T HE CINEMA OF CGI ATTRACTIONS

Understanding the Contemporary Hollywood Blockbuster’s Appeal

Sonny Sidhu
Swarthmore College
Film and Media Studies 092: Film Theory and Culture
Professor Patricia White
Spring 2009
FMST 092: Film Theory and Culture Sonny Sidhu
Professor P. White 22 May 2009

The Cinema of CGI Attractions

Understanding the Contemporary Hollywood Blockbuster’s Appeal

The advent of computer-generated imaging (or CGI) in Hollywood special effects, in the late

1970s and early 1980s, was welcomed enthusiastically by film critics, cinema theorists, die-hard

cinephiles, and casual moviegoers alike—all of whom sensed, in this new technological frontier, the

potential for a radical expansion in the scope and reach of the cinema itself. CGI technique and

technology matured rapidly during the 1980s, and throughout the early 1990s the unprecedented

commercial success of a string of CGI-driven special-effects blockbusters, including The Abyss

[1989], Terminator 2: Judgment Day [1991], and Jurassic Park [1993], demonstrated a persistent demand

for CGI-driven spectacle amongst the global moviegoing public. Hollywood studios have diligently

catered to that demand ever since, and today, more than fifteen years after Jurassic Park, CGI-driven

special-effects spectacle is securely entrenched as the dominant mode of the Hollywood cinema, both

in the domestic and (evermore) global markets. That is to say: Every summer so far this century, the

Hollywood studios have presented moviegoers around the world with a slate of flashy, escapist,

pointedly CGI-laden cinematic fantasies, and every summer, at least one of these films has joined

the list of the top ten highest-grossing films of all time.1 The most successful of these films and

franchises—The Lord of the Rings [2001, ‘02, ‘03], Harry Potter [2001, ’02, ’04, ’05, ‘07], Spider-Man

[2002, ‘04, ‘07], The Chronicles of Narnia [2005], Transformers [2007], The Dark Knight [2008], and Iron

Man [2008], among others—blend live-action photography with the ‘magic of CGI’ to bring to the

screen familiar stories and characters from pop-cultural properties that appeared, originally, outside

of the cinema. Collectively, this breed of Hollywood-produced CGI spectacle represents a global,

commercial and pop-cultural juggernaut that shows no signs of slowing. How should theory ap-

1
Source: Internet Movie Database <http://www.imdb.com/boxoffice/alltimegross?region=world-wide>
proach these films, and the source of their immense appeal? This essay aims to define the common

aesthetic that unites the most successful 21st-century Hollywood CGI-effects blockbusters through a

reading of director Sam Raimi’s enormously successful Spider-Man trilogy, with the ultimate goal of

approaching an understanding of the specific promise buried within the visual spectacle these films

provide.

Seeking to conceptualize this new breed of film, contemporary theory has embraced the

early-film historian Tom Gunning’s model of a “cinema of attractions”—a term originally coined to

describe the cinema as it existed prior to 1903 or 1904, in its earliest forms of production and exhibi-

tion. According to Gunning, the cinema of this period was an “exhibitionist cinema” that repre-

sented “less a way of telling stories than a way of presenting a series of views to an audience” (Gun-

ning 1989 62). Narrative concerns, he argues, did not come to dominate the practice of filmmaking

until the middle of the 20th century’s first decade, at which point the exhibitionist ‘cinema of attrac-

tions’ was gradually supplanted by the voyeuristic visual codes of later narrative cinema.

To many contemporary scholars, Gunning’s description of cinema at the turn of the last cen-

tury appears to perfectly capture the essence of CGI-laden Hollywood cinema around the turn of

this century. In the past ten years, cinema scholars have often approached the issue of contemporary,

CGI effects-driven Hollywood cinema through the theoretical framework of a latter-day ‘cinema of

attractions.’ In this growing body of theory, scholars universally indicate that the two cinemas share,

aesthetically, an exhibitionist mode of spectator-address and an emphasis on visual spectacle at the

expense of narrative development. Some researchers venture beyond these formal similarities to

note that both the early ‘cinema of attractions’ and the latter-day cinema of CGI attractions emerged

within the particular techno-historical context of a visual culture informed by discourses involving

the spectacular novelty of the cinema’s promise. (Crucial to this last point’s continuing utility is the

fact that Hollywood CGI—which advances constantly at the exponential rate of technological accel-

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eration predicted by Moore’s law, yet which is subject to the seasonal rhythm of the Hollywood re-

lease schedule in its exhibition—seems to offer the promise of endlessly renewable novelty.)

Contemporary scholarship amply demonstrates the metaphorical usefulness of Gunning’s

early ‘cinema of attractions’ model in engaging with basic aesthetic and techno-historical issues sur-

rounding the current reign of the Hollywood CGI blockbuster. However, today’s theory offers less

consensus on the present-day applicability of the most important component of Gunning’s ‘cinema

of attractions’ model—namely, the author’s penetrating insight into the socio-cultural context within

which the technologically novel visual spectacle of the early cinema came to resonate in the collec-

tive psyche, and was elevated from mere diversion to attraction. The element of attraction that sup-

ports Gunning’s model of early cinema derived from a social impulse far more complicated than a

simple interest in visual spectacle and technological novelty. Similarly, if contemporary cinema the-

ory seeks to fully understand the current Hollywood blockbuster category as a ‘cinema of attrac-

tions,’ it must look beyond CGI’s surface novelty and graphical flash to examine the fundamental

significance and allure that this imagery holds in the psychology of the 21st-century spectator-subject.

Tom Gunning approaches the question of audience-attraction in the ‘cinema of attractions’

model in “An Aesthetic of Astonishment: Early Film and the (In)Credulous Spectator.” Published in

1995, six years after “The Cinema of Attractions,” this essay represented Gunning’s effort to redeem

the early cinema spectator from a primitivist myth of credulous naïveté, which, the author argues,

was a fabrication of subsequent 20th-century cinema theory:

The first audiences, according to this myth, were naïve, encountering [the]
threatening and rampant image with no defenses, with no tradition by
which to understand it. The absolute novelty of the moving image there-
fore reduced them to a state usually attributed to savages in their primal
encounter with the advanced technology of Western colonialists, howling
and fleeing in impotent terror before the power of the machine. This
audience of the first exhibitions exists outside of the willing suspension of
disbelief, the immediacy of their terror short-circuiting even disavowal’s
detour of ‘I know very well… but all the same.’ Credulity overwhelms all
else, the physical reflex signaling a visual trauma (Gunning 1995 114-15).

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According to Gunning, the idea that early cinema spectators were fundamentally deceived by the

powerful illusion projected by the cinema apparatus is popular because it supports a number of 20th-

century realist discourses on film rooted in the ‘objectivity’ or ‘indexicality’ of the photographic me-

dium—the existential relationship that links every photographic image to a real-world referent

grounded in a distinct time and place. However this idea, in Gunning’s view, bears little relation to

fact. Rather, he argues, early cinema spectators were mostly savvy and self-possessed subjects of a

late-19th-century visual culture that placed great emphasis on the technological novelty of a variety of

visual effects, whose appeal was understood to lie not in the spectacle of the effects themselves, but

in the unique, thrilling ontological uncertainty of the images they produced. According to Gunning,

“the projection of the first moving images stands at the climax of a period of intense development in

visual entertainments, a tradition in which realism was valued largely for its uncanny effects” (Gun-

ning 1995 116). This suggests the early spectators were not liable to confuse cinematic images for

the objects depicted therein, because in the context of the visual culture in which the first cinematic

images were displayed, the very concept of cinematic realism had already been constructed as a mat-

ter of reference, not of existence. Tracing cinema’s lineage back to the magical theatre of 19th-

century stage illusions, Gunning writes, “rather than being a simple reality effect, the illusionistic arts

of the nineteenth century cannily exploited their unbelievable nature, keeping a conscious focus on

the fact that they were only illusions… Rather than mistaking the [cinematic] image for reality, the

spectator is astonished by its transformation through the new illusion of projected motion. Far from

credulity, it is the incredible nature of the illusion itself that renders the viewer speechless” (Gunning

1995 117-18). In the early ‘cinema of attractions,’ the cinema’s illusion of reality did not merely con-

jure the attraction—it was the attraction.

To the extent that early audiences were visibly astonished by the cinematic display, their re-

sponse indicates little more than their complicity in a contemporary discourse that stressed the novel

Sidhu 4
power of emerging visual-effects technologies to produce astonishing effects of spatial and temporal

subjective displacement—in short, to reshape the spectator’s notion of reality. Early spectators were

indeed astonished by the enhanced indexicality of the cinematic medium, not for indexicality’s own

sake (as the myth of their petrification before the ‘real’ object onscreen would indicate), but because

of the novel capability inherent in the medium’s expanded indexical faculties. What was thrilling

about the cinema, then, was its apparent capacity to extend the spectator’s perception of objects in

time beyond the spatio-temporal constraints of corporeal subjectivity.

According to Gunning, the promise of the cinema thrilled early spectators because it seemed

to offer a reprieve from some of the peculiar demands and disappointments of urban life at the turn

of the 20th century. In the author’s own words, the ‘cinema of attractions’ “responds to the specifics

of modern and especially urban life, what Benjamin and Kracauer understood as the drying up of

experience and its replacement by a culture of distraction” (Gunning 1995 126). Invoking the Au-

gustinian concept of curiositas—defined in the fifth-century Confessions as a ‘lust of the eyes’ that at-

taches itself even to the unbeautiful ‘simply because of the lust to find out and to know’—Gunning

writes:

While the impulse to curiositas may be as old as Augustine, there is no

question that the nineteenth century sharpened this form of ‘lust of the
eyes’ and its commercial exploitation. Expanding urbanisation with its ka-
leidoscopic succession of city sights, the growth of consumer society with
its new emphasis on stimulating spending through visual display, and the
escalating horizons of colonial exploration with new peoples and territo-
ries to be categorised and exploited all provoked the desire for images and
attractions (Gunning 1995 124).

The early cinema spectator was an urbanized subject burdened by a fundamental contradiction of

the turn-of-the-century condition: a heightened awareness of the richness and variety of the world’s

images, coupled with an oppressive sense of one’s own inability to take it all in. The cinema’s arrival

promised to alleviate this burden of modernity by technologically expanding the spectator’s ability to

see the images of the world. The early ‘cinema of attractions’ arose out of filmmakers’ attempts to

Sidhu 5
deliver on this promise, and exhibits what Gunning calls an impulsively ‘encyclopedic’ ambition,

with the ultimate goal of “transforming all of reality into cinematographical views” (1995 126). As

Gunning observes:

It is not surprising that city street scenes, advertising films, and foreign
views all formed important genres of early cinema. The enormous popu-
larity of foreign views (already developed and exploited by the stereoscope
and magic lantern) expresses an almost unquenchable desire to consume
the world through images. The cinema was, as the slogan of one early film
company put it, an invention which put the world within your grasp. Early
cinema categorised the visible world as a series of discreet attractions, and
the catalogues of the first production companies present a nearly ency-
clopœdic survey of this new hyper-visible topology, from landscape pano-
ramas to microphotography, from domestic scenes to the beheading of
prisoners and the execution of elephants (Gunning 1995 124-25).

In Gunning’s reading, the attraction of the early cinema derived from the medium’s potential to ex-

pand the spectator’s self-consciously limited ability to perceive the innumerable visual wonders of

the world, and thus the early ‘cinema of attractions’ took as its subject these elusive sights. “If the

first spectators screamed,” Gunning argues, “it was to acknowledge the power of the apparatus to

sweep away a prior and firmly entrenched sense of reality. This vertiginous experience of the frailty

of our knowledge of the world before the power of visual illusion produced that mixture of pleasure

and anxiety which the purveyors of popular art had labeled sensations and thrills and on which they

founded a new aesthetic of attractions” (Gunning 1995 121-22). The myth of the naïve early specta-

tor presumes that the aesthetic of the ‘cinema of attractions’ was in fact primitive, and that it re-

mained in a primitive state for years because an unsophisticated and easily-astonished audience, fail-

ing to demand a higher level of cinematic craft, allowed it to. Gunning’s redemptive project turns

this notion on its head, revealing that the audience for early cinema, having sensed the attraction and

promise of this new medium early on, approached it with a specific set of demands, and that the aes-

thetic of the ‘cinema of attractions’ was in fact carefully calibrated to fulfill its spectators’ expecta-

tions and validate this sense of promise.

Sidhu 6
 Gunning’s insight is pertinent to the subject of this essay because it demonstrates a useful

way of approaching the question of the attraction of the 21st-century Hollywood CGI blockbuster

aesthetic. To the extent that contemporary theory engages this question, it tends to treat it as though

it were no question at all. Seeking to locate the particular appeal of the new Hollywood blockbuster,

critics cite the extreme visuality of the CGI blockbuster aesthetic, as well as the perpetual discourse

of the ‘new’ that accompanies the aesthetic in contemporary visual culture, as though these factors

alone could support the form through nearly two decades of unprecedented commercial and cultural

ascendance. To ignore the missing element of audience attraction—the spark of conceptual novelty

buried within a new technology, which allows audiences to draw personal meaning and significance

from a nevertheless predominantly visual aesthetic—is to do contemporary audiences a disservice.

Like Gunning’s early cinema spectators, the contemporary spectators of the Hollywood CGI block-

buster cinema have been made out to be slack-jawed, passive, and indiscriminate—satisfied by novel

visual spectacle, and demanding little more. If the 21st-century Hollywood cinema of the CGI-effects

blockbuster is, indeed, a cinema of attractions, then theory must acknowledge that this attraction lies

not simply in the loudness and newness of these films’ CGI effects, but in their seeming capacity to

bend the dimensions of reality, allowing the cinema to show audiences sights they’ve always wanted

to see, but couldn’t—until now.

What, specifically, does the audience of the cinema of CGI attractions want to see? Judging

from domestic and worldwide box-office statistics, the single greatest audience demand in our time

is for films that feature cherished properties culled from the existing body of popular culture—

whether from literature, video games, toys, comic books, graphic novels, or television—brought to

life in full Hollywood style, with moments of action and spectacle enhanced by CGI special-effects

technologies. In fact, twenty-four of the fifty highest-grossing films in history, worldwide, are 21st-

century Hollywood CGI-effects blockbusters that feature familiar stories and characters drawn from

Sidhu 7
wider popular culture. Evidently, the most successful Hollywood CGI-effects blockbusters share a

common focus of subject matter, but since the attraction of this cinema is aesthetic as well as the-

matic, we must also ask: Do these films also share a common aesthetic, and if so, what formal quali-

ties define that aesthetic?

Director Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man cycle of films provides us with an obvious case for close

study as we address the question of a CGI aesthetic of attractions. Even by the dizzying standards of

the 21st-century Hollywood cinema of CGI attractions, the success of the Spider-Man trilogy was

enormous, and enduring—today, all three of its entries continue to hold positions in both the do-

mestic and worldwide all-time box-office top twenty. Raimi’s Spider-Man films exhibit an internally

consistent aesthetic that is both recognizable and recognizably ‘CGI.’ Moreover, subsequent to the

success of the Spider-Man films this aesthetic—distinguished by a hypersaturated and predominantly

primary color palette; an exaggerated, almost assaultive emphasis on camera mobility; and the nearly

continuous blending of CGI and live-action footage into a seamless and hyperreal composite—has

in many ways become a blueprint for the Hollywood cinema of CGI attractions, in general, and the

CGI cinema of comic-book adaptations, in particular.

In “The Hollywood Cobweb: New Laws of Attraction,” theorist Dick Tomasovic examines

Raimi’s Spider-Man within a ‘cinema of attractions’ framework, finding that, “like early films, Spider-

Man proposes a profoundly exhibitionist system of the image-attraction, because, after all, it is al-

ways a question of giving to see rather than of telling; moreover, the stories do not have much to tell

(the story of Spider-Man has been told a thousand times in the comics, just like everybody knows the

history of Titanic)” (Tomasovic 314). While Hollywood CGI-effects blockbusters like Spider-Man,

which build on widely familiar elements of pop-culture mythology, may betray a reduced emphasis

on narrative exegesis, this cinema is distinguished from the early ‘cinema of attractions’ by the fact

that it must, to some extent, concern itself with the development of narrative. As Tomasovic notes:

Sidhu 8
“The opposition between the ‘system of monstrative attractions’ and the ‘system of narrative inte-

gration’ is not valid any longer here. According to the tradition of comics, the supernatural is at-

tached to the character (‘The Amazing Spider-Man’). Without the character, there is no attraction.

The dichotomy narration/attraction becomes actually the condition of the attraction” (Tomasovic

314). In the Hollywood cinema of CGI attractions, unlike the early ‘cinema of attractions,’ the exhi-

bitionist visual spectacularism of the CGI sequence must be incorporated into a structure largely de-

fined by the voyeuristic codes of narrative cinema, resulting in a hybrid mode of spectator-address

that vacillates between these two poles. While these films may be dominated by a traditional Holly-

wood mode of narrative integration, at times the narrative must recede into the background to make

way for the ‘interruptive spectacle’ of CGI special effects (to borrow a term coined by Brooks Lan-

don in reference to the pre-CGI special effects of 1970s sci-fi cinema).

Although the phrase ‘interruptive spectacle’ aptly describes the mode in which both CGI and

non-CGI special-effects sequences operate within the context of Hollywood narrative cinema, the

aesthetic of the CGI-effects attraction is marked by a particular quality of alterity that distinguishes it

even from earlier forms of special effects. In her work on the CGI-driven Hollywood blockbuster

cinema of the early 1990s, Michele Pierson details the beginnings of a presentational tradition of

marked (and remarked-upon) visual difference pertaining to the CGI special effect, which contrib-

uted to its extra- or even counter-narrative aesthetic of alterity:

The mode of arts-and-effects direction characteristic of science-fiction

cinema in the early 1990s is very much directed towards establishing a
spectatorial relation to its computer-generated special effects that is won-
dering, and even contemplative… The presentation of key computer-
generated images produces a distinct break in the action. These temporal
and narrative breaks might be thought of as helping to establish the con-
ditions under which spectators’ willed immersion in the action—their
readiness to be carried along by ‘the ride’—is suspended long enough to
direct their attention to the display of the digital artefact. Effects se-
quences featuring CGI commonly exhibit a mode of spectatorial address
that—with its tableau-style framing, longer takes, and strategic intercutting
between shots of the computer-generated object and reaction shots of the
characters—solicits a contemplative viewing of the computer-generated
image (Pierson 169).

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While certain early-‘90s strategies of framing the CGI effect may have fallen by the wayside in the

21st-century CGI blockbuster cinema (surely, as the contemporary audience’s initial awe of the tech-

nique of CGI gives way to an increasingly jaded familiarity, the practice of intercutting between a

CGI effect and reaction shots of impressed spectator-surrogates has all but disappeared), Pierson’s

observations remain useful to our understanding of today’s cinema of CGI attractions—a cinema

that continues to present technically and technologically virtuosic CGI special effects sequences in

the mode of interruptive spectacle. Pierson notes, “What becomes important in the counter-

narrative represented by this ‘show-stopping’ special-effects imagery, is not the power of special ef-

fects to represent the other-worldly technologies of future societies and alien civilizations, but the

power of special effects to present the awesome imaging capabilities of special-effects technologies

themselves” (165). The spectacle of the CGI effect interrupts the narrative because, as a form of

cinematic attraction akin to the original attraction of the early cinema, it must draw attention to the

technological novelty of its own technique, and in so doing must short-circuit a network of narrative

codes designed to render the apparatus of the cinema transparent. When CGI effects are forced to

compete with narrative, they struggle to attain the status of spectacle, let alone attraction.

Thus, the cinema of CGI attractions offers forth the special-effects setpiece—a self-

contained cinematic subunit in which the voyeuristic narrative code of apparatus-transparency that

structures the film as a whole is set aside, for the moment, to allow an exhibitionist framing of the

featured CGI attraction. Raimi’s Spider-Man films rely heavily on the ‘narrative-setpiece-narrative’

rhythm of exegesis that characterizes the 21st-century cinema of CGI attractions, and in some senses

Raimi allows the spectacle to dominate; it appears as though the films’ narrative material has been

tailored to fit within plot structures primarily defined by the escalating spectacle of a series of inter-

ruptive CGI setpieces.

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 The third Spider-Man film contains one of the most arresting setpieces to be found within the

whole cycle, and indeed within all of the 21st-century cinema of attractions to date: a continuous

three-minute tracking shot depicting the reorganization of a pile of sand, grain-by-grain, into the

form of the villain Sandman (Thomas Haden Church). To quote the film critic Manohla Dargis’

particularly lyrical description of the scene’s effect, “when [Sandman] rises from a bed of sand after a

‘particle atomizer’ scrambles his molecules, his newly granulated form shifts and spills apart, then

lurches into human form with a heaviness that recalls Boris Karloff staggering into the world as

Frankenstein’s monster. There’s poetry in this metamorphosis, not just technological bravura, a

glimpse into the glory and agony of transformation” (1). The visual poetry of the Sandman birth se-

quence replaces the narrative prose of Spider-Man 3’s exegesis for several minutes, during which the

film’s mode of address largely reverts to the exhibitionism of early cinema. Bob Rehak, a writer on

the function of special effects in contemporary cinema, notes the correspondence between the aes-

thetic of the CGI setpiece and the presentational mode of early films: “Like atavistic structures

within the human body, setpieces seem to preserve long-ago aesthetics of early cinema: their logic of

action and escalation recalls Edison kinetoscopes and Keystone Cops chases, while more hushed and

contemplative setpieces (like the Sandman birth) have about them something of the arresting still-

ness and visual splendor of the actualité” (1).

The Sandman birth sequence opens with an extreme close-up on a configuration of lifeless

sand particles. For a moment, the frame holds on this unfamiliar and disorienting image. Then, as

the camera slowly zooms out and enters its circular tracking motion, the particles begin to stir, and

as the bed of sand gradually coheres into an a recognizably vital and human form, the uncanny spec-

tacle of the illusion comes to life. This halting presentation, which dramatizes the transformative

promise of the leap from photographic to CGI special-effects, mirrors the manner in which the first

cinematic images were exhibited. According to Tom Gunning:

Sidhu 11
 “In the earliest Lumière exhibitions the films were initially presented as
frozen unmoving images, projections of still photographs. Then, flaunting
a mastery of visual showmanship, the projector began cranking and the
image moved. Or, as [Maxim] Gorky described it, ‘suddenly a strange
flicker passes through the screen and the picture stirs to life’… This coup
de théâtre, the sudden transformation from still image to moving illusion,
startled audiences and displayed the novelty and fascination of the ci-
nématographe… the presentation acts out the contradictory stages of in-
volvement with the image, unfolding, like other nineteenth-century visual
entertainments, a vacillation between belief and incredulity” (Gunning
1995 118-19).

Like the early film exhibitors who opened their cinematic presentations by projecting the beginning

of a film in suspended animation, Raimi opens the Sandman birth sequence with a technically unim-

pressive still shot of a pile of sand, deftly dramatizing the technological novelty and conceptually

transformative power inherent in the animated images that follow.

In the early ‘cinema of attractions’ model, the ‘fascination of the cinématographe’ lay in its

novel power as a technology of perceptual extension, and the promise that it could fulfill the dream

of a ‘world within your [visual] grasp.’ What dream does the novel power of CGI special-effects

technology promise to fulfill? Michele Pierson notes that “one of the most powerful discourses on

computer-generated imaging technologies centers on the possibility that this technology might one

day produce images that are so realistic it is impossible to distinguish them from objects in the real

world... Popular discourses on CGI effects have also focused on the dream of simulation, often pre-

senting the latest Hollywood science-fiction blockbuster as an invitation to participate in the techno-

scientific adventure that this dream represents” (Pierson 167). The ‘dream of simulation’ certainly

seems to be at work in the Sandman birth scene, a CGI-effects sequence that de-emphasizes its own

visual spectacularity through formal restraint (the long take; the simplicity of the camera’s move-

ment) and seeks to mask its synthetic artifice through the inclusion of pseudophotographic cues

such as lens flare and motion blur. The Sandman sequence is an exercise in what Stephen Prince has

termed ‘perceptual realism,’ a theory of cinematic realism that supplants traditional models based on

the indexicality of the photographic image with a model that acknowledges the potential for any im-

Sidhu 12
age—photographic or otherwise—to correspond to a spectator’s experience and expectation of real-

ity. According to Prince, “a perceptually realistic image is one which structurally corresponds to the

viewer’s audiovisual experience of three-dimensional space” (32). In the case of live-action/CGI

composites (or fully-CGI sequences meant to match a live-action aesthetic), the demands of percep-

tual realism dictate the inclusion of pseudophotographic cues, such that the CGI image appears to

have been recorded using the same familiar apparatus responsible for the corresponding live-action

material. According to Prince, “[pseudophotographic] techniques… lend credence and a sense of

reality to the composited image such that its computerized components seem to fulfill the indexical-

ized conditions of photographic realism” (Prince 33). The novel consequence of ontological uncer-

tainty produced by a convincingly ‘photographic’ yet conceptually fantastic CGI effect stems from

the residual currency, within contemporary visual culture, of discourses of indexicality surrounding

the photographic-cinematic image. If the photographic image of an object is understood to indicate

the real-world existence of its referent, then the presence of a convincingly ‘photographic’ image of

a conceptually fantastic object seems to imply that this object, too, exists in reality.

According to the cinema scholar Dan North, in “witnessing the birth of the Sandman, one

of the pleasures comes from seeing a two-dimensional comic book character transplanted into a

three-dimensional, digitally rendered figure” (1). In North’s opinion, much of the attraction of this

visual spectacle stems from the fact that the figure of the Sandman is ‘digitally rendered’—in fact, he

argues, “the Sandman is the perfect CGI character [because] the kind of particle-system modeling

used to make swarms of particles take on shapes and patterns is something that computer-graphics

are equipped to do—it would be extraordinarily difficult, if not impossible, to do this in stop-motion

or another kind of pro-filmic object animation… In short, the scene’s novelty value is to be under-

stood in terms of its differentiation from prior instances of animation and effects shots” (1). North

believes that the fundamental attraction of the Sandman birth sequence derives from its status as a

Sidhu 13
particularly novel and sophisticated instance of visual spectacle—in this case, a spectacular demon-

stration of CGI’s capacity to simultaneously calculate and render motion vectors for a huge number

of individual digital sand particles. While North’s observations are astute—the Sandman birth se-

quence indeed revels in its own novelty, and is presented in a way that renders self-evident the exis-

tential debt it owes to the fantastic technology of CGI—his analysis accounts for only the techno-

historical and visual attraction of the CGI-effects aesthetic, not its conceptual potency. Indeed, by

focusing so keenly on the element of technologically novel visual spectacle within the Sandman birth

scene, North largely ignores the subtle formal qualities of counter-spectacle that permeate the scene

and differentiate it from the visual hyperbole that characterizes most of Spider-Man 3’s big CGI-

effects setpieces. As Bob Rehak notes, “for all the sequence’s correctly lauded technical artistry and

narrative concision, there is something ploddingly literal at its heart, a blunt sense of investigation

that smacks of pornography, surveillance-camera footage, and NASA animations—all forms, inci-

dentally, that share the Spider-Man scene’s unflinching long take” (1). Rehak’s point is well-taken—

for all the obviously fantastical elements at play within this sequence, its overall effect is remarkably

subdued, grounded in a banal aesthetic of primitive (and thus assuredly indexical) cinematic tech-

nique. The key to this sequence’s conceptual potency, and thereby its status as an attraction, lies in

the tension that arises between its conceptually fantastic subject and the photographically grounded

literalism of its aesthetic—a tension that exploits contemporary audiences’ residual faith in the in-

dexical fidelity of film to evoke a thrilling state of ontological uncertainty in which obviously unreal

elements seem to possess a verifiable trait of existence: the quality of photographability.

In essence, this seems to be the attraction of the 21st-century CGI blockbuster category as a

whole. Like the cinema itself at the moment of its introduction, contemporary CGI promises to re-

shape the spectator’s sense of the dimensions of reality—or at the very least, realism—by showing

her something she previously lacked the capacity to perceive visually. In the context of the early

Sidhu 14
‘cinema of attractions,’ the visual spectacle of photography in motion offered an experience-

deprived and image-addicted urban audience the promise of visual mastery over the world’s far-

flung objects of wonder. In the context of 21st-century visual culture, the spectacle of perceptually

realistic CGI special effects technology offers an image-saturated, internet-enabled cinema audience

(an audience that might justifiably worry that it has seen everything worth seeing in this shrunken,

globalized world), the promise of the imaginary made visual and thus manifest—at least according to

an inherited logic of cinematic indexicality. In this sense, it is not surprising that the most successful

films of our time have generally featured cherished characters and stories culled from the collective

imagination of contemporary cinema audiences. The success of these films simply indicates a gener-

alized demand for literal renderings of previously imagined but cinematically unrealizable images. It

is only logical to expect renderings of the most widely-held fantasies—fantasies involving popular

superheroes and familiar literary neverlands—to find the greatest audience. Neither is it surprising

that the most successful cinema of our time is that which most convincingly merges the inherited

technology of the photographic cinema with the new technology of CGI. Just as CGI extends the

indexical capabilities of photographic cinema by enabling the cinema to include images with no real-

world referent, the photographic cinema extends the figurative capabilities of CGI by providing it

with a visual grammar of indexical photographic reality that can be used to wipe away the traces of

its own synthetic artifice. In the 21st-century Hollywood cinema of CGI attractions, the indexical

photographic image takes on qualities of the figurative synthetic image, and the figurative synthetic

image takes on qualities of the indexical photographic image, their convergence profoundly and

thrillingly interrogating the spectator’s inborn sense of the conceptual and sensory limits of reality.

The aesthetic of this cinema can be found where the literal meets the figurative, where realism meets

formalism, and most importantly, where the photographic cinema meets the cinema of computer-

generated imagery—in the uncanny zone of the perceptually realistic fantasy.

Sidhu 15
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