These eyes are cryin’
The Guess Who, “These Eyes” (1969).
These eyes have seen a lot of loves
But they’re never gonna see another one like I had with you
My college fiction teacher Justin Cronin, who later went on to pen The Passage trilogy, disseminated a glossary of craft terms in his classes that included specific Cronin-isms that might be best emblematized in the entry designated “‘Baby, It’s Yu,'” which he defines as “A Jungian pun; any use of language in a story that takes a physical circumstance and retools it through metaphor.” He provides as an example the story “Trust Me” by John Updike, in which the character is literally in a high place in the first two scenes and then figuratively high (on a hash brownie) in the third. Cronin does not provide in his official glossary document the origin of the “‘Baby, It’s Yu'” term he uses for this concept, but he did describe its origin in class, which derives from a dream he had that I can’t really remember except that it involved some kind of play on “Yu” and “You.” The fact that the term derives from a dream is significant to his designation of the “Jungian pun” concept, because unlike the broadly used “Freudian slip,” the “Jungian pun” also seems to be a Cronin-ism not in general circulation. The psychologist Carl Jung elucidated a lot of the function of the human “unconscious” (manifest often in dreams), which the fiction writer Robert Boswell (a grad school teacher of mine) uses as the foundation of his book of craft essays The Half-Known World (2008), which has the narrative spandrel essay I still use in my advanced fiction classes.
Per my previous post‘s dissection of “the way eyes look,” Justin’s “Yu”/”You” wordplay from so many years ago bubbled up from my unconscious when I started thinking about integrating AI-generated writing into my advanced fiction class this semester, since this has become such an integral issue in creative-writing professions, as demonstrated by the Writers Guild of America strike. “Eye”/”I.” What is the value of writing by humans rather than robots? Does the world “look different” through the eyes of artificial intelligence?
As I explore such questions with the fiction class, I am also starting an elective on Disney and continuing to explore “the way eyes look” in Disney movies. Expounding to the Disney class on the multitude of topics they could do their presentations on this semester, my examples included narrative comparisons of the live-action remakes to their originals as well as why a certain movie or movies did better at the box office than others. I mentioned that when you “look closer” at certain Disney texts, you might notice things you didn’t before, like the significant differential in the quality of the original Pinocchio (1940) and Dumbo (1941), with the former having been labored over for much longer at much greater expense than the latter, since Dumbo was truncated (so to speak) due to the onset of WWII. Then it occurred to me that two of the biggest Disney live-action remake bombs were Dumbo (2019) and Pinocchio (2022). Having watched both, I concur they are terrible–and for multiple reasons (though I could probably argue Dumbo is worse)–but per the eye theme, I think they both exemplify a trend of failure across the span of the live-action remakes, and that is the use of CGI, or even more specifically, of the CG-EYES. Before I watched the remakes of this pair, I watched the originals again, which I had seen more than a few times in my childhood, and despite Dumbo‘s factually objective lower quality, I was instantly affected by the emotion conveyed in the animated eyes of Dumbo’s mother in the opening sequence as she waited, in vain, for the stork to deliver her a baby. How do they do that? I thought.
The CG-Eyes of the elephants in the remake similarly swell with emotion at points–and yet this emotional swelling turns out to be quite different. Rather than the genuine emotion conveyed by Dumbo’s mother’s eyes in the original, the emotion expressed by the CG-Eyes to me felt fake, saccharine, obnoxious.
(In the case of Dumbo, this failure was exacerbated by that of the main child actor, whose general emotional conveyance was as deadpan as cardboard, despite her having actual eyes.)
Pinocchio has the exact same CG-Eye problem.
The Little Mermaid works better because the eyes of the characters are not CG-Eyes (and because the live actors in this film can actually act).
And yet, if you watch a movie like Wall-E (2008), you can see that it’s not CG-Eyes in and of themselves that are the problem. In a narrative that revolves around an AI-robot’s emotions, the emotional conveyance of the robot CGI-Eyes is critical, and in Wall-E, it’s really nothing less than stunning. While Wall-E’s eyes arguably replicate human eyes to some extent, the robot Eve’s eyes definitely do not, yet these eyes still communicate emotion quite effectively.
This effectiveness is elemental to the general success of the studio that pioneered CGI animation, the Disney-owned Pixar, though the failure of its most recent film–Elemental (2023)–seems to evidence Pixar’s waning quality, as aptly analyzed by Jessica Winter, who essentially reads a Jungian pun into this film’s concept, designating it a “tearful metaphor for Pixar’s decline.” Dissecting how its narrative climax derives from the “running joke in ‘Elemental’ that evolves into a grand theme (spoilers forthcoming) is that Wade cries a lot,” Winter then extrapolates the main character’s climactic “(re)generative tears [into] a metaphor for what Pixar has lost. They are what Pixar wants from us and can no longer have,” before pulling back into a broader analysis of a defining quality of the Pixar brand: producing “tearjerkers.” (Winter also mentions that Wall-E, that film based around the emotion conveyed by AI-eyes, is considered by many critics “to be Pixar’s best film.”)
Near the beginning of the titular essay in Boswell’s The Half-Known World, he mentions watching a play in which rain was replicated on stage in such a way that, despite replicating rain in an authentic manner, diverted his attention from the world of the play’s narrative specifically because it was too authentic:
Imagine a play set in the wilderness, a serious play by an important playwright. The stage set is elaborate. It includes a mammoth tree and a stream with real water that runs across the front of the stage and feeds a small pond. A few minutes into the play, thunder sounds and it actually begins to rain, water cascading down from above and landing in the stream. It is an impressive spectacle; however, sitting there in the audience, I feel myself slip out of the drama to wonder about the complicated sprinkling and drainage system. In the second act, one character tortures another by drag- ging him to the pond and holding his head under the water. At this point, I bounce entirely out of the play. I catch myself wondering whether he has a straw under there by which to breathe.
Robert Boswell, “The Half-Known World,” The Half-Known World (2008) (emphasis mine).
The rain and pond interfere with the audience’s ability to enter the play’s world. They are too literal for the medium. You will not be surprised to hear that the playwright had recently been writing Hollywood screenplays. Returning to the stage, he confused the nature of film with the nature of drama. Serious theater, like serious fiction, is a medium of implication. A play succeeds by making you see what is not there. Two actors staring as if through a window create not only the glass but also the landscape.
This explains why the CGI-Eyes work across the Pixar canon but not the Disney live-action canon. In Pixar movies, the eyes and the creatures they belong to are not the only CGI-rendered elements in the films’ landscapes: the entire filmscape is CGI. In the live-action Dumbo and Pinocchio, the titular characters are rendered in CGI while the landscape surrounding them is “real.” This represents the inherent flaw in rendering cartoon-animated Disney narratives in “live-action”–these narratives necessitate a problematic juxtaposition of CGI and live acting, or a juxtaposition of real and fake: a contrast that calls attention to the fake, rather than making the fake seem real.
If Boswell essentially wondered how do they do that? about the rain like I did seeing Dumbo’s mother’s eyes, the effect on him was the opposite of what my question represented. Those eyes drew me (so to speak) into the world of the story, making me feel her emotion in a way that made her world seem real, while the real-seeming rain drew Boswell out of the story. The lesson: the mechanics of a narrative, whether it’s in prose or in special tech effects, should never call attention to themselves, but should rather draw attention to the story.
Thinking about all the AI stuff, I recalled a story a student wrote in the advanced fiction class last fall, before the advent of ChatGPT, about an AI robot–a story it happens was entitled “Rain.” This was a gorgeous story, and exemplifies ALL of this post’s aforementioned themes, as you can see from another students’ summary of the story in their written workshop critique:
Summary: In “Rain,” there is a robot who is watching the rain outside. It is the first time it has rained in a long time. The robot is charged with watching a girl in an incubator. After giving its daily report, the robot goes to the mess hall and notices the other robots aren’t there, which is odd. After completing its assignments, the robot returns to the room with the incubator and feels lonely, staring wistfully at the rain. It wants to go outside. The robot thinks about its past, where it was created to prepare the new planet for human habitation but without any AI, just as a very mechanical thing. The humans have still not woken up, though they landed on the planet a while back. While watching the rain, the robot comes to the conclusion that the girl will never wake up. While going to the airlock, the robot looks at its face and is disturbed by the state of disrepair of it. When the robot wakes up, he gets a new face and body. He goes outside, looking at the girl one last time. The sun and the dust start to rust him and cause him pain, but he dances in the dewy dust and notices, as he is shutting down, the other robots, all rusted and dead in a pile. They had gone out in the rain and had rusted through, but they had “lived” for a moment. As he dies, he hears a girl cry.
Part of this story’s effectiveness is in its rising action developed through the pronoun use, as described in the same student’s critique: “The shifting pronouns [from ‘it’ to ‘he’] through the story were a really nice touch to show how 01178 is gaining more and more of a sense of self…” and in the climax, that sense of self is cemented by the robot having the agency to make a choice–ironically, a choice that kills its self, and one that we’re also shown by the pile of dead robots that seem to have made the same choice, that this sense of self is not particularly unique, and neither, this development highlights, is humans’. (If a narrative climax is often constituted by an epiphany, or main character REALIZING something, this concept heightens the significance of REAL EYES, to make another Jungian pun.) The summary also gives us a sense of how emotions pervade the story despite its being about a ROBOT, as is the case in Wall-E.
Wall-E also happens to exemplify, indirectly, an approach to Jungian depth psychology in how the titular robot’s emotion that is the foundation of the film’s plot, his love for the robot Eve, apparently derives from his having seen it in a film:
(This film that Wall-E learns the concept of love from is Hello, Dolly! (1969), which it’s probably not a coincidence that Disney owns the rights to, as evidenced by its presence on Disney+.) Reflecting how visual texts can help us learn about ourselves, our emotions, and the unconscious factors that might inform them, three different theses for Masters in Counseling Psychology at the Pacifica Graduate Institute that I’ve come across n the UH library database offer frameworks for integrating Disney movies into the application of Jungian depth psychology–one using Beauty and the Beast (1991), one using The Little Mermaid (1989), and one using a combination of Frozen (2013) and Maleficent (2014).
I recently befriended a biology teacher based largely on a shared interest in AI, which we have conversed about almost exclusively over text messaging rather than in person. As part of these exchanges, we texted about collaboratively generating fictional dialog–in this case between an AI android and a human scientist–via text message exchange (an exercise I plan to have the fiction students do in class). I also plan to have the students try to replicate their text exchange dialog conversations with ChatGPT to compare similarities and differences in their responses, with an eye to the authenticity of the emotion conveyed through dual human dialog exchanges versus a human-and-AI exchange. This reminded me of the recent South Park episode “Deep Learning” (March 8, 2023) co-written with ChatGPT in which texting and the potential authenticity of ChatGPT’s emotional conveyance is highlighted by the plot development of some of the boys getting ChatGPT to generate text-message responses to their girlfriends who want them to be more emotionally “supportive” in their texting rather than just repeatedly sending thumbs-up emojis. The effectiveness of this method prompts one girlfriend, Wendy, to respond “‘Thank you for being the only real thing in my life.'” And yet, when Stan turns to ChatGPT to write him out of the problem he’s gotten himself into and ChatGPT takes over to write the remainder of the episode, the bland and stilted nature of ChatGPT’s narrative powers becomes glaringly apparent.
-SCR
the pva creative writing review 