I can’t help but wonder if there’s a reason for the increasing proliferation of audience surrogates popping up like enterprising gophers in recent well known and less-well known Hollywood films as of late. When I use this term I am talking about characters in movies for whom at least one of their roles in the narrative is to metaphorically represent “the audience”. Straight off the bat and flying out into the tropopause at supersonic velocity there’s a couple of examples I’d like to talk about in the subsequent blather: Ariadne in Inception, Neo in The Matrix, Upham in Saving Private Ryan (Hornaday 2010, Jameson 1998: 23). Mostly the former, but some of the latter.
There’s a common thread in all of these movies. Some of them are high-concept, others less easily summarised, but they all require viewers to accept worlds outside the boundaries of the everyday, where accepted norms of reality have been transgressed, rewritten or completely turned upside down and faceplanted into the sand.
There’s a practical need for audience surrogates, of course: particularly when the protagonists of a film are acclimatised to the rules of the onscreen universe, it would make no sense for them to explain those rules for the audience’s benefit without a trainee member to rationalise the brief (i.e. Inception, Saving Private Ryan). The rules of Inception’s shared dreamscapes are so complex and elegantly layered that the film demands at least some level of verbal exposition, much of which is directed at Ariadne. Likewise, the first forty minutes or so of The Matrix feature Neo’s discovery and orientation of the “world within a world” of the Matrix itself.
In Saving Private Ryan, by contrast, the in-film reality is the battlefield and the grossly distorted version of the everyday this engenders. The other members of Miller’s squad are soldiers whose experience of battle make Upham (Spielberg’s audience surrogate) seem naïve and out of his depth by comparison, symbolically pointing to the helplessness of the civilian audience when confronted with the horrific realities of war (Jameson 1998: 23) To some extent, they act as mentors to Upham (i.e. Private Caparzo’s ruffled advisory that “every time you salute the captain, you make him a target for the Germans”) but for the most part, the audience is forced to adjust to the in-film reality themselves (Jameson 1998: 23).
It’s worth pointing out at this stage there’s a purely superficial aspect to the presence of the audience surrogate, as well, one which is much more commonly associated with mmopugers (Yahtzee’s phrase) such as World of Warcraft or Everquest than popular narrative cinema. Given that we are being asked to symbolically inhabit a fictional universe, we want (and indeed have the unfettered freedom to) imagine ourselves as the perceived ideal. So we project ourselves into the popular culture multiverse as the visually idealised versions of ourselves, complete with good looks, nice clothes and an ever-present air of confident capability. The audience surrogate, to use a very 21st-century-specific term of endearment, is the “avatar” of collective desire. There is a great deal of literature on the real-world concept of “celebrity” status and its similar significance as the embodiment of a collective set of ideas which people hold dear, which I think is probably relevant checking out in lieu of me expanding on it and boring everyone to sobs. I could say a bit about Inception specifically here, though, and that bit goes something like this: if we’re inhabiting the Freudian dreamscape of repressed desires (or the collective dream space of the darkened cinema), it makes sense that, perhaps involuntarily, we would dream of ourselves in our idealised forms. This is comparable to what Morpheus in the Matrix called, “residual self-image”, and indeed, the same dynamic is at play in that movie with its leather trenchcoat-clad, noir-styled pastiche of high fashion.
But there’s another angle which I find far more interesting for the purposes of this discussion: why do we want, or need an extraneous character serving as a “projection” of ourselves? Particularly if they’re not the emotional/dramatic locus of the story, (i.e. the character onto which the audience is traditionally expected to project their identity, hopes, fears etc) would this not just displace and/or weaken emotional identification with the film’s protagonist?
Theoretically, yes, but not always. Giving the audience a voice in a peripheral character can actually be used to create some clever polemic situations. For example, observing the events of Inception metaphorically through the eyes of Ariadne distances the protagonist Cobb, making him something of a mystic. He becomes an aloof, unknowable mentor figure. This in turn preserves the element of suspense around the film’s climax as it hinges upon the interference of Mal, who is herself an enigma of whom Cobb alone has knowledge. At the same time, Cobb becomes dramatically significant to us as half father-figure, half seer; a conflicted anti-hero who we are forced to trust to help guide us through the labyrinth of the dream. We may not identify with him as a projection of ourselves, but rather, Nolan makes us closely dependent on him from the outset and this fosters a kind of emotional identification.
This looks like a good spot for me to shift the topic to end on a question mark and possibly trot out my favourite I-word into the bargain. Does having a character and a personality we can project ourselves onto specifically for that purpose (as opposed to the implied physical presence of the spectator-audience, mediated through the camera lens) wreck the sense of immersion at all?
In what we might call the “traditional” mode of viewing, the audience is the implied observer, which doesn’t give us any visible signs of existence in the onscreen world but instead naturally replicates the process of seeing to the point of being self-effacing. Before we’re introduced to Ariadne, we watch the opening scenes of Inception as easily and naturally as if we were just another person sitting silently at the dinner table listening to Cobb and Saito talk. With the “audience surrogate” model, we possibly lose that sense of situated, first-person immersion but gain a sense of empowered dramatic involvement. The sense that we are an actual in-universe identity with the ability to directly influence or change the course of the narrative adds poignancy and pathos to the action.
So I suppose it ultimately boils down to the question: which is more important in the cinemagoing experience? The simple act of seeing, or being emotionally involved in the narrative? Incidentally, being a longtime fan of the Thief game franchise (as I think I may have mentioned once or twice before), I’m reminded of all those debates surrounding “first person vs. third person” that cropped up after Thief: Deadly Shadows went postal with its third person mode back in 2004. But this is a whole different basket of beetles. Well, perhaps not so different. I contend tentatively and somewhat necessarily ambiguously that it depends what the requirements of the movie are and what you’re personally trying to achieve as a director. But that was predictable, so here’s something that’s not: BGloooghgooopooolsdgfsdgsreaaargh.
Sources referenced in this entry:
Hornaday, Ann (2010) “Inception's' dream team weaves a mesmerizing tale”, Washington Post. http://www.washingtonpost.com/gog/movies/inception,1158861/critic-review.html
(accessed 14 March 2011)
Jameson, Richard T (1998) “History’s Eyes: Saving Private Ryan” in Film Comment 34.5: 20-23.
The Matrix (1999) Director: Larry & Andy Wachowski, Warner Bros.
Saving Private Ryan (1998) Director: Steven Spielberg, Dreamworks.
