Digital Space and Entanglement in Life of Pi, Gravity, and Interstellar
Total Page：16
File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb
2. Knowing Not What To Believe: Digital Space and Entanglement in Life of Pi, Gravity, and Interstellar William Brown Abstract In this essay, I argue that Life of Pi, Gravity, and Interstellar exemplify a cinema of entanglement. I do this by analyzing how the films’ depictions of vast space are ‘sublime’, while also considering how these sublime moments are made using computer-generated imagery. This sublime is potentially paradoxical in that the images are computer-generated (i.e. ‘fake’), while film theorists have historically considered the awe inspired by cinema to depend upon the indexicality of the (analogue) image (i.e. cinematographic images depict something real, with that reality being separate from humans). However, drawing on Immanuel Kant’s ‘mathematical sublime’ and Gilles Deleuze’s ‘powers of the false’, I argue how these three films stage a sense not of sublime detachment but of sublime entanglement. Keywords: CGI, mathematical sublime, powers of the false, Life of Pi, Gravity, Interstellar In this essay, I wish to explore the way in which Life of Pi (Ang Lee, USA/ Taiwan/ UK/Canada/India, 2012), Gravity (Alfonso Cuarón, USA/UK, 2013), and Interstellar (Christopher Nolan, USA/UK, 2014) all use computer- generated imagery to depict the vast expanses of space. My aim is not to explain the filmmaking technologies involved but to explore from a more theoretical perspective our engagement as viewers with such digital depictions of space. That is, I shall argue that these moments, and the narratives of each film more generally, invite viewers to question the Sæther, S.Ø. and S.T. Bull (eds.), Screen Space Reconfigured. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2020 doi 10.5117/9789089649928_ch02 56 WILLIAM BROWN reality of that which they see, thus bringing about a thinking—or intel- lectual—engagement or interaction with the films. This is not simply a rehashing of the passive-active spectator debate as represented respectively by Screen theorists in the 1970s and by subsequent cognitive film theorists. That is, the type of ‘thinking engagement’ or ‘interactivity’ that I wish to suggest here is not simply that viewers make cognitive inferences about how a character got from one place to another.1 Rather, it is that viewers are placed in a position of uncertainty regarding the reality of what they see, both in terms of not knowing where the CGI begins and ends and in terms of not knowing whether what we are seeing is ‘real’ within the films’ diegetic worlds. This uncertainty means that the viewer is encouraged intellectually to engage/interact with the films and thus to choose what to believe is true or real—as per Gilles Deleuze’s theorization of time- image cinema.2 I shall argue that this engagement/interaction and the subsequent process of choosing what to believe is linked to the supposedly non-indexical nature of the digital imagery that pervades these films. I also contend that the way in which these films ask us to consciously engage in the process of choosing to believe what is real/true reflects on how such choosing is not something limited to our appreciation of (certain) films, but that it is a part of our real-world existence. I shall do this by making reference to the concept of ‘entanglement’ as devised by feminist physicist Karen Barad.3 First, however, let us explore the nature of digital images by engaging with the established discourses surrounding the issue of indexicality. Indexicality It is an oft-repeated argument that the digital image does not have the indexical relationship with the world that the analogue image does. By being a direct inscription of light (or rather, of reflected light) on celluloid or polyester film stock, the analogue image functions as evidence, or proof, of what was before the camera at the time of the image’s taking. The digital image, meanwhile, is composed of the 1s and 0s of the binary code that is the image’s fundament and thus supposedly does not have the same direct link 1 For pioneering work along these lines, see Bordwell, Narration in the Fiction Film; Branigan, Narrative Comprehension and Film. 2 Deleuze, Cinema 2. 3 Barad, Meeting the University Halfway. KNOwiNG NOT WHAT TO BELIEVE 57 with reality, even if it is an image taken with a digital camera (as opposed to an image composed using graphics software). There is a large body of scholarship on this distinction, not all of which I shall be able to discuss as a result of limited space. Readers might look at work by, inter alia, Mary Ann Doane, Laura Mulvey, and D.N. Rodowick as initial considerations from within the field of film studies of the indexical in relation—even if only implicitly—to digital images.4 To engage only with one example, Philip Rosen draws on Charles Sanders Peirce to argue that the index, or the image’s referent (that which is in the image) is ‘an existent whose presence is required in the formation of the sign [here, the image]’.5 Rosen recounts how for many theorists digital images are, conversely, more like Peirce’s category of the icon: the digital exists ‘through pure ideals rather than impure actualities, things that will eventually be achieved, rather than an achieved state of things’.6 For Rosen, there is an implied ‘futurity’ in the digital image, then, in that it does not refer back to a reality that happened and of which the analogue image functions as proof—with this idea of proof being key for understanding both André Bazin’s ‘ontology of the photographic image’ and Roland Barthes’ concept of the punctum.7 Instead, being proof of nothing that has existed, of nothing that was before the camera at the time of the image’s taking, the digital image asks us to relate to it in terms of a present, or a present-future fashion.8 Now, Rosen is not unaware of the fact that ‘[i]t was, after all, possible to fake photographs before digitization’, a fact also discussed at some length by William J Mitchell.9 In comparison to the analogue image, however, the digital image possesses ‘infinite manipulability’ since it is not tied to the real world in the same way as an analogue image is via indexicality.10 This in turn supposedly lends to the digital image an ‘interactive’ quality, 4 Doane, The Emergence of Cinematic Time; Mulvey, Death 24x a Second; Rodowick, The Virtual Life of Film. 5 Rosen, Change Mummified, p. 18. 6 Ibid., p. 316. 7 Bazin, What is Cinema?; Barthes, Camera Lucida. Although Bazin’s work on the ‘ontology of the photographic image’ discusses the direct link between the world and the image, it is perhaps important to point out that he does not use the term indexical, which was instead a concept introduced by Peter Wollen, Signs and Meaning in the Cinema, pp. 120-155. We might also note that Bazin’s understanding of cinema is more nuanced than simply believing film to be a direct copy of the world, as Tom Gunning and Daniel Morgan have more recently explained; see Gunning, ‘The World in its Own Image’; Morgan, ‘Rethinking Bazin’. 8 Rosen, Change Mummified, p. 322. 9 Ibid., pp. 320; Mitchell, The Reconfigured Eye. 10 Rosen, Change Mummified, p. 322. 58 WILLIAM BROWN since one can literally change it or it is never fixed or finished.11 Rosen, however, challenges this idea of interactivity on two levels. Firstly, if the digital image is freed from its direct, indexical link to the world, then the fact that so many digital images aim to look like photographs, especially in terms of their realism, indicates that there is a fixed (sense, or perception, of) reality that does underpin even the digital image and in which, therefore, we are implicitly rooted.12 That is, the ‘infinity’ referenced in the term ‘infinite manipulability’ is somewhat small (and not infinite) if the image tends not to be manipulated beyond the already-existing conventions of cinematic representation.13 Secondly, since the viewer cannot interact with digital images in a particularly creative fashion (instead just copying the conventions of analogue cinema), Rosen asserts that ‘this means that there has never been any such thing as interactivity’.14 He says this because while it is all well and good to hypothesize an interactive cinema, this interactivity remains an ideal rather than a reality. Since this interactivity only exists in the realm of the ideal, it does not exist—and never has existed—in the ‘real’ world. In that he tries to bring the idealist discourse surrounding the interactivity of digital images back into the ‘real’ world, there is much to admire about Rosen’s argument. In short, we can all dream of a digital utopia, but until disparities in technology, wealth, access, and education (among other things) are addressed and rectified—in addition to a transcendence of the all-too human capacity for both humans and human-designed machines to make mistakes (as revealed in the case of the latter by glitches)—that utopia remains simply an ideal, most likely an unworkable one.15 Nonetheless, I shall argue that there are grounds upon which to challenge Rosen, both in terms of a more ‘intellectual’ interactivity that can exist between film and viewer and via a shift in understanding about the real world. Rosen himself implies the former when he says of digital images that ‘[o]ne can 11 Ibid., pp. 333-334. 12 Ibid., pp. 331-332. 13 ‘To boldly go’ is the famous split infinitive that was uttered at the beginning of every episode of Star Trek (Gene Roddenberry, USA, 1966-1969).