John Bleasdale wrote:
Here's a suggestion to perhaps broaden the discussion:
movies that you like despite yourself.
Yes, this is worth a look. It describes my reaction to Pearl Harbour,
though probably I went already prepared to disengage my 'ideological
critique of Hollywood mode' and re-engage my childhood fascination with
all things war, particularly aereal.
The obvious place to start theorising this ambivalence toward films is
the Freudian psychoanalytic tradition and its take-up in film studies:
Metz has an interesting discussion of pleasure/unpleasure reactions to
films in the Imaginary Signifier: (crudely put) unpleasure = a superego
driven override of incipient pleasurable response to seeing/hearing
something transgressive (killing, destroying, rape, porno).
What did surprise and mildly alarm me about my response to Pearl Harbour
was being swept up in the emotions of the 'America strikes back' last
phase of the film. Maybe it's explicable as the power of ideological
formations to interpellate my subjectivity (even me, an Australian with
a robust cynicism/indifference to patiotic American propaganda). But I
think it's also to do with the emotive force of the action-images of the
film; their spectacle, impressive (if not historically accurate)
orchestration of powerful images, sounds and sensations of speed and
destruction activate the spectator's mind, evincing a sort of energetic
response (channelled perhaps via ideological pathways into 'rah rah rah'
feelings).
Unlike classic ideological readings of films I don't think this
necessarily programs the spectator's political beliefs, or successfully
sets the dominant mode for understranding history, culture etc. But
maybe I'm being naive. PH was a bit of an eye opener for me in
simulating the experience of watching a propaganda film during
wartime.....
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