On Mon, 5 Sep 1994, Road Angel wrote:
 
> BUT, who the studio marketing whores target has precious little to do
> with the artistic statement made by the movie.  Marketing aside, this is
> most definitely NOT a movie made for teenaged boys.  I don't know about
> the audience Greg was in, but I noticed no such adolescent celebration of
> violence in the theater (which featured a number of younger patrons).
 
RA, you are lucky.  I, too, was in the midst of adolescent celebration
when I saw the film (the guys right behind me broke into hysterical
laughter whenever someone was called "bitch"), and it was chilling -- a
bit like watching "A Clockwork Orange" while sitting next to Alex and his
droogs.
 
But I actually logged in to take friendly issue with your premise, which
is that the text is legible outside of its discursive and other contexts
and that it has meaning apart from the multiple instances of its being
read (i.e., it still "has" meaning even if that meaning is not conveyed).
Even your own reading of the film has not been a reading of
the-text-itself but a reading of that text against contexts, including
Stone's corpus and film history.  A knowledge of Stone's work in some ways
pre-reads NBK for you.  In the same way, the marketing campaign pre-reads
the film for an audience paying attention to such a campaign (indeed, this
is its purpose), so in fact studio marketing whores have EVERYTHING to do
with the film's artistic statement.  And while we may suggest that Stone
is not responsible for the work of marketers who muddy "his" message,
neither is he responsible for the long history of humanist criticism which
encourages our seeing the message as "his" to begin with.  Moreover, the
fact that Stone has made a mass-marketed R-rated film already structures
expectations, and thus readings, to an extent that Stone himself surely
understands.  Even if every frame of the film remained the same, NBK would
be a "different" film if it played only in art houses, or went straight to
video, or carried an NC-17 rating. In short, everything about this film --
its budget, its cast, its marketing, its timing as a summer film, the
soundtrack by Trent Reznor, the scramble to get Tarantino's name somewhere
on the credits even after he disowned the project -- is very clearly
seeking out a mass market, which with today's demographics means first and
foremost 18-34-year-old males; to say it is not a film "for" them is to
willfully remove it from the cultural context in which it exists and with
which it wishes to engage.
 
JRG
 
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John R. Groch <[log in to unmask]>            |  "Work!  FINISH!  THEN sleep."
English Department/Film Studies Program    |     -- The Monster,
Univ. of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, PA 15260  |        "Bride of Frankenstein"
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