This Is Running for Your Life (34 page)

But then the movie business has always been more interested in going concerns than in rocket science—and in terms of focus grouping, fMRI is the slick new thing. More comprehensive than the electric-signal capture of electroencephalography (EEG) and electromyography (EMG), and more accurate than galvanic skin response (“It can tell you a little bit,” Carlsen says, “but I wouldn't change a campaign based on Subject 42 sweating”) and standard MRI pictures, fMRI works in real time, revealing the parts of the brain where, as Carlsen says, “all the cool stuff happens.” The machine takes a picture of the brain every two seconds, which happens to be the average length of a movie shot. Though Hollywood studios are hypercautious about confidentiality (political campaigns also demand DEFCON secrecy), MindSign hopes to insinuate itself into every step of the filmmaking process. At the moment they deal mainly in movie trailers; in this they are not far removed from their Hollywood clients.

Still gunning in start-up mode, MindSign has picked up a rogue assortment of clients. Much smaller fish than McDonald's and Warner Bros. are willing to shell out for what Carlsen calls “an expensive way to prove the obvious.” They have dealt with lawyers looking to out medical claimants as malingerers, and women determined to crack the case of the husband and the Asian masseuse. Though a techno-gumshoe outfit called No Lie MRI provided a steady feed of clients, MindSign found the adultery racket a little tawdry. Even so, there's something comforting in the idea that the same old human messes were first in line at the future's door. If there is an unwavering constant between the days of savior-doubting, witch-floating, and last week's episode of
Cheaters
, it is the human obsession with gleaning, eliciting, and proving the “truth.” In that sense, the relationship between technology and tribalism is a two-way parade.

The lie-detecting business will thrive with or without MindSign—the people who know about such things agree that fMRI lie-detection scans will soon be widely admissible in courts. Still waiting for the movie-studio lawyers to triple-caulk their nondisclosure agreements, in 2010 MindSign hooked up with Martin Lindstrom—a branding consultant and the author of a book called
Brandwashed: Tricks Companies Use to Manipulate Our Minds and Persuade Us to Buy
—to conduct more traditional neuromarketing research. Together they designed a study to determine how close iPhone users are to the truth when they talk about being addicted to their gadgets. Subjects were scanned while they looked at images of an iPhone with no service and an iPhone that read “Mom calling”; they listened to the chirp of a text coming in; they watched video of an iPhone vibrating with a new message. The study predicted that iPhone stimuli would match the activation patterns associated with addiction, but in fact it engaged the insular cortex, the part of the brain believed to be associated with feelings of love and empathy. Carlsen cited this study as an example of how brain scans often prove surprising. Several months later Lindstrom discussed the results in a
New York Times
op-ed titled “You Love Your iPhone. Literally.”

*   *   *

I got stuck on the larger picture.

*   *   *

Response is the crudest and yet the most profound external measurement of consciousness. I know that you are not just alive but conscious because you respond when I look at, speak to, or touch you; you know the same about me. Together we form the network of mutually reinforcing subjectivities we call human existence. We respond, therefore we are. Underlying Carlsen's belief in what he described as fMRI's ability “to make the subjective objective” is a coolly tautological redefinition of consciousness: you respond, therefore you respond.

The most obvious illustration of that statement's ontological bulk involves the seemingly vegetative patients revealed, through fMRI testing, to be suffering from “locked in” syndrome. Dr. Adrian Owen, the British neuroscientist whom Carlsen calls “the Michael Jordan of fMRI,” is at the forefront of this research, having already proven brain response in at least one vegetative patient. The first step was finding a substitute for what “yes” looks like in the brain, so they could try to communicate with simple questions. The trick was developing a kind of neurological key, a pattern of response robust enough that it could serve as a marker. The motor receptors that control our movements seemed like plausible candidates—they are known to activate, for instance, whether we imagine throwing a ball or actually throw it. As hoped, certain patients showed the appropriate activation when they were asked to imagine swinging a racket, or booting a soccer ball. One of Dr. Owen's patients, a twenty-nine-year-old car-accident victim who had lain unresponsive for five years, was instructed to pretend he was hitting a forearm winner if he wanted to answer a question in the affirmative. Knowing the answer, Dr. Owen then asked the young man if he had any brothers.
Yes
, the subject's brain said, glowing at the top of his skull like a porch light.
As a matter of fact I do
.

Yet there is no way of knowing whether the young man had a subjective experience of that response, since scans have also shown that the unconscious brain is capable of responding to stimuli even when what we think of as the conscious mind registers nothing. One term for this phenomenon is
blindsight
. If patients who have sustained ocular trauma say they cannot see the photo of the smiling face being held in front of them but their unconscious brains say they can, are both responses true?

The legal and ethical debates over such questions will shape a larger discourse. In the future of consciousness, it would seem, subjectivity is somehow both paramount and beside the point. The protection of human life is ostensibly behind all medical advances, yet with neuroscience in particular the terms of what it means to be human are blurred. The question of quality comes into play more urgently in discussions of what it means to be alive, or to be capable of living the kind of life we think of as “good.” Again, the concept of “bad” is defined by a kind of default. Only the scientific path is clear: it is always better to know more, to pursue the science to its ends and then treat the human conundrums that result as inevitable.

It's no wonder we have started pair-bonding with our iPhones. In device attachment resides the old struggle between the possessor and the possessed, the shifting sands of desire and consent. What we respond to is not the gadget itself but its promise of some personal and highly specific gratification. Yet love must find its object. The image of a phone shivering alone on a table is no more or less loaded than a pinup of Brigitte Bardot. The image of a human being strapped into a three-ton magnet to watch a vignette of a smart phone shivering alone on a table, however, is a dystopian icon of heartbreak.

*   *   *

MindSign studies offer clients something that eludes even the most elaborate analog focus group: reliability. It's pitifully easy, however, to outperform a system based on consulting college kids—“drunks and stoners,” in Carlsen's words—for their thoughts on a $250 million movie. Carlsen cites his own time making the focus-group rounds while he was a film student as proof of their uselessness. After watching an early cut of a 2004 Dennis Quaid film called
Flight of the Phoenix
, Carlsen expedited the questionnaire like a man with better ways to waste his time.

“I literally was like ‘Good, good, good, good, good, good, good, good, good, good, good,'” he said. “I want my ten bucks, I'm done.” Other data-occluders include our ovine tendency to defer to the loudest person in the room, and the inclination to tell a sympathetic or otherwise great-looking questioner what he wants to hear. As well as doing away with the obstructive veils of subjectivity, MindSign cuts the average focus group down from between fifty and one hundred subjects to the magic number of sixteen. “That's the number for statistics, as far as fMRI science goes,” Carlsen said. “Sixteen is enough to speak for the population in a specific demographic.”

Calming investors is a major selling point of this kind of science; calming investors has probably always been a kind of science. But when I point out that creating a better focus group bypasses the question of why the film industry began outsourcing their creative autonomy to average civilians in the first place, Carlsen is sanguine. He's seen too much to worry about furthering a process that began shortly after he was born.

“I just came from Hollywood,” he said, in response to a question about the protests of writers and directors against his line of work. “You think those guys have any power? I worked for four producers [including Quentin Tarantino's longtime producer, Lawrence Bender]. I never wanted to be a producer, I just did it because I didn't have any money and I needed a job.” Carlsen sat in on the meetings we all now know from the meta-genre of “backstage” movies and TV shows, where talent is massaged in the room and spit on the second it leaves, major decisions hinge on a coked-out executive's fuckability call, and assistants spend their days making twenty copies of the latest piece of shit movie because it tested well and the boss is excited about it again. “It's like that everywhere,” Carlsen said. “It's just how it is. But great art will demand—” He paused. “Great art is
always
going to come through.”

This, certainly, is the hope. The studio system, for its flaws and foibles, was a closed house, the proverbial dream factory from which all Hollywood movies flowed. The independent renaissance of the 1970s privileged individual directors over a tightly run system. Film was ordained as an art form and filmmakers as artists, complete with their infernal talk of
vision
. Then, as film journalist Mark Harris has suggested, the monster success of
Top Gun
in 1986 solidified a producer- and marketing-driven generation of “high concept” blockbusters, “pure product” films interested chiefly in “the transient heightening of sensation.” The 1990s hosted a resurgence in independent filmmaking, a flare of innovation whose ashes were sifted through for the next decade, mostly by studio boutiques hoping the residue of “quality” might rub off. What prevailed in the mainstream were tent-pole pictures based on established brands, endless sequels to fluky original hits, and children's movies.

Developing a movie the way you would a brand seems like the safest option in a time when audiences are fragmenting and piracy is making it harder with every passing evening to get people out of their living rooms. Even the toughest-minded forecasts from previous decades—all that high/low hand-wringing—read a little quaint today. Think of Pauline Kael forewarning of a future in which the good old popcorn movie disappears up Antonioni's backside in an anomic ten-minute shot. Or Joan Didion arching precisely 3.5 millimeters of her brow over the empire that produced John Wayne giving way to an age of masturbatory passion projects. And that was the
sixties
. As a mass, middlebrow culture loomed, critics were preoccupied with segregating taste levels to their respective cultural water fountains. Eventually a policy of separate but equal arrived, and soon after that miscegenation ruled. In recent years the folding chair of creative power—having been passed from the studios to the independent auteur to the superproducer—ascended into the response-card cloud. Exit interviews, test screenings, and now brain-imaging scans help shape a film. It would seem that the audience has never been more powerful: united we stand, loving
Bridesmaids
one night and Nuri Bilge Ceylan the next.

The phrase
lowest common denominator
, often applied to questions of taste, is actually a matter of biology. Our most basic human responses are basic because they are shared: hunger, sex, sleep, fight or flight, pain—the pain response is so old it's vertebraic. If you gather enough people together and question them along a broad enough line, their responses will boil down to the consistency of a thick, primordial ooze. No one is above an ooze-based movie; it's
designed
to stimulate everyone with a working spinal cord. But what's being stimulated is a body, not a mind or spirit or even a brain. The latter is required for the punching of sensory buttons, but the human housing those responses is not. Denuding those senses—through deprivation or overstimulation—is a quick way to dehumanize. As our digestive tracts learn to break down frequently eaten foods more efficiently and develop resistance to foods we avoid, the psychologist Jonathan Schooler has suggested that the threshold for sensory stimulation adapts by a process called cosmic habituation. Where that threshold might top out, nobody knows. But it might be worth a guess.

*   *   *

Anyone standing downriver of the mainstream cannot escape this stuff. After several years of being expelled into the evening with the stink of a bad movie on me, a hierarchy of badness emerged. The bottom two-thirds of shit mountain is just the law of averages in digestive action, the same crap there has always been and ever will be. Only from the pinnacle does the horizon's bleakness come into view.

I remember my first glimpse from the top of Shit Mountain well. It was 2007, and I was watching the third installment of
The Pirates of the Caribbean
, the three-billion-dollar Disney franchise based on an amusement-park ride. It is the first time I can remember feeling that a movie was providing a direct and seriously unflattering reflection of what its makers thought of me. Savvy advertising is always trying to tell you something about yourself; it traffics only in different, better, more fulfilled versions of you. That's why it's so miserably effective: an ad can adopt the stance of leading you toward your own best interests. But a brand-centric movie is stuck pretending its purpose is to entertain, even if its job was done the moment it got you through the door, $13.50 lighter. And that's where movies like
Pirates
get caught out—it's the ad
and
the product, a long commercial for itself with nothing to actually sell.