The Eyes Have It: Cinema and the Reality Effect

Notes

223 Notes Prelude: Corn 1. See for example, Georges Seurat’s 1884 drawing of a monkey (as a study for La Grande Jatte) and his 1883 conté crayon drawing of a colt, which illustrate the ébauche and the étude, respectively (Courthion 62; 58). 1.Vivid Rivals 1. This is a cheat, of course: in “reality,” the little boy is not having his focus pulled, but we can solicitously imagine that he is, and thus protect ourselves from having to fully engage with what is fictionally engaging his young and unprepared consciousness. 2. Even this depends for our sense of its authenticity on the conviction that it is really Hitler we are watching, and not one of the many actors who have pretended subsequently to be him (see Pomerance“Villain” for a partial listing). 3. The“far-below” shot is neatly deconstructed in Mike Nichols’s Postcards from the Edge (1990) where we see the horizontal mechanics of such a “vertical” perspective as actors work on a diegetic soundstage. 4. Other specialists work in other films to produce realistic, as opposed to“real,” effects, making things look as presumably they would look if they existed in our world while avowedly they do not: Jack Pierce making up Lon Chaney Jr. in 1941 or Rick Baker and some thirty-odd others doing Benicio Del Toro in 2010 as a “wolfman,” for example; the age of blockbuster spectaculars has been rife with“aliens,”“monsters” and hideously wounded humans,“mutants,” or“zombie/undead.” 5. A moment like that in The Purple Rose of Cairo (1985), in which a character walks out of the movie screen and into the audience, being the exception that proves the rule. 6. Cinematic history is replete with cases of films about filmmaking (8½ [1963]; Alex in Wonderland [1970]; The Stunt Man [1980]) and, as Jane Feuer has artfully pointed out, musicals about doing musicals (Footlight Parade [1933]; Singin’ in the Rain [1952]; Three for the Show [1955]), but a film in production 224 Notes to Pages 38 – 50 at this writing raises the bar by migrating into “real” territory. This is the Ivan Reitman production of Sacha Gervasi’s film Hitchcock, based on Steven Rebello’s discursion Alfred Hitchcock and the Making of Psycho (1999), in which Scarlett Johansson will play Janet Leigh, and Helen Mirren and Anthony Hopkins the happily married Hitchcocks. One may expect that the degree to which any of the actors will have been cast, or will be made up, to resemble real persons no longer alive (Hopkins has already been photographed in a typically puffy profile shot) will reflect the “knowness” of the character. To miscast Hitchcock would be a problem for the general viewer. To miscast Barney Balaban, Bernard Herrmann, or Joe Stefano would be a “reality” breaker for only film scholars; but perhaps film scholars have become the core of a new audience. Perhaps, too, the general population has become indistinguishable, as far as Hollywood producers are concerned, from scholars of film. 7. Ferren was even struck himself by the finished work.“I liked Vertigo, both as a picture and my sequence,” he wrote to associate producer Herbert Coleman. “I saw it twice. The first time I was put out by some technical roughtnesses [sic] the second time I thought that I had a real kick and was fine in and for the story. Incidentally Bob Burkes [sic] photographed the thing (I mean the entire picture) beautifully” (Ferren to Coleman). 8. On the not dissimilar rhetoric of the biblical spectacular, see Sobchack “Surge.” 9. In January 2009, I screened The Mummy for a delighted audience of adults and students at Toronto’s Royal Ontario Museum. Afterward, there were numerous comments and questions, not a single one of which reflected any doubt on the viewers’ part that they had been seeing not “Egypt” but Egypt. 10. “Pure” because unformed by arbitrary human action (and thus “natural”). While Zombie and surgical adventures could show bodies erupting with mechanical parts (as in The Terminator [1984] and its sequels), the constructions they use tend to be hyper-organic, and what“leaks” is usually biological matter , that which is beyond our aegis to create (that is, that which is created only through the “magic” of human sexual reproduction). Most cyberadventures, such as David Cronenberg’s Videodrome (1983) or Jon Favreau’s Iron Man (2008), offer a body/machine hybrid expressly built as such, rather than what is actually more common in...