1. Early in Darren Aronofsky's Black Swan (2010) we are shown the protagonist, Nina Sayers (Natalie Portman) and her mother, Erica (Barbara Hershey) as Nina prepares to leave for her day as a working ballerina. The mother is preparing breakfast for Nina as if she were a little girl heading off to school. At one point they face each other on opposite sides of a narrow breakfast counter, and as the mother hands Nina her plate, they repeat in perfect unison Nina's child-like description of the breakfast: "so pretty they say, giggling together. A distinct visual mirroring accompanies the verbal synchrony of mother and daughter. The mother takes a quick step to her right in order to be exactly across the breakfast counter from Nina at the instant of their speaking together. To add to the mirroring effect, both women have their hair tied back in identical buns. Though each clearly mirrors the other, Nina's mother is dressed ominously in black, while Nina wears the girlish pale pink and grey outfit that becomes a metaphor for her situation at the beginning. This minor interaction initiates a major concern of the film: the relationships between mirroring, imitation, and identity. (1) Now, most film and literature scholars will likely think of Lacanian psychoanalytic theory as a foundation upon which to investigate any text that deals with mirroring and identity. I, however, will replace that foundation with a newer, and significantly different one: social neuroscience. Since social neuroscience may not be familiar to many of my readers, we will first take a detour through the theory before returning to this scene from Black Swan. Broadly defined, social neuroscience studies the linkages between certain biological mechanisms--"neural, hormonal, cellular, and genetic"--and various forms of social behavior (Decety and Cacioppo 3). In the present case we will concentrate on what social neuroscience has to tell us about imitation. It hardly needs saying that imitation is important in human life. But social neuroscience (and cognitive psychology) has shown just how imitative we humans are. As imitators, humans have no equal. In one influential study, psychologists Andrew Meltzoff and Wolfgang Prinz studied fourty infants with an average age of just thirty-two hours and documented the fact that even neonates imitate facial acts of adults (Meltzoff and Prinz 23). Adult imitativeness has been studied as well. Social neuroscientists and cognitive psychologists have investigated the embodied bases of a phenomenon remarked upon for centuries: emotional contagion, our predisposition to automatically imitate the faces, voices, and movements of others, and so to take on their emotional state. Empathy, often related to emotional contagion, has also received much attention. (2) One conclusion from this research is that imitation is a constitutive element of human social-psychology. Marcel Kinsbourne argues that imitation in newborns "becomes the source of most of one's social knowledge base." And such imitation begins far too early in development to have originated as a deliberate and reasoned choice. Also it is far-reaching, beyond adaptation to the social norm. It is a prime mover in mental development, and ... underlies affiliation both to individuals and to the group ... affiliation has a neurobiological rudiment, mediated by imitation. (Kinsbourne 326) Imitation can readily be seen as "a default social behavior. Imitation is not something we only occasionally engage in. Instead, we usually imitate--automatically--and not doing it is the exception" (italics in original) (Dijksterhuis 208). Imitation is useful. It gives humans a unique ability to learn from others by imitating their actions. From this fact V. S. Ramchandran argues that imitative learning "may have been the key step in hominin evolution, resulting in our ability to transmit knowledge by example" (Ramachadran 132). In a similar vein, Merlin Donald--one of our foremost thinkers about imitation, cognition, and evolution--has argued that in our evol utionary past as well as in the present, mimesis "is the elemental expressive force that binds us together into closely knit tribal groups. …

https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5325/style.47.4.445

Social Neuroscience, the Imitative Animal, and Aronofsky's Black Swan

To experience a work of art is to have a distinctive kind of cognitive experience. Stated more specifically, the largely unconscious interactions between certain sensory systems and the sensible qualities that define a given kind of art constitute in substantial ways our conscious apprehension of that art. This is obvious enough for the visual or musical arts. But, it is equally true that our embodied cognitive experience of, say, reading a novel the relatively automatic processing of conventionalized black marks from left to right and top to bottom, and so forth--is an essential element of our more directly conscious understanding of the content of a given story. A cognitively oriented examination of a given art form, then, will take off from the kinds of cognitive operations that most matter for the apprehension of that art form. Film, since its beginnings, has been discussed in terms of its psychological qualities and affects. (1) To this day, psychologist Hugo Munsterberg's 1916 The Photoplay: A Psychological Study remains a foundational work in film studies. Since that time, and especially in recent decades with the rise of second-generation cognitive psychology, two versions of a cognitive-psychological approach to film have emerged. We have a more strictly scientific version, grounded directly in cited laboratory research. It makes claims about the experience of film based on findings about the ways in which our eyes process moving images, the ways our eyes track the eyes of others, the ways that mirror neurons in the brain link us to the actions we see on-screen, or the ways our emotion systems respond to certain kinds of visual cues. This kind of study has been done in various ways by, among others, such scholars as Gregory Currie, Torben Grodal (Embodied Visions; Moving Pictures), Greg Smith, Per Persson, James Cutting (9-27), and Arthur Shimamura. But we also have a less strictly scientific version. As David Bordwell has observed, film "researchers aren't psychologists or sociologists, but we can draw upon the best scientific findings we have to mount a plausible framework for considering effects" (44). That is what I will be doing here. My approach--I will call it a cognitive phenomenology--examines the experience of film in relation to our everyday kinds of cognitive experiences of the world, and it taps into cognitive psychology for direct support only at strategic points. Otherwise, this approach simply makes sure not to violate the general kinds of knowledge established by cognitive (and evolutionary) psychology. This kind of project has been carried out by, for instance, George Wilson, Colin McGinn, Noel Carroll, and David Bordwell. Here, I will take up a variation of this latter kind of approach. I will primarily turn to the field of ecological psychology in order to provide a cognitive-phenomenological reading of the Prelude sequence to Citizen Kane. If we want to understand our embodied responses to fiction film, we may take as a first principle that film "engages our perceptual system directly, and we process the changing array of light before us as we process the natural world" (Anderson and Hodgins 65). Considered on the basic level of visuo-cognitive experience, motion pictures are the singular kind of visual imitation that comes closest to looking at the world. In fact as James Gibson, in establishing ecological psychology, explained, "we ought to treat the motion picture as the basic form of depiction and the painting or photograph as a special form of it.... Moviemakers are closer to life than picture makers" (293). Given this, we may explore our responses to film by asking: what every day acts of looking are like the special case in fact the unique case--of looking at movies? An unsurprising first answer to this question is that looking at a movie is like looking at a scene through an aperture of some kind. The most basic case of such an aperture would be, as Colin McGinn has argued, simply a hole (20). …

Tony Jackson

Papers

Social Neuroscience, the Imitative Animal, and Aronofsky's Black Swan

Prime Time: Visual Cognition in the Prelude to Citizen Kane