Boyhood and the Mystery of Growing Up on Film

In Boyhood the relationship between reality and fantasy is explored through an immersion in what Cavell calls the uncanniness of the ordinary. He believes that films have a special capacity to present the mystery and strangeness of the ordinary and to draw our attention to aspects of reality that we may have overlooked. A sense of uncanniness is associated with feelings of strangeness and vulnerability that occur when we fail to notice things that are in plain sight. Consequently, the ordinary can appear fantastic upon reflection when we become aware of things that we have missed. In other words, Cavellian philosophical film criticism can reveal how close the fantastic is to the ordinary in cinema and how easy it is to overlook this fact. One prominent example of the uncanniness of the ordinary from Boyhood is viewers not acknowledging the extraordinary or “fantastic” experience of watching people age in front of their eyes in a dramatic film. Viewers are uncertain how to respond to this completely unique experience and how to think about what this experience implies about their relationship to their own mortality when they are watching films.