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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Danielle, I think you’ve hit on a very interesting link between Fiske’s ideas and the phenomenon of movie trailer parodies — something I’ve used in film classes to talk about genre formulas and active audiences. Here’s a Wikipedia entry on re-cut trailers, which they treat as a subset of the video mashup.
Do these texts seem subversive? Playful? Or both?
I think that might be a very loaded question. There are hundreds of remix trailers these days and frankly it’s difficult to categorize them fairly.
There are definitely subversive elements to certain examples and definitely a lot of shared elements with Slash considering the common homo-erotic elements incorporated into remix trailers. The sense of playfulness one may derive from these videos comes from the fact that the audience knows how the film actually plays out. The conventions we are accustomed to are played with and that is often where the humor comes from.
Then again there are also trailers which imply pedophiliac relationships, sexual misconduct, etc…. all stuff not so easy to call playful and what one might call subversive another might call exploitive or even offensive.
I just wanted to add one of my initial reactions that made me immediately think of a passage in Fiske. Often times when I see a remix trailer and see how they changed the well-known plot or relationships with characters, I groan, and almost feel like I knew it was coming.
I coudn’t help but think of the way Fiske describes how some people react to puns. Fiske writes, “Those of us who groan or grimace at its puns but find a wry pleasure as we do are so simultaneously aligned with each side of the tension. Our pleasure derives from the creativity of the release from linguistic discipline, our displeasoure from our social investment in the system that is mometarily scandalized” (Fiske, 111).
While Fiske is clearly talking about puns, I agree with Danielle that this argument is very applicaple to remix trailers. In a sense, we “know” in general how most mass media romantic comedies, thrillers, etc will turn out and the remix trailers modify many of these norms, thus eliciting a reaction of both pleasure and groans from the audience. After this thought process, I would have to conclude that these trailers are at once both playful and subversive.