In a weekend in early August, 2019, U.S. citizens witnessed horrific mass shootings of at least twenty-two people killed and twenty-nine wounded in the border city of El Paso, Texas, and at least nine killed and twenty-seven wounded in Dayton, Ohio. President Donald Trump promptly tweeted that the causes for these tragedies included “the glorification of violence in our society” in video games and elsewhere (Wagner), urging mostly a mental health response to the problem. Another Republican claimed the massacres occurred because the news media was spreading information about same-sex marriages, football player Colin Kaepernick’s refusal to respect the American flag, and former President Barack Obama’s and other Democrats’ rejection of Trump as duly elected. Eventually, by mid-Monday morning, Trump did move to a primary argument that hatred was the cause for the shootings, with a few words condemning white supremacy ideologies.

Still, Trump’s and others’ initial configuration of explanations reran the classic and decades—even centuries—old theses about ideas, images, and sounds directly affecting their audiences, warning about audiences being under the influence of wrong and dangerous representations. And based on that presumption of more-or-less direct causality, they proposed the suppression and repression of some ideas, images, and sounds, propositions that have occurred from the earliest religious strictures to the present-day under the supposition of causal impact.

However, contemporary research into representations of violence as they occur in violent video games and movies indicates no causal linkages with acts of hostility. As scholar Chris Ferguson indicates about a recent summary of the research in relation to Trump’s and others’ claims, “the evidence [of the review of the literature] was clear that violent video games are not a risk factor for serious acts of aggression. Neither are violent movies, nor other forms of media. [As Ferguson said], ‘the data on bananas causing suicide is about as conclusive […] Literally. The numbers work out about the same’” (Draper A13).

One of the concerns to be raised about “trouble on screen” is: does it have anything to say about “trouble in the audience”? Obviously, we do want to consider possible causality from representations, but I would argue that we need to hypothesize so-called potential effects with much more sophistication than a linear consequence of representations to people with pure mimicry as an outcome. Mitigating factors are always operating when discussing “trouble on screen.”

One factor, in particular, includes social context and pre-existing audience knowledge. Recently, several other scholars and I were asked to comment on a series of questions about the history of the Hollywood Production Code and its impact on classical Hollywood cinema (“(Dis)agreements”). The project was useful, but at times the questions seemed to imply that the Production Code only operated significantly from about 1934 until the mid-1960s. It was as if the Production Code existed within its own filmic world, and a larger nexus of pre-movie views about improper or dangerous representations did not tacitly or explicitly affect filmmakers or as if community sentiments and local public laws were inconsequential1. As one individual addressing in 1928 the Fourth Annual Motion Picture Conference stated, “everybody knows there is nothing novel in censorship, nor anything untraditional in the warfare which men and women of free minds and hearts wage against it” (Kallen 20).

The project’s questions also led one to think that nothing replaced the Production Code, which simply permitted or denied screening rights within industry-controlled theaters (a "yes" or a "no"), when it ceased in 1967. Thus, the questions ignored the legal restrictions on U.S. network television as a public utility or the new 1968 Film Ratings System of various categories linked to age-levels, ratings around which producers often work in order to secure the sort of rating they favor. Cutting or adding, going to a broader or more specialized audience is common. And, for instance, producers sometimes create “directors’ cuts” for a later supplemental audience and more profits. These ratings are mostly advisory codes based on assumptions about appropriate representations for particular ages, but they do provide more audience flexibility in representational choice while they affect representations. As I concluded for the project’s group discussion on the Production Code: “regulation still happens, now by both the industry and the audience members” (“(Dis)agreements” 166).

Moreover, even with censorship, audiences are not ignorant about what has or might have been omitted or revised in a representation. Questions about effects of representation must also tackle the situation that people know representations are manipulated. As in the case of the 1932 film Blonde Venus, newspaper and fan magazines detailed some of the behind-the-scenes struggles over representation and provided both true-life and fictional alternative stories through which to read (or, at least, to contrast) the events represented in the screen version. As Michel Foucault has emphasized, repression might actually produce more expressions of the forbidden (Staiger, Perverse 77-8).

These expressions of the forbidden are productive but not always in ways most obvious. S. Elizabeth Bird has studied how audiences “interpret and use [real-life] scandals in their everyday lives,” concluding that one theory argues for “an effect of neuroticizing the audience, suggesting there is something sick or abnormal about being attracted to unwholesome news” (100). Another approach focuses on an “‘active’ audience,” assuming that people use this information to criticize their everyday experiences. Yet she offers a third hypothesis that many of these stories follow melodramatic or carnivalistic emotional trajectories that “tend usually toward the maintenance of the status quo” (117), so the stories can be effective personally for emotional as well as intellectual purposes and socially for interpersonal communication with friends—the “water-cooler” effect.

The question of effects of movie representations had its social science investigators early on. In the U.S., the Payne Fund studies of the 1930s is a major initial instance2. However, the literature is filled with studies of this question. One rather prominent case begins in the late 1940s when Fredric Wertham starts claiming that “comics are an important fact in causing juvenile delinquency” (83). Wertham’s assertions influenced U.S. congressional hearings in the mid-1950s with an outcome of a tacit self-regulation agreement with comic book producers to avoid racist and sexist imagery (Staiger, “Wertham Case”). But other social scientists at the time strongly criticized his linear causal claims. Frederic M. Thrasher, in the Journal of Educational Sociology in 1949, notes that Wertham’s “extreme position which is not substantiated by any valid research, is not only contrary to considerable current psychiatric thinking, but also disregards tested research procedures” (195). Thrasher particularly points to studies by Paul G. Cressey which indicate that people already with a propensity to crime may pick up methods of violence from representations, but the representations themselves are not causal. Many of the children Cressey studied knew movies were representations. Moreover, real-life violence was “so familiar to the children [...] that movies seemed rather tame by comparison” (199). Thrasher concludes by quoting the editors of Collier’s magazine, which had published Wertham’s original essay:

Juvenile delinquency is the product of pent-up frustrations, stored up resentments and bottled up fears. […] But the comics are a handy, obvious uncomplicated scapegoat. If the adults who crusade against them would only get as steamed up over such basic causes of delinquency as parental ignorance, indifference and cruelty, they might discover that the comics are no more a menace than Treasure Island or Jack the Giant Killer. (“Old Folks”)

By the early 1960s, social science research into effects of representation had produced many useful studies pointing out the extremely complicated issues in describing or determining effects of representations. As one study examining whether movies might enhance or reduce ethnic prejudices notes:

[…] People do not attribute accuracy or seriousness of purpose to commercial films which are meant to entertain. […] People may evade propaganda with which they disagree: rather than accepting or refusing the message, they may fail to understand it or they may twist and misinterpret it. Finally, the point is sometimes made that because ethnic prejudices are deeply ingrained, brief exposure […] to a message of tolerance is hardly sufficient to bring about changes in attitudes deriving from the personality systems of individuals. There may even by [sic] a “boomerang effect,” with prejudices being strengthened in the face of attack. (Middleton 680).

The research on this has continued over the past sixty years with much more sophistication and penetration of variables, but the basic conclusions remain. In fact, the contemporary problem of conspiracy thinking—in the U.S., for example, theses about the “deep state” and “QAnon” narratives—and the refusal to believe in news stories that contradict the beliefs of their audiences—the “fake news” argument—provides an extremely difficult situation in which representations, while at the heart of the matter, can hardly be the source of, or cure for, the illness.

On the one hand, this rather pessimistic situation surrounding thinking about whether one might fix troubles in the audience through the “right” representations on the screen (or at least not contribute to making things worse), however, still requires some “on the other hand” thinking. If representations on the screen cannot be argued to affect the audience except perhaps very temporarily as a stimulant or as a reinforcement of already held beliefs, that does not mean that it is unwise to consider causes for “trouble in the audience.”

Here I want to shift focus from the screen to the audience—those social contexts and pre-existing audience knowledge as causal agents for what happens while watching the movies and afterwards for spectators. I do not want to pretend—to take a very easy instance—that “adult” (sex) movies have no consequences for audiences who attend them in order to become aroused. Or that movies with political messages do not reinforce beliefs, either to the better or worse. And I particularly want to emphasize that audience members’ pre-existing notions about representations and specific social contexts will influence what they perceive and retain from a cinematic experience. As someone whose research has emphasized historical materialist analysis of interpretation, I want to contribute to producing more subtle investigations of the relations between representations and audiences. I also wish to turn to a happier example than that which initiated this chapter. My case will be the earliest audiences for Stanley Kubrick’s 1968 film, 2001: A Space Odyssey, and the audience “troubles” that became public soon after its release. This example is part of several scholars’ attention to audiences’ behavior as part of the filmgoing experience: drinking alcohol, binge watching, using home-viewing as cover for sex, and so forth (Benson-Allott, Church "Altered States, Altered Temporalities," and Szczepaniak-Gillece). This case study is about the audience’s use of a film for taking drugs3.

The Case of 2001

In his study of fan mail written to Kubrick at the time of the initial release of 2001: A Space Odyssey in 1968, Peter Krämer notes that the film originally received a mixed critical response but that a large contingency of youth in the audience, probably fueled by a revised advertising campaign using the slogan, “the ultimate trip,” produced a critical re-evaluation of the movie and acknowledgement of the film’s possible “psychedelic” features. Krämer also writes: “we can only find traces of this [drug use] in the letters sent to Kubrick. […] So far I have not seen a single letter from 1968 or 1969 mentioning the correspondent’s drug use during the viewings of 2001, or the fact that substances were being smoked or ingested by other people in the auditorium” (“Dear Mr. Kubrick”), although Krämer is not asserting this is not going on.

R. Barton Palmer in his essay, “2001: The Critical Reception and Generation Gap,” does note that one or two contemporaneous critics do mention the use of marijuana or drugs by audience members and points to the generation gap between older, established critics who were initially more skeptical about the film than younger people. Palmer focuses on the themes and structures in 2001, which might explain this disparity of response. Moreover, he includes in a footnote that critic John Russell Taylor noticed about a year after the film’s release that the attention of an “enthusiastic young viewer” was different from that of his parents: “he was . . . not in the slightest worried by a nagging need to make connections. […] He was accepting it like […] an LSD trip […] as a ‘succession of vivid moments’” (note 3, quoting Taylor).

Considering “how 2001 bec[a]me associated with drug use by its initial audiences,” I want to emphasize three elaborations of Krämer’s and Palmer’s original forays into detailing the history of the early altered-state, “under-the-influence” spectatorship of 2001. First, using a bit of auto-ethnography, I would stress that many youths of the late 1960s would have been smoking marijuana or ingesting more complex drugs before seeing any film. They would not have needed public suggestions that watching a film that way might be great. Everything was susceptible to “inebriated” viewing—although some movies were much better for this than others4. An extension of this project might be to consider what people think produces “better” experiences; among these might be striking visual displays, more intense emotional responses, and intellectual insights5.

Second, unusual aesthetic features of 2001 appear to have facilitated the linkages between the movie and a drug trip. Amongst these features are the minimal dialogue, an oddly mixed sound track, the “slow” pace, and visual novelties. Hence, aesthetics mattered.

Third, and a primary focus in this essay, is that early mainstream reviews did use language which might have primed the pump (or stoked the pipe) to encourage that spectatorship-state to a knowledgeable person. Hence, not everyone would have had the information necessary to appreciate the possibilities of combining the movie with drug use, but many people would.

To pursue this investigation, I will set the scene for the premiere of 2001 on April 3, 1968, then I will examine the early reviews of the film, and, finally, I will sketch out very briefly several highlights of public discourse about 2001 in its first couple of years. This history will indicate that, to a knowledgeable viewer, the clues about how to “dig” the most out of watching 2001 are evident in the very first reviews if one needed such hints to choose the state—altered or not—in which to watch. I will also comment very briefly about fine-tuning the method of using of reviews to appreciate audiences.

The Scene, Part 1

First, a setting of the “scene.” In 1968 people used many drugs that had variable effects; 2001 had a particular connection with lysergic acid diethylamide, LSD. Although marijuana had been illegal since the mid-1930s in the U.S., possession of LSD was not declared against the law until October 1968, half a year after the release of 2001. LSD was synthesized in 1938 in Switzerland, with medical and psychological doctors exploring its use for mental and emotional therapies and the military investigating its applications for warfare during and after World War II. In 1953, the U.S.’s Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) authorized the famous MK-ULTRA program to experiment with altering behavior with LSD; also, medical clinics using it as therapy opened that year in England and then across Europe, Canada, and the United States. In the late 1950s, actor Cary Grant praised its values (Lee and Shlain xiii-xiv, xviii, 3, 27, 56-7). In 1954 British author Aldous Huxley published his experiences with mescaline, recounting his experiences and pleasures, particularly the intense colors, and connecting it to “being” and Buddhism: “Place and distance cease to be of much interest […] And along with indifference to space there went an even more complete indifference to time” (331).

In 1957 Huxley and Humphrey Osmona introduced the term “psychedelic” in association with LSD since “hallucination” and “psychosis” had negative connotations (Lee and Shalain 54-5). By the 1960s, the term “psychedelic” was in widespread use to imply finding “a more universal ‘cosmic consciousness’” (Berlatsky 609) through such drugs. Art, underground and experimental films, and light shows flourished. And people smoked and ingested drugs to accompany and enhance experiences. Filmmaker and critic Jonas Mekas reported, in 1964 in the journal Film Culture, that he found a magic lantern show so boring he had a drink and came back: “the show became much more interesting that way.” He then reports, “I remember another time when I watched Marienbad [1961] and L’Avventura [1960] doped on pot. There, just the opposite occurred. My perception increased. I could see more than usually. The movie became tedious. A shot of ten seconds seemed to last ten minutes” (157)6.

In his excellent article on U.S. fictional narrative drug and LSD films, Harry Benshoff focuses on the cinematic representation of taking LSD. This subgenre of these so-called “head” movies begins in 1959 with The Tingler and runs through the 1960s with the several well-known examples of The Trip (1967), Psych-Out (1968), Skidoo (1968), and Easy Rider (1969)7. Of course, representing an LSD trip could be awfully different from experiencing LSD while watching a film. Benshoff concludes that, according to discussion in the late 1960s, a film good for watching while stoned or tripping is one which “regularly eschews or modifies classical Hollywood narrative form” and has a “focus on spectacular aural and visual effects”; it is “often episodic or nonnarrative” or is an “anthology concert film” (31)8. David Church concurs, the “psychedelic film proper devotes extended sequences to dazzling effects which audiovisually recall hallucinogenic experiences, often through avant-garde (or avant-garde-inspired) techniques” (“Doors of Reception”).

The Scene, Part 2

2001: A Space Odyssey was initially released on April 3, 1968, in New York City in Cinerama. I am not going to recapitulate information about Kubrick’s stated intentions or his narrative and stylistic choices for the film, his cutting out of seventeen minutes of the film between the first and third screening (LoBruto 310), or the early contradictory and often negative reviews of the film before its slow roll-out as a MGM roadshow film over the summer9. What I want to do, to consider how the social context and pre-existing knowledge of audiences matter when thinking about trouble on screen and trouble in the audience, and as to how knowledgeable audiences may have learned to associate the film with possible drug use while viewing it, is to consider the first two weeks’ worth of public reviews10. Here is part of what these initial reviews said:

“Robe,” Variety, 3 April 1968: “Big, beautiful but plodding sci-fi epic. […] Dullea, after being subjected to a wild celestial ride through a series of galaxies that create a psychedelic effort [sic] on both him and the audience, finds himself in a room decorated in a style familiar to earth…”

Renata Adler, The New York Times, 4 April 1968: “The movie is so completely absorbed in its use of color and space, its fanatic devotion to science-fiction detail, that it is somewhere between hypnotic and immensely boring. […] The special effects […] are the best I have ever seen” (58).

Joseph Gelmis, Newsday, 4 April 1968: “Although it is dramatically disjointed and pretentious, its special effects create their own other-worldly reality. […] It exists on its own terms as a unique experience, […] an unparalleled movie spectacle. […] Dullea […] passes through a mind-expanding psychedelic experience . . . ”

Andrew Sarris, The Village Voice, 11 April 1968: “The ending is a mishmosh of psychedelic self-indulgence for the special effects people and an exercise in mystifying abstract fantasy in the open temple of High Art” (45).

Penelope Gilliatt, The New Yorker, 13 April 1968: “[…] uniquely poetic piece of sci-fi […] The film is hypnotically entertaining” (150-51).

William Wolf, Cue [New York City Weekly], 13 April 1968: “[…] in total it is a brilliantly conceived cosmic adventure, exciting for the look of it alone. […] Unable to get the film out of my mind, I wanted a second look and found both experiences spellbinding” (57).

William Kloman, The New York Times, 14 April 1968: The special effects include a “psychedelic apocalypse” (15).

Gene Youngblood, The Los Angeles Free Press, 19 April 1968, reprinted in The Village Voice, 2 May 1968: 2001 “is a masterpiece, […] unspeakably beautiful. […] It belongs in the same league with Antonioni’s ‘Red Desert,’ Godard’s ‘Alphaville’ and Emshwiller’s ‘Relativity.’ That’s what I mean by masterpiece. […] Expanded Cinema no longer is restricted to the underground. […] You sit there completely overwhelmed, numbed, staggered by what you're seeing. […] [It is okay to label the film] psychedelic. […] And then comes the incredible denouement, the wordless final half-hour of the film which becomes a tour-de-force display of abstract cinema and surrealistic imagery as powerful and inventive as any I've seen in the so-called 'underground' or anywhere else” (44).

Anonymous, Time, 19 April 1968: “An avalanche of eerie, kinetic effects attacks the eye and bends the mind. Kubrick turns the screen into a planetarium gone mad and provides the viewer with the closest equivalent to psychedelic experience this side of hallucinogens” (“2001” 92).

Hollis Alpert, Saturday Review, 20 April 1968: “What happens next might cause some moviegoers to wonder if a solution of LSD had been wafted through the air conditioning system” (48).

It should be obvious where I am going. While many of the reviews were critical about the film as plotless and with lifeless characters, they also gave information that might indicate something particularly worth seeing for reasons other than those that draw many people to the cinema. Of the twenty-one reviews that I could find from April 3, 1968, through May 3, 1968 (the first month of limited release), nine of them use the word “psychedelic,” and others use terms such as “trip,” “LSD,” and “surreal.” Even in this first month, three of the critics mention seeing the film a second time and revisionist assessments begin to appear.

In mid-May (six weeks into the limited roadshow release), Variety provided an analysis of 2001’s weaker advance sales compared with Dr. Zhivago’s, with a headline of “‘2001’ Draws Repeat and Recant Notices, Also a Quasi-Hippie Public,” while noting, “This may be a meaningless statistic, since ‘2001’ seems to be attracting a young, quasi-‘hippie’ audience which plunks down its money at the box office but is unlikely to buy ducats three or six weeks in advance” (20).

While not in the most visible venue, Larry Lee in Rat Subterranean News (New York City) reports at this same time: “Granted: 2001 is the head flick of all time. Note the faintly resinous spoor of the audience, the people fighting at intermission to get those 50-cent chocolate bars, the spaced-out few who contemplate the curtain for long minutes after the movie ends” (247).

Also by mid-May and through the summer while 2001 was roadshowing in sixty-one theaters (“‘2001’ Draws Repeat” 20), more “studied” analyses appear in film journals and periodicals of review. Many of these organize the film into themes and messages, compare it to Kubrick’s other work, and may complain about the length, lack of action, and opaque conclusion while praising the technology. Others extol the film as a new kind of cinema. Debates occur about whether or not films should have “meanings,” whether the ending of the film is “worth the deadly boredom of the rest of film” (Spinrad 58), whether this is a step forward in science fiction, and whether the reason youth like this film so much is because they have grown up in the visual environment of television.

By January 1969, when the film begins its broad release in “inferior” 35mm, summaries and thought-pieces take stock of where everything is. While implicit suggestions about watching the film tripping or stoned had appeared in the first two weeks of its release, the discussion becomes quite explicit. Variety reports that people want to sit in the front area of theaters “to be ‘enveloped’ by the psychedelic special effects.” In fact, during the “light show,” people in the balconies and back rows move up to the front and lay on their backs. “The Fume of Poppies” exists; managers report “the smoking of marijuana in the balconies” (Byron 19)11. By January 1970, in discussing the recent re-release of Disney’s Fantasia (1940) and its stoned audiences, Cambridge, Massachusetts's weekly journal, Phoenix, recalls: “Last year, the same was true of 2001: A Space Odyssey and Yellow Submarine, and currently the second-most popular drug flick in town is Easy Rider, which is billed on the Abbey [theater] marquee under the phrase ‘Oh, You Mean Marijuana,’ a quote from the film.” The theater manager said, “I’d estimate that our audience for 2001 was 75% stoned.’” He apparently advertised 2001 as “‘Rated S, for Stoned Audiences’” until MGM objected. Still, “Audiences betrayed their blithe condition in other ways. Everyone sat as close to the screen as possible, giggled constantly, and ate popcorn ravenously” (C. Kramer 14). The theater manager’s concessions income doubled. Even Vincent Canby knew about this trait of the audiences of 2001 by Spring 1970. Upon seeing the film a second time, he reports that 2001 “went on to become a cult film, a head film, a film to recant by, and a smashing commercial success. […] The ultimate irony of ‘2001’ is that it became known as the film to turn on by” (1, 21).

Rated S—Lessons

I must admit to enjoying thoroughly this excursion into the public notices about 2001. It provides three lessons. A minor one is that 2001 has some historical linkages to the late 1960s cult movie scene. In those years, repeat viewings of movies were occurring among two types of audiences: the “art-house devotees” who sought “to find authorial signatures, to seek hidden messages, and to participate in a group audience experience.” This group could overlap with “underground audiences” who, because of the locations of the screenings “(run-down, large-city theaters; midnight screenings) […] were very much an urban, mostly male, and gay or gay friendly audience” (Staiger, “Cultural Productions” 54-5). Particularly the descriptions of people moving about in the theater to maximize an experience forecast the dynamics for The Rocky Horror Picture Show (1975) phenomenon, which begins in 1976 in New York City (Hoberman and Rosenbaum). Lots of trouble in the audience here!

However, an even more significant lesson concerns using reviews to learn about audiences. While I have, since 1985, been studying reviews of and discourse about films to gage political, social, emotional, and personal interpretations of films, I have tried not to make claims about specific effects of those appraisals. In this instance, however, I am considering what results the reviews might have on audience behavior. And I have begun to think about how I use reviews for my personal movie-going choices.

While I know that some critics have an engagement with a film much as I do, and while I know what other reviewers say, I often do not follow the writers’ general guidance about whether or not to spend my time in the theater with the movie. Instead, I look somewhat piecemeal for information that tells me aspects of the film that might connect for me. For instance, I have favorite (and non-favorite) genres. Some directors and actors will pull me in to a theatrical showing no matter what the film. Less for me, but greater for many others, music matters: see the widespread box office appeal of Bohemian Rhapsody (2018) versus its initial critical response. Thus, I am fairly confident in concluding that the use of certain words like “psychedelic,” a “trip,” and “surreal” said something very particular to the potential audiences of 2001. Word of mouth invariably also mattered, especially from people who saw the film stoned and had a great time. So even a negative review might provoke the hopes for a particular use of a film for a knowledgeable audience member.

It seems easy to see how 2001: A Space Odyssey immediately became “the ultimate trip,” encouraging an “altered” spectatorship. This matters not only for historical reasons, however, but also for scholarly ones. Yes, critics and researchers may rightfully produce exceptionally valuable analyses of films to share among themselves and with amateur connoisseurs of films. Still, I would wager that the average audience member is doing many other things with the movies and their reviews, and this is worth recognizing as scholars study the place of media in culture and society.

This brings me to my third lesson and back to the beginning of my essay: social context and pre-existing audience knowledges matter in considering audiences and representations. Part of what produced the actual audience effects for 2001 of choosing to watch the film stoned or tripping included the difference of, not the representations per se (in terms of plot, 2001 is somewhat a traditional science fiction story) but, the non-standard aesthetics that I described earlier: the minimal dialogue—in a 141-minute-long movie “only about 40 of those minutes include scenes where language has any importance” (Nelson 112); an oddly mixed soundtrack; the “slow” pace; and the visual novelties: characteristics that are not standard classical Hollywood cinema but more aligned with European art cinemas. Consequently, reviewers rated well for altered-state viewing other films perceived as similar in their aesthetics such as Zabriskie Point (1970), Performance (1970), El Topo (1970), Walkabout (1971), and The Man Who Fell to Earth (1976), fashioning even a subgenre of film known as the “acid Western” (Gallagher 163; “Acid Western”; Palmer.)

These comparable aesthetics in 2001 also produced one of the valuable contrasts in film analysis between Pauline Kael and Annette Michelson. In Febuary1969, Kael pointed out that critics were praising one of the head movies, Wild in the Streets (1968), as though it was “art.” She did not consider it that but rather “trash.” Sure, it was entertaining and someone could have fun watching it, but just do not treat it as if it were “art” (67-74). The same for some of the recent European art films. She writes,

A few years ago the new “tribalists” here responded to the gaudy fantasies of Juliet of the Spirits [1965] by using the movie to turn on. A few had already made a trip of 8 1/2 [1963], but Juliet, which was conveniently and perhaps not entirely accidentally, in electric, psychedelic color, caught on because of it.

Using movies to go on a trip has about as much connection with the art of film as using one of those Doris Day-Rock Hudson jobs for ideas on how to redecorate your home—an earlier way of stoning yourself (74).

In contrast about art cinema aesthetics, Michelson, in her essay, “Bodies in Space: Film as Carnal Knowledge,” published in the same month, saw similar personal experiences of the cinema differently. Using 2001 for her case, she considers it a “breakthrough” in cinema; it is a film “whose substance and function fuse in the synthetic radicalization of its metaphors”; “its ontogeny recapitulates a phylogeny” (55-6).

I am not sure I fully understand Michelson, but her appreciation of the bodily experience permitted while watching 2001, perhaps enhanced by the audience’s personal choices of being “under the influence,” marks a rupture in critical analysis as she employs Bergsonian and subjective aesthetic criteria for appreciating the movie. It is not so much that the representations or their aesthetics cause the effects in the audience, but that an audience in a particular social context and with particular pre-existing knowledges and propensities might make use of the film in a specific way.

I am personally concerned about wishing to eliminate hostile images of racism, gender-phobia, misogyny, and so forth from public and private representations because I think people can make use of these images. However, I do not believe that the representations themselves are the first line of attack. Rather, in a small re-write of the Collier’s magazine editors in 1949, I think we need to consider that inter-personal violence “is the product of pent-up frustrations, stored up resentments and bottled up fears. […] If the adults who crusade against [violent and racist images] would only get as steamed up over such basic causes of [violence] as parental ignorance, indifference and cruelty” we might make inroads into creating a better world12.