Popular Culture Review Vol. 2, No. 2, July 1991 | Page 32

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The Popular Culture Review

finding obviously relevant to anyone committed to expanding the
theatre's relationship with populism.
The idea of popular theatre learning from Hollywood is, of
course, controversial. For one thing, Hollywood's principal
motivational forces are financial, which accounts for its paramount
interest in fulfilling audience tastes. Many theatrical populists
consider any compromise between popular theatre and such
inherently decadent commercial forces to be anathema. These
theorists often ignore the existence of a commercial sector of the live
theatre, or alternatively view it as a spectacle-laden lost cause, and
have little or no interest in that sector becoming more populist,
preferring instead to focus on the fringe theatre.
Feminist critics, on the other hand, have been interested in
mainstream, commercial film from the early seventies onwards. The
first wave of critics--like Molly Haskell and Marjorie Rosenessentially approached such films sociologically, listing the kind of
roles in which female characters could be found. More recent feminist
critics have noted the limitations of Haskell's assumption that
dramatic characters can be equated directly with women who have a
real-life existence—critics using the ideas of structuralism and
semiology p oint out that such characters can be more accurately seen
as a collection of signs and symbols that govern the film's narrative.
Feminist film theorists—such as Laura Mulvey—have been
particularly active in the approbation of psychoanalysis and,
specifically, Lacanian, theory. Such ideas are particularly useful
when it comes to explaining the popularity of the dominant film.
Mulvey argued that a viable alternative to the dominant film can be
fashioned only if certain aspects of it are first understood and then
broken down—especially the inclination of the cinema to build the
way a woman is to be looked at into the spectacle itself.
Although Mulvey's insistence that the dominant cinema be
broken down is a problematic one, especially as she advocates an
audience freed from voyeurism, allowed the unlikely privilege of
indulging in "dialectics [and] passionate detachment,"(1 ) her work
was seminal in the field because she analyzed the appeal of the
mainstream and the popular. Whatever action is to be subsequently
taken (and it is true that Mulvey offered nothing appealing to
replace the "voyeuristic active-passive mechanisms of the dominant
cinema"(2 ) that she so detested; there seems no reason why an