The Movies
By the end of Hollywood’s “Golden Age” in the early 1960s, a movie theater could be found in every city and town in America, and increasingly across the world. These institutions were, first, the “ports of call” of Hollywood’s commercial distribution. In fact, the dominance of theater chains led to a Supreme Court ruling in 1948 against vertical integration and the oligarchy of the “Big Five” studios. Beyond that, the theater was the centerpiece of American culture and the “high temple” of the Hollywood imaginarium. As Norma Desmond might say, “We taught the world, new ways to dream.”1 It is difficult to overstate the degree to which Hollywood defined what it meant to be an American, or to be “spiritually America” for audiences across the world. Hollywood established the idols of glamour, heroism, and villainy. Today the movie theater is taken for granted. Many are run-down and losing relevance, as cinema is increasingly displaced by streaming video and social media. Nevertheless, “the movies” remain the ultimate development of the “magic lantern” concept and the definitive “mystery cult” of the modern age.
In the 1890s, Thomas Edison invented the kinetograph, likely the first “moving picture” camera, which could take hundreds of photographs in succession and thus capture motion. The kinetoscope, developed by Edison and William Kennedy Laurie Dickson, allowed for the viewing of these “movies.” This was not a projector but a large console with a peep hole, allowing individuals to watch short films. These were commercialized as coin-operated attractions. As a singular viewing module, the kinetoscope could be thought of as the precursor to the television, smartphone, and even the virtual reality headset. (Not surprisingly, the kinetoscope was used to distribute pornography.)
The Nickelodeons (nickel + odeon) marked the first wide-scale attempt at “movie theaters” as we know them today. They could seat 50 to 100 people and, as the name implies, each show cost a nickel. Early on, silent films were accompanied by live musicians, most notably a player of the Mighty Wurlitzer pipe organ. In 1927, Warner Bros. produced The Jazz Singer, which utilized a “sound-on-disk” system that could be synchronized to the film. Later on, sound could be embedded in the reel itself. Film became a total work of art.
The Hollywood theater proper came about as an evolution of the opera houses of the 19th century: an indoor hall with an elevated stage above an orchestra pit, a curtain that reveals and conceals the action, large seating sections with mezzanines, etc. Perhaps none other than Richard Wagner should be given credit for fully developing cinema’s essential component—total emersion.2 His Bayreuth theater, built expressly for performance of the Ring cycle (1869-76), was darkened during performances, whereas most opera houses of the 19th century kept the hall illuminated, so goers could read the libretto or check out the crowd. Wagner also hid the orchestra pit: the players and conductor were completely covered and not acknowledged, allowing the sound to emanate, impossibly, into the hall. The live performance of Wagner’s music became something like a soundtrack to a film—coming from nowhere and everywhere. The darkened theater isolated each audience member in his own mind and kept him fixated, almost forceably, on the imagery on stage. Under the spell of “invisible music,” he would slide into a kind of trance. On the other hand, he was connected to every other benighted participant in a way that could only be described with Nietzsche’s term “dionysian.” Wagner had attempted, quite consciously, a new religion. Hollywood adopted his “church” and went about promoting its own “mystery.”
The Allegory
Beyond Wagner, the theater of total immersion had ancient roots. In the Greece of Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides, plays were performed outside in the broad daylight, for obvious reasons. “The movies” were, however, foreseen and theorized by none other than Plato (c.425-348), the student of Socrates, teacher of Aristotle, and founder of The Academy. This image or blueprint of the movie theater comes to us through the Allegory of the Cave from The Republic (c.375), perhaps the most celebrated—and misunderstood—passages in Western philosophy.
Here, “Socrates” (Plato’s mouthpiece) offers to make an “an image of our nature in its education and want of education, likening it to a condition of the following kind.
See human beings as though they were in an underground cave-like dwelling with its entrance, a long one, open to the light across the whole width of the cave. They’re in it from childhood with their legs and necks in bonds so that they are fixed, seeing only in front of them, unable because of the bond to turn their heads all the way around. Their light is from a fire burning far above and behind them. Between the fire and the prisoners there is a road above, along which see a wall, built like the partitions putppet-handelers set in from of the human beings and over which they show the puppets….
Then also see along this wall human beings carrying all sorts of artifacts, which project above the wall, and statues of men and other animals wrought from stone, wood, and every kind of material; as is to be expected, some of the carriers utter sounds while others are silent. 3
“Glaucon,” Socrates’ interlocutor, notes the strangeness of this situation, in which the audience are prisoners. “They’re like us!” responds Socrates.
For in the first place, do you suppose such men would have seen anything of themselves and one another other than the shadows cast by the fire on the side of the cave facing them?
The puppet-masters are also making sounds, which echo off the walls of the cave and seem, for the prisoners, to come from the shadows themselves. The captive audience thus loses touch with reality: they are naming and categorizing things as if the shadows were real, producing the sounds that are, in fact, echoes. We are reminded of the total immersion of Wagner and Hollywood, with music emerging, invisibly, from the action on stage.
Before going further, it is important to examine the physical situation and contraption that Plato has devised. He describes—amazingly—a modern movie theater or Wagnerian opera house. Whereas in the Greek theater, “backstage” would be in front of the audience and behind the actors, here, in The Republic, Plato imagines “backstage” behind the captives, with puppet-masters creating a “shadow play,” illuminated by a great fire in the cave. The puppet-masters are controlling what is, in effect, a “magic lantern.” The set-up is identical to a film projector.
As the parable goes on, one man is released from bondage, for reasons not made clear, and he makes his escape from the Cave. As he stumbles outside, he is discombobulated. His eyes are “dazzled” by the light of the Sun. At first, he might only be able to comprehend reflections of the real world, say, an image of a tree in a pond. He then can only contemplate the heavens at nighttime, “looking at the light of the stars.” At last, after his eyes have adjusted, he is able to look at the Sun itself and conclude that it is the source of the seasons, the “steward of all things visible,” and the fundamental cause of life on Earth (516 a-c). Once enlightened, the man would never want to return to the cave. In fact, he would, according to Glaucon, “prefer to undergo everything rather than live that way.” Sticking to the basic metaphor of the parable, once you see the truth, you can never go back to your old life, which seems like a prison in comparison. The is the experience of “awakening.” If the enlightened man did venture back into the cave, and install himself again in his seat, his eyes would then fail him again, as they adjust to the dark. He could not view the shadow play and would be mocked by the audience that remained. They would conclude that no one should ever leave the cave. If the enlightened man ever encouraged others to break away from captivity, they might even kill him. Are prisoners really imprisoned if they are as happy as clams?
The enlightened man here is, clearly, a stand-in for the philosopher or knower. Essentially, leaving the Cave is a metaphor for seeking the truth, and disabusing yourself of illusion. His plight, if he should ever return, is Plato’s caustic commentary on that of all wise men in every age: They will be rejected by the public. In a madhouse, the sane man is considered out of his mind. His wisdom remains wisdom in speech, and it cannot be realized in the world.
It is difficult to underestimate the impact of Plato’s allegory in informing Western philosophy. Among countless examples, the Cave is the precursor to Descartes’s famous “thought experiment” about a “demon” or “genius” messing with your head and skewing reality:
I shall then suppose, not that God, who is supremely good and the fountain of truth, but some evil genius, not less powerful than deceitful, has employed in whole energies in deceiving me; I shall consider that the heavens, the earth, colors, figures, sounds, and all other external things, are nothing but the illusions and dreams of which this genius has availed himself….4
Descartes resolves the problem of dualism—mind and world—with consciousness itself: Je pense, done je suis, “I think therefore I am.” By being self-aware, we cannot doubt that reality is real.
This quandary has been rehearsed with various “brain in a vat” models, both disturbing and ridiculous, which suggest that reality might not be as real as we assume: Are we living in a simulation!?” “Are we characters in a video game played by a super-intelligent alien!?” This conceit is as much about the quest for truth as it is about the philosopher’s own paranoia and sneaking feeling of entrapment and claustrophobia.
This conceit, no doubt, inspired The Matrix (1999), the neo-noir classic, built on the premise that life as we know it is computer program created by advanced AI robots, who have turned human into hapless batteries. The protagonist “Neo” awakens to a higher reality beyond perception. His mentor, Morpheus, invites Neo to leave the Cave:
Do you want to know what [The Matrix] is, Neo?
It's that feeling you have had all your life. That feeling that something was wrong with the world. You don't know what it is but it's there, like a splinter in your mind, driving you mad, driving you to me. But what is it?
The Matrix is everywhere, it's all around us, here even in this room. You can see it out your window, or on your television. You feel it when you go to work, or go to church or pay your taxes. It is the world that has been pulled over your eyes to blind you from the truth.5
“Taking the Red Pill” or “Breaking The Matrix” became watchwords for most every radical, marginal, or deranged political movement that cropped up after the release of the film. Libertarianism, the “Mano-sphere,” the Alt-Right, and even Flat Earth-ism and QAnon are not so much political movements as they are “mystery cults” in themselves, offering participants the experience of “awakening.”
In addition, the Allegory of the cave was adopted by later thinkers as a grand metaphor for the Enlightenment project of the 17th and 18th centuries. What is capital-E “Enlightenment” or “liberal democracy” if not an attempt to bring sunlight into the Cave and allow all men to see—and thus be free. It is important to remember that this was not Plato’s intention. Enlightenment, for him, is an act of personal liberation, a breaking away, done at great cost, never appreciated, and always vehemently resented by the hoi palloi. The Allegory of the Cave is not a call to “awaken” the public; it is, to the contrary, a cautionary tale about “public education.”
The Really Real
On a more technical level, the Allegory of the Cave is describing higher level or abstract thinking or the ability to differentiate between correlation and cause. The poor prisoners see shadows and hear echos, and conclude that these are the things themselves—and who could blame them. At some point in our dark past, our ancestors might have observed some sort of primitive religious act, such as a sacrifice or sacred dance—or even a random incident like a lunar eclipse—and which was followed by a successful hunt or raid. He concluded that the former caused his good fortune. Such sequencing is at the base of our concept of cause-and-effect. It might be at the root of our of conception of gods—that there are figure “out there,” in control of natural forces or personal fortunes, who could be appeased, paid off, or adored. Critical thinking (that is, Plato’s conception of “dialectic” or discussion) represents a rising above this primitive “causation by correlation.”
Moreover, the Allegory of the Cave is integrated into Plato’s broader system. The captive audience mistakes the shadows and sounds for reality, much as most people mistake objects and sounds for their higher reality. In Plato’s system, every artificial object—a “couch,” for instance—is an imperfect imitation of an idealized form—“couch-ness.” Just as you could never draw a perfect circle by hand—that is, fully capture its abstract geometry—you could never fully capture the ideal seating instrument (“couch-ness”) in crafting a couch in the real world. This follows for higher-level concepts like “justice,” whose real-world applications are but counterfeits of the idea of justice itself. Furthermore, art is understood by Plato as yet another “imitation” or mimesis. It is, in this way, a second-order replica or derivative. If a couch is a “re-presentation” of couch-ness, then a painting of a couch is “re-re-presenation.” Art is an image of the appearance of the real, which, again, for Plato, exists only in the “world of forms.” Confusing the image for the essence—or mere reality for the real—is the “original sin” of thinking. True philosophy advances, through dialectic, to the idea itself.
It might be tempting to understand the Allegory of the Cave as a metaphor for a kind of empiricism or realism—“Go outside and touch grass,” in contemporary parlance. The true philosopher should leave the realm of theory or dogmatic slumber, go get his hands dirty, and study the natural world. Again, that would be a profound misreading of the passage. The Cave and the Sun are metaphors, and Plato’s underlying message is something close to the opposite of what those symbols might suggest at first hearing. This is revealed in a major turn the passage takes after the allegory is introduced. Socrates stresses to his interlocutors that they should “[l]iken the domain revealed through sight to the prison home, and the light of the fire in it to the Sun ’s power; and, in applying the going up and the seeing of the what’s above to the soul’s journey” (517 b). In other words, those who use their eyes and sunlight to understand the real might as well be staring at shadows on the wall. For Plato, you do not “see” with your eyes. The philosopher can only “see” through dialectic: “in the knowable the last thing to be seen, and that with considerable effort, is the idea of the good:
[O]nce seen, it must be concluded that this is in fact the cause of all that is right and fair in everything—in the visible it gave birth to light and its sovereign; in the intelligible, itself sovereign, it provided truth and intelligence—and that the man who is going to act prudently in private or in public must see it. (517 c)
For Plato, the idea of the good, accessed through dialectic, justifies and reveals all other concepts, like “justice,” “politics,” and more. It should also guide men to act ethically in public and private affairs. Remarkably, Plato announces that the idea of the good acts in the visible world as well: “ it gave birth to light and its sovereign.” The idea is creator or unmoved mover. In passages like this, we perceive Plato’s monumental impact on Western philosophy and, as a consequence, Christianity, which has always been “platonism for the people.” The philosopher posits a moral and rational “creator god” at the center of the universe—one disembodied (or hidden) as the idea. “There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is no male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus” (Galatians 3:28). The Apostle Paul’s most famous maxim reveals that he is not merely an egalitarian; he is a Platonist. In opening his eyes to the blinding image of Christ—and thus the “Word” of logos—one grasps “God” or the fundamental cause of all things.
Put bluntly, the philosopher should never believe his lying eyes. Plato’s motive is thus the denigration of the visible—the merely visible—in contrast to moral inquiry. The conversation about “justice” in The Republic begins with a discounting of seeing: Is a man truly “just” who appears to be upright, successful, attractive, and the rest? Might the “extreme of injustice” be to “seem to be just when one is not” (361 a)? Plato is discovering (or perhaps constructing) the human interior of intention, desire, and authenticity. Shakespeare had something like this in mind when Hamlet express his true loyalty to his dead father, in contrast to the cheap gestures at the kingdom’s funeral proceedings:
But I have that within which passeth show;
These but the trappings and the suits of woe. (I, ii, 85-86)
This makes the visual metaphor of the Cave all the more surprising and remarkable: To see is not to understand. Understanding begins when you close your eyes.
The Philosopher As Artist
Also at play in the Allegory is Plato’s distinct conception of art. As mentioned above, for Plato, things in the world are replicas of their ideal forms: “couch” for “couch-ness,” in our example. Art is a “re-re-presenation” or image of the appearance of the real. This justifies Plato’s preference for philosophy over art or, better put, his subjugation of art by philosophy. It is only the latter that seeks the real. Art, to the contrary, reflects the real, if that. Whatever we might think of Plato’s opinion here—and whatever he might be missing or, in fact, hiding—this basic conception of what art is has informed painting, sculpture, and performance since the ancient world. Codified by Leon Battista Alberti in De pictura (1450), there should be no difference between looking at a painting and looking out a window on the real world.6 In other words, Western art developed after having internalized Plato’s critique. Tolstoy famously accused Plato, with justification, of “banishing the poets from the Republic.” He didn’t quite want that, but The Republic is filled with lengthy discussions of the need to censure undignified or bawdy depictions of human action, including those in Homer and Hesiod; he worries that music, if too rhythmic and lascivious, could lead us into temptation; Plato goes as far to undermine the Greek mythological system itself and the undignified behavior of its gods.
Thus, you could be forgiven for concluding that Plato simply despises art, or is even a prude, fuddy-duddy, or killjoy. Such a view is understandable, but it misses a crucial turn in Plato’s thought—as well as the esoteric meaning of the Allegory of the Cave. Plato is ultimately a “hypocrite,” in both senses, a liar and actor. The least we could say about him is that he found art powerful and bewitching. Perhaps a certain jealousy drove him to regulate art, demean it, or dismiss it altogether? Is it not ironic that Plato wrote dialogues, not treatises, all of which read like dramas, feature characters and plots, and are unsurpassed in subtly and cleverness? Is Plato himself not a myth-maker of the highest order? In this line, in the Allegory of the Cave and the prisoner’s escape, we see a retelling and refashioning of the myth of Orpheus, himself a kind of idealization or refinement of Dionysius. The great musician, able to lull anyone, even a god, into a trance, is heartbroken at the death of his lover, Eurydice, who was bitten by a snake. He travels to the underworld, where his beautiful music convinces even Hades to release Eurydice back to the land of the living. The god’s sole condition is that neither look back as they exit the Underworld. When Orpheus ventures out of this great “cave,” he sees the Sun and cannot help himself but look back at Eurydice with joy—sending her back to Hades forever.7 We see a guiding influence of the Orpheus cult on Judaism and Christianity: the snake, which bit Eurydice, in the Garden of Eden; we see Jesus’ descent into and rise out of Hell after the crucifixion. Jesus is Orpheus, Adonis, and, at base, Bacchus. Plato’s Allegory has itself acted as its own “cave,” entrapping Western philosophy in dualism for more than two millennia.
Does all of this not evince a love of art—or perhaps a love-hate of art—a desire for philosophy to compete with—and defeat and absorb—this earlier institution? Plato, indeed, sought to bring the artistic impulse to a new stratum, with philosophy as art par excellence—and the philosopher as directed towards the governing of men and world affairs. It is Socrates’ contention in The Republic that the city …
could never be happy otherwise than by having its outlines drawn by the painters who use the divine pattern.… They [the philosophers] would take the city and the dispositions of the human beings, as though they were a tablet … which, in the first place, they would wipe clean.” (500 e-501 a)
This political art would not be “imitation” or mimesis; it would be prescription. In other words, life would imitate art. Here we should move beyond the traditional Straussian reading of The Republic as a kind of “tragedy” over the impossibility of the “city in speech” becoming reality.8 Plato certainly recognizes the difficulty of his project; he recognizes even the necessity of lying to the general public. His resolution of the problem of educating the general public is subtly revealed in the Allegory of the Cave.
Plato’s Teaching
With Plato’s Allegory, we are left with a few “loose ends.” As the story comes to a close, the dilemma of the knower, or tragic hero, is still unresolved. And the benighted, captive audience are still strapped into their seats, entertained by shadows. But what of another group, which receives only a brief mention. What of the puppet-masters? They are critical to the functioning of this ancient movie theater, as well as our final understanding of the Allegory as a teaching. Surely these puppet-masters are fully aware of the opera they are creating? Are they not equally enlightened as the man who escaped the cave? Are they, perhaps, more enlightened? Had these men previously freed themselves from bondage, viewed the Sun , and then returned to the cave to better maintain the theatrical illusion? Is not the “model of education” that Plato offers the Cave itself?
This line comes from Andrew Lloyd Webber’s musical version of Sunset Boulevard (1993), with lyrics by Don Black and Christopher Hampton. It did not appear in the original film (1950).
See Fredrick Spotts, Bayreuth: A History of the Wagner Festival (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1996).
Plato, The Republic, translated by Allan Bloom (New York: Basic Books, 1968), 514 a.
Descartes, Meditations on First Philosophy, edited by David Weissman (New Haven & London: Yale University Press, 1996 [1641]), 63.
The Matrix, written and directed by The Wachowskis, Warner Bros., 1999.
See Arthur C. Danto, What Art Is (New Haven and London:Yale University Press, 2013).
See Algis Uzdavinys, Orpheus and the Roots of Platonism (London: The Matheson Trust, 2011).
Leo Strauss and Joseph Cropsey (eds.), History of Political Philosophy, Third Edition (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1987 [1963]), 34-68.
Fascinating that the kinetoscope was there as a prelude to the modern theater, and now a much more sophisticated and potent handheld form of this technology (the smartphone) is with us again as we usher in the end of the modern theater.
The Wagner to Hollywood thread is an interesting one as well. I feel like Communism may see this arc as well only from the opposite perspective. If Wagner is tearing his hair out postmortem to realize that Hollywood has built a synagogue on top of his Pagan shrine, than I wonder if Marx is doing the same. Would Communism even be valuable to Marx if not practiced by people's of a Judeo Christian tradition? We often think of Jews as being the sole creators of golem but it's interesting to see where gentiles have created them in the past. Maybe Wagner and Marx are not angry ghosts but perplexed ones.
I think Richard is asking the pressing question as to who are the puppet masters with regards to the cave allegory. Are they benevolent figures out to protect us? Like parents perhaps, who protect us from ourselves until we are old enough? Or are they an outsider group seeking to keep us as prisoners while their own kin roam free from competition with those in the cave? What are the images on the wall of the cave? Are they telling us a story? Are they moralizing or demoralizing? Are they there to scare us? Do they make us dream? Or simply entertain us? Do the shadows on the wall set us towards life or against it?
Our society now seems like it's no longer viewing the shadows on the wall and instead we have closed our eyes and are viewing the shadows of our minds eye, all in disagreement about what we are seeing in our own darkness. Or maybe its more accurate to say we have left the cave and are overwhelmed like newborn God's by the light of knowing and omnipresent information (the internet) and are longing to return to a time of shared story and allegory, even if we understand those stories to be false.
Good stuff, we will one day liberate ourselves from those pesky Phoenician deceivers.