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Friday, May 05, 2006
Meat Dreams
Only normal people read the Valve. All normal people read BoingBoing. Therefore, you’ve already watched the prize-winning short film adaptation of Terry Bisson’s “They’re Made Out of Meat".
Now I know what I’m going to show on the first day of next semester’s “Philosophy and Film” module. So pardon me while I scribble some hasty lecture notes.
In my module, I focus just on SF film (my co-lecturer gets to take the rest.) My first lecture is a meditation on whether it makes sense to try to teach philosophy through film. I have them read this exchange between Julian Baggini and Stephen Mulhall in Film-Philosophy. Mulhall’s On Film
Well, anyway. The other thing I talk about in my first lecture is the relationship between thought-experiments - which are deemed fairly standard argumentative equipment; and illustrations - likewise, standard fare; and allegory, symbol and so forth. Especially allegory. These latter items are literary standard fare, naturally, and as such are likely to raise suspicious eyebrows when passed off as philosophy in certain quarters. Baggini:
Mulhall’s unpicking of the movies’ metaphors, in particular those of sexuality, life, and human identity, is meticulous and insightful. Yet, especially given his somewhat negative assessment of the majority of film criticism in the introduction, one may wonder how what is being offered here is any different to standard critical fare. Is the reality of film as philosophising simply the familiar idea that films contain layers of symbolic meaning, which perhaps correspond to certain arguments and views about the way the world is?
That can’t be so, since, as we have seen, Mulhall insists that for films to philosophise they have to ‘reflect’ and ‘evaluate’ the positions that they raise, and perhaps most interestingly, they must do so ‘in just the ways that philosophers do’. (2) It is not enough, then, that the eponymous aliens of the series in some sense symbolise raw life and male sexual threat, for example. In order for this symbolic representation to be philosophical, it must contain substantive reflections on and evaluations of life and male sexuality, ones which take our understanding forward rather than merely represent without commentary pre-existing philosophical views.
Yet I have to confess that I have struggled to see the Alien films and Mulhall’s discussions of them in these terms. The problem I have encountered is that for philosophy to be anything more than an exchange of opinions, it must involve the giving of good reasons for accepting or rejecting the position under discussion. These reasons may well be other than formal arguments, but they must be reasons of some kind. Such reasons, however, appear to be lacking from the Alien quartet.
The nice thing about “They’re Made Out Of Meat” is that it serves as a very economical response to Baggini - maybe a better one than Mulhall gives. On one level the story functions as a pure thought-experiment, clearly intended to counter familiar thought-experiments which attempt to pump our intutions that (crudely) only meat can think. (The mental strongly supervenes on the carnal.) The story is the anti-Chinese Room Argument, in effect. It’s a thought-experiment about the limits of thought-experiments, you might say. (It pumps our intuitions about the dangers of intuition-pumps.) I’m not sure how wonderful it is, for doing that intellectual work, but it strikes me that it’s not half bad. But obviously it works on more levels than that - and the film really makes this much clearer than the story. The film is a sort of allegory of ... of what? It’s a bit hard to say. Well, for starters, it’s very funny that the guy is wearing the Sgt. Pepper’s Remaindered Band Club get-up. Oddly, just a few months ago - in this post - I commented on the distinctive atmospherics of Wittgenstein’s thought-experiments, as dramatic scenes [go read the post if you want to get it about the logs]:
There is something so strikingly Unheimlich about the tableau ... Kafkaesque isn’t quite it, although it’s in the neighborhood. We can imagine a figure; perhaps a stiff, retired Austrian military officer, living alone in a house leaning preposterously out over a river (on Dr. Seussian foundations) so that it is constantly banged by logs descending downstream. With each bang, his meticulously groomed moustache twitches. (Or at least the feather on his shako shakes.) Perhaps he is obsessive-compulsive, like the dweller in Kafka’s “The Burrow”. But probably there will be more of Rube Goldberg about the officer’s ritual, less blood on the forehead.
The truth is that the atmosphere of the passage is ... Wittgensteinian. Passages like this have the obsessiveness of Kafka, but not the Angst. The scene is reduced, like an endgame out of Beckett, but more cerebral and logically controlled. I don’t mean Beckett isn’t as smart, just that there is often an element of almost Vaudevillean humor. Wittgenstein doesn’t do Vaudeville. (So by adding the moustache and shako I really ruin it. Would you say that is fair?) Also, Beckett’s reduced figures are damaged humans, formerly full-fledged in their faculties. Wittgenstein’s are experimental automata - not yet built up enough, but perhaps problematically come to consciousness.
It’s very interesting (well, I think so) that the director of this film had the same idea for dramatizing the Bisson story that I did for dramatizing Wittgenstein. Namely, goofy Sgt. Pepper outfits. And you could even give the story a Wittgensteinian title: “If meat could speak, we really wouldn’t want to understand what it said.” And, oddly, another SF writer I’ve lavishly praised of late - Paul Park - whose most recent anthology is entitled If Lions Could Speak, has this insight into Bisson’s short story style:
I remember meeting Terry Bisson around the time Talking Man came out. I think I was about half-way through Sugar Rain and I was completely stuck. I asked him whether he ever wrote any short stories, just to take a break from real work. He said he had no idea how to write them, couldn’t understand them, didn’t know anything about them. He said all he knew about was writing novels and fixing cars, and I suppose I felt the same way, except for the cars, of course. But then he published a couple of stories and I thought, well heck—he doesn’t know anything about it and he’s doing it. What’s to stop me?
Just in case you ever thought Plato was wrong and these crazy artist-types aren’t just bizarrely mystified about their own sources of inspiration.
Here’s an interview with Bisson himself, which contains some interesting observations on satire and SF (obviously relevant to the film). A critical comment by John Clute calls forth the following demurral:
Much as I like Clute and admire the vertiginous amplitude of his post-parnassian insinuations, you could say that about anybody. Deadpan is what you do. I think my trademark might be that my narrators are a little stupid. That’s a common literary device, too.
This is, of course, another distinctive feature of the short film. It’s fantastically deadpan. In fact, it’s riffing on a couple different sizes and shapes of expired pan: hardboiled detective, Monty Python absurdist, socratic ‘gee mister, can you spare a definition?’ faux-innocence that asks for a conceptual handout while somehow picking your pocket; Wittgensteinian vatic. The transformation of the Sgt. Pepper alien from obtuse to beatific, before he is literally transported, is like a parody of some simple fable - maybe out of Tolstoy: “How Much Meat Does A Mind Need?” (I like the fact that the aliens are holding hands there at the end.)
However exactly you choose to cash out the allegory - maybe it’s just got an allegorical mood; it feels like it should be allegorical? - the film, in its small but successful way, works a thought-experiment about the conditions of the possibility of thought into a kind of allegorical or symbolic treatment of/reverie on/disclosure of the wonder of life and human identity. It’s about sex and body anxiety, in a way that Searle’s Chinese room - frankly - is not . The philosophy is absolutely essential to the film. It has to be just an argument, story-wise. Only a tidy little thought-experimental dialogue would do to provide the right set of occasions for establishing this absurdist mood, this pathos of argumentative extremism, this vaguely Platonic anti-body anxiety, whimsy. Whether this, then, counts as philosophy through film or not, it is clearly a response to the sorts of concerns Baggini expresses. The film is most definitely about the philosophy in it.
Philosophers are like these silly aliens - the twit and the mildly dangerous-looking one. But philosophers are not wholly unlike human beings, smacking their gum, slapping their gums, and making elegant little structures of triangles. (Anxious philosopher, considering the teaching material: We’ve probed them ... all the way through. They’re made out of film.)
The Diner setting will also come in handy, reference-wise, when we get to Dark City.
Comments
Terry Bison? Food? Pets or meat? (I’m still puzzling what’s philological about ‘sarcophagus’ referring to winecoolers rather than breadboxen.) Philanthrosophy? (via) Or res ipsa loquitur?
I liked the cigarettes. I mean the way the two aliens smoke so stiffly in their clumsy attempt to ‘blend in’, drawing smoke in but never (as far as I can see) exhaling ... as if they’re innards are capacious gaseous storehouses, or something. Which is nice, because it’s struck me in the past that ‘smoking’ is a weirdly anti-organic thing to be doing in the first place: it’s radically unlike eating or drinking, drawing this very un-meat substance deep into the meat.
I may be less convinced by the Holbonical ‘hey it’s philosophy!’ line, though. It’s kind of stoned philosophy, isn’t it? By which I mean it takes a certain state of mind to be struck as if by a profound insight with the thought ‘wow isn’t it weird that we, like, think? With our brains? They’re just like organs of the body, but they can, you know, think? And where are the biscuits? I’m famished.’
God, how did I miss titling my post “Look, he’s filming a Bisson - Bisson! Food!”
But Adam is right that I’m laying it on a bit thick. But I sort of like it like that.
No one, ever, should read boingboing.
"I may be less convinced by the Holbonical ‘hey it’s philosophy!’ line, though. It’s kind of stoned philosophy, isn’t it? By which I mean it takes a certain state of mind to be struck as if by a profound insight with the thought ‘wow isn’t it weird that we, like, think? With our brains? They’re just like organs of the body, but they can, you know, think? And where are the biscuits? I’m famished.’”
If you’ve got a solution to the mind body problem which navigates issues of qualia, mental content, under-determination by behaviour, the other minds problem and the mad pain/ martian pain problem and the ever looming problem of epiphenomenalism to name just a few in, say, a hundred I’d just love to hear it.
If Adam has a solution to the mind body problem that navigates the problems of qualia, under-determination, multiple realizability and the ever looming spectres of epiphenomenalism and eliminativism I would very, very much like to hear it!
Hey, wow, man, like, totally deja vu!
Sorry Adam, I thought the valve had eatern my comment.
The Valve is in fact behaving rather weirdly, comments-wise. Adam, T. Scrivener - are you, like me, getting weirdly redundant notifications in response to this thread? You too Ben. (And what do you have against boingboing?)
As to T.’s comments, Adam, deja vu is usually a sign that we machines are resetting the Matrix. T. Scrivener is one of the many relatively sophisticated program constructs we have set to plague you poor, meat-encased minds. Muh-ha-ha! (Always important to laugh like that so people know you mean business. Sadly, comments don’t yet support the muh-ha tag.)
Well, yes, absolutely. And, obviously, when I said ‘wow!’ back there I actually mean ‘woh!’
’wow’ is an accepted alternate spelling for ‘woh’ (he said while angling his cigarette awkwardly without inhaling.)
Really? I’d always assumed that “Wow” was a more maiow-y noise, whereas “Woh” was more, well, Keanuesque. But I could be wrong. (He said whilst slapping his rubbery meaty lips together and rolling his tongue about.)
(And what do you have against boingboing?)
Boingboing is written by people who aren’t sure if it’s more accurate to just call a sandwich a new kind of mashup and have done, or if it’s some sort of breadcraft (or maybe a foodmod), or if they should take the additional step of describing the act of making a sandwich out of leftovers as remixing them.
BoringBoring, on the other hand, that’s quality.
That’s good stuff, Ben. I do believe BoringBoring is going on the sidebar.