American Audiences on Movies and Moviegoing by Tom Stempel (review)

Reviews Tom Stempel. American Audiences on Movies andMoviegoing. Lexington : University Press of Kentucky, 2001. 280p. Ryan Simmons Utah Valley State College Stempel attempts to do for the movies whatJanice Radway did for the Harlequin romance in ReadingtheRomance and Cathy Davidson did for the colonialAmerican novel in Revolution andthe Word: make the reactions ofactual, everydayaudience members count more in their critical assessment. Too often, he asserts, academic film critics fail to account for the lively "blood sport" ofwatching movies in America, or for "how personal moviegoing is" (xi). Thus, throughout his book, Stempel describes the experience ofwatching movies not only in terms of technique , performance, and theme, but alsowith an eye toward neglected factors such as the environment in which they're watched (with a date, as part of a raucous crowd), the music ("wonderful and loud," as one subject recalls ofthe Raiders of theLostArk soundtrack), and even the trailer that prompts us to attend the movie in the first place. Stempel's approach is proudly and purely (well, almost) subjective : he's interested in how people respond to movies and doesn't much care to examine why. Rather than being a systematic study ofaudiences in terms ofeconomics or psychology, American Audiences on Movies andMoviegoing is really a sort of collective memoir ofa national lifetime going to the movies. That's aworthwhile goal, butStempels achievement ofit is uneven. Some problems are obvious—notably, that the 158 people he surveyed (mostly his own students at LosAngeles Community College) can't really stand in for awhole nation ofmoviegoers. While Stempel suggests that many movies (such as Star Wars, the subject ofits own chapter) workbetter than most critics admitwhen the audience's whole experience is considered, his respondents often seem even harsher and pickier than most critics. Not only Star Wars and Top Gun but critical darlings like Citizen Kaneand The Godfatherreceive their share ofaudience drubbings, and one wonders whether the predominance of Stempels own film-history students among those surveyed hasn't introduced a subtle bias. Are some of these assessments influenced by a desire to impress the teacher with a keen critical eye and a resistance to being too easily impressed? (Tb be fair, Stempel also includes comments suggesting that Kane, The Godfather, and even StarWarshave changed some viewers' ways ofunderstanding not only the world, but life itself.) We should give Stempel a little bit ofa break here: he intends this study to be a corrective to the overlyobjectified, sterile approach ofmany film studies, and so to complain about the intentional lack of quantified data would be to misunderstand the spirit of SPRING 2002 * ROCKY MOUNTAIN REVIEW * the book. We're meant not to be persuaded byhis findings, but to connectthem to our own moviegoing experiences. Still, some implications ofStempels studyare more disturbing and detractfrom thevalue ofthe book. An arguably benign stereotyping ofAfricanAmerican movie audiences pervades much ofthe chapter tided "Black and Dark," inwhich Stempel asserts, "Given the influence ofreligion in theAfrican American community, several of the seventies horror films that appealed to black audiences dealt with pseudo-religious subjects" (96). The chapter continues, frustratingly, with several accounts ofwhite viewers' discomfort at seeing movies like Menace IISociety and Nightmare on Elm StreetPart3: Dream Warriors in gang-riddled areas ofLos Angeles . While Stempel tries to mitigate the appearance ofa racial bias in this section , noting that the only time he personally felt threatened by an audience it was composed "almost exclusively [of] young white males" (102), the shape of the book—the way Stempel has gadiered and arranged these narratives—seems governed by some rather quaint assumptions about who Americans are. Despite his best efforts, theAmerican moviegoing audience comes offin his book, unfairly to them, as a middlebrow monolith. Even for readers interested in the entire moviegoing experience, there are more locker-room style descriptions ofgetting lucky at drive-ins ("The thing that was so great about it was that I even got to hold her breast inside ofher brassiere. I have never felt that good since") than are really required. Stempel throws in a few cursory movie-date narratives from women's perspectives to seem balanced, but the whole perpetuates a rather oldfashioned stereotype in which prim women ward offgrabby, hormonal men...