Mental Models, (De) Compressions, and The Actor's Process in Body-Swap Movies

Mental models, (de)compressions, and the
actor’s process in body-swap movies

Ahmed Abdel-Raheem
Maria Curie-Skłodowska University
The body-swap comedy, where someone finds themselves inhabiting an

entirely different body, is a well-established Hollywood tradition. Crucially,
American filmmakers have tried every twist and contortion of this genre
premise at a point or another over the past few decades. And yet, other
countries, such as Egypt, Japan, and South Africa, seem to have just now put
different spins on the theme. Nevertheless, this genre is under-theorized and
under-explored. Drawing on insights from blending theory (Fauconnier and
Turner 2002), mental models (van Dijk 2014), and the actor’s process as
described by, among others, Stanislavsky (1995, 2008) and Brecht (1964,
1970), this article provides cognitively plausible answers to the perennial
questions: What is so funny in body-swap films? How do spectators make
sense of this genre? How do blending processes operate in body-swap
movies? Do spectators “live in the blend?” What patterns of compression or
decompression are at work in body-swap templates? Can humor be a strong
determiner of moral-political cognition? And what connections can be
drawn between acting and cognitive neuroscience? A discussion of English
and Arabic examples (i) points to some of the cultural concepts involved in
body-swap films, (ii) shows how conceptual blending in humorous films
serves to both perpetuate and modify culturally relevant concepts, and (iii)
highlights the necessity to expand the current scope in compression,
embodiment and identity research. More generally, then, this article
presents a new cognitive theory of how cinema, television, or theatre
communicates meaning. The most important aim of this study is thus to
contribute to the small but growing number of publications that use the
cognitive sciences to inform scholarly and practical explorations in theatre
and performance studies, as well as to the study of Arab theatre and cinema,
which are among the most neglected subjects in the field.
Keywords: body-swap comedy, mental models, (de)compression, the

method acting process, spectatorship, moral cognition, Egyptian vs.
American popular culture
https://doi.org/10.1075/cogls.00026.abd | Published online: 14 February 2019

Cognitive Linguistic Studies 5:2 (2018), pp. 376–409. issn 2213-8722 | e‑issn 2213-8730
© John Benjamins Publishing Company
Mental models, (de)compressions, and the actor’s process in body-swap movies 377
1. Introduction
A character finding him- or herself in a completely different body is quite a

familiar trope in fiction, the body swap, one which usually produces various
wacky antics (Burnett 2014: para. 1). In film, body swapping can take place
between parents and teens, between adults and babies, between husbands and
wives, between princesses and slaves, between animate and inanimate things,
between humans and animals, and so on. The swap is usually caused by magical
items (such as, e.g., cursed earrings or fortune cookies), heartfelt wishes (of, e.g.,
protagonists or their family members), or by other strange quirks of the universe.
Once lessons are learned, protagonists are typically returned ‘safely’ to their bodies
at the end of the story.
One of the earliest famous examples of the body switch is the 19th century
novel Vice Versa, but it has been employed often since. Other notable instances
include mainstream comedies like Freaky Friday (1976, 2003), The Change Up
(2011), Nine Lives (2016), and The Shaggy Dog (2006) where it is essentially a
comedic device. According to Burnett (2014), for example, there is nothing more
hilarious than when somebody suddenly ends up in a body that is a different
sex to their usual one (2014: para. 10). A good instance of this kind is the 1999
American comedy film A Saintly Switch, where a washed-up Nation Football
League (NFL) quarterback and his wife switch bodies. Other examples include
Virtual Sexuality (1999), The Hot Chick (2002), It’s a Boy Girl Thing (2006), and the
Japanese record-breaking animated film Your Name (2016).
According to Koestler (1964), the sudden “bisociation” of one idea or event
with two habitually incompatible “matrices” may result in a comic effect,
“provided that the narrative, the semantic pipeline, carries the right kind of
emotional tension. When the pipe is punctured, and our expectations are fooled,
the now redundant tension gushes out in laughter, or is spilled in the gentler
form of the sou-rire” (1964: 51). With this somewhat abstruse reference to “bisoci-
ation”, “matrices”, and the “semantic pipeline”, Koestler, as Coulson (2005a) states,
“alludes to the simple fact that humor often involves the unlikely combination
of related structures” (2005a: para. 11). Coulson has demonstrated that blending
processes (where partial structures from two or more input mental spaces are
dynamically combined in a blended space) are crucial for humor production
and comprehension. Her blend analyses of a variety of humorous texts – such
as jokes, political cartoons, and radio talk – are indeed key contributions to this
research (see Coulson 2003, 2005a, 2005b). As such, scholarly descriptions of
humorous discourse as blends are not new (Bing and Scheibman 2014, p. 16; see
also, e.g., Asmolovskaya 2009; Abdel-Raheem 2018; Dynel 2011a; Fludernik 2015;
Jabłońska-Hood 2015; Marín-Arrese 2008). In fact, however, blending scholars did
378 Ahmed Abdel-Raheem
pay little attention to humorous blends in moving images, or, in film, and espe-
cially the body-swap genre – note that film is a “multimodal” medium par excel-
lence, because it usually draws on several modalities (Forceville 2016a: 20).
Drawing on insights from blending theory (Fauconnier and Turner 2002),
multimodal mental models (van Dijk and Kintsch 1983; van Dijk 2003, 2008,
2014), and the method acting process as described by, e.g., Stanislavsky (1995,
2008) and Brecht (1964, 1970), the present study addresses the following four
questions:
1. What is so funny in body-swap movies?
2. How do blending processes operate in body-swap films? Or what patterns of
compression or decompression are at play in body-swap templates?
3. Can humor be a strong determiner of moral-political cognition?
4. And what connections can be drawn between acting and cognitive neuro-
science?
As this paper digs deep into the notions of “compression” and “mental models,” it
brings in pragmatics – a dimension that, at least until recently, blending scholars
have too much ignored (Forceville 2016b: 94; see also Abdel-Raheem 2017). More-
over, the budding interest in film blends seems to be an exciting and promising
development. For instance, application of the notions and terms charted in the
present study is likely to demonstrate blending to be a useful tool in the analysis of
how cinema, as well as other art forms (such as television and theatre), communi-
cates meaning, and can further sharpen the analyst’s awareness of the role played
in filmic blends (but not just in blends) by different modalities (see also Forceville
2016a). Conversely, systematically investigating blends in film will also benefit
both blending theory and humor studies. For example, in exploiting the fortuitous
structure that arises in blends, humorous instances (in this case, body-swaps)
permit us “to test the flexibility of our conceptual system, navigate the space
of possible construals, and explore the radically different social and emotional
consequences they can trigger” (Coulson 2003: 87). It is assumed that body-swap
movies often have a serious rhetorical agenda. Crucially, by projecting film char-
acters into new contexts, filmmakers, just like cartoonists, can show us the ridicu-
lous side of a serious situation, or, the serious side of the ridiculous.
The structure of this article is as follows. In Section 2, some of the basic termi-
nology will be explained. Specifically, the principle of “(de)compression” and the
concept of “mental models” will be discussed, and an integrated two-level frame-
work of multimodal film analysis will be developed. Section 3 will present a few
case studies. The article ends with some thoughts for future research (Section 4).
2. Terminology
2.1 (De)compression
In blending networks, links between input mental spaces (also known as “outer-
space” links) can be compressed into relations within the blended space (also
known as “inner-space” relations). In other words, blends permit “compression”
of events that in reality occur sequentially into a single representation (Forceville
2016b: 94; see also Pagán Cánovas and Turner 2016). Compression takes place in
many cartoons, comic panels, advertisements, movies, and so on.
As an example of this phenomenon, consider a statement like “Dinosaurs
changed into birds,” employed to propose the new theory according to which
birds are descendants of dinosaurs. At one level, as Fauconnier (2005) points
out, this story of evolution spans millions of years, in which many creatures
lived and died, none of them actually “turning” into anything. These creatures
are linked by important conceptual relations such as Cause-Effect (genetic evolu-
tion), Analogy (one dinosaur is analogous to another) and Disanalogy (offspring
are disanalogous to their ancestors), and Time. In the human-scale blend, the
Analogy is compressed into Identity (a single dinosaur becomes a single bird)
and the Disanalogy is compressed into Change for that unique identity. Time is
compressed into the lifetime of a creature, which at the start is a dinosaur and
at the end is a bird (see also Coulson and Pascual 2006; Fauconnier and Turner
2000; Turner 2006a, 2014).
Some observations must be made. First, identity is not just a vital relation
but perhaps the primary vital relation, without which the others are pointless.
According to Fauconnier and Turner (2002, “[h]uman mental life is unthinkable
without continual compression and decompression involving identity” (2002: 115).
Second, integration and disintegration, compression and decompression, are two
sides of the same coin (Fauconnier and Turner 2002: 119). Clearly, the above blend
does not provide the appropriate understanding on its own; it must be linked
to the rest of the network, in which things that are compressed in the blended
space are decompressed and held separate. In other words, the understanding is
importantly a matter of invoking and connecting compressions and decompres-
sions simultaneously in the entire conceptual network (see also Fauconnier and
Turner 2000).
Compression is, thus, seen as a major force in human conceptualization
that permits comprehensive or complex stories such as biological evolution
to be reconstrued with simpler, more familiar, human-scale concepts (Coulson
and Pascual 2006; Fauconnier and Turner 2000, 2002; cf. Houggard 2008). It is
somewhat paradoxically claimed that the unrealistic cognitive models developed
by integration “actually” facilitate the comprehension of scientific events such

as evolution (Coulson and Pascual 2006: 155). Moreover, Fauconnier and Turner
(2000, 2002) stress the influence of compression on our processing efficiency,
while Coulson and Pascual (2006) stress the way that speakers’ compressions
enable them to strategically frame controversial issues, and to activate partic-
ular types of affective responses consistent with their argumentative or ideo-
logical goals.
Forceville (2004, 2016b) claims that the role of pragmatics in blending theory
deserves to be addressed more elaborately, and that compression is a promising
construction principle. But what guides compression itself?
While Fauconnier and Turner (2002, 2003) list a number of overarching goals
and governing principles for this process – such as, achieving “human scale” in
the blend, by, e.g., “Creation of vital relations” (i.e., adding new vital relations
to a space), or by “Syncopation” (i.e., projecting the relation to the blend and
leaving out all but a few key elements) – their list in fact does very little to explain
how we “Go from Many to One” (“a noteworthy subgoal”) (2002: 223) – and
hence to further a theory of the human mind. Indeed, what conditions or factors
govern the adding or dropping out of elements or relations? Is “genre” a potential
factor? Hollywood-film style? Moreover, the notion “human-scale(or -friendly)”,
as Sandler (2016) states, features essentially a single mind facing the world around
it, but as such examples as “So, while my heart says Travis or Scott, my head
says Kai or Conner and my gut says Danny”) demonstrate, on a truly human
scale, the mind is not alone (2016: 32). In other words, intersubjectivity in these
instances of fictive-interaction cannot be reduced to allegedly “simpler” semantic
concepts(Sandler 2016: 24; cf. Bache 2005; Hougaard 2005, 2008; Pérez-Sobrino
2014; Turner 2001). This, as Sandler proposes, amounts to replacing Fauconnier
and Turner’s monological approach with a dialogical one. Furthermore, although
Fauconnier and Turner (2002) emphasize that compression and decompression
go hand-in-hand (2002: 391), they, like many others, overlook such an interaction
between the two processes (Jabłońska-Hood 2015: 38; see also Fauconnier 2005;
Turner 2006a, 2006b, 2017).
Fauconnier and Turner (2002) claim that “[t]he principles of conceptual inte-
gration – constitutive and governing – have been discovered through analysis of
empirical data in many domains” (2002: 322). This claim in itself is not unprob-
lematic, simply because much of the traditional literature on blending and
compression was premised on a very reduced conception of language use in terms
of isolated, invented sentences (e.g., “If I were you …” examples), instead of natu-
rally occurring discourse, as well as ignoring the “cognitive mental models” (in
the sense of van Dijk 2008, 2014) that play an important role in discourse produc-
tion and understanding. After all, as Forceville (2016b) points out, it is not quite
clear what counts as a mental space in the first place (2016b: 94; see also Bateman
2017: 145 for other critical comments).
2.2 Mental models
Mental models (as defined by van Dijk, Kintsch, and others) are unique repre-
sentations of personal experiences in episodic memory (EM) (part of long-term
memory (LTM)) – with personal opinions, emotions, etc. – and also represent
the unique personal interpretation of text or talk (van Dijk 1997, 1999, 2003,
2008, 2014; van Dijk and Kintsch 1983; see also Johnson-Laird 1983; Tomasello
2008). They are construed from (i) external data (perception, comprehension,
etc.) and (ii) instantiations of generic knowledge (organized in schemas, scripts or
whatever). Because mental models involve all possible, embodied, experiences of
participants – vision, audition, touch, smell, feeling, sensorimotor, etc. – they are
multimodal (van Dijk 2014: 315).
So, as van Dijk claims, while in most forms of discourse between members
of the same community mental models will be similar enough to guarantee
successful communication, it should be emphasized that “mental models neces-
sarily embody personal elements that make all discourse productions and inter-
pretations unique – and hence misunderstanding possible – even when they have
many, socially shared, elements (2008: 60; italics added; see also van Dijk 2014: 52).
As such, “discourse comprehension involves the context-controlled construction
of mental models based on knowledge-based inferences” (ibid.; italics added; see
also Graesser, Singer, and Trabasso 1994). This also means that people (readers,
speakers, writers, etc.) invoke their own knowledge system to understand
discourse (van Dijk 2014: 66). Thus, high-knowledge subjects tend to do better
on most aspects of discourse processing (better comprehension, more recall, etc.)
than low-knowledge subjects (van Dijk 2014: 67–68) – note that prior knowledge
not only pertains to general world knowledge but also involves knowledge of the
language (van Dijk 2014: 74).
This also means that discourse is controlled not merely by underlying
semantic situation models (a tiny fragment of selected dimensions of an event),
but also by pragmatic context models that in many ways may change underlying
knowledge and beliefs in order to be more appropriate or efficient in the commu-
nicative situation, for example because of politeness constraints (van Dijk 2008,
2009, 2014). In other words, “the control structures of actual text and talk as
appropriate social action and interactions are cognitive, namely situation models
and context models” (van Dijk 2014: 255; see also van Dijk and Kintsch 1983).
Context models are conditions of discourse (also temporally as they mentally
precede the actual discourse/utterance). For instance, to issue an appropriate
command, one possible or probable condition of the communicative situation is

that the speaker has a power relationship over the recipient. In that sense, the
meanings of expressions and discourse and their associated situation models may
vary contextually, i.e., in different spatiotemporal settings, and when employed
for different aims, but also with different speakers/communicators and different
addressees/audiences, that is, as controlled by dynamic context models (van Dijk
2014: 257), as they also define the dynamic K-device of Common Ground (CG)
(see van Dijk 2008, 2009, 2012, 2014 for a detailed discussion).
In short, then, it is not contexts that constrain discourse production, struc-
turation, and understanding, but the subjective interpretation of the context by
discourse participants (van Dijk 1999: 124; see also Giles & Coupland 1991). Put
another way, given a communicative event in a social situation, its participants
actively and ongoingly construct a mental representation of just those properties
of this situation that are presently relevant to them (van Dijk 1999: 124).
Unfortunately, although there are now several (formal) context theories, so far
cognitive psychology has hardly paid attention to cognitive context models (van
Dijk 1999, 2014), and one even never found a detailed cognitive approach to these
more general experience models – which, as van Dijk proposes, must exist for
human beings to be able to act, interact, communicate, etc., and hence must be
central in cognitive science. This lack seems very strange.
2.3 Drama and film connectors: An integrated theory
Dramatic performances, as Fauconnier and Turner (2002) propose, constitute

deliberate compressed blends of a living being with an identity (2002: 266). They,
according to these authors, call for a living being in one input mental space or
framing and a different living being, an actor or actress, in another. The person
on stage is a compressed blend of these two. The character depicted may of course
be completely fictional, but there is still a mental space, a fictional one, in which
that person is alive (Fauconnier and Turner 2002: 266). In the blended space, the
being sounds and moves like the actress and is where the actress is, but the actress
in her performance tries to accept projections from the character depicted, and
so modifies not only her language, appearance, dress, attitudes, and gestures (cf.
Fauconnier & Turner 2002), but also, I would argue, mental model. The distinc-
tion between mental models of actresses and those of characters is essential, since
the actress and character each have their own personal experiences, knowledge,
attitudes, ideologies, thoughts, etc., and hence their own unique interpretation
(model) of the discourse and its meaning. Knowledge of fictional (hoped, wished,
and so on) events and situations, as van Dijk (2014) states, is represented “in
meta-models reflexively representing the specific mental activity dominating the
construed mental models of fictional events” (2014: 44; see also McGinn 2009) –
note that fictional discourse may well be about the imagined actions or properties
of ‘real’ individuals, “thus mixing real and imagined worlds in construed situation
models that resemble models of real events even more closely” (van Dijk 2014: 42).
This means that the actress, as Blair (2009) states, must have a capacity to engage
the character’s experience imaginatively while at the same time maintaining a
sense of self that is separate from the character (2009: 100; 2010; Chekhov 1985;
Kemp 2012; cf. Hill 2009, 2010; Stanislavsky 1948, 1961) – this need to maintain
a sense of self “might be contested by actors who “lose” themselves in the role,
such as Daniel Day Lewis, who is said to stay “in character” from the beginning
to the end of filming” (Blair 2009: 100; quotation marks in original). For spec-
tators, the perceived living, moving, and speaking body is a supreme material
anchor. The outer-space relation, according to Fauconnier and Turner, is one of
Representation. Typically, Representation is backed by outer-space Analogy, so
that, for instance, a middle-aged male character will be played by a middle-aged
female actor. In the blended space, these outer-space relations ‘are compressed
into uniqueness.
In principle, actors and actresses are connected to characters by virtue of
performing in the real world actions that share physical properties with actions
performed by the characters in a represented world (Fauconnier and Turner
2002: 266; see also Oakley 2013). This permits spectators, as Erving Goffman
(1974) notes, to be aware of more than one framing. Although a single scene is
perceived, the spectator is simultaneously aware of the actress moving and talking
on a stage in front of him, and of the corresponding character moving and talking
within the represented story world. Common to the two frames or input spaces
are some language and action patterns (the so-called ‘generic space’). While films
are of course technologically more complex, the spectator can also be aware simul-
taneously of the character and the actor or actress. As Fauconnier and Turner
explain, in Gone with the Wind, for example, viewers see Rhett Butler and also
know that they are seeing Clark Gable. Rhett’s actions are interpreted as part
of the story, and the very same actions, attributed to Clark Gable, as part of
movie making. In this sense, as Fauconnier and Turner claim, “in each partic-
ular theatrical representation, there will be rich shared generic structure between
“reality” and “fiction”“ (2002: 266; quotation marks in original).
Spectators, according to Fauconnier and Turner, can decompress the blend to
recognize outer-space relations between these frames, as when they observe that
the actor has not quite got the accent right or Hamlet trips over the stage lights.
Decompression, in my view, is at its best when the actor “breaks the fourth wall,”
that is, refers to, acknowledges, or addresses the spectator, usually for comedic
effect or as an avante-garde technique. For example, in Brecht’s plays, the actors
routinely address their spectators out of characters and interrupt the narrative
to provide some commentary on the action within the play (Dickey 2015: 50; see
also, e.g., Brown 2012; cf. Thabet 2002). Similarly, in Egyptian plays (such as, e.g.,
Rayyawi Skina [Rayya and Skina, 1980], Sok Alaa Banatak [Lock Your Daugh-
ters in, 1980], and Al-Wad Sayyed Al-Shaghal [Sayyed The Servant-Boy, 1985]),
as well as movies (such as Ashra Baladi [Baladi Progression, 1952]), the actors
show maximum awareness of themselves as actors and of their immediate circum-
stances. In Al-Wad Sayyed Al-Shaghal, for instance, we see Sayyed (played by Adel
Imam) telling Asim (played by Omar El-Hariri) that he has watched him play a
role in the Ramadan TV series Alf Lila wi Lila [One Thousand and One Arabian
Nights, 1985], asking him to remind him of the name of character he has played. In
the same scene, Imam also tells late Egyptian actor MostafaMitwali that he often
sees him on TV, addressing him with his real name and commenting on his role
in Bakiza wi Zaghlool [Bakiza and Zaghlool, 1986], while Mitwali, trying so hard
to stop laughing, asks him to let them “work” (act) – interestingly, the scene has
hit over 4 million views on YouTube. After all, actors and actresses, as well as the
director, also line up and hold hands on stage, bowing to the crowd at the end.
The theatrical notion of “breaking the fourth wall” overlaps with an important
aspect of construal known in Cognitive Grammar (CG) as subjectivity vs. objec-
tivity (Langacker 2008; Oakley 2013). In the subjective viewing arrangement, the
spectator remains unaware of her involvement and thus is outside the objective
scene, while in the objective arrangement she places herself (or is placed)inside
the objective scene (Oakley 2013: 24; Langacker 2008: 77). Spectacular examples of
complete story awareness and subjectivization, as Oakley illustrates, are evidenced
in spontaneous reactions from spectators to the events unfolding before them, as
when a spectator might try to tell the actress that she is being poisoned or might
try to warn the actor that he has indeed been brainwashed (2013: 21). Conversely,
spectators’ applause for a particular scene (so common in Egypt), for example,
means that they are maximally aware of themselves and their own immediate
circumstances. That is, spectators, like actors, can break the fourth wall, also by
greeting the actor as he first appears on stage – at least that is the case in Egyptian
theatres – and the actor takes center stage, greeting them in return. But the power
of drama (or film), as Fauconnier and Turner claim, comes from the integration
in the conceptual blend, rather than from outer-space connections: The spectator
does not go to a performance of Hamlet so as to measure the similarity between
the actor and a historical prince of Denmark (2002: 267). According to Faucon-
nier and Turner, spectators are “able to live in the blend, looking directly on its
reality” (2002: 267). As Goffman points out, in extreme cases, the spectator has
been known to lose the framing of himself as a spectator and of the actress as an
actress, and has rushed onstage to stop the murder or had a heart attack when
the heroine is hacked to bits. Indeed, models of fictional events, as represented

in fantasies and films, may appear so real that spectators sometimes have a hard
time differentiating them from representation of real events – and producing real
emotions like happiness and fear (van Dijk 2014: 42); interestingly, the late popular
Egyptian comedian Ismail Yassin, for example, made numerous films with his
name in the title (e.g., Ismail Yassin fil-Geish [Ismail Yassin in the Army, 1955],
Ismail Yassin fil-Police (Ismail Yassin in the Police, 1955), etc.); similarly, in a movie
like Khataf Mirati (He Stole My Wife, 1954), late Egyptian actors Anwar Wagdi
and Farid Shawki play “Anwar” and “Farid” respectively; furthermore, again, a lot
of movies, plays, and TV series may be based on real events or life stories, such
as Lion of the Desert (1981) and Ayyam El Sadat (The Days of Sadat, 2001). The
possibilities are so many (see also Fauconnier and Turner 2002: 267). When the
viewer experiences a movie as a fully realized world, what is called a “sensory illu-
sion” (Allen 1993, 1995), he or she, claims Oakley (2013), becomes a “story-aware
spectator” (2013: 20). The film spectator, according to these authors, constitutes a
virtual-self interacting with an ontologically distinct world as if she were in it but
unable to affect it (Oakley 2013: 21). Such as if or “illusory” responses, although
likely, are, argue Allen and Oakley (among others), only for relatively short inter-
vals (i.e., seconds). According to William (2017), however, spectators are under no
illusions as their minds are actively engaged in shifting perspectives and forming
a nuanced understanding of the movie and its characters, and possibly of the
portrayed historical situation as well (2017: 157; see also Thabet 2002) – a result
that is also contrary to Brecht’s understanding of Einfühlung (a shutting down
of the audience’s “critical faculties” and a “dangerous distancing from reality”)
and hence to his advocated use of the “alienation effect” to jolt spectators out
of the “dramatic illusion” and to make a lasting impression that would ideally
inspire them to political action. One may completely agree with William’s notion
that cinema or theater1 is a medium that encourages spectators to move beyond
simple character identification and toward more complex situational perspective-
taking (2017: 129). The problem, however, is with this author’s “actively engaged,”
which receives no or very little support from research on implicit cognition and
framing effects (e.g., Druckman 2001; Haidt 2001; Nosek, Graham, and Hawkins
2010; Thibodeau and Boroditsky 2013, 2015). One thus subscribes to the view that
frames may create realities for us, that frame adaptation is commonly a covered
process, and that a movie or play is relevant for spectators not only if it contributes
to their knowledge about (specific) events, but also if it has other effects in their
1. But, of course, cinema and theater are two different mediums/genres which carry different
experiences for spectators.
lives, like participating in a demonstration (which would be strictly speaking an

indirect effect).
Finally, one should also draw a line between mental models of directors and
mental models of spectators. This is a crucial issue, since mental models, as laid
out above, are subjective mental constructions and representations of (experi-
ences of) situations, and the director is typically the person in charge of all the
creative dimensions, both interpretative and technical, on a film or play produc-
tion, and the one who has to make the right decisions to get the right mix of
all ingredients, from acting to lighting to editing, to make up a motion image
(Fischer 2000: 2). It is thus convenient to talk of feature films or plays as the inten-
tional objects of directors, while at the same time noting that as largely collabo-
rative efforts they also bear intentional properties of many constituents (executive
producers, sponsors, ratings boards, writers, actors/actresses, editors, cinematog-
raphers, critics, preview audiences, etc.) (see Forceville 2014: 67; Oakley 2013: 28) –
but note that some theatre practitioners such as Stanislavsky had grown frustrated
with the so-called “table work or analysis” (“the process where actors [or actresses]
sit with the director at a table and verbally analyze the script, identifying moti-
vations, objectives and actions” [Kemp 2010: 136]), after realizing that it allowed
his actors/actresses little freedom, making them come on stage with stuffed heads
and empty hearts, and could act nothing (Stanislavsky 1991: 325–226; Carnicke
2000: 32; 2009: 195; Kemp 2012: 25, 112); this frustration led him to develop a
system called “active analysis” (also called the “Method of Physical Actions”),
which is more easily controlled by the actor/actress (see, e.g., Kemp
2012: Chapter 5 for a detailed discussion).
This illustrates an essential point: namely, in film or drama, communication
occurs at multiple levels of conceptual organization. In this case, a higher-level
communication between the director and the spectator emerges within and influ-
ences a lower-level communication between the characters (see also Dynel 2013
for analogous findings). Again, each communicator and addressee here has their
own unique mental models. Thus, a movie is a shooting of the subjective mental
model of a story as it is construed and shot by the director, and the spectators
each construe their own personal interpretation, their own mental model, of the
story as referred to by the movie. What the spectator sees, then, is one interpre-
tation, but never the only possible interpretation, of the film. Productions of the
‘same’ movie (or play) by other directors may offer drastically different interpreta-
tions, resulting in drastically different visual and aural styles (see Brockett, Ball,
Fleming, and Carlson 2014: 25; Monta and Stanley 2008: 67).
Filmmakers, as Oakley (2013) observes, try to align their spectators’ expe-
riences with those of the story’s protagonists. Here, understanding a scene as
it relates to the rest of the movie, claims Oakley, requires the construction and
dynamic activation of a network of five mental spaces and a “Relevance Array”

(arguably to “stabilize” the network). Specifically, this author proposes that
semantic analysis proceeds with a “ground space”, where the spectator is being
“absorbed” in the world of the story, i.e., keeping track of the events presented
before her and seeing the characters on the screen and identifies with them,
sorting the villains from the heroes or antagonists from protagonists (Oakley
2013: 10–11). There is also a “presentation space”, which aligns the audience with
the character’s knowledge of the current situation. The third space is called the
“reference space”, which, in contrast, indicates the spectator’s knowledge of the
present situation, including privileged knowledge of the villains’ inward inten-
tions. The fourth mental space in Oakley’s model is referred to as the “virtual
space”, which, as the composition of the blend (the fifth space) selective structure,
is projected from the presentation and reference mental spaces.
Oakley is not alone in positing blending as the cognitive basis of spectating.
Recent conference papers (e.g., Gordejuela 2017), articles in key journals (e.g.,
Blair 2009) or in edited volumes (e.g., Bateman 2017; Oakley and Tobins 2012;
see also McConachie and Hart 2006), and monographs (e.g., Blair 2008; Kemp
2012) have demonstrated “blending’s remarkable potential to enrich the field”
(William 2017: 30–31; see also Dannenberg 2012; McConachie 2008). For
example, Oakley and Tobins (2012) argue that suspense is a function of human
social cognition, with “joint attention” (in which two or more individuals are
both focused on some external object and mutually aware of this shared focus
[2012: 2; see also Pagán Cánovas and Turner 2016; Steen and Turner 2013]) and
conceptual blending (in which, as mentioned earlier, elements and vital relations
are selectively projected from multiple input mental spaces, and processes of
composition, completion, and elaboration give rise to new emergent structure in
the blended space [Oakley and Tobins 2012: 2]) as the two cognitive operations
that give life to the anticipation and dread that accompany people’s engagement
with manipulated story worlds (2012: 20). Similarly, Gordejuela (2017) discusses
blended joint attention, time compression, viewpoint integration, and identity
and analogy connections, attempting to answer the question of how spectators
make sense of film flashbacks.
What is so painfully missing from such approaches is dynamic, cognitive
context models, which feature a knowledge device (K-device) that regulates the
complex managementof Common Ground shared by the filmmaker/actor/etc. and
the spectator (the participants in the higher-level communication) and by the
characters (the participants in the lower-level communication). Crucially, the
filmmaker presupposes that spectators will know what the characters are saying,
she assumes that they will think and interpret scenes more or less like her, and
she predicts that they will produce specific psychological responses. This also
means that in some cultures, directorsmay keep spectators (especially if under

18) from accessing different types of knowledge, particularly knowledge around
sex.2 Furthermore, it is obvious that the parameters of a film production context
are crucially influential for its style and content. A story shot for television, at
another time, by another director, with a different aim, different knowledge and
different spectators would be very different. That is, multimodal context models
are partly pre-planned for many films, plays, etc. or genres, even before their
detailed meanings or mental models. Consider a movie starring Ahmed Helmy,
Mohamed Henedy, or Mohamed Saad. The knowledge conveyed – and as signaled
by the trailer, the title (or opening) sequence (see, e.g., Pötzsch 2012; Stanitzek
2009, for a survey and functions of title sequences in film)3 or by the poster – is
comedic, the actors are no doubt comedians, and they are addressing the Egyptian
audience (particularly young people). That is, the spectator already has a large
part of the context model in place before starting to watch the movie, as had the
director before shooting it (at least that is the case in Egypt). Thus, most gener-
ally, spectators are more interested in what is consistent with their expectations,
attitudes, and so on, and if the movie (or the play or TV series) falls short of such
expectations, then spectators or critics will explicitly attack it and say things such
as “X was woefully miscast here,” “The film did not make us laugh,” etc. (visit also,
e.g., http://www.elcinema.com/work/2025865/review for some spectators’ critical
comments on Amr Salama’s (2014) comedy film Made in Egypt, which will be
analyzed below). In short, the spectator seems to enter the humor mode, even
before watching the film. The comedy context model not only controls what the
character says, but also how such should be done.
This seems to put an end to a heated debate (with more than 9, 000 Google
search hits) about whether humor is a violation of Grice’s (1989) Cooperative
Principle (CP) or the principle of relevance (as presented by Sperber and Wilson
(1995), Yus (2011, 2017), and so on, and which has developed from the Gricean
2. At the same time, access to such scenes, also about violence, is more likely to be regulated
by boards of media and film censors.
3. Note that the opening sequence could be placed in the middle of the movie or series, gener-
ally after the first scene. Here, the first scene aims not just to set the tone of the work the spec-
tator is about to watch but also to set up its premise or to introduce the main character (see
also Braha and Byrne 2011). This is the case for the title sequence of, e.g., The Adventures of
Sinbad, produced by Atlantis Films and All American Television in 1996–1998. After all, notice
that opening, as well as closing, sequences function as “(de)compression (or (dis)integration)
signals” (see below). In The Adventures of Sinbad, for example, signals such as “Atlantis Films &
All American Television present,” “The Adventures of Sinbad,” “Starring,” “Dermott as Himself,”
and “Jacqueline Collen as Maeve,” and so on prompt the spectator to unpack the reality-fiction
blend (i.e., reconstitutes the roles, relations, and inferences in each input frame).
framework) (see Attardo 1990, 1994, 2017 for a review). Clearly, according to
the theory employed in the present study, since the situation models of film
characters (participants in the micro- or lower-level communication) may be
different (as is typically the case in all communication), partial understanding
or misunderstanding of discourse is common, whereby a conspicuous humorous
incongruity may emerge, though the socially shared generic meaning and mutual
knowledge of the participants guarantee that in most situations understanding
seems adequate (see also van Dijk 2014: 52). This should not be interpreted as
saying that either one of the characters did a “violation” of the CP (as suggested
by Yamaguchi [1988]) or the director has violated the maxims. Rather, there is
no violation. This naturally suggests Attardo’s (2017) question of “how [then]
to account for the “surprising” presence of the incongruity” (2017: 182; double
quotation marks added; see also Attardo 1994: 290), which, as this author states,
none of the Relevance Theoretic accounts (e.g., Yus 2011, 2016, 2017) addresses.
The answer to this question is, once again, discourse is defined not just by
underlying situation models that are the basis of its semantics, but also by models
that represent the communicative situation itself: pragmatic context models (van
Dijk and Kintsch 1983: 338; van Dijk 2014: 54). Despite individual differences of
knowledge in terms of cognitive models construing variable personal experiences
depending on context, there necessarily needs to be a minimum of shared basic
knowledge, not merely of language, discourse and communication, but also of the
natural and social knowledge (van Dijk 2014: 181). Similarly, a movie is based not
only on a situation model of a director or actor about a story, but crucially also
on the context model representing shooting for a film company and a general
public. The K-device of context models controls the complex knowledge manage-
ment of discourse and interaction: what spectators probably know already, may
have forgotten, do not know as yet, might want to know, what has been commu-
nicated before, etc. To put it more clearly, filmmakers and spectators (participants
in the macro- or higher-level communication) engage in routine interaction and
communication for which they already have partial context models as ‘pragmatic
plans’. Strategies of discourse production and comprehension, as pointed out
earlier, make use of many ways to express or signal this by means of opening title
sequences, trailers, movie posters, previews, interviews with filmmakers or actors,
etc. – note also that filmmakers usually signal aspects of the story they find
humorous or more relevant for the spectators, as is the case in the body-swap
movies below; this is in line with the notion that a spectator’s ability to expe-
rience continuity from scene to scene relies on analogical coherence, particu-
larly at the categorization point on the continuum (Oakley 2013: 6); crucially, a
scene may be a “reminding incident” of a previous situation; in short, a spectator’s
ability to consider a later scene as the same type of incident depicted in an earlier
scene is an instance of analogical coherence, even though the exact conditions

(time, place, topic of conversation, fellow-character) do not obtain (see Oakley
2013). These not merely strategically pre-define overall topics but also serve to pre-
invoke the generic knowledge needed to understand the (rest of the) discourse.
This means that the presence of the incongruity in comedies is not completely
surprising or sudden (cf. Attardo 1994, 2017; Dynel 2013). Similarly, a reader
searching the Internet usually already has a plan to read, e.g., jokes and even to
search specifically for such knowledge in Nokat Masria (“Egyptian Jokes”), and
hence construes, invokes or updates the partial context model that will control the
process of searching and reading. Indeed, much of the context model is already
construed before starting the activity, given the person’s general, sociocultural
shared knowledge of the situation, or his (or her) own, personal knowledge of
such a situation derived from earlier context models (van Dijk 2014: 55). In short,
then, context models represent the parameters of the communicative situation
that at each moment are relevant for directors and/or spectators. Hence, “they also
provide a more cognitively embedded theory of relevance than more philosoph-
ical and formal approaches to relevance” (van Dijk 2014: 54).
The body-swap genre, however, is extraordinarily complex, for several
reasons. First, we are dealing here with two complex blends usually involving two
actors(or actresses, or one actor and one actress) and two characters. Second,
body-swap films, TV series, etc. are particularly rich in “(de)compression signals”
(like “Give me my body back!”, “You want your body back?!,” “I was transformed
into (or made) Y,” “X believes I am you,” etc.) to help spectators to unpack mainly
character-character (rather than actor-character) blends, to construe local coher-
ence, to construe or (re)invoke relevant mental models or model fragments, to
invoke generic knowledge and in general to invoke and integrate all knowledge
relevant for adequate understanding. (De)compression signals are thus like traffic
signs, guiding the spectator from one scene to the next. Of course, they are not
only linguistic, but also visual or multimodal. Importantly, gesture (especially
if the body-swapping is into a different sex) and incongruity (which is a direct
result of the body-swapping)are also strong (dis)integration signals. Put another
way, far more than linguistic expressions are involved in communication (Kendan
2004: 69). Tones of voice, modes of hesitation, styles of talking, patterns of into-
nation, vocal quality, bodily posture, bodily movements of all sorts, glances, facial
expressions, all function as (dis)integration signals. This is in line with Brickman’s
(2012) view that one of the ramifications of the ambivalent approach to changing
gender norms, for instance, is that “gender quickly exposes itself as masquerade”
(2012: 156–157). In the mother-daughter body-swap film Freaky Friday (1976), for
example, the body switch literally “unhinges” gender from the body, as the femi-
nine housewife [Mrs. Ellen Andrews, played by Barbara Harris] has to maneuver
in her daughter’s [Annabel Andrews, played by Jodie Foster] athletic milieu and
the masculine daughter has to inhabit the role of domestic helpmate (Brickman
2012: 157). The movie, as Brickman observes, seems to get out of its way to stress
the humor of the performance of gender, for instance “by having Foster as
Annabel imitate the voice and mannerism of Barbara Harris, which transforms
hernotorious “froggy” voice into a higher pitched motherly tone” (2012: 157;
double quotation marks in original). This overt performance of gender resurfaces
when the Annabel employs her mother’s body to forge a relationship with Boris, a
neighbor whom she has harbored a crush (see Brickman 2012 for a discussion).
While incongruity is an indispensable condition for humor, it is insufficient
(Dynel 2011a: 67). The enjoyment of multimodal jokes, as El Refaie (2011) shows,
relies to a large extent on the background knowledge, moral values, and attitudes
of the individual (see also Abdel-Raheem 2018). If, for example, a body-swap film
is too threatening to somebody’s core sense of identity, it is likely to create anger
and alienation rather than amusement.
Below, two case studies are used to further illustrate the theory.
3. Two body-swap films
The case studies analysed are Made in Egypt (Amr Salama, Egypt 2014;
https://ok.ru/video/90286524991, last accessed 3 December 2017) and The Hot
Chick (Tom Brady, USA 2002; https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xnJun-lZ_wg,
last accessed 1 December 2017). One reason is that Made in Egypt, produced by
New Century Production and Shadows Communications, is the Arab world’s first
ever body-swap movie, and generally Arab cinema is among the most neglected
subjects in the field (Landau 2016: xi; Khouri 2010: xxiii; see also Shafik 2007).
Second, The Hot Chick, which involves a stereotypical man switching bodies with
an equally stereotypical woman, is ideal for the analysis of the construction and
performance of gender identity in discourse. The film is rated PG-13 (Parents
strongly cautioned), and – according to Holden (2002), for example – is “loaded
with off-color humor and sexual innuendo” (2002: para. 8).
Again, broadly speaking, the body-swap genre is a good medium for
exploring (de)compressions and multimodal mental models. In the first place, it is
particularly rich in its exploitation of (de)compressions. Moreover, in body-swap
movies, blends are double-scope both for Identity and for framing. Typically, the
person in the blend has the public identity and powers of X but literally a new
character (mental model) that delivers someway of proceeding that is not avail-
able from the character (mental model) of X alone – note that, again, there are
two types of blends here: “actor-character” and “character-character” (see below).
This means that, in line with Fauconnier and Turner (2002: 254–255), not just the
identities but also the frames themselves may be strikingly different and yet lead
to creative blends.
At the risk of stating the obvious, one wants to stress that the analyses do
not aim to demonstrate that interpreters of the films need to be taught blending
theory or multimodal mental models in order to understand and be moved by
them; conversely, one hopes to show that comprehension (or production) and
aesthetic enjoyment of the films is governed by cognitive processes of compres-
sion and decompression and by multimodal cognitive models.
3.1 Made in Egypt
Summary
A lazy young Caireneman, Alaa el-Farsi (Ahmed Helmy), inherits his father’s
marionette-making workshop. Instead of pursuing his father’s career and of
fulfilling his 7-year-old sister’s wish that he would make puppets for her school
show, Alaa transforms a section of the workshop into a shop selling Chinese-made
toys, gifts, fashion accessories, and boxer shorts, among other things, taking out a
bank loan. Accidentally, a giant teddy panda bear, Panda or Dabdoob (also played
by Ahmed Helmy), instead of boxers is shipped from China to the shop. Panda,
unlike Alaa, speaks Classical Arabic and highly values work (often quoting some
important Muslim figures like Imamal-Shāfiʿī [767–820] on that). Alaa’s sister,
Tamtam (Nour Osman), therefore starts to love Panda more than her brother.
As a lazy and careless person, Alaaforgets to lock the shop’s door, and conse-
quently all goods get stolen and he finds himself unable to repay the bank loan.
His beloved Ola (Yasmeen Raees), who works at her father’s lingerie shop opposite
his, describes him as a loser, so do his sister and mother, Hoda (Dalaal Abdel-Aziz).
Tamtam, then, wishes that Panda would turn into her brother, and her brother
into Panda. The wish gets fulfilled, and many hilarious scenes follow. Most of the
jokes revolve around not only the physical but also the mental differences between
Alaa and Panda (see below). Alaa eventually emerges from his travails a better,
more responsible person. In his campaign to undo the curse, he not just makes
puppets for his sister’s play but also acts in it. Only then does Tamtam wish her
brother would get back to his original body. And what of Panda who finds himself
in Alaa’s human body? The film pays him equal (if not more) heed given the
person in the blend now has the public identity of Alaa. For example, with help
from Tamtam, Panda (in Alaa’s body) succeeds in striking a puppet export deal
with some Chinese toy traders. It is such a new character that excites Ola’s admi-
ration, which then turns into love.
Analysis
The opening title sequence of Made in Egypt is reduced to the film title and release
date. This represents an occasional tendency to downsize opening titles (see Stan-
itzek 2009). Of course, this, as Stanitzek notes, does not mean that the rest of
the credits vanish (2009: 48). They are relegated to the end titles, with which the
opening titles not merely share the function of framing the film, but also a mutual
reciprocity (Moinereau 2004). Importantly, in the current case, the end title func-
tions as a decompression signal, with, e.g., the movie’s name, release date, produc-
tion companies, etc., as well as the actors’ names and roles.4
This does not, of course, preclude that the context model is partly pre-planned
for the present communicative situation, or genre, even before its detailed
meaning or cognitive model, let aloneits precise “grammatical” realization. A
spectator going to the cinema or searching YouTube usually already has a plan
to watch comedies and even to search specifically for Ahmed Helmy’s new or
most recent movie, Made in Egypt, and hence construes, invokes or updates
the partial context model that will control the process of searching. Moreover,
the trailer (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0b-AAXxu9wE) – like the movie
posters (e.g., Figure 1), newspaper advertisements, stills, etc. – is an “epitextual
form” (as described by Stanitzek 2009: 52–53). Its main purpose is not just to
arouse the spectator’s curiosity and expectations about the movie (see Maier
2006: 1–2) but also to transpose the heralded movie to the future perfect: “This is
the experience you [the spectator] will have had (and of which you will be able
to tell your friends)” (Stanitzek 2009: 53). In other words, the trailer’s advertising
function necessitates a concentration on the plot summary – incomplete, as is
the case for all film trailers – that draws on footage from the movie, on touting
the movie’s star cast and special effects, and explicitly over-the-top formulations.
Here, Tamtam, Hoda, and Ola, among others, all describe Alaa as a loser. There are
also many verbal and non-verbal (de)compression signals. For example, in a post-
transformation scene, Panda (in Alaa’s body) addresses Alaa (in Panda’s body),
saying “You’re me, and I’m you.” In another scene, Ola addresses Alaa, saying
“What you’re saying will make people think that you’re crazy”; “Crazy because I
said that I was a teddy bear and became a human being?!” Alaa replies. In a third
scene, Alaa asks Panda to hail a taxi, but Panda hails a white jeep, asking the driver
whether he is a taxi. In a fourth scene, Alaa (in Panda’s body) says, “Finally, I
knew how I would turn back into Alaa.” Obviously, from those and other scenes,
the spectator can infer that the film is about a man-toy body swap, that the man,
unlike the soft toy panda, does not value work, and so on. Of course, this also
4. It may be important to note, however, that all Egyptian black and white films have opening
title sequences, but not end titles.
means that “intertextuality and interdiscursivity are at the basis of any trailer”
(Bortoluzzi 2009: 142).
Figure 1. A poster of Made in Egypt

In the foreground, black-haired Helmy is depicted as wearing a black-and-white T-shirt
and dark sunglasses; in the background, there is a giant panda. It is known that giant
pandas are distinctly black and white (white fur, dark patches around their eyes, black
ears, shoulders and legs).
The film has two hyper-blends, involving at least three input frames – namely,
an actor (Ahmed Helmy) and two characters (Alaa and Panda), each of which has
his own multimodal mental model – again, note that mental models “define and
control […] everyday perception and interaction in general and the production
and comprehension of discourse in particular” (van Dijk 2014: 49). The person in
one blend (Alaa in Panda’s body) has the public identity of Panda but the char-
acter or subjective experience (mental model) of Alaa – note that Panda, voiced
by Helmy, is already a blend, even before the transformation: he has some of the
properties of a toy, such as having a battery and being made of cotton, but he also
has many human properties, such as speaking Classical Arabic. So the blended
“Panda” speaks Cairene Arabic, is lazy, knows about everyday routine actions
and their intentions and goals, has expertise in making puppets, etc. The person
in the other blend (Panda in Alaa’s body) has the public identity and powers of
Alaa but the character or mental model of Panda. So the blended “Alaa” speaks
Classical Arabic, severely lacks knowledge about routine actions and their inten-
tions and goals, about (Egyptian) social norms and values, about computers and
the Internet, about giving an injection, about making marionettes, about amuse-
ment parks, etc., and is illiterate. Matters are somewhat more complicated when,
in order to disguise, Alaa (in Panda’s body) occasionally speaks Classical Arabic;
Panda (in Alaa’s body), mostly Colloquial Arabic (see below). After all, Alaa is a
metonym for Egypt/Egyptians, while Panda is a metonym for China/the Chinese.

What about the actor input frame?
One, as Blair (2010) claims, may follow a number of conceptual directions:
(1) it can arguably be said that the actor and the character are entirely separate
(problematically echoing Diderot’s (eighteenth century) binary, as it is the actor’s
body-mind doing the work); (2) it can be proposed that the actor and character
are just one, that is, there is no difference between them at all (“there is only
me myself,” also potentially problematic, since the actor may break the fourth
wall or simply stops “being the character” once the performance comes to an
end – or at least it is hoped); (3) it can be suggested that the character is an
operation or score that the actor performs (in which case there is still only the
“me myself ” of the actor); etc. (2010: 11). Regardless of which of these cognitive
stances one holds, a preliminary phase of the actor’s work, argues this author,
is imagining himself in the character’s situation, which can arguably be referred
to as “empathizing” (Blair 2010: 11). A better way, however, to say this is that
the fictional situations and events again constitute the intentional objects of
higher-level mental (meta-)models reflexively self-representing the actor (in the
current case, Ahmed Helmy) as imagining these situations and events – much
in the same way as one does for hopes and wishes: the “reflexive meta-model”
(‘I am now imagining things’) (van Dijk 2014: 42; cf. Soto-Morettini 2010 for
a discussion). This may also be supported by the fact that Helmy plays two
completely different characters in one same movie. Matters are further compli-
cated by the body swap: Helmy-as-Alaa-in-Panda’s-body vs. Helmy-as-Panda-
in-Alaa’s-(Helmy’s)-body. This all seems in line with Fauconnier and Turner’s
(2002) view that the actor is engaged in a kind of blend in which “his motor
patterns and power of speech come directly into play, but not his free will or
his foreknowledge of the outcome” (2002: 267); in other words, in the blend,
the actor says just what the character says. That should not be taken to mean,
however, that the actor cannot improvise. Rather, thanks to the reflexive meta-
model above, the actor can invent words or things he has not learnt or prepared
before and, on stage, respond to the audience’s applause – of course, such impro-
visations must be in line with the character’s own (experience) models.
The spectator, meanwhile, is engaged in a different type of blend, one in
which she, again, may lose the framing of herself as a spectator and of the actor
as an actor. In other words, in drama or film, as Fauconnier and Turner (2002)
state, “the ability to live in the blend provides the motive for the entire activity”
(2002: 267).Made in Egypt exploits a range of viewing arrangement along the
subjective-to-objective scale. Crucially, it puts Egyptian spectators on stage as the
focus of attention: with, e.g., an opening scene of a billboard reading “Smile, as
you’re in Egypt!” and a voice of what appears to be a microbus driver saying,
“Ramses,” with the title “Made in Egypt” (which appears at both the beginning and
end), and so on. Spectators see Alaa El-Farsi and also know that they are seeing
Ahmed Helmy. They interpret Alaa’s actions as part of the story, and the very same
actions, attributed to Ahmed Helmy, as part of film making. In this sense, in the
film representation, there is, again, rich shared generic structure between “reality”
and “fiction.”
True to its genre, the film is especially rich in character-character (dis)inte-
gration signals, which help the spectator figure out which is which. In one scene,
for example, Alaa (in Panda’s body) says, “Oh my! I have been transformed [into a
panda].” In another scene, Alaa leaves Panda a message saying, “I’ll be away for a
few days, as I am traveling to Sharm El-sheikh with a friend; don’t reveal the secret
that I have turned into a teddy bear, otherwise I’ll kill you […].” Similarly, when a
man punches Panda (in Alaa’s body) on the nose, Alaa says “Oh, my nose!”
Of course, (de)compression signals, as mentioned earlier, are not merely
verbal, but also nonverbal or multimodal. These once again operate on physical
and mental incongruity between input frames. Individual differences of knowl-
edge, as pointed out earlier, can be accounted for in terms of multimodal
mental models construing variable personal experiences depending on context.
Without a minimum of shared basic knowledge, not just of language, discourse
and communication, but also of the natural and social world, mutual under-
standing and social interaction would be problematic, which may create humor.
In the present case, for instance, when told by Tamtam that he had an email
from China, Panda (in Alaa’s body) asked her to let “him” (i.e. the email) “come
in.” Similarly, when asked by Ola to give her father, Hassan (Abdullah Mishref),
an injection, Panda handed the syringe to him. Panda also displays a total igno-
rance of, e.g., male urination and has to be instructed by Alaa (in Panda’s body),
of social norms, giving a bra to Ola as a gift and hugging girls he does not know,
and so on. Similarly, Alaa’s experience models are fundamental and crucial for
his everyday life; they are his everyday experiences – whatever he does: Alaa
(after the transformation) represents himself, in a specific place, time, with a
current (but variable) identity in relation to other characters (or object), doing
something (like trying to watch Ola changing her clothes) from the moment he
wakes up, and becomes conscious of who he is, where he is, what he does, etc.
Hence, they are called “experience models” (van Dijk 2014). They define what IS
a (subjective) experience.
Some observations need to be made here. First, in line with Morreall (1983),
“[w]herever there is a principle to be violated or regularity to be upset, there is
room for incongruity and so for humor” (1983: 82). Crucially, most of the incon-
gruities people laugh at, especially in comedy, are “human shortcomings – igno-
rance, stupidity, awkwardness, mistakes, misunderstandings, and moral vices”
(Morreall 2008: 234; see also Berger 1993; Ritchie 2004). Indeed, a great many
scenes of Made in Egypt, as can be seen above, are transparently contingent on
circumscribed topics, such as body taboo, sex, and so on. It should be stressed
here that the understanding and appreciation of humorous phenomena in film
discourse relies not only on the background knowledge, values and attitudes of
the spectator, but also on the broader socio-cultural context in which the film is
encountered (see also El Refaie 2011: 87). Once again, if, for example, a scene or
film is too threatening to a spectators’ score sense of identity or too challenging
to her cultural and/or religious values, it is likely to create anger and alienation
rather than humor.
Second, frame-shifting (Coulson 2001) or incongruity in humor or (multi-
modal) jokes is, again, not completely “surprising” (cf. Attardo 2017; Dynel 2013,
2017 and references therein). Once again, the fictional discourse of films, for
example, operates on two levels of communication: the lower (micro) level, repre-
senting the fictional participants’ interactions, and the higher (macro) level,
concerning the spectator’s interpretation of the former, as carefully devised by
the film production crew (see also Dynel 2011b). This presupposes a fundamental
distinction between ‘character’ and ‘spectator’ communication models or knowl-
edge, which may imply the general condition of lack of knowledge on the part
of the character (e.g., Panda in Alaa’s body) and the assumed knowledge of the
spectator. To repeat, the cognitive mental models play a crucial role in discourse
production and understanding. Crucially, context models are partly pre-given (or
-planned) for a great many communicative activities, and in film spectators can
also experience continuity from scene to scene relying on analogical coherence
(involving extracting a “template” from one situation and applying it to another
situation [Oakley 2013: 6; see also French 1995]). The second scene depicting
Panda (in Alaa’s body) ignorant of how to give an injection is a “reminding
incident” of the previous situation depicting Alaa (before the transformation)
injecting Hassan; the third scene depicting Panda (after the transformation)
injecting Dr. Ashraf (Edward), of the second scene. It is also important to note
that the trailer itself shows parts of these scenes. All this goes to show that
Panda’s levels and stages of knowledge acquisition and evaluation, for example,
are different from those of the spectator. Since the situation models of Panda
and other characters are different, partial understanding or misunderstanding of
discourse is so common. This is why Ola and her father take advantage of the
opportunity in the next turns (e.g., fourth) to perform some operation on the
trouble-source turns (e.g., first), by saying “Wait a second, Mr. Alaa; please give
my father the injection!” and “Give me the injection here [i.e., in the buttock], Son;
[…] insert the needle and inject [the medication],”respectively. As the film goes
on, Panda acquires knowledge (of, e.g., language, medicine, social norms, etc.).
It is thus important to repeat a point made before, namely that context models
ongoingly regulate which information of the situation model(e.g., of an experi-
ence, an event) is relevant to be expressed at each moment, which information is
already known by the spectators or which can be easily inferred, which is inter-
esting or less so, polite, etc.(van Dijk 2014). In short, the socially shared generic
meaning and mutual knowledge of the filmmaker and spectator guarantee that in
most scenes understanding is adequate. Of course, most spectators, unlike Panda,
know what the expression “give someone an injection”, e.g., means.
Moral cognition
The movie recurrently invokes strict-father(or conservative) values (as described
by Lakoff 1996), such as self-discipline, independence, individual responsibility, and
direct causation. For example, Panda (both before and after the transformation)
usually comes out with wise old sayings on hard work (e.g., “He who works
hard achieves (goals);” “He who plants will harvest;” and “He who seeks high-
ness must spend nights awake”). Importantly, Panda again, via both metaphor
and metonymy, stands conceptually for (hard working) China, whose economy is
export-driven. In contrast, Alaa, through both metaphor and metonymy, stands
conceptually for (lazy) Egypt, whose economy is import-dependent. The film
can thus be seen as a call for replacing “Made in China” with “Made in Egypt.”
Crucially, its scenes place the fault for unemployment or failure with the indi-
vidual/Alaa(who did not work hard enough). Somebody who embraces nurtu-
rant-parent (or liberal) morality, however, is more likely to place the fault for
unemployment or failure on social and economic trends (which can result in
unemployment, no matter how hard a citizen works) (Wehling 2013: 13).
The film also has a go at gay people. Importantly, in aurination scene, Alaa
(after the transformation) falsely accuses Panda of trying to peek in at his private
parts, and therefore a group of people starts to beat up Panda, saying, “Oh! Are
you one of them [i.e., homosexuals]?” Of course, this is influenced by the group’s
cultural background and religious beliefs. Surely, every community has its own
moral views and needs. What works in other societies may not fit in the Arab
or Muslim world, and the reverse. Many spectators may refuse to be amused by
the scene because they find the whole subject of homosexuality too challenging,
regardless of what they perceive the filmmaker’s attitudes to be (see also El Refaie
2011 for supportive experimental evidence). Some may also feel reluctant to admit
to being offended by the scene, particularly if this involves revealing their own
sexual orientation. After all, the problem does not reside in criticizing homosex-
uality but rather in encouraging violence against other people or groups. In other
words, it is the duty of the executive and judicial departments of a state, but not of
the public, to enforce a law.
3.2 The Hot Chick
Summary
Jessica Spencer (Rachel McAdams) is a spoiled, snobbish high school cheerleader
whose whole world suddenly falls apart when she loses half a pair of cursed
earrings she has stolen from an antique shop, “mambuza: treasures of the
ancient world.” When a petty 30-year-old criminal, Clive Maxtone (Rob
Schneider), finds the lost earring at a gas station and puts it on, he and Jessica swap
bodies. In her campaign to lift the curse, Jessica has to, for example, enlist the help
of the uncool peers she used to disdain. The film, on the other hand, does not pay
Clive much heed until the end, when it brings most of the main characters to a
sleazy bar, the Pole Cat, where he is making a fairly decent living as a feisty exotic
pole dancer (Holden 2014).
Analysis
The opening title sequence of The Hot Chick is reduced to the production
company (Touchstone Pictures and Happy Madison) – indicating who is respon-
sible for the film and, more crucially, right to ownership as well as copyright
and terms of use – and the film title. The opening scene then shows Abyssinian
Princess Nawa (50 B.C.)using the cursed earrings to escape a bad marriage. Her
last words to her slave girl before the body swapping were “Soon you will live your
life in jewels and not chains.”This title sequence thus provides a focus that allows
for a transition into the film. Crucially, it leads into what follows, sets the course in
this respect, captures the genre, and the specific “mood” of what is to come, so that
one is initiated into the cinematic narrative, the “diegesis” (in the sense of Stan-
itzek 2009). The title sequence is thus a “peritext”; it is tied more or less securely
to the movie it introduces (Stanitzek 2009: 52).
Of course, context models, as laid out earlier, are partly pre-given for films
or genres, even before their detailed meanings or mental models. A spectator
going to the cinema or searching YouTube usually already has a plan to watch
comedies and even to search specifically for Rob Schneider’s movie and hence
construes, activates or updates the partial context model that will control the
process of searching. Furthermore, the task of marketing the movie has already
been fulfilled by its trailer (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6z5zbY-0QCA),
poster (Figure 2), and so on. The trailer, like the poster, concentrates on the plot
summary, again constituting an epitext (located at a greater distance from the
text/movie to which it refers). Besides showing scenes from the movie (e.g., of
Jessica (after the transformation) telling her closest friend April [Anna Faris],
“Please, it’s me; I’m Jessica,” or kissing her saying, “I’m so lesbian right now”;
or of April asking Jessica, “Can I see it [i.e., the wiener]?”), the trailer has a
narrator’s “voice-over” describing certain things about the movie (e.g., “Jessica
Spencer, she is Miss Perfect, she is Miss Popular, … but a curse is about to turn
her into a Miss … [Mis]ter … Now, she’s got to reverse the spell … or live like
this forever; from Touchstone Pictures; Rob Schneider is the Hot Chick”). This
means, again, that the spectator already has a large portion of the context model
in place before watching the film.
Besides the Princess-Slave blends, the film has two complex blends, involving
at least four input frames – namely, an actor (Rob Schneider), an actress (Rachel
McAdams), and two characters (Clive and Jessica, respectively). The person in one
blend (Jessica in Clive’s body) has the public identity of Clive but the character or
subjective experience (mental model) of Jessica. Here, Clive displays a total igno-
rance of, e.g., male urination and has to be instructed by a kindly, dumbfounded
attendant (Dick Gregory), and is horrified to discover hair growing in his/her
nose and ears. To some spectators, the character also appears as an effeminate gay
stereotype (Holden 2002: para. 6). The person in the other blend (Clive in Jessica’s
body) has the public identity of Jessica but the character or mental model of Clive.
Here, Jessica is a sleazy crook. Finally, spectators see, e.g., Rob Schneider and also
know that they are seeing Jessica/Clive. They interpret Jessica’s actions as part of
the story, and the very same actions, attributed to Rob Schneider, as part of movie
making. Conversely, as in the previous case, the fictional situations and events
represent the intentional objects of higher-level mental (meta-)models reflexively
self-representing the actor or actress as imagining these situations and events: Rob
Schneider as Clive Maxtone; Rachel McAdams as Jessica Spencer; Rob Schneider
as Jessica Spencer in Clive Maxtone’s body; Rachel McAdams as Clive Maxtone in
Jessica Spencer’s body. Again, the actor says just what the character says and, on
some level of his psyche, is surprised, even though he knows in advance that he is
going to be surprised (see also Cone 1974: 126; Fauconnier and Turner 2002: 267).
All this means that “[m]ental models may be combined in larger, hierarchically
more complex models […]” (van Dijk 2014: 50).
The movie, true to its genre, is so rich in (de)compression signals. These
include expressions such as “It’s me, … Jessica,” “So… do you really have a
penis;[…] it’s not every day that your best friend grows a penis,” “I had my
period,” “I want my body back right now,” OK […] I’ll give you your body back,”
etc. Also included are the credits relegated to the end title (e.g., coporate logo,
actors’ names, film title, directors, etc.). Of course, (dis)integration signals are
also nonverbal. For example, Jessica (in Clive’s body) appears as an effeminate
gay stereotype. Crucially, most of the film’s jokes revolve around the physical and
mental differences between men and women. Again, Jessica (after the transforma-
tion) displays a total ignorance of, e.g., male urination, one of the funniest scenes
to some (e.g., Holden 2002: para. 4).
Figure 2. Poster for The Hot Chick portraying Rob Schneider with a towel covering his
hair, and green facial cream covering his face, and holding two cucumber slices in his
hands over his chest – all metonyms for a woman; the textual “hot chick” anchors (in the
sense of Barthes 1986; see also Unsworth and Cléirigh 2009) this interpretation, but for
many viewers this text is redundant; so is “Rob Schneider.”
A spectator’s ability to experience continuity from one scene to another,

as pointed out earlier, relies on analogical coherence. For example, the second
body-swap situation between Jessica and Clive is a “reminding incident” of the
previous situation between Princess Nawa and her slave girl. A spectator’s ability
to consider the later scene as the same type of incident depicted in an earlier scene
is an example of analogical coherence, even though the exact conditions of the
body swapping do not obtain: different characters, eras, and so forth. These local
“slippages” do nothing to destabilize the analogous character of the two situations;
rather, they help advance the narrative or movie itself (see Oakley 2013 for an anal-
ogous discussion). Similarly, the second scene depicting Jessica (in Clive’s body)
licking an ice cream using lips and fingers to arouse the male cashier and have her
and her friends’ ice creams on the house is a “reminding incident” of the previous
situation. Also, the second scene depicting Jessica (after the transformation) and
April singing “Boys are Cheats and Liars” is a “reminding incident” of the previous
scene. Furthermore, the second scene of disguised Jessica (after the transforma-
tion) throwing her adoring boyfriend, Billy (Matthew Lawrence), a kiss forms a
“reminding incident” of the previous situation. The examples are many.
As in the previous case, filmmakers of course know about the knowledge of
spectators and so they are able to represent such knowledge in their context model.
Global and local coherence of discourse crucially depends on the structures of
subjective situation models of spectators, as well as on the generic knowledge

employed in the construction of these multimodal models.
Moral cognition
As in the previous case, the current comedy film is transparently contingent
on circumscribed topics, such as body taboo, sex, political dissatisfaction, etc.
Crucially, it has its share of gay innuendo, though careful to mute any “homo-
phobia” (Holden 2002: para. 6). Late in the movie, for example, there is a delicately
handled flirtation with lesbianism in which Jessica’s best friend, April, confesses
her attraction – also used in the trailer. Similarly, although Jessica’s boyfriend,
Billy, recognizes his sweetheart inside her new body, he, disgusted, cannot bring
himself to give her a kiss – note that at the cheerleading competition, Billy has
thrown up after the identity of disguised Jessica was accidently revealed. Physical
disgust – according to Eskine, Kacinik, and Prinz (2011) – can increase moral
disgust (see also, Schnall, Benton, and Harvey 2008a; but see Schnall, Haidt,
Clore, and Jordan 2008b). Conservatives are both maximally concerned with
purity and easily disgusted (Lakoff 1996; see also Wehling 2013 and references
therein). After all, the enjoyment of a multimodal comedy, as emphasized earlier,
depends to a large extent on the background knowledge, values and attitudes of
the spectator.
4. Conclusion
The paramount goal of this paper was to explore what some recent developments
in cognitive science can tell us about film or drama spectatorship and creation.
These explorations not only led to new ways of understanding the meaning
conveyed by particular body-swap films, but also provided insight into the
potential or actual social/moral impact of these films. Compared to earlier theo-
ries of (humorous) film processing and the role of knowledge in discourse
production and comprehension, the current theory featured (or emphasized the
need for)the component of van Dijk’s (2014) “mental models” as the basis of
both the semantics and the pragmatics of discourse. Importantly, it was proposed
that this component is not only a crucial pragmatic factor pertinent to blending
theory and humor concerns, but also provides ways of addressing two basic
dimensions of the actor’s work that are central to the Stanislavskian method of
acting and which were significantly informed by his encounter with science –
imagination and action.
Such an enterprise is, no doubt, ambitious, and this study lays claim to
nothing more than providing the first version of a theory to examine how cinema
or drama, in general, and body-swap comedies, in particular, communicate

meaning. In this manner, the theory can be further tested, refined, or elaborated in
future research. Such research will aid both film or drama scholarship and (moral)
cognition studies based on visual or multimodal stimuli.
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Address for correspondence
Ahmed Abdel-Raheem
Department of English Studies
Maria Curie-Skłodowska University in Lublin
Poland
rheem.ahmed@gmail.com

Mental Models, (De) Compressions, and The Actor's Process in Body-Swap Movies

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Mental models, (de)compressions, and the

actor’s process in body-swap movies

The body-swap comedy, where someone finds themselves inhabiting an

Keywords: body-swap comedy, mental models, (de)compression, the

https://doi.org/10.1075/cogls.00026.abd | Published online: 14 February 2019

A character finding him- or herself in a completely different body is quite a

by integration “actually” facilitate the comprehension of scientific events such

2.2 Mental models

command, one possible or probable condition of the communicative situation is

2.3 Drama and film connectors: An integrated theory

Dramatic performances, as Fauconnier and Turner (2002) propose, constitute

the heroine is hacked to bits. Indeed, models of fictional events, as represented

lives, like participating in a demonstration (which would be strictly speaking an

dynamic activation of a network of five mental spaces and a “Relevance Array”

means that in some cultures, directorsmay keep spectators (especially if under

scene is an instance of analogical coherence, even though the exact conditions

3. Two body-swap films

3.1 Made in Egypt

Figure 1. A poster of Made in Egypt

metonym for Egypt/Egyptians, while Panda is a metonym for China/the Chinese.

3.2 The Hot Chick

A spectator’s ability to experience continuity from one scene to another,

subjective situation models of spectators, as well as on the generic knowledge

or drama, in general, and body-swap comedies, in particular, communicate

Bortoluzzi, M. (2009). An inconvenient truth: Multimodal emotions in identity construction.

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