Irreality and counterfactual thinking in the semiotics of cinema: A cognitive-psychological aspect

Modern literature and cinema increasingly draw on possible world semantics to tell stories about alternative realities, parallel universes and counterfactual events. Imagining the world from a plurality of perspectives, envisaging several life scenarios for one and the same developing story, undoing the past and rewriting history are only a few interesting ways in which our alternative (counterfactual) thought can flow as we engage in the changing and unpredictable experiences our environment affords. In this research, I view irreality as a linguistic product of counterfactual thinking analyzable on the level of both text and cinematic observation. Given that irreal semantics has been mostly investigated so far in terms of logic and information processing, I aim to explore the bodily experience in which our imagination of what could (not) be is grounded. With such a focus on the empirical and psychological aspects of irreality construction in thought and action, I turn to films and filmmaking techniques observable on screen as enactments of irreal meaning and irreal description of the world. In doing so, I analyze the features of polymodal construction of irreality in cinematic discourse. Using four feature films as research material – The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, Atonement, Sliding Doors, and Desperate Housewives – I investigate the dynamics of attention, bodily movements, perception and intellectual operations that are enacted on screen through the audio-visual semiotics to enable coherent alternative thinking and produce irreal descriptions of the situation. I argue a conclusion that in polymodal cinematic discourse, irreality “emerges” as a result of the subject’s operating with his/her past perceptual experience and re-configuring this experience in temporal terms in accordance with certain pragmatic goals and interests. In particular, I distinguish the following cognitive-psychological functions of irreality: undoing (canceling the lived experience), rescripting (rewriting, or re-evaluating and reconceptualizing, the lived experience), exploration of options (thinking of an experience in its alternatives), and scenario planning (acting on such experiential alternatives). I establish that imagining an alternative reality is not rejected by a film character as a perception-distorting fantasy but accepted instead as a useful cognitive and psychological tool that helps deal with uncertainty and solve various life problems. Through irreality, filmmakers manage to construct reversible time out of the characters’ non-linear flow of experience by enacting changes in their understanding of familiar events and objects of the surrounding world. A conclusion can be made that irreality and counterfactual thought in films are emplotted experiential configurations reproducible through the audio-visual semiotics of recorded video sequences.

polymodal discourse, alternative thinking, undoing, rescripting, scenario planning, exploration of options