Why Movies Move Us

COMMENTARY WHY MOVIES MOVE US Roger Bacon Much speculation and debate have centered on the new media. Many fear that "television in particular is . . . the agent of moral and aesthetic education, supplying a continuous stream of attitude-forming information under the label of entertainment, replacing the teaching of church and family and school."1 Because of the filmic pervasiveness in our times, the phenomenon of cinema's audience affectiveness and the causes for this unique reaction have intrigued many investigators. Several theories attempt to explain why movies are different from other art forms, but few seem complete, accurate, or empirical enough to deal adequately with the problem in all of its complexities. Professor Marshall McLuhan's Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man deals extensively with the power of film and develops several interesting theories concerning it. Primarily, he postulates, film's impact is due to the medium becoming the message itself. It is an extension of our senses, and therein lies its tremendous force. He contends that, as with all new media, two facts need underscoring: that a radical reorganization of "our sense life" occurs,2 and that it comes from the new medium's use of its preceding medium as content (hence the novel, play, and opera become the content of the succeeding cinematic medium).3 The result of this he calls "implosion"; its initial effect is immediacy and a sense of actuality. Employing communication theorists' models, he asserts that movies are essentially "programming, as it were; one can play back the materials of the natural world in a variety of levels and intensities of style."4 This transmission of data always is transformed via the vehicle that transmits it. Hence the movies ' power to "store" information (unique likeprint in its capacities of uniformity and repeatability5) is very great. And from these potentialities come a most twentieth century device—a mirror of the external world, now automated.6 This theory of McLuhan's continues into all aspects of the film's role as shaper "of our own consciousness" in the contemporary world.7 He claims that this "inclusive form of the icon," this programmed "ratio of the senses," this "statement without syntax, the delineation of the inner world by 'gestalt' " is the modem movie.8 And yet a central theory of "why" still seems lacking from McLuhan's assessments. To attack this giant theorist when armed with so few xDenys Thompson, ed. Discrimination and Popular Culture (Baltimore: Penguin, 1964), p. 16. "Second edition (New York: New American Library, 1964), p. 33. sMcLuhan, p. 32. 4McLuhan, p. 65 6McLuhan, p. 170. eMcLuhan, p. 171. 7McLuhan, p. 67. "McLuhan, pp. 67, 181. 65 66RMMLA BulletinJune 1972 qualifications and new proposals might seem David-like, but such is the attempt of the present article. My proposed explanation is based upon qualifications of the McLuhan position, with a wider definition of "point of view" as we traditionaUy employ it in literary criticism. In literary analysis the emphasis is on relationship of the narrator to the action and other characters in the setting vis-á-vis his placement in the "scene"; here the focus is on "point of view." For example, fiction is classified and investigated by this method of narration analysis. Among others, there is the diary narration; dramatic or interior monologue;9 first, second, or third person point of view; self-conscious narrator; observers and narrator-agents.10 But whatever the relationship of the narrator to the character, scene, theme, or audience, he remains the "visible teller." As Thornton Wilder noted, "A play is what takes place. A novel is what one person tells us took place."11 The distinction also applies to the cinema. This storyteUer's presence is so universal that the point of view analysis is most productive in understanding various fictive efforts, structures, and story-audience relationships. After all, if the story is in print before us, obviously it mast have been composed by someone; consequently we seek the point (angle, relative position, nature of the vantage place of view) from which the story is "seen." In cinematography the emphasis is upon the latter term, "view." Contrary to the McLuhan thesis, the difference between the impact of the two...