Textual Intimacy

Dear Richard,

When I was thinking about your contribution to film studies for this roundtable, I was struck by the fact that no matter which of my courses I turned to, your writing features prominently on the syllabus: if it's a course on film noir, then it's your "Homosexuality in Film Noir"; if it's women and film, it's "Four Films of Lana Turner"; if it's romance, it'll be the Brief Encounter book; even on my new course on Tilda Swinton (whom you have not written about), I taught Pastiche in relation to Lynn Hershman's 2002 film Teknolust starring Swinton, and this coming semester, I am teaching White alongside a comparison of how Swinton and Bowie embody what you called "extreme whiteness."¹

Thinking about Richard Dyer in the house of cinema, for me, means thinking about your writing in conjunction with teaching. And I have had the pleasure of teaching alongside you. When working with you on the annual Sexuality Summer School at Manchester, we ran a workshop called "Textual Intimacy." I have taken this as my title here to characterize just one aspect of your contribution to film studies.

My suggestion is that your modes of intimacy with films as texts defy the distinction between what Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick famously characterized as "paranoid and reparative readings": as has been well rehearsed, the paranoid mode achieves a mastery motivated by a hermeneutics of suspicion and revelation (uncovering ideology and exposing a text's hidden secrets); the reparative mode is motivated by affective connection, bringing the critic into a loving intimacy with the object of study.² Despite Sedgwick herself refusing to frame the distinction as an opposition, many others have turned it into a polarity. I think that your approach to close reading, your textual intimacy, is a mode of analysis that combines the best of these two approaches, and demonstrates the importance of not holding them apart. As you have often said: "What we feel about films matters." Like Raymond Williams, you are concerned with structures of feeling; as Williams put it: "Not feeling against thought, but thought as felt and feelings as thought."³

Here are two brief examples of how beautifully your textually intimate method demonstrates the false dichotomy of paranoid and reparative reading. And I think they show how you have brought your formation as a PhD student (supervised by the late Stuart Hall) at the Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies to film analysis in some subtle and yet vital ways: you find the context in the text and then pursue its implications beyond the text (showing how they are intimately intertwined); you travel across art forms, from cinema to art history, from literature to photography; you combine Marxism, feminism, and antiracism with a queer sensibility to produce a reading of culturally embedded formations and pleasures; and you're just terribly good at getting at that dimension of culture, which cannot quite be captured and pinned down but has a powerful grip upon our feelings.

Figure 1.

The final touch of Laura's shoulder. Brief Encounter (Cineguild, 1945).

My first example is taken from your BFI classic on the film Brief Encounter (David Lean, 1945) (or, as you always call it, Brief!). One wonderful example of your textual method is the discussion of the early scene when Alec (Trevor Howard) leaves Laura (Celia Johnson) at the railway station tearoom (Figure 1):

There is a close-up of him gently squeezing Laura's shoulder before going. This is the most obtrusive camerawork so far in the film, using a close-up to convey a sense of the momentousness (for Laura) of his departure. It is not a point-of-view shot, which would explicitly place the gesture within Laura's perception; it is the film as impersonal narration slipping into identification with Laura's personal position. . . . Brief Encounter puts a woman at the centre of the story, puts her in charge of telling the story, validates her account and perception of it. Yet there is a price to pay for this position of narrative...