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 ---- To signoff SCREEN-L, e-mail [log in to unmask] and put SIGNOFF SCREEN-L in the message. Problems? Contact [log in to unmask]