Cinema, Theory, and Political Responsibility in Contemporary Culture

Patrick McGee has written books on a wide range of literary and cultural topics, including “style as ideology” in Joyce’s Ulysses (Paperspace, 1988), the question of value in modern and postcolonial literature (Telling the Other, 1992), and “the ends of race” (Ishmael Reed, 1997). In the present study he explores the political significance of aesthetic analysis in the context of contemporary cultural studies. Taking as the practical focus for his discussion a close reading of Neil Jordan’s The Crying Game, McGee energetically enlists the theories of Adorno, Derrida, and Lacan in the service of film studies. In the first chapter, he considers the relation of Adorno to the general field of cultural studies, with illustrative analyses drawn from film—a bizarre scene in It’s a Wonderful Life and, in a discussion of Lacanian sublimation, a comparative reading of Wharton’s and Scorsese’s versions of The Age of Innocence. The second chapter is a more specific discussion of Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory and the “intersubjectivity of mimesis.” Chapter 3 is devoted to the detailed reading of Jordan’s film but also extends the analysis of Adorno, challenging received views of his cultural theories. (In discussing “sexual nations,” McGee also pointedly returns to Lacan and the concept of sublimation.) Turning in the final chapter to Derrida and his critics, the author considers the question of “responsibility” (raised by Habermas, Hogan, McGowan, et al.) and the academic arena in which cultural studies are pursued, asking finally how political responsibility can be reconciled with the concept of the university as a democratic institution. Art and the university, according to McGee, share a common feature: they are usually, if ideally, regarded as autonomous realms that resist the determination of economic and political interests, while they still play a governing role in ethical and political discourse.

McGee’s detailed, nuanced analysis of The Crying Game occupies the central section of the book (79–160). Here he demonstrates how film can be both a product of the culture industry and an artistic critique of its assumptions. Remarking that Jordan’s film “unabashedly seduces its spectators through an overt deception and organizes itself structurally around a series of narrative ruptures and displacements,” McGee argues that the film, like the art work in general for Adorno, is “a system of contradictions.” Though it may seek to transcend the social context determining its commodity form, the film also “projects onto the spectators an experience of disappointment that requires what Adorno called a second reflection.” This involves a contextual reading that must “adapt itself to what is singular in the work as the articulation of a specific historical context.”

McGee illustrates how The Crying Game “indirectly responds” to Irish and British history, colonial and postcolonial Caribbean history, the histories of sexuality and race, and, most important, “the history of the concept of the nation.” His analysis does not attempt to subordinate the work to a stable context but rather “to situate it in relation to the social processes of which it is a part.”

He develops the argument that Adorno’s critique of the “aesthetic monad” and Derrida’s speculations on intellectual responsibility “offer crucial models for the political and ethical functions of critical work, including close reading as a form of contextual analysis.” Much that he has to say about the two faces of The Crying Game as commodity and critique could be fruitfully adapted to other films and other conflictual moments in film history; an obvious instance would be the adversarial relation between émigré directors like Fritz Lang and the Hollywood production system governed by the values of its immigrant moguls and the mass public whose taste they helped to shape.

On balance, McGee in his treatment of Adorno proposes a fresh approach to film studies and to the claims of political criticism. In reconfiguring Derrida’s theory of undecidability, he addresses some of the most crucial debates on freedom and the ethics of intellectual work in social institutions like the university...