Hollywood Utopia

36 Hollywood Utopia
Essentially a youthful crowd, this audience does not have very sophisticated tastes or
expectations when it comes to narrative. Given this lack, they may never ask for
strong, persuasive story-telling when they grow up. What they get . . . is not narrative
as it has been traditionally defined, but a succession of undifferentiated sensations .
. . there is in fact no authentic emotional build-up, consequently no catharsis at the
movie’s conclusion
(Schickel in Collins 1995: 141).
But, as Collins rightly asserts, Schickel is nostalgically evoking traditional notions
of narrative that depend on ‘coherence, plausibility, authentic emotional build-up,
natural outgrowths and catharsis’. This list of requirements grows out of
conventions first developed in classical tragedy, codified most obviously in
Aristotle’s Poetics and then expanded in realist theatre and literature through the
nineteenth century. According to this model, ‘virtually all modernist and
postmodernist narratives would be deficient’ (Collins 1995: 142).
John Fiske, a ‘high priest’ of audience reception theory, lays down the gauntlet for
the ‘progressive’ potentiality of popular, commercial texts by affirming that all films
and other mediated texts must, ‘in order to be popular, contain within them
unresolved contradictions that the viewer can expect in order to find within them
structural similarities to his or her own social relations and identities’ (cited in
Angus et al. 1989: 186). While other critics such as Robert Stam correctly highlight
some very pertinent institutional questions which can undermine this textual
position, 24 Fiske’s assertions remain a starting point for this valorisation of the
progressive potential of Hollywood utopianism.
Norman Denzin also affirms what can be described as an ‘existential aesthetic
perspective’, which decodes the popular as containing ‘multiple, contradictory, and
complex positions’ (Denzin 1992: 139). While these contradictions remain
unresolved within popular texts, they can serve to expose and dramatise the core
concerns of the age. Ecological meta-narratives flourish within this cultural and
aesthetic milieu.
But, first of all, issues of relative value and progressive potential must be fully
addressed if not systematised within a textual analytical framework. It is commonly
asserted that there have been two basic approaches to interpretation: ‘thematic
explication’ and ‘symptomatic reading’. Both avoid audience consideration yet
intend to go beyond simple comprehension. Explication explores meaning, which
is covert or symbolic and is often artist-centred, intending to reveal an individual
director’s underlying vision, whereas symptomatic interpretation looks for
repressed (ideological) meaning in the text, such as gaps between its explicit moral
framework compared with aspects of its style or semantic structure.