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    Vol. 4  No. 27, November 2000
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    Martin Barker and Thomas Austin

    Reply to Brereton



Pat Brereton
'The Audience as Reader is Seldom Caught in the Act?'
_Film-Philosophy_, vol. 4 no. 26, November 2000
http://www.film-philosophy.com/vol4-2000/n26brereton

First of all, thanks to two people: to Pat Brereton for a fair, friendly,
and very thoughtful review of our book, and to the editor of
_Film-Philosophy_ for asking if we would be interested in responding to
some of Pat's comments. We very much appreciated the spirit in which the
review discussed our arguments, and it would be quite inappropriate to grab
space in order just to get more attention -- we can only hope that the
review will stimulate some others to look at what we've attempted. Some of
the points that we could comment on are matters of honest disagreement --
that's fine, that's what reviews are for, among other things. Other points,
if we are honest, we don't quite understand -- for instance, we don't get
the point or see the force of his remark that our critique of
psychoanalytic approaches 'does not take into account how such
methodologies could be applied within contexts other than those intended'.
Still, Brereton's review does raise some issues with real substance which
we think deserve response, simply because they are to us very important.

First, a comment on the position our book adopts overall, which seems to us
not quite as Brereton described it. He comments on our endorsement of
cognitive theory, associated with David Bordwell and Kristin Thompson. In
one respect, this is right -- we do take on board Bordwell's rejection of
theories of enunciation, and his use of notions of 'cueing'. But it would
be wrong to see us merely wanting to try to 'add in', like a codicil, a
concern for emotion. Our goal is much wider: to have an account of the way
films invite us to play a complicated role opposite them which will embrace
not only cognitive and emotional, but also aesthetic and community/cultural
modes of responding. And our critique of, in particular, Kristin Thompson's
_Breaking the Glass Armour_ (a fine and important book, whatever our
criticisms of it) is therefore about much more than the absence of emotion.
We show, we think, the persistence of an elitism in Thompson's account
which privileges certain kinds of films and certain kinds of response to
them. Films seem only worthy of attention to the extent that they
approximate to 'complexity' -- and her interest in popular films is that
they might sometimes have this, unrecognised. Our goal was to begin to
construct an approach to any and all films, but which did not prejudge
which ones are important, by the inclusion in the mode of analysis of a
criterion for determining their 'value'.

Brereton is right, though, to say that the core of our reconsideration of
procedures of film analysis is to insist that in the end our claims about
films have to be compatible with what might be learnt from and about
audiences. In the first instance this is because every single example of
film analysis that we can think of already contains within it figures of
the audience: what must be going on as they respond to a film; how they are
potentially influenced by it; and so on. In the second instance this is
because it seems to us that this is not a problem, but precisely what makes
film analysis *worth doing* -- analyses become interesting precisely
inasmuch as they contain possible implications for and about real
audiences. But this is more complicated than at first appears. Brereton
tends to equate this with asking about 'audience pleasures', which in turn
suggests that we might be looking to connect with the recent surge in fan
studies. Though important, these don't do what we are after here. Just as
important, in our view, are audience frustrations and disappointments, or
-- even more complicated -- audience multiple engagements or ambivalence.
This is something each of us has tried to investigate in our audience
researches. For instance, Austin's work on _Basic Instinct_ tracked how
audiences negotiated the commercially motivated proliferation of viewing
strategies proposed through advertising, publicity, and the film's internal
organisation. He shows how, on occasions, audiences oscillated from one
orientation to another. For example, some straight male teenagers aligned
themselves with the Michael Douglas character in terms of his sexual
curiosity and desire for the Sharon Stone character, but were
simultaneously repelled by his *excessive* sexual violence. In certain
social settings, viewers were also acutely aware of the co-existence of
different avenues of access to _Basic Instinct_. Some young women watching
with their boyfriends found that their own enjoyment of the film as a
narrative of female assertion was impaired by their male companions'
appraising looks at the body of Stone.

Barker found in his research on responses to _Judge Dredd_ that while it
was possible to identify six separable orientations to the film, in fact
certain combinations were common. But a combination was not like adding
sugar to coffee. People had to live with the consequences of wanting to
combine orientations which put different requirements on them. For
instance, Barker shows how a person following an Action-Adventure
orientation (which is not interested in narrative complexity, and wants to
live the film sensuously 'in the present tense') manages to combine this
with a more 'literary' way of assessing a film's worth (which needs to
weigh the film against criteria of complexity, and to set the film within
continuing frames of that person's life), by carrying out *sequenced*
viewings of the film.

These points are very relevant to Brereton's review because of what we see
as a misunderstanding. Brereton refers to our discussion of _The Lion King_
and our discussion of three ways in which audiences might relate
affectively to Simba's suffering: 'caring for', 'caring with', and 'caring
as if they were . . .'. His description of our account of this misses two
vital words: we say these are 'ideal types' of responses, therefore asking
the question: if audiences were to engage in one of these ways, what would
be the consequences for their mode of attention to subsequent elements in
the film.

Brereton then asks: what if an audience oscillated between these? Do these
modes of engagement exclude each other? Absolutely not, and that is why we
call them 'ideal types'. But to know that they *might* combine is either
just an abstract possibility, or it is the beginning of a task. Each of
these modes of engagement would have consequences. Therefore to combine
them would carry cognitive and affective baggage. How would we find out? We
are proposing that it will take a certain kind of combination of film
analytic work along with highly targeted audience response to answer these
sorts of questions. Which is among the reasons why we are unhappy with a
good deal of fan investigation, which essentially detaches fans from their
'texts', seeing them as so productive, so creative, and so 'radical' that
the formal organisation of their chosen materials has become almost
unnecessary.

Our next-to-last point arises from this in another way. Brereton concludes
his discussion of our account of _The Lion King_ with a comment on our
claim that the film does indeed contain an ideological potential, which
would begin to be activated in any situation in which, for instance,
parents and children discuss the characters and the narrative afterwards.
He comments that this presupposes that 'a child can only experience the
text emotionally and that adults or 'ideal readers' have much greater
overall critical faculties'. This is not what we are saying. Rather, we
would argue that it is quite possible for an adult to play the role of
being a 'child', and to want, hope for, and worry about the outcomes of
Simba's struggle even while s/he is fully aware of the conventions of a
Disney film. Such a dialogue, activating the ideology of the film, could
well happen entirely within one individual's head. But the fact is that,
demographically, a very large proportion of the audience for the film was
in fact parents with children, and the film plays on that fact.

Final point: Pat Brereton's title interests us: 'The Audience as Reader is
Seldom Caught in the Act?' Yes, of course. But it seems to us to be an
invitation to paralysis to make this seem a barrier, or an epistemological
limit. Of course audience researchers, except under the most artificial
circumstances, don't get to record audiences' responses as they are in the
process of formulating. But then, neither do friends, relatives, or anyone
else -- this is the nature of the world. We watch, and while watching we
think and feel and wonder. Then we come away and think further and very
often talk to other people as part of concretising our responses. What
audience researchers do is to try to gather investigable quantities of
audience responses, and then use grounded methods of analysis to explore
the patterns and directions of those responses. We often hear this quoted
against our work with audiences as if it either invalidates its claims, or
at least makes it no different from textual interpretation. It is
interesting that Brereton cites a John Hartley essay which makes exactly
this false move.

We think it is a particular risky one here, since the core argument of our
book is that *all* film analyses of necessity incorporate *claims* about
the audience, but most are unwilling to take responsibility for them.

These are important issues, and we are very happy that they should be
debated. We would very much hope that others will share our determination
to try to build a working relationship between methods of formal analysis
and methodologically sharp modes of audience research. If this exchange
stimulates further debates along this road, that can only be to the good.
Whether we were wise to claim that this could amount to 'reinventing film
analysis' -- for which Pat Brereton mildly admonishes us, and for which
Robert B. Ray recently told off the authors of _Reinventing Film Studies_
-- is not for us to say in the end, although we will stick by our guns for
now!

University of Sussex, Brighton, England


Copyright © _Film-Philosophy_ 2000

Martin Barker and Thomas Austin, 'Reply to Brereton', _Film-Philosophy_,
vol. 4 no. 27, November 2000
<http://www.film-philosophy.com/vol4-2000/n27barkeraustin>.

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[Apologies: this reply was published on the website on Thursday but not
forwarded to the salon. Ed]