Page 232 - Cyberculture and New Media

Alev Adil and Steve Kennedy 223
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technology and adapt to the demands of new viewing subjects. Hollywood is
rarely flattering about competing modes of film dissemination. Films about
television like The Truman Show, Pleasantville and Quiz Show for instance,
all represent television as an autocratic anti-intellectual medium/technology
that produces undemocratic and dumbed-down viewing subjects. The small
screen is represented as small-minded, conformist and simplistic, explicitly
fascistic in both The Truman Show and Pleasantville. Cinema iterates itself
as, by implied contrast, the space of Technicolor, high art and individualism,
offering opportunity and free will. As in The Matrix, eXistenZ and Minority
Report most cinematic representations of new technology commonly make
free will a crucial anxiety/ problem in the new media environment. Beyond
its characterisation of new technologies as totalitarian, cinema also posits (as
both threat and perhaps tantalising promise) technology as penetrative and
prosthetic, as threatening the autonomous Enlightenment subject. In
Videodrome and eXistenZ David Cronenberg represents both video and
gaming as penetrative technologies that produce subjugated users tied to an
organic/ prosthetic medium, as do the Wachowski brothers in The Matrix.
What’s at stake here is not simply representational: the positive or
negative properties attributed to new media platforms in mainstream
Hollywood cinema but relational: the kind of viewing subject being
interpellated/ constructed. Film viewing, as much as film making, is a
situated practice. The viewing subject is to some extent technologically
determined, their relationship to the text shaped by their mode of reception.
The cinematic apparatus is predicated on a mode of viewing which renders
the viewer as an essentially scopophilic and passive subject: alone in the dark
watching the film according to dictates set by the cinema’s timetable and the
director’s sequencing. Yet, ironically, new media viewing environments that
offer more choice in modes, qualities and intensities of reception are
presented as more threatening to individual autonomy, as deterministic and
breaching the boundaries of the self. Laura Mulvey contends that mainstream
Hollywood organises meaning around the active (penetrative and sadistic)
male gaze both through narrative and visual construction. Her argument is
relevant here, not only because it attempts to configure the psychological
relation between the viewing subject and the technological mode of reception
but also because it invites us to see the film consumption in the classic mode
as creating a subject for whom film is a prosthetic through the phantasy of the
penetrating gaze.
Technology as a signifier in cinema takes on a variety of signifieds
but ultimately acts as a fetish, that asserts that technology is ‘thing’, outside
sentience, that there is an essentially human sense of self as clearly
distinguishable from the machine. This acts as a fetish in both an economic,
anthropological and psychoanalytic sense. In its very articulation the
assertion undermines itself : whereas the Freudian fetish both acknowledges