“A Man's Gotta Do What a Man's Gotta Do,” and Other Memorable Lines from “Philosophy and Film”
2012; Penn State University Press; Volume: 95; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês
10.5325/soundings.95.2.0206
ISSN2161-6302
Autores Tópico(s)Empathy and Medical Education
ResumoFor ten years now at Florida State University I have been teaching a course called “Philosophy and Film” for the Honors Program. To give you some background I should say that I am an English-born philosopher who has been teaching now for nearly fifty years. For the first thirty-five years I taught at a medium-sized university in Ontario, Canada (a public university, as are nearly all universities in Canada), and for the last twelve years at Florida State University. I left Canada at the age of sixty to avoid compulsory retirement, but looked upon coming South as an opportunity and not simply an escape. Most of my labors on this new campus have been directed toward starting a small graduate program in the history and philosophy of science, but I have always done (and enjoyed) a lot of undergraduate teaching.When I found that there was an honors program on campus that was looking for instructors, I jumped at the chance. The opportunity was attractive for a number of reasons. Most obviously, one would be teaching bright, motivated students, and in small groups (around fifteen, although this number has increased slightly recently). What really appealed to me, however, was something that, for many faculty, actually made unattractive the prospect of teaching in the honors program. One is encouraged to do something—to offer a course—that is somewhat outside the loop. My professional field is the philosophy of science, and what was very much not needed was another course in the philosophy of science. What was needed rather was something that, well, would be right for an honors program! I take this to mean something to do with culture in a broad sense—meaning that it could as easily be something to do with the sciences as the humanities, but should be about issues in society and more generally relating to the intellectual and social milieu in which we are raised and live.I am not quite sure where I got the idea of a philosophy and film course. One sense that I have is that around 2000, a number of philosophers were independently starting to think in terms of philosophy courses based on the movies. My completely unscientific evidence for this is that, checking with Amazon.com, I find that there are around ten or more texts on the topic published in the past five years or so. That would suggest that ideas were gestating about ten years ago. I do remember that the distinguished philosopher Stanley Cavell (he was for many years at Harvard, teaching aesthetics) had written on film, particularly on Hollywood comedies from the thirties and forties. He might have had an influence on me, although I am not sure that I ever read anything that he had written and probably picked things up from such places as the New York Review of Books. (Don't we all?!)One thing that leads me to suspect that there was an influence was that Cavell did not choose “important” or “distinguished” movies, but rather movies that people like—more importantly, movies that he liked. That attitude has been absolutely basic for me in my approach to my course. I look upon movies in the twentieth century as akin to opera in the nineteenth century. A great art form has first and foremost to be entertaining, has to be fun. I don't think twentieth-century art has been much fun, and twentieth-century music has certainly not been. But the movies have been, and that for me is the starting point. (Incidentally, by “movies” I mean movies and not television. For me, television never has had that almost mystical sense of wonder and enjoyment as the lights go down and the screen takes over. This is not to say you couldn't have a course on television and philosophy—it is just that I don't think it would be the same course.)So what about my course? I set it up ten years ago and haven't done a lot of tampering with it since. We meet once a week for three hours. A designated student gives a five-minute introduction to the week's movie (date, director, and so forth), and then we watch the movie together. After a short break—at seventy-one that is not a luxury for me!—we discuss the movie for about forty-five minutes. Not much less but also not much more. You are expected to come to class. I don't take attendance, but I soon notice if people are not there and check out why not. By and large this is not a big issue. Almost all students come almost all of the time. I remember about two years into the course, a member of the English Department whom I used to meet once a year (at a mutual friend's birthday party) went after me a bit. (We had both had enough to drink for candor!) Why was I spending so much of the class time showing the movie? Couldn't the students watch it on DVD beforehand so that the class time could be used for lecturing and seminar and so forth? A couple of years later he turned to me and apologized. He'd been talking to two or three students who had taken the course and they had been so excited. They stressed what was (and is) for me absolutely fundamental. We have a shared emotional experience—and it is just that—and then we talk about it as a group, on the spot. Watching a DVD a week or more before, in isolation, just isn't going to be the same thing. I think it is the group experience that means I have very few absentees and when I do, there is a reason that has nothing to do with the course.I should add incidentally that if we didn't do it this way—getting together to watch the movie—we would be breaking the law. By one of those serendipitous happenings that make you believe that perhaps there is a good god after all, at some point the U.S. Congress revised the copyright laws and put in an expressly worded clause that allows teachers to show any movie whatsoever, free of charge, so long as it is done in a face-to-face educational setting.Section 110(1) of Title 17 of the United States Code grants a specific exemption from the copyright laws for performance or display of a work by instructors or pupils in the course of face-to-face teaching activities of a nonprofit educational institution, in a classroom or similar place devoted to instruction, unless, in the case of a motion picture or other audiovisual work, the performance, or the display of individual images, is given by means of a copy that was not lawfully made under this title, and that the person responsible for the performance knew or had reason to believe was not lawfully made. In other words, you have got to buy or rent the movie. But after that, it is free so long as the teacher is around and you are in a proper classroom. Not otherwise.Now all of this is starting to sound a little bit like a bird course, especially when you learn that there is no text and no exams. No wonder the course is fully subscribed within ten minutes of registration opening. Pray to God that the Athletics Department doesn't find out about it or next semester it will be full of very large young men and women. (Actually, since it is restricted to honors students, that probably couldn't happen, but you get the idea.) Let me therefore now tell you about the three aims I have in the course, starting with that which makes it anything but a bird course, and why, of all the courses I have ever taught, this is the easiest to defend to my colleagues, my students' parents, and any legislators who come sniffing around to see what a lousy, worthless job we humanities professors are doing on the state tab.The requirement for the course is an essay assigned every week. It is to be 500 words long; my rules state that this means not a word less than 450 and not one more than 550. The essay is on the movie of the week, and is to be handed in the week following the showing, no exceptions (except for medical or other legitimate reasons). My guarantee to them is that I will read and mark the essays in the week following and hand them back in the next class. Students must do a minimum of twelve essays. They can do more if they so wish, and the top ten count. (Each essay is worth ten marks, and if a student completes fewer than twelve then she loses ten marks—an essay's worth. It is very rare not to get at least twelve essays from each student; most students do more. The teaching part of the semester is fifteen weeks long.)I look upon all of this as an exercise in learning how to write a short essay, quickly and to the point. There are no footnotes and no references, and no explicit instructions about style. (I always point out that if your grammar and spelling are dreadful, then you are irritating me just at the point when I am about to give you a mark!) We talk about the kinds of things that were in the movie and that could be written about, and when the papers are returned, I make some comments on what was or was not in the papers. In other words, although we have a discussion, I look upon myself as their teacher and not just one of the chaps. My job is to give guidance and instruction and to help people do better than otherwise. If students decide not to turn up but to watch the movie on their own, pretty quickly this shows up on the work that they do, giving them strong motivation to start again coming to class. I encourage students to use the Internet—all of the movies have stuff about them out there—and also I encourage students to discuss the movies among themselves. The rule—and it is a rule of honor—is that once you start writing, you do it on your own. I suppose there could be cheating, but frankly this is the kind of exercise where cheating is going to require almost more effort than doing it straight.The point is that what I am trying to set up is the kind of professional situation in which you find yourself in adult life. Your boss wants five hundred words on the competitor's product, on his desk, on Monday morning. He doesn't want a long essay with references to everything from the OED to the Holy Bible. He wants you to hit the ground running. What is the competitor doing? Why is it better than our product? What can we do to meet the challenge? Your paper isn't the last word, but it is a good start. That is what I am looking for in the student essays. What's the theme? How does it relate? Does it work? And so forth. My experience is that at the beginning of the semester, the essays are not very good. By mid-term they are a lot better. And everyone gets it by the end. I should say that generally my marks are high (not ridiculously so) because I am trying to teach a skill to bright, motivated students—and when they get it, I am happy and reward them. (Incidentally, in this course I tend to work less by designated office hours and more through e-mail and getting together with needy students on a one-to-one basis, over coffee at Starbucks. That is one of the luxuries of a small class and—in my case—a light teaching load.)So that is the first thing I do in this class. I should say that we all work pretty hard, including me. But we also try to break it up and not to be too serious. At Halloween there is always a horror movie (more on this in a moment) with candy and pop and a prize (ten marks and no paper to write) for the best costume. I should say that the course tends to be a bit intense, because I want to pump them up and get them motivated and writing. I want them working with me right through the semester and not just at midterm and end-of-term exam periods.I used to worry about the great age difference between me and my students, but rapidly both sides learn to put this to advantage. I love the vitality of young people and the chance to teach them something. And they are fascinated by someone who obviously gets such a kick out of doing what he does and who can report on history as it was made. The terror of the week of the Cuban missile crisis, for example. Or Elvis upsetting the staid and worthy by singing, “You ain't nothing but a hound dog.” Or life before the pill. This brings me to the second aim of the course. I wasn't joking when I compared movies to opera. I think movies are part of culture and reflective of culture. America dominates, but obviously other countries—France, Germany, Italy, Russia, Sweden, Japan—are very important too. We cannot cover everything, but I want to give a group of generally rather culturally naïve young people a taste of what is out there—a whiff of their own heritage as well as that of others in the century just past.I don't do things chronologically, but I like to span the decades if possible and show about half American movies and the rest from elsewhere. So, for instance, one of my favorite American movies to show is On the Waterfront (1954), starring Marlon Brando, and Eva Marie Saint, and (for me, the really great) Lee J. Cobb as the corrupt union boss. The point about this movie, of course, is that it is directed by Elia Kazan and is about the dilemma of putting your group or family above or below the needs and demands of society. Kazan had been a communist and (in the opinion of many) betrayed his fellow believers before the House Un-American Committee. The movie reflects real life. (Or does it?) We have some great discussions about why someone might have been a communist and why the cold war made things so different from the thirties. The great thing about a course like this is that old movies can relate to the present. This last semester, fall 2011, given the way that so many conservative governors and legislators are trying to solve problems on the backs of their workers, the whole question of unions has become much more vital and topical than previously.Completely different is Leni Riefenstahl's propaganda movie for the Nazis, Triumph of the Will (1935), a film of the 1934 Nuremberg Rally. What does this tell you about a society? What about the person who made it? Was she in some sense in love with Hitler? It is remarkable (and I don't say this in a condescending way) how ignorant young people can be about something so fundamental as the Nazis: how they came to power, what they set out to do, how they manipulated society and its thinking. It's true that, thanks to a great deal of effort by Jews (especially American Jews), we now have a much greater understanding of the horrors of the Holocaust than we did fifty years ago. But that is not the only thing to learn about what happened in Germany in the 1930s. One issue that has always been vital for me is the way in which ordinary, decent people got caught up in the Nazi movement. My German-born stepmother, for instance, although from a family that was very much against the movement, nevertheless had to join the Hitler Youth. (She is the same age as Pope Benedict, who also had to join.) What did this mean to people? Is there any echo in our own society today? For instance, are we in danger of demonizing Muslims in the same way the Nazis demonized Jews?Moving forward and back to America, what price The Deer Hunter (1978)? For a portrayal of what it is to be a working-class, ethnic American, there is no equal. Nor is there a better portrayal of the destructive nature of war, not the least on those who survive. Would we ever have gone into Iraq if a man who had fought or at least served in Vietnam had become president? Is patriotism being used as a tool of oppression? My students are not in the military preparing to go to Iraq or Afghanistan. As always, it tends to be the members of the working class who sign up and who go fight—and suffer. Of course, today there is the bigger context of the place and role of America in the world as a whole. Is it America's job to be a universal policeman? Is the only alternative the kind of isolationism that was rife in the 1930s? And look where that got us.I could go on indefinitely listing movies like these. I certainly don't mean to imply that all movies (or all the movies I choose) relate directly to major political or social crises or movements. The point I want to make to the students is that movies can be terrific entertainment and yet tremendously important as mirrors of society and indeed of the human soul. Obviously I have to pick and choose, and how I do this is going to influence what we cover. I cannot pretend that I sit down and list the major events and movements of the twentieth century and then let this be the sole determining criterion of choice. My own likes and dislikes come into major play too. I strongly suspect that, if you looked over the years at my choices, after America, France would come out as the most favored. I won't say that there has never been a bad movie with Paris as its background, but I can't think of one offhand. I also strongly suspect that if you looked at decades, the 1950s would win hands down—Gregory Peck, Jimmy Stewart, Henry Fonda, Grace Kelly, Marilyn Monroe, Elizabeth Taylor, the Duke (John Wayne). Somehow those film stars just have a glow that has never been replicated. But don't forget I was a teenager in those years, so I have rosy memories. Hey, if you don't like my selection, choose your own! This is my course!And so I come to the third and most important aspect of the course. Its raison d'être. The reason for the course in the first place. I want to emphasize that this is not a course on the philosophy of film. I am not quite sure what that would be, although I am sure as a topic it exists and has been written about. But whatever. That is not my course. My course is philosophy and film: dealing with philosophical issues through the medium of film. So, start with “philosophical issues.” What are they? Give us a list. Well, Immanuel Kant is always reliable on these matters. From the Critique of Practical Reason (1788): “Two things fill the mind with ever new and increasing wonder and awe: the starry heavens above me and the moral law within me.”So start with problems of existence. What is there and how do we know it? We can (not necessarily as Kant would) think of this as applying both to the natural and to the non-natural, perhaps supernatural, world. What can I know and how do I know it? At the natural world level, there are obvious questions about perception, about theorizing, and about deception. There are a host of questions about science and technology, and equally about the living world, both plants and animals and also humans. Here are three movies I have shown that have to do with perception and theorizing and so forth. First is the Japanese film Rashomon (1950), about a woman being raped and her husband being killed. It is told through four flashbacks, from the perspectives of the woman herself, the alleged murderer, the husband (thanks to a medium), and a woodcutter who happened on the scene. Four stories, four very different stories. Is there such a thing as the truth and if so what is it? Was there really a truth or are we just assuming this? Second is the American film Twelve Angry Men (1957), about a jury debating the guilt or innocence of a young man who supposedly killed his father. From 11–1 in favor of conviction they change to 12–0 for acquittal. How is this done? How do we puzzle out the past? Is inferred knowledge ever absolute? When would we prefer inferred knowledge to direct perception? (Think of a rape. Which would you rather go with: the eyewitness or the DNA analysis?) Is all inference the same? Do we apply the same methods and standards in law as in science?Third is the French film Belle de Jour (1967). This movie is about a middle-class wife (played by the incomparable Catherine Deneuve) who is impotent at home but turns in the afternoon to prostitution, which, it is made very clear, she enjoys immensely. But there is a lot to suggest that she lives at least part of the time in a dream world. We have the question that Descartes posed in the Meditations. How do you tell when you are awake and when asleep? How do you tell truth from illusion? Showing how great works of art always have some new dimension, and so often are pertinent for our day as well as when made, Belle de Jour clearly also involves childhood abuse. Belle is as she is as an adult because of what happened to her as a little girl. This last time I taught the course was just as the dreadful revelations from Penn State were unfolding. In a way—and because of the nature of the course I was able and happy to let this happen—this story rather took over the discussion as we worked through the whole matter of human nature and responsibility, in the light of what happens to you in childhood. This meshed nicely with the theme of another French movie I showed, Les Quatre Cents Coups (Four Hundred Blows) (1959), François Truffaut's autobiographical film about a young boy who is neglected at home and misunderstood at school.Science is a whole topic in its own right, and expectedly, given my own professional training and interests, I want to cover it well. However, as it happens, my history and philosophy of science program (which has an undergraduate minor) has recently started an undergraduate course on science and film, and so these days I don't do quite so much on science in my own course. One good film to break the ice, as it were, is the science-fiction flick The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951), starring Michael Rennie and Patricia Neal and, above all (literally and metaphorically) the robot Gort. Made in the early 1950s, at the start of the cold war and with the threat of nuclear weapons very real—the Soviets now had the Bomb and the Korean War was getting under way—it is a fascinating meditation on science, its power of good and evil, and the responsibilities of scientists themselves, especially in the face of non-comprehending politicians. The story is simple, about an alien (good question: would humanoids from outer space always look like us?) who visits Earth to warn that the intergalactic powers that be are getting really cheesed off with our behavior and we had better smarten up. Apparently robots have been given the ability and instruction to destroy any civilization that threatens the rest of space. (This is in itself an interesting point. Are android nannies really such a good thing? Isn't there more than a hint of fascism here, with the state deciding what is best for us?)Along the way, the alien meets a figure clearly meant to be Einstein. It is interesting that for all that the alien has come to warn about our use of atomic weapons, it is the leading scientist of the day who is presented as the most rational and fundamentally moral person of his time. The alien also gets shot up, rescued by his robot, and miraculously brought back to life. (This resuscitation is miraculous only metaphorically, because the resurrection is clearly meant to be natural. See below for more on this.) And we get one of the classic lines of cinema, when the heroine—a war widow who befriends the alien—has to go to the robot and convince it (him?) to help, not hinder. Instructed beforehand by the alien, she utters the magic disarming words: “Klaatu barada nikto.” One wonderful piece of trivia is that apparently the architect Frank Lloyd Wright was consulted on the design of the alien's space craft!There are many other good science movies—not necessarily great movies in themselves, but good for teaching and bringing out points and themes. Perhaps not directly on science but with scientific underpinnings, Groundhog Day (1993), about a man (Bill Murray) doomed to repeat the day until released (which he achieves through the delightful expedient of getting the gorgeous Andie MacDowell into bed), is great for raising issues to do with the nature of time. Is time real, or is it a fiction? Is it like a river into which we could in principle step from any point on the bank? Is it a contradiction to think you could move or repeat time like the movie supposes? What if, instead of being stuck with Andie MacDowell in repeated day after repeated day, you got stuck with Kathy Bates playing the psychotic Annie Wilkes in the horror flick Misery (1990)? (That's not a scientific question, although it might be philosophical!) More directly scientific, I particularly like Contact (1997), based on a story by the astronomer and public figure Carl Sagan. Starring Jodie Foster as a scientist involved in extraterrestrial intelligence exploration, it raises some fascinating issues about the nature of intelligence and how we would recognize it. (More than any other movie I show, this is the one that gets us into animated discussion from the word “go.”) It also raises some good questions about the relationship between science and religion—a major topic both because it is central to my own work (I write much on evolutionary theory and its relationship to Christianity) and because my students and I are living in the South, where religion is never far from the surface.I don't, however, want to go overboard with the topic, so I usually balance my choice with one or two other good treatments of the science and religion issue. If I want to get more into the social issues, and how religious belief functions in society and how it can clash with science, then the obvious film to show is Inherit the Wind (1960). This is a fictionalized version of the Scopes Monkey Trial of 1925, starring Spencer Tracy (as the secular lawyer, based on Clarence Darrow) and Fredric March (as the evangelical politician, based on William Jennings Bryan). I am not sure that it has an awful lot to do with the real case; it is probably more a parable for the 1950s, when it was written and made, when the real threat was the suppression of voices of dissent in American society. But it is great fun to watch two old war-horse actors reveling in it, and it has a terrific performance by Gene Kelly (playing the H. L. Menken newspaper man role). Unforgettable is his comment to the sweetheart of the teacher being prosecuted for teaching evolution. She is upset by his flippant tone about something she takes so seriously. “I may be rancid butter but I'm on your side of the bread.” (A great line, but not the greatest. That's still coming.)Actually, however, in respects (especially if we are thinking about the role of dangerous knowledge in society) I prefer the Planet of the Apes (1968). I am referring to the original version with Charlton Heston. It is easy to laugh at him with his roles as Moses and Ben Hur and so forth, or to sneer at him for his obsession with guns in his later years (though actually as a younger man he was bravely at the front of civil rights reform), but when he was good, as he was here, he was very, very good. Some people just have star quality in front of the camera. Apart from some very interesting racial themes—the gorillas are thugs and black, the chimps are sensitive and lighter-colored, and the orangs are brilliant and light red—there is much about the suppression of knowledge for the greater good. I think the treatment of dangerous knowledge is more subtle than in Inherit the Wind—although frankly the lack of subtlety is part of the charm of the Tracy–March confrontation.Moving on to the supernatural and the God question, Ingmar Bergman's The Seventh Seal (1957) is virtually essential. This film tells the story of a knight and his squire, home from the Crusades and playing Death at chess to put off his own death from the plague. It explores the question of faith or lack of it through the questioning knight, through his atheistic squire, and through the humble beliefs of a family of jugglers and entertainers. Before the course starts, all of my students think that any movie in black and white must be inferior, made in such a way only because the more sophisticated color technology was not available. After the course, not one of them could imagine that movie in anything but black and white. Also, they get a terrific lesson in how the very simple and low-tech can do so much more than the very complex and expensive, like the difference between a string quartet and a choral symphony.Although speaking of low-tech, I do have to be careful. I cannot overtax the kids with foreign movies needing subtitles. Complaints do start to rise in that direction. Also, although I am always determined to show a silent film, I don't dare do too much in that direction. My favorite by far is Carl Dreyer's The Passion of Joan of Arc (1928), based on the actual transcripts of her trial and starring the unforgettable Renée Jeanne (or Maria) Falconetti as the Maid of Orléans. The main theme here (with respect to my course, that is) is: how do you determine sainthood? Is it something really there, or is it always something conferred later by people wanting to make a point or to use the past for the needs of the present? Was Joan really a saint, or was she someone psychologically disturbed who was used by the French as a country-unifying heroine—or was she both? (And, for a good laugh given my nationality, is every Englishman as vile as the English are portrayed in that film?)What about a Jesus movie? There are obviously lots of choices here. I have shown (with success) The Gospel According to Saint Matthew (1964) by the atheist, homosexual, Marxist director Pier Paolo Pasolini. It is a terrifically moving telling of the gospel that uses peasants rather than professional actors. Does it tell the story of the Son of God, or does it tell a secular story of a Marxist revolutionary? Is there an answer to that question and does it matter? How else might the Son of God be portrayed? Is there such a thing as an authentic definitive reading of the Bible? Another movie I have shown exploring some of these themes is The Shawshank Redemption (1994). Is Andy, sentenced to life imprisonment for a murder he did not commit, the Christ or at least a Christlike figure? What would it mean to say that he was? What is the meaning of suffering? Does it make sense to say that someone suffers for the sake of others? Lots of questions here, even if you don't really think that any of this really holds water. It is still a great movie! We love it, especially that great line by Warden Nor
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