Film-Philosophy
Journal | Salon | Portal (ISSN 1466-4615)
Vol. 7 No. 24, August 2003
Julian Baggini
Alien Ways of Thinking:
Mulhall's _On Film_
_On Film_ London and New York:
Routledge,
2002 ISBN
0-415-24796-9 142 pp. At the beginning of the
first chapter of his short but rich discussion of the
_Alien_ quartet, Stephen Mulhall describes the first scene
of Ridley Scott's original movie, where the camera slowly
glides around the spaceship Nostromo, undisturbed by any
human activity (13-17). Eventually, we are shown the human
inhabitants slowly awake from the suspended animation, in
what Mulhall calls 'a kind of rebirth', one which 'represses
its creatureliness, that represents parturition as an
automated function of technology rather than of flesh
emerging noisily and painfully from flesh -- as essentially
devoid of blood, trauma and sexuality' (16). These skilfully written
pages set up much of what is to come: the problematic
relationship between humans and technology, sexuality and
embodiment; but also the problem each film confronts in
having to give new life to the alien universe, to bring a
new directorial sensibility to each film while preserving
the continuity of the series. But from a philosophical
point of view, the main, underlying question which the book
never escapes from has already been raised in the
Introduction. Mulhall writes that he wants to see each of
_Alien_ films as 'philosophy in action -- film as
philosophising' (2). But what does it mean for film to
philosophise? Reading and rereading the book, watching and
re-watching the films it discusses, this for me emerges as
the most important and pressing question raised in _On
Film_. Mulhall specifies a few
things it does not mean for a film to philosophise. It does
not mean that film provides 'philosophy's raw material' (2)
in the sense that the philosopher treats the film as merely
providing subject matter for his or her philosophising. Nor
is it 'a source for its ornamentation' (2), from which
examples and illustrations can be plucked to dress up
philosophy in the garb of accessible popular culture. To add
to these two negative answers, we can also say that to see
film as philosophising is not to see it as simply helping
itself to a melange of philosophical ideas in order to
explore their dramatic potential. All these ways of treating
film philosophically have been exemplified by the use of
philosophy by both the makers of and commentators on _The
Matrix_. [1] Scenarios and scenes from the film have
been taken up as starting points for philosophical
discussions or as 'cool' illustrations of perennial
philosophical problems. The film certainly picks up and
plays with many philosophical ideas, such as those
concerning reality, authenticity, determinism, and free
will. But little or none of this literature has treated
seriously the idea that the film itself did serious
philosophical work, genuinely moving forward our
understanding of the problems and issues it raises, for the
obvious reason that it did no such thing. It does not deepen
our understanding of the ideas it toys with, it merely plays
intellectual and dramatic games with them, albeit it to
spectacular effect. Most obviously, perhaps,
Mulhall is not thinking about film as philosophising in the
sense that film can offer explicit arguments, a series of
articulated syllogisms. Interestingly, this is how the
Wachowski brothers sought to deepen the philosophical
dimension of _The Matrix_ in _The Matrix Reloaded_. Perhaps
emboldened by the philosophical literature the first film
spawned, in the sequel they allowed themselves the
indulgence of inserting lengthy philosophical digressions,
in which the characters actually discuss explicit
philosophical ideas and arguments. This crude attempt to put
philosophy into the film was rightly derided by the critics,
who saw through the pretentiousness of the script to its
philosophically bankrupt core. A further approach which
Mulhall himself expressly says he eschews is to follow the
many film theorists who 'treat the films they discuss as
objects to which specific theoretical edifices . . . could
be applied' (6). If we are to take the idea of film as
philosophising seriously, we need to allow the possibility
that they can challenge as well as confirm the prior
theoretical commitments we bring to them. This deliberate distancing
from the conventions of film criticism may disconcert
readers expecting to find discussions coached in a
particular vocabulary. For example, nowhere in the text does
the term 'auteur' appear, even though Mulhall does relate
the _Alien_ films to other works by their directors. This is
not because Mulhall the philosopher hasn't done his
film-crit homework. (As if to prove this point, there are
four references to 'auteur theory' in the index.) It seems
rather that Mulhall is deliberately trying to make sure we
don't slip into seeing his discussion of the _Alien_ films
as a standard (whatever that means) piece of film criticism,
but remember that he is looking at the films as examples of
'philosophy in action'. If these are the various
things Mulhall does *not* mean by 'film as philosophising',
what does he mean by this phrase? Mulhall seems to make
himself clear enough: 'I see them rather as themselves
reflecting on and evaluating such views and arguments, as
thinking seriously and systematically about then in just the
ways that philosophers do' (2). Many films represent
philosophically pregnant ideas and arguments, but not all of
them actually take these ideas and arguments forward. For a
film to genuinely philosophise it must make this positive
contribution. It must not only mimic or enact philosophical
arguments but do some real work with them. Mulhall's succinct answer
is the source of what for me is this book's most important
and lingering question: how can film philosophise in this
way? How does a movie think 'seriously and systematically .
. . in just the ways that philosophers do'? And what does
the answer to that question tell us about the ways in which
philosophers normally think 'seriously and systematically'?
The answers to these questions are not self-evident, since
it is obvious that the kind of discussion exemplified in _On
Film_ is very different to those usually found in
contemporary academic journals and monographs. Mulhall does not
explicitly answer these questions anywhere in the book. But
this should not be seen as a great failing or omission.
Rather, I would like to take seriously the possibility that,
in being invited to see the _Alien_ films as examples of
philosophy in action, we are deliberately being *shown*
examples of what philosophy is, rather than being *told*
what it is. And the most plausible explanation of why
Mulhall shows rather than tells is that he sees that
difference as being crucial to understanding the mode of
philosophising he is dealing with. One cannot talk about the
difference between showing and telling in philosophy without
evoking Wittgenstein's aphorism, 'What *can* be shown
*cannot* be said.' [2] If Wittgenstein is right,
then it might seem to threaten the very possibility of
writing philosophically about what is being shown. For if,
as I have suggested, Mulhall is working with the idea that
film as philosophising is a form of showing, and what can be
shown cannot be said, then in trying to write about it,
isn't he attempting to say the unsayable? And isn't this
paradox doubled if, in discussing Mulhall's text, we attempt
to spell out what it is Mulhall shows? The way out of the first
paradox also provides a way out of the second. The simple
point is that one can show with words, and that this is
nonetheless different from saying. For example, I can say
what singing is or I can show you what singing is, by
breaking into song. In both cases I use words, but in the
second case I am genuinely showing your something rather
than saying what it is. Similarly, and more pertinently, I
can attempt to say what philosophy is, by completing a
locution of the form 'philosophy is . . .'; or I can attempt
to show what philosophy is by doing some for you. Again, in
both cases words are being used, but one is an example of
saying, the other showing. So there is no paradox in the
idea that Mulhall might be showing us what philosophy is or
can be in his text rather than saying it, since his showing
can take the form of a demonstration or exemplification of a
form of philosophising. Nevertheless, his task is
not easy, since he is trying to show us what film as
philosophising is, as a distinct form of philosophising. The
difficulty he has is how to show this without translating
his examples of film as philosophising into standard written
forms of philosophising. This is perhaps the main reason why
Mulhall cannot explicitly say what it means for film to
philosophise: for to say it would be transform its
distinctive mode of philosophising into another mode and
thus to distort the phenomenon which is supposed to be
explained. So Mulhall has to point and guide us towards the
philosophising undertaken in the films, hoping that we see
for ourselves what is going on. And in writing about this
attempt, this review must also avoid trying to say what can
only be shown by providing a neat 'translation' into the
prose form of the mode of philosophising possible in
film. If we are to take
seriously the idea of a distinctive 'film as philosophising'
mode of argumentation, we can thus hope to be able to
understand it at least in part by reference to the show/tell
distinction. By itself, however, the distinction is
inadequate to explain how fictional films can philosophise,
since by their nature what they show is not reality but a
fictional construct. This is especially true within the
genre of science fiction, where the action is premised
precisely on the fact that the world depicted is different
from the real world we inhabit. So to show something within
a film is not necessarily to show something which is true of
the world and is indeed sometimes to necessarily not show
something which is true of the world. This might seem
antithetical to the project of philosophy, which is surely
about, in some sense at least, revealing the nature of
reality, the structure of logic, the essence of being, and
so forth. If this is true, then how can fictional
representations hope to show the nature of reality in a
philosophically rigorous way? This problem may not
appear so great to someone with Mulhall's broader
philosophical commitments, however. He has said elsewhere
that he has 'a sense that there's an open border between
philosophy and literature'. [3] For anyone who holds
such a view, the distinction between a description of
reality and a fictional representation of reality is not
likely to be as sharp as, say, the project of pure
twentieth-century analytical philosophy would hope. To
accept this point need not mean going the whole way down the
road to accepting that all descriptions of reality are
'mere' constructs, or that there is no difference at all
between fact and fiction. It is simply to accept that both
literature and philosophy are in the business of describing
and representing, often with very different ways, but with a
common aspiration for truthfulness. This kind of truthfulness
is obviously not the kind of truth as depicted in
traditional correspondence theories, for example, where a
proposition is held to be true if and only if it fits
reality exactly. As the paradigm example has it, the
proposition 'snow is white' is true if an only if snow is
white. A filmmaker or novelist does not attempt to be
truthful by achieving this kind of literal correspondence.
Of course we do not say that Newt's line in _Aliens_, 'My
mommy always said there were no monsters -- no real ones --
but there are', is true if and only if there are monsters
and her mother said there weren't. That much is obvious. But
what is less obvious is what truthfulness means in
philosophy if we declare the correspondence theory dead, as
many philosophers have done. Even if we maintain that
truth is a matter of correspondence, *truthfulness* can
still be seen as distinct from truth. Bernard Williams, for
example, sees truthfulness as being a kind of intellectual
virtue, 'a readiness against being fooled, and eagerness to
see through appearances to the real structure and motives
that lie behind them'. [4] This virtue of
truthfulness can be shared by philosophy, literature, and
film. Paradigmatically, philosophy's truthfulness is
demonstrated by the precision and rigour of its arguments.
And yet it is far too limiting to conceive of philosophy as
being solely or even mainly about the construction of
arguments, with conclusions that follow from premises, as
the product follows from the multiplication of numbers. For
example, in order to reason well from sound premises one
first needs to identify those features of the world which
are most pertinent to the problem at hand. This process of
identification is not itself a form of deductive argument.
Rather, it is something which is done well or badly
according the skill and judgement of the philosopher. We
thus assess the success of this part of their philosophising
not by looking to see if they have an appropriate argument
but by judging whether the philosopher has correctly
identified what it is that really matters. For example, David Hume's
most famous contribution to the philosophy of personal
identity is not an argument, but an observation: 'When I enter most
intimately into what I call myself, I always stumble on some
particular perception or other, of heat or cold, light or
shade, love or hatred, pain or pleasure. I can never catch
myself at any time without a perception, and never can
observe anything but the perception. When my perceptions are
removed for any time, as by sound sleep, so long am I
insensible of myself, and may truly be said not to exist.'
[5] We assess this claim not
by attending to the logical structure of the paragraph but
by entering most intimately into what we all ourselves, to
see if our experience matches that of Hume. What we are
looking for is a consonance between Hume's perception and
representation of the world and our own. This is much closer
to what goes on when we look for truthfulness in a film or a
book, and explains at least in part how literature, film,
and philosophy can overlap. It also explains how film can be
a form of philosophising. The filmmaker perceives the world
in a certain way and represents it to us -- perhaps
symbolically. We judge the success of the result --
philosophically, if not aesthetically -- by the extent to
which that representation is consonant with our
experience. It is not, enough,
however, for a representation to be merely consonant with
our experience. If that were all we were looking for then
video recordings from CCTV cameras would be as good as
feature films. Film should be consonant with our experience
but in such a way as to reveal something about it we had not
noticed before, or to make sense of it in a different and
helpful way. This would serve equally well as a description
of philosophy; Hume's observations on the self are
philosophically interesting because they reveal to us
something about the nature of our experience of self which
we may not have noticed or articulated as clearly
before. This fits in with what
Mulhall says about film as philosophising as 'reflecting on
and evaluating such views and arguments, as thinking
seriously and systematically about them'. Film, like
philosophy, can represent reality to us truthfully in such a
way as to make us understand it better or more accurately
than before. Film can achieve this through fictions which
can include non-literal modes of representation such as
metaphor, whereas philosophy usually achieves the same goal
through more literal modes of description. Philosophy thus
*says* while film *shows*, its form of showing being
distinct from more literal forms such as
demonstration. How does this cash out in
the particular examples of film being discussed, namely, the
_Alien_ quartet and selected other works by their directors?
Mulhall identifies various themes the films philosophise
about. Their two main philosophical subjects are identified
as 'the relation of human identity to embodiment' (2) and
'the conditions for the possibility of film' (3). What might be surprising
is that when Mulhall comes to illustrate how the _Alien_
films exemplify film as philosophising, what we seem to be
offered is a standard form of interpretation, where the
films are understood to contain various levels of symbolic
meaning. The language here includes the usual verbs of
metaphor and simile: 'represents', 'characterises', 'like',
'suggest' and so forth. Hence, in some lines already cited:
'We are being given a picture of human origination that
represses its creatureliness, that represents parturition as
an automated function of technology rather than of flesh
emerging noisily and painfully from flesh . . .'
(16). 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. Take, for example, one of
two possible explanations given by Mulhall for why Ripley
sleeps with Clemens in _Alien 3_. For Mulhall, this is in
urgent need of explanation, for Ripley has not only been
chaste in the first two _Alien _ films, she has also,
according to Mulhall, been engaged in symbolic battle
against the violence of heterosexual male penetration which
the alien itself represents -- as a creature that literally
enters and impregnates the body of its host by force.
Mulhall believes the key is that, as the title sequence of
the third film shows, she has already been penetrated by the
alien, and on some level she knows this. He
writes: 'Ripley has, without
willing it, already undergone her worst nightmare of
heterosexual intercourse and survived; hence (assuming she
knows this about herself), it is a world in which actual,
human heterosexual intercourse has been demystified, and
hence becomes a real option for her' (104-105). It would run counter to my
stated goal of trying to avoid translating film as
philosophising too literally into ordinary philosophical
discourse to even attempt to spell out in explicit terms the
ways in which this aspect of the film advances philosophical
debate in the area of human sexuality. But whatever way we
understand this as an attempt to move us forward, to
'reflect' on and 'evaluate' our existing ideas about them,
it is hard to see how the depiction of events in the film
could provide us with reasons for accepting or rejecting the
picture we are being offered. The 'alien universe', as
Mulhall repeatedly calls it, is simply too artificial a
creation for us to be able to draw any inferences from what
happens there to how the world really is. At best, it seems,
the alien universe can be used to provide us with models and
metaphors that we can then go and examine to see how
accurately they reflect the world we inhabit. But this takes
us back to the idea of the films as providing the 'raw
materials' for philosophy rather than actually being
examples of 'philosophy in action', which is precisely what
Mulhall said would be mistaken. I will consider a possible
response to this objection shortly. But first I want to
stress that I do not have these doubts because I think that
'film as philosophising' is impossible. Rather, I simply
think that the _Alien_ films fail to provide good examples
of it. A better example, I would argue, is Akira Kurosawa's
_Rashomon_. _Rashomon_ is usually thought of as providing a
meditation on or even demonstration of the relativity of
truth. However, to think that the film merely champions a
version of relativism or Nietzschean perspectivism is, I
would argue, to seriously underestimate the extent to which
it is, in Mulhall's phrase, an example of 'philosophy in
action'. The basic structure of the
film is that one event -- the capture of a couple, the rape
of the woman, and murder of the husband -- is reported in
contradictory ways by four different protagonists: the
bandit Tajomaru, the wife, the husband (via a medium), and
the woodcutter. What makes it philosophically interesting --
and original -- is that the specific ways in which the
accounts differ point towards a much more subtle conception
of truth than crude relativism or perspectivism, but one
which nonetheless preserves their basic insights. The
crucial point is that even though the accounts differ in
various important aspects, they are sufficiently similar for
us to be able to see them as recollections of the same
event. Furthermore, when one looks at how much is common to
all accounts, a surprisingly large number of objective facts
remain constant. Hence the recollections, although very
different, are in a large number of respects consistent with
a stripped-down version of events that confines itself only
to certain central events. Where the accounts differ
most is in how they portray the comportment of the
protagonists, in particular those aspects of their behaviour
which relate most clearly to their virtue or lack of it and
which are seen as indicative of their inner states of mind.
It is quite clear that the protagonists are making very
different moral assessments of how they and the others
behaved, assessments which are in part based on their
perceptions of motives and feelings which cannot be fully
manifest in behaviour, since they have at least in part a
private dimension. What we are really being
shown then is how one event, which in certain respects
objectively occurred, since its key details are not even
contested by the inconsistent accounts, is nonetheless
recalled differently because the participants did not merely
experience the events as detached, objective observers, but
as participants who saw, in their actions and the actions of
others, motives, feelings, and moral commitments that were
not simple, publicly observable facts. Hence we are shown
how to make compatible a kind of non-relativistic view that
there are objective facts with the truth that events are
ineluctably perceived differently by each
individual. Obviously this is just a
sketch of the philosophically deep waters _Rashomon_
gracefully swims through. The purpose of the sketch is
merely to bring out two important points. The first is that
this is an example of how film can take forward a
philosophical debate in a specifically cinematic way.
Although one can to a certain extent formalise the
'argument' of the film in standard philosophical discourse,
the argument of _Rashomon_ is stronger on screen precisely
because it is more effective in this case to show than to
tell. This is because -- and this is the second key point --
the showing provides reasons for us to accept the
philosophical position being shown. It demonstrates the
possibility of what might, simply described, seem
impossible, and in showing it in the context of a story that
is all-to believable -- all-too human in its moral and
emotional projection, fallibility, and self-serving bias --
it provides evidence that this is actually the way the world
is. In short, the argument presented is coherent, it
explains things about truth and belief in novel ways and it
fits our understanding of how the world actually
is. _Alien 3_ on the other
hand, does not have the same intellectual reach. The image
it symbolically presents of male heterosexuality may be
coherent, but it is not clear how it deepens our
understanding of it. After all, the idea that male sexuality
is inherently threatening, if not actually necessarily
violent, is not new. And although Mulhall obviously explores
this theme in more depth, I struggle to see the significant
new insight the film offers. Furthermore, there seems
nothing that could give us reasons to accept such
'insights', even if they were present. Where _Rashomon_
seemed to genuinely show us something about truth, _Alien 3_
seems only able to offer us metaphors for life and sexuality
that we must go away and chew over later. We are back again
to film as providing the 'raw materials' for philosophising
rather than philosophising themselves. One possible response to
this objection is that I have over-simplified the ways in
which philosophy can provide us with reasons. Although I
have been careful to stress that these reasons need not be
arguments or propositions, it could be objected that I have
overlooked the extent to which a symbolic representation can
itself provide reasons for belief. One line such an argument
could follow is suggested by Mulhall's assertion that film
can think 'seriously and systematically . . . *in just the
ways that philosophers do*' (2, my emphasis). If we take
Mulhall at his word, instead of starting from how we think
philosophy works, as I have to a certain extent done, and
then seeing if the _Alien_ films match up, perhaps we should
look at how the films examine their ideas and see how
philosophy matches up to that. If we do this we are left
with the suggestion that philosophy is also about offering a
symbolic representation of the world which we accept or
reject in so far as it fits or fails to fit the world it is
in some sense describing. Hence the kinds of reasons we
might have for accepting a philosophical position are not
just those offered within and by the description or
representation of that position, but those that result from
our success or failure to see the position as providing a
fruitful or enlightening way of seeing the world. This
similarity between the form of film as philosophising
Mulhall seems to be describing and standard philosophy is
strengthened if one accepts that a philosophical account is
also a symbolic representation. It is simply that the
symbols of orthodox philosophy are those of language and
logic, whereas those of film are metaphor and imagery, in
its visuals as well as dialogue. But there is no objective
reason why we should allow a traditional logocentric bias in
western philosophy to prejudice us against the equal merit
of non-linguistic forms of representation. There is surely much that
is right in this kind of line of argument, in that it points
the way to what Mulhall calls the 'open border' between film
and philosophy. But I remain unconvinced that we can start
with the assumption that the _Alien_ films philosophise 'in
just the ways' philosophers ordinarily do. Certainly films
can be *philosophical* when they present a symbolic
representation of the world for us to judge the accuracy of.
This is one way of understanding the 'open border' between
film and philosophy. But I still think we need something to
distinguish philosophy from just any attempt to come up with
a way of viewing the world, and I would maintain that the
key to this difference is that philosophy is by its nature
reason-giving. Reason-giving must come to an end at some
point. To quote Wittgenstein again: 'For just where one says
'But don't you *see* . . . ?' the rule is no use, it is what
is explained, not what does the explaining.' [6]
Hence when assessing the claim of Hume's discussed earlier,
although Hume is giving us a reason to follow him,
ultimately we have to simply look and see if his account
fits our experience of the world. But I see it as central to
the philosophical enterprise that we offer reasons as much
as is possible and that reason-giving ends only when it has
to, not before. In contrast, along with much film and
literature, the _Alien_ films offer us symbolic
representations of the world but don't provide us with
reasons for thinking that these representations are
accurate. We have to go away and see if they fit our
experience of the world, we are not shown that they
do. Others, such as some
varieties of Wittgensteinian (by which I do not presume any
fidelity to the actual Wittgenstein), may be less convinced.
They may be more willing to accept that often philosophy can
do no more than present a picture which we either judge
should be accepted or rejected on the basis of how well it
fits experience. For such people, there is no particular
problem in accepting the symbolic representations offered by
the _Alien_ films as examining ideas 'in just the ways
philosophers do'. But for philosophers of my ilk, this may
be to stretch the idea of philosophy too far, leaving us
with no way of distinguishing between philosophy and, say,
religious or mythological accounts of the world. For sure,
it is not that this distinction can be made sharply, hence
the existence of 'open borders'. But for those of us still
sufficiently attracted to the merits of good, strong
arguments, ones which provide the reasons we have for
accepting them, there are good motives for wanting the open
border to remain a border, one we cross with ease but the
legitimacy of which we recognise. In conclusion, then,
Mulhall's claim that we should view the _Alien_ films -- and
by extension many other films -- as 'themselves reflecting
on and evaluating . . . views and arguments, as thinking
seriously and systematically about them in just the ways
that philosophers do' can only be accepted if we also accept
a much broader claim about the nature of philosophy itself.
This amounts to the claim that philosophy's lofty ambition
to distinguish itself from other forms of discourse by
virtue of its reason-giving nature cannot or should not be
fulfilled, at least not as we would normally understand it.
Rather, philosophers can often do little more than present
their understandings of the world, through dry, literal
descriptions, as in most academic philosophy; or through
imagery, metaphor, and symbolism, as in literature and film
(and no doubt other art forms). Reasons may be explicitly
offered as to why we should accept these understandings, but
they need not. We might simply have to judge them by how
successful they are in the explanatory work they set out to
do. Only on something like this understanding of what
philosophy is can we accept Mulhall's claim that the _Alien_
films philosophise 'in just the ways that philosophers
do'. Although I have expressed
my own doubts that this is how we should view philosophy, it
would be dishonest of me to express any confidence in my
rejection of Mulhall's stance (or indeed in my
interpretation of it). I take his book to provide a serious
challenge to the understanding many of us have about what
forms philosophising can take. For that reason alone, it is
an extremely valuable contribution to the much neglected
area of metaphilosophy: the examination of the nature and
methods of philosophy itself. I would not, however, like
to leave the impression that _On Film_ is mainly a
metaphilosophical treatise. For me, the metaphilosophical
issues it raises infuse the whole text and are of greatest
interest. But those more concerned with the cinematic
aspects of the book also have much to get their teeth into.
In particular, Mulhall weaves into his text an ongoing
discussion on the nature of sequels. Central to this is how
each reiteration of the alien universe by each different
director is a comment on the nature of repetition,
difference, and sequeldom. So, for example, Mulhall shows
how James Cameron's _Aliens_ almost fetishistically
reiterates themes, structures, and even whole scenes from
the first film, but always in such a way as to at the same
time transform them. David Fincher's _Alien 3_ more daringly
utterly obliterates the redemption Cameron ended his film
with before the opening credits have finished rolling. Yet
this is not to disregard his inheritance but to respect it,
for Fincher's brutal opening is a judgement that Cameron,
despite his repetitions of _Alien_, had 'taken the series
away from itself', and that Fincher intends to 'return the
series to itself' (96) and then 'to shut it down'. (94) The
last film in the quartet, Jean-Pierre Jeunet's _Alien
Resurrection_, problematises the idea of the sequel even
further, since both the main protagonists -- Ripley and the
Alien -- are at once clones (hence copies) and hybrids
(hence not perfect copies after all) of the protagonists of
the first three films. So the basic elements of the film
itself raise the question: 'Is _Alien Resurrection_ a sequel
to _Alien 3_, and hence to the previous two 'Alien' films?'
(119) In these and many other
discussions Mulhall shows himself to be an engaging and
insightful writer on film. But what makes this much more
valuable and interesting than a critical dissection of the
_Alien_ films is, for me at least, what it says and shows
about the nature of philosophy in general and the
possibility of seeing film as philosophising. This
possibility deserves further exploration. In particular, it
would be good to see someone try and show us how film can
philosophise using its more specifically cinematic
resources. Mulhall does not ignore the importance of
editing, colour, camera movement, mise-en-scene, and so on,
but his discussion does mainly focus on the films' thematic
and narrative elements. In whichever ways Mulhall's key idea
of 'film as philosophising' is taken forward, it represents
a challenge both to film theorists and philosophers who
think they already know where and how film and philosophy
meet. Manchester,
England Footnotes 1. See in particular
William Irwin, ed., _The Matrix and Philosophy_ (Chicago:
Open Court, 2002), and the official _Philosophy and The
Matrix_ website, <http://whatisthematrix.warnerbros.com/rl_cmp/phi.html>;
accessed 29 May 2003. 2. Wittgenstein,
_Tractatus Logico-philosophicus_ (London: Routledge, 2001)
4.1212 3. 'Post-Analytic
Philosophy. In conversation with Stephen Mulhall', in Julian
Baggini and Jeremy Stangroom, eds, _New British Philosophy:
The Interviews_ (London: Routledge, 2002). 4. Bernard Williams,
_Truth and Truthfulness_ (Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 2002), p1 5. David Hume, _A Treatise
of Human Nature_, Book One (Glasgow: Fontana, 1962)
pp301-302 6. Ludwig Wittgenstein,
_Zettel_, ed. G. E. M. Anscombe and G. H. von Wright
(Berkeley, California: University of California Press,
1970), §§302-3 Filmography _Alien_, Ridley Scott,
1979. _Alien Resurrection_,
Jean-Pierre Jeunet, 1997. _Aliens_, James Cameron,
1986. _Alien 3_, David Fincher,
1992. _The Matrix_, Andy and
Larry Wachowski, 1999. _The Matrix Reloaded_,
Andy and Larry Wachowski, 2003. _Rashomon_, Akira
Kurosawa, 1950. Copyright ©
Film-Philosophy 2003 Julian Baggini, 'Alien
Ways of Thinking: Mulhall's _On Film_', _Film-Philosophy_,
vol. 7 no. 24, August 2003
<http://www.film-philosophy.com/vol7-2003/n24baggini>. Read a response to this
review-article: Stephen Mulhall, 'Ways of
Thinking: A Response to Andersen and Baggini',
_Film-Philosophy_, vol. 7 no. 25, August 2003
<http://www.film-philosophy.com/vol7-2003/n25mulhall>. Join the _Film-Philosophy_
salon, and receive the journal articles via email as they
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