3

Psychoanalytic Film
Theory and the Problem of
the Missing Spectator

Stephen Prince

As a field of inquiry, film studies is today composed of three distinct, though

somewhat interdependent, areas of focus: history, criticism, and theory.
Though there is some overlap, each area is characterized by a distinguishing
set of conceptual and methodological issues. With a heavy reliance upon pri-
mary sources, film historical investigations demonstrate admirable scholarly
rigor and are furnishing us with an increasingly detailed portrait of the me-
dium's past. Colorful anecdotes, in which the earliest histories heavily traf-
ficked, have been replaced with an intelligent understanding of the intercon-
nections among social and technological factors as they have shaped the
medium.
Film criticism has continued as it always has, and probably always will, to
furnish the reader with interesting accounts of the meeting between critical
minds and artists and their creations. The critic proceeds, and convinces, by
virtue of the power of his or her rhetoric and command of the language and
by skillfully referencing these against observable features of the films under
study. The finished product can become a stimulating supplement to the films
themselves, deepening the viewer's appreciation of them. Film criticism is
among the most durable, popular, and, for the general public, visible products
of our field.
Film history and criticism are doing just fine currently, but in the third area
of focus-film theory-all is not well. Some serious problems exist, not just
in terms of confusion over what "film theory" is and what it should do, but
also in terms of how it should do it. Film theory is sometimes understood as
providing sets of shared perspectives that facilitate scholarly dialogue; yet in
the area of spectatorship, issues of evidentiary support often go unexamined.
Let me be very clear. In what follows, I am not trying to conflate theory with
supportive data nor to suggest that the former should be reducible to the
latter. Positivism is not my goal. To remain theoretical, theory needs to place
its evidentiary supports within a philosophical or aesthetic framework. I do
not wish to slight or to underestimate the importance of such a framework. It
is, after all, part of what makes theory theory. But our problem today in film

71
72 Part Two: Film Theory and Aesthetics

studies is that theories of spectatorship fly well beyond the data and in ways
that pay little or no attention to the evidence we do have about how people
watch and interpret films and television.
Contemporary theories of spectatorship are distinguished by a preference
for employing psychoanalysis as the primary modality for explaining film
viewing. Indeed, a recent review of theories of spectatorship warns that the
failure by cognitivists to take psychoanalysis seriously can only result in limited
and imperfect accounts. Accepting psychoanalysis as a given, the author as-
serts, somewhat dogmatically, that the spectator's activity "needs to be read
in relation to unconscious processes." 1 Contemporary theories of spectator-
ship are also characterized by a reluctance to engage empirical modes of in-
vestigation. I will be suggesting in this chapter, however, that questions about
how people process, interpret, and respond to cinematic images and narratives
are empirical questions, or, at the least, incorporate an empirical dimension,
which can be investigated by observing the behavior of real viewers. Theory
building can, and should, come from this. Research on real viewers will need
to be placed within a theoretical framework, but any theory of spectatorship
which fails to deal at some level with the empirical evidence on spectatorship
should be suspected of being insufficiently grounded. One result offilm stud-
ies' disdain for empirical methods has been the construction of theories that
deal with "subjects" but not real viewers, with ideal spectators who exist in
the theories but who have no flesh-and-blood counterparts. As Judith Mayne
explains:

One can understand the historical necessity for bracketing "real people" when
the only available way to talk about such viewers was in the language of socio-
logical or mass communications research-a language, that is, totally drenched
in the assumptions of a white, male, heterosexual norm and a belief in con-
scious, rational responses presumably untainted by contradiction or unconscious
desires. 2

This kind of blanket and egregiously unfair dismissal of an entire tradition

of research has tended to impede the ability of film studies to understand how
viewers make sense of films, despite the contributions of several decades of
psychoanalytic theory. The aim of this essay is to clarify the nature of that
handicap and to suggest several ways in which it may be overcome. Rather
than discussing all of the many grounds in which psychoanalytic theory is
weak (for example, the issue of its being unfalsifiable), I'd like to briefly con-
sider one problem that, in itself, should be cause for great skepticism about
the utility of employing psychoanalytic categories to explain issues of specta-
torship. Then I will illustrate this problem by using an essay of Freud's that is
much quoted by film scholars, "A Child Is Being Beaten" (1919). Psycho-
analytic film theorists have closely scrutinized several key essays by Freud,
among them Fragment of an Analysis of a Case of Hysteria (1905), Three
Essays on Sexuality (1905), "Instincts and their Vicissitudes" (1915), "The
 P R INC E: Psychoanalytic Film Theory 73

Economic Problem in Masochism" (1924), "Fetishism" (1927), and "A

Child Is Being Beaten." Although I will focus only on the latter essay and will
use it as a kind of test case for evaluating the character of the theories that
have been spun from it, much of what I will say is generalizable to the other
essays and to their use in film theory. In general, I am interested to show the
weak foundations on which some of the most elaborate current theories of
spectatorship rest and to clarify the general problem of what I call the "miss-
ing spectator." Finally, I ask, what do scholars in empirically oriented disci-
plines' such as psychology and communications, know about the film and 'IV
viewer that we in film studies do not?
The primary and to my mind insurmountable problem with basing general
theories of spectatorship on psychoanalysis is that such theories must remain
unsupported because psychoanalysis is a discipline without reliable data. I re-
alize this statement may seem harsh or astonishing, so let me clarify it.
The criticisms that follow are not directed at the therapeutic context where
an individual may come seeking relief from unpleasant feelings or behavior.
In such a context, psychoanalysis may very well be valuable. It is, instead, the
use of what passes as clinical data by film theory which is problematic and for
several reasons. Published reports of analyses, whether by Freud, Lacan, or
others, are typically unaccompanied by transcripts showing what the patient
really said and how the analyst responded. Readers of published cases have no
access to this information. In addition, psychoanalysis as a discipline lacks es-
tablished standards for interpretation that can ensure inter-analyst reliability.
Different analysts produce different interpretations. Furthermore, the pub-
lished accounts of clinical cases present a grossly inadequate description of the
therapeutic encounter between patient and therapist. The therapist will sum-
marize and paraphrase the client's words, typically leaving out the rich non-
verbal channels of communication that establish a context in which the pa-
tient's verbalizations have a unique meaning. In private notes and published
summaries of the cases, the analyst will select only a subset of the range of
behaviors and words on display during the session, and each analyst's stan-
dards of selection are uniquely his or her own. One cannot, therefore, work
backward from the published descriptions to a comprehensive data set in or-
der to check the analyst's interpretations. Most problematically, each clinical
encounter is non-repeatable, is uniquely eccentric, and, as noted, features
non-traceable disclosures.
All of these problems have been noted by Colby and Stoller in a discussion
of why psychoanalysis should not be counted as a science. They point out that
"Psychoanalytic evidence is hearsay, first when the patient reports his or her
version of an experience and second when the analyst reports it to an audi-
ence." 3 They conclude that "Reports of clinical findings are mixtures offacts,
fabulations, and fictives so intermingled that one cannot tell where one begins
and the other leaves off." 4
Despite the problem of finding reliable data within the psychoanalytic
74 Part Two: Film Theory and Aesthetics

paradigm, contemporary film theory has proceeded as if Freud's and Lacan's

case studies are trustworthy reports of authentic observations. Once again, let
me stress that not everything we count as knowledge should be testable and
that theory both incorporates and transcends the data sets from which it
draws. The problem is that we cannot reference the psychoanalytic theories
against available, unambiguous evidence. Let us look at how, in practice, the
ambiguous data furnished by psychoanalysis are utilized by film theory.
As previously noted, one of Freud's most widely quoted essays by film
theorists is "A Child Is Being Beaten: A Contribution to the Study of the
Origin of Sexual Perversions." Here Freud discusses the beating fantasies he
claims are reported by both male and female patients. Film theorists have re-
cently used this essay to revise the rather monolithic and rigid accounts of
identification typical of early psychoanalytic film theories. Early accounts
tended to see the gaze of male characters on screen as an expression of male
subjectivity and as a basis for the identification of male spectators. Counter-
posed to the active male gaze was the passive female object of the gaze. 5 Film
scholars 6 have used Freud's essay to revise the bipolar terms of active male
gazing and female passivity. In "A Child Is Being Beaten," Freud describes
his patients' fantasies developmentally in terms of three distinct phases. Freud
claims that his female patients report having fantasies in which, initially, a child
of unspecified gender is being beaten by its father. In phase two, the patient
reports "I am being beaten by my father," thus sexualizing the victim as fe-
male and, of course, as the patient herself. In phase three, an authority figure,
such as a teacher, is beating a number of children, most frequently boys. In
this third variation, the gender of the victim changes to male. Film theorists
have interpreted phase three as representing a cross-gender identification fig-
ure for the fantasizing female patient. Indeed, throughout the fantasies, the
gender of the fantasized characters is not stable. Instead, gender changes.
Psychoanalytically inclined film theorists have analogized these beating
fantasies, in which the patient is an onlooker to the beating spectacle, to the
cinema, since both-the patient's fantasies and the cinema-are thought to
playoff unresolved sexual and Oedipal conflicts. (Metz found the cinematic
signifier to be susceptible to psychoanalysis to be "precisely Oedipal in
type."V The Freud essay has been accepted by film theorists as a reliable, if
sometimes improperly inflected, clinical account and has been used to argue
in favor of adopting a flexible conception of emotional identification in the
cinema in which male and female viewers may identifY with characters of ei-
ther gender. D. N. Rodowick, for example, notes that "the essay is nonethe-
less about the difficulty of aligning masculine and feminine identifications
with a 'final' sexed subjectivity." 8 Freud's essay has been the basis for under-
standing the spectator's identification with characters on screen in terms of
oscillating, rather than fixed, allegiances which are capable of crossing gender
boundaries.
In keeping with my earlier remarks about the problem of usable data in
 P RINC E: Psychoanalytic Film Theory 75

psychoanalytic accounts, let us look at this difficulty in the Freud essay and
how it has failed to slow the launching of theoretical claims in film studies.
Typically, in the sciences, measures of quantitative data are evaluated in terms
of the issues of validity and reliability. Is the researcher really measuring the
phenomenon in question or some other unsuspected phenomenon? Are the
results consistent, assuming all conditions could be replicated? Freudian data,
of course, are qualitative, but one still wishes to know whether the linkages
between clinical data and the high -level theories (in the case of the essay on
beating, theories of sadism and masochism) spun from them are warranted.
Unfortunately, several characteristics of the Freud essay help produce a
weak foundation for theory, especially when trying to analogize Freud's dis-
cussions to the cinema. First is the extremely limited number of patients Freud
used as the basis for his discussion-six patients, of whom four were female
and two male. The bulk of the essay is confined to descriptions of the fantasies
of the four female patients. His findings, therefore, are based on an extremely
small sample, and, beyond the clinical diagnoses of obsessional neurosis or
hysteria, he provides no particulars on the patients. One cannot even tell if the
quotations Freud presents to summarize the content of the fantasies (for ex-
ample, "My father is beating the child") are his own words paraphrasing his
patients' reports or are actually the words of one of the patients. They seem
to be paraphrases because of the peculiar manner in which he presents them
and because they are meant to represent the common elements in the descrip-
tions of all four patients. This succeeds in further mystifying the particulars of
the patients since we do not even have their own words before us.
In light of this, I submit that it is extremely difficult for film theorists to
evaluate the validity of Freud's claims in this essay and, especially, to generalize
from this small sample in ways that permit the construction of grand theories
of cinema spectatorship sui generis. But extremely intelligent film scholars
have not been reluctant to generalize to a much larger population. Thus, in
film theory we can read confident announcements that "there are three basic
factors in common between the beating fantasies of men and women." 9
More troubling even than the extremely small sample upon which Freud
bases his macrotheories of sadomasochism is his own admission, clearly stated
in the essay, that phase two-"I am being beaten by my father"-is fictive, is
made up for the purposes of analysis. Freud writes:

This second phase is the most important and the most momentous of all. But we
may say of it in a certain sense that it has never had a real existence. It is never
remembered, it has never succeeded in becoming conscious. It is a construction
of analysis, but it is no less a necessity on that account. 10

By Freud's own admission, data were apparently manufactured to justify

the interpretation and theory built from them. Despite Freud's acknowledg-
ment that some of the information he reports is fictive, film theorists have
written about this essay as if it provides a secure basis from which to con-
76 Part Two: Film Theory and Aesthetics

struct theories of cinema spectatorship. Kaja Silverman points out Freud's fab-
rication of phase two and emphasizes the audacity behind it but decides,
nevertheless, that "I can find nothing to dispute in Freud's account of
phase 2 .... " I l

Empirical Portraits of Spectatorship

As these examples indicate, theories of spectatorship have tended to go far

beyond what the data can clearly show, a practice supported by film studies'
tendency to view concerns about evidence as the hallmarks of an ideologically
suspect empiricism. This tendency notwithstanding, a review of Freud's beat-
ing essay reveals problems of sampling, of fabrication of data, and of the intro-
duction of a response set in his subjects. Psychoanalytic film theorists have
remained untroubled by these issues. Unconstrained by empirical support,
Freudian and Lacanian theories of spectatorship have resulted in construc-
tions of spectators which differ remarkably from the rather detailed portraits
of film and television viewers furnished in the disciplines of psychology and
communication. In order to understand more fully the limited terms of our
prevailing theoretical accounts of film spectators, we need now to consider
this research and these portraits.
Some of the theoretical constructs and modes of research that figure in the
following discussion may seem quite far removed from the purview of film
studies, but to recognize that is also to glimpse the limits of narrow discipli-
narity. Scholars conducting empirical work in psychology and communication
now know a great deal about how people process and make sense of visual
images. I submit that it is an embarrassment that film scholars have written so
much about spectatorship at a level of almost total theoretical abstraction
while other disciplines have done systematic work on real viewers.
What do scholars in other disciplines know about the film and television
viewer that film scholars do not? What general shifts of conceptual emphasis
might be productive for constructing better accounts of spectatorship and,
more generally, of how cinema communicates? I will concentrate on two gen-
eral areas where a great deal of empirical work has already been done and
where, consequently, bodies of data exist that point toward some rather dif-
ferent operating principles in moving picture media than those that have been
postulated by psychoanalysis. In recommending the kinds of shifts of orien-
tation that I'll be outlining, I do not mean to imply that fantasy plays no role
in the attractions viewers feel for the cinema. Rather, the emphasis upon fan-
tasy derived from models of unconscious psychological processes has de-
flected a recognition of spectatorship as a phenomenon that can be, and has
been, empirically investigated and about which valid and reliable evidence can
be furnished.
Before describing and recommending two conceptual shifts that can make
 PR INC E: Psychoanalytic Film Theory 77

our research and theory more productive, I should point out that the move
toward a more cognitive and empirical orientation can help close a gap in our
understanding of film viewing which psychoanalysis has helped to produce.
Psychoanalytic film theory fails to deal with the complex role that perceptual
processes play in a viewer's understanding of visual media. Perception tends
to get conflated with sexual energy as a "scopic" drive, a sexually based urge
to view things voyeuristically. Metz claimed that "the practice of cinema is
only possible through the perceptual passions: the desire to see (= scopic
drive, scopophilia, voyeurism) .... " 12 For Metz, visual perception was under-
stood as a kind of sweeping searchlight mounted on top of the viewer's neck,
and psychoanalytically inclined theories of perception have not gained much
in sophistication since Metz's uninformed description. 13
Aside from psychoanalytic film theory's failure to model a sophisticated
perceptual process, the claims it does make ill fit the available evidence on how
viewers watch film and television. The problem with the "scopic drive" is that
it models viewing as a driven and reactive process during which the viewer's
passion for looking is cathected by particular formal cues (for example, "fe-
tishizing" close-ups). The scopic drive implies a unifocal fixation within the
viewer maintained by a match of formal features and inner fantasy.
Observations of real spectators furnish a rather different portrait of viewing
behavior. A great deal of research has studied the ways young children watch
television. Preschool children in a room furnished with toys and containing
other adults or children do not stare with steady fixation at the screen. In-
stead, the child will repeatedly glance away from the screen, averaging about
150 looks toward and away from the screen per hour. Furthermore, glances
at the screen are quite brief, and most last no longer than 15 seconds. 14 Ob-
servations of adult television behavior reveal a similar pattern: looks at the
screen are extremely brief and are punctuated by regular glances away from
the screen, with non-looking pauses averaging as high as 22 seconds. The
researchers conclude that "continuous episodes of visual attention as long as
60 seconds are relatively rare." 15
These data, of course, are derived from television viewing behavior. The
psychoanalytic film theorist could object that the conditions of film viewing,
in relation to which the scopic drive is discussed, are crucially different-the
film viewer sits before a huge screen in a theater free of the distractions that
typically accompany television viewing. However, most people now watch
their movies on television via the VCR, and the psychoanalytic theorist would
still need to be able to explain how a sexually driven "perceptual passion"
yields patterns of viewing behavior in which visual attention is intermittent,
subject to continual breaks and interruptions, and is discontinuous. While the
scopic drive might not rule out intermittent attention, scopic theory needs to
deal with this phenomenon, which the drive-based model of vision as fetish
has tended to downplay.
At the very least, theorists of the scopic drive should begin to specify those
78 Part Two: Film Theory and Aesthetics

factors that might produce the onset and cessation of glances at the screen.
Empirical research has already pointed toward a host of such factors, among
which are specific formal features. Not surprisingly, cuts and on-screen move-
ment tend to maintain visual attention, but so do auditory features, which are
especially effective in stimulating glances back to the screen since a viewer can
monitor audio changes while looking away from the screen, as signs that im-
portant changes are occurring in the show or film that bear attention. 16 Theo-
ries of the scopic drive say little about the role of auditory features as cues
regulating a viewer's levels of visual attention because attentiveness, an active
and conscious process, is not posed as a major variable by the theories.
Furthermore, empirical evidence suggests that visual attention to television
is a function of age and may have a developmental basis in terms of cognitive
growth and increasing sophistication of medium-specific skills,17 rather than
being something driven by a fixed current oflibidinal energy. Empirical evi-
dence, in other words, can deal with differences among spectators better than
can psychoanalysis. Levels of attention and comprehension will vary among
film and television viewers depending on such characteristics as age, degree of
cognitive development, and amount of prior experience with the medium.
The empirical research on factors affecting levels of attention and comprehen-
sion can give us a more nuanced portrait of spectatorship than does psycho-
analysis, and this, in turn, can help us to construct theories that are sensitive
to the differences, as well as the similarities, among viewers.
Rather than continuing to base theories on a concept of the scopically
driven, fixated (or "positioned") viewer, I suggest that we begin to derive our
theories and research from the constructs of "attention" and "attentiveness."
This will enable us to make a key advance in the way we model viewing be-
havior. It will enable us to conceptualize, and study, viewing processes in
terms of levels of information processing and emotional response. IS Concep-
tualizing attention as a multilevel process and researching spectatorship from
that angle, rather than in terms of a unifocal drive, can help bring our theories
more in line with the available empirical evidence on film viewing. 19 This is an
important step that film studies needs to take in order that our theories be
consistent with well-established evidence about media viewing. The con-
structs of "attention" and "attentiveness" can be usefully employed to build
flexible, multilevel models of how viewers of visual media process visual
narratives.
An example can be instructive here. Communication researcher Frank
Biocca has recently proposed a sophisticated model of semantic processing
which bears a close relationship to some of the stipulations of contemporary
film theory, yet it is inclined in a different, cognitively oriented direction. 20
Biocca's model rests upon the synthesis of a great deal of empirical research
from the fields of psychology and communication, as well as input from film
theory, and, by working at a high level of abstraction, it demonstrates how
theory both incorporates and transcends the empirical data from which it
draws.
 P R INC E: Psychoanalytic Film Theory 79

Biocca points to the differences between the model viewer that filmmakers
and other communicators have in mind during production and the actual,
"instantiated" viewer who sees the program or film. He stresses, like reader-
response theories, variability of response across viewers, but he comes at these
issues from a cognitive context emphasizing multilevel semantic processing of
the message in terms of seven "schematic frames," so called because they ac-
cess the viewer's schemata or frameworks of interpretation. From the first sec-
onds of programming, Biocca points out, viewers begin to construct models
of the intended message and, during the course of the show or film, they are
continuously revising these models in accordance with the shifting formal and
semantic structures of the message. This interpretive work carried out by the
viewer is complex and ongoing and is informed by data -driven processing of
formal codes as well as by schema-driven inferences about meaning and val-
ues. Biocca suggests that viewers organize incoming information by assigning
it to, and evaluating it within, seven overall frameworks. The spectator judges
information with respect to its discursive topic, its membership in a "possible
world," the actors or agents in a causal sequence, point of view understood in
terms of both mode of address and position of sight, narrative structure, ideo-
logical organization, and the relation of all of these issues to the viewer's own
self-identity.
In the mind of the viewer, schematic frames organize information and inferences
about places and social situations (possible worlds); people, causes, and agents
(actants); topics (discursive frames); as well as inferences about ideologies and
how the programming relates to the viewer (ideological and self-schematic
frames).21

Biocca's account emphasizes the viewer's response as a series of interpretive

moves, as information from the program or film is selected and assigned mem-
bership in one of a series of conceptual frameworks. As viewing continues,
interpretations are revised and program information can be supplemented
with new, incoming information or reassigned to another interpretational
framework. 22 Biocca concludes by pointing to the relationship between a mes-
sage's formal structure and the kinds of information processing it may cue.
The way a television program or message introduces information and topics
(strategy of semantic disclosures embedded in the semantic frames of the mes-
sage) will influence while semantic frames are fore grounded by the viewer (which
information is attended to and how it guides the viewers' inferences ).23

We are a long way here from the unidimensional framework of psychoana-

lytic film theory. Psychoanalytic theory fails to grasp what is apparent in Bioc-
ca's model: when watching media presentations, the viewer simultaneously
executes multiple levels of information processing and engages in a series of
interpretive moves. Psychoanalytic theory tends to collapse the viewer's re-
sponses into a single dimension fed by primary process energy and the unre-
solved childhood traumas associated with it. Film theory needs to discard the
kind of reactive and passive viewers who are built into theories of "suture"
80 Part Two: Film Theory and Aesthetics

and "positioning" and, instead, place viewers within an altogether more ra-
tional, flexible, and multivalent context.

Film Viewing and

Perceptual Correspondence

By employing the constructs of "attention" and "attentiveness," film scholars

can formulate investigable problems. Indeed, we ought to stipulate as a cri-
teria of future theory building that postulated theories be able to generate
researchable questions. Current psychoanalytic theories of spectatorship do
not do this, in part because psychoanalytic critics often aim only to produce
interpretations of particular movies and because many film scholars employing
psychoanalytic theory seem interested in abstract and ideal, as opposed to ac-
tual, viewers.
Formulating researchable questions, however, may require taking a more
pragmatic and less abstracted approach to theory construction and in our gen-
eral thinking about film and how it references the world for viewers. In line
with this recommendation, and to show an additional way in which it might
be carried out, I propose a second area in which our thinking about film
ought to be reoriented. Film studies has grossly underestimated, and under-
epresented, the important correspondences that exist between photographic
images, the narratives constructed using them, and the spatial and visible
world that may be photographed. We have preferred to analogize visual rep-
resentation to linguistic signification instead of grasping the essential differ-
ences between film and language. We need to reemphasize and carefully study
those points of correspondence between photographic or moving picture im-
ages and the real-world visual experience available to viewers. In short, we
need to recover a recognition of cinematic images as iconic rather than as
symbolic signs, depending on relations of similarity to, rather than difference
from, what they represent. 24 Recognizing this will support our appreciation
for the constructs of "attention" and "attentiveness." Understanding cine-
matic signs as iconic enables us to ask about those structural features, or points
of similarity with the viewers' real-world experience, that facilitate attentive-
ness. (For example, children attend more closely to other children's voices on
television than they do to adult male voices.)25
A wide range of evidence indicates that film spectatorship builds on corre-
spondences between selected features of the cinematic display and a viewer's
real-world visual and social experience. Interpretive frames (or schemas) de-
rived from this experience may be used by viewers to make sense of the film
narrative. I have already discussed a good deal of this research in an earlier
article. 26 Briefly, experimental evidence indicates that naIve or first-time adult
and child viewers have little difficulty identifying either simple, familiar pic-
tured objects when presented as line drawings and photographs 27 or simple
 P RINC E: Psychoanalytic Film Theory 81

culturally familiar narratives when presented using continuity editing. 28 The

reasons for this are likely found in the variety of ways in which photographic
images are isomorphic with their corresponding real-world displays (for ex-
ample, replication of edge and contour information and of monocular dis-
tance codes; in the case of motion pictures, of motion parallax; and in the case
of continuity editing, the projective geometry of successive camera positions
creating a screen geography whose coordinates we can readily analogize with
our own visual experience). So powerful is this isomorphism that pictorial
images have even been shown to elicit apparent recognition responses in a
wide range of nonhuman subjects-primates, birds, fish, reptiles, even insects.
These apparent recognition responses have been demonstrated across differ-
ent classes of pictorial media-black-and-white and color photographs, high
contrast photographs, film and videotape, even line drawings. 29
In addition to the foregoing sources of iconic isomorphism, an additional
area of correspondence between film images and their associated real-world
referents includes the stock of socially defined interpersonal and behavioral
signals that viewers routinely use as cues for evaluating on-screen characters.
Psychoanalytic film theory has had almost nothing to say about the way spec-
tators will use interpersonal cues and behavioral assumptions, derived from
social experience, as a way of judging the personality and actions of characters
on screen. These cues and assumptions may be iconic or noniconic. In either
case, a large amount of empirical evidence indicates that viewers' assessments
of media characters and of real peers are based on common perceptual criteria.
Similar cognitive processes and socially derived assumptions about motive,
intent, and proper role-based behavior are used when evaluating both media-
based and real-life characters and individuals. Indeed, as Elizabeth Perse and
Rebecca Rubin have pointed out, "'people' constitutes a construct domain
that may be sufficiently permeable to include both interpersonal and [media]
contexts." 30 Communication researcher Aimee Dorr has recognized that

the people on television and their interactions present interpretive tasks which
are common to all presentations of social life, whatever the medium. They in-
clude such tasks as understanding that another person has his or her own per-
spective, inferring the other's perspective, and judging the morality of another's
actions. 31

Dramatic evidence of how viewers use construct domains derived from

real-life experience or beliefs emerged from a study of children's and adults'
responses to a photographic narrative. A doctor is shown arguing with his
secretary, encountering a traffic accident victim on his way home, and con-
tinuing on his way without helping the victim. 32 Second-grade children, in
contrast to adult viewers and older kids, reported that the doctor had indeed
helped the victim, even though they had not seen this in the narrative. They
attributed behavior to the doctor based on a cultural stereotype of doctors as
individuals who help other people. They attributed unseen behavior to the
82 Part Two: Film Theory and Aesthetics

fictional character based on socially derived conceptions of what real-life

doctors do.
Other empirical research has demonstrated that preschool and elementary
school children will evaluate the behavior of fictional film characters based on
analogizing that behavior with real-life concepts of individual motive and in-
tent in ways the researchers point out are consistent with both social learning
and cognitive-developmental theories of moral development. 33 Similar age-
related trends have been found to underlie the evaluative constructs viewers
may apply to the behavior of television characters and real-life individuals.
Second-, fourth-, and sixth-grade school children have demonstrated a stock
of evaluative constructs that become increasingly differentiated, abstract, and
integrated with age and can apply these constructs to evaluate behavior on TV
and in real life, suggesting that a common person-perception process under-
lies both spheres. 34
Other age-related trends that have been demonstrated indicate that at dif-
ferent ages children shift from perceptual to conceptual categories for evalu-
ating behavior. Preschool and elementary school children viewed one of four
versions of a videotaped story in which an old woman's appearance was pre-
sented as either attractive or ugly and her behavior as either kind or cruel.
Younger kids based their evaluation of the woman more on her appearance,
older kids more on her behavior.35 The researchers found that appearance ste-
reotyping was demonstrated among all the age groups studied. Despite this,
however, the older children still tended to weigh behavior more than the
younger kids. This age-related shift from perceptually based responses (for
example, the youngest kids who evaluated the woman character's behavior
according to how she looked) to more cognitively based, morally inflected
judgments of behavior points toward complex dimensions of spectatorship
which psychoanalytic film theory has either ignored or been unable to ex-
plore. To the extent that the scopophilic drive is activated by visual imagery,
psychoanalytic film theory tends to see all spectators as being positioned by
perceptual stimuli and has remained silent about how viewers process that
imagery by constructing rational analogies with their real-life experiences, val-
ues, and precepts.
Given that photographic images are visually isomorphic with the appear-
ance of the photographable world, and given the usual standards ofverisimili-
tude that prevail in narratives, it follows that viewers are behaving quite ratio-
nally in using interpersonal cues derived from personal experience to evaluate
the behavior of characters on screen. In an important sense, viewers are not
being "positioned" by films. Rather, they are positioning film events and
characters according to socially derived, extra -filmic knowledge of appropriate
and inappropriate real-world behavior. It should be noted that these evalua-
tions are facilitated by iconic information about facial expression and gesture.
This information, as Ray Birdwhistell has pointed out,36 is systematically pat-
terned within cultures and is situation ally articulated as a communicational
 P RINC E: Psychoanalytic Film Theory 83

form in daily life. Motion picture viewers are expert decoders of the gestural
and facial displays sanctioned in their culture and may even be sensitive to
certain displays across culturesY (In cases where facial and gestural cues
might be unfamiliar, filmmakers can always build redundant information into
the narrative and dramatic context of a scene to clarifY for viewers the appro-
priate responses, thus ensuring the general comprehensibility of their prod-
uct.) This reproduction by the cinema of culturally patterned streams of facial
and gestural expression provides an important incentive to viewers to measure
the content of the cinematic image against their horizon of extra-filmic life
experience.
Psychoanalytic film theory has tended to ignore these dimensions of iconic
and noniconic correspondence or has dealt with them in a negative fashion by
postulating viewers who are duped by "transparency effects" or the "illu-
sions" of realist, perspective-based imagery. It is clear, however, that these
correspondences facilitate the viewer's easy comprehension of cinematic im-
ages and encourage an entirely rational process whereby the viewer maps as-
pects of the cinematic display onto dimensions of his or her real-life visual and
social experience. Psychoanalytic film theory has had little to say about the
complex ways viewers seek correspondences between their experience and
what they see on screen-at least little to say that is truly researchable. Virtu-
ally all of the evidence cited in the foregoing discussion has come from the
disciplines of psychology and communication. Researchers in the disciplines
which have established traditions of empirical study, have looked carefully at
how viewers watch film and television, and they have gone some way toward
understanding that process. Film theorists, by contrast, with little tradition of
work in (and little respect for) empirical procedures, have constructed spec-
tators who exist in theory; they have taken almost no look at real viewers. We
are now in the unenviable position of having constructed theories of specta-
torship from which spectators are missing.
Spectators are absent from our accounts of spectatorship because psycho-
analysis has failed to furnish valid or reliable data that could be used to con-
struct or modifY theory. Our field's dilemma in this area is not that it needs to
engage in better "theorization" but that it needs to revise some of its basic
methodological procedures. As a field that encompasses the domains of his-
tory, theory, and criticism, film studies sprawls over a large area. Not all of the
questions it confronts are empirical ones, nor should they be approached us-
ing empirical methods. But some clearly are, and I submit that spectatorship
is an area for empirical inquiry. Two excellent avenues for approaching ques-
tions of spectatorship empirically would involve application of the concepts of
correspondence (both iconic and noniconic) and of attention and attentive-
ness. In this essay, we have seen how these concepts can produce fruitful in-
vestigations of spectatorship and, I hope, how nicely they fit as constructs with
the evidence that is available on the ways that people watch visual media and
infer meaning from visual displays. These concepts have already informed a
84 Part Two: Film Theory and Aesthetics

great deal of research elsewhere, and there is no reason why film studies can-
not further these lines of inquiry. Doing so, however, will involve a rethinking
of what spectatorship is and a recognition that theory is more than a set of
shared perspectives facilitating dialogue among adherents of the theory.
At a minimum, we should ask that our theories be capable of generating
researchable questions and be responsive to the evidence our studies furnish.
As this chapter has suggested, psychoanalytic film theory is flawed in both of
these areas. Once again, it is important to emphasize that the approach out-
lined here does not entail minimizing the richness of our philosophical or
conceptual frameworks. The results of our research always will need to be
integrated within a broad explanatory framework, that is, will need to be ac-
counted for theoretically. But our theories of spectatorship will also need to
be referenceable in terms of the available evidence on spectators. Above all,
we need to start our search for the missing spectator who has been lost to film
theory for several decades now. It will be a difficult search since film studies
has a long way to go. But iffilm scholars can undertake it, film studies will lay
claim to what should always have been an essential area of distinguished ac-
complishment-a sophisticated portrait of what it means to watch a film.

NOTES
1. Judith Mayne, Cinema and Spectatorship (New York: Routledge, 1993), p. 59.
2. Ibid., p. 37.
3. Kenneth Mark Colby and Robert J. Stoller, Cognitive Science and Psychoanalysis
(Hillsdale, N.J.: Lawrence Erlbaum, 1988), p. 3.
4. Ibid., p. 29.
5. See Laura Mulvey, "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema," Screen 16, 3 (Au-
tumn 1975): 6-18, and her reconsideration of this essay in Visual and Other Pleasures
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989).
6. See D. N. Rodowick, The Difficulty ofDifference (New York: Routledge, 1991);
Mary Ann Doane, "The 'Woman's Film': Possession and Address," in Re-Vision: Essays
in Feminist Film Criticism, eds. Mary Ann Doane, Patricia Mellencamp, and Linda
Williams (Frederick, Md.: AFIjUniversity Publications of America, 1984), pp. 67 - 80;
and Miriam Hansen, "Pleasure, Ambivalence, Identification: Valentino and Female
Spectatorship," Cinema Journal 25, 4 (1986): 6-32.
7. Christian Metz, The Imaginary Signifier: Psychoanalysis and the Cinema, trans.
Celia Britton, et al. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1982), p. 64.
8. Rodowick, The Difficulty ofDifference, p. x.
9. Ibid.,p. 71.
10. Sigmund Freud, "A Child Is Being Beaten: A Contribution to the Study of the
Origin of Sexual Perversions," in Sigmund Freud, Collected Papers, 5 vols., trans. su-
pervised by Joan Riviere (New York: Basic Books, 1959),2: 179-80.
11. Kaja Silverman, "Masochism and Male Subjectivity," in Male Trouble, ed. Con-
stance Penley and Sharon Willis (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993),
p.50.
12. Metz, The Imaginary Signifier, p. 58.
 PRINCE: Psychoanalytic Film Theory 85

13. Ibid., pp. 49-50.

14. Daniel R. Anderson and Elizabeth Pugzles Lorch, "Looking at Television: Ac-
tion or Reaction?" in Children's Understanding of Television: Research on Attention
and Comprehension, ed. Jennings Bryant and Daniel R. Anderson (New York: Aca-
demic Press, 1983), pp. 10-11.
15. Daniel R. Anderson and Diane E. Field, "Online and Offline Assessment of the
Television Audience," in Responding to the Screen: Reception and Reaction Processes,
ed. Jennings Bryant and Dolf Zillmann (Hillsdale, N).: Lawrence Erlbaum, 1991),
p.213.
16. Anderson and Lorch, "Looking at Television," p. 19.
17. Ibid.,p. 12-13.
18. Cognitive approaches are frequently criticized for failing to deal with emotion,
but emotion and cognition are not separate. Affective responses include cognitive di-
mensions which can stipulate how physiological arousal is labeled as particular emo-
tions. Classic work here includes Stanley Schachter and J. Singer, "Cognitive, Social
and Physiological Determinants of Emotional State," Psychological Review 69 (1962):
379-99, and Stanley Schachter, "The Interaction of Cognitive and Physiological De-
terminants of Emotional State," in Advances in Experimental Social Psychology, ed.
Leonard Berkowitz (New York: Academic Press, 1964), 1 :49-80. See also the essays
in Approaches to Emotion, ed. Klaus R. Scherer and Paul Ekman, (Hillsdale, N.J.: Law-
rence Erlbaum, 1984).
19. Edward Branigan discusses narrative comprehension in terms of multilevel in-
formation processing in Narrative Comprehension and Film (New York: Routledge,
1992).
20. Frank Biocca, "Viewers' Mental Models of Political Messages: Toward a Theory
of the Semantic Processing of Television," in Television and Political Advertising,
vol. 1, Psychological Processes, ed. Frank Biocca (Hillsdale, N.J.: Lawrence Erlbaum,
1991), pp. 27-89.
21. Ibid., p. 81.
22. Empirical evidence indicates the ways that increasingly elaborate viewing sche-
mas can facilitate and enhance information pickup. See, for example, Jeanne M. Mea-
dowcroft and Bryon Reeves, "Influence of Story Schema Development on Children's
Attention to Television," Communication Research 16,3 (June 1989): 352-74.
23. Ibid., p. 8l.
24. For an additional discussion of this point, see my article "The Discourse of
Pictures: Iconicity and Film Studies," Film Quarterly 47, 1 (Fall 1993): 16-28. See
also Noel Carroll, "Toward a Theory of Point-of-View Editing: Communication,
Emotion, and the Movies," Poetics Today 14,1 (Spring 1993): 123-4l.
25. L. F. Alwitt, D. R. Anderson, E. P. Lorch, and S. R. Levin, "Preschool Chil-
dren's Visual Attention to Attributes of Television," Human Communication Research
(1980) 7: 52-67.
26. Prince, "The Discourse of Pictures: !conicity and Film Studies," Film Quar-
terly47,1 (Fall 1993): 16-28.
27. Julian Hochberg and Virginia Brooks, "Picture Perception as an Unlearned
Ability: A Study of the Child's Performance," American Journal of Psychology 74, 4
(Dec. 1962): 624-28.
28. Robin Smith, Daniel R. Anderson, and Catherine Fischer, "Young Children's
Comprehension of Montage," Child Development 56 (1985): 962-71; Renee Hobbs,
Richard Frost, Arthur Davis, and John Stauffer, "How First-Time Viewers Compre-
hend Editing Conventions," Journal of Communication 38, 4 (1988): 50-60.
86 Part Two: Film Theory and Aesthetics

29. For a comprehensive review of this literature, see Patrick A. Cabe, "Picture Per-
ception in Nonhuman Subjects," in The Perception of Pictures, 2 vols., ed. Margaret A.
Hagen (New York: Academic Press, 1980),2: 305-43.
30. Elizabeth M. Perse and Rebecca B. Rubin, "Attribution in Social and Parasocial
Relationships," Communication Research 16,1 (February 1989): 73.
31. Aimee Dorr, "How Children Make Sense of Television," in Reader in Public
Opinion and Mass Communication, ed. Morris Janowitz and Paul M. Hirsch (New
York: Free Press, 1981), p. 374.
32. Paul Messaris and Larry Gross, "Interpretations of a Photographic Narrative by
Viewers in Four Age Groups," Studies in the Anthropology of Visual Communication 4
(1977): 99-111.
33. Thomas J. Berndt and Emily G. Berndt, "Children's Use of Motives and Inten-
tionality in Person Perception and Moral Judgement," Child Development 46 (1975):
904-12.
34. Austin S. Babrow, Barbara J. O'Keefe, David L. Swanson, Renee A. Meyers, and
Mary A. Murphy, "Person Perception and Children's Impression of Television and Real
Peers," Communication Research 15, 6 (December 1988): 680-98.
35. Cynthia Hoffner and Joanne Cantor, "Developmental Differences in Responses
to a Television Character's Appearance and Behavior," Developmental Psychology 21, 6
(1985): 1065-74.
36. Ray L. Birdwhistell, Kinesics and Context (Philadelphia: University ofPennsyl-
vania Press, 1970).
37. See Paul Ekman and Wallace V. Friesen, "Constants Across Culture in the Face
and Emotion," Journal ofPersonality and Social Psychology 17, 2 (1971): 124-29, and
Paul Ekman, "Expression and the Nature of Emotion" in Approaches to Emotion, ed.
Klaus R. Scherer and Paul Ekman pp. 319-43.