ABSTRACT
The film industry’s need to construct the kind of fusion I have previously referred to-between cultural verisimilitudes and generic ones —is a situation often muddied by the theoretical and descriptive terms that tend to be used in relation to it, both in the discourses of the industry and in the discourses of critics, theorists, and workers in the tributary media. In terms of the discourses that, as it were, greet the film product’s release, I have tried already to suggest some of the difficulties of two of the most common ways of conceiving of the relation between the product and the culture in which it is produced. Films are not, or not ever very simply, reflections of the culture. Nor is it the case that they unproblematically make that culture. Rather, there exists a dialectical relationship between these two kinds of effect that precludes our simply stating that, for instance, Thelma and Louise reflects a feminist backlash against the antifeminism of the Reagan years, or that some given studio-era movie reflects the socioeconomic ordering of capitalist America in the 1930s or 1940s. Equally, it is simplistic to suggest that a particular movie can simply or unmediatedly produce some cultural effect, or unproblematically instantiate and install some particular social meaning. This is an especially questionable move to make when such effects and meanings are attributed-as they so often are-to the putative controlling activity of “auteurs.” Either of those ways of thinking about the relationship of film to culture will be found exemplified in all kinds of reviewing practices, in criticism, and even in theory. The relationship is not often enough understood as dialectical and overdetermined.
