Introduction to Film Textbooks

I previously wrote (and wrote and wrote...) about what I was thinking when designing an intro to film class that I'll be teaching next term, and particularly when choosing the fourteen films to show during the 150-minute screening time outside of class.  That post wasn't complete, though, because an important other factor in the shape of the course is the textbook.

When I got the assignment to teach intro to film, I'd never looked at a film textbook.  I'd be tempted to say, "When I was in school, we didn't need none of them overpriced, overstuffed, overacademic behemoths!"  And though it is true that the profileration of such textbooks is a relatively recent event, a handful of them are over thirty years old.  I just tended to get teachers who didn't want us to read much in film classes.

I'm a fan of reading, though.  And I'm especially a fan of reading in an intro class, where a textbook gives interested students more information than they'll get from the inevitably incomplete survey an intro class provides.  With a good textbook, or even a mediocre textbook, a student who becomes particularly curious about a topic will have a tool that shows the way toward deeper exploration.

I began by borrowing books from colleagues, then contacting publisher's representatives to see what they could send me.  I soon had over a dozen books to choose from.

After skimming the books in my pile, I was able to eliminate half of them as in one way or another obviously inappropriate.  For instance, I loved Routledge's Introduction to Film Studies, and particularly appreciated that it was thirty dollars less expensive than most of the other textbooks.  But that book's idea of introduction and mine are very different -- for students in their first or second year of college, it would be dauntingly complex, its vocabulary and concepts challenging even for intrepid students.  As a textbook for graduate students or for undergraduates in a serious and comprehensive Film Studies program, it would be an excellent resource.

Once I had skimmed and whittled, I encountered this post by Chris Cagle about film textbooks and found it helpful and reassuring.  Most of the books Cagle writes about have been updated or are out of print, but the post confirmed a number of ideas that had been floating around in my mind.  With one exception (and that likely because of a difference in editions), the descriptions of the books seem accurate and fair to me.

It only took me a few days to get down to three finalists: Bordwell & Thompson's Film Art, Barsam & Monahan's Looking at Movies, and Corrigan & White's The Film Experience.

Each is a wonderful textbook and would serve the class well.  Looking at Movies is the most straightforward and clearly written of the three, absolutely perfect for a basic intro class.  It also has the only useful accompanying DVD that I've seen with a textbook.  Film Art is a pure joy to read and look at; it has, hands down, the best use of images from films in any textbook I looked at.  Appropriately, given its title, it feels like an art book.  David Bordwell and Kristen Thompson are among the best writers in the English language on film -- this is a book I sat with and read as much for pleasure as for work.  The Film Experience is the book I thought must have improved between the first edition, which Chris Cagle wrote about, and the second, which I have.  The layout and design is not bad at all, with full color throughout, though the book doesn't even come close to Film Art in its use of the imagery -- too many of the stills seem to be in the book to provide a break from the text rather than to illustrate a concept, whereas Film Art brilliantly demonstrates how to make stills an essential part of the book's argument and information.  Cagle also notes that The Film Experience is advanced and likely difficult, but I didn't find this to be particularly true for the second edition, though certain advanced terms are included (syntagma is still there, as it should be!).

The first book I eliminated was Looking at Movies, though I wished there were some way I could have the students have access to the DVD, since a number of film ideas are explained far more efficiently and clearly via a DVD than a book.  Alas, it seems the only way to assign the DVD is to assign the book, and in the end Looking at Movies was just too simple and too formalist in its approach for my needs.

 Film Art is also mostly formalist, but it's also by Bordwell & Thompson, and if you're going to get formalist, you might as well get Bordwell & Thompson.  As they said of James Bond, nobody does it better.  I'm not sure why textbook writers and publishers even try to compete.  Film Art is the most frequently adopted film textbook, and so publishers and writers feel compelled to try to nip at its market, but though a genius might be able to improve on Bordwell & Thompson, most textbook writers are not geniuses.  The key to competing with Bordwell & Thompson is to offer a textbook for the teachers who want something other than what Film Art, for all its wonders, offers.

The only book I've found that does that is The Film Experience.  Its chapters on the formal elements of film are adequate, though the materials trying to convince you to adopt the book say it has "the best coverage of film's formal elements," which is a lie.  Film Art has the best coverage of film's formal elements, and White and Corrigan recognize the need for a book that has a perfectly good but not "the best" section on film form and style while also offering something else.  The example films in The Film Experience are broader and more diverse than the examples in Film Art, there's coverage of theoretical and political approaches to analyzing film, and throughout the book there's an emphasis on the social construction of our responses to and expectations of the movies we see.

The Film Experience arrived after all of the other textbooks, and before I saw it, I was certain I would use Film Art and that it was pointless to look at any other textbook.  I had never read a textbook of any sort with the pleasure I had read Film Art.  It's that good.

But when I started trying to fit the lists I had made of films I wanted to screen to the content of Film Art, I saw there was a bit of a problem.  I would need to supplement the book with something to cover the territory Film Art ignored or skimmed over.  I had planned a whole unit on how engaged filmmakers have used the medium to explore ideas of representation (thus, Do the Right Thing, The Living End, and  Orlando, plus the various clips I planned for the six classes in that unit).  Film Art would not help me much during that unit (though it has a great 4-page analysis of Do the Right Thing).

When The Film Experience arrived, I paged through it and, without looking at the captions, recognized still after still after still.  One film after another on my lists was included.  There was a chapter on global and local cinemas, with two paragraphs on Ousmene Sembene (one of those paragraphs devoted to Black Girl), which may not seem like a lot, given Sembene's importance, but is astounding for an intro textbook.  In a section on "The Lost and Found of American Film History", significant discussion is given to the pioneering women of early cinema and the awful facts of Hollywood sexism -- a subsection titled "Women Who Made the Movies" begins, "The movie industry remains male dominated, with women directing only 7 percent of the 250 top-grossing films in the United States, according to a 2006 study."  It goes on to discuss women in independent film (still not even remotely equal) and the overlooked, significant contributions of women to the history of the medium.  It does the same with African-American film and with gay and lesbian film, and it discusses in a pretty accessible way the power of ideology to shape expectations and actions.  These sections aren't tokenist, either -- the text of the entire book supports them, making these sections feel like elaborations on ideas that have been prepared earlier.

I hated to let Film Art go, but it was obvious once I saw The Film Experience that this would be the textbook for my class.  I wish I could assign them both, because they make fine companions, but I try not to go beyond a retail price of $100 for all of the books I assign to a course.  (This has gotten harder to do over the last decade, so I sometimes have to raise the limit to $125, but never beyond that.)

Just before book orders were due at the bookstore, I decided to add one more text.  I'd been toying with the idea of adding Amy Villarejo's Film Studies: The Basics, at least as a recommended text, because it's a good one-stop reference guide and priced like a trade book, not a textbook.  It didn't offer sufficiently different content from The Film Experience, though, to justify the order.

What I did decide to add, though, was The Village Voice Film Guide, which is a great collection of short reviews of many wonderful movies, including some we'll be watching in class.  One of the virtues of the book is that it often gives multiple reviews of films, so, for example, there's the original Andrew Sarris review of Psycho along with a later review from a re-release.  These reviews can sometimes be entirely at odds with each other, and that serves my purposes well.  The Voice has employed a good range of reviewers, so the book shows a variety of writing styles, from the informal to the almost-academic.  It's important for the students to have good examples of a range of short writings on film, because most of the writing they will be doing will be short responses.  Ultimately, the book will, I hope, help guide students toward films we don't watch in class and further stoke their curiosity about all that remains to be seen.

In addition to the textbooks, I'll constantly be pointing them toward various film blogs and websites, because today much of the conversation about cinema has moved to the web.  Indeed, I can slightly alleviate my sadness at having to let Film Art go by sending students to David Bordwell's website, one of the best film sites out there.

Update 1 (2011) here.

Update 2 (2013) here. 

An Introduction to Film Class

Because a colleague is going on sabbatical next term, I've been recruited to teach an Intro to Film class at Plymouth State. I suppose they thought of me because I spent three years as a playwrighting and screenwriting major at NYU, so my CV has more film-related stuff on it than most other folks' in the English Department, which oversees this particular class (though it's also a class that's a requirement for the Communications department ... I'm staying happily ignorant of the politics and regulations that, in the absence of a specific Film Studies department, make particular film classes part of one department or another...). I've spent time on film sets of various sizes, know a few writers and producers and such, and even have a couple of friends who were real, live film majors in college ... but academic film study is a world I know only at a superficial level, so it's good this is just an intro class.

And so I've spent more time preparing for this class than I have for any class since I decided to add an African lit section to one of the high school AP English classes I taught nearly ten years ago. I've done this only partially out of fear of not knowing what the heck to do once I'm standing in front of the class -- that fear, I've learned, never goes away, no matter how well prepared I am; it's the same fear I have before setting foot on stage as an actor, and it's essential to being able to perform well. (Indeed, the few times I've lacked the fear have been disastrous.) The primary reason I've spent so much time preparing is that the material is engrossing and the possibilities for the class are about as close to limitless as it's possible to get and still provide a general course description. One of the two regular teachers of the class told me he loves teaching it because it allows him to show some movies he likes and talk about them with students, and who wouldn't like that? (His syllabus reveals there's a bit more to it than that!)

Go Underland for the Holidays!

The great and glorious Victoria Blake at Underland Press has created a "Friend & Family" sale and let me know I could share it with all of you.

Here's what you do: Go to the Underland website, order lots of books, and type in the code xmas09. This should get you 15% off your order. The more you spend, the more you save! I would recommend getting at least 5 copies each of Finch, Best American Fantasy, Pilo Family Circus -- well, heck, all of their books. You need at least one for yourself, two or three for various friends and family, one to donate to the local library or school, etc...

Robin Wood: 1931-2009

The news of film critic Robin Wood's death came as a real shock to me because, in preparation for teaching an intro to film class next term, I've been spending a lot of time with his writings recently.  One of my projects, only vaguely justified by the class, has been to view or re-view all of Alfred Hitchcock's films, and Wood was one of the most important writers on Hitchcock.  Indeed, his Hitchcock's Films Revisited has been the book I've spent the most time with during my journey with Sir Alfred because it is richly provocative and unpredictable, and helped me reassess some films, such as Marnie, that I would otherwise have felt were minor.

Hitchcock's Films Revisited is fascinating, too, because it is multiple books in one, and various parts think about, contradict, and, indeed, criticize other parts of the book.  After the original Hitchcock's Films was published, Wood's life changed considerably -- he had been a married man living in England, politically uncommitted, with little knowledge of or respect for certain trends in film theory.  In the 1970s, he divorced, came out as gay, re-evaluated some of his stances on film theory, developed strong leftist political convictions, and moved to Canada.  These seismic shifts in his life inevitably affected his view of Hitchcock's films, and he chronicles those changes in the autobiographical sections of Hitchcock's Films Revisited, which includes the entire text of the original book and adds hundreds of pages of later material.  Even if I were not as interested in Hitchcock's work as I am, I would find Hitchcock's Films Revisited valuable as a model for the intersections of autobiography and criticism.  It forces readers to assess their own ways of evaluating and interpreting films by showing the ways Wood himself had done so over the years and, as importantly, the experiences that led him to choose particular techniques of evaluation and interpretation when he did.

There have been numerous eulogies for Wood written in the past few days.  The Auteur's Notebook has a roundup.  David Bordwell's blog post is typically thoughtful and well-written.  Film Studies for Free links to eulogies as well as works by or about Wood.  All worth reading.

Charlie Darwin, Bewildered

December 18 1832
After passing through the straight of Le Maire at Tierra del Fuego, the Beagle anchored at Good Success Bay. Here Darwin had his first encounter with savages [sic]. He was shocked by the primitive way of life they led but was also fascinated by them. A group of four male Fuegians met the landing party. After an attempt to communicate with the Feugians the party presented them with some bright red cloth and the Feugians immediately became friendly with them. The natives initiated a dialogue by patting the crewmen on their chests. Apparently they had the most amazing ability to mimic the crew's gestures and even the words they spoke, often repeating whole English sentences back to them. Darwin was bewildered by all this.

Directors of the Decade

The ever-wonderful Matt Zoller Seitz has written a great feature for Salon.com -- "Directors of the Decade: The Sensualists". Actually, this is one of ten features Seitz is writing for Salon about "Directors of the Decade", but for me this is the group that matters most, because it includes Hou Hsiao-hsien, David Lynch, Terrence Malick, Michael Mann, and Wong Kar-Wai, some of my absolute favorites, though I had never thought of them as a group before.  Or maybe I have -- I've been thinking a lot recently about why Lynch, Malick, and Mann in particular appeal to me so deeply. (I love some of Wong Kar-Wai's films, too -- 2046, In the Mood for Love, and especially Happy Together, though My Blueberry Nights proved nearly unwatchable and Ashes of Time, in either version, left me cold. Hou Hsiao-hsien I hadn't really thought of in relation to the others, and I'm least familiar with his work, having only seen Flight of the Red Balloon and The Puppetmaster.)

Here's how Seitz defines the group:

The sensualists are bored with dramatic housekeeping. They're interested in sensations and emotions, occurrences and memories of occurrences. If their films could be said to have a literary voice, it would fall somewhere between third person and first -- perhaps as close to first person as the film can get without having the camera directly represent what a character sees.

Yet at the same time sensualist directors have a respect for privacy and mystery. They are attuned to tiny fluctuations in mood (the character's and the scene's). But they'd rather drink lye than tell you what a character is thinking or feeling – or, God forbid, have a character tell you what he's thinking or feeling. The point is to inspire associations, realizations, epiphanies -- not in the character, although that sometimes happens, but in the moviegoer.

You can tell by watching the sensualists' films, with their startling cuts, lyrical transitions, off-kilter compositions and judicious use of slow motion as emotional italics, that they believe we experience life not as dramatic arcs or plot points or in-the-moment revelations, but as moments that cohere and define themselves in hindsight -- as markers that don't seem like markers when they happen.

Bingo -- if I could sum up the mix of aesthetics and worldview that most appeals to me, that reflects and extends my own take on how it feels to live, I doubt I could come up with a better description than Seitz has.  Indeed, it reveals succinctly what I most favor in art.  That's not, of course, to say that all other approaches are wrong or don't work or whatever, but that the fastest, surest way I've found toward the pleasures of recognition (of life, of living, of being and time) and the evocation of emotion (without what feels to me to be sentimentality) is via exactly what Seitz describes.

(If my preoccupations of late seem mostly to be with the world of cinema, you're right. A profound sense of having burned out on prose fiction has been replaced by a deeper fascination for film and film criticism than I've felt for years. [The timing is appropriate, since I'm teaching an intro to film course next term, about which more later.]  I always return to prose fiction -- it is, in so many ways, the foundation of what I know -- but sometimes need to take a little break.)

Manohla Dargis on Women in Hollywood

Manohla Dargis may be my favorite mainstream film reviewer -- it's not just that she's got great perception of cinema as an artform of its own (too many reviewers treat movies like they're illustrated novels), but she's also an extraordinarily talented writer, one of the few film reviewers I'm happy to read simply for her sense of language and prose structure within the newspaper review form. Plenty of writers' expressive abilities have been deadened by the demands of writing multiple 800-1000-word reviews week after week, but Dargis still turns in more energetic and thoughtful reviews than not, and it's an impressive feat.

In a recent issue of the Times, Dargis wrote an essay about women in Hollywood. The commercial American film industry remains an astoundingly sexist enterprise, and the sexism is systemic, as Dargis shows. Even if you think you know how bad the situation is, the statistics are breathtaking:

Only a handful of female directors picked up their paychecks from one of the six major Hollywood studios and their remaining divisions this year: 20th Century Fox had “Jennifer’s Body” (Karyn Kusama) and “Alvin and the Chipmunks: The Squeakquel” (Betty Thomas), while Fox Searchlight had “Amelia” (Mira Nair), “Post Grad” (Vicky Jenson) and “Whip It” (Drew Barrymore). Anne Fletcher directed “The Proposal” for Disney, while the studio’s once-lustrous division, Miramax Films, continued on its death march without any help from female directors. Ms. Ephron’s “Julie & Julia” was released by Sony Pictures while the art-house division Sony Pictures Classics released “An Education” (Ms. Scherfig), “Coco Before Chanel” (Anne Fontaine) and “Sugar” (Anna Boden, directing with Ryan Fleck). Universal Pictures has Nancy Meyers’s “It’s Complicated”; its specialty unit Focus Features has no female directors.

Paramount Pictures and Warner Brothers Pictures, meanwhile, did not release a single film directed by a woman. Not one.

The Jezebel website has now published an interesting interview with Dargis about the essay and about the relationship between women and Hollywood. Her replies to the questions are sharp, succinct, and peppered with the wonderful vernacular vocabulary the Times never lets her use...

The only thing Hollywood is interested in money, and after that prestige. That's why they'll be interested in something like [Kathryn Bigelow's] The Hurt Locker. She's done so well critically that she can't be ignored.

Let's acknowledge that the Oscars are bullshit and we hate them. But they are important commercially... I've learned to never underestimate the academy's bad taste. Crash as best picture? What the fuck.

Rain Taxi Auction

Rain Taxi Review of Books is a marvelous magazine, and they've just begun their annual auction, which is an event I always look forward to because of the wide variety of items they have to offer, including dozens of signed books.

The new print issue of RT includes an essay I wrote about the work of Wallace Shawn, a playwright and essayist whose face and voice many people know from some of his iconic roles in movies and TV shows, but whose writing is vastly less known -- he's one of those writers who is more popular outside of his native country than in it.

Aside from a couple short stories that are currently wending their way through the submission process, my major writings since this summer have been the Shawn essay for RT and the essay on Coetzee for The Quarterly Conversation. The effect of spending so much time reading and re-reading the writings of both men is obvious in my latest Strange Horizons column, "On the Eating of Corpses".

00 Movies

Gawker is totally right -- "The choice of our favorite movie of the decade is one of the most important we as individuals can make." (And here I was thinking it was my choice of underwear that defined me -- but that's so '90s!)

Everybody's making lists of the best of everything from 2000-2009 right now. I like reading such things when they're the personal preferences of individuals -- Richard Brody's film list is the most idiosyncratic I've encountered, filled with films I haven't seen and in many cases have never heard of, and of the ones I have seen, they aren't really films I'd put toward the top of my own best-of-the-decade list, were I even able to come up with such a list. And yet I loved reading Brody's list because his explanations worked together to create a sense of how he thinks about his encounters with art.

Similarly, John Patterson's passionate essay on Terrence Malick's The New World as the single best film of the decade is a joy to read because of Patterson's ability to share his deep engagement with Malick's creation. It helps that I'm sympathetic to Patterson's view -- I would certainly include The New World among my favorite ten or even five movies of the decade, though I don't think I could choose just one as "the best".

The committee lists are less interesting to me (even when they are ones I am surprised to find myself frequently agreeing with), because I use them primarily to remind myself of films I wanted to see but forget to get around to sticking on the Netflix queue. By melding various aesthetics in a quest for objectivity that ends up being more procrustean than coherent, the editors produce lists that feel, to me at least, almost random.

Whereas looking at the individual ballots is fascinating -- at Time Out London, for instance, I love that the dance editor put Man on Wire as #1. And when I looked at the ballots for the Time Out New York reviewers, I realized why I had liked the overall list more than any other committee list I've seen: though I preferred the individual lists to the combined one, none of the lists made me say, "Egads! I will never trust a review you write!" The film section at TONY is one I read closely because they have managed to put together a group of writers who do not have exactly the same tastes (how dull that would be!) but who share an approach to analyzing and evaluating movies -- an approach that often fits well with my own tastes. They also show a talent for writing very short reviews that are usually richer than many reviews twice their length.

As for me, I would need to go back and take a closer look at what came out between 2000 and this year before I could really make such a list. I'd also need to take another look at at least a few films (The Fall, Grizzly Man, Mysterious Skin, There Will Be Blood, 3-Iron, others) before I could sort out anything resembling a list I was happy with, but I know I would be inclined to include Across the Universe, Children of Men, Code Unknown, The Edge of Heaven, I'm Not There, Memories of Murder, Miami Vice, Mulholland Drive, The New World, No Country for Old Men, Nobody Knows, Public Enemies, Reprise, Spirited Away, Synecdoche, NY, The White Diamond, Yi Yi, Zodiac...

Oh, lists are such fun -- especially when I should be writing a final exam and/or doing housework!

School of Rogue

While listening to this interview with the great and glorious Werner Herzog, I learned of Herzog's Rogue Film School. It has some guidelines I thought more workshops might want to emulate:

• The Rogue Film School is about a way of life. It is about a climate, the excitement that makes film possible. It will be about poetry, films, music, images, literature.

• Excerpts of films will be discussed, which could include your submitted films; they may be shown and discussed as well. Depending on the materials, the attention will revolve around essential questions: how does music function in film? How do you narrate a story? (This will certainly depart from the brainless teachings of three-act-screenplays). How do you sensitize an audience? How is space created and understood by an audience? How do you produce and edit a film? How do you create illumination and an ecstasy of truth?

• Related, but more practical subjects, will be the art of lockpicking. Traveling on foot. The exhilaration of being shot at unsuccessfully. The athletic side of filmmaking. The creation of your own shooting permits. The neutralization of bureaucracy. Guerrilla tactics. Self reliance.

• Censorship will be enforced. There will be no talk of shamans, of yoga classes, nutritional values, herbal teas, discovering your Boundaries, and Inner Growth.

• Related, but more reflective, will be a reading list: if possible, read Virgil's "Georgics", read Hemingway's "The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber", The Poetic Edda, translated by Lee M. Hollander (in particular the Prophecy of the Seeress), Bernal Diaz del Castillo "True History of the Conquest of New Spain"

• Follow your vision. Form secretive Rogue Cells everywhere. At the same time, be not afraid of solitude.

The description on the front page is marvelous as well:

The Rogue Film School is not for the faint-hearted; it is for those who have travelled on foot, who have worked as bouncers in sex clubs or as wardens in a lunatic asylum, for those who are willing to learn about lockpicking or forging shooting permits in countries not favoring their projects. In short: for those who have a sense for poetry. For those who are pilgrims. For those can tell a story to four year old children and hold their attention. For those who have a fire burning within. For those who have a dream.

Summertime and Coetzee's Countervoices

An essay I wrote on J.M. Coetzee's autobiofictional memoirs, including his latest book, Summertime, has been posted in the new issue of The Quarterly Conversation. (I'll note here that the title and the section titles in the essay are not mine: my original, preferred title was "Awakening the Countervoices in One Self: J.M. Coetzee and the Authority of the Author", but that's not really very descriptive, so I can see why the change was made. Similarly, I left the sections untitled, but I've titled subsections before, so it's more consistent this way.)

Here's a taste:

In its form and subject matter, Summertime has more in common with Elizabeth Costello and Diary of a Bad Year than Boyhood and Youth, but some of its central concerns are the same, and it is possible to see the John Coetzee who is the topic of Summertime as an adult version of the John Coetzee who is the protagonist of Boyhood and Youth (if we assume the protagonists of those books are the same John Coetzee . . .). In many ways, Summertime unites the strategies of the recent books with the earlier ones—not only Boyhood and Youth, but Dusklands, In the Heart of the Country, Foe, The Master of Petersburg, and Doubling the Point.

As usual, this is a rich and diverse issue of TQC -- deserving particular attention is "Translate This Book!", in which dozens of translators, writers, editors, publishers, agents, journalists, etc. offer one title not available in English that they wish were.

Under the Dome by Stephen King

Stephen King's new novel, Under the Dome, is a tremendously entertaining and often emotionally affecting story about, among other things, cruelty and pity. King has called Lord of the Flies "the book that changed my life", and its influence feels especially strong here, where a Maine town is turned into an island when a mysterious, invisible dome suddenly covers it, and adults begin to behave like the children in Golding's novel. There are political overtones to the book, with the main villain, "Big Jim" Rennie, sounding an awful lot like Big Dick Cheney; with crisis turned into political opportunity; with fear used as a tool for consolidating power; with brutality replacing sense. These connections to the world outside the book are important, sometimes amusing and sometimes even insightful, but they're also obvious (intentionally so, I'd bet). More complex and interesting is the novel's narrative voice and how it relates to the revelation of what created the Dome.

(It is here, dear reader, that you should depart if you have not read the novel and do not want to learn important details of plot and situation, for I shall soon be writing about some of the primary mysteries of the tale........)

One of the ideas propelling the narrative of Under the Dome is that it is a rare person who will not, under the right circumstances, behave in a cruel and brutal way. There's nothing particularly profound about this -- we all know about the Milgram experiments, after all -- but it's one of those ideas that proves particularly fruitful for storytellers. In Lord of the Flies, Golding found a powerful template for such an idea, and King has extended it to the world of adults, although the adults who are self-reflective and try for decency often think back to the shames and cruelties of childhood. Shame for the decent people usually comes as much from complicity as from the commission of crimes: Dale "Barbie" Barbara, the primary protagonist-hero of Under the Dome carries tremendous guilt for having stood by while soldiers under his command tortured and killed a man in Iraq. Barbie's shame mixes at the end with the very different shame of the other protagonist-hero, Julia, who helps evoke a sort of pity from the alien child controlling the Dome by projecting her memories of abasement at the hands of the children who had attacked her in elementary school along with Barbie's memories of Fallujah, and the effect is to cause the alien child to lift the Dome: "She took pity," Julia says, "but she wasn't sorry." The shame wasn't enough to bridge the gap of species and create empathy, but it is enough to evoke pity and a sort of mercy.

There are more implications in the novel's exploration of such emotions as pity, empathy, and remorse, but the one I found most striking was how the reader becomes implicated by the narrative. The people who get their news of the Dome from CNN are observers, just as the aliens are observers, just as we are observers. We take pity and are not sorry, because this is our entertainment. There's a Hitchcockian element to it all -- reading the book, we share some qualities with the aliens who have set the Dome down on the town of Chester's Mill. The Dome is there in the narrative for our entertainment. The characters suffer and die because we read the words that equal their suffering and death: we create that suffering and death in our minds, and we take some sort of pleasure from the imagining. Julia hears the alien child say, "You aren't real," and "How can you have lives if you aren't real?" Julia tries to convince the alien otherwise, screaming out that she is, indeed, real:

--Prove it [the alien child says.]

--Give me your hand.

--I have no hand. I have no body. Bodies aren't real. Bodies are dreams.

--Then give me your mind!

The child does not. Will not.

So Julia takes it.

The moment can't help but be metafictional. The words we have read are tools that let us imagine a character named Julia, and that imagined character, like all the other characters in the book, has, indeed, taken our mind. If we have read this far, we want her to live. We have developed more feelings for her than the alien child has, though, because we are capable of more than pity -- our minds have turned the words into characters and situations, and those characters and situations have evoked emotions. We have reached the point in the narrative where we want the tension to be released, where we are ready for an end, and so the Dome lifts ... and a few pages later, the book runs out of words.

Thus, King has made us complicit. We are the alien children. Storytelling is an experiment in cruelty. We could have stopped reading at any point. We did not need to imagine the suffering and horrible destruction -- we could have stopped it. But we wanted to see what happened. We wanted to be entertained, amused, to pass some time with this toy of a tale. Fiction is a safe way to enjoy all sorts of things we'd rather not enjoy in life, because it's all make-believe. How can the characters have lives if they aren't real? It's just a story.

The narrative voice supports the metafiction -- it is not invisible. From the earliest pages, the narrator tells us of things that will happen in the future. By page 37 (of the U.S. hardcover) we can't ignore the narrator, who suddenly steps forward:

We have toured the sock-shape that is Chester's Mill and arrived back at Route 119. And, thanks to the magic of narration, not an instant has passed since the sixtyish fellow from the Toyota slammed face-first into something invisible but very hard and broke his nose.

If the narration has been transparent, it has now revealed itself to be, like the Dome, very hard indeed.

The narrator, being a good storyteller, encourages our fun, popping in now and then to let us know that everything is going to get much worse. If we keep reading and are horrified at the carnage, we cannot say we were not warned.

The citizens of Chester's Mill aren't like ants being tortured and killed by sadistic children, as the survivors think. They're like characters in a novel: their misery is the stuff of someone else's entertainment.

Maybe Aristotle was right, and great tragedy produces some sort of purging of pity and fear. If so, Under the Dome is a great tragedy about great tragedy. Scholars have argued for centuries over who benefits from Aristotle's purgation -- the creator, the characters, the audience? We could argue the same for Under the Dome. For centuries, too, people have debated the uses of art and imagination, the morality of imagining suffering and horror, the complicity of narrative voyeurism.

And yet few of us desire stories where the characters do not face obstacles, do not struggle and suffer, because, alien children that we are, we can't help but want to set down Domes and see what happens.