Killer Tapes and Shattered Screens: Video Spectatorship From VHS to File Sharing

By Caetlin Benson-Allott

Since the mid-1980s, US audiences have watched the majority of movies they see on a video platform, be it VHS, DVD, Blu-ray, Video On Demand, or streaming media. Annual video revenues have exceeded box office returns for over twenty-five years. In short, video has become the structuring discourse of US movie culture. Killer Tapes and Shattered Screens examines how prerecorded video reframes the premises and promises of motion picture spectatorship. But instead of offering a history of video technology or reception, Caetlin Benson-Allott analyzes how the movies themselves understand and represent the symbiosis of platform and spectator. Through case studies and close readings that blend industry history with apparatus theory, psychoanalysis with platform studies, and production history with postmodern philosophy, Killer Tapes and Shattered Screens unearths a genealogy of post-cinematic spectatorship in horror movies, thrillers, and other exploitation genres. From Night of the Living Dead (1968) through Paranormal Activity (2009), these movies pursue their spectator from one platform to another, adapting to suit new exhibition norms and cultural concerns in the evolution of the video subject.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of California Press
• Release date: Mar 22, 2013
• ISBN: 9780520954496

Caetlin Benson-Allott

Caetlin Benson-Allott is Provost's Distinguished Associate Professor of English and Film and Media Studies at Georgetown University and editor of JCMS: Journal of Cinema and Media Studies. She is author of Killer Tapes and Shattered Screens: Video Spectatorship from VHS to File Sharing and Remote Control.

Book preview

KILLER TAPES AND SHATTERED SCREENS

Killer Tapes and

Shattered Screens

Video Spectatorship from VHS to File Sharing

CAETLIN BENSON-ALLOTT

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS

BerkeleyLos AngelesLondon

University of California Press, one of the most distinguished university presses in the United States, enriches lives around the world by advancing scholarship in the humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences. Its activities are supported by the UC Press Foundation and by philanthropic contributions from individuals and institutions. For more information, visit www.ucpress.edu.

University of California Press

Berkeley and Los Angeles, California

University of California Press, Ltd.

London, England

© 2013 by The Regents of the University of California

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Benson-Allott, Caetlin Anne.

Killer tapes and shattered screens:video spectatorship from VHS to file sharing / Caetlin Benson-Allott.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-520-27510-2 (cloth : alk. paper)

ISBN 978-0-520-27512-6 (pbk. : alk. paper)

eISBN 9780520954496

1. Technology in motion pictures.  2. Cinematography— Technological innovations.  3. Horror films—History and criticism.  4. Motion picture audiences.  5. Video recordings—Production and direction—Data processing.  6. Digital video—Production and direction—Data processing.  7. Video recordings industry.  I. Title.

PN1995.9.T43B462013

791.43’656—dc23

2012038612

Manufactured in the United States of America

22  21  20  19  18  17  16  15  14  13

10  9  8  7  6  5  4  3  2  1

In keeping with a commitment to support environmentally responsible and sustainable printing practices, UC Press has printed this book on Rolland Enviro100, a 100% post-consumer fiber paper that is FSC certified, deinked, processed chlorine-free, and manufactured with renewable biogas energy. It is acid-free and EcoLogo certified.

For my mother, Kathryn Joan Allott (1942–2004)

Contents

Illustrations

1.Title card for Friday the 13th (1980)

2.Barbara (Judith O’Dea) in Night of the Living Dead (1968)

3.Multilevel blocking in Night of the Living Dead (1968)

4–5.Multimedia eyeline match from Night of the Living Dead (1968)

6.Detail from The Vault of Horror, no. 17 (1951)

7.Cover art from reissued Vault of Horror, no. 32 (1953)

8.A homage to The Vault of Horror no. 32 in Dawn of the Dead (1978)

9–11.Opening credits from Day of the Dead (1985)

12–13.Cholo’s nondisposable shoulder in the widescreen and full-screen editions of Land of the Dead (2005)

14.The zombie gaze in Land of the Dead (2005)

15.Civic TV’s Station Identification in Videodrome (1983)

16.Max Renn (James Woods) and his television set in Videodrome (1983)

17–19.A first-person video hallucination in Videodrome (1983)

20.Latex effects in Videodrome (1983)

21.Dziga Vertov’s kino-eye from Man with the Movie Camera (1929)

22.Rachel’s video-eye in The Ring (2002)

23.Timer trouble in The Ring (2002)

24.Samara’s video, The Ring (2002)

25.Samara (Daveigh Chase) in The Ring (2002)

26.Zoë Bell (Zoë Bell) in Grindhouse (2007)

27.A blend of visual and latex effects in Grindhouse (2007)

28.A previsualization video for Planet Terror (2007)

29.The Blair Witch Project (1999)

30.Katie Featherston (Katie Featherston) in Paranormal Activity (2007)

31.Cloverfield (2008)

Acknowledgments

It takes an institution to produce a dissertation; it takes many institutions, innumerable friends, and much of their patience to produce a book.

I am immensely grateful for the support of Cornell University and the amazing advisers I found there. Ellis Hanson taught me about the intense joys of film theory and rigorous feedback. Ellis was not just a chair but a role model and a champion. Amy Villarejo kept asking for more until I figured out how to deliver it; her encouragement and friendship have shown me the kind of professor I want to be. Eric Cheyfitz shared my enthusiasm for low genres, high theory, and the political potential of both. Jonathan Culler generously shared his time and insight; he even agreed to work through Infinite Jest with me against his better judgment. And finally, Masha Raskolnikov was a superlative mentor and confidant. Masha was never part of my dissertation committee, but she was there for every crisis and victory. She still is.

This project was made possible with fellowships from the Graduate School and Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Program of Cornell University, as well as research grants from Cornell’s Graduate School, American Studies Program, and Rose Goldsen Archive of New Media Art. While at the University of California, Santa Cruz, I received grant support from the Senate Committee on Faculty Research, along with the feedback and fellowship of the wonderful Film and Media Studies Department. I am especially grateful for the sage counsel and warm friendship of my colleagues Irene Gustafson, Irene Lustzig, and Shelley Stamp. Neda Atanasoski, Mayanthi Fernando, and Megan Moodie-Brasoveaunu also sustained me and my research during my time among the banana slugs. Amelie Hastie took me under her wing and made a professor out of a terrified graduate student. I once told Amelie I would not be here if it were not for her. Neither would this book.

More recently, the English Department and Graduate School of Georgetown University provided research grants and a Junior Faculty Research Fellowship that enabled me to finish this manuscript. My colleagues in the English Department have revitalized my appreciation for interdisciplinary conversation; I especially wish to acknowledge Dana Luciano, Ricardo Ortiz, Henry Schwartz, and Kathryn Temple. Our Junior Faculty Writing Group gave me the collegiality I needed to keep my fingers on the keyboard; thank you Jennifer Fink, Nathan Hensley, Brian Hochman, Samantha Pinto, Daniel Shore, and Mimi Yiu. I also want to express my gratitude to the faculty and staff of the Film and Media Studies Program; the students of Multimedia Spectatorships; and my research assistant, Ryan Walter. Georgetown facilitated my entry into the DC Queer Studies Reading Group, which makes the district feel like a home. Carla Marcantonio and Kristen Bergen, in particular, make capital life a joy. And Matthew Tinkcom needs an acknowledgment all his own: thank you, Matthew, for reading, commenting, encouraging, and reminding me that professing is just a job, but a great job.

I am eternally grateful to the generous souls who read and reread large chunks of this manuscript over the past six years, including many of the aforementioned and Jacob Brogan, Paul Fleig, Daniel Herbert, Jen Malkowski, Hugh Manon, Lisa Patti, and Celeste Pietrusza. Various chapters were also improved by insights from Larry Andrews, Will Brooker, John Thornton Caldwell, Nick Davis, Max Dawson, Paul Dergerabedian, Anne Friedberg, Theresa Geller, Amy Herzog, Chris Holmlund, Alexandra Keller, Chuck Kleinans, L. S. Kim, Marcia Landy, Julia Lesage, Peter Limbrick, Paul McDonald, Cathy and Corey Mifsud, Laura Mulvey, Tim Murray, Chris Olivia, Anthony Reed, Jeffrey Sconce, Vivian Sobchack, Lynn Spigel, Yiman Wang, Frederick Wasser, Kristen Whissel, Rob White, Linda Williams, and Patricia Zimmerman. Portions of chapters 3 and 4 were previously published in Jump Cut and Film Quarterly, and I wish to thank their anonymous readers for invaluable feedback. I was privileged to present works-in-progress from this project at San Francisco State University; Smith College; the University of Pittsburgh; and the University of California, Berkeley, and I want to reiterate my thanks to the generous audiences I met there. I would also like to thank the owners and staff of Revolution Video, Lincoln Video, Five Star Video, Collegetown Video, and Westside Video. Without you this project would have never begun.

Mary Francis has been the best editor I could have imagined; her critical acumen and consistent encouragement always inspire me to rise to the challenge. Kim Hogeland and Rachel Berchten have also been invaluable. Mary found two wonderful readers for my manuscript, but Lucas Hilderbrand was the greatest interlocutor I could have asked for. I have heard it said that one should pick one’s research projects so as to enter into stimulating conversations with smart colleagues. Not only is Lucas a wonderful writer; he is a generous scholar who nurtures colleagues and ideas equally. I have been truly blessed by his generous suggestions and close attention to detail. He knows I cannot thank him enough.

My family has supported this project in ways too myriad to mention. My mother trained me from a young age to appreciate the wonders of Movie Night, and my father taught me the value of returning to an important text again and again. My sister has been my constant viewing companion since 1985; without her I would be lost. Patricia and Earl Silbert have been so much more than an aunt and an uncle, and I am forever grateful. And then there are the family who are also friends and those friends who have become family: thank you all!

I would also like to recognize the contributions of my two wonderful dogs, Joey and Frisco. And finally, Seth Perlow: my best reader and best friend. Just the best, my love. Thank you.

Introduction

Opening Up to Home Video

As early as 1980, when a mere 1 percent of US homes owned a VCR, the opening moments of a terrifying new movie, Sean Cunningham’s Friday the 13th, portended the influence video distribution would have on motion picture aesthetics.¹ Cunningham’s movie was heralded for its gruesome reinvention of horror movie gore, but its most important innovation was its assault on the viewer: the broken glass that flies at the viewer’s face when the movie’s title card appears to crash through a television monitor and into US movie culture. Film critics overlooked Friday the 13th’s salutation to home viewers, almost as if they considered video exhibition more gratuitous than the bloody dismemberment of comely camp counselors. By the end of the 1980s, however, the lowly videocassette would mount such a challenge to cinema-centric (or cinecentric) traditions of motion picture spectatorship that video’s thematic and aesthetic effects on feature-length films had essentially rendered the term obsolete. Since 1988, US audiences have watched the majority of their movies on a video platform, be it VHS, Laserdisc, DVD, Blu-ray, Video On Demand (VOD), or streaming media. Different video platforms come and go, but prerecorded video as a distribution model continues to structure motion picture production and consumption. In other words, movies are now primarily videos for both their makers and their viewers. This change has been called revolutionary in both popular and academic film histories, but to date there has been remarkably little critical discussion about what this revolution looked like. How did the video revolution affect the spectator, the viewing subject that movies imagine and address themselves to? Killer Tapes and Shattered Screens examines how video exhibition influences the historically shifting premises and promises of spectatorship, but rather than offering a history of video technology, it analyzes how the movies themselves understand the mutual imbrications of platform and spectator, especially movies already committed to the expression of cultural anxiety. This study takes the polemical position that video distribution changed and is changing spectatorship and that film and new media theorists must attend to these changes. We must attend to the ways video platforms affect the motion picture experience if we want to continue to comment on the ideological significance of motion pictures for contemporary culture, politics, and subjectivity.

Friday the 13th dramatizes the stakes of this intervention because it reflects contemporaneous theoretical debates about and material changes to the filmic experience. During the mid to late 1970s, Marxist, psychoanalytic, and semiotic theorists dominated academic discourse about motion pictures in the United States, France, and the United Kingdom. Chief among their concerns were questions regarding spectatorship, including the role of the cinematic apparatus in molding the spectator. Admittedly, exhibition technologies do not play a large role in Friday the 13th’s narrative about a deranged woman massacring counselors at the camp where her son drowned. Camp Crystal Lake has neither television sets nor VCRs; in fact, it is the counselors’ reliance on more intimate forms of entertainment that leads to their demise. Nevertheless, the movie’s opening sequence reveals Friday the 13th to be uncannily aware of itself as a movie and of the pleasure it gives as a video. This metacinematic commentary begins just after the prologue, in which the spectator watches two frisky Crystal Lake counselors get slashed to ribbons from the killer’s first-person perspective. As the second counselor dies, the movie’s slow motion freezes to a still image that blanches out, like the end of a film reel. It then fades to black and a title card rises from the lower-right corner of the frame. As Friday the 13th approaches the middle of the screen, an exaggerated perspectival effect gives the block letters physical force. As they rush toward the viewer, they appear to break through a sheet of clear glass—or rather a glass monitor (Figure 1). This shot, like all title sequences, establishes the discursive frame of the motion picture. It is remarkable precisely for that reason, because the shape of its discourse marks a transition from cinema to video, from tearing a screen to shattering a TV. In fact, the idea for the title sequence preceded the movie’s production. Cunningham ran an ad featuring the title card’s big block letters and broken glass as early as 1979, and although he never explained why he wanted Friday the 13th to burst through a glass screen, the rapid increase in video distributors pouring money into independent movie production may have had something to do with it.² Classic horror movies had been in syndication for decades, but Friday the 13th was the result of a new era in filmmaking: it was too bloody and sexually explicit for TV, yet it addressed itself to a home viewer.

Figure 1. Introducing the new apparatus of horror in Friday the 13th (1980).

In short, Friday the 13th joined 1970s apparatus theorists in commenting on the impact of the technical and physical specificity of watching films on the processing methods used by their watchers.³ These writers—including Jean-Louis Baudry, Christian Metz, and Laura Mulvey—propose that the meaning-making process of watching a movie necessarily includes the mechanics of viewing, from the architecture of the theater to the location of the projector and the size of the screen, not to mention its constitutive components: the motion picture being screened and the human viewer. All these elements make up the motion picture apparatus and are internalized by a viewer as she watches the movie and experiences herself as the cinematic subject. Apparatus theorists thus study the material forces shaping a viewer’s psychic relationship to a movie. In developing this definition and approach to film studies, the 1970s apparatus theorists drew on psychoanalytic concepts of desire, identification, and the unconscious to explain how films create spectatorial pleasure. For that reason, and despite its emphasis on the technological components of the apparatus, the field has been haunted by its Lacanian ancestry as it explores how both viewer and movie are subject to and in negotiation with their materiality. Christian Metz suggests, for example, that movies appeal to the spectator through his or her ensconced passivity in the darkened theater: "The institution of cinema requires a silent, motionless spectator, a vacant spectator, constantly in a sub-motor and hyperperceptive state, a spectator at once alienated and happy, acrobatically hooked up to himself by . . . his preliminary identification with the (invisible) seeing agency of the film itself as discourse, as the agency which puts forward the story and shows it to us."⁴

Examining the cinematic experience from a distinctly ego-oriented position, Metz argues that, contrary to popular belief, viewers do not identify first with a character onscreen but with themselves as spectators. Many film scholars have unpacked the psychic implications of Metz’s observation that the spectator identifies primarily as a subject of vision, but if we focus instead on the exhibition norms surrounding apparatus theory, that historical context opens an important new materialist perspective on film studies. When Metz wrote about the cinematic institution in 1974, the cinema was the norm for film viewing; it was the shape of the discourse that organized every spectatorial encounter with a movie regardless of how it was exhibited.⁵ Despite television, airplane, and domestic small-gauge exhibition, movies were films at that time.⁶ Thus, it stands to reason that when theorizing the viewer’s imagined relationship to film as a machine of vision, Metz describes the spectator’s primary identification with her look in cinematic terms. According to Metz, viewers experience their all-seeing access to the film as being like that of the camera and its "representative consisting of another apparatus, called precisely a ‘projector.’ An apparatus the spectator has behind him, at the back of his head, that is, precisely where phantasy locates the ‘focus’ of all vision."⁷ In short, viewers are able to understand films precisely because they internalize the architecture of the cinema, an architecture Metz standardizes in the service of psychoanalytic theories of visual pleasure. This theory of spectatorship is cinecentric, but it nonetheless offers considerable insight into the affective functioning of that apparatus. So given that the normative shape and architecture of the motion picture have changed, we can use Metz’s insight to formulate a new account of motion picture spectatorship that recognizes prerecorded video as the dominant apparatus.

Nowhere is that new apparatus more clearly announced than in Friday the 13th. Cunningham’s movie offers its material acknowledgment of changing exhibition practices and apparatuses as part of a generic commentary on the structuring discourse of film history, specifically the history of horror films. The movie’s very first shot, of clouds passing across a pale moon in a pitch-black sky, pays homage to Luis Buñuel’s Un chien andalou (1929), which substitutes a shot of clouds bisecting the moon for a razor blade slicing a woman’s eye. Lest the viewer miss this reference, Friday the 13th returns to it—to an almost exact mirror image of the Buñuel cloud—right before the killer starts attacking counselors. Cunningham’s cheap slasher movie is aware of its generic roots, in other words, but instead of inaugurating a new mode of vision by slashing the viewer’s eye (as Buñuel does), Cunningham explodes glass in her face. That this surprise attack comes just after a long first-person sequence seems no coincidence but a response to the 1970s film theory Cunningham studied while earning a master’s degree in Film and Theater at Stanford University.

By placing that all-seeing gaze in the eyes of a psychotic murderer, Friday the 13th thus toys with Metz’s theory of primary identification, with the spectator’s identification with her own look as the all-seeing gaze of the camera. This technique had been used in horror movies before, notably in John Carpenter’s Halloween (1978), but taken together with the title card, Friday the 13th’s approach first pathologizes and then disrupts the viewer’s identification with the cinematic apparatus.⁸ As the credits demonstrate, even if one sees Friday the 13th projected, it is still—or rather was always already—a video. Indeed, given that Friday the 13th was produced in 1979, it is something of a fluke that it became a film at all. Paramount purchased the movie as part of a package deal with Cunningham, but the movie was financed autonomously by Georgetown Productions, an independent company assembled solely for Friday the 13th parts 1 through 5. Friday the 13th emerged in response to distributors’ demand for inexpensive product to fill the new video market. Horror was one of the genres that benefited most from this brief opening in the movie industry, particularly its new subgenre of teen-oriented slashers.⁹ A few of these films became known as video nasties during UK censorship debates, and although it is true that few of the nasties feature the spectatorial games of Friday the 13th, that movie, as one of the most intelligent of its ilk, comments on their arrival and their role in film history.

Friday the 13th was only one of many movies to reflect figurally on video distribution and demonstrate that home video changed a wide range of US movie cultures—from exploitation to art house, production to exhibition. Indeed, the generic differences among movies featuring video technology have prevented many film historians from drawing connections among them. From Atom Egoyan’s Next of Kin (1982) to Michel Gondry’s Be Kind, Rewind (2008), Steven Soderbergh’s Sex, Lies, and Videotape (1989) to Kathryn Bigelow’s Strange Days (1995), video enters so many stories and conventions that it can seem ubiquitous—or invisible.¹⁰ Therefore, I explore video’s effects on motion pictures by studying the changes its ascension wrought in their style, tone, and politics. True, Egoyan’s art film and Cunningham’s slasher movie have very different pedagogical models—the former relies on narrative and character to ask questions about family and sexuality, while the latter depends on allusive imagery to comment on industrial trends—but both affirm the significance of home exhibition for motion pictures. That said, Killer Tapes and Shattered Screens focuses on horror and other low-genre movies to uncover how home video makes new stories available to new audiences for reasons I will explain momentarily.

This approach generates a motley archive of low-budget and genre movies that helped educate US consumers and filmmakers in how to understand themselves as video subjects. It includes movies both about home video and not, but all enable historically situated textual analyses that explore how video distribution changed the ways movies address their spectators. Killer Tapes and Shattered Screens thus offers a new analysis of video’s cultural significance for the US entertainment industry because it focuses on the technology’s most common use among North American consumers: the exhibition of prerecorded feature motion pictures. From VHS to DVD and online media, most video with which we interact was recorded and distributed by someone else. Other video scholars have written admirable studies of time-shifting (recording television broadcasts for later viewing), bootlegging, amateur videography, and video art, but the fact remains: for most US video users since the mid-1980s, video has been synonymous with the movies.¹¹

That association has changed the motion picture industry, but the video revolution did not just happen in boardrooms or at the video store. It happened in movies, in the exchange between viewer and text that happens every time one watches a movie. This book attends to the spectatorial relationships—to the discursive construction of a spectator who sometimes goes to the movies but more often waits for it on video—by examining how motion pictures have reacted to home video, the new ways they reach and affect their viewers. As D.N. Rodowick explains in The Virtual Life of Film, "Periods of intense technological change are always fascinating for film theory because the films themselves tend to stage its primary question: What is cinema?"¹² During the last three decades, images of video technology and video cultures in movies like Videodrome (1983), The Blair Witch Project (1999), The Ring (2002), and Paranormal Activity (2009) reveal the US film industry in avid contemplation of the role of medium and platform in audience and industrial identities. So do multiplatform blockbusters and trendsetters like Top Gun (1986), Twister (1997), and The Matrix (1999).¹³ Like movies about video and movies made possible by video (such as the aforementioned 1980s horror cycle or the concomitant increase in children’s features, or kid vid), movies made in periods of technological change offer a deep well of material for new theories of motion picture spectatorship in an age of multiplatform distribution. The producers and artists working within the US and Canadian entertainment industries know that most viewers approach their products through one video format or another; only film studies continues to insist on the primacy of the cinematic experience, and we do so in spite of our own video-enabled research and pedagogy.¹⁴ We need to address the unique experience of watching movies on their various platforms and examine how movies respond to their new exhibition platforms both formally and narratively. Spectatorship theorists have argued for a long time now that the architecture of the cinematic encounter affects how viewers experience films; we need to ask how video distribution changes the physical and psychic structure of that relationship.

Developing a theory of video spectatorship requires one to push existing spectatorship scholarship in some directions it never anticipated. For one thing, many contemporary spectatorship theorists fail to address the video revolution at all. Almost all recent work on motion picture spectatorship continues to posit film as the movies’ natural medium and the cinema as its province.¹⁵ Rodowick suggests this may be part of a wider disciplinary aversion to video; he asks, Is the philosophical coherence of film theory and visual studies challenged by the increasing cultural presence of digital and electronic media?¹⁶ While he and I think not, many scholars have turned a love of cinema studies into a notable disregard for video. I empathize with their affection for cinematic experience, but such thorough neglect of the video experience sometimes smacks of planned obsolescence. The term planned obsolescence was coined by Bernard Logan in 1932 and popularized as a business strategy by US industrial designer Brooks Stevens, who defined the concept as instilling in a buyer the desire to own something a little newer, a little better, a little sooner than is necessary.¹⁷ Planned obsolescence enables the motion picture industries to increase profits by multiplying exhibition platforms and thereby extending the market for their products. In addition, it motivates them to develop and cater to new media platforms even while venerating older technologies, a ruse film studies perpetuates when it uses video in its pedagogy and research but insists that its subject is cinema. As Rodowick points out, film studies maintains its subject’s status as the seventh art by opposing the cinema to the variety of video platforms on which movies are also available, and it continues to do so even when such nostalgia risks the field’s own obsolescence. This sentimentality has come under many guises, from Paulo Cherchi Usai’s momentous credo The Death of Cinema or Jon Lewis’s portentous anthology The End of Cinema as We Know It to Peter Greenaway’s hyperbolic pronouncement: "Cinema is dead. . . . It died on September 31 [sic], 1983, when the remote control was introduced into the living rooms of the world. Bang, that was it, that was the end."¹⁸ Each of these examples suggests in its own way that film criticism has come to rely on the obituary as a key rhetorical form for analyzing contemporary motion pictures.

Ironically, these death notices are also grandiloquent calls for life support; they draw attention to the planned obsolescence inherent in the industry in order to forestall film studies’ own obsolescence. As a disciplinary trajectory this move amounts to an eschatological hypothesis—similar to Foucault’s repressive hypothesis—since it allows us to convince ourselves that we have never said enough on the subject, that, through inertia or submissiveness, we conceal from ourselves the blinding evidence, and that what is essential always eludes us.¹⁹ There is no essential truth to the death of cinema, in other words, and such posturing ignores the history of the cinema’s collusion with allegedly competing media. Eschatology may work as a way to shore up film studies as a discipline, and it can prove very useful when rationalizing curricula or requesting new hires, as Rodowick notes.²⁰ But ultimately such insistence on ontological stability is historically indefensible, and as Judith Mayne observes, it leaves film studies open to the charge that it has only the most remote connection with the ways in which films are actually received.²¹

The question of how motion pictures are actually received has driven and divided spectatorship studies since its inception, and it is important to set forth the history of its ideological and methodological controversies in order to clarify the stakes of my intervention. Rather than dividing spectatorship studies according to platform, into film and television, as others have done, I want to emphasize film and television studies’ interdisciplinary disputes, as the very terms of their disagreements help explain why prerecorded video has been underanalyzed. In the plainest possible terms, spectatorship studies has been vexed by—and Killer Tapes and Shattered Screens emerges from—a disagreement about whether the best way to understand the spectator is as cinematic subject or viewer. The controversy began during the 1970s vogue for psychoanalytic and Marxist analyses of the cinematic subject-effect, many of which were published or translated in the British journal Screen (thereby earning their collective enterprise the moniker screen theory or Screen theory, regardless of actual publication history). Following Louis Althusser’s concept of interpellation and Sigmund Freud’s and Jacques Lacan’s ideas about the formation of the subject, screen theorists tried to describe the ways in which individual films—or in the case of apparatus theorists, the cinema as an institution—created a position for individual viewers to occupy when they participated in the act of watching a film.²² In analyses by Jean-Louis Baudry, Christian Metz, and Laura Mulvey (among others) the spectator is an idealized subject-effect or concept, not a real person. A construction of the cinema, this spectator is both physically and psychically passive, immobilized before the gigantic screen and prostrate before its ideological manipulations.²³ In making such claims, screen theorists sought to demystify the ideological apparatus of the cinema, but they were often rebuked for their universalist identification of a singular cinematic subject and a tone at once combative and cowering.²⁴ In short, some contemporaneous media scholars felt excluded by the screen theorists’ propensity for dense rhetoric and specialized terminology. They also refused to reduce spectatorship to one textually constructed position, which they believed was assumed to be white, male, heterosexual, wealthy, and Western.

These scholars began looking for ways to articulate resistant or minority experiences of the cinema; many were inspired by Stuart Hall’s essay Encoding/Decoding and began studying viewers’ supposedly more interactive relationships with television.²⁵ This celebration of the empirical and rejection of master narratives became something of a rallying cry in television studies during the 1980s and 1990s, as it reoriented the study of spectatorship around different viewers’ reception of television programming and their actual use of media technologies. Hence, reception theorists used viewer interviews to argue that individual audience members never fully occupy the position accorded them by a program; they are always active, sometimes even oppositional, agents who may be interpellated by a text but do not necessarily respond as anticipated.²⁶ Although their qualitative empirical analyses were methodologically distinct from the quantitative studies of mass communications, reception scholars were also ideologically opposed to the allegedly ungrounded abstractions of 1970s film studies. Whereas apparatus and screen theorists often used spectator and cinematic subject interchangeably to describe the observer-function of film, reception theorists equated spectators with viewers, making the latter’s responses their primary texts in order to study how a person’s cultural identities influence her negotiations with different programs. As Ien Ang has shown, even these ethnographic analyses still rely on a notion of the cinematic or televisual subject as the position with which any given viewer is in negotiation, but such acknowledgments of the interrelationship of 1970s film theory and reception studies are few and far between.²⁷

Indeed, apparatus theory remained marginalized even among the theoretically grounded responses to reception studies that emerged around the turn of the millennium, as if critics feared the taint of its alleged universalism. Although most apparatus theorists actually describe the normative functions of the cinema, their insights were dismissed as essentialist, even within film theory. During the 1990s, film scholars moved toward historically specific, archive-driven exhibition histories and cognitivist explanations of the neurological functions behind spectatorship. With the exception of technologically minded theorists of visual culture like Anne Friedberg, most historians of spectatorship made the apparatus a very small part of their project.²⁸ Nevertheless, Friedberg’s interests were anticipated and matched by television scholars who study how the box invites a glance rather than a gaze or how the remote control anticipates a new kind of viewer interaction.²⁹ Renewed attention to the locations of viewing has also launched questions about how the mechanics of viewing shape experience in ways individual viewers might not be able to articulate. Anna McCarthy’s work, in particular, challenges the empiricism of reception studies, including reception studies of media technologies, but none of these studies interrogates how television and home video create their own subjects.³⁰

Video, new media, and platform studies have emerged to take up the technologies and topics overlooked by film and television studies, but the stakes of their interventions typically direct them away from studying video as an apparatus with its own subject effects. Historically, video studies defines itself as the study of avant-garde video art and in opposition to amateur and prerecorded video.³¹ At the same time that video (art) studies was circumscribing its subject, however, early ontological studies of video—like Sean Cubitt’s Timeshift: On Video Culture—pursued poststructuralist readings of analog video’s technical characteristics instead of the content of the videos.³² Histories of video’s industrial development similarly often ignore the movies the technology helped distribute, as do political economies of prerecorded video, which typically focus on video’s impact on national movie industries rather than its cultural effects (save piracy). New media scholars have likewise proven unwilling to account for the role home video played in the development of their subject. The phrase new media could refer to any advancements in communications technology, but since its disciplinary formation during the mid-1990s, new media studies has routinely equated new with digital and disregarded mechatronic (mechanic + electronic) antecedents to digital media.³³ While many scholars in the field look back to film and precinematic motion pictures as antecedents to digital sampling and random access memory, continuous signal formats such as analog video have been dismissed as though they were lacunae in an inevitable march toward computerized multimedia.³⁴ This oversight becomes especially problematic during discussions of interactivity, or the nature of a user’s involvement with a text. As the keyboard, videogame controller, and touch screen emerge as benchmarks of interactivity, interactivity itself becomes one of the standards by which new media theorists distinguish products and texts of the digital era from previous formats, such as film, that allegedly require the viewer to remain passive while consuming a completed text. Scholars have found predigital precedents for interactivity, of course; Lev Manovich, in particular, observes that modernist painting and fiction often require interpretive work from the user that constitutes a form of interaction. Yet genealogies like Manovich’s seem oddly incomplete when confronted with the material, push-button interaction of the sort that the VCR (and its allegedly cinema-cidal remote control) offers video subjects.³⁵ Recent studies of digital sound formats have pushed the field to address how popular platforms like the MP3 create new media subjects, but their authors specifically contrast their projects with dominant trends in digital video scholarship.³⁶ In sum, both video studies and visually oriented new media studies seem to consider prerecorded video no more than a convenience, the bastard child of cinema and television that must subsist outside the purview of even their highly interdisciplinary disciplines.

Platform studies could address video’s technological and cultural specificities, but the field explicitly refuses to consider analog media of any sort. In essence platform studies analyze the imbrications of technology and culture, the way media hardware and software shape and are shaped by media cultures. The field is very young—scholars date the term platform studies to a 2007 conference on Digital Arts and Cultures—but some advocates already argue that platform can only apply to computation systems. Ian Bogost and Nick Montfort, the editors of MIT Press’s Platform Studies series, define platform as a computing system of any sort upon which further computing development can be done. It can be implemented entirely in hardware, [or] entirely in software, but it has to be digital; one scholar they quote even maintains, If you can program it, then it’s a platform. If you can’t, then it’s not.³⁷ Bogost and Montfort explicitly exclude mechatronic and analog systems from their notion of platform even