from his girlfriend’s intimations that he would fail like Tomas in a crisis, takes charge on the bus to

94  Force Majeure – the force of circumstances ensure an orderly evacuation, even resorting to the Titanic-inspired ‘women and children first’ line at one point. And in the last scene of the film, as Tomas walks with his son down the mountain road, someone offers him a cigarette, which he takes. As the director points out, when his son asks, ‘do you smoke, daddy?’, instead of saying ‘no, I’m just taking one cigarette’, he says ‘yes I do’. Tomas has now assumed the manly role of heroic smoker (Bibbiani 2014). Everything so far has been concerned with the challenges the film poses to cultural norms around proper masculine and feminine behaviour that have internalised by the main characters, norms that are very much bound up with their roles in the traditional nuclear family. Here the challenging experience is the dangerous situation that confronts the characters with the possibility of falling short of their defining ideals. However, the film has something more in store for Ebba, another form of this experience-based challenge to one’s sense of identity. In this case, the challenging experience is the experience of another person who fails to conform to the ideals we subscribe to, who is resisting them and experimenting with a different way of being. This constitutes a challenge insofar as that failure to conform represents the possibility of another way of living that goes beyond what our existing ideals permit, and in turn implies that our own ideals may not be the only possible framework of norms it is possible to live by. This is once again a disturbing, threatening experience, but it also opens up the possibility that we ourselves might be able to move beyond the limits of our current way of being, to live a different sort of life. In other words, it points towards a certain kind of freedom. Generally speaking, the characters in the film can be said to be constrained by their roles insofar as the normative ideals constitutive of any role determine the kinds of decisions and actions individuals can justify to themselves. Insofar as these ideals limit the class of actions individuals are capable of entertaining, they can also be thought of as limits to freedom; not external obstacles but internal limits or ‘positive constraints’ on what it is possible for individuals to do or be. Such constraints will have a larger socio-historical context, being ‘the effects of the social relations in which the individual lives are being played out’ (Patton 1989, 263). Even within the circumscribed world of the ski lodge, various relationships are clearly in play. But beyond that, these roles will be supported by social arrangements, including legal, administrative and educational practices, the whole social world that in the film is so conspicuous in its absence. Once again, some such set of internal limits or positive constraints, being orienting commitments, is necessary for us to function as coherent subjects. We are not the radically free subjects envisaged by Sartre. There are however occasions when particular norms we subscribe to might be questioned, for example when we encounter someone who refuses to submit to the norms we find so compelling, who is resisting them and experimenting with something different. In Force Majeure, the possibility of questioning one’s defining norms in this manner is raised most clearly in connection with Ebba. Of course, her identity

Force Majeure – the force of circumstances  95 as caring wife and mother, the expressive leader responsible for the emotional and physical care of the family, comes under challenge to the extent that, in her actions on the bus, she falls short. However, the norms defining that identity themselves come under challenge earlier on, when she is confronted by someone who is clearly failing to conform to that particular female role. This is her friend Charlotte, who rejects the constraints of the role of wife and mother in a nuclear family, engineering an open relationship that allows her to go on holiday and romance the ski instructors. Faced with the confronting experience of a different way of being, Ebba is provoked into thinking about her own role, if only to the extent of becoming uncomfortable, defensively insisting that marriage and having kids is surely worth more than casual relationships with strangers. When Charlotte replies that she has both and doesn’t need to choose, Ebba protests that it can’t be as easy as that, to the point where Charlotte has to tell her to calm down. We can surmise that behind Ebba’s defensiveness is the ‘ontological anxiety’ engendered by the sense that the framework giving sense to her life and actions might not be absolute; that a different way of living is possible, and cannot be dismissed on a priori grounds. Moreover, just as, in connection with Tomas, the film challenges a cinematically conventional notion of the heroic male that also amounts to a cinematic perpetuation of cultural norms of proper manhood, it also challenges the film stereotype of caring wife and mother that is also arguably perpetuating cultural norms around proper female behaviour. In film, this sort of role is often indirectly affirmed insofar as women who stray from it are punished in some way. Force Majeure conspicuously does not do this. At the end, there is one person who does not get off the bus being driven by the incompetent bus-driver, namely Charlotte. Here’s the director again: Charlotte is the character that is supposed to be punished, if you look at conventional films. Anyone who’s promiscuous or unfaithful gets punished at the end of the film. And I almost wanted the audience to hope for Charlotte to go over the cliff and crash down as punishment for her sinful way of life. But instead, she’s the one who makes it to the airport. (Lucca 2014) In this way, the film pushes against both film convention, and film insofar as it serves to play a normalising role, reproducing or perpetuating social norms. Deviation from a traditional role is portrayed as a genuine alternative that could be freely taken up. That is not a direct criticism of the role Ebba espouses, but of the idea that it is the only legitimate role. Overall, if Force Majeure’s portrayal of a dangerous experience that challenges a character’s moral identity draws attention to our constitutional fallibility, its portrayal of the confronting experience of another’s failure to conform to one’s moral norms points to the finitude of our defining ideals themselves. We

96  Force Majeure – the force of circumstances may need these norms to function as moral agents, but they are nonetheless particular, contingent, and hence also potentially modifiable. This again reflects our status as worldly agents, rather than abstract moral subjects governed by transcendental principles. The film calls attention to these aspects of our existence as moral subjects in its capacity as a visually rich narrative experiment. It is also experimental insofar as it challenges conventional cinematic scenarios that privilege and reinforce traditional male and female roles, and more indirectly, abstract philosophical positions regarding the moral agent. This gives further levels of significance to the idea of experiencing Force Majeure as an experimental film. Finally, to see what the film would look like without these reflective aspects, one only need look to the American remake, the 2020 film Downhill, directed by Nat Faxon and Jim Rash. Like the McBride remake of Breathless, Downhill follows the same basic plot as the original, with a few tweaks. The couple, now Americans Pete and Billie, are on holiday with their children in the Austrian alps, where Pete has his unfortunate encounter with the avalanche. But like the Breathless remake, Downhill manages to remove everything that was reflective and subversive in the original. The very style of the camerawork and editing has become more conventional. Force Majeure has its long, uninterrupted, objectively framed shots, where the audience is invited to observe and reflect on the behaviour of the characters. The remake reverts to the more traditional style, with close-ups and multiple cuts in which the audience is told exactly what to think, and we are shown only what will move the plot along, which contributes to the remake’s much shorter running time (86 minutes as opposed to the original’s two hours). There is also an unevenness in tone in the remake. Where Force Majeure is a dark comedy of discomfort, maintaining its blend of humour and tragedy throughout, Downhill, as a number of commentators have noted, veers between broad comedy and downbeat dramatic parts (Brody 2020). And where, in the original, no attempt is made to make Tomas sympathetic, although we still come to feel a certain kinship with the character, the remake shifts disconcertingly between holding Pete up as a buffoon and encouraging us to feel sympathy for a suffering soul. More substantively, the core experience in these films, the disturbing spectacle of the father who abandons their family in the face of danger, is blunted in Downhill. This is partly because whereas in Force Majeure Tomas has no excuses and must face the consequences of his actions, in Downhill, Pete is given a backstory about his father having recently died, something made apparent right at the start of the film when we see that he has brought along his father’s ski cap, implying that they went skiing together. This not only elicits our sympathy for the character but makes it possible for us to see his unfortunate response to the avalanche as at least in part a reflection of his specific circumstances and particular psychological state, rather than being a more general challenge to people’s moral self-understanding, or the social role of patriarch and leader of a nuclear family. The character has no opportunity to wrestle with these issues. The character’s

Force Majeure – the force of circumstances  97 moral self-understanding and heroic family man role can thus be left essentially untouched and unquestioned. The film’s neutering of its challenging experience is further confirmed in that where Force Majeure only permits Tomas an ironic redemption, Downhill progresses to a happy ending, and an entirely non-ironic redemption for its main male character. Pete’s ‘saving’ Billy on the ski slope appears to completely resolve the marital difficulties his earlier abandonment caused. The film has Billie spelling out to Pete that she has engineered his rescuing her in order to restore her husband’s standing in the eyes of their sons, but also gives him the opportunity to say that he will henceforth be there for the whole family, and this seems to be enough to satisfy Billie, restore everything to normality, and wipe the entire incident from memory. This happy ending decisively undermines the film’s exploration of the ‘fragility of goodness’. The remake also omits the bus sequence at the end in which Ebba ends up doing much the same thing as Tomas, panicking and abandoning her family, which serves to convey the sense that Force Majeure is concerned with the vulnerability not just of men but of women also, indeed the vulnerability of human beings as such to the possibility of failing to live up to their defining ideals. In the film, the other couple, friends of Tomas and Ebba, are also drawn into these considerations. In Downhill, the idea that everyone, including the film’s other couple, is dealing with the same issues is given a perfunctory rendering when, as both couples are leaving the hotel for the last time, a ‘mini-avalanche’ of snow suddenly falls from the roof, and everyone leaps back to save themselves without thinking of anyone else. But it’s very brief, and comes over as too little, too late. As we have seen, Force Majeure also presents another kind of challenge to a character’s defining norms. This is the challenge posed to Ebba’s identity as wife and mother in a nuclear family through the encounter with her ski-hotel friend Charlotte, whose open relationship represents the possibility of a different kind of female role that amongst other things allows her to holiday alone and have affairs. In Downhill, this encounter is reduced to something more familiar and less challenging, the stereotypical culture clash between ‘normal’, familyoriented Americans and perverse, licentious Europeans. Charlotte has become the comically promiscuous Austrian hotel employee who flirts with the guests, and who encourages Billie to have a ski lesson with the comically amorous Italian instructor Gugliemo. It comes down to whether Billie will stay faithful or not, though there is little doubt that she will. In multiple ways, then, Downhill betrays the message of the earlier film, removing or watering down everything that was reflective and subversive in the original. But by the same token, talking about Downhill is a way of drawing attention to the reflective and subversive aspects of the original.

7  Under the Skin – a sense of the other

Jonathon Glazer’s haunting and unsettling science fiction film Under the Skin (2014), like Breathless and Force Majeure, offers a challenging experience that calls one’s orienting presuppositions into question. It particularly highlights the way that such experience, in exceeding familiar forms of thinking, is always the experience of something that is in some measure strange, foreign, or alien. What distinguishes Under the Skin is the degree of otherness or alienness it is able to portray, and how intimately it confronts the viewer. In Breathless, both the main characters exhibited behaviour that was at odds with their self-understanding as rebellious, free spirits, although they themselves were largely blind to this. In Force Majeure, the main male character is all too aware, not only of a natural world that has suddenly become strange and dangerous, but also of his own behaviour in the face of the threatening circumstances. This is behaviour so out of keeping with his role as patriarch in the traditional nuclear family that initially at least he cannot recognise himself in it, and desperately tries to hide from it. His partner has another kind of challenging experience, encountering another person who embraces a way of life that flies in the face of her own defining moral ideals, implicitly questioning the values central to her identity. In both films, however, the viewer is able to maintain a certain distance from the proceedings, participating in the experiment, to be sure, but also observing the characters in their predicament. Under the Skin takes us much further down the path of this kind of encounter with a challenging other, insofar as it brings the viewer themselves into direct contact with the point of view of a truly alien being. In this, the film demonstrates the capacity of film to ‘open up a sense of otherness in a broad sense, bringing us into sometimes intimate contact with realities we could not otherwise conceive’ (Richardson 2010, x). It also brings the self that encounters this otherness into question in a profound way. One is not challenged simply in relation to one’s particular self-understanding or moral standpoint, nor in relation to one’s perceived role in the social order, but as a human being, a member of the human species. What is being called into question is a distinctively human way of experiencing the world, a way of seeing characteristic not so much of a specific cultural milieu as of a species, at least DOI: 10.4324/9781003207764-7

Under the Skin – a sense of the other  99 insofar as one is a socially developed member of that species. This is a way of seeing in which we regard other human beings as fellow beings, morally significant creatures deserving of some degree of respect, concern or sympathy. It is a ‘morally infused’ way of seeing. The alien’s viewpoint is radically different, precisely insofar as they do not experience human beings as morally considerable beings but purely as prey. In portraying the radically amoral viewpoint of the alien, the film offers a challenge to the viewer’s ordinary, morally infused way of experiencing the world. In so doing, the film also readily lends itself to engagement with philosophical discourse, in particular the discourse of moral philosophy. In implicitly challenging the necessity and universality of a moral view of things, revealing it as species-specific, it offers a way of posing in a very concrete manner what is perhaps the most fundamental meta-ethical question – ‘why be moral’? In addition, as we will see, Under the Skin offers a further level of experiencecentred reflection on specific cultural norms, as well as reflecting on the role of film in reproducing and perpetuating those norms. Since the predatory alien takes the form of a human female, and the prey is exclusively male, the film is able to comment on the ways men and women typically relate to one another in a patriarchal society. In this, the film can once again be seen as lending itself to engagement with positions and arguments in the philosophical literature. In particular, it can be brought into connection with Sartre’s existentialist picture, particularly as that picture concerns relations with other people, which Sartre sees as always being reciprocal relations between equal subjects. The film can be seen as questioning this rather abstract picture, in a matter not dissimilar to fellow existentialist Simone de Beauvoir who holds that in practice, relations between male and female subjects in a patriarchal society are typically one-sided. Beyond this, the film is also a reflection on asymmetries in gender relations insofar as they are reproduced and perpetuated in film itself, particularly in the cinematic privileging of the ‘male gaze’. If the engagement with philosophy is especially prominent in Under the Skin, along with the experience-centred challenging of cultural norms, the film is not particularly critical in the sense of challenging norms constitutive of the cinematic art-form itself. But while it is not particularly experimental in the traditional sense of the term, it does, like Force Majeure, challenge certain genre conventions. Most strikingly, it largely departs from the highly constructed, special effects-heavy style that has become the norm in recent science fiction films. Certainly, special effects have been a feature of science fiction film since Méliès and the early days of cinema. There is an interesting exception here in Godard’s Alphaville (1965), which eschews special effects while cleverly contriving to turn everyday Paris into a futuristic science-fiction dystopia. But in the main, special effects have been seen as indispensable to the science fiction film, and they have become especially prominent since the advent of computer-­ generated special effects in the seventies. Increasingly sophisticated visual

100  Under the Skin – a sense of the other effects technologies have enabled the portrayal of all manner of alien, otherworldly or futuristic worlds. These effects have proved especially useful for a genre that is almost constitutionally drawn to envisaging experiences that are alien to our ordinary forms of understanding. The subversive feature of Under the Skin is that it portrays a particularly alien experience, but it does so while largely abandoning special effects, employing a stripped-down, austerely realistic, documentary-style approach, telling a science fiction story that is very much taking place in this world, in the here and now. Indeed, it makes use of this departure from science fiction film convention in its portrayal of the alien experience. The documentary-style approach, as an objective, impersonal way of portraying reality, is employed within the film to portray its alien’s essentially inhuman point of view, so foreign to ordinary human ways of thinking. The alien other In the first part of the film, we see a woman driving around Scotland in a white van, stalking and killing working-class men. The film’s premise is that the woman, played by Scarlett Johansson, is in reality an alien in a woman’s skin, here to hunt humans, men in particular. She (the female pronoun will be used here for convenience, as there is no indication of the alien’s sex) lures them to a house where they follow her into a dark place, and are submerged in a black liquid where they eventually collapse and are turned into some form of nutrient for alien consumption. The alien or inhuman predator amongst us is a familiar enough science fiction theme – The Thing, Terminator, Predator, and so on. What is distinctive about Under the Skin is that it seeks to depict a truly alien perspective. The film provides the viewer with an opening into the radically other, inhuman experience of the alien herself, through whose viewpoint the first part of the film’s story is told. Trying to cinematically portray a radically alien view of the world comes up against a fundamental limitation in that a film is only going to be seen through human eyes. Nonetheless, the film gives a strong sense of a non-human perspective by portraying the world in a way that is entirely at odds with ordinary human ways of looking. And what characterises the alienness of this perspective is that it is one of absolute amorality, which is to say, not malevolence but indifference to moral concerns. The film portrays things and people as they might look to a creature with no moral sympathies or concerns at all – the view of a pure outsider, a pure alien. That is also to say, in this film, alienness is not conveyed through the construction of a fantastic alien being, or an exotic alien world, using extensive special effects in the standard science fiction movie manner. On the contrary, the film adopts an unembellished, documentary-style realism. The alien is a thoroughly ordinary-seeming woman, driving around in a non-descript van, in the most mundane Scottish locations imaginable. No one sees her as strange or exceptional. Of course, it could be argued that the otherness of the alien that the film conveys

Under the Skin – a sense of the other  101 derives at least in part from the fact that, for the viewer, the ­‘ordinary-seeming’ woman is being played by a well-known Hollywood star, who will naturally come across as an exotic import in the everyday Scottish settings. However, it cannot be denied that the actor submerges herself in the character to a remarkable degree, taking on the blank, affectless expression and demeanour of an alien observer. This lines up with the film’s use of its impersonal, documentary-style realism to portray the human world as it might appear to such an observer, the viewpoint of the non-human outsider, the ultimate anthropologist. This enables the viewer to appreciate the alien’s alienness even though they are initially aligned with her perspective. As the alien sets out on her mission, there is an extended point-of-view shot in which we follow her through a shopping mall, and later we view the world through the windows of the van she is driving. In this manner, the viewer is aligned with her point of view, but this is also a world that is being portrayed in a strangely impersonal, realistic, matter-of-fact way that reflects her alien perspective. Contributing to this realism, almost all the locations are real, everyday settings, many of the roles are played by non-actors, and there are unscripted encounters with men on the streets, filmed with hidden cameras and using on-location sound to capture unself-conscious behaviour, in the style of cinéma vérité documentary. As the director put it in an interview, ‘You were there, watching them completely unguarded, with no awareness of your presence. That fit into the idea of her looking at animal behavior as it is – not recreating it as a kind of movie scenario, but watching human beings as we are’ (Adams 2014). There is an interesting contrast to be made here with Force Majeure. As we saw, that film objectively observes its characters and their tribulations, but the viewer is nonetheless able to establish a kinship with them, even if only intellectually. In Under the Skin, the reverse is the case. The viewer is aligned from the start with the alien’s point of view, but feels no kinship at all, not even an intellectual kinship, with the alien. Instead, they are seemingly confronted with the point of view of a genuinely alien being. This alien perspective is most especially in evidence in the scene at the beach. We are midway through the alien’s mission. On a bleak, windswept beach, we see the alien watching a swimmer emerge from the ocean and start walking towards her. The two of them are alone except for a family further down the beach, two parents and a baby. The family’s dog is swimming in the rough surf. Suddenly there is the sound of screaming. The dog is in trouble. A woman is in the water, swimming out, trying to rescue the dog. Now she is also in trouble. Her husband dives in after her and is soon himself in trouble. The swimmer runs back into the ocean to try to help, and manages to rescue the husband. However once brought back to the beach, the husband immediately breaks free and goes back into the water to try to save his wife. The alien woman has a different reaction. She watches the tragedy unfold with indifference. Then she walks down to the swimmer, who has now returned to the beach and is lying exhausted and defeated on the sand. She picks up a

102  Under the Skin – a sense of the other rock and strikes him with it, and then drags him off the beach to her van, leaving the couple’s crying baby to its fate, which is very likely going to be death from exposure. This scene is a challenge to the viewer’s sensibilities not simply because it portrays a tragic event, two people drowning, or even because throughout the scene the alien looks on impassively, but because the scene itself is shot in a flat, dispassionate, matter-of-fact way. This forces the viewer to experience the events in the inhuman way the alien does. The swimming couple’s life and death struggle, which would ordinarily be the major concern for an onlooker, and the dramatic focus of a film scene, is not acknowledged in any significant way. The couple are just tiny figures in the waves, their struggles little more than a detail in the distance. On the soundtrack, all one can hear are their faint shouts and the sounds of the ocean, intermingled with the unearthly Mica Levi music that further emphasises the presence of the alien. The disturbing strangeness of this way of perceiving the world is reinforced when, at the end of the scene, as the alien drags the swimmer she has incapacitated along the beach to her van, we hear the sound of crying and are suddenly reminded of the presence of the couple’s baby, who comes into view in the background of the shot. The alien pays it no attention and the film follows suit, leaving the baby, like its parents, as just a detail in the background, without any especial significance. What is missing in this way of experiencing the world is any regard for the people as fellow beings, morally significant creatures deserving of some degree of respect, concern or sympathy. The portrayal of this amoral vision of the world, so at odds with ordinary ways of experiencing the world, serves to reinforce the idea that this is a non-human, alien protagonist. Over and above this, it represents a challenge our ordinary, morally infused, way of experiencing the world and other people, in the sense that it highlights our view as a particular way of relating to the world, one possible way of doing so, and by no means the only one possible. One might try to defuse such a challenge to our sensibilities by writing off the amoral perspective as a kind of malevolence, with the alien predator as villain, or as a sociopathy in which something that should be there is missing. But Under the Skin makes no attempt to do either of these things. The creature’s amoral perspective is simply the way it views the world, and therein lies its challenge to our own, morally infused point of view. This is not a challenging experience that is liable to lead to any transformation in how we apprehend the world, given that the morally infused form of experiencing is not culture-specific, but seems to be more broadly characteristic of the human species, at least in its socially developed form. To be any kind of socialised individual is to have some regard for others. Nonetheless, it does introduce a note of contingency into our way of experiencing the world, with its intimation that it is a species-specific way of doing so, and that a differently constituted creature might see things very differently.

Under the Skin – a sense of the other  103 In thus highlighting the ultimate contingency of the moral point of view, the film raises in a very concrete way, the old philosophical question of why one should be moral. This is a key point where Under the Skin lends itself to engagement with existing philosophical discourse, where the question of why one should be moral has been discussed since Plato. Within philosophy, the response to the question has often been that one needs to give an argument for why one should be moral, to develop a theory to ground or justify the moral response to the world. The film can be seen as connecting with philosophy by challenging the philosopher to show why it is rational to be moral, like the ring of Gyges story in Plato’s Republic. However, another way the film might be seen as engaging with philosophy is in calling into question the very idea of developing a theory to ground or justify one’s moral response as such. That is, it might be taken to be suggesting that a moral point of view is not something that needs to be justified or argued for by philosophers, but is simply part of our condition as human beings, at least beings that have been socialised and have internalised the moral norms and values of their culture. For such beings, it ‘goes without saying’ that one should view others in a moral way. The film suggests this by reminding us that the question ‘why be moral?’ is most naturally posed by someone who stands outside of any moral framework, like a non-human alien. Their alienness is indicated precisely by their not taking the moral view for granted. And the question they pose appears strange to those already committed to a moral point of view, precisely because they do not need reasons or justifications to be moral (see Louden 2015, 45–46). Becoming human Everything said so far relates to the first part of the film, which is dominated by the story of the alien predator hunting for human beings. However, as the film progresses, the alien abandons her mission. She tries to lose her alienness, and to identify herself with her human form, the way she appears to others. The character thus goes from embodying and representing a pure other vis-a-vis the human, a disturbing experience of alienness, to an alien who is trying to become human, to become like us. With this, there is also a change in the way the character is presented in the film, and in the viewer’s relationship to the alien. In the second part of the film, there is less emphasis on aligning the viewer with the alien’s point of view, an alien point of view with which the viewer can feel no kinship. There are now more scenes where the alien is portrayed in an objective, removed way, as an object of observation, a figure in the landscape. At the same time, in a reversal of the situation in the first half, even though she herself is increasingly portrayed in this removed, objective way, we in the audience feel an increasing kinship with her as she strives to become human. Meanwhile, the alien, whose perspective represented such a challenging experience for the viewer in the first

104  Under the Skin – a sense of the other part of the film, is starting to have some challenging experiences of her own – experiences of her own inhumanness. It may be noted that the development of the story in the second part of the film represents a significant departure from the novel of the same name by Michel Faber, on which the film is based. It has proved illuminating to compare Breathless and Force Majeure to their American remakes, which conspicuously jettison much of what made the original films work so well, particularly as reflective, critical exercises. And it is useful now to say a little about how Under the Skin adapts its source novel, and how the cinematic ‘remake’ of the story differs from the literary original. Here also there is a degree of modification going on between the novel and the film, but it is very much to positive effect, cinematically speaking. The director has said in an interview that he ‘absolutely didn’t want to film the book. But I still wanted to make the book a film’ (Leigh 2014). That is to say, presumably, that he did not want to make a faithful adaptation of the novel, to simply render a literary narrative in audio-visual form. Rather, he wanted to turn the book into something that could only exist in a cinematic medium. There are obvious overlaps between the two, of course. The film shares the basic premise of the novel, the idea of an alien on earth to hunt human beings, men in particular, to be processed as food. Also, both novel and film present things from the alien’s point of view, the novel throughout, and the film most markedly in the first half. And in both cases, there is little of the conventional ­science-fiction ‘paraphernalia’. We can say that in both cases, this is science fiction brought into the real world. One large difference between them is that whereas the film divides into a first part concerned with the alien predator hunting for human beings, and an equally long second part in which the alien tries to escape from her predatorial role and to become a human being, the novel spends most of time with the alien hunting humans. For 12 of its 13 chapters, we see Isserley, as the alien is called in the novel, performing her predatory role. Not that there are not also growing doubts and internal conflict, but she does not make the break from the predator role until the last chapter, to enjoy a brief spell of freedom. The film substantially expands the post-predator part of the story, and here we also get the development of the theme of the alien wanting to become human, something that isn’t strongly present in the book. In the book, Isserley eventually gains a certain sympathy for human beings, and starts to feel some remorse for her past actions, but she never goes so far as to want to become human. A systematic difference between the two is that in the film, there is an enormous reduction in the amount of information presented concerning the alien’s situation. Much of the detail presented in the novel concerning Isserley, especially her backstory and motivation for taking on this role, along with her thoughts about her victims as well as theirs about her, is removed in the film, leaving a distilled, stripped-down presentation of the alien and her predatory adventures. It might be thought that this stripping of content reflects the different narrative mediums involved. The literary medium is perhaps better suited to presenting exposition, as

Under the Skin – a sense of the other  105 well as being able to provide direct, extended access to a character’s reflections, recollections and internal ruminations, with the cinematic medium being more suited to showing rather than telling, and portraying external appearances and action rather than internal monologue. But film is perfectly capable of providing exposition, setting the scene, and powerful techniques of cinematic representation enable ‘internal’ states and emotional lives to be perfectly well represented. The cinematic medium, rather than lacking certain representational capacities, is contributing in a more positive way to the proceedings. The film gets much of its haunting power by excluding explicit exposition, minimising dialogue and making full use of visual techniques, sound design, and music to convey what is going on. Here we can also appreciate the degree of autonomy that visualisation has vis-a-vis the narrative in film. In Under the Skin, the ‘poetry of images’ frequently overwhelms and supplants the film’s minimal narrative. Moreover, the lack of direct access to the alien’s internal reflections and ruminations in the film is used to enhance the character’s mysteriousness, allowing her motivations to be left ultimately mysterious and inscrutable. This lack of access also works against the viewer developing any real kinship with the alien, in the first half of the film at least, even though the story here is being told largely from her point of view. The novel also has a different critical focus to that of the film, though it can be seen as taking a broadly similar, experience-centred approach in undertaking its critical work. For the novel, the critical focus is on the factory-farming of animals. In a 2002 interview, the author indicated that his novel could be understood as calling into question the practice of meat-processing and meat-eating in our diets. At the same time, he insisted that ‘Under the Skin is a work of literature and not intended to be an “argument” for anything’ (Adams 2009), and it is indeed plausible to see the novel as doing its critical work not by running an argument but through the experience-centred form of reflection, now in a literary rather than cinematic context. What the novel is challenging is the widespread human tendency to ignore how meat comes to the table, to studiously avoid dwelling on the process, on what the animals go through, to get there. As Faber put it, The trouble with our carnivorous society is that we have millions of people eating vast amounts of meat but not wanting to take moral responsibility for how it’s produced. Animals can be cruelly treated . . . as long as it all happens in secret and the result is disguised in a neat supermarket package. (Adams 2009) The novel contrives to make these processes and practices visible to the reader, as well as throwing a light on the hollowness of the rationalisations we are typically moved to make if we think about the issue at all. The novel questions factory-farming practices by imagining a situation in which humans are the non-human animals. They are being farmed and exploited by aliens who refer to one another as humans, and to the humans as vodsels, or

106  Under the Skin – a sense of the other subhuman creatures. The protagonist, the alien Isserley, usually proceeds without regard for the fate of the vodsels she captures, but is forced to think about her position when she finally comes to witness the meat-processing part of the operation. This is graphically described in the novel, as the captured men are castrated and fattened up in crowded pens for slaughter. The depicted scenario resonates with the reader as a reminder of the cruel conditions and practices in factory farming they are ordinarily happy to turn a blind eye to, an experience intensified by the added identification of the reader with the creatures being treated in this way. Also being challenged is the kind of hollow rationalisation that is often made in this connection, which holds that since the animals being processed are ‘not like us’, because they don’t do certain essentially human things like speak or use tools, they do not warrant any moral consideration or concern, and so can be routinely mistreated and their suffering dismissed. In the novel, Isserley still tries to rationalise the treatment of the vodsels she has witnessed on the grounds that they are not human, since they ‘couldn’t siuwil, they couldn’t mesnishtil, they had no concept of slan. In their brutishness, they’d never evolved to use hunshur . . . nor did these creatures seem to see any need for chail, or even chailsinn’ (Faber 2000, 174). But it is clear that in order to sustain this view, she has to ignore any similarities between herself and these creatures, something that she herself finds increasingly hard to do. The reader is able to appreciate the emptiness of Isserley’s rationalisation, but is of course also reminded that they make similar rationalisations of their treatment of the animals that they regard as subhuman on similarly specious grounds. Coming back to the film, we can see there that what is only hinted at in the novel, a softening of the alien’s attitude towards the humans she is hunting, becomes a more fully developed quest on the part of the alien to lose her alienness entirely and become human. This quest occupies the entire second half of the film. The leadup to this is a series of indications of an awakening of concern and sympathy in the alien for the humans she has been hunting, along with tentative efforts to participate in human life. Soon after the scene on the beach, we watch the alien walking along a town street, filled with people. For the first time in the film, she has decided to leave her van, and her mission, to move amongst the people she has been hunting. This also makes her vulnerable, as she discovers when she stumbles and falls hard on the pavement; but she is soon surrounded by concerned passers-by, and two men help her to her feet. She returns to her van but now as she drives she is looking at men, women and families interacting on the street, and eventually there is a montage of faces forming a golden aura around the alien’s face. It is as if she is starting to be drawn to the human beings who assisted her, no longer seeing them purely as prey. This does not mean that she immediately abandons her predatory mission, but now things do not proceed quite as smoothly as before. After the street scene, the alien picks up what will prove to be her last victim, a facially disfigured man (Adam Pearson). Though she talks with him in what seems to be a genuinely sympathetic way, she still

Under the Skin – a sense of the other  107 brings him to the house for processing. Now, however, she is also moved to let him go. Although her motivation for this act remains ultimately obscure, her blank face still giving nothing away, we now start to feel we have some understanding of her. Elena Gorfinkel suggests that ‘we can only inexactly impute, and perhaps we project, that she has found kinship with another being at odds with their corporeal exterior’ (Gorfinkel 2016). Another possibility is that she is identifying with him as someone who wants to be seen by others as a human being. This would make sense of the scene immediately prior to her letting her prey go, a scene where she catches sight of her face in a mirror and studies it at length. We have so far seen her catch sight of portions of her face in the van’s rear-view mirror, but this is the first time her entire face appears in a reflected image before her. And arguably this is the first time she is seeing herself as others see her, as a human being. This does not seem to be a moment of self-discovery, so much as the point where she starts to see herself as the woman she is in the eyes of others. It is certainly the turning point in the film. After letting the man go, she abandons for good her van and her mission. From now on, the men she encounters are no longer the pure objects of prey. She even enters into a kind of relationship with one of them. Here the situation she finds herself in is completely reversed. Instead of picking up and taking men to her house, she is picked up by a man (Michael Moreland), who invites her to stay in his house. There are, however, some problems with this attempt on the alien’s part to identify with the human she externally appears to be. The problem above all is that from a human point of view, the alien remains alien, entirely other, at a basic physiological level. At this level, her humanity can only ever be skin-deep. Hers is an inescapably alien biology. As such, she can only be human to the extent that she denies her biological non-humanity to herself. Her attempt to be human, to identify with the human, is thus at the same time a form of self-deception. This invites comparison with the less than heroic hero of Force Majeure. Where Tomas in Force Majeure tries in a self-deceptive way to close his eyes to the behaviour that conflicts with his self-understanding, his identity as the proper man he sees himself as being, the alien, in order to identify as human, tries to deny in herself all that is non-human, all that conflicts with and calls into question her attempt to see herself as a human being. At this point, we can turn again to ways in which the film can engage with positions in the philosophical literature. As it has proven to be in other cases, Sartrean existentialism makes a useful point of contact. We have seen how Breathless implicitly calls into question the existentialist notion of the human being as a radically self-choosing agent, an absolutely free subject. It is illuminating both in connection with the film and the philosophy to consider Under the Skin as well in relation to Sartrean existentialism. Here, what is particularly relevant is the account that Sartre gives of self-deception in connection with our relations with others. For Sartre, at least in terms of the account given in

108  Under the Skin – a sense of the other Being and Nothingness, the gaze of the other objectifies me, steals away my freedom, defines me as a certain kind of self. It is not that I thereby cease to be free. Because I remain essentially a free being, I can always turn the tables and objectify the other in turn. By the same token, any attempt to identify wholly with the object that I am in the eyes of others is a form of bad faith, Sartre’s idea of self-deception. Bad faith is the cowardly attempt to hide from one’s freedom, the freedom that is also the terrible burden of being entirely responsible for oneself, a burden that extends to having to choose the very framework of values, the identity, in terms of which one chooses. In this particular form of bad faith, I try to hide from my freedom by pretending I am nothing but the object that other people see me as being. When the character Estelle in Sartre’s 1944 play No Exit looks for a mirror so she can see herself as others see her, she is exhibiting this form of bad faith (see Sartre 1974, 18–19). She is trying to give herself the determinate identity of the attractive woman she is for others. It is plausible to interpret the alien in Under the Skin as trying to do something similar, to identify with the image in the mirror. She is trying to give herself the identity of the human being, the woman, she is for others. As we have also seen, the notion of freedom that Sartre’s picture turns on is questionable in its extremity. His radical individualism arguably overestimates the extent to which individuals can define themselves, independently of external influences. Breathless brings this idea of freedom into question by showing how its characters, despite thinking themselves these great free spirits, depend to some extent on their cultural milieu for the elements of their seemingly anarchic personalities. In the same vein, we can see the behaviour of both Estelle in No Exit and the alien in Under the Skin not so much as representing a self-deceptive attempt to hide from one’s radical freedom, as calling the extreme existentialist conception of freedom into question. What both Estelle and the alien do is provide a reminder that a great deal of what we take ourselves to be, our sense of identity or who we are, involves the judgements or definitions of others, views that we internalise in the course of our development. Our self-image, in part at least, involves how other people see us. Sartre effectively acknowledges this, but he also sees any definition by others in essentially negative terms, since to be defined by others to any degree is to suffer a reduction of our freedom to define ourselves. We however can turn this argument around and say that the way we develop a sense of identity, at least in part by internalising the judgements of others, the behaviour that is alluded to in both No Exit and Under the Skin, represents a challenge to the idea that we are completely self-determining beings, free to make ourselves in any way we wish. Another form of bad faith that Sartre identifies takes the form of thinking that there is some biological nature or makeup that determines what one does. This claim needs to be clarified. Sartre is not denying that there are determinate facts about ourselves, facts concerning our physical and biological makeup that we cannot control or determine, which he calls our ‘facticity’. However he does

Under the Skin – a sense of the other  109 not think that this in any way brings his radical notion of human freedom into question. Freedom for Sartre is not the denial of one’s facticity, but its ‘transcendence’, in the choosing of goals we might seek to pursue, in the light of which I  choose the meaning the facts of my situation have for me. I  may as a matter of fact be handicapped, but the meaning that condition has for me – whether something to be accepted as part of me, as a challenge to be overcome, or whatever – is entirely up to me. Our choices are always made in relation to our facticity, but the important point for Sartre is that there is nothing in one’s facticity that determines the choices one makes in relation to it. In these choices, one remains completely free, and this freedom is the transcendence of facticity, not its denial. Indeed, Sartre thinks that it is a form of bad faith to completely deny one’s facticity. The bad faith here lies in its being a way, albeit a rather indirect way, of trying to hide from one’s freedom and responsibility. One might, for example, refuse to acknowledge an aspect of one’s situation, regarding which a decision is called for. A famous example of this that Sartre gives in Being and Nothingness is the woman whose dinner companion has just taken her hand in a clear expression of romantic interest, but who puts off making a decision regarding this development by studiously ignoring it, disassociating herself from the hand being held: ‘the hand rests inert between the warm hands of her companion – neither consenting nor resisting – a thing’ (Sartre 1958, 208). It can be added here that the attempt to hide from freedom involved in this form of bad faith is more obvious in connection with relations with others. Here, the self-deceptive denial of one’s facticity is manifested in the idea that we can be a pure transcendence that completely denies the other’s freedom, objectifies them, and bends them entirely to our will. On his account, just as the masochist tries to hide from their freedom by pretending they are nothing but the object other people see them as being, the sadist is deluded in thinking that the other is nothing more than the object they see them as being. In practice, the other can always, at any moment, ‘look’ at me – as in the defiant look of the tortured victim. In human relations, there simply can’t be a decisive victory of one subject over another. Once again however, the extreme notion of freedom that Sartre’s account turns on can be questioned. In his understanding of freedom as the transcendence of facticity, Sartre arguably underplays the extent to which our facticity influences or limits the choices we can make in relation to it. In the end, the real self-deception may in fact be thinking that we are absolutely free, that our freedom is not conditioned by external factors. There are surely occasions where one comes up against facts about one’s condition that represent constraints on what one can meaningfully choose. For example, can one meaningfully choose to eat coal? And this is what the alien effectively discovers in Under the Skin, where the facticity in question is her alien biology. She may be trying to become human, but she comes up against the fact of her alien biology despite her efforts.

110  Under the Skin – a sense of the other This means that the human face, body, and life that she is seeking to identify with will remain insuperably alien to her. One of the first things she does while on the run from her former life is to go to a restaurant and try to eat a piece of cake, a piece of ordinary human food. But the food proves to be incompatible with her biology. She retches and has to spit it out. She can no more eat cake than human beings can eat coal. Thus, human food is experienced by the alien as alien. It represents an experience that challenges and brings into question the alien’s efforts to identify herself with the human. This is not something she is absolutely free to do. It is important to add, however, that even if the film implicitly challenges Sartre’s notion of the radically free subject, pointing as it does to the condi­ tioning role of the judgements of others, or of one’s facticity, this does not amount to a complete rejection of freedom or agency. It does not give support to the view that individuals are completely determined by their circumstances. As with Breathless, Under the Skin also resists not only a radically free but also a wholly deterministic reading of the individual. It implicitly calls into question the idea that individuals are no more than products of their social milieu, or simply determined by their biological makeup. After all, the alien is not just being defined by others, or being determined by her alien biology. She is actively trying to identify as human, trying to become the attractive object that others see her as being, trying to overcome her biology. But for all that, it remains the case that in seeking to become human, the alien comes up against the stumbling block of her own alienness, the otherness of her own biology; or to put things from her point of view, she persistently comes up against the alienness of the human. The alienness of the human is the second way a disturbing experience of otherness is portrayed in the film. The first was in the portrayal of the alien’s way of looking at the world, as an inhuman perspective, radically different from any human standpoint. The second, which becomes more prominent in the second half of the film, is the portrayal of the human world as an alien place. The human food, the ordinary piece of cake the alien tries to eat, proves to be an alien object for her. Later, after the alien meets the man who offers to help her and invites her to his house, she makes an effort to play the role of a ‘normal woman’, but the role remains alien to her. She tries to appreciate the music being played, but is unable to tap the right rhythm to it. Afterwards, alone in her bedroom, standing once again before a mirror in the second extended mirror scene in the film, she examines her body, which is to say, her human female ‘body suit’. She wants to identify with this body, but it remains a body that is alien to her, an alien body she is removed from, a foreign object she is inspecting. The next day, the alien’s confrontation with alien humanness comes to a head. After the two return from a trip to see a ruined castle, they kiss and begin to have sex, but the alien stops abruptly and examines her genitals in confusion. Human sex is incomprehensible to her. In the end, she is unable to lead this human life, and flees into the forest.

Under the Skin – a sense of the other  111 Gendered relations Let’s think of everything so far as constituting the first dimension of reflection in the film, in which the human as such is confronted by the alien, and the alien is confronted by the human. Over and above these reflections, there is a further dimension of experience-centred reflection going on in the film, a critical reflection on particular cultural norms, and also on the role of film itself in reproducing and perpetuating those norms. Since the alien predator takes the form of a woman, the film is able to reflect and comment not only on cultural norms around male and female behaviour, but also on the gendered nature of ordinary experience, the cultural dominance of the male world-view, and the dominance of the male gaze in western culture. In addition, it is able to reflect on the manner in which film itself can reproduce these cultural norms, particularly evident in the historical tendency in film itself to privilege the male gaze. If we return to the first part of the film, it will be recalled that the film starts with the extended point-of-view shot in which we follow the alien through a shopping mall, and later we view the world through the windows of the van she is driving. In this way, we are aligned with her point of view; but at the same time, it is a viewpoint that seems strange, foreign, hard to identify with. This is partly because, as we have seen, it is the coldly amoral view of the alien predator, as opposed to the more familiar, morally infused way of experiencing the world. But it is also strange because it is an experience of men reduced to the objects of what appears to be a female gaze. In this, the viewer is confronted with another experience that is at odds with everyday cultural experience, insofar as that experience has been characterised by the relative dominance of the male viewpoint, the male gaze, and it is more likely for women than men to be the objects of the gaze. This privileging of the male gaze over the female reflects more general asymmetries in the relationship between men and women, power relations between men and women in a patriarchal culture, understood as a particular, if remarkably widespread, kind of cultural arrangement. Here we can move directly to consider philosophical positions that the film can be seen to engage with. We have been thinking about the film so far in connection with Sartre’s existentialist account, but it is useful here to consider how it relates to Beauvoir’s development of existentialist ideas in order to address social and political concerns, particularly concerning relations between men and women. Her book The Second Sex, which appeared in 1949, is a significant text in feminist thought that, amongst other things, provides an extended analysis of the asymmetry in relations between men and women in modern western patriarchal culture. The starting point for Beauvoir’s account is Sartre’s existentialism as developed in Being and Nothingness, which had appeared six years before, but it also stands in a critical relationship with Sartre’s position. Beauvoir is influenced by but also modifies and transforms existentialist ideas. In particular, she challenges the extreme Sartrean notion of freedom as abstractly asocial, seeking

112  Under the Skin – a sense of the other to take concrete social and political circumstances more fully into account. Being and Nothingness allows no real constraint on individual freedom. Whatever our situation, no matter how oppressive it might be, we are completely free to choose ourselves in relation to it, radically self-defining. For Beauvoir, social and political circumstances can diminish human freedom. In particular, in a patriarchal society, the freedom of women is regularly denied, they are regularly subordinated to the projects and freedom of men. Moreover, they internalise this subordinate status, seeing themselves as primarily attractive objects for men. This analysis, in turn, influenced Sartre, who in his later Marxist phase would himself modify his position to take social circumstances, in his case, class relations in a capitalist society, more fully into account. The transformation of Sartrean existentialism in Beauvoir’s thinking is reflected in a very different understanding of interpersonal relations. For the ­Sartre of Being and Nothingness, when we encounter another person, we experience ourselves as a ‘being for others’, an object for their gaze, and an instrument for their free projects; but we can always turn the tables and objectify them in turn. It is a level playing field. For Beauvoir in The Second Sex, relations between men and women are not reciprocal in that way. Instead, they typically involve an oppressive, one-way relationship. Women continually experience themselves as ‘beings-for-others’, as objects for men, rather than ‘beings for themselves’, free subjects. A woman is unable to assert her subjectivity, she cannot ‘look’ at a man in the sense of threatening his freedom. This is why the look of a woman at a man does not have the same meaning as the look of a man at a woman. Behind this asymmetry are power relations in society, and in the book, Beauvoir gives a detailed description of the social and cultural processes by which women’s experience of themselves as an object, an other, is produced and reinforced. Limiting cultural representations of the feminine that are internalised by women, different forms of socialisation for boys and girls, with women being trained to be passive and submissive rather than active, and economic inequality and lack of concrete means for self-affirmation, all contribute to women thinking of themselves as objects for others. At the same time, while Beauvoir is questioning Sartre’s radically free subject, she does not completely abandon the existentialist idea of freedom as self-determination, and sees individuals as no more than the products of their social circumstances. And she does not think women are doomed to a subordinate status. She retains the idea that women, as conscious beings who want to be the subject of their own lives, can challenge these circumstances and resist this asymmetry. She looks forward to the possibility of more reciprocal relations between men and women. This brings us back to the film. Insofar as Under the Skin’s alien takes the form of a woman, what the film might be seen to portray, at least in the first half, is the reversal of this asymmetry in gender relations that Beauvoir identifies. The men in the street are reduced to the objects of a predatory female gaze, and cast as potential prey. Now, it is the woman who is the subject, and the man is the

Under the Skin – a sense of the other  113 object of the female gaze. As such, the film might be taken to be offering a challenge to the culturally prevalent objectification of women under the male gaze, by presenting the possibility of something different. What is being challenged here is not a feature of experience that might be thought of as characteristic of the human as such, at least as culturally developed, namely a morally infused way of experiencing the world, but rather the more culturally specific experience, the dominance of the male gaze in a patriarchal society. In this case, it is more plausible to imagine the possible transformation of this experience, the overcoming of this asymmetry in gender relations. They could be transformed, and the world viewed differently, without the viewer thereby ceasing to be human. Continuing with this interpretation, in this challenge to the dominance of the male over the female gaze, the film is also challenging film’s own complicity in perpetuating these dominance relations, insofar as there has been a tendency in the cinema itself to privilege the male gaze – or more precisely, the heterosexual, masculine gaze. In the history of film, women have tended to be portrayed as attractive, sexualised objects for the male protagonist, and implicitly for the male viewer. This is the cinematic feature famously highlighted by Laura Mulvey in ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’ (Mulvey 1975). Mulvey’s account is couched in a psychoanalytic model of male and female sexuality. On this account, women in classic Hollywood cinema ‘exist to fulfil the voyeuristic and sadistic desires of the male spectator’ and women spectators can only have a masochistic relationship with this cinema. Women ‘are cast in the classic role of exhibitionist; they are looked at and displayed as sexual objects’. They ‘have a looked-at-ness which turns them into the site of the screen’s spectacle’ (Denzin 1995, 43). While the particular model of sexuality being employed here might be questioned, what is captured is the asymmetry of the gaze under conditions of patriarchal oppression, the asymmetry in gender relations that Beauvoir also calls attention to with the idea that in this culture women more than men are the object of the look, that women continually experience themselves as ‘being for others’, as objects for men. And Under the Skin is amongst those films that set out to counter the dominance of the male gaze in the cinematic context, by visualising the possibility of a female counter-gaze that turns the tables on the male. As Ara Osterweil puts it, ‘In a cinematic world still defined by what Laura Mulvey famously theorised, in 1975, as the sadistic male gaze, the representation of an insatiable feminist point of view wreaks havoc on spectator expectations’ (Osterweil 2014, 47). It thereby helps to challenge this persistent dominance of the masculine world view in film and media more generally. The challenging reversal that the film brings to the fore in its first half underpins an additional piece of cinematic self-critique that is going on, which is also, once again, an indirect critique of cultural presuppositions that have been internalised in film. Here, the film is challenging the cinematic scenario in which females who transgress the roles allotted to them are punished. It will be recalled that in Force Majeure, where the ‘promiscuous’ woman, Charlotte, who refuses

114  Under the Skin – a sense of the other to submit to traditional norms of proper female behaviour, to conventional marriage and motherhood, is pointedly not punished at the end of the film. This is a knowing challenge to the more conventional filmic scenario, where a bad end typically awaits the sexually active female. The horror genre in particular tends to be extreme in the punishments it metes out in this area, with only the sexually inexperienced ‘final girl’ usually having any chance of escaping the killer (see Clover 1992). This cinematic scenario is also being challenged in Under the Skin, which in its first part at least has some of the characteristics of the horror film. Here, the aforementioned trope is very much turned on its head. It is now promiscuous men who are being punished, becoming victims of the female alien; and the only man to survive her attentions is the one with no sexual experience because he is facially disfigured. Thus, to put this point in terms drawn from The Second Sex, in the first part of the film at least, the alien woman in Under the Skin is far from being a powerless object of the male gaze, existing only as an attractive object for men. She is the subject who objectifies the men, turning them into objects of prey. One further point about this is to note that in the course of this activity, she is presenting herself as an attractive object for the men she is seeking to lure in. Isn’t adopting this role a denial of one’s status as a subject, and in some sense the perpetuation of an oppressive situation? Certainly, in The Second Sex, Beauvoir was critical of a certain form of bad faith that she thought women were particularly prone to, namely pretending that they were no more than a sexual object in order to hide from their freedom, a ‘moral fault’ that amounted to complicity in their own oppression (de Beauvoir 1983, 27). This view, insofar as it sees women as having some responsibility for their oppression, sits rather awkwardly with Beauvoir’s emphasis on the force of the circumstances that women face, her insistence that in a patriarchal society, women are regularly subjected to objectifying circumstances, subordinated to the projects and freedom of men, and brought to internalise this subordinate status, to see themselves as attractive objects for men. It might be thought indeed to be a remnant of Sartre’s position, for which, as radically free subjects, we can never be determined in any degree by our circumstances, and any claim to be so determined is simply bad faith. There may indeed be some tensions within Beauvoir’s account, between her wish to take social and political circumstances seriously and her refusal to entirely give up Sartre’s radically free subject. However, it is possible to see this activity of seeing oneself as an attractive object for men not as a form of selfdeception, or as complicity in one’s own oppression, but as a means of contesting oppression, a way of turning the tables on it. Here the alien’s behaviour in Under the Skin proves illuminating. Her turning herself into an attractive object for men is not a self-deceptive denial of her freedom and agency, so much as an expression of these things. The alien’s agency extends to using her appearance, how she appears to others, to lure in and control the men she is hunting. In filmic terms, this is like the agency of the femme fatale in classic film noir – the femme fatale

Under the Skin – a sense of the other  115 understood not merely as turning herself into a sexually attractive object for the male gaze, and thus as complicit in her oppression, but in control of herself as a sexually attractive object, using this appearance to manipulate and control those men who aspire to possess and control her. So understood, the classic femme fatale is herself a subversive figure, the woman who refuses to be subordinated to and constrained by the traditional norms of ‘good’ female behaviour, the norms associated with marriage and family life. She is a threat to the status quo and to the male hero precisely because she takes control of her sexuality and directs it in terms of her own choosing. Everything that has been said so far about the film’s treatment of gender relations has been predicated on the idea that the alien, in taking the form of a woman, represents a female gaze. What we then have, in the first half of the film at least, is a reversal of the kind of asymmetry in the gaze typical of western patriarchal society, with men now becoming the objects of a predatory female gaze. In this way, the film presents an experience of female dominance that straightforwardly challenges the dominance of the masculine perspective, within film and beyond. However, there is another possible reading of what is going on here. This is, that what the film presents, men as the objects of a predatory female gaze, is sufficiently at odds with ordinary cultural experience to indicate that this cannot be the perspective of a female, that it could only be that of an alien. As Alicia Byrnes puts it, the film’s import in this regard is that ‘for a woman to act in this way (and get away with it), she must be alien’ (Byrnes 2015). This might then be seen as another way in which the film contrives to portray a truly alien point of view, to convey the idea that this is an inhuman perspective. It could also be seen as part of the film’s reflection on the asymmetry in the ways males and females experience one another, the conventional privileging of the male gaze over the female. Only now the reflection is not so much a challenge to existing social conditions, more an ironic comment on them, that under present social conditions, the predatory gaze that objectifies men could not be the perspective of a human woman. This new reading of the first half of the film gets support given the way things develop in the second half. As the film progresses, we have the alien attempting to lose her alienness and to identify with her human form, to become the woman she appears to others. Earlier, the problem that was seen to arise with this project of humanisation was that however much the alien might want to identify with the human, she remains inescapably, biologically alien. She can only be human to the extent that she denies her biology, her non-humanity, to herself. The problem that now presents itself with this project, in connection with the theme of relations between men and women in a patriarchal society, is that in seeking to live as a human female, the alien thereby becomes an object of the male gaze, and at risk of male violence. She is the prey even of the well-meaning man who takes her to his house and wants to look after her. Now she is being taken on a tourist excursion, carried over puddles, and helped up the stairs of the ruined

116  Under the Skin – a sense of the other castle. And although she escapes from the constraints of domestic life into the forest, this only makes her more vulnerable to male predation. In the forest, she is pursued and attacked by the logger. So, what the film portrays in its second half is that insofar as the alien becomes a woman, she becomes the prey of men; just as conversely, it was only as an alien that the woman was a hunter of men in the first half. This might give the impression that all the film is doing in its second half is continuing its ironic commentary on the asymmetry in relations between the sexes in a patriarchal society. If the first part of the film is telling us that a woman could only be a predator of men and get away with it if she were an alien, in the second part, it seems that an alien can only become a woman at the cost of becoming the victim of male predation. However, it is also possible to see the second half of the film as offering something more than ironic commentary. It is offering a challenge to existing social arrangements, an experience-centred critique of this asymmetry in gender relations, calling attention to an experience that one might want to turn a blind eye to, particularly as a male viewer. This is the challenging experience of being objectified as a woman, which culminates in the attack by the logger at the end. The viewer has come to feel an increased kinship with the alien in the second part of the film, even though she is increasingly portrayed in an objective way, as a figure in a landscape. This connection makes her ultimate fate an even more confronting experience, especially for the male viewer. As Kristy Puchko puts it, once the director has established a bond and recognition between the viewer and the alien, he presents the true-to-life rape scenario, forcing men in particular to consider this atrocious act of violence with fresh eyes, ones that through the power of cinema give a window to what rape culture feels like for women, but through the safety of a movie theater screen. (Puchko 2014) After the predatory logger tries to rape her, he discovers the alien body under her torn skin and runs off, only to return and kill the creature. Is this the most extreme form of male objectification of the female, the ultimate denial of female as subject? Or is it, returning to our first level of analysis, the final repudiation of an alien other that challenges the human? Perhaps it can best be understood as the alien’s final escape from oppressive circumstances. After the logger has run off, she proceeds to discard her human skin, fully revealing her alien form. She then spends some time contemplating her human face, which she now holds in her hands. While this act echoes the two earlier scenes where she examines herself in the mirror, its significance is not entirely obvious. Maureen Foster has pointed out that while we would expect the alien to see a dead mask here, what we have instead is a ‘human face is looking back up at her, soft and palpably alive, conveying tender emotion . . . her eyes wide and full of affection, sadness,

Under the Skin – a sense of the other  117 and mourning’ (Foster 2019, 56) To that extent, one might see the face as the realisation of the alien’s quest to become human. At the same time, since this face is no longer the alien’s, it may also amount to the humanity she could never quite identify with. Perhaps what we are witnessing is the alien’s realisation that she has failed to become the human being she hoped to identify with. But this may also constitute a final recognition that the humanity she wanted to identify with was only ever skin-deep, alien to who she really is, a mask she can now rid herself of. Whether this scene represents failure or liberation remains unclear. Which is also to say, the alien remains in the end enigmatic, mysterious. But in that very elusiveness, she escapes capture or identification, not just as the human others see her as being, or as an object for a patriarchal culture, but in the last analysis, as a character in the film. The film is good enough to leave its central character as an irreducibly alien figure. In the end, Under the Skin is a film that haunts the viewer, which is to say that it presents experiences that continue to challenge, disturb, and raise questions about ordinary or conventional ways of thinking. These include conventional ways of thinking about what constitutes a science fiction film, cultural norms relating to the interaction of men and women, and a number of general philosophical positions and concerns, from existentialism to the question of why one should be moral. There is much more that could be said about this film, but the main feature I have tried to bring out in this discussion is the way the film achieves its critical effects by invoking a limit-transcending experience that challenges the presuppositions in one’s thinking. It is thus an experimental film in the broad sense being pursued here, in that it puts the concepts or principles presupposed in one’s everyday thinking to the test of experience. And this is also to say, it is a philosophical film, engaging in experience-centred critical reflection.

8 Concluding remarks

I am going to conclude with a brief summary of the terrain that has been covered in this discussion, just to provide a reminder of the broader aims being pursued here. We have been looking at how three films Breathless, Force Majeure, and Under the Skin can be understood to be doing philosophical work. This analysis has been undertaken in support of the broader contention that films can do more than serve simply as a resource for philosophy, whether this means being enlisted as a handy illustration or example of a philosophical position, or even being treated as a kind of thought experiment, Wartenberg’s idea of film as philosophising. The idea that films can in some sense be said do philosophy is not in itself a novel claim. It is a view that has had numerous defenders as well as critics in recent years. The novelty of the present discussion of this contention lies in the claims about the nature of the philosophising that is supposed to be going on in film. Supporting this contention depends on questioning the idea that philosophy can only proceed through abstract reasoning and argument. This is the usual basis for denying that films can be said to philosophise, since films simply do not have the capacity to organise or assess their content in terms of arguments, with premises and conclusions. That, I argued Chapter 1, is a narrowly rationalistic conception of philosophy, where rationalism in this context refers to philosophical activity that proceeds primarily via argument and also that is broadly concerned with establishing general truths or unchanging essences beyond change and transformation. This is a view that can be traced back to Plato, for whom philosophy is the argument-driven search for the essential nature of things, or ultimate principles of thinking, in his terms the Forms. With a suitably modified understanding of the ultimate principles of thinking, it is also the conception of philosophy to be found in Kant, and in contemporary analytic philosophy. The positive claim I am making in this connection is that there are other forms of reflection to be found in philosophy, which are still recognisably philosophical in the sense of interrogating the fundamental presuppositions of our thinking, but are non-rationalistic or anti-Platonic ways of doing so. In particular, there is DOI: 10.4324/9781003207764-8

Concluding remarks  119 reflection through narratives that foreground challenging experiences and limittranscending events, through which the background framework of principles, concepts, and values in terms of which we make sense of the world can be brought into question. This is not a thought experiment in the traditional sense, but it is nonetheless an experimental form of reflection in the broad sense that one’s presuppositions are being put to the test of experience. Though by no means the only philosopher to do so, Foucault has been singled out as a practitioner of this kind of reflection within philosophy, in the form of a historico-­critical reflection on the present, undertaken through a historical counter-narrative that foregrounds limit-transcending events in the historical record. Importantly, for the purposes of this discussion, this is a form of philosophical reflection that can be pursued not only independently of argumentative, ­principle-centred reflection but outside of written philosophical discourse; and in Chapter 3, I argued that it can be pursued in the context of narrative fiction film. Here, through a narrative that foregrounds a challenging experience, the film can engage in a critical interrogation of the cultural norms, categories, and conventions prevalent in the society from which it emerges, and which inform and find expression in its characters and at the level of the film’s narrative. Of course, film can also work to reproduce and reinforce these cultural presuppositions, and most films do little more than this, but the point is that it is also possible for them to operate in a critical way vis-à-vis these presuppositions. There can be more or less critical films. The object of reflection here has been characterised as the film’s ideological content, with the proviso that this is not a Marxist notion of ideology understood primarily as a mystifying representation of social reality, but rather ideology as the background framework of norms and principles through which one is able to make sense of the world in a particular culture. With this qualification in mind, experience-centred, experimental reflection in film can be described as a critique of ideology. It is in the light of this core conception of critical reflection that we then turned to consider the philosophical dimensions of our three films, the focus of the following three chapters. As we saw, critique of ideology, in the appropriately revised sense of the term, is a prominent feature of Force Majeure. The film brings into question cultural norms and conventions that have been internalised as moral self-conceptions, particularly concerning ‘proper’ male and female behaviour in the modern nuclear family. In the film, the central characters find themselves confronted with behaviours, their own as well as that of others, that challenge their sense of who they are, morally speaking. This kind of critical reflection is also discernible in the other films we have been looking at. Breathless similarly questions the self-conception of its two main characters, which in their case is the conviction that they are free spirits, unfettered by social rules, all the while drawing on their cultural milieu for important elements of their supposedly anarchic personalities. Since the predatory alien in Under the Skin takes the form of a human female, the film is able to challenge or at the very least

120  Concluding remarks illuminate the privileging of the male perspective over the female characteristic of a patriarchal society. It might be thought that this account of film philosophising sets too low a bar for a film qualifying for doing philosophy, that on this view any film that challenges a social stereotype, or traditional views of any kind, is going to count as philosophy. However, on the view being developed here, the crucial element that identifies this activity as philosophical is that what is being questioned is the presupposed or taken-for-granted in our thinking, which is to say, the ruling concepts and categories, the general principles of order and classification that give form to one’s thinking, and which provide a standpoint in terms of which to make sense of the world and oneself. It is reflection at the limits of one’s thinking, not so much in order to establish the limits of legitimate thought and action, the Kantian or analytic version, but to raise the possibility of modifying how one thinks and acts, of thinking and acting differently, which I am taking to be the Foucauldean option. Getting at these presuppositions requires some work, since they are not ordinarily entertained as a series of explicit rules or propositions, but silently embodied in the actions and practices of individuals, habits of thinking that have been internalised in the process of growing up. We also saw another way in which this experience-centred reflection can be pursued in a cinematic context. It can be exercised in relation to the norms or conventions that are constitutive of the film’s own identity as a film, as a cinematic self-critique. This is in fact what film that is experimental in the traditional sense of the term does. It challenges cinematic conventions relating to both form and content. This cinematic self-critique is especially evident in Breathless, which famously ‘breaks all the rules’ of filmmaking, robustly challenging conventions relating both to genre and film technique, and which as a result still looks fresh and innovative sixty years later. And while our other films, Force Majeure and Under the Skin, are not particularly innovative in relation to cinematic technique, they still make a point of challenging genre conventions, those associated with what can be called the ‘domestic action movie’ genre in the first case, and with contemporary science fiction film, where the lavish use of special effects has become almost mandatory, in the second. Once again, one might concede that there is some kind of self-critical activity going on here, but still want to ask why this self-critical activity qualifies as a film doing philosophy. The answer is still the one given earlier, that what is being interrogated is the presupposed or taken-for-granted in our thinking, in this case, our cinematic thinking. In question are the features that are taken to define what counts as a film, or a certain type of film. This is not film doing philosophy in the sense of seeking to determine the essential nature of film or of particular types of film, but rather, as challenging existing ideas as to what counts as film, and potentially expanding the space of possibilities for what can be done in cinema. Finally, we saw that this experience-centred form of reflection can be brought to bear indirectly on philosophical notions, positions and arguments as they have

Concluding remarks  121 been developed in the traditional written context. Here, experience-centred cinematic reflection can play a role as part of a dialogue between film and traditional philosophical discourse. There are a number of ways in which films may connect with philosophy in this sense. The film may serve as a handy example or popular illustration of problems or positions that have been developed in the philosophical literature. Or a film narrative may be employed in a philosophical discussion as a kind of thought experiment, on the model of thought experiments within philosophical discourse. Or again, film understood as reflecting in an experiencecentred manner, the idea of film as itself philosophising that I am arguing for here, can be brought into connection with philosophical positions and arguments as they have been developed in written philosophical discourse. This last item completes the circuit, so to speak, in the sense that having developed an idea of philosophical reflection that can be pursued outside of written philosophical discourse, and in particular in film, we can now link film, understood as being able to philosophise in this sense, back to established philosophical positions and arguments that can only be properly articulated in the traditional written form. These include not only philosophical positions coming from a conventional rationalist approach to philosophising, but also strands of thinking within written philosophy that are opposed to the rationalist approach, of which Foucault’s thinking is one prominent example. Insofar as films foreground challenging experiences and evoke situations in a richly detailed way, they can align with thinking within philosophy that runs counter to the rationalist approach, and they can offer correctives to philosophical thinking that has succumbed to a rationalism that disdains experience and particularity, and has become lost in abstraction and over-generalisation. In this latter capacity, films can show a reality that is more complex or messier than an abstract theory can allow for. Along these lines, Under the Skin shows us how human beings might look from the perspective of an absolute outsider, and there are fertile grounds for a dialogue between this film and philosophy concerning the human condition. In particular, the film features an alien predator that has taken the form of a woman, on earth to hunt men, whose entirely amoral way of viewing the world contrasts with our ordinary, morally-infused form of experiencing. As such it offers a concrete way of posing perhaps the ultimate question in moral philosophy, why be moral? It can also be seen as calling into question the idea that the proper response is to give an argument or provide a theoretical justification for why one should respond morally to the world. In its reflection on asymmetries in relations between men and women in a patriarchal society, Under the Skin can be brought into dialogue both with Sartre’s somewhat abstract account of human relationships as reciprocal encounters between equal subjects, and Beauvoir’s feminist critique of the Sartrean account. Meanwhile, Force Majeure’s concrete depiction of the moral agent can be seen as bringing into question the abstract notion of moral agency that can often be found lurking in moral philosophy, the abstract agent whose moral life seems to be confined to developing

122  Concluding remarks choice-guiding arguments. It can also be considered in connection with Nagel’s subversive notion of moral luck. Finally, the characters depicted in Breathless can be seen as calling into question not only Sartre’s core idea of the heroically self-determining existentialist subject but also an overly deterministic Marxism that reduces individuals to mere products of external forces. Looking over the discussion as a whole, the reader might be surprised to find that while initially the main philosophical reference point for the discussion of film as philosophy was Foucault’s historico-critical philosophy of experience, in the ensuing discussion of the films themselves, Foucault himself has seemingly disappeared from the scene. Now, the main philosophical positions being invoked are existentialism, and certain key concepts in moral philosophy. ­However, it needs to be remembered that these later philosophical references are to areas of established philosophy that film as experience-centred critical reflection can be brought into some sort of dialogue with. It remains the case that the experiencecentred form of critical reflection being undertaken in the films, in the form of the critique of ideology and cinematic self-critique, is itself being understood on the model of the historico-critical reflection exemplified by ­Foucault within philosophy. To that extent, Foucault remains the main philosophical reference point throughout the discussion. One more general point I wanted to make is that, with regard to the notion of critical reflection being put forward here as film philosophising, this notion of a narrative, experience-centred critical reflection, it should be noted that this is a notion of philosophising that is neither exclusive to film, nor simply what is done in philosophy, but occupies a mid-way position between them. It does not suppose that the philosophising is something exclusively cinematic, wholly different to existing written philosophy, the radical position on film as philosophy as defined in the typology of positions presented in Chapter 1. If what was happening in film bore no resemblance at all to existing philosophy, we might ask, how could we even identify it as philosophy? But nor does it suppose that the philosophising going on in film is the same as that traditionally to be found in written philosophy, which is to say, the rationalistic, argument-driven kind of reflection. This avoids the main objection to not only the bold position, but also Wartenberg’s moderately bold position, film as thought experiment, insofar as a thought experiment necessarily requires a context of argument. On this view, it is possible to concede that argumentative activity is beyond the capacity of film alone, while still having a conception of film as philosophy. On the view of film as philosophy being promoted here, film is doing something that is both like what goes on in existing written philosophy, and so recognisably philosophical, and different enough from what is going on there to be able to be conducted in a cinematic medium. What it is different from is the Platonic, argument-driven form of philosophising with which philosophy is traditionally identified, but it is akin to the anti-Platonic, experience-centred kind of reflection that can also be seen to be going on in existing written philosophy.

Concluding remarks  123 In terms of the typology of positions outlined in Chapter 1, it is more radical than the bold position since it can be conducted beyond written philosophy, and more moderate than the radical position since it is akin to a form of reflection within written philosophy. As such, however perverse the label might sound, it can fairly be characterised as a moderately radical position. So overall, this is a story about how our three films, Breathless, Force Majeure, and Under the Skin, scenes from which were presented at the outset, can be seen as doing philosophical work; and more broadly about how narrative fiction film can be understood as doing philosophy rather than simply being a resource for philosophy. The contention is that all three films demonstrate, in various ways, the idea of experience-centred, experimental philosophical reflection. They are, in short, exemplary experiments in film and philosophy.

Appendix

Jean-Luc Godard (1930–2022) was a French-Swiss film director, screenwriter, and film critic. One of the most influential filmmakers of all time, Godard arrived with a shock to transform cinema with his first film Breathless (À bout de ­soufflé). The 1960s was an especially productive time for Godard, resulting in a string of classics, including Une Femme est une Femme (1961), Vivre sa vie (1962), Le Petit Soldat (1963), Les Carabiniers (1963), Le Mépris (1963), Bande à part (1964), Une femme mariée (1964), Alphaville, une étrange aventure de Lemmy Caution (1965), Pierrot le Feu (1965), Masculin Féminin (1966), Made in U.S.A. (1966), 2 ou 3 choses que je sais d’elle (1967), La Chinoise (1967), and Weekend (1967). After his politically radical period, with the formation of the Dziga Vertov group of radical filmmakers (1969–1972), Godard would return to making more commercial though still unconventional films, along with highly experimental video essays. Later films include Tout Va Bien (1972), Numéro Deux (1975), Ici et Ailleurs, (1976), Sauve qui peut (la vie) (1980), Prénom Carmen (1983) Je vous salue, Marie (1985), Helas Pour Moi (2003), Notre musique (2004), Adieu au Langage (2014), and Le Livre d’image (2018). Godard may fairly be said to have spent his entire career reinventing the cinematic form. Ruben Östlund (1974–) is a Swedish writer and director who came to prominence in 2014 when Force Majeure (originally Turist), his fourth feature, won the Cannes Jury Prize in 2014. Other films include The Guitar Mongoloid (2004), Involuntary (2008), Play (2011), The Square (2017), and Triangle of Sadness (2022). His films are gleeful dark comedies, satirising various aspects of contemporary culture, such as modern masculinity, the contemporary art-world, and the ultra-rich. After a time spent in making commercials and music videos, director, and screenwriter Jonathon Glazer (1965–) came to notice with Sexy Beast (2000), followed by Birth (2004), and Under the Skin (2013), with The Zone of Interest (2023) his most recent film. As film critic Ryan Gilbey points out (Gilby 2014), Glazer’s films have often involved worlds disrupted by unexpected visitors, with Under the Skin distinctive in that it makes its visitor’s outsider point of view central, presenting an alien’s view of the human race.

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Index

Aliens films 6 Alphaville 99 anarchism 68, 71 Andersen, Nathan 75 Andrew, Dudley 72, 77 anti-essentialism 93 anti-individualism 49 – 50, 69 – 70 anti-Platonism 5, 7, 21, 26, 31, 63, 118, 122 Aristotle 51, 87 – 88; Poetics 52 auteur directors 62, 78, 79 Bakewell, Sarah 17 Baudrillard, Jean 9 – 10 Bazin, André 39, 41, 67, 75 Beauvoir, Simone de 66, 111 – 112, 113, 114 Being and Nothingness (Sartre) 65 – 66, 109, 111 – 112 Bogart, Humphrey 1, 64, 69, 70, 73, 77 Breathless: American remake of 77; analysis of characters and their motivations 65 – 71; ‘Bogart’ scene 1 – 2, 69; cinematic self-critique in 52, 120; cinematic techniques 41, 53 – 55, 72 – 77; editing techniques 72; existentialism in 65 – 68, 70 – 71, 79, 80, 107, 122; experimental nature of 59, 71 – 80, 82; Godard’s assessment of 68, 71, 72, 77 – 79; Hitchcock influence on 76; idea of freedom in 65, 67 – 70, 81, 98, 108, 110, 119; jump cuts in 72, 74, 75, 76, 78; as New Wave film 71 – 74; philosophical reflection in 5, 45, 50, 62, 123; plot 64 – 65

Brecht, Bertolt 51 – 52, 75 Brisson, Luc 19 Byrnes, Alicia 115 Camus, Albert 66 Carroll, Noel 57 – 58 Cavell, Stanley 2 cave myth 8 – 9, 11, 12, 17, 21, 52 Chabrol, Claude 67 Chaplin, Charlie 55 cinematics 42 cinematic techniques: in Breathless 41, 53 – 55, 72 – 77; hyper-realism 76, 77; jump cuts 72, 74, 75, 76, 78; self-critique 44 – 45, 49, 52, 56 – 60, 64, 113, 120; in Under the Skin 59 cinema vérité 76, 101 counter-narratives 41 – 43, 56 Deleuze, Gilles 2, 6 Descartes, René 2 – 3, 9, 10, 13, 14, 15 – 16; Meditations 2, 17 disbelief, suspension of 50 – 51, 52 di Sica, Vittorio 41 documentary style 19, 36, 37, 40, 42, 72 – 73, 75 – 76, 101 Downhill 96 – 97 dreams and dreaming 3, 9, 13, 15 – 16, 17 Dreyfus, Hubert 67 Duchamp, Marcel 57, 59 Dziga Vertov Group 79 Eisenstein, Sergei 40 Empire 57 epistemology 4, 10, 13, 16, 51, 61, 70, 83

134 Index Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind 16, 62 Euthyphro (Plato) 11 Evans, Richard 26 evil demon hypothesis 3, 9, 13, 14, 15, 17 existentialism 64, 92, 107, 111 – 112, 117; in Breathless 65 – 68, 70 – 71, 79, 80, 122 experience machine 13, 16 Faber, Michel 104, 105 facticity 108 – 109 factory farming 105 – 106 Fairfax, Daniel 67 Faxon, Nat 96 feminism 111 – 113 Film as Film (Perkins) 39 film and philosophy: argument-centred reflection 80; arguments supporting 3 – 4; bold position 6 – 8; in Breathless 5, 45, 50, 62, 123; the cave myth 8 – 9, 11; cinematic reflection 44 – 63; in dialogue 60 – 63; experience-centred reflection 41 – 43, 44 – 45, 61 – 62, 71, 89, 120 – 121; experimental reflection 71 – 72; film as thought experiment 14 – 15, 18 – 19, 60 – 61, 118; films as bourgeois illusionism 8 – 9; in Force Majeure 5, 45, 62, 81 – 82, 91 – 93, 98, 107, 123; generality objection 10 – 11; historico-critical reflection 48, 63, 80; null view 5 – 6, 8, 10, 60; radical position 6 – 7; in Under the Skin 5, 45, 62, 107 – 110, 123 filmosophy 6 Filmosophy (Frampton) 3, 6, 42 films: Bollywood 46; cinema vérité 76, 101; documentary style 19, 36, 37, 40, 42, 72 – 73, 75 – 76, 101; domestic action movies 82, 89, 120; experimental 56 – 60, 64, 82, 89, 96; film noir 73 – 75, 114 – 115; having lives of their own 62 – 63; and history 19 – 20; Hollywood 46, 76, 77; identity of 44, 56, 64, 71, 82, 89, 120; as ideological indoctrination 8 – 9; New Wave 46, 64, 67, 73, 78, 79; realist 41, 72 – 73, 75, 101; science fiction 2,

40, 46, 56, 98 – 100, 104, 117, 120; and society’s dominant ideology 8, 47, 51; structural 57; subjective vs. objective presentation 53 – 55; YouTube videos 84; see also cinematic techniques; film and philosophy Fire and the Sun, The (Murdoch) 12 Force Majeure: American remake of 96 – 97; cinematic conventions in 59; counter-narrative in 48; gender roles in 49, 56, 82, 89, 93 – 95, 94, 96 – 97, 113 – 114, 119; ironic redemption 90 – 97; opening scene 1 – 2, 82 – 83; philosophical reflection in 5, 45, 62, 81 – 82, 91 – 93, 98, 107, 123; plot 82 – 83; question of ‘moral instinct’ 83 – 89, 92 – 93, 121 – 122; Under the Skin compared to 101 – 102 Foster, Maureen 116 Foucault, Michel: on counter-memories 25 – 26; historico-critical reflection 5, 18, 20 – 26, 35, 63, 122; History of Sexuality (Vol. 2) 31; on Kant 32; and Marxism 47 – 48; on normalising 49; opposing rationalism 121; on phenomenology 5, 26 – 27; philosophical questions of 20 – 21, 120; on the present 28, 45; Sartre’s affinity with 33 Foucault and Fiction (O’Leary) 26 Frampton, Daniel 3, 6, 42 gaze: female 111, 112 – 113, 115; male 99, 111, 113 – 115; of the other 108, 112 Gehr, Ernie 57 Glazer, Jonathon 1, 98; other works by 124; see also Under the Skin global deception 2, 9, 10, 13, 14, 16 Godard, Jean-Luc: assessment of Breathless 68, 71, 72, 77 – 79; as auteur 78, 79; critical writing of 39, 67, 72, 73, 75; as director 1, 41, 52, 62, 99; Dziga Vertov Group period 79; and existentialism 65 – 67; influence of 76; making Breathless 64, 67, 76, 78; other works by 124; see also Breathless Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von 38

Index  135 Gondry, Michel 16 Gorfinkel, Elena 107 Grau, Christopher 16, 62 Gray, Lorraine 19 Griffin, James 32 Griffith, D.W. 40, 72 Gunda 36 Harder They Fall, The 1, 69 Hawks, Howard 73 hedonism 13 hedonistic utilitarianism 13, 62 Hegel, G.W.F. 20, 21 – 22 Heidegger, Martin 6 Herodotus 19 heroism 84, 89 Hesiod 11 history 23 – 24; empirical 26; Foucault’s approach to 20 – 26; Hegel’s approach to 21 – 22; as narrative 23 – 24; philosophical 21 History of Sexuality, Vol. 2 (Foucault) 31 Hitchcock, Alfred 54, 73, 76 Hobbes, Thomas 13, 86 – 87 Homer 11 humanism 92 Husserl, Edmund 5, 33 hyper-realism 76, 77 identity: female 94 – 95, 97, 98; of the film 44, 56, 64, 71, 82, 89, 120; human 108; male 90, 107; moral 84, 88, 91, 93, 95; national 25; personal 24, 45, 91, 99, 93, 108 illusionism 51; bourgeois 8 – 9 Inception 16 In Defense of History (Evans) 26 individualism 68, 70, 78 internet 23 jump cuts 72, 74, 75, 76, 78 Kael, Pauline 39 Kant, Immanuel 32, 91 – 92, 118, 120 Keaton, Buster 55 Kossakovsky, Victor 36 Kurosawa, Akira 26 La Chinoise 75 Lacombe, Lucien 48 Lang, Fritz 42

Levi, Mica 102 Locke, John 24 Lyotard, Jean-François 25, 59 Mach, Ernst 13 Malle, Louis 48 Marx, Karl 20, 22 Marxism 8 – 9, 45, 46, 47 – 48, 49, 50, 51, 52, 64, 68, 71, 78 – 79, 80 Matrix, The 2 – 3, 9 – 10, 14, 16 – 17 Matrix and Philosophy, The (Irwin) 3 McBride, Jim 77 McClelland, Tom 16, 60 – 61 Meditations on First Philosophy (Descartes) 2, 17 Méliès, Georges 40 Melville, Jean-Pierre 78 Mennel, Barbara 73 Moi un Noir 76 Monaco, James 74 moral instinct 83 – 89, 92 – 93 moral luck 84, 91 – 92, 122 Mulhall, Stephen 3, 6, 7 Mulvey, Laura 113 Murdoch, Iris 12 Nagel, Thomas 84, 91 – 92 Narration in Light (Wilson) 42, 45 narrative: films without 57; historical 19 – 20, 26; mythical 19; philosophical context for 60 – 61; as philosophical discussion 119, 121; and thought experiments 10 – 15, 17, 18 – 19; as visual experience in film 35 – 41; see also point of view Nausea (Sartre) 33 – 34, 65 – 66 Nietzsche, Friedrich 6, 20, 27, 31 nihilism 66 No Exit (Sartre) 108 Nolan, Christopher 16 Nozick, Robert 13, 16 O’Leary, Timothy 26, 27 – 28 On Film (Mulhall) 3, 6 Osterweil, Ara 113 Östlund, Ruben 1, 81, 124; see also Force Majeure Parsons, Talcott 89 Patton, Paul 10

136 Index Perkins, V.F. 39, 40, 46 phenomenology 5, 26 – 27, 33 – 34, 67 philosophising 2 – 8, 16, 17, 18, 20, 31, 56 – 57, 59, 61, 63, 118, 120 – 122 philosophy: analytic 118; Anglo-American 5, 13, 29; anti-Platonism 5, 7, 21, 26, 31, 63, 118, 122; argumentative discourse of 11 – 12; of art 59; European 5, 63; existentialism 65 – 68, 70 – 71, 79, 80, 107, 111 – 112, 117, 122; Greek 11 – 12; hedonism 13; hedonistic utilitarianism 13, 62; hypothetical approach 29; moral 62, 91, 99, 121 – 122; phenomenology 5, 67; Platonism 5, 28; pragmatism 5; rationalism 4 – 5, 12, 118, 121; and thought experiments 28 – 34; see also film and philosophy Plato 4, 5, 10, 19, 20, 32, 50, 51, 103, 118; cave myth 8 – 9, 11, 12, 17, 21, 52; Euthyphro 11; Republic 8, 11, 12, 103; Theaetetus 11 Platonism 5, 28, 33, 51, 52, 63, 80, 122 Poetics (Aristotle) 52 point of view: alien 98, 100 – 101, 103, 104 – 105, 107, 110, 111, 124; of characters 53 – 56, 85; feminist 113; god’s-eye 55; male 36, 77; morally infused 102 – 103; narrative 49; philosophical 13; Platonic 51; subjective 54; third person 54 Poster, Mark 25 postmodernism 26 pragmatism 5 Predator 99 presentism 24 progressivism 24 – 25 propaganda 9 Puchko, Kristy 116 Pushover 78 Quine, Richard 78 Rash, Jim 96 Rashomon 26 Rashomon effect 26 rationalism 4 – 5, 12, 31, 33, 43, 63, 118, 121 Rawls, John 13 Ray, Man 57 Ray, Nicholas 73

realism 41, 72 – 73, 75, 101 Rear Window 54 Republic (Plato) 8, 11, 12, 103 Rivette, Jacques 67 Rorty, Richard 5 Rossellini, Roberto 41 Rouch, Jean 76 Sartre, Jean-Paul 33 – 34, 62, 64 – 68, 79, 94, 107 – 109, 114, 122; Being and Nothingness 65 – 66, 109, 111 – 112; on moral agency 92 – 93; Nausea 33 – 34, 65 – 66 sceptical conjectures 15 Schick, Theodore 29 – 30 science fiction 2, 40, 46, 56, 98 – 100, 104, 117, 120 Second Sex, The (Beauvoir) 111 – 112, 114 self-reflection 84 – 85 Serene Velocity 57 – 58 Simulacra and Simulation (Baudrillard) 9 Sinnerbrink, Robert 6 situationist views 88 Smith, Justin 23 Smith, Murray 16 Snyder, Timothy 83 social contract 13 social psychology 88 Socrates 11, 29 Stam, Robert 8 Sterrit, David 68 subjectivism 71 Taylor, Charles 92 Terminator 99 Theaetetus (Plato) 11 Thing, The 99 Thinking on Screen (Wartenberg) 3, 7, 10 – 11, 14, 16, 19, 35 Thinking through Film (Cox and Levine) 43, 61 – 62 thought experiments 13 – 17, 18 – 19, 60 – 61, 118; vs. philosophical experiences 28 – 34 Thucydides 19 Tolkien, J.R.R. 50 Total Recall 16 Trip to the Moon, A 40 Truffaut, François 62, 64, 67, 72, 73, 78 truth: eternal 33; and falsity 37 – 38; historical 25; timeless 21

Index  137 Under the Skin: on becoming human 103 – 110; cinematic techniques 59; compared to Force Majeure 101 – 102; confronting otherness 54, 56, 98 – 103, 121, 124; film compared to novel 104 – 106; gendered relations in 99, 111 – 117, 119 – 120, 121; opening scene 1 – 2, 101 – 102; philosophical reflection in 5, 45, 62, 107 – 110, 123; plot 103 – 104 utilitarianism, hedonistic 13, 62 Verhoeven, Paul 16 viewer: challenging 23, 47, 58 – 59, 99, 102 – 104, 111, 117; controlling viewers’ access to narrative 41 – 43, 47, 62 – 63; distancing of 85, 98;

male 113, 116; perspective of 54, 55, 63, 69 – 70, 101; relationship with film 50 – 56, 75, 105 virtual reality 9 Wachowskis 2 Warhol, Andy 57 Wartenberg, Thomas 3, 7, 10 – 12, 14, 16, 18 – 20, 35 – 36, 60, 118 Williams, Bernard 91 Wilson, George 42, 45 With Babies and Banners 19, 36 Wittgenstein 30 You Only Live Once 42 YouTube videos 84 Zabunyan, Dork 47