Notes on
Walkerdine, V. (1986) 'Video Replay:
families, films and fantasy'. In Burgin
V., Donald, J., and Kaplan, C. (Eds) Formations
of Fantasy, 167-199. London:
Routledge.
Dave Harris
This is based on a study of a family watching a
violent film on television—Rocky II.
Research here is a kind of perverse voyeurism,
with obvious possibilities [of observer effects],
including the observer acting as 'the silent Other
who is present in, while apparently absent from,
the text' (167). Walkerdine chose instead to
be present in the text, to become apparent, to
insert herself explicitly into the research.
This led her to reveal her own feelings, including
the theorist's desire for knowledge, and a certain
latent content of this desire including 'the
terror of the other who is watched'. In
these circumstances, the researcher practices
'surveillant voyeurism', which can be driven by
'the will to truth', possibly even containing
'desperate desires—for power, control, for
vicarious joining in—as well as a desperate fear
of the other being watched' (168). There
also doubts about the processes of the
'intellectualization of pleasures' among film
critics, who often have an equal desire for
mastery: this is as equally political as the
pleasures of the masses
Psychoanalysis features in some film theory,
mostly about the relations in the film rather than
as a matter to explain the engagement of
viewers. However, viewers are already
involved in some complex dynamics, not immediately
reducible to class, gender or ethnicity, although
these factors are important. There is also
the context of domestic and family practices, and
the play of discourses and the relations of
signification between them. In particular,
filmic representations can be incorporated into
domestic practices.
The family being researched was a working class
couple with three children watching Rocky
II on video. The violent climax was
replayed several times. First reactions [by
W] were an initial condemnation of the violence
and sexism of the working classes, and shame and
disgust for the observer [which could even be seen
as one of the pleasures of voyeurism, she
says]. The experience also awakened her own
memories of pain, struggle and class, and her own
views of engagements with the underdog and his
struggles. Thinking of these fantasies and
dreams permitted her own entry as a viewer within
the possibilities offered by the film. This
suggests that effective viewing requires a
vocabulary of fantasies.
Escape seems to be a source of the appeal for the
working class viewers, rather than any resonance
with the 'pathology of working class life'.
In other words, engagement involved deploying
their own set of fantasy spaces, part of their own
fragmented subjectivity. These and her own
fantasies were already discursive, and thus
subjected to power and regulation (171).
These fantasies are the ones that connects with
positions offered in the film, and this connection
also is a signifying practice. Theory can
also be seen as similarly motivated by the desire
to look, to master, possible only after personal
fantasies have been subsumed.
Fantasy material in a film is more popular than
realism. The signification of fantasy
appears as 'hot' aesthetics. Rocky
is a film loaded with other symbols, for example
those of the Cold War, Stallone's earlier role as
a Vietnam vet in Rambo. All these
offer fantasies of 'omnipotence, heroism and
salvation'. Fighting is seen as
necessary. Macho display is required to
resist oppression [with the same paradoxes as
pointed out in Willis].
Fantasies are attached to bodies rather than the
bourgeois preference for the mind. There is
a struggle to be a 'big man' at home too, and
Rocky displays suitable private emotions as
well. In particular, fighting can be seen as
a 'class-specific and gendered use of the body'
(123). The body is both spectacle and
triumph. A fear of mutilations seems to
drive the urge to fight, including the risk of
oppression and humiliation, and this can be seen
as an alternative to adapting to [oppressive]
reality. Masculine identity is never secure,
but is always threatened, by those from another
class or gender.
Walkerdine attempted to transcribe the
conversation the family had as they watched the
climax to Rocky, and noted:
- They did not watch in
fascinated silence, but brought disruptions of
various kinds in their viewing, such as
controlling playback. This made more
connections possible, especially with
masculine domination of the family;
- Fighting was actively
developed as a metaphor within the
household—kids need to stand up for themselves
(a working class value), but this was
sometimes mixed with fears for their
femininity if girls do it, so the wife's
participation in television activity had to be
both encouraged and undermined. Party
politics was seen as fighting, and there were
links with other combats, for example with the
education authority over school policy.
This was seen by both parties as 'trouble
making'. These examples show that
fighting is a celebration of masculinity but
'its basis is in oppression'(181).
Working class men are able to beat a desperate
retreat to the body, because there is no
escape through their mind [rather fanciful I
thought].
Talking and surveillance also involves power and
regulation by the researcher, and there were
frequent [adult male] remarks about what happens
when the researcher is not there. The women
were silent. Talking about fighting for the
male head of household was clearly significant,
not simply pathological behaviour as in bourgeois
conceptions. These reactions need to be
grasped in terms of class specificity.
Masculine values can also be seen behind the
ridicule of female fantasies, which have a latent
as well as the manifest content [some peculiar
material appears about the fears of very small
men, 182-3]. Reality and the fantasy of being a
fighter are linked through a 'psychical reality'
(183).
[Then there is an aside]. Characteristic male
names for females are usually diminutives, and
this shows their role in male fantasies [with a
undertones of Lacan on identity, and its link with
'specific regimes of representation' (184)].
Walkerdine provides her own examples from
photographs and from memories about her own
childhood identity, as a bluebell fairy, nickname
by her father as 'Tinky', referring to
Tinkerbell. Tinkerbell is not a normal woman
but an 'hysteric', kept alive only by audience
wishes. She's childlike, feminine but safe,
an object of the male gaze, a constructed Other, a
'narcissistic image of the femininity of man'
(186). Walkerdine felt positive about this
identity: she wanted to live the fiction, bask in
the gaze of the other. It is clear that
males want to do this too, because they are not
outside of fantasies themselves. Fantasies
are attractive because they are affirmatory,
because they are narcissistic, and safe. [A
number of links are made with the image of the
pale consumptive or anorexic woman]. Getting back
to the studied family, the male adult calls his
own kid 'Dodo'and infantilizes her in order to
create a role for himself as a protector, a
fighter. However, he also wants her to be a
fighter, producing a certain 'fractured
subjectivity' in her.
Psychoanalysis in films still largely focuses on
positioning, and there is little empirical work
showing how films are connected with daily
lives. The classic subject is over
determined and passive. However, there are
multiple sites for the production of subjectivity
and they may contradict rather than fix a
subject. Viewers in contact with films
engage in active signification. There are
always particularisitc viewing situations, instead
of, say, pathological scopophilia [an obvious
reference to Mulvey].
There can still be general meanings, however,
including some from the pre-oedipal stage.
[Back to the role of the researcher and
surveillance]. Power differentials are not
just managed by 'putting subjects at their
ease'. The observer's account simply must be
'a regulative reading which pathologizes the
participants' actions' (190) [as in symbolic
violence for Bourdieu]. The presence of the
observer does trigger responses. Walkerdine
tried to develop her multiple positioning as both
middle class academic and working class girl, and
to make a positive use of the process of
'recognition' [as in Althusser, who sees it as a
flawed process] to engage more deeply than is
usual in the rhetoric of siding with the
researched -- as in Willis in Learning to Labour,
where he appears as an academic wanting to be a
lad, but there is no account of his real
position. Lots of ethnographic interviews
develop simple interpretations, for example to
show female resistance to school—or is this hiding
pain and anxiety because of academic
failure? (192).
Interviews need to penetrate to latent content, as
in Freud on dreams unlocking meaning through key
signifiers and how they are connected with other
meanings in actual discourses in the present and
to unconscious or past practices.
Historically specific relations and connections
are what give meaning, not the internal rules of
some sign system, and there is a necessary
struggle involved because power and regulation
also intervene. There is a danger of infinite
regress in the analysis of latent content, but it
can be stopped if we focus on relations of
domination and subordination in the present [for
political reasons]. We must investigate the
empirical realities of power and surveillance, a
quasi-Foucaldian approach [accompanied by the old
hope that this might produce a political
practice].
Social science is voyeuristic [again]. The
will to truth hides a fear of the masses and their
animal passions. It is necessary to develop
multiple identities from multiple disciplinary
practices. Middle class radicals often see
rationality and intelligibility as the only escape
route for the masses, but this can involve a
pathologization of the mass audience.
However, all analysis is a regulative practice,
producing both the audience and our own
subjectivity. Researchers often fantasise
that they can make the audience see properly,
while disavowing fantasies of their own.
Actually, fantasy spaces offer hope and
escape—Rocky for males, romantic fiction for
females. Insistence on using these materials
to intellectualize risks a new kind of regulation,
replacing pleasure in films and television.
The bourgeois will to truth is probably even more
perverse: to know is to control, to regulate
otherness. Terror at the lack of control can
lead to a desire to rationalise the 'terrifying
physicality'of the masses (197), and to promote
embourgeoisment as 'the only dream left'.
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