On Film

On Film
Stephen Mulhall

Like Fred Botting and Scott Wilson did in The Tarantinian Ethics (Sage, 2001), Stephen Mulhall aims to explore and explain philosophy with reference to popular film.

Whereas the former used five Tarantino screenplays to make their often impenetrable and rather tenuous claims, Mulhall's chalkboard is the Alien quartet. According to the blurb, On Film - part of Routledge's 'Thinking in Action' series - shows us that these films are 'compelling examples of philosophy in action'.

Mulhall is all too aware of film theory's frequent shortcomings. He claims that 'theorists exhibit a strong tendency to treat the films they discuss as objects to which specific theoretical edifices (originating elsewhere, in such domains as psychoanalysis or political theory) could be applied' (p6). Accordingly, the clever structure of On Film is ideal for navigating the tensions between genre and auteur theory. It goes some way to establishing the transformation of Ridley Scott's tense original into a money-spinning franchise while simultaneously assessing each movie in terms of its individual director's style and vision. As a result, the main trilogy is presented as a conversation between Scott, James Cameron and David Fincher. (Echoing developments on screen, Alien Resurrection crops up as something of an afterthought in this slim volume.)

Stressing the importance of the director is more than a tad unfashionable at the 'high' end of film theory today - while simultaneously popularised by magazines like Empire and Hotdog - but it helps Mulhall to make his case. Doubts are prompted when a work entitled On Film discusses only a sci-fi quartet. Yet these are addressed by placing specific interpretations of the Alien mythology on a thematic continuum with earlier or subsequent films by Scott, Cameron, Fincher and Jean-Pierre Jeunet.

Each director makes a contribution to an overall story arc cohering the 'Alien universe'. Simultaneously, issues from Alien are continued in Blade Runner while those from Terminator end up resolved in Aliens. Alien3's religiosity is reworked in Se7en by serial killer John Doe. And, well, the cast of Delicatessen and The City of Lost Children pop up in Alien Resurrection. That's the basic framework, but does the argument convince?

Rather like the quartet structured around the character of Ripley and her clone (and the not unrelated stardom of Sigourney Weaver), On Film makes for a rather uneven read. In places it gives a close reading of individual scenes, such as the born-again evangelism of Alien3's prison colony. It is clearly intended that, by describing selected scenes in tandem with themes from contemporary thinkers like Stanley Cavell or key philosophers like Nietzsche and Wittgenstein, one can explain wider existential arguments.

There is a question here as to just who this intended reader is. In places an over-familiarity with the eight Hollywood movies under scrutiny is assumed; someone wanting to use On Film as a step up from Philosophy for Dummies would need to pop down to the video shop first. Conversely, it's unclear why an Alien quartet buff would pick up the volume and accidentally ingest philosophical expertise.

Occasionally the intermittently graceful prose can grab you like a facehugger, yet it never quite implants the intended knowledge in the head (or is it chest?). Obviously Mulhall's own home viewing was fruitful and materials like director's cuts and DVD-featured deleted scenes are used to good effect in shoring up his argument.

Strangely the screenplays don't warrant the same treatment, but this is barely explained; apparently the 'sequeldom' aspect of movie franchising can interrogate philosophy, but not the merchandising: the book-of-the-film, action figures, comics and so forth. On occasion a little more accuracy and fact-checking would have helped; The Terminator is not Cameron's first film (p.55) - anyone for 1981's Piranha II: The Spawning? More seriously, while one can compare Schwarzenegger's monosyllabic cyborg to the reinvented, all-action Ripley, most thirty-something film fans would recognise Aliens' debt to Gordon Douglas' Them (1954). Mulhall never mentions the near-symmetry of the two films.

If the author had considered more the incommensurate aspects of philosophy and mass entertainment, theory and film, then a more balanced account may have emerged. Since the broad philosophical claims are drawn largely from Mulhall's interpretations (and thus a limited base of evidence), almost anything goes. One wonders if bringing in a different octet of related movies would produce the same list of insights into the human condition. For instance, Alien is an exemplar of 'body horror', second only to David Cronenberg. With (refreshingly) little reference to the bloated corpus of work in this academic genre, Mulhall unwittingly illustrates the sheer banality of observing that disease, morbidity and rebellious flesh terrify the contemporary mind. No doubt we would also rather not have xenomorphs impregnate us orally leaving their acid-blooded offspring to burst out of our chests.

Mulhall's own emphasis on the body is his book's Achilles' Heel. He continually asserts that Ripley is driven by the morbid fear of sex she exhibits throughout the main trilogy. Admittedly, this makes some sense in terms of the assorted surrogate families she acquires and loses: Jones the cat, Newt, Corporal Hicks, an alien queen and its live young. However, in the director's cut of Aliens, Ripley awakes from suspended animation ('hypersleep') to find that her daughter has died of old age. As this scene was deleted from the original release, Mulhall offers it as a 'textbook example of the ways in which supposedly non-aesthetic considerations (the need to trim a movie to maximise potential daily box office) can engender aesthetic achievements' (p.138).

Surely the same episode flags up the limits of On Film's auteurist proclivities; if studio decisions undermine the director's individual control, they presumably do the same to the dialogue between directors said to characterise sequels and film franchises, which in turn are used to subject our humanity to philosophical examination. Campaigning critic Mark Kermode once suggested one could blow apart any claims made for David Lynch's The Straight Story with the phrase 'Forrest Gump on a lawn mower'. Likewise, one can do the same to advocates of the Alien universe by saying 'Alien Resurrection'.

But to end up in such a situation with Stephen Mulhall you would first have to buy into his belief in the explanatory power of his chosen flicks. When the reader stands back from the impressive claims made in On Film, the sneaking suspicion remains that various celluloid scenes are being matched up to philosophical categories, gaining credibility from descriptive coincidences. Aspects of Alien and its spin-offs can coincide with our fears, from claustrophobia to disease, making compelling cinema, but it's stretching a point to say that they explain them.

Stephen Mulhall, On Film (London: Routledge, 2002) £7.99 ISBN: 0-415-24796-9