A Companion to Motion Pictures and Public Value

What then, if anything, do the various methods and approaches taken by the contributors in this volume have in common? Arguably, it is their analytical orientation, as we suggested above. By “analytical,” we mean relating to analysis in the sense of a detailed and careful examination of a particular phenomenon. We might also add that in the chapters collected here, such analysis tends to be question- or problem-driven and the point or purpose of the analysis is clarificatory or explicative. In other words, although the project is explicitly underpinned by a commitment to particular ideas and values, this commitment exists at a quite general level and underdetermines the kinds of methodological or disciplinary-specific commitments that one might find in another edited collection. For example, our project might, methodologically speaking, be contrasted with an edited collection that was oriented around, say, actor-network theory; in such a volume, the contributors might be committed to a fairly specific doctrine and then proceed to offer a hermeneutic exploration of a text or group of texts on that basis. In contrast, the contributors to A Companion to Motion Pictures and Public Value tend to limit their doctrinal commitments and, instead, avail themselves of those methods or approaches that are most suited to exploring a particular research question or problem analytically in the sense described above.

Our goal in this part of the introduction is to offer some preliminary characterisations of the key concepts of our project—motion pictures, public value, and value. Our discussions will necessarily be brief here, but we hope at least to canvas some of the general theoretical issues tied to these concepts and to clarify both the sense in which we are using them and the extent to which our use of them involves particular theoretical commitments.

In this volume, we understand and use the term “motion pictures” capaciously. Included in the category of motion pictures are fictional films, documentary films, interactive documentaries, instances of virtual reality (VR) “filmmaking,” television advertising, and fiction and documentary television series. Likewise, we use the term “television” in a broad sense to include not just the content that we watch on physical televisions, but also the streamed “television” content of providers like Netflix, Hulu, Amazon Prime, Disney +, and so forth, as well as independently produced and distributed web-series and web-videos. “Screen media” might be another term that roughly picks out the sorts of phenomena under discussion here.

Yet, we have elected to use the term “motion pictures” rather than “screen media” or similar terms in part because the concept of “motion pictures” has been most thoroughly theorized and defended as a coherent category. Here we have in mind the philosopher Noël Carroll’s definition of motion pictures (or “moving images”, as he variously calls them) in his 2008 volume, The Philosophy of Motion Pictures . Carroll’s definition is somewhat technical, and we will leave it to interested readers to explore its details (2008, 53–79), as well as alternative accounts (e.g. Ponech 2009, 52–63). The key point in this context is that Carroll’s inquiry moves beyond the historically prominent question “what is cinema?” (posed most notably by French film critic and theorist André Bazin) in a way that allows us to recognize the commonalities between “cinema” and similar media such as television, VR, and the like.

In more ambitious moments, Carroll even urges us to “forget the medium” and focus on the broader category of moving images (or motion pictures) (2003, 1–9). Underlying Carroll’s entreaty is a worry that talk of medium-specific features of cinema, television, and the like is bound up with dubious metaphysics—namely, the doctrine of medium essentialism, according to which media are individuated by their unique, timeless essences. Carroll has lodged a number of devastating objections to medium essentialism (e.g., 2003, 1–9, 2008, 35–52) and we would certainly want to distance ourselves from that doctrine. However, we are not convinced of Carroll’s suggestion that medium-specificity claims—claims about particular tendencies or affordances of, say, television versus film, or interactive documentary versus traditional documentary—are necessarily underpinned by medium essentialism and, thus, illicit or false (see Nannicelli 2017, 51–87; Smith 2006). On the contrary, we will work on the assumption that there is a metaphysically neutral or innocuous way of understanding such medium-specificity claims, which seems necessary to make sense of the plausible arguments made by a number of our contributors that the affordances or capacities of new media (e.g., interactive documentaries, VR) often raise new ethical challenges or create new possibilities for realizing value in the domains of politics, the environment, health, and so forth.

The extremely abstract nature of “value” and the varied uses and senses of the term “value” make explicating it a particularly tall order. Of the numerous difficult questions and issues orbiting the concept of value, we’ll address just a few—namely, what is value? And what is its nature? The first of these questions is about the definition of the term “value”; the second is about the metaphysics of value. In light of our present purposes, we will try to paint in broad strokes. Moreover, we will try to avoid the related topic of the epistemology of value, which involves questions about the warrant and justification of value judgments, even though there are many matters on which the metaphysics of value and the epistemology of value intersect (see, e.g., Kirchin 2012).

First, what does it mean to say that something has value? A common and apparently sensible starting point is to reply that it either means that some person(s) value it (or could value it) or that it is valuable. Yet what might seem like a straightforward choice between two plausible starting points turns out to be the source of an ancient and intractable problem—“the Euthyphro problem” from Plato’s dialogue of that name. In our terms, the question is whether we value something because it is valuable or whether something is valuable because we value it. The Euthyphro dilemma bears not just upon understanding the concept of value but also upon the sort of thing (in metaphysical terms) we take it to be. Nevertheless, we shall see presently that there is a pragmatic approach to this problem that can help us at least avoid or defer it.

At least one apparently uncontroversial claim is that whatever else value might be, it is goodness or “the good.” This seems to point us in the direction of explaining why we seek value out, why we are motivated to pursue it. And this observation, in turn, underpins several of the better-known accounts of value. According to a simple version of hedonism, goodness is nothing more than pleasure (and badness is nothing more than pain or suffering). Put this way, hedonism will be familiar to many of us from the role it plays in the classical versions of utilitarianism developed by Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill, according to which the morally right action is whatever brings about the most good (defined in terms of pleasure).

However, the definitional question is now merely moved back a step, since defenders of hedonism then have to say what pleasure is—a task that is more complicated than it might seem. Mill, for example, acknowledged that there are different kinds of pleasure that plausibly have greater or lesser value, although this is a contentious claim. (Is the pleasure one gets from watching televised soccer the same in kind as the pleasure one gets from watching an experimental film? Are they comparable? We return to this sort of question below.) Hedonism perhaps seems more plausible in its negative formulation that takes badness to be pain and emphasizes its avoidance. However, the positive formulation, especially, has been subjected to much of the sort of criticism one would expect to see leveled at a theory that equates value with pleasure (e.g., it regards as good or valuable the drug addict’s high, the sadist’s torture of his victim, Schadenfreude, a “pleasurable” life plugged into “the Matrix,” and so forth). In the present context, it is worth noting that hedonism is premised upon a kind of psychological individualism. In principle, hedonism allows for the possibility of overall goodness as an aggregate of the pleasures experienced by multiple individuals; but there is, apparently, no possibility of a collective or common good that does not ultimately reduce to individual states of pleasure.