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STEPHEN MULHALL
The Impersonation of Personality: Film as Philosophy
in
Mission: Impossible
One reason I chose the
Alien
quartet as the
central concern of my book
On Film
was that its
unusual combination of features invited, even
demanded, the simultaneous exploration of a
number of different questions about the relation
between cinema and philosophy.
1
At the level
of content, its themes—the relation between
human identity, integrity, and embodiment, as
encountered in the field of our fantasies of sex-
ual intercourse, pregnancy, and birth—evoke
undismissible questions about what it is to be
human. At the level of form, its nature as a
series of sequels suggested that the question of
what it is to make a sequel—to inherit a par-
ticular narrative world, together with whatever
preceding directors have managed to make of
it—would become an increasingly central pre-
occupation of its successive directors and would
thereby naturally lead them to confront further
questions about related conditions of filmmak-
ing (the relation between actors and characters,
the phenomenon of stardom, the photographic
basis of projected individuals and worlds, and
so on). In particular, since each film in this series
had a different director, each of whom—although
hired relatively early in his career—had none-
theless begun to establish a considerable body
of work, the perennial question of the signifi-
cance of the cinematic
auteur
seemed impossible
to avoid.
One might think of each of these three sets of
questions as isolating one aspect of our concept
of individuality: the individuality of the direc-
tors (Ridley Scott, James Cameron, David
Fincher, Jean-Pierre Jeunet), of the character
(Ellen Ripley) and the actor (Sigourney
Weaver), and of human individuality as such.
Furthermore, the particular way these films
engaged with such matters was understood by
me to illuminate the individuality of cinema—
as a distinctive art form and as a distinctive phe-
nomenon of everyday human experience. And,
of course, perhaps the most provocative aspect
of my understanding of the films’ mode of
engagement found expression in my claiming it,
and so them, for philosophy. I wanted to under-
stand these films not as raw material for philo-
sophers, and not as handy (because popular)
illustrations of views and arguments properly
developed by philosophers, but rather as them-
selves reflecting on and evaluating such views
and arguments, as thinking seriously and sys-
tematically about them.
2
In this essay, I propose further to test the
coherence and plausibility of this way of under-
standing one of the possibilities of cinema by
examining the only other sequence of movies I
know of that holds out some prospect of match-
ing the unusual combination of features that
made the
Alien
quartet so suitable for my
book’s purposes—the two
Mission: Impossible
films. The first (released in 1996) was directed
by Brian De Palma, the second (released in
2000) by John Woo; the third was due to go into
production in 2005. It might seem foolhardy to
embark on a reading of the two existing films in
the absence of the third; nevertheless, this much
can, I think, already be said.
Each film in the sequence centers on the same
protagonist, Ethan Hunt (played by Tom
Cruise), an experienced member of the IM force,
a covert offshoot of the CIA; each is scripted by
98
Thinking Through Cinema: Film as Philosophy
Robert Towne; each has a different director who
brings to bear an established and highly influen-
tial body of work. The structural analogies of
continuity and discontinuity at the level of char-
acter, author, and director are thus evident, but
so, it might be thought, are the differences. For
first, concerning content, there is no obvious cor-
relate in the
Mission: Impossible
sequence to the
thematic preoccupations of the
Alien
quartet—
nothing apparently concerning human identity,
embodiment, and individuality of the kind so
familiar to modern philosophy. And second,
concerning form, the two directors so far
involved have a reputation for, let us say, valu-
ing surface sheen over human and artistic depth.
David Thomson, for example, in his
Bio-
graphical Dictionary of Film
, suggests that
John Woo’s early work supplies “evidence of
how a culture like that of Hong Kong had
become degraded, long ago, by the attempt to
live up to American models,” characterizes his
later work in America as not so much “stream-
lined poetry” but rather the kind of film “that
make[s] hay with the idea of a nuclear explo-
sion,” and goes on more specifically to say that
Mission: Impossible II
“is—and isn’t—the new
version of
Chinatown
.”
3
Beyond its reminder of
Robert Towne’s illustrious past, the precise point
of that comparison remains unclear, but it seems
clearly to the detriment of the new version.
However that may be, Thomson reserves his
real, unambiguous venom for De Palma.
films as “those two horrible wastes of time,
expertise and writing talent.”
5
Since Thomson is not only a critic of jus-
tified renown, but one properly attuned to the
basic merits of the
Alien
quartet, his particular
way of speaking for the critical majority in this
context deserves to be taken seriously. So, too,
however, does the edge of hysteria that undeni-
ably (to my ear at least) invades his graceful
and hypnotic, vivid and lyrical denunciation.
Something about the way these two directors
are so quickly taken as symptomatic of a larger
(originally American) cultural weakness and
degradation suggests to me that their work is
being made to bear the brunt of much more
general anxieties about Western modernity in
general, and about the possibilities of the
medium of cinema itself. Is it always a mani-
festation of moral weakness to acknowledge
the motion picture camera’s capacity to detect
beauty in the flowering of an explosion or the
trajectory of a human body caught up in its
blast? And are the ways artists in film have pre-
viously taken up the challenge to make some-
thing humanly meaningful of such possibilities
of the medium the only ways that challenge can
be met? What if, for some directors in contem-
porary circumstances, film is experienced as
being in the condition of modernism—a condi-
tion in which the conventional ways of ensur-
ing the human significance of the projected
worlds of movies have, for them, lost their
power?
6
To be sure, one way of reacting to that loss of
assurance would be to cut oneself loose from
those conventions altogether, and thereby from
the artistic enterprise they were able to support;
call this the modernizing, or postmodernist,
response. For such filmmakers, the history of
cinema is a dismissible problem, to be tran-
scended or simply left behind in favor of some-
thing essentially discontinuous, radically new.
Another way, however, is to try to find another
relation to those conventions, or another set of
conventions, that can continue the basic enter-
prise otherwise; call this the modernist
response. For such filmmakers, the history of
cinema is an undismissible problem; they
undertake to maintain a relation to it (however
critical, however troubled or kinked), and hence
to continue or inherit it. Such a response will
inevitably place the question of that enterprise’s
There is a self-conscious cunning in de Palma’s work,
ready to control everything except his own cruelty
and indifference. He is the epitome of mindless style
and excitement swamping taste or character …I
daresay there are no “ugly” shots in de Palma’s
films—if you feel able to measure “beauty” merely in
terms of graceful or hypnotic movement, vivid
angles, lyrical color and hysterical situation. But that
is the set of criteria that makes Leni Riefenstahl a
“great” director…De Palma’s eye is cut off from
conscience and compassion. He has contempt for his
characters and his audience alike, and I suspect that
he despises even his own immaculate skill. Our cul-
tural weakness admires and rewards technique and
impact bereft of moral sense. If a thing works, it has
validity—the means justify the lack of an end.
4
We are not, then, surprised to find Thomson
characterizing the two
Mission: Impossible
Mulhall
The Impersonation of Personality
99
continued existence, and so of its present nature
in the light of its past achievements and their
conditions of possibility, at the heart of its
own endeavor. It will, in other words, take up
within its work as its essential subject matter the
question of cinematic practice—its point, its
conditions of possibility, its present possibility
altogether.
One might say the following: Thomson’s
critique of Woo’s and (especially) De Palma’s
work identifies it as postmodernist; it is held to
deploy cinematic techniques with great skill,
but in ways that are essentially unrelated to
cinema’s artistic, moral, and human ends, as
established by the great cinematic works of the
past. Hence it exemplifies an essential disconti-
nuity in the enterprise, a body of cinematic
work unworthy of the name. But it is, of course,
sometimes very hard to distinguish the modern-
izer from the modernist; for what the modern-
izer merely deploys (emptily, without human
meaning) is what the modernist makes his or
her subject, thereby aligning the content of his
or her work with its form. In Thomson’s terms,
the end of the modernist is that of putting the
means in question, which entails that the mod-
ernist may well appear to have no independent
end, or no independent interest in ends. This
essay will explore the possibility that, at least in
the
Mission: Impossible
movies, Woo and De
Palma should be identified as modernist rather
than postmodernist filmmakers.
I want to take my initial bearings here from
some remarks by Stanley Cavell, published in
1971.
It at first seemed that [
Mission: Impossible
] was
merely a further item among the spies-and-gadgets
cycles that spun off from early science-fiction movies
or serials, mated with films of intrigue. But it went
beyond that. Its episodes contained no suspense at all.
Because one followed the events with interest
enough, this quality did not show until, accidentally
reverting to an older type, a moment of suspense was
thrown in (say by way of an unplanned difficulty in
placing one of the gadgets, or a change of guard not
anticipated in the plan of operation). This felt wrong,
out of place. The explanation is that the narrative had
nothing to do with human motivation; the interest lay
solely in following out how the gadgets would act.
They were the protagonists of this drama. Interest in
them depended not merely on their eventual success,
this being a foregone conclusion, but on the know-
ledge that the plot would arrive at that success
through foregone means, absolutely beyond a hitch,
so that one was freed to focus exclusively on how,
not whether. Then one noticed that there were no
human exchanges between the characters in the mis-
sion team, or none beyond a word or two exchanged
at the beginning, and a faint close-up smile here
and there as the perfect plan was taking its totally
envisioned course. The fact that the format required
the continuing characters to pass as foreigners and,
moreover, required one of them to use perfect dis-
guises so that he could temporarily replace a specific
foreigner, itself disguised the fact that these charac-
ters were already aliens, disguised as human. This
displacement permitted us something like our old
conviction in spy movies.
7
I. ALIENS IN HUMAN GUISE: THE TELEVISUAL ORIGINS
OF
MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE
In
Alien
(1979), Ridley Scott created a narrative
world that would constitute the central inherit-
ance of the directors who were to follow him. In
Mission: Impossible
, beyond the general and
generic forms of indebtedness to cinema’s past
that he shares with Scott, the origin of De
Palma’s work lies outside the world of this
film, and indeed outside the medium of film
altogether. For, of course, before it was a film,
Mission: Impossible
was a highly popular
American television series, running from 1966–
1969. How might a film director take respon-
sibility for such a source, and for such a task of
transformation and renewal? Just what kind of
TV series was
Mission: Impossible
?
I find that the features Cavell identifies as
capturing the peculiarly evanescent essence of
Mission: Impossible
to be true to my experience
of it. It is striking how far his talk of the mission
team as aliens in human guise might seem to
reinforce the Thomson case against De Palma.
For to a filmmaker supposedly capable only of
realizing simulacra of human beings, essentially
emptied of moral and motivational intelligibil-
ity, the prospect of directing characters whose
sole business is (what Cavell, elsewhere in his
footnote, calls) the impersonation of personality
would seem like the perfect project, an exact
match for his specific (anti)-talents. Moreover,
100
Thinking Through Cinema: Film as Philosophy
De Palma’s film undeniably invites its audience
to take an interest in the independent life of
gadgets. I think here of the articulated electric
screwdriver that can remove and collect screws
from the farther side of an air-conditioning
grille, and the spectacles with in-built video
positioned on a pile of books to catch the “traitor”
Golitsyn in the act; but the computer—utterly
ubiquitous in the film’s various plots, and essen-
tially immune to malfunction (other than those
caused by others’ manipulation, or the limits of
its material medium)—is perhaps the contempo-
rary gadget that best absorbs this fantasy of tech-
nological success as an absolutely foregone
conclusion. About such gadgets, and the opera-
tions of which they form a central part, our inter-
est is certainly in the how, not the whether; and
this might seem to support the Thomson claim
that De Palma is all means and no end.
Why, however, should such a series have
been so widely and enduringly popular? Is there
some particularly powerful way in which its
format discovers a potential of the televisual
medium? Here, I think, we need to see the con-
nection between Cavell’s impression of the mis-
sion team as in human guise, and the nature of
their business in the world. For, of course, their
prime function in relating to their gadgets is not
merely to dissimulate (to hide their true motives
and identity) but to simulate (to become other
people—both real and fictional); and a form of
life that consists of endlessly discarding one
role in favor of the next, in which one’s calling
is precisely to disguise one’s identity with
another, will not only attract impersonators of
personality but threaten to transform real people
into mere wearers of human guise.
One might say the following: This TV format
consists of the unending, varied repetition of
acts of theater; Jim Phelps’s taped briefings
assign him the role of director in a sequence of
theatrical productions. And, as Stanley Cavell
has argued, one defining characteristic of
theater is that, in it, the actor is subordinate to
the character.
8
Various people can play a given
role; one does so well by working oneself into
that role, accepting and training one’s skill and
instincts so that they match most intimately
with its possibilities and necessities. Those best
suited to inhabit a world of theater such as that
of
Mission: Impossible
are those whose own
personality interferes as little as possible with
their ability to occupy an unending series of
different roles.
This point, of course, applies at the level of
character and actor. The characters in
Mission:
Impossible
are human ciphers because that is what
their job demands; and the actors who play those
characters correspondingly lack any distinctive
personality, any powerful expression of individual
character through the physiognomy captured by
the television camera’s recording of their
presence—that is what
their
job demands in this
case. The apparent actorly exceptions to this claim
in fact simply prove its validity. The member of
the cast with the most striking individual presence
was Martin Landau, but his was the role that
involved the donning of a face mask; and when
Leonard Nimoy joined the series at a relatively
late stage, he did not last for long, precisely
because he brought with him not only a distinctive
identity as an actor, but also an identification with
a role in another TV series of apparently undying
fame—the Vulcan Spock in
Star Trek
(Gene
Roddeneberry, 1966–69). This alien presence was
not one that our series could accommodate.
A comparison with
Star Trek
is in fact more
generally instructive here, for it, too, has been
subject to a displacement into the medium of
film, but that displacement was unimaginable
without the retention of the original actors from
the TV series. Indeed, what is, to my eye, the
most successful of the
Star Trek
films (the
second, entitled
The Wrath of Khan
(Nicholas
Meyer, 1982)) is so in large part because it
makes its reliance on those actors—hence its
need to acknowledge their age, and hence their
aging, their mortality—the thematic center of
the narrative world they inhabit, in ways ranging
from its villain (Ricardo Montalban) (a character
escaping from an exile created in an episode of
the TV series), through its McGuffin (the Gene-
sis device, which can create animate from inani-
mate matter, or the reverse), to its preoccupation
with the avoidance of death (Kirk’s (William
Shatner) solution to the Kobayashi Maru test
being to reprogram the test conditions) and its
acceptance (Spock’s concluding self-sacrifice).
A similar kind of resistance would attend any
attempt to recast characters in any successful
TV series or sitcom; just as the loss of Farrah
Fawcett in
Charlie’s Angels
(Ivan Goff and Ben
Roberts, 1976–81) demanded the introduction
of a new character for the new actor to inhabit,
Mulhall
The Impersonation of Personality
101
so the death of the actor who played the grand-
father (Lennard Pearce) in
Only Fools and
Horses
(John Sullivan, 1981–2003) necessitated
the arrival of another elderly relative (Buster
Merryfield) in the Trotter brothers’ (David
Jason and Nicholas Lyndhurst) world. This
suggests that, in television, as in cinema but in
contrast to theater, the character is subordinate
to the actor. The screen actor takes a role onto
himself or herself, lending his or her physical
and temperamental endowment to it and accept-
ing only what fits—the rest is nonexistent; the
specific, flesh-and-blood human being is the
primary object of the camera’s study, since
the reality of whatever is placed before it is
what the camera places before us. And yet, in
the film of
Mission: Impossible
, we accept a
wholesale recasting of the team, even when it
involves certain actors who bring with them not
only a substantial body of work but also the
aura of fully-fledged cinematic stardom.
Shall we say, then, that the TV series in fact
works precisely counter to the possibilities of its
medium—perhaps even that its enduring (if lim-
ited) power and interest for us shows the empti-
ness of this idea of a medium and its conditioning
possibilities? I am rather inclined to suggest that
if we can understand why this series needs human
impersonators as both characters and actors, we
will thereby come to understand how it discloses
certain possibilities of the televisual medium.
9
I claimed earlier that any such explanation must
acknowledge the theatrical mode of their inhabi-
tation of their world, but the TV camera’s relation
to their theatricality has not yet been specified.
Once again helping myself to ideas of Stanley
Cavell’s, I would like to say that the camera mon-
itors these acts of theater: each episode in the
series allows us to attend in that particular way to
the preparation for, the enactment, and the imme-
diate aftermath of a theatrical event.
10
What mode of attending is captured by the con-
cept of monitoring? Some facets of the concept
are implicit in the way a security guard might
attend, via his bank of monitors, to the empty cor-
ridors leading from points of entry to a building,
and Cavell emphasizes how the same mode of
access to reality underpins that staple and para-
digm of televisual coverage, the sports event.
for home consumption is merely an accident of eco-
nomy; in principle, we could all watch a replica of
the bank of monitors the producer sees …When there
is a switch of the camera whose image is fed into our
sole receiver, we might think of this not as a switch
of comment from one camera or angle to another
camera or angle, but as a switch of attention from one
monitor to another monitor…The move from one
image to another is motivated not, as on film, by
requirements of meaning, but by requirements of
opportunity and anticipation—as if the meaning is
dictated by the event itself. As in monitoring the
heart…say, monitoring signs of life—most of what
appears is a graph of the normal, or the establishment
of some reference or base line, a line, so to speak, of
the uneventful, from which events stand out with per-
fectly anticipatable significance. If classical narrative
can be pictured as the progress from the establishing
of one stable situation, through an event of differ-
ence, to the reestablishing of a stable situation related
to the original one, [television’s] serial procedure can
be thought of as the establishing of a stable condition
punctuated by repeated crises or events that are not
developments of the situation requiring a single res-
olution, but intrusions or emergencies—of humor, or
adventure, or talent, or misery—each of which runs a
natural course and thereupon rejoins the realm of the
uneventful.
11
The baseline of the
Mission: Impossible
serial
lies in the repeated elements that make up the
formula generating its instances or episodes:
the taped instructions, the initial briefing, the
technological preparations, the allotting of roles,
and so on, on the side of the IM team; and on
the other, the everyday flow of activities in the
realm of foreigners into which our team will
insert itself. As with a live TV broadcast of an
operatic performance, the camera then prepares
us for a certain eventuality—here, a theatrical
event—that differs in each case from its pre-
decessors, but naturally completes itself and
returns the team to its uneventful state of gener-
alized readiness. More specifically, the techno-
logically-driven nature of this series’ events
(creating the sense that its success is foregone)
is precisely responsive to the way monitoring
invokes anticipatable—essentially predict-
able—opportunities for attention; the placing of
each camera, and the meaning of a given switch
from one image to another (unlike that of any
particular camera placement or edit in a film), is
[A] network’s cameras are …placed ahead of time.
That their views are transmitted to us one at a time
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