In a recent book, _Descartes' Error_, neurophysiologist Antonio Damasio
describes his work with patients who have damage to particular areas of the
frontal cortex that attach affect to experience.  These people can show
absolutely no impairment in any of the standardized tests of reasoning,
including tests that require them to weigh complex moral issues, yet they
simply cannot cope with ordinary tasks in what Damasio calls the personal
and social realms of life.
 
Evidently, these people can tell and understand stories.  Without expressly
addressing the question of their narrative competence, Damasio gives
examples of it.  Yet they experience and exhibit little emotional response
to stories.  They follow the chain of cause and effect just fine, but
without doing what we often call "getting it," in human and emotional
terms.
 
For example, one particularly icy Iowa morn, a patient arrived at Damasio's
office.  When Damasio asked him about the drive, he responded that the
drive had been quite ordinary, although it had required some attention to
the mechanics of driving on ice. As an illustration--woven into a lengthy
discourse on the mechanics of driving on ice--the patient told of a driver
ahead of him that morning who had skidded on a patch of ice, panicked, hit
the brakes, and careened into a ditch.  Moments later, the patient
negotiated the same patch of ice calmly, surely, and dispassionately.  The
patient recounted this tale, Damasio reports, "with the same tranquility
with which he had obviously experienced the incident."  He turned the
incident into a narrative--a narrative intrinsically bound up with the
business of "problem solving"--but without really "getting it."
 
So what?
 
One influential theory of the classical Hollywood cinema suggests that the
primary pleasure audiences derive from Hollywood movies is the pleasure of
problem solving, which is akin to the pleasure of working on a puzzle in
anticipation of finding a solution.  According to this theory, anything
that interferes with the anticipation of and drive toward narrative
outcomes is likely to also inhibit the pleasure that viewers pay for.  The
evolution of classical "transparent" storytelling techniques is the primary
evidence upon which this theory rests.
 
An alternative theory, which better accounts for melodrama, horror,
spectacle, other visceral and libidinal thrills of movies, and some kinds
of comedy, is that viewers are paying for emotional responses, which
narrative transparency facilitates but does not guarantee.  I am exploring
this theory at the moment in an essay on comedy, which even in its
"classical" Hollywood embodiments is full of things that interrupt the
drive toward narrative outcomes, from pratfalls to non sequiturs to
self-reflexivity.  Still, comedy is one of the things people pay for in
movies, and always have.
 
I wrote an letter to Damasio asking him whether his patients ever laugh and
how he thinks they might respond to "The Pawnshop" (one of Chaplin's best
comic shorts, which even my four- and seven-year olds find uproariously
funny).  To my surprise, Damasio responded, Give me a list of short comic
sketches to try out with my patients, and we'll see.  While we're at it, he
said, why don't we check out horror and other kinds of emotional responses
to movies?  He asked me to suggest especially emotionally-charged short
scenes of various kinds to test out with his patients.
 
The trick is to come up with short scenes that ordinarily produce powerful
affective responses even when taken out of context.  Here's where I need
your help.  Can you suggest stand-alone scenes that you think produce
extraordinary responses in any of the following categories?
 
        Mirth
        Sadness
        Anxiety
        Disgust or shock
        Excitement
 
I choose these categories because they seem to be attached to some of the
basic attractions of movies besides narrative: comedy, melodrama, suspense,
horror, and spectacle, respectively.
 
Examples that come to my mind immediately are the battle of Agincourt in
Branagh's _Henry V_ (an example of spectacle), the booby-trapped basement
in _Home Alone_ (slapstick comedy), and the opening sequence of Robert
Gardner's _Forest of Bliss_ in which a pack of wild dogs mercilessly savage
another dog (which must be one of the most horrible moments in the history
of cinema).
 
I'll repay everyone who responds to this query by sending them the results
of Damasio's experiments.
 
Gratefully yours,
 
 
*******************************************
        Dirk Eitzen
        Department of Theatre, Dance & Film
        Franklin & Marshall College
        Lancaster, PA  17604
        717/291-4297
*******************************************
 
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