Page 205 - Cultural Studies Volume 11

REVIEWS 199

became flexible and open to the diverse interpretations of the viewer. Elsewhere
Michael Schudson (1987) has summarized this movement as ‘the validation of
popular sensibility’, which involved not only a re-evaluation of the active role of
the audience in the accomplishment of any reception or interpretation, but also a
change in the very notion of the cultural product. In French literary theory, this
transformation in cultural theory resulted in a shift from a structuralist semiotics
to poststructuralism. In the United States, says Mayne, under the impact of the
Birmingham School and postmodernism, the tendency towards re-evaluation took
its most extreme, populist form.
Mayne considers such a straightforward reversal of the earlier apparatus theory
a mistake. Instead, her goal is to arbitrate between these two opposed theories, not
simply to dispense with past theories, nor to forget the most recent insights. She
claims her desire is not to resolve the contradictions in any ‘Pollyanna dialectic’,
taking a bit from here and there of what is best in both. Rather, she works to take
apart the dichotomies that seem to plague the two opposed positions.
Mayne offers an incisive and convincing account, which I will shortly detail,
but two problems injure the usefulness of her book. First, she provides an
inadequate explication of apparatus theory. Mayne devotes two chapters to such
an elaboration but does the job poorly. Admittedly this theory has been discussed
in countless other volumes, but it is the central starting point of her book and needs
to be explained. Secondly, when she expresses her own innovative analysis she
has an overly pedantic style. Some parts are explained in excessive detail, while
others are presented without the necessary background information and, thus, will
remain remarkably obscure, at least for the beginning student in film theory. This
combination of pedanticism and innovation will doubtless make her book exciting
and irritating for both experts and novices in cinema studies.
Following Eugene Lunn’s formulation (1982), we may say that original 1970s
‘apparatus theory’ rested on a ‘Marxist Modernism’. The aesthetics of modernism
was melded to the politics of Marxism. Apparatus theory claimed that classical
Hollywood cinema successfully promoted an illusion of realistic representation.
The passive viewer was caught up in this proclaimed realism and was absorbed in
the workings of the plot. The audience was oblivious to the set of cinematic
mechanisms that produced the highly stylized and ideological world of the
Hollywood film. Apparatus theory dissected these mechanisms as the workings of
a regressive Freudian fantasy. In the darkened room of the theater, the spectator
participated in various Oedipal scenarios. These Oedipal fantasies assured the male
viewer of his power and his necessary superiority over women, as long as he
accepted the norms and values of a bourgeois society. Thus film was seen as
capably indoctrinating the viewer into the values of a hierarchical and sexist,
industrial civilization.
Against this great ideological machine of Hollywood, the 1970s film theorists
pitted avant-garde films. Such experimental films offered none of the easy
pleasures gained from absorption in the secure, melodramatic fantasies of
Hollywood. They, in fact, attempted to disrupt the passive viewing of the audience