Make Use of Us

I just read a heavily foot-noted blog post on theory, and have the strong urge to bill the author. Or maybe I should bill my colleague who recommended the blog. Yes, as the post suggests, life can be ambiguous. Some ambiguity comes from shifting cultural barriers, some of it from changing vantage points. Yup. Got it.

Some of it comes from writing something so opaque that when people got to a passage like the following quote, they didn't notice the typo: 

What distinguishes images (including motion pictures) from language and from other modes of communication is the fact that images reproduce many of the informational cues that people make us of in their perception of physical and social reality.

Or maybe I'm the first person to ever read that far. Yes, many of "us" have been made constructs, and many of "us" have been made to see something, but if we have resistant spectators, aren't social realities up for debate? 

My point here is that although spellchecker did not differentiate between "make us" and "make use," the ultimate theory renders writers passive. The typo at least granted "images" some immediacy. The problem, however, is that the audience shares most of the responsibility for how images work in their imaginations, not how artists shape them, how writers collaborate with images or audiences.  

In a moment of despair, Solomon Northrup appears to look directly into the lens, as if looking through and past production to the audience, challenging us.

I think it's great that Christian Metz theorized about a gaze beyond a particular character's, but John Gardner's modulation of psychic distance already had writers on notice. Gardner's writings on fiction technique are the smoking gun. But "the author's dead," and ballistics can't match the bullet in his brain to the semi-auto fire on screen or in theory.

But who am I to dis a colleague who landed on the wrong side of auto-correct's double-edged tech? If you've read my blog, you know syntax will occasionally suffer friendly fire.

So I wanted to say three things, not because there are only three to say, but because three is an easy number to start with after melting one's brains in a vat of semiotics:

1) Although people are more important than movies, people can use movies to give a sense of their lives; nevertheless, curve back around in person whenever possible to check out the verisimilitude of a movie, book, radio report, corrido, etc.
2) Beside noticing the gaze and asking whom it belongs to, be honest when it approximates your perspective and be just as honest when you have to resist it (Diawara).
3) Keep track of the diegetic shifts. Sometimes they will bring you far from yourself; when that happens, make a note to circle around and listen to The Other (person). Does ze confirm & reject a movie's details. Rinse & repeat.

In short: distinguish cues that make people us from those not-us. And spellchecker can be an evil genius.