Flashback: Two ways to miss the point

Posted Wed, 19 Jun 2002 14:33:00 -0700

Of all the various ways of writing about movies, two approaches are uncannily alike: bottom-line oriented "entertainment journalism," and academic work in film studies and cultural studies. In both cases the films themselves, as works of art or entertainment created by incommensurable human beings, are the last things the writers are really interested in.

In Hollywood the bottom-line-feeders blend right in, and to the person who loves movies living here can be a bit like being the last human being in Roswell after the pods have taken over. Their eyes glaze over when the subject shifts from the weekend grosses to whether or not the movie is any good. In an almost parasitical way the data about a film's box office performance seeps into the afflicted brain, displacing any other type of thought or response, until the film itself has been successfully digested and in effect ceases to exist. What a blessed relief it must be to be able to crap out a hard pellet of statistics and achieve closure!

The academic film scholars practice a form of pseudo science -- using turf language borrowed from the mother of them all, sociology -- which achieves its apotheosis when the movies themselves can safely be set aside altogether. It is a dead giveaway that entire essays are written in these fields in which the names of the writers, directors, and actors, the human agents who shape the films as vehicles of communication, are never mentioned even in footnotes. There is probably an extensive body of "reception theory" that can be used to justify this approach.