Comedy poses a problem for McGinn's dream theory of film. Dreams are not funny. Even when they are happy, they have no sense of humor. Perhaps this is because we are always at their center, and comedy requires a certain distance. We may awaken from a dream and find it funny, as McGinn points out; but by then we have gained distance from the dream. And distance, whether comic or aesthetic, is not something his theory allows us when watching a film. His whole emphasis is on the affective power of movies, their capacity for manipulating our feelings, for emotion writ large on the screen: "Both film and dream serve, not just to represent and express emotion, but to open the emotional valves--to let emotion flow freely." His theory fails with comedy and applies better to melodrama, which theater critic Eric Bentley has characterized as "the naturalism of the dream life."

Even with melodrama, though, McGinn runs into trouble. What a film makes us feel, he says, is what the characters are feeling: "It is as if we are seeing the emotions of the characters, so entwined are the images and the feelings." But drama enacts conflict, and to be effective it must be able to imagine the different sides of a conflict. Imbued with feeling though the images may be, a film portrays a number of characters who are not all feeling the same thing--unlike in a dream, which represents the emotions, the imagination, of just one person. That's what Langer meant when she said that "the camera is not a dreamer": It is not a character in the picture, nor is it usually identified with the feelings and perceptions of just one character in the picture. The self-centeredness of dreams, for Langer their most distinctive property, is puzzling to McGinn. He comes up with the interesting idea that it "helps in generating a certain attitude that defines our relationship to the screen...the attitude of identification." Our identification with the camera as the mind's eye is the basis of Langer's dream mode, but for McGinn it is our identification with a character on the screen

that really bears the imprint of the dream: you may not be literally up on the screen yourself, but you identify with the people who are. This identification may be monogamous or promiscuous: you may pick a single character and stick with him throughout the film...or you may shift your allegiance back and forth, now choosing this person, now that. Whatever you do, there is always someone on the screen whose place you are imaginatively occupying.

McGinn seems to think that it's entirely up to you which character in a film you identify with, that you stay with one character or switch from one to another according to your own monogamous or promiscuous disposition, that it's not anything the film does but your own affinity with a character you happen to like that brings on your identification. "When I watch Brief Encounter (probably my favorite film)," he writes, "I feel a strong sense of identification with the female lead, Laura, played by Celia Johnson, and less with the male lead, Alec, played by Trevor Howard--probably because I feel a stronger resemblance of personality between Laura and myself." But Brief Encounter (a 1945 melodrama of unconsummated adultery directed by David Lean and based on a play by Noël Coward) is told from Laura's point of view with first-person voiceover narration by her, and even the Rachmaninoff piano concerto on the soundtrack is something she's hearing on the radio as she recounts the story in her mind, which the viewer is taken into from start to finish. Regardless of your personality, you have no choice but to identify with this character. That's where the movie puts you, and if you don't want to be there you can only be turned off or walk out. No doubt McGinn likes this movie so much because he personally likes Laura, but the calculated, insistent way the movie sets up the viewer's identification with her can't be overlooked.

To me the most mysterious property of dreams is that we are their authors but feel that we are merely their audience. We experience our dreams as if they were not of our making, not products of our own imagination but something given to us, something we seem to be receiving from elsewhere. This property is above all what leads us to the interpretation of dreams: They don't seem to be coming from us but to be telling us something we need to decipher. And it is key to the film-dream analogy: Watching a film, we are caught up in a succession of images not of our making, which is like what we feel during a dream (and unlike, it may be noted, a daydream).

McGinn construes the analogy in another way, however. He puts the emphasis on "the active role of the imagination in creating the movie we 'watch'; for in a real sense the movie takes place inside our own head--the screen is merely the trigger for this inner activity." Some have supposed that the viewer of a movie has the illusion of being its author, but McGinn goes further and alleges that, as with our dreams, we actually are the authors of the movies we view: "The images we literally see are splashes of light that act as stimuli to our constructive mental processes: we don't see the characters and scenes at all--we imagine them." It's good to emphasize how our imagination comes into play when we watch a film. One often hears it said that movies, unlike novels, leave nothing to the imagination--though any shot on the screen shows us only a detail and leaves the rest of the world implied. But McGinn appears to believe that a film shows us nothing at all and leaves everything to the imagination. His fantasy of the future of movies--their "manifest destiny"--is that they will be

downloaded directly into the brain. You rent a cassette, plug it into your cortex, and enjoy the experience. There is no screen, no light projection--just mental images floating through your consciousness.

Although, he concedes, "no one yet has any idea how to stimulate brain cells so as to produce specific images," he looks forward to the day when movies will take place wholly inside our heads. That might be a lot of fun, but it wouldn't be the movies.

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