Arcane Theorizing

Landon | Arcane Theorizing Phil Landon landon@ime.net Arcane Theorizing Gary R. Edgerton, Michael T. Marsden, and Jack Nachbar, eds. In the Eye ofthe Beholder: Critical Perspectives in Popular Film and Television. Bowling Green State University Press, 1997. (274 pages) The editors of In the Eye ofthe Beholder, promise "a representative cross section" of the critical perspectives used to analyze pop culture over the past twenty-five years (1), and the sixteen chapters which follow fulfill that promise. The book is divided into three parts: seven essays are devoted to subjects of continuing concern, establishing authorship , defining the popular text, and exploring the ways in which audiences receive these texts; another seven essays which illustrate how the influence of contemporary critical theory and practice has "challenged and replaced the more traditional ways of thinking about the popular media" (113). "Part I, The Popular Tradition" opens with "Mystic Chords of Memory': The Cultural Voice of Ken Burns," Gary Edgerton's analysis of the filmmaker's PBS documentaries . In it Edgerton explores ways in which Burns uses emotion to awaken audience sympathy for a vision of the American past which is "romantic, liberal pluralist, celebratory." In the tradition ofJohn Ford, a major influence on Burns, he sees the past in mythic terms and would agree with Ford that these myths are essential to a national identity. The next four essays in Part I explore, from various perspectives , the problematic nature of authorship and texts in film and television. George Plasketes traces the career of writer-producer Lome Michaels, the creator of Saturday Night Live, in order to illuminate the difficulty writers have controlling their work in a medium which demands "collaboration , constraint, and compromise." In a complementary essay, Michael Marsden reveals the manner in which a story line is "molded and shaped by the [requirements] of the media it is designed and redesigned to fit." The last two essays address the issue of audience. Bruce Austin's essay "Researching Film and Television Audiences" surveys the sorts of research which has been done to better "understand, explain, and predict the social consequences" (86) of movie going and watching television. Television, he observes, has received far more attention both because it has been regarded as a public trust and because advertisers are anxious to know about their potential customers. Austin sees more research as crucial to understanding the nature of audiences, but, unfortunately, he never makes clear what specific studies will better "predict the social consequences" film and television have on those audiences. Kathryn Fuller's study of the way Motion Picture Story Magazine served to encourage a highly gendered image of the movie fan is more modest in its scope, but, in my estimation , far more useful. At the outset, the publishers, like the movie industry in general, sought to attract an educated middle-class audience without much concern for gender. Within a few years ofits founding in 1910, the magazine had succeeded in attracting a readership "both sexually undifferentiated and geographically diverse" (105), a readership interested in all aspects ofmovie making. After 1916, however, when the title was changed to Motion Picture Magazine, it included more articles aimed at an audience ofwomen, who were regarded as more passive "spectators, consumers, and movie-star worshipers." By the 1920's, Fuller concludes, movie magazines promoted the image of the "frivolous female fan magazine reader" making it difficult "popular culture to imagine male movie fans" (HO). Part II In the Eye ofthe Beholder is devoted to "the contemporary cultural landscape" (113). The seven essays, examples ofrevisionist theory at work, reveal both the strengths and weaknesses of their critical methods. Three of the essays are distinguished less by their methodology than by their subject matter. Martin Norden examines the image of the disabled Vietnam veteran constructed in Hollywood films, and Rod Carveth analyzes the manner in which television news has portrayed the lives ofpeople living with AIDS. Both essays reveal the subtle ways in which the media serves to define popular images and marginalize social groups. Although Jack Nachbar's study of images of the English in the western is concerned with assimilation rather than marginalization, it too deals with the creation of cultural stereotypes . From...