Winston's Diary

Last week, the folks over at Hatemonger's Quarterly wrote a post on Cinema Studies that caught my eye.

You see, I make use of film (and sometimes television) in my literature classes on a regular basis, and I have been doing this pretty much since the first time I started teaching. I'm of the opinion that good cinema does indeed count as literature, and that it can be as difficult to "read" as any novel, play, or poem.

Yet I cannot help but agree with the myriad of "Chips" over at Hatemongers that Cinema Studies is, for the most part, complete and utter bullshit. Most of what is being produced by the "scholars" in this field is the same sort of self-indulgent crap I was complaining about last week in my Boomer vs. Gen X post.

A not-so-brief quotation from the Hatemonger's post in question highlights what I'm talking about:

Don’t believe us? Then clearly, dear reader, you have not taken a gander at the Fall 2001 number of the journal Cinema Studies, which features an article penned by one Nicholas F. Radel, a professor of English at Furman University.

The magnificently ridiculous title of Mr. Radel’s piece says it all: “The Transnational Ga(y)ze: Constructing the East European Object of Desire in Gay Film and Pornography after the Fall of the Wall.”

Delicious, isn’t it? We, the crack young staff of “The Hatemonger’s Quarterly,” particularly savored Mr. Radel’s pathetically typical use of parentheses. You can imagine him patting himself on the back after typing the word “Ga(y)ze,” can’t you? Sure, his ideas may all be pseudo-radical academic boilerplate; but, man, can he use those parentheses!

Mr. Radel’s article begins with a sublimely ridiculous sentence: “Of all the effects of the collapse of the Iron Curtain on East-West relations, perhaps the one that will be the least discussed is its effect on gay communities in the United States.”

Gee, Mr. Radel, we wonder why that is? Actually, given the number of idiotic English professors in these here United States, we have the sneaking suspicion that the influence of the collapse of the Iron Curtain on US gay communities will be among the topics most pondered.

So what, you may (or may not) be asking yourself, is Mr. Radel’s landmark work of scholarship about? Let Mr. Radel tell us himself: “In particular, I wish to examine the ways of in which Eastern Europeans are constructed as desirable sexual partners for American gay men in Gary Terracino’s popular short film My Polish Waiter (1994) and in some examples from the increasingly large number of gay pornographic films that feature young men from Eastern Europe.”

I wish I could say that my own perusal of cinema studies journals belied the findings of the Hatemongers. It has not. Oh, this is an extreme example, of course, but it's pretty much par for the course in a field which now boasts "pornography studies" under its every widening umbrella. You should read some of that stuff. It's porn people. It's there for people to wank to.

But I digress.

As I said, I like to use film in my courses, and I'm of the opinion that in an age where the ideas that were once delivered to the populace via the printed word are now delivered via the projected or broadcasted image, it's become just as important to teach students to do close readings of film and television shows as it is to do close readings of novels. Oh, not all of them, of course. I would never bring an episode of Survivor or some crap like that into class, but there are some very well-done episodes of The Twlight Zone, the original Star Trek, and even The Simpsons that need "textual unpacking" to really appreciate them in full. And, of course, there are hundreds of films out there that reach a level of artistry and philosophical complexity competitive with some of the greatest works of literature.

The problem I've run into is trying to find criticism that I can hand to my students that isn't full of the sort of masteurbatory nonsense cited above.

Honestly, I've never seen a field as myopic as cinema studies. From what I've seen of it so far, it's all theory. With a few exceptions, the majority of essays and books I've examined looking for sources for my students are chock full of Lacan, Freud, Marx, Althusser, Foucault, etc. In many cases, there are more pages of an essay or book dedicated to a theorist than there are to the filmmaker being examined. In fact, I've made a practice of examining the index of every film studies book I pick up to see what the ratio of artist to theorist is.

Is there anything going on in cinema studies that even remotely resembles old-fashioned, close reading of literature? That examines the formal elements of films and television episodes without using them to make some sort of lefty argument? Readings of films by straight, white men that are not hostile? That do not seek to prove that the straight, white filmmaker was/is some sort of evil monster, out to pervert the minds of innocent viewers with radical conservatism?

Where is the common sense in cinema studies? Anyone? Anyone?


(More on the Boomer stuff soon. I've had a few Boomer vs. X encounters this week--or at least encounters I was predisposed to examine in terms of generation because of my earlier post--and I need to fit them into my overall concept. Soon.)