Beowulf: the digital monster movie

Animation http://anm.sagepub.com/ Beowulf: The Digital Monster Movie William Brown Animation 2009 4: 153 DOI: 10.1177/1746847709104645 The online version of this article can be found at: http://anm.sagepub.com/content/4/2/153 Published by: http://www.sagepublications.com Additional services and information for Animation can be found at: Email Alerts: http://anm.sagepub.com/cgi/alerts Subscriptions: http://anm.sagepub.com/subscriptions Reprints: http://www.sagepub.com/journalsReprints.nav Permissions: http://www.sagepub.com/journalsPermissions.nav Citations: http://anm.sagepub.com/content/4/2/153.refs.html Downloaded from anm.sagepub.com at Roehampton University on September 2, 2011 article Beowulf: The Digital Monster Movie William Brown Abstract Robert Zemeckis’ Beowulf (2007) is the latest film made using motion capture technology, a film that tells the story of a hero’s quest to defeat a series of monsters. This article examines not only the thematic role of monstrosity in the film, but also the way in which the film’s very construction, through motion capture and CGI, can be understood as monstrous. That is, after Deleuze’s Cinema 2: The Time Image (1989[1985]), Beowulf can be understood as typifying a cinema that has seen a shift from montage to montrage, a cinema that shows. Analysing the aesthetics of monstrosity in Beowulf, the author also considers how the film’s motion capture synthespian performances can be understood as comic through Henri Bergson’s (1912[1900]) theory of laughter, which suggests that humans laugh at mechanized human beings. Keywords animation, Beowulf, cinema, Henri Bergson, monster, monstrosity, montrage, motion capture, Robert Zemeckis, synthespian Prior to and upon its release, the digital animation Beowulf (Robert Zemeckis, 2007) refuelled the ongoing debate concerning the fate of humanity in a cinema gone digital: thanks to the ever greater power of computers to translate human motion and features into ever more detailed mathematical code, a time may come when cinema is made without humans. Wired’s Chris Kohler (2007) speculates that in animation: an interdisciplinary journal (http://anm.sagepub.com) Copyright © The Author(s), 2009. Reprints and permissions: http://www.sagepub.co.uk/journals/journalsPermission.nav Vol 4(2): 153–168 [1746-8477(200907)]10.1177/1746847709104645 Downloaded from anm.sagepub.com at Roehampton University on September 2, 2011 154 animation: an interdisciplinary journal 4(2) ‘another five to ten years . . . you’ll have your choice of CGI action movies. And if they star Angelina Jolie, they’ll likely just pull her digital likeness straight out of Beowulf’s asset files.’ In other words, cinema will feature photorealistic synthespians, or vactors, who no longer suffer from the vacuity attributed to them in earlier incarnations, but who instead move and express themselves as convincingly as their flesh and blood counterparts. Beowulf’s creators felt that the film achieved new levels of motion capture verisimilitude (Blair, 2007). But while Andrew Osmond (2007) felt that ‘the eyes in Beowulf move and react with convincing humanity’, the majority of reviewers perceived continued shortcomings in the motion (or performance) capture technology in terms of a total likeness to human actors (Chang, 2007; Corliss, 2007; Dargis, 2007). That a ‘total’ likeness may not be the filmmaker’s goal is never questioned, an issue to which I shall return in due course. Theories of the synthespian are wide-ranging, with scholars addressing the legal implications of digital resurrections (Beard, 1997; Kurtz, 2005), authorship (Wolf, 2003), reception (Creed, 2000), and, in the realm of motion capture in particular, performance (North, 2008). In addition, Beowulf can also be understood as working at the nexus of several other concerns of film studies in the digital era. These include: adaptation (from the original poem); the replacement of analog film by digital animation/code; the supposed tension between narrative and spectacle that is enacted in special effects-led cinema, and the contribution of gaming and video game aesthetics to film. Furthermore, the latter raises issues of spectator immersion in believable 3D environments, questions of exhibition (Beowulf was conceived as an IMAX ‘experience’, as well as being released in both 3D and conventional 2D), and marketing (the film had a sizeable marketing budget, and also enjoyed spin-off videogames for Xbox360 and PlayStation2, together with other games for mobile phone platforms, podcasts and a novelization). Although this article acknowledges and invokes a number of these issues and debates, its main purpose here is twofold: first, to show how Beowulf, as a digitally created film, contains elements of what I term ‘monstrosity’, a concept that I hope to explain as being linked to digitality; and second, to analyse Beowulf’s synthespians from the perspective of the ‘monstrous’ in order to theorize how we might or might not cross what Masahiro Mori (1970) termed the ‘uncanny valley’. Monster movies Live action movies featuring monsters have a sustained historical presence in cinema, which aesthetically has sought on the whole (but not without exceptions) to portray these monsters as realistically as possible. The credibility of monsters in cinema depends on the Downloaded from anm.sagepub.com at Roehampton University on September 2, 2011 Brown Beowulf 155 utilization of most elements of cinematic mise-en-scène (make-up, costume, etc.), although I shall argue that a key feature of creating credible monsters is in the temporal and spatial continuity of their existence on screen. That is to say, when said monster can be located in a time and space that extends beyond its bodily limits. With regard to space, a monster is rendered more convincing when it is seen to share the same ontological status as and to interact with the other matter, both living and dead, that occupies the screen at the same time as it does – an argument put forward by Elsaesser and Buckland (2002: 195–219) in their analysis of Jurassic Park (Steven Spielberg, 1993). We see this conception of realism through continuity enacted in Peter Jackson’s remake of King Kong (2005): film director Carl Denham (Jack Black) insists that star Bruce Baxter (Kyle Chandler) stands in frame with some feeding brontosaurs. His reasoning is that if they are not in frame together, no one will believe that the brontosaurs are real. With regard to time, a monster is similarly more convincing when one can depict its actions not necessarily in real time (for one might use slow or fast motion) but as taking place in a temporal continuity, that is, a time not fragmented by cuts. Michele Pierson (2002: 148–56) suggests that Roland Emmerich’s Godzilla (1998) failed because it was too concerned with repeating the aesthetic of the original Gojira (Ishirô Honda, 1954). That is, both films revealed the monster only in fragments, or over time and through the use of cuts, rather than showing the monster at once and as a whole. From this we might surmise that audiences of the 1990s do not enjoy the construction of monsters through montage, since the predominant aesthetic in this era of digital cinema is to show the creature whole, interacting with its environment and in a temporal continuity, because this method is more convincing. Montage seems to have been replaced by an aesthetic of realism through continuity, an aesthetic not necessarily enabled by digital technology but achieved with greater ease through digital technology. To elaborate: if showing an entire monster in a temporal continuity was impossible or at the very least hard to achieve in the past, and, if achieved, then likely with lower levels of realism (Gojira looks like a man in a dinosaur suit), then technology plays a privileged part in realizing, if not necessarily causing, this aesthetic of realism. For digital cameras allow us to shoot longer takes (analog cameras typically only hold 10 minutes of film) and postproduction software allows for the addition or removal of desired or unwanted detail. It also allows light levels to be modified, it can ‘correct’ performances, and it can create photorealistic 3D spaces through which we, freed from the physical limitations of a heavy and solid camera, can navigate in any given direction (both in terms of space and time), at any given speed, and through any object, be it a keyhole, a wall, a human, a planet. Downloaded from anm.sagepub.com at Roehampton University on September 2, 2011 156 animation: an interdisciplinary journal 4(2) Contrary to this aesthetic of temporal and spatial continuity, however, David Bordwell (2002) identifies that contemporary cinema, including the cinema of digital special effects, has an increased number of shots (with a concomitant increased number of edits and reduced average shot lengths). This would suggest an aesthetic of discontinuity (increased fragmentation through increased numbers of cuts). However, Bordwell himself terms this a cinema of ‘intensified continuity’; that is, we do not see an ever more fragmented reality, the totality of which we cannot grasp, but a continuous, and therefore believable, time and space. Furthermore, one might contend that increased realism through temporal and spatial continuity comes at the expense of reality itself, in that digital images are not necessarily images of real objects/an index of reality, but entirely unreal. However, Gerald Gaylard (2004) argues that paradoxically there is increased realism within the unreal/virtual: ‘if we look past the utopian hype we can discern a tendency toward the healthy survival, even flourishing, of realist tropes and mores within digital virtuality.’ Gaylard terms this trend the ‘postmodern archaic’, since old tropes are remediated in new media. These realist tropes are precisely those of spatial and temporal continuity. Monstrosity: a digital cinema of show and tell Digital technology may enable filmmakers to show monsters as sharing the same ontological status as their surroundings; it may also enable filmmakers to show these monsters acting within a temporal continuity. But I would like here to propose that this ‘intensified’ continuity, which can be understood as a kind of paradoxical (and ‘postmodern archaic’) realism, paradoxical because its continuity is constructed through the artifice of the virtual, is itself monstrous, regardless of whether any actual ‘monsters’ are featured in the film or not. This notion of intensified continuity being a monstrous form of cinema can be understood through the terminology used by various film theorists. Gilles Deleuze, for example, in his analysis of the time–image (1989[1985]), posits that time–image cinema is often characterized by blurred boundaries between the actual and the virtual (the actual interacts with the virtual; the virtual inverts/folds into the actual), as well as by long takes in which time is brought to the fore. He explains that cinema has moved away from a cinema of cutting, montage, and towards a cinema in which there is reduced cutting, a cinema of montrage (p. 40). However, where Deleuze posits a time–image cinema in which events dictate the temporal duration of the film, rather than the film (through cuts and other techniques) dictating or distorting the temporal duration of events, I would like to propose that it is not duration but continuity (the unbroken nature of the image) that is key to a monstrous cinema. The reason that Downloaded from anm.sagepub.com at Roehampton University on September 2, 2011 Brown Beowulf 157 continuity, both in terms of space and time, is core to this monstrous cinema is because it makes of cinema what Mary Ann Doane (2002: 158) terms, after André Gaudreault (1990), a ‘monstrator’. That is, cinema ‘simply shows’ (it de-monstr-ates). In the mainstream, a cinema of temporal and spatial continuity, which is enabled by digital technology, may well show us monsters (dinosaurs, giant apes, balrogs, etc.), but it is the cinema of showing that is itself monstrous. Time and space in monstrous digital cinema What applies to the monsters that walk through contemporary blockbusters (they are more convincing if we get to see them whole and interacting with their environment), is also true of that selfsame environment that they inhabit; space itself is more convincing if seen, or rather, if shown‘whole’.Aylish Wood (2002) has emphasized the importance of continuous space and time in the effort to create convincing ‘timespaces’ that subvert the traditional binary opposition of narrative and spectacle. The Perfect Storm (Wolfgang Peterson, 2000), for example, sees the storm not just as a spectacle, but as a motivating factor in the film’s narrative. Depictions of the storm not only provide ‘a coherent space for the place where events occur’, but the storm surpasses merely a ‘background’ role and becomes ‘a more active element within the narrative, from forming a location to becoming a timespace’ (pp. 379–81). Wood’s (2006) subsequent work on ‘animated’ space (space that is similarly not a mere backdrop but a dynamic element) within animated films also suggests the central role that space plays in the creation of convincing cinematic narratives. That role is not just as a coherent but static narrative space that functions as a backdrop for the story, but as a dynamic and participatory space, one that changes over time, thereby becoming not just a space but a ‘timespace’. This monstrous cinema that shows, this monstrous cinema that is based upon continuous time and space (upon ‘timespaces’), is one that is intensified, if not entirely enabled, by digital technology and its various applications to cinema. It can show us impossible shots of humans interacting with dinosaurs, or of perfect storms, it can take us from the inside of a human head to the ‘outside’ world as if there were no difference between the inside and outside or between human flesh and empty air (as per the opening shot of Fight Club, David Fincher, 1999).There thus emerges a different way in which this is a ‘monstrous’ cinema: digital cinema offers us a monstrous perspective since it shows us what previously cinema could not, transcending the limits of what is physically possible either for a material camera or for a flesh and blood human. Scholars such as Scott Bukatman (2003: 83–110) and Sean Cubitt (1999) have defined special effects that achieve this transcendence through theories of the sublime, but while the sublime Downloaded from anm.sagepub.com at Roehampton University on September 2, 2011 158 animation: an interdisciplinary journal 4(2) remains a pertinent framework for digital special effects, its focus precisely on moments of special effects is perhaps too narrow for present purposes. For while there may be transcendence in the overcoming of physical barriers and boundaries, and while digital cinema might show us diegetically real monsters, a monstrous cinema is, as I shall argue, a cinema that shows the monstrosity in all things.To recap: a monstrous cinema firstly shows, but it also shows us continuities that previously were impossible/invisible (mobility through both space and time). Since these images are beyond the ability of unaided human vision (we do not have such mobility through space and time), then the ‘inhuman’ connotations of the word ‘monstrosity’ add a third layer of meaning to this term: monstrosity is ‘inhuman’. The fact that what we see is not real at all, but a digital simulation adds a fourth layer of meaning: monsters themselves are more often than not unreal/imaginary. However, there is a fifth layer of meaning I should like to add: this monstrous cinema does not just show us digital monsters, it also renders monstrous everything that it depicts. In order to explain this, we should turn our attention to Beowulf. Beowulf: a monster movie? Beowulf is about a monster, Grendel (Crispin Glover), who terrorizes the realm of Danish King Hrothgar (Anthony Hopkins) until Geet warrior Beowulf (Ray Winstone) arrives with his men to rid the Danes of this curse. However, having killed Grendel, Beowulf’s men are slaughtered by Grendel’s vengeful mother (Angelina Jolie). Beowulf subsequently chases Grendel’s mother to her cave, where, in Roger Avary and Neil Gaiman’s script, she seduces Beowulf, promising him his own kingdom. Years later, King Beowulf must defend his kingdom from a dragon, who turns out to be Beowulf’s son as conceived with Grendel’s mother. The dragon-son has come to punish Beowulf for taking back from Grendel’s mother a bejewelled horn that he had given to her. Given the prevalence of monsters in the film (Grendel, his mother, the dragon half-brother), Beowulf is obviously a monster movie. It is also a film in which monstrosity is a key theme. ‘Underneath your glamour, you’re as much a monster as my son Grendel’, says the mother to Beowulf as she seduces him. Beowulf later concurs by telling his right-hand man, Wiglaf (Brendon Gleeson), that ‘we men are the monsters now.’ This notion of humans being as ‘monstrous’ as, say, Grendel, seems reaffirmed by the film’s depiction of human characters: the human body performs base, corporal functions (belching, urinating, fighting, extra-marital copulating) and is mere ‘meat’ (even supposedly strong bodies are frail and easily torn apart, and often nude). In a scene where Grendel attacks Hrothgar’s mead hall, we see a close-up of a woman’s vibrating tonsils as she screams before the Downloaded from anm.sagepub.com at Roehampton University on September 2, 2011 Brown Beowulf 159 monster; we track backwards from inside her mouth and to Grendel’s vibrating ear. Beowulf suggests a cinema that shows us inside the human body as easily as it shows us outside the human body, such that what was once ‘invisible’ is now seen (cinema as monstrator). However, as well as ‘monstrating’ through the transcendence of physical boundaries (inside/outside), Beowulf also shows us humans as governed by their bodies, as mere flesh or meat. This is emphasized by the way in which heroism is asserted in Beowulf only through violence, which is esteemed as the pinnacle of human endeavour. Furthermore, Beowulf himself is a self-promoting propagandist and philanderer (he lies about killing sea monsters and Grendel’s mother; he openly cheats on his wife). This critical stance towards the film’s would-be hero not only raises questions of adaptation (might Beowulf’s self-promotion – as opposed simply to his self-preservation – be against the spirit of the original poem?), but it also undermines the worth of Beowulf’s self-professed heroism. Even Beowulf’s redemption, in that he saves his kingdom and more specifically his wife Wealtheow (Robin Wright Penn) and lover Ursula (Alison Lohman) from the dragon, is also undermined by the fact that, in doing so, Beowulf slaughters his own son: the monster is as much a part of Beowulf as an external fantasy creature in the form of a dragon. There is seemingly little place for or stock set by cerebral activity here; humans are not elevated creatures, governed by logic and rationality, but base creatures, existing only through the body. They are monsters, even if not in monstrous form (i.e. still resembling humans), and while scholars like Barbara Creed (1993) have shown how the monstrous is often linked to the feminine in cinema, here monstrosity seems not to discriminate between the sexes. Yes, Grendel’s mother is female, but Grendel, Beowulf and Beowulf’s son are all male; no one is exempt. Beowulf is not just a film that features monsters like Grendel, then. It shows us the potential for ‘monstrosity’ in all things, including its human protagonists. Beowulf’s monstrous aesthetics If monstrosity pervades Beowulf thematically, can we also see monstrosity in the aesthetics of the film, stylistically? That is, is Beowulf emblematic of a cinema that shows through spatial and temporal continuity? We have already considered the ‘shot’ that passes from inside the Dane woman’s throat to Grendel’s ear, a shot that suggests not inside as separate from outside (fragmentation), but inside as forming a continuity with outside (the ‘camera’ shows inside and outside without cutting). But Beowulf involves many other shots in which we are presented with continuous spaces. The ‘camera’ glides through Hrothgar’s mead hall, up into the rafters, Downloaded from anm.sagepub.com at Roehampton University on September 2, 2011 160 animation: an interdisciplinary journal 4(2) and to a rat, which crawls to join a second rat on the hall roof, before being grabbed by a hawk, which then flies out into the countryside; we fly with and then without the hawk across a bridged ravine, through tree branches, and into Grendel’s cave. The ‘camera’ swoops in on Beowulf’s ship at sea, holds on Beowulf as he talks to Wiglaf, before flying backwards away from them as the ship mounts a wave, forward again towards Beowulf and Wiglaf, who continue their conversation, and then along the ship’s hull, revealing Beowulf’s team of rowing Geets. We fly with an arrow down to a battlefield, where the arrow pierces the skull of an attacking Friesian, before tracking back through the combat zone and seemingly through collapsing bodies to another Friesian, who falls dead into a puddle, the ‘camera’ dropping into the water with the Friesian corpse. Each of these three shots is monstrous since each shows us the space of the film in all of its continuity and without cutting. The first shot in particular guides us through all of the key locations that will feature in the film: Hrothgar’s famed mead hall, the ravine through which Beowulf’s dragon son will fly, together with the tree tops and branches that will provide an obstacle for Beowulf as he hangs from the dragon, and Grendel’s cave, in which he will also face Grendel’s mother and latterly the dragon.This depiction of narrative space allows us to become familiar with the geography of Hrothgar’s Danish kingdom. The demonstration of this space in all of its continuity (an ‘intensified’ continuity) provides us with a ‘map’ of the film world such that we are convinced of its reality (we will not later on be surprised or feel that new elements have been added spontaneously, thereby betraying our trust in the film’s reality). Such a technique of giving us an overview of the action-space of the film is, as Jessica Aldred (2006) points out, a technique likely borrowed from the narratives of videogames,1 but it can also be understood as the rejection of montage (cutting; even though the film does not involve what we have traditionally understood as cuts)2 and the adoption of an aesthetics of montrage, a shift that can be seen as a central part of monstrous cinema.3 MoCap The technical production parameters of Beowulf further the possibilities for continuity and for showing. For while Beowulf may contain shots that defy the laws of physics and which involve the ‘camera’ travelling in any direction and through any obstacle and at any speed required (the film involves both slow and fast motion shots, suggesting a mastery of time as well as space), the motion capture technology used to make the film also suggests a ‘monstrous’ cinema that involves a rejection of cutting/montage in favour of an aesthetic of continuity. Downloaded from anm.sagepub.com at Roehampton University on September 2, 2011 Brown Beowulf 161 Perhaps it is worth taking some time to explain how motion capture works. Stephen Keane (2007) summarizes it as follows: A technique that works in capturing an actor’s physical performance as a ‘reference point’ for digitally rendered characters in films and videogames. The actor wears a mono-coloured suit equipped with motion sensors which allow the computer to track and store movement. This is often supplemented by ‘facial capture’ to give the character expressive capabilities . . . The combination of motion capture and facial capture has come to be known as ‘performance capture.’ This was first used in relation to the animated feature film, The Polar Express. (p. 156) In other words, the technique of motion capture used in Beowulf involves ‘filming’ without the need for a camera: since the sets are virtual, there are no locations, and the actors are not filmed so much as sensors on their bodies translate their performance directly into code that is then outputted in a visual format that resembles human perception.4 That is to say, the actors’ performances are recorded straight on to a computer chip with no photography needed at all, not even digital photography: ‘while you’re capturing actors’ movements, you’re not actually creating a camera POV yet. All you do is record human data moving – you don’t have the cinematic POV’ (Blair, 2007). Beowulf’s producer, Steve Starkey, reaffirms this: Before, he [Zemeckis] would be looking both at the performances of his actors and at a very complicated camera move. Now he can separate the two. When he feels the performances are good, he gets to go into the computer and do the camerawork that he would normally have done on set. (Ambrose, 2007: 141) Theorists have indirectly linked motion capture to monstrosity. For example, of the so-called ‘Burly Brawl’ sequence in The Matrix: Reloaded (Andy and Larry Wachowski, 2003), in which Neo (Keanu Reeves) fights hundreds of Agent Smiths (Hugo Weaving), Dan North (2005) has written: While the action escalates and Smith multiplies exponentially throughout the second and third films, the monstrative elements of the film’s technological meta-narrative effect a parallel development.The scene operates selfconsciously as a showcase for something called ‘Virtual Cinematography,’ the conglomeration of digitally-rendered bodies and backgrounds offering a theoretically unlimited number of shooting angles within that virtual space. (p. 52, emphasis added) Similarly, Lisa Purse (2005) describes that film’s bullet-time effect as ‘an expression both of the film’s mastery over the visual – its ability to show everything – but also the spectator’s mastery of the visual – his or her ability to see everything’ (p. 159, emphasis added). However, I should like to make this link more explicit by considering the use of motion capture in Beowulf. As explained, the director can reconstruct the performances by applying to the actors whatever Downloaded from anm.sagepub.com at Roehampton University on September 2, 2011 162 animation: an interdisciplinary journal 4(2) appearance he or she wants (although Beowulf predominantly tries to present its synthespians as similar in appearance to their real-life counterparts). Since the performances exist as manipulable binary code, the scale of the characters can be modified: for example, making Grendel large or small,5 and the director is also at liberty to choose to present the shot as being from any angle and from any distance desired. Performances can be captured in their continuity without the need for multiple camera set-ups or even lighting. Although the filmmaker can then present the scene visually as a continuous take, angles can be changed in the form of what appear to be cuts without needing to set up a second shot. This removes possible obstacles in the struggle for absolute continuity via match cuts, simply because the director is using the same ‘shot’/information recorded in the first place; in other words, visually we see a cut, but in fact there has been no break in the actors’ performance at all. As Lee Marshall (2007) puts it: The neat and alarming thing about this level of performance capture is that you can re-run any scene from any angle you like, Matrix-style. You can choose, within certain limits, to dolly through or zoom in on a detail you may have missed. So there are no worries about getting the shot right first time – you can just reshoot it later, without having to reshoot. (p. 3) This total mastery over the image and this complete continuity, if chosen to be used, are indicative of the film’s monstrous nature, its aesthetics not of montage but of montrage. Immaterial monstrosity In his essay on Christian Volckman’s motion capture film, Renaissance (2006), Markos Hadjioannou (2008) argues that the digital can still matter, not least through the Deleuzean notion of the geste, in which the corporeality of a performance is asserted as the body becomes a role, or, as Hadjioannou extrapolates, a digital image (p. 135). In accordance with Hadjioannou, there is perhaps room for the reemphasis of the body in motion/performance capture cinema, precisely because of the continuity of the performance. Although performance in cinema is technologically constructed (Wolf, 2003), not least when using motion capture, the physicality of continuous performance is also re-foregrounded in a theatrical manner, something that Ray Winstone asserts in his thoughts on the film (Carnevale, 2007). Dan North (2005) perhaps similarly sees the digital merely as a prosthesis, a sentiment echoed by actor Bill Nighy, who describes the MoCap ‘suit’ used to capture his performance for Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End (Gore Verbinski, 2007) as his ‘computer pyjamas’ (Marshall, 2007). In other words, although we do not see the actors themselves, only digital animations created through motion capture technology, their virtual Downloaded from anm.sagepub.com at Roehampton University on September 2, 2011 Brown Beowulf 163 selves are dependent on their actual selves in order to exist (unlike the ‘pure’ digital animations of, say, Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within [Hironobu Sakaguchi/Moto Sakakibara, 2001]). In light of this argument, the casting of the film becomes significant and, in many senses, apt, especially with regard to Angelina Jolie. Jolie has always acted in her films as a spectacular body. Given her ‘spectacular’ nature, Jolie has always been somewhat ‘unreal’, or perhaps virtual. For example, Jolie has starred as computer game hero Lara Croft in the film series developed from that game (see Lara Croft: Tomb Raider [Simon West, 2001] and Lara Croft Tomb Raider: Cradle of Life [Jan de Bont, 2003]), as well as featuring in Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow (Kerry Conran, 2004), the first film to feature all-virtual sets. Similarly, John Malkovich has established a reputation as an actor associated with virtual thanks to Being John Malkovich (Spike Jonze, 1999). Notably, these characters survive in the virtual world of Beowulf, while actors traditionally associated with flesh-andblood characters, particularly Ray Winstone and Anthony Hopkins, meet their demise; even though the body is foregrounded in Beowulf, these physical actors cannot survive in the film’s virtual world. We reach here a paradox: in a ‘monstrous’ film that shows the monstrosity in humanity, only the female characters (Wealthow and Ursula) and those who reject the life of the body (Malkovich’s Unferth becomes a temperate Christian) survive. It would seem that the ‘monstrous’ males all must die, although the monstrous female does still linger in the form of Grendel’s mother. It is perhaps through this final rejection of the physical that the film, in spite of its aesthetic of showing, is not material beyond the sense that Hadjioannou suggests. That is to say, none of the characters, the setting or the props in the film is real, in that none of them possesses any material reality. I have tried to describe the film as being constructed with shots, as involving cuts, and I have described its contents as if they had some physical existence. However, none of these things are real at all (we do not see ‘shots’ in the traditional sense of the word), a fact that may mean we are in still in search of a vocabulary that accurately can describe what it is that we see. Dan North (2005) might argue that a film such as Beowulf enacts its own ‘monstrosity’: ‘visual effects are not definitive renderings of a character or event but indicators of the state-of-the-art’ (p. 54). In other words, Beowulf’s story is just an excuse to show (off) the new technology that Zemeckis and collaborators have at their disposal.As such, the technological construction of the image supersedes the narrative as the primary driving force of the film. Since the image that is technologically constructed is the time and space of the film itself, then we can see how Beowulf does embody Wood’s (2002) notion of the ‘timespace’: this digital/virtual timespace is the primary motivator in the film, not the narrative. We might contend that, rather than subverting the monstrosity of the film (because the film is not real, it in fact shows Downloaded from anm.sagepub.com at Roehampton University on September 2, 2011 164 animation: an interdisciplinary journal 4(2) us nothing at all), the virtuality of the film – its very constructedness, its very digitality – in fact heightens its monstrosity – as Gaylard (2004) says, it heightens its realism. It does so in two different ways. First, since both the space of the mise-en-scène and the camera itself have no physical reality, the film can present to us these spaces in all of their spatial and temporal continuity (even if the filmmaker chooses not to do so). Passing with ease from inside to outside, Beowulf shows/monstrates inside as if it were outside. Second, the so-called shallowness often attributed to vactors/synthespians works in the film’s favour, for the film’s insistence on the portrayal of human nature as shallow and perhaps even soulless is brought forth by what critics have described as a lack of soul in the virtual characters (see, for example, Dargis, 2007).That is, if the film can be seen only as enacting the falseness of its own construction through MoCap, it is fitting because the film also works hard to highlight how humanity’s own claims to control the flesh are subverted by the flesh itself (the monstrous within us). Du numérique plaqué sur du vivant I would like to end this article by crossing this notion of monstrosity with notions of the synthespian. In this way, perhaps we can eke out some further queries about the nature of the virtual actor and, if not resolving the paradox of the film’s immateriality, then at least work out how the paradox might be useful for developing a greater understanding of synthespianism. In his review of Beowulf, Roger Ebert (2007) urges audiences to find the film funny, for he suspects that Beowulf is a satirical piece of work. Ebert’s attitude may seem unusual since earlier I discussed the film as an indictment of a vainglorious and ultimately corrupt (monstrous) humanity. However, aside from the film’s obviously humorous double entendres, overt sexual imagery, and its general over-the-top status, especially the moments of nudity, the film might be deemed humorous for other, more profound reasons. Henri Bergson, in his book on laughter (1912[1900]), argues that humans often find funny what he terms du mécanique plaqué sur du vivant (p. 39), or, loosely translated, ‘the mechanical tacked on to the living’. Humans become automata, in other words, and provoke laughter since the humanity has been removed from the human, rendering what was once familiar uncanny. Given that we see in Beowulf du numérique plaqué sur du vivant, or digital code tacked on to the living, might we not also say that there is something uncanny about these images, an uncanniness that, in accordance with Ebert (2007), makes them funny? While discussions of the uncanny normally centre on horror, and while Bergson does not directly use the term uncanny in his work on laughter, the rendering-unfamiliar of the familiar is key to both Bergson’s sense of humour and to most theories Downloaded from anm.sagepub.com at Roehampton University on September 2, 2011 Brown Beowulf 165 of the uncanny in horror; indeed, although not politically correct, the French philosopher also says that blemishes, like a spot on one’s nose or, and this reveals as much about the time in which Bergson lived as it does about the man himself, the face of a black man, are also amusing since they render unfamiliar what is perceived as normal. That is, they render unfamiliar the human face: Bergson finds a spot on the end of someone’s nose and the faces of black people amusing because both look like [white] people with blemished faces (p. 41).That historically black people have also suffered (blancocentric) accusations that their uncanny (and I might add historically dependent and hopefully now defunct) otherness is monstrous and threatening as well as amusing (to Bergson and his contemporaries), we can see the link between comedy and horror through this idea of the uncanny, the rendering unfamiliar of what was once familiar, or what I might term the depiction of the human as if monstrous. Roboticist Masahiro Mori (1970) has described the uncanny valley that separates robots and virtual humans from the real thing: something is missing that separates the virtual from the actual. Lisa Bode (2006) has also commented on the strangeness of watching digital animations, grounding her analysis in a comparison of digital animation with Maxim Gorky’s original impressions of cinema, and relating this experience to the uncanny. Similarly, Barbara Creed (2000) has said that: The experience of identification [with synthespians] would be marked by a sensation of strangeness. The experience of strangeness is based on an alteration, sometimes almost imperceptible, of reality, a reconfiguration designed to create an odd, uncanny effect, one of having one’s ‘eyes wide shut.’ In Camera Lucida, Roland Barthes argues that within every photograph ‘is the advent of myself as other,’ and links this other to ‘the return of the dead.’ Asked to identify with a cyberstar, the spectator would be haunted by a sense of uncanny: the image on the screen appears human, and yet is not human. The glamorous other is a phantom, an image without a referent in the real, an exotic chimera, familiar yet strange. (p. 86) Although the synthespians in Beowulf do have referents in the real (Angelina Jolie, Ray Winstone, etc.), the strangeness/uncanny effect evoked by seeing their digital equivalents is only increased because of the disparity between synthespian and real referent. And it is in this uncanny gap that digital cinema is able to show: for, in the same way that it is all too human to have a spot on the end of one’s nose, it is the revelation, after Bergson, of the disparity between one’s virtual self-image and one’s actual self that both horror and comedy function. Both involve recognition of this disparity and, importantly, both present an opportunity for humans to learn and subsequently to change. What is true formally of motion capture synthespians (an uncanny valley between real actor and virtual avatar) is reflected in Beowulf’s Downloaded from anm.sagepub.com at Roehampton University on September 2, 2011 166 animation: an interdisciplinary journal 4(2) narrative: there is a disparity between the image humans have of themselves (mighty) and that which the film presents to us (mere flesh) – and only those that do change their ways (Unferth, the ever-shifting Grendel’s mother) survive. Given the meaning that is generated by this uncanny valley, the total realism that critics assume to be the goal of motion capture films such as Beowulf is rendered unnecessary, even if computer animators eventually achieve this. For the vactor, through its very vacuity, its very shallowness, etc., as captured via Zemeckis’ motion capture sensors and as outputted pictorially onto our cinema screens, paradoxically reminds us that we are all too human and easily corrupted and of the flesh. Although vactors themselves may have no unconscious (as Creed, 2000, argues), an animation like Beowulf shows/demonstrates our collective and monstrous unconscious, playfully reminding us that we are not as mighty or able to transcend our bodies as we think we are. Acknowledgement An early version of this article was presented at Continuity and Innovation: Contemporary Film Form & Film Criticism, a conference that took place at the University of Reading, 5–7 September 2008. The author would like to thank the organizers and participants of this conference for their invaluable feedback, which has helped to shape this essay. Notes 1 For more on the convergence between gaming and cinema in Beowulf, see Kohler (2007) and Duncan (2008). 2 Since the film is not created using celluloid, but only code on a computer, then there are no cuts at all; the film gives the appearance of cutting in order to retain a sense that this is a film – although it does not need to (and perhaps one day films will not). 3 Beowulf, at 109 minutes long, contains 708 shots (see Duncan, 2008: 59), at an average shot length (ASL) of 9.24 seconds. This is significantly longer than the ASL of 1.8 seconds found in Alex Proyas’ Dark City (1998), one of the films characterized by Bordwell’s (2002) concept of intensified continuity. 4 Sixteen DV cameras (in addition to 228 motion capture cameras) were in fact filming the performances of the actors, but, once the performances had been digitized, Zemeckis could put together what he thought was the best set of performances and then choose to motivate his so-called camera as he saw fit. For more, see Ambrose (2007) and Duncan (2008). 5 Although, as Ambrose (2007) explains, the scenes in which Grendel tears in half some Danes and then a Geet were filmed with Crispin Glover ripping apart half-sized models of the actors. Downloaded from anm.sagepub.com at Roehampton University on September 2, 2011 Brown Beowulf 167 References Aldred, J. (2006) ‘All Aboard The Polar Express: A “Playful” Change of Address in the Computer-Generated Blockbuster’, animation: an interdisciplinary journal 1(2): 153–72. Ambrose, T. (2007) ‘He Is Legend’, Empire 223: 138–42. Beard, J. (1997) ‘Will the Reel, er, Real Bill Clinton Please Stand Up: The Unauthorised Use of the President’s Image – A New “Contact” Sport’, Entertainment and Sports Lawyer 15(4): 3ff. Bergson, H. (1912[1900]) Le rire: Essai sur la signification du comique. Paris: Félix Alcan. Blair, I. (2007) ‘Visual Effects: Beowulf’, Post, 1 November. Bode, L. 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