Beyond their own control
February 9th, 2008 by DanielleSo, I was having an extreme senioritis afternoon yesterday and came across these two videos on College Humor. They both take scenes from a movie and place them in a different order and context so that the movie appears to have a totally different meaning than the original. The first clip uses scenes from Ferris Bueller’s Day Off to portray the film as a horror film rather than a comedy. The second clip does very much the opposite by making scenes from American Psycho appear to be part of a romantic comedy. These videos made me think of the Fiske reading and his definition of producerly texts in that these texts seem to have gaps large enough within them that entirely new texts can be produced in them. Even though we perceive these videos to be funny and sort of ridiculous because the new texts appear so different from the originals, we can still understand how these texts could make sense when the scenes are put into a new context. So, are these examples of texts being, as Fiske says, beyond their own control?
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