Steven Chang
Davis
5/5/11
RHE 330E
Final Project: The Inception of Affect.
Inception. Here’s me planting an idea in your head: the reason that people love dramatic and action-filled movies like Inception so much is not only because of what we interpret about the content, but how we respond emotionally and affectively. Unfortunately, this idea is not my own, but a radical portrayal of rhetoric, emotion, and affect from authors like Nussbaum, Walker, and Massumi. It is also not a simple idea. But perhaps by the end of this exploration into Inception and affect, we may just take away a simple enough idea of rhetoric to be called our own.
Inception was one of the great movies of 2010, opening #1 at the box office, receiving high critical acclaim, and reaching the position of 25th highest grossing film of all time. The film was regarded for its stunning visual and sound effects, the emotional performances from its actors, and its innovative concept and plot. Roger Ebert says that the idea and plot of Inception is “wholly original, cut from new cloth, and yet structured with action movie basics” (Ebert). James Rocchi from MSN movies calls Inception, “an expensive, expansive emotional film, a nested set of tricks and stratagems with parallel plotlines leaping tracks to affect each other” (Rocchi). Inception also took the Academy Awards for Best Cinematography, Sound Mixing, Sound Editing, and Visual Effects, while being nominated for several other categories. Altogether, Inception was highly enjoyed and highly popular, for a wide range of reasons.
Here’s a clip from the movie at its climax. Leonardo DiCaprio’s character, the protagonist Dom, is overcoming his biggest obstacle as the rest of the team is spread out through different settings, enacting their intricate plan all at once. Their efforts and planning throughout the movie come to fruition as their mark, Fischer, has a cathartic moment with his father, successfully achieving Inception. With their purpose accomplished, the members of Dom’s crew simultaneously activate a “kick” in order to escape the dream world and return to reality.
This clip, as the climactic peak of the movie, is indicative of why Inception is an entertaining and memorable experience for the viewer. As we saw from the critics, the common interpretations of why this movie was enjoyable include its deep plot, the innovative concept of a dream world, or the dramatic moments throughout the movie. However, rhetorical theorists have another explanation of why we are so engrossed with Inception and other kinds of dramatic, thrilling movies: pathos and affect.
Teresa Brennan explains that “the term ‘affect’ is one translation of the Latin affectus, which can be translated as ‘passion’ or ‘emotion’” (Brennan 3). She goes on to say that, “by an affect, I mean the physiological shift accompanying a judgment” (Brennan 4). What makes affect, this physiological shift, interesting is “the notion that passions and affects are themselves judgments” (Brennan 4), with or without any conscious response. So, for a movie like Inception, do our responses in emotion, physiology, and affect determine how well we receive the movie?
In this clip, we can see three major appeals to pathos and affect: the emotional appeals, the auditory appeals, and the affective interruption. These appeals directly influence our movie-watching experience, and although the common public doesn’t traditionally think of these aspects as criterion for movies, Brennan, Nussbaum, Walker, and Massumi will describe the heavy impact of affect in all forms of communication.
Drama and emotion are crucial parts of entertainment media, and the creators of movies, television, and music focus on drawing out a strong “feeling” from their audiences. In the visual, these emotions and feelings are transmitted from person to person, as Brennan describes: “sights and sounds are physical matters in themselves, carriers of social matters, social in origin but physical in their effect. Every word, every sound, has its valence; so, at a more subtle level, may every image” (Brennan 71). Brennan goes on to describe an experiment in which subjects were shown visual images of people with certain types of emotion in their faces, e.g. “anger and tension,” and this caused a physiological response in the subjects like an increase in testosterone and raising their aggression (Brennan 71). From these experiments, we can see that there is a transmission of affect and emotion even with looking at a certain form of a person’s face.
In this clip, and really throughout the movie, the actors portray their characters in a constant tension and intensity, reflected in their expression of their faces, vocal inflection, and general body language. Dom’s character, dealing with an impossible situation and an insurmountable challenge, has a perpetual look of concern and focus. His jaw is clenched, his eyebrows furrowed, and he rarely smiles throughout the movie, transmitting this tension and concentration to the viewers. However, the transmission of emotion from Leonardo DiCaprio’s character is only one of the many emotions portrayed, even just in this clip.
In this climactic portion of the movie, the viewers are bombarded with a flurry of emotions – Fischer (Cillian Murphy), the group’s target, experiences a deep emotional catharsis, reconciling his strained relationship with his father and receiving his acceptance. Dom (DiCaprio) simultaneously mourns the “death” of his projection wife Mal, while being released from the guilt of his involvement in her suicide. Even the more minor characters have a mix of emotions: Eames (Tom Hardy) gives a slight nod of triumph, knowing the team has achieved their goal, Ariadne (Ellen Page) shouts advice to Dom with panic and conviction, and Arthur (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) shifts back and forth in the elevator, knowing the implications of his role in the team’s “escape.” In just four minutes, the viewer experiences catharsis on multiple levels, reconciliation, acceptance, mourning, freedom, panic, nervousness, and victory. According to Brennan, these emotions are all transmitted to us through the visual and auditory cues in the movie.
Martha Nussbaum gives us some insight on why emotion makes a difference, by giving us the view of ancient Greek theorists that intimately connect emotions with awareness and belief (Nussbaum 304). The transmission of affect and emotion from the actors to the viewers affects us in a deeper way than just “feelings” at the moment of the movie. Instead, “these emotions have a rich cognitive structure. It is clear that they are not mindless surges of affect, but discerning ways of viewing objects; and beliefs of various types are their necessary conditions” (Nussbaum 309). Emotion is deeply tied in with how we view things, and even directly connected with our beliefs. These emotions impact how we view the movie as a whole. We may subconsciously or cognitively attribute these cathartic and positive emotions (e.g. the reconciliation of a relationship or the achievement of a goal) to the movie, resulting in a positive feeling toward the movie in general.
Although Inception didn’t receive the award for Best Picture, it earned four different Academy Awards and several more nominations, including wins in Best Sound Editing and Best Sound Mixing. Hans Zimmer, the composer, was also nominated for Best Soundtrack. Zimmer, well known for combining an epic, orchestral sound with a variety of synthesizers, created an electrifying soundtrack that was important in driving the pace and tone of the movie (Segerson). Inception has also been associated with a synthesized, body-shaking, deafening sound effect (see: here), and the movie is laden with highly stimulating auditory appeals. Music and sound effects have a huge part in how we experience movies – and it’s because of affect.
Jeffrey Walker explores Aristotle’s theory on music influencing emotion, and explains how “different kinds of music will produce different kinds of emotional states, and different kinds of souls will have different emotional predispositions, making them more or less responsive to one or another kind of music” (Walker 77). According to Aristotle, certain types of music will directly affect our emotional states. Walker gives an example that “‘angry’ music would create a corresponding ‘motion’ in the soul of the hearer and in consequence would ‘stir up’ the bodily state of anger, especially in a person whose bodily nature was inclined already to greater than average ‘heat around the heart’; and at that point, the hearer would in fact be angry, albeit groundlessly” (Walker 79).
In the same way that the cast of Inception portrayed a constant tension and intensity, the music and sound effects added to the viewer’s experience in the suspense and drama of what was happening in the movie. James Sergeson, in a review of Inception’s soundtrack, lauds “the music itself is an actor portraying intensity and emotion, furthering the story like a plot element of its own all while slipping in unobtrusively” (Sergeson). Sergeson goes on to note that the accents, crescendos, flowing strings, and clashing tensions add to the movie’s tension and emotion (Sergeson). These aspects of musical tension and emotion are indeed affective appeals, resulting in the viewer taking away a feeling of intensity and excitement from the movie.
Creative cinematography is an essential part of making a movie original and remarkable. Inception boasts epic landscapes, fight scenes in zero-gravity, entire created worlds, and an artistic flair in even the simplest settings. The timing and positioning of camera angles directly influences how a viewer experiences a movie. Even in cinematography, affect is at work in creating a suspenseful and vivid movie environment.
Brian Massumi, in The Autonomy of Affect, takes a look at interruption as an affective influence. Massumi gives the example of Ronald Reagan’s speech style, famous for his jerkiness and lack of fluency in his body language. Surprisingly enough, this interruption resulted in an affective influence. The reason, Massumi explains, is because of potential of movement: “At each jerk, at each cut into the movement, the potential is there for the movement to veer off in another direction, to become a different movement. Each jerk suspends the continuity of the movement, for just a flash, too quickly really to perceive but decisively enough to suggest a veer” (Massumi 41).
The cinematography in Inception uses this idea of interruption, specifically in this one clip of the movie. The movie has already been filled with plot twists and unexpected obstacles, and the creators of the movie use this built-up suspense to heighten the experience at the climax. The characters are spread throughout four levels of the dream world, each fulfilling their own role and with their own personal obstacles. The creators mix and cut each scene together in quick succession, with different angles, close-ups, broad views, and all across the different settings. With all the different cuts, we don’t know what to expect, and it’s physiologically affecting our bodies and preparing us for many different scenarios. Each cut adds to the suspense and intensity, resulting in an increased affective experience.
When we watch dramatic movies like Inception, we aren’t just mindlessly enjoying cool visual effects, but experiencing the emotions that the actors portray, physiologically responding to the auditory aspects, and being influenced by the cinematography and interruption within the movie. This is not to say that meaning and content have no part in our interpretation of movies, but that affect is an inseparable part of movie-watching and other forms of communication.
Indeed, these three elements of pathetic and affective appeal are vital in our interpretations and experiences of the movie. Although affect may be a relatively new area of study, we’ve seen throughout several different theorists and authors that affect has everything to do with how we understand and receive a certain message or feeling from different sources -- be it movies, social groups, speeches, sign posts, or any variety of things. These different strategies of appealing to a person’s affective responses are used throughout the movie industry, but when they are all combined in such an effective and powerful way, we see something new and exciting, like Inception.
Entertainment media is just one part of what Jenny Edbauer calls an “affective ecology” (Rice 22), where rhetoric is not just speech or writing, but affect and rhetoric encompass all encounters. We communicate through physiological, affective, pathetic, and rhetorical means, and these become an essential part of our experience in movies, despite our lack of awareness in the realm of affect. The makers of Inception captured these appeals in their movie, resulting in an unforgettable film, and making us wonder about the importance of meaning versus affect. Both are undoubtedly important, but as we can see from the views of Brennan, Nussbaum, Walker, and Massumi, affect is undeniably a crucial part of our experience in communication and response.
Works Cited
Brennan, Teresa. The Transmission of Affect. Ithaca, N.Y: Cornell UP, 2004. Print.
Ebert, Roger. "Inception :: Rogerebert.com :: Reviews." Rogerebert.com :: Movie Reviews, Essays and the Movie Answer Man from Film Critic Roger Ebert. Web. 02 May 2011. <http://rogerebert.suntimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20100714/REVIEWS/100719997>.
Edbauer, Jenny. "Unframing Models of Public Distribution: From Rhetorical Situation to Rhetorical Ecologies." Rhetoric Society Quarterly 35.4 (2005): 5-24. Print.
Gross, Alan G., and Arthur E. Walzer. Rereading Aristotle's Rhetoric. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 2000. Print.
Massumi, Brian. "The Autonomy of Affect."
Rocchi, James. "Inception (2010) - Critics' Reviews - MSN Movies." MSN Movies: Movie Listings, Showtimes, Movie Reviews, Trailers, Movie Clips, DVD and More. Web. 01 May 2011. <http://movies.msn.com/movies/movie-critic-reviews/inception/>.
Sergeson, James. "Album Review: Hans Zimmer – Inception OST." LA Music Blog. Web. 02 May 2011. <http://lamusicblog.com/2010/07/uncategorized/album-review-hans-zimmer-inception-ost/>.
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