Movies have never been, with rare exceptions, a highbrow medium. They rejoice in the visceral, the gaudy, and the vulgar. And this has been held against them by critics who prefer the still gray ma,r of the brain to the whirling kaleidoscope of the screen. 16 be sure, there have been art-house movies, with big words in them, and obscure plots, and little in the way of rush and throb; but this has always been a minority taste—movies today are as philistine as they have ever been. Movies revel in sensation and emotion (often the cruder, the better); deep abstract thought is not their thing. They are a sensory (and sensational) medium, inarticulate, nonverbal, dazzlingly in love with spectacle (the circus is not dissimilar). Brutality and disorder, death and destruction— these are their frequent themes. There is nothing more cinematic than the sudden shock of a fearsome predator lunging into the screen, eliciting a gasp of surprise from the audience. Even a "sophisticated" filmmaker such as Ingmar Bergman deals in raw emotion, conflict, and violence of the spirit. This is surely why those of a certain cast of mind have always disapproved of the movies (as they have rock music and, before that, jazz). They rightly sense the anarchic flow of some of our most—what shall I say?—basic emotions (I won't say "animal" because animals don't in general enjoy explosions and knife fights). They correctly discern that movies don't as a rule engage the higher mental faculties.
However, I am here not to condemn this trait of film, but to explain it. Sleep science has shown that the brain is selectively activated during dreaming: the parts that control sensation, emotion, and movement are as active as they are in the waking state, but the parts that sustain reasoning and self-reflection are dampened down. Thus J. Allan Hobson writes: "We can see that, when the brain self-activates in sleep, it changes its chemical self-instructions. The mind has no choice but to go along with the programme. It sees, it moves, and it feels things intensely but it does not think, remember, or focus attention very well ."12 Later he says: "The reason that dreams are so perceptually intense, so instinctive and emotional, and so hyperassociative is because the brain regions supporting these functions are more active. The reason that we can't decide properly what state we are in, can't keep track of time, place, or person, and can't think critically or actively is because the brain regions supporting these functions are less active."3 Now these results from the study of the dreaming brain must pique the interest of the student of film, for they are eerily reminiscent of what is obviously true of film. Just as the higher intellectual and critical faculties are diminished during dreaming sleep, so the movie watcher is operating at a psychological level at which the higher mental faculties are not in play or are in abeyance. The parts of the brain that are most active in movie watching are connected to sensation, emotion, and movement; and these crowd out the more abstract conceptual functions of the brain. If we call the parts of the brain that are responsible for sensation, emotion, and movement the SEM brain, then we can say that in movie watching it is the SEM brain that is primarily recruited; the critical and reflective faculties are (largely) offline.
The self that is childlike, instinct-driven, and sensation-fixated. This I distinguish from the critical self, which is reflective, language-driven, and conceptually fixated. (Think Jekyll and Hyde, roughly) My hypothesis is that the base self is upper-most in the dreaming state (the self subserved by the SEM brain) and is also calling the shots in the movie theatre, while the critical self takes a well-earned rest. To put it more pointedly, the crassness of movies is a function of the brain regions that are activated during them, which overlap with the regions of the brain that are active during dreaming sleep. Can we explain the lowbrow character of movies by the fact that it is the dreaming brain that is primarily activated by them? As the physiology of sleep tells us, the brain can be selectively activated, with some parts active and others quiescent. According to the present hypothesis, in the movies the brain likewise shifts its patterns of activation. The preoccupations of the sleeping brain—fear, appetite, wish, and delirious fantasy—are also the preoccupations of the mass movie audience. The movies chemically alter the brain in the direction of its dreaming mode: that, at any rate, is the hypothesis. During sleep the SEM brain wakes up, as it were, and with it the base self, while the critical self snoozes; I am suggesting that something similar might be true for the state of semisomnolence known as watching a movie
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