On ideology, pedagogy and affect (via Iron Man)

I’ve been thinking more about the discussion under Mike Rennett’s fascinating Iron Man post below. I feel compelled to make my points a little clearer, as a lot of these issues are actually very important to me—as a scholar and as a teacher.

Often times, my comments are not fully formed thoughts because, well, they are comments—initial, random, quickly composed observations based off of first responses. So, I thought I would clarify some of the points I was trying to make, and why I believe them.

First off, I was not disagreeing with Mike’s reading of Iron Man. Secondly, I was not criticizing the film, either. I was trying to place how I read Iron Man’s politics within a larger tradition that I have often felt identified major Hollywood films (not all films, and not even all Hollywood films—just the ones that strive for the widest possible audience, which is most, regardless of ideology).

Contrary to what was said, I was not suggesting that Iron Man was not ideological. As I have taught my film students in the past, every Hollywood film is deeply ideological. Nor was I arguing anything as crass as its only ideology is/was financial.

What I was arguing in relation to Iron Man (and which relates to many such films)—something that is not particularly novel (see Robert Ray), but which perhaps does not get as much play as it should—is that ideology is deeply contradictory. Or, put other way, contradictory ideologies always co-exist. Iron Man is a film which offers up the potential to be read legitimately as a Bush/War on Terror wish fulfillment (see Mike’s post), while at the same time that it presents to Dave, in the comments, an argument which suggests that the roots of global terrorism are fundamentally misunderstood and misrepresented.

Both arguments seem valid to me based on my viewing of the film. However, this is not to suggest that the film is at all neutral, or—in one initial comment—ultimately non-ideological. Every major Hollywood film is deeply ideological. But, the “beauty” of Hollywood films is that they give just enough to offer up, to activate, potentially contradictory readings amongst the audience. And it’s this ideological irreducibility which should remain intact.

When I showed students Predator last semester as part of the week on film and ideology, the point I repeatedly made was that ideology was contradictory, but that such ideology was also part of its commercial success (or possible success). I’m not sure they all really understood it, but it was a point I really hammered home for the remainder of the semester. A text is never just one thing.

I said that Predator was a product (Like Rambo) of the Reagan “Hard Body” aesthetic—but what does that mean? I suggested looking at Predator as a Vietnam allegory. Obviously, Predator is a film in part “about” Vietnam. The film starred and was co-written by Vietnam veterans; Vietnam is referenced in the film—the plot? A US military unit trapped in the jungle fighting an unseen enemy. But what does it say about Vietnam?

Is it pro-Vietnam? The Reagan Hard Body (Arnold Schwarzenegger) defeats the enemy in the end, while destroying Communists along the way. Is it anti-Vietnam? His unit is wiped out on a suicide mission, engineered by a distrustful government bureaucracy. Predator’s success, I suggested in the end, rests in no small part because neither reading can be discounted. “Hard Bodies” are indisputable icons from a particular period (1908s), politics (Ronald Reagan) and place (America). But it’s still not that simple. To borrow a phrasing from Laura Marks, icons are narratively thin, but affectively full. They say little definitively, but still have far-reaching effects. Or what they say is said through its affect.

Of course, Rambo is also a product of the Reagan 80s. I’ve argued as much in other writings, and taught my students as much in Intro to Media. But what I object to is the easy assumption that Rambo is only a product of Reagan’s America. That is perhaps the dominant reading of the film which has held up over time, but it’s not the only one. People often forget that the original Rambo, for example, was much more critical of America’s attitude towards Vietnam and its veterans, and offered up a vision of isolation versus militarization that does not easily align itself with reactionary readings.

Rambo was not a massive hit only because it allowed conservative Americans to see a vision of Vietnam won, or of the Communists vanquished. It was a much more complicated text than that. And if Iron Man proves to have long legs as both a summer blockbuster, and as a franchise, it will not be simply because it was one political reading or another.

This is all partly why I have been so fascinated by affect theory—it attempts to an extent to address a film’s potential, its potential to affect contradictory readings. Rather than focus on what films or shows may definitively say at the level of narrative/presentation (as in, "clearly the evidence in the film's plot proves argument X"), affect theory takes a step back and suggests that a text's mere presence affects contradictory responses that needn't be tied to how we "read" narrative of a given film/TV show. And that such readings are perfectly valid, not because they can be logically substantiated, but in so far as they are authentic responses to a text, which create their own meanings, their own interpretative worlds.

Affect accounts for readings which are completely unsubstantiated by narrative or representational evidence. A text’s affect is not reducible to emotions or bodily responses—it’s a testament to the ideas and discourses which it activates as well. And such responses are not at all necessarily tied to each other.

This is something I’ve become especially attuned to recently—and not only because teaching ideology in the media to students has made me acutely aware of how complicated ideology really is. Its also something I’ve thought more about because of my dissertation.

My dissertation is a reception history of Disney’s controversial Song of the South (1946). Reception histories have awoken me to seeing just how complicated a text’s ideological work is. My whole project is centered on the contradictory responses which the film activates—even responses which have no direct connection to any narrative evidence which would otherwise support such a reading.

People might be fascinated to know, for example, how many times a deeply reactionary text such as Song of the South has been taken up in progressive ways. And it does no good to say that "of course they are wrong"—for this completely negates the ideologies working affectively—and as such are just as rooted in the text as any other reading.

Peace,
js
Jamais Vu