"Traffic Was a Bitch":Gender, Race and Spectatorhip in Robert Altman's The Player Michael T. Schuyler (bio) "I was drawing a comparison not based on race or gender."1 So says Griffin Mill (Tim Robbins) to Detective Susan Avery (Whoopi Goldberg) during a critical scene in Robert Altman's The Player (1992). Griffin's words tumble out of him as if they are foreign to him, as if he's an unrehearsed actor of little depth woodenly reading fresh lines from a new, previously unseen script. His words fall upon deaf ears: they won't convince Susan Avery (who's chattering away distractedly, anyhow); they certainly won't convince the spectator who has learned that Griffin's notions of reality derive solely from the movies. Ironically, though, Griffin himself controls a lot of cinematic content, so the seemingly informed spectator-creator has become uninformed by seeking education from what he has created. Altman's film criticizes this "trickle down" system of assumed reality where the wealthy, white male studio executives infuse their products with "truths" about American society, and in turn, the movie-going public begins to believe in the stereotypes which pervade these mass-consumed texts. Griffin, as executive-cum-spectator, barely survives in a world where women and African-Americans don't behave cinematically. Scholar Stuart Hall asserts that "[t]he culture industries do have the power constantly to rework and reshape what they represent; and, by repetition and selection, to impose and implant such definitions of ourselves [End Page 218] as fit more easily the descriptions of the dominant or preferred cultures" (232–3). This essay sees Altman's independently financed and distributed text as an expansion on this theme, where the "culture industr[y]" in question is the cinema; Griffin, as the "dominant or preferred [culture]," holds all of the "power" which is nearly usurped by various females (one of whom—the aforementioned Avery—is black) because the "definitions of ourselves" that he has "impose[d] and implant[ed]" cause him to misinterpret the world outside of the studio and flounder to the point of near ruin. As such, this essay explores The Player in terms of spectatorship. After all, Griffin becomes for Altman the ultimate spectator—an amalgam of buyer and seller, the person who has imposed his misinformed set of values on the movie-going public and is then forced, as a spectator, to rely on all that he has learned from the film-watching experience. I will concentrate on three issues of spectatorship in this essay: viewing portrayals of females, viewing portrayals of blacks, and—to a lesser extent—stargazing. I contend that Altman includes the subordination, domination and exclusion of women in The Player as a pro-female commentary against the established discourse of patriarchal success in the Classical Hollywood narrative. Similarly, I propose that Altman inscribes his text with prevailing racist rhetoric in order to limn both the continued fostering of such attitudes in cinema and the subsequent on-going, tacit acceptance of these attitudes by the spectator. He ties both of these ideas, as we will see, to issues of power in the film. Stargazing reinforces the audience's consciousness and—in a particular example—unmasks cinematic racism. I. Skirts Four characters—all female—define Griffin throughout The Player: Bonnie Sherow, June Guddmundsdottir, Detective Susan Avery, and Celia. From the beginning, they threaten, endanger, impede our hero's stability, thus adhering to at least one convention of the Classical narrative: a protagonist's interrupted stability. Two of these women, Bonnie (Cynthia Stevenson)—Griffin's protégé/girlfriend/lap dog—and Celia (Dina Merrill)—the ever-efficient secretary to studio president Joel Levison (Brion James)—are introduced in the film as diametric opposites despite striking [End Page 219] similarities. As I will show, by film's end, each has been subordinated, but because one plays by men's rules, only the other suffers. As it opens The Player, the now famous eight-minute tracking shot introduces us to multiple characters and orients the viewer to the world of the film, as most good establishing shots do. First, Celia enters the outer office, blocking our view of the Charles Bragg lithograph...