The DVD and film scholarship
Here is an interesting addition to the discussion on DVD extra texts and audio commentaries. I was thinking about what came up in the lecture about how the director's commentary of Fight Club attempts to suppress what some scholars believe is a homoerotic tension between Edward Norton and Brad Pitt's characters.
I am working from the assumption that film scholarship and film criticism emerged as an academic discourse for those cinephiles who were bent on untangeling and unpacking deeper social, political and economic meanings within film texts. This may be wrong (please correct me if it is) but doesn't the director commentary now do this for us?
Granted there are a lot of director and actor commentaries which are quite trivial and bland and reveal little about the meaning embedded in the text itself, but it seems to me that it would be quite hard to argue with the director's preferred reading if it was the director who was responsible for giving the text meaning in the first place.
I think this makes for interesting discussion. Please let me know what you think.
-Andrew
I am working from the assumption that film scholarship and film criticism emerged as an academic discourse for those cinephiles who were bent on untangeling and unpacking deeper social, political and economic meanings within film texts. This may be wrong (please correct me if it is) but doesn't the director commentary now do this for us?
Granted there are a lot of director and actor commentaries which are quite trivial and bland and reveal little about the meaning embedded in the text itself, but it seems to me that it would be quite hard to argue with the director's preferred reading if it was the director who was responsible for giving the text meaning in the first place.
I think this makes for interesting discussion. Please let me know what you think.
-Andrew
posted by Anonymous at 4:34 pm
1 Comments:
I also think it is interesting to note that the one person who could have been asked about this was never contacted. The author of the original book.
Because the book is full of homo erotic slurs and after reading it and before seeing the movie I thought this was the point, that that is what 'Jack' (he is never actually named) was missing in his life, while Tyler had sex like the nymph he never was either.
I know that movies are obviosuly different from the books and it always seems that movies set about to completely undermine the subtext of the original thing (see - new King Kong vs. Old King Kong). But I think the reason you include scenes of homo-social bonding in the bath and fist fighting shows some sort of need for a homo-social, at the very least, relationship.
It is interesting to note though that Tyler has sex with women, like that still matters to 'jack' in some way, even if it's something he hears others do..
I suppose you could link this back to the economics of film making, the producers might not want everyone to think there is a gay undercurrent because it might not sell as well, which may be interesting because Fight Club was rubbished in the states because it came out just after the Colombine shootings, maybe DVD was the best way to make some of the money back.
Ben
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