File spoon-archives/film-theory.archive/film-theory_1995/film-theory_Feb.95, message 18


Date: Sat, 4 Feb 1995 20:19:30 -0500 (EST)
From: Roger Warren Beebe <rwb1-AT-acpub.duke.edu>
Subject: Re: Point-of-view, primary id and all that jazz


On Thu, 2 Feb 1995, Seymour Chatman wrote:
> 
> "Camp" and other cross-grain readings may be explained as explicit, 
> discursive rejections of the normative (not "normal") reader/viewer that 
> the text constructs.  They are not misreadings, but deliberate (and now 
> institutionalized) reinterpretations, deconstructions of intended 
> meanings.  The intended meanings of classical Hollywood films are usually 
> quite clear (see Bordwell, Thompson, and Staiger).  Noir, of course, 
> began the subversion of "normalcy," and we're all glad to see Tarantino 
> continuing the glorious countertradition.
> 

Generally I think I agree with this point (especially with the Tarantino
laudation), but what I'm wondering is whether the intended readings
are so readily accessible as to make the concept of the normative 
reader as amazingly transparent as it seems to be when thus expressed.

The problematic example that immediately comes to mind is that of the
types of readings done by someone like Frederic Jameson.  (I guess
the specific example I was thinking of is his reading of "Jaws".)
The problem that his style of reading represents for the belief in
a simplified reception theory based on the notion of the missive and
its apparent decipherability in terms of authorial intention is that
Jameson's readings are based on close readings of the films he deals
with yet yield results which don't seem to fall readily in line with
what one would consider the transparent meanings one finds in common
circulation.

[phew!]

To take a concrete example which may clarify the above babblings, when
Jameson suggests that Jaws is about the death of cottage industry and
its replacement by the united representatives of the technocracy and
the forces of law and order, is this a non-normative reading?  If one
looks at the film through Jameson's eyes, this reading seems really
textually compelling.  However, this meaning is not the "transparent"
meaning which is all about three guys coming together to kill a shark.

I don't think Jameson's reading (nor a bunch of other academic spins
you could put on this film--homosociality, the threat of the alien,
the monstrous id-created attack on self, &c.) can be considered
anomalous or aberrant without reducing the role of academia to one
of systematic misreading (which one may wish to do).  

I've gone on far too long already, so I'll wrap up, but I have to say
that I don't see how the model of "normative reader" accomadates the
seeming anomaly of the active/academic reader.  Is reading a fundamentally
non-normative response?

Enough,
Roger.

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