Jean-Louis Baudry’s apparatus theory suggests that movie viewers experience an immobility that makes watching a film akin to dreaming. Spectators are unable to freely move, unable to affect what they see, and unable to differentiate between self and other as well as the ideologies of a film and their own thoughts. Theorists like Noël Carroll criticize Baudry’s concept, claiming that viewers maintain at least limited movement while watching a film and, therefore, retain ideological autonomy. Director Satoshi Kon’s Paprika (2006) can be used to explore Baudry’s idea of whether or not a spectator blindly accepts the subliminal ideologies of a film through the way three of its characters experience motion.
Thanks to the dream scene which occupies most of the running time of the film, Mulholland Drive, directed by David Lynch, can be read as representing the internal conscious and unconscious states of its protagonist. In this paper, I will argue that Mulholland Drive characterizes its protagonist using two mirrors of identity, the Jungian way in which she perceives herself in the dream (as opposed to how she really is) and the projection of Rita (an amnesiac stranger in need) that she subconsciously invents in order to try to fill her empty identity with the love of another.
This paper utilizes the Japanese anime Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood to evaluate different uses of facial close-up. Drawing heavily from the theoretical works of Bela Belaz and Maya Deren, the examination reveals that the seriously realistic and absurdly impossible are often juxtaposed in anime, yet do not contradict each other. Instead, the combination of realistic close-up and “super- deformed” aesthetic is employed equally to demonstrate a variety of emotional responses in recognizable, stylized ways.
