Film and Risk

Introduction: The Film Phenomenon and How Risk Pervades It

1 mette hjort Introduction The Film Phenomenon and How Risk Pervades It The language of risk is common coin these days, informing virtually all areas of our lives. Parent/teacher discussions, whether in Asia or the West, make reference to learner profiles, and these often include the idea of being a “risk taker.” Thus, for example, a child may be encouraged proudly to report that the recent class excursion with Outward Bound allowed her to meet one of her learning targets, to become “more of a risk taker.” Discourses related to health, whether journalistic or medical, draw attention to long-term risks accompanying lifestyle choices. Phenomena such as Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS), climate change, and the most recent financial meltdown all offer opportunities to reflect on the extent to which life in the twenty-first century is shaped by global risks, by the threat of different kinds of harm, some of them with remote originating causes. The ease with which many of us “speak” the language of risk is itself an indication of the extent to which highly sophisticated studies of risk, by economists, sociologists, and medical professionals, among many others, have been absorbed into the language of everyday life. That risk should be a pervasive feature of contemporary life is anything but surprising. As Peter L. Bernstein argues persuasively in his intriguing study Against the Gods: The Remarkable Story of Risk, “The revolutionary idea that defines the boundary between modern times and the past is the mastery of risk: the notion that the future is more than a whim of the gods and that men and women are not passive before nature. Until human beings discovered a way across that boundary, the future was a mirror of the past or the murky domain of oracles and soothsayers who held a monopoly over knowledge of anticipated events.” Bernstein’s is a fascinating story 2 Mette Hjort about the thinkers, many of them passionate gamblers, who showed “the world how to understand risk, measure it, and weigh its consequences.” While Bernstein sees the “Hindu-Arabic numbering system that reached the West seven to eight hundred years ago” as having facilitated probabilistic reasoning about the future, he understands the “serious study of risk” to have begun in the seventeenth century, as a result of two French thinkers’ mathematical study of “a seventeenth-century version of the game of Trivial Pursuit.” Blaise Pascal and Pierre de Fermat’s findings, claims Bernstein, “led to the discovery of the theory of probability” and this in turn made possible “the capacity to manage risk, and with it the appetite to take risk and make forward-looking choices,” that is, the very “energy that drives the economic system forward.” According to Bernstein, then, the ability to think in terms of risk, and the inclination to do so are, quite simply, defining features of modernity. And while modernity is now often held to be a plural phenomenon, admitting of different types and paths, Bernstein’s view that probabilistic reasoning about possible damage or harm pervades contemporary life is difficult to dispute. The global riskfocused debates prompted by the collapse of the 2009 Copenhagen Climate Change Conference clearly suggest the extent to which the language of risk is a lingua franca that is understood all around the world. What is striking is that while the study of risk has become a veritable industry over the last few decades, film scholars have had very little to say about the topic. Yet, risk has not been entirely ignored, either, for many film scholars do gesture toward risk or make passing reference to it. For example , in her book on the remake phenomenon, Encore Hollywood: Remaking French Cinema, Lucy Mazdon points to risk management, or risk aversion, as a possible way of understanding the remake strategy. And in his chapter “Gangsters, Cannibals, Aesthetes, or Apparently Perverse Allegiances,” Murray Smith suggests that when we experience pleasure as a result of engaging with such characters as Hannibal Lecter (Silence of the Lambs, dir. Jonathan Demme, 1991), we do so in part because we are afforded the opportunity to explore “the extremes of possible or conceivable experience that we lack the opportunity or courage (emphasis added) to experience in reality.” Drawing on Greg Currie to weigh the advantage of imagination over actual experience, Berys Gaut chooses to foreground risk and the related questions of courage and danger: The great advantage of imagination over experience is...