Summer-Fall 2001

The Reel Thing: Wasson on Film

by Eugenia Smith

An unapologetic consumer and aficionado of popular culture, Haidee Wasson is "not ashamed to admit" that she'd just as soon watch "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" as read Proust.

Yet Wasson, a new faculty member in the Department of Cultural Studies and Comparative Literature (CSCL), doesn't watch TV the way the rest of us do. She reads it, and so do her students.

Bringing to bear her vast knowledge of visual culture--including TV, film, and video--Wasson is working with CSCL professor John Mowitt and others to build a new major, Studies in Cinema and Media Culture, which she says will take students on an intellectual tour through a rich media archive--the images, technologies, and political strategies that constitute contemporary media culture.

Wasson has spent much of her time as a scholar digging through the dusty film archives of New York's Museum of Modern Art, whose collections shine a floodlight over a broad sweep of 20th century culture, from Mondrian to Mickey Mouse, nickelodeons to multiplexes.

For Wasson the visual culture historian, all media are worthy objects of study--art films and B movies, thrillers and horror flicks, classic dramas, commercials, Web pages. Indeed, she says, "Truthfully, I will watch anything once. Teen movies, action flicks, vintage instructional shorts, silent German expressionist films."

An equal opportunity cultural critic, Wasson gleefully takes on the hierarchies of value that pit "high" culture against "low" and elevate critics of certain tastes and sensibilities to connoisseur status. Challenging the notion that any form of cultural expression is inherently better than any other, she notes that such highbrow terms as"art film" are "as much products of industry marketing campaigns as designators of a high-minded political or aesthetic practices."

Especially in the academy, words such as "culture" and "art" have acquired the force of moral and aesthetic imperatives. That's why, says Wasson, when we watch TV, we think we should be reading.

"The academy has always privileged the written word as the highest form of cultural expression," says Wasson. "But why revere books and not film or video?"

Windows on the cultural landscape

Wasson comes by her scholarly niche quite naturally. As a kid growing up in Canada, she spent much of her time in "three favorite places: the shopping mall, the movie theater, and that precious piece of floor directly in front of the television."

At local movie houses, she gobbled up cinema culture like popcorn, viewing the world beyond her home town through the eyes of Steven Spielberg and George Lukas, not to mention Yoda, Darth Vader, and E.T.

Bringing to her classrooms a mind brimming with provocative and intellectually edgy ideas, today Wasson challenges her students to view film and TV with a critical mind's eye--and through a wide-angle lens--as windows on culture. Film study in the 21st century, she says, "requires a cross-media approach. Films are complex cultural objects. The dedicated cinephile sitting in the cinema watching Godard or Hitchcock or Capra with studied detachment is no longer the ego-ideal of the discipline."

In her article"Assassinating an Image: The Strange Life of Kennedy's Death," Wasson examines nearly four decades of media scrutiny of one very complex cultural object, the Zapruder footage of the Kennedy assassination. Thanks to relentless media replays of the events of November 22, 1963, even people not yet born then feel as if they were there to witness the assassination and its aftermath.

This sense of immediacy, of immersion in the historical moment, says Wasson, raises "interesting questions about the relationship of images to politics and history--the way in which images fasten themselves to cultural memories, irretrievably shaping" how such events are understood.

"These images have been endlessly reinterpreted, reframed, reshot, manipulated, and now digitized," says Wasson. "What's especially interesting is the tension between, on the one hand, their ostensibly indisputable value as evidence of that moment, and their equally indisputable value as shapers of myth and ritual.

"The images themselves, as records of an event, mean less and less. The rhetorical and institutional shaping of those images is everything."

Thumbs up, thumbs down

Challenging the "appreciation model of media study," Wasson says the goal of her film classes is not to assess "artistic merit" but to examine the culture of film and film making: "We are not here (in the words of a colleague) to teach the 'thumbs-up, thumbs-down' theory of culture."

Yet, says Wasson, we also must understand why we like or do not like something, in part to let ourselves off moralistic and aestheticist hooks. It is crucial, she argues, to develop intellectually rich models for understanding the "politics of pure pleasure"--so that, for example, we can give ourselves permission to like Julia Roberts "while also believing, perhaps, that the movie 'Pretty Woman' is a reactionary attack on women in the workplace."

In the final analysis, what's important about a film is "what kinds of dialogue it evokes," says Wasson. "Why was it created? Whose interests are served? What are its politics?"

In the larger sweep of history, she asks, "What's the relationship between Karl Marx and Britney Spears? Sigmund Freud and Ricky Martin? Bertolt Brecht and Bugs Bunny? Henry Fordand James Cameron or Spike Lee? These are not trivial questions. They are the questions that really matter."

Indeed, says Wasson, such questions are at the core of a liberal education. "Education should be a compelling invitation to complex thinking," she says. "[As academics,] we have a responsibility to challenge our students to expand and think about the world around them; to navigate ambivalence; to ask questions about the relationship between the world as they know it and the world as understood by others."

Toward the end of the interview, a student stops by and greets Wasson as if she's an old and dear friend, then turns to tell me what an "amazing" teacher Wasson is. That verdict is confirmed by Wasson's teaching evaluations: her students give her nearly perfect scores.

The admiration is mutual. As her student disappears into the crowded coffee shop, Wasson exclaims, "There goes one of the reasons I love teaching."

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