Page 206 - Cultural Studies Volume 11

200 CULTURAL STUDIES

by rejecting the illusion of realism. The film did not pretend to be a transparent
window on to reality. Instead, it consisted of complex and ambiguously signified
images which the viewer must help decode. Only avant-garde film, which resisted
cinematic illusions, could initiate the spectator into critical reflections on the
socially produced nature of capitalist roles and gender relations.
Mayne astutely notes various problems with this apparatus theory. The theory
created a sharp split between the critic and society. Films were considered part of
a seamless web of society’s bourgeois ideology to which the critic opposed his or
her scientific truth. Furthermore, every Hollywood movie embodied this ideology
without contradiction. The individual viewer was passive before the ideological
workings of the film; he or she lacked all resistance and agency. In the end, it
became very difficult to see how the criticisms of the theorist would ever be able
to pry the individual out of this entrancing web of ideology.
‘Reception’ film theorists of the 1980s effectively rejected this portrait of
Hollywood as an all-encompassing, ideological machine enforcing conformity.
But for Mayne these ‘postmodern’ theorists simply reversed the position of
apparatus theory without overcoming its simplifications and dualisms.
Postmodernists shifted the emphasis from the cultural object to the receiving
audience. Now the cultural text was seen as inherently open and requiring the
activity of the audience to complete its message—an audience who might elaborate
different interpretations of the movie’s essential meaning depending upon their
socio-economic background. Mayne observes that such writers gave all power to
the audience, yet they analyzed the audience’s interpretations as activities of
resistance and contestation, Having dismissed apparatus theory, they cannot
explain the power of the text against which the audience is resisting. In addition,
reception theorists, and here Mayne is referring to the ethnographies of the
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Birmingham School, still adopt the dualistic categories of apparatus theory. The
movie is considered a mere extension of a larger cultural domination while the
audience’s interpretive resistance is necessarily liberating.
In the development of her critique, Mayne subtly complicates this analysis. Such
theorists, she argues, are still entranced by the romantic image of a contesting
agent, uncontaminated by ideology and power. But, it is too easy to claim that all
audience activity is liberating without scrutinizing the ideas and relations being
advocated by the subordinate group. Furthermore, the supposedly unified
dominant ideology is better characterized as multiple, fragmented and
contradictory discourses. Consequently, there is no simple oppressive dominant
ideology from which one could rebel. Finally, Mayne provocatively queries
whether cultural positions can be so easily labeled as progressive or reactionary in
abstraction from the way those ideas are used and applied by social groups, that
is: in abstraction from real politics.
Mayne demonstrates that the history of film theory over the last two decades
presents a series of important interrogations of the ideology and domination in the
mass culture industries. In her discussion of these theories, Mayne renders
problematic any easy answers to the questions of power in popular culture. Cinema