Chapter 15

Exploring New Approaches to Film Theory – and Beyond

In This Chapter

Deconstructing post-structuralism

Considering postmodernism and gender theory

Diagnosing the health of High Theory

What’s going on with film studies’ fascination with all things theory? No sooner have you grasped classical film theory and then managed to get your head around structuralism (I discuss both in Chapter 13) than you have to deal with post-structuralism and post-colonialism, not to mention post-feminism and postmodernism, which for some reason doesn’t normally require a hyphen.

Film theorists love sticking post in front of everything. In regular usage, the prefix post- simply means ‘after’, which makes it a useful add-on when discussing historical periods or other processes. So in this sense, post-structuralism is a label for a period of theorising that came after the time when everyone was into structuralism. Simple, right?

Well, unfortunately not: this post- also implies a kind of opposition to the ideas of the earlier period. It’s not quite as strong as anti- (against) but it comes pretty close in some cases. Just to confuse matters further, in strictly chronological terms, film theorists started to use structuralist and post-structuralist ideas around the same time, during the 1960s and 1970s. So instead of a clear development from one idea to the next, you have to see this time as more like a messy period of overlap, conflict and exchange. But then history is always like that when you think about it.

Multiplying Meaning: Post-Structuralism

Linguistics teaches that the word ‘pig’ is a sign, made up of a signifier (the letters ‘p’, ‘i’ and ‘g’ arranged in that order) and a signified (a pink, hairy four-legged creature that lives on a farm). Linguistics is the basis of structuralism (see Chapter 13), which is a way of interpreting texts that assumes a fixed relationship between signifier and signified. A pig is a pig, right? Yes, unless you’re speaking informally about ‘a greedy person’ or, in British slang, ‘a police officer’. These meanings are all related to each other, but many, many of them exist. Post-structuralism, which extends and challenges structuralism, accepts and explores the multiplicity of meaning in language and in culture.

Discerning the difference between structuralism and post-structuralism

The idea that meaning is multiple, flexible and unstable has profound implications for the way you understand and study texts (see Table 15-1).

Table 15-1 Structuralism versus Post-Structuralism

To clarify the difficult concept that signifiers produce only more signifiers, consider how a dictionary works. If you look up the signifier ‘pig’, you find that it has several possible signifieds including the farm animal, the greedy person and the police officer. But how do you know what a ‘farm animal’ is? You need to look up the signifiers ‘farm’ and ‘animal’, which themselves have several further possible signifiers. And so it goes on.

Post-structuralism states that meaning is constantly put off, or deferred. Only when you read or hear a word used in context can you determine its meaning. But even then, each word carries traces of its other meanings and uses.

These insights connect to studying films, because in some ways the film image feels closer to the post-structuralist model of a sign than the structuralist one. Think of a familiar motif such as the cowboy riding off into the sunset. This image has no single fixed meaning in itself. It only acquires meaning in a narrative sense due to its context, its place within a chain of other images. Even then the traces of its previous uses inevitably colour its meaning, because audiences familiar with westerns have seen this device used over and over again. Not to mention the specific associations of the sunset, or the horse. Watch those meanings multiply… .

Deconstructing texts and discourses

The 2002 documentary Derrida includes a riveting moment when the white-haired French philosopher and post-structuralist Jacques Derrida is asked to provide the origin of his critical method called deconstruction. Sat in a conventional academic pose, surrounded by bookshelves, Derrida reacts immediately against the question itself, pointing out the artificiality of the interview situation and the impossibility of knowing who the audience for the documentary will be. He chooses to underline the fact that he’s speaking within the frame of a documentary rather than ignore it. Here Derrida isn’t just being a grumpy academic; he’s answering the question by deconstructing it and exposing some of the assumptions behind it.

Given this startling demonstration from Derrida himself, you can understand why defining deconstruction as a critical approach is rather difficult. In fact some people claim that doing so is impossible, because to define it is to shackle it to convention, which is the opposite of deconstruction.

However, this section is likely to disappear entirely up its own derrière if I don’t at least try defining it:

• Deconstruction aims to open up a text to multiple readings by overturning commonly accepted interpretations. For example, when analysing a text, you can easily fall back on a Freudian explanation for a male character’s behaviour (see Chapter 13). But deconstruction forces you to take apart your assumptions, for example by acknowledging that Freud’s ideas were – in themselves – a teeny bit misogynist.
• When analysing a text, deconstruction looks out for axioms, or self-evident truths. Popular movies are full of these neat moments or lines that you’re not supposed to question, such as ‘life is like a box of chocolates’ or ‘love means never having to say you’re sorry’. Take these to pieces, and you find new ways to read the film (see the sidebar, ‘Deconstructing Forrest Gump (1994)’).
• By exposing the power relations in commonly accepted readings, deconstruction creates space for marginalised social groups. Therefore it’s a useful strategy for feminist readings, queer theory and post-colonial theory (see the later ‘Going for girl power! Post-feminism’, ‘Moving beyond gender: Queer theory’ and the following section, respectively).

Okay, so deconstruction is a tough one. Luckily, other post-structuralist thinkers take elements from Derrida’s strategy but make them easier to apply.

Philosopher Michel Foucault shares Derrida’s deconstructive attitude to culture, although the two famously argued about their critical methods. Foucault’s central idea is known as discourse, which begins with what people say or express about a particular topic. But a discourse is more than just idle chatter: it also manages knowledge and power within society, and therefore governs behaviour. Ultimately, even your own identity comprises discourses around gender, nationality and so on.

Discourse differs from Althusser’s notion of ideology (see Chapter 13) in that discourse is not simply an instrument of control imposed upon the masses. Instead, discourse is a site of conflict, negotiation and debate. The nearby sidebar ‘Of killer cyborgs and office politics’ takes a stab at the discourses of technology and gender in The Terminator (1984).

Dismantling empires: Post-colonialism

If, as I describe in the preceding section, post-structuralism is about instability and multiplicity of meaning, as well as giving voice to the voiceless, you can see why it became a suitable framework for studying the current and former colonies of the Western powers.

In film studies, post-colonialism allows detailed consideration of films produced by countries that are (or were) colonised. It also examines the representation of colonised nations and people within Western cinema. A key process within post-colonialism is that of othering: the ways that one group defines itself against what it isn’t – often people who are different in particular ways.

The literary theorist Edward Said lived the experience of colonialism from childhood, being born in Jerusalem to Palestinian and American parents. Later, as an academic working in the US university system, he wrote the book Orientalism (1978), which helped to set the agenda for post-colonial studies. Said draws on Derrida and especially Foucault to create his notion of an orientalist discourse that characterises the representation of the East within the culture of the West. Here the East functions as the mysterious, sexualised other to the West’s rationality. His primary examples are from visual art and literature, including the novels of Joseph Conrad, but his ideas are flexible enough that you can apply them to popular cinema.

A classic example of Hollywood’s orientalist tendency is Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom (1984) – the one set in India, with the cute/annoying Chinese kid sidekick and Spielberg’s wife as the love interest. Indy (Harrison Ford) needs to save a village’s children, whom a cult has kidnapped and enslaved. The film implies that the locals are incapable of providing strong father figures to protect their own children, and so an American with a whip has to save the day. It also depicts Indians as being only superstitious primitives or brutal cannibals. I’m sorry, you probably loved this film as a child (I know I did), but it’s really racist.

The other side of the post-colonial coin is to give a voice to people deprived of one by the processes of colonisation. Here the Indian critic Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak provides useful terms to open up the debate:

• Subaltern: Spivak adopts the lowly military ranking to refer to colonised peoples who have no access to the tools of Western culture. More than simply being a repressed minority, the subaltern literally has no cultural voice, identity or history.
• Epistemic violence: Spivak borrows Foucault’s term ‘episteme’ to refer to the power structures that make knowledge possible. Therefore epistemic violence is knowledge and truth that colonising powers use as social control (for instance, imposing religion or education upon indigenous populations). In order to escape epistemic violence, the subaltern have no option other than to abandon their cultural heritage and adopt Western modes of culture and behaviour.

Here’s an example of this process at work within the international film industry: Western critics adopted many of the best-known world cinema directors, such as Satyajit Ray and Akira Kurosawa (whom you can meet in Chapter 12), only after they won prizes at European film festivals. You can argue that they found such favour only because they adopted the narrative and visual style of Western art cinema, such as Italian Neorealist films. Indeed Kurosawa, adored by the festival circuit, was widely criticised on his own turf for pandering to European sensibilities, suggesting that Hollywood cinema isn’t the only one guilty of epistemic violence against indigenous cinemas.

Realising Nothing Matters Anymore: Postmodernism

Postmodernism is the critical theory that everyone pretends to know about. People apply the adjective postmodern willy-nilly to everything from pop videos to home décor. In its most vague and general usage, the word seems to be synonymous with the notions of irony and self-consciousness.

These ideas of postmodernism aren’t necessary problematic – in fact they’re strangely appropriate given the term’s connotations of rampant populism. But if you want to be taken seriously as a film student, you need to understand some of the depths hiding within this wilfully superficial term. Fortunately, you can do so while reading this section and watching some fascinating films.

Narrating the end of history

You can view the loss of faith in the world-changing philosophy of modernism in the 1950s and 1960s (read the nearby sidebar ‘Modernism’s moment’) as symptomatic of a larger crisis facing all the heroes and big ideas of Western culture. According to literary theorist Jean-François Lyotard, this crisis is the essence of the postmodern condition. Lyotard had a fancy name for these big ideas: metanarratives, literally stories about stories.

You can think of all the theories I cover in Chapter 13 – Marxism, structuralism, psychoanalysis – as metanarratives, because they offer overarching ways to understand the grand sweep of human history and experience. You may therefore expect postmodern cinema to abandon large ambitious ideas and focus on banal spectacle. Transformers (2007) anyone? Yet, as the following sections attest, this isn’t the case: big ideas are still plentiful.

Another key postmodern thinker Frederic Jameson disagrees with Lyotard on metanarratives, because he considers Marxist theory still applicable to today’s stage of late capitalism. He does, however, share Lyotard’s pessimism about popular culture with regard to its ambition and sense of history. Jameson argues that the main features of postmodern cinema are:

• Pastiche: Unlike parody, which copies to mock convention, pastiche is the pointless quotation of other films, genres and periods. No one has anything new to say, and so culture endlessly recycles and quotes other culture.
• Nostalgia: In the 1980s, Hollywood looked back to the 1950s in films such as Back to the Future (1985), as it attempted to relive the vitality of pop culture of that period. Even Star Wars (1977) evokes nostalgia, not for a historical period but for a lost style of storytelling and viewing.
• Waning of affect: Affect is the raw experience of emotion before it is given a label such as ‘happiness’. Jameson argues that postmodern culture has lost touch with emotional expression. This idea is close to the philosophical term nihilism: the sense that nothing has meaning.

Quentin Tarantino’s Kill Bill films (2003 and 2004) blend many different styles of action film together: Hong Kong martial arts movies, Japanese anime, low-budget ‘grindhouse’ revenge thrillers. Tarantino isn’t parodying these styles – indeed, he clearly has great affection for them – and he’s aware that mainstream audiences aren’t as familiar with their conventions as he is. And yet, affect (emotion) is weak. Revenge is a conventional motivation rather than a personal one, and violence is slick and spectacular rather than painful and tragic. Most of all, the Kill Bill films are nostalgic for a particular kind of video-store cinephilia, where exploitation movies from across the world used to rub their VHS-shaped shoulders together.

Getting super-excited about hyper-realism

Jean Baudrillard, who died in 2007, always gave good headline. The title for his 1991 book The Gulf War Did Not Take Place was thoroughly provocative for the political elites of America and its allies, and his views on 9/11 were equally inflammatory, inviting accusations that he was defending terrorists’ actions. As a theorist of the media itself, not just its products, he was always on hand for a spiky, counter-intuitive quote or a controversial statement. He was also a master at turning news items or anecdotes inside out to expose their theoretical meaning. But mostly, he really enjoyed an argument.

Baudrillard’s central idea emerges from the ruins of semiotics and post-structuralism (check out the earlier section ‘Multiplying Meaning: Post-Structuralism’). Under structuralism, the sign has meaning because it refers to a signified, an essence of meaning drawn from reality (see Chapter 13). But if post-structuralism is correct, and a signifier creates only more signifiers rather than a signified, where does reality fit into this equation? Everything becomes a copy of a copy for which no original exists. Baudrillard calls this copy of a lost original the simulacrum. In place of reality, postmodernism creates a hyper-reality where you can’t identify a meaningful difference between a simulation and a real object.

I know, this argument sounds completely nuts, right? But bear with me for a moment and consider a few of Baudrillard’s persuasive examples:

• The Gulf War: As the first conflict of the modern media age, TV images of the 1990 Gulf War serve as the war itself for Western audiences. One moment of news coverage became a Baudrillard anecdote to illustrate the hyper-real: a CNN news anchor cut live to reporters in the Gulf only to find them watching CNN to find out what was happening.
• Disneyland: As a perfect simulation of the idea of ‘America’, the theme park is actually more real than the confusing experience of being in a modern US city, such as Los Angeles.
• 9/11: Come on, didn’t you feel like you were watching some kind of low-budget version of Independence Day (1996) the first time you saw the planes hit the Twin Towers on TV?

Luckily, Baudrillard loved the movies and spoke and wrote a great deal about them. His favourite thing about cinema is its joyful avoidance of the real, its ability to act as pure, beautiful simulation. He was also interested in films that blur real and virtual identities, such as Mulholland Dr. (2001) and The Truman Show (1998).

Perhaps understandably, he considered realism to be a complete waste of energy and despaired that cinema was drifting towards an obsession with the illusion of reality, particularly with regard to digital special effects. But definitely the most interesting case of overlap between Baudrillard and cinema is The Matrix (1999).

The Wachowskis claimed to be heavily influenced by the concept of the simulacrum when writing The Matrix and even feature a close-up of Baudrillard’s book in one scene. When Morpheus (Laurence Fishburne) shows Neo (Keanu Reeves) the post-apocalyptic Earth, he cites Baudrillard’s phrase ‘the desert of the real’. But Baudrillard later denounced the film as a misreading of his work. The clear separation between the matrix and the ‘real’ world is actually the opposite of hyper-reality where the two collapse together. Plus, Baudrillard found the film’s negative view of virtual reality inconsistent with its heavy investment in digital special effects.

True to form, Baudrillard came up with a perfect sound bite to leave you with: ‘The Matrix is the kind of the film about the Matrix that the Matrix itself could have produced.’ Ouch. My brain hurts.

Going for girl power! Post-feminism

To be clear, don’t take this (or any) discussion of post-feminism as implying that the feminist project is over or that it’s a job well done. In Western culture, women continue to face inequality in the workplace, sexual discrimination and domestic violence. In other parts of the world, women have barely any human rights whatsoever.

Why then do many people think that feminism is something that their mothers and grandmothers had to worry about? Even worse, why are people – including many young women – so uncomfortable with the term feminism itself? Critiques of post-feminist culture are concerned with these kinds of questions.

Cultural theorist Angela McRobbie advises against considering post-feminism as a simple victory for the conservative backlash against feminism itself: things are more complicated than that. She discusses the box-office hit Bridget Jones’s Diary (2001) as an example of the post-feminist conflicts facing modern young women:

• Bridget (Renée Zellweger) has benefitted from the apparent freedoms of choice for women, in that she’s able to relocate to London and forge her own career – albeit one at which she’s not particularly good.
• These freedoms serve only to create new anxieties however: being a ‘singleton’ in a world of happy couples, not finding the right man and handling the ticking biological clock. She also deals with comedic neuroses, including an obsessive monitoring of weight and alcohol consumption.
• Bridget fantasises about marrying her sexy boss (Hugh Grant), but the white wedding dress and traditional trappings seem ridiculous, because feminism dictates that women aren’t supposed to want that anymore. The film ends, however, on a very conventional romantic clinch with the sensible, marry-able Mark (Colin Firth).

The contradictory ending of Bridget Jones’s Diary is typical of post-feminist culture. Women may be well aware of feminist ideals but choose to flout them, sometimes ironically. Just think about the debates around female pop stars such as Madonna, the Spice Girls and more recently Rihanna, who all claim or claimed female empowerment while presenting themselves as sexual objects for a male gaze. Film scholar Sarah Projansky has named this brand of post-feminism as ‘sex-positive’ in that it decries Second Wave feminism as being ‘anti-sex’.

A similar process is clearly at work in Charlie’s Angels: Full Throttle (2003). The film’s beautiful female stars play the roles of tough women, but they’re frequently displayed in demeaning activities such as pole dancing. Of course, they’re also required to wear skimpy, figure-hugging outfits while saving the day (see Figure 15-1). You go, girls.

Moving beyond gender: Queer theory

First, the ‘Q’ word. Inappropriate much? Queer may cause a bit of discomfort and squeamishness, but that’s entirely the point of using it. The term has been used as a derogatory affront against gay men for decades. Turning the word around from an insult into a celebration is suitably camp and politically radical. What’s more, queer is now an extremely inclusive term, describing not only gay men and women, but also the whole rainbow spectrum of non-normative sexualities and gender identities. Most importantly, it rhymes as part of the famous battle cry: ‘We’re here, we’re queer, get used to it!’

Post-structuralist Michel Foucault’s ground-breaking History of Sexuality (1976) sparked theoretical work on sexuality as a set of conventions within society. Here Foucault takes a common assumption – that Victorian society repressed sexuality – and turns it on its head. By naming, pathologising and criminalising homosexuality, repressive institutions in fact created the discourse that became gay identity.

The idea that sexuality is a discourse (see ‘Deconstructing texts and discourses’ earlier in this chapter), instead of natural and predetermined, is also explored at length by gender theorist Judith Butler. Butler goes further than Foucault by arguing that gender itself is a performance:

• Early feminists argued that you’re born male or female, but have to learn to become a man or a woman. Butler disputes that even your physical sex is a predetermined binary, citing examples of transgender identities.
• After your sex is ascribed one way or another, you’re taught gender as a way to behave: from your parents, schools, the media and culture. This process is like a ritual, which creates an illusion of being natural and essential. But nothing is inherently natural about femininity or masculinity.
• Butler discusses the practice of drag, or playing a different gender role to your given gender, as a way of demonstrating that all gender identities are performed, straight or otherwise. The explicit performances of drag artists help to bring this to light.

So queer theory suggests that all gender identity is performed, something that you do rather than something that you are. In the same way, you can apply queer readings to any cultural text, not just those created by gay people or featuring gay characters.

A vital strategy here is camp, which is derived from the knowing, theatrical style of behaviour common to gay sub-cultures. Author and critic Susan Sontag called camp a ‘sensibility’ with many elements, including artificiality, extravagance and debunking the pretentious. Film critic and author Jack Babuscio refined Sontag’s definition, emphasising irony, wilful superficiality and humour. Within the gay community, humour is a coping mechanism for social alienation and tragedies such as the 1980s AIDS epidemic. For another take on camp, check out the nearby sidebar ‘Well, his real name was Marion’.

Reaching the End of Everything: Post-Theory?

Post-theory can mean one of two things. Firstly, it can be used as a catch-all term for the group of theories which begin with the prefix post-, such as most of the frameworks I examine in this chapter. Secondly, and more controversially, post-theory can refer to the period after high film theory has run its course. Clearly, not all film scholars believe that this has happened yet, or that it ever will. Nonetheless, this chapter dares to ask: is film theory dead? And if so, what next?

The glory days of film theory were the 1960s to the 1980s. During this extremely productive period (which Chapter 13 explores), film theory cross-fertilised with linguistics, Marxism and psychoanalysis to produce many of the classic texts students still read today. Film studies was still an upstart discipline with plenty to prove to older, more familiar fields of study, and so dense, challenging ideas were a suitably highbrow response to those who doubted that film was worth studying at all.

From the 1990s to the present day, the field of film studies has grown in size and confidence, and so naturally a greater diversity of approaches is now on offer. This section discusses the place of film theory in this new order and whether you even need it anymore.

Smashing the SLAB: Bordwell takes aim

In 1996, possibly the most famous film scholar on the planet David Bordwell published an edited collection with the attention-grabbing title Post-Theory: Reconstructing Film Studies. In the introductory essay, Bordwell conceded that his title was a bit of a tease. He wasn’t intending to argue that all film theory was useless, but instead that High Theory had had its day.

The kind of Theory (with a capital T) that Bordwell aimed to dismantle carries the suitably weighty acronym SLAB:

• S is for Saussure: His study of linguistics gave rise to film semiotics.
• L is for Lacan: Psychoanalyst of choice for film theorists.
• A is for Althusser: His concept of ideology is vital for film studies.
• B is for Barthes: Particularly his productive post-structuralist reading strategy.

So what exactly is Bordwell’s beef with High Theory?

• Bordwell objects to top-down inquiry, the tendency of film scholars to start with the theory and then move down to a text as illustration. The task of research should be to pose a problem and gather data, instead of simply attempting to prove a theoretical model works. Bordwell also claims that film theory suffers from an over-reliance on French philosophy, to the detriment of schools of thought from different countries, which often aren’t even translated into English.
• Bordwell claims that theorising is too eclectic in its sources, drawing from a wide range of positions that may be logically opposed to one another. He cites the fact that High Theorists discuss some ideas of the favoured theorists while overlooking others. Theories that refute the commonly held position are simply ignored: for example Noam Chomsky’s work on linguistics that overturns Saussure.
• Bordwell mocks the loose, associative style of argument characteristic of the least intelligible film theory. Instead of classical rhetorical strategies such as inductive reasoning, which posits evidence to substantiate a claim, film theory often performs bizarre leaps of logic and offers eloquent but unsupported conclusions.
• Bordwell critiques theorists who over-rely upon evidence drawn from film texts themselves. He suggests that instead of evidence, the film theorist has only interpretation. By this logic, a theory is given weight simply by generating a fresh reading of a film.

Bordwell’s preferred way forward for film theory is what he calls middle-level research. This approach asks questions that have factual and theoretical implications. Studies of particular film-makers, genres and national cinemas are good examples, as are the variations of film history that investigate production, exhibition or stylistic developments over time. Most importantly, Bordwell suggests that middle-level research projects don’t require a ‘Big Theory of Everything’ in order to be worthwhile and valid. Phew, thank goodness for that.

Striking back at Bordwell

Not everyone agrees with David Bordwell on the passing away of High Theory. Many theorists refute Bordwell’s argument that research doesn’t need a ‘Big Theory of Everything’, by insisting that any claim around knowledge, truth and power is inherently about culture, identity and politics. If you choose not to make these assumptions explicit, you’re basically kidding yourself. More importantly, plenty of interesting ideas are still waiting to be explored at the level of Bordwell’s High Theory. Should theorists abandon attempts to rethink the discipline of film studies just because they’re busy studying films? Doesn’t the field of film studies have room for pragmatism and ambition?

In recent decades, few cinematic thinkers have been more ambitious than Gilles Deleuze. Yes, he was another French philosopher – but don’t hold that against him. The most fascinating thing about Deleuze is that he doesn’t just philosophise about cinema and how it works, instead he uses cinema as philosophy. In other words, Deleuze claims that films actively produce new ideas and new ways of seeing the world. They’re not simply representation; they’re events in themselves.

You can see why Deleuze’s ideas are an attractive starting point for film scholars, who’ve taken them in a variety of directions:

• Deleuze’s dissection of the complex relations between time and movement are useful frameworks for film scholars to analyse a wide range of film styles and genres, including classical Hollywood and European art cinema.
• Deleuze influences studies of national identity through the idea of minor cinema. For example, films from post-colonial nations may use the dominant cinematic form but play it ‘in a minor key’, subverting its meanings. This approach is more optimistic than that of subaltern studies (see ‘Deconstructing empire: Post-colonialism’ earlier in this chapter).
• Deleuze’s free-floating ideas on affect (emotion) provide a focus for studies of visceral effects upon the body in cinema, in an avant-garde context (for instance, Andy Warhol) and in mainstream horror films (George A Romero).

Deleuze was a reclusive figure, believing that his books spoke for him. By contrast, Slavoj Žižek is somewhat of a rock star – at least by film-theorist standards. His frequent media appearances, journalistic contributions to political debates and, most recently, the documentaries he stars in, all capitalise on his entertaining and engaging persona. Žižek takes two of High Theory’s biggest ideas – Marxism and psychoanalysis – and fuses them into a radical critique on contemporary consumer society. He’s particularly influenced by Jacques Lacan’s notion of fantasy as the way people experience the world and the social construct of ideology.

If you want to get a quick grasp of Žižek’s ideas and experience his unusual rhetorical style, take a look at one of his documentary films, such as The Pervert’s Guide to Ideology (2012). He takes clips from many films and intersperses them with shots of himself explaining his theories. But instead of capturing the interviews in the studio, director Sophie Fiennes shoots him on location and with lighting and cinematography to match the film itself. So when discussing frustrated fantasy and violence in Taxi Driver (1976), Žižek is sprawled out on Travis Bickle’s military cot bed. This amusing and thought-provoking device literally places the theorist within the text.

Thinking about thinking: Cognitive theory

If you ever (bravely) try to read Deleuze or simply watch Žižek doing his quirky thing in his documentaries, you may well end up thinking: wait a minute here. That’s a brilliant theory, delivered convincingly. I even understand some of it. But where’s the evidence? Can you prove that the theory works in practice? If you have this kind of rational brain, cognitive film theory may well be for you.

Cognitive film theory is extremely diverse, drawing on aspects of psychology, biology and neuroscience. But it’s united in its use of scientific methods and its implicit opposition to the High Theory of psychoanalysis.

Unsurprisingly, as the lead opponent to High Theory, David Bordwell is a committed cognitivist. His fascination with storytelling and narration has neoformalist qualities (see Chapter 13), but in recent years it led him further and further down the cognitive route. Bordwell describes how he came to reject top-down inquiry (taking big ideas from other fields and attempting to apply them to film), in favour of asking specific, detailed questions and then looking for broader theoretical frameworks if necessary.

For example, Bordwell examines film characterisations, noting that audiences tend to make snap judgements about characters based on their actions, as soon as they’re introduced. These reactions are useful for screenwriters because they allow economy of storytelling. But why does this process work?

• Bordwell argues that clinical psychology offers several convincing answers. The primacy effect suggests that you’re trained to rely heavily upon the first pieces of information you receive, which shape your future responses.
• Bordwell also notes the fundamental attribution error, which leads you to interpret other’s behaviour as attributable to their personalities, even while you excuse your own through environmental factors. So if someone shouts in a meeting, they’re bossy; if you do it, you’re stressed out.

Taken together, these two factors help to explain superficiality when grasping character. Of course film-makers can use this straight, or choose to subvert it to provide narrative twists.

Philosopher Noël Carroll argues that the increased interest in cognitivism within film theory circles creates challenges for film theory’s long-standing love of psychoanalytic theory (see Chapter 13). He uses the analogy of psychoanalysis as a clinical practice, which is only considered necessary in medicine after rational explanation for behaviour is at an end. Carroll’s implication is that when two theories about film clash, one of which is cognitive and one psychoanalytical, the burden of proof is with the psychoanalytical response. Carroll also notes that, although the practice of psychoanalysis has data generated by patients, psychoanalytic film theory seems to exist with no evidential basis.

So does cognitivism spell the end of High Theory? Or does it simply replace the problems of one method with those of another? One thing’s for sure, you can bet film theorists across the globe are thinking about issues like this right now. Thinking really, really hard… .