I’ve been reading Ian Nathan’s book Alien Vault, an agreeable account of the making of Ridley Scott’s Alien. “Making of” books and documentaries make it clear just how many hands go into putting a movie together. The director is not the God of classical theism, creating ex nihilo. There has to be a screenplay, which is usually written by someone other than the director, and which is in turn often based on source material -- a novel or short story, say -- written by someone other than the screenwriter. Good actors can salvage an otherwise mediocre film, and bad actors can ruin an otherwise good one. The music, sets, and special effects depend on the artistry of yet other people. So, why is it “Ridley Scott’s Alien” rather than “Dan O’Bannon and Ronald Shusett’s Alien”? Why is it “Stanley Kubrick’s Lolita” rather than “Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita”? Why “Alfred Hitchcock’s Rear Window,” and not “Jimmy Stewart’s Rear Window”?
Well, there’s a good reason. As the “making of” literature also makes clear, no one else is nearly as crucial to the nature of the overall product as the director. He, of course, is the one who gathers and arranges all the other elements into just the pattern we see onscreen. To understand his role we need to look for our analogy, not in Genesis or in Part I of Aquinas’s Summa Theologiae, but rather in Plato’s Timaeus. The director is not God, but he is a kind of demiurge.
A demiurge or craftsman god (with-a-lower-case-g) takes pre-existing matter and fashions it in light of the eternal Forms. Matter by itself is without form; the Forms by themselves are abstract entities, causally inert. The demiurge creates neither, but he does bring them together, thereby ordering the otherwise chaotic matter and bringing into concrete reality the otherwise remote and ineffectual Forms.
A director is like that. Screenplays and other source material are, relative to a movie, like the Forms -- pure ideas, abstracted from concrete reality and utterly unable by themselves to bring such a reality into being. (And there is absolutely nothing in the world as causally inefficacious as an aspiring screenwriter trying to break into the business, as any one of them could tell you.)
Like the Forms in Platonism, stories and screenplays are in one sense the source and standard of everything else, which is why the writer naturally feels a sense of injustice at the attention given to directors and actors. But like the Forms, they simply can’t do a damn thing on their own and are only ever imperfectly grasped by anyone in the first place, which is why the director feels little compunction about altering the writer’s contribution -- since like a philosopher vis-à-vis his own ideas, a writer may not understand the nature and implications of his own story as well as others do -- and slapping his own name on the result.
A good actor, meanwhile, is like prime matter, having the potentialityto take on the “form” of any role but not actuallyhaving any such form until directed in light of the director’s vision of some story. The raw material that goes into making up a set or special effects is obviously like this too. Even pre-existing works of art -- such as the music used to such good effect in Kubrick’s 2001, or H. R. Giger’s bizarre designs in the case of Alien -- are, relative to film, just “matter” waiting to be arranged in some cinematically sound way or other. And it is the director who ultimately determines how all this works out. (Especially if he is eminent enough, though of course there is occasional interference from studio executives and the like -- lesser gods frustrating Zeus’s will, as it were.)
So, the unique association of a movie with its director is artistically justifiable. And of course, there is another way in which the big shot director is like a demiurge, or like the deity of what Brian Davies calls “theistic personalism.” He only thinkshe’s God.
Related posts:
The metaphysics of Vertigo
The theology of Prometheus
The Avengers and classical theism
Cinematic representation
Related posts:
The metaphysics of Vertigo
The theology of Prometheus
The Avengers and classical theism
Cinematic representation