Today I posted a new draft, coauthored with Ron McClamrock: Reflections on popular music and collapse phenomena
The paper is about the listening to pop music, but the “collapse” of the title comes from Robert Hopkins’ idea of collapsed seeing-in. When watching a movie or TV program, it’s common not to have the screen or even the performers show up as the primary objects of one’s experience. Instead, one sees the fictional characters and events represented in the show.
At other times, what shows up is actors performing roles which represent the fiction. I sometimes think to myself that the secondary plot of an episode was probably written because the scenes could be filmed by the second crew, working in parallel with the first crew which was filming scenes for the main plot. In those moments, my phenomenology does not collapse to the fiction. Instead, for a moment, I see the people as actors. (Hopkins calls this tiered seeing-in.)
Here’s an example that we cut for space:
My partner and I have been rewatching Orphan Black, which plays with this phenomenon. In the show, the actress Tatiana Maslany plays more than half a dozen different characters who are clones. Her performance is successful enough that I typically have the collapsed experience of the particular clone going about their activities. This holds up even in scenes where one of the clones is (in the story) impersonating one of the others. Her performance is sufficiently convincing that it is easy to think of them not just as different characters but also as different actresses.
So I find myself thinking of b-plots with the suburban clone Alison the way I think of B-plots in other shows. Oh, I think for a moment, this is the second team filming in parallel. But that can’t be right, because the same actress is playing characters both in the main plot and in the secondary plot. There is a momentary illusion, though, where I think of the actress who plays Sarah (in the main plot scenes) and the actress who plays Alison (in the b-plot scenes) as different people precisely because the characters are convincingly different. The pleasing but unstable illusion is possible precisely because of the difference between collapsed seeing-in and tiered seeing-in. The collapsed experience of distinct characters is stable. The tiered illusion of distinct actresses is not.