Richard Maltby
Harmless Entertainment:
Hollywood and the Ideology of Consensus
(1983)
PART 1
THE CRAP-GAME
CHAPTER 1
TAKING HOLLYWOOD FOR GRANTED
...
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...
"MOVIES ARE YOUR BEST ENTERTAINMENT"
(Industry promotional slogan of early 1950, hastily with-
drawn when it was pointed out that its initials spelt
M. A. Y. B. E.)
What do you go for, go see a
show for?"--lyrics to Dames
entertainment is a type of
performance produced for pro-
fit, performed before a gener-
alised audience (the "public"),
by a trained, paid group who
do nothing else but produce
performances which have the
sole (conscious) aim of pro-
viding pleasure.Richard Dyer
The American cinema was a commercial institution, and its films were commercial products. Any assessment of those products must acknowledge this economic fact of
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life, and not merely because Hollywood took an industrial attitude to its own activities. Film, by its very nature, proposes a symbiotic relationship between the commercial and the aesthetic . It exists simultaneously in two states. Materially, it is a roll of celluloid, wound onto a metal spool and stored in a tin can. In use, it is a progressive series of "moving pictures, " evanescent shadow images projected onto a blank white screen. Unlike books or paintings, film undergoes a material transformation when it is viewed or experienced. This transformation is engineered by a combination of mechanical and optical processes needing complex projection equipment as well as a large space across which the magnified image is thrown. The economics of these material prerequisites forcibly encourage film to project itself before as large an audience as possible. The evolution of viewing apparatus, from the Kinetoscope and peepshow to the nickelodeon, picture palace and Cinerama, traces a history and an economic logic of larger pictures projected in front of larger audiences. The institution of the cinema is first of all a physical institution of the buildings in which it takes place.
In its inert, tin-can state, film is purely a trading commodity of no intrinsic value or use. As an economic entity it depends on its potential existence as a spectacle offering its consumers an aesthetic experience. It can only perform both its commercial and aesthetic functions when being exhibited to an audience. While showing a film need not involve a financial exchange between customer and exhibitor, the cost of projection, and for that matter of production, must be borne by someone. In capitalist practice, the consumers have conventionally paid for their experience, binding the material requirements for cinema's existence to a commercial system of exchange.
We might, however, consider what it is the spectator actually buys in the cinema. It is nothing tangible or permanent. Film offers the illusion of motion by projecting an uninterrupted flow of sequential images, and the temporal continuity of their projection is essential if the illusion is to be maintained. Each image has a place in this flow, but is of necessity only on temporary exhibition, replaced in a traction of a second by the image that follows it. The temporary nature of the cinematic experience, which is a material condition of film's existence, again differentiates it from stable aesthetic forms such as books or paintings. The spectator does not actually buy anything in the sense that he
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or she leaves the cinema with a material object at the end of a screening. He or she merely rents a seat in the cinema for the duration of a performance, a process we might call buying time. The aesthetic experience that has been purchased ends with the expiry of the commercial transaction that has predicated it. You leave the cinema behind you when you leave the movie theatre.
This transitoriness is a quality common to aesthetic experiences commonly described as "entertainment" ; for example, the circus, vaudeville, or playing a pinball machine. It is, of course, an inevitable condition of any performing art, since the act of performance itself is impermanent. But it may also be seen as a determining condition of entertainment as a sub-species of leisure. Sociologically, leisure can be approximately defined as a non-work activity that is relatively self-determined; that is to say, leisure time is segregated from time spent at work, and is occupied by activities undertaken voluntarily. Such a concept of leisure is a product of an industrial gociety which segments work as separate from other activities. Within a capitalist economy, leisure time can be regarded as a possession , purchased through the expenditure of time at work. At the same time, however, an industrial society turns the provision of leisure into a commercial activity , and what is categorized as leisure for one section of the population becomes work for another : professional sports or the theatre, for example. Leisure thus becomes an activity of consumption--consumption of time if nothing else--and, in consequence, is attached to production.
Leisure is therefore a type of activity which can be recognised through its dependence on commodities, the audience is entertained through the objects it chooses to possess. In the sense of conspicuous consumption this process is easily recognised, it is less easy to grasp in relation to the complementary sense of "spending time."
[Chaney, Fictions and Ceremonies]
In an economic system which treats time as a commodity (the eight-hour day, leisure-time, etc.), the buying and selling of time are normal activities, constantly expressed in the economic metaphors of "spending time," "time-consuming" and so on. Nineteenth-century industrialits regarded their labor force as simply a necessity for production, but in the early twentieth century it was recognized that capitalism must put labor to work as consumers
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as well. One mechanism of this process was to reduce working hours and increase leisure time. In 1926 Henry Ford argued, "It is the influence of leisure on consumption which makes the short day and the short week so necessary." Terms such as Show Business and "the entertainment industry" make semantic associations between amusement and commercial activity and describe entertainment as a subject of economics. Historically the development of commercial mass entertainment--preeminently the cinema--and consumer capitalism are closely related.
Hollywood's self-description as "the entertainment capital of the world," and its happy acceptance of its goal of producing "escapist entertainment," acknowledged that its function was to amuse and distract. The American cinema was, indeed, legally defined as both a business and entertainment by the Supreme Court in 1915, which declared films not to be vehicles for ideas . For fifty years Hollywood acquiesced in this opinion of itself, and provided the primary example of an industrial system devoted to what Lasch describes as "the organisation of leisure as an extension of commodity production." From its establishment as an industry (at the latest by 1922 with the founding of the MPPDA), the American cinema committed itself absolutely to the business of entertainment. Throughout the Classical Age of Hollywood (which lasted until the 1950s) the industry saw itself as manufacturing and merchandising a non-durable consumer commodity, which was the experience of "going to the movies," rather than the specific articles it produced. The picture palaces of the 1920s, the development during the 1930s of longer programs including newsreels, Screeno and other participant activities, indicate that what was being proffered by the cinema was a way of spending part of the "leisure dollar." Individual films were simply the principal manifestation of the mode in which it provided entertainment, but show business embraced such other forms of leisure as fan magazines, fashion and children's toys, as well as promoting consumerism and offering stars as celebrities for public consumption.
The debates over "Mass Culture' arose from the occupation, by commercial enterprises such as the cinema, of territory previously segregated from economics by its appellation as "Art." The cultural distinction between art and entertainment is far from precise: we may not know what entertainment is, but we recognize it when we see it. Its determining characteristics are negative: that which fails to
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be art is entertainment, as is that which lacks a socially or politically significant meaning. "Mere entertainment" is an idea frequently implicit in the term's use, and its connotations are triviality, ephemerality, and an absence of seriousness. Unlike art, entertainment is not "about" something outside itself, but is self-enclosed. Ernest Lindgren suggests entertainment is
In the form of fiction, at least, ... the use of representation to create make-believe situations which are designed to arouse emotion for its own sake, and for the mere pleasure of having it aroused. It is not intended that the emotion shall be carried forward into the practical affairs of life. The emotion is both aroused (titillated is perhaps a better description) and satisfied within a self-contained framework.
[Lindgren, The Art of the Film]
["summarizing ideas" in Collingwood, The Principles of Art]This self-contained quality, with its inevitable connotation of a lack of seriousness, is the most frequent charge by which entertainment is indicted. Even though their language and their political precepts are at odds, both the elitist critics of "Mass Culture" and the theorists of the Frankfurt School argue the existence of what Dwight MacDonald termed "Gresham's Law in Culture, " in which mass entertainment drives out Art by mimicking and debasing its forms. Mass culture, it is alleged,
pre-digests art for the spectator and spares him effort, provides him with a short-cut to the pleasures of art that detours what is necessarily difficult in genuine art.
[Greenberg, "Avant-Garde and Kitsch"]
At the same time, it forces Art to compete on its vulgar economic terms, or else encourages its ghettoization into an Avant-Garde protected in one way or another from market forces. For Adorno and Horkheimer, who saw this process not simply as a matter of cultural debasement but as an ideological instrument for repressing the difficult, subversive qualities of art, the shallowness of entertainment reduced it to a commodity of consumption which reinforced the exploitative pattern of bourgeois systems of production. "Amusement under late capitalism is the prolongation of work."
These analyses investigated the function of entertainment and, however they phrased it, generally agreed that entertainment was an ideological commodity. But definitions
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of entertainment have, in the main, tended to be affective rather than formal , and describing entertainment as that which is not art in a society which professes pluralism gets you nowhere . One man's meat is still another man's poison. As a function of leisure, entertainment is "deliverance from boredom." As a particular kind of leisure activity, however, entertainment must be defined by its specific formal features. Kaplan distinguishes between entertainment and Johann Huizinga's view of play by suggesting that play involves the subject actively, while entertainment is passive and controlled by others. Such a definition fails to elucidate distinctions that exist in ordinary usage about the relative cultural value of different forms of leisure.
Among the arts of performance, there is a broad, commonly assumed distinction between the performances of High Culture, consisting in performances of musical or dramatic texts which exist independently of any production of them, and the performances of entertainment, in which the text does not have the status of a fixed referent but may be infinitely revised with cultural impunity. Clearly, this distinction between "official" and "unofficial" cultural forms can only be regarded as a tendency, and not as in any sense absolute. However, the sacredness of a "text" by Shakespeare or Tchaikovsky bears on any particular production of it in a way quite different from the responsiveness a stand-up comic brings to his performance of routines before any particular audience.
Of course the
sacredness of a "text"
may or may not be worth hanging onto in any given case. But this has nothing necessarily to do with the transient-durable distinction. A highly embellished version of a "sacred" text can, potentially, achieve a new durability as "art" just as well as any other version. The difference, rather, is in who keeps the gate and collects the money.
The funny thing about this "sacredness" on one hand and nothing-being-sacred on the other is that both are properly "collective" aspects of art, and both are indispensible precisely because they are collective and "durable" rather than individual and ephemeral.
Implicit in the contrast are distinctions related to the durability of the "text" and between two understandings of the concept of performance. Theatrical performance, in the Grand Tradition of the English theatre from Kean to Olivier, is essentially a matter of interpretation and convincing imitation. In discussing Olivier's Hamlet, there is an implicit assumption that "Hamlet" is a fixed entity, inscribed in the words on the pages of The Complete Works of William Shakespeare. In this sense, performance is primarily a matter of inflecting a given object. Kaplan illustrates both this point and the absence of a sociological distinction between entertainment and art when he says,
The entertainer does respond to his audience, but fundamentally it is a one-way communication; no serious violinist would cut Bach's "Chaconne" in half because of a restless audience.
[Kaplan, Leisure: Theory and Policy]
The stand-up comic, on the other hand, is obliged to respond to his audience in exactly the way Kaplan suggests
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the violinist does not. To carry on regardless would be, in the vernacular of vaudeville, to "die" before the audience.
Stand-up is a particularly interesting example because comics also workshop their routines intensively. This suggests that "entertainment" can be highly refined on the production end, i.e. in a way that is quite incongruous with reception in the mode of "entertainment." i.e. The disposable,
self-contained
leisure experience actually requires immense effort to design and execute.
We can, then, distinguish between two types of performance: that of the actor, whose primary relationship is with a pre-existing text , and that of the entertainer, whose primary relationship is with the audience . Where the actor performs the text, what the entertainer does is to perform himself, to enact himself as a fiction constructed in collaboration with his audience. The theatrical actor attempts to disguise his presence in the act of performance, immersing his own existence and the audience's suspended disbelief in the character he portrays rather than his portrayal of that character. The entertainer , by contrast, asserts his presence in the act of performance, constantly reminding his audience of his actuality , whether it be in the spectators' knowledge of the tightrope walker's physical vulnerability (if she falls she will break her neck) or in the comic's asides directly addressed to his audience. It is this latter sense of performance as self-assertion that I shall employ from now on.
Perhaps ironically (paradoxically?), there is honesty in
reminding his audience of his actualityand deceit in
disguising his presence
.
The cinema might seem to occupy an ambiguous position in this typology of performance. It is in itself a fixed text, which appears to deny it the flexibility of response possessed by audience-related performances, while at the same time it does not provide the opportunity for variable interpretation provided by theatrical performance. To clarify its position, it will be necessary to examine the relationship the cinema posits between a film and its audience. Before doing that, however, it is worth pointing out that two conditions of entertainment are particularly appropriate to the material form of film. First is the idea of transitoriness, which is implicit in the ephemeral nature of the cinematic image. The other is the proposition that entertainment is self-contained: "going to the movies" is an event, marked off from other activities by a sustained set of segregations. It takes place in a separate building, which conventionally has this exclusive function and a unique architecture. Its accommodation and lighting are arranged to reduce extraneous sensory perception to a minimum, while the film itself is formally isolated by the strong caesuras of the house lights going down at the beginning and coming up at the end, and the internal device of its opening and closing credits. This experience was, of course, intensified by the grandiose decor of the picture palaces, which impressed even more forcefully on audiences the sensation of being in another world, but the formal devices that insulate the spectator are the same in any cinema. However well-worn the metaphor of the Dream
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Factory may be, the dreaming state remains the most evocative analogy to the cinematic experience, suggesting as it does the contradictory position of the spectator as participant witness to a fantasy not under his or her control. What is perhaps most important about the familiar cinematic sensation of being awake in the dark is the way that it is separated off from other activities, protecting both itself and its spectators for a while from the world outside. This separation, which V. F. Perkins describes as a "public privacy," constitutes it as a self-contained event, formally immune to and removed from events outside the cinema.
David Chaney suggests that
There is a recurrent paradox that as metropolitan provision swamps regional variation, so that we seem to live more in a world of shared forms, there is an increasing emphasis upon retreating from public civility to private individual experience.
[Fictions and Ceremonies]
The formal arrangements of the cinema serve to insulate the audience from each other at the same time that they expose them to an identical apparition. When compared to the audience's experience of theatre, these arrangements precisely chart Chaney's paradoxical movements towards shared forms and private experience. Television, of course, extends both movements even further.
Well, some of this (much, perhaps) has been attempted by (and even successfully institutionalized) by "art." The recent symphony orchestra has imposed much the same thing upon its audience, against which all kinds of grievances have been levelled. Why no such grievances against the cinema? The consultants, who con-fuse and in-sult their clients, say it's the presentation and not the product that is at fault. But if there is a contemporaneous art form which also uproots the audience from quotidian experience, shrouds them in darkness, enforces certain arbitrary conventions, and presents something highly artificial, and if this contemporaneous art form manages to be wildly and ragingly popular while the symphony orchestra enjoys a mere bitter and protracted "death," then maybe it always has been about the product.
THE CINEMATIC CONTRACT"The Cinema exists in the
distance between the audience
and the screen."
Jean-Luc GodardRecent critical theories of film, developed out of the rarified atmosphere of Marxist semiotics and Lacanian psychoanalysis, have proposed a model of the cinema that locates the spectator as an essentially passive figure acted on by the film. The individual subject (the spectator) is deprived of his or her centrality by a theoretical assertion that he or she is constituted in a prior existing system,
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which may be identified as "a linguistic system," "the imaginary," or "ideology." The integration of these theoretical discourses by their originators and disciples suggests that we can take these various terms to apply to different aspects of "the system of ideas and representations which dominate the mind of a man or a social group." The individual subject, deprived of such false bourgeois attributes as free will by his or her restriction within a system of language which determines his or her consciousness, is seen as a receptacle for the various manifestations of this pre-existent and determinist system. The correlative of such a theoretical construction is that the primary object of study is seen to be the language system rather than any particular language event. Despite its immense complexities as a theoretical and analystical discourse, such an approach to the cinematic experience seems to be somewhat simplistic , reducing the audience to a passive amalgam of individuated but not individual receivers of pre-determined messages.
This approach has two weaknesses, which ultimately derive from its origin as a theoretical systemic model. Firstly, it discards Chaney's paradoxical relationship between shared form and private experience by describing the form as a system and singularizing the audience into separate spectators, to whom the system is applied . This singularization is the exact reverse of the cinema's optical process. The camera records a field of vision from a singular point of view, which is itself spatially contiguous to the space it records. In projection, however, the camera's point of view is abstracted from its original spatial context and universalized for the audience, who, wherever they are sitting in the cinema, see the field of view from the same, by now abstracted, point of view. By this process of spatial abstraction and universalization the camera/projector does not so much constitute the spectator as its subject as indicate the difference between perception inside and outside the camera. The single perspective is pluralized by its presentation to a plural audience.
Unmistakably, reproduction as offered by picture magazines and newsreels differs from the image seen by the unarmed eye. Uniqueness and permanence are as closely linked in the latter as are transitoriness and reproducability in the former.
[Walter Benjamin, "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction"]
In the third quarter of the seventeenth century, Samuel van Hoogstraten, a Dutch painter and theorist of perspec-
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tive, constructed a peepshow in which the spectator, looking through a hole in the side of the box, would see a three-dimensional view of the interior of a room. The painting, on five of the interior surfaces of the box, presents its illusion of monocular perspective only from the point at which the peephole is cut, and the box is designed so that it can be viewed from that point alone. Such an artefact, perhaps the archetypal product of the optics of bourgeois individualism, can precisely be said to constitute the viewer as its subject, since it obliges the spectator to adopt a precise geographical position in relation to the image. The cinema, on the other hand, does the very opposite in the way it establishes the spectator's spatial relationship to the screen. The camera records the scene before it from a unique optical position, which the projector then pluralizes and makes equally available to every spectator in the theatre. This pluralization of the image in part accounts for the experiential differences between cinema and theatre, and also emphasizes the distinction between the spectator's perceptions within the cinema and those he or she experiences outside it. The result is to mark a distinction between the fiction of the image and the corporeal, material reality of the spectator, which, Walter Benjamin suggests, "permits the audience to take the position of the critic, without experiencing any personal contact with the actor."
One example of this distinction is an audience's reaction to point-of-view shots taken through car windshields in chase sequences, or the switchback ride sequence in This Is Cinerama. The audience will react physically to such scenes, jumping up and down in their seats as the car hits bumps. But at the same time that they are most obviously viscerally associating with the image before them, the spectators are most concretely aware that they are watching an illusion . The motion might make them sick, but they do not think themselves in danger of falling off the rollercoaster. Chaney describes this "feature of the spectacle" as fulfilling the audience's "desire for vicarious authenticity," and providing "an opportunity for a member of the audience to participate in and yet be distanced from someone risking his life crossing the Niagara Falls, an organization spending many millions of pounds, and Christians actually being eaten by lions." It is not a matter so much of the camera/projector's imposing a point-of-view on the audience as a question of their adopting the camera's perspective. The distinction is between a diktat and a voluntary agreement, but the distinction is essential. If the individual spectator
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is irredeemably fixed in position by the image, then the possibilities of his or her relation to its signification are at best limited to what Stuart Hall describes as "preferred," "negotiated" or "subversive" decodings or readings. If, on the other hand, the audience's role of participant witness is a voluntary one, then their relationship with the image is open to much wider, polyvalent, interpretations. I am suggesting that such polyvalence is implicit in the pluralized nature of the cinematic image as presented to the audience, and that attempts to describe the cinema as constituting its subject misinterpret the nature of the exchange between the audience and the screen .*
To this description of the audience's relation to the image as polyvalent it might be objected that they in fact have no choice as to what they look at. The film preexists its audience in its selection and ordering of images. But in that selection and ordering, it also offers the audience a multiplicity of fictional perspectives. Within any sequence of the most conventional Hollywood fiction the camera may cut among half a dozen distinct spatial placements and provide as many different viewpoints on the events. The cut, for which there is no literary or linguistic equivalent, is an even more obvious instrument to distinguish between the process of cinematic and non-cinematic perception. Only in the cinema can we move our viewpoint without moving physically. The task of the spectator--which is an active task, and a necessary one for even the most basic comprehension of film--is to correlate the separate visual viewpoints, comprehend their spatial relationship, and construct a fiction out of their juxtaposition. Those who propose that the cinema constitutes its subject are in a sense giving no more credit to the audience's capacity than the producers who objected to the introduction of the close-up because the spectators would be confused as to what had happened to the rest of the character. Rather than convert it into a determinist relationship between film cause and spectator effect, we should try to preserve the paradox that the camera's presentation encourages the view-
__________
*It is worth noting that detailed analyses of the proposition that the film constitutes its audience subject have concentrated almost exclusively on the atypical visual rhetoric of the direct point-of-view shot. Even from its own theoretical position, this approach has a great deal more of the image stream to account for than it has yet done.
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er's participatory identification with the performances it presents at the same time that it demonstrably reveals itself as artificial.*
It might be more useful to offer a model of the film-audience relationship based on a model of contractual relations. There is, of course, a legal contract established between spectator and exhibitor by the sale of an admission ticket; that is why box offices display notices announcing that "the management reserves the right to..." The obligations under this contract are, however, limited: try demanding our money back on the grounds that you didn't like the film! However, the broader notion of a contractual relationship between film and audience serves first of all to make the point that the audience's commitment to the film is a voluntary one, particularly since they have already fulfilled their part of the contract by paying the price of admission before seeing the film.** In one sense, the cinematic contract may be taken to be the arrangement by which the filmmakers consent to provide the sequential materials necessary for the construction of a fiction, and the spectator consents to undertake its construction, remaining free to determine significance wherever he or she may choose to locate it. David Bordwell and Kristin Thompson's distinction between plot and story may make the point clearer:
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*Walter Benjamin concisely expresses the paradox of the camera: "In the studio the mechanical equipment has penetrated so deeply into reality that its pure aspect freed from the foreign substance of equipment is the result of a special procedure, namely the shooting by the specially adjusted camera and the mounting of the shot together with other similar ones. The equipment-free aspect of reality here has become the height of artifice; the sight of immediate reality has become an orchid in the land of technology."**We can distinguish two levels of performance participation (negotiation). The first is those social skills displayed in buying tickets, finding one's seat, observing the conventions of attention and applause and managing exiting. The second level is only analytically distinguishable from the first, but it relates to the development of identity involved in attending performances of a distinct style... By patronizing a certain type of performance an individual is asserting a conception of self with distinctive aesthetic tastes and communal commitments.
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The story, then, is a mental reconstruction we make of the events in their chronological order and in their presumed duration and frequency. The plot is the way in which these events are actually presented in the film.
[Bordwell and Thompson, Film Art]
I will elaborate on this distinction and add other terms to it later, but for the moment it is enough to observe that it is obviously possible to construct a wide variety of stories from one plot, simply by varying the emphasis placed on different plot events . Anyone who has ever tried to tell someone else the story of a film, or, even worse, tried to explain "what's happened so far" to someone who has come in late, will know what I mean. The process of constructing a fiction is formally retrospective : it requires a distance between the fictional events and the spectator who puts them to use. In practice, the audience construct the fiction as they go along, relying on their individual powers of memory and observation to locate the material the film provides them with in the overall pattern of the fiction they construct.
Two things should by now be clear. First, the spectator is not a passive recipient of the film . He or she is assigned a task which must be performed if he or she is to elicit any meaning from it. The audience, then, have to work at their entertainment; they have, in fact, to entertain themselves from the material provided on the screen.*
The work involved may not be very hard, and a knowledgeable spectator performs it as unconsciously as he or she might perform a simple task on a factory production line, but the fact that the cinematic contract does provide the spectator with a task to perform if the fiction of the film is to be brought into being is empirically demonstrated every
__________
*They may, for example, choose to do this in "deviant" ways quite contrary to the filmmakers' expectations: the Camp appreciation of B-movies is one example; the repeated viewings of cult films like The Rocky Horror Picture Show, in which audiences dress up as their favorite characters in the film and recite the dialogue with them, is another; tearing up cinema seats during screenings of Rock Around the Clock is a third; and adolescent sexual experimentation in the back row or the drive-in is obviously an extreme possibility in constructing your own entertainment in the cinema.
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time a cinematic convention is ruptured and the spectator has to negotiate a new spatial or character relationship.*
My second point is that an alternative description of the audience's activity is to call it a process of performance. Entertainment is not a system or a material object, it is an activity. The product the American film industry sold in its movie theatres was entertainment, but that commodity was a process in which the audience was contractually obliged to perform a function. Kaplan's distinction between play and entertainment does not, in this analysis, hold. Applying my earlier definition of performance as an act of self-assertion the audience becomes not simply an active presence in the process of cinematic articulation, but necessarily a self-conscious presence. I shall argue later that the cinema of the consensus (which to some extent coincides with what is now commonly, if vaguely, called "the classical Hollywood narrative") seeks to construct a mode of articulation in which the self-conscious role of the audience is reduced to a minimum so that its cinematic fictions may be consumed with as much ease and as little work as possible. To a degree this makes my empirical interpretations of the effects of the consensual mode on fictional construction similar to the conclusions of the theorists I am criticizing. But there are, or at least there seem to me to be, several crucial points of methodological difference, which reveal themselves in terminology. I shall argue that the cinema of the consensus effectively restricts its products to a unilateral mode of communication, in which the spectator is encouraged to construct the fiction intended by the filmmakers because of the conventional arrangements of the fictional material. But I emphatically do not accept that such a procedure is inherent in the cinematic process, or within the Hollywood cinema. The Interludes on Dissent exist precisely to make this point: that it was and
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*Recent developments in the theory of motion perception have invalidated the idea that the cinematic illusion results from persistence of vision, and suggest that the spectator is involved in a much more complex unconscious process. "Just as film theorists have supplanted naive notions of cinema as a simple copy of the world with an attempt to come to grips with the medium as a system of representation and signification, so too must the naive notions of persistence of vision and of direct perception be replaced with an effort to understand visual perception itself as a transformational and representational process."[Joseph and Barbara Anderson, "Motion Perception in Motion Pictures"]
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is possible to make films that contest the assumptions of the consensus by questioning, breaking or exposing its conventional arrangements--and still remain within the Hollywood system.
My second point of disagreement with the systematizers is a discrepancy in the objects of our inquiry. I am much less concerned with the language system of cinema than I am with the language event; that is, with the film as experienced by its audience and as located in its specific historical and ideological context. I am unconvinced that the cinema is either a language or a language system because its production of meaning is both too mimetic and too connotative to be systematized. A science of connotations strikes me as an inherently contradictory proposition. I do not deny the value of a great deal of recent semiological analysis, and it will, I hope, be clear that my own methodlogical techniques have been influenced by formalist and structuralist approaches to film. But I am inclined to think that the study of the cinema is at the moment more in need of historical and textual research than it is of further theoretical speculation.
Finally, I disagree with the assumptions about ideological intention and effect in much recent theoretical writing. European presumptions about ideology cannot be imported unproblematically into the analysis of a culture which has so steadfastly refused to acknowledge their existence. Of course, American society can be subjected to class-based European modes of analysis, but in the process, some acknowledgment should be made of the fact that American institutions do not recognize themselves in these terms. The concept of a dominant ideology fits more readily into a society that consciously operates class divisions than it does in one which propounds its egalitarianism. America's Great Refusal of Marxism is a curious cultural fact the ramifications of which go far beyond the scope of this book. But while the English or French cinemas can clearly be seen to be operating class-based ideologies, I am less convinced that such assumptions can be readily recognized in Hollywood. Equally, the conventional structures of Hollywood which determine its unilateral mode of communication cannot automatically be regarded as hegemonic in purpose even if they achieve that effect. The evolution of the mechanisms of consensus cinema was not concerned with the establishment of an ideological hegemony or the imposition of a particular, ideologically conditioned perceptual system. It was rather a
[25]
technological evolution geared to the production of more efficient entertainment.* Hollywood sought to minimize its audience's effort both because it was economically more effective for it to do so, and because that was what it presumed its audience wanted. Within the contractual framework I have proposed, there is good reason for thinking that it was correct in its presumption. The development of Hollywood's fictional conventions was a gradual process, conducted progressively in film after film, and took the form of an economic dialogue between filmmakers and audience at the box-office. Innovations in form or content were negotiated by their financial success or lack of it; a crude mechanism of consultation, no doubt, but a mechanism nevertheless.**
My proposition, then, is that while the American cinema of the consensus may have established itself as a hegemonic and unilateral system of communication, it did so not out of a conscious or unconscious desire to impose a dominant ideology on its audience, but with the active participation of that audience, which was also maintained through its products. If Hollywood films governed the perception of their audiences, they did so with "the consent of the governed."
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*In contrast to Europe, the private business sector in American history has been a more and more important factor in affecting activities, attitudes, and tastes for leisure... education or quality are not primary goals of business. The leisure dimension of American life, inasmuch as a portion of it is dominated by goods or services provided for financial, profit, is efficiently served instead of purposefully elevated.[looks like a quotation whose marks and endnote have accidentally been omitted]
**I am, of course, making certain assumptions about the legitimacy of capitalist procedures that many Marxist critics would dispute. This seems to me exactly the problem in much critical analysis of the American cinema. I do not seek to defend monopoly capitalism as an economic or ideological institution. I merely intend to acknowledge that that was the condition within which the American cinema operated. Any analysis of its products must place it within that condition rather than insisting against history that it ought to have operated under different conditions.
