ABSTRACT
Throughout Hollywood Melodrama and the New Deal: Public Daydreams, Hollywood films of the Depression era have been interpreted in light of the political context of their release. There has also been an assumption throughout the book that the spectators of these films were political subjects who should be theorized accordingly. Hollywood melodrama obviously activates spectator empathy, but there have been very few attempts to explore the politics of this empathy using the vast resources of moral and political philosophy. The political theorization of the spectator offers some advantages over psychoanalytic and cognitivist theorizations because psychoanalysis and cognitivism both typically ground their arguments in ontological or scientific claims about the subject, rather than in the social and historical analysis of the political institutions that shape media culture. Unlike cognitivism (which claims that Hollywood narration plugs into mental capacities that are biologically inherent and thus largely devoid of political or ideological implications) and unlike psychoanalytic semiotics (which often describes narrative techniques as extensions of historically unchanging, unconscious mechanisms), an approach developed from the concepts of political philosophy has the potential to be keenly attuned to shifts in social, political, and cultural institutions and to the effects of these changes on the spectator. Specifically, in contrast to psychoanalytic and cognitivist film theories, the political theorization of the spectator can help us determine how the state provides an influential context for Hollywood film spectatorship, and, consequently, what social, cultural, and political changes are needed to construct a film spectator who furthers the ideals of radical democracy.
