Mental (Mis)watching

Plenty of times, academics, movie critics, IMDB and Critereon Collection boxes encourage (mis)watching. They instruct us to ignore the ending of Brazil, to imagine additional scenes in The Magnificent Ambersons , and they tell us Peeping Tom is about the politics of representation. Reading that tricks our brains into watching movies in new and different ways.

All this is OK, but it isn’t creative (mis)watching, it’s learned (mis)watching. Instead of letting an advertiser or theater tell us how to watch a movie, we let Leonard Maltin (or somebody fancier). Sure, we could all do our own research and analysis. But can we skip all that film-school work and still creatively (mis)watch using only our brains?

Totally. Take camp – the method of creative (mis)watching Hollywood (or other mainstream) movies as Queer expression. What’s awesome about camp is that it provides a method that can be readily applied to a broad range of films. One downside, though, is that the range of potential meanings is somewhat limited.

A different, more flexible strategy is inventing mental games that force creative (mis)watching. It’s like what film critics do – only without needing evidence, theory or logic. For example Whitney and her boyfriend Oliver recently got a kick out of watching History of Violence as if it was a real-time documentary. Like all games, mentally creative (mis)watching takes a sustained imaginative effort. And some games are bound to work better than others. Still, this method frees the mind and, for that reason, is rich with potential.

Last post, I wrote, “I can’t imagine someone loving a movie without creatively (mis)watching it”. Obviously, everybody who loves movies doesn’t play mental tricks on themselves like Whitney. Probably the most common way of mental creative (mis)wathching is identifying with characters. The Fresh Prince isn’t about you. By watching it as if it is, the show’s meaning changes. It becomes is something very different to you than it is to the general audience of watchers. The same goes for having romantic or sexual feelings for characters – the dudes and girls who see Herbie for Lindsay Lohan’s jiggle are creative (mis)watchers, big-time.

More on them in Part Four. Next time: altering a movie. And a final note on academics and critics: the best of them are heroes of creative (mis)watching. And while it is necessarily to be rigorous with theory and evidence, its also important to remember that audacity scores a lot of points – at least with me. I’d definitely read a gender studies critique of Pluto Nash before a Marxist critique of Godard. Scholarship started out in temples, mosques and monasteries…academics ought to take some leaps of faith!

L

Last Modified: Saturday, September 30th, 2006 @ 09:24