Isn’t it peculiar that we are reading an excerpt from this metacomic but not the metahypertext piece by George Landow that our editors refer to in the intro?
Upon finishing McCloud’s brilliant sketch of comics, i found myself reflecting that it was a useful analog to the way we experience computer media—a verbal media enhanced with pictures (and often also sound and motion). It seems that our most successful digesting of digital information happens when there is effective pairing between the verbal and the image so that the affordances of each interact with each other to surface a more profound meaning. (Like the RSA illustration of that lecture on education that Jim linked.)
McCloud’s treatment of panels was helpful in thinking about the frame in which we experience Web content. If Nelson had his way, instead of there being a frame around the Web-page, would the information exist within an ever-expanding panel? The Web today seems to me to do a pretty decent job of keeping those frames pliable through hyperlinks.
The poignant truth foundational to Viola’s essay is that we exist in edited realities. this has been a theme of many thinkers whose work I find most interesting. For one, Viola’s notions that as “things are perceived as discrete parts or elements, they can be rearranged. Gaps become most interesting as places of shadow, open to projection. Memory can be regarded as a filter” and that “we quite literally carve out our own realities” reek of Errol Morris and his idiosyncratic films about human constructions of reality.
"Life without editing, it seems, is just not that interesting"--Viola makes a valid point (464). The question I guess then is who is the editor? The question is ceaselessly interesting, regardless of your notions of human purpose and whether you assign agency to the self or external forces (god? media?).
Interestingly, Viola's conception of the holism of digital computers and software technologies seems more aligned with Renaissance versions of cosmological order and religion than postmodern relativism. He writes, "I saw then that my piece was actually finished and in existence before it was executed on the VTRs" (465). His thought sounds very much like Michelangelo's notion of forms:
Much of Viola’s theory concerns historical patterns of art: “the original structural aspect of art, and the idea of a ‘data space’ was preserved through the Renaissance …” (467). We can learn a valuable lesson from Viola’s tactic of examining the present and future of interactive video arts with an eye to all the art that came before it; and our readings have helped us to keep in mind the history of human consciousness as we study human communication. It’s hard to say whether we have been talking more in NMFS about media, or the user of media.
Kay and Goldberg’s word metamedium a powerful way to conceive of the computer (394). Metamedium expresses all that the tired metaphors of desktop and paper fail to signify. I think one of the most optimistic summation of the current state of the digital age our editors have made so far is that the “desktop and virtual paper metaphors are meeting a significant challenge, and may themselves fade” (391). As we do away with thinking that labels the computer in terms that we already know (instead of allowing it to become an entirely new thing) and replace it with Ted Nelson-style and sized thought, the closer we come to actualizing Engelbart’s vision of augmented intellect. There is much to show that we limit ourselves by thinking of computers in terms of knowledge-organization tools that we already know. For one, I’m curious about the precise evolution of the desktop metaphor. We may assume that it was first used to express the physical location of the computer (as suggests later words like “laptop”); if this is true, then using the word “desktop” to refer to the monitor’s screen and its activities is a fallacy that evolved out of convenience or metonymy—in the same way that we use the word “Kleenex” to refer to tissue. An actual desktop hardly resembles my computer screen:
The web interface promotes a level of information exchange that paper medium inhibits. The death of desktop and virtual paper metaphors will be the liberation of vivacious, uncharted human-computer interaction. Further evidence of this is Kay and Goldberg’s observation of children’s interactions with computers: “Their attention spans are measured in hours instead of minutes” (394); as indeed any of us know who have observed a five year-old at a computer. In contrast to the adult whose human faculties have the molding of years of non-digital expression and functioning, the child’s unformed infomations-palette takes naturally to the computer/the digital/the metamedium. Does this not suggest that the computer allows for record-making/knowledge-playing that is more aligned with natural thought processes than have been the page, the book, the library … Instead of understanding computer media entities by comparing them to what we were familiar with (page, document, file), we must allow them to become their own, new ___.
I’m still reeling from Nelson’s visionary overhaul of the computer experience; despite his departure from Engelbart’s foundational model, the excerpts still had a spectacular bootstrapping quality about them: in reading Nelson’s users’ manifesto, I, the user (and someone in need of the user-friendly*) was able to understand concepts of the interactive computer system that Engelbart wanted his reader to grasp (but couldn’t because of Engelbart’s invented language). I do need to thank Charles Ulrich III, one of our “Memex to Youtube” counterparts, for helping me see where i have missed some of Engelbart’s vision. While I still feel that Engelbart focused too much on a kind of computer-elite, more essential to his goal for computer systems is the “co-evolution between computers and people themselves” as Charles termed it in his comment on my blog. Charles, i really like your vision of us all joining Engelbart’s elite: “[we] will have the tools to be augmented by, and to easily augment the computer before [us], not just use it. If everyone was in the computer-elite as Englebart had seen, all of our browsing experiences, peripherals, machines would be different based on our OWN preferences, not a company’s market research, and the best of these Ideas created by everyday people would rise to common use”, and i think we should still strive for that kind of bootstrapping. Before reading Nelson’s piece, however, i was still uncertain of how this realistically reconciled the gap between the user and the programmer. Engelbart and Nelson think of the necessary relationship between programmer and user differently: whereas Engelbart hopes that the user will build the uses for himself, for Nelson, only the uses are taught to the user:
“interior computer technicalities have to be SUBSERVIENT, and the programmers cannot be allowed to dictate how it is to behave on the basis of under level structures that are convenient to them … we the users-to-be must dictate what lower-level structures are to be prepared within”
The user’s existence in this “prefabricated environments carefully tuned for easy use” is a happy reality that we know today, as is especially imaged (I think) in Apple products. It makes sense that in the 1970s Apple would provide its employees with Computer Lib/Dream Machines. Do we not think of Apple as the ones who brought the computer to the People? And as my brother pointed out to me in his kitchen this morning while he was preparing his famous technicolor velvet cake, Macs are as programmable as the user wants them to be—but software designers have made those features only visible to those who know how to or want to manipulate them. So, while my brother does with his Mac a multitude of things I may not be interested in (including using Open Office technologies, that present day tribute to Engelbart), the option to bootstrap my computer into advancement lies waiting for me should i choose to learn how.
*we don’t need this term user-friendly and its connotations of helplessness; i think Nelson would call it user-mindfulness-in-the-construction-stage
In our editors’ helpful introduction, they highlight the gap between the ARC’s intent for their technology and the work that followed it. Number four says Engelbart’s “primary goal was to allow people to work together to solve difficult problems more easily … networking and shared information spaces were essential” (232). However, the editors also say that Engelbart didn’t intend his technology to be accessible by Everyman and Anyman, but for experts: today’s “gulf between [software] users and creators” is incongruent with the concept of “bootstrapping” (232). Still, I would argue that it is because of this gulf, because technology is increasingly “user-friendly” for an increasing number of social types and strata that we can actualize Engelbart’s goal of networking and working together online–unless, of course, he only envisioned only one demographic:
taking on the complex problems of the world—but I think we will all agree that a man of Engelbart’s brilliance could not possibly be so myopic.
A central theme in the “mother of all demos” is communication. Engelbart’s term for the computer’s actions in the service exchange is “feedback” (239). He mutters “that’s good feedback” when the computer does what he wants it to do. Engelbart and the rest of the white males at the ARC had to invent a new language for the service-system software; and it is indeed part of their work’s genius. But i’d like to ask the question: might it also have been part of their disease? Language is powerful. It is at once the locus of human connection and a vehicle that can inhibit interconnectivity. “Lofty intellectual discourse” can alienate those not fluent in its idioms, and put a roadblock in idea exchange. In the blogging community, I think we could find a model for equitable interconnected communication (see Robert Wright’s thoughts the good of social connectivity). The Blog is one significant area of communication technology where we can see how its progression as a technological tool parallels its growth among more diverse groups of users. (Many have argued that while the blog started as a frontier largely settled by the white male, bloggers today reflect a more accurate representation of all members of society.) As much as the blog owes to Engelbart and the ARC, maybe the blog answers to some of what “A Research Center for Augmenting Human Intellect” misses. To solve the world’s problems will require an augmented human intellect, but it will also take all types: addressing global problems will require global fluency in computer language so that we can all talk to each other.
As I started to say in my comment on Marcie’s blog, what I enjoyed most about class last week was hearing the varied responses shared in answer to the same question: even as each perspective pointed at the same truths, it did so in the terms/language/expressions of the speaker’s respective discipline. The theologianin our class posed a question about the changing role of the educator in an age when his students have access to more knowledge than he could ever pass on to them on his own. The rhetoricianin the room answered first with every writer’s cardinal rule: it depends on what his audience expects of him. The librarian answered next: “it’s not knowing the answer but knowing where to find it”. Then the neuroscientist answered, referring to her use of statistical analysis software for her computations—while she uses them to arrive at answers, she still has to understand how it does what it does. That our learning experience in NMFS is distinctly interdisciplinary is a simple observation, but it is fascinating to be learning among such a diverse crowd of experts for the first time.
This spirit of interdisciplinarity is fundamental to Engelbart’s augmented human intellect. Indeed, solving the globe’s most complex problems requires the knowledge of several fields. This is not to say that NMFS 2010 is equipped to take on the issues currently threatening humanity; I fear we lack something most pivotal in Engelbart’s vision. More than just emphasizing the interdisciplinary nature of human problems and solutions alike, Engelbart is insistent on the necessity of a uniform language; a language that would allow one individual to understand the work of another “even if you find his structure left in the condition in which he has been working on it—that is, with no special provisions for helping an outsider find his way around” (108). In his introduction, Engelbart sketches “life in an integrated domain” in which “streamlined terminology and notation” is part and parcel of the augmented intellect (95). Everyone who answered Steve’s question in class used experiences relevant to their field to affirm the same truth: the widespread access to knowledge that is character of our digital age in no way makes the educator obsolete. However, each of us did so using the various languages unique to each profession. There is a bit of a gap between the way disciplines interact today and the way I think Engelbart wants them to interact. For one, not only do we not have the streamlined terminology Engelbart described, we use very different softwares to accomplish our daily tasks. If you’ll allow me to make an uneducated, oversimplified assumption—the epidemiologist and the policy maker and the sociologist and the social worker who will work together to combat AIDS will not set off on their task using the same tools, nor will they share a precisely analogous vocabulary. “Augmenting Human Intellect” at once highlights the major gains humanity has most recently accomplished to fight the gravest of societal ills and reminds us where we fail perilously short—at the most basic level of language.
Our editor’s crafty little association-drawing sidebars accomplished their task: after reading the nod to Donna Harraway on the first page of the “As We May Think” intro, the feminist’s cyborg vision was on my mind and shaped my reading of Vannevar Bush and his memex. In the same way that Bush’s article and the Atlantic Monthly editor who prefaced it speak of machines as extending man’s powers, Harraway’s cyborg vision has a theme of supplementing what is human with something machine (37, 516). Her basic definition of cyborg is “a cybernetic organism, a hybrid of machine and organism, a creature of social reality as well as a creature of fiction”—creatures whose humanity has to be read/understood in the context of a new cyber reality (were these words “cyber” and “reality” recently antonyms?) in which they exist (516). As I think about the legitimacy of the cyborg concept and look for examples of it, I think of the many ways technology is part and parcel of many of my daily moments. We are cyborgs in that as we hold a smart phone in our hands, it interacts with us and our world so that the moment is changed by our wielding of the phone—in this sense, the phone is part of our human experience, and (Harraway would say) part of what makes us human.
Similarly, reading has become an increasingly cyborg activity. Even if it is in print medium, there is hardly a time that I read without having the internet beside me, chasing any unknown allusions or words—and this is no lofty OED search; wiki generally is most useful. (However many would call that cheap or cheating, I think an equal many would call it engaging a mediated reality: the reading/information processing is enhanced by coupling it with the knowledge of others.)
Harraway’s 1991 sketch is astute. I believe that we will continue to prove the truth that undergirds her myth: that the machine and human are more alike than unalike, and in embracing that unity, there is liberation (for social structures, for daily mundanities, for women, for humanity). Herein lies part of Bush’s prescience: the foundational character of his memex is its ability to think like a human, i.e. associative indexing. He says that in 1945, the ineptitude of technology/information storage is its selection by indexing rather than selection by association, as operates the human mind: that “speed of action, the intricacy of trails, the detail of mental pictures” (44). Indeed, the machines we know and use today are more human in this regard, and are more like the memex than the technology Bush describes in the first half of his article. For example, during my reading, I used my Droid’s “Google Goggles” app; with its visual search engine I took a picture of the picture of memex on p. 44 and it returned Wikipedia’s memex page. We also have seen the advent of human-like computers with the Apple age with devices that have more in common with their users than do pcs. The blending of machine and human into cyborg has been catalyzed by these devices that are increasingly human-like. I think Harraway would agree: as much as we are incorporating that which is machine into our human selves, the machine is also learning better how to be human.
I have uncovered a dialogue between Errol Morris, Stephen Prince, Andre Bazin, Temple Grandin and my classmates. It is about language and pictures, and so inevitably is also about human living and human death, and more specifically, the ways we represent them—both to ourselves and to others. Some of the statements circulating, and questions that are frequently returned to in the discussion:
Humans use signs to represent the meaning of their experiences and thereby accumulate knowledge. These signs can be pictorial or linguistic.
Are humans more inherently inclined to pictorial literacy or verbal literacy?
How much of this production of meaning loses its value if we think of it as framed by cultural construction? Does the ability of some signs to span cultures argue for the existence of transcendent meaning?
It turns out that cinema is an excellent medium in which to explore these ideas. And more specifically, Stairway to Heaven, Errol Morris’s made for TV documentary about Temple Grandin is the ideal place to explore these questions. Temple Grandin, and maybe Morris as well, would argue that pictures are language, or at least the way we edit pictures together in our heads constitutes language. “I think in pictures,” Grandin says in the film’s first line. “Pictures is my first language, and, you know, English is my second language.”
Stairway to Heaven is a monologue. It is part of First Person, a TV series of 30-minute shorts in which Morris explores the capabilities of the Interrotron. Grandin (with some assistance from Morris’s incisive, immaculate questioning and editing) tells the story of her mission to make livestock-handling facilities (that is, slaughterhouses) more humane for cattle. Stairway to Heaven is ultimately a story of the things humans do in order to reconcile those big ideas that are hardest to grapple with; for Grandin, these are questions of mortality.
When Grandin was in college at Arizona State University she became fascinated with the Swift livestock handling plant nearby. Eventually she got to take a tour of the facility and began designing more tolerable systems for handling cattle in the plant. The name of that first system she designed was Stairway to Heaven. Its curved chutes and alleys utilize the natural circling and herd behavior of cattle; in Grandin’s design, the cattle are soothed by the familiar feeling of following their “buddy” up the stairway. One-third of U.S. livestock are handled in slaughterhouses Grandin has designed.
The major component of Grandin’s story in Stairway to Heaven is her experience with autism; as an autistic individual, Grandin has access to a unique way of thinking and viewing the world. People with autism are often intensely visual thinkers. As Grandin says, when someone says something to her, she translates it into a video in her head before she can respond to it. Her ability to see the world the way a cow sees it—in pictures—allows her to visualize herself in the plant as a cow and so understand why cattle were panicked by certain elements. In a TED lecture, Grandin explains why this makes it natural for her to empathize with animals.
Recall Stephen Prince’s ideas about “pictorial identification skills” in his essay “The Discourse of Pictures” (Braudy 102). In his discussion of iconicity (which has to do with conceived similarity or closeness between a sign and its meaning), he differentiates between pictorial signs that are realistic and symbolic. For example, while a picture of a tree is recognizably a tree because it so resembles it, we understand a picture of a red octagon to mean stop because we have culturally learned what it represents.
Prince’s essay is about understanding how humans comprehend images. His argument is a kind of backlash against poststructuralist ideas that all signs suffer from a severe disconnect with their intended meaning. He contends that there is a degree of “inherent human ability to perceive pictures” and that not all meaning is culturally constructed (97). He points to the example of a “seminomadic, nonliterate, pastoral tribe in Kenya” (100). Researchers showed adult villagers “two videotapes of a culturally familiar story. One version was unedited, the other featured 14 cuts with frequent alterations of close-ups, medium shots, long shots, and zooms. No significant differences in ability to recall story information were found between respondents who viewed the edited and unedited versions. Fragmentation of the visual scene through point-of-view editing did not hinder comprehension […]” (100).
The idea that the meaning of certain signs persists cross-culturally argues for the existence of transcendent human understanding. Prince further reinforces this idea with studies that engage image processing by children. Two researchers who were particularly devoted to their field conducted an experiment with (on?) their child in which they prevented the child from ever seeing pictures before he turned 19 months.
“The child learned his vocabulary solely through the use of objects and received no training regarding pictorial meaning or content. He was nevertheless able to recognize, when tested with a series of 21 two-dimensional line drawings and photographs, the series of pictured objects (people and things familiar in his environment). The researchers concluded that the results indicate the existence of innate picture perception abilities and that, if there are allegations of cultures or viewers lacking these, it cannot be a matter of not yet having learned the language of pictures” (97).
Prince also argues that the fact that many animals similarly exhibit this ability to perceive pictures and respond to them argues for some inherent picture-processing function—something Grandin has already identified for us with her special relationship to cattle.
Without ever addressing autism, Prince brings Grandin into this discussion. Prince says that the difference between learning language and “pictorial identification skills” is that the former develops from “an extended period of exposure to signification and consequent learning” (102). In other words, humans are largely born with the capacity for pictorial identification, whereas learning words to assign to those pictures requires being around other humans who do so. This is the same thought behind the idea that autistic individuals often develop verbal skills much later than other children; adults on the extreme end of the spectrum may never use verbal communication. We can think about this “extended period of exposure to signification and consequent learning” as meaning the same things as socialization, an area that Grandin describes as highly problematic for the autistic individual. For the same reasons the autistic individual is adverse to socialization, he or she has difficulty with symbols that require social and cultural situation to derive meaning. However much she relies on pictures to process and synthesize information about herself and her world, symbolic images will always be problematic for Grandin. Symbols—pictures “which have a more arbitrary relationship to what they represent”—do little for Grandin’s epistemic process. In fact, they can be quite confusing.
Morris’s editing in this clip suggests that he has at the forefront of his mind applying the affordances of video to emulate the way Grandin sees the world. Immediately preceding this montage was Grandin’s discussion of her fascination with optical illusions. Then the screen goes black—we enter Grandin’s mind’s eye—and the images come up. Each is a close up of a single object that is a part of a larger piece of art. A big sun fades into view, cuts to a moon, cuts to two hands in a greeting embrace, cuts to an ark afloat. As the imagery becomes recognizably religious, and Christian, the shot cuts back to Grandin in monologue and she begins to talk about the Lord’s Prayer and its difficult overflowing of abstractions. Morris is particularly fascinated with how someone who cannot speak in abstractions deals in matters of faith. The documentary will go on to explore the ways Grandin’s autism affects her religious beliefs, especially in terms of the afterlife .
Grandin explains an instance in which she used her very literal way of processing things to get a grasp of something abstract. She recounts that to get adjusted to the idea of leaving high school and going on to college, she would practice walking through a door that led out onto the roof. Within this literal act, she could meaningfully symbolize “going on to the next step”. As she talks about repeatedly walking through that door, the shot of Grandin’s face talking to the Interrotron cuts to footage from Hitchcock’s Spellbound. Simultaneous with Grandin’s words “going through the door” is a close up shot of Ingrid Bergman’s eyes as they close. The Spellbound footage continues:
From Bergman’s shutting eyes, Hitchcock fades into an ominous image of a door opening upon another door opening upon another door opening upon another door which opens into bright light—it is a scene cited for Hitchcock’s overbearing Freudian symbolism. The film is about psychoanalysis and unlocking repressed memories. When Bergman’s (Dr. Peterson’s in the film) eyes close, it is to receive a kiss from the patient/doctor (Dr. Edwards/Ballantyne) whose memories they are trying to uncover. The doors opening are a kind of symbol of the sexual love between them that allows him to trust her, and so allows him to open for her doors into his dormant memories. There are two major memories Ballantyne is repressing, and both are of horrific deaths he witnesses. Morris’s choice of Spellbound makes sense because of its dealings with fear of death, but these Freudian underpinnings are what Morris craftily uses to contextualize other parts of the film.
As the last Spellbound door opens into blinding light, Morris cuts to an image of some kind of exploding light and then to back to a medium shot of Grandin at the Interrotron; perhaps the second image of light, exploding into darkness suggests Grandin’s door-opening-into-light-moment will be harder to come by than Ballantyne’s. She begins to talk about the difficulty in adhering to Christian ideas about the afterlife when you are a logical person who explains everything in terms of science. Grandin says that she had origninally founded her belief in heaven from stories of near-death experiences in which individuals see the light at the end of the tunnel. But as she investigated further, it turns out all these individual’s causes of death were related to loss of oxygen. Disbelief set in: “I would tend to believe it a lot better if somebody got the occipital cortex completely destroyed”—screen goes black—“the whole back of the head blown off, then I’d believe it,” Grandin says in her unique deadpan. The death she describes sounds a little bit like death by the same bolt stun gun used to kill cattle in Grandin’s livestock facilities—think No Country for Old Men.
The screen goes black again. From this vantage point, we can begin to see that all the documentary’s subsequent footage and all the footage leading up to it has to do with Grandin’s coming to terms with death—and it all revolves around her design that facillitates the cattle’s death, the Stairway to Heaven.
A few scenes prior, Morris gives us an image of what Grandin’s heaven might look like. It comes after the film’s most deeply intimate scene. Grandin tells the story of how she came to understand her close connection with and similarity to cattle. Visiting her aunt’s ranch, she saw cattle being put in a “squeeze chute” when they received innoculations because the contraption calmed their nerves. As Grandin observed the cow soothed by the chute’s application of equal pressure to all sides, she wondered what kind of effect it might have on her. At the time, she was in her teens, years that were characterized by what she says felt like “constant stage fright”. Anxiety is common to autistic individuals, Grandin explains. She describes the fierce oversensitivity to light, sound and touch that is characteristic of autism. Morris simulates anxiety for the viewer by bouncing between shots of Grandin’s face at different angles and closenesses as she describes: “a dentist drill going through my head”-CUT-“like a jackhammer in my ear”-CUT-“scratchy petticoats like sandpaper rubbing off raw nerve endings”-CUT-and then a close up on the pin ball machine that Grandin says best describes the “overwhelming tidal wave of stimulation” while Caleb Sampson’s score beats around silver metal balls in a too-small space like a Carol of the Bells meets electronica meets Jack Nicholson in The Shining.
And so the image of the cow held tight in the chute a few shots later seems especially peaceful; the film captures in slow motion as the cow ruffles her ears and sleepily blinks an eye on a large graceful head. Grandin was able to talk her aunt into putting her in the squeeze shoot. She describes the experience as a calmness like she had never felt, and so Grandin set out to build her own squeeze machine. Today, Grandin has an industry that markets this “hug machine” to autistic individuals. In the next scene we see Grandin using the contraption . The scene is a bizarre crossbreed between science experiment and personal intimacy. Though Grandin argues for the former by framing it within her review of “scientific literature” and discussion about “more humane restraint devices”; as she describes the science behind the experience of the cow and why she feels what she feels when the pressure comes over her, Morris is shooting an almost voyeuristic bedroom scene of autoeroticism as Grandin enters the “squeeze machine”. The screen goes black. Sampson’s score begins in the still darkness:
And we are invited into the feeling of the moment. Fade in on a home’s second story, a slightly low, tilted angle shows us white window frames on grey house on blue sky; the camera pans in on one of the windows and continues to tilt like a head slowly-cocking in curiosity: we are inculpated by Morris, reeled in like regular peeping Toms. Cut—now we’re in the house, but not quite in the room. The camera, still at a sneaky tilt lets us peek into the room, but the door we’re hiding around is in focus and Grandin’s slow motion motions around the room preparing the “Big Squeeze” are blurred. The contraption sits on the floor behind a bed. A ceiling fan turns. The blinds of the windows we a moment ago tried to see in through are shut. Grandin gets on her knees. She enters the machine. Cut to an overhead shot of Grandin in the contraption. Cut. Cut. Now we’re under her face, watching as her two fingers take lightly the red knobbed lever. Cut. Close up on just the fingers in action with the shiny red knob in focus. Using just the pads of her fingertips she push-pulls it in a steady pulse. In a series of cuts, we see and hear a rope and pulley system alternatingly tightening and loosening so that the two massive padded brown leather panels tighten around Grandin’s body. After a few seconds of silence, Grandin’s narration resumes, but she is not talking about the cow in the chute any more. Morris has edited her words (?) so that without transition, Grandin is now describing her own squeeze experience and the feelings that “wash over” her. Her voice is just the slightest bit huskier as she almost grows more peaceful in the interview just thinking about how “any bad thoughts in my head, it just gets rid of ‘em.” The score cuts out so we just hear the air pressure shifting in the contraption and then Grandin’s voice, “You have to feel that nice feeling of being held in order to have nice, kind thoughts,” as the camera has cut from the overhead shot to a shot of Grandin’s face held by the device. We hear the final squeeze subside, and Grandin’s eye is the entranced, totally relaxed eye of …the cow in the chute. If Morris is indeed conflating this time in the squeeze machine with an autoerotic moment, the scene that appropriately follows is a post-climactic death—after her autoerotic moment, Grandin goes to her fantasy heaven, where the cows go after their own ride up the “stairway”.
Now the screen goes black and then cuts to what must be the place at the end of the stairway, the place that follows the peak experience (Grandin’s squeeze, the cow’s ride up the “stairway”). In an ethereal corral in a pitch-black night, several shiny-haired cows stand around, glowing from an out-of-frame but sun-bright light source. Everything is slow motion. Grandin walks into the frame, dressed in an all white lab coat that reaches down to her muck boots. Sampson’s score is a slowly sauntering electronica dreamy haze. We are in a final resting place—the infinity at the end of the stairway that follows the culminating destination of the peak experience, Grandin’s petit mort to the cow’s actual death by bolt gun.
As the angelic Grandin wanders among the cows, her monologue continues, explaining how once she had ambivalent feelings toward the squeeze machine when school authorities and psychologists in high school told her it was abnormal and wanted to take it away. Cut back to the close up on her two fingers manipulating the lever; Grandin continues, “They just made up all this kind of Freudian nonsense … and I wouldn’t give it up.” The parallels between sexuality and death and visualization as a means for understanding things our minds can’t otherwise process makes Morris’s use of Spellbound poignant.
Morris aligns Grandin’s squeeze machine experience that borders on autoeroticism with the cow’s ascent up the Swift plant’s Stairway to Heaven, and Grandin’s post-climactic death with the cow’s slaughter. He bolsters this theme elsewhere in the short with religious imagery. For Grandin, the Swift plant was both church and a passageway to heaven. She describes driving around it like it was “Vatican City”, and Morris plays footage of St. Peter’s while she describes seeing the outside of the Swift plant. As Grandin says, “I wanted to find out what happened when you die. Regular religion was way too abstract. It was just meaningless. But the slaughterhouse was real,” the camera pans to the right, across the top of St. Peter’s, saint by saint, and then cuts to the faces of cattle at the same close-up distance while maintaining the panning movement so that the cows are aligned with the heavenly host.
We next see Grandin driving, seemingly on her way to the Swift plant, singing a country tune that I think is Hoyt Axton: “I’m goin’ to heaven in a flash of fire, with or without you.” The scene so captures Grandin’s unique personality and the song fits so perfectly that I do not believe Morris asked her to sing along to it to emphasize the conflation of their destination (the Swift plant) with heaven, though it may be rare to hear the song today. When they arrive at the Swift plant/heaven, the SUV stops outside and the camera focuses on a series of warning signs that adorn the front gates and regulate entry into the plant. “STOP Check with guard before entering plant,” we see twice, as if Morris is suggesting they are checking in with St. Peter at the Pearly Gates before entering.
Grandin’s book Thinking in Pictureslikewise portrays the Swift plant as a kind of heaven. She reminds us of animal sacrifice in ancient and classical religions—times in which the temple was also the town slaughterhouse. Earlier in the same chapter Grandin reports a dream that she had around the time that she started working with the plant in which the Swift plant was a kind of heaven. Also, one of her diary entries after working in a kosher plant alongside an orthodox Jewish rabbi records “an overwhelming feeling of peacefulness, as if God had touched me. […] A good restraint chute operator has to not just like the cattle, but love them.” For Grandin, the slaughterhouse introduces her to God and to love for humanity in a way religious abstractions never could.
The Stairway to Heaven, then, is Grandin’s venue for faith within the slaughterhouse. The subsequent shots of the Stairway allow Grandin to explicate the humanity instated by her design. She says, “If I can go into a meat plant and the cattle just walk in nice and calmly and they’re not scared, […] that makes me feel happy. Because I know what it’s like to feel fearful and scared.” Morris has reminded us of the deep connection she feels to the cow, a connection so deep that she seems to at times view herself as a cow.
Morris then takes us into Grandin’s visualization of herself ascending the Stairway to Heaven in the same way the cow would. The hazy, blurry shots are in slow motion with abnormal lighting to emphasize the within-memory quality of the scene: What we are watching is what Grandin sees in her mind’s eye of herself following the cow’s path to the stun gun. Recall in the very beginning of the documentary when Grandin makes the comment “When I get old and die, I’d much rather go to one of my meat-packing plants than have a lion eat my guts out.” The statement, with her chuckle at the end seems the slightest bit absurd without the context of the rest of the film; or at least one wonders why the thought has occurred to her. Now the final scenes of the movie show that in visualizing herself dying the peaceful, humane death of a stunned cow, Grandin reconciles any uncertainty she may have had about her own mortal moment.
At the end of the film, we hear Morris ask Grandin, “Are you afraid of death?”; Grandin replies no. She is not afraid of a life that is “finite”. He asks her if she ever sees herself walking up that Stairway to Heaven. “Oh, yeah,” she nods. “I’ve gone through the system many, many, many times. If everything’s just going right, you just, you know, go through…, feel the conveyor pull me in and then it’d be over with; if everything’s working right, I wouldn’t feel a thing.” It seems that in the same way that she conquered her fear of going to college by walking through a door and visualizing its what it represented, Grandin is at peace with the idea of death because she has, in her mind’s eye, ascended the Stairway to Heaven. The shot cuts to antique-looking footage of longhorns being herded across a river in a way that brings to mind the River Styx.
In this last minute of the film, Sampson’s rendition of Led Zeppelin’s “Stairway to Heaven” that has been playing during the last scene comes to an end; there is a cut from Grandin’s face to one of the images from the montage of religious imagery at the beginning:
I’m puzzled by this. The image was originally a part of a montage of symbols whose abstract meaning were difficult for Grandin to process. In addition to verbal communication with abstract symbols, human communication via touch is another thing that seems almost entirely lost on Grandin; it’s something that repels her more than it makes sense to her. Is Morris highlighting the strangeness of someone who is soothed by the idea of metal walls squeezing and conducting her body along to death by stun gun but is destroyed by the touch of another human?
I don’t know.
Before this conclusion, Morris asks Grandin to explain the story behind Stairway to Heaven. Grandin tells of how when she finished the Stairway to Heaven project, she brought her blind roommate to the plant to experience it. After feeling with her hands the cattle going through the chute to their death, the roommate composed the following prayer:
The Stairway to Heaven is dedicated to those people who desire to learn the meaning of life and not to fear death. You, through respect for these animals, can come to respect your fellow man as well.
As Grandin recites the poem before the Interrotron, she receives almost fatherly guidance from Morris about how to rightly situate her face in the bright light. The small cues he offers her are reminders of the control Morris exerts over his material. When I first saw the documentary, I was amazed at how Morris had surfaced this complex though unified theme of religion and death and humanness out of a story about a meat packing plant designer. I thought he surely had taken a postmodern-sized helping of creative license and only told a fraction of her story so that he could focus on the same themes he’s always returning to. Stairway to Heaven struck me as a retelling of Fast, Cheap’s themes about mortality and leaving a legacy as a means for defying death.
I think I was right that Stairway to Heaven explores the same themes as Fast, Cheap, but I was wrong that Morris could have contrived the meaning that lies behind Grandin’s monologue. For one, these are themes that inevitably arise any time someone offers to tell a really good story about being a human. Secondly, I read Grandin’s book Thinking in Pictures, (written a few years before the Grandin-Morris conversation happened) and Grandin tells the same story—and in many cases, word for word.
Diane blogged about Morris’s uncanny ability to precisely construct a frame around the material he wishes to explore. In the same way that Morris’s camera frames a scene, and thereby controls reality by choosing which pieces the viewer sees, so the documentary as a whole is framed by which images he edits together. As a documentary director, Morris is iconoclastic for his willingness to make himself a forcible presence in his work. Dr. Heather Nunn, Professor of media, cultural, and gender studies at Roehampton University in London, cites in her useful article about “psychic drama” Morris’s words: “I’ve always thought of my portraits as my own version of the Museum of Natural History [with] these very odd diorama where you’re trying to create some foreign exotic environment and put it on display” (415).
We often talk about Morris’s delicate ability to render reality into an almost fantastic story in a way that is entirely unique from any other documentary maker. However, I’m not convinced that what he is doing is so different from everyone else. I think Rekha is talking about the same thing when she says: “We all view the world through our own little magnifying glass that’s created by our own experiences and that’s unique to us. The same two people could be in the exact same situation and each could have a tremendously different experience.” Morris, like every documentarian, subjectively selects which details of reality with which to build his story. (Although his keen eye does a better job than any other documentarian at choosing the details.)
In other words, I disagree entirely with Andre Bazin when he claims that cinema is objective. Morris’s documentary shows us that a film can portray reality without being objective. (Though I acknowledge that I would likely share Bazin’s perspective if I too were writing in the time and space of 1946, throwing out some of his claims is useful for understanding Morris-ian storytelling.) Bazin wants to suggest in his article that the photographic image is portrayal of reality that denies the artist’s imposition of his own interpretation.
In an interview with the Believer Morris disagrees with Bazin:
“Everything that you’re seeing has been controlled by some central authority. There is a kind of puppeteer—the director—pulling the strings. The flipside of it is verite: everything you see in front of the camera is uncontrolled. The director observes, records, but in no way influences, in no way determines what will happen in front of the camera. And so what people are really talking about is not truth and fiction when they talk about drama and documentary. What they’re talking about is control and lack of control.”
Bazin underestimates the power of the frame, while Morris applies it to its fullest potential. Moreover, his ability to do so is what enables Morris to capture the story and to illuminate meaning about the human condition. This is the difficult paradox that Morris’s work embodies: by manipulating reality, he generates beautiful expression of profound human truths. Perhaps it has something to do with Stephen Prince’s notions about iconicity that I cited at the beginning: if pictures have a quality of a transcendent language that all humans can understand, does it follow that that pictorial language in the form of cinema can uniquely give voice to universal human experience?
When yet in the unwieldy editing process of Fast, Cheap, Morris voiced the worry to our professor: “I wonder whether I have projected [too] much on material that may be inchoate and vague.” You could reword the question for Stairway to Heaven: is this Grandin’s story or Morris’s story?
The answer has to be both: if the story of Grandin’s human struggle with understanding death speaks to Morris’s human story, then it must be true.
And so Temple Grandin and her story that is at once unique and shared by the human community has decided it for me: Morris is not a contriver of meaning; he is a portrayer of reality. I’m not going to tell you what that term—reality—refers to, or what exactly portrayal involves, but I will tell you that when equipped with his tools—cinematography, editing, his framing eye, Caleb Sampson’s musical genius, and of course, a subject—the story Morris tells is true.
While looking through JSTOR for Errol Morris articles for my project, I found this one by Renee R. Curry called “Errol Morris’s Construction of Innocence in The Thin Blue Line.” She states as her purpose to continue the work other critics have begun in examining Errol Morris as a post-structuralist film maker (in that he highlights for his viewers the blurry relationship between fiction and reality, and in the case of “The Thin Blue Line,” of history and memory). Unique to Curry’s stance she says, however, is an “interrogation of the technical and verbal paradigms of innocence constructed throughout the film.”
She reviews many of the ideas that we discovered in class—that although Morris is not a literal presence in the frame, he makes his presence known through a series of technical and cinematic devices. Part of his presence is that he is able to make known to viewers his stance that Randall Adams is innocent: this is principally accomplished by portraying “observers” who are supposed to be objective as those who participate in “the incrimination of an innocent man”.
One interesting thing Curry does add to our discussion is the difference between American and European documentaries. She contends that where the documentary in the United States is to be a kind of “pictorial journalism” pursuit of truth, in Europe, documentaries have adopted a style that involves the audience in the formation of the film so its meaning is constantly being shaped by their interaction with it, as in the works of Jean-Luc Godard.
She quotes Godard: “There are two kinds of cinema, Flaherty and Einstein: There is documentary and there is theater; but that ultimately, at the highest level, they are one and the same. Through documentary realism we arrive at the structure of theater, and through theatrical imagination and fiction we arrive at the reality of life.” For me, Godard’s words articulate and coalesce into coherence the thoughts I’ve been churning since our Morris section. As my group in working on our project attempted to draw the lines between documentary and fiction films, the task was rendered moot. Foremost, Errol Morris has taught me that a documentary is not an assertion of fact over fiction, but merely a different medium for exploring the “truths” and kinds of motifs that all good works of film should set out to explore.
c paige panter 
