Of Fred Astaire, McGinn observes:

Only a dematerialized body could treat space and gravity as he so effortlessly does. In a certain sense, then, dance is the essence of cinema--the most visible assertion of its ability to transform the human body. When Astaire starts to move, he releases the potential of the medium--he becomes what the image suggests that he might be, a shimmering incorporeality.

McGinn is right to note the affinity between film and dance. But dance is not about incorporeality. It is very much an art of the body, even, or especially, as airy and nimble a body as Astaire's. Our response to dance depends on our sense of the body performing it, no less subject to gravity than our own bodies and yet capable of moving with transcendent grace. Astaire's dance numbers eschew the kind of fanciful editing or camera work that would have interfered with our appreciation of the dancer's body and its movement in actual space.

McGinn isn't wrong about the ghostliness of the film image. His error is to disregard its materiality. (He would have been wise to consider the mixture of the mental and the bodily in Un Chien andalou.) Screen presence, that quality all movie stars possess, each in his or her distinctive way--Astaire as well as John Wayne, Isabelle Huppert or Naomi Watts in the latter-day surreal Mulholland Drive, as well as Greta Garbo--clearly has to do with the camera's rendering of their bodies. The film image is made of light, true, but light directly received by the camera from the body of things, which confers on the impalpable image a material palpability, a documentary stamp. The French film critic and theorist André Bazin described the photographic image as a "tracing...[an] impression in light...a mold. As such it carries with it more than mere resemblance, namely a kind of identity." McGinn treats Bazin as a naïve realist who thought that the photographic image was identical to the object depicted. But Bazin didn't mean that the camera exactly reproduces the object ("mere resemblance"). What he meant was that, by virtue of its direct connection with the object, the photographic image captures something of the object itself ("a kind of identity"). It is McGinn who is being naïve, who misses the way film images peculiarly combine the ghostly and the material, and how a movie star is somehow both a shimmering incorporeality and a bodily presence.

The dualism posited by Descartes, the split between mind and body, with the mind as "what the person essentially is," is in McGinn's view not "just the fantasy of an eccentric philosopher" but "the way people naturally think...we are instinctive dualists." It is in any case the way McGinn thinks, and he imputes it to the movies: "When we watch a movie, seeing those immaterial images dance before us, we are tacitly subscribing to the Cartesian conception of the person...as an immaterial entity." Bazin and others have argued that, unlike theater, which sets up the stage as a realm apart from nature, cinema puts human beings on the same plane as the rest of nature. But McGinn insists that movies remove us from the physical world, and he's glad of it:

The sheer inertness of matter--its essential mindlessness--can seem repulsive in itself. We want to overcome the alienation we naturally feel from our own bodies.... We don't want to feel that we are made of the same stuff as the objects around us.... Movies offer us a transformed reality in which the body is stripped of its material bonds and becomes united with our essential nature as centers of consciousness.

McGinn's dualism is apparent in his notion that an actor "pretends that someone else's mind is in her body. She doesn't pretend that her body is someone else's...since it so obviously is her body." But it is through the body--including of course the face and the voice--that we gain access to the mind. The actor acts with her body, and to pretend that her mind is someone else's she must pretend that her body is someone else's, too. The character an actor plays is a fiction, someone who has neither a real mind nor a real body, and the actor's job is to lend that fiction both a body and a mind.

There is another form of dualism McGinn espouses. Besides dividing the mind from the body, he divides reason from emotion, the "higher" mental faculties from what he calls the "base self." "Think Jekyll and Hyde," he explains, forgetting that the moral of the story of Jekyll and Hyde is that the split is fatal. In movies as in dreams, he believes, "the higher mental faculties are not in play or are in abeyance," and the base self takes over, "childlike, instinct-driven, and sensation-fixated." Wittgenstein liked to go to the movies, McGinn tells us, and assumes that the lowly movies could only have served Wittgenstein as a relief from the rigors of the higher mind: "I experience movies in just this way myself. There is nothing better after a hard day of philosophical thinking and writing than a 'mindless' movie." We don't know what Wittgenstein got from the movies, but other philosophers--Stanley Cavell, Gilles Deleuze, George Wilson--have found them to be a vehicle for thought, an incitement to it, rather than an escape. And as for the supposed dormancy of reason in dreams, it's worth recalling that a dream about a ring of serpents revealed to the chemist Kekule the structure of the benzene molecule.

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