The elevator film: neither here nor there

ABSTRACT

One must always know the place and accept it as believable. But in most films the design conceit is that when characters are in a place, there is nowhere else they can be found at the moment. This article posits an exception: the ‘elevator’ plot device, in which every place may be multiplied in layers. Many films of the late 1990s and early 21^st century recount a story of dimension-shifting or reality substitution. These ‘Elevator films’ invoke a connection between discrete spheres sharing a single space or a single moment. A character ‘shifts’, ‘jumps’, or ‘ports’ to a ‘higher level’, slipping through some highly technologized gateway to the hitherto unlocated. Distinct within the broader category of sci-fi, where travel is generally from one point to another point in this same, single universe, films, such as eXistenZ (1999) and The Matrix (1999) invoke evanescent worlds: a presence and placement unavailable to the waking senses (actual or extended by imagination from the actual). The elevator film suggests that dream domains exist as parts of waking reality, coterminous, and coextensive with the everyday albeit separated by a kind of organizational membrane of definition and containment penetrable through the sacred aperture.

KEYWORDS:

• Film genre
• reality
• fantasy
• diegesis
• social relations

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. The video-game connection should not be discounted, but when one begins to think about the cognitive, receptive, and philosophical considerations involved with seeing ‘elevator levels’ and coming to some comprehension of the diegetic ‘world’ they might imply, filmmakers’ choices are hardly just business-related takes on gaming. With gaming in actuality, as distinguished from diegetic characters gaming, we have an acceptance of the elevator principle that is largely tactile and operational, the demands of operationality taking charge over philosophical consideration.

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Murray Pomerance

Murray Pomerance is an independent scholar living in Toronto and adjunct profes- sor in the School of Media and Communication at RMIT University, Melbourne. He is the author of A Voyage with Hitchcock (SUNY 2021), The Film Cheat: Screen Artifice and Viewing Pleasure (Bloomsbury 2020), Grammatical Dreams (Green Integer 2020), Virtuoso: Film Performance and the Actor’s Magic (Bloomsbury 2019), A Dream of Hitchcock (SUNY 2019), and Cinema, If You Please: The Memory of Taste, the Taste of Memory (Edinburgh 2018). His book Color It True: Impressions of Cinema (Bloomsbury) is forthcoming. He edited “The Color of Our Eyes”, a special issue of New Review of Film and Television Studies, in 2017.