Understanding Indian Movies: Culture, Cognition, and Cinematic Imagination

Afterword: On Watching Indian Movies

Afterword On Watching Indian Movies Why do we watch Indian movies? Or, more generally, why do we watch movies at all? Recently, Lisa Zunshine devoted a book to a cognitive exploration of why we read fiction. The question about movies is directly parallel. Zunshine’s answer has to do with our “Theory of Mind,” our ability to infer other people’s intentions and beliefs. Perhaps, she suggests, we enjoy the experience of our smoothly functioning Theory of Mind capacities (20). This is undoubtedly a motive in certain cases. But the basic reason why we watch movies is much more general. It was isolated by Ed Tan when he emphasized the production of interest. We watch movies because they engage our interest, focusing our attention.Of course, this merely pushes the question back, for it leads us to ask just what engages our interest. But this is less of a problem. Cognitive research shows that a number of things excite interest. For example, novelty combined with comprehensibility appears to draw and sustain a pleasurable attentional focus (see Anderson 117–118).The point has, in a way, been obvious to literary critics all along—thus the commonplace that the most enjoyable plot is one we cannot predict (at least not with confidence), but that makes sense retrospectively. Cognitive research adds precision to this, and a requirement that we not lose our way in the middle as well. Of course, a mere spontaneous delight in novelty is not the whole story. 251 On Watching Indian Movies As just noted, interest engages our capacities for understanding.We feel the need to make sense out of novelty. Our effort to infer characters’ motives is one case of this sort. So is our effort to infer the thematic concerns of a work, and to make sense of the work as a whole—including the characters’ motivations—by reference to those thematic concerns. Indeed, even our sense of novelty is not simple and unmediated, some sort of pure experience of the work itself. A sense of novelty involves considerable cognitive processing. For example, there are perceptual conditions for the experience of novelty, and for inference-based understanding. We may find a work banal or derivative if we do not encode those features that are distinctive and creative. We may find a work muddled or incoherent if we do not encode those features that define its organization.There are also cognitive structures that orient our ongoing, anticipatory imagination and thus our response to a work. If we do not implicitly expect certain outcomes in a story, we will not find a shift away from those outcomes to be surprising and engaging. Perhaps most important, interest is a sort of preliminary or basic form of emotion. Indeed, it is very difficult to sustain interest in novelty if the novelty does not have further emotional consequences. Suppose Jones starts talking about beekeeping. I know nothing about beekeeping. In a sense, everything he says is novel. Moreover, his discussion is so lucid that I have no difficulty following. But I feel no emotional engagement with beekeeping .Thus his talk quickly becomes tedious; my interest flags; my mind wanders.Conversely, there are cases where interest does not require novelty or unexpectedness. The inevitable march toward an emotionally affecting outcome can very strongly provoke interest, despite its predictability. Thus our engagement with films is bound up with a series of complex cognitive operations. Interest is inseparable from thematic inference, encoding, the structural organization of encoded information with the associated generation of expectations, and more full-blown emotional response . We might consider each in turn. Thematic inference, by its nature, involves judging just what issues are of general importance in a society, what concerns are candidates for elaborate , particularized examination in a hugely expensive collaborative work of narrative art, such as a movie. At a general level, this is simple. An American film is unlikely to take up untouchability as a theme. An Indian film is unlikely to address anti-African racism. But it is, of course, considerably more difficult to isolate the precise issues at stake and to explore their de- 252 understanding indian movies tailed elaboration in a given case (e.g., going beyond a banal recognition that untouchability is bad to examine just what a particular film is saying about untouchability, point by point, as the story develops). Encoding is inseparable from our perceptual habits and our knowledge of...