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Copyright by Lisa Marie Schmidt 2010 Copyright by Lisa Marie Schmidt 2010 The Dissertation Committee for Lisa Marie Schmidt certifies that this is the approved version of the following dissertation: SENSATIONAL GENRES: EXPERIENCING SCIENCE FICTION, FANTASY AND HORROR Committee: Janet Staiger, Supervisor Mary Celeste Kearney Joseph Straubhaar James Buhler Allucquere Rosanna Stone Sensational Genres: Experiencing Science Fiction, Fantasy and Horror by Lisa Marie Schmidt, B.A., J.D., M.A. Dissertation Presented to the Faculty of the Graduate School of The University of Austin in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy The University of Texas at Austin August 2010 Acknowledgements I would like to thank my advisor, Janet Staiger, who has truly been a mentor to me, not just on the writing of this dissertation but throughout my entire doctoral experience. Special thanks also to the other members of my committee: Mary Kearney, Jim Buhler, Joe Straubhaar and Sandy Stone. I am truly grateful that you have been willing and interested in working with me. I appreciate all your support, advice and, of course, your constructive criticism. I want to express my appreciation for my consultants, even if you may never read this! Thank you for showing up and bringing your enthusiasm with you. And finally, thanks to my graduate school pals Kristen Warner, Tariq Elseewi, Andy Scahill, and Kevin Bozelka. You helped to make these five years a fun time – and when it wasn’t fun, you helped to make it bearable. iv Sensational Genres: Experiencing Science Fiction, Fantasy and Horror Lisa Marie Schmidt, Ph.D. The University of Texas at Austin, 2010 Supervisor: Janet Staiger This dissertation explores the embodied and sensory dimensions of fantastic film, those elements that are generally held up in contrast to and, often, in excess of, narrative structure. I suggest a departure from the traditional approach to genre study which has been preoccupied with narrative formulas, themes, and iconographies. My goal is not to dispense with those kinds of analyses but to complement them and, importantly, to point to some neglected dimensions of genre pleasure. I propose to transform the presumably excessive pleasures of the fantastic genre into something essential to it. First, I explore the disavowal or avoidance of embodied sensation within popular genre criticism. I then turn to critique existing models of film reception, focusing particularly upon a critique of the ocularcentric or visualist framework. From this critique, I am able to suggest some criteria for an alternative theoretical model based upon embodiment. I propose a theoretical framework based, first, on the phenomenology of Maurice Merleau-Ponty, who demonstrates that human subjects are constituted materially and culturally through their perceptual relations within the world. Second, I rely upon a further interpretation of this phenomenology by the American philosopher Don Ihde. Ihde’s work, configured as “postphenomenology,” draws variously from technoscience studies, the philosophy of science, feminist, and posthumanist theory, and sketches a system for the application of an experimental phenomenology. With this method, I explore various embodied, sensational aspects of fantastic genre films, i.e., spectacle, gore, musical genre conventions. I describe and relate these aspects of fantastic film to other cultural venues, exploring common themes and structures among them. From this, I draw some conclusions as to the nature of these sensational genre pleasures for embodied human individuals. Simultaneously, I consider the possibilities for embodied difference among individuals. v Table of Contents Chapter I. Genre Spectacle: Too Much and Not Enough ............................................................................................. 1 Sensational Genres ......................................................................................................... 7 The Turn to Experience ................................................................................................. 16 Approaching (Post) Phenomenology ............................................................................. 22 Chapter II. Seeking Embodiment: Taking on the Ocularcentric Model of Perception ........................................................ 41 The Dominant Spectatorship Narrative ......................................................................... 49 Perception as Experience .............................................................................................. 55 Embodied in the World ................................................................................................. 68 The Body in Technology ................................................................................................ 72 Chapter III. To the Things Themselves: The Postphenomenological Process ............................................................................. 85 Step One: The Description ............................................................................................ 91 Step Two: The Reduction ............................................................................................. 95 Step Three: The Interpretation ................................................................................... 105 Chapter IV. The Perceptacle Spectacle ...................................................................... 111 Description: Pleasurable Spectacles ........................................................................... 120 Thematization: Wonder Before the World.................................................................. 136 Interpretation: The Perception of Awe ....................................................................... 151 vi Chapter V. Playing with Unpleasantries .................................................................... 167 Description: Bloody Extravagant................................................................................. 172 Reduction Revisited .................................................................................................... 188 Interpetation: Play With Danger ................................................................................. 200 Chapter VI. The Movie Sucked but the Music Was Good .......................................... 206 Description: Once More with Feelings ....................................................................... 220 Reducation and Variation: Background Relations ...................................................... 250 Interpretation: The Embodied Perception of Music (A Sketch) ................................... 260 Chapter VII. Conclusions ............................................................................................ 272 Appendix I The Matter of Genre ................................................................................................... 283 Thinking Science Fiction ............................................................................................. 293 Horror Affects ............................................................................................................. 308 Fantasy Movement ..................................................................................................... 312 Sound Matters ............................................................................................................ 313 Works Cited ................................................................................................................ 323 Films Cited .................................................................................................................. 344 Vita ............................................................................................................................. 358 vii Chapter I. Genre Spectacle: Too Much and Not Enough Nearly every time I read a movie review in a newspaper or popular magazine, I am struck by the gap that exists between our actual experience of the cinema and the theory that we academic films scholars construct to explain it – or perhaps, more aptly, to explain it away. Vivian Sobchack, Carnal Thoughts 53. Danny Boyle’s Sunshine (2007) is filled with sunshine – white-hot and oppressive, golden-soft and warming, maddening and terrifying, a presence that I do not merely see but feel on and under my skin. Some moments invoke the ice-cold of space, the feel and (non)sound of the vacuum greedily sucking the oxygen, the very matter, from my body. A perfectly spare electronic score at times resembles nothing so much as the wheezing and banging of futuristic gears and gizmos and then at other times gives way to more conventional musical bursts, sufficing for an heroic climax. Scenes completely disorient me so I do not know where I am with respect to those others on the screen, their spaceship, or the furious sun. Gravity is taken from me in a way that is both pleasurable and extremely unnerving. I departed my first experience of this film with the experience of these and many other moments, yet if someone asked me about Sunshine I might very well reply, “Well, it’s about these astronauts who travel to the sun. .” I would not deny my true experience, not to myself 1 or to anyone who asked, but for a number of reasons I would hesitate to share it, falling back on the reliability of narrative as descriptive of the film. For I was and am aware of the narrative of Sunshine ; narrative is easy to fall back upon. It is easy, too, when describing this film or any film, to let narrative be
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