UNDERSTANDING COMICS: More about closure

In my last post, I criticized Scott McCloud's assumption that, in reading comics, we supply our own mental imagery to fill in the gutters between panels. Sometimes we do, but not always, certainly not necessarily, and as I argued, not in one specific case he uses to illustrate the point.

The reason I think that argument is worth making, and the reason I'm going to push it a little further in this post, is that I think many creators, critics, and audiences alike tend to regard the human imagination as unlimited, almost magical. Well, it's not. The brain is a material organ with an evolutionary history, metabolic demands, and finite computational resources. Cognitive research into mental imagery has isolated a number of surprising constraints and limitations. Some effects can only be achieved in imagination imperfectly and indirectly, as for example the imagery considered in the last post that could only apparently be animated through a succession of "blink transformations" which substituted one static mental image with another. Just to underline the twists and turns our evolutionary development has built into our brains, not all forms of animating mental imagery are constrained like that; rotation is remarkably easy to imagine as smooth, continuous motion, probably because rotating mental images figures so crucially in so many forms of problem-solving.

In "closure," McCloud does point to a very real phenomenon, and for the most part it's as important to understanding comics (and life in general) as he asserts. The problem is, he doesn't do much to suggest this wondrous capacity has any bounds or limits. Worse, some readers try to extend his points in ways that aren't warranted, as I'd argue Dr. K does here:

I think it's easy to see Final Crisis as a disconnected series of events that don't really cohere. (Even the more negative critics agree that there are some awesome individual moments in the series.) However, this view is only true if you expect the passive reading experience of a narrative that lays out the connections for you. This is not necessarily a bad expectation--most Western forms of entertainment train us for a passive viewing or reading experience. But another valid view allows for the reader to make the connections him- or herself--to fill in the gaps with the story that Morrison trusts us to make--and to participate in its creation. . . .

With Final Crisis, Morrison has kicked that participatory tradition up to another level, proving, like Mister Miracle's letter from the New God's alphabet, that comics can be a medium "free from restrictions," much in the way artists from other media did throughout the 20th century. It’s also the ne plus ultra of Scott McCloud’s concept of “closure” that he describes in Understand Comics [sic], where the gap in the gutter between comic panels is filled in by the reader, who is trained by the narrative form to make certain decisions regarding that transition from panel to panel. Closure, for McCloud, is what separates comics from other artforms, and Morrison is combining that concept with the reader’s knowledge of DC Universe continuity to create a new kind of closure.

No, I haven't forgotten Final Crisis; I just have a few more things on the front-burner before I can get back to it. To be clear, the following won't have any direct bearing on Dr. K's assertions above, but I do see it as a baby step or two toward reining in this almost magical understanding of closure, and bringing it down to earth in our finite material brains.

At the beginning and ending of his chapter on closure, McCloud touches on the old philosophical chestnut about the space behind our heads:

He doesn't go so far as to say, and might not even go so far as to suggest, that we fill this space in with mental imagery. Really, he just sort of playfully tosses the conundrum out there for us to think about. Well, there's no need to speculate; this is actually a settled matter in neuroscience and cognitive psychology. According to V. S. Ramachandran:

Of course, ordinarily you don't walk around experiencing a huge gap behind your head, and therefore you might be tempted to jump to the conclusion that you are in some sense filling in the gap in the same way that you fill in the blind spot [of the optic disc]. But you don't. You can't. There is no visual neural representation in the brain corresponding to this area behind your head. You fill it in only in the trivial sense that if you are standing in a bathroom with wallpaper in front of you, you assume that the wallpaper continues behind your head. But even though you assume that there is wallpaper behind your head, you don't literally see it. In other words, this sort of "filling in" is purely metaphorical. (emphasis added)

Ramachandran is not denying that we can imagine or visualize what's behind our heads if we so choose. He's only denying that we walk around with an ongoing, updating mental image of what's behind us. Such mental imagery might be feasible if closure were a magic paintbrush the brain could wave in all directions, but it would be a pointless and outrageous waste of resources for the finite, material, nonmagical organ we actually have. It's a luxury our brains simply can't afford--far more economical just to turn around and look, any time we want to know what's behind us. If that sounds like I'm being a smartass, this principle of just looking at the world rather than building up an internal representation of it is one that AI researchers and roboticists had to learn the hard way, after countless man hours and grant dollars thrown at the problem of trying to get computers to generate navigable, ongoing, updating models of the surrounding environment. Andy Clark explains:

The visual brain is thus opportunistic, always ready to make do and mend, to get the most from what the world already presents rather than building whole inner cognitive routines from neural cloth. Instead of attempting to create, maintain, and update a rich inner representation (inner image or model) of the scene, it deploys a strategy that robiticist Rodney Brooks describes as "letting the world serve as its own best model." Brooks's idea is that instead of attacking the alarmingly difficult problem of using input from a robot's sensors to build up a highly detailed, complex inner model of its local surroundings, a good robot should use sensing frugally in order to select and monitor just a few critical aspects of a situation, relying largely upon the persistent physical surroundings themselves to act as a kind of enduring, external data-store: an external "memory" available for sampling as needs dictate.

Our brains, like those of the mobile robots, try whenever possible to let the world serve as its own best model.

Here, by the way, is Brooks's paper outlining these ideas.

This need Clark mentions for the brain to be frugal and opportunistic in order to function optimally within its limited means should serve as a corrective to the notion that the brain lavishly generates vivid imagery to fill in any gaps whatsoever. As we've seen, it doesn't fill in where it doesn't need to, either the space behind our heads in real life, or the gutters between panels showing simple, linear action in comics, to reiterate the two examples already considered. And Ramachandran notes that lots of the filling-in our brain actually does is not so much a solution to the problem of incomplete information, but a shortcut to avoid dealing with information overload:

The answer lies in a Darwinian explanation of how the visual system evolved. One of the most important principles in vision is that it tries to get away with as little processing as it can to get the job done. To economize on visual processing, the brain takes advantage of statistical regularities in the world--such as the fact that contours are generally continuous or that table surfaces are uniform--and these regularities are captured and wired into the machinery of the visual pathways early in visual processing. When you look at your desk, for instance, it seems likely that the visual system extracts information about its edges and creates a mental representation that resembles a cartoon sketch of the table (again, this initial extraction of edges occurs because your brain is mainly interested in regions of change, of abrupt discontinuity, at the edge of desk, which is where the information is). The visual system might then apply surface interpolation to "fill in" the color and texture of the table, saying in effect, "Well, there's this grainy stuff here; it must be the same grainy stuff all over." This act of interpolation saves an enormous amount of computation; your brain can avoid the burden of scrutinizing every little section of the desk and can simply employ loose guesswork instead.

Out of overwhelming amounts of information, the poor harried brain snatches what looks important, says "Fuck the rest of it," and does a good enough job of filling in what it doesn't consider worth the trouble of actually processing. That's how filling-in functions in a real, working brain. Creators who expect the brain to spontaneously fill in whatever gaps they leave in their movies, comics, novels, or whatever, with maximally vivid, animated 3d Technicolor imagery simply don't understand what filling-in actually does or how it works.

That's not to say creators can't craft gaps in a way that primes the brain to fill them in with extraordinary results, but the information around those gaps matters crucially to the filling-in. Stephen Kosslyn describes experimental findings about how differences in the quality of information provided influence the quality and success of filling in:

Biederman and Blickle (1985) and Biederman et al. (1985) describe a series of experiments in which subjects were asked to name pictures, some of which were degraded in specific ways. In a typical experiment, Biederman and Blickle (1985) asked subjects to name drawings like those illustrated in figure 5.3. The left column shows the intact versions of the objects, and the interesting comparison is between the middle and right columns. Although the same amount of contour has been deleted in both cases, the locations of the deleted contours are different. In the middle column, all of the nonaccidental properties have been left intact; indeed, the fragments line up along smoothly fitting functions. In contrast, in the right column, the nonaccidental properties themselves have been deleted. Not only do the deletions disrupt collinearity but they also obscure intersections and symmetries. In addition, one is led to complete fragments improperly, forming misleading "virtual" lines.

The results were dramatic. The subjects had an extremely difficult time naming the objects when the nonaccidental properties were disrupted. Furthermore, presenting the names of the drawings before the naming task did not help; the subjects simply could not use this input to access the appropriate stored representations. In contrast to this abysmal performance, subjects could identify drawings like those in the middle column relatively easily. The subjects were increasingly accurate with longer exposures, and were virtually perfect when the pictures were presented for five seconds. When the pictures were presented briefly, however, performance degraded--but never got as bad as performance when the nonaccidental properties were deleted.

Some creators scorn to produce, and most critics scorn to appreciate, anything that might correspond to the left column of the illustration. That's "spoon feeding" the audience. I strongly disagree with that point of view, but I don't mind if a creator, aspiring to Art, structures the gaps in an artwork in such a way as to correspond to the middle column. Where I take issue is when a creator turns out the kind of mess that belongs in the right column, as I think (to put the criticism in a nutshell) Morrison did in Final Crisis, and then critics rush to praise it as "challenging" or whatever. It's not challenging in any way that redounds to its credit; the creator simply did a poor job of crafting and structuring the gaps.

And that's why I think all this stuff matters. I wish more creators and critics had a better grasp on the limits of imagination, and went about their work accordingly.