"What About the Audience? What About Them?" : Spectatorship and Cinematic Pleasure

Abstract

What about the Audience?AVhat About Them? : Spectatorship and Cinematic Pleasure Tamara Harvey Poststructuralist analyses of subjectivity tend to focus constitution of the Subject through the process of desire Subject's perceptions of on the and the an Other. These theories have broken ground in their critique of the unified Cartesian subject (the subject of empire) and of metaphysically guaranteed truth. But I want to explore pleasure, not desire. If desire is an experience of difference subtly informed by lack, pleasure is an experience of multiple differences often figured In particular, I (I believe improperly) in terms of excess. am interested in a kind of cinematic pleasure evident in genre film spectacles involving many bodies and mov- ing outside an individual's jouissance. Specifically, I discuss cinematic pleasure and the Kool Thing dance number from Hal Hartley's 1992 film Simple Men. Though movie is not a genre film, I use recent genre film theories because they say something useful about pleasure and because this specific scene works as a number like those found in genre films. I chose Simple Men because it gives me pleasure, and be- cause, though I don't have time to develop these ideas today, how we understand this scene reflects on our understanding of postmodernism analyzing this film in terms of pleasure and spectacle provides an alternative to readings which emphasize market excesses and ironic citationality. Genre films have been traditionally excluded from the canon of serious and aesthetically-redeemable films largely because they are concerned with pleasure rather than desire. Successful narrative is frequently connected to notions of desire narrative is driven by a lack whose fulfillment is the carrot which leads both characters and readers alike toward the denouement. When genre Hartley's films are characterized as a string of numbers loosely held together by a weak plot, the pleasure of these films is still being defined in terms of desire. Their weak plots suggest that satisfaction comes model, pleasure is simply the fulfillment of desire. The problem, I would argue, is that this this too soon and too crudely; by