Morals of the Tale Still in Play Morals of the Tale Still in PlayWe began this journey through inner and outer theaters—of the brain, prehistoric caves, and modern screen monsters—with the question of human wildness, of what “drives” us to transform our environment, ourselves, and each other in hypertheatrical, good and evil ways, far beyond the evolved instincts of other animals, in many cultural varieties. Such differences may be consolidating now, through global travel and shared media spaces. Yet current technologies also expand our species’ transformations, as we become godlike in our screen imaginings, though often without the wisdom or consensus to manage the real-life changes that we make. This final chapter will summarize what came before it and then consider how our species’ super-natural wildness and yet moral (or rasa-cathartic) awareness might be evolving today, through inner and outer theaters, inherited from the past.
Popular media manifestations of vampires, werewolves, lab hybrids, and simian civilizations may seem to be frivolous entertainments. But such films reflect our still evolving animal-to-human awareness, in the particular decades when these movies were made and in the brains of current viewers. So does Herzog’s recent documentary of the Chauvet cave, with its various animal figures, including a bull-head, lion-head, human-vagina-with-legs chimera on one stalactite. So, too, do images of animals, abstract signs, hand prints, and animal-human hybrids in many other caves, painted with charcoal or ochre and etched on the walls of selected theatrical spaces, by brains that were structured like ours, tens of thousands of years ago. The exploration of such cave and film details in Chapters 2, 4, and 6 provides a bridge from prehistoric spaces and images to current movie, home, and handheld theaters, to glimpse what our “inner theaters” may share, then and now.
You might believe in a cosmic theater of gods or one God framing our bio-cultural evolution. Or you might see that process as existing without a metaphysical spectator—evolving toward higher levels of consciousness, through each human being and perhaps through life on other planets, or just evolving here as a survival and reproduction trick. But through any of these lenses, a common “human nature” can be glimpsed in the super-natural figures on cave walls and movie screens, developing its wild impulses and moral restraints in diverse cultural ways, through and beyond the instincts of our animal relatives. Our hyper-theatrical consciousness, playing with remnant instincts to form new moral worlds and creative environments, on earth and onscreen, is our greatest gift and burden. It makes survival for most of us much easier than for wild animals, yet it makes some of us wilder in our social conflicts, emotional impulses, and metaphysical needs for purpose and meaning beyond just surviving. Thus, we reimagine lost friends and pleasures, foresee our own aging and demise, but also hope, fight, and sacrifice ourselves for more that might come from our lives, like the beast-people and their slayers or creators onscreen.
Chapters 1, 3, and 5 combined neuroscience research and psychoanalytic theories with movie-theatrical paradigms to create a model of inner performance elements, regarding the artifacts on cave walls and cinema screens, explored in the even-numbered chapters that followed. Chapter 1 considered the “staging of consciousness,” according to cognitive psychologist Bernard Baars, along with theater metaphors (such as “puppeteer”) and other terms from neuroscientist Antonio Damasio, plus related research. It refined Baars’s reference to Paul MacLean’s evolutionary model of the brain’s animal levels: vertebrate/fish brainstem (a.k.a. “reptilian”) areas with basic drives, a mammalian limbic system for emotions, primate fronto-parietal lobes for Self/Other and spatial orientations, and advanced human prefrontal cortices with distinctive right and left, Imaginary and Symbolic functions (adding Lacan’s terms). Such levels relate to Damasio’s definitions of a proto-self (assessing internal bodily states) and a core self (interacting with objects), which we share with other vertebrates, especially through mammalian emotions and social systems, plus an autobiographical Self with higher orders of hyper-theatricality, which is uniquely human.
The staging of consciousness in our brains involves an inner theater of animal legacies, with the bottom-up and top-down feedback loops of survival and reproduction values, Deep Goal and Conceptual Contexts, immediate intentions and expectations, and executive controls, as the “director” and “operators” of a largely unconscious self. Baars relates his model to Gerald Edelman’s theory of “Neural Darwinism” within the brain, interacting with the outer theaters of “experiential selection” (Edelman, Second 27–30). Baars’s model also includes “audience” members lobbying (or Web users “liking”) through automatic, implicit, verbal, declarative, and autobiographical memories. Such neural networks cooperate and compete for which perceptions and ideas appear as “players” in the “spotlight” of the mind and on its “stage” of working memory. I also mentioned Politser’s actor-critic-audience model for neuro-economic pleasure, learning, and liking, as evaluated by the brain.
There are cinematic elements, too, of the brain’s inner theater (as Kosslyn and Zacks point out). The mind’s eye zooms in and out, rotates, or pans across imagined or remembered objects and scenes. There are “flashbacks” of memory associations, variable frames, and temporal and spatial chunks in the brain’s “filling in” of perceptions, involving past and future possibilities. There is a backdating and rearranging of the present continuum like the “cuts” in film editing. And there is an internal monolog in our brains like a film “voice-over,” involving Self and Other, left- and right-cortical networks. When we go to the movies, or watch films on personal devices, we are sharing in various kinds of dreamlike, memory-like, and reality-like performance spaces. As with dreams (in Revonsuo’s theory), we use movies to “rehearse” our animal drives, emotions, and actions, as well as specific fantasies and realities—from remnant instincts and daily experiences to long-term cultural patterns, with contending social rules and bonds. Between brains, inner director/operators and audience members signal (mostly unconsciously) through mirror-neuron mimetics, emotional contagion, and Imaginary and Symbolic networks. Each person’s circuits are thus pruned in unique ways, especially through childhood experiences,1 with influences from family members, peer groups, school, work, and media environments.
Nine neuro-aesthetic “laws,” as proposed by V. S. Ramachandran, were considered in Chapter 1, along with the nine rasas (refined emotional flavors) of ancient Indian theater theory.2 Through these ideas and Aristotle’s ancient notion of the purifying of emotions in reading or watching Greek tragedy, I developed a Western and Eastern flavored, neuro-aesthetic theory of “ rasa-catharsis,” also involving the modern aims of Bertolt Brecht and Antonin Artaud. Next, I considered the primary and social emotions defined by current neuroscience, including panic, fear, rage, lust, seeking, care, sadness, and joyful play in other mammals, as researched by Jaak Panksepp. Antonio Damasio gives a similar list of primal emotions: joy, surprise, disgust, sadness, fear, and rage. To this, he adds a list of social emotions: sympathy, pride, indignation, shame, envy, guilt, and admiration. Jonathan Haidt offers “families” of emotions to point to universal moral foundations. There are parallels, too, between the animal-to-human emotions in Panksepp’s, Damasio’s, or Haidt’s list and the aesthetic feelings involved in ancient Greek and Indian theater traditions (Table 1.1).
Regarding such developments, from primal to complex, animal to human and moral emotions, I considered prehistoric cultural changes, from episodic to mimetic, mythic, and theoretic stages (according to Merlin Donald). This also relates to right and left cortical, Eastern and Western orientations in humans today. There is increased stress in socialized self-control from primates to humans, with herd mentalities and alpha competitions, especially through our dreamlike media and “consumer” demands, far beyond basic food and water, as reflected by the voracious beast-people onscreen. Yet I also described the potential for rasacatharsis, as a cognitive remastering and reappraisal of primal and social feelings, with tragicomic twists at certain moments in the film examples of Chapters 4 and 6.
Chapter 2 explored prehistoric cave art as showing an early development of human Self and Other awareness, from the brain’s inner theater to its shared performances. Whether in narrow passageways, possibly as painful tests of shamanic initiates, or in large chambers with different acoustic effects for the collective audience, the cave art shows projections from Paleolithic brains. Perhaps these were hallucinations seen by the artists on the rock wall, and then recorded there, which also became for others, in the flickering firelight, moving pictures. Even for us today, the animal images, especially when combined with human features, handprints, and abstract signs, reveal a growing awareness of human nature as evolving culturally, then and now, super-naturally akin to, yet moving beyond other animals.
Chapter 3 related the animal-human “staging of consciousness” model from Chapter 1, plus its prehistoric representations in Chapter 2, to the “hall of mirrors” between brains: the multiple reflections and projections of Self and Other, of individual and group identities, revealed by cognitive experiments and neural mappings. This involves the human infant’s mirror recognition of Self, in the first two years of life, which appears only in a few, highly intelligent, and very social mammal species, such as elephants, dolphins, and apes. These animals also have Von Economo spindle cells or “intuitive social decision making” neurons, but humans have them in much larger numbers (Gazzaniga, Who’s 39–40).
Prior to the full awareness, at about 18 months, of being distinct from, while also mirrored by the primary caretaker, the human infant lives in a self-other continuum more like other primates, such as baboons. According to psychoanalytic theory, this Real order of natural being with the (m)Other is lost as the child becomes shaped by specific Imaginary and Symbolic experiences. Yet it persists as a “lack of being” and “want to be,” with particular fantasies and desired objects of Oedipal sacrifice and maternal reunion.
The movie screen, as window and mirror, may encourage pleasurable fantasies of fetishistic, voyeuristic, or sadomasochistic reunion, through alluring fictional objects—activating the spectator’s inner theater while the body is in dreamlike immobility within a darkened space. Melodramatic violence with good heroes and innocent victims fighting, fleeing, getting revenge against, or “slaying” evil villains may consolidate stereotypes, along with erotic objectifications, affecting the neural circuits, social networks, and real-life acts of audience members beyond the screen. This may involve the danger of “cathartic backfire” with aggression increased and stereotypes reconfirmed.
And yet, even within this general formula of revenge melodrama, of courageous heroes and evil villains, some films may have more complex effects, especially in the genres of romantic horror, monster comedy, and sci-fi. Viewers’ critical awareness of their own primal emotions sometimes increases during vampire, werewolf, lab-hybrid, or simian-civilization movies, through a paradoxical mix of desire and fear, attraction and repulsion. Tragicomic twists in such entertainments might evoke a rasa-catharsis of various feelings, with shifts between Artaudian immersion and Brechtian distance. This cognitive reappraisal of one’s bottom-up, impulsive, animalistic emotions, through a greater top-down awareness, also elicits a questioning of binary, objectified stereotypes—of certain groups as primal others, as more animal than human—in the hall of mirrors between brains during the film and in everyday life.
Human group identifications begin around age three, with in- and out-group projections, involving more empathy toward those “like” us. Understanding that others have different perspectives starts at age three to four, and then perspective taking about others’ false beliefs at age four to six. Parents and teachers, along with peer groups, influence the child’s performances and neural development with their expectations—as indicated with lab rats performing differently when handled by humans who assume they are smart or not.
This gives key evidence for the significance of the teacher’s role in what I call “classroom catharsis.” When teaching any subject, but especially theater, film, or media studies, a teacher may increase the students’ awareness of their inner-theater drives and emotions—their mindfulness regarding how the material affected them and what it reflects in our society—through what is selected, which questions are asked, and which exercises are given to “play” with it. The teacher might also reappraise her own cognitive and emotional assumptions, including unconscious expectations for her students, regarding gender, race, class, and other attributes.
Tests with rats and monkeys show that emotional contagion, empathic helpfulness, and self-sacrifice are part of our mammalian heritage. Fairness expectations have been found with wolves, coyotes, dogs, ravens, and monkeys—and in 15-month-old humans. Vengeance has also been found with chimpanzees. Yet reward and pleasure networks in the human brain are activated with altruistic anger and the righteous punishment of others—suggesting how mammalian empathy and primate fairness may become vindictive scapegoating in our species, especially with contagious group identifications and binary projections (of “us versus them” or “us versus that one”). This can be rationalized by our objectifying left cortex, like the shift from social norms of generosity (with more right-cortical caring) to market norms of fair trade.
Levels of cooperation appear in our animal relatives: (1) emotional contagion and motor mimicry, in bird flocks, mammal herds, and human mobs, (2) the coordination of shared goals in wolf/dog packs and ape troops, (3) active consolation for an injured colleague in apes, and (4) perspective taking, targeted helping, intentional imitation, and various kinds of altruism in apes (with targeted helping also in dolphins, whales, and elephants). These levels might be taken as a natural foundation for ethics in humans. But there is a dark side to animal-human group cooperation. It increases with outside threats, sometimes projected onto others (as in genocidal scapegoating), and it involves competitive drives within as well as between groups (as with the genetic logic of infanticide in various mammal species). Regarding the brain’s inner theater, this also includes left-cortical Self distinctions competing with right-cortical self-other relations.
But the “hall of mirrors” effect, between our hyper-theatrical brains, evoking uncertainties and dangers, has positive as well as negative aspects, reflecting our super-natural heritage of youthful creativity. Human neoteny extends far into adulthood: our youthful appearance as apes with rounded heads and flat faces, our promiscuous sexuality (more like bonobos than chimps), our creative flexibility from art to technology, and our playful behaviors, even with organized games, sports, and dramatic media. This also relates to a double edged, reflective mirroring with romantic, communal bonding, which involves the neurotransmitter oxytocin, plus an opioid rush of pain reduction, bringing pleasure in togetherness, yet also mimetic rivalry—as we mature from primal attachments to new mates and group identifications.
Personal degrees of communal engagement—or of ego defensiveness against the mirroring influences of others—stem from an individual’s “attachment style,” which may be passed unconsciously from mother to child. Yet group egos can also be defensive, with positive in-group bonding but also negative out-group projections, often (hypocritically) of odious, yet repressed traits within one’s own group. This involves overgeneralizing similarities within the group against the dissimilarities of others, producing “empathy gaps” and stereotypes (Van Boven and Loewenstein; Ames). The likelihood of such projections in everyday life makes even more meaningful how movies and plays may rehearse effortful perspective taking by the audience, especially with tragicomic, rasa-ca thartic twists onscreen or onstage.
“Machiavellian intelligence” is another aspect of the super-natural hall of mirrors between our brain theaters, regarding group hierarchies. With primates in the wild, clever individuals find sneaky ways to mate or feed by deceiving their higher ups, signaling a false threat or not reacting to newly found food. In humans, such functional deception evolved into intentional deception and even self-deception to prevent the unconscious “leak” of a disadvantageous signal through motor and emotional contagion (Trivers). This uncertainty of self-deception relates, in my view, to the powerful hyper-theatricality of humans. We play many roles in our social networks, using various characterizations of self and other from our inner theaters, continually readjusted by the hall of mirrors in others’ reactions to us. Research has found signs of deceit in children as young as two and half, involving right frontal cortex activity (with the inner mime improviser ), although in a performative, “as if” mode, rather than intentional deception, which comes later. Thus, our playfulness with as-if scenarios on stages and screens throughout our lives, involving imaginary objects, becomes distinct from the functional Machiavellian deception of other apes.
Primate troops also show aspects of “social proteanism,” relating to trickery in our human groups. The alpha male might punish whimsically, creating uncertainty and obedience among subordinates. Likewise, females in various primate species use protean promiscuity or concealed ovulation, to keep males guessing as to whether an offspring is theirs. This reduces infanticide by males and increases their desire for long-term pair bonding. In our evolution from animal to human, females developed both promiscuity and hidden ovulation, unlike most primates. Thus, loyalty to mates and to larger group hierarchies increased in human evolution, as our social networks evolved in size and flexibility far beyond those of other apes. The competition for alpha power by selfish egos and the lack of work by free loaders, disruptive of group cohesion, was counterbalanced by external conflicts, with altruistic groups surviving beyond others that had less unity. Today, we use “social categories” to define our remnant instincts of survival, reproduction, and territory, often in binary stereotypes of “you’re with us or against us.” Yet this also involves a dynamic continuum, fueled by testosterone aggression (more so in males) and oxytocin bonding pleasures (in romantic pairs and with group camaraderie), through protean, transformative mirroring.
People can be primed unconsciously with social categories like “elder” and “professor,” so that they walk more slowly or perform better on tests. Social psychologists have found not just a “looking-glass” effect of others used as mirrors for the Self, but also a “spyglass” effect of merging the self with the other through “behavior matching.” This extends kinship identification to larger, sometimes contending groups—through mimetic desires and rivalries. Thus, humans ape even more than other apes. Children over-imitate adults, copying unnecessary steps, whereas chimps emulate behavior, finding shortcuts to a goal. Starting at nine months, children share joint attention with adults through gaze following, using the whites of our eyes, the distinct sclera that is lacking in other animals. Such a mimetic mechanism in us, extending from our mammalian ancestors, also involves oxytocin—as a “tend and befriend” hormone in females and a “tend and defend” neurotransmitter in males, which increases their ability to read subtle social cues, but also their ethnocentrism. Mimetic desire in the hall of mirrors between our brains, while fostering care bonds within a family or extensions of kinship to ethnicity, nationality, and religion, can also lead to rivalry and reciprocal vengeance between individuals and groups.
Oxytocin is involved with the alternatives of “liking” or disgust, mediated by the insula and VMPFC (as superego or inner stage manager), showing the relationship of moral and physical feelings, with personal and group attraction or repulsion. We like those we see as like us and reject those who are not, often projecting negative feelings and stereotypes onto those others. However, “wanting” involves dopamine reward circuits, which can become addictively attached to certain people, objects, or rituals—with compulsive, repeated actions even when disliked, as with mimetic rivalry and reciprocal vengeance.
Humans inherit powerful grouping mechanisms of herd contagion, kinship bonds, and pack/troop (seeking and hierarchy) coordination. Our inner theaters absorb outer reflections of contending identity models, categorical projections, social rules, and nurturing networks. But we also experience profound alienation—when misrecognized or rejected in the hall of mirrors between our brains. Chimpanzee group members groom each other for much of the day, negotiating favors in the social hierarchy that also involve food and sex, as nurturing bonds. Yet sometimes, they go on border patrols to capture a female or to chase, beat to death, and even eat the flesh and drink the blood of a lone chimp who might have been a former kin (as they also do when hunting monkeys).3 Humans have done far worse, however, when inspired by the “Social Darwinism” of racism, rationalizing the survival of the cruelest as the fittest, as a super-natural Übermensch beyond morality. This is a potential in all of us, individually and collectively, reflected by the movie screen’s undead vampires and feral werewolves, as lone shape shifters or in clans and packs.
Chapter 4 explored the development of vampires and werewolves across cinema history, with references also to earlier folktales. Nosferatu, Count Dracula, the Werewolf of London, and the Wolf Man, as foreign or exotically infected adults of the 1920s–40s, eventually turned into local teenage vampires and werewolves, female as well as male, in the 1950s. (An Eastern European Dracula also appeared in a series of British films, produced by Hammer Pictures from 1958 to 1974.) Such lone shape shifters returned to the screen in the 1980s as students in high school and college or travelers infected in Europe, again showing the desires and fears of alienated, tragicomic, hormonally charged youths. Black vampires appeared onscreen in the 1970s and 1990s (also with a black vampire slayer in a series that continued into the next decade). Homoerotic vampire couples and families, from the Old and New Worlds, with theatrical and musical groups, appeared in the 1980s–2000s. A high-kicking female slayer of vampires, with her teacher, crew, and tragicomic twists, came to movie and TV screens in the 1990s. Faux historical figures (Jesus Christ and Abraham Lincoln) became vampire hunters, too, in the new millennium. The lonely Romanian vampire, Vlad the Impaler, was also revived in 1992 and 2014. A lone werewolf appeared again, in today’s work world or an older setting, in 1994 and 2010. A lone girl’s menstruation also made her lycanthropic in 2000 and 2004. Yet clans of vampires and packs of werewolves became increasingly popular since the 1980s, with the Underworld and Twilight series having both, as enemies or allies (drawing on their preexisting videogame and young adult novel fans).
Thus, the animal-to-human staging of consciousness within us and the hall of mirrors between our brains (and groups) became reflected in various transformations onscreen—with vampires as undead, bloodsucking, yet charmingly ideal egos and with werewolves as moon-struck, hairy, fanged, and savagely tormented ids. Across the decades they also expressed various modern and postmodern fears, involving superego clashes in the mass movie audience, through conflicts of culture, sex, race, and age identifications: as foreign gentlemen and exotic ladies, homoerotic families, black criminals, rebellious teens, or terrorist tribes. They showed the primal drives of dominance, attraction, and trickery—behind our insatiable desires, social demands, and yearning for a sense of destiny, alone and in groups. Especially when these monsters are portrayed sympathetically, along with their “chosen” slayers, through ironic twists onscreen, a catharsis of particular rasas might occur in viewers’ inner theaters. Beyond fear, contagious panic, vengeful rage, and lustful seeking, a cognitive reappraisal can be evoked, with intimacy and yet distance, refining such feelings into new perspectives. But that also depends on how we watch.
Chapter 5 explored how the hall of mirrors between our brains, exemplified by such films with undead vampires disappearing in mirrors and werewolves changing in the moonlight, involves fun-house-like distortions of the body, displacements of identity, and illusions of immortality exposed by current research on real-life subjects (with rubber hand, enfacement, and head-mounted video experiments). This also reflects our hyper-theatrical “ape ego,” developing through the stages of human childhood with shifting growth spurts and distinctive functions in the right and left hemispheres. Chapter 5 thus set up the investigation of lab-created hybrids and simian civilizations in the next chapter on movies. It also developed further details of the brain’s inner theater with various metaphors that relate to the outer theaters of stage, screen, and everyday life.
First, the “gene-based” logic of infanticide, territoriality, and promiscuity was explored in various mammal species, regarding our bio-cultural evolution of cuteness nurturing, aggressive/defensive, and lustful passions. Next, the mirror awareness of one’s own face and body by most simians was related to its gradual development in the human child—toward social emotions, Self memories, and theories of the other’s mind (involving “mind games” that have also been observed in wild chimps). Growth spurts occur in right and left cortices: the right in the first 18 months, then the left until age 3, the right again until 5, the left until 7, the right until 11, and the left again after that, though to a lesser degree with each swing (Cozolino, Human 70–71). This gives evidence for specific functional shifts, as they develop in the human child and become aspects of our inner theater throughout life. Especially the greater growth spurts in the early years reflect the development of Imaginary, Self-Other awareness functions in the right cortex and then Symbolic, verbal, social identity, and self-deception functions in the left—building to the “terrible twos” of the human toddler’s ape ego.
Even 1-year-old humans have an “intentionality detector” about others’ desires and goals, like other primates. At 15 months, babies expect fairness in food distribution and demonstrate altruistic sharing, perhaps with reciprocal expectations, again like other primates. But in humans this shows a further development of left-cortical, prosocial networks, along with self-assertiveness toward age 2. Self as actor/character becomes redefined by the 2-year-old, who tests the theatrical frame of one’s double in the mirror, challenging others’ desires and demands with a repeated “No” and temper tantrums. Yet, children at that age start to console others in pain, as seen also with some monkeys and apes. Children at age 2 enjoy “pretend play,” showing a sense of others’ beliefs, which relates to the Machiavellian deceptions performed by primates in the wild.
At age 2½, with a shift toward right-cortical growth, children become active deceivers (also showing activity in the right frontal cortex). At age 3, they create as-if scenarios, asking others to join in, and form in- and out-groups, with more empathy toward those like them (even with just the same color of T-shirt). At that age, the child’s impulse control can be increased with Symbolic abstraction (using numbers for candies in a bowl), as shown also in tests with chimps. Yet at age 4, children have a more holistic, right-cortical awareness, a “lantern” of attention rather than a spotlight, more like that demonstrated by chimps who can recollect a pattern of numbers on a checkerboard better than adult humans, using eidetic (photographic) memory. At that age, children also form “best friends” with real and imaginary playmates, while interpreting personality traits in tests with puppet animals.
As early as 18 months, but increasingly toward age 5, children over-imitate adults in tests of following a series of ritual actions to get a prize— unlike chimps who emulate the goal instead and discover a quicker route to the treat. Here we see a crucial difference in the super-natural ape ego of the developing child: a mimetic inclination, along with symbolic powers of language and abstraction, which greatly increases the human learning of cultural behaviors and thus the flexibility of our species in adapting to and transforming new environments. Yet, the protean mimicry of children, upgrading to new levels of creativity, faces a challenge in the teen years.
Hormonal passions evoke primal emotions in the young animal-human, like in the werewolf onscreen, just when the social rules and roles of family and school may come into conflict with peer group pressures. Media ideals of muscular or curvaceous sexiness challenge the teen’s changing self and body images. Oddly like the testosterone-driven female hyena, with a strangely enlarged clitoris that looks like a penis, young human males often exhibit physical aggression to handle confusing changes in gendered identity, while females specialize in psychosocial conflicts. (The hyena-swine-man character, as leader of the tragic rebellion against Dr. Moreau in the 1977 film, expresses both the physical and psychosocial drive for meaningful identity in human adolescents.) Unlike most mammals, the sexual receptiveness of human females, through estrogen and progesterone, also involves testosterone, as if with a degree of male urgency. Thus, the adolescent girl is akin to the hyena in her mix of hormones fueling different passions. Yet testosterone, with its gendered receptors in the human brain, still distinguishes males from females. Men have a more continual sex drive while women are cyclical and mysterious in theirs, especially with hidden ovulation.
Vasopressin, in humans and other animals, also shifts the brain/body toward more masculine pushiness and competitiveness, while oxytocin evokes more feminine tending and befriending—even with today’s changing cultural interpretations of such identities. Indeed, oxytocin fuels nurturing and protective behaviors in both genders, along with confidence, trust, parental play, gloating, and the ability to interpret facial expressions. Thus, testosterone and vasopressin help viewers, both male and female, to identify with masculine warriors onscreen, even in ape-planet movies. But oxytocin helps connect viewers to more feminine characters and psychosocial scenes, which also occur in such films, especially with the female chimp doctor in the original series and the male parenting of an infant chimp in the 2011 version. (The female-dominant, alternatively sexual culture of bonobos has not been shown in the series, even with a nominal character of that species in the 2011 and 2014 versions.)
Brain mapping studies with male college students who were shown erotic film clips revealed arousal activity in limbic and subcortical areas, especially on the right side (Beauregard et al.). But when these males were asked to become detached observers of such erotic scenes, their right lateral prefrontal cortex became active, an area that I describe as the “inner character” of the brain’s theater, because other studies also show that it is involved with mirror self-awareness (on both sides). Hence, awareness of one’s appearance to others and of one’s primal sex drive activates the lateral PFC, especially on the right side. In another study involving female viewers and sad film clips, the right ventromedial PFC (the “inner stage manager” in my model) also became involved, along with the lateral PFC, in the detached observation of one’s own mimetic feelings. A similar study with children showed five times more activation in the LPFC on both sides, suggesting more difficulty for them in detaching from mimetic feelings while watching tragedy onscreen. Teenagers also lack the fully insulated wiring of emotional detachment and self-control networks in the PFC, which develops later in life. This shows the importance for growing brains of mindfulness training in general and of particular rasa-refining films, as well as the danger of cathartic backfire with melodramatic action movies (or videogames), shaping the viewer’s sexual and sadness circuitry.
Like but far beyond other mammals and apes, humans have an advanced “mentalizing system” for theatrical perspective taking, in becoming aware of others’ viewpoints (Matthew Lieberman). I call it the “inner director” because the director’s role in staging a play is to give the actors, designers, and technicians a sense of cohesive aptness—as the creative Other watching their performance choices, prior to the audience becoming involved. This brain network includes hubs in the dorsomedial prefrontal cortex (DMPFC), temporal parietal junction (TPJ), precuneus (PC), and posterior cingulate cortex (PCC). It is also called the “default network,” active when the mind is not focused on a particular task, which shows its importance for our social survival, imagining how others might view us and everything else, like and unlike our own view. Additionally, the brain’s septal area, deep in the limbic system, with many oxytocin receptors and direct ties to the DMPFC, shows a relation between personal pleasure and empathy in helping others, through understanding the other’s viewpoint.
However, the medial prefrontal cortex or MPFC (between the DMPFC and VMPFC) is a distinctive hub for another network, involved with self-knowing based on the prior influence of others. I call this network the “inner actor” because an actor onstage, like a person in everyday life, has a sense of self from past experiences that is distinct from the character being performed at a certain moment. (This is related to Baars’s metaphor for the staging of consciousness, but that involves any percept/concept becoming a player in the spotlight of awareness, which might include the inner actor.) In a study showing erotic film clips, as mentioned earlier, the MPFC and LPFC were active on the right side when subjects imagined a detached view, distancing themselves from the arousal. But in another study, with subjects talking themselves into a distanced viewpoint of aversive pictures, the left LPFC was active. This shows how the right hemisphere more generally, as “mime improviser/scene designer” in my model, connects with the inner character and actor (LPFC and MPFC) in imagining a detached perspective for oneself, while the left hemisphere as “critic/scripter” ties with the inner character (LPFC) in verbalizing such detachment. But there are also many other functions of the right and left hemispheres, taken from Ian McGilchrist’s meta-analysis, which relate to these terms in my model, as listed in Table 5.2in Chapter 5.
Another study on the cognitive reappraisal of aversive (disgusting) photos showed the DMPFC as active (Beauregard et al.), thus relating to the mentalizing or default system as “inner director” in my model, with subjects reflecting on their feelings through the Other within. A study involving young girls showed the MPFC, LPFC, and VMPFC as active when they distanced themselves from sad film clips, observing their own reactions. This involvement of the inner actor, character, and stage manager also relates to the tragicomic twists explored in lab-hybrid and ape-planet movies in Chapter 6, which may distance the viewer toward cognitive reappraisal. Other studies show that the right VMPFC (or OFC) integrates memory, attachment, emotion, bodily regulation, and social cognition (Siegel, Developing 40, 303)—as inner stage manager, I would add, especially in its Imaginary (right cortical) dimension, involving the inner mime
Table 7.1 Summary of Inner Theater/Cinema Elements (simplifying Table 5.1)
| Performance Element | Cognitive/Affective Function | Neurological Hub |
| Applying both theater and filmmaking terms to Self/Other brain functions and areas, through Lieberman's and Zacks's neuroscience research (as well as Baars's cognitive model): | ||
| actor | inner self, yet influenced by oth-ers as mask/prism | MPFC network |
| director | mentalizing system, imagining others' views of oneself | DMPFC network |
| stage/production manager and cinematographer | moral and goal behavior monitor | VMPFC/OFC network |
| character | outer self, recognized in mirror | LPFC network |
| stage itself and film editor | working (short term) memory, rational attention, time chunking, and inhibiting of self-interest | DLPFC network |
| light/sound operator and filmmaking grip | controller of impulses and attitudes | rVLPFC network |
| audience | language, movement, emotional color, intuitional memories | temporal lobes and insula |
| More generally, with McGilchrist's meta-analysis & Panksepp's research: | ||
| critic/scripter | abstract rules and verbal focus | left cortex (senses/actions on right side) |
| mime improviser and scene designer | holistic, contextual, visual, spa-tial, & tonal openness to new percepts | right cortex (left side of body, stronger ties to limbic system and brainstem areas) |
| stagehands | social emotions and pleasure/pain of primary emotions (seeking, rage, fear, panic, care, and play), plus survival/reproduction drives | limbic system (including temporal lobes) and brainstem areas |
improviser/scene designer. Also, the MPFC, with its ties to the VMPFC, creates a meta-cognitive representation of one’s feelings, as inner actor, regarding social and moral behavior, including others’ views. (See Table 7.1.)
Matthew Lieberman’s studies show that teenagers, more than adults, use the DMPFC mentalizing system (inner director), along with the MPFC network (inner actor), when reflecting on the Self, showing the importance of peer and authority pressures on the developing brain. Lieberman even argues (and I would agree) that despite the Western stress on an independent, True Self, as inner self-knowing actor, such an identity masks a “social construction” developing especially in our childhood and teenage years through others’ influences. As I added in Chapter 5, the masks of the inner actor are prisms, absorbing conscious and unconscious scripts and images from others, for self-knowing, self-reflections, and mentalizing projections upon others—in the hall of mirrors between us. There are many potential selves (and ghostly influences of others) within each of us, as beast-people at various levels of our brain, from natural to virtual, tied to our past, current, and projected social networks.
Lieber man finds a shift from left to right VLPFC activity in the “reappraisal” of emotions, involving calmness and mental clarity, plus a diminished amygdala (fear/rage) response. He contrasts this with the “suppression” of emotions, in distracting the brain to avoid feeling and looking distressed, which involves a later VLPFC effort in restraining one’s facial expressions. One might relate this distinction to the Freudian notion of “working through” difficult emotional memories, rather than just “repressing” them. My theory of Artaudian/Brechtian rasa-catharsis also benefits from these distinctions.
Initially, the viewer’s right-cortical (Imaginary) mime improviser/ scene designer becomes immersed in a scene, with Artaudian openness to its emotions while identifying with the main character (in alliance and allegiance), extending what is perceived onstage or within the film frame to larger contexts through personal associations. Then, an ironic, tragicomic twist in the scene (through plot and/or presentation), or a choice by the viewer in how to see and feel it, triggers a shift toward the left-cortical (Symbolic) critic/scripter, reappraising and redrafting the scene with its personal extensions inside the mind, through a distanced Brechtian perspective (and perhaps a laugh). Thus, the scene’s rasa flavors, resonating with the viewer’s (Real) bhava drives, offer calmness and clarity through the cognitive reappraisal of emotions, in a shift back from left to right VLPFC activity, from immersive openness to distance and then to global awareness—not just a VLPFC suppression of emotions. (Further details of rasa-catharsis are given in Table 7.2.) This is also distinct from the more common melodramatic immersion in emotional identifications (and good versus evil stereotypes), experienced as fear, sorrow, and rage in theater or cinema, but often “suppressed” in everyday life. The conventional notion of catharsis, with vicarious participation and then crying or laughter to “purge” such emotions, relates to the simpler sense of VLPFC activity—as the fictional experience and then suppression of remnant feelings, especially with violent entertainment as a distraction from deeper concerns, which may backfire if the stereotypes are evoked again in everyday life.
Chapter 5 explored the different functions of brain hemispheres that we share with most animals: intense emotional responses in the right, with a wider awareness for danger or mating, often inhibited (or transformed) by the left’s narrower focus on goals such as food gathering or hunting—and abstract, analytical, linguistic operations in humans (McGilchrist). In toads, horses, and humans, new stimuli activate the right hemisphere (with ties to the left side of the body) until they fit into (or alter) the left’s categories. Most emotions are more active in the right cortex, with its stronger ties to the limbic system and brainstem areas. But anger is stronger in the left cortex, with dopamine pleasure circuits and a binary operator (in the left parietal lobe)—which relates to the power of melodramas onstage and onscreen, evoking viewer identification with the vengeful rage of the hero against the villain. The left hemisphere, from animals to humans, is also involved with objectifying prey and using tools—as in the objectifying of a
Table 7.2 Possible Steps of Rasa-Catharsis
| 1. | The playful space around a stage or screen shifts the viewer's background emotion (mood) from malaise toward well-being and from stress to calm, yet with fictional malaise and stress. |
| 2. | Sympathetic identification is engaged, plus pleasure/pain with the main character(s), through initial plot conflicts, facial expressions and gestures, vocal tones, scenic images, sound effects, and music. This involves mirror/intuition neurons and emotional contagion between the viewer's inner actor/character/ director/stage-manager/operator/audience/stagehands and scenes onstage or onscreen—also involving the inner improviser/designer and critic/scripter. |
| 3. | Primal emotions are evoked, fictional yet real, such as fear at the villain's threats, sorrow and rage at the victim's suffering, and courage in the hero taking revenge or stopping the villain, against overwhelming odds. Social and moral emotions may also be evoked. (See Table 1.1.) But this involves paradoxical contradictions as the viewer sees tragicomic flaws in the hero's efforts or sensible motivations in the villain's acts. |
| 4. | Such ironic edges, along with the viewer's choices in how to watch, alter the viewer's perspective and feelings (through plot twists and recognition scenes, according to Aristotle). This occurs from the hero's initial situation, challenges, conflicts with villains, ties to victims, and commitment toward a course of action, through increasing conflicts and potential changes in the hero, toward the climax and resolution of the overall conflict with the villain/antagonist. |
| 5. | The viewer's inner theatre changes via moments of awareness at sympathetic impulses with those onstage/onscreen, through immersion in the fictional action and yet a distancing effect at ironic twists (as in the theories of Antonin Artaud and Bertolt Brecht). |
| 6. | Shifts occur from right-cortical emotion to left-cortical analysis, grasping new sensations and perspectives, with a shift again toward right-cortical openness, letting go of prior concepts, especially in-group/out-group projections. |
| 7. | There is a refinement of the viewer's bhavas through such shifts of hot/cold emotional perspectives, evoking inner mimesis and yet critical questions, with resonance & distance in the savoring of rasas (as aesthetic flavors and cognitive reappraisals)—perhaps also with Brechtian motives for social as well as personal change. |
monster that must be slayed with certain tools (like a stake in the vampire’s case), unless the film also evokes sympathy for the beast-person, through tragicomic twists and a new right-cortical awareness.
Studies have found that the right hemisphere is used more for facial expression and recognition, involving the left side of the face and left visual field, in certain species of birds, sheep, and monkeys, as well as humans. This also relates to facial expressions and other subtle gestures on the movie screen, evoking the viewer’s mirror neuron mimicry and emotional contagion. (Pain mimicry specifically involves the right anterior cingulate cortex.) Babies are more often held on the left side by chimps, gorillas, and humans, increasing the right-cortical, emotional attunement. Such attunement might also occur between the viewer’s inner theater and the screen’s emotional seductions. Regarding the limbic system, this would involve more of the left amygdala for conscious emotional representations and the right for unconscious processing.
The left hemisphere’s “conscious verbal self” tends to rationalize or inhibit the right’s unconscious intuitions (Timothy Wilson). It also tends to be overly optimistic, while the right is better at perceiving deceit, with more attention to the other’s eyes (while the left attends to the mouth). So the eventual triumph of the hero over the villain, despite great odds against him, in action movie melodramas, confirms left-cortical, stereotypical, optimistic pleasures—and their “stickiness” against the right’s perceptions (as McGilchrist puts it). But a complex film with tragicomic twists might connect more with the right’s suspicions and alternative perspectives. Right frontal delay and left frontal distancing may also be evoked, in relation to circuits toward the back of the viewer’s brain. Right and left, front and rear areas of the cortex become significant, too, regarding depression and mania in humans, related to the freezing and fleeing instincts in animals.
Even 10-month-old babies show greater left prefrontal activity when watching a movie actress smiling and more right when watching her crying. This happens with adults also: more left with amusing or uplifting videos, evoking detachment, and more right with frightening or disgusting videos, triggering a sense of danger or immorality. Yet Richard Davidson’s research on this found great variability between viewers, which he eventually defined as different “Emotional Styles,” involving degrees of Resilience, Outlook, Social Intuition, Self-Awareness, Attention, and Sensitivity to Context. Davidson has demonstrated that Resilience and Outlook are malleable through mindfulness training, which increases left prefrontal activity. I would relate this to the potential for rasa-catharsis to alter a viewer’s emotional style in theater and cinema as well. This involves a crucial separation yet interplay between brain hemispheres, in the spreading “inner tree” of consciousness, especially left-cortical, prosocial controls versus right-cortical, alternative freedoms—which often play out in political theaters and on movie screens, as a clash of moral tribes.
Chapter 5 concluded with recent research on the “rubber hand illusion” and “body swapping.” Such experiments suggest how the movie viewer’s body image and sense of Self might merge with the fictional figures onscreen. Once the illusion is created of a rubber hand, or a tabletop, as an extension of one’s body (involving right frontal and parietal brain areas) through synchronous sight and touch, then bending the rubber finger backward or hitting the table with a hammer evokes an automatic nervous system response, as if damaging to one’s Self. Although the subject knows the rubber hand is just rubber, or the tabletop is not a part of one’s body, the reshaping of identity disrupts that left-cortical, categorical knowledge. This shows how readily a movie viewer’s sense of Self might be affected, consciously or not, through identifications with screen characters, their bodies, and their animal-human transformations, as well as physical and emotional wounds. Even more akin to movies, a head-mounted video display can make the subject feel that a manikin or another person, sliced by a knife, is one’s own body, through a simple exchange in visual viewpoints—like a cut between angles onscreen.
Experiments also show that implicit antiracial bias can be altered in subjects who experienced the illusion with a rubber hand of a different skin color. This suggests that cross-racial identifications by movie viewers may change their in-group/out-group prejudices, depending on how stereotypes are challenged by ironic twists in plot and character expectations. Yet, such expectations are sticky (with left-cortical presumptions) as shown in an experiment that caused one group of viewers, given a stimulant, to laugh more at a short comedy, but found that they reported it as not being any more enjoyable than others who got a placebo or tranquilizer—with their ratings influenced by prior experiences with that type of film and its star.
Identification with another person’s face onscreen, or “enfacement,” has also been measured in the laboratory. It occurs more readily with beautiful faces. Thus, the sticky prejudices of beauty and racial ideals, or their binary opposites, might evoke or block face identifications by movie viewers. Yet the mostly unconscious (right cortical) malleability of one’s body image and sense of Self offers an opportunity for viewers to engage with characters onscreen, across in-group/out-group and beauty/ugliness stereotypes. This can happen especially with beast-people films that evoke a mix of fear and desire, along with other paradoxical emotions, at rasacathartic moments, building toward transformative challenges and changes of the viewer’s inner theater. But the details of that depend on numerous personal associations, in the particular memory, fantasy, and projection networks of each brain.
Chapter 6 explored possibilities of such rasa-cathartic twists in beast-people films that reflect fears of a godlike scientist, manipulating animal-human subjects in a lab, or of “apes” doing that someday to humans, in a vengeful clash of our evolving cultures. It considered recent experiments that show the predilection of young children to attribute agency, design, and purpose to all living things, intuitively believing in a “creator.” The films based on H. G. Wells’s The Island of Dr. Moreau reflect this “natural” inclination toward super-natural belief, but also a fear of science, with a “genius” conducting ruthless experiments as creator-parent. The 1932 version shows Depression Era fears of class revolution, colonial hubris, and biotechnology—even prior to World War II and Auschwitz—with sympathy evoked for the subhuman creations of the mad doctor, even as they rebel violently against his “Law.” Despite the expected framework of a melodramatic adventure movie, the viewer’s identifications are shifted, through tragicomic twists. Through the hero’s noble fight against a ship captain, his romance with the island’s Panther-Woman, and then his disgust with her as a beast-person and with Moreau as a cruel experimenter, the viewer may experience a fear of, yet sympathetic rage with the creatures that rebel, first against the Sayer of the Law and then against their godlike creator. Various rasas are evoked and potentially refined, especially through reflections onscreen of the viewer’s inner actor/character, director, and stage manager, with beautiful and odious creatures, a fearful scientist-puppeteer, and his morally troubled assistant and visitor.
In the post-Vietnam, 1977 version, ironic sympathies and fears are elucidated, even about the island’s visitor, as heroic surrogate for the movie viewer, and yet as bestial. The visitor’s love interest is not a Panther Woman, but she does have a wild cat as a pet. The visitor also meets a Bear-Man in Moreau’s lab, whose “natural instincts” are reduced and thus his body transformed by the doctor’s injections, from animal to human, in an anti-werewolf direction. But when the visiting hero rebels against Moreau, mating with his daughter and threatening to leave the island with her, the scientist uses an opposite serum against him, making him bestial with full-body hair like a werewolf. After the beast-people rebel and kill Moreau, the animal-human hero tries to raise his corpse like a scarecrow with faux immortality. But that only delays their destruction of his compound and of themselves.
In the post-Rwandan-genocide, 1996 version, the beast-people are initially sympathetic but become even more monstrous, evoking a range of rasas for the viewer. Yet the island’s visitor also kills at the start of the film, in a struggle to survive against other humans, with dwindling supplies on their lifeboat, before he is rescued. This is ironic, too, because the visitor was on a UN peace mission when his plane crashed in the ocean and he became a brutal survivor. Moreau’s assistant (Montgomery) acquires perverse traits as well, as drug user, drug pusher, and Moreau-god mimic. Moreau himself appears as clownish, yet with scenes showing his calm fatherly compassion for the frightened visitor, for the troubled teen Panther-Woman (who develops sharp teeth and claws like a werewolf), for his other house-servant children, and for the rebellious fieldworker beast-people, even the reckless Hyena-Swine. Thus, various rasas are stirred throughout the film, especially with Moreau’s death at his creatures’ hands, tearing him to pieces offscreen after they learn (from Hyena-Swine) to tear out the pain chip that their “father” implanted in their bodies as an obedience device, and with further cruelties in their revolution. Such scenes elicit sorrow, disgust, awe, courage, fear, and anger, through different perspectives, involving viewers’ VMPFC stage manager and limbic stagehands (especially the ventral striatum, insula, and dorsal ACC) for fairness and pleasure/pain networks, both social and physical. This challenges viewers’ body-swapping and hierarchical ape-ego identifications from earlier in the film, toward a reappraisal of their own chimeric impulses.
In a parallel with the mad scientist Moreau and his Panther-Woman daughter, the 1942 film, Cat People, posits a backstory of Serbian village folk who use satanic magic to turn themselves into wild animals. The film’s femme fatale, Irena, evokes tragic sympathy, as well as audience fear, as a victim of her predatory ancestry, in the multicultural lab of a modern New York City, when she changes into a panther through rivalry with another woman for her man. The 1982 remake presents brother and sister were-panthers, shifting the setting to the black magic or “voodoo” aura of New Orleans. This suggests also the threat of the Black Panther movement in the 1970s, although both were-panthers are white. The older sibling, Paul, wants to have sex with his sister, Irena, because he is cursed with becoming a panther whenever he feels lust. He must kill then, as the beast, in order to return to human form. Rejected by her, the Panther-Paul is killed by a female zookeeper. But Irena is turned into her panther form by a male zookeeper who makes love to her, while she is tied up, and then cages her for her own good. Thus, the zookeepers become slayers and Law-Sayers, containing the wild beast-people, through romantic rivalries and passions. This reflects the inner (left cortical) critic/scripter of movie viewers inhibiting, yet also renegotiating its powers with the (right cortical) mime improviser/scene designer. But the 1982 version shows different fears from the 1942 original: of the animal-Other within one’s own culture and family, not from an exotic Eastern European country with its folk magic and world war threats.
Further tragicomic ironies are shown involving left-cortical, obsessive, objectifying functions with the mad scientist in The Fly series, especially in the 1958 original and 1986 remake (though not as much in their sequels). In the 1958 version, a meticulous inventor ignores family distractions to perfect his teleportation device, but accidentally swaps bodies with a fly, producing two hybrids with human and insect parts. The one with a human body but fly head and hand pleads for help from his wife to be fed, understood, and then mercifully killed as he fails to reconstitute his ape-human ego and body. Many of the eight rasas may be evoked along the way, as the viewer takes the wife’s as well as the scientist’s perspective: romance, awe, fear, disgust, heroic courage, rage, sorrow, and even humor (at the human-headed fly, an inverted double of the genius-inventor with a fly head, pleading for help at the end, while caught in a spider web, instead of asking heroically for death). These rasas, refined by ironic juxtaposition, raise a cognitive awareness of the viewer’s own emotional impulses through new perspectives—depending on how each viewer watches the film.
The 1986 version focuses more on the inventor’s horrifying hubris, propelled by a new mate whom he meets at a party, takes to his lab, and has sex with. This inspires his teleportation error, though he sees it as improving his body and brain toward super-natural skills, in a radical alteration of left-cortical rationality, obsessiveness, and optimism, right-cortical openness, and limbic/brainstem drives. His former girlfriend, a science journalist, agrees to videotape his gradual transformation into a Kafkaesque wingless bug, becoming more vicious, gene driven, and monstrous as a humanoid insect—until she gets too disgusted and fearful to be with him. He then tries to mate with her again, so as to produce a further chimeric offspring. He also dismembers a male human rival, showing ruthless rage. Yet the scientist-inventor retains his courageous wit while struggling with a changing body and hybrid powers, which eventually incapacitate him, evoking sympathetic sorrow and dark humor, as well as fear, disgust, and awe, in movie viewers. The film also reflects increasing fears in the 1980s of sexual wildness, AIDS, and technological monsters— although the inventor tries to view his disease as having a “purpose” that will benefit mankind.
The godlike purpose of human science and technology, to discover nature’s mechanisms and improve on them, is questioned further in the 2009 film, Splice. A couple of scientists, who are romantically involved, defy their corporate bosses to persist in their biotech discoveries. They create a new hybrid species and nurture the plant-animal-human infant until it changes its form and gender, from big-brained but strange-legged child with a barbed tail to dangerous femme fatale and then to primal demonic threat for both parents. This also involves the female scientist’s haunting memories of being abused as a child by her mother—and the male scientist’s betrayal of her while drawn to his hybrid daughter as she grows toward sexual maturity, before changing into a male. The “mom”-scientist even operates on her offspring (like Moreau), amputating the barbed tip of her tail after it killed a pet cat. But is this operation pragmatic (with a genetically modified monster), or vengeful (against the sexy daughter who also mated with the scientist dad), or repeating a childhood trauma?
Such multiple dimensions in the scientist-parent and were-animal motifs shift audience identifications in radical ways. We may sympathize with the courageous bio-engineers fighting the big bad company to discover medical cures but fear their tragic hubris in taking the godlike experimenting too far. We might also fear the wild monster they create, especially when it seems like an invasive alien, yet feel an oxytocin-fueled love for it, as a child in a dress. At times, we may view it with disgust but then also with awe as it transforms, like and unlike a human. We might experience rage and yet sorrow, along with the two scientists, as she battles the maternal demon inside her, as he struggles with incestuous desires, and as they fight each other and then their super-natural teen. These shifts evoke and reflect our inner-theater elements, our own ape egos, and our multi-mirrored morphing relationships of animal-human signaling and transgression—which can create personal and group rivalries, but also rasa-cathartic compassion.
The Planet of the Apes series explored the ape-ego rivalries of our neural and political theaters more directly: initially with five sci-fimovies in the 1960s to 1970s and then with three in the 2000s to 2010s. In the Civil Rights Era, the first film (The Planet of the Apes, 1968) turned the tables on the Western domination of others by having an American astronaut, Taylor, crash land on a planet where he becomes a colonized subject. He also finds primitive humans there that are mute slaves and experimental subjects controlled by talking gorilla warriors, chimp scientists, and orangutan ministers, who have early modern weapons and religious beliefs. His shipmates from the spacecraft are even more objectified: a black man killed and stuffed in a museum and another white man made obedient with a large surgery scar on his skull. Taylor escapes, though, with the help of a female chimp scientist who realizes he can speak intelligently, but hides that from most of the other apes. The astronaut, barely covered by animal skins (or shown naked from behind) fights off the racist apes, gathers a native girl with him, kisses the chimp scientist on the lips in parting, and discovers to his horror that he is actually on a future earth, destroyed by nuclear war. This surprise ending, with a mostly buried Statue of Liberty, recycles the viewer through the various allegorical warnings of the film, engaging specific inner-theater networks, personal associations, and collective rasas, as if saying: evolve your culture in a better way or this could be your descendants’ fate.
The four sequels in the 1960s to 1970s played upon nuclear annihilation and communist revolution anxieties as well as civil (animal and human) rights issues. They also evoked tragicomic twists through further ape sympathies and fears. And they continued a trans-historical question given at the end of the first film. Are we humans an aberrant species, “a devil’s pawn,” that will inevitably destroy the world, because of our brilliance as a wild yet technological “beast” which, alone among the apes, “kills for sport or lust or greed”? In other ape species, males may indeed kill out of genetic lust or greed, especially when taking another male’s mate and destroying her infants, or when taking power as alpha. Females in many mammalian species also kill their infants to conserve resources. But we humans have extended this genetic rationale of self and kin, of survival and reproduction, into vast cultural aims to sacrifice oneself for the extended kinship of clan or country or religion and to take territories across the globe, through genocide and slavery in many historical periods, even our own. Yet we also have highly reflective, inner theater and outer social networks to alter ourselves, regarding the first film’s warning: “Beware the beast, man. . . .” Movies today may help us or harm us in playing with that bio-cultural evolution of animal-human morality.
The second movie (Beneath the Planet of the Apes, 1970) showed an advanced society of radiation-scarred, mutant, telepathic humans who live underground, in the ruins of New York City, and worship a totemic nuclear missile from the film’s own period. Sexual and social revolutions are also suggested with the primitively dressed Nova and with young chimps holding signs in protest of the gorilla armies marching into the Forbidden Zone where the underground humans live (also suggesting prehistoric cave artists). But the movie turns cynical about such 1960s ideals, as gorilla warriors dominate the ape agenda and the mutant telepaths, with the astronauts’ help, destroy the earth in a nuclear explosion—shown then to the movie viewer at a godlike, outer-space distance. It seemed as if the movie series might have to end there, too, with a raging, fearsome, and awe-inspiring rasa warning.
Yet the filmmakers found a way to continue, returning the series to earth. In the third film (Escape from the Planet of the Apes, 1971), Zira and Cornelius, along with the chimp-genius Milo, somehow rebuild the American spaceship that crashed on their planet and travel to the earth of our time. Ironically, the chimps are at first kept in a zoo by the humans, like the astronaut in the future had been by them, and Milo is strangled to death by a gorilla in the cage next to theirs. But soon, Zira and Cornelius become the toast of New York City, as intelligent, speaking chimps from the future. Forces become allied against them, however, showing our current intolerance for wisdom in other species and races. Authorities fear a consciousness-raising revolution, with these advanced apes, that will send the human world in the direction of annihilation, which the chimp scientists have foreseen (along with movie fans). Zira and Cornelius are sacrificed but their baby survives, hidden in a circus cage as an ordinary, subhuman ape. This encourages further identifications of viewers’ inner theaters with the chimp characters and their human allies, against the government villains, involving rasas of sorrow (at Milo’s death), joy (at the chimps’ initial celebrity), courage (at their struggle to survive with their offspring), rage (at their killers), and tragicomic sorrow/joy again (at their demise yet the baby’s first spoken word at the end of the film, “Mama”).
The fourth film (Conquest of the Planet of the Apes, 1972) showed the rise of that baby as “Caesar,” the Messiah-like leader of an ape revolution against the humans in the near future. His only human allies are Latino and Black, again suggesting Civil Rights alliances. However, as his name suggest, Caesar becomes tempted toward imperial power, especially when he and the other apes want revenge on the humans, through their successful, collective violence. This offers an ironic twist for viewers cheering the apes’ melodramatic fight against fascist oppressors—and connects, through tragicomic rasas, with viewers who fear the dangers of righteous vigilantes or communist revolutionaries, on either side of the political spectrum (or terrorist insurgents today). Yet Caesar becomes cathartically aware of the apes’ rage toward vengeance with the help of a female chimp who gazes at him with an imploring “No,” the first word by any of the other apes in the film. Caesar tells the apes to put down their weapons and promises that they will dominate the humans humanely, with “compassion and understanding”—evoking the ninth rasa of peace.
The fifth film (Battle for the Planet of the Apes, 1973) again involves a melodramatic battle between good apes and evil humans, yet also another between the apes. This time the humans are “mutants” who survived a nuclear war by living underground, but then attack the apes to acquire their fertile territory. After Caesar leads the apes in repelling the mutant humans, his rivalry with a certain gorilla general resurfaces. The militant gorillas almost assassinate Caesar, but he maintains his alpha “savior” role with the help of a wise orangutan, who reveals that the rival general killed Caesar’s son, breaking the sacred law of “Ape does not kill ape.” Caesar kills the general, getting heroic revenge, which movie viewers might cheer. But he also stops the apes from getting further revenge against his innocent human friends, who had been imprisoned by the general and almost killed. This ironic twist might make viewers pause, too, and consider in their own lives the emotions of vengeful violence (sorrow, rage, fear, and courage), even if it seems righteous—with more regard for the victims’ perspectives, whether innocent or not.
Chapter 6 also explored the three remakes of the Planet of the Apes series in our new millennium, regarding sci-fi extensions of our ape egos, territorial rivalries, vengeful violence, and yet kinship kindness. A new Planet of the Apes was released in 2001, after Y2K fears and just two months before the 9/11 terrorist attacks in the United States. It again involves an astronaut crash landing on a planet in the far future (but this time it is “Ashlar” in 5021, where everyone somehow speaks his language). He tries to escape bondage, along with some primitive human friends, in an ape-run society with elements of our own, including a decadent upper class. Again, there is a sexy, animal-skin clad, native human female for the astronaut and a female chimp love interest who helps the humans escape. However, in this version the native humans can speak and the apes move in more natural or super-natural ways, running on all fours and with powerful leaps. The ape warriors again ride horses, but wear heavier armor and fight without guns—in a premodern style. There is a comical orangutan slave-trader and a bellicose chimp general with a hunchback like that of Richard III. He functions in the film’s melodrama as a somewhat sympathetic villain and trickster, fighting brutally, yet cleverly to continue his alpha role over the gorilla warriors, wealthy apes, and escaped humans. He is also shown in a poignant scene with his dying father and then later trapped in a crashed space station, as ape temple, when he falls from power.
More ironically, another chimp (played by an actual chimp) appears as a deus ex machina, like Caesar as Messiah to the apes in the earlier series. But here, the apes soon lose their awe at the god’s return and the humans must fight for freedom with technological, instead of divine weapons. In a further, tragicomic twist, the human astronaut returns to what appears to be earth, crashing near the Lincoln Memorial, but in a different time-space parallel, on a planet where the chimps have created an Abe-like historical god (putting a further ironic spin on the film’s trickster-villain). Such twists complicate the typical action-movie rasas of sorrow, rage, romance, fear, and courage, spicing the viewer’s awareness with humor, disgust, and ironic awe. Thus, the film offers not only postmodern winks at the spectators’ prior knowledge of the series, but also a cathartic reappraisal of the emotions circulating between our inner theaters and the silver screen.
The playfully perverse, somewhat satirical “reboot” of the Planet series in 2001 turned more respectful with a brain-enhancement, animal-rights version of the rise of Caesar, in 2011 and 2014, involving viral epidemic and culture clash fears from recent decades. Like the Island films, the 2011 movie, Rise of the Planet of the Apes, starts with scientists experimenting on animals for biomedical reasons. As in Splice, a scientist nurtures a baby lab creature, rebelling against a corporate demand that the animal’s life and such experiments be ended. But the baby chimp’s brain has been enhanced with a viral drug the scientist was developing, which it absorbed from its dead mother. The scientist nurtures it with his father’s help, although his father is suffering from Alzheimer’s dementia. The scientist tries the drug on his father, without the company’s permission, when he sees its effect on the developing brain of their chimp child. Thus, oxytocin-fueled bonding and nurturing circuits are shown in two male mothers with a male chimp offspring, saved from death at the lab, evoking right-cortical empathy from viewers regarding animal treatment and unconventional family structures, along with hopes for left-cortical scientific cures.
The use of computer graphics and motion capture technologies, to create more realistic and expressive ape characters, in this film and its sequel, alters viewers’ empathic, ape ego, body-swapping ties to the screen. We see little Caesar turn gestures into sign language, while interacting with the facial expressions of the human characters around him. The virtual yet realistic images of a baby, then adolescent, and then adult chimp become extensions of the viewer’s Imaginary interactions with the movie, through mirror-neuron mimesis and emotional contagion. With their brains signaling to mimic Caesar’s actions and facial emotions, especially through responses by the parental actors onscreen, viewers accept that the animated chimp could be real—in scenes that were filmed without it or with an actor in a motion-capture suit—adding a greater reality to the screen via their inner theaters.
The adoptive, cross-species parenting performed by the scientist and his father in this film has been found in real-life animals as well. But it is usually done by females, even by predators who nurture a baby rather than eating it, after killing its mother (Hrdy, Mothers 209–11). Within our species, unlike nonhuman apes, we evolved a “cooperative breeding” style, with the birth mother often getting help from others, especially kin, but also from “wet mothers” as servants (30, 206). Thus, oxytocin circuits (evoked in viewers with the chimp development scenes in this film) are crucial to our high capacity for collaboration with others, through shared intentions, goals, and action plans that reach far beyond our fellow apes’, as does our sharing of childcare (9–11, 138). Likewise, dopamine reward centers are active when mothers look at photos of their smiling babies (213)—and probably within male and female viewers when the infant Caesar smiles onscreen.
This pleasure at a smiling infant also involves activity in the OFC/ VMPFC stage manager, even when adults are shown pictures of unfamiliar infants (Hrdy, Mothers 220). It suggests, too, that human morality, in the huge and highly complex social groups of our ape species, may be based in our “attachment” experiences as infants, as well as our ability to care for others’ children. Various studies have shown that babies with multiple caretakers grow up feeling secure, with “more enhanced capacities to view the world from multiple perspectives” (132). Movies, as I have been arguing throughout this book, might also help us to feel secure enough to engage with fictional conflicts and increase, through rasa-cathartic twists, our perspective-taking capacities.
The first half of this ape-planet film focuses on the brain-enhanced Caesar, developing from child to adolescent, in the care of the scientist and his new girlfriend, as well as his father. But a conflict arises when Caesar (with white sclerae in his eyes, signaling more expressively like us) sees that he is similar to a dog on a chain, while on a walk with his human caretakers. He asks existential questions and learns from the scientist how his mother was killed in the lab. Another conflict occurs when Caesar tries to protect the scientist’s father (whose dementia is increasing), in a confrontation with an angry neighbor, and the chimp’s protective rage emerges as bestial in public. The scientist-parent is forced to put Caesar in a “shelter” where he eventually takes an alpha role, administers the stolen viral drug to his fellow apes, and speaks with them through sign language (subtitled in the film). He leads them in escaping from the shelter and its abusive handlers, in freeing other apes in a zoo and the lab, where they become like terrorists to the human authorities, taking a violent vengeance on building structures. But Caesar also leads the apes in crossing the Golden Gate Bridge toward the redwoods, despite a fierce battle with humans trying to stop them. Thus, viewers’ rasas are altered across various perspectives, involving emotional resonance and yet critical distancing, with and against Caesar: (1) in his territorial conflict with the neighbor and alpha competition/cooperation with other apes, (2) through his trickery in staying at the shelter instead of going home with the scientist and in stealing the viral drug to enhance his fellow apes’ brains, (3) in his outwitting and punishing of human handlers at the shelter, and (4) with his leading the apes as terrorist invaders of San Francisco, yet also as criminal fugitives or displaced refugees seeking a true shelter in the redwoods.
The eighth film, Dawn of the Planet of the Apes, was released in the summer of 2014, a few months before Ebola outbreaks in West Africa and elsewhere on the globe, carried by airline travelers. Coincidentally, a similar but more extensive plague was shown at the end of the 2011 film with the fictional, brain-enhancing, viral drug becoming deadly to humans. The sequel in 2014 begins with Caesar’s tribe (10 years later) hunting deer with spears and living in a beautiful, orderly, forest village—although with dangers, too, as a bear attacks Caesar’s son and they are both saved by the bonobo Koba. This romantic ideal of the “noble savage” contrasts with how the humans are shown, also in a small tribe, but as traumatized survivors of the worldwide viral plague, sheltered in the ruins of San Francisco, and running out of the technological power they need to survive. Territorial threats occur, with incursions from each side, as the humans enter the ape area to fix a hydroelectric dam—recalling to viewers, perhaps, the battles over territory and oil reserves in recent Middle East wars. The apes, with painted faces, also offer a “show of force” by entering the ruined city on horseback—reminiscent of Indians evoking fear and awe in white settlers and their viewers during Wild West movies from earlier decades.
But despite the melodramatic stereotypes and escalating battle scenes, alpha rivalries are shown within each tribe, complicating the viewer’s alignments and allegiances. Malcolm argues with Dreyfus about developing trust with the apes, to solve the human techno-power problem, and this works at first. Yet Dreyfus’s defensive measures prove right, after distrust arises on each side, emerging in specific ways. Koba (scarred by human lab tests and not acting like lovemaking bonobos in the wild) saves the lives of Caesar and his son, but then fights with that alpha-friend about loving humans more than apes. Koba avenges the shooting of another chimp by a human, but later kills that same chimp (Ash) when he feels betrayed— and betrays his friend, Caesar, as their rivalry grows. Koba may initially charm the viewer with his laughing antics at the armory, just as he tricks two humans while stealing their weapon and shooting them, thus shocking the viewer at his cruel cleverness. When he also makes Caesar fall, tricking the other apes into blaming the humans, movie viewers see his further villainy. And yet, there is a tragic twist in Caesar’s revenge against the villain. He must rationalize his own violation of a sacred rule (shown at the start of this film as well as earlier in the series): “Ape not kill ape.”
In another ironic twist, Dreyfus turns into a suicide-bomber against the Koba-led apes, destroying the metal tower that they both killed many others to control. This might provoke movie viewers to think again about their rasas in the us-against-them battle scenes (or in current cultural parallels). And that is precisely what I have tried to identify with the many film examples in this book, using inner theater and rasa-catharsis models. Even in popular, money-making, “escapist” entertainment, there may be tragicomic, Artaudian-Brechtian, emotional resonating yet critical distancing twists that engage various rasas and inner-theater elements in ironic ways. If we value such movies (and TV shows and videogames) with tragicomic edges, encouraging their challenges to us, with how we watch and discuss them, a spreading ripple effect in our culture is produced. This may evoke a more mindful awareness across many brain theaters about the primal alienation, violent impulses, and collective signaling in our evolutionary successes and current dangers as dominant, attractive, and tricky beast-people.
Wildness in humans involves objectifying one another beyond the limiting patterns of animal instincts, even while fueled by remnant instinctual drives. Whether idealized through erotic desire or demonized with horror and rage, or ridiculed with laughter, humans may appear as bestial objects that attract and repel us—as vampires, werewolves, lab hybrids, and civilized apes onscreen, entertaining us at a safe, enticing distance. Camaraderie is also evoked in the audience, in the fight against such beast-people, with a romantic duo or “slayer” team (or scientist-creators as lawgivers) versus the demon or pack, even when involving sympathetic monsters, like the Cullens, against others that seem worse. But slayers versus beast-people in melodramatic battles may confirm stereotypes of heroes and villains, activating emotional circuits of our inner theaters: from brainstem, limbic stagehands (with fear, rage, and in-group/out-group passions) to left-cortical critic/scripters (projecting binary, good against evil schemas).
Movies have been doing this, in various genres, for over a century. For example, in 1915, D. W. Griffith’s silent film, Birth of a Nation, presented blacks as beastly villains and white-robed Ku Klux Klan members on horseback as heroic slayers, saving other whites. This may promote identifications with such slayers outside the movie theater, who fight against the fearful terrorist monsters, exercising rather than exorcizing violent emotions in viewers’ brains. (Birth of a Nation was a mass-audience hit when it premiered and was used for decades thereafter as a recruiting tool by the KKK.) The conventional attempt at a cathartic venting of emotions, in theater, cinema, TV, or videogames, can backfire, as studies show, increasing aggressive tendencies, especially in children (Craig Anderson et al.; Zacks 113–35). Through melodramatic and participatory formulas, outer theaters may capitalize on the addictive habits of viewers and gamers, extending primal drives of lust and survival—with oxytocin, dopamine, and opioid networks transforming the inner theaters of those watching, even to the point of acting out, beyond the screen.
Such “cathartic backfire” involves a realignment of inner-theater elements—from the easy, entertaining, yet addictive violence of melodramatic good-versus-evil onscreen to its ripple effect of aggressions in real life, in minor mimetic acts or major copycat crimes. Viewer identifications may shift (in Murray Smith’s terms) from “alignment” with righteous slayers to “allegiance” with their vigilante violence—through right-cortical mime-improviser attunement. This could increase the brain circuits for acting impulsively, or acting out vengeful fantasies, given similar stereotypes of victims and villains, beyond the movie’s dreamlike rehearsal spaces.4
Yet tragicomic twists onscreen may provide an antidote to cathartic backfire for many viewers (or videogame players). Such ironic, antiheroic twists might provoke a further shift of viewer’s inner-theater circuits, balancing the self-conscious character of left-LPFC verbal and right-LPFC imagistic reappraisals of limbic emotional stagehands, triggered by the action onscreen. This may spur a more mindful, reflective thinking, with a “dismantling” of the brain’s top-down, left-cortical stereotypes, as “auto-matic classifications,” because of a shift to right-cortical “imagery-based processing” through the present flow of working memory, in the DLPFC editor, instead of relying on long-term memory patterns (Siegel, Mindful 248–51). Such a metacognitive “de-automatizing” awareness (Kang et al.), along with personal associations in watching a film (or playing a videogame), might also involve the MPFC actor reassessing one’s alignment/allegiance—in relation to the VMPFC stage manager’s monitoring of moral behavior and the DMPFC director’s sense of others’ views, as reflected by the screen.
According to psychologists Jonathan Haidt and Craig Joseph, there may be an inherited, animal-to-human basis for fundamental aspects of morality. Their research shows that both humans and nonhuman apes make intuitive moral judgments about minimizing suffering, supporting fairness, respecting hierarchical authorities, being loyal to group bonds, and maintaining cleanliness. These “universal moral modules” in today’s human brain probably evolved through natural and cultural selection, from our ape and hominin, hunter-gatherer ancestors (Gazzaniga, Who’s 172–73). They involve right-cortical perceptions of others’ motives, through emotion simulations and expectations, which are then rationalized by left-cortical judgments (174–76). In reaction to moral intuition and reasoning (in the right and left cortices), a specific brain area, the right dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, inhibits self-interest for the sake of fairness—especially as children learn particular social norms (176–78; Steven Anderson et al.). Thus, the inner “film editor,” as I have called it, redefines one’s sense of self, regarding personal appetites and desires, yet also fairness to others (involving the inner stagehands, stage manager, actor, character, and intuitive audience networks).
Recently, Haidt has added “liberty” to his list of moral foundations, derivable from ape observations, and put them into abstract terms with binary opposites. The list also involves characteristic emotions, as shown in Table 7.3, mostly using Haidt’s terms, but with a few added in relation to Table 1.1, in Chapter 1. I would also note that the animal instinct to fight for freedom changes greatly in various human contexts, depending on how one feels trapped or how the ideal of freedom seems threatened. Humans can feel free while in a cage if believing that their sacrifice is for a higher good. Humans can also experience too much freedom, without a meaningful purpose in life, as a trap. Haidt has argued, with data from online surveys involving tens of thousands of volunteers at YourMorals.org, that libertarians are more concerned about the first two binaries in this list, liberals with the first three, and social conservatives with all six (Righteous 297–306).
Haidt values the “breadth” of conservatives’ strong concern for all six moral foundations, although he calls himself a “Durkheimian utilitarian” not aligned with the Republican Party (Righteous 372n36). He suggests, with section titles in his book’s final chapter, that liberals are “yin,” while libertarians and conservatives are “yang.” He does not explore these gendered or Daoist associations further, except to recommend that we shift from Manichaean, good-versus-evil polarities “to a more respectful and constructive yin-yang disagreement” (312). But Haidt’s characterization of liberals as yin relates to what I have been describing in this book as
Table 7.3 Haidt and Joseph’s Moral Foundations Theory (with added elements in brackets) adapted from Haidt and Joseph’s “Intuitive Ethics,” plus Haidt’s Righteous Mind (125)
| Ape [or Animal] Observation | Human Emotion | Moral Binary (Good/Evil) |
| [fighting for freedom] | [rage] | liberty/oppression |
| supporting fairness | anger, gratitude, guilt | fairness/cheating |
| minimizing suffering | compassion | care/harm |
| being loyal to group bonds | group pride, rage at traitors | loyalty/betrayal |
| respecting hierarchical authorities | respect, fear [and awe] | authority/subversion |
| maintaining cleanliness | disgust [and awe] | sanctity/degradation |
the more nurturing, holistic, oxytocin-fueled functions of the right-cortical mime improviser/scene designer, with stronger ties to limbic emotional stagehands than the left. This might be viewed as the more feminine or yin side of our animal-human (super)nature, with the long-evolved role of women as primary caretakers and with women on average being better able than men to interpret facial emotions using their right hemispheres. Libertarians could then be seen as more masculine or yang, especially regarding the moral module of “liberty.” They are sensitive about threats to it (using right-cortical wariness) like liberals, but more eager to fight against any social controls or service institutions that might reduce it— using the left-cortical critic/scripter and its limbic rage circuits. Conservatives can also be viewed as more yang-oriented and abstract rule based, not just as balanced across the six “moral foundations.” They may be holistically sensitive (through the right cortex) about threats to all six, yet conservatives manifest strong left-cortical critic/scripter and limbic stagehand networks in order to, as Haidt puts it, “fight back ferociously when they believe that change will damage the institutions and traditions that provide our moral exoskeletons (such as the family)” (305).
Of course, we all use both sides of the brain all the time (unless there is damage to certain areas) and liberals fight for their beliefs, too. But the conservative versus liberal split in today’s politics, although it gets different names elsewhere in the world, is often characterized as “right” versus “left.”5 This again suggests a connection between conservatives and the rule based, narrowly focused functions of our left cortex, which controls the right side of the body—or between liberals and the detail oriented, openly aware, right cortex, tied to the left side. Another way to regard our still evolving bio-cultural moral spectrum involves parental roles. George Lakoff describes liberals as using a “Nurturing Parent” (feminine, yin, maternal) model of government while conservatives employ a “Strict Father” metaphor for their moral politics, believing in people’s inherent evil, which must be contained by surveillance, threats, or rewards, and retributive justice. One might add that such a figure of good trying to contain evil often appears in melodramatic horror and action movies, especially in vampire films with a “slayer” (who might be female, like Buffy, but is still taught by an older male) or in lab-hybrid movies with a scientist as controlling parent. Sometimes, the monster is a Strict Father to itself, trying to subdue its own bestiality or protect others from it, as in various werewolf films, or to stop the spread of evil by others of its kind, as in films with vampire or werewolf clan battles. There is also a violent rivalry for alpha male, Strict Father rule in ape-planet movies, often with Nurturing Parent (or scientist) conflicts as well.
Psychologist Joshua Greene sees a flaw in Haidt’s research about the broad spectrum of conservative moral foundations, arguing that his online surveys, finding clustered responses by certain political types, were already “designed with five clusters in mind” (Righteous 386n). Greene reveals a danger in Haidt’s admiration for the conservative breadth of morals, 6 which also suggests, to my mind, a danger in Lakoff’s envy, as a liberal, of conservatives’ successful appeal to the country-as-family metaphor (19). Greene argues that we should not resort to such “tribal” intuitions with automatic moral emotions. Instead, we should cultivate effortful perspective taking, or what Daniel Kahneman calls slow, “System 2,” deliberative thinking, as a way to improve our understanding of others’ views and to alter our fast, “System 1,” intuitive, tribal-based morals. This is akin to the potential of theater and film, even when evoking tribal, System 1, good versus evil, hero against villain identifications, to challenge viewers’ perspectives with ironic, tragicomic twists, through emotional immersion and yet critical reappraisal, as System 2, perhaps with a dose of playful laughter.
Greene points to neural areas involved in this shift, which correspond to my inner-theater model. His brain-mapping research shows more activity in the amygdala and MPFC, plus parts of the VMPFC, with a personal moral dilemma, involving System 1, automatic feelings—as compared with an impersonal dilemma, which has more activity in the DLPFC, using “explicit decision rules” that can “override competing impulses” ( Righteous 120–22). As dilemmas for test subjects’ brains, Greene used a fictional “trolley car” story, offering an impersonal “utilitarian” choice of saving five people’s lives but killing one person, by throwing a switch to change the tracks and divert a runaway trolley, or a more personal version of pushing a person off a footbridge over the tracks to divert the trolley. Most people in the lab could do the first easily (when asked to imagine this) but hesitated or declined doing the second, even though the numbers saved and killed were the same—showing the influence of System 1, automatic, intuitive, tribal-based morality.
Further evidence for this “dual process” of moral judgment,7 involving DLPFC utilitarian decisions competing with MPFC-VMPFC-amygdala emotions, comes from brain-damaged patients. Those with VMPFC damage were much more likely (five times more in Damasio’s experiments) to agree, at least fictionally, to kill someone with a personal push off a footbridge in order to save five others below, even to kill a family member in order to save a larger number of strangers (Greene 125).8 But in normal subjects, tests also show that inducing mirth or evoking skepticism about one’s intuitions with tricky math problems “increases utilitarian judgment” (126–27).
Adding my inner-theater terms to Greene’s, the amygdala stagehands signal “an initial alarm bell,” the VMPFC stage manager “integrates” emotional signals in monitoring one’s potential behavior (causing hesitation in the footbridge version of the trolley experiment) and the MPFC actor forms a decision, which might be overridden by the DLPFC film editor. This dual process, faster or slower PFC system also relates to Joseph LeDoux’s finding, as considered in Chapter 1 here, of a quicker, “low road” of sensory cortex to thalamus to amygdala circuits for fear, bypassing the conscious “high road” of PFC circuits, in signaling the body to act with animal survival instincts. Thus, it takes practice for brain circuits to shift from the fast, “emotional automatic settings” of thalamus-amygdala survival/mating emotions and amygdala-VMPFC moral foundations (or immoral temptations) to the slower, System 2 roads of outer-inner, topdown, DLPFC “manual-mode reasoning” (quoting Greene’s terms, 349).9 But insightful, tragicomic twists, even of popular action-adventure, romantic comedy, or melodramatic horror scenes in films and videogames, offer such rehearsals for the viewer’s (or gamer’s) inner theater, as might the cognitive reappraisal practice of “mindfulness” therapy. Moral foundations and reasons are still at play in our bio-cultural evolution, as each of us alters our neural circuits of tribal allegiances, impulsive actions, and cognitive reflections—with potential ripple effects of conserved archetypes or altered stereotypes—through what and how we watch.
Philosopher Patricia Churchland argues that “morality originates in the neurobiology of attachment and bonding,” through the oxytocin/ vasopressin (in-group trust) network that we inherit as mammals (71). Yet such personal attachment and group bonding networks, setting up various moral foundations with tribal emotions and utilitarian ideals, involve more influences than just a Nurturing Parent or Strict Father. As mentioned earlier, regarding the ape-planet movies, humans evolved a form of childcare distinct from other primates. “Alloparenting,” with multiple caretakers beyond the mother and father, enables our young to develop in complex and challenging social worlds, with diverse perspectives (Hrdy, Mothers 138).
And yet, the primary caretaker is extremely important to human development, especially with our very early birth, premature in comparison with other apes. Through genetic predispositions and early childhood experiences, we develop a certain “attachment style,” which continues into adulthood: secure, avoidant, anxious, or disorganized/disoriented (Mikulincer and Shaver 25).10 One-year-old infants, in a strange lab room without their mother, show a “secure” behavior in holding her briefly and yet continuing to explore the space at her return, “avoidant” with little distress but also not trusting her for comfort when she returns, “anxious” (or ambivalent/resistant) with extreme distress at separation and conflicted responses at her return, or “disorganized/disoriented” with high levels of both avoidance and anxiety. Mothers of avoidant infants, in home observations, “tend to be emotionally rigid, and as well as angry and rejecting” (26). With anxious infants, home interactions “are characterized by lack of harmony and lack of caregivers’ consistent responses.” Disorganized infants oscillate between strategies or they do “bizarre” things in the lab room with the mother’s reappearance, such as lying face down on the floor or sitting passively under a table. The “disorganized, unpredictable, and discomfiting” behavior of parents is likely due, “research shows,” to their also suffering from unresolved losses or “attachment-related traumas.” Vampires, werewolves, and negatively nurtured lab hybrids, show extreme attachment disorders onscreen, with bizarre behaviors conveyed across generations.
Genetics and family environment11 set up attachment styles and group bonds, orienting our moral and political foundations, through the biochemistry of our brain’s inner theater—with more of a Strict Father model when others are perceived as untrustworthy or evil. For example, a study showed that oxytocin levels were significantly lower in women who suffered “abuse or neglect” in their childhood (Churchland 80). Their mammalian, in-group, trust network may be more fragile, and seek firmer footing, than people with secure attachments in childhood. Yet disorganized attachment emerges not just with abuse, but also in children whose parents show “frightened, dissociated, or disoriented behavior” (Siegel, Developing 108).
Attachment ideals in politics and entertainment, through our mass media, become significant for all of us, but especially for people who did not have secure attachments in childhood. People with avoidant attachment may be stronger individuals in certain types of work and play, using more of the left-cortical critic/scripter to enforce and define rules in new or threatening situations. People with anxious attachment, on the other hand, might help a group with their alertness to danger through their right-cortical mime improviser/scene designer. Such avoidant or anxious attachment styles also relates to Brechtian distance or Artaudian immersion in viewers’ participation with the scene onstage/onscreen. All of us, as animals, need a source of security, especially with our evolved extension of youth and playfulness as humans. For better or worse, this derives from parental influences that we absorb, rebel against, and renegotiate throughout our lives. Such influences relate also to the Nurturing Parent and Strict Father modes of government, involving ideals of liberty, fairness, and care for liberals versus additional ideals of loyalty, authority, and sanctity among conservatives.
Child psychiatrist Daniel Siegel describes how each of us goes through “natural oscillations” of an internal or external focus, of solitude or connection with others, and thus the importance to a developing child’s brain of the caretaker’s attunement with such patterns (Developing 101). This involves a “mutual co-regulation of resonating states” between child and parent brains, with the disengagement and reengagement of “alignment” (88)—akin to what we rehearse with the movie screen or live theater stage. Research shows that children with avoidant attachment, who are disengaged from others, have parents who are “emotionally unavailable, relatively insensitive to their children’s state of mind, imperceptive of their children’s need for help, and not effective at meeting those needs once perceived” (92–93). Children with anxious attachment, who are not easily soothed when the parent returns to the lab room, had parents who were “inconsistently available” and sometimes intrusive with “emotional invasions into the infant’s state of mind” (100). This might include apparently positive acts, such as grabbing a happy child and showering it with kisses, though that disrupts its focus in play. Such children and later adults (in my view) may seek a better Other for emotional resonance, with engaged and disengaged insights, through various entertainment screens, as well as theatrical play, games, and sports.
Siegel explains how there is “an internal image of the parent” within the child’s mind by about 9 months of age (Developing 102). This “virtual other” becomes a “filtering process” for perceiving and representing the parent and others throughout one’s life. Here, one might see a correlation to the prismatic mask/lens of the inner theater, creating a “hall of mirrors” between brains: I see you through others in my past while projecting/ perceiving how you see me through your others, as we interact. The filtering of perceptions by the virtual parent-Other inside one’s brain thus involves the temporal lobe’s audience of intuitive memory associations, the DMPFC’s mentalizing director, the VMPFC’s moral stage manager, and the MPFC’s inner performing actor, which is also a social construction, having absorbed scripts and images from others.
Sometimes, we might even hear the ghostly voice of an influential person inside our heads, or see the Other’s image, absorbed into memory traces that form the Self, which also has an inner voice. For many people, this involves a religious dimension, with the virtual Other of attachment figures extending to saints or gods or God. According to psychologist Lev Vygotsky, the inner voice of Self (vis-à-vis the Other) occurs especially through early childhood experiences, as we shift, at about age three, from image thinking to verbal thinking by internalizing our learned behaviors in verbalized interactions with others. I would also relate this to the narrative “voice-over” in some movies, a ghostly persona usually identified with the main character (as with Louis or Bella in their vampire films), mediating scenes between the screen and the viewer’s inner theater, with its associated images and voices.
In daily life, the image or voice of a virtual Other in our heads involves not just the birth mother and primary caretaker, but also various allo-parents, from strict and kind father figures to various relatives, teachers, coaches, and peers (perhaps also older siblings). They, along with our mothers, help us to realign our Imaginary bonds with the primal (m)Other toward further Symbolic networks and narrative identities. The play space around “transitional objects” (in D. W. Winnicott’s terms) is especially significant in this development of external ties and inner-theater elements, from childhood to adulthood. Movies are transitional attachment objects of identity play, as we integrate and change our shared reality/ fantasy perceptions. Thus, the teacher’s alloparenting role gains particular value, at various developmental levels, when films are used in the classroom to evoke emotional engagement and yet cognitive reappraisal, as rasa-catharsis. This might involve the home and peer-group environments, with scripts and characters absorbed by the child’s inner theater and then brought to school.
Research shows that resilience in adults is affected by “the level of security established with the primary caregiver during the first two years of life” (van der Kolk 161). Parents and alloparents, including teachers, may pass on to children the insecure attachment they experienced and still carry within as a virtual Other—or their resilience (and “Post-Traumatic Growth”) if they become more mindful themselves. A study showed infants raised by severely depressed mothers developed a shift toward right frontal-cortex activity similar to their moms’. And yet, an eight-week Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) program caused a shift toward left frontal-cortex activity in both long-term meditators and new practitioners, which was correlated in the latter with better immune system functioning (Siegel, Mindful 220–21). Mindfulness also helps to develop VLPFC-limbic circuitry that may be deficient with manic-depressive bipolar disorder (281–82). As Siegel puts it, “parents who come to ‘make sense’ of their lives can actually alter their attachment status and raise children who thrive” (204).
Siegel defines a “resonance circuit” in the insula and temporal lobes (superior temporal sulcus), also involving the prefrontal cortex, especially the MPFC and right VLPFC, plus the mirror neuron system—with mindfulness skills enhancing both compassion and affect regulation in these areas ( Mindful 354–55). He theorizes that intrapersonal resonance within one’s brain will increase interpersonal resonance between brains, especially between parent and child. Such resonance between neural areas may involve the inner audience, actor, and light/sound operator (or film grip) of one brain becoming more mindful and thus altering the attunement with another person’s brain. Resonance between a viewer and a movie might likewise involve intra- and inter-personal changes, with limbic emotions and PFC reappraisals, through some degree of attachment to certain screen figures and yet tragicomic twists of awareness. Especially with horror movies, this could evoke monstrous identifications and powerful emotions, as with traditional Tibetan images in Vajrayana deity meditation,12 but evolving then into compassion for and from the virtual Other, through personal memory networks of the temporal-lobe and insula audience.
Various therapies, such as MBSR, LKM (Loving-Kindness Meditation), CFT (Compassion-Focused Training), and CBCT (Cognitively Based Compassion Training), have translated Eastern meditation traditions into Western medical contexts, mostly without religious elements. Many studies demonstrate their therapeutic benefits.13 But they can sometimes have dangerous side effects, including the appearance of personal nightmarish images during meditation, as with other forms of “sensory deprivation and perceptual isolation” (Lindahl et al.).14 Yet these effects may be akin to hallucinations that prehistoric humans experienced, through sensory deprivation and perhaps other media, in the caves of France and Spain, where they left images of large herbivores, predators, and animal-human figures—as emotional pictures, moving in firelight. These might have become a very early form of cinematic meditation, sharing such pictures with others, between inner theaters, as a way of ritually containing and yet exploring their super-natural dreams and nightmares as evolving humans.
Today’s horror films about vampires, werewolves, and other beast-people attract viewers for various reasons. Some may just want the adrenalin rush of fear at a safe distance or to share that with a partner as sexually arousing. But some may seek relief from the pain of personal traumas and subsequent anxieties. Psychiatrist Bessel van der Kolk found that Vietnam veterans withstood pain 30% longer while watching a violent film clip from Platoon (1986, dir. Oliver Stone) than when watching a peaceful film clip (32–33). The stress of strong emotions and memory associations in veterans’ inner theaters, while watching the violent scenes from that film about the Vietnam War, produced endorphins in their brains that blocked the pain of holding one’s hand in a bucket of ice water, equivalent to 8 milligrams of morphine. “This suggested that, for many traumatized people, reexposure to stress might provide a similar relief from anxiety.” Thus, horror movie stress, at a safe distance, might also relate to exposure therapy for people with phobias for certain things, such as elevators or spiders, gradually increasing their ability to experience what is feared, and to exposure and response prevention (ERP) with obsessive-compulsive disorder.
In later experiments with trauma victims, van der Kolk found that their right cortex reacts, when reminded in daily life of what they suffered, as if it were happening again in the present, without the left cortex making them aware of the threat being in the past (45). When triggered in this way, they become “furious, terrified, enraged, ashamed, or frozen” and may blame somebody else for it. I would add that beast-people movies, especially with tragicomic twists, might help all of us with our traumas from the past, with specific fears or general anxieties, in being reexposed to such stress—not just with an adrenalin or endorphin boost, but with a greater awareness, in the shift of neural networks between right and left hemispheres.
In severely traumatized people, adrenalin-fueled stress is triggered easily and does not return readily to normal levels. This causes memory and attention problems, irritability, sleep disorders, and long-term health problems (van der Kolk 46). For these viewers, as for those with an anxious attachment style, movie stress may backfire—if it simply triggers right-cortical, mime-improviser, bottom-up, emotional associations. It may even become addictive as an adrenalin (exciting) and endorphin (pleasurable, morphine-like) high. Van der Kolk describes the danger of addictions and self-harm practices when trauma victims seek to relieve bodily anxiety in the wrong way (32). But I would argue that beast-people films with ironic twists might also shift viewers toward left-cortical, critic-scripter, top-down, cognitive reappraisals, through cathartic rasas. This may help us to practice a more mindful awareness about our everyday stresses and anxieties, as not being so life threatening to the animal within.
According to van der Kolk, some trauma victims “go into denial” and ignore messages from their emotional brain, but their organs still get the stress hormones and their bodies “keep the score” (46). With such viewers, like those with avoidant (and secure) attachment to their virtual Other, the monster onscreen may offer insights as an object of fear and subjective identification, evoking emotional messages and yet altering cognitive viewpoints. This might involve right-cortical improviser/designer threat signals, otherwise ignored, and a left-cortical critic/scripter narrative awareness, with compassionate perspectives connecting the hemispheres in new ways.
As a sympathetic creature and yet object of fear, the beast-person onscreen could represent to viewers both a traumatized child and the abusive (or non-attuned) parent, who may have been traumatized earlier in life—a tragic cycle across generations reflected, too, in the blood infection curse of vampires and werewolves. Movie vampires often have wildly disorganized attachment styles, with avoidant and anxious aspects, like undead babies in adult bodies (or even wilder beings in immortal childish bodies). They appear as charmingly aloof, exotic strangers, yet also sharp toothed and blood sucking. At times, they are avoidant of touch and sunlight; at others, they anxiously cling to and bite their victims, like a child desperate for more than the parent’s life can offer. However, to the seduced victim onscreen or to the movie viewer, in awe of the vampire’s super-natural energies and immortal powers, taking and giving life, that animal-human might appear like a suddenly enraged or joyfully intrusive parent to a tiny child. The vampire might evoke deep memory circuits in the viewer like those in the disorganized child whose caregiver is “simultaneously necessary for survival and a source of fear” (van der Kolk 117).15
Likewise, werewolves onscreen transform into voracious beasts, beyond self-control, akin to a monstrous parent, yet also a virtual Other inside the child, teen, or adult, with animal-human emotions sometimes erupting and stresses changing the body. Werewolves may represent, especially to sympathetic viewers, the “denial and dissociation” that can emerge with parental “disengagement and misattunement during the first two years of life,” as the later teen or adult does not “feel real inside” and resorts to extreme behavior “to feel something” (van der Kolk 121). Lab-hybrid films reveal such parenting problems more directly, with a genius inventor or a scientist couple failing to handle a new monster (even if it is himself), or a clan of such beast-people, seeking the right moral balance of nurturing mother and strict father, as godlike source of life and yet Lawgiver.
Many of the vampire and werewolf films considered here also show tragically troubled, or comically twisted, romantic and family relations— with humans choosing whether to slay the beast-person or mate with and become one, sometimes creating monstrous offspring. Even ape-planet movies have recently focused on the difficulty of raising an animal-human child in the right way, with alloparenting problems tied to larger social conflicts and cross-species clan wars. Such films may evoke, for some viewers, the radical uncertainties of an abusive or intrusive parent, which they experienced early in life and retained as a virtual Other in unconscious memory networks. But they also reflect the animal-human emotions and bodily symptoms of stress in all of us, as we renegotiate gender, age, class, and race projections in our social networks, through inner images and voices from our family lives.
Van der Kolk refers to Paul MacLean’s notion of the rational brain as a “more or less competent rider” on the “unruly horse” of the emotional brain, related to that scientist’s model of rational neo-mammalian, emotional paleo-mammalian, and primal reptilian levels of neural circuitry (64). Haidt puts the rational rider on an emotional elephant (Righteous 48–50). To my mind, this rider on a horse/elephant (and reptile/dragon) recalls Plato’s ancient allegory of the human “soul” or mind as a flying chariot with reason as the charioteer, holding the reigns of two winged horses: a noble, spirited, white horse flying upward toward heaven and its dark, pleasure-seeking opposite plunging downward toward earth (Phaedrus). In Book 9 of The Republic, Plato also describes the human soul as “a multitudinous beast, having a ring of heads of all manner of animals, tame and wild.” He says that the “supporter of injustice” feeds the beasts and starves the man, but the “maintainer of justice” strengthens the man by using his “lion heart” to bring together in unity the “many-headed hydra.”
But van der Kolk gives another model, with new metaphors, for the animal survival mechanism that often goes awry in human brains— through misattunement in infancy that might set up later anxieties, avoidances, and differing views of justice, with moral foundations of nurturing or strict government (in Haidt’s and Lakoff’s terms). With van der Kolk’s castle kitchen model, the thalamus is a “cook,” the amygdala system a “fire alarm” (both in the limbic system), and the MPFC a “watchtower” that can calmly observe, predict, and make conscious, mindful choices (60–63). The thalamus-cook takes in and blends perceptions, along with expectations, sending slower signals to the watchtower-MPFC or faster to the amygdala as fire alarm. Anxious-attachment people have a hypersensitive alarm system; avoidant people have a watchtower that ignores the smoke; secure people have a better balance between them.
This cooking metaphor suggests, to my mind, the ancient Indian notion of rasas in art as a mix of emotional flavors between brains. But it focuses on the alarm system of the brain’s theatrical kitchen. As shown with LeDoux’s description of fear activating a quicker, “low road,” the amygdala fire alarm, with feedback from hippocampus memory circuits, signals a survival threat through stress hormones and the autonomic nervous system (ANS) “to orchestrate a whole-body response” (van der Kolk 60). This also involves “polyvagal” ties between mirror neurons, the body’s various organs, and our herd-like sensitivity to danger or safety signaled by other humans or animals around us, with subtle facial cues and other physical gestures (78; Porges).
In relation to the model I gave earlier, trauma victims with a hypersensitive alarm system have a temporal-lobe (amygdala/hippocampus) audience, along with subcortical, ANS/polyvagal stagehands, yelling “fire” in a crowded inner theater. They are thus “misinterpreting whether a particular situation is dangerous or safe” (van der Kolk 61–62). Sometimes, especially in people with an avoidant attachment style, the executive “watchtower” ignores the smoke signals from the kitchen, though they still alarm the body, causing stress and health problems. At other times, especially with PTSD anxieties, the conscious MPFC actor is overwhelmed by signals from the sensory stagehands and memory-projection audience . According to van der Kolk, people with intense fear, sadness, and anger have increased subcortical (alarm system) activity and reduced frontal (watchtower) mindfulness (62–63). Thus, “mindfulness practice, which strengthens the MPFC, is a cornerstone of recovery from trauma” (96).
With theater or filmmaking, the actor onstage or in the camera frame, like the inner MPFC watchtower, is partly watching his or her performance, aware of saying the correct lines and moving mostly as planned (left cortically), though also with room for improvisation (right cortically). Different schools of acting, such as the various American offshoots of Stanislavski’s “Method,” emphasize more of the left-cortical planned technique for finding and sharing something Real from the “given circumstances” of the script (and with “outside-in” bodily training) or stress right-cortical “emotional recall” (as less watchful, “inside-out” spontaneity). But many acting theories, especially those derived from Stanislavski’s system, value “relaxation” techniques to help the actor be mindful onstage, even when playing an emotionally stressed-out character. Of course, the outer director and stage/production manager also help the actor’s inner actor and character (along with other inner-theater elements) to prepare and be aware, while performing, of how the outer character might appear onstage or, at later points, onscreen.
In van der Kolk’s model, if people are hypersensitive due to trauma and attachment disorders, there are “two ways of changing the threat detection system,” top-down and bottom-up (63). Top-down alterations involve “strengthening the capacity of the watchtower to monitor your body’s sensations,” through certain meditation techniques and talk therapies, with self-awareness and new perspective taking (63). The bottom-up way helps to explore the score that the body has kept, even in avoidant personalities, or to calm its alarms, in anxious persons, with mindful “breathing, movement, and touch.” Van der Kolk discusses various bottom-up techniques, such as EMDR with rapid eye movement (REM), neurofeedback, and psychomotor group therapy (related to Internal Family Systems therapy). In the last of these, participants act out roles from a patient’s inner theater. The patient then becomes a protagonist/director, to “go back into the movie of your life and rewrite the crucial scenes,” especially through “non-verbal, right-hemisphere realms” of communication (256–61, 281, 297–99, 305, 352). Both ways are included in “Trauma Drama” and other theater workshops for at-risk youth, which van der Kolk also describes (334–47).
For movie viewers, rasa- cathartic mindfulness may be mostly topdown, with the body seated in stillness. Yet the viewer’s mimetic and intuitive mirror neurons (as visual and acoustic systems) also signal vicariously with the action onscreen, especially actors’ facial expressions and gestures, plus the emotive soundtrack, camera movements, and editing cuts, toward empathic immersion much of the time, and yet distanced awareness at certain points. Perhaps this relates to the REM technique in EMDR therapy, which the patient performs while reimagining and narrating traumatic memories. According to van der Kolk, this may involve cross-cortical stimulation and be akin to REM sleep, during which dreams activate “distant associations” that integrate recent experiences with long-term patterns, forging “new relationships between apparently unrelated memories” (260–61). Likewise, viewers’ eyes move rapidly across the screen and between angles. While watching horror and action scenes, this may evoke a dreamlike, yet narrative integration of “fragmented sensory and emotional traces” from traumas in their own lives (176), associated with the fictional figures onscreen. As with IFS and psychomotor therapies, this might involve the inner theater of virtual Others as well, through top-down and bottom-up, as well as cross-cortical networks, tied to the beast-people onscreen, as objects of fear and yet also forces inside us.
Each of us plays a role in our species’ animal-to-human journey of consciousness. We might stress different “moral foundations,” advocating a Nurturing Parent or Strict Father form of government. But these feelings involve brain structures that we all have in common, along with various degrees of security, anxiety, avoidance, and disorganization in our childhood to adult attachments. If we feel secure about our past and present attachments, yet sympathetically anxious about the dramas and traumas of others (as replayed by our news media), we may feel more Nurturing Parent compassion, beyond our family and tribal bonds, extending kinship to other classes and races, even across the globe. We might advocate the moral foundation of care, with extensions of liberty, fairness, and loyalty to those foreign to us, against our oxytocin-fueled, evolutionary need to belong and cooperate within our own clan, in competition with others. This also relates to our human drive for a personal mission and meaning in life beyond just survival, reproduction, and territory. The ideal of spreading “freedom” to others can be misplaced, however, especially when mixed with territorial anxiety or survival vengeance—as with U.S. difficulties in reproducing its sense of democracy in other cultures, from Vietnam to Afghanistan and Iraq.
If we are anxious about our attachments, or avoidant about such feelings, or oscillate between these positions, we would be more likely to see certain people as threats, based on our in- and out-group stereotypes. The amygdala-hippocampus fire alarm (as inner audience), drawing on ANS-polyvagal body networks (as stagehands), might send frequent smoke signals to the MPFC watchtower (as inner actor). Hence, the moral foundations of liberty, fairness, care, and loyalty would have a different sense, restricted to kin and allies, with projections of their opposites onto others. More weight might be given to authority and sanctity, with the inner watchtower/actor under constant threat and with right-cortical fears of subversion and degradation from within, sometimes projected outward, activating left-cortical rage from the kitchen-castle.
Beast-people movies evoke, but also challenge these primal emotions and moral ideals, with characters changing from human to animal (vampires and werewolves), or showing bestial elements in families, inventions, and societies (lab hybrids and simian civilizations). They often align viewers melodramatically, with or against the slayer-team, scientist-creator, monster, and ape-warrior, through moral binaries and related feelings (such as those shown in Table 7.3). But in my view, the best beast-people movies mix the rasas of awe/disgust, fear, anger, and courage with romantic love, sorrowful sympathy, and humor, for tragicomic twists of cathartic immersion and mindful detachment.
Movies, like other forms of storytelling, help us to integrate the traumatic memory fragments within each of our brains, which cause suffering for alienated individuals and between conflicting groups (Siegel, Developing 320–36). However, we should be careful about what we watch onscreen—and how we view it, value it, discuss it, and teach it to our children and students. If movie images and narratives consolidate stereotypes of certain people as beasts, drawing on primal emotions of the viewer’s virtual Other and focusing them as an evil versus good binary, as a monster that must be slayed, then the potential cathartic healing may backfire. Anxieties could increase, especially in child and teen viewers, as undead animal-human characters, even if slayed onscreen, mate with deeper memory fragments and haunt the viewer’s inner theater after the film. With adult viewers, too, personal and collective myths of vengeance may form, or be reconfirmed, with melodramatic victims, heroes, and villains onscreen. Groups often need such myths about the evil other to project their internal mimetic rivalries upon an outer enemy. Such cooperation within a group, through fantasies of righteous vengeance and vigilante justice, may help the traumatized to feel less alienated. But it also fuels competition between groups, causing much bloodshed throughout human history. Individuals sometimes feel compelled to sacrifice themselves and others, with deceptive morals, when “terrorists” appear. Ironically, they become like the beast-person they fear, in seeing others as that threat.16
Animal-human monsters and slayers onscreen, when reflecting such ironies, encourage us toward a tragicomic awareness about traumas of the past, affecting our inner theaters and how we perform in everyday life, as parents, teachers, coworkers, and morality players. They also reflect how the staging of human consciousness continues to evolve, inside our brains and in the “hall of mirrors” between us—with each of us in a full-body prismatic mask/lens, involving various animal scripts and personal ghosts. Most of the signaling between us, by the inner stagehands, is subconscious while a small raft of Self/Other awareness tries to focus all the outer refractions and inner waves onto a momentary screen, with left-cortical frameworks and right-cortical flashes to related memories and fantasies. Our ape egos aspire to be godlike, yet our remnant instincts and traumatic traces make us go wild at times, wilder than beasts, individually and collectively. But each of us can choose how we cling to suffering, with survival and mating anxieties, causing others to suffer or not—through how we participate, each day, in the animal drives of dominance, attraction, and trickery, reproduced and reshaped by cultural trends. Beast-people movies are thus a way to join popular culture’s stream of consciousness, with its collective daydreaming of unconscious desires. Yet we might also alter it, by selecting what to value in, question about, and take from the seductive, computer-enhanced, body-swapping illusions onscreen.
So with each film you watch, especially those about beast-people, ask yourself and others around you, or on the Web, some questions like these.