Hollywood film as public pedagogy: education in the crossfire.

As the opportunities for civic education and public engagement begin to disappear, film may qualify as one of the few media left that enables conversations that connect politics, personal experiences, and public life to larger social issues. Using films in my university classes during the last two decades, it has become clear to me that film connects to students' experiences in multiple ways that oscillate between the lure of film as entertainment and the provocation of film as a cultural practice. On the one hand, many students, feeling powerless and insecure in a society marked by a cutthroat economy, the ongoing privatization of almost everything, a runaway individualism celebrated daily on Reality TV, and a breakdown of all notions of public life, find a sense of relief and escape in the spectacle of film. On the other hand, many students see in the public issues addressed by film culture a connection to public life that revitalizes their sense of agency and resonates well with their sense of the importance of the cultural terrain as a source of both knowledge and critical dialogue. At best, films offer my students an opportunity to connect the theoretical discourses we engage in classes with a range of social issues represented through the lens of Hollywood movies. Reading about youth seems more compelling when bearing witness to dominant representations of youth in films such as Kids (1995, by Larry Clark), Higher Learning (1995, by John Singleton), Thirteen (2003, by Catherine Hardwicke), Sucker Free City (2004, by Spike Lee), or Alpha Dog (2006, by Nick Cassavetes). Theorizing masculinity in American society becomes more meaningful and concrete when taken up within a film such as Fight Club (1999, by David Fincher) or Jarhead (2005, by Sam Mendes), especially since many students identify with these films and only after seeing and talking about them as part of a critical and shared dialogue do they begin to question critically their own investment in them.

As a form of public pedagogy, Hollywood film combines entertainment and politics and lays claim to public memory, though in contested ways given the existence of distinctly varied social and cultural formations. Yet films are potentially more than commodified vehicles of public memory. Mining the twin operations of desire and nostalgia, they are also sites of educated hopes and hyper-mediated experiences that connect the personal and the social by bridging the contradictory and overlapping relations between private discourses and public life. While films play an important role in highlighting particular ideologies and values as worthy of public conversation, they also provide a pedagogical space that opens up the "possibility of interpretation as intervention." (11) As public pedagogies, they make clear the need for forms of literacy that address the profoundly political and pedagogical ways in which knowledge is constructed and enters our lives in what Susan Bordo calls "an image-saturated culture." (12) For educators and others, this means encouraging the ethical and practical task of analyzing critically how films function as social practices that influence their everyday lives and position them within existing social, cultural, and institutional machineries of power. This also means understanding how the historical and contemporary meanings produced by films operate to align, reproduce, and interrupt broader sets of ideas, discourses, and social configurations at work in the larger society. (13)

FILM AS PUBLIC PEDAGOGY

Films no longer constitute merely another method of teaching for me, but now represent a new form of pedagogical text--one that does not simply reflect culture but actually constructs it--and thus signals the need for a radically different perspective on literacy and the relationship between film texts and society. The power and pervasiveness of films not only call into question their status as cultural products, but also raise serious questions about how their use of spectatorial pleasure and symbolic meaning works to put into play people's attitudes and orientation toward others and the material circumstances of their own lives. The importance of films as a form of public pedagogy also raises questions about the educational force of the larger culture and demands the recognition that to make knowledge meaningful, critical, and transformative, it is necessary to understand, engage, and make accountable those modes of learning that shape students' identities outside of the school. Of course, there is always the risk of using popular cultural forms such as Hollywood film as a way of policing students' pleasures and in doing so undermining the sense of joy and entertainment that films provide. But, as Margaret Miles points out, it would be an ethical and pedagogical mistake to allow students to believe that films are merely about entertainment, or at the same time to suggest that the pleasure of entertainment is identical to the "learned pleasure of analysis." (14) Scrutinizing the pleasure of entertainment in films, James Snead points out that "[i]t never has been enough to just see a film and now, more than ever, we need, not just to 'see.' but to 'see through' what we see on the screen." (15) Snead is not denying the importance of how film mobilizes affective investments. Rather, he wants educators to recognize that such investments often connect people and power through mechanisms of identification and affect that effectively undermine the energies of critical engagement. Snead's comments suggest that students must think seriously about how films not only give meaning to their lives but also mobilize their desires in powerful ways. In this way, seeing through films means developing the critical skills to engage how the ideological and the affective work in combination to offer up particular ways of viewing the world. Educators and students gain a new source of pleasure through the insights they bring to the workings of film culture. This new pleasure in film as an object of pedagogical analysis stems in part from understanding the massive social impact of film, which now assumes such a major educational role in shaping the lives of many individuals and groups.

As a teaching form, film often puts into play issues that enter the realm of public discourse, debate, and policymaking in diverse and sometimes dramatic ways--whether we are talking about films that make racism visible, challenge homophobia, or provide provocative representations that address the themes of war, violence, masculinity, sexism, and poverty. Uniquely placed between the privatized realm of the home and other public spheres, film provides a distinct space in which a range of contradictory issues and meanings enter public discourse, sometimes in a subversive fashion addressing pressing issues in American society As a space of translation, they also bridge the gap between private and public discourses, play an important role in putting particular ideologies and values into public conversation, and offer a pedagogical space for addressing how a society views itself and the public world of power, events, politics, and institutions. I make no claims suggesting that there is a direct correlation between what people see, hear, and read, and how they act, between the representations they are exposed to and the actual events that shape their lives. But I do argue that film as a form of civic engagement and public pedagogy creates a climate that helps to shape individual behavior and public attitudes in multiple and complex ways, consciously or unconsciously.

The entertainment industry is the second largest export of the United States--second only to military aircraft. It is estimated that a successful film is seen by 10 million people in theaters, and millions more when it is aired on cable and exported to foreign markets. (16) Moreover, the film industry is controlled by a very limited number of corporations that exercise enormous power in all major facets of movie-making--production, distribution, and circulation in the U.S. and abroad. (17) At the same time, media culture is not an unchanging, monolithic bastion of corporate and ruling-class power; a critical approach to media and film should not reduce either their messages to unified narratives or their audiences to passive dupes. Film, like other media, works to gain consent, and operates within limits set by the contexts in which it is taken up. Hence, it is crucial to analyze films in ways that link texts to contexts, culture to the institutional specificity of power, pedagogy to the politics of representation, affective investments to the construction of particular notions of agency and learning to public intervention. By taking up films intertextually, it becomes possible to foreground not just questions of meaning and interpretation, but also questions of effects, politics, power, agency, and social transformation.