I am a great fan of Lee Child and Jack Reacher, the hero of his many novels. Reading Child takes me into a world where I feel like I am walking with Reacher as he goes around beating up the bad guys.
Then they made Jack Reacher into a film. Now look, Tom Cruise is cute but he ain’t no Reacher. The film was a let-down. I felt the grittiness of the written word had been Hollywoodised and sanitized. Cruise looked cute but was nothing like the Reacher in my head.
Many of us feel let down by the film adaptation of a book which we’ve enjoyed reading. Although there are many books which we enjoy seeing on the silver screen, there is, nevertheless, a sense of ‘loss’ when the book is adapted. At the heart of this unease lies a deep philosophical tension between seeing and reading. Paradoxically, both these acts use the same ‘external’ organ, the eyes, but they are fundamentally at odds with each other. Oft-repeated clichés like ‘A picture is worth a thousand words’ has only added to this confusion.
An act of interpretation
The source of the difference between seeing and reading is located in some basic beliefs about the nature of perception and language. Seeing is normally a passive act in that we do not do any ‘work’ to ‘see’: all we need to do is to open our eyes.
But here, reading differs. We do see a page just like we see the world, but the act of reading is to make meaning of what we see. Seeing by itself does not yield any direct knowledge about the book. We need to know the language in which the book is written and then, most importantly, decipher meaning in those words.
It is no surprise then that there have been many attempts to reduce one to the other. The idea of the world as a book has had a deep influence on theology as well as science. This is an attempt to make seeing a form of reading, a view that is quite popular in academic circles. In this view, one reads the world, reads a performance, reads culture—all the world is just a text. In contrast, reading as a form of seeing has not had much currency.
Except in films. This is precisely what is special about films.
Subordinating meaning
The act of reading a book is not perceptual because reading always goes beyond the mere act of seeing. As creatures of meaning (meaning-making is perhaps our most common mode of action), reading is nothing more than recognising or discovering the meaning in the text. If we do not understand what we read we would not continue reading.
Seeing is fundamentally different. The experience of seeing does not need the act of meaning-making. However, over time we have also reduced seeing to reading. When we see a painting which we think we don’t ‘understand’, what we are saying is that we do not get the meaning of that visual field. When we say that we do not understand what a painting means, we are essentially seeing the painting as a book and not as a painting in itself.
Good cinema consciously breaks this habit of constantly subordinating vision to meaning. Art’s fundamental purpose is to keep stretching and breaking the habit of thinking in terms of meaning. Music is a good example of sound (like language) whose experience often transcends meaning. Music is experienced without making the experience always subordinate to meaning.
Thus, we can understand the use of music in films as a way of breaking the habit of searching for meanings. Good cinema brings this caution to visuals as well; it trains us to see, without reducing seeing to reading. Cinema is that which resists being read like a book. Tom Cruise can never match Jack Reacher .
The writer is a professor of philosophy at the National Institute of Advanced Studies, Bengaluru.
