it's with some trepidation that i join this particular battle in the ongoing
debate about what we do when we read films, but. . .
 
. . . it seems to me striking that all the correspondents who cited the
response of pre-adolescents who disliked the ending of BEAUTY AND BEAST in fact
support the notion of "normative readings" . . . for what makes those young
girls' responses so intersting is precisely our own sense that they are NOT
normative, in other words that in some implicit cultural norm presupposed by
the film is not available to them, and that thus in some way they really don't
understand the film . . . so while i absolutely do NOT want to say that their
responses are not valid or not important or not valuable, i DO want to say that
they are not "correct," at least not within the discourse community subsumed by
the film
 
mike frank
 
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