Alone in the Dark

Just as Socrates and Descartes, in their different ways, argued for the ability of the human psyche to endure beyond death, film allows us to have the experience of the soul existing without needing a body to contain it. By Wyatt Mason

THE POWER

OF MOVIES

How Screen and Mind Interact.

By Colin McGinn.

Pantheon Books €24

When I read Michael Cunningham's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, The Hours, I admired it as a thoughtful, delicately considered engagement with the literary past and a sensitive articulation of various kinds of loss. Curiously, though, when I sat in a dark theatre and watched the film version, I sobbed and moaned as though I were being viciously beaten.

And although my cinematic reaction was physically extreme whereas my literary response was emotionally mild, I would say it is Cunningham's novel, and not the film it spawned, that is of greater value. I have had any number of interesting conversations about the book, and phrases from it stay with me ("without her there is no world at all"), but of the movie I can now remember precious little beyond its having left me sobbing.

I suspect the nature of this paradox has everything to do with what the philosopher and Rutgers professor Colin McGinn means when he writes, "Movies carry some sort of psychic charge that no other art form – perhaps no other spectacle – can quite match." The very useful question that McGinn poses in The Power of Movies (and that I imagine I am not alone in hoping to see resolved), is precisely what it is about film that allows its products to insinuate themselves so swiftly and deeply into our all-too-vulnerable beings.

One might try to arrive at an answer by making a comprehensive study of famous movies, or conducting a series of conversations with notable film makers or undertaking a neurological profile of the brain while reading a book versus viewing a film, but McGinn has nothing so practical in mind.

Rather, his approach is elevatedly philosophical: "I had been working with the idea that our immersion in our dreams is analogous to the immersion we experience in fictional works, especially films... But then it occurred to me that perhaps... Our experience of films is conditioned by our prior experience with dreams. Could it be that the allure of film is explained by the fact that films evoke the dreaming mind of the viewer?" Although McGinn acknowledges that "the dream interpretation of film has a history," he also asserts that "the idea had never been fully developed and treated as a theory to be argued for and tested." The Power of Film, then, is a theory put to a philosophical test, which sounds like a promisingly rigorous line of inquiry. But before McGinn tests that theory, he attempts to dismantle "the particular way in which we visually apprehend the screen". This turns out to be an unfortunate choice, for rather than providing the meticulous examination of the process of looking it might suggest, we are treated to rhetorical flights that provide little perspective of any useful kind.

For example, after citing the film editor Walter Murch's idea that television is a "look-at" medium whereas movies are a "look-into" medium, McGinn assembles a list of ten things we look into (holes, water, windows, etc) and then elaborates on each in order to evaluate the extent to which they inform the experience of "looking into" films. If this sounds potentially interesting, it is not. Here is an extended glimpse at one such rumination on how sky and screen are meant to be related: "As an extra piece of evidence for this analogy between sky and screen, consider what may not be a coincidence of nomenclature – the use of the word 'star' in both connections.

"There are the stars of the blackened night sky, arrayed and twinkling, aloof, distant, not shrinking from our awestruck gaze – the celebrities of the heavens; and there are those effects of light in human form, flitting across the capacious screen, remote yet intimate, shining, perfect – the film stars that equally populate our imagination. I venture to suggest that the use of the word 'star' in application to film actors derives from its use to name the denizens of the night sky, and not vice versa.

Then whoever it was who first employed that astronomical term in application to human beings must have been thinking of the stars of the sky, and hence analogising sky and screen". The word for this sort of writing is twaddle. The stars in the sky weren't named for movie stars?

Really? As for McGinn's claim that "whoever it was who first employed that astronomical term" was analogising sky and screen, I am sure that the first person on record in English to have likened people to stellar bodies ("The little stars, who hid their diminished rays in his presence, begin to abuse him") was not thinking about the cinematic implications of such an analogy in 1779 – a fact that McGinn could have unearthed in 15 efficient seconds in the Oxford English Dictionary. In place of argument or even accurate information, too much of The Power of Film is given over to specious "philosophising" of this kind. That few readers will have the patience to get past the book's first 60 turgid pages is doubly unfortunate, for when McGinn calms down he can be a lucid, rewarding writer. His chapter 'The Metaphysics of the Movie Image' is as enlightening as the book's earlier pages are undistinguished.

Staring at an actor on screen, McGinn notes that we feel "no alienation from a body like this, no division into me and it. It is the body as transformed into another type of material, an immaterial material.

There is something wondrous and magical about it.... It is a body without the ignominy of flesh." This is both good writing and good thinking. "ignominy of flesh" is borrowed from Yeats's lyric meditation on mortality, 'A Prayer for My Son' – an ideal allusion, for McGinn has seized on the metaphysical punch that film, unlike any other medium, delivers.

Just as Socrates and Descartes, in their different ways, argued for the ability of the human psyche to endure beyond death, film allows us to have the experience of the soul existing without needing a body to contain it. As McGinn writes, "Movies offer us a transformed reality in which the body is stripped of its material bonds and becomes united with our essential nature as centers of consciousness." It is a pity that The Power of Film is not similarily centred around its most essential, and illuminating, ideas.

© The New York Times