Like most kids worth their fluorescent slap bracelet and Air Jordan kicks, I can break out The Fresh Prince of Bel Air theme song on command. So the day Vivian Banks inexplicably morphed into another woman was a strange one indeed. (Unbeknownst to impressionable ten-year-old fans such as myself, the original Aunt Viv was too busy suing NBC for breach of contract to attend Will and Carlton’s graduation. Her double silently stepped in a few episodes later.) This wasn’t a case of a bad perm job; it was identity theft. And yet, the Banks residence didn’t seem to notice. I was spooked.

For those who had the same reaction—and I’m sure there were whispers of conspiracy in classrooms across the continent—check out Errol Morris in discussion with psychologists Dan Levin and Dan Simons about how we perceive being just as significant as what we perceive. Simons, one of the masterminds behind the “invisible” gorilla perception test and its moonwalking bear spin-off, posits that, “for the most part, we don’t notice things because they don’t matter.” (A shaky concept for the fact-checking intern army here at the magazine.) In Luis Buñuel’s That Obscure Object of Desire, for example, both Carole Bouquet and Angelina Molina play Conchita, a casting trick Morris describes as trapping “the viewer in an extended continuity error.” The director’s soft spot for surrealist imagery succeeds in distracting the audience to the point that the switch goes undetected by several viewers. Although the actresses are clearly different women, they are slowly, seamlessly brought together until almost sharing the same frame. Perhaps I shouldn’t have been so irked to see two women in the same role…

“The camera introduces us to unconscious optics as does psychoanalysis to unconscious impulses,” Walter Benjamin wrote in The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction. True to his Marxist roots, he also believed that in film, “the meaning of each single picture appears to be prescribed by the sequence of all preceding ones.” Of course, frames acting as neat narrative building blocks are shot out of sequence and edited back together again—continuity errors are the cracks in the eggshell after a patch up job. In fact, the fragmentary nature of film actually mirrors our own perception and, as Morris writes, “vision itself is discontinuous.” It’s possible to make a perfectly linear event, such as an interview, appear strangely disjointed through the lens of a camera by simply trespassing over the invisible axis between two subjects. Unless they are filmed from the same side, right or left, the encounter will look unnatural to the viewer. What appears to be inauthentic is actually real and vice versa.

Straddling this paradoxical divide are re-enactments, a technique Morris often employs to control a viewer’s understanding of an event and focus on, say, the trajectory of a milkshake. “If seeing is believing, then we better be damn careful about what we show people, including ourselves—because, regardless of what it is—we are likely to uncritically believe it.” Watching Fresh Prince re-runs, I realize there isn’t much to look at beyond Will and Carlton’s song and dance interludes. But just in case, I’m on guard for renegade Aunt Viv zombies and moonwalking bears.

Tags: continuity, Errol Morris, moonwalking bear, walrus interns

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Posted on Tuesday, April 29th, 2008 at 11:23 am. Follow comments through the RSS 2.0 feed. Comment or trackback.