SPECTATORSHIP
Audiences bring ideas and feelings of their own into the film. Intertextuality can accommodate their spectatorship as a useful aspect of adaptation.
Theorizing the audience in cinema is no easy task. First of all, “the audience” is a vague idea. Does it refer to a group of people? One person? An idea that goes un-personified? And yet, despite its difficulty to conceptualize, an honest accounting of the importance of the viewing audience is an essential aspect of cinema studies. This is especially so in the case of film adaptations, because much of the film’s premise is based on previous associations with other works; the filmmakers are at least in part counting on an audience’s preexisting assumptions about the story’s content.
When you watch a film, you cannot help but respond. You may identify with the characters on screen, or you may judge them harshly. You may engage with the narrative, or you may be pushed away by it. Films can create empathy or they can deliberately alienate the spectators. Above all, however, like all works of art, movies are trying to get you to react to them. Spectatorship matters, as critic V.F. Perkins articulates: “Direct response allows direct communication. The facility, the immediacy of our reactions is essential to this degree of involvement. Without apparent effort of will or imagination, and without conscious adjustment of our attitudes, we can share points of view, ways of seeing, which are foreign to us. Films can make us associate with attitudes which are not our own, with thoughts, feelings, and reactions which are outside our normal range. Within limits the filmmaker can recast our normal priorities of response. Vicarious experience can bring us a valuably extended experience and a broadened range of sympathies, but it cannot be isolated from our more active pleasures. Our involvement with personalities and in actions is only one part of a much wider and more complex experience.”
Perkins is getting at an important aspect of spectatorship, which is the way in which cinema can bridge cultural divides by showing other people from other places with different customs and beliefs, but with whom we can identify because of our shared humanity. From an American perspective, this is the value of international cinema. We can identify with the plight of a poor man searching for his stolen property in Bicycle Thieves (1948, De Sica), even though the man speaks Italian (top left). We can watch the family in Kaneto Shindo’s The Naked Island (1960) struggle to sustain their crops, even though they barely speak any dialogue in any language, and hope they’ll survive (top right). Men in the audience might learn to identify with the hopeless love and heartbreak of the female title character of Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s The Bitter Tears of Petra Von Kant (1972) (bottom left). Women in the audience might find catharsis in the furious rage and violence of a father killing the men who attacked his daughter in The Virgin Spring (1957, Bergman) (bottom right). As viewers, we cross boundaries and think about people in situations beyond our own. It is no wonder that cinema has long been compared to dreaming; sitting in the dark, immobile, images flickering across our eyes without our control—this is the experience of watching, held captive by ideas and emotions that we cannot stop.
Perkins describes the act of watching in similar terms, but acknowledges that we do not totally give ourselves over to the dream world: “Emotional reactions may be strongly invoked but intellect and judgment are never completely submerged. The subconscious does not take complete charge of the film-dream as it does of the real one. Part of our mind remains unengaged in the fantasy. We know that the experience is unreal and in an important sense unimportant. We are freed from the responsibility of acting upon what we see and feel. Consequently, we can trace our reactions with a detachment which is unattainable in dreams and very difficult in any real situation of like intensity. We can analyze our dreams and our real experiences after the event. In the cinema we can observe our involvement while it is taking place. We enter the film situation but it remains separate from ourselves as our own dreams and experiences do not.”
Analyzing spectatorship from a critical perspective demands studying the emotional reactions inspired by the cinema we watch. Though film content affects our perceptions greatly, film style also plays a considerable role. Through style, filmmakers create a perspective that illustrates how they see the world, shaping our understanding of reality for a few brief hours. Perkins argues that “In the cinema style reflects a way of seeing; it embodies the filmmaker’s relationship to objects and actions. But, as a way of showing, it also involves his relationship with the spectator. The film’s point of view is contained within each of these relationships. Attitudes towards the audience contribute as much to a movie’s effect, and therefore its significance, as attitudes towards it more immediate subject matter.”
Consider a pair of examples, which illustrate the complex relationship between the camera’s subject, the camera itself, and the spectators. Out of this triumvirate, cinema makes all kinds of different magic that is dependent on tone, mood, and the desired effect of individual filmmakers. The two video commentaries below examine the impact of cinematic style on the spectator at two extremes. On the left, a cinema of radical subjectivity designed to inspire a well of empathy in the audience. On the right, a cinema of distancing alienation that uses the audience’s desire for forward motion against them. In both examples, the subject is the relationship between the subject and her environment. Radical empathy in Darren Aronofsky’s Mother (2017), and radical alienation in Michelangelo Antonioni’s La Notte (1961).
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Spectatorship analysis requires consideration of the intended and unintended effect of film texts on audiences. Often, those effects are multiple and difficult to articulate, especially because audiences are made up of diverse individuals with different ideas and experiences. V.F. Perkins offers a useful reminder about the risks of being too reductive in considering the impact of cinema on spectators, but also sees value in the prospect: “Too great a concentration on what a film ‘has to say’ implies that the significance of a movie is reducible to the verbal concepts which its action suggests. But films are unlikely to replace speech or writing as the medium for examining and conveying ideas. Moral, political, philosophical and other concepts can attain in words an (at least apparent) clarity and precision which no other medium can rival. The movie’s claim to significance lies in its embodiment of tensions, complexities, and ambiguities. It has a built in tendency to favor the communication of vision and experience as against programme.”
Perkins is getting at the thematic richness of cinema, which can express itself through so many stylistic markers. Because it has so many narrative and expressive tools in its toolbox, those individual tools may work on different members of the audience in different ways. Increased sensitivity to film style and its impact on viewers offers a useful way forward.
clip quiz - intertextuality and spectatorship
Review the following clips and answer the questions in Blackboard.
BEACH RATS (2017, Hittman)
Connect this clip from Beach Rats to Lonely Are The Brave. |
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COOGAN'S BLUFF (1968, Siegel)
Connect this clip from Coogan’s Bluff to Lonely Are The Brave. |
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THE FOUNTAINHEAD (1950, Vidor)
Connect this clip from The Fountainhead to Lonely Are The Brave. |
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8 MILE (2002, Hanson)
Connect this clip from 8 Mile to Lonely Are The Brave. |
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LONELY ARE THE BRAVE AND Spectatorship
By 1962, the Western had started to slip a little in terms of its popularity with audiences. Western television shows were beginning to proliferate, an oversaturation of storylines and characters that would eventually contribute to the overall decline of the genre. This led to an increasing awareness on the part of filmmakers and stars who had made a number of Westerns that the genre’s time was running short; they responded by making films that directly confronted the loss of the West, and the Western, as a viable storytelling form or set of applicable myths. Lonely Are the Brave is one of the earliest examples of this kind of self-conscious Western. It could only come at this point, after audiences were familiar enough with the Western to understand these kinds of allusions and revisions to earlier moments in the genre’s life cycle.
The opening sequence of Lonely Are the Brave neatly sums up its own attitude toward the genre. Jack Burns (Kirk Douglas) is with his horse in the desert, dressed in fairly traditional and non-descript Western clothing—jeans, a jacket, and the ever-present symbol of the genre, the cowboy hat. To an audience unaware of the film’s contemporary setting (it was released and is presumably set in 1962), this would seem to indicate that we’re in a traditional Western. However, the illusion is shattered when Jack looks up at the source of a distant roar overhead—a plane is flying high in the sky, a symbol of modernity crashing through the Western fantasy.
Jack is completely anachronistic—he’s got an old point of view in a new world that doesn’t have room for him. His plan to get himself arrested so he can break his friend Paul (Michael Kane) out of jail is pure Western in its conception, but Paul doesn’t want to leave the prison. In an old Western, the incarcerated man would eagerly accept the help of his friend, but Paul has accepted his fate, resigning himself to the new world. In the old outlaw days, two jailbirds could head across the border for Mexico, or disappear into anonymity in any number of the dusty towns that populated Western movies; in 1962, the police would almost certainly track them down and throw them right back into jail. The West, and the Western that it mythologized, is long over.
Nowhere is this more poignant than in the film’s final sequence, when Jack’s horse Whiskey is scared by the lights and sound of the traffic on a busy highway in a rainstorm. They’re struck down by a truck—the horse, a symbol of the cowboy’s independence, is killed by a delivery vehicle, yet another symbol of the modern world.
Lonely Are the Brave was based on a novel called The Brave Cowboy by Edward Abbey, but the screenplay was by Dalton Trumbo, a screenwriter who had been blacklisted during the Red Scare of the late 1940s; like many other blacklisted writers, Trumbo had his career more or less destroyed by the anti-communist panic of the 1950s, and he had to work for a number of years under a series of assumed names and “fronts,” people who would pretend to be the authors of screenplays so that the real writers could get work in secret. Star Kirk Douglas had been one of the people to help return Trumbo to work in Hollywood under his own name, committing to not only hiring the writer to pen the script for Spartacus (1960, Kubrick), which Douglas starred in and produced, but insisting on giving him screen credit. Lonely Are the Brave is yet another collaboration between Douglas and Trumbo, combining the social consciousness of both star and writer. The resulting film is a lament for an individual who stands against the society that has rejected him, something Trumbo certainly must have felt while spending so many years toiling in obscurity under the blacklist.
The question when an audience watches Lonely Are The Brave today is how much its deconstruction of the Western genre continues to resonate. Though Westerns were once incredibly popular—one of the most, if not the most successful of all Hollywood genres—their systems of meaning have migrated into other places as the genre has slipped into decline. There just aren’t that many Westerns anymore, and that’s largely because audiences stopped looking to them for meaning. In our contemporary moment, when Westerns have ceased being so important to audiences, does a film about the end of the West and the decline of the outlaw cowboy who plays by his own rules still resonate?
That’s up to the individual audience member to decide. While the Western hero has certainly become a rare commodity in mainstream Hollywood movies, the ideals he represented, like individuality, freedom, and self-reliance, remain important to a lot of American audiences, and they can certainly still see in Jack Burns the same kind of romantic ideals that audiences would have found in him in 1962. When those ideas are in danger of slipping into decline (as they always seem to be), then perhaps a character like the hero of Lonely Are The Brave can continue to resonate with audiences.
Audiences play a significant role in adaptation by bringing their spectatorship; their familiarity or unfamiliarity with other sources is crucial for filmmakers to consider, and shapes our perspective as we think about film adaptations from an intertextual vantage point. Most intertextual work is done by spectators; as audience members, we make connections and think about individual films in relationship to other kinds of stories that may have preceded it.