Working the Crowd: Movies and Mass Politics

GOING TO THE MOVIES has always been in part an experience of joining a crowd: picking up the buzz about the latest hit from friends and newspapers, feeling the line surge forward as the velvet ropes are lifted, getting carried along on a tide of rolling laughter. Yet film critics almost never speak of crowds or crowd responses when they analyze movies. Film theorists such as Christian Metz, Kaja Silverman, and Laura Mulvey go so far as to claim that people at Hollywood movies react as if they were utterly alone, each person becoming a spectator isolated in the dark fantasizing about the stars on the screen. ¹ Though such theorists often turn to social criticism, they repeatedly describe the audience as if there were only one individual reacting, speaking in the singular of "the Spectator," "the Male Gaze," the "All-Perceiving Subject," and the "Voyeur," never of crowd responses or mass fantasies or even social trends. Even critics such as Mary Anne Doane and Manthia Diawara who have sought to broaden spectator theory by considering that audiences may contain different kinds of spectators still treat these alternative spectators as individuals reacting separately to movies. ²

Part of the reason critics have ignored the ways that movies elicit crowd responses is that the dominant theory of crowd psychology—Freud's—treats members of a crowd as individuals. In Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego, Freud says that in a mass, each person is lost in a private, unconscious dream of loving the leader. ³ In other words, psychoanalysis converts the crowd back into a collection of spectators, and so it has become a crucial resource for film theory.

But there are other ways to conceive of the psychology of the crowd, and, what is most intriguing, Hollywood moviemakers definitely believed in a non-psychoanalytic crowd psychology. ⁴ Using the movie industry's own account of crowd behavior, we can construct a "crowd response theory" modeled on the methods by which psychoanalytic spectator theory is constructed. Before examining this alternative psychology, however, it will be useful to briefly summarize how spectator theory uses psychoanalysis, to suggest how an alternative psychology might be used to build an alternative film theory. Spectator theory applies psychoanalysis to two elements of the Hollywood experience: first, to the "cinematic apparatus," the structure of movie projection; and second, to the distinctive style of Hollywood movies. In spectator theory, the apparatus is described as comprising "the darkness of the auditorium, the resultant isolation of the individual spectator, the placement of the projector, source of the image behind the spectator's head." ⁵ This structure makes movie watching rather like dreaming in bed in the dark. The stylistic features of movies noted by spectator theorists are mostly those which produce the effect that the movie world is a complete, sealed reality, plus features which define geometrically and socially a position from which the movie is supposed to be viewed, what Nick Browne calls the "spectator-in-the-text." ⁶ The viewer thus seems both completely removed from the film world and located in a distinct position, becoming, as Miriam Hansen puts it, "the transcendental vanishing point of specific spatial, perceptual, social arrangements." ⁷ The sense that there is a transcendental point from which to view everything draws on unconscious feelings from early childhood to fuel ideological effects: the feelings everyone had for godlike parents are transferred to the dominant group within society and the viewer is projected as an ideal member of this dominant group (in the United States, white, middle-class males).

To build a crowd response theory then, we need two more elements besides a non-psychoanalytic psychology: an alternative description of the cinematic apparatus; and an alternative list of "textual" features of movies which elicit the crowd response rather than turning viewers into isolated spectators. All these necessary elements, including the psychological theory, can be found in one document that had tremendous influence on the way Hollywood movies were...