---------- Forwarded message ---------- Date: Thu, 4 Aug 1994 07:37:37 -0500 From: Steven Mintz, U. Houston <[log in to unmask]> To: Multiple recipients of list H-FILM <[log in to unmask]> Subject: Re: Audience manipulation in recent film From: Amy Nelson <[log in to unmask]> Patrick: You suggest (albeit tentatively) that perhaps pre-WWII Americans "were more readerly" and also "more literate," therefore more able to appreciate "subtlety and nuance" as well as a "slower pace." Well, contemporary Hollywood films certainly don't answer to such sensibilities, right? OK. Waht about the ideas of literate here? What do we mean? Film-literate, like we'll pick up on self- conscious fiolm refs within films? Or product appearances? This is part of what Barthes describes (in _S/Z_) as "the readerly": that which gives us, comfortably, back to ourselves as we are, and doesn't ask us to change it or think about it. Really, this is interesting because I wonder how _you_ meant readerly; I'm so used to using it in my own work via Barthes and Ray Federman as quintessentially reactionary and, yes, "dumbing." This is also how I see a lot of contemporary mainstream (as well as past) film operating -- as easy reaffirmation of the usual ideological formulae and ways of being in the world, at least the first-world USA themepark. I hope there are responses to your post that help revise that unpleasant but longstanding assessment of "the film industry." Cheers -- Amy Amy Nelson Department of English Rutgers University [log in to unmask]