- Chapter 04 -
MIRROR AND THE WINDOW IN MOVIES
Last update:
1. September 2004
Orson Welles: Citizen Kane
Index:
4.1. Shortly
4.2. We see with you brains
4.3. Window
4.4. Mirror
4.5. Good and well known
4.6. Inside the picture
4.7. Credibility
4.8. Size has it's meaning
4.9. Psychodynamic
4.10. Images
4.11. Effectiveness
4.12. Fairy tales for adults
4.13. Mirrors and windows
4.14. Only an equipment
4.15. Transference
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4.1. SHORTLY:
Window
Window represents the reality we see, observe outside our selves, outside of
our body
and mind, the reality that surrounds us 360 degrees. Through that "window" we
can find all those small bits of absolute truth, absolute reality, its
components and phenomena.
Through window we learn the comprehension of life with its causal connections.
Window shows and offers us signs, incitements and irritants to which we react,
which
represents and describes us the world, the truth.
Mirror
Mirror represents that reality we experience and feel inside, in our ego.
We observe neutral marks, incitements and irritants that are outside, but inside
they get and create meanings and emotional reservations. We compare all the time
all those new marks we get to those old ones and make conclusions about what that
mark means and tells us, how should we react or should we react at all.
Movie
Movie offers us only lifeless marks but those impressive meanings we feel
comes only
from inside our mind, our ego and mostly from our subconscious mind, from our inner
reality.
Our own consciousness and those emotions it has a need to reflect makes those
lifeless frames on white canvas live in front of our eyes. It gives "life and
feelings" to those celluloid heroes and anti-heroes.
While watching a movie we see and feel only the projection of our own consciousness,
real and meaningful as dreams. Our own consciousness mix the external and internal
marks and meanings and when it works we a taking a part of that big drama, we live
inside the movie fantasy and at the same time we direct it and write the story with
it's meanings.
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4.2. WE SEE WITH OUR BRAIN
Movie operates in two extensions and on two levels in proportion to our
conception:
1) As a window and
2) As a mirror and also
3) In external reality and
4) In internal reality.
A human sees, hears, feels, perceives, remembers and becomes aware in his brain.
A movie projected on the white canvas shows us, as external reality, only lifeless
marks and incitements, from - or with - which our internal reality creates
living entirety from those early experiences and meanings we have had.
Movie is a difficult and complicated language. Millions marks having different
meanings. To understand a message we must understand the meanings of marks
- just like to understand a language we must understand the words and their
meanings. Those marks must be familiar and recognizable enough. If it isn't so,
the message doesn't pass and we do not get the whole idea what a movie is trying
to tell as. If we don't understand all the marks and meanings we create the rest
in our mind so that the picture would look like understandable. Just like when we
go to a different country in different culture where we don't understand what's
happening - we assume things and make our conclusions.
And - sad or not - we do that same thing all the time during our life:
we conceive the facts, create and project images, which we think - and hope - to be
so real as possible.
Professor of movie science in Finland, Veijo Hietala, says that all our
relationships with the movie characters are fictional and all our relationships
with other people in this real life are fictional too. I think that he is right
with that.
We project, mostly without knowing, emotions and assumptions to people in
everyday life and in movie life (= passive transference relationship), which
emotions and assumptions come more from our past and our earlier experiences
than from those people at this moment.
We need only few seconds to make heavy conclusions about a person we
see the first time in our life. That is because we all carry so many marks with us
all the time and those marks have different meaning to different people.
Transference works with enormous power.
When we are watching a movie we in fact are watching our own mind, our own
emotions and, own inner reality, the history of our life, own meanings, own
values, our own moral. We face our own hopes and feelings, own fears,
own excitement, own excitement, own horror, own love, own joy and sorrow, which
bubbles surface from our experimental history.
We face our emotions just the way we can handle them and emotions for which we
have a big need at that time. What touches us most is the reality we are in and
about what we know enough and what is close enough. Symbolic thinking: we feel
that mostly our - or our country's - enemies are far away from us, those people
and that life and reality we don't know.
Movies offer us consistent marks, which all viewers in theory can face and
understand the same way, but because we are individual and have all different
background and different experiences we understand those consistent marks
differently and explain the meanings of those marks differently.
Watching movie in cinema is collective privacy. We satisfy our personal,
individual needs.
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4.3. WINDOW
Window allows us the views and visions to the external world, to reality, which
surrounds us 360 degrees constantly.
Window allows us views and visions to the world and people, to the way of life
people live and solve their problems and act in different kind of interdependency.
Window shows us the collective reality, wondering in time and feelings to
existence and to other people.
Through the window we can take a look to other cultures, customs, point of views,
values, moral and believes and - otherwise than in real life - to peoples privacy,
even to the most intimacy part of life, which we hide in every day life.
We can peek behind the scenes, to concealed life, thoughts, bedrooms, to emotions
deep, big, inspiring and frightening as possible.
We don't take our stool and go to the neighbour's kitchen or bedroom watch what
they do in their privacy, but in movies we are willing and able to see all those
details - and more.
In movies the Viewer creates the "real" story and is in the middle of action.
Viewer is the centre point and sees & hears what is intended to be seen & heard.
Viewer takes part to something that is not possible in real life.
With big close-ups we get so close to strange people (=actors) that
we are almost able to touch their skin, just like when we are kissing or making
love or feeding the baby. Using very much close-ups makes those actors fellowmen
to us.
Moving pictures on the silver screen is a window and through that window we
are observing just like we were there. Movie is a window to the world and it
offers us incitements, shows (movie’s) reality and tunes our imagination to
conceive continuations and causal connections. And because of our mind, it’s
not necessary that those things even exist in the movie.
Characters of the movie live outside the screen in our imagination and have
emotions that we, mostly subconsciously, hope they have. Or emotions that we
usually have in the same kind of situation.
In our imagination we face situations and events we don’t reach in real life.
Or we may believe our dreams come true for a while. We can be present in events
we are not able in real life: we can feel how it’s to be a star in the spotlights
or how does it feel to be hunted or in prison or what ever. We can have a close
relationship with our movie idol, think that we know him / her well and at the
same time know that we may ever meet that idol in real life. Yet we have so close
relationship even “physically” that we are almost able to touch or kiss our idol.
Movies represent safe threat, dazzling adventure in armchair, the world of
passion and fear. We feel those events on silver screen as real as we feel our
private dreams that are absolutely true only in dream world.
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4.4. MIRROR
Like a real mirror shows our physical portrait we meet in movies our mental
portrait: our capability to think, make conclusions and our capability to feel
and make explanations, our need to face moral and values and divide good and bad,
condemnable and permitted.
The illustrated language is based on montage, cutting the film. Two different
pictures create a new, powerful meaning which effect we experience more powerful,
more epic than those two pictures separate.
With montage we conceive chain of images that turn in our mind to stories
and cause meanings and interpretation.
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4.5. GOOD AND WELL KNOWN
Those images we create during the movie help us to build and perceive our
own, unique general picture of existence and it’s different kind of phenomenon.
We complete our defective picture of existence by enclosing those missing pieces
in it that we think there should exist.
We set (mostly without knowing) two criterion to a movie we are going to
see: one is that it must be good enough, safe and familiar, the other one is
that it must be believable in it’s own category. A good movie is always
believable although it can be fictional.
A familiar enough, easily adopted and predictable movie helps us to build
credibility and liability.
Mostly we watch movies that come from culture and living environment we
know well enough. It helps us to understand values and norms that exist in the
movie. We need to have recognizable marks and meanings.
There are made more movies in India than elsewhere but we who live outside of
India or its influence we seldom are watching those. One reason is that their
mark language is often too hard to understand to outsiders like us.
America has big influence all over the world and that is one reason why
American movies are so popular all over the world. One reason is their enormous
business machine.
This is important: we can understand only understandable messages.
And: only significant marks can transfer meanings.
By using the mirror effect in movies the therapeutic way we can concentrate
to our awaken images and face our emotions with open mind. It helps us to
understand ourselves better. At the end what we fear most is our own self and
those possibilities we may have. We fear those black holes in our mind that we
can’t control well enough and it makes us uncertain. The fear of loosing control
of our mind may be one of the biggest fears of mankind. Loosing a leg or ability
to move or eyesight or something like that can be very dreadful but loosing the
control of mind, loosing my ego can be much worse.
In every persons mind there are safe areas and those dreadful black holes.
Mental health has very much to do with it how well and how safely we can live
in our wheel of life, is it large enough or is it too small, when we feel like
being choked.
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4.6. INSIDE THE PICTURE
The external existence of movie and the internal existence of viewers mind
meet and merge while we are watching a movie. We step inside the reality that
is happening in the silver screen and become its center point. All that enormous
deluge of visions we face is happening “only” in front of our eyes and it helps
us to get the feeling that we are almost omnipotent. It’s just on the contrary
than usually in real life where we have a role of innocent bystander.
In movies we can be in the center of love, hate, peace, war, birth, dying,
construction, destruction, passion, exercise of power, excitement, adventure,
horror, comedy, …
We let our imagination to take with. We become regressive, decline and give the
baton of our mind into the hands of the movie. We let over emotions to run
freely.
Some years ago we were watching an Indiana Jones movie in mental hospital with
long-term patients and they put their soul into that adventure so deeply they
couldn’t sit calmly. Some of them jumped many times from their chair and shout:
“beware”, “jump!” They had those emotions we all have but we “normal” people
control ourselves maybe too much.
We have big need to identify to our heroes and have better self-esteem with and
through them.
When we identify ourselves to a hero like James Bond the feeling is almost the
same as our national spirit when our country wins gold the world championship of
ice hockey – or whatever. “I’m one of them!”
Identified viewer absorbs a part of our hero’s glory to oneself and becomes a
little bit heroic too. After a good experience we grow few centimetres and have our
head a little bit higher than before.
The identification to the James Bond is quite understandably: who would refuse
from honour of solving the most difficult problems, jump from the roof of a
skyscraper without a scratch, save the world in the last second before a atom
bomb would explode, travelling aroun the world or sharing a bed with the most
beautiful women. And after all have a vodka martin shaken.
The feeling is quite the same as when we are playing air guitar in front of a
mirror and imagine that we are playing with Rolling Stones in a big stadium.
That thin line where external reality of a movie meet internal reality of our
consciousness remind the thin line when we are still awake and just falling asleep. Just like in dream a viewer of movie leash internal reality to be taken inside those floating visions on the silver screen. We have a need to face those emotions we can’t face enough in our real life, outside cinema.
While watching a movie we work with our subconscious emotions and unfinished
thoughts. We can have a contact to those with transferences.
This is one reason why we want to see movies and why they are so useful to us.
If watching movies doesn’t satisfy our needs, we would not watch them.
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4.7. CREDIBILITY
When a movie looks like real life it helps us to face strong emotions.
Especially in the darkness of cinema we can disengage from our fetters of
reality and meet our inner world.
Like all arts movies are based in passive transference. Viewers are reflecting
their own meaning to those marks they get from the piece of art.
The credibility of a movie is based on how well it fits our picture of
existence.
Believable movie supports our view and is good because of that.
Unbelievable movie doesn’t support our views or opinions.
It is quite same as if a person believes in flying saucers; it depends on how
well or badly that belief fits in that person’s picture of reality.
Credibility is not based only in facts. In movies we take believable fiction
seriously.
Often a simplified fiction, like animation, catches up our emotions better
than realistic movies, for example dramas of human relationship, because we
project our transferences maybe too much into those human characters. In animation
we go more directly into emotions and rationalize and explain less.
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4.8. SIZE HAS IT'S MEANING
Large silver screen creates mighty frame to course of events than a small
television. Unreal big pictures and close-ups come so close that they suck
inside.
Programs made especially for television use more often close-ups, talking heads
because they come closer.
Close-ups bring those people closer into our mind and life. They help us to
take those people more personal than those we can see clearly. Soap operas use
a lot of close-ups and staring actors.
In television people look often to camera (= straight in viewers eyes) and it
helps to create image of personal contact. In movies actors look more often a
little bit beside the camera which gives to a viewer image that viewer is present
there where it all happens as a bystander.
Identifying requires adhesive strength, good relationship and enough closeness
to create empathy.
If we think about size it goes like this: closer a person is more closer
relationship we have to that person and we think that we know that person better.
It’s hard to create a close and caring relationship to people who are too far
away or whom we don’t know or understand.
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4.9. PSYCHO DYNAMIC
Movies reflect only a viewers mind and emotions.
What moves are viewers own emotions and their meaning to a viewer.
Horror, excitement, fears, love, indecency, quilt or emotions like that are
not in movie, in those lifeless pictures on silver screen. Those emotions are
inside every viewers mind.
Every viewer is going to face private, personal own ego, own strength and
weakness, subconscious fears, hopes and instincts.
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4.10. IMAGES
That powerful experience of moving pictures is based on those emotions we have
had in our earlier life that we are now observing through our sense of sight and
auditory sense. Our eyes are just lenses. We see inside our brain those marks
but the meanings come from the past, from our earlier emotional history.
We satisfy those need with emotions we assume are suitable for that specific
purpose.
Our senses are observing reality but images we create inside our mind are more
or less fictional.
We make conclusions that are based on our earlier experiences but we transfer
those old conclusions into new positions with our transference systems. We try
to make logical and reasonable conclusions.
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4.11. EFFECTIVENESS
Movies effect is based on four factors: identification, projection, imitation and
idealisation.
We try to recognize movie characters by giving them prestige and thoughts about
their nature, purpose and background from first seconds.
We act just like we act in normal life, mostly from moral and value aspect
dividing on good – bad, right – wrong, positive - negative levels. We create
images about goodness and wickedness. We create visions about heroes and
anti-heroes, between who is going dialectic – moralistic arm-wrestling.
Identification, projection, imitation and idealisation ease on perceiving
effectiveness of a movie in theory but we seldom do it consciously.
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4.12. FAIRY TALES FOR ADULTS ¨
Human being, child and adult, operate always appropriately. Or at least we try
to do so. We try to find best possible answers, skills and ways to satisfy our
needs.
Arc and content of classical fairy tales and adults drama remind extremely
well each other. Movies made for adults may sometimes have more deeper levels
and branch vein than a little bit more simplified fairy tales that concentrate
on main content.
In children fairy tales and animation evil is going to get punishment, but
often a change to mend one's ways too. In adults drama judgement is crueler and
revenge tastes sweet.
We all are here for the first time and we are very interested in life and
living and how to manage in it. It’s very important for us to be good enough
and accepted in society we want to participate.
If we compare (children animation) Moomin to Lethal Weapon or Snowman to
Return of Jedi we can be astonished how much same they have in content and in
narrative.
Good fairy tales and movies for adults can reach something very important,
fundamental idea of human life and succeed in transferring it.
Maybe this is one reason why Moomin animations are so popular everywhere and
why Lethal Weapon 1, 2, 3 and 4 are the most popular movies around the world. We
can have different opinions of Lethal Weapons value content but something very
important that team succeed to catch. If I had more time I would like to make good
depth psychological analyse of it.
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4.13. MIRRORS AND WINDOWS
In passive movie therapy we use ready movies two ways: analytical or
supportive
In analytic movie therapy we use mirror dimension of movies to reflects mental,
emotional self-portrait. It offers possibility to get to know oneself better and
face emotions movies stimulate or those one projects to movies and think about
them and their meaning.
In supportive movie therapy we work in window dimension viewing pictures of
world, ways how people live and face their challenges and response to them. Window
allows us to use cognitive therapeutic methods and it can be very effective
although some may think that it’s too superficial.
I would like to remind you about the idea of healing relationship. What works
in therapy is that magic, invisible, gentle touch (meaningful healing relationship)
that has so much meaning to us deep down inside. It may be like holy light,
mysterious touch, cosmic understanding, peace of mind, divine thought or just the
right answer to a need.
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4.14. ONLY AN EQUIPMENT
In all therapy form we use is just instrument like a car when we are travelling
from a place to another. Surely it helps a lot if client is interested about the
method we use and eager work with it.
In movie therapy movies are instrument in relationship between two or more
people or just in self-relation.
There are no healing words, sentences, thoughts, pictures, movies, sound, motion
itself. Instead there is healing relationship with those elements. For example
words, sound, pictures etc. can have good, healing connection with time, place,
emotion or person.
Healing relationship is like life, unique and different every time, constantly
changing.
Movies don’t heal itself, but with movies we can reach and touch something
important and unique. We can have deep relation with our mind and our emotions.
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4.15. TRANSFERENCE
In movie therapy we use passive transference and transitional objects in
transferring important emotions from deep darkness to daylight.
Transference helps us in perceiving what, where, when, why and by whom is
happening on the silver screen real like a dream.
In a good movie we don’t pay so much tension on how it is done. In good movies
story is leading us from the beginning to the end. When a movie starts they
usually show us with wide pictures where and what is happening, they introduce
important characters well enough so we can have good relation with them and
enough time to come to know those person better.
We need to have enough marks to start create meanings and participate that
great fantasy.
- The End of Chapter Four -
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