Hollywood Aesthetic: Pleasure In American Cinema by Todd Berliner (review)

Hollywood seeks the right dose of cognitive challenge to cultivate aesthetic pleasure without confounding its mass audience. Todd Berliner supports this modest claim with an elegant analysis of a movie's four related layers: narrative, style, ideology, and genre. These four elements each play between the spontaneous pleasure of easy comprehension and the deeper reward of challenging complexity. The best Hollywood films find an optimal balance that Berliner uses a range of case studies to illustrate.

Within film and cultural studies there are serious stakes to such a modest claim. Against high theory critics who deny that the dream factory formulas produce anything but passive ideological conformity, Todd Berliner defends the Wisconsin School position that mainstream cinema engages active viewers who freely reject the worst failures and who rejoice in the aesthetic experience afforded by the best works. Whereas Carroll and Bordwell debate directly and at length with Critical, French, and Screen Theory, Berliner does not dwell on polemics. He builds upon the work of the Wisconsin School and other moderate critics by sculpting a holistic approach to the aesthetics of film as a mass art. He states the book's central question with a turn of phrase that Gertrude Stein would appreciate: "What is it about the Hollywood movies that people enjoy that makes people enjoy them?" (xi).

Berliner begins with an overview of aesthetics, an aspect often oversimplified for mainstream cinema. He specifies that movies afford various pleasures including an aesthetic kind—defined as thoughtful appreciation of a work that depends on sensory perception and results in emotional experience. Successful movies elicit such delight through a balance of uniformity and incongruity. Well known is Hollywood's classical tendency to conventional genres, affirmative ideology, and consistent style that clarify a story's causal connections; however, its deviant tendency to complicate those familiar unities has received less attention. Novelty and complexity exhilarate the spectator through a process of active discovery. To a certain degree, that aesthetic pleasure aligns with the industry's practical imperative to avoid monotonous product. Berliner introduces the Wundt curve with research from psychology to illustrate the optimal balance between processing fluency and cognitive challenge, or simply between ease and difficulty. He associates difficult art cinema with interestingness, one value of aesthetic pleasure associated with knowledge and expertise. Meanwhile mass art seeks only a moderate degree of interestingness, and maximizes the other aesthetic value, pleasingness. Mass audiences and cinephiles have different cognitive coping potentials that correspond to the categories of films they prefer. To engage their audience with both values Hollywood filmmakers must engage competing tendencies to convention and novelty. Their interplay and optimal balance is evident across the four different layers of the film object, which all contribute to aesthetic pleasure in their own way.

The body of the book is structured around four key elements or layers: narrative, style, ideology, and genre. Berliner aptly describes how narration arouses "a guided act of imagination" (51). The process cues audiences to actively construct the story. On the one hand, classical unities bind events with "uncluttered clarity"—one of Carroll's clever terms. On the other hand, disunities demand greater cognitive investment from capable viewers who must employ free association, abduction, and insight. Psychological theories of incongruity in humour explain how these forms of risk-free cognition create pleasure, if one has the capacity to cope with a given challenge. Berliner cites the example of mind game films, and then shows this process in the less obvious genre of the western with Howard Hawks's Red River (1948). This section's argument contradicts screen-writing manuals that would have all plot holes eliminated from a story. Some subtle gaps and discontinuities can enrich the narrative process for viewers. I admire how Berliner presents a cognitive approach that does not reduce narrative to a machine, but appreciates ambiguity.

Style, in this study, refers to any distinctive manner in which a work is created or presented. Berliner distinguishes two functions of style that serve storytelling: clarity and...