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Visions and Revisions: Hollywood’s Alternative Worlds Review: James Walters (2008) Alternative Worlds in Hollywood Cinema: Resonance Between Realms. Bristol: Intellect.

David Sterritt Long Island University

Near the beginning of Alternative Worlds in Hollywood Cinema: Resonance Between Realms, media scholar James Walters cites the observation by filmphilosopher Stanley Cavell that Hollywood movies have ‘always had a taste for contrasting worlds of the everyday with worlds of the imaginary,’ which Cavell sees as ‘playing on the two primordial possibilities of film, realism and fantasy’ (10; Cavell 2005, 345). This statement covers an enormous amount of film-historical ground, and Walters takes it as an invitation to consider the vast array of contrasting-world movies as a metagenre that can be systematically organized and analyzed. Setting to work, he elaborates on the notion of cinematic ‘worlds’ via assorted film-theoretical concepts. One starting point is Edward Branigan’s idea that a narrative film’s visual and aural components are ‘experienced in two ways: virtually unshaped on a screen as well as apparently moving within, reflecting and issuing from, a world which contains solid objects making sounds’ (17; Branigan 1992, 33). Another is V.F. Perkins’s contention that the relationships ‘between reality and illusion, object and image’ in narrative cinema derive their complexity from every film’s need to forge a synthesis that ‘both records what has been created and creates by its manner of recording’ (20-1; Perkins 1993, 61-2). Still another is David Bordwell’s account of the ‘forking path’ or ‘what-if’ story, which aims to ‘create resonance between one world and another, reversing or revising key details in order to communicate the weight and Film-Philosophy | ISSN: 1466-4615

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purpose of certain decisions and directions,’ as Walters paraphrases it (34-5). Other antecedents cited by Walters include Peter Wollen’s description of the multiple-diegesis movie, á la Jean-Luc Godard, and Jane Feuer’s work on ‘dream worlds’ and ‘dream stages’ in the Hollywood musical. Walters’s survey has two appealing features. One is its way of putting theoretical ideas into play with one another, as when Branigan’s concern with ‘the three-dimensional depth of the cinematic world’ is contrasted with Cavell’s explication of an ‘implied world’ extending beyond the camera’s scope (17). The other stems from Walters’s wish not to engage in theory for theory’s sake but rather to study how alternative movie-worlds can matter in specific and distinctive ways, exploring ‘questions of individual selfawareness and fluctuating self-identity’ (13) that affect us in the audience as well as characters in the films. This part of the book also has two weaknesses, however. Not all of the ideas Walters cites are equally pertinent to the films he goes on to examine – none of them has much (or anything) in common with Wollen’s ‘counter-cinema’ paradigm, for instance – and some of his conclusions are rather obvious, as when he deduces that ‘the world in film is a complex amalgamation of real and fantasized elements, but crucially the existence of both does not compromise our definition of the fictional world as a world’ (25). True enough, but hardly a revelation. Having set up his theoretical framework, Walters goes on to deploy his tripartite scheme for classifying alternative-world movies. Films in Category 1 present Imagined Worlds, dreamed or hallucinated by characters who otherwise dwell in familiar-seeming environments; those in Category 2 present Potential Worlds, transformed or distorted versions of the characters’ usual milieus; and films in Category 3 present Other Worlds, wholly different from and discontinuous with the characters’ normal habitations. The book introduces each category with a chapter using several films as examples, and then probes the classification more deeply in extended analyses of two or three movies. In one of his most successful strokes, Walters opens his investigation of Imagined Worlds with Let Me Dream Again, a 1900 comedy by British filmmaker George Albert Smith wherein a man makes movie-style love to a frisky young woman in what appears to be his living Film-Philosophy | ISSN: 1466-4615

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room, and then – after a moment when the image slips out of focus – abruptly finds himself in bed, attired in a nightshirt, and accompanied not by the young playmate but by ‘an older, less attractive female that we take to be the man’s wife,’ as Walters puts it (44). Along with subsequent examples ranging from the film-within-a-film in Sherlock Jr. (Buster Keaton, 1924) to the Salvador Dalí sequence in Spellbound (Alfred Hitchcock, 1945), Smith’s antic dream-movie provides an apt introduction to the extended close analyses that follow. These analyses focus on The Wizard of Oz (Victor Fleming, 1939) and The Woman in the Window (Fritz Lang, 1944), which exemplify how two movies can seem diametrically different at first glance but reveal uncanny resemblances when even briefly examined.1 They also shore up Walters’s thesis that effective Imagined World movies are those where the worlds inflect

and

resonate

with

one

another

in

epistemologically

and

psychologically meaningful ways. Judy Garland’s Dorothy and Edward G. Robinson’s Dr. Wanley both hail from colourless environments – an unexciting Kansas farm for her, a monotonous professorship (assistant! at his age!) for him – and both fall into dreams, one of Oz and one of murder, that carry the force of reality while they’re unfolding and leave the dreamers with (normative, obedience-inducing) life lessons after they’ve faded. Walters unpacks the films’ similarities in useful and sometimes creative ways, closing with the accurate observation that these characters have always been ill-suited to the waking worlds in which they actually live, and that whatever forms their lives might take in the future, ‘neither film has given…much hope to build upon’ (77). He then applies his Imagined World model to Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (Michel Gondry, 2004), showing that the model is flexible enough to illuminate a movie that, unlike the Lang and Fleming films, makes the characters and audience continually aware that much of the action is occurring within the protagonist’s hyperactive, and acutely imperilled, mind.

1

Or maybe not so uncanny; see Lang’s masterly The Testament of Dr. Mabuse (Das Testament des Dr. Mabuse, 1933) for evidence of his interest in L. Frank Baum’s popular Oz fantasy six years before Fleming’s film appeared. Film-Philosophy | ISSN: 1466-4615

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Next up is the discussion of Potential Worlds, beginning with brief considerations of several relevant films including Donnie Darko (Richard Kelly, 2001), Back to the Future (Robert Zemeckis, 1985), and The Last Temptation of Christ (Martin Scorsese, 1988); pointing to the next chapter, about It’s a Wonderful Life (Frank Capra, 1946), Walters reinforces his theme of ‘resonating realms’ by quoting a newspaper critic who likened Scorsese’s biblical epic to an upside-down version of Capra’s depression epic. The expansive analyses of It’s a Wonderful Life and Groundhog Day (Harold Ramis, 1993) flesh out the concept of Potential World films, in which protagonists enter different versions of their usual environments; of Walters’s three categories, this is the one most directly in sync with the word ‘alternative’ in the book’s title. I also find it the most artistically compelling, since the movies it subsumes generally avoid the easiest narrative tricks, such as dream sequences, and it is the most philosophically rich as well, offering fertile territory for the explorations of identity and consciousness that Walters wants to highlight. This said, his analyses of the Capra and Ramis films have pretty much the same outcome, finding their carefully detailed alternative worlds to be mechanisms for little more than educating and uplifting the protagonist, leading in Capra’s drama ‘to George’s rescue and resurrection’ and in Ramis’s comedy to ‘an unexpected reinvention of Phil’s life,’ to quote the final words of their respective chapters. It’s too bad that the interpretive energy of Walters’s close readings do not bring about more original conclusions. A discussion of the problem of other minds, the philosophical topic raised by every frame of Groundhog Day and very germane to the concept of alternative worlds, would have been welcome too. Other Worlds are just that – worlds entirely apart from the characters’ habitual surroundings – and Walters efficiently sets the scene with concise treatments of such films as The Others (Alejandro Amenábar, 2001), A Matter of Life and Death (aka Stairway to Heaven, Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, 1946), and The Purple Rose of Cairo (Woody Allen,

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1985); the most intriguing are Flatliners (Joel Schumacher, 1990), not a great movie but a fascinating conceit, and Lang’s 1934 version of Liliom, which Walters could (and should – it’s a missed opportunity) have compared with Frank Borzage’s astonishing 1930 version. The chapter-length analyses that follow are devoted to Brigadoon (Vincente Minnelli, 1954) and Pleasantville (Gary Ross, 1998), which certainly present Other Worlds but hold little narrative or cinematic interest in themselves. In the book’s conclusion, Walters reiterates his desire to present readings that support the value of his chosen films ‘as works of fantasy which are pertinent to the human condition in ways both complex and profound’ (213). My critical judgements aren’t necessarily more valid than his, but nothing in Walters’s extended

studies

of

Minnelli’s

flat,

laboured

musical

and

Ross’s

inconsequential teen-pic persuaded me that complexity and profundity are afoot. This would be a better book if its primary objects of study were works of more aesthetic and philosophical substance.2 I also wish Walters had incorporated the philosophical notion of possible (and incompossible) worlds in his discussion; the Imagined, Potential, and Other Worlds that he identifies, classifies, and scrutinises have powerful resonances with ontological and epistemological issues linked to the legacy of Gottfried Leibniz, and philosophically informed reference to the polyvalent interrelationships among actual, virtual, possible, potential, necessary and their discursive kin could have broadened and deepened his project in many ways. Missing too is a discussion of the connections between Walters’s alternative-world schema and the ever-expanding domain of virtual reality; the book is fundamentally about the virtual realities cooked 2

If ever Walters decides to expand further on alternative worlds, perhaps looking beyond Hollywood, my suggestions would include Vampyr – Der Traum des Allan Grey (Carl Th. Dreyer, 1932), When Worlds Collide (Rudolph Maté, 1951), 2001: A Space Odyssey (Stanley Kubrick, 1968), Hot Tomorrows (Martin Brest, 1977), Brazil (Terry Gilliam, 1985) for its terrifying final scene, Jacob’s Ladder (Adrian Lyne, 1990), Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (Terry Gilliam, 1998) because drug experience should surely play a part in this discourse, Mulholland Dr. (David Lynch, 2001) for its unprecedented spin on dream-world aesthetics, the Matrix trilogy (Andy Wachowski and Larry Wachowski, 1999-2003), for a long list of reasons, and 25 th Hour (Spike Lee, 2002) for its sublime and visionary ending.

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up by an industry whose technical armamentarium and means of distribution grow exponentially from year to year, and while Walters has every right to focus his energies on Hollywood theatrical films, his avoidance of even glancing remarks about such topics as digital imaging, interactive telecommunications, and the teeming realms of cyberspace is regrettable. These matters aside, I find James Walters’s alternative-world paradigm to be useful as an analytical tool and valuable as a springboard to further discussion along the lines he has imaginatively opened up. There is one more problem with the volume, however, and it’s a major one for me, although some readers (not too many, I pray) may find it just a quibble. Much of the book is badly written – not badly in the sense of pretentious or jargon-ridden or obscure, but badly in the sense of frequently displaying an insecure grasp of the English language. Intellect Books must share the blame; still, a scholarly author should be able to steer clear of malapropisms, solecisms, and the like. The phrase ‘being as’ is not an acceptable substitute for ‘since’ (49); one follows ‘the regimens of everyday existence’, not the ‘regiments’ thereof (213); using gender-neutral language is well and good, but when you’re referring to a male character played by a male actor, it’s well and good to write ‘the character himself’, not ‘the character themselves’ (34); an element of mise-en-scène might distract, not ‘detract’, our attention from what the characters are doing

(63); the pronouns ‘he’ and ‘him’ are not

interchangeable (passim); ditto for ‘she’ and ‘her’ (passim); in the phrase ‘concert-standard pianoforte’ (35), the hyphenated words constitute an adjective, not a verb, and while some people may still say ‘pianoforte’, they probably aren’t referring to Bill Murray tickling the ivories in Groundhog Day. Et cetera. Errors like these detract from the book’s persuasive power, and its best ideas are too interesting to warrant such slipshod prose. I respectfully suggest that all involved with producing Alternative Worlds in Hollywood Cinema fine-tune their future projects with more care. They and their readers will be much better served.

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Bibliography Branigan, Edward. (1992) Narrative Comprehension and Film. London: Routledge. Cavell, Stanley (2005) ‘The Good of Film’ in Cavell on Film. Ed. William Rothman. New York: State University of New York Press, 333-348. Perkins, V.F. (1993) Film as Film: Understanding and Judging Movies. New York: Da Capo Press.

Filmography Allen, Woody (1985) The Purple Rose of Cairo. USA. Amenábar, Alejandro (2001). The Others. USA/Spain/France/Italy. Borzage, Frank (1930) Liliom. USA. Brest, Martin (1977) Hot Tomorrows. USA. Capra, Frank (1946) It’s a Wonderful Life. USA. Dreyer, Carl Th. (1932) Vampyr – Der Traum des Allan Grey. France/Germany. Fleming, Victor (1939) The Wizard of Oz. USA. Gilliam, Terry (1985) Brazil. UK. Gilliam, Terry (1998) Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. USA. Gondry, Michel (2004) Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. USA. Hitchcock. Alfred (1945) Spellbound. USA. Keaton, Buster (1924) Sherlock Jr. USA. Kelly, Richard (2001) Donnie Darko. USA. Kubrick, Stanley (1968) 2001: A Space Odyssey. UK/USA. Lang, Fritz (1933) The Testament of Dr. Mabuse (Das Testament des Dr. Mabuse). Germany Lang, Fritz (1934) Liliom. France. Lang, Fritz (1944) The Woman in the Window. USA. Film-Philosophy | ISSN: 1466-4615

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Lee, Spike (2002) 25th Hour. USA. Lynch, David (2001) Mulholland Dr. France/USA. Lyne, Adrian (1990) Jacob’s Ladder. USA. Maté, Rudolph (1951) When Worlds Collide. USA. Minnelli, Vincente (1954) Brigadoon. USA. Powell, Michael, and Emeric Pressburger (1946) A Matter of Life and Death (Stairway to Heaven). UK. Ramis, Harold (1993) Groundhog Day. USA. Ross, Gary (1998) Pleasantville. USA. Schumacher, Joel (1990) Flatliners. USA. Scorsese, Martin (1988) The Last Temptation of Christ. USA. Smith, George Albert (1900) Let Me Dream Again. UK. Wachowski, Andy and Larry Wachowski (1999) The Matrix. USA. Wachowski, Andy and Larry Wachowski (2003) The Matrix Reloaded. USA. Wachowski, Andy and Larry Wachowski (2003) The Matrix Revolutions. USA. Zemeckis, Robert (1985) Back to the Future. USA.

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