Alternative Realities

CARL PLANTINGA is the Arthur H. DeKruyter Chair of Communication at Calvin University in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Among his many books are Rhetoric and Representation in Non-Fiction Film, Moving Viewers: American Film and the Spectator’s Experience, and Screen Stories: Emotion and the Ethics of Engagement.
 

Introduction
 
Much of the fun of watching Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2 (2017) is marveling at the fantastical world and characters thought up by the filmmakers. Aside from the very human-looking Peter Quill (Chris Pratt), make-up and digital artists present us with a diverse group, from the green-skinned Gamora (Zoe Saldana) and blue-skinned, crooked-toothed Yondo Udanta (Michael Rooker), to Gamora’s blue-grey cyborg sister Nebula, to Baby Groot, the odd combination of tree sapling and human infant, and finally, to Rocket, a genetically engineered bounty hunter and mercenary who looks much like a terrestrial raccoon. These Guardians of the Galaxy travel through dozens of fantastical worlds populated by bizarre landscapes and outlandish creatures. The story even features a god, Ego (Kurt Russell), with his very own planet. This god at one point morphs into television star David Hasselhoff, but this is nothing compared to the fantastical changes to his planet itself. The spectacular interior of Ego’s planet was inspired by the fractal art of Hal Tenny, and was designed to be extremely geometrical, employing of many fractals, including Appolonian gaskets. 

This is a book about the imaginary worlds created in the medium of motion pictures. But it is also about the nature of this expressive and powerful medium. The movies are capable of producing mind-blowing fantastical worlds and characters. The very perceptual basis of film is rooted in illusion, since the illusion of movement results from a series of still images, projected in succession, that trick our eyes and brains into seeing something moving on the screen. The capacity of the medium for fantasy and the fantastic was recognized by the earliest practitioners. In the late 19thand early 20th centuries French filmmaker and magician Georges Méliès, in films such as A Trip to the Moon (1902) and The Kingdom of the Fairies(1903), used stop motion cinematography and whimsical sets and costumes to create bizarre worlds and impossible events. The rise of sophisticated digital technologies in the past decades, often combined with traditional make-up, costume, sets, etc., has resulted in a resurgence of popular animated fantasy, superhero, and science fiction films on the big screen, many of which present strange and imaginative alternative worlds.

One the other hand, however, the film medium has been characterized as realist, as having a unique and powerful capacity to reveal the objective world with a compelling power unequaled by any other representational medium. Some of the earliest projected films—those of the Lumière brothers in France in the late 19th century—were basically the world’s first home movies, designed simply to record an event occurring in front of the camera. This realist tradition continues today in both documentary and the fiction film. After viewing Debra Granik’s realist fiction films Winter’s Bone (2010) or Leave No Trace (2017), the viewer is left with a sense that the films provide an authentic approximation of life among meth manufacturers in the Ozarks, or in the latter film, what it might be like to live off the grid in the forests of Oregon. 

More than this sense of objective realism, however, the movies are also capable of representing the subjective experience of the world. Thinkers as diverse as psychologists Oliver Sacks, Williams James, Hugo Munsterberg, and the film theorist V.F. Perkins have pointed out that movies are particularly capable of representing individual human experience (Plantinga 2009: 48-49). Perkins likened the movie medium to a “mind recorder” (Perkins 133); it would be more accurate to call it an “experience recorder.” What might it be like, as a young woman, to marry a wealthy widower and move into his imposing mansion by the sea, then to be haunted by the creepy spectre of his deceased wife? What might it be like to volunteer to marry a Nazi in service of the CIA and your country, then realize that the man and his frightening mother have discovered your identity and have been gradually poisoning you? Watch Alfred Hitchcock’s films Rebecca (1940) and Notorious (1946) to find out. A movie doesn’t typically describe the experience (although verbal description through dialogue and/or voice-over narration is an option, of course), but typically provides the phenomenology of the experience—how it sounds, looks, and feels. It presents the spectator with images and sounds that often have a direct sensuous effect that resonates through the body and mind. 

Alternate Realities explores the complex intersection between reality and fantasy, subjective and objective representation in the movies. It examines the complexities inherent in a medium that can record what is in front of the camera on the one hand, and provide nearly limitless avenues for the creative expression of the human imagination on the other. Alternative Realities describes the nature of “world-making” in movies, and suggests some of the important ways that spectators are cued to respond to those worlds. It shows that even the most surreal fantasies ground their images, sounds, and narratives, to a large extent, in quotidian reality. On the other hand, it also shows that even the most realistic documentaries and realist fictional styles rely on creative structures that are products of the human imagination rather than mere imitations of the outside world. As French film theorist Jean Mitry writes, the movies break down the barrier between fantasy and reality. In the same way that the medium “‘injects fantasy’ into reality, so it ‘injects reality’ into fantasy” (363).  This combination of realism and imagination, of the objective and the subjective, the book argues, is a key to the expressive and psychological power of movies, and that power makes considerations of ethics vitally important. Ultimately, this book is a meditation on the capacity of movies to extend the human imagination but remain grounded in everyday reality. It also reveals the means by which movies can correspond with the world around us, and have the capacity to educate, illuminate, and inspire through a combination of realist and expressive technique.

Chapter 1, “Realism and the Imagination,” surveys what has been said and written about movie realism, or in other words, about the relationship between movies and the real world. Chapter 2, “Fantasy and Reality,” examines what is thought to be reality’s opposite--fantasy, and surveys some of the latest technologies used to create fantastical worlds and characters. A look at Patty Jenkins’s Wonder Woman (2017) and James Gunn’s Guardians of the Galaxy (2014) not only highlights the imaginative capacities of the medium, but also demonstrates that all popular fantasies remain firmly rooted in the subjective human experience of the world. Chapter 3, “Subjective Realities,” explores the capacity of movies to represent highly subjective experiences especially during bizarre or heightened states of mind and body. In examining films such as Christopher Nolan’s Memento (2000), Michel Gondry’s Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004), Joel and Ethan Cohen’s The Big Lebowski (1998), and Nolan’s Inception (2010), the chapter focuses on the representation of memories and dreams. 

Chapter 4, “Ruptured Realities,” focuses on films such as Martin Scorsese’s Shutter Island (2010), Lana and Lilly Wachowski’s The Matrix(1999), Franklin J. Schaffner’s Planet of the Apes (1968), and similar films that undermine our epistemic certainty. These are movies that that gradually disclose hidden worlds, that posit worlds within worlds, or that provide surprise endings that challenge everything we had previously assumed. These are the twist endings and “frame shifters,” screen stories that alter a previous frame of reference and throw viewers into serious doubt. The chapter ends with a discussion of the ethics of such films that challenge our assumptions.

Chapter 5, “Documentary: The Art of Reality?” examines the documentary and similar forms, including what is popularly called the “mockumentary.” The complicated relationship between movies and reality does not end with the fiction film. This chapter shows that although documentaries are sometimes called the “art of the real,” they nonetheless employ all sorts of creative techniques that are shared with fictional moviemaking. All documentaries are the product of the human imagination, not a mere record of whatever was in front of the camera. This chapter will reflect on the differences between fictions and documentaries in regard to their relationship to the actual world. The chapter examines the nature of docudrama, a kind of filmmaking that seems to mix elements of fiction and nonfiction, such that spectators are sometimes unsure about how to relate them to the historical record. Using the classic mock documentary Rob Reiner’s This is Spinal Tap (1976) as an example, the chapter also explores these “fake” documentaries that wear the mantle of documentary ironically. Mock documentaries, I will argue, are fiction films ironically posing as documentaries. 

The argument of the book is that the movies enact a dance between the creative, fantastical possibilities of the medium, and its groundedness in the everyday world and our experience of it. The moving image is a composite medium, using a variety of communicative techniques that sometimes have striking correspondences to our world and experience of it, but that are always used for some expressive or rhetorical purpose. To better understand the relationship between realism and fantasy, the subjective and objective, and fiction and nonfiction, is to better understand the medium and its possibilities, and the power of films to move us and influence cultures.  Finally, it should be noted that all dates for the films mentioned in this text are from the Internet Movie Data Base; all box office figures are from Box Office Mojo.

Introduction   
1          Realism and the Imagination
2          Fantasy and Reality
3          Subjective Realities
4          Ruptured Realities
5          Documentary: Art of the Real?
Acknowledgements  
Further Reading 
Works Cited
Index