A Critical Ethnography of Social Media: "How Come She’s in the Club?"

 

There is, and some might find this interesting, something, using the language many social media “kiddies” use today, something “ewww" and “weird” about reaction videos to television shows on YouTube and in academic bureaucracies. The something that is “eww” and “weird” or interesting and fascinating about them is that one can argue compellingly that they are both forms of reader response criticism.

They are both forms of reader response because both amateur responses to television shows on YouTube and professional academic crystal ball textualism, a form of textual analysis that largely eschews any documentary evidence beyond the text as important, to television shows (and film and literature) are both similar in that they both are equally grounded in a kind of ideology of fundamentalist literalism, namely that all you need is the text in order to understand any given television show. (or film or piece of literature). They are both, in other words, limited in scope.

Now don’t get me wrong, I do understand that there are differences between amateur and professional reactions. Amateur reactors and their reactions don’t have the theoretical, methodological, and interpretive depth and sophistication (varying degrees of cultural capital) professional reactors and their reactions do. They largely fail, as a consequence, to explore important economic, political, cultural, demographic, and geographic aspects about the text under ethnographic observation. Amateur reactions generally do not ask about how the industrial and corporate structure of Hollywood, for instance, impacts how a given television show is made, about the compromises auteurs have to make to get their television shows funded and on the air, and how auteurs can sneak more marginal cultural forms into a text, particularly if they are of the science fiction or fantasy genre. Like the Soviet censors of yore, Hollywood’s standards and practises suits appear to have a blind spot when it comes to some things. Academic reactors are more attuned to such questions, though not entirely, sometimes they seem to think that economic contexts aren’t that important, and ask such questions even though their analyses are problematic given their blind spot for primary source materials beyond the text making their approach a kind of donut hole approach to empirical phenomena. They may ask the right questions and get, on occasion, the right answers but their is something missing from their analyses, namely, the primary source material beyond the text that would add heft to their arguments and allow for sound scientific replication on the basis of evidence beyond the text.

There are other aspects particularly of amateur reaction videos on social media that are interesting as well. I have written about and explored other aspects of amateur reaction videos in other posts focusing on social media on this site. One I haven’t focused on extensively is how reactors react to the introduction of new characters into a television show. For instance, in season or series five of Buffy the Vampire Slayer (see “Buffy vs. Dracula” and “The Real Me”) a new character who we have never seen of or heard of before is introduced into the Buffyverse, Buffy’s sister Dawn. Dawn is a fourteen year old teenager, which means she is annoying to those of an emotional and proprietary bent, by definition. Viewers have no idea who she is. Is she Buffy’s sister who has never been mentioned or who we may have heard of but forgotten about? Is she a demon, the Big Bad of season five who is doing something bad to Buffy’s mother Joyce in order to weaken Buffy?

Many of the reactors have those initial reactions to the introduction of Dawn to the series (for examples of reactions to Dawn see the Horror Bandwagon, SofieReacts, TheLexieCrowd. Fan Theory, VicFrost, cass reacts, Dakara, George Alexander, alley box, domi e, Liam Catterson, Jules Reacts, After Show Reacts, Liam Duke, The Normies, JayPeaKay, DodoReactions, for example). Few of them, despite the fact that an episode that showed how the manipulation of space and time can change things in season four called“Superstar”, grasp the admittedly somewhat arcane obvious about Dawn, that she may be the product of something akin to what Jonathan did in that episode, this despite the fact that they must be familiar with how Buffy has manipulated its viewers and played with its text in reflexive ways before throughout its run. Most of the reactors, in fact, have little sympathy and empathy for Dawn and some even immediately dislike Dawn wondering why she, as Willow asked when Jenny Calendar became a sometime member of the Scooby Gang in season one’s “Prophecy Girl", a curious reaction to a show that privileges outsiders and rails against insider cliques. Some of them, like VicFrost, even express their dislike of Dawn yelling at their screens within their screen querying why she is here thinking she must be evil, something, admittedly, the writers and actors play with as a red herring, something again most Buffy viewers should be used to by season five.

It is not until the fifth episode of season five (a way to build Hitchcockian suspense and anticipation in viewers) that reactors learn who Dawn really is, namely, a ball of mystical energy, a key, that opens portals to other dimensions, something that raises further questions in the process. At this point some reactors like SofieReacts feel a bit guilty about their previous unsympathetic and un-empathetic feelings toward Dawn, something many initial viewers of the series did not and even expressed this hatred for whining Dawn at “Once More With Feeling" sing-alongs at the Alamo Draft House in Austin, Texas, something that is a pretty stark reminder about the real life behaviour of some human beings toward others of their same ilk. 

All of this, of course, raises the question of what these reactions say about us, about us humans, in general in real life? Personally, to go all homiletic and social ethical on you, I don’t think it says much that is good about the human species. But then life amongst core nation humans has made me cynical (or realistic) about them. 

The Cultural Therapeutics of Losing My Religion

 

I have been reading a several books on film and television recently along with the curated film festivals on John Ford and others I have been recently doing. In particular, I have been reading several books on what is easily my favourite American television show—a kind of backhanded comment given that I don’t find most American TV shows worth watching—Buffy the Vampire Slayer and other television shows created by Joss Whedon.

The most recent book on the television worlds of Joss Whedon I have been reading is The Psychology of Joss Whedon edited by Joy Davidson and published by Dallas based BenBella books. Amongst the interesting essays by various social scientists in this collection is an autobiographical one by Stephanie DeLuse, an essay that stimulated me to follow her example and explore how I lost one of my traditional religions, though i was only marginally devoted to it in the first place, just as she lost hers.

DeLuse writes about her upbringing in a Christian fundamentalist religion in her essay “More Than Entertainment’ in the book. She explores the minuses of such an upbringing. She mentions that were positives but doesn’t make these explicit. Perhaps it was a focus on ethics if an authoritarian ethics and morality.  This community—she doesn’t note which fundamentalist Christian group it was though I suspect it was not Mormon fundamentalism as polygamy, which is central to sectarian Mormon fundamentalist groups is not implied whatsoever—was, she writes, authoritarian patriarchal, paternalistic, ethnocentric, apocalyptic, and manichean. It was an authoritarian group which convinced if not coerced her to marry a 26 year old patriarch when she was 17 and which had negative impacts on her health (mental? physical? both?), impacts that eventually forced her to leave the community and face shunning, a shunning she still faces today from the group.

One of the things Deluse notes was that she was not allowed to, in this authoritarian social group, watch television, particularly television of a “nefarious” sort like Bewitched and I Dream of Jeannie, both of which the faith defined as “occult” and hence evil. For this faith such television was worldly and wicked and hence verboten. Paradoxically, television, in the form of Joss Whedon’s Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Firefly, would prove to be healing balm for the scars that fundamentalist Christianity left on her body and her mind. It made her think, think about women’s roles in society, about misogyny, and about social ethics and morality.

I was not brought up in any Christian fundamentalist, evangelical, liturgical, or mainstream religion at all. The Dallas I grew up in—Big D was only one of the places I lived in my youth—was dominated by the Southern Baptists and the Methodists, the former perceived as conservative, the latter as liberal—but I was neither nor were my parents. My religion was, if only briefly and without much depth to it, Americanism and Texasism, the religions which preached the gospel of American and Texas greatness (second to none), manicheanism (we good, they bad), messianism (we are on a mission from god), apocalypticism (utopia is coming to the America and Texas near you), and compassionate (if, of course, converts accepted the gospel of America and Texas). I recall feeling briefly proud of being a Texas as I sat in my Texas civics class in junior high and reflected on the brilliant words to the Texas national hymn, “Texas Our Texas".

It really didn’t take me long to lose this faith. The war in Vietnam was the initial agent of change. It was a war I eventually came to realise was based on a series of lies: lies about the dangers of communism to the US (the North Vietnamese and Viet Cong were, of course, primarily nationalists), lies about dominos falling, likes about the Gulf of Tonkin incident, and the lie that the US was not the latest in a long line of imperial great powers. With the proper empirically grounded scepticism in place I soon realised that the US was grounded it lies: lies that it was democratic (it is, as is almost always the case with great powers and beyond, oligarchic), lies about its economic system (the lie that it is great for everyone; it is good, of course, for the oligarchs), lies that it was a beacon to the rest of the world (the lie that its messianic mission was to spread “democracy” and that it was protecting democracy by its police actions all around the world), and lies that it was the most moral nation on earth (tell that to those collaterally damaged by America’s war machine, political system, economic system, and cultural system).Unlike DeLuse, for whom Buffy was therapeutic, it helped her think her way through her sometimes difficult situation and helped heal her as she went through this process, my therapy was history, sociology, and the knowledge music, like that of the Beatles and the Stones, and films, like Dr. Stangelove, brought to my consciousness.

Faith in and worship of the United States and Texas weren’t the only things my escape from a fundamentally and inhterently hateful faith brought me (the US is ethnocentric as are all human groups and what they have wrought). I also, over time, recognised the fallacies associated with the ideologies these religions had about human beings. Many, if not most human beings, drawing on a Christian cultural script similar to the manichean and apocalypiic good versus evil and virgin versus whore ones that have had an immense impact on Western culture (including Islam which has its own iterations of these), the saint versus sinner binary, tend to divide human beings into saints on the one side of the accounting page and sinners on the other. Of course, human beings in general, are neither saints nor sinners. They are, in fact, both. Take the recent case of Buffy’s creator, Joss Whedon. 

Whedon, like America and Texas, has been accused of being a hypocrite, of shilling for feminism while cheating on his wife. Like America and Texas, who are perhaps more whores than adulterers, he has been accused of adultery (something unlike many adulterers he has admitted to) and harassing behaviour on set, which I assume means he was dictatorially demanding (something that comes with the territory of director, military commander, football coach). Unlike America and Texas, however, he has been shunned by pots and kettles living in glass houses. Humans, you see, just like nation-states like the US, are tried and true hypocrites.

Now don’t get me wrong, I am not saying that Whedon’s weaknesses should be ignored. I am simply noting that those self-righteous, self-serving, and vengeance seeking individuals who are whinging about Whedon’s behaviours, such as Sarah Michelle Gellar, Charisma Carpenter, and Marti Noxon, have, I am certain, similar skeletons in their own closet. I should also, while I am here, note the similarities between those who watched the Shoah happen without doing much, bear some similarities to those who, in the soap opera that is human life and existence, try to straddle the fence trying not to offend anyone in the process.

The Vietnam War was not the only thing that made me question my religion and heal from it. Cultural Anthropology also made me sceptical of religion and made me recognise that not only nation-states are fallible but so are humans. I learned from Cultural Anthropology that humans have had, over the course of human history, among other things, varying marriage systems, varying conceptions of when marriage is acceptable, and varying sexual practises, all of which function to do one of the things all of these function to do (increasing the age of marriage is functional in a demographically growing world), replicate the species. I learned that notions of what is “deviant” are often if not generally social and culturally constructed and that deviance serves the function of socialising for conformity in most cultures, in showing the masses what not to do if they want to get along and what to do if they don't. I learned that adultery is common, that sexual “deviance” is common, and that hypocrisy is omnipresent in the human species. I learned, in other words, to question political, economic, and cultural authority and developed, in the process, a healthy dislike of, for example, paternalism, patriarchalism, patronisation, bureaucracies, and hypocrisies of all flavours.

And it is here—the commonplaceness of, the widespread reality of “sin”—that one has to ground one’s understanding of the human species on and one’s social ethics on. We have to understand, in other words, that humans are fallible, that human criticisms of human weakness is a socialisation for conformity process and that it is often if not always hypocritical, and that we have to accept human beings for what they are and what they always will be not what we wish they could be (utopian ideologies are almost always dangerous and hazardous to human health). Now don’t get me wrong, human weakness runs along a continuum. There is a massive difference between, for example, Adolf Hitler and Joss Whedon though one wonders if his groupies turned haters grasp this anymore than they grasp their own hypocrisies. 

Being a life long and professional “deviant", of course, has brought much pain—being the “deviant" has its drawbacks including shunning and isolation including in the academy that vaunted (if mythical) bastion of freedom of though—but it has also brought much pleasure, pleasure that, to some extent, compensates for the trials and tribulation of outsiderness. I wouldn’t want it any other way.

The Books of My Life: The Searchers (Buscombe)

 

As I came to know more and more about film in my teenage years and to understand that there were some films that were considered classics and some directors who were considered to put out classic film after classic film, I came to look for certain films on television and at second run theatres, the latter after I went up to university.

There were several films that I wanted to see that were hard for me to find so they became films I really wanted to see. After I became interested in the work of Howard Hawks, for instance, I looked especially hard for Howard Hawks’s Ball of Fire (I was also, by this time, an appreciator of the work of Barbara Stanwyck and made every effort to watch any film with her in it) and Twentieth Century, both of which I was finally able to see if only once on television. And I looked especially hard for John Ford’s The Searchers, which I too was finally able to see on television in those dark age days before the advent of the VCR and later the DVD. Blu ray, and 4k disc.

The first time I saw The Searchers I was unimpressed. At the time I chalked my moderately negative attitude towards the film up to the very high expectations I had for the film given its critical reputation. The second time I saw the film—again if memory serves on television, on television in the days where widescreen VistaVision films like The Searchers were sadly and badly shrunk into the academy frame doing injustice to it—I was much more impressed with the film and could understand why many considered it not only a classic but one of the best films ever made, something made flesh by the Sound and Sight poll of filmmakers and film critics of their favourite films. It is still number 13 in the most recent poll of 2022, an iteration of the poll that bears the marks of a greater attention to female filmmakers. 

The third time I saw the film was this week. I watched it on DVD this time around, the Warner Brothers (easily the worst studio producer of DVD’s on the market) “Ultimate Collector’s Edition” DVD of the film, a DVD which is in the correct aspect ratio but which doesn't sadly gives viewers the option of listening to the film's soundtrack in the original mono, something any quality producer that cares about history (fat chance these days) would give us. The film looked pretty good in DVD format though the reviewer of the transfer of the film at the wonderful DVDBeaver found it somewhat wanting. The “Universal Collector’s Edition” was accompanied by a lovely reproduction of the comic book produced for the film’s marketing campaign and some lovely reproduced theatre cards, both of which made the lack of a mono track and the good but not great transfer even more annoying. Anyway, the third time I watched the film, this time during my John Ford film festival, I responded more to the film as a historian and a social scientist than as a fanboy or fangirl. I ended up finding it interesting and appreciated it as a consequence particularly for what it told us about the cultural contexts of the era in which it was made.

Seeing the film again stimulated me to read, Edward Buscombe’s monograph on the film, The Searchers (London: BFI, BFI Film Classics series, 2000). The monograph follows the same strategy as Western film specialist Buscombe’s excellent monograph on another John Ford film, Stagecoach. Buscombe, while he is summarising and analysing the meaning of the film text, takes readers on a journey into the production, distribution, and exhibition of the film just as he did in is monograph on Stagecoach. The only major difference between what Buscombe did in that monograph and what he did in his monograph on The Searchers was that in The Searchers he made greater use of psychoanalytic theory, something Buscombe deems appropriate in a film impacted by the social, cultural, and psychological darkness of American film noir, something that also impacted, as Buscombe notes, the Westerns of director Anthony Mann—the director of several of my favourite Westerns, a genre I am not as into as I was when I was younger—who directed film noirs before he directed Westerns and it shows. As such, the utilisation of psychoanalytic approaches to literary and film art makes more sense than its fetishisation by many contemporary film scholars given its increasing impact on American intellectual culture in the post-World War II era.

For some reason, a reason I can’t precisely put my finger on, I preferred Buscombe’s monograph on Stagecoach to his monograph on The Searchers. Perhaps it was the fact that the first time Buscombe’s approach seemed sensible if not revelatory while the second time it appeared somewhat repetitive particularly since I read both monographs one after the other in a short period of time. That said, I had and have no doubt that like Buscombe’s monograph on The Searchers, like his monograph on Stagecoach, should be mandatory reading for anyone interested in the film, in the work of John Ford, and in the history of American film.

Did Buscombe, who claims that The Searchers is one of the greatest of films ever made, convince me that The Searchers was one of the greatest films ever made? No. It is, however, as Buscombe notes, interesting for its magnificent compositions, something Ford was expert at, for its use of Monument Valley as a character, for Ford's meaningful punctuations of the film with significant camera movements, and for its noirish and almost nightmarish portrayal of American racism embodied by John Wayne’s character Ethan (Ford’s sympathies seem to lie with Marty, the “half breed” character Jeffrey Hunter plays), and for its somewhat “fakish" fairy tale ending. Just as Buscombe’s book on The Searchers is worth reading the film is definately worth watching. Perhaps it and the book on it can teach us a little something about American myths, American legends, American racism, and American imperialism.

The Books of My Life: Stagecoach (Buscombe)

 

Recently, thanks to retirement, I have been watching a lot of movies and television shows from my substantial, actually my way too substantial given the size of my flat, DVD and blu ray collection. Just last week, for instance, I ended a Gillian Armstrong film festival and began a John Ford film festival.

Watching the filmed work of noted and celebrated directors is not something new to my viewing pleasure, my not so viewing pleasure, or my viewing displeasure. One of the first films I ever watched, for example, was a film of Alfred Hitchcock’s of whom my recently departed father was a fan and who allowed my sister and me to watch the film because he thought we would like it. We did and his allowing to watch The Birds set my sister and me on a film watching life course that has lasts to this day. Both of us remain inveterate film watchers.

Sometime in my teens my film watching became more oriented to directors than to genres and stars. My sister, on the other hand, remains more oriented in her avid film watching to genre—the Western—and stars—John Wayne in particular—than mine. No doubt this was because my sister and I grew up in an era when Hollywood, Hollywood film stars, and certain Hollywood genres ruled the roost. Westerns, film Westerns and television Westerns, were still a big deal in the sixties when my sister Cindy and I came of film watching age in the mid-1960s and Hollywood stars were the biggest draw in bringing bodies into cinemas all across North America. 

I soon learned, however, particularly after I left for college—a defining moment in my relationship with my sister and in my life—where I gravitated toward others who were also film heads or cinephiles and took a few film classes, and learned that the work of certain directors was worth seeking out. I learned, for example, not only that Hitchcock’s film work beyond The Birds, was interesting in general and worth seeking out, but also that the film work of Howard Hawks, Orson Welles, Joseph Mankiewicz, and a host of European art cinema directors like Ingmar Bergman, Eric Rohmer, Jacques Rivette, and others like John Ford and Gillian Armstrong were worth paying attention to as well. I came of intellectual age, in part, in the age where the film director, well a few film directors, were regarded as auteurs, as authors of a film, after all. As you can see by my film festival format I still feel the same way though today though I do realise that performers like the Marx Brothers and even writers and music might be auteurs too.

Stimulated by my recent auteurist film watching festivals I decided to pick up several monographs on film auteurs to read. So, after I rewatched Stagecoach and listened to the commentaries on the Criterion and Warner Brothers DVD’s I owned  by noted scholars Jim Kitses, author of the highly regarded monograph Horizons West, and Scott Eyman, who wrote a highly regarded biography of Ford, I picked up and read Edward Buscombe’s excellent BFI monograph on John Ford’s film Stagecoach (London: BFI, BFI Film Classics, 1992). I am glad I did.

Buscombe’s monograph on Stagecoach is almost everything one could hope for in a brief work on a film classic. In between summarising the film and exploring the meaning of the film and its mise-en-scene Buscombe tells us about the life, career, and film strategies of John Ford. He explores the history of the Western in its literary and film forms. He tells us about the production aspects of the film. He tells us about the promotion campaign for the film. He tells us how much the film earned upon release. He writes about the casting of the film. He tells us about the themes of Ford’s Westerns, of which there are many, and of his film work in general (I am particularly fond of Ford's pokes at moral guardians like the temperance league). He tells us about Ford’s use of folk and folk like tunes in his films, tunes that sometimes provided themes for the characters in his films. He tells us something about the historical and cultural contexts the film draws on from both the past and from the 1939 and thereabouts present of the film. He tells us something about the contemporary and historical reception of the film. Buscombe’s Stagecoach is thus everything an excellent guide to a classic film should be and can be.

Watching Stagecoach and reading Buscombe’s outstanding monograph on the film foregrounded for me something I have sensed for some time, namely, that how we watch films and how we view or see them changes with time, age, and education. I was, for example, in my younger film watching days, raised on nationalist and Texas nationalist robbery. Then the Vietnam War came along and nutted me with reality forcing me to become much more sceptical and critical than I was before of the American nationalist and Texas nationalist ideologies I had been socialised for conformity into. I began, as a consequence, to look at America or American films differently than in the naive way I used to. The American Westerns I grew up enjoying as pure entertainments I suddenly realised were, in many cases, the embodiment of an American manifest destiny ideology, the embodiment of the American White man’s burden ideology, the embodiment of the ideology of American chivalric masculinity, and the embodiment of the American fear of the wild savage whoever that wild savage happened to be—commies when I was a young lad. Today I am no longer embedded within such nationalist religious bubbles and I am, as a consequence, much more critical of the cultural fabric woven into American films and American genre films like the Western and its ancestors.

As a consequence I no longer watch an American film, an American Western, or a John Ford film the way I used to. That doesn’t mean I no longer have an aesthetic appreciation for certain Westerns. Like Buscombe I recognise the qualities of Ford and his work including Ford's wonderful eye for composition, the wonderful ambiguity Ford felt, on occasion, toward America and the myths and myth making at the heart of the imagined American nationalist politically and ideologically correct enterprise, Ford’s limited use of close-ups to make narrative points, his emphasis on the gestures of his actors for expressing meanings in his films, and Ford’s use of comedy amidst drama and tragedy for effect, something that Ford drew from Shakespeare and something that I think, particularly in retrospect from the vantage point of 2020s, is not as successful as I thought it was when I was much younger. 

As I have grown older I have become much more choosy about the films and television programmes I like and watch.  I still like. the work of Hitchcock, Orson Welles, Rohmer, Jacques Rivette, Francois Truffaut, Joss Whedon’s Buffy and Firefly—both of which meld tonal variations much more successfully than Ford—and the films Valerie and Her Week of Wonders and WR: Mysteries of the Organism. I am, however, less and less enamoured of the films of Ford—too much stereotyped and caricatures farce, too much sentimentality (I prefer the sentimentality of a Capra to a Ford)—though I still have fond memories of his Grapes of Wrath, How Green Was My Valley, Rio Grande, and The Man Who Shot Liberty Valence, and Howard Hawks, the subject of an upcoming film festival which will undoubtedly result in more re-evaluations, than I was when I was younger. I have come to realise that my notions of who is in the pantheon of film authors and the films I really like changes, just as does life in general.