infobong.com

Apparently film studies falls within the range of discourse at the Los Angeles Times, after all. "Brilliant film historian" Janet Staiger forwarded me this response to an earlier Magazine feature critical of UCSB's film studies program and film theory in general. The earlier Weddle piece attacked the discipline as useless in finding work in "the industry," for using jargon, and for being a little left-leaning. Staff writer Manohla Dargis' response argues that film studies is far from a monolithic system of thought (or "metaphysics" in Weddle's inflammatory cant) and instead provides a plethora of approaches and frameworks for apprehending films.

One passage in the piece left me bemused. Dargis relates how she and another student confessed to fetishizing films, which led them to study them in grad school. In Janet's class last spring, I often wondered, "Why do we have all this film theory, but there's no comic book theory? Or cereal box theory?" Or, more importantly, Internet theory? Of course, the Internet didn't emerge until the late sixities and didn't gain popularity much later, but comic books, as we understand them today, emerged in the 1930's, roughly the same time as the "Classical Hollywood Era," and, if I remember correctly, cereal boxes arrived during the Depression, as well. Certainly a certain amount of fetishization would account for film's popularity as an object of study, while comics and cereal boxes remain largely neglected. I'd love to see neo-Formalist take on the narrative in Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth or debates about how Tony the Tiger can be both a cat - a generally feminine-gendered animal - and reflect a macho hypermasculinity.