Below are the opening pages of a fascinating 2022 book by Thomas Puhr, Fate in Film, about determinism in film–much of which is horror, including Under the Skin, Hereditary, Midsommar, Us, Gus Van Sant’s Psycho, and Michael Haneke’s American Funny Games. We highly recommend.
INTRODUCTION
“You’ve Always Been the Caretaker”
When introducing compatibilism, my undergraduate philosophy professor drew a crude maze on the blackboard with a stick figure at its entrance. She traced the figure’s possible paths with diverging sets of arrows and explained how it had, say, a choice between left or right at a given T-junction (free will), but was prohibited from continuing straight (determinism). As this simple exercise illustrates, compatibilism’s deliciously ambiguous response to whether or not we have free will can be boiled down to: “Well, sort of yes, sort of no.”
This “answer” epitomizes what I find occasionally frustrating but immensely gratifying about philosophical inquiry, especially when applied to cinema. But here’s the thing: many films espouse a decidedly deterministic worldview, be it narratively, stylistically, thematically, or any combination of the above. This tendency speaks to a broader implication: that the medium embodies, as both physical object and cultural artifact, determinism. Here and elsewhere, I refer to determinism as the concept that everything past, present, and future is guided by external causes (societal, hereditary, paranormal, etc.) we cannot change.1
In terms of its narrative preoccupations and very physicality, cinema grapples with a primal human fear: that we do not control our lives nearly as much as we hope, that forces beyond our control—or even our comprehension—dictate our thoughts, (inter)actions, and notions of selfhood. Nowhere is this essential nature clearer than in horror and science fiction films, wherein malevolent forces inexorably pull the protagonist and narrative toward their mutual demise. As an object, film (analog or digital) physically manifests this predetermination: its beginning, middle, and end coexist simultaneously, prepackaged and rolled up into one circular object—be it a DVD, computer hard drive, film reel, or even the inner reels of a VHS tape. In Gore Verbinski’s The Ring (2002), a cursed VHS tape not only dictates the characters’ gruesome deaths, but also self reflexively acknowledges the film’s (that is, The Ring’s) boundedness to its medium. A similar message underlies the final scene of John Carpenter’s In the Mouth of Madness (1994), wherein protagonist John Trent (Sam Neill) watches In the Mouth of Madness in a dingy movie theater (the marquee outside even features a poster with the tagline: “New Line Cinema Presents a John Carpenter Film”). By confining us within a digital screen’s boundaries, computer-based found footage films—such as Unfriended (2014) and Host (2020)—remind us that all films do the same, albeit less explicitly.
Of course, film’s literal self-containment has been commented on before, as has its natural capacity for philosophical inquiry; none other than Andrei Tarkovsky extolled cinema’s “ability to capture the actuality of time ‘in its factual forms’ as well as to preserve it ‘in metal boxes for a long period of time.’”2 But my purpose is to trace these ontological qualities from the latter half of the twentieth century to the present day in order to illustrate their pervasiveness among films often shrugged off as mere genre or stylistic exercises. Unlike Mary M. Litch’s Philosophy Through Film or Robert B. Pippin’s Filmed Thought, which similarly grapple with philosophical questions through close readings of film, Fate in Film is the first text of its kind to focus solely on deterministic themes and elements.
My goal, then, is not to break new ground but to delve deeper into preexisting territory. The forest has already been mapped—a peer reviewed journal, Edinburgh University Press’s Film-Philosophy, is devoted to exploring the intersections between film and philosophy—so Fate in Film should be approached as an opportunity to pause and closely examine just a few of its trees.
Before I outline the ensuing chapters and examine a number of films that illustrate what I’ll call deterministic cinema, let’s briefly consider three examples—two modern and one contemporary—of what I see as an inherent aspect of the medium.
Fig. 0.1: The hedge maze model in The Shining.
Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining (1980) always calls that philosophy lesson to mind, especially when Jack Torrance (Jack Nicholson) gazes into the hedge maze replica displayed in the Overlook Hotel’s great room. An overhead shot (presumably from his point of view) reveals Wendy (Shelley Duvall) and Danny (Danny Lloyd) walking inside the model. Jack smirks, and we wonder: Is the replica imbued with a supernatural power that allows him to see his wife and son in real time, or is Kubrick dramatizing a hallucination? This surreal moment defies logical explanation and leads to a variation of the above conclusion: both, sort of. Or neither. Or maybe it doesn’t even matter.
Many have analyzed the visual parallels between the hedge maze’s paths and the hotel’s corridors (mostly due to the analogous tracking shots that “map” them), but another, more revealing maze must be considered: the grid of photographs featured in the final sequence. The white wall spaces separating the symmetrical frames resemble a labyrinth’s pathways, and, just as he slowly zoomed in to the central image of Wendy and Danny in the model, Kubrick now creeps, via a series of fade-ins, to the central frame for his big reveal: Jack, beaming front and center, in a photograph dated from 1921. Since there is no “before” shot of a Jack-less photograph, which would have granted viewers some closure (“Aha, he has entered the hotel for good now!”), a disturbing implication pervades this sequence: that Jack has been in the photograph, unnoticed, since 1921.
Fig. 0.2: Another maze: The Shining’s final photograph display.
His presence in this final maze’s center collapses past and present, beginning and end, and nullifies the possibility that the narrative could have turned out any differently. What felt like a symbol for compatibilism (freedom to choose within inherent constraints) reveals itself as one for determinism. Things have always been this way, it suggests, and there’s nothing anyone could have done to alter their course. Prior choices prove inconsequential, for all paths lead to one inevitable endpoint: Jack’s physical (his body grotesquely frozen in the snow) and metaphysical (his ageless image in the photograph) petrification. It makes sense that Kubrick cut a denouement in which authorities fail to locate Jack’s frozen body, for such a revelation would imply physical change (melting, decomposition). But Jack’s body, like a photographic image that ages without changing, must remain in a state of immutability, of diffusion across all time. After all, is a photograph not a ghost of sorts, an ageless image of someone who may be long dead?
The Shining’s circular structure takes us back to the beginning, or, to be more precise, before the beginning, into the far past. “You’ve always been the caretaker,” Ullman (Barry Nelson), one of the film’s few literal ghosts, warns Jack. Indeed.
Kubrick wasn’t the only director to employ this framing device. Four years earlier, Roman Polanski’s The Tenant tapped into similar existential dread. Its protagonist, Trelkovsky (Polanski), finds himself transposed not into a place but a person: Simone (Dominique Poulange), his apartment’s former resident, who attempted suicide by jumping off her balcony. Out of curiosity and perhaps some guilt, he visits a convalescing Simone in the hospital. Wrapped head to toe in bandages, she emits a ghastly scream when she sees him and then dies soon after. In the ensuing narrative, Trelkovsky adopts Simone’s life, starting with banal habits (buying “her brand” of cigarettes from a nearby shop, first out of necessity and then out of habit) and ending with utter psychosis (dressing in her clothes, going by her name, and, ultimately, reenacting her suicide attempt).
Though it has something of a cult following, The Tenant remains divisive, its climax having incited Roger Ebert’s wrath upon its Cannes premiere: “In an ending that must rank among the most ridiculous ever fashioned for an allegedly reputable movie, he [Trelkovsky] dresses in drag, hurls himself from the same window the former tenant used, fails to kill himself, climbs back upstairs and throws himself out again.”3 Though ridiculous (it features more self-aware black humor, however, than I think Ebert gave it credit for), this ending does follow a warped logic. Whether or not the building’s other occupants are actually manipulating him to “become” Simone (as he claims), Trelkovsky jumps the second time because he believes he has to die as she did.
Like Kubrick, Polanski pulls the rug out from under us in a denouement that underlines petrification. After his second jump, a bandaged Trelkovsky awakens in the hospital and screams at his former self, from the earlier scene, staring down at him. The end is again the beginning, leaving us to question Trelkovsky’s agency. Similar to Jack, his “frozen” state (constrained by gurneys, unable to move) carries disturbing implications. Is he caught in a horrific riff on Nietzsche’s eternal recurrence, doomed to watch and then become the faceless screamer over and over again? It’s worth noting that Jack Torrance’s last utterance is also an incoherent, primordial scream . . .
Excerpted from Fate in Film: A Deterministic Approach to Cinema by Thomas M. Puhr, published by Wallflower Press, an imprint of Columbia University Press. Copyright (c) 2022 Columbia University Press. Used by arrangement with the Publisher. All rights reserved.
Thomas M. Puhr‘s criticism has appeared in Film International, Beneficial Shock!, Bright Lights Film Journal, and the Los Angeles Review of Books. His book Fate in Film: A Deterministic Approach to Cinema (2022) is available from Wallflower Press. He lives in Chicago.
