Introduction Imagini corpo
The book that you are going to read is a product of a long intellectual journey that started in
the 1960s. at the University of Copenhagen. I was a young student in comparative literature.
There were two major approaches to the humanities: a historical approach that described the
history of authors and genres from old Greece onwards and the ’analytical’ approach that
used the tools of the Anglosaxon new criticism, namely ’close reading’, that is: interpretation,
interpretation. Suddenly a small group of student saw the light: One of our teachers
introduced us to french structuralism: Todorov, Greimas, Genette, Barthes, Metz and the
Italian semiotician Umberto Eco. We felt an atmosphere of real science: Now we could use
theories and models just like real scientist, and soon we invited the major structuralists to
Copenhagen, and wrote articles about narrative models and semantic structures and our holy
texts were those articles that were published in the French journal Communications. The title
alone smelled of modernity, we were not people that were high priests for ART as our old
teachers, but young scientists that studied communication. We possessed models that were
universally valid so whether it was an old, a new, an oriental or a European text, we had the
tools. Many of us started to analyze popular culture and media.
There was of course one problem with the language-oriented structuralist
theories that they lacked a psychological theory that could explain how texts passed though
human minds and could provide a psychological dimension to fiction, so we used Freud’s
theories as a supplement to structuralism, as the dominant behaviorist psychology was of
little help for understanding literature.
But the heydays of structuralism were short-lived: From 68 and onwards
universities all over Europe was in a turmoil, and Copenhagen was not an exception: The
literary department was occupied and soon everything in the department was decided by a
teacher-student board. The atmosphere was strongly influence by socialist and historicalmaterialist ideas and in the beginning of the 70s structuralism and fiction theory was not the
hot stuff: Now the important thing was to criticize the ‘dominant ideology’. However, in
Copenhagen most of us did not follow the French deconstructivism and its strongly antiscientific trend: we kept the structuralist models and ideas, they were good for teaching, and
we all became associate professors in a young age.
However, we – the young literary professors - now focused on describing how
the historical development and the social structures influenced culture and fiction. A large
project was formed: 47 professors from all over Denmark write a new 8 volume history of
1000 years of Danish literature by means of what you might call historical-materialist
principles. I spend eight years of analyzing the late 19th century history and culture. It was
interesting, and indeed we found interaction between history and literature. However, the
project also made it clear for me that there was much more universalism that would be the
case if literature were just a social construction that reflected social structures. Themes and
forms persisted over periods of time with very different social structures, and furthermore,
there was not much that was specifically Danish, we were part of a European culture and in
many forms also part of a global culture.
After I finished my part of the history I had time to reflect on my research,
because I had a sabbatical for one year in Berkeley, California. I decided to return to the
problems of theory, and I furthermore decided to study fiction broadly and slowly started to
focus on film. My return to theory was perhaps not fully independent of being socially
integrated in the world of my late wife. She was professor in mathematical economics and she
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and her friends were brilliant theoreticians. As a humanist it was illuminating to be
confronted with such sharp theoretical and logical arguments. So I returned to theory, and
because film is a much more basic medium than literature since it directly in several
dimensions mimic the way in which we interact with the real world through eyes and ears, I
started to reflect on psychology again, partly on the basis Freud’s work, partly on the basis of
a few mainstream work on psychology that I had bought. A central point of departure for me
was Gremais’ narrative theory that focused on canonical narratives as long series of actions
performed by a hero, and this lead me to focus on seeing narratives and film experiences as
flows from perceptions to actions: say seeing lion, that evoke emotions of being afraid,
cognizing (should I run, attack or whatever) and motor action: I run. This was the beginning
of my fascination with embodiedness, the brain as intimately related to its function as the
controller of the body in space. Many theories of fiction focuses on perceptions and
cognitions, but for me the brain is strongly attached to the body and to actions. So this led to
the first sketch of what was going to be the PECMA flow model, the continuous interaction
between perception, emotion, cognition and action that I have described in the introduction to
part II of this book..
Early 1988 I showed my model to the grand old man of film theory, Christian
Metz, that made some positive remark and then added: but need you not account for the role
of hormones for the film experience, a rather curious remark from a person that had been
deeply embedded in psychoanalysis. But this little remark became a new turning point in my
life because it suddenly motivated me for studying neuroscience. At that time the psychology
department and its library was in the same building as the film and media department that I
now belonged to, and I started to read psychology and neuroscience, it became an obsession.
My interest in psychology was enhanced by experiences in the early sixties. Drug
use was part of the new youth culture, and those using such drugs – like LSD - got their brains
completely reprogrammed, they got hallucinations, became paranoid or got out of body
experiences. Many hippies drew the conclusion that there existed higher ‘spiritual’ truths. My
interpretation was different: Psychological events are based on physical brain structures that
may be strongly influenced by physical changes such as the use of drugs. So, when I in the
mid-eighties began extensive reading en neuropsychology it was an extraordinary intellectual
experience to get insight in the way in which the physical brain formed our experiences.
The timing of my renewed interest in psychology was right, because the late
1980s and the early nineties were renaissance years within psychology. The fifties, sixties and
seventies were dominated by first generation cognitivism that was inspired by computers.
Psychology was understood as being disembodied: The brain was just another computer that
produced algoritms. But the eighties onwards the whole picture changed: now it was neuroscience, the study of the physical brain and its activities that was at the forefront. The brain
was not just another computer, the brain was/is a complex physical entity that is fully
integrated with the body. The body approach also meant that emotions came back to
psychology in a big way. For decades only psychoanalysis have studied emotions but now a
series of psychologists and neurologists began to describe the role of emotions in our
embodied brain. Researchers like Frijda, Damasio, and Ledoux put emotions on the agenda,
and later Jaak Panksepp provided a profound theoretical description of human emotions and
their evolutionary history and this was a revelation for me.
In parallel with the development within psychology, linguists like Lakoff and
Johnson had revolutionized the understanding of language through their study of metaphors.
The central finding was here that the basis for our understanding of the world is our
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embodiedness, the way in which we see and hear the world in order to maneuver and act in
the world. Even abstract ideas are developed on the basis of metaphoric projections from
basic embodied actions like grasping an idea, seeing your point of view, struggle with
problems.
A third innovation informed my thinking in those years: the renaissance of
evolutionary thinking as a key to understand human behavior and human emotions by seeing
how they are related to our animal ancestors and how some of the fine-tunings of our mental
capacities relate to our ancestors’ adaptation to a life as hunters and gatherers. To see ‘the
grand chain of being’ of how humans developed out of lower life forms also activated strong
interests based on my early childhood on an isolated farm, surrounded by numerous animals,
+ father, mother, sister and brother. Due to this early bonding to animals it was strongly
gratifying to understand our connectedness to other living beings. Our animal links does not
give me a reaction of reductionism – are we just animals and not spirit as spiritualists might
feel, but rather a warm feeling of understanding humans in their relation to the rest of nature
and the animal world. Evolution provides a feeling of ecological connectedness.
Six years of intensive research in psychology and film theory and film analysis
resulted in my dissertation Cognition, Emotion, and Visual Fiction that combined
neuropsychology and genre analysis. I focused on how emotions and the mental flow could
explain the fascination with the big genres, and how manipulations with the flow might result
in subjective and lyrical experiences if the flow from perception and emotion to action was
impeded or blocked. It further analyzed how viewers relate to characters in different ways,
from empathic simulation to distant observation, as in meta-fiction and some forms of
comedy. I decided to rewrite the dissertation to be published internationally, and after close
to three years of rewriting in was published by Oxford University Press with the title Moving
Pictures. A New Theory of Film Genres, Feelings, and Cognition in 1997.
I started my research on the relation between neuroscience and film pretty much
on my own, but in the year of the publication of Moving Pictures a group of film scholars
interested in the cognitive psychology of film gathered for the first time and soon formed the
Society for the Cognitive Study of the Moving Image SCSMI, and its biannual and latter annual
conferences now provided an international platform for such studies even if I in the beginning
was pretty much alone in my fascination with neuroscience and embodiedness.
Moving Pictures included consideration of the evolutionary framework of film,
but its main focus was psychological explanations. In the following years an understanding of
the relation between biology and culture, nature and nurture, became increasingly important
in my research. The dominant trend within the humanities was still strongly constructivist:
Our brains were clean slates at birth and they then became programmed by culture. But my
own experiences as cultural historian had convinced me that there exist universal patterns in
fiction even if also there exist a multitude of traits that are produced by specific cultures or
individuals. So I started out to analyze how you might understand how our biology, our
evolutionary past created some mental frames and emotions that supported some fiction
forms better than others. Fiction-makers are then part of big cultural survival-of-the-fittest
experiments: Those fictions that appeal to our biological inheritance will be successful and be
copied, those with lesser appeal will have short lives and not get any offspring, they will not
be copied. Children, for instance are strongly dependent on care-givers like father and
mother, and therefore successful stories for children will deal with bonding and bonding in
jeopardy as we see it in the globally successful Hollywood movies for children. Children are
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also strongly exploratory and therefore we will again and again see how exploration and
bonding problems abound in children’s fiction. But movies also reflect a given culture: The
bad guys in westerns used to be Indians or Mexicans, the heroes white Anglosaxons; So the
narrative patterns of conflicts, bonding and romance reflects universal patterns that are
primed by our nature, but the specific objects of conflict, the descriptions of the good and the
bad are culturally constructed. To make a successful film demands skills that have been
developed for thousand of years of narrative experiments to find formulas and themes that
appeal to our nature.
I started to write a new book – Embodied Visions - that on one hand discusses the
questions of universalism and biological nature versus culture, and on the other hand further
develops the theoretical problems of film aesthetics seen in a neuropsychological light. I gave
the PECMA flow model its final form. An inspiration for this was my work with computer
games that provided a new dimension to understanding the role of viewers and the question
of embodiedness. In computer games everything is focused on the ‘muscular control’ of the
world, the player of the most popular first person shooter games continuously tries to control
the game world via the interface. In films and other narrative forms there is some control, we
may simulate heroes that travel, shoot, make love or whatever. But in lyrical films and art
films there are often no outlet for actions: the perceptions feelings and associations are
impeded or fully blocked and we may therefore get such salient saturated experiences where
we feel that the world is deeply meaningful even if the feelings are not very precise. These
feelings can be explained by means of the PECMA flow.
After I finished Embodied Visions I have further worked on these feelings of
meaningfulness inspired by the descriptions in neuroscience of the working of the
dopaminergic seeking system. Dopamine is a neurotransmitter that we know from cocaine,
Ritalin and amphetamin and its function is to motivate the frontal brain to focus, especially to
focus on future pleasures, and you might call dopamine ‘the desire neurotransmitter’ that
motivate for cognitive as well as for motor seeking. The opposite of Dopamine is the
pleasure-neurotransmitters based on opiates: they do not motivate for seeking but for
relaxation. A central narrative form of dopaminergic seeking is the classical crime fictions,
where everything becomes salient signs that may lead to the revelation of some mystery (and
I have published several articles on crime fiction and dopamine1). Crime fiction is one of the
most important genres within mass entertainment and to understand the mechanisms that
fuel the craving of solving mysteries and unraveling mysterious clues is therefore a central
research endeavor. But also art film strongly rely on the continuous activation of
dopaminergic seeking to unravel the mysteries, because whereas mainstream fiction like the
full PECMA flow: see and hear, feel, think, and then act that leads to pleasure by success, art
films block the flow so that viewers are full of cognitive desire and of feelings of deep
meanings that cannot fully be grasped.
I have further worked on comic entertainment and published an article ‘A
General Theory of Comic Entertainment’2. The comic reaction is a curious variation of the
Pecma flow. The normal arousal and excitement aims at doing actions that can change the
world in such a way that the arousal is extinguished, like in the fear-flow: See danger, arousal,
avoid danger, pleasurable relaxation. Here the excitement fuels those muscles in arms and
legs that serves to control body and world. But comic reactions are different, they are based
on arousal, say a person slips on a banana peel and you are aroused; but you do not fully
simulate those negative experiences, the muscles in arms and legs relax, and your excitement
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flows to your central body muscles around the lungs that produces laughter. You modify your
own body, not the world.
Comic entertainment is extremely social, you need an actual or virtual audience
that accepts to laugh even at very painful things like shameful incidents and failures. This
have also lead me into writing about how the film experience rely on the viewer’s explicit or
implicit feeling of the film experience as a social event, whether it is laughing at the
misfortunes of life in comedies, sharing grief in sad melodramas, or sharing happiness in
musicals. The classic structuralist understanding of narrative was strongly focused on the one
side of the experience, our simulation of the doings and sufferings of narrative agents. But
consuming narratives are also social rituals that make people share their experiences.
Numerous researchers within evolutionary psychology (for instance Boyd and Richerson)
have further lately focused on the fact that humans are ultra-social. An aspect of our ultrasocial nature is its dark side: tribalism. We bond with ingroups, our tribe, nation or whatever,
but at the cost of regarding all those people that do not belong to our ‘tribe’ as inhuman. This
profound human tribalism I have analyzed on The Lord of the Rings-trilogy3.
The last twenty-five years have revolutionized our understanding of our
embodied brain, partly due to the astonishing development of scanning techniques, partly due
to an enormous expansion in our understanding of the evolution of the brain. As films possess
the most powerful tools to simulate human experiences the study of films needs a
psychological understanding of how and why film impacts our embodied brain. We also need
an evolutionary explanation for why hiding, tracking, trapping, observing, fleeing and fighting
plays such an enormous role in film fiction, despite the fact that such activities have been
more useful for our hunter-gatherer ancestors than for us modern city people. I hope that
Imagini Corpo will provide an useful introduction to this fair new world of studying the
interrelation between biology and culture.
1
Grodal, T. (2010). “High on Crime and Detection”, Projections, Vol. 4. Issue 2, p. 64-85
Grodal, T. (2011). “Crime Fiction and Moral Emotions: How Context lures the Moral Attitudes
of Viewers and Readers. Northern Lights, Vol. 9, p. 143-157.
In Nannicelli and Taberham ed. Cognitive Media Theory p. 177-195. London: Routledge AFI
2014.
2
Torben Grodal: Tapping into Our Tribal Heritage: The Lord of the Rings and Brain Evolution.
In Ian Christie ed.: Audiences: Defining and Researching Screen Entertainment Reception. red. / Ian
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Christie. Amsterdam : Amsterdam University Press B.V., 2012. p. 128-142.
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