My kids and I have been watching Light and Magic, a docuseries on Disney+ all about the history of the special effects house, Industrial Light & Magic. The series begins by outlining George Lucas’s rationale for establishing the company. His vision of a space opera that would merge the visuals of Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey with the pace of old serials like Buck Rogers or Flash Gordon would require significant resources. These were resources that, as Lucas puts it in the show, “simply did not exist anywhere else in the world.” By assembling a group of creative, multi-skilled, driven artists and designers, Lucas—and the head of ILM at the time, John Dykstra—kicked off a new era in movies.
Movie magic is compelling, although I think not for the reasons people typically think. Often people assume that the magic of effects has to do with their accuracy and photorealism, what one visual effects supervisor describes as “visuals so realistic that the viewer accepts what they are seeing, and their disbelief is momentarily suspended.” Yet, to my mind, the real magic of the movies actually comes from our awareness of being duped. Visuals so realistic that we accept what we are seeing do not create the experience of magic; they are more akin to an elaborate con. To witness magic as magic requires rather that your disbelief remains firmly intact.1
There is a moment at the end of the second episode of the ILM series, where master animator Phil Tippett describes Lucas’s disappointments with the effects in Star Wars: “He always said things like, ‘If I could wave my magic wand, I would put electrodes in my head and have the movie made right there.’”
George Lucas himself later explains:
I wanted to get it my way and I didn’t have the time or the money to do it [...] I can see all the scotch tape and the rubber bands that are holding it together. But that’s how movies get made. They don’t get made right, they get made the best possible way under the circumstances. I thought, “I’m sure we can figure out a better way to do this.” Maybe I better figure out what it is.
I’m not sure whether it was intentional, but the beat after he says this in the documentary felt like a subtle foreshadowing of Lucas’s eventual digital baptism of the original trilogy.
The Allure of the Real
Special effects fall into several types, depending on whether the effects are created during the production or afterwards. Effects that are filmed on set as part of the production, such as miniatures or creatures or pyrotechnics, are sometimes called “practical effects.” Post-production effects are often called “visual effects.” These could include computer graphics imagery (CGI), but also other composited effects produced by adding elements after the original footage has been shot. Visual effects these days are often created digitally: the footage (which itself may have been captured digitally rather than on film stock) is enhanced using a computer program that allows a team of artists to manipulate the digital information representing what had been shot without any loss of quality. Films using either in-camera techniques (such as the forced perspective technique that Peter Jackson used to create the illusion of the hobbit’s relative size to Gandalf in The Lord of the Rings) or miniatures are increasingly rare.
Although it is astonishing what can be accomplished using digital visual effects, there is an allure that many movie fans describe when watching films that use more practical, handcrafted effects. Yet this allure is also one that many will immediately disavow. For example, I was recently listening to an episode of Quentin Tarantino and Roger Avery’s new podcast, The Video Archives. On it, they discuss a 1970s sci-fi cult classic, Dark Star. At one point, they talk about how charming the special effects in the movie are and then they catch themselves and say, “Not that I want to fetishize practical effects or anything, but…”
We’ve probably heard (or maybe even said) that sort of thing before. In fact, while doing a Google search on the line, I came across that exact phrase eight times in different contexts. The phrase “fetishization of ‘practical effects’” also shows up in this very interesting subreddit thread from 7 years ago:
People might not “hate CGI for the sake of it,” but there's definitely an ongoing fetishization of “practical effects.” They’re often held up as an objectively superior method of making VFX, while CGI is derided as a form of laziness endemic to modern Hollywood.
The word “fetishization” gets tossed around a lot when you start to talk about handmade or practical anything. When I was in graduate school, I remember visiting the rare books library. We were all viscerally excited to see these old texts: after all, we all loved books and were passionate about history. Within a few minutes, though, someone felt the need to mumble something about “book fetish” and a sad murmur very quickly spread to the whole group. We promptly enacted a kind of mea culpa for our earnestness—and the visit to the archives proceeded with a more stoic, and we felt I suppose, nobler resignation.
It’s almost as if there’s an inherent embarrassment that must accompany this sort of desire.
But just what is this sort of desire? I think that it has to do with “materiality” — the allure of a reality that might actually, despite all evidence to the contrary in this world of deep fakes and charlatans, be real. It isn’t that the illusion is real; it’s the reality beneath the illusion that shines through and is compelling. Somehow the illusion draws attention to its materiality in ways that aren’t as forthcoming otherwise. Yet, at the same time, there is something about experiencing a brush with this form of desire that compels the one who desires to immediately diminish it by labelling it a “fetish”.
The other F-word
The idea of fetishism originates in eighteenth-century anthropological studies and developed especially into the nineteenth century under the influence of anthropologists such as James Frazer and E.B. Tylor. To fetishize something meant perceiving spirit in inert matter. Of course, the term was broadcast into the wider culture more emphatically through the writing of Karl Marx. For Marx, the way we treat commodities is fetishistic because it involves treating a material object as if it has value in and of itself, rather than recognizing that the object has been imbued with a life force derived from a worker’s labour. This perspective is nonsensical to Marx for whom matter can have no intrinsic value: it’s just stuff.2
It is perhaps unsurprising that the accusation of fetishization has its roots in the Victorian era — a period characterized by great brilliance but also a pervasive air of superiority. The use of the term always implies a condescension; it’s hardly a neutral concept. It is difficult to see how one might even use “fetishization” in a purely neutral sense since it begins from a set of assumptions that are Western and modern themselves. For example, the idea that matter is inert. Or the belief that humans want to see spirit in everything and anything and so often fool themselves, because — the assumption goes — there is no spirit.
This is a good reminder for the Christian: those who hold to thoroughly spiritual worldviews should maybe avoid tossing around accusations of “fetishization.” After all, if fetishization is “a concrete, sensuous body that harbors an abstract, nonsensuous soul”,3 this does not seem that far from the standard definition of sacrament as “the visible sign of an invisible grace.”
So here’s my question: Is the longing for the materiality that an appreciation of practical effects points to a fetish, in which some poor sap projects an unwarranted vitality onto handmade objects, or might it be something more sacramental in nature? Could the joy of these things actually stem from a deep innate sense that materiality is a given thing? And this materiality goes well beyond the physical objects — the icecube trays and model kits that special effects artists have famously used to construct their miniatures. It includes the specific skillsets and literal hands and handheld tools of those artists, which resist the automating impulses of digital tools by virtue of their constraints within time and space. Unlike the digital world, which is fundamentally causal and driven by instructions, the given world of matter and human action is emergent. The first word of a digital world is a binary statement that dictates what is. The first word of the given world is a kenotic invitation: “Let there be.”
A Critique that Conceals
The critique of this desire for materiality as a “fetish” may also conceal another impulse.
In her book, The Empire of Effects: Industrial Light and Magic and the Rendering of Realism, Julie A. Turnock explores the way ILM has been able to promote its particular aesthetic of visual effects as the way these effects should look. It has accomplished this partly through its active promotional efforts (of which Light & Magic is just the latest example) in the wider culture to encourage the public to automatically associate “movie magic” with ILM itself and its standard suite of tools, which increasingly have come to be computer-based and digital. The history of this development is helpful for our conversation because it suggests that, behind our tendency to self-abashedly disavow our desire for materiality as “fetishistic”, there may in fact be an interested party encouraging such a response: “Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain. Seriously, there is no man. There is no curtain. The illusion is all there is.”
In Light and Magic, there’s a moment where Ron Howard says, “He [George Lucas] used to say that he only got about 25% of what he had in his mind on screen with Star Wars, which, you know, of course, was shocking as hell to me because it looked like 100% to me, but not George. He could see through the magic.”
But isn’t the point to see the magic as magic? To see through it is, in fact, to see it as it is meant to be seen, as magic. The best kind of magic is the one where the audience is in on it and can witness together the gap between the illusion and the reality.
A world that is given dictates, contra George Lucas, an inevitable gap between what’s in the mind and what’s on the screen. It means that the illusion cannot be all there is — it cannot match reality if its status as illusion is going to be maintained. Materiality requires that the scotch tape and rubber bands be visible, at least to the maker.
Perhaps learning to love this gap — learning to love the constraints of materiality — is a kind of fetishism. I think it may be more generous (and accurate), though, to see it as one small way of developing a more sacramental perspective.
I wonder if the well known lover of practical effects, Christopher Nolan, is making a commentary on exactly this in his 2006 masterpiece, The Prestige. Christian Bale and Hugh Jackman’s characters depict two different approaches to magic, one of which is committed to producing illusions that nevertheless remain firmly constrained within the limits of reality and the other of which seeks to make their illusions real—and in so doing undermines their ability to know the real.
The Wikipedia entry about “Commodity Fetishism” cites a text that Marx approved of from John Ramsay McCulloch: “In its natural state, matter ... is always destitute of value.” The article captures Marx’s response: “this shows how high even a McCulloch stands above the fetishism of German ‘thinkers’ who assert that ‘material’, and half a dozen similar irrelevancies are elements of value”.
This definition is given by Christopher Bracken in his book Magical Criticism: The Recourse of Savage Philosophy, p. 161.