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THE SPECTATOR 159
exhaustively treated in earlier contexts) mean an increased demand on the spectator's physiological make-up. The unknown shapes he encounters involve not so much his power of reasoning as his visceral faculties. Arousing his innate curiosity, they lure him into dimensions where sense impressions are all-important.
Lowered consciousness
All this favors organic tensions, nameless excitements. "It is not mainly a more or less marked complacency/' says Cohen-Seat about the spectator's condition, "which makes one renounce the effort to use his mental and superior capacities; rather, even a mind most capable of reflective thought will find out that this thought remains powerless in a turmoil of shock-like emotions." Within the same context Cohen-Seat also speaks of the "mental vertigo" which befalls the spectator and the "physiological tempests" raging in him.6
With the moviegoer, the self as the mainspring of thoughts and decisions relinquishes its power of control. This accounts for a striking difference between him and the theatergoer, which has been repeatedly pointed out by European observers and critics. "In the theater I am always I," a perceptive French woman once told this writer, "but in the cinema I dissolve into all things and beings."7 Wallon elaborates on the process of dissolution to which she refers: "If the cinema produces its effect, it does so because I identify myself with its images, because I more or less forget myself in what is being displayed on the screen. I am no longer in my own life, I am in the film projected in front of me."8
Films, then, tend to weaken the spectator's consciousness. Its withdrawal from the scene may be furthered by the darkness in moviehouses. Darkness automatically reduces our contacts with actuality, depriving us of many environmental data needed for adequate judgments and other mental activities. It lulls the mind.9 This explains why, from the 'twenties to the present day, the devotees of film and its opponents alike have compared the medium to a sort of drug and have drawn attention to its stupefying effects10— incidentally, a sure sign that the spoken word has not changed much. Doping creates dope addicts. It would seem a sound proposition that the cinema has its habitues who frequent it out of an all but physiological urge.11 They are not prompted by a desire to look at a specific film or to be pleasantly entertained; what they really crave is for once to be released from the grip of consciousness, lose their identity in the