The Cinematic in Literature, Cinema, and Dreams
"Accidents like a stray dog walking in out of nowhere don’t happen in literature because literature is absolutely fictional."
The difference is basic and it starts with “I”. Natural for literature. An irritation for cinema. Axiomatic for dreams.
In a scene in Sofia Coppola’s Somewhere, movie star Johnny Marco (Stephen Dorff) sits in a chair in a make-up room. Two men heap plaster onto his face. The camera slowly zooms in after the task is done. It does what it does longer than we expect it to (more than ninety seconds). All this time, we are looking at the fake monster, and we are slowly approaching it. At some point, we get ‘access’ beyond the mask, beyond the real face, inside the actor’s head—into something we are not seeing right now but know exists. The mind. We find that we are anticipating the actor’s thoughts. Largely beyond articulation, but connected somehow to one simple idea: lack of authentic connection in the actor’s life, lack of authentic connection and the consequent alienation and sadness. (‘I’m nothing,’ he will say later in the movie.)
This hypothesising in the mind of the viewer, about the mind of the person they are seeing on the screen—a person without a face at present, and thus offering no expression—is the miracle of the silent moving image.
Cinema has to go sideways to access interiority. Perhaps it succeeds most when it stays cinema.
Visuals of the setting, the appearances of characters, sounds, the content and volume and tonalities and of the conversation the characters are having, the displacement of objects as they move by inertia or are moved by force, jump cuts from one narrative space-time to another, or a montage of visuals as perceived or imagined by a character or an incorporeal narrator—most novelists spend a lifetime trying to do these cinematic things well.
Even where the components of material reality presented or represented are the same in literature and cinema, their rich rendering is received differently. This is because Time is consumed differently. One experiences detail serially while reading: one thing follows another. We first learn of a yellowing shower curtain, then of a big burn hole in it, then of how three of its rings have come undone from the top bar. While watching a movie, however, one experiences detail at once: the whole curtain shows up if the framing is desirous of showing it so.
But when the whole curtain shows up, we don’t necessarily notice the three components of the image distinctly. We are immediately concerned about their combined effect, unconscious of the combinatorics of these three details.
And there are more things in the frame—a piece of the wall, a sliver of the side mirror, grey-tiled floor, a big bottle of lotion.
Perhaps not too bold to say that cinema casts a light on literature’s fabrications. It shows literature’s make-believe processes as crooked; by simply showing that the world is not a chain-linked thing, that it’s not one thing separated from another through punctuation. The framed part is all here, all at once, and most of its detail will pass unnoticed.
This unnoticed remainder carries a paradox: despite its characteristic and inevitable surplus of detail, cinema is more about the essence of things than literature is.
A film critic sometimes posts, on Twitter, screenshots of dogs appearing in the backgrounds of certain movie shots. At times he opines on whether the dogs are intentional or accidental. It’s always interesting to read those tweets.
When a stray dog’s appearance is accidental, it is but a result of the continuity of reality between the frame and outside. The dog, when noticed, also brings to notice cinema’s artificiality. It is reality’s surplus burst in.
Needless to say, such surpluses are impossible in literature.
Accidents like a stray dog walking in out of nowhere don’t happen in literature because literature is absolutely fictional. Its events have never been enacted in the material world, not even for make-believe. There is no shooting on location. In point of fact, all the locations in a work of literature were first made inside a single mind, where they were lit and focalized with intention and inspiration. When a particular vision came with too much clarity, the writer grew anxious—because they knew that to translate an at-once sight revealed in the mind’s eye to a serial, verbal medium would require extraordinary memory. Keeping a notebook was not an antidote to this problem.
Insofar as intention and inspiration are not coached into some kind of control, a writer cannot write.
Writing down dreams is a unique kind of literature—a kind of making literature out of cinema, formally. It is the only kind of writing where the possibility of a stray dog walking in the background exists. Of course, unlike cinema, this stray dog is not a real dog walking into a set frame, but a dreamt dog first remembered and then penned in a record of that remembrance. This dog is the result of two mental processes—dreaming and remembering—and is in that sense a ghost of a ghost of a dog that will be recreated as a ghost again in the mind of every person who reads the text.
One can never be sure if the dog existed even in the dream, or if it was just a misremembering. The text of a dream is only a representation of the dream and not a presentation of it.
But does anything remain in the background in a dream? If you dream of a dog, will the dream-eye not focalize the dog? It will. A dream is, in fact, all focus. And it is in this that it differs from cinema.