"Two thumbs down!" My friend Alexander Horwath, director of the Austrian Film Museum in Vienna, isn't a guy who waves around his thumbs around casually -- much less a man given to quoting Roger Ebert. But Alex was fuming, his double-digit antipathy directed at an article by David Weddle published in the Los Angeles Times Magazine July 13 with the title "Lights, Camera, Action. Marxism, Semiotics, Narratology."
In the article, Weddle's daughter, a film studies major at UC Santa Barbara, tells her dad that she has received a C on one of her finals. Baffled, Weddle worries he's not getting "a fair return on my investment" -- he had, after all, spent "more than $73,000" on her college education. The problem, Weddle soon discovers, is contemporary film studies, a discipline overrun with radicals, who pushed their liberal social agendas via an intellectual smorgasbord of Marx, formalism, semiotics, structuralism, psychoanalysis and narrative study over the apparently discredited auteur theory, which isn't really a theory -- but no matter.
Weddle's daughter wanted a career in film but instead was stuck in a department where, as the UCSB Web site states, the "primary emphasis is on film history, theory and analysis." Film studies majors become "familiar" with what the site calls "the basic tools of filmmaking," and some students can take courses in screenwriting and production, but this isn't the place to go if you're strictly interested in the nuts and bolts of moviemaking.
Expressing concern over his daughter's theory books, with their arcane language that could get her "laughed off" a Hollywood lot, Weddle wondered if there was a "hidden method to these film theorists' apparent madness." Or was Ebert correct when he threw down the gauntlet and declared to Weddle that "film theory has nothing to do with film"?
There are those who will always resent the idea that something as ostensibly frivolous as movies is worthy of intellectual engagement. Readers have always told me to "stick to the film" and leave my opinions and politics out of the mix. They don't want to know that movies are more than actors and camera angles but are also agents of ideology and that movies tell us certain things about ourselves that we can learn nowhere else.
"I just like going to the movies for fun," a friend said when I was in the first flush of my romance with film criticism and theory. "I don't want to think about them." I liked going to the movies for fun too. But I didn't understand why grooving on movies and thinking about them should be mutually exclusive pleasures. I still don't.
Like Weddle, though, I have reservations about film theory -- or rather some film theories, since film studies embraces a host of different, at times competing theories. Soon after I entered a master's program in cinema studies in 1985, I knew that I probably wouldn't be going on to a PhD. My moment of truth arrived when the brilliant film historian Janet Staiger, saddled with teaching an introductory film theory lecture class, announced that she "didn't fetishize the object." My friend Chuck Stephens, another film critic in the making, turned to me and silently mouthed "I do."
I laughed. It was precisely because I fetishize movies that I had gone to graduate school for cinema studies in the first place. I had no plans to teach or to write about film; at that point, I had no plans at all. I was just delaying dreaded adulthood by doing one of my favorite things in life -- watching and thinking about movies.
Theory versus the real world
Ebert is wrong -- it is nonsense to say that film theory has nothing to do with film. It's unlikely that movies would be edited the way they are if Sergei Eisenstein hadn't been interested in film theory -- and Todd Haynes, a former semiotics major, probably wouldn't have directed "Far From Heaven." But it's also true that the theory I read in school often felt removed from how movies make meaning in the real world with real viewers.
I began to understand just how removed when I was mocked for bringing up "Rambo: First Blood Part II" in one theory class even though President Reagan had cited the film. The other clue that what I was learning might not have much to do with lived experience occurred while I was reading a feminist study on 1940s women's films in which author Mary Ann Doane repeatedly referred to "the female spectator." What female spectator, I wondered -- a 1940s shopgirl? Simone De Beauvoir? Me?
