transparent to us except in their most extreme instances. Exemplary here for its ordinary quality is the common experience of those of us who like to cook—and eat—of tasting a recipe as we read it. This commutative act between the visual comprehension of abstract language and its carnal meaning not only attests to a grounding synaesthesia that enables such translation but also again demonstrates “the subversive force of the body…in its capacity to function both figuratively and literally.” My eyes read and comprehend the recipe cognitively, but they are not abstracted from my body, which can—albeit in a transformed and somewhat diffused act of gustatory sense-making—taste the meal. Why, then, is it not possible that we might partake even more intensely of Babette's Feast (Gabriel Axel, 1987)? And to what extent are we being quite literal as well as figurative when we describe the meals in Like Water for Chocolate (Alfonso Arau, 1994) as “a feast for the eyes”? Here, in a popular review of Big Night (Stanley Tucci and Campbell Scott, 1996), Lisa Schwarzbaum makes some apposite discriminations: “The difference between a movie that makes you admire food and one that makes you love food is the difference between a dinner table posed like a still life in Martin Scorsese's The Age of Innocence [1993] and a clove of garlic sliced so intently you can practically inhale its ornery perfume in Scorsese's Goodfellas [1990]. One engages the eye and the other arouses all five senses.”57
This is not mere rhetoric. Philosophy aside, recent developments in neuroscience have indicated that “the boundaries between the senses are blurred.”58 Furthermore, a series of experiments has shown not only that the brain's visual cortex is activated when subjects—who are blindfolded—touch objects with their fingers but also that when researchers blocked the subjects' visual cortex, their tactile perception was impaired. Apparently, research has also shown that “the olfactory area of the brain also involves vision,” particularly in relation to the perception of color.59 We are, in fact, all synaesthetes—and thus seeing a movie can also be an experience of touching, tasting, and smelling it.
In sum, the cinesthetic subject names the film viewer (and, for that matter, the filmmaker) who, through an embodied vision in-formed by the knowledge of the other senses, “makes sense” of what it is to “see” a movie—both “in the flesh” and as it “matters.” Merleau-Ponty tells us that the sensible-sentient lived body “is a ready-made system of equivalents and transpositions from one sense to another. The senses translate each other without any need of an interpreter, and they are mutually comprehensible without the intervention of any idea” (235). Thus, the cinesthetic subject both touches and is touched by the screen—able to commute seeing to touching and back again without a thought and, through sensual and cross-modal activity, able to experience the movie as both here and there rather than clearly locating the site of cinematic experience as onscreen or offscreen. As a lived body and a film viewer, the cinesthetic subject subverts the prevalent objectification of vision that would reduce sensorial experience at the movies to an impoverished “cinematic sight” or posit anorexic theories of identification that have no flesh on them, that cannot stomach “a feast for the eyes.”
In a particularly relevant—and resonant—passage Merleau-Ponty elaborates on the intercommunication of the senses, not only as they provide us access to the rich structure of perceived things but also as they reveal the simultaneity of sensory cooperation and the carnal knowledge it provides us:
The form of objects is not their geometrical shape: it stands in a certain relation to their specific nature, and appeals to our other senses as well as sight. The form of a fold in linen or cotton shows us the resilience or dryness of the fibre, the coldness or warmth of the material.…In the jerk of the twig from which a bird has just flown, we read its flexibility or elasticity…. One sees the weight of a block of cast iron which sinks in the sand, the fluidity of water and the viscosity of syrup. (229-30)
(Here, citing this passage, I recall The Piano and my own bodily response to the humid heaviness generated by Ada's skirt hem and boots as they are sucked into the viscous mud of the forest, or, later, the drag on my proprioception caused by the weight and volume of her layers of wet skirts and petticoats as she tries to drown herself.)60
Continuing this discussion of the cross-modality of the senses, Merleau-Ponty writes: “If, then, taken as incomparable qualities, the ‘data of the different senses' belong to so many separate worlds, each one in its particular essence being a manner of modulating the thing, they all communicate through their significant core” (230). That significant core is, of course, the lived body: that field of conscious and sensible material being on which experience is gathered, synopsized, and diffused in a form of prelogical meaning that, even as it is diffused, nonetheless “co-heres.” This is because, the philosopher says, “My body is the fabric into which all objects are woven, and it is, at least in relation to the perceived world, the general instrument of my ‘comprehension'” (235). Thus, while the senses each provide discretely structured modes of access to the world, they are always already interactive and “transposable, at least within certain limits, onto each other's domains”—and this because “they are the senses of one and the same subject, operating simultaneously in a single world. ”61 We could say, then, that it is the lived body (as both conscious subject and material object) that provides the (pre)logical premises, the foundational grounds, for the cinesthetic subject, who is constituted at the movies as ambiguously located both “here” offscreen and “there” onscreen. Indeed, it is to its grounding in the corporeality of the spectator's consciousness that any theory of cinematic intelligibility must return.
III
Thus we are led back to the question of the specific nature of the relation between the body and cinematic representation, between the literal and the figural. For all my argument about the cross-modal communication of our senses and the synthetic quality of the lived body that comprehends both our sensorium and our capacity for language, it is phenomenologically—and logically—evident that I do not touch the cinema, nor does it touch me in precisely the same way in which I touch or am touched by others and things unmediated by cinema (or other perceptual technologies). However hard I may hold my breath or grasp my theater seat, I don't have precisely the same wild ride watching Speed that I would were I actually on that runaway bus. I also don't taste or smell or digest those luscious dishes in Like Water for Chocolate (or, for that matter, in my cookbook) in the same way I would if, unmediated by cinema, they were set on the table before me. Where, then, does this leave us at the movies? Or as theorists of the cinema? Are we condemned to speak of our sensual engagement of the cinema as confounding—our material responsiveness to films understood only, as Dyer puts it, “in some still unclear sense ‘as if real'”? And Dyer is not alone here: if we return to those popular reviews with which I began, his uncertainty and ambivalence are duplicated, albeit less reflectively. The Piano's “salt air can almost be tasted” one reviewer tells us—at the same time he speaks of “immediate tactile shock.” The reviewer of Toy Story says the plastic Tyrannosaurus rex “is so glossy and tactile you feel as if you could reach out and stroke its hard, shiny head”—at the same time he says that “the waxy sheen” of toy soldiers “strike[s] Proustian chords of recognition,” suggesting a sense memory less reflectively thought than reexperienced. This complex ambivalence and confusion about the literal and figural nature of our sensuous engagement with the cinema is wonderfully condensed in a review of Eat Drink Man Woman (Ang Lee, 1994), which tells us, “The presentation of food on-screen is, in all senses of the word, delectable.”62 Here, not only is onscreen food “presented” rather than “represented,” but it is also experienced as “delectable” both literally in “all senses” and figurally in all senses of “the word.”
In The Rule of Metaphor philosopher Paul Ricoeur writes: “If there is a point in our experience where living expression states living existence, it is where our movement up the entropic slope of language encounters the movement by which we come back this side of the distinctions between actuality, action, production, motion” (309). Clearly, these ambivalent
