Film Theory

The Virtual Life of Film by D.N. Rodowick

by

The Wachowski’s The Matrix

Rodowick, D. N. The Virtual Life of Film. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 2007.

Rodowick’s philosophical musings on the curious circumstances at the beginning of the 21st century which saw the physical nature of the cinematographic medium changing from real film to digital capture, processing, and projection. Full of asides that feel just as valuable as his main ideas, which follow Stanley Cavell’s notions of the automatisms of media as their defining features, the book is dense and a little difficult to navigate. Luckily, in his preface he provides a succinct overview of his argument and its progress.

In his first section, he argues that even though the physical film is changing, the concepts and ways of understanding visual media propagated by film throughout the 20th century still retain a tight grasp on the current technology such that we can still use many of the ways of understanding images derived from film theory and our narrative practices still largely spring from classical Hollywood narrative structures.

In his second section, he spends a lot of pages working through understanding what the film medium provided artists and audiences in its automatism, or those elements that were central to the operation of the medium itself. Largely agreeing with and expanding upon Cavell’s ideas, Rodowick suggests that film (and photography before it), are isomorphic in their capturing of reality. That is, a photograph captures the shape and time of the physical world as it existed in the moment of capture. A film does the same thing but over the course of time itself, an additional automatism Rodowick names as “succession.” Rodowick argues that the automatisms of automatic isomorphic capture has been largely understood via its spatial representative powers, the idea that the photograph contains evidence of a place, while Rodowick argues that the temporal element is more important, it contains evidence of a place from the past. The photograph (and film) therefore brings evidence of the past to us in the present and creates an uneasy mixture of the two, a mixture that never fully coalesces into one thing but remains separate via the screen. Up there is the past, here in the present. Because of these automatisms, the physical nature of the cinematographic medium is crucial to understanding the way film effects us as audience members. When it disappears, Rodowick argues, something of great value is lost.

Part three is focused on that loss, and its digital replacement. Rodowick essentially argues that because digital capture is non-isomorphic because the light inputs are separated from the numerical outputs (that can be infinitely manipulated), it loses that sense of pastness that film once had and brought to the culture. In its place, Rodowick argues, the digital image creates a kind of ever-presentness (and interactive past) through its automatisms of constantly-refreshing, pixel-based “montage.” Basically, if every pixel is the smallest discrete unit of a digital image, Rodowick sees the digital image as already composed of the juxtaposition of those pixels in a way that creates a montage effect even in the still image. The fact that motion (or the simulation of it) is created by changing each of those pixels individually extremely quickly rather than the succession of images means that there is no longer such a thing as a shot, at least not without some modification. Rodowick proposes this drastic reconsideration of what the digital image is and how it works to reassert the value of film theory and terms to understand what’s happening, at least right now.

He astutely argues that the conventions of film and film theory still hold sway over the digital, even if the digital is fundamentally different from the filmic. Since artists, technology developers and engineers, and audiences still crave the sense of “perceptual realism” defined by the century of filmic history which says that what we see is a real record of the past as it was, modern digital images must still follow the rules of that perceptual realism, which asserts the physical reality of the image through the single-point perspective and laws of physics. It’s no wonder that digital images recreate these elements to claim a grounding in reality when their automatisms do not assert it themselves.

It’s a fascinating book, full of dialogue with film theorists like Metz and Bazin and Barthes and, of course, Cavell. On the digital side, Lev Manovich and Bolter and Grusin get their due as well. Film philosophy isn’t strictly my thing, and it usually takes me much longer to get through, but I also find it intensely fascinating. I noticed I was watching a movie after reading Rodowick’s breakdown of the digital image and I felt like I could see the pixels shifting, fundamentally changing the way I looked at digital images. That’s powerful stuff.

Remediation by Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin

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Bolter, Jay David, and Richard Grusin. Remediation: Understanding New Media. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999.

I’m going to start doing shorter recaps for the books and essays that feel less crucial to my understanding of what’s going on or don’t bring as much to the table. It’s no knock on the works themselves, especially as I really enjoyed reading this one. I just need to get through this faster and I don’t foresee it being as important to my exams as other works I’ve already covered.

Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin have one big idea in this text. It’s a little complicated but not too bad. Basically, they have a series of propositions that inform how they understand what media do and how they interact with each other. They examine this through the lens of new digital media like the web browser or VR, but it applies pretty generally across most media.

They claim that media works in two ways towards one goal. The two ways are immediacy and hypermediacy. Immediacy is the idea that a medium is a way to experience as closely as possible the thing represented in that medium, an idea most closely associated with point-of-view perspective in visual art forms. Hypermediacy is the idea that a medium is actually more multiplicative in ways that draw attention to the medium itself, as seen in a computer interface or television’s overwhelming combinations of different media like video and text and animation. Both of these interact with each other and are dependent upon each other, such that a medium is never wholly one or the other. Both of them are ways to get transparency, or an experience of something represented within the medium either via the act of getting closer to it or, paradoxically, further away but from many angles.

This is all tied in with their idea that remediation, or the movement of an idea or representation from one medium to another, is what mediums are. They contend that every new medium is simply the recreating and reformation of previous media in an attempt to get closer to transparency via a new combo of immediacy and hypermediacy. Its a convincing argument that they spend the majority of the middle of the book developing as they look at quite a few different media for how they remediate and employ immediacy and hypermediacy.

Their final section looks at the philosophical impact of their ideas as they develop ideas alongside Stanley Cavell and Laura Mulvey about how media position the self and incorporate their ideas of immediacy and hypermediacy into the fray. It’s all a little outside of my area of interest, but it was interesting to skim. They also push back against Marshall McLuhan’s technological determinism for its ignorance of the social and economic factors involved in the development and use of media but keep his concept of remediation and the interrelation of different media.

 

Media of Serial Narrative edited by Frank Kelleter

by

Various versions of the Planet of the Apes

Kelleter, Frank. Media of Serial Narrative. Theory and Interpretation of Narrative. Columbus, OH: Ohio State University Press, 2017.

This book collects essays by a wide range of narrative media scholars and divides them into four different sections based on medium (comics/lit, film, television, and digital transmedia), even though there are obviously overlaps between those media as stories branch out and find homes in different media. I want to come back and read all the essays I skipped because they weren’t directly connected to the other works on my reading list, but for now I read the intro, all of the film and most of the television essays (I’m not allowed to read the essay by Sean O’Sullivan as he is on my exams committee). Here’s the brief summary of each.

“Five Ways of Looking at Popular Seriality” – Frank Kelleter

Kelleter, editor of the book, uses his introduction to talk about what he calls “popular seriality” or the sense of seriality that has pervaded most media forms. He juxtaposes this to the idea of the “work” that has dominated popular and academic conceptions of the media landscape, an idea of a full and complete object that can be fully studied and explained or taken in. Popular seriality, on the other hand, extends on almost interminably, constantly inventing and reinventing the story such that it cannot be studied, explained, or taken in the same way as a singular work. He calls out, like the title says, five ways of looking at popular seriality: as evolving narratives (where there is a feedback loop between everybody involved in the production and reception of the serial that all create change within the narrative); as narratives of recursive progression (where narratives constantly are revised and reformulated as they are adjusted and continued such that what might be the main idea at the beginning might not be even part of the story by the end); as narratives of proliferation (where we must take into account the wide array of official, semi-official, and unofficial stories that are told with elements of the narrative, particularly what Kelleter calls “serial figures” who retain some central core while also shifting greatly depending on their incarnation); as self-observing systems and actor-networks (where serials become what Kelleter calls “entities of distributed intention” that attain an agential status through the reflection and work of the people involved in its making or experiencing); and as agents of capitalist self-reflexivity (where serial narratives become ideologically wrapped up in the idea of renewal via duplication, a core tenant of capitalism itself).

Kelleter’s ideas start off relatively benign but become increasingly more troubling as they go along, largely because they seem so plausible. His last two ways of looking at popular seriality will be something to wrestle with as I continue my work on serialization as a storytelling strategy.

Based on the points discussed so far, we can describe popular series as self-observing systems, in the sense that they are never just the “product” of intentional choices and decisions, even as they require and involve intentional agents (most notably, people) for whom they provide real possibilities of deciding, choosing, using, objecting, and so on. In shaping the self-understanding of their human contributors, series themselves attain agential status. As praxeological networks, they experiment with formal identities and think about their own formal possibilities. And they do not do so instead of human beings but with and through dispersed participants, employing human practitioners (who are sometimes much younger than the series in question and who will often express a sense of practical commitment to it rather than a sense of originating authorship) for purposes of self-reproduction. Series are not intentional subjects but entities of distributed intention. (25)

At its most abstract, my (systems-theoretical) argument suggests that popular seriality, understood as a larger historical phenomenon that has accompanied Western modernity since the mid-nineteenth century, supports a practical regime of continuation itself. What is being continued here is the contingent, but historically powerful, partnership between democratic ideologies and a particular system of cultural production. It is worth remembering in this context that one of the most difficult problems of serial storytelling consists in translating repetition into difference. Following Eco (1990), this has been said so often that we sometimes like to move beyond these terms. But we ignore Eco’s lesson at our own peril, because what looks like a simple matter of narrative technique on closer inspection turns out to be a core problem of modernity itself: the problem of renewing something by duplicating it. This problem lies at the heart of an entire system of cultural production that, for want of a better term – and without need for revelatory pathos – is still best described by the name it has chosen to describe itself: capitalism. (29)

“Inevitability of Chance: Time in the Sound Serial” – Scott Higgins

Higgins writes about old film serials like Flash Gordon, and observes that not only do the serials have a pretty obvious 5-part structure in the small episodes (three action beats at the beginning, middle, and end with two dialogue segments that come between each of the action beats), but also that there is also a somewhat standard overall structure for the full run of the serial where the opening and closing episodes contain most of the narrative progression while most of the episodes between do relatively little to progress the plot in any real way. Though these early serials are not my main area of interest, they are nevertheless influential for the movies and shows that I am interested in, and so Higgins’ ideas must be contended with as I think about whether or not my objects of study stick to these structures or deviate from them meaningfully.

“Spectral Seriality: The Sights and Sounds of Count Dracula” – Shane Denson and Ruth Mayer

Denson and Mayer productively develop their own conception of the “serial figure” by claiming that they are the character who, via their liminality and ease of crossing borders, often takes up a kind of media-ness as they adapt and change depending on the time and situation they appear in. These figures don’t usually change over time, at least not in the way we think of traditional character growth or change. Instead, they adapt (or are adapted) to fit within one historically-rooted idea or another while retaining a core truth(s), especially including the ability to change form or inhabit different planes of existence. It’s a very intriguing idea, even if my own area of interest is in the very opposite phenomenon (where characters do change, usually offscreen, from their previous incarnation).

In particular, we are interested in the way that Dracula embodies and paradigmatically exemplifies a “spectral” logic that enables serial figures to proliferate across media channels, passing from literature to film to radio to TV and to digital media, exhibiting all the while and uncanny sort of resiliency that is the product as much of the figure’s flexibility as of its iconicity. By serial figure, we mean a type of stock character inhabiting the popular cultural imagination of modernity – a “flat” and recurring figure, subject to one or more media changes over the course of its career. We see serial figures as integral and ideologically powerful components of the political and economic order of modernity, part of a system that works expansively to increase commensurability and connectivity. Serial figures operate in this system as mediating instances between the familiar and the unknown, the ordinary and the unusual. […] These figures parasitically appropriate the media ensembles of a given period, taking up residence in them and making them their own. In doing so, they function as markers and active agents of the very process of media change. In a certain sense, they become media – epitomizing the fact that media are never only transparent means of transportation but that they also imprint their “traces” indelibly onto the “messages” or “contents” they convey (Krämer 1998: 74). […] These large-scale media transformations tend to be read in terms of “innovations” (or, more recently, “updates”) and thus suggest that media history is a directed and linear process. But serial figures, with their feedback loops and self-reflective logics of iteration, epitomize the fact that the evolution of media systems is a non-teleological process: overdetermined by competing forces, random, accidental, and consequently always also haunted by a sense that “things could have been otherwise) (Denson 2012). In this respect, not only are serial figures subject to constant narrative revision and adjustment for the sake of retrospective continuity, but they also invite counter factual questions (“what if?”) about the course of media history itself, thus situating themselves as the ideal conceptual figures for media archaeological inquiries. (108-9)

“Hollywood Remaking as Second-Order Serialization” – Frank Kelleter and Kathleen Loock

One of the two essays that directly touches upon my area of interest, this essay by Kelleter and Loock is rife with interesting ideas and examples. The central conceit is that the remake is not fundamentally distinct from the ways that serials work, from the ideas of revision and cinematic self-historicization (where a remake or sequel tends to confer a certain status upon the original film that is sometimes only recognized or reignited by that sequel or remake) to enable what they call second-order serialization, or serial narratives about (and by way of) serial narratives.

Unlike daily cartoons or telenovelas, feature film iterations cannot structure rhythms of everyday life. Instead, they often structure seasonal, generational, and media-historical sequences. (131)

In short, the early [Planet of the Apes] films, the 2001 remake, and the 2011 prequel/reboot – made so many years apart – all lay claim to being state-of-the-art, thereby reflecting, with varying degrees of success, distinct media specific moments of an expansive narrative consumer aesthetics. In this manner, popular culture’s increased availability for re-performance and comparison invites deeply autobiographical engagements with commercial material, to the point of structuring individual personalities and their life stories in terms of progressing brand (dis)attachments. But media generations can also recognize themselves in the cultural concerns of remade films, which are usually accentuated more sharply there than in non-serialized formats. (142-3)

“New Millennial Remakes” – Constantine Verevis

Verevis, like Kelleter in the opening essay, identifies several ways that a phenomenon happens or works, in this case the object of study is the spate of remakes that occurred in the early years of the new millennium. Verevis claims that these remakes are intermedial and transnational, that they embrace the postauteur (where the marks of authorship shift from originality towards reproducible trademarks), that they are characterized by proliferation and simultaneity, which lead into the final idea that they do not compete but coexist with the originals. There’s some strong crossover with the ideas presented in the previous essay by Kelleter and Loock, but Verevis uses the essay to draw out some minor differences in the concepts presented in each.

By the beginning of the new millennium, however, there was evidence of a discursive shift, with subsequent industry discourses framing publicity more positively around a new film’s “remake” status by ascribing value to an earlier version and then identifying various filters – technological, cultural, authorial – through which it had been transformed (“value-added”). In the first instance, this move can be seen as a commercial strategy (a way to sell a back catalogue), but it also identifies a serial practice in which the remake does not simply follow an original but recognizes new versions as free adaptations or variations that actualize an implicit potentiality at the source. This trend, which has increasingly led to authorized remakes that bear only a generic resemblance to their precursors, seems to have found its apotheosis in the “reboot”: a legally sanctioned version that attempts to disassociate itself textually from previous iterations while at the same time having to concede that it does not replace – but adds new associations to – an existing serial property. In other words, it marks out not merely a critical historical moment in which remakes no longer linearly follow and supersede their originals but also a digitized, globalized one in which multiple versions proliferate and coexist. (148-9)

The remake has never been a static thing but a concept that is always evolving. And while it may be too early to draw conclusions as to the nature of a distinct historical period, these notes should demonstrate that the present and future of cinema is a re-vision of its past, especially in the new millennium, and that aesthetic and economic evaluations of film remakes (good or bad, success or failure) are less interesting than the cultural and historical significance of new millennial remaking practice. (164)

“The Ends of Serial Criticism” – Jason Mittell

At the start of the TV section, Mittell focuses on arguing that the study of serial storytelling is fundamentally different from that of the singular work because it has formal and production-based differences that must be paid attention to. He writes of the way that a show might use one element (a taped confession in Homeland, for example) in different ways throughout the series to mean different things in different situation, a point that he extrapolates to write of the way that a long-running show can contain multiple different political (or other) perspectives, sometimes conflicting ones, over the course of the show. These realities mean that academics studying serial stories must be cautious of trying to pin a show or story down to one particular position, particularly if they are writing about a show that isn’t yet finished. Even a finished show might come down on one side or another, but that still doesn’t negate the variety of perspectives contained within the show.

His second point is that shows and other serial stories have the ability to incorporate audience sentiments within the show, but that such a possibility doesn’t cancel out other criticism of the show. To demonstrate this point, he writes of the way that Walter White uses much of the same language that the misogynist “fans” of Breaking Bad used in talking about Skyler White during a climactic speech to her. While this makes for a powerful example of the ways that shows can respond to their bad fans, Mittell takes pains to point out how the show fostered such fans to begin with through season after season that positioned Skyler as an obstacle to Walter instead of a more fully developed and understandable character. The overall point of Mittell’s essay is that we, as academics interested in looking at serial media, must pay attention to the plurality of polysemy of the form, a polysemy that comes not just from applying different lenses to a singular work but from the series itself, which by their nature contain multitudes of different meanings.

We can understand these serial instances of political reframing through the lens of articulation, as defined by Stuart Hall (Grossberg 1986): dominant forms of political ideology are forged by the contingent linking of social practices to cultural meanings, which frequently shift and transform within new contexts. […] Serial articulation depends on the practice of reiteration, where repeating and reframing help define which linkages are maintained and which are discarded over the course of a series, highlighting how the political interpretations of serial narratives are always subject to revision and recontextualization. Seriality itself is wrapped up within this notion of articulation, as the connections between the already-seen and the new installment are the chemical reactions that create resonances of meanings, emotional engagements, and layers of cultural politics that encourage viewers to keep watching for new linkages and recontextualizations. (175)

As argued by Horace Newcomb and Paul Hirsch (1994, analyzing conventional episodic forms), the power of television narratives to raise cultural questions is at least as important as their power to provide ideological answers. Television’s ability to act as a cultural forum is even more vital for long-form serialized narratives whose potential answers providing closure are deferred for weeks, months, or even years. Such temporal gaps highlight how much political meaning making occurs within the broader temporal frame of serial consumption, as the politically explosive questions that Homeland raises remain ambiguously unanswered for months, creating a temporal gap for viewers and critics to fill with their own shared practices of interpretation and debate. (176)

It is fairly straightforward business to interpret a television program using the field’s well-established critical tools, isolating the particular episodes and moments that best support an argument or focusing on opinions that will help label a text ideological and/or progressive. But once you account for how serial television works over time and across various cultural sites, it becomes hard to say anything about a program’s politics with any conviction that is not draped in contingency, partiality, and competing perspectives. That might also be true for a stand alone cultural work like a novel or film, as a text’s multiple layers of meaning contradict itself and create enough interpretive varieties to sustain decades of competing scholarly interpretations. But a serial text talks back to its critics by rearticulating the meaningful moments through reiterations and recontextualizations, as with Homeland‘s video, or by putting the words of its most rabidly misogynist viewers into its protagonist’s mouth, as with Breaking Bad‘s climactic phone call. Interpretive criticism of a moving target that both serially rearticulates itself and directly incorporates its own cultural reception is of a distinctly different order than the stable polysemy of a novel or film, or even the post-serialized finality of a television series that has completed its run. (181)

“Sensing the Opaque: Seriality and the Aesthetics of Televisual Form” – Sudeep Dasgupta

Dasgupta spends much of this essay adding on to Mittell’s concept of the “drillable” TV text, those shows that invite and inspire audiences to investigate and try to fully understand the plot, characters, and world depicted therein. Dasgupta suggests that if Mittell claims that these kinds of shows create a sense that audiences can completely take in and understand a text through this drilling process (which happens largely online after initial airing), they also usually contain moments of opacity that are un-drillable, pure sensation and meaningless. Dasgupta’s premise is intriguing to say the least, as it pushes back against the standard academic stance that everything is explainable and understandable with enough work, but I have to say that I was just not smart enough to follow the rest of the essay. I just couldn’t make sense of Dasgupta’s references to other academic works and theories, which left me without a lifejacket in the middle of an ocean of non-understanding. I’ll go back to this one in the future to try to figure it out, but for right now, I’m throwing the towel in.

Storytelling in Film and Television by Kristin Thompson

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David Lynch’s Twin Peaks

Kristin Thompson, Storytelling in Film and Television (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 2003)

Summary & Implications: What is the author’s project and why is it important now? What’s the narrative about the field that’s emerging from the reading? What narratives are silent? Whose voices are silent?

Kristin Thompson spends most of the four essays (collected from a speaking series given about a year earlier) here arguing for the value of looking at individual episodes, seasons, or series as objects of analysis. Opposing Williams’ idea of flow where viewers are basically unable to distinguish between what is the programming and what is the interruption (in terms of ads or even changes of show or channel), Thompson suggests (rightly) that viewers are not only able to make such distinctions, but that the storytelling, which aligns with her conception of the classical Hollywood storytelling structure, helps viewers make this distinction and forms the fundamental argument for her desire to focus on shows in every scale as the objects of study for television scholars. While this argument may seem somewhat unnecessary, I’d wager it only really seems that way now, in 2020, almost 2 decades after Thompson first made this argument. Her mode has become the standard, but TV scholarship is still relatively new, and it is very possible that the time between her argument and now has been shaped by that very argument.

To focus more on how that storytelling works, she notes that film is reliant upon redundant storytelling that uses dangling hooks and multiple narrative threads, and that TV weaponizes those concepts to ensure that viewers understand what is happening in an episode, season, and series. It’s a compelling argument.

She also, in the third essay, argues that the prevalence of TV has changed the way that we tell stories overall. She claims that the concept of seriality has become so embedded in the public consciousness that it has influenced film and literature, leading to a resurgence of sequels, prequels, and saga style storytelling. I find this claim to be very credible, but I think it both needs some more bolstering and some further thought given the developments of the past 20 years. But I guess that’s what I’m here for.

In her fourth essay, she argues that there can be such thing as Art Television the way there is Art Film, following Bordwell’s famous essay outlining the six features of art cinema. She shows that there are pretty tight homologies between the two media in how they handle the same ideas, using David Lynch’s Twin Peaks and Blue Velvet as her primary examples.

Context: Who is this author debating with and why? What is the context of the text’s production and distribution? What historical, cultural, etc. factors affect the way it makes meaning? Does the author seem to be in conversation with other scholars and/or paradigms? Where is this piece of writing centered in the field? What is their intervention in the literature/field? What text is this text in conversation with?

As I said above, she only really argues with (or even references outright) Raymond Williams’ concept of flow. Otherwise, she’s obviously positioning herself as an argument for what might be seen as a standard film theory angle on TV theory. I think it’s important to notice what is similar between the two media, as well as what is different. Though I wouldn’t go as far as McLuhan does on the concept of medium specificity, there are definite differences that make for real, meaningful variances in how the two media handle similar ideas/stories/techniques. Thompson provides a good first step here by noting that there is a tendency towards a unified act structure in different types of TV in a way that is similar to the classical Hollywood style, but there’s so much more to explore (and that was already explored after Thompson’s publication).

Methodology: What is the methodological framework of this text? What methodological moves or questions does the author engage? What is their object of analysis?

Textual analysis of several different kinds of TV shows, including some extended dialogue scenes that are presented in script form.

Rhetorical Moves: What are the major rhetorical moves of the author’s arguments?

By trying to port film theory ideas to TV theory, she both argues for their fundamental similarity and notes the obvious differences.

Engagement & Application: How do I engage this text? How does this apply to my work? Does it support or provide a counterargument or model for strong intro or lit review? In other words, why is this piece of writing useful to me and/or how is it limited (bad writing style, problematic, didn’t consider x, y, and z)? Does it intersect with other items on the list?

Her argument is pretty foundational for TV studies as far as I can tell, as her focus on aesthetics and poetics is a core from which other kinds of analysis can be built. I’ll definitely be going back to her ideas on serialization, even if I don’t think they’re as fully developed as they need to be.

Key Terms: What terms are key to the author’s argument, and are they operationalized explicitly or implicitly?

film, television, poetics, serialization, serials, sequel, redundant narration, dangling hooks, art film, art television, flow

Significant Quotations: What key quotations from this work would I want to have quick access to?

In Storytelling in the New Hollywood, I argued further that the norms and widespread use in recent decades are essentially still those of the “Golden Age” of studio filmmaking in the decades before 1960. This is not to say that all films draw on all aspects of that model, and certainly there are some films that stretch the conventions. I mean rather that the norms are still there to be drawn on, and most films do. Here I would like to take one further step and suggest that many of these norms have been adopted or adapted by television precisely because they have been so suited to telling straightforward, entertaining stories. (19)

Thus it would appear that in some cases even half-hour programs that are not interrupted by commercials tend to include major turning points that divide them into large-scale parts, or acts – though obviously here the authors were not required to time these moments as precisely as they did. With the increasing number of original series produced by premium channels like HBO in the U.S., one might wonder whether these commercial free programs also fall into evenly timed acts. A look at one half-hour sitcom, Sex and the City, and one roughly hour-long drama, The Sopranos, suggests that act structure is somewhat more flexible in such programs, but that it is not abandoned or radically altered. (51)

Such divisions of programs into acts, whether rigidly or flexibly proportioned, are not simply arbitrary. They give an episode a sense of structure, much as the balanced movements of a classical concerto do. They provide the spectator with a sense of progress and guarantee the introduction of dramatic new premises or obstacles at intervals. They allow for the rising and falling action that many writers refer to as crucial to good plots. Regular turning points also give variety to a story, ensuring that the action does not simply involve a character striving toward a goal and meeting a series of similar obstacles. Thus there are reasons why even television episodes that are broadcast without breaks would draw on an act structure. (54-5)

Currently all the familiar studios of Hollywood’s golden age are subsidiaries of large multinational corporations. In many cases, adaptations are attractive because such companies already own the rights to various narratives that have already been produced in one medium but which are available to be recycled in another. Moreover, these huge companies have been able to market their products, including movies, in part by using synergy. That is, a company’s TV stations will promote its movies, while its record division puts out the soundtrack, and so on. Such marketing now has also come to mean selling the same narrative over and over in different media. (81-2)

What, then, of serial narratives? It is possible that the vogue for sequels, series, and serials in film reflects an influence from television. […] These films [in the Lethal Weapon series] also, however, incorporate the mild seriality of much serious television, with the characters and their situations gradually changing. (103)

It is apparent, then, that the tendencies toward adaptations of stories among media, toward sequels, and toward seriality are all part of a general stretching and redefinition of narrative itself. In particular, the notion of firm and permanent closure to any given narrative has loosened across media. Series television, with its broad possibilities for spinning out narratives indefinitely, has been a major impetus in these tendencies. They, along with the innovations and interwoven multiple plot lines discussed in the last chapter, seem to me some of the most intriguing areas where an analyst might explore the aesthetic specificity of series television. (105)

Understanding Media by Marshall McLuhan

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Marshall McLuhan himself

McLuhan, Marshall. 2003 (1974). Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. Edited by W. Terrence Gordon. Critical Edition. Berkeley, CA: Gingko Press.

Summary & Implications: What is the author’s project and why is it important now? What’s the narrative about the field that’s emerging from the reading? What narratives are silent? Whose voices are silent?

Marshall McLuhan has two big concepts that, tellingly, make up the first two chapters of this massive text. The first is his pithy “the medium is the message,” a statement he returns to throughout to explain exactly what he means and some of the intricacies of the implications thereof. The point is that it isn’t the content of a medium which matters but the medium itself which most meaningfully changes the ways humans operate. He uses bodily metaphors of amputation and prosthesis to explain how we have ceded much of our sensory organs to these media, which then structure how we interact with the world and the other people in it. This idea is augmented by his other important idea, that of the temperatures of media, where a hot medium is “high definition” and requires little human interaction in order to achieve a sense of “closure” with the medium while a cold medium is “low definition” and therefore requires more human work in order to achieve that closure. For McLuhan, closure is a rebalancing that must occur whenever a new medium is introduced to human life, which inevitably creates a numbness in the corresponding bodily sense, a phenomenon he borrows from the medical field called “autoamputation.”

McLuhan suggests that these hot and cold media have different effects depending on whether the society it enters is prepared to handle its intrusion or not. He supposes, for example, that print exploded a previously tribalistic society in Europe into a land of individuals while the introduction of radio tended to cause an implosion of nationalism. These things, again, happen no matter what the content of the medium is, it is the technological form of the medium that dictates what will happen when it becomes integrated with the culture it comes from, or comes in contact with.

Which brings us to McLuhan’s ickier side. He writes a lot, like, a lot a lot, about how various peoples are unprepared to deal with the mediums that those in the West might be able to integrate more smoothly. He writes with large, sweeping assumptions, for example, about the continent of Africa and its peoples, and how such “primitive” societies might respond poorly to different media. It’s a bunch of hooey as far as I’m concerned, and it makes one question everything else he says about “understanding media.”

Where most other theorists have linked the movies to prior media like photography or theater, McLuhan links it instead with print, and specifically the book, given its visual presentation of a high density of information and its linear progression. I think there are fundamental flaws to this idea, especially when one starts to consider the content of the media (which, to say the least, is an area where McLuhan and I have some differences of opinion). He does, however, productively link it to an industrialized society where people come together to make one thing, which, he says, is similar to the symphony orchestra of the 19th century. He also, like Eisenstein, links film to stream-of-consciousness writing in the works of James Joyce and others.

McLuhan writes that TV is a medium well-suited to looser personalities (like JFK instead of Nixon, famously) and process instead of product. McLuhan also believes that, because TV (in 1964, at least) is a cool medium in which the audience must participate in order to experience closure, TV then leans towards the documentary and makes us into people who require a depth of knowledge on a subject presented to us via its poorly resolved images. I tried to foresee what McLuhan would have made of TV in is current form, which is higher definition and therefore hotter. I couldn’t really do it. McLuhan doesn’t provide a whole ton of great roadmaps for a project like that, and thinking of a medium without its content seems antithetical to me anyways (and, frankly, impractical, given McLuhan’s own ultimate failure to do so).

Context: Who is this author debating with and why? What is the context of the text’s production and distribution? What historical, cultural, etc. factors affect the way it makes meaning? Does the author seem to be in conversation with other scholars and/or paradigms? Where is this piece of writing centered in the field? What is their intervention in the literature/field? What text is this text in conversation with?

McLuhan is in conversation with scholars and writers of his time who, he claims, think about media in a wrong way. McLuhan’s arguments are indeed more expansive than many, though I think they are bound up in some really bad assumptions that taint them pretty thoroughly. More importantly, McLuhan has been a source for debates in several of the books I’ve read so far, and likely more as I keep reading. The strongest pushback to him I’ve found so far is Raymond Williams’ in Television: Technology and Cultural Form, where he argues that McLuhan’s is a theory of technological determinism which ignores the culture’s role in a given medium’s invention, production, and reception. There is still some merit to be found in McLuhan’s big ideas, but they need to be separated out from the unuseful stuff and properly accounted for to be of any real value

Methodology: What is the methodological framework of this text? What methodological moves or questions does the author engage? What is their object of analysis?

McLuhan’s strategy here seems to be largely scattershot. The first section of his book develops the big theoretical ideas before the second part, the longer part, dives into a bunch of media on an individual basis where he discusses that particular medium’s peculiarities in the context of his larger ideas. Within these chapters, however, thoughts seem to bubble up out of aphorisms and telling anecdotes. This can lead to a confusing and difficult to follow flow of ideas.

Rhetorical Moves: What are the major rhetorical moves of the author’s arguments?

McLuhan seems to be going for a kind of gestalt-based theory. He’ll throw dozens of vaguely connected ideas at you in a given chapter, from a variety of angles, and hope that something sticks. It often does, but it also leads to a sense of time wasted, unfortunately.

Engagement & Application: How do I engage this text? How does this apply to my work? Does it support or provide a counterargument or model for strong intro or lit review? In other words, why is this piece of writing useful to me and/or how is it limited (bad writing style, problematic, didn’t consider x, y, and z)? Does it intersect with other items on the list?

As a work of theory I think this is valuable but heavily flawed. I remain unconvinced of his content-less understanding of the media, while his imperialist tendencies make it difficult to read his arguments in good faith. I’m sure I’ll return to him, but more likely as a person to argue against than with.

Key Terms: What terms are key to the author’s argument, and are they operationalized explicitly or implicitly?

medium, message, closure, autoamputation, prosthesis, high definition, low definition, hot medium, cool medium, literacy,

Significant Quotations: What key quotations from this work would I want to have quick access to?

In a culture like ours, long accustomed to splitting and dividing all things as a means of control, it is sometimes a bit of a shock to be reminded that, in operational and practical fact, the medium is the message. This is merely to say that the personal and social consequences of any medium – that is, of any extension of ourselves – result from the new scale that is introduced into our affairs by each extension of ourselves, or by any new technology. (19)

What we are considering here, however, are the psychic and social consequences of the designs or patterns as they amplify or accelerate existing processes. For the “message” of any medium or technology is the change of scale or pace or pattern that it introduces into human affairs. (20)

Our conventional response to all media, namely that it is how they are used that counts, is the numb stance of the technological idiot. For the content of a medium is like the juicy piece of meat carried by the burglar to distract the watchdog of the mind. The effect of the medium is made strong and intense just because it is given another medium as content. The content of a movie is a novel or a play or an opera. The effect of the movie form is not related to its program content. The content of writing or print is speech, but the reader is almost entirely unaware either of print or of speech. (31)

There is a basic principle that distinguishes a hot medium like radio from a cool one like the telephone, or a hot medium like the movie from a cool one like TV. A hot medium is one that extends one single sense in “high definition.” High definition is the state of being well filled with data. A photograph is, visually, “high definition.” A cartoon is “low definition,” simply because very little visual information is provided. Telephone is a cool medium, or one of low definition, because the ear is given a meager amount of information. And speech is a cool medium of low definition, because so little is given and so much has to be filled in by the listener. On the other hand, hot media do not leave so much to be filled in or completed by the audience. Hot media are, therefore, low in participation, and cool media are high in participation or completion by the audience. Naturally, therefore, a hot medium like radio has very different effects on the user from a cool medium like the telephone. (39)

Intensity or high definition engenders specialism and fragmentation in living as an entertainment, which explains why any intense experience must be “forgotten,” “censored,” and reduced to a very cool state before it can be “learned” or assimilated. […] For many people, this cooling system brings on a life-long state of psychic rigor mortis, or of somnambulism, particularly observable in periods of new technology. (40)

Nevertheless, it makes all the difference whether a hot medium is used in a hot or a cool culture. The hot radio medium used in cool or non-literate cultures has a violent effect, quite unlike its effect, say in England or America, where radio is felt as entertainment. A cool or low literacy culture cannot accept hot media like movies or radio as entertainment. They are, at least, as radically upsetting for them as the cool TV medium has proved to be for our high literacy world. (48)

The present book, in seeking to understand many media, the conflicts from which they spring, and the even greater conflicts to which they give rise, holds out the promise of reducing these conflicts by an increase of human autonomy. (76)

By putting our physical bodies inside our extended nervous systems, by means of electric media, we set up a dynamic by which all previous technologies that are mere extensions of hands and feet and teeth and bodily heat-controls – all such extensions of our bodies, including cities – will be translated into information systems. Electromagnetic technology requires utter human docility and quiescence of meditation such as befits an organism that now wears its brain outside its skull and its nerves outside its hide. Man must serve his electric technology with the same servo-mechanistic fidelity with which he served his coracle, his canoe, his typography, and all other extensions of his physical organs. But there is this difference, that previous technologies were partial and fragmentary, and the electric is total and inclusive. An external consensus or conscience is now as necessary as private consciousness. With the new media, however, it is also possible to store and to translate everything; and, as for speed, that is no problem. No further acceleration is possible this side of the light barrier. (86)

If the movie merges the mechanical and organic in a world of undulating forms, it also links with the technology of print. The reader in projecting words, as it were, has to follow the black and white sequences of stills that is typography, providing his own sound track. He tries to follow the contours of the author’s mind, at varying speeds and with various illusions of understanding. It would be difficult to exaggerate the bond between print and movie in terms of their power to generate fantasy and the viewer or reader. (383)

Film is not really a single medium like song or the written word, but a collective art form with different individuals directing color, lighting, sound, acting, speaking. The press, radio and TV, and the comics are also art forms dependent upon entire teams and hierarchies of skill in corporate action. Prior to the movies, the most obvious example of such corporate artistic action had occurred early in the industrialized world, with the large new symphony orchestras of the nineteenth century. (392)

As much as the infinitesimal calculus that pretends to deal with motion and change by minute fragmentation, the film does so by making motion and change into a series of static shots. Print does likewise while pretending to deal with the whole mind in action. Yet film and the stream of consciousness alike seem to provide a deeply desired release from the mechanical world of increasing standardization and uniformity. Nobody ever felt oppressed by the monotony or uniformity of the chaplain ballet or by the monotonous, uniform musings of his literary twin, Leopold Bloom. (395)

The TV image requires each instant that we “close” the spaces in the mesh by a convulsive sensuous participation that is profoundly kinetic and tactile, because tactility is the interplay of the senses, rather than the isolated contact of skin and object. (419)

With TV came the end of bloc voting in politics, a form of specialism and fragmentation that won’t work since TV. instead of the voting block, we have the icon, the inclusive image. Instead of a political viewpoint or platform, the inclusive political posture or stance. Instead of the product, the process. (427-8)

Now that we have considered the subliminal force of the TV image and a redundant scattering of samples, the question would seem to arise: “What possible immunity can there be from the subliminal operation of a new medium like television?” People have long supposed that bulldog opacity, backed by firm disapproval, is adequate enough protection against any new experience. It is the theme of this book that not even the most lucid understanding of the peculiar force of a medium can head off the ordinary closure of the senses that causes us to conform to the pattern of experience presented. The utmost purity of mind is no defense against bacteria, though the confreres of Louis Pasteur tossed him out of the medical profession for his base allegations about the invisible operation of bacteria. To resist TV, therefore, one must acquire the antidote of related media like print. (436)

If we ask what is the relation of TV to the learning process, the answer is surely that the TV image, by its stress on participation, dialogue, and depth, has brought to America new demand for crash-programming in education. Weather there ever will be TV in every classroom is a small matter. The revolution has already taken place at home. TV has changed our sense-lives and our mental processes. It has created a taste for all experience in depth that affects language teaching as much as car styles. Since TV, nobody is happy with a mere book knowledge of French or English poetry. The unanimous cry now is, “Let’s talk French,” and “Let the bard be heard.” And oddly enough, with the demand for depth, goes the demand for crash-programming. Not only deeper, but further, into all knowledge has become the normal popular demand since TV. […] the right approach is to ask, “What can TV do that the classroom cannot do for French, or for physics?” The answer is: “TV can illustrate the interplay of process and the growth of forms of all kinds as nothing else can.” (439-40)

The young people who have experienced a decade of TV have naturally imbibed an urge toward involvement in depth that makes all the remote visualized goals of usual culture seem not only unreal but irrelevant, and not only irrelevant but anemic. It is the total involvement in all-inclusive nowness that occurs in young lives via TV’s mosaic image. This change of attitude has nothing to do with programming in any way, and would be the same if the programs consisted entirely of the highest cultural content. The change in attitude by means of relating themselves to the mosaic TV image would occur in any event. It is, of course, our job not only to understand this change but to exploit it for its pedagogical richness. The TV child expects involvement and doesn’t want a specialist job in the future. He does want a role and a deep commitment to his society. (443)

Double Negative by Racquel J. Gates

by

John Landis’ (or Eddie Murphy’s) Coming to America

Gates, Racquel J. 2018. Double Negative: The Black Image & Popular Culture. Durham: Duke University Press.

Summary & Implications: What is the author’s project and why is it important now? What’s the narrative about the field that’s emerging from the reading? What narratives are silent? Whose voices are silent?

In Double Negative, Racquel J. Gates argues that the categorizing of “positive” and “negative” examples of representation in media (particularly that of Black characters, but seemingly broadly applicable to other groups and sub-groups) problematically creates a tendency in academic and popular discourses that align representation to the politics of respectability. Looking to subvert that tendency, Gates takes as her objects of study those negative representations (and their containing media) in order to reveal that, despite their reputation, they can be places where Black creators (actors, writers, directors, and even reality show stars) can insert the kinds of topics and ideas that aren’t allowed by a politics of respectability or understood by a hegemonic white Hollywood and audience. The idea is that these so called “negative” representations act exactly as photographic negatives do, revealing what isn’t there in the “positive” image by inverting it, and even bolstering that positive image by way of giving a means of expression to real feelings, ideas, and attitudes that aren’t acceptable when the goal is to become “respectable.” It is in this spirit that Gates advocates for deploying strategic essentialism to retain these positive and negative labels but to investigate what we really mean when we say that something contains or is a “negative” portrayal of a certain kind of person, and what work that image is really doing in the world, rather than just relegating it to the gutter and ignoring it except as a useful bludgeon against the media as a whole.

Gates lays all of this out in a very detailed opening chapter, which begins by running through several examples of the responses by Black celebrities (Chris Rock and Katt Williams) to the resurgent popularity of Flavor Flav at the same time as Barack Obama was trying to become president. It’s a perfect example to begin with, laying out the stakes of the project at the highest level and showing how these kinds of discourses vary depending on who the person speaking is and to whom they are speaking. She then explains herself and her conception of exactly what the words “positive” and “negative” mean in her reckoning, before at the end detailing several different kinds of negative representations, each of which she focuses on for a chapter in the remainder of the book using various exemplars as the way of working through her ideas.

Formal negativity: when a work contains formal elements, from aesthetics to narrative, that are a reversal of what is accepted in positive works. Her example chapter focuses on Coming to America, which, sandwiched between Hollywood Shuffle and Do the Right Thing as far as release dates go, contains elements of both the positive, hegemonic portrayal of Black characters within the film’s main plot, the romance, while it uses formal qualities like echoes of Eddie Murphy’s sketch comedy background in the side plots to express ideas, feelings, and jokes that were ignored by the mainstream critical reception to the film but spoke to Black audiences directly and clearly. Interestingly, she also spends some time looking at the production history of the film to suggest that it challenges traditional auteurist understandings of who is responsible for the film by showing that John Landis, the film’s director, was basically responsible for the romantic A-plot while Murphy basically had control over everything else in the film. In this way, Gates argues that we shouldn’t rely upon an easy Black writer/director = Black film equation, noting that a variety of factors might influence who should get credit for the making of a film.

Relational or comparitive negativity: when the positive representation is so dominant that its reverse is hardly visible at all. For this chapter, Gates examines a collection of what she calls “sellout films,” which were released at the same time as the respectable Boyz N the Hood and Menace II Society but were focused on Black characters who were trying to survive in white-dominated workplaces and who had to fight to retain a sense of their Black identity in the process. Gates ably argues that these sellout films were just as important as the more critically respected black male struggle films because they were able to speak to a group of people who were experiencing the same anxieties about selling out to whiteness in order to get ahead. Example by example, she shows how these films were able to both express that anxiety and show that there was a way towards both being successful and retaining a Black identity.

Circumstantial negativity: in these cases, outside discourses, for example, those surrounding Halle Berry over the first ~10 years of her career impart a kind of transference of negativity onto a text that doesn’t otherwise have anything negative in it. Gates uses this opportunity to study Berry’s evolving star image, how it was damaged by her role as a “tragic mulatto” in Queen, even though the star herself tried to counter the narrative that foregrounded her biracial identity by declaring firmly and frequently that he thought of herself as a Black woman. This confusion in the press lead, Gates argues, to Berry’s swift downfall following her Oscar win for Monsters Ball. Berry became unable to control her own star image, which led to her inability to get good roles in good films, Gates claims.

Strategic negativity: when a show or other kind of media is already dismissed categorically as “trash,” like reality TV, people who make the show, including the onscreen stars, can actively use that label as a way of bypassing the respectability politics that dominates prestige tv for their own ends. Here Gates explores several shows, like The Real Housewives of Atlanta and Love & Hip Hop for the way that their stars assert their agency within the show’s production under the guise it must maintain of capturing “reality.” Throughout this chapter, Gates demonstrates how these shows, which were broadly labeled “ratchet” by cultural activist Michaela Angela Davis. Gates argues that, though limited by production realities and so on, the trashiness of these shows allows both the stars and their audiences places to express those ideas about their identity that wouldn’t fit in to a sitcom or traditional drama. Gates also views the ratchet reality star as one who has a degree more control over her image than one who acts in a more accepted manner. The agency, the ability to talk about things that are taboo elsewhere, and the ensuing increase in wealth and fame are the key points in this chapter.

Gates ends by looking at Empire, a show which pretends at negativity but still subtly pushes the tainted respectability politics of positive portrayals of Black characters. She notes that in its carefully manipulated depiction of its queer characters and the show’s acceptance by various critical bodies, including awards shows, Empire reveals that for all of its trashy aesthetics, it still engages in a large amount of respectability politics. Maybe one day we’ll be able to fully celebrate the so-called negative representation, Gates claims, but that day has not yet come.

Context: Who is this author debating with and why? What is the context of the text’s production and distribution? What historical, cultural, etc. factors affect the way it makes meaning? Does the author seem to be in conversation with other scholars and/or paradigms? Where is this piece of writing centered in the field? What is their intervention in the literature/field? What text is this text in conversation with?

Gates provides an important push back against what seems to be the dominant mode of talking about representation on film. The job, she argues, focuses on determining which representations are good and bad and for what reasons, then throwing the bad ones out to celebrate the good ones. Gates’ corrective is to argue for the value of studying the negative portrayal, and not just for how it was made and came to be, but for what it can actually do. She counters the claim seemingly inherent to academics that push for positive portrayals because they will make the society at large more accepting and understanding all on their own. This isn’t how it works, Gates writes, and closer attention must be paid to what representation actually does and what it doesn’t do.

The cultural context, the belief in a post-racial America following the election of Barack Obama and, at the time of the book’s release, the backlash to his presidency in the form of Donald Trump, is also crucial to understanding Gates’ project. Obama, she says, was an exemplar of the so-called “talented tenth” of Black Americans whose very existence and prominence would lift up the entire group of Black Americans, that is if the negative exemplars didn’t pull them back down. This kind of rhetoric is problematic in all kinds of ways, and Gates carefully unpacks the harm it does and, in opposition, the good that “negative” portrayals can bring to Black audiences.

All of this isn’t to say that Gates is claiming that we should only celebrate the negative representations of Black people in media, but that the positive should always be examined with, not against, the negative. It’s a call for a fuller scholarship, and that’s a valuable contribution as far as I’m concerned.

via GIPHY Love & Hip Hop Atlanta‘s Joseline Hernandez

Methodology: What is the methodological framework of this text? What methodological moves or questions does the author engage? What is their object of analysis?

Gates moves between and through various kinds of discourses, looking at film history, auteurism, genre studies, star studies, and production environments in the process of uncovering and examining her various kinds of negative representations. As she does so, she dives into varying levels of depth with her examples. Coming to America merits nearly 40 pages of investigation, Berry’s star image gets a good amount of depth as well, while both genre chapters, the sellout and ratchet reality show examples, get less space for each example, sacrificing depth for breadth. Both modes work for Gates’ points, though, and after the extensive theoretical work of the opening chapter, she can largely focus on the specifics of each case study in as much depth as she needs to.

Rhetorical Moves: What are the major rhetorical moves of the author’s arguments?

By connecting the already accepted terminology of positive and negative representations to the photographic concept of a negative that creates a positive, Gates strongly connects her ideological goals to the existing discourse on the topic. It makes for an easy and fruitful transition into digging into her way of thinking on the subject at hand. She also taps into a kind of underdog narrative that Americans are primed to buy into, which works well for her.

Engagement & Application: How do I engage this text? How does this apply to my work? Does it support or provide a counterargument or model for strong intro or lit review? In other words, why is this piece of writing useful to me and/or how is it limited (bad writing style, problematic, didn’t consider x, y, and z)? Does it intersect with other items on the list?

I want my future discussions of representation, which will form a fundamental part of my work even if I come at it somewhat obliquely, to be as nuanced as possible. Gates provides a lot of great ways of thinking about what we might otherwise write off, and a way towards discussing those texts that might not be as good on that front as we want them to be. What else might those texts be doing that we’d miss by easily dismissing them? I’ll find out!

I’ll also take anybody’s arguments against auteurism anytime they want to provide them. It’s a valuable tool, but obviously not the only one and not always applicable.

Key Terms: What terms are key to the author’s argument, and are they operationalized explicitly or implicitly?

representation, positive, negative, ratchet, star studies, star image, auteur, genre, film history, production, agency, respectability politics, Black, hegemony, strategic essentialism

Significant Quotations: What key quotations from this work would I want to have quick access to?

Designations of positive versus negative with regard to representations of blackness and black people can be frustrating. Taken as a straightforward descriptors, they are limiting categories that do not allow us to access the full, complex range of images that circulate in the media, nor do they allow for the possibility of nuanced engagement with these images by the people that consume them. Conventional uses of “positive” and “negative” support politics of respectability and close off possibilities for multi-layered conceptions and performances of identity. At their worst, to invoke these categories uncritically reinforces racist ideologies that use discourses of black exceptionalism to further marginalize black behaviors and people that deviate from white, middle-class, heterosexual norms. (12)

The problem is that, try as we might, we cannot seem to shake the assumption that representations do the work by themselves. In other words, there is an unshakable belief that images do work outside of the histories and contexts in which they circulate. (13)

In the end, I am suggesting that it is not necessary to eradicate these categories as much as to deconstruct them: understand how they develop, where they are applied, how, and when. And further, by using these terms strategically, as critical race scholars have already done with strategic essentialism, we gain much in the way of developing a lens of analysis and language with which to understand and talk about what these texts are actually doing. Therefore, taking up Herman Gray’s call to analytically shift discussions of identity and media “from signification and representation to resonance and experience,” I propose that we actually embrace the designation of “negative” that has long been assigned to certain types of images. To activate the dictionary definition of “negative” as “expressing or containing negation or denial” reveals the ways that disreputable images such as those found in reality television, for instance, disrupt hegemonic norms regarding race, class, gender, and sexuality. […] I embrace the term “negative” because of its historical use in defining certain types of black texts and because it implies a direct, tangential relationship to “positive” representations. If the current post-racial, color-blind moment truly is a moment of color-muteness[, following Linda Williams], then perhaps the negative image functions as the repository for those identities, experiences, and feelings that have been discarded by respectable media. (15-6)

This book offers two, interrelated definitions of a “negative” text. The first type of negative text is a qualitative one that is defined by its distance from normative, white hegemonic standards of quality. […] The second definition of a negative text is a formal category that functions as an inversion of another media text. In the second sense of the term, the film or television show in question may not be thought of as stereotypical or demeaning, but has simply been erased from critical discourse because its salient formal and ideological components are not recognized as bearing significant meaning. […] The concept of negativity derives first from the idea of a photo negative. In fact, my approach in this book is based heavily on the metaphor of a photographic negative, in which a positive image is considered normal (or, in the case of media, normative) and a negative is the complete inversion of that image. I argue that these negative images engage in explorations of identity and a manner that is inversely proportionate to contemplations of identity and respectable media texts. Just as a negative is necessary for the production of a photograph, this book argues that the negative image is a necessary component for the production of the “positive” images that circulate throughout popular culture and scholarship. (17)

As a framework, negativity helps to elucidate how tastes, politics, and modes of performance develop and change, and it reveals the ways that time forms our perceptions. (18)

I argue that reclaiming these overlooked images from black popular culture and offering an alternative history of their meanings and possibilities also provides a strong intervention and present-day debates about proper black behavior and the role of popular culture in the current sociopolitical moment. Moreover, as the veritable gutter of black media, negative representations serve as the repository for all of the feelings that positive images cast aside. (21)

Negative spaces can exist as havens for topics deemed outside of the boundaries of respectable texts, particularly when those topics have to do with matters of identity. […] Similarly, reality television functions as the metaphorical gutter for the rejects of respectable black media representation. Interestingly enough, these individuals, groups, and topics that I refer to here as rejects happen to intersect and overlap with the same individuals, groups, and topics that are typically marginalized by mainstream and black uplift narratives in society. […] Many of these negative texts open up possibilities for non-normative feelings, experiences, and allegiances that, I argue, are simply not possible in the image-policed spaces of positive texts. (25-6)

For, if this book aims to highlight the way that whiteness functions invisibly and media, it must also point out that whiteness occupies a similar default position in scholarship on the media. In other words, we should productively trouble these existing discussions of taste and culture by first acknowledging that whether we use adjectives such as high, low, mass, or trash in front of the word “culture,” all of these descriptors are still referring to white culture, in that the producers, texts, and fan communities that constitute the foundations of this scholarship do not typically include people of color. (27)

While I acknowledge that negative representations sometimes fall prey to the same limiting constructions of race as their positive counterparts, I believe that the power of the negative image rests in its ability to shift the dynamics and popular culture. We see negative texts actively influencing mainstream popular culture and pulling it into the gutter in certain ways […] And, unlike the Bakhtinian carnivalesque, these are not shifts that simply bubble up temporarily only to be ultimately reabsorbed by dominant culture and robbed of their subversiveness. Nor are these subcultures that exist as a sort of parallel, underground universe to that of mainstream culture. Rather, the reverberations of negative texts function as tremors that irrevocably weaken the foundation on which their positive counterparts are constructed. Those are, in fact, performances that matter in spite of the fact that they have traditionally been understood as inconsequential as far as I articulating ideas about black identity. To this end, I examine the ways that they privileged disreputable behavior, characters, genres, and media as the means to negotiate the dynamics of culture, race, and power. (29-30)

Formal negativity involves a text that becomes a negative because one or more of its formal qualities – aesthetics, mise-en-scène, narrative, and so on – can function as an inversion of those typical positive texts. Although this type of negative text may not have a direct corollary in the positive realm, it gestures toward practices and genres either in mainstream media representation or in black media. (32)

In relational or comparative negativity, the positive counterpart directly overshadows the negative text. (32)

In circumstantial negativity, a media text is categorized due to the issues and debates surrounding it, rather than because of a direct relation to its positive counterpart. (33)

[Strategic negativity refers to] media texts that make full use of their location in the metaphorical “gutter” of media that is negativity, taking advantage of their distance from the politics of respectability to explore topics that their positive counterparts do not typically address. […] I argue that, as a genre, reality television escapes critical attention because of its negative status and because the genre itself masks the real labor of the cast and crew as “reality.” (34)

Further, [Eddie] Murphy’s immense and unmistakable influence on the film [Coming to America] runs contrary to auteurist theories that would place John Landis, the director, as the main creative force behind the film. Not simply a challenge to director-centric theories in film studies, this reimagining of Murphy as the visionary behind the film rather than Landis likewise complicates our understanding of how we define a film as “black.” Is it possible for a white director to make a “black” film, where “black” is understood not just by the race of the cast but also by its cast, themes, politics, and popularity with black audiences? Coming to America would suggest so and, therefore, troubles the commonly held assumption that Hollywood-produced films are only capable of promoting films ideologically aligned with whiteness. (38)

For it is one thing to acknowledge the structural and industrial pressures that lock black women into certain mediated tropes, but it is another thing altogether to grapple with the notion that these women actively choose to represent them themselves in these ways. Moreover, when the show creator is herself an African American woman, and the bulk of viewers are also African American women, we must contend with matters of choice and agency on every level, from production to performance to reception. Let me be clear here: I am not suggesting that we ignore the ways that larger social, historical, and industrial factors constrain the kinds of options that these women have available to them. I am, however, proposing that we look at the various ways in which the women associated with these shows negotiate these limited choices within the system of reality television, and how they use the very behaviors labeled as “ratchet” to achieve a degree of autonomy regarding the representational and economic aspects of their lives. (144)

Therefore, while some may view reality television’s conventions as tools to mask its regressive politics, I am interested in exploring how reality television actually lends itself to contemplations of racial (and gender) identity that are specific to its genre conventions. In other words, I argue that, in contrast to critically attended-to genres such as the sitcom or the hour-long drama, reality television involves deeper considerations of race, gender, class, and sexuality precisely because it is perceived as frivolous, fun, and trashy. It is reality television’s distance from respectability, its location in the gutter of television programming and critical regard, which allows it to delve into topics and issues that its respectable counterparts shy away from. (147)

Death 24x a Second by Laura Mulvey

by

via GIPHY Psycho by Alfred Hitchcock

Mulvey, Laura. 2006. Death 24x a Second: Stillness and the Moving Image. London: Reaktion Books.

Summary & Implications: What is the author’s project and why is it important now? What’s the narrative about the field that’s emerging from the reading? What narratives are silent? Whose voices are silent?

Mulvey’s project in this book is to rethink spectatorship through the lens of the new possibilities opened by home video technologies like DVD and so on, which she argues returns the notion of stillness to the otherwise moving image. Because the spectator now has control over pausing, rewinding, and revisiting only certain scenes of a film, Mulvey argues, the spectator is made more undeniably aware of the cinema’s inherent stillness (in the material form of being composed of still images played in quick sequence to simulate motion). That stillness, she continues, opens the spectator’s potential line of engagement with a film not only as a story but also as a historical document of the indexical (or, broadly, real) aspects of the film image that are usually hidden behind the story’s iconographic impulses. In other words, recognizing that film is basically made up of photographs via technological manipulation of the film image enables both what Mulvey calls a “possessive” and a “pensive” spectator.

The possessive spectator is one who uses their ability to pause, rewind, and repeat images to sadistically, in Mulvey’s terms, control the object of their spectatorship. They develop a fetishistic attachment to the image that was once only possible with the help of extratextual aids like production stills or calendar images. Interestingly, she points out that this new control over the image basically negates the strong masculine voyeuristic tendency she saw in Hollywood films in her formative “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” essay. Or, if not outright negating the voyeuristic part, it demasculinizes the gaze and turns it towards a more individualized and therefore less-gendered form. This happens for women as well as men, she claims. She also notes that the possessive spectator is one who is attuned to the star persona’s complicated balance of energy/motion (which drives the action of the film and the gaze of the camera) and stillness, which is embodied in the pose which is either captured in still images like the production photos or in the span of time when a star pauses on screen, or when a spectator pauses the action at their own whim.

The pensive spectator is less interested in control and more interested in observing how the stillness they create in a film reflects back within the film when it is played in its normal capacity. What attention does the pensive spectator bring to the film during their pauses, delays, and repititions? It is similar to the attention a film scholar brings to films, and Mulvey convincingly argues that the ability to manipulate the time of a film has turned anybody who wants to be into a film scholar who can almost automatically understand the strange play of tenses that occurs when one watches an older film. The old film plays out in what Barthes calls a time of “this was now” where the index (again, reality, kinda) is captured at a particular moment in time. He had argued that this only works with the singular photograph, while the film tends to blur that indexicality into nothingness. Mulvey rescues his assertion for film by claiming that the ability to pause it and so on snaps spectators into a position where they can recognize the indexicality of the image and the historical nature of it. This, she argues, is crucial for political readings and uses of films to bridge the gap between the present and the past in a world which tends to want to insist on the immediacy of the moment.

Crucially for Mulvey, these ways of seeing films as containing stills was not only excavated via video control. It was always hidden, from the very early experiements of the Lumière and Méliès films, in the moments of slow motion and “still” frames achieved by the repetition of cells in sequence to create the illusion of stillness within a technically still moving medium, a phenomenon she calls “delayed cinema.” These traditional filmic techniques opened opportunities to see stillness on film and recognize the importance of stillness to the medium of film. Mulvey ties this to the narrative death drive she notes motivates many films. Hence the trope of ending on a static shot to, symbolically at least, represent the death of the story being told. With this association between stillness and death, Mulvey continues to pull at the cinema’s relationship between time passing, which is inherently captured on film but now can be paused by spectators and even reversed given the right technological tools, and the ability to see beyond death. When we see old movie stars on our home screens, we are not only watching old movies, we are conjuring ghosts and that is yet another reminder that time passes and the present always comes from the past.

Context: Who is this author debating with and why? What is the context of the text’s production and distribution? What historical, cultural, etc. factors affect the way it makes meaning? Does the author seem to be in conversation with other scholars and/or paradigms? Where is this piece of writing centered in the field? What is their intervention in the literature/field? What text is this text in conversation with?

Mulvey is in closest conversation with the twin pillars of Bazin and Barthes, each of which form a crucial part of her argument about stillness via their writings on photography and its properties. In addition to the two of them, Mulvey also engages with Miriam Hansen’s augmentations of her ideas from “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” which Mulvey also engages with several times. Of course, Freud and various readings of his ideas form the foundations of Mulvey’s fundamentally psychoanalytic approach to spectatorship. I tend to bristle at psychoanalysis, but I was able to dig around in Mulvey’s version of it and find what seemed to be most crucial so I didn’t have to throw the baby out with the bathwater there.

The other bit of crucial contextual info is Mulvey’s writing at the dawn of the 21st century. She uses this temporality to position her argument within conversations about the cinema’s centenary and the nearly concomitant discussions around the “death” of cinema thanks to the invention and propagation of digital filming and projection technologies. Mulvey largely dismisses this later idea, noting that the loss of the direct materiality of film’s imprint of light and shadow is retained in all but a literal sense when what happens is instead a numerical translation of the same data. The indexicality is not fundamentally lost, she claims, and I tend to agree. Otherwise, her arguments tend to rest on the affordances of the DVD, which was picked up and expanded upon by Benson-Allott less than a decade later.

via GIPHY Journey to Italy by Roberto Rossellini

Methodology: What is the methodological framework of this text? What methodological moves or questions does the author engage? What is their object of analysis?

Mulvey’s is a largey theoretical text, working mostly with other theorists who wrote on similar subjects to develop her own thoughts. She does, however, spend three chapters dedicated primarily to close readings of Psycho, Journey to Italy, and the works of Abbas Kiarostami. Here she draws out the ideas developed in the first half of her book about the role of stillness in cinema and how it connects or doesn’t to the death drive/passage of time inherent in cinema and narrative. She also delves into some smaller close readings in several of the other chapters, but those are used mostly to demonstrate ideas rather than as the primary purpose of her text.

Rhetorical Moves: What are the major rhetorical moves of the author’s arguments?

Mulvey devleops her points by first talking about how the video spectator’s ability to pause a film is an extension of the filmmaker’s ability to maniuplate the flow of time in their film. After showing that the spectator’s manipulation is related to the filmmaker’s manipulation, she traces how filmmakers used the manipulation of time to their own ends in metaphorical expressions of death and connects it to the uncanny of both Freud and Jentsch. She goes on to connect these ideas to narrative theories of death as a metaphorical ending to stories. After exploring this idea in her three close reading chapters, she comes back to develop a theory of spectatorship based on the ability to pause, rewind, and reorder a film via technology, which she claims creates a two new kinds of spectators, the possessive and the pensive.

Engagement & Application: How do I engage this text? How does this apply to my work? Does it support or provide a counterargument or model for strong intro or lit review? In other words, why is this piece of writing useful to me and/or how is it limited (bad writing style, problematic, didn’t consider x, y, and z)? Does it intersect with other items on the list?

Though I don’t buy most psychoanalytic theories, Mulvey was still quite convincing in her explanation of the way that home video opens new possibilites in recognizing the stillness at the center of film as a medium, and in the implications thereof. She also inspired a new way of thinking about the legacyquel that I’ll have to ponder on. Ultimately, her work is not only salvageable from the psychoanalysis but likely crucial to some of my upcoming work.

Key Terms: What terms are key to the author’s argument, and are they operationalized explicitly or implicitly?

stillness, movement, death, uncanny, spectatorship, pensive spectator, possessive spectator, fetish, voyeur, the death drive, narrative, video, delayed cinema, aesthetic of delay, automata, cinephilia, star, star system, pose, control, power

Significant Quotations: What key quotations from this work would I want to have quick access to?

Delayed cinema works on two levels: first of all it refers to the actual act of slowing down the flow of film. Secondly it refers to the delay in time during which some detail has lain dormant, as it were, waiting to be noticed. There is a loose parallel here with Freud’s concept of deferred action, the way the unconscious preserves a specific experience, while its traumatic effect might only be realized by another, later but associated, event. (8)

A dialectical relationship between the old and new media can be summoned into existence, creating an aesthetic of delay. In the first instance, the image itself is frozen or subjected to repetition or return. But as the new stillness is enhanced by the weight that the cinema’s past has acquired with passing time, its significance goes beyond the image itself towards the problem of time, its passing, and how it is represented or preserved. At a time when new technologies seem to hurry ideas and their representations at full tilt towards the future, to stop and to reflect on the cinema and its history also offers the opportunity to think about how time might be understood within wider, contested, patterns of history and mythology. Out of this pause, a delayed cinema gains a political dimension, potentially able to challenge patterns of time that are neatly ordered around the end of an era, its ‘before’ and its ‘after’. The delayed cinema gains further significance as outside events hasten the disappearance of the past and strengthen the political appropriation of time. (22-3)

The dialectic between old and new produces innovative ways of thinking about the complex temporality of cinema and its significance for the present moment in history. As the flow of cinema is displaced by the process of delay, spectatorship is affected, reconfigured and transformed so that old films can be seen with new eyes and digital technology, rather than killing the cinema, brings it new life and new dimensions. The process of delay not only bring stillness into visibility but also alters the traditionally linear structure of narrative, fragmenting its continuities. (26)

To look back into the reality of that lost world [of the early 1900s] by means of the cinema is to have the sensation of looking into a time machine. However cliched the concept, the presence of that reality, of the past preserved, becomes increasingly magical and uncanny. Furthermore, as electronic and digital technologies have overtaken the cinema and, as a new ‘new’ arrives, the old ‘new’ becomes relegated to ‘the old’. Paradoxically and incidentally, the new technologies have contributed further to bringing the uncanny back to the cinema. The ease with which the moving image can now be halted exposes the cinema’s mechanisms and the illusion of its movement, as though the beautiful automaton had become stuck in a particular pose. (52)

Cinema’s forward movement, the successive order of film, merges easily into the order of narrative. Linearity, causality and the linking figure of metonymy, all crucial elements in story-telling, find a correspondence in the unfolding, forward-moving direction of film. […] But at the end, the aesthetics of stillness returns to both narrative and the cinema. Death as a trope that embodies the narrative’s stillness, its return to an inanimate form, extends to the cinema, as though the still frame’s association with death fuses into the death of the story, as though the beautiful automaton was to wind down into its inanimate, uncanny, form. In this sense, endings present different kind of aesthetic exchange between narrative and cinema. Freud’s concept of ‘the death drive’ negotiates between the two, including, as it does, movement towards an end as the desire to return to an ‘earlier’ state. (69-70)

While the flow of the image at 24 frames a second tends to assert a ‘now-ness’ to the picture, stillness allows access to the time of the film’s registration, its ‘then-ness’. This is the point, essentially located in the single frame, where the cinema meets the still photograph, both registering a moment of time frozen and thus fossilized. (102)

As people and history recede into the past, the traces they leave on the world mark their absence, the impossibility of regaining time, but also bear witness to the reality of their once-upon-a-time presence. With the cinema, the past is preserved in the full appearance of reality. In the Pompeii sequence [of Journey to Italy], filmed in 1952, with the living presence of the anonymous workmen as well as Hollywood stars, another layer of fossilized history is superimposed on the ruins of the city. Those alive in the scene, then, are now as fossilized in their screen image as the plaster casts of the Pompeiian couple. (107)

The discovery of a particular sequence or segment that responds to textual analysis necessarily leads to questions of film form both in terms of material and language. To halt, to return and to repeat these images is to see cinematic meaning coming into being as an ordinary object becomes detached from its surroundings, taking on added cinematic and semiotic value. But delaying the image, extracting it from its narrative surroundings, also allows it to return to its context and to contribute something extra and unexpected, a deferred meaning, to the story’s narration. (150-1)

New ways of consuming old movies on electronic and digital technologies should bring about a reinvention of textual analysis and a new wave of cinephilia. But the cinema is deeply affected by the passing of time itself. Now, to look at films such as those made by Douglas Sirk is to have the impression of looking into history. Even studio sets and stars take on the status of document, and close readings inevitably lead to questions of context as well as text. But reflection on film now leads not only to its surrounding history. To see Imitation of Life now, after Lana Turner’s death and, no doubt, the death of many of the extras surrounding her on the set, is to see time itself caught and fossilized into the illusion of movement. Now, as Lana Turner runs down the steps onto the Coney Island set, conjuring up the meanings inscribed into Sirk’s film and her performance, she also shifts between the ghostly and the living. Her presence brings with it the cinema’s unique ability to return and repeat the past, which becomes both more real and more mysterious as the film’s fragment is itself subject to repetition and return. (160)

When a film industry streamlines its star system, instantly recognizable, iconic screen actors produce a highly stylized performance, enhanced by an equally highly stylized star-focused cinema. Start performance is, not inevitably but very often, the source of screen movement, concentrating the spectator’s eye, localizing the development of the story and providing its latent energy. But the great achievement of star performance is an ability to maintain a fundamental contradiction in balance: the fusion of energy with a stillness of display. However energetic a star’s movement might seem to be, behind it lies an intensely controlled stillness and an ability to pose for the camera. Reminiscent, figuratively, of the way that the illusion of movement is derived from still frames, so star performance depends on pose, moments of almost invisible stillness, in which the body is displayed for the spectator’s visual pleasure through the mediation of the camera. (162)

Watching Hollywood films delayed both reinforces and breaks down these oppositions. The narrative drive tends to weaken if the spectator is able to control its flow, to repeat and return to certain sequences while skipping others. The smooth linearity and forward movement of the story become jagged and uneven, undermining the male protagonist’s command over the action. The process of identification, usually kept in place by the relation between plot and character, suspense and transcendence, loses its hold over the spectator. And the loss of ego and self-consciousness that has been, for so long, one of the pleasures of the movies gives way to an alert scrutiny and scanning of the screen, lying in wait, as it were, to capture a favorite or hitherto unseen detail. With the weakening of narrative and its effects, the aesthetic of the film begins to become ‘feminized’, with the shift in spectatorial power relations dwelling on pose, stillness, lighting and the choreography of character and camera. Or, rather, within the terms of the ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’ model, the aesthetic of pleasure of delayed cinema moves towards fetishistic scopophilia that, I suggested, characterized the films of Josef Von Sternberg. These films, most particularly the Dietrich cycle, elevate the spectator’s look over that of the male protagonist and privilege the beauty of the screen and mystery of situation over suspense, conflict or linear development. The ‘fetishistic spectator’ becomes more fascinated by image than plot, returning compulsively to privileged moments, investing emotion and ‘visual pleasure’ in any slight gesture, a particular look or exchange taking place on the screen. Above all, as these privileged moments are paused or repeated, the cinema itself finds a new visibility that renders them special, meaningful and pleasurable, once again confusing photogénie and fetishism. (165)

The possessive spectator commits an act of violence against the cohesion of a story, the aesthetic integrity that holds it together, and the vision of its creator. But, more specifically, the sadistic instinct is expressed through the possessive spectator’s desire for mastery and will to power. In the role reversal between the look of the spectator and the diegetic look of the male protagonist, the figure that had been all powerful both on and off the screen is now subordinated to manipulation and possession. Film performance is transformed by repetition and actions begin to resemble mechanical, compulsive gestures. The cinema’s mechanisms take possession of the actor or star and, as their precise, repeated gestures become those of automata, the cinema’s uncanny fusion between the living and the dead merges with the uncanny fusion between the organic and the inorganic, the human body and the machine. (171)

Bellour makes the crucial point that a moment of stillness within the moving image and its narrative creates a ‘pensive spectator’ who can reflect ‘on the cinema’. Not only can the ‘pensive’ spectator experience the kind of reverie that Barthes associated with the photograph alone, but this reverie reaches out to the nature of cinema itself. This pause for the spectator, usually ‘hurried’ by the movement of both film and narrative, opens a space for consciousness of the still frame within the moving image. Similarly, the pensive spectator who pauses the image with new technologies may bring to the cinema the resonance of the still photograph, the association with death usually concealed by the film’s movement, its particularly strong inscription of the index. These reflections are not lost when the film is returned to movement. On the contrary, they continue and inflect the film’s sense of ‘past-ness’. And the ‘pensive’ spectator ultimately returns to the inseparability of stillness from movement and flow; in Bellour’s words, ‘two kinds of time blend together’. (186)

Sometime after writing ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’, I tried to evolve an alternative spectator, who was driven, not by voyeurism, but by curiosity and the desire to decipher the screen, informed by feminism and responding to the new cinema of the avant-garde. Curiosity, a drive to see, but also to know, still marked a utopian space for a political, demanding visual culture, but also one in which the process of deciphering might respond to the human minds long standing interest and pleasure in solving puzzles and riddles. This curious spectator may be the ancestor of the pensive spectator and the cinema of delay unlocks the pleasure of decipherment, not only for an elite but also for anyone who has access to the new technologies of consumption. Of particular interest is the relation between the old and the new, that is, the effect of new technologies on cinema that has now aged. Consciousness of the passing of time affects what is seen on the screen: that sense of a ‘sea-change’ as death overwhelms the photographed subject affects the moving as well as the still image. There is, perhaps, a different kind of voyeurism at stake when the future looks back with greedy fascination at the past and details suddenly lose their marginal status and acquire the aura that passing time bequeaths to the most ordinary objects. (191-2)

The tape creates a dialogue between the cinema of the past and video, between the special insights of a 1960s critic and the new technology that makes critics as of us all. This exchange creates a dialectical relation between the old and the new, breaking down the separation from the past from which nostalgia is derived. But at the same time, it is elegiac: there is no escape from passing time and death itself. (194)

Killer Tapes and Shattered Screens by Caetlin Benson-Allott

by

David Cronenberg’s Videodrome

Benson-Allott, Caetlin. 2013. Killer Tapes and Shattered Screens: Video Spectatorship from VHS to File Sharing. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.

Summary & Implications: What is the author’s project and why is it important now? What’s the narrative about the field that’s emerging from the reading? What narratives are silent? Whose voices are silent?

Caetlin Benson-Allott writes persuasively that the old theories of film spectatorship should now be adjusted based on the fact that the cinematic experience is no longer the most dominant form of filmic consumption. She argues that home video now holds the position of being the primary way one sees films (and that’s certainly true in the very present moment of Summer 2020, thanks to the dangers of COVID-19). She argues that because much of spectatorship theory is based on the cinematic apparatus as a structuring metaphor, the fact that most people now watch movies at home should trigger a revision of spectatorship based on the aspects of home video as the structuring metaphor. She continues to claim that the shift to home video has changed the way filmmakers compose their films and address their audiences, which covers everything from the prevalence of over-the-shoulder shots (that, she claims, provides a presence within the film that excuses the outside attention grabbers like a partner walking in front of the tv or other such distractions) to color changes (which, she argues comes with other shifts in the political nature of the films that have changed).

Similar to Connor‘s claims that films are always about their own making, Benson-Allott uses horror films, which are always about cultural anxieties, to show how many films within that genre are places where filmmakers worked through the anxieties related to the shift to home video viewership. This comes in the form of 5 close-reading-based chapters, which follow a general historical/temporal path. The first, a series of readings of George Romero’s Dead series sees how one filmmaker shifted storytelling and filmmaking techniques in response to changes in distribution models. Then Benson-Allott reads Videodrome and The Ring for their focus on the VHS as a space for thinking through anxieties of cultural imperialism and reproduction/piracy, with the former coming at the start of the home video phenomenon and Canada’s fears of US media imperialism and the latter coming at the inflection point between VHS and DVD, a supposedly more secure home video format which allowed the filmmakers to truly demonize the easy reproducibility inherent in VHS. Then Benson-Allott looks at the Grindhouse film(s) and how they create a simulacrum of what she calls “cinematicity” or the “unique process and experience of theatrical exhibition” as a singular cinema object even as they also prepare for their eventual permanent home on separate home video discs, a fate which would render that simulacrum even more visible and pointed in an effort to bring attention to the falseness of the cinematic “truth” (133). Benson-Allott wraps up her close readings with a chapter on what she calls “faux footage” horror films, from The Blair Witch Project to Cloverfield, each of which, she claims, calls attention to the dangers of peer-to-peer file sharing as a place where unverifiable footage (files) could lead to hauntings and other dangerous outcomes. 

Benson-Allott closes her book in a brief but dense conclusion, thinking through the supposed “freedom” that home viewers feel in relation to the films they watch. She claims that the freedoms associated with home viewership are still largely structured and controlled. In other words, you get some limited temporal control over the film you watch (you can choose when to start it, and to pause it for a moment or overnight if necessary, and you can of course rewind and fastforward and jump around) but that the temporal freedom is not total in that you are not able to choose different orders or takes or events to happen. The movie is still the movie. She also claims that things like DVD menus and the like are used to put your viewership of the film in a particular context, a certain limited perspective on the film. In other words, though the home video spectator is more empowered than the cinema spectator, who is traditionally seen as subjecting themselves before a film, that power is still quite limited and used to turn the spectator into a subject, just one of a different variety.

Benson-Allott’s readings and claims are largely persuasive, as she calls attention to a platform that has largely been either ignored or only marginally considered. I hope that my own work in the future can further extend some of the claims she makes here into the streaming age.

Context: Who is this author debating with and why? What is the context of the text’s production and distribution? What historical, cultural, etc. factors affect the way it makes meaning? Does the author seem to be in conversation with other scholars and/or paradigms? Where is this piece of writing centered in the field? What is their intervention in the literature/field? What text is this text in conversation with?

Benson-Allott’s major task is to decentralize spectator theory put forwards by apparatus theorists like Christian Metz, Laura Mulvey, and company. She does so not by following other critiques of that theory on the grounds of its totalizing vision of the cinematic apparatus from which nobody can escape but by historicizing it as once being somewhat explanatory in its concept of the way films position their spectators but that movies now position their spectators differently because those spectators are most likely to be spectating at home. In the process of this project, she also responds to D. N. Rodowick’s musings on the “end of cinema” to claim that movies aren’t dying, just changing. She uses Vivian Sobchack’s phenomenology to talk about the way VHS and bodies interact in Videodrome, Barbara Creed’s concept of the monstrous feminine to write about the abject horror of the VHS tape as womb, and Derrida’s simulacrum to think about what it means for something to have cinematicity. Each of these theorists are given their due and woven into the larger work Benson-Allott is doing here.

As is becoming a refrain here, though, Benson-Allott’s book has its limitations in that it doesn’t quite come up to the present anymore. What does the proliferation of streaming channels, especially now that companies are consolidating many of their back catalogues under their own service mean for what she lays out here? In many ways her text is easily extensible to the present moment, which marks it as a very valuable text indeed. But it is limited in that she is necessarily unable to address the things that have come to be after the time of her writing.

Eduardo Sánchez and Daniel Myrick’s The Blair Witch Project

Methodology: What is the methodological framework of this text? What methodological moves or questions does the author engage? What is their object of analysis?

Benson-Allott takes the concept of spectator theory and apparatus theory under a microscope using horror films for close readings in an effort to understand how spectatorship changes when one is sitting on their couch watching a movie on their tv instead of in a movie theater. Each close reading has several subsections, which usually revolve around explaining one aspect of the film-in-question’s nature, from the filmic techniques to the political and technological context, including often one major relevant film theorist as noted above.

Rhetorical Moves: What are the major rhetorical moves of the author’s arguments?

Benson-Allott gets most of her rhetorical power from the strength of her close-readings and the context she provides in each chapter for those close readings. She adds on to spectator theory in a valuable and important way, critiquing it for being too narrowly focused and not adapting to the realities of spectatorship over time. In tracking how home video spectatorship was thought about through the films themselves, Benson-Allott is able to provide examples of how this work can be done beyond what she covers in her book as well, opening the door for further work done in her model after the fact. In that way, Benson-Allott provides a great example of scholarship, one to emulate.

Engagement & Application: How do I engage this text? How does this apply to my work? Does it support or provide a counterargument or model for strong intro or lit review? In other words, why is this piece of writing useful to me and/or how is it limited (bad writing style, problematic, didn’t consider x, y, and z)? Does it intersect with other items on the list?

This one really opened some doors for me. For one, it triggered a breakthrough in my conception of the legacyquel as designed for home viewership on platforms like Disney+ (which houses all of the Star Wars films and much of the ancillary material) and HBO MAX (which houses many of the DC universe films). I’m excited to work through the details and consequences of this new area and way of thinking for my project.

Key Terms: What terms are key to the author’s argument, and are they operationalized explicitly or implicitly?

home video (as an expansive term encompassing basically any technology/platform that allows movies to be watched outside of a theater), spectatorship, apparatus, formats, spectator, simulacrum, cinematicity, postcinematic, control, power, film subject, video subject, phenomenology, abject

Significant Quotations: What key quotations from this work would I want to have quick access to?

This study takes the polemical position that video distribution changed and is changing spectatorship and that film and new media theorists must attend to these changes. We must attend to the ways video platforms affect the motion picture experience if we want to continue to comment on the ideological significance of motion pictures for contemporary culture, politics, and subjectivity. (2)

Like movies about video and movies made possible by video (such as the aforementioned 1980s horror cycle or the concomitant increase in children’s features, or “kid vid”), movies made in periods of technological change offer a deep well of material for new theories of motion picture spectatorship in an age of multiplatform distribution. The producers and artists working within the US and Canadian entertainment industries know that most viewers approach their products through one video format or another; only “film studies” continues to insist on the primacy of the cinematic experience, and we do so in spite of our own video-enabled research and pedagogy. (6-7)

[…] I examine how innovations in motion picture exhibition have changed the way filmmakers imagine and address the spectator. What one can show influences what one can say, so the effect of video platforms on filmmaking matters not only because they influence production (as Janet Wasko, Frederick Wasser, and David Bordwell have shown) but also because they shape the transmission of ideas. By examining how the movies’ production design, cinematography, and editing anticipate video distribution, we begin to recognize new patterns and how they interpellate the spectator. By reading these formal innovations in conversation with the narratives they convey, we can see how filmmakers negotiate story, platform, and form to achieve a particular response and a viewer. (26)

Thus I argue (contra Neale and Bordwell) that the allegedly disposable shoulder represents not a concession to but a thematization of video exhibition, specifically of the other video viewers whose bodily presence remains irritatingly visible during televisual exhibition and so must be psychically repressed from one’s movie experience. This need does not exist in the same way at the cinema, where silhouettes of heads tend to block the bottom of the screen instead. Hence Romero’s “over-the-disposable-shoulder shot” – which was nowhere near as prevalent in Day of the Dead and non-existent in Dawn of the Dead and Night of the Living Dead – must be recognized as a new video convention that reflects the current mode of consumption. Indeed, it could even be read as creating a spectatorial continuum between the video viewer and the diegetic look that further involves the spectator in the narrative. (56)

Unlike remakes, reboots rarely follow the narratives of their antecedents and typically create new mythologies for the old horrors, mythologies that can then produce a new line of sequels. In some cases such reinventions can lead to innovations in the horror genre – such as the attention to feminine class markers in the new Texas Chain Saw Massacre – but most reboots merely cash in on name recognition. (59-60)

Videodrome (1983) was among the first narrative representations of home video and develops preexisting anxieties about the technology’s capacity for surveillance, psychic violence, and espionage. As early as 1977, movies like Demon Seed began to suggest that viewers beware lest their new consumer electronics consume their lives and identities. Yet few of the movies about video address the machines of exhibition themselves, much less our embodied encounters with them. Cronenberg’s Videodrome and Gore Verbinski’s The Ring (2002) are unique in their willingness to focus on videocassettes as material objects we manipulate – and are manipulated by. These two movies bookend the videotape’s reign as the dominant motion picture platform, and both use cassettes as metaphors for larger media takeovers (specifically the Americanization of Canadian media and the threat of digital piracy). They do not bear the traces of video distribution in the same ways that Romero’s later zombie movies do, but they do advance the artistic tradition of self-reflexive filmmaking by turning the camera on the VCR and the cultural battles it catalyzed. Through unsettling narrative and formal techniques they ask how home video reconstructs the film spectator and in whose interests these changes occur. (70)

As this chapter will show, Videodrome uses the story of Max Renn’s involvement with Videodrome to contend that video spectatorship forces the viewer to adapt physically to suit a new technological environment. It will then explore how the movie imbricates Max’s story in a series of explicit references to Canadian media history and uses these connections to ground its reading of consumer electronics in a surreal critique of the United States’ technocultural imperialism. After outlining this political intervention, I will argue that Videodrome offers its spectator a phenomenology of new media through a radically destabilizing form of first-person filmmaking. (71-2)

Grindhouse invokes cinematic abjection to emphasize the historical contingency of spectatorship. Its simulacrum of suboptimal viewing conditions thus brings the spectator’s attention to the here-and-now-ness of spectatorship and utopian fantasies about the cinema. For inasmuch as the movie depicts a cinematic utopia – and its idealized theatrical nonplace that never was – it drags the spectator into this fantasy as well, since she is also part of the motion picture apparatus. Indeed, the motion picture apparatus and the simulacrum interpellate the spectator similarly. (146)

By emphasizing the thrills of illicit viewing but associating it with inevitable death, [faux footage] movies make pirate spectatorship horrifying. Taken on their own, these movies can seem innocuous, far-fetched, even silly, but read within their industrial context, including the MPAA’s war on piracy, they offer intimations about the dire consequences of illicit spectatorship that may scare viewers away from the pleasures of piracy. Like Videodrome and The Ring, they promise death to pirates, yet they do so by uniting tropes from horror films, reality television, and MPAA public service announcements. Indeed, they teach the spectator not to go searching for underground videos, because what she finds could be deadly. (168)

Whereas cinema and television immerse the spectator in the illusion of voyeurism or indulge her in narcissistic fantasies of panoptical vision, the prerecorded video apparatus replaces such powers with temporal control. That is, all video playback technologies give their subjects (limited) temporal control over the motion picture and sustain the subjects fantasy of coherence and autonomy through an illusion of temporal mastery. (204)

Prerecorded video compromises some of those [cinematic spectatorial] pleasures by making the apparatus visible to the spectator and foregrounding her participation in it. Indeed, it can be rather difficult to prostrate oneself to a thirty-inch screen when other people, noises, or technologies keep interrupting. The prerecorded video apparatus compensates for these losses by allowing the viewer to fantasize that she is in possession of the text instead of being possessed by it. Not only can the spectator physically possess her video tape or disk, but she may experience similar feelings of possession regarding her digital files. […] Through possession, prerecorded video gives its spectator a powerful illusion that she can control time and marshal outside events to suit her schedule. (206-7)

In foregrounding pre-recorded video as an apparatus, I am suggesting that the video subject internalizes the prerecorded video interface much as she does the remoteness of the cinematic projector or the flow of various television channels. More than any individual technology, the persistence of the basic functions of video playback has come to unify and define the spectator’s experience of video. The video spectator possesses temporal control over a movie, but that is not the same as the power of self-determination, the power to imagine what it means to be a video subject. (207)

Thanks to prerecorded video, it now seems that we can watch what we want when we want, but who we understand ourselves to be in that moment remains a function of the motion picture apparatus, because spectatorship is always a power play. (208)

Fans: The Mirror of Consumption by Carl Sandvoss

by

J.J. Abram’s Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker

Sandvoss, Carl. 2005. Fans: The Mirror of Consumption. Malden, MA: Polity Press.

Summary & Implications: What is the author’s project and why is it important now? What’s the narrative about the field that’s emerging from the reading? What narratives are silent? Whose voices are silent?

Carl Sandvoss sets out to first recap many of the ways that fandom has been theorized before his writing in the early 2000s before offering his own theory on how fans interact with the texts they’ve chosen to be fans of. Specifically, he refutes Fiske’s assertion that fandom is a place of inherent resistance to the desires and values of the “power bloc” Instead, he conceives of fandom through a four-step process which he uses to develop his idea that fandom is inherently self-reflective and therefore not inherently partisan or emancipatory, as fans are as likely to use their fandoms to close off revolutionary ideas within a text as they are to embrace them or perform revolutionary acts with their texts.

The first step in Sandvoss’s project is to develop a sense of fandom as a place with properties like that of Heimat, a sense of home with attendant notions of security and warmth but which also implies a hierarchy of those allowed within that Heimat and those who are excluded. While fandoms might give fans a sense of community and togetherness based on that shared adoration of a fan text, it also allows them to discriminate against those who deemed unworthy of belonging for whatever reason.

Sandvoss’ next task to to examine the psychoanalytic nature of fandom, which he mostly congeals into a combined act of projection and introjection which allows fans to see themselves in the text and see elements of the text within their own worldview. In this sense, the text doesn’t have much control over what a fan uses it for, and different fans can have wildly different uses for the same fan text. This is another reason why fandoms aren’t inherently emancipatory.

Developing this idea of intro-and-pro-jection further, Sandvoss borrows from several readings of the Narcissus myth, including Winnicott’s and McLuhan’s, to put forth his own thesis that objects of fandoms are more like mirrors than anything else. Fans see in them what they want to see, and the objects therefore reflect back what a fan puts into them. This is different, he says, from literature, which, according to Jauss, uses its gaps to expand readers’ “horizons of expectations.” In fandom, gaps and blanks are either worked around, ignored, or used for further reflection of the fan’s point of view. This is all possible because objects of fandom, Sandvoss claims, are so polysemic (open to possible readings) that they are in effect “neutrosemic” or open to any reading. Fans also tend to encourage this reflection by rejecting anything within a fan text (say, an episode of a tv show or a spinoff novel) that does not conform to their horizon of expectation. Fan texts and fandoms are then likely to conform to the status quo as fans use them only to confirm what they already believe, which is likely to be well within the boundaries set up by the “power bloc.”

Sandvoss does allow for one area where fandoms can be a force for change, however. It is in the discussion of an object of fandom which will necessarily feature fans with different perspectives (because they are based on the fan’s pre-established beliefs) talking to each other. Here Sandvoss imagines a place where fans might challenge each other’s understanding of the fan text and provide at least some expansion of the horizon of expectations.

Like Fiske before him, Sandvoss again creates a kind of totalizing system of fandoms, this time, however, not based in (again, totalized) class distinctions but instead on the (one more time, totalizing) universality of psychoanalysis. This allows Sandvoss to claim that all fandoms work in this one way, and that differences in identity or positioning matter little to his framework he’s developed. I tend to be skeptical of these kinds of projects, even as I am convinced by much of his argument. In other words, I think this works well as a framework but careful study of individual fandoms (and facets of fandoms based on different identificatory affiliations) should feel open to pushing back on some of the broader claims Sandvoss makes here. I think here of bell hooks’ proposition that black women filmgoers often watch with an oppositional gaze developed through years of being underserved by the white male dominated popular culture. What kind of resistance would this oppositional gaze bring to Sandvoss’s concept of fandoms as self-reflective?

Context: Who is this author debating with and why? What is the context of the text’s production and distribution? What historical, cultural, etc. factors affect the way it makes meaning? Does the author seem to be in conversation with other scholars and/or paradigms? Where is this piece of writing centered in the field? What is their intervention in the literature/field? What text is this text in conversation with?

Sandvoss cites a heck of a lot of people here and builds on much of their work within fandom. He writes about the first, second, and third waves of fan studies and positions his work as building upon all of them. His is a theory deeply enmeshed in dozens of other voices. However, it’s also a product of its time. Sandvoss does mention some online fandom gathering places and the kinds of interactions that are performed there, but I could easily see a sequel study done which might expand greatly on what Sandvoss has already done here w/r/t online fandoms. I’ve found, for example, both an impulse towards the kind of self-reflective fandom and the push-back provided by other fans seemingly increase in intensity on the internet. Sandvoss also claims that fans have little to no input on how the objects of fandom are created, but recent examples like Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker and the (eventual) release of the Snyder cut of Justice League would call that into question as well, never mind the historical examples of viewer feedback causing big changes in film serials, tv shows, and so on.

The fan group called the 501st Legion was used as extras on Disney’s The Mandalorian

Methodology: What is the methodological framework of this text? What methodological moves or questions does the author engage? What is their object of analysis?

Sandvoss pulls a lot from previous fan studies for his examples, including his own study of sports fans. These are contextualized with theoretical frameworks like psychoanalysis and Marxist critical theory to try to get at what fandoms are, and what they can do. One might most accurately say that this is a study of prior studies, as it is more interested in developing an overarching theory than it is in actually looking at specific fandoms.

Rhetorical Moves: What are the major rhetorical moves of the author’s arguments?

The largest rhetorical move Sandvoss engages in is the introduction of several fan studies that have previously made claims about how fandom works in a specific area which Sandvoss engages with to explain and pick out the high points before discarding the majority of the theory for being not particularly useful. For example, he takes from Fiske the three kinds of fan productivity but disputes the larger claim Fiske makes about the emancipatory nature of fandoms. This lends Sandvoss a sense of both magnanimity as well as a logical superiority as his theory is developed on only the good parts of the many studies that have come before his. He also builds his case nicely, using each chapter after the second (the recap chapter) to develop one important part of his theory that is then used as the core of the next part. It makes for a clean, logical procession of ideas.

Engagement & Application: How do I engage this text? How does this apply to my work? Does it support or provide a counterargument or model for strong intro or lit review? In other words, why is this piece of writing useful to me and/or how is it limited (bad writing style, problematic, didn’t consider x, y, and z)? Does it intersect with other items on the list?

As currently configured in my brain, my dissertation will end on a study of how the Star Wars fandom responded to the three legacyquel films (TFA, TLJ, TRoS), and I could very much see how Sandvoss’s theories would be directly applicable to what I’ve seen so far. It’s going to be central, I think, to that chapter.

Key Terms: What terms are key to the author’s argument, and are they operationalized explicitly or implicitly?

fans, fandom, fan text, object of fandom, Heimat, self-reflective, horizon of expectations, popular culture, literature, fan productivity, polysemic, neutrosemic, mirror, introjection, projection, identity, fan practices, consumption, habitus

Significant Quotations: What key quotations from this work would I want to have quick access to?

For the purpose of empirical investigation and academic analysis, we therefore need to turn to observable aspects as defining marks of fandom. I thus want to suggest a definition of fandom focusing on fan practices. This admittedly devolves the problem to the question of which fan practices are most indicative of fans’ emotional investment and affect. (6)

I define fandom as the regular, emotionally involved consumption of a given popular narrative or text in the form of books, television shows, films or music, as well as popular texts in a broader sense such as sports teams and popular icons and stars ranging from athletes and musicians to actors. (8)

Consequently, fandom can be subversive, especially when based on textual productivity; yet there is no automatism which positions the tactics of reading in necessary opposition to the strategies of (mass) production. (29)

In this sense, I believe, fandom best compares to the emotional significance of the places we have grown to call home, to the form of physical, emotional and ideological space that is best described as Heimat. […] Understanding fandom as a form of Heimat thus accurately combines the significance of symbolical, personal space in fandom with the importance of territorial place within which such fandoms is physically manifested. However, these spaces differ from the territorial place conventionally understood as Heimat. Rather, as our discussion here has illustrated, they can be physical as well as textual, and hence can be accessed by fans in different mediated and unmediated ways, at different times, and from different localities. […] But the notion of fandom as a form of Heimat comes with its own implications with regard to the social and cultural consequences of fandom. The idea of Heimat is based upon notions of security and emotional warmth, but Heimat also always involves an evaluation and categorization of others. (64)

The theoretical challenge here is to account for the dual function of the object of fandom as experienced not in relation to the self, but as part of the self, despite constituting an external object. The basic premise of my argument, then, is that the object of fandom whether it is a sports team, a television programme, a film or pop star, is intrinsically interwoven with our sense of self, with who we are, would like to be, and think we are. (96)

Here, I want to take such arguments to their conclusion and suggest that in the intense interaction between self and object of fandom, acknowledgment of the object of fandom as an external object disappears. Rather than as a transitional realm between the self and an external world, the object of fandom forms part of the self, and hence functions as its extension. (100)

The object of fandom in this sense is not so much a textual possession; nor does it only define the self. It is part of the fan’s (sense of) self. For the object of fandom is as an external object – whether it is Bruce Springsteen or, say, Star Trek – to be experienced as part of the fan’s fabric of self, fans need to build an intense identification with their object of fandom. (101)

[Following McLuhan’s reading of the Narcissus myth,] [w]e may then be aware of parallels between ourselves and our objects of fandom, and even actively seek to foster and construct these, yet self-reflection is always based on a misrecognition of the external object. Our fascination with the object of fandom does not arise out of the fact that, objectively, it is like us, but is instead based on the projection of our own image. The object of fandom, like the river in the Narcissus myth, is the coincidental medium of self-reflection, whose true quality lies in its reflective capacity. (104)

Moreover, as the object of fandom becomes part of our fabric of self through processes of self-reflection, fans actively maintain this stage of self-performance and projection. Fans thus seek to emulate and emphasize parallels between themselves and what they recognize as external qualities of the object of fandom. […] Yet, beyond resemblance and imitation, the actual origin of meaning in either the fan object or the fan becomes unclear. In fans’ self-reflective relationship with their object of fandom, we cannot allocate the origins of personal beliefs and attitudes and either the fan or the fan object. (111)

From such a self-reflective reading it follows that texts allow not only for a multiplicity of meaning, but for any meaning. Only if fan texts function as a mirror, can fans find their reflected image in the object of fandom. Having stated that all texts are polysemic, because they cannot carry a single, definitive meeting, this supposes that at the end of the spectrum polysemic texts allow for so many different readings that they can no longer be meaningfully described as polysemic. The notion of self-reflection and fandom suggests that some texts come to function as a blank screen on which fans’ self-image is reflected. These texts are polysemic to a degree that they become neutrosemic – in other words, carry no inherent meaning. By ‘neutrosemy’, I describe the semiotic condition in which a text allows for so many divergent readings that, intersubjectively, it does not have any meaning at all. (126)

The definition of textual boundaries forms a key strategy that allows fans to construct a self-reflective reading of the object of fandom. It is a simultaneous process of inclusion and exclusion. On the one hand, the discriminative power of fans to serves to maintain the object of fandom as a space of self-reflection. […] The object of fandom thus always consists of a textual hybrid, a meta- or super-text composed of many textual episodes whose boundaries are defined by the fan him- or herself. The reader, then, does not, as Rorty suggests, beat the text into a shape which will serve his or her own purposes (cf. Eco 1994), but cuts his or her own text out of all available signs and information like a figure out of a seemingly endless sheet of paper. (131-2)

The multiplicity of meanings in literary texts thus has a double function. In the first instance, it is reminiscent of the common interpretation of the notion of polysemy in media studies, in that it occurs in the different readings of the same text by different readers. There is, however, a second, qualitatively decisive dimension: the multiplicity of meanings within a given text experienced on the level of the individual reader, thus creating semiotic ambiguities and challenges to the value position of the reader, thereby invites a reflexive dialogue between reader and text. On this level of indeterminacy, literary texts differ fundamentally from fan texts. It is precisely these semiotic ambiguities and challenges that are lacking when the fan of a sports team can so easily project his values and beliefs onto the team, when the Bruce Springsteen fan finds her own philosophy readily represented in Springsteen’s songs, or when the fan of Star Wars finds no difficulty in relating the fan text to his own military career and aspirations. (143)

It is important to note that in all these cases texts are turned into fan texts through a relative judgment following the fan’s horizon of expectations, not any objective generic qualities. What comes to function as a fan text to one reader may still possess literary qualities to another reader. (144)

Secondly, reception aesthetics provides us with a useful tool for analyzing the reading of fan texts. However, while the relationship between fans and their object of fandom is at the heart of fandom, it does not account fully for all aspects of fan performance and social interaction. Beyond fan texts as fan objects are many texts, conversations and forms of communication which form part of fandom, yet lack the neutrosemic quality of the fan text. While in the mediated quasi-interaction between fans and the object of fandom the fan texts cannot intervene in the normalized, self-reflective meanings that fans construct, other fans and texts which we encounter in our fandom can. Secondary texts, including, of course, academic studies of fan texts, may challenge fans’ normalized, self-reflective readings. Moreover, the interaction with other fans through in situ consumption, everyday life conversation, fan meetings and online communication potentially constitutes an array of challenges to fans’ (self-reflective) interpretation of the fan texts, demanding forms of self-reflexivity not dissimilar to those that Iser ascribes to reading of literary texts. The challenge to fans’ horizon of experience and expectation consequently does not lie in the fan object but in the experiences and interactions that surround the relationship between fan and fan text – in other words in fandom as ‘interpretive community’. (147)

Commonly, this discrepancy – given the inherent textual distance of mediated quasi-interaction, as well as fans’ need to maintain their relationship by to the object of fandom based upon familiarity – will be kept at bay by the fan. However, different factors can trigger a decreasing textual, and hence growing aesthetic, distance between fan and object of fandom. First, the fan text is more complex in its boundaries over time and space than single literary texts. As dynamic texts evolving over time, fan texts cannot fully meet the fan’s horizon of expectations, and thus remain truly banal. The departure of a lead character from a given television show, the increasingly international labor market and professional sports, the new artistic direction of a given musician or band, or the death of one’s favorite star in this sense possess literary quality, in that they increase the aesthetic distance between text and fan. In these moments of rapture, the fan assumes a quality similar to that proposed by Iser for literary texts, in that it evades attempts at normalization and thus demands a reflexive reaction. […] In the first case the fan resolves the discord between his or her values and sense of self and the now altered fan text through rejection of the former object offend them. The fan text thus loses its significance, and the respective fandom comes to an end. […] Fans also overcome dissonance and indeterminacy by reinforcing the norms encapsulated in the fan texts, thus refashioning the self in an attempt to conform with its changing reflection and what I have previously described as the fan’s tendency to serve as servo-mechanism to the object of fandom. If textual blanks and aesthetic distance in the reading of fan texts, and subsequent processes of a reflexive readjustment of self, however, are created through the economic and social forces which already structure the conditions of modern industrial living, fandom cannot function as a space for the creation of new social norms; neither, then, can fandom reflexively challenge the macro parameters of the production of fan texts, which in turn are reflective of the economic and social status quo. (150-1)

“The Cultural Economy of Fandom” by John Fiske

by

Joss Whedon’s Buffy the Vampire Slayer

Fiske, John. 1992. “The Cutlural Economy of Fandom.” In The Adoring Audience: Fan Culture and Popular Media, edited by Lisa A. Lewis, 256. New York: Routledge.

Summary & Implications: What is the author’s project and why is it important now? What’s the narrative about the field that’s emerging from the reading? What narratives are silent? Whose voices are silent?

John Fiske builds upon Pierre Bourdieu’s concept of cultural capital to put forth the idea of a fan culture that creates a “shadow cultural economy” which involves the appropriation of the products of the larger cultural economy while also providing for the production of its own products and output, which might involve the remixing/rewriting of the original texts (30). The idea is that, because the texts fan cultures are based on aren’t valued by the dominant culture, they are more amenable to this kind of adaptation and reuse, they contain within them space for fans to interact and create more readily than do the “texts” of the dominant culture. Fiske proposes that there is still a strong drive, at least among those who fit in well with the dominant culture (straight white men) to evaluate the fan-attracting texts as the dominant culture does to the dominant texts, hierarchically, meanwhile those less likely to fit in with the dominant culture care less about valuation and hierarchy as tools for interacting with their fan-accessible texts.

Fiske proposes that fans engage in three kinds of “productivity” in response to and conversation with the texts they are a fan of. The first, semiotic productivity, involves the reading and understanding of a text, and isn’t specific to fandom in particular. The second takes the ideas developed in that semiotic reading and turns it into dialogue in the form of enunciative productivity, which is, basically, fan talk. Writing first in 1992, Fiske argues that this fan talk is often limited because there is a relatively small chance of overlapping fandoms within a fan’s immediate vicinity. This will later explode with the popularization of the internet. The final kind of productivity is textual, which sees fans produce their own texts in a complex web of interactions with the original texts and personal desires/creative impulses.

Fiske notes that fans and the dominant culture both revolve around accumulating collections of cultural artifacts, but that fans are generally more interested in the size of the collection whereas the dominant culture is generally more concerned with the monetary value of their collected materials. He notes also that because fan-attached texts aren’t usually valued by the dominant culture, their collections and productions are less likely to be valuable economically.

Fiske holds one way of seeing the difference between the fan and dominant cultures as being almost inalienable: the dominant culture is always going to be uninterested in the fan-attracting texts except as ways of extracting money from fans, while the fans will be uninterested in the official, proscribed use of a fan-attracting text and will instead value it for what they can do with it and how they can undermine it or fundamentally change it.

Fiske also writes that gender is a primary differentiator in the world of fandom, that differences in how fans react or respond to texts will tend to vary with their gender. He notes that race might also be part of this calculation but doesn’t think that it holds as much explanatory or differentiating power as gender and class do. This point is obviously arguable.

Context: Who is this author debating with and why? What is the context of the text’s production and distribution? What historical, cultural, etc. factors affect the way it makes meaning? Does the author seem to be in conversation with other scholars and/or paradigms? Where is this piece of writing centered in the field? What is their intervention in the literature/field? What text is this text in conversation with?

As stated above, Fiske is most interested in augmenting the work of Bourdieu to explicate the difference between the dominant cultural economy and the “shadow” cultural economy of fandoms. This is a valuable contribution, even if it only starts and doesn’t finish this conversation. Its own time of production in the pre-internet era severely limits its base explanatory power, though minor corrections and additions might address some of the new situations created by the internet. The biggest change that has made it less explanatory at this moment in time is the shift in the dominant culture to appropriate and absorb many facets of what was once limited to fan culture. the MCU, Star Wars, and the continued growth of videogames as a huge cultural product has made the relationship between fandoms and the dominant culture much more difficult to sharply distinguish from each other. How might this change in the relationship between the dominant and fan cultures explain the straight-white-male backlashes to diversity in popular (once-fan-based) media?

Gene Roddenberry’s Star Trek

Methodology: What is the methodological framework of this text? What methodological moves or questions does the author engage? What is their object of analysis?

Fiske’s task is to take ideas from Bourdieu’s concept of cultural economy and tease out the differences that occur when the texts aren’t those specified as valuable by the dominant culture. He provides examples based on his and other research into different fandoms of how fan economies vary from the dominant economies.

Rhetorical Moves: What are the major rhetorical moves of the author’s arguments?

The biggest rhetorical move is the sharp distinction between the dominant and fan cultures, which holds some value still but has been complicated by changes in both landscapes over the past 30 years. The same has happened with the other rhetorical move Fiske performs as he prioritizes gender over race (or sexuality, or even the complexities of gender) as the dividing line between different kinds of fans. A more thorough investigation of fan cultures would attend to these other dimensions of fans and fandoms.

Engagement & Application: How do I engage this text? How does this apply to my work? Does it support or provide a counterargument or model for strong intro or lit review? In other words, why is this piece of writing useful to me and/or how is it limited (bad writing style, problematic, didn’t consider x, y, and z)? Does it intersect with other items on the list?

I think the idea of looking at fandom through the lens of a cultural economy has its limitations, even as I understand how valuable it might be to my future studies. In the end, I think the economic lens can only go so far in explaining how fans respond to texts and why those responses come in the forms they do. That being said, I think Fiske will likely show up, in some form, in my later work.

Key Terms: What terms are key to the author’s argument, and are they operationalized explicitly or implicitly?

fandom, cultural economy, dominant culture, capitalism, industry, productivity, cultural knowledge, producerly, texts, gender, discrimination, hierarchy, habitus

Significant Quotations: What key quotations from this work would I want to have quick access to?

Fandom is typically associated with cultural forms that the dominant value system denigrates – pop music, romance novels, comics, Hollywood mass-appeal stars (sport, probably because of its appeal to masculinity, is an exception). It is thus associated with the cultural tastes of subordinated formations of the people, particularly with those disempowered by any combination of gender, age, class and race. (30)

We need to add to Bourdieu’s model gender, race and age as axes of discrimination, and thus to read his account of how culture works to underwrite class differences as symptomatic of its function in other axes of social difference. […] [H]e leaves proletarian culture and the proletariat as an undistinguished homogeneity. This leads him seriously to underestimate the creativity of popular culture and its role in distinguishing between different social formations within the subordinated. He does not allow that there are forms of popular cultural capital produced outside and often against official cultural capital. (32)

Fans discriminate fiercely: the boundaries between what falls within their fandom and what does not are sharply drawn. And this discrimination in the cultural sphere is mapped into distinctions in the social – the boundaries between the community of fans and the rest of the world are just as strongly marked and patrolled. (34-5)

Those who are subordinated (by gender, age or class) are more likely to have developed a habitus typical of proletarian culture (that is, one without economic or cultural capital): the less a fan suffers from these structures of domination and subordination, the more likely he or she is to have developed a habitus that accords in some respects with that developed by the official culture, and which will therefore incline to use official criteria on its unofficial texts. It would not be surprising in such a case to find that older fans, male fans, and more highly educated fans tend to use official criteria, whereas younger, female and the less educated ones tend towards popular criteria. (36-7)

Fan productivity is not limited to the production of new texts: it also participates in the construction of the original text and thus turns the commercial narrative or performance into popular culture. Fans are very participatory. […] This melding of the team or performer and the fan into a productive community minimizes differences between artists and audience and turns the text into an event, not an art object. […] The reverence, even adoration, fans feel for their object of fandom since surprisingly easily with the contradictory feeling that they also ‘possess’ that object, it is their popular cultural capital. (40)

Fan texts, then, have to be ‘producerly’, in that they have to be open, to contain gaps, irresolutions, contradictions, which both allow and invite fan productivity. They are insufficient texts that are inadequate to their cultural function of circulating meanings and pleasure until they are worked upon and activated by their fans, who by such activity produce their own popular cultural capital.  (42)

In the same way, the dominant habitus uses information about the artist to enhance or enrich the appreciation of the work, whereas in the popular habitus such knowledge increases the power of the fan to ‘see through’ the production process normally hidden by the text and thus inaccessible to the non-fan […]. This knowledge diminishes the distance between text and everyday life, […] or between star and fan. […] The popular habitus makes such knowledge functional and potentially empowering in the everyday life of the fan. (43)

In capitalist societies popular culture is necessarily produced from the products of capitalism, for that is all the people have to work with. The relationship of popular culture to the culture industries is therefore complex and fascinating, sometimes conflictive, sometimes complicitous or co-operative, but the people are never at the mercy of the industries – they choose to make some of their commodities into popular culture, but reject many more than they adopt. (47-8)