Thinking About Movie Sentiment: Toward a Reading of Random Harvest

GEORGE TOLES Thinking About Movie Sentiment: Toward a Reading of Random Harvest The life of human beings is not passed in the sphere of transitive verbs alone. Martin Buber, I and TL·u The work of someone like Dorothy Wordsworth consists of the effort to melt the hostile knot of self, which is perception in the I-it relationship. When the heart melts, it can itself become the vision, and a reciprocity has been established that goes beyond the transitive view of nature. Irving Massey, The Gaping Pig The sentimental film is a tempting but troublesome place to begin any discussion of the formidable role that emotion plays in the act of movie watching. It is tempting because this type of film so directly solicits feeling and revels in its display. The difficulties arise from the discomforts and uncertainties of speaking about the process of emotional identification in the first person, from a position that is, unavoidably , vulnerable. A familiar alternative strategy, amply explored in current film theory, is for the spectator critic to distance herself from the emotional content of the sentimental narrative and, by reconstructing a film's method of positioning an imaginary spectator within that content, demonstate how she is coerced, deceived, or otherwise taken Arizona Quarterly Volume 49 Number 2, Summer 1993 Copyright © 1993 by Arizona Board of Regents issN 0004-161 76George Toles over by "mechanisms" of feeling. An arguable weakness of this strategy is that it tries to interpret emotional response from a place too far removed from it, as though the flow offeeling, when strongly resisted, is still much the same phenomenon that is encountered by the "immersed" and assenting spectator. To modify some well-known lines from T. S. Eliot's "East Coker": "Because one has only learnt to get the better of [feelings]/For the thing one no longer has to [feel] or the way in which/ One is no longer disposed to [feel] it."1 The rhetoric of sensibility, in the impoverished form in which it survives for us as a vehicle for aesthetic and moral inquiry, seems inadequate for the task that confronts us: treating the force of sentiment in film as an actual experience rather than an object for theory to act upon. "Sympathy," "passion," "idealization," "powers of spirit," "exaltation" are no longer terms to which we can readily assign values or which we can take for granted as valid components of imaginative expression. There is considerable doubt among literary theorists whether any of these "states" can be pried loose from the delusive hierarchies and exploded assumptions of the religious/cultural systems that gave rise to them. Can we presently speak on behalfofthe feelings that sentimental films sometimes make available to us without becoming apologists for old orthodoxies and subtly tyrannical codes of behavior that we do well to leave behind? Perhaps no one would deny that at least some of our emotional identifications with films are beneficial and blameless, but it is possible to make such concessions without lessening one's tesistance to the rhetoric of sentimental movies. The majority of identification points established for female spectators, say, in the "women's films" of the forties, as Mary Ann Doane, Linda Williams, and othets have impressively argued, create false positions for women to occupy, denying them—through an enticing mirage of victim attitudes—not only a room of their own, but also the basic materials of identity. (What happens to the female "gaze" and "voice" in these narratives?)2 In the face of such persistent threats of distortion and entrapment, it is reasonable that feminist critics demystify the lure of ennobling tears and reveal the dangers of "natural" responses to powerful rhetoric. Is it possible, however, to separate the emotional content of film scenes from other ways of knowing what the narrative is "saying?" In making such a division, do we not lose those aspects of film reality which only emotion can reveal? Sentimental films typically contain Random Harvest77 one or more significant scenes which do not merely invite our emotional involvement but command it, urgently summoning our swift involuntary surrender to something whose value can only be apprehended if we are made to feel it. For...