Slow mo implies bullet time is a narrative device

Recent news from Baylor College of Medicine, suggests that an experience of slow-motion during a physical crisis only occurs after the memories of the event have been made, and that the person's perception is not actually resolving events at shorter intervals, as when an overcranked camera records for slow motion.

In the experiment, subjects were dropped for a few seconds into a net far, far below. Subjects reported time for freefall, which seemed to be a third longer than actual time. Subjects were equipped with watches with digits that flickered slightly too fast to see. It was presumed that subject would be able to see the digit if actually overcranking vision.

The experimental setup is suspect. Just because vision is not overcranked does not mean that the motor-control apparatus of the brain could not be overcranking. Also, the subjects might have sufficiently useful subconscious survival mechanisms that prevent them from faithfully paying attention to non-life threatening digits while the body feels it is in peril.

But if the experiment is valid and its conclusion too, then the experience of slow-motion in a movie or a videogame represents the memory of an experience and not a simulation (or even romantic expression) of an experience. It does not change how cool it is to go into slow-mo and defeat a flaming-chain-mace warrior in God of War II, but does suggest that the experience corresponds to a memory rather than a direct experience, which means, technically in this cinematic medium, wouldn't slow-motion qualify as a narrative device of recall? And so the experience of cinema or a videogame with such devices of recall is not exactly the eternal present (whose tense screenplays are wisely written in), but a once-removed memory of the present, as the narrator of Sands of Time is wont to remind us.

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