At the Cinema

I had been looking forward to this week’s readings, hoping to find a defense of the filmic spectator as capable and important to the cinema’s ability to be. I wasn’t wholly disappointed. Baudry seems to relocate the film’s action in the spectator himself (“ ‘subject’ as the active center and origin of meaning” – 355). Nevertheless, I am unclear if by subject he means spectator or the intersection of spectator/camera/projector/screen. This leaves me a bit disheartened with the way spectators are not in control over the meanings they make from a film. Baudry especially shows that the human is not in control. At best, the human/camera/projector/screen is the site of the action: “term ‘subject’ here as a vehicle and as a place of intersection of the ideological implications” (357). We’ve slipped into technological control: the camera and its buddies did it, the machine is responsible. The spectator is everywhere and nowhere: “ ‘In the cinema I am simultaneously in this action and outside it, in this space and out of this space. Having the power of ubiquity, I am everywhere and nowhere.’” (360, footnotes). My short-lived victory for the spectator’s importance is pyrrhic, since being the site of meaning-making is not a great consolation when the meaning is determined by the dominant ideology’s wish for conformity and ability to obscure its controlling influence (364-5). However, how the dominant ideology can control an apparatus as its stooge when neither the producers nor the consumers have any agency baffles me.

Perhaps the problem of the spectator’s lack of agency is the spectator’s basic unwillingness to engage (tones of Adorno and Horkheimer in the background)? At the cinema, the pre-mobile, highly-visual status of our infancy (363) is reproduced. Do adults go to the theater to become children again, to lose themselves in fiction in triplicate (Metz, 833)? Is it true that we can achieve the unthinking thought pointed out by Travis by focuses only on the means of communication (camera/projector/screen) rather than the content? This reminds me of the Blues Traveler song “Hook” (I know, from way back when), which explicitly foregrounds that what is being said matters less than how it’s being said. We don’t lose ourselves in the fiction, but the camera (364). This troubles me, because I cannot lose my awareness of self and the surrounding situation in a terrible movie. Of course, it’s possible that my low-brow instincts to lose myself in a movie are ill-advised, as Katie points out how identification/enjoyment might undermine any capacity film has to be political. Personally, however, Brecht’s distanciation applied to film and serving to undercut my identification with the content doesn’t sound all that much fun, though it might be intellectually or ideologically best for me. All I know is that, amidst all my bafflement surrounding the film and its theory, I’d like to be at the cinema right now. Or asleep. Katie might give me a way to do both: “we view film in a state that is not unlike the psychological state in which we dream.” Spring break anyone?