Criticism

Tratner, Michael.
Working the Crowd: Movies and Mass Politics
Criticism - Volume 45, Number 1, Winter 2003, pp. 53-73

Wayne State University Press

Michael Tratner - Working the Crowd: Movies and Mass Politics - Criticism 45:1 Criticism 45.1 (2003) 53-73 Working the Crowd: Movies and Mass Politics Michael Tratner GOING TO THE MOVIES has always been in part an experience of joining a crowd: picking up the buzz about the latest hit from friends and newspapers, feeling the line surge forward as the velvet ropes are lifted, getting carried along on a tide of rolling laughter. Yet film critics almost never speak of crowds or crowd responses when they analyze movies. Film theorists such as Christian Metz, Kaja Silverman, and Laura Mulvey go so far as to claim that people at Hollywood movies react as if they were utterly alone, each person becoming a spectator isolated in the dark fantasizing about the stars on the screen. Though such theorists often turn to social criticism, they repeatedly describe the audience as if there were only one individual reacting, speaking in the singular of "the Spectator," "the Male Gaze," the "All-Perceiving Subject," and the "Voyeur," never of crowd responses or mass fantasies or even social trends. Even critics such as Mary Anne Doane and Manthia Diawara who have sought to broaden spectator theory by considering that audiences may contain different kinds of spectators still treat these alternative spectators as individuals reacting separately to movies. Part of the reason critics have ignored the ways that movies elicit crowd responses is that the dominant theory of...