God’s Eye
From Volume 5 of the New Machine Cinema
Film is not a medium for the Mona Lisa. The medium is transient, not permanent. Not an object. It is the very artform of memory. You should not hold it. Look at it. Admire it. Your life should be precious, not your films. Cinema should endlessly refresh from zero, earning its keep from scratch from hard effort. The impulse to make cinema into something sacred, transcendent, larger than life, demanding of reverence, is what I call God’s eye.
God’s eye is the unearned, algorithmic pursuit of transcendence to mask a total lack of rigorous practice. It is the abuse of omniscient scale, religious awe, and aesthetic maximalism as shortcuts for meaning. It operates through the camera, through marketing, through the canon itself, and now through the metaphysics of AI. The solution to God’s eye is what I call the Ise Shrine Model. But first we must define the tendency in its multiple forms.
Evoking God’s eye is a decision filmmakers make trivially. The transcendent happens to align with market tendencies toward grandness and spectacle, through a cheap trick of evoking, eventually abusing, religious awe.
In this era, creating a sense of religious fervor with a maximum self-importance is a pre-requisite for capturing audience attention. Consider the standard Nolan film trailers presenting itself in hushed tones, some hype script being teased, and blaring discordant notes screaming something transcendent is happening. They are marketed sometimes years ahead to evoke the feeling of the second coming.
It is selling us maximum awe front to end. This is an extreme use of God’s eye. It is attempting, by brute-force, to imprint upon us something so sacred it is beyond words, cranking a film to the maximum level of impact, just to sell the audience a movie ticket.
From a camera standpoint, God’s eye are shots that could not be perceived from a human vantage point. Sweeping overhead shots that evoke scale beyond human perception. This sort of filmmaking on screen can be vulgar and thoughtless because it cheats physical reality.
Often it is carefully chosen via aesthetic shorthand for the purpose of simple visual splendor. Aesthetic is ultimately the lowest hanging fruit of cinema, not because transcendence is the enemy, but because it consumes the many nuances of craft. A pretty image is often the cheapest in the bag of tricks.
One, the God’s eye should be earned, the way a symphony should earn its crescendo, not blare them out in a row, but lead to it with smaller hills and peaks, eventually landing on its statement.
Directors with limited budgets used to be resourceful in this way, earning a film from ground up, sometimes even through the banal before their scope was spent with a transcendent finale.
Just as a life is earned, not through shorthand, but through one’s effort and then keep, a film should earn itself through effort. It should offer little, if any pleasures, before it would even consider evoking God’s eye.
The ability to deploy a technique does not excuse a director from earning it.
If one were to watch a film and point out every instance of God’s eye, the markings would overwhelm the work, like an essay filled to the brim with fallacies.
An impossible shot from God’s eye; no one can view it, so why should the audience? No one can possibly think those thoughts, they belong to a kind of divine, overarching point of view, not a director’s, certainly not the way the camera is framing upon the characters on screen.
Cinema has fallen into a tendency from directors, where the moment they understand a shorthand, they must abuse it. To where even the standard weekend film is carrying religious frames of meaning to the most trivial ends. Beyond weekend fare, we must examine the entire canon of masterpieces. The Mona Lisa aspiration.
Cinema has no term yet for purple prose, the visual equivalent exists everywhere. It has become so pervasive that the canon of cinema has simply become a shorthand ranking of who deployed God’s eye most effectively. Therefore the canon must be rethought as one about practice instead of as a grab bag of aesthetic shorthands.
Anyone can achieve grandness when evoking the epic narrative, therefore when evoking the transcendence, the response should be skepticism.
Films entrenched in God’s eye like The Odyssey, The Tree of Life, The Passion of the Christ are mythic, transcendent, but operate primarily through God’s eye. There is a feeling of something larger than life behind the camera’s eyes.
They arrive, start to end, demanding importance. Because of course art can have great impact when evoking all the fates. But does aesthetic shorthand accurately reflect an artist’s perspective? Upbringing? Interests? Or does it squash these things in favor for the broadest form of communication, evoking the primal animus.
Hollywood arrives there because market function demands maximum impact, and that means the abuse of God’s eye wherever convenient, is always justified through this spectacle. Because imagistic religiosity resonates does not mean it is the final word.
It happens through the abuse of the image, the easiest shorthand for God’s eye is aesthetic beauty. A film should cease to constitute a series of pretty or stunning images. This is yet another crutch.
Stanley Kubrick represents the summit of cinema as aesthetic object, every frame composed with the precision of Renaissance painting, every element controlled to a degree no other director achieved. His films are the strongest argument the artifact tradition has. But the response to Kubrick was not more rigor. It was an arms race of aesthetic maximalism, directors borrowing the surface of his transcendence without the decades of compositional discipline underneath it. God’s eye became a shorthand because Kubrick made the destination look achievable. What was lost was the understanding that his destination was earned through an unreproducible practice, not through the aesthetic shortcuts that followed.
Transcendence in its own right is not the enemy. But a film must be painstakingly earned. God’s eye must be scarcely used, if at all. Maybe even invisibly, you saw it without seeing it. There is a vessel to achieving grace that should exist as a practice. Through the poetic. The invisible. The small.
In this, we see God’s eye should be utilized as a component, not a film’s overriding feature.
While used sparingly it functions like the classic close-up—scarcely used, for the moment of highest impact.
We should think of the canon beyond this approach of the director as God. I think of the animated canon in its vibrant wholesomeness. I think of comedies where the approach is in likeability achieving in humility. I think of ascetic dramas, neorealism. Romance can often be fatalistic, but it seldom works through pretension.
Because director as God backfires when most directors should not be gods at all, their films come short where they come short; at the level of cinema, the screen reveals your every fault, your every limitation. Despite our tolerance, good traits can never overcome bad ones. The shorthand of God’s eye reads where it is used as a tactic to avoid personal feeling, creating a generation of impersonal but aspirationally meaningful films.
A film may be so empty that a director dare not impose upon it with their thinking, it becomes too loud, and the films fall apart the moment it is disturbed by a grand message. There is no fixed formula, but we know it when it goes wrong, immediately so.
The abuse of God’s eye in cinema on this scale can only arise through a society devoid of purpose or meaning. This is the present of fandom. The only rule: it must never end. It must never be resolved. It must play out perpetually. Because functionally it is not art, it is play.
The act of partaking is ritualizing the franchise, the culture itself.
The loss of the one character’s ending does not register as empathetic. Our focus lands on the winner, temporarily, and we imagine ourselves happy for them.
A new story does nothing. Nothing changes. Because that would mean the franchise ends, and the number one and only rule: it can’t, because it must accommodate everyone at every time. Here, universality must never land in God’s eye, it must touch the individual, not the mass.
Machine maximization and the algorithmic mind afford God’s eye in every area of production. Through possibility, ritualization, transience, and the metaphysical structure of films, AI cinema achieves God’s eye in its metaphysics. But it is important not to match the tendencies of the previous form, where God’s eye became a marketing, commercial, and critical necessity; with limited budgets and limited means, it becomes the primary vehicle in which a film is delivered. With unlimited budgets and unlimited means—the proposal in post-scarcity—pretension is no longer a necessary driving force. Paradoxically we are free to be personal, we are free to be ourselves.
Two responses follow. The True Line Cut refuses structural God’s eye by forcing finality, a single forward pass collapses branching possibility into one unrepeatable gesture, restoring scarcity inside abundance. The next is what I call the Ise Shrine model, which reformulates it, locating omniscience not in the artifact but in the directorial pattern that regenerates instances of it. This resists the Mona Lisa because this work of art represents the practice and tradition itself, the material end result is the evidence, but not the lifestyle, not the priority.
