Page 114 - Culture Society and the Media

104 CULTURE, SOCIETY AND THE MEDIA
subordinate discourses, notably the subjective account provided by the heroine,
Bree, talking to her psychiatrist, in a series of fragmentary scenes throughout the
film. This subjective discourse in which Bree talks about her desire for
independence is seen to be illusionary in relation to the dominant discourse.

The final scene [it is suggested] is particularly telling in this respect. While
Klute and Bree pack their bags to leave, the soundtrack records Bree at her
last meeting with her psychiatrist. Her own estimation of the situation is
that it most probably won’t work but the reality of the image ensures us
that this is the way it will really be. (MacCabe, 1974, p. 10)

This analysis allowed MacCabe to dispute contemporary critical accounts of the
film which stressed the realistic and liberated character of the heroine, played by
Jane Fonda. Rather MacCabe contended that the hero, Klute, the detective,
played by Donald Sutherland, is privileged within the narrative as a character
whose discourse is also a discourse of knowledge. As a man and a detective, he
both solves the problems of his friend’s disappearance and comes to know the
truth about Bree, thereby guaranteeing that the essential woman can only be
defined and known by a man. Moreover, this possession of knowledge is also
shared by the reader of the film as the narrative unfolds: ‘if a progression
towards knowledge is what marks Bree, it is possession of knowledge which
marks the narrative, the reader of the film and John Klute himself’ (MacCabe,
1974, p. 11).
The linguistic paradigm, the form of ‘immanent’ analysis familiar to us from
earlier examples, is clearly present in this type of reading. What distinguishes
MacCabe’s argument, however, is the setting up of the category of ‘classic
realism’ as the dominant mode of film and television production and endowing
that category with certain essential ideological characteristics. MacCabe does
not suggest that classic realist texts cannot be progressive but he does argue that
such texts can only be progressive in so far as they espouse an ideological or
political position which is at odds with the status quo. Realist texts remain
unprogressive in their form in the sense that realist texts always interpellate or pull
in spectators as unified noncontradictory subjects in a position of dominant
specularity. In Klute, for example, there is a process of identification involved in
the progression of the narrative and the sequence and form of shots which
positions the viewer in relation to the narrative in a position of knowledge, which
makes it appear as if he or she knows reality. But this position of knowledge is
created by the film rather than produced by the viewer. The classic realist text is,
in MacCabe’s formulation highly ‘closed’. It is for this reason that MacCabe
favours, as progressive texts, certain avant garde films in which there is no
dominant discourse but on which the reader has to work and produce a meaning
for the film.
There are a number of problems with the notion of the ‘classic realist text’ not
least of which is the extent to which films and television programmes conform to