Last fall on a job interview, I was asked what my "intellectual autobiography" was. Like most every question ('cause interviews tend not to be my strong suit), I responded like a deer in the headlights and eventually rambled on with a very bad answer (without going into specifics, it was a poorly worded question, but that didn't matter--I hadn't really thought about the content at its core regardless). Unlike other questions, however, it took a long time for me to understand the importance of what was really being asked and why it was being asked.
Increasingly, I am finding myself confronting the persistent and difficult question of how to "define" myself. As a film scholar, unlike a critic, it is not enough to be interested in movies, but rather one must also have a niche, or better yet, a personal narrative of how one's work speaks to larger consistent interests. For most, it is simple enough--what is your dissertation about? What is your first book about? (quite often the same thing.)
This is where I run into trouble. It’s not a "good" thing to have written a lot, as others in the field can begin to perceive you with a great deal of skepticism--preferring to see your prolific work as, at best, a sign of intellectual schizophrenia, rather than the product of a healthy and active intellectual curiosity. My first (very old now) book was about Kubrick, only because that was the first thing I wanted to write at length about, at a very specific moment in my life--but it didn't mean I wanted to be thought of as an auteurist either. In fact, by the time I was done with it, I had long since developed other, unrelated, interests.
And then there is the persistent question of cinephilia--namely, Cinephilia in the Age of Digital Reproduction. I don't want to be defined by that either, starting with no less than my dissertation topic. But, like Kubrick, I have come to terms with how that works to define me too. That's what, until now, is out there, and it makes sense to accept it, address it and incorporate it into a larger narrative, rather than to try to outrun it--to ignore it as merely as a youthful transgression.
Although I do not *love* every film I write about, I have always had a general cinephiliac passion for cinema’s potential, which I have channeled and refined through years of a first-rate graduate education. Sometimes, my interest in cinephilia has taken self-reflexive detours, such as my contributions to the collection, Cinephilia in the Age of Digital Reproduction, a collaborative labor of love with academic friends. However, more often, my cinephilia has implicitly underwritten a scholarly interest in notions of cinematic authorship and in historical approaches to reception studies.
My old master’s thesis was originally about filmmaker Stanley Kubrick, which I heavily revised and expanded into The Kubrick Façade: Faces and Voices in the Films of Stanley Kubrick (2006). While providing one of the first scholarly examinations of Kubrick’s first film, Fear and Desire (1953)—and thus a valuable contribution on those terms alone—this early project also explored how voice-over narration and the ubiquitous use of close-ups on blank faces throughout his larger body of work were both crucial to affectively creating the sense of narrative ambiguity and thematic coldness for which Kubrick’s films are popularly known.
I am very proud of this first major project as an important milestone in my own career, but its unevenness reflects, on many levels, the work of a young scholar still finding his voice. Thus, I am more interested in rethinking and expanding some of the major assumptions underlying The Kubrick Façade as a study in authorship. I am currently preparing a course at Northwestern on American filmmaker Paul Thomas Anderson, which will serve as the foundation for a major writing project in the near future. While my first approach to auteur theory focused almost exclusively on textual analysis, this new research will place critical readings of Anderson’s five major films in the context of larger cultural issues, such as historical discourses of whiteness, class, authorship and independent cinema—contexts which frame both the production and reception of his films.
As this scholarly maturity reflects, I’ve moved away from cinephilia per se since my early graduate days, and turned instead towards issues of racial formation and the historical reception of American films. And so my dissertation was designed to show I could expand my range—to research and write something uninterested in authorship, in critical theory, in cinephilia (all the things I had spent grad school to that point refining). I wanted to deconstruct something that was ugly (a text, but also a history) instead of something that was beautiful, I wanted to write about the audience instead of the author, I wanted to write about the past instead of the perpetual postmodern present, I wanted to write something that was rooted in meticulous period research rather than self-referential theory, I wanted to write (skeptically) about someone else’s passion instead of unconditionally about my own, and I wanted to write about someother media besides film. My dissertation was supposed to be a rebirth--a new phase in my scholarly interests. And when it was over, I discovered I could never go back.
Thus, the backbone of my primary scholarly interest is in reception studies. In particular, my dissertation, A Frown Upside Down / The Affective, Cultural and Convergence Histories of Disney’s Song of the South (2010), used the case study of Disney’s most notorious (and now self-censored) racist film to explore how media audiences and industries have negotiated the persistence of offensive representations of race through decades of reception and strategic remediation.
First released in 1946, Song of the South is most famous today for its Oscar-winning song, “Zip-a-Dee-Doo-Dah,” and the story of Brer Rabbit and the Tar Baby. Although it broke some modest technological ground for its innovative mix of live-action and animation, the Disney film was justifiably condemned originally for its anachronistic post-WWII representations of idyllic Southern plantations and African-Americans such as Uncle Remus, and thus disappointed at the box office.
However, Disney continued to re-release the film periodically until 1986, while also re-using the property heavily in various remediated forms—children’s books, television episodes, records, VHS tapes, theme park rides and so forth. Meanwhile, the film developed a cult following, which seemed to intensify during the “White Backlash” era of the 1970s and Reaganism in the 1980s, becoming a huge box office draw later in its theatrical recirculation.
Today, Song of the South maintains a small, but passionate, fan base on various internet forums and websites, despite Disney’s “official” refusal to re-release it to theatres or home video formats for over the last twenty years. This online phenomenon is the focal point of my article in the newest Cinema Journal 49.4 (Summer 2010): “Reassuring Convergence: Online Fandom, Race and Disney’s Notorious Song of the South,” which explores this internet fandom in relation to discourses on the relationship between new media, nostalgia and so-called “post-racial” forms of whiteness. Overall, my dissertation puts the various acts of reception of the infamous film over the last seventy years in dialogue with the particular technologies and racial discourses of the historical period in question, and I've since expanded it into another book project.
By exploring both textual analysis and relevant period discourses (such as popular newspapers and magazines), I hope to better understand and problematize the Hawaiian islands’ distinctive popularity during the mid-20th Century—placing these films and television shows within larger discourses that emphasize emergent historical forms of whiteness, leisure culture and military veteran spectatorship. I have proposed teaching a course on this subject at Northwestern this coming spring, and hope to begin serious research on the project sometime next year. In all, I plan to dedicate the next several years to researching, writing and revising this project.
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