4. ConclusionIt has not been our task to assert the value of the depth approach over the surface approach, to insist on the general primacy or validity of one over another. As was previously mentioned, both are probably important ways of apprehending the world. Our main purpose has been to elucidate the differences between the two, and in so doing to shine a light into an area that may formerly have been dark. Whilst a surface approach to cultural products may be necessary, it has also been our purpose to highlight its drawbacks.
We've described a film as being like a vessel, and the meanings of the film as being its cargo, and have suggested that for these meanings to truly do their work within the world - the world for which they were always intended - it may often be necessary to leave the vessel, to take our cargo and move on. In practical terms, this would offer a different approach towards cultural products to the one that currently prevails (and to offer this approach is not to insist upon a new orthodoxy, rather to offer an alternative to the current way of things); an approach that accepts the potential multiplicity that is inherent in films, with their whirl of meanings, and that does not seek to wrap up this plurality within a unifying banner or judgement. It is an approach that seeks to allow meanings the freedom to spark and ignite within the spectator, regardless of the surface-level aspects of the vessel that carried these meanings.
It sees through Top 100 Films lists, or in how many stars a certain film got. It recognizes that these things work to keep us thinking of the film as an object, and in so doing threaten to delimit the reach of the meanings contained therein; that they push us back towards the surface, and tempt us into playing games.
In the interests of balance this text necessitates another, that expands upon the value of the surface approach. Yet, regardless of the value that any such text would undoubtedly highlight, our observations upon the drawbacks of fetishism - and in particular upon the dangers of game-playing, must surely remain.
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However, for the man who studies to gain insight, books and studies are merely rungs of the ladder on which he climbs to the summit of knowledge. As soon as a rung has raised him one step, he leaves it behind.On the other hand, the many who study in order to fill their memory do not use the rungs of the ladder for climbing, but take them off and load themselves with them to take away, rejoicing at the increasing weight of their burden. They remain below for ever, because they bear what should have borne them.
[Arthur Schopenhauer]
The World as Will and Representation, Volume II, p.80
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Even writing and speaking, whether didactic or poetical, have as their ultimate aim the guidance of the reader to that knowledge of perception from which the author started; if they do not have this aim, they are bad.
For this reason, the contemplation and observation of everything actual, as soon as it presents something new to the observer, is more instructive than all reading and hearing about it.
[Arthur Schopenhauer]
The World as Will and Representation, Volume II, p.72
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One of the most curious things in the structure of our psyche is that we all want to be told because we are the result of the propaganda of ten thousand years. We want to have our thinking confirmed and corroborated by another, whereas to ask a question is to ask it of yourself.
What I say has very little value. You will forget it the moment you shut this book, or you will remember and repeat certain phrases, or you will compare what you have read here with some other book – but you will not face your own life.
And that is all that matters – your life, yourself, your pettiness, your shallowness, your brutality, your violence, your greed, your ambition, your daily agony Kali and endless sorrow – that is what you have to understand and nobody on earth or in heaven is going to save you from it but yourself.
[Jiddu Krishnamurti]
Freedom from the Known, p. 125-6
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