6 - The Dialectics of Mass Culture
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 21 November 2020
Summary
Abstract
Jameson reads popular Hollywood films as political allegories. Three different levels of allegory can be distinguished, which in my opinion are characterized by a growing degree of abstraction. In his interpretation of Jaws and The Godfather, allegory describes the mode of personification of class relationships that have become invisible. The fictional characters are decoded as allegorical representatives of different class positions. The abstract dimension of collective processes is thus simultaneously embodied and kept open by means of concrete characters. In Jameson’s analysis of Dog Day Afternoon, we can observe a change in his use of allegory, away from the concrete character towards abstract spatial images. In this film, it is precisely the manifest political dimension of the character played by Al Pacino that sabotages the political significance of the film, while the evocation of totality is set in motion by an apparently insignificant secondary character, and, finally, by the airport images in the film’s conclusion, which are completely detached from any figurative personification.
Keywords: Allegory, Class, Personification, Space
Whenever a political aesthetics is to be determined, then alongside an over-evaluation of self-reflexivity, we can often observe a second, related reflex which takes it as self-evident that only those politically radical works of art should be treated whose modernist or avant-gardist autonomy is irreconcilable with the consumable commodity forms produced by capitalist mass culture. As I have already pointed out, 1970s film theory, in particular, constructed a monolithic Hollywood cinema whose ideological hegemony was to be opposed. If there is one theorist who can be used to counteract such anachronistic but still quite prevalent reflexes, then it is Fredric Jameson. Although he is a great advocate for all forms of European modernism, Jameson has always stressed the political forms articulated in Hollywood cinema. As Colin MacCabe pointed out in his introduction to Jameson’s book The Geopolitical Aesthetic, since apparatus theory’s over-evaluation of Godard, film theory has not advanced a single noteworthy attempt at a new political film aesthetics. That this is perhaps not entirely the case was demonstrated in the first part of the present book. Jameson, however, is indeed one of the few writers who has explicitly taken it upon himself to reformulate the relationship between film and politics, and, in doing so, to find a way out from the dogmatic dead-ends of 1970s theory.
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- Towards a Political Aesthetics of CinemaThe Outside of Film, pp. 177 - 204Publisher: Amsterdam University PressPrint publication year: 2020