Campaign for the American Reader: Pg. 69: "The Power of Movies"

Colin McGinn is an acclaimed philosopher with a long list of books and articles to his name. Many of those publications are written for professional philosophers, but two of my favorites-- The Making of a Philosopher and Ethics, Evil, and Fiction--are accessible and inviting to a much wider audience.

His two more recent books are the just-released Shakespeare's Philosophy and The Power of Movies: How Screen and Mind Interact (2005).

I was very pleased that he agreed to put The Power of Movies to the "page 69 test." Here is his response:

My book explores the power of the movie image to grip and enthrall the human mind. Why do movies and the mind seem so well-suited to one another? On page 69 I am considering the theory that the movie image is an incorporeal concoction of light analogous to the Cartesian immaterial mind—so that the interaction of screen and mind is like the interaction between two minds, yours and the one on the screen. I note that there is a crucial disanalogy between the immaterial self of Descartes and the movie image, namely that the latter is visible and two-dimensional while the former is invisible and non-spatial. This theory then gives way to the idea that the movie image is more like the “spiritual body”—the kind of body possessed by angels and ghosts. The screen image of a person is like a shadow of that person, and shadows are incorporeal (yet visible) counterparts of solid 3D people. Thus movies present us with the human body as transformed and dematerialized, rendered ethereal. Consider, say, the body of dancing Fred Astaire as he defies gravity.

The book also deals at length with the idea that movies resemble dreams, so that watching one is like being in a dream. Thus movies connect with a deep part of the psyche, both primitive and powerful. For example, movies dovetail visual sensation and emotion in the same kind of way that dreams carry emotionally charged sensory images. Accordingly, move watching appeals to part of ourselves that is activated during dreaming. Not surprisingly, then, a movie like The Wizard of Oz actually consists of a screened dream. But other movies too put images together in a “grammar” analogous to that of dreams—as when the camera jumps from one location to another without intermediate steps, just as dreams whisk us from one place to another.

Many thanks to Colin for the input.

Among the praise for The Power of Movies:

“The analogy between movies and dreams has a long history, but it has never been so thoroughly and provocatively explored as in Colin McGinn’s The Power of Movies. A must-read for anyone interested in films, dreams, or the mysteries of consciousness.”
–Walter Murch, editor and sound designer for Apocalypse Now and The English Patient

A brisk and often scintillating discourse on the striking similarities between dreams and movies.... [McGinn] fascinates as he shows how a film's narrative structure, spatial discontinuities, montage, length, even its gestation and distribution all resemble dreaming. He caps his series of analogies by suggesting that dreams and films perform cathartic functions for those in the dark, an experience he finds akin to an intense sexual ravishing. Given currency, this particular hypothesis may well raise the box office from its current slump by sending readers rushing out for a good movie. McGinn's observations will resonate with thoughtful moviegoers, who will surely annotate the text with their own dream and movie experiences.
--Kirkus Reviews

Warren Etheredge interviewed McGinn about the book, movies, and ... Tara Reid.