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Aristotle with Kubrick

(Note: This text was prepared for a school assignment, for an MA level English course in literary theory. As such it bears the marks of scholarly apparatus: scholastic footnotes, works cited page, stilted style... Nonetheless I thought it was a valuable enough exercise to share, and compact enough for a blog post. So here it is.)

A double approach to Aristotle’s categories of tragedy may prove favorable in the case of film. We will at once use the categories to analyze Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining (1980), and use the film to show the limits of the categories. A strictly Aristotelian reading of The Shining, foregrounding the film’s content and evaluating the “tragicity” of that content, or the extent to which it exemplifies the Poetics, would only respect the first of the two operations I mentioned. I want to add to this something like a “Kubrickian” reading of Aristotle, calling on a scene in the film, when Wendy chances upon Jack’s writing, to critique the limits of Aristotle’s idea of plot, complicating it with reference to character, song, and spectacle.

1. The plot of Kubrick’s film is simple enough. Employed to housesit the isolated Overlook Hotel through a harsh mountain winter, struggling, alcoholic writer Jack Torrance, following the footsteps of previous caretakers, gradually loses his grip on reality. His wife, Wendy, and his clairvoyant son, Danny, stay with him in the hotel, and are subject to increasingly disturbing supernatural encounters—Danny more so for his clairvoyance—as well as Jack’s fits. After her encounter with his writing (“All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy”) reveals the extent of Jack’s mental degeneration, Wendy incapacitates him and locks him up in the pantry. He escapes, perhaps by supernatural intervention, and is compelled, either by insanity or by the souls of the dead trapped in the hotel, to axe-murder his family. Wendy eludes him, and Danny plies his psychic powers to call for help: the hotel’s head chef shares his clairvoyant gift. But when the chef arrives, Jack kills him. Danny, feeling the wound in the force, cries out, and the chase begins. Jack is easily fooled by Danny’s shenanigans in the hedge maze, and Wendy and Danny escape unharmed, leaving Jack frozen in the ice and snow.

We can use Aristotle’s normative claims about effective tragic plotting to analyze this short synopsis, before complicating it with the specificity of a certain scene. The tragic plot is most effective for Aristotle when it exhibits two complimentary forms: recognition and reversal. Recognition is sudden discovery, a momentary fulcrum which levers the plot to a higher valence, forcing “a change from ignorance to knowledge” (Poetics 1452a). Reversal, meanwhile, is “a change from one state of affairs to its opposite, one which conforms… to probability or necessity” (ibid.). The full structure, therefore, is a decisive moment in which a sudden revelation of knowledge changes the course of events, “lead[ing] to good or bad fortune” (1452b).

The moment Wendy discovers Jack’s madness—the famous shot-reverse-shot that jumps from the pages of reformatted iterations of Jack’s mantra to Wendy’s terrified face and back—at once exemplifies and challenges Aristotle’s form. For on the one hand, we immediately apprehend this as a moment of recognition: focusing on her facial reaction, the audience now understands, with Wendy, Jack’s bizarre behavior over the previous weeks as the symptoms of his creeping insanity, and Jack’s violent reaction (“I’m not gonna hurt you, I’m just gonna bash your brains in!”) confirms the psychosis. So much for recognition; but my own ekphrasis of the scene undermines it as an example of reversal. By this point we have already seen bizarre behavior from Jack: staring manically out the window, spending hours throwing a bouncy ball through the great hall, his unsettling encounter with the rotten old woman in the bathtub. Couple this with our private insight into Danny’s premonitions, and the audience, if not Wendy, already suspects that something is wrong with Jack.

The “All work and no play” scene thus functions differently, depending on whether your analysis privileges the characters within the plot, or the audience without it. Restricting perspective to the situation “for” Wendy, this moment is a textbook reversal-recognition. But if we reckon the audience as more than the passive receptor of affective intensities understood by Aristotle but as determinant of film’s mechanics, then the ironic distance from the action introduced by the mediation of the camera becomes decisive. We are mostly figured as the empty chamber into which suffering flows by mimesis, where the alchemy of catharsis radiates pity, fear; but the logic of film, which invites a third point of mediation, the camera, upsets that passivity. For the audience, having witnessed Jack’s gradual descent into madness, this moment is less a reversal than a culmination, the completion of a lapse into insanity which has been mounting from the first scenes.

2. This climactic bursting of the flood gates finds its visual analogue in spectacle: the pools of blood erupting from the elevator doors. Courtesy of Danny’s vision, we already know the blood is there—but once Wendy discovers it, its virtual presence, looming in anticipation, becomes actual. Just so with Jack: we know his madness, but only Wendy’s discovery can actuate it. We must therefore challenge Aristotle when he insists that “Spectacle, or stage effect, is an attraction,” and that it has little to do with the artistry of the poet (1450b); in film, the director, via montage, becomes a poet of images. Spectacular effects are used to drive and react to the plot.

So it is not so much that Aristotle would criticize Kubrick for failing to combine recognition with reversal—in fact, limiting our perspective to Wendy makes the scene perfectly Aristotelian. It is on the contrary Kubrick who critiques Aristotle: by manipulating dramatic irony in this way, by portraying the moment of recognition as simultaneously culmination for us and reversal for Wendy, Kubrick presses the limit of Aristotle’s theory of tragic plot, forcing it to judge in the affirmative and the negative at once. This doubled judgment is the mark of irony, the sort of dialectical double-talk that, while eluding Aristotle, is brought into the open by his categories and their limits.[1]

3. We have also shaken up Aristotle’s idea of character. He argues that “…it is their characters, indeed, that make people what they are, but it is by reason of their actions that they are happy or the reverse. Tragedies are not performed, therefore, in order to represent character, although character is involved for the sake for the sake of the action” (1450a). But the degeneration of Jack Torrance challenges this idea. For it is not his static ethos that makes Jack “what he is,” but his change from simply grumpy, somewhat abusive, and alcoholic, to raving axe-murderer, that is both the means and end of his fate. This shift in ethos is nether prescribed by Aristotle nor evident in any of his principle examples. Moreover, it is not “by reason of [his] actions that [Jack is] happy or the reverse,” but very precisely by virtue of larger forces that act upon him, changing his character, that the plot advances. One could argue then that this “tragedy,” if we can still call it that, is indeed performed in order to represent character, but more, to represent the very shift in character that I have been discussing.

4. Finally, a word about song. While Aristotle regards song as “the most important of the pleasurable embellishments” to tragedy (1450b), he also notes that “The Chorus should be regarded as one of the actors” and that “it should be a part of the whole, and should assume a share of the action” (1456a). So song, as communicated by the chorus, is both more and less than participant in the plot.

This, I think, is a place where Aristotle shines. Shortly after Danny escapes out into the snow, Wendy is running through the hotel, she begins to encounter the supernatural, including the bloody spectacle I have mentioned, as well as a person in a bear costume performing fellatio on a man in a tuxedo. During these moments, the scoring is crucial. In the first, a horrible, shrieking chorus of sopranos wailing in minor-key cacophony, not unlike that which attends the Monolith in Kubrick’s 2001; in the second, indistinct, distant chanting punctuated by percussive storms. Now, I have been speaking of Jack’s degeneration in psychological terms, but I think these moments confirm the supernatural. Not only is Wendy witnessing things which, were Jack’s crisis “merely” psychological, should be limited to his perspective, but we also have the “Chorus” invited by Kubrick’s scoring of these scenes. The literal chorus of voices seem to imply an external presence, an army of ghostly presences summoning forth these horrid spectacles. Here Kubrick and Aristotle seem to be in agreement that the musical element is at once external to the action, a “pleasurable embellishment,” while also playing a part in it as “one of the actors,” a sort of semi-character.

I want to conclude by emphasizing that these insights into The Shining, while pushing the film against Aristotle, could not have been possible without the framework his theory provides. It is only through his rigid idea of plot that Kubrick’s play with dramatic irony comes to fore; only by the stability he assumes of character that its dynamism appears; and only by his reduction of spectacle that it asserts its determinateness for us. I have not been so dialectical with song, but only because to treat a category bound to the fossilized concept of the Chorus already involves a certain stretching of the imagination which enlivens our appreciation of its contemporary incarnation, the filmic score. This leap of the imagination defines dialectical thought, historicizing our present moment by bringing us into sparking contact with the past.

Works Cited

Aristotle, Poetics. Classical Literary Criticism. Murray and Dorsch, pp. 57-97.

Kubrick, Stanley, director. The Shining. Warner Bros., 1980.

Murray, Penelope and T. S. Dorsch, editors. Classical Literary Criticism. Penguin, 2000.

[1] I am obliged to provide references that may challenge the assertion that dramatic irony eludes Aristotle. The Sophoclean Oedipus is always prominent (e.g., 1452a), and there we certainly know the identities of Oedipus’ victim and bride before he does, but the irony here seems to depend more on external knowledge of the myth than on the disjuncture between gradual accumulation of irony for the audience and the sudden recognition for the character, as in my reading of The Shining. The other example here is the Iphigenia of Euripides. He highlights the appearance of the brother as a key example of reversal-recognition (1452b), before giving a synopsis of the plot (1455b). From these references, it is not clear that Aristotle reckons dramatic irony into his reading: “On his arrival [the brother] was seized, and was about to be sacrificed, when he revealed who he was, either in the way that Euripides makes it happen, or, as Polyidus suggests, by making the not-unnatural remark that not only his sister, it seemed, was fated to be sacrificed, but himself too; thus he was saved” (ibid.) This could imply that the “not-unnatural” remark reveals his identity to both captors and audience, but reading the texts in question would be required, and that is beyond the scope of this analysis. Note, however, that the text of Polyidus is lost (Classical Literary Criticism 78n47, 80n50).

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Shyamalan’s Split (2016)

Let me make a hypothesis: the phrase show and don’t tell, such a worthless cliché for writing, should be completely determinant for film. Showing and Telling, diegesis and exposition, are locked in an eternal tension here, the camera willing its gaze to overcome the abstract materiality of the set, the blind stupidity of the set always threatening an idiotic moment of explanation when the heroic camera falls short. This hypothesis surely explains our admiration for the auteur-like figure of the “director,” that poet of the cut who weaves together a series of images—flailing decompositions of human meat and prop on their own—into a harmonious flow of narrative so invisibly orchestrated that we salute its sequence as though it were the product of our own imagination. Directors become virtuosic Kantians in an ironic register, feigning the purposiveness of form that makes the montage gel with our innate senses of motion and time, without letting the illusion collapse into husklike purpose, where we suddenly and disgustedly discover, yes, each shot is puppeteered, yes, this is a film, this is a consumer product, yes, I spent money on this schlock—and walk out.

So perhaps this hypothesis also explains the sublime stupidity of a movie like M. Night Shyamalan’s Split (2016): here the director has profoundly lost control, letting the idiotic world of the set overthrow the calm of the camera. Let me start straightaway with an example. The film tries to recount the story of three girls held in captivity by a man with “23 distinct personalities.” They are subject to his shenanigans early on, after a wonderfully tense moment of kidnapping: about to be driven home from a birthday party, two of the girls, more popular and more connected, sit in the backseat of the car doodling on their cellphones and giggling incoherently while the third, more astute, sits patiently and alone in the front seat. The father is outside, placing something in the trunk.

We see the three girls through the front windshield, but depth of field quickly eases in like a veil of liquid focus to isolate the third girl in solution: the camera synthesizes a protagonist. Now the sound is filtered to a dim muffle as we are slowly carried, with her gaze, across the windshield in a slow arc to the side view mirror. Reverse shot: the mirror, the pavement through it. Reverse shot: the girl, her attention drifting, the sound warming back up, the camera drifting back across the windshield. A dull, sickening thunk precedes the muffling again as we arc back across the windshield, faster, more alert this time, with the girl as she glares back into the mirror. The other two remain oblivious. Reverse shot: the winderbreakered arm of the father falling lifeless to the ground, then dragged out of view. Final reverse shot: the girl, terrified, as the car door opens. Someone else is getting in.

Minimally acted yet powerful, we cannot neglect the role of the actress in this dynamic, tense performance. But the star of the show is the camera: each moment of attention is delicately and superbly directed by the flow of images, each event in this micro-narrative of invisible aggression carefully calculated for the natural mythmaking of gaze. We have learned everything visually and sonically: we have subtly and silently shifted from a space of innocence and teenage drama into a more compromised space where violence hangs like a shadow, within the compact arena of the car. But more directly, we learn that our heroine is deeply perceptive, and while the situation has become perilous, we can already count on her to perceive loopholes and pitfalls in which to maneuver, hide, and escape—and all without a word of dialogue.

This would have been too easy for Shyamalan. Too easy to let the audience put together the story, to let the viewer and the camera synthesize their powers and sculpt the narrative in mutual harmony. No, Shyamalan had to let the dumbness of his little scenario overpower the camera; more correctly for our hypothesis, he let attachment to Telling us all about his richly stupid plot overpower the subtle, Showing grace of his camera work: for mere moments—moments—later, we are treated to an unbelievable, patronizing flashback sequence, intruding into the narrative flow, forcing us to learn that, thanks to her experience hunting with her father as a child, the heroine learned early on to be exceedingly perceptive to sounds and sights.

The anterior scene, with all its perfectly crafted, moving, and immersive Show, is snuffed out, extinguished, or better muted, under the idiotic mumble of an overeager Tell. Every image, every cut, every pan, which a moment ago seemed to extend a hand back through the camera and invite us to create a story together, has now been mercilessly cut short, the invitation crassly rescinded, the audience partnership Shyamalan is capable of canceled by the expository ineptitude he cannot seem to help. “You can’t figure it out on your own,” Shyamalan reminds us through the goofy voice of the girl’s father explaining how listening works, “I have to tell what it means to perceive.”

It is not the only such moment in Split. In fact, Shyamalan has decided the film requires an entire character devoted exclusively to this stupefying function. The character of the Split man’s psychiatrist seems to exist only to explain the depths and development of the former's madness. After, for instance, we witness the Split man walk into the girls’ holding cell with one “distinct personality,” walk out, then return with yet another “distinct personality,” only to do it yet a third, fourth, and fifth time, each “personality” more “distinct” than the last—after this parlor act we are treated to the psychiatrist Skyping into an international psychiatry conference, staring directly into the camera, and explaining the distinctness of her patient’s personalities. Each “distinct personality,” mind you, has its own costume. There is no confusing them. Do we really require this ancillary character, removed from the narrative drama of the kidnapping except by obvious scriptural fiat toward the end, to lecture at us on the difference between these personalities if they are so distinct? Of course not: we are not stupid. But I think that Shyamalan's films are deeply motivated by the belief that we are.

The coup de grace: a final scene reveals, through the odious appearance of Bruce Willis, that Split (2016) is a sequel to Shyamalan's own Unbreakable (2000), a film no one watched and for whose sequel no one was waiting. After two hours of this painfully mis-coordinated dialectics, where Telling oafishly lumbers in to choke out any accidentally beautiful moments of Showing, we learn that it has all been an elaborate meta-Tell. Split reduces to a two-hour movie trailer for a third, as yet unannounced film in this series of blunders. This is not film as industrial art, film as medium in which audience and auteur blend their powers, but film as commercial, as promotion—not as product to consume and (at least) enjoy, but as the very form of reproducing consumption.

Telling in film, in other words, is the sign of commodity capital, of the desperate need of the film industry to ensure the purchase of its upcoming products, which, with so much dead capital pumped into them, require exponentially greater returns on each installment to realize even the slimmest margin of real value. Is it any wonder then that Unbreakable is after all a superhero film, and that Split is a villain’s “origin story?” Do we not see this same perpetual logic of bait-and-switch propelling the whole shambling mess of cross-reference comprising the insipid depths of the “Marvel Cinematic Universe,” where every entry must be capped off with up to three previews for upcoming sequels and crossovers, and where every cinematic experience therefore reduces in practicality to a trailer for the whole idiotic maze of carrot-stick consumption—where your time in the audience amounts to shelling out for commercials? But like a good director, I’ll leave this connection for you to draw.