Hooplah

Imagine, say, the Oval Office, with functionaries, aides, public service officials and other assorted personalities. Imagine the President of the USA, standing in the midst of all those people. Or perhaps more prosaically, based on the situation, imagine the Parliament House overlooking the dense, modernist skyscrapers of Singapore. How does your mind process such a scene? Mine is incapable of doing so without adding at least a sheen of cinematic graininess. The scene is literally like a movie. Actions, words are caught in the crystalline, fragile web of otherness, of fictive reality a few degrees removed from my own. A kind of solipsism of the mundane. When I think of President Bush, for example, I think of an actor who has so effectively inhabited his role that he has become Bush. He is Bush, and always has been, from childhood. This I can accept, viscerally, but only when it is concomitant to the idea that Bush is nothing more than a fictive portrait, that once my attention wanders away from my mind’s portrait of the scene, the President Bush will disappear, to be replaced with an idea and a person who inhabits that idea, the actor-Bush who is capable of being mundane and prosaic in a way that Bush-the-idea, the President of the United States, cannot. More directly put, I find it somehow difficult to accept, on a gut level, the idea that President Bush reads the paper in the toilet, or chokes on pretzels while watching a football game, or flashed le fingre at the cameras before a press conference. The events that lie outside of my immediate perception, especially those events with great import on the state of Humanity as a whole, are concealed underneath a veil of other-reality. The mind’s cinematic grain, so to speak. I suppose it is this very effect that restricts people from true communion with each other, across space and time. One has to experience something to fully appreciate it, on the gut level.

To wit, coming back to the metaphor of the cinematic grain, what do movies like the upcoming W (President Bush’s biopic) or perhaps Tropic Thunder, or Saving Private Ryan, with its graphic, no-holds-barred depiction of the gore and death of warfare, mean to us? To me, it is precisely such fictive portraits that reinforce the intangible veil between my reality and the reality of the other. It’s called the fourth wall, which is never to be spoken of by the actors themselves, but nevertheless exists in the mind of the viewer, who abandons his sense of incredulity in favour of the fictive experience but enthuses, ironically, of the fourth wall’s very intangibility after the said experience, thus acknowledging its reality even more. Movies, in other words, reinforce the sense of dislocation between the viewer and the fictive subject matter. By watching a movie like W, for example, the viewer obtains an intellectual and artistic understanding of the reality behind the fictive portrait. Nevertheless, the impression of the cinematic grain, of the fourth wall’s sequestering of the viewer and the viewee, becomes even stronger. Viscerally, the viewer begins to see the events of the world outside his own as being like movies. Being fictive portraits, idealized portraits that somehow proscribe the very prosaic and mundane facts of life. For life cannot be captured wholly without losing some of its experiential integrity. The very fact that life is staged in movies leads to the creation of that fourth wall, which, in any case, exists because of the artificiality of the scene. That the scene is not spontaneous in any meaningful way (barring the adlibs that have gone on to become great quotes from movies: cf Heere’s Johnny!). Meaninglessness, or chaos, is either excised from the portrait or made to carry extraneous significance. Thus is the meaningless mundane transformed to significance in a movie, and by that very token, loses its mundane aspect, thereby creating, once again, the impression of the ever-important cinematic grain.

In conclusion, I have droned on about two things: one, the dislocation between a viewer’s reality and the reality of things he does not see, called the cinematic grain effect; as well as the propensity of an artistic format, of a fictive representation of reality, to reinforce that dislocation by adapting the world into a format that the viewer can accept viscerally, in turn informing the viewer (falsely) of the very artificiality of the reality that the fictive format was based on, giving him the impression of otherworldliness. The former is already a fixture of most human imagination, movies only reinforce it; but I am in no way dissing art. There is nothing wrong with viewing life as a movie, because, despite everything, it is one. It is a format in which the roles of the actor and the character are reversed. And insofar as the human imagination lacks the capacity to achieve a visceral understanding of the things it does not see, it can partially make up for that lack by informing itself intellectually, on a conscious level. Why else does one read the news, if all the world is not a stage in which the farthest end lies so far beyond the horizon that the viewer cannot see it?

***

In other news, Spore!!!!!!111One