Over the past couple of weeks, I've been posting sections of the piece I wrote for the inaugrural issue of Audience 2.0. I'm looking forward to the web-publication's launch, but I wanted to give this article some air after the time of writing in August. So expect, over time, to see the serialized version, the full version appearing on its own page sometime in the near future.

What follows is the third section. The fourth is called "Multiplicities Of and Within Identity"

Audience and Spectacle

One who gives audience is on the opposite side of the dynamic than West's mob or the Shakira fans; he is not only endowed with an autonomous identity but, more importantly, he remains in control of the interaction. To examine this it might be helpful to take a look at a few key points from a classic text of psychoanalytic, feminist film theory: Laura Mulvey's “Visual Pleasure in Narrative Cinema.” Mulvey describes the relationship between the viewer and the figures on screen from a Freudian/Lacanian perspective. Sparing the details of the entire essay—and no doubt over-simplifying it in the process—one particular passage illustrates the relationship between the film audience and the actors (speakers) on screen:

“Traditionally, the woman displayed has functioned on two levels: as erotic object for the characters within the screen story, and as erotic object for the spectator within the auditorium, with a shifting tension between the looks on either side of the screen. ... As the spectator identifies with the main male protagonist, he projects his look on to that of his like, his screen surrogate, so that the power of the male protagonist as he controls events coincides with the active power of the erotic look, both giving a satisfying sense of omnipotence.”

Here we can see that the spectator's gaze—his visual audience—becomes a tool of power and control. The act of looking becomes the signifier of the solid, autonomous identity of the male protagonist. The spectator's audience is merged with that of the protagonist's through a process of misrecognition. Audience, in this sense, is symbolic and subjective control.

An example that I'm anxious to bring up is Dirty Harry, the 1971, Clint Eastwood, hard-boiled cop movie. In it, Eastwood's character Harry Calahan hunts down a dangerously deranged, racist, counterculture sniper. Overt and unsubtle political and racial discussions aside, the film rests on the very idea that audience is control. The sniper attempts to control the San Francisco populace by watching (and killing) them with the aid of his scope; in parallel, Harry attempts to control the sniper by getting into a series of predicaments that require him to see the sniper without being seen. In fact, superior vision seems to be what makes Harry such a good cop in the first place. He manages to foil a bank robbery thanks to his keen observation of a suspicious (read: black and smoking) man waiting in a car. With his back turned to this scene, he asks the diner-counter cook if he can see what's going on. He doesn't—while Harry, facing the other direction, does. Eastwood has the omnipotence of universal vision, the perfect example of audience-as-control.

When Harry first manages to subdue the sniper, it is in the middle of a football field just as his partner turns on the flood lights. The sniper falls to the ground in the middle of the expanse, blinded by the light as Eastwood walks slowly toward him armed with full visual capacity. The sniper is defeated, ultimately, by being unable to avoid or return Harry’s gaze. The power construct favors the one able to give audience and belittles the one unable to return it. As the sniper's concept of self fully breaks down under the oppressive weight of Eastwood's visioned subject, he speaks madly and incoherently, while Harry is imbued with a calm and deliberate assurance of self and justice.

Audience has a deadly power.