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conclusion DOING IT FOR bell: CULTURAL CRITICISM AND SOCIAL CHANGE Radical postmodernist practice, most powerfully conceptualized as a ‘‘politics of difference,’’ should incorporate the voices of displaced, marginalized, exploited , and oppressed (black) people. bell hooks, ‘‘Postmodern Blackness’’ Acontinuum connects classic noir and postclassic noir, the same continuum that connects feminism to third-wave feminism and postfeminism, and modernism to postmodernism. The endpoint is not the current ‘‘post’’ isms; these isms lead somewhere too. Modernist cultural critics Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer felt that film induced a dangerously passive state in spectators, onewhere imagination shut down in the face of the relentless consumption of the same old new product. In the mid-1940s, Horkheimer and Adorno collaborated on ‘‘The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception.’’ They asserted that ‘‘the culture industry as a whole has moulded men as a type unfailingly reproduced in every product’’ and added that all ‘‘the agents in this process, from the producer to the women’s clubs, take good care that the simple reproduction of this mental state is not nuanced or extended in any way.’’1 In his 1936 essay ‘‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,’’ Walter Benjamin took a more optimistic view of film’s potential. He suggests that the ‘‘progressive reaction [to art] is characterized by the direct, intimate fusion of visual and emotional enjoyment with the orientation of the expert.’’2 For Benjamin, the expert 155 status of cinema spectators, as they engage in the mass consumption of a film, enables a progressive rather than reactionary response. In the late 1990s and in the first decade of the twenty-first century, both reactionary and progressive noir texts appeared, and spectators consumed these texts with varying degrees of awareness. Adorno and Horkheimer give too little credit to the consumers of popular culture; Benjamin, perhaps too much. Nevertheless , Benjamin’s remarks speak to my own desire to enable competent readers of cultural texts, to instruct progressive readers who may also become progressive artists.The expert in the audience might well become the moviemakeror the cultural critic. I cite the views of the popular and scholarly press to evoke various audiences, to gauge their responses to filmic texts. Postmodern cultural critic Edward Said, in ‘‘Opponents, Audiences, Constituencies, and Community,’’ asks, ‘‘Who writes? For whom is the writing being done? In what circumstances?’’3 He goes on to suggest that these are ‘‘the questions whose answers provide us with the ingredients for making a politics of interpretation.’’4 The film reviewer in the popular press who sees and critiques sexism and racism at the movies bodes well for changing movies. If those writers revel in misogyny and fantasies of white male supremacy, then producers will continue to make movies that fulfill those longings. My goal as a film theorist, scholar, and teacher is to consider the way we read and understand film history and films noirs and even perhaps to change the way film represents gender, race, and class by facilitating an understanding of those issues in various audiences. Activism is writing, thinking, speaking, and teaching in a way that encourages critical participation. At my first Society for Cinema Studies conference in Denver in 2002, I excitedly attended a session on feminist film theory, the esteemed scholars of my graduate student days sitting on a panel at the front of the room.5 After the session I talked with my peers, other scholars who had recentlyentered academic careers from graduate schools across the county. We all consider ourselves feminists; we talked about the rich and rewarding nature of our own intellectual work with its inclusion of queer theory, race theory, and masculinity studies. For us, the panel discussion we had witnessed, with its nostalgia for past feminisms, seemed limited in focus.Yes, seventies and eighties feminist film theory starts us off thinking critically and complexly about film; yes, Laura Mulvey’s lucid and remarkably intelligent style serves as a fine model of academic film criticism; yes, I would and did start a syllabus for a feminist film theory course with ‘‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema.’’ From there, though, I moved to masculinity studies and bell hooks’s Reel to Real: Race, Sex, and Class at the Movies. Feminist film theory is alive and well in my scholarship and in the thinking and writing of my students, who constitute the future of film production, film reception, and film spectatorship. But these 156 DAMES IN THE DRIVER’S SEAT [3.138.33.178...

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