ABSTRACT
In recent years I have been troubled by the return of a ploddingly sociological approach to cinema in academic as well as media criticism. By plodding, I do not mean a sociology which goes out to explore the dense social contexts of film consumption today; in cinema as distinct from television studies, we’ve had very little of that. I mean a strictly armchair way of seeing or not-seeing films which first views them as evidence of some social or political mess, then treats them as guilty stand-ins for that mess-and wages a war of attitude on other viewers.
