Page 154 - Cultural Theory and Popular Culture an Introduction

CULT_C07.qxd 10/25/08 16:28 Page 138

138 Chapter 7 Gender and sexuality

Table 7.1 Film as object of study in film studies and cultural studies.

Film studies Cultural studies

Spectatorship positioning Audience readings
Textual analysis Ethnographic methods
Meaning as production-led Meaning as consumption-led
Passive viewer Active viewer
Unconscious Conscious
Pessimistic Optimistic

Richard Dyer’s (1999) excellent argument for the utopian sensibility of much popular
entertainment, to construct an account of the utopian possibilities of Hollywood
cinema for British women in the 1940s and 1950s. Dyer deploys a set of binary
oppositions to reveal the relationship between the social problems experienced by
audiences and the textual solutions played out in the texts of popular entertainment
(Table 7.2).

Table 7.2 Popular texts and utopian solutions.

Social problems Textual solutions

Scarcity Abundance
Exhaustion Energy
Dreariness Intensity
Manipulation Transparency
Fragmentation Community 28

For Dyer, entertainment’s utopian sensibility is a property of the text. Stacey extends
his argument to include the social context in which entertainment is experienced.
The letters and completed questionnaires by the women made it clear to her that the
pleasures of cinema expressed by them were always more than the visual and aural
pleasures of the cinema text – they included the ritual of attending a screening, the
shared experience and imagined community of the audience, the comfort and com-
parative luxury of the cinema building. It was never a simple matter of enjoying the
glamour of Hollywood. As Stacey (1994) explains,

The physical space of the cinema provided a transitional space between everyday
life outside the cinema and the fantasy world of the Hollywood film about to be
shown. Its design and decor facilitated the processes of escapism enjoyed by these
female spectators. As such, cinemas were dream palaces not only in so far as they
housed the screening of Hollywood fantasies, but also because of their design and
decor which provided a feminised and glamorised space suitable for the cultural
consumption of Hollywood films (99).