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Right. Sorry for leaving this one so long. Essentially there's a lot of work that has been done on the relationship between Ancient Greek ritual and and Ancient Greek drama. In fact if you read the extant tragedies in chronogical order from Aeschylus through to Euripides you can almost feel it happening. For some background reading I suggest initially this highly simplistic but effective overview of the transition from Dionysiac worship to drama and this pretty exhaustive reading list.
My doctoral work - which I left incomplete about six years ago - was basically built around concepts of identification, mainly from a crudely psychoanalytic perspective that viewed drama as a form of articulated release for both conscious and unconscious desires that interacted and played with the defense mechanisms built into the psyche. My investment in Freud since those days has diminished a lot, but I still find a lot of value in this kind of approach. Basically the work of Freud's that I found most useful was his book on "Jokes and their relation to the unconscious", "Hysterical Phantasies and their relation to bisexuality" and "Creative Writers and Day-Dreaming" - the latter two of which are extremely short and easy reads and I would very much recommend them. The basic implication is that drama in its most simple and basic is nothing more or less than the activity of day-dreaming - of creating self-narratives in which you are the hero and in which you can do anything. So that's XXX and James Bond and quite a lot of super-hero comic books. The difference between reading and day-dreaming is - of course - that you're being asked to make an identificatory leap between yourself and the (often anodyne and partially invisible) vessel of the character through whom you're exploring your own desires. Freud says that - on the whole - these pretty basic fantasies tend to be about getting all the men/women or about freedom/power (in which more often or not freedom or power could be seen to be nothing but a means to an end ie. it's really about getting all the men/women).
Ok - from the very basics we start getting into slightly more complex areas. Christian Metz in his book "Psychoanalysis and Cinema" talks about the only two reasons why people don't like films - (1) that there is not enough instinctual satisfaction vs. (2) there is too much. With the first one of those reasons, everything is nice and simple: if your aim is the satisfaction of your desires through identificatory fantasy then you'll like a film if it fulfils those needs. You won't like it if it doesn't - ie. if the identification is unsuccessful, or the levels of desire too low or presented in the wrong kinds of way. Interestingly people seem to enjoy frustrated releases as long as they get resolved in the end - ie. there's always a bit in the hero drama where everything goes terribly wrong but then gets resolved perfectly well in the end.
The second part of that formula is more interesting, and is where (if you want) you can bring things like Freud's primordial complexes come in. So those desires we have that are too dark, perhaps, for us to look at head-on are the things that Freud refers to as repressed. If they came into consciousness then our egos would freak out, maybe even be damaged. So there are mechanisms that allow these desires to manifest and be dealt with in disguised ways. These include the ability to represent them in other ways - to shunt them into imagery or metaphor - which gets us to things like the Freudian image or slip, where what has happened is that one unconscious desire pushes its way into conscious thought in an altered form. The Freudian slip is when we accidentally say something truthful when we meant to lie or when we get lost on the way to a place we don't want to get to, or where we leave something at someone's house by 'accident' but because we'd really like to go back there - there's a whole book on them - Freud calls them parapraxes (IIRC).
So in practice this kind of stuff goes like this: Let's accept for a moment that both boys and girls have strong attractive feelings towards their mothers as infants and resent the presence of - and wish to destroy - their fathers (which is Freud's later articulation of the beginnings of the Oedipus complex). Now the resolution of the Oedipus complex is about the total repression of these desires, so they are in no way manifest consciously (a mistake that people often make is that adults are supposed to 'have an Oedipus complex', when in fact Freud's proposal was that you wouldn't be an adult unless you'd gone through an Oedipal stage and that if you felt Oedipal urges later in your life then you would be mentally ill). So you have these primordial desires, but you cannot express them. However if you found a mechanism that allowed you to explore these primordial desires without scaring or damaging or freaking out your ego then your level of instinctual satisfaction would be enormous. If - on the other hand - you did freak out your ego that would be because your levels of instinctual satisfaction would have been too high and you would feel repelled or horrified or grossed-out because your defenses woudl have kicked in enormously.
So to repeat - a film (or book or comic) either gives you a lot of instinctual satisfaction in appropriate forms that your mind can handle (ideally by dealing with difficult desires in safer ways) or it doesn't. In the latter case it either provides too little satisfaction or too much of the wrong kind. And in those cases you don't like it.
I'm going to wrap this portion up relatively quickly, but the end result of the whole palaver is that you end up with an understanding of drama as being about the creation of vehicles for identification which allow you to explore desires and fantasies (both repressed and conscious). We use metaphor and symbolism directly within those dramas in order to help us put in more difficult desire-satisfying things without freaking ourselves out, but more interestingly we've also built in some of the defenses themselves - so we can explore really dark and difficult stuff and then have the drama do the work of our defenses for us.
So here's an example: Natural Born Killers is a film in which a pair of highly charismatic serial killers kill lots of people before being captured. They then subsequently escape again and go on another rampage. Now the first third of the film is all about fantasy fulfilment - the serial killers are very very cool, their behaviour is presented as justified and we are protected by humour (one of the mechanisms for dealing with difficult desires and impulses) from the true horror of what they are doing. Then Stone starts to reveal the horror of what they're doing, undermines their ability to be suitable vehicles for our desires and we start to back away from them horrified. We don't identify with them any more. At this stage normally dramas enact some kind of punishment on our previous identificants so that we can put all our murderous toys back in their baskets and leave the cinema having - basically - been complicit in their murders and rapes but not consciously having to deal with the consequences of that. Natural Born Killers does that right on cue, but then at the end kicks it all up again - releasing them back into the world to be murderers again, demanding our identification, only this time with us having full knowledge of what we're being asked to be a party to. If you're able to deal with that then you're either not particualrly repressed or ashamed of your murderous urges OR you're mentally ill. If you're not, you will express your dislike through comments about bad taste or grotesqueness or horror or disgust and that either makes you highly repressed or a basically civilised human being. Depending on your perspective.
Ok - so that's that chunk done.
So back to ritual -> drama -> cinema -> virtual reality.
Basically this is a balancing act through time between levels of satisfaction and the number of people who can be satisfied directly or through identificatory behaviours. In Greek ritual practice originally either you would participate in the practice (occasionally a sacrifice - ie. the killing of an animal, the wrapping up of bones in fat and the burning of that portion for the gods) or you would be a direct observer of that. The ritual would be an articulation of a set of desires, along with some kind of attempt to create structure and order around those desires and needs. By being present you would be able to feel more satisfied, but of course the satisfaction deteriorated dramatically the less you were able to see it or the further removed you were from the person performing the act.
Greek drama was an infinitely more sophisticated way of developing ways for people to satisfy their desires through identification and mostly worked on the basis of a character who expressed excess power and/or desire (giving people a chance to vicariously feel that power and desire) before being punished for that action. The places that such performances were undertaken were also designed to increase the ability of the audience to identify with the action, by being auditoria with raised seating and a wide spread of views. Lots of people could see it. The cost being, of course, that the drama will inevitably be slightly less tailored to the needs of an individual audience member.
Film and cinema is about the greater satisfaction still of basic needs and desires that can only work eocnomically because lots of people will want to see the performance. Good film are supremely elegant mechanisms for identification and the fulfillment of basic desires, but as a result of their scale they're inevitably going to be less interested in the more complex interactions or conflicts that greek drama may have explored more effectively (on the whole). That explains the high presence of basic hero-drama and enormously clear generic structures that most films fall into.
But gaming changes that and the more sophisticated the gaming the more the individual who is playing with the drama gets to alter the narrative in directions that reflect their own personal desires, needs and defense mechanisms. More importantly the process is back down to one of participation or minimal identification between you and the person on screen. You're no longer a passive vehicle for their needs, you're actively controlling them.
Is that enough of an exposition? |
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