with reference to my comments on "correct" readings of disney's "b & b,"
jerry says . . .
 
 
"Frank reasons that the girls' readings [those common among adolescent girls]
> (being different from our own) are not correct within 'the discourse
> community subsumed by the film.'
>
>"I was waiting for somebody to fall in this trap.  Why is THIS discourse
> community (the 500 are so cinephiles who are obsessed with film on
> Screen-L) THE community subsumed by this particular film.  C'mon, we
> represent a slim sliver of the viewing audience.   At least 20 million
> pre-adolescent girls have seen this film, and I have not found one yet who
> saw the heterosexual coupling at the end of it as a positive
> representation."
>
 
being very grateful for the kind words jerry adds in his conclusion, i'm more
than happy to oblige him by falling into his trap . . . but i think the
matter may be a bit more complex . . .
 
. . . for starters i certainly don't think that film critics and scholars are
even remotely the discourse community that movies aim at . . . we're just a
bunch of wierdos, and that's fine with me . . . but in my own wierdness i DO
think that disney was not shaping a movie for an audience that would see the
resolution as an unsatisfactory one, and that the implied audience of the
film (implied both in the wayne booth sense of the audience created by the
narration of the text as its ideal reader, and implied in the $$$ sense of
catering to audiences that pay for happy endings) is one that WOULD read the
ending as "happy" . . .
 
. . . i haven't seen the film, so i can't comment on it sepcifically . . .
but i take it that the implicit discourse of disneyism is conservative with
a reassuring recuperation into the dominant ideology serving as closure . . .
from what i gather this film falls nicely into that sort of narrative
politics . . . and thus other readings are, if not incorrect, at least
deviant . . .
 
now  . . . and this is the good part . . . if in fact it's true that loads of
adolescent girls have responses that are, at least in these terms, "deviant" .
. .  if, that is, these kids have--without ever having read a page of
feminist film theory--started (in modleski's terms) to read these hegemonic
films "against the grain,"  then, boys and girls, something VERY  intersting is
going on . . .
 
a more cynical and pessimistic view, though, might be that the movie allows
the girls to act out, as it were, latent deviant impulses, while the
hegemonic [patriarchal, if you insist] resolution of the plot reasserts the
normative force of the manifest . . . in other words, they like the dream
but, if pressed, would have to admit that they really need to wake up from it
. . . something like this coming to terms with the necessities of the real is,
after all, what bettleheim sees as the classic function of all fairy tales .
. . and that is why fairy tales, for all of their dark side, are never
subversive texts
 
. . . my own cynical guess is that the bettleheim explanation works best . .
. but wouldn't it be lovely if in fact disney has really missed the boat on
the kind of politics these films actually articulate for their main audiences?
 
. . . we certainly need to know more, and think more, about this
 
mike frank
 
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