Abstract
A generation of film and media scholars weaned on 1980s videocassettes are sparking renewed interest in the home viewing apparatus and video spectatorship. This field is not quite television studies or new media studies, so Caetlin Benson-Allott coins the name ‘new video studies’ to include her work alongside an assortment of articles and books by scholars such as Lucas Hilderbrand, James Moran and Daniel Hebert. Benson-Allott’s background includes new media, spectatorship, and queer and masculinity studies, and her intervention here explores how cinema’s ongoing platform and distribution changes since the late 1970s have affected both the text and the viewing subject. What she accomplishes is thus a revival of screen theory and a revision of platform studies. She reframes exhibition as an essential component in the affective functioning of the apparatus while expanding Ian Bogost and Nick Monfort’s conception of platform to include such analog ‘mechatronic’ devices as VCRs. The cross-connections between technology and media culture are most visible, she maintains, in the ‘low’, mass entertainment genre of horror. In order to provoke audiences, filmmakers must tap into the cultural anxieties of their historical moment, which also demands that they anticipate how the latest distribution and exhibition practises can work to their advantage. For this reason Killer Tapes and Shattered Screens is filled with close readings of sumptuously described scenes of horror that evince the interwoven historic contexts of technology, industry, political economy, and nation.
The book’s central thesis and method are encapsulated well in its first chapter, an historical overview of five succeeding platforms elegantly mapped onto the zombie films of George A Romero. Each new platform requires that Romero adjust his formal style and ideological content to engage the spectator accordingly, whether that spectator is watching in a shopping mall cinema (as in the 1978 Dawn of the Dead) or online through their mobile devices (2007’s Diary of the Dead). Romero customizes his style to suit the format, for example, by muting the color palette and restricting depth of field to facilitate the anticipated VCR viewing of Day of the Dead, a direct to video release. But Romero’s political polemics are also responsive to the media literacy of the time. For instance, he simplifies the mise-en-scene and tinges it with an unsightly digital blue filter as part of his critique of the ‘cloistered withdrawal’ of the DVD viewer of Land of the Dead (p. 51).
The following two chapters are single film analyses that bookend the reign of the VCR. Both Videodrome (David Cronenberg, 1983) and The Ring (Gore Verbinski, 2002) channel the industry’s anxieties surrounding this format into the ‘abhorred’ figure of the videocassette. By the time of The Ring the videocassette had accrued such stigma from piracy that it began to figure as a murderous parthenogenetic black box, like Barbara Creed’s monstrous-feminine, reproducing without male fertilization (i.e. industry consent). Not that this ‘anti-tape rhetoric’ is an hyperbole, either; Benson-Allott observes its real world correlate in the litany of anti-piracy petitions before Congress, many of which she humorously ventriloquizes through the ribald exhortations of MPAA president Jack Valenti, who campaigned tirelessly to ‘plug the analog hole’ (pp. 110, 21).
On the other hand, Benson-Allott reads Videodrome as metonymic of the viewing body’s mutation to meet evolving media. She writes: ‘Videodrome looks at how the viewing body adapts in response to video technology rather than representing video as an extension of that body’ (p. 80). Thus she asserts the movie ‘offers an alternative mythology to the … prosthesis model popularized [in part] by McLuhan’ (p. 83). Indeed it does; however, it should be noted that this popularized model is also a common misreading of McLuhan. I would counter that Videodrome’s new media mythology effectively elaborates McLuhan’s central thesis, which is that media not only extend (and amputate) our senses, but while doing so, simultaneously reshape sense ratios and patterns of perception, not to mention social relations. In light of contemporary biomediation theory, Richard Cavell has further expounded McLuhan’s thesis to suggest that our subjectivities are not located in the autonomous hierarchal personhood of self, but bleed into our media while those media bleed back into us.
Just as bodies merge with media, so does digital video form a symbiotic relationship with celluloid, which had become evident by the time the industry finally ‘terminated’ VHS production in 2006. To illustrate the advent of post-cinematic spectatorship, Benson-Allott makes instructive use of Grindhouse (Robert Rodriguez and Quentin Tarantino, 2007) as a modular narrative intended to reshape and recombine in the different viewing platforms of cinema, DVD, and Blu-ray. Probing deeper into Grindhouse’s distribution and production strategies reveals that theatrical releases have become little more than expensive box-office trailers targeted to home viewers. So, too, has damaged and degraded celluloid become a (special) effect of cinema. In its restaging of these and other effects – both analog and digital – Grindhouse aspires to an aura of what she calls ‘cinematicity’. This movie’s cinematicity, in particular, discloses the ‘simulacral heart of cinema [and] … subverts the cinema’s phantasmatic status as original’ (pp. 161, 165). Cinema persists to haunt the post-cinematic age, she argues, but it is not cinema that we mourn so much as medium specificity in this era of digital convergence.
Several strains of thought that were opened in these chapters are revisited in her final one, which explores the industry’s present strategies to combat the interminable issue of piracy, today’s most popular form of movie downloading. Expanding on the aforementioned premise that movies can stigmatize through their content, Benson-Allott isolates the ‘faux footage’ horror sub-genre as a conveyor of an industrial tactic to breed spectatorial paranoia about orphaned media. Twenty-first century faux footage such as Quarantine (John Erick Dowdle, 2008) and Paranormal Activity (Oren Peli, 2007) are distinguished from early ‘found footage’ forerunners like Cannibal Holocaust (Ruggero Deodato, 1980) by their absence of metacinematic framing stories. Beginning innocently and ending abruptly with the violent death of the cameraperson, faux footage mystifies the original filmmaker’s intentions and arouses anxiety about watching content obtained through illicit back channels.
This last chapter is the book’s most contentious and daring, to be sure. It may seem like a stretch to propose that these movies serve as the industry’s ‘weapon in a format war fought by copyright holders and pirates over e-spectatorship’, because piracy and digital distribution are nowhere represented in their content (p. 171). Even so, Benson-Allott’s argument stands as an exemplary model of film studies method. She maps the discourse of digital era piracy as it winds through the multivalent dimensions of blogs, ‘hactivist’ polemics, community guidelines of P2P services, NET act and DMCA legislation, MPAA lobbying and anti-piracy ads, as well as studios’ production, distribution, and marketing strategies. Indeed, her approach is akin to the cultural studies practice of radical contextualization and articulation of power relations.
Paranormal Activity is a case in point. Consider Paramount’s decision against a big-budget repackaging of the original upon deducing something intrinsically horrific in the low-budget, found footage format; Spielberg’s intervention into the ending – making it more sudden and terrifying; the limited-release marketing campaign – encouraging younger demographics online to ‘Demand It’ in their neighborhood; and the pirated circulation of the pre-Paramount cut – serendipitously reinforcing the uncanny doubleness of the format within the cultural imaginary. Taken together, such paratext demonstrates the lines through which the format war over e-spectatorship may be channelled into the movie-text itself. Additionally, Benson-Allott’s nuanced close reading of faux footage’s formal style occasions a revision of Christian Metz’s theorization of primary and secondary identification. She observes: The spectator’s identification with the diegetic camera and cameraperson exposes her to the physical threats that menace her surrogates in these movies in a way that conventional slasher cinematography does not. However, faux footage horror movies invite their spectators to become – or rather to acknowledge that they are – part of a precarious and defenceless mechanical apparatus. (p. 192)
The violent and abrupt endings common to the genre violate the spectator in their very act of watching and engender an ambivalent paranoia toward the apparatus – that the apparatus is unauthorized, unsafe, and the stream can be cut at any moment.
Benson-Allott’s rich, multi-layered work is packed with such case studies and compelling inroads that pave the way forward for an expanded apparatus theory. The apparatus, which is contingent upon technology, exhibition space, and socio-cultural milieu, distinctly shapes the formal style of the texts themselves as well as the political polemics infused therein. In effect, Benson-Allott’s argument is an elegant working through of Vivian Sobchack’s proposition that ‘seeing images mediated and made visible by technological vision … enables us to not only see technological images, but also to see technologically’ (quoted on p. 94). Vision, here, is socialized; platforms interpellate the viewer in a historically specific manner, inducing patterns of formal style that dictate what and how we see – processes basic to identity formation.
While her theory inspires several new concepts and directions for further exploration, the book’s most generative contribution is its exemplary method. If it’s true that the art of close reading has been relegated to the cloistered study of aesthetics and auteurs, Benson-Allott reinstates it to its rightful place by means of historically embedded, keen textual analysis. Readers should be left with little doubt that the historicity of platform is decipherable in acute audio-visual details, and that it is precisely such details that court, agitate, and interpellate the viewing subject. In further expanding upon these readings with theory, Benson-Allott is omnivorous and non-partisan. Skillfully deploying Sobchack and phenomenology for Videodrome, Žižek and psychoanalysis for The Ring, and Deleuze and simulacrum for Grindhouse, she selects the theories best suited to her subject rather than squeezing her argument through one or two theoretical frames. So it is that this book succeeds in teaching film theory alongside film history as it opens new horizons for thinking video spectatorship. An indispensable film history text for film and media scholars, it will also prove useful to graduates and advanced undergraduates, who will benefit from Allott’s model of substantiating connections between theory, history, and text. Killer Tapes and Shattered Screens is as timely as it is thorough, as crafty with its methods as it is challenging in its arguments.