Page 208 - Cultural Studies Volume 11

202 CULTURAL STUDIES

Chapter 7 along with the earlier two chapters is a subtle and convincing reading,
but, as a reception study, the chapter is notably weak. It is unclear how the
audience’s active interpretations will contest or inflect the ones that Mayne has
traced out as academic analyst.
The book’s concluding essay, ‘The Critical Audience’, discusses the reception
of Hollywood movies and stars by gay and lesbian audiences. The chapter is less
an extended empirical analysis than a series of critical queries on how to frame the
issues. Contemporary reception studies have often downplayed the significance
and power of commercial culture. They have demonstrated that a movie is one
limited cultural document, incomplete in itself, and requiring contextualization
within the audience’s broader interpretive framework. Placed within the
audience’s everyday cultural lifeworld, the individual film loses much of its
ideological significance. Cinema is no longer the most exemplary and strategic
instance of the operations of capitalism’s ideological machinery. Mayne
participates in this shift of theoretical attention from the film text to its socio-
cultural context, that is, to the more general culture of society and its diverse
subcultures. For example, on page 166 she remarks: ‘From this perspective…, the
question is not what characterizes the gay/lesbian spectatorship as common
responses to film texts, but rather what place film spectatorship has had in the
cultivation of gay/lesbian identity.’ Such a shift of focus opens up film study to
the analysis of the construction of meaning by contending groups in society.
In sum, Mayne’s case studies are innovative and sophisticated explorations of
Hollywood’s films and their audiences. The analyses reject any easy drawing of
political consequences from the complicated mix of power and representation in
the cinema and society. And, they are certain to enhance the reflexive questioning
of any critic studying the movie industry, as she makes problematic any simple
division between ideology and resistance, control and freedom. Mayne forthrightly
acknowledges that her own research ventures represent not a new theoretical
synthesis of the interconnections between power and mass cultural industries in
contemporary America. Instead, they mark the initial, tentative steps of exploration
after the breakdown of a paradigm.

Notes

1 Addams (1909) as quoted in May (1980:53 and, in general, see chs.2–3).
2 See, for example, Blumer and Hauser (1933).
3 Mayne in particular refers to Angela McRobbie (94–8), Richard Dyer (126–7) and
Stuart Hall (92–3).

References
Addams, Jane (1909) The Spirit of Youth and City Streets, New York: Macmillan
Company.