Clayton George Wickham - final thesis

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through use of the eye/camera, which, combined with sadism, results in a type of
shot that contains very complex emotional and informational coding. In fact, Wood
seemingly contradicts much of his own argument in his discussion of point of view
in relation to the work of Alfred Hitchcock. Wood states:
The power of the POV shot in constructing identification has been greatly
exaggerated (by myself, among others): it is simply not true that to stick
in a shot from a given character’s point of view automatically identifies
the spectator with that character, beyond the obvious enforced
identification with a physical position (we see what the character sees).
(1989; 308) [parenthesis in the original]
If this was written after his previous discussion regarding the eye/camera in relation
to the slasher film and he was in the process of re-evaluating his opinion, then Wood
could justify his change of position. In Hollywood from Vietnam to Reagan... And
Beyond, however, he revisits his writing in Hollywood from Vietnam to Reagan
(1986) after having written Hitchcock’s Films Revisited (1989), and fails to account
for his change in interpretation of point of view shots. This inconsistency creates
difficulty when establishing Wood’s ultimate position, but it should be noted that his
statement about the complexity of the point of view shot is more thoroughly
established, as he uses more detail to support the latter claim than he does the
former, which is reduced to a few generalized statements. While this does not
necessarily reflect the quality of the argument, the fact that Wood deemed it
necessary to commit a greater amount of writing to the development of the point of
view complexity argument as opposed to the alibi for sadism argument could be