Before analyzing each theorist’s notions of spectatorship, their basic theoretical frameworks need to be defined. Christian Metz based his spectator theories upon semiotics and psychoanalysis. Semiotics is concerned with the study of codes and signs. These codes and signs make up language systems, but they can also come together in a smaller scale to create a system or text, in this case a film. Cinematic codes could be anything from specific editing techniques to different lighting techniques. Metz also applied psychoanalysis, specifically Lacan’s notion of the mirror stage, to his theory on spectatorship. For Lacan, the mirror stage was the moment in a child’s development, usually between the age of six to eighteen months, when they finally recognize themselves as different from the world, i.e., the child recognizes that they are experiencing the world through their own subjectiveness. On the other side of the spectrum lies the cognitivist approach. Instead of understanding the world through the study of language and its signs and systems, cognitivists seek to understand the world through processes of mental representations. For cognitivists, there are certain “physiological and cognitive systems “hard-wired” into all human beings,” which come before any knowledge of history, culture or identity. Bordwell calls these systems “contingent universals” and they consist of simple assumptions ranging from the assumption that “natural light falls from above” to the understanding of a coherent space within a film. Cognitivists also want to stray away from the notion of applying a theoretical model and trying to prove it through interpretation.
Now that their basic theoretical frameworks have been explained, their respective notions of film spectatorship can be considered. Metz compared the spectator’s situation while watching a film with the mirror stage, acknowledging one difference: that with film the spectator does not get a reflection of himself. He claims that since the spectator has already experienced the “real” mirror stage, he “is thus able to constitute a world of objects without having to first recognize himself within it;” creating an “all-perceiving” spectator. The spectator is not only “all-perceiving” but has a dual knowledge as well: that what is being perceived is imaginary (the film) and that he himself (the spectator) is the one perceiving it. The spectator is also in the unique position of “receiving” and “releasing” the film. He receives the film, like the screen in the auditorium, but he also releases it, like the projector, “since it does not preexist my entering the auditorium and I only need close my eyes to suppress it." Metz states that the spectator identifies not only with “himself as look” but also with the camera since it looked at everything the spectator is now looking at first. Metz divides these cinematic forms of identification, which he distinguishes from regular identification, in two: primary identification with the camera and one’s own look and secondary identification with characters within the filmic world. In order to make sense of the film, the spectator must simultaneously put himself in the position of the character of the film so that he can accept and understand the filmic world, but at the same time reject himself from that position so that he can accept the fiction as symbolic.
Instead of believing that the spectator makes meaning out of symbolism through an identification process with the film, Carroll believes that films are “emotively focused.” What he means is that filmmakers emotionally organize films in order to elicit different emotional states in the spectator throughout the film. The spectator is “encouraged to adopt pro attitudes to certain developments in the story” and where these “story developments mesh with those preferences, the response is likely to be euphoric; where they clash…dysphoric." The emotional response then leads to the emotive focus that guides our attention to the events in the film. In the process of eliciting this emotional response, the spectator’s “faculties of cognition and judgment are brought into play." In order to analyze films then, research should be focused on how films are “emotively focused” and if the emotion desired is pertinent with actions of the film. The cognitivist analysis disregards the positioning of the spectator by the camera, instead emphasizing an active spectator responding to the film emotionally.
These contrasting theories do share some similarities. Both theories apply a theoretical model to their approaches in analyzing the spectator, Metz with Lacan’s mirror stage and semiotics while Carroll creates his own theory based on emotions. Understanding Lacan’s notion of the mirror stage or how emotions work for Carroll is crucial to their perspective views on spectatorship. Both theorists also believe that films are constructed in a certain way as to create certain effects on the viewer. For Metz these effects are different stages of belief as for Carroll they are different emotions. They both believe that films are meticulously constructed to carry out these effects that keep audiences engaged. Even though they share some similarities in how they construct their theoretical arguments, the theories are opposed in the most fundamental aspect of how the mind works: for semioticians language systems come first and for cognitivists thinking comes first.
Both of these contrasting theories fall short in certain aspects when analyzing spectatorship. As mentioned before, both theorists set out a theoretical stage in which to analyze the spectator but Metz is applying a non-cinematic theory to film instead of creating a specifically cinematic one. Carroll creates his theory of how films are structured and their effects on spectators solely based on cinematic phenomena. Carroll’s account can also explain how and why certain emotions are elicited in the spectator within separate films and genres, while Metz’s seems to only account for our “passion for perceiving” films in general. The cognitivist approach also has its shares of fallbacks, for example, Carroll states that when “looking at a horror film like From Beyond from an analytic point of view requires dissecting, so to say, the way in which the monster has been designed to engender a horrified emotional response from audiences." This sort of dissection, by focusing solely on emotional responses, seems to restrict analysis. Metz’s theory of identification allows for a spectator to think of the filmic world as symbolic and not just as a phenomenon that produces certain emotions, arriving at more interesting theories behind films. Neither theory deals with what the spectator does while viewing avant-garde or experimental films. A film like Peter Kubelka’s Arnulf Rainer does not provide room for any sort of identification or emotional response.
Metz and Carroll’s theories on spectatorship provide different notions of how spectators experience a film. Metz provides an account of a passive spectator who is positioned by and identifies with the camera, while Carroll portrays the spectator as active and responding to the criterially prefocused filmic text. These scholars have provided their own accounts of the spectator with each one being more pertinent than the other in some aspect of film analysis.
Quotes and research from Robert Stam's Film Theory: An Introduction and Baudry/Cohen's Film Theory & Criticism
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