Phenomenology In The Secret Life Of Walter Mitty

Phenomenology by its definition is: “the way in which one perceives and interprets events and one's relationship to them in contrast both to one's objective responses to stimuli and to any inferred unconscious motivation for one's behavior; also : a psychology based on the theory that phenomenology determines behavior” by the Merriam-Webster Dictionary. While on the other hand: “Phenomenology studies structures of conscious experience as experienced from the first-person point of view, along with relevant conditions of experience. The central structure of an experience is its intentionality, the way it is directed through its content or meaning toward a certain object in the world.” As defined by the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
My

personal understanding of phenomenology is that it is the study of consciousness and how we choose to perceive and view the world in its reality, and the way that our consciousness subverts reality and instead brings it to the realm of a figment of our own imagined reality. Which ties into film and film theory in the way that one person’s views and ideas about a film can be entirely and polar opposite to another person’s ideas. While at the same time they could be identical. It just depends on the social construction of their mind that they have had received up to the point of watching the film and also what context that they have experienced that they are trying to attach to a central theme of a film. Edmund Husserl through his stating of: “pure phenomenology is the science of pure consciousness,” I believe shares the same viewpoint. I also do not think that there is a solid way to undermine the process of phenomenology due to it is the study of a consciousness and the way that our minds interact with reality to create our own independent subjective reality. Through my understanding of the process of phenomenology I would like to place it in conversation with the films Dancer in the Dark and The Secret Life of Walter Mitty, and through these conversations reinforce the already fortified process.
I think that this frame of thought is bolstered by a statement made by Slavoj Zizek in his film The Perverts Guide to Cinema when he is talking about one of the most erotic moments in film being in the film Persona by Ingmar Bergman, in which the character Alma recounts a random sexual encounter that took place while she was on vacation. The only reason for it being so erotic being that it is not depicted to the audience in a flashback, there is no audio playback of the sounds that would have transpired during the act, but instead we just watch as Alma retells the story and our own minds visualize and fill in the blanks with our own contexts and experiences that we have accumulated. These two things mixing together is what makes the scene so erotic. Not that it is going into vivid detail but that our minds are put into a place of eroticism and verbal cues and we are left to visualize what transpired on our own, in the grimy depths of our own minds. Our own experiences and consciousness transcend the realms of reality in order to create our own personal subjective reality based on our past experiences.
First, the film The Secret life of Walter Mitty, we are introduced to our main protagonist who is a constant daydreamer who works for Time magazine, that extenuating circumstances force him to go on an wondrous adventure that meshes the reality with his dreamlike reality.

Through the film we follow Walter on his journey and are subject not only to the reality of the situations that he finds himself in and the experiences that he is accumulating, we are also subjected to the daydream like situations that Walter is seeing in his figment of reality in which due to the fact that out of his view of not doing anything noteworthy in his life he then projects his dreamlike and amazing fantasy form of reality out into the world for us to see and experience. For example, in one scene of the movie Walter is talking on the phone with a technical advisor for a dating site in which he is having difficulties with, and the technical advisor states to the fact that Walter had left most of his profile blank, to which he replies that he hadn’t done anything noteworthy enough in his life to fill his page with. As Walter says this we are cast out into his dreamlike subjective reality on what he thinks would be optimal for him and noteworthy as he dives off of the subway terminal and into a building and saves the dog of his romantic interest as it explodes behind him and is forced back into the “real”

reality.
Through Walter’s consciousness being void of many experiences and phenomena his mind instead replaces this void with his dreams that result in the figment of reality that is then manifested on the screen for the audience. It is only as Walter goes on his trip and really begins filling his consciousness with experiences that the view of the “real” reality and the view of Walter’s reality begin to fade. This is due to the fact that his consciousness then has past experiences and phenomena to pull from to fully assemble his version of his subjective reality, and is then seeing his reality rather than his figment of imagination type of reality.
I think that the best quote to really summarize the point that I am attempting to make is Husserl saying: “Natural objects, for example, must be experienced before any theorizing about them can occur.” I believe that what Husserl is saying is that you cannot do what Walter is doing, Husserl is saying that without Walter actually experiencing the things that he is thinking about then there is no way for them to occur. Which is why we are instead shown these fantasized versions of reality that show him doing these phantasmagorical things intermixed within his dull reality, until finally he is actually doing some marvelous and sensational things and because of this we are shown the “natural objects” that are his then reality.
The second film that I would like to explore in terms of phenomenology and the way that we experience and affect our realities is in the film Dancer in the Dark in which the audience is placed into the story of a European girl that goes to America and fantasizes about it being like a Hollywood musical. Through her experiences with Hollywood musicals and her deep infatuation with them. The audience is shown how at times in her life in which she is bored and or wants to escape from her current circumstances she fills those gaps with the sounds around her that begin to take shape in the way that a Hollywood musical would do so. So, for example when she is bored at work she zones out, and through hearing rhythms and beats that are being made in the natural world around her she then rearranges them into a symphonic almost arrangement that even the people around her get in on and begin dancing and singing along to.
This plays into phenomenology through Selma’s past experience with Hollywood musicals. She is able to enhance her version of reality with her consciousness that is perpetuating a musical and that is what is displayed on screen to the audience. The most prevalent situation that sticks out in my mind is when she is at work and hears the presses making a beat and then a person passes by her sweeping the floor, and she begins arranging and composing this song made entirely from the reality around her, and uses these experiences to augment her subjective reality in which it is a beautiful song in which everyone can hear and then partakes in as her coworkers begin to pirouette and dance along with the music that she is envisioning herself as the lead in.
I think that Dancer in the Dark is one of the best examples of phenomenology and film due to the fact that the audience is shown a person that is taking from her past experiences with Hollywood musicals and is taking those pure experiences and using them to alter her form of reality into her conscious subjective version of reality. Which illustrates how our consumption of film and in media in a whole can alter our experiences in our lives and therefore compound on top of each other to form an even more personal subjective reality due to the multiple layers of consciousness that are altering the experiences that we are taking in. I think that the beauty of this process of thinking is in the way that you think that each person is nothing but compounded layers of experience that continue to layer on from the day that they are born and continue to grow and alter and twist reality in ways that make a person in to an myalgia of nothing but compounded conscious experiences. That intake the world in a massive array of different ways that is different from any other person on the entire planet. While at the same time people can be alike and share ideas and views but how they came to that conclusion is due to the way that their conscious has constructed this viewpoint from its first inkling of a thought and how differently hued two same ideas and thought processes can be.
I think that the only downfall to this process is the way in which most humans are constructed. The human race is a very egotistical and selfish being, and the ways in which we force our viewpoints onto other people, and try to force people to think and feel in the exact same way that we feel about certain topics. That way of thinking and subjugation is very closed minded, we are all very different, in the ways we were born, raised, taught, learn, think, and feel etcetera, and to try and make people fit into this box of mythical normality is ridiculous in its even thought to try and do it let alone to institute it.
Although my claims can be reputed because of Husserl’s later work on the phenomenological epoché in which he states to the fact that all phenomenological research done must be done from the first person point of view as to confirm its validity and truthfulness and that no current assumption can or should be made based on an already preconceived assumption. Although at the same time reinforcing the idea of a hallucination being as much of a truth as a real moment and that all experiences whether or not they are a hallucination as in the case of Walter in The Secret Life of Walter Mitty and Selma in Dancer in the Dark, are just as valid and real as any actual and or “real” reality experience to which Husserl states “even a hallucination is an intentional act, an experience “as of” an object.”