Mass Culture and the Feminine: The “Place” of Television in Film Studies

Abstract

the fear of the vulgar is the obverse of the fear of excellence, and both are aspects of the fear of difference..."'The final session of the 1984 Society for Cinema Studies Conference held in Madison, Wisconsin was devoted to the question of "The Place of Television in Film Studies."The question of television's "place" in film studies was nevertheless soon displaced by an intense debate over the "proper" object for scholarly attention, a debate which encouraged some conference participants to voice their fears about the precarious status of film within the academy and to express their anxieties over television's potential threat to that status.To begin with, some conference participants feared that once television was incorporated into film studies, a return to various positivist methodologies would soon follow, thereby undermining the more sophisticated approaches to spectatorship and textuality carried over from continental philosophy and literary theory to film studies proper.Furthermore, the emphasis upon content analysis, audience survey, and controlled experiment in mainstream television study, in short, the "number crunching" empiricism of communication research, was seen by some to threaten the already beleaguered position of film study within the university by moving it further away from the humanities and in the direction of the social sciences.In addition to this was a second, less articulated, fear that the study of the "vulgar," popularized medium of television would undercut the artistic and educational goals of film study within the university.In support of this fear, and serving as further evidence to indict television as medium, were quoted the apparently different modes of reception assumed to follow from "viewing a film" and "watching television."As many theorists have pointed out, when viewing a film, the spectator centers attention on the screen, becoming absorbed in the narrative and with the characters.When watching television, however, viewing seems to be marked by discontinuous attention, by the spectator's participation in several activities at once in which televiewing may not even rank as third in importance.2Drawing upon these assumed differences between perception and spectatorship in film and television viewing, the debate over television's place in film studies came to rest upon the (unexamined) assumption that while film

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