Becoming George

Abstract

There are two philosophically inclined ways to understand films. The first comes from the belief that the world we inhabit is constructed from the thoughts we have about it. With this in mind, films are understood as a dialogue between what they present and the world as it is shaped by our own imagination. While the second position sees film as a purely realist phenomenon, focused not on our subjective power to imagine but on film’s formal presentation of what is. Of course, how we tend to approach films is usually from somewhere in between these two positions. In failing to fully convince us, being neither entirely idealistic nor realistic, films then serve to activate an unsettling thoughtfulness around our own subjectivity. Through a reading of the film A Single Man (2009), this paper examines how subjectivity is best understood dialectically, as an idealist project undergoing a never-ending transformation toward realism. It outlines what I tentatively call a subject of the cinematic: a subjectivity shaped by the questions we have about how we understand films.