Note: I’m not sure anyone reads this anymore, which makes sense given the frequency of my posts (~3x/yr.), but I had a half-formed thought I wanted to flesh out, and nowhere else to put it. Here it is.
A few days ago, the following tweet started making the rounds:
I generally agree with the premise--we ought to be resisting the creep of the persistent logics of capital. This remains true even of movies, which are an inherently capitalized art form. After all, movie are commodities; they exist in a system that requires massive amounts of funding to produce (even a “low-budget” movie can cost in the range of $50,000), and admission prices are charged for movies in the hopes that they will earn back their budgets. Despite this, movies are also artistic expressions, and as such, to the extent that they resist justifying their existence on captalistic concerns, I think that’s a positive change.
However, I disagree with the tweet’s premise that asking “who was this movie for” leads to inevitably erroneous criticism. Just a few days prior to this tweet, an opinion essay by film critic Monica Castillo demonstrated this point perfectly.
Castillo’s essay demonstrates the immense value in examining film--or any other art form--by asking the basic question of who the audience is, of “who this movie is for.” In her essay, Castillo convincingly argues that Knives Out, a movie that directly engages contemporary American politics of immigration, through the figure of its protagonist, a Latinx woman whose mother is undocumented, constructs its audience as white liberals. Castillo claims that the filmmakers failed to sufficiently consider the viewing experiences of Latinx audiences, for whom the jokes about immigration status, while well-intentioned, could ring much more hollowly.
My aim is not to re-hash Castillo’s argument, which I find convincing; I think it stands on its own. Instead, I can see how my enjoyment of Knives Out may, in part, be because I am part of its intended audience of white liberals. This stands in contrast to Castillo’s experience of “emotional whiplash.” This comparison demonstrates the utility of understanding “who this film is for,” because ascertaining what kind of audience seems to have been imagined by the filmmakers as they were creating the movie can help us understand its impact and reception. That’s not a capitalistic logic; it’s a rhetorical one.
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