Carnal Thoughts: Embodiment and Moving Image Culture

Film Comment, Jan-Feb, 2005 by Chris Chang

Carnal Thoughts: Embodiment and Moving Image Culture

by Vivian Sobchack

University of California Press, $24.95 Alexander premiered after the publication of Sobchack's dazzling collection of essays, but a single moment in Oliver Stone's film exemplifies one of the book's central ideas. During a massive battle sequence a broadsword hacks off the trunk of an attacking elephant. At the instant of amputation, this viewer needed no prior experience with pachyderms to recoil in sympathetic shock. You could call it response-via-metaphor: even though I have no trunk, I can imagine and sense it as an entity with which I share certain commingled attributes. Sobchack is quick to point out that this permeation of image, thought, and sense impression is not analogical. Metaphor involves the ability to consciously choose interpretations. But in the case of the severed appendage, my "feeling" of abrupt dismemberment is instantaneous, reflexive, "thoughtless." Any poetic explanation or description can arise only after the fact. This is an example of an event that "forces us to confront and name a gap in language." In a grander scheme, it also illustrates a way of considering responses to film outside both academic lines (semiotics, structuralism, psychoanalysis, etc.) and beyond "soft" humanist film criticism. What Sobchack calls for is a reintroduction of the human body as the site that precedes meaning on the one hand, and allows meaning to achieve its truth on the other. What we see onscreen is not to be repudiated--only reconstituted into a now forgotten phenomenological calculus. Apparently, Descartes and Euclid were major players in this institutionalized amnesia. If it sounds daunting, fear not: Sobchack accomplishes her task with concrete examples drawn from familiar realms, peppered with some very spry, feminist wit. In fact, I'm tempted to say only women will understand, or at least fully appreciate, some of her arguments--but then I, as a man, wouldn't really know what I'm talking about." We possess an embodied intelligence that opens our eyes far beyond their discrete capacity for vision, opens language to a reflective knowledge of its carnal origins and limits. This is what, without a thought, my fingers know at the movies."