Doing Philosophy at the Movies

Richard A. Gilmore

Description

Doing Philosophy at the Movies finds the roots of profound philosophical ideas in the relatively ordinary context of popular, mostly Hollywood, movies. Richard A. Gilmore suggests that narratives of popular films like Hitchcock's Vertigo, John Ford's The Searchers, Woody Allen's Crimes and Misdemeanors, the Coen Brothers' Fargo, and Danny Boyle's Trainspotting mirror certain epiphanies in the works of great philosophers. Via Plato, Aristotle, Kant, Nietzsche, Wittgenstein, and Zðizûek, Gilmore addresses such themes as the nature of philosophy, the possibility of redemption through love, catharsis, the sublime, and the human problem of death. Gilmore argues that seeing these movies through the lens of certain philosophical ideas can show how deeply relevant both philosophy and the movies can be.

Preface

Acknowledgments

Introduction: What It Means to Do Philosophy

1. John Ford's The Searchers as an Allegory of the Philosophical Search

2. A The Usual Suspects Moment in Vertigo: The Epistemology of Identity

3. The American Sublime in Fargo

4. Visions of Meaning: Seeing and Non-Seeing in Woody Allen's Crimes and Misdemeanors

5. Oedipus Techs: Time Travel as Redemption in The Terminator and 12 Monkeys

6. Into the Toilet: Some Classical Aesthetic Themes Raised by a Scene in Trainspotting

7. Horror and Death at the Movies

Conclusion: The Dialectics of Interpretation

Notes

Index

Sujets

• Philosophy
• Cinema
• Film

Informations

• Publié par: State University of New York Press
• Date de parution: 01 février 2012
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9780791483534
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

Doing Philosophy at the Movies

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Doing Philosophy at the Movies

Richard A. Gilmore

S T A T E U N I V E R S I T Y O F N E W Y O R K P R E S S

Published by State University of New York Press, Albany

© 2005 State University of New York

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Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data

Gilmore, Richard A. Doing philosophy at the movies / Richard A. Gilmore p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0–7914–6391–5 (hardcover : alk. paper)—ISBN 0–7914–6392–3 (pbk : alk. paper) 1. Motion pictures—Philosophy. I. Title. PN1995.G495 2005 791.4301—dc22 2004008050

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10

Preface

Acknowledgments

Contents

Introduction: What It Means to Do Philosophy

1.

2.

3.

4.

5.

6.

7.

John Ford’sThe Searchersas an Allegory of the Philosophical Search

AThe Usual SuspectsMoment inVertigo: The Epistemology of Identity

The American Sublime inFargo

Visions of Meaning: Seeing and Non-Seeing in Woody Allen’sCrimes and Misdemeanors

Oedipus Techs: Time Travel as Redemption in The Terminatorand12 Monkeys

Into the Toilet: Some Classical Aesthetic Themes Raised by a Scene inTrainspotting

Horror and Death at the Movies

Conclusion: The Dialectics of Interpretation

Notes

Index

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Preface

Less than two months before he died of cancer, Wittgenstein wrote the fol- lowing, which was included in the collection of his writings entitledOn Certainty: “I am sitting with a philosopher in the garden; he says again and again ‘I know that that’s a tree’, pointing to a tree that is near us. Someone else arrives and hears this, and I tell him: ‘This fellow isn’t 1 insane. We are only doing philosophy.’ ” I read this as a sort of philo- sophical joke. It is a joke that says a lot about what Wittgenstein wants to criticize with respect to philosophy, but also about what he wants to cele- brate and pursue in philosophy. He wants to criticize a kind of empty arguing about concepts that are being considered outside their ordinary contexts in our everyday language practices. He wants to celebrate and pursue philosophy’s ability to determine when concepts are being misused in this way, as well as its ability to help us get some perspective on our ordinary ways of using language so that we can avoid slipping into bad, philosophical-type practices there as well. For my purposes, I would like to focus on his expression “We are only doing philosophy.” I like this formulation because it signals how philoso- phy is an activity like any other, like doing work or doing sports or doing one’s taxes. It has rules, primary concerns, secondary concerns, goals, suc- cesses and failures, and, most important of all, when it is done properly, it should be useful, it should serve some purpose, it shoulddosomething. Right up to the time of his death Wittgenstein continued to do philosophy. His close friend Normal Malcolm reports that on his deathbed, 2 Wittgenstein said, “Tell them I’ve had a wonderful life!” His life was, in fact, filled with many hardships, but the central activity of his life was doing philosophy, and, in the end, that seems to have been more than enough for him. When Wittgenstein speaks in this passage of “doing philosophy,” as though philosophy were a particular kind of activity you can choose to do or choose not to do, he implies that, like other activities you might choose to do, as you do more of it you will get better at it. Like any such activity, it may be difficult at first, but it gets easier as you practice doing it. I do

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not know whether it is important that everyone should do philosophy— my sense is that it is—but it can certainly be a source of pleasure and empowerment for those who do learn to do it. In the chapters that follow I will be considering some very popular movies from a philosophical perspective. Perhapsthephilosophical intu- ition is that there is more going on than mere appearances suggest. It is the sense that a more complicated dynamic may be at work in a situation than at first appears. You may have the sense that there is more going on, but not be at all clear what that more is; philosophy is all about tracking down what that more might be. There is a point in watching movies at which this idea inevitably begins to dawn on you. You begin to register signs, clues, that there may be a larger narrative at work simultaneous to the explicit narrative of the primary plot of the movie. This might be called the meta-narrative of a movie. I will be considering meta-narratives in movies that derive from philosophical ideas from the great philosophers in the Western tradition. I will be doing “readings” of the films that I consider. I will be looking at these movies not just as entertainment, but as texts, just as Descartes’ Meditationsare texts. The assumptions here are, first, thator the Bible there is something important in these texts, something worth learning about, and, second, that what it is that is important may not be immedi- ately obvious, may need to be searched for in the text. This search for meaning is generally referred to as an interpretation, and that is what I will be doing with the movies I will be discussing. I will be interpreting them to try to understand some of the lessons that they may have to teach. As with these movies, I see life, and the world in general, as like texts. There is a literal level to what happens, the simple facts of the case, but then there is also a higher, more abstract level, the level of relationships between things, the trajectory of a situation, a narrative of what is really going on. At the literal level you may see two people talking, but there are also all sorts of clues that you interpret and you see that these two people are not just talking, they are also in love. The love part is literally invisi- ble, but can be plain as day if you know how to read the signs, if you know how to interpret the situation. And, of course, to be able to see when two people are in love you have to know a lot about people, about how people act when they are doing business and how they act when they are just being sociable, and how they act when they are in love. That is a lot to learn. A lot of what growing up is about is learning to interpret the world at this level. Knowledge of this level is very empowering. And, of course, there is always more to learn because the relations between things, between people, or in any situation, are infinite. There is always a larger story that can be told. There is always more to understand. So that is what I will be looking for in these movies; not symbols so much as clues

Preface

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to the relationships between things, to the relationships between people and things, to the relationships between people and people, and to the potential trajectories of a given situation. By referring to “the potential trajectories of a given situation” I just mean recognizing the signs in a situation that suggest where the situation might be going. This idea is sort of like Aristotle’s notion of an entelechy (literally, the end contained in something). For Aristotle this is the energy in a thing to become what it is supposed to be, the thing in an acorn that drives it to become a mighty oak. There is something similar to this in every situation, a kind of directional energy which, if you know how to read it, will help you to anticipate what is going to happen. We are doing this kind of reading of situations all of the time. We do this in conversa- tions, anticipating what a person will say next. We do it while driving; if a car ahead of us has put on its left blinker three times in a row without turning it tells us that this driver is not sure where he or she is and may stop or turn erratically. Again, to be able to read this kind of beyond-the- literal narrative in a situation will take study and practice to learn—which is why teenagers have so many car accidents (which I know from my own personal experience). Since the primary activity that I will be doing, the primary lens through which I will be reading film, is philosophy, I would like to make a couple of final introductory remarks about philosophy and movies. Stanley Cavell says that “the creation of film was as if meant for philoso- 3 phy.” I would like to add that the inverse of that also seems true to me, that the creation of philosophy was as if meant for film. What I mean by that is that what I take to be the best part of a film is the part of the film that is about the higher, nonliteral realm of relationships and the trajecto- ries of things. From this perspective, as entertaining as the literal story of the film may be, the real measure of how good a movie is is determined by the conversation after the movie. An exciting conversation will be inspired by a movie in which the relations suggested larger and larger ramifica- tions, or a more and more complex network of interrelations. Philosophy is, in some sense, just about trying to understand as much as possible of what is going on in a situation, on all levels. Philosophy is all about trying to figure out what is really going on. To talk about a movie, to try to understand what went on in it, to try to interpret it, is to do philosophy. Over the centuries philosophers have developed some very sophisticated tools for interpreting things. I will be using some of those tools for inter- preting popular movies. I have mentioned two levels of reality (which is itself a very philo- sophical idea); a literal level and a more abstract level of relationships between things and trajectories of situations. There is another level that I want to suggest also exists, and exists as real-ly, as those two levels, but is