viz.

Image of Ron Mueck's In Bed (2005); Image Credit: Brooklyn Museum

Ron Mueck is an Australian sculptor of the "hyperrealist" school. He got his start working for Jim Henson and on Labyrinth (1986). Mueck became known to the art world for his 1996 Dead Dad, a two-thirds life-size sculpture of the artist's father moments after passing away. Mueck's sculpture attempts to reproduce human beings in all of their external reality. That is to say, while there are no organs on the inside, so far as what everyone but surgeons can see of a person, Mueck depicts, down to the last follicle. 

Image Credit: Prometheus (2012)

Hollywood, you are going about action movies all wrong, then, because you have taken for granted what is the opposite of the actual case. You believe we viewers take pleasure from grandiosity of visual effect, but in fact your viewers are suffering from a spiritual condition of nullity brought on by over-exposure to the visually incomprehensible. How to make us feel anything: that is your challenge! Two recent treatments of the action movie hero provide a neat case in point and will serve for a conclusion to these remarks on the importance of psychological realism to compelling action cinema.

Image Credit: J.R. Eyerman

Part I: Analysis of the Problem

What ails action cinema? Why, it is Hollywood’s obsession with visual effect, which derives from a misunderstanding about how emotion is connected to looking.