Auto-Eroticism: Narcissism, Fetishism, and Consumer Culture

Abstract

In a recent article on cross-gender identification and spectatorial pleasure, Sharon Willis recalls a childhood fascination with the boys and cars of Route 66.' Her memories of identifying with the leads of the television series prompt Willis to develop a theory of identification across boundaries of difference and constituted along the axis of desire-of spectatorial identification-as-bricolage. Willis develops her theory specifically within the context of responses to the film Thelma and Louise (Ridley Scott, 1991)--a work that problematizes privilege (and standards of representation) by placing female characters in the lead roles of a formerly masculine genre. Thelma and Louise represents a kind of outlaw sensibility or desire, both in its narrative content and in its structural approach, by usurping a highly codified genre of experience and making it other. Like Thelma and Louise, a number of other recent films have begun to work at eroding some of the stereotypical standards of the masculine genre, most notably Gregg Araki's The Living End (1992), which features two HIV positive gay males and Bruce MacDonald's Highway 61 (1992), a work set in Canada that illustrates the lure of the elusive American dream to those outside or at the margins of American mainstream consumer culture. These films align themselves with a position of disempowerment with respect to the pervasive culture that literally defines both the mise-en-scenes in which their characters find themselves and the terms of the characters' exclusion. Willis's argument for what might be termed a postmodern reader formation allows for a variety of interpretive positions to develop. It takes into account various spectatorial/reader responses across a wide spectrum, from the kind of straightforward viewer response anticipated during the planning and preproduction phases of film development (audience market research) all the way to responses like camp that radically re-interpret the messages and images presented by the work and, in doing so, negate the exclusionary standards of representation, repositioning the outsider as inside the system of meaning production (through interpretation). For the above mentioned works (and especially the latter two), this kind of interpretive instead of passive receptive approach is literally incorporated into the narrative. These films cite, through the comments of their characters or