Discussing books on movies … almost as good as watching them, and without the sticky floors!
While I am hazy on the actual date, I can remember with total accuracy the moment I realized I never would become a grad student and most likely would drop out of university before I earned my worthless B.A. in Film Studies … which is precisely what I ended up doing.
I was 18 and had only been going to classes for a couple of months. At the end of another one of his agonizing lectures, my Intro to Film professor informed the class that we were soon to be honored with a visit from an “important” film scholar who was the head of the semiotics department at an Eastern school much more renowned than our own. That he was the head of the semiotics department and not the film department should have been my first warning, but I was young and stupid and did not appreciate the difference. What attracted me to the news of his upcoming lecture was that it was going to be about one of my favorite filmmakers, David Cronenberg. At that point, none of my classes had touched upon the grimy, ugly genre films so close to my heart, so I jumped at the chance to hear someone “smart” talk about something I was actually interested in.
Imagine my surprise, then, as I sat through the 50-minute lecture and listened for 35 minutes before David Cronenberg’s name actually passed through the lips of our orator. Imagine my further surprise when, during those first 35 minutes, I found myself unable to understand a single thing our honored visitor had said.
Though I was, due to my youth and ignorance, briefly cowed by the man’s polysyllabic doubletalk and verbal trickery, my attitude soon changed once he finally – in the last 15 minutes of his lecture – reached the actual argument of his thesis. And though he used just as many big words and alien phrases as he had before, I now was able to follow the path of his ideas and was shocked that they came to this: The films of David Cronenberg are closer to being science fiction than horror, because all of their monsters are created by scientists rather than through more traditionally paranormal means.
And that was the moment I knew my career in academia was doomed before it had even began, because it became immediately evident that the trick to making a name for yourself as a scholar wasn’t to express complicated ideas in a way everyone could understand, but rather to complicate simple ideas until they no longer made sense to anyone and that was a game for which I had no talent (despite my passionate love for paragraph-long sentences just like this one).
I am reminded of this moment every time I scan my bookshelf and catch sight of DIRECTED BY ALLEN SMITHEE, a collection of 11 essays edited by Jeremy Braddock and Stephen Hock. In each of these cases, the authors try to convince the reader that by quoting Foucault and Derrida nonstop for the first two-thirds of their papers that they are in turn creating valuable and important insights of their own, but the reality is that not only do these emperors have no clothes, but they’re standing in front of an X-ray machine without a lead apron. In other words, they are as transparent as that anorexic French fashion model they kept showing on the news a couple weeks back.
Which is really a horrible shame, because the book’s conceit of attempting to look at the films of Smithee – the pseudonym occasionally used by the Directors Guild of America for film directors who could prove that interference by producers or a studio resulted in a movie so bad that it could damage their careers and reputations if released with their real names attached to it – as if he were a genuine auteur is one with a lot of potential for fun and satirical mischief (which is why I bought the book in the first place). Unfortunately, it is instead used only to further that most noxious and arrogant of popular academic theories: the fallacy of the author.
At its simplest (which is never how you’ll find it described in this book), the concept works like this: Since each person approaches a text with the perspective of their own experience, they effectively create the text in their own mind as they perceive it – often times reaching conclusions the text’s “author” never intended – which means, it is argued, that it is the spectator and not the creator who is the true author of the text. Essentially it’s an idea warmly embraced by the most craven of academics because it allows them to believe that they are a more important part of the artistic process than the people who actually created the works they are studying.
What then does this bullshit have to do with Mr. Smithee? Well, to the folks who contributed to and edited this book, the fact that there are dozens of films (HELLRAISER: BLOODLINE among them) credited to a man who doesn’t exist serves as ample proof that all credits are meaningless, even when they indicate real living people. It’s a stupid argument, but one the contributors make so unnecessarily convoluted, you can be forgiven for assuming that have to know what they’re talking about.
And before you start wondering why I felt compelled to alert you to the existence of an obscure academic text published half a decade ago, let me answer you by admitting I get a nostalgic kick out of telling that David Cronenberg lecture story and also by saying that next week’s review is going to be for a book full of nekkid pictures and I wanted to show you I could write a full review about a serious work without once making a reference to the glories of female anatomy … although I guess I just did. –Allan Mott
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