Philosophy and the Essential Ambiguity of Film

To begin, an example of how my thought processes work. Monday night, after Conan was over, tv inertia found me switching over to Bravo and watching the last half of an old episode of Without a Trace. The plot was about a missing teenager whose girlfriend had been involved in a near-daily series of sex parties held at his best friend's house. The girl had been a regular at the parties until she met her boyfriend, when she stopped going. But after the host started spreading rumours that the boyfriend had cheated on her, she returned, and the fight they had when he discovered this fact happened right before his disappearance.

The actors playing the party host and the girlfriend looked incredibly familiar, but I couldn't remember the name of the episode, or the names of the actors. But this morning, as I woke up, I remembered where I had seen the party host before: Canadian teen sitcom Student Bodies, which I used to watch semi-regularly when I was in high school. The actor was Jamie Elman, and on his imdb page, they had listed the name of the Without a Trace episode, "Sons and Daughters." The girlfriend in that episode was Kat Dennings, who starred last year in Nick and Norah's Infinite Playlist with Michael Cera.

Now, here's the idea I had in the shower this morning, after looking up this thread of interconnecting movies. I noticed another item on Jamie Elman's filmography, When Nietzsche Wept, in which he played a young Sigmund Freud. After searching through some reviews on the internet of this movie, I discovered that there were none, except a couple of forum posts on nytimes.com, one of which was a one-sentence endorsement, and the other of which said it was fit for MST3K. Apparently, Armand Assante had a decent performance, but the film was a gross oversimplification of his views.

It reminded me of an opinion I've held for some time about philosophy movies: that they should not be made. Why they shouldn't be made is a matter of the very different form of philosophy and film. Philosophy is a clearly written argument or exploration of an idea. Philosophy is largely making declarative statements and arranging them to articulate a concept or an argument. It is a matter of words, and occasionally illustrative diagrams, but mostly words. The purpose in philosophy is to explain, and interpret those explanations.

But film is a medium of images, and images don't declare anything: they just are. Sure, you can film a lecture, but a fascinating lecture is a boring film, and attempts to represent philosophies in film are best done through characters whose motivations can be understood as being rooted in or inspired by particular philosophies. If characters actually talk about their philosophical motivations, usually in long, ludicrous speeches, it becomes boring. Philosophy strives for clarity, but films strive for ambiguity. A well crafted image is a display that can consist almost entirely in interpretation. Interpretation in philosophy only begins after the text has been clearly stated. Philosophical interpretation must begin from a clear standing point in the text, and if the starting text itself is obscure, the interpretation will collapse. This is the key difference between the image and the text.

This is why novels work so much better in stating philosophical ideas. The works of Marcel Proust, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, and Milan Kundera are three examples that come immediately to mind. The adaptation of Kundera's The Unbearable Lightness of Being is an excellent example of the difference between novels and films when it comes to philosophy. The novel was largely an exploration of Kundera's philosophical engagement with Nietzsche, and his interpretation of Nietzsche's eternal return concept. (I think Kundera committed the common mistake in Nietzsche readers, thinking of the eternal return as the sameness of repetition, when it's actually the repetition of difference, but that's neither here nor there.) The characters were cyphers for the philosophical exploration. The novel was a philosophical exploration that happened in a political and personal narrative context, and as such, it was a brilliant success.

In his adaptation, Philip Kaufman understood exactly what to do with his film. To have the characters state explicitly Kundera's philosophical engagement with Nietzsche and have the film revolve around that would have sent the audience to sleep. Instead, Kaufman's film focussed on the articulation of these ideas in the actions of the characters themselves. The audience sees the characters engage with the world, and we can work out through their actions the ideas that animate them. There are some wonderful images of Daniel Day-Lewis in the film that illustrate his philosophy of being's lightness much better than any speech ever would. Wondering whether he should rejoin his wife Juliette Binoche, who has fled the superficial and selfish society of Zürich for Prague, he stands in a pond playing with ducks, his arms outstretched on a foggy afternoon. After finding tranquility together working on their farm in rural Czechoslovakia, Day-Lewis, driving a tractor, raises his arms in mocking thanks to God, sitting on a line between the brightnesses of blue sky and green fields, Binoche watching and laughing. These images are ambiguous in themselves, and their explanatory content depends centrally on the audience.

After first conceiving this idea, I thought of a narrative inspired by that Without a Trace episode that would be an excellent philosophical novel, and if I eventually decide to pursue it, would be the first genuinely philosophical novel I write. I hope you don't mind my spoiling the end of a six year old episode of Without a Trace. At the end of the episode, we discover that the county sheriff was engaged to Kat Dennings' mother, and had discovered that his own daughter from his previous marriage was a participant in Jamie Elman's parties. Irrational with rage over seemingly having lost his biological daughter to a nihilistic lifestyle, he follows his soon-to-be-daughter-in-law back home. That night he sees the boyfriend visit and try to reconcile, only for Kat Dennings to turn him away. Dennings had told her mother that she was raped to cover up her involvement with Elman's parties. The sheriff, thinking the boyfriend was Dennings' rapist, captures him as he leaves Dennings' house, and takes him into the woods where he strangles the boyfriend to death. The end of the episode sees him confessing to Anthony LaPaglia and being led away to jail.

I wondered what could the motivations possibly be of a lawyer who would try to get him off, someone whose defense strategy would have to consist in badgering the highly traumatized witnesses to force them to break down on the stand and tricking them into contradicting themselves. This lawyer would have no ethical values other than his own power in convincing people that his desires were the truth that should motivate them. I can think of no motivation for anyone to convince a remorseful confessed killer to plead not guilty and allow his lawyer to destroy the psyches of the prosecution's witnesses. This lawyer would go ever farther than not believing in an absolute good, because you can believe in a plurality of good and still be ethical. That's me. This lawyer would have to believe that there is not, and cannot be, any good at all. Each case would be, for him, an expression of his own power. He would be a living exercise in what we could call, paraphrasing Nietzsche, a monstrous nihilist, a man happy to have overcome the values of the society in which he lives, but who sees no need to create new values.

A Union of the Mystical and Liquor

Finally, the union of my cultural heritage with two of my greatest passions. Manufactured and distilled in Newfoundland, uniting a design based on mystical and religious engagement with ethical philosophy, along with hard liquor. Crystal Head Vodka.



It certainly earns my endorsement, Dan.

All Things and Events Are Raw Material

I think there is a lot of similarity between a philosopher and a comedian. We observe life and interpret it, discovering new perspectives on the everyday that had never existed before. Most of the time, when philosophers elaborate these perspectives, we do it in the name of intellectual progress, cultural critique, or moral indignation, to list a few motivations, all of which are quite serious. Comedians do the same, except their motivations are to make us laugh, although the best comedians have the motivations of a philosopher in mind as well.

This is what I enjoy most about Slavoj Zizek, a man who can find the most fascinating interpretations in the most mundane material, who happily blurs the lines between philosopher and comedian. When I say in the title of this post that all things and events are raw material, I mean it in the sense that comedians describe their material, the elements from which they build their jokes and funny narratives.



There is no element of our society today more trivial than twitter, perfectly summarized in this Penny Arcade comic from last April. However, an amazing profundity emerged from the twitter-verse a few weeks ago, as my friend Sheena explained on her blog. CBC's Jonathan Goldstein discovered that he had an impostor on twitter, and neither could convince their followers that they were the real Jonathan Goldstein. But, if I may allow my philosophical comedian to enter the discussion, I don't think such a thing matters anymore. (Imagine that I'm speaking the following paragraphs with a thick Slovenian accent.)

One of the fascinating thing about the internet is that it allows you to be present simultaneously for millions of people, but that presence is in a highly reduced form. This has been true of every long-distance media, that your presence for the people to whom you communicate is reduced to a highly abstract form. When I meet someone face to face, I am a full, nuanced, physical, fleshly human, intricate in detail. And many of those details are beyond my control. If it is hot out, I will be sweaty; if it is raining, I will be wet; and so on. But when I communicate through long-distance media, even the ancient smoke signal, the person to whom I speak only perceives me as smoke. To her, I am smoke. Likewise in writing a letter, to my recipient, I am text on a page. I do not mean this as a metaphor. When I send you an e-mail, I am quite literally text on your screen.

Twitter is possibly the most abstracting of all internet-based communication, and probably the only one that will survive the upcoming bandwidth crush, when there will simply no longer be enough room in our cables and satellites to send the large video and audio files that make up so much internet traffic. On twitter, I am a small profile picture that serves as an iconic part of my name, and 140 characters of text. I can be only what I can manifest in these 140 characters, so if someone were to pretend to be me (or Jonathan Goldstein), it would be a simple matter of replicating the style of 140 characters. Because I am the style of my writing those 140 characters, a skilled mimic could not only pretend to be me, but for my own twitter followers, become me.

In reductive communication, it does not matter who is doing the typing when you are only perceived as that which is typed. There could be a thousand Jonathan Goldstein, all replicating themselves 140 characters at a time. And they would equally be Jonathan Goldstein if they were perceived as Jonathan Goldstein. All the physical bodies sitting at computers typing themselves as Jonathan Goldstein could be entirely different, but if the style was right and they were successfully perceived as Jonathan Goldstein, then as far as twitter-presence was concerned, they would be Jonathan Goldstein.

Being perceived as a set of words makes you into a set of words, just as being perceived as a fleshly human in a face to face encounter is what makes you into a fleshly human. The power of perception to constitute how you exist is immense, and it is not a process of which you are in complete control. Certainly, there is some control. I type what I type on this blog and my twitter. But I cannot control how that typing is interpreted, how it is read. If we were all so aware of the degree to which we depend on others for what we are, perhaps we would not be so quick to consider our interpretation as precisely what was intended. Perhaps we would use that power more carefully, and listen attentively rather than scan, and take what is barely noticed to be the truth of things.

Short Posts and Bad Cover Versions

A couple of weeks ago, I was in a bar on a Monday with some friends visiting from St John's, and there was a mediocre bar band playing cover versions of our favourite songs from the 1990s and early 2000s. I think they took their inconsequential musical production very seriously, if only because of the emotional intensity of the songs they played, particularly the classic Radiohead and good Coldplay (in contrast to the shit Coldplay).

I just listened to "Karma Police," which was the first song in the set these dedicated cover artists played, and I noticed some key differences between their version and the original, which made the original quite a lot better, unsurprisingly. The point is that it only takes a few subtle differences to turn a striking song into a far schmaltzier version. I couldn't put my finger on it at first, because I could forgive the singer for not quite having Thom Yorke's voice. That would just be unrealistic.

The cover band played the piano part with a ton of sustain on the notes, blurring them all together. If you listen to the video I linked above, each of the piano notes in the first half of the song have no sustain at all, making each one distinct, and isolated from each other in the melody. It emphasizes the percussive quality of the song, where the cover version I heard in the bar made the song sound mushy. The original Radiohead communicated a feeling of alienation in the song, which was the whole aesthetic point of Ok Computer. It's fascinating that such a subtle change could alter an artwork so completely.

Barack Obama Is Still a Brilliant Political Leader and Thinker, But I Think He Might Be a Jerk

So I read an article on Slate the other day called "Notes Toward a Theory of Obama." It consists of Jacob Weisberg working through a series of observations of Barack Obama, trying to assemble a coherent picture of the man. I still admire him as a brilliant political thinker, and one of the few genuinely smart people who has the charisma and eye for opportunity put their complex philosophical ideas into practice. And there are signs that he might succeed to some reasonable degree in his plans to transform the American economy into a sustainable framework with a more comprehensive social safety net.

However, Weisberg makes some cutting observations that I've noticed about the man himself. Even though he's notoriously cool and continually depicts himself as a calm, tactful, caring man, there's a razor sharp edge to many of his off the cuff remarks, even to his friends and family. I first noticed this during his joke at a press conference during the transition. Regarding his consultation with past presidents, he mentioned that he wouldn't try to contact Nancy Reagan for a séance, and apologized the next day for his insensitivity. As he was boarding the train with his family to the inauguration ceremony, he told his daughter Sasha to mind the gap. "We wouldn't want you to fall underneath the train," he said. "That would really mess up our whole inauguration."

I first listened to those jokes, and felt quite amused. Finally, a politician with as black a sense of humour as mine. I was sure people wouldn't understand, but fortunately his critics are focussing on his actual policies instead of his knife-edge jokes. Then when I listened to his monologue at the Correspondents' Association Dinner, I observed what Weisberg would later write about in his piece.



All Obama's jokes about his cabinet and fellow politicians were insulting, sometimes cruelly personal. He never went as explicitly far as Wanda Sykes' jokes later, but he carried an implicit sting. The only one spared from his wit was himself, who he played up to be the most awesome human being alive.



His comments, his style of policy production, and his relations with political friends, opponents, and co-workers in cabinet has let me put together an even more nuanced picture of Obama than comes across in his two books. Dreams from My Father depicted Obama as an uncertain youth, adrift without a place in the world. The Audacity of Hope saw Obama in a stable place, articulating his vision for society.

Now that he has the validation of the presidential election and his high popularity throughout the country, he now sees himself as a Great Man of History. He makes the policy, forms the philosophies, and no one is above him. The problem is that he knows it, and acts like he knows it. An even bigger problem is what will happen if he makes a serious mistake. Men convinced of their own superiority can lose sight of their ability to stumble, and become unable to tell when they're falling. That denial can seriously exacerbate an error, compounding it into a disaster.

An Alien in London, Overweight as an American

A few days ago, I decided I'd watch the revived Doctor Who over again on dvd, one episode a day, or thereabouts. I've been watching a few of my classic series dvds like this while I ate dinner for the past couple of weeks, and it's a damn good improvement over most of what else is on tv at 5.00 in the afternoon. I think it actually has been well over a year at least since I watched any of the Christopher Eccleston year, so it makes for a good visit to an old friend.

Saturday afternoon, I watched "Aliens of London," the fourth episode of Eccleston's season, and the first part of one of its least-liked stories. The premise of the main plot, as we're introduced to it, is that a group of aliens called the Slitheen have disguised themselves as humans in the British government and security services, and faked an alien invasion. The Slitheen disguise was that they killed people and turned the humans' skins into pressurized suits that they squeezed their large bodies inside, and removed by opening zippers concealed on the forehead and wriggling out.

The main problem people had when the episode first aired in 2005 was that the aliens were more laughable than menacing. They always had to release excess pressure within their suits, and did so by farting, which often led to a barrage of immature jokes that the aliens made themselves. And that immaturity was present in their personalities, vanishing only when they were out of their skin-suits actively snapping necks, which was not often enough to make them genuinely frightening as Doctor Who can make an enemy. Overall, they were quite underwhelming, completely incapable of generating any gravitas, usually coming off as childish alien jerks.

It was only after several years of watching the new show regularly that I realized that this was the idea. Chief producer Russell T Davies has worked out quite a few ideas through the stories of Doctor Who while he was in charge, and the Slitheen was the first iteration of what was actually a quite intellectually interesting villainous motivation: money. The Slitheen were actually an extended family of cash-strapped alien criminals. Their plan was to blow up a planet with a bombardment of nuclear weapons and sell the radioactive pieces on the black market as fuel. But they didn't have the money to buy a planet's worth of nuclear weapons and blow up a lifeless Earth-sized rock. So, after a little research, they discovered Earth, a planet with many antagonistic governments with enormous nuclear arsenals. All they could afford were a couple of transport ships, pressurized skin-suits, and some surgical equipment for a quickie operation on their fake alien, a pig. And with this cheap equipment, they enacted a plan to fake an alien invasion, gain the launch codes for one of the country's arsenals, and attack the other nuclear powers under the pretext of defending from an invading vessel in orbit. The retaliatory strikes would destroy the planet.

The Slitheen were a band of rather ingenious petty criminals, the Fat Tony of Doctor Who. Russell was interested in exploring how petty crime and greed on a galactic scale can cause civilization-ending destruction. It's an interesting idea that such a cataclysm could be inspired by petty greed, but ultimately it makes for a let-down in the drama. As we watch a story unfold, we see a world-destroying catastrophe being precipitated, and we expect a similar sense of majesty in the motivations of the villains. This is why I was so dissatisfied when I first saw the Slitheen acting like immature school bullies. These people are planning to destroy an entire inhabited planet! Could we at least make them aware of the scale of their actions?

It may be fascinating to consider the extreme selfishness that a character could have destroyed a civilization for some quick cash. I think Russell might have been trying to work through a banality of evil concept in a Doctor Who story, which is intellectually interesting, and morally terrifying. The problem is that while the concept is morally frightening, it's a dramatic letdown. Immense plans are being carried out by pathetic, petty morons. I respect Russell's ambition in trying to make this dynamic work, but the mismatch is just too great for anything but an intellectual consideration. As drama, it just doesn't work.

Dreams Are Not For Sleeping, They're For Flying

A few days ago, I finished reading a semi-autobiography of Federico Fellini, a book I picked up in a bookstore in Windsor last month, one of the best impulsive literature purchases I've ever made. Everything in the book except the forward and afterword are transcripts of interviews the author, Charlotte Chandler, had with Fellini talking about his life during their fourteen years of friendship. All you read, though, are Fellini's rants, and none of the questions he was asked that inspired those rants. They cover recollections of his entire life, and while you don't discover much trivia about the production of his individual films, you learn a great deal about the conceptions of the films, the thoughts, philosophies, and imaginations that went into them. It was like reading Fellini's blog entries, as if this loud, huge, joyous man were in the room with you telling these stories.

For the sake of full disclosure I will tell you that I have only ever seen one Fellini film, 8&1/2, and nothing more. But now I want to see them all. Intervista especially seems fascinating. It's his second last film, a meta-film about filmmaking itself. A Japanese documentary crew is making a film about Fellini while Fellini himself is directing an adaptation of Franz Kafka's Amerika. And at one point, Fellini begins to fly over the studio sets he's built in Cinecittá. It's a recurring image throughout the book, that Fellini flies in his dreams.

Listening to Fellini's voice, I've reconsidered the importance of dreams and dreamlike images in the works I'm planning to write in the future. A Small Man's Town is a very realistic book, its narratives all taking place in solidly ordinary life. And my Undesireables project fits my realist leanings neatly as well. But my untitled cyberpunk project has considerable room for this kind of perceptual bending.

I imagine realistic conversations shifting seamlessly into frightening dream logic, as the protagonist Gina is confronted by a novel idea and sets off exploring her psyche and her memories. She has a dark past of which she knows nothing, and her rediscovery of that past is terrifying, a great shock to her suburban sensibilities. Her fugues of rediscovery are to be explorations of a strange place in her brain and in the past of which she knows nothing, yet are disturbingly familiar. She eventually becomes comfortable in her strange surroundings, though what surrounds her is no less strange, and she is just as alienated from her dry dull life at the end of the story as she was from the terrifying dreamscapes at the beginning.

The story has changed quite a bit since its original conception, introducing the dreamscapes and science fiction elements, as it now takes place in a community I think of as cyberpunk suburbs. I'm not yet sure what they'll look like. There is a character of a detective who becomes Gina's unwitting guide to her past, who in my initial conception of the story was a regular jaded ex-cop. But now, I see him as a cross between Nick Fury and Dirk Gently. See if that makes any damn sense.

The Problems of Philosophical Argument

As part of my research, I've been working my way through an old anthology of essays under the title Deep Ecology. I'm discovering the name is something of a vague term, which I enjoy philosophically, but will make some of my philosophical writing more difficult. I had originally conceived of two projects in environmental philosophy: the extension of political/judicial rights to non-humans, which I think is a philosophical misstep; and re-systematizing our metaphysical and ethical understanding to understand the integration of all auto-assembling patterns with each other.

I thought of this more radical philosophical work as deep ecology, and the more conservative rights extension as deep ecology. Reading through the history of the field, I've discovered that all 'deeper' thinking about the environment has been referred to as 'deep ecology,' and there's no solid definition for the term. This is the kind of grey area of philosophy I enjoy working in, and think is the most fruitful. Unfortunately, it means any reviewers will likely say my account doesn't treat the concepts simply. It wouldn't matter that the concepts are nowhere near simple anyway. Perhaps I'm being too pessimistic.

Today, I found an essay in that anthology call "Discriminating Altruism" by Garrett Hardin. Hardin, an American, is a fascinating figure, one whose ideas for shaping a sustainable contemporary society through population control alienated both rightists and leftists. His endorsement of abortion as a suitable means for population control took care of conservatives, while his critiques of immigration as being a detrimental public policy and altruism as a laughably silly morality took care of liberals.

While I'm intrigued by the unsuitability of universal altruism (the "brotherhood of man," as John Lennon and a ton of others have said) as an attribute that would be naturally selected, the way he writes about it irks me. It's no more than an irk, a formal issue of philosophy. But the way one writes philosophy is at the centre of what precisely you think philosophy is. And the first important question you can ask anyone is what exactly it is they do.

Strict philosophical argument is a technique of writing suitable to start debates over increasingly small issues, but is unsuitable for a genuinely radical philosophical engagement. Hardin's argument in that paper begins from a series of premises setting up a network of definitions. The definitions are then analyzed so that you're led to infer step by step to his conclusions. The conclusions are elaborations on the definitions. This is very good for working out the results of a set of definitions, but I don't think it works so well for approaching what is normally called the Truth™, or for creating radical or transformative new ways of thinking.

An argument is always an argument for something, something that you believe in and want to convince other people. Your targeted belief can be a premise in your argument, and you would convince readers by showing how your premise leads to a widely accepted idea as a conclusion. Or your targeted belief can be a conclusion, and your argument would be structured on showing how widely accepted ideas are premises that support your conclusion. A reader's expectations about what is possible in thought are restricted, so any opposition or doubt of that which is argued for becomes silly, rejected, wrong. Relations between ideas may be worked out by examining arguments, and this is very valuable, because we can see how ideas can be made to fit together, or how they are incompatible. But truth is discovered by investigating the world, not by demonstrating compatibilities among ideas.

The most difficult task of philosophy is to create a new way of thinking, a new way of life. This has been done very rarely. Plato, Confucius, Friedrich Nietzsche are some names that come to mind. Perhaps the revolutionaries in logic at the start of the twentieth century as well. Gilles Deleuze made a living writing books that examined other philosophers to work out new ways of life that they inadvertently created within their investigations and arguments. This is creative philosophy, radical philosophy. This is done by an opening of thinking.

As yet, I'm not sure how to explain this beyond my vague gestures and invocations to read Deleuze and Ludwig Wittgenstein. But creative philosophy is the generation of a worldview, a break with traditions in understanding. This kind of philosophy requires an opening of thought, even embracing systems of thinking that contradict each other blatantly, if the mashing together of paradox is to create a new logic where such inferences are perfectly normal. The rhetorical arguments of philosophy – and to argue is rhetorical – narrows the possibilities of thought. Creative philosophy throws those possibilities wider than previously imaginable.

It is far more difficult to orient oneself in a groundless process of thinking, and the vast majority of people are scared shitless by this prospect. I've met philosophers who dismiss this way of thinking about philosophy as the techniques of a charlatan, creating excuses to get away with bullshit. But a creative philosopher only makes bullshit when he fails. When she crafts a worldview that intrigues, that offers useful re-creations of old premises, new approaches for the challenges of new times, then brilliant work has been done. And if the successful creative philosopher is lucky, that work will last longer than even the tightest, most comforting argument.

Is this a well-written defense of philosophical egomania? If you think so, I can't convince you otherwise. After all, an argument is only persuasive if some premise, or some conclusion, was acceptable beforehand. If you approach an argument and think it's all wrong, that it contains nothing of value, then you will pass it by, because it doesn't matter to you.