Spectatorship’s Scenes beside the Screen

Abstract

Spectatorship’s Scenes beside the Screen Kate J. Russell (bio) Caetlin Benson-Allott. The Stuff of Spectatorship: Material Cultures of Film and Television. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2021. 354 pages. $85.00 hardcover. $29.95 paperback. Caetlin Benson-Allott’s The Stuff of Spectatorship: Material Cultures of Film and Television is an invigorating study of the material culture that surrounds spectatorial and cinephilic environments, recentering what is taken for granted in spectatorship studies to demonstrate how “stuff” shapes the viewing experience in fundamental yet unacknowledged ways. The book makes a significant intervention into spectatorship studies, arguing that what is often dismissed as peripheral in examinations of viewing environments actually influences and alters how viewers make sense of media objects. This approach accounts for diverse objects and experiences surrounding the scene of the screen, including the format of ephemeral programming listings, the food and intoxicants consumed and their centrality to cinema’s commercial interests, the industrial machinations that dictate accessibility, and the media coverage of violence that creates moral panics. In recentering these marginal [End Page 249] areas of study, Benson-Allott also carefully considers the different viewing subjects that are imagined and created by the material cultures surrounding media, attending to how racialized, gendered, and classed viewers respond to media and its offshoots and are in turn interpellated by them. It is an innovative approach that looks sideways as well as backwards in time, looking at what is beside (and inside) the viewer and the screen when consuming media and its auxiliary products. The introduction lays out the book’s intervention into a number of overlapping areas of study, namely media industry studies, spectatorship and reception studies, new cinema history, and material culture studies.1 This chapter teases out underexplored aspects of these fields of study and expands their parameters to conceptualize creative ways of making sense of media consumption and reception. For instance, The Stuff of Spectatorship is attentive to critiques of apparatus theory and its presumption of a universalized viewing subject, but it also pushes apparatus beyond the technologies through which films are exhibited, incorporating the surrounding material culture into its analysis. This material culture, the inanimate objects that lurk around the scene of spectatorship, have the potential to influence one’s experience of the text, to create distinct meanings, in ways that have not yet been fully explored in studies that attend to either the imagined transcendental subject of apparatus theory or the presumed individualized viewer of reception studies. Benson-Allott introduces her methodology through an exploration of television guides, the ubiquitous accompaniments to home viewing that were so central in deciding what to watch, but as Benson-Allott demonstrates, the differing presentations of this information also influences how viewers interact with it. Rather than assuming that the television guide is simply a neutral tool for planning one’s viewing, Benson-Allott incisively unearths how different iterations of television guides harbor social distinctions related to economic class. The utilitarian TV Week, a free supplementary pullout in regional newspapers, appeals to pragmatism, while the glossy TV Guide, a magazine purchased separately, positions itself as engaging in cultural taste-masking; each therefore serves different class interests and aspirations. This foray into television guides captures Benson-Allott’s overall goal in the book, which is to demonstrate that there are significant stakes in taking seriously seemingly inconsequential aspects of media consumption and examining how they structure our understanding of it in relation to wider sociocultural concerns. The first two chapters tackle how commercial interests dictate [End Page 250] our access to the content we consume and how distribution plays a larger role in how we interpret media than has heretofore been acknowledged in academic studies. Chapter 1 is a case study of Battlestar Galactica’s (2004–2009) inaugural season that complicates our understanding of how different media formats communicate televisual history, heeding new cinema history’s caution against reading film texts as symptomatic of their historical moment.2 Benson-Allott’s nonsymptomatic approach is especially pertinent given that the pilot episode was interrupted in some areas by news bulletins reporting the signing of the Camp David Accords, drawing an uncanny parallel between the fictional depiction of an ostensible peace...