Page 157 - Cultural Studies A Practical Introduction

Visual Culture 141

back to ancient Greek myths and wind their way through the knight tales
of the Middle Ages and the Westerns of John Wayne and Clint Eastwood.
They promote an ideology that posits men as leaders and women as
passive victims or rewards, celebrates individualism and violence as
opposed to community and diplomacy, and locates the source of society ’ s
ills in the aberrant behavior of solitary madmen rather than in the sys-
temic problems of exploitative power structures. We can see that
America ’ s dominant narratives, disseminated through visual media such

as comic books and Hollywood films, are both historically consistent and
subject to revision as times change. They draw from the past while
pointing toward the future, and are capable of being simultaneously
conservative and progressive. They address the desires and anxieties felt
by the masses by channeling these emotions through the actions of
individual characters in popular stories.
It might seem inevitable that visual media should glorify the perspective

of the individual. When we watch a film or a television show, we get the
impression of seeing through someone else ’ s eyes. But whose eyes, exactly?
Sometimes the answer is obvious, such as when we slowly stalk a swimmer
from the shark ’ s point of view in Jaws , or watch Agent Clarice Starling
fumble in the darkness through the killer ’ s night vision goggles in Silence
of the Lambs . But in most other cases, it is less clear - cut. We experience a
sense of ghostly disembodiment as the camera shows us scenes from
vantage points unattainable to a corporeal being. We hover invisibly over
characters ’ shoulders as they converse with one another; we fl oat above
great battles, impervious to bullets; we explore from all angles, without fear
of being caught, the bodies of couples engaged in the most intimate activi-
ties. Because we ’ ve become acclimated to the process by which our gaze is
woven seamlessly into the visual narrative, our identification with the

camera has been rendered virtually unconscious – we rarely stop to ponder
why we ’ re seeing things the way we are, we just accept it as a natural part
of the viewing experience. To indulge in media spectacles is to temporarily,
willingly surrender some element of our control over the world to someone,
or something, else; we see what “ it ” wants us to see, and if the illusion is
successful, we feel what it wants us to feel. Much of the pleasure we derive
from watching visual media is due to the opportunity they give us to
relinquish personal responsibility and slip into a mental state of, if not total
passivity, then relaxed participation. We let the camera do the work
of moving us about the cinematic world. Among critics interested in
exploring the power dynamics of media spectatorship, the nature of our