"anyone with a lick of sense [would] want to sneak out of a bad movie Jri mere existence of such everyday ethical dilemmas, and their prosaic re ^ nizability, should reassure cinephiles everywhere that the practice pe: sfcis e if we still dream of a more enriching cinema. Alexander Kluge spoke for ma when he claimed, "I love to go to the movies: the only thing that bothers me ■" the image on the screen."125 „- * CHAPTER HME Cinemagoing as "Felt Internationalism" 228 STRUCTURES OF CINEMATIC EXPERIENCE In his beautiful short essay "Upon Leaving a Movie Theatre," Roland Barthes describes the prehypnotic state one falls into at the start of a cinematic event.1 He suggests that moviegoers get ready for dreaming, with the theater acting as a mechanism to keep us at the twilight between sleep and consciousness. Darkness helps promote that sense of bodily loss, one that keeps audiences prepared for the experience of departure from the ordinary. The film is a lure, he writes, for an ideological and unconscious process of organizing the world as we rest calmly before the screen. It is evident that it is equally a lure that moves populations from one location of their neighborhood and city to another, drawing people out to experience that intensely personal twilight together. The elaborate theme lobbies of megaplexes sustain the sense of departure initiated by the screen images. To be sure, they are not darkened environments in which one loses sight of the strangers in one's presence. But, even with their colored lights and cacophony, the intermedia turmoil of cinema complexes broadcasts their singularity and uniqueness. Here is a set of technologies, practices, and shared engagements that cannot be found anywhere else. A trip to the cinema, the passage through the lobby and the consumption of food, drink, and games, is part of the preparation for the screening—preparation for that filmic twilight—like an urban and architectural trailer for movie watching. Production, distribution, and exhibition, as the broad divisions of the film-industry apparatus, present a narrative path for the film commodity as it moves from conception to consumption. Clearly, the mechanics of the film business involve not only the making of movies but also their delivery to an audience, the gathering up of that audience, and the provision of a site for the film encounter. The latter moment of consumption is a death of sorts. When its exchange value has been expended, so has a commodity's life from an economic perspective, hence the concurrent obsession with the various subsequent media "reincarnations" of the work. The path of a motion picture text molds each stage via a revisitation to earlier phases, so that a film gets "re-produced," "redistributed," and "re-exhibited" time and again. As cross-media stakes intensify, whether through ownership or coventures, so too has the experimentation with commodity forms and the paths they take. Such a transmission or nar-rativized approach to the life of the film should not steer us away from the construction of that audience, that is, the making of the consumer, citizen, fan, and spectator. Delivery, distribution, and exhibition of film to some segment of the population might be understood best as the shaping of that segment. And as this book has contended, this shaping is not the province of textual conventions alone but of spatial and temporal ones. The "where" and the "when" of film are crucial components in the formation of audiences, whether imagined as the product of local practices or as manifestations of international popular taste: My concentration on the establishment of an industry common sense about this, and its ramifications for popular cultural life, stem in part from an impression that the powerful elements of the formation of the location and context of cinemagoing have been underplayed in film theory and analysis. The organization of people at film events is evidence of communion. Miriam Hansen's use of Kluge's alternative public sphere is one example that takes the meeting of strangers at a film screening as holding the germinational potential of becoming a public. Moreover, some filmgoing events and habits offer a wedge of resistance unavailable to some populations elsewhere. Importantly, Hansen highlights the historical efforts to put a halt to the variability of film crowds and, in effect, to audiences' ability to transform themselves into a fully realized public. Indeed, the complexity of this question makes Oskar Negt and Alexander Kluge critical of the potential uses of the "public sphere," seeing the ephemeral qualities and locations of the contemporary environment as a mark of individuation rather than of community. In the end, they suggest that ■ what we think of as the public sphere is in fact a relation to the sphere of production. They write, it cannot be considered to be unified at all, but rather the aggregate of individual spheres that are only abstractly related. Television, the press, interest groups and political parties, parliament, army, public education, public chairs in the universities, the legal system, the industry of churches are only apparently fused into a general concept of the public sphere. In reality, this general, overriding public sphere runs parallel to these fields as a mere idea, and is exploited by the interests contained within each sphere, especially by the organized interests of the productive sector.2 Furthermore, it is precisely the ephemeral nature of film audiences that makes them productive illustrations of contemporary social existence. People move through cinemas to sit momentarily in the presence of others, retaining thoughts of similar situations unfolding elsewhere, and move back through the streets to domestic life. The fleeting arrest of that movement is a point of imagined relation to an unseen population of resting, consuming bodies. Cinemas are sites for the mobility and flow of bodies, texts, and money. They are also sites for the materialization and conceptualization of shared ideas about mobility and flow. Looking at them in this way, we can begin to grasp the remarkable changes that have already installed themselves in contemporary civic life, as exemplified by the miniaturization of the theme park and its incorporation into the cinematic exhibitionary complex. Resting momentarily, balanced between the "safety" of home and the public of crowds, the film audience—that abstract creature of industrial and cultural discourse—might be apprehended as an intermediary between our private and public selves. Often public spaces have been seen as infused with the possibility of messi-ness and unruliness. The cinematic sphere, contrarily, it would appear, offers the opportunity to glimpse the orderly and servile nature of a population. The policing of ushers, the presence of security cameras, the regiment of scheduling, and the overt appeals to decorum in film trailers (feet off the seat in front, no talking, cell phones and pagers off, etc.) are indices of the intense interest in encouraging civility and reducing the prospects for impromptu (and econom- 230 STRUCTURES OF CINEMATIC EXPERIENCE "Felt Internationalism" 231 icaily unproductive) interventions. Hansen has suggested that the 1990s saw an unusual amount of talk and enforcement of how one was to comport oneself at movies.3 Famous Players has taken to having employees introduce each screening under a spotlight with a litany of "dos and don'ts." And probably the biggest budget announcement ever designed exclusively to install a code of silence played in Canadian theaters in the middle of that decade, produced by the agency Gee Jeffrey and Partners for Rogers Cantel Telecommunication (figures 14,15, and 16). Winning Clio, Cannes, and Andy awards for advertising, other wireless communication companies used versions of the trailer, including BT Cellnet in the UK, Vbdaphone in New Zealand, Telstra in Australia, and Tele fonica in Spain. In a military setting, it presents a scene of emergency in which a young white hero arrives to dismande a noise-sensitive nuclear device. He performs the delicate operation with sweaty-browed concentration, but something goes wrong. A beeping sound starts the countdown. Just before the device blows, obliterating the characters and presumably the entire city, the frantic hero demands to know the source of the sound that triggered the bomb. In his final words, his assistant states, "It came from the audience," to which the hero replies, "What kind of jerk lets their cell phone go off in a movie?" The advertisement elicits a momentary confusion. It presents itself as a trailer for a coming attraction, using signs of high production values to evoke a big-budget action film, including sweeping lights, fast camera movement, and a relatively large number of extras to create the spectacle of nuclear panic. A patchwork of technological commodities, from cordless microphones to a laptop computer, provides a link with the primary object of attention, the cell phone. The breaking of its realism by the interference from the audience here results in nuclear devastation. It is a humorous—at least in the first viewing— depiction of the dire need for the regulation of cinemagoing behavior. It might not be criminal for a spectator to let a cell phone ring during a movie, but it might be explosive for realist narrative. Every screening wants to announce itself as another exercise in bourgeois civility, or an individually embodied comprehension of a cooperative silent crowd. This is not to suggest that such efforts to police and propagate a discourse of comportment are successful. Given what appears to be an obsession in controlling and limiting social interaction during a cinemagoing event, one Don't blow the film. Please turn off your cell phones and pagers. FIGURES 14-16 Stills from trailer discouraging cell phones in cinemas. By permission of Gee Jeffrey and Partners, Rogers Cantel Telecommunication. 232 STRUCTURES OF CINEMATIC EXPERIENCE -"':#|g||SH might conclude that the opposite is the case and innovative alternatives* "good" cinematic behavior abound. But the qualities of this investment h exhibitors and distributors are telling. As discussed earlier, one of the ax m i ments about the formation of cinema spectatorship has to do with predictability and control, a sort of industrial standard of audience generation and! comportment. In the current dominant incarnation of standardizing meiha*! nisms, the themed cinematic institution of the megaplex or the upgraded mulJ tiplex, and the accelerated international cinema text, pursue knowable an- ^ diences across the globe. ,. This book has attempted to document how the impulse to seek out and 3i shape an ideal standardized audience has been retooled yet again for a global! cinema environment. In the process, the relations among media and contexts! have been redrawn, one key element of which has been an augmenting sense nfi coordination and simultaneity across locations. One of the theoretical chal-i lenges advanced here has been the following: where are the spaces for ageni . 1 cultural politics in light of evidence of cultural simultaneity? As has been put forward throughout, there is no necessary reason why! simultaneity must equate homogeneity. The dispersion of spaces and sites, the intermedia mutations of cultural commodities, and the polysemic nature of signs all indicate that it would be a profound and presumptuous misstep tol| think that cultural artifacts harbor their own essential meaning effects. For too long, the speedy critical glide to this premise has made for some lazy claims about global culture. Instead, Ien Ang's discussion of capitalist postmodernity as a chaotic system is instructive. She points out that "chaos" does not signal an absence of structure or lack of order, but that our historical context, and our globalizing tendency, is one of radically indeterminate meaning.4 The structures of theatrical exhibition contribute to global cultural economic forces as well as a sensibility about the global. There is, of course, work to be done to maintain and promote diversity in cultural life; attacking transnational culture as a matter of course, however, is a dead-end strategy. Cees Hamelink twenty years ago warned about "cultural synchronization."5 And yet, despite a passionate and detailed analysis, Hamelink's dependency theory cannot account for the variable functions of that international culture, concluding that the forces of synchronization must be arrested in order to 234 STRUCTURES OF CINEMATIC EXPERIENCE ■froniote cultural dissonance. Alternatively, Benedict Anderson indicates that a TRjodern concept of simultaneity resides at the cultural roots of nationhood. He Krites of how the novel and the newspaper provided a national communal |mnsdousness tnat harbored a sense that events were taking place coinciden-p£]iy, as was people's awareness of those events. He proposes, drawing from Psalter Benjamin's "Thesis on the Philosophy of History" that "meanwhile" Ifloats above such cultural forms, allowing people to grasp not only the words Wop the page but the way those words presume simultaneous consumption.6 On if these grounds, synchronization in cultural life produces forms of community, I'which for Anderson are nations. Contrary to Hamelink's assessments, interna-Ftional cultural simultaneity spawns new transnational communities that reside Bin people's imaginations and have material consequences for the organization &. of popular existence. I can think of no better embodiment of such transnational *' imaginings than cosmopolitanism. a The age of the megaplex has its antipode in earlier arguments for the perfect ' spectatorial situation. Peter DeCherney comments on the ideal movie theaters < advocated by Seymour Stern and Harry Allan Potamkin in the 1920s and 1930s, 1 which embraced a "streamlined continuity model as an alternative to the ba-5 roque designs and multimedia presentation of the palaces."7 The clean, uncluttered auditorium with nothing to interfere visually with the viewer, they rea-soned, encouraged a more immersive, individual relationship with the screen. Today, prestige screens (Ex-Centris in Montreal) and nominally adult venues (Alliance Atlantis Cinemas) adopt aspects of this, in which the tastefully sparse is a response to the megaplex clutter. And yet, as DeCherney mentions, Siegfried Kracauer responded differently, arguing that the elements of "supplementation" to the screen—music, illumination, live performance, and decor—help to create, in Kracauer's words, a "homogeneous cosmopolitan audience."8 This supplementation served a productive function by distracting and interrupting the concentration of that cosmopolitan audience. As Kracauer wrote of the movie palaces' external and surface bombardment of the senses, "Like life buoys, the refractions of the spotlights and the musical accompaniment keep the spectator above water."9 It is opportune to speculate on a similar affirmative potential for the oft-mentioned gaudiness and trashy muddle of today's cinemas. The supplementation of midway distraction one experiences at megaplexes "Felt Internationalism" 235 might, like the movie palaces, pilot audiences away from individual interpellation toward wider senses of community. Just as the cinema complex stirred reconstitutions of public and private life, it also helps initialize a contemporary brand of cosmopolitan public to which Kracauer alludes in his essay on movie palaces. He reasoned, "in pure externality, the audience encounters itself; its own reality is revealed in the fragmented sequence of splendid impressions."!0 Several cultural theorists approach cosmopolitanism as a point of entry intb a model of political life. The concept captures a sense of competence with theif contemporary and a connection or empathy with difference. The cosmopolitan person imagines a global breadth for his/her habitus. Ulf Hannerz writes, "Cosmopolitans can be dilettantes aswell as connoisseurs, and are often both, at different times,"1' and then wonders about how this alters when internationals movement is not necessarily a denning feature of cosmopolitanism any more. Moreover, cosmopolitanism is taken by some as a possible alternative to the restrictions of national or local communities. On this point, John Hartley describes a postmodern public sphere of media images and Arjun Appadurai f wants to name a transnational public.12 All are fairly careful to avoid a stable: trajectory whereby the cosmopolitan culture lifts one out of the local; instead,: the notion describes an importing, as much as an exporting, mechanism. But ; their reinvestment in the very term "public" is telling, reminding us that thinking of political agency requires some site—or imagined point—of commune. Here, Timothy Brennan's intricate study is particularly instructive. Detailing the mobilization of cosmopolitanism as an obstruction to emerging formations of nations and states, Brennan reveals the pitfalls such globalism has had for critical theory's ability to help us understand contemporary cultural politics. Where others have championed cosmopolitanism as a conceptual negotiation of new global political agency, Brennan cautions us about the way its current form may redirect us from other key struggles for community and may carry with it what are not international ideals but American ones.13 Such an indispensable lesson, one that essentially turns on scholarly discourse, can be supplemented by bringing cosmopolitanism as a structure of feeling—or a "felt internationalism"—-into full relief. Steering away from the treatment of cosmopolitanism as a worldly view from above, Bruce Robbins compellingly imagines it as a "collective, engaged, and empowered" brand of in- 236 STRUCTURES OF CINEMATIC EXPERIENCE i I ternationalism, one characterized by continuities between local and global com-: mitments.14 Importantly, he questions a tendency to pit nationalism against globalism, as though the two are in battle for people's affiliations and emotional attentions. Rather, he proposes that "the forms of global feeling are continuous with forms of national feeling. This implies that, though the potential for a conflict of loyalties is always present, cosmopolitanism or internationalism does not take its primary meaning or desirability from an absolute and intrinsic opposition to nationalism. Rather, it is an extension outward of the same sorts of potent and dangerous solidarity."15 A line of attack that runs through this book is a class critique of the misguided binary option of globalism and nationalism. He notes in close detail the operations of a jet-setting intelligentsia that result in a disparaging view of the nationalist commitments of the broader population. And yet he documents an emerging discussion of a "popular cosmopolitanism," a shared and easily accessible sense of worldliness, that holds significant weight in the everyday life of people.16 I can think of no more apt characterization of Canadian cinemagoing, where commercial screens inhibit for the most part a Canadian film presence but offer an encounter with an international scene. The Canadian national-popular, such that it is, includes a continuing reorganization and reappraisal of skirmishes with and glorifications of international culture. In the context of a sense of Canadian cultural absence, one of the strategies has been to present a cosmopolitan face, that is, to celebrate worldly sophistication, or, in effect, to live elsewhere. Here, I arrive at a general conclusion about the motors and effects of transnational culture, namely, that popular cosmopolitanism needs to be taken seriously as a pervasive mode for negotiating and managing reigning ideas and experiences of global economies and cultures. It is a structure of feeling about senses of allegiance and affiliation—about being in step—with imagined distant and synchronized populations. Popular cosmopolitanism can be continuous with, and can be incorporated into, senses of nationhood. It is a mode internal to existing national boundaries and obviously does not make them disappear magically. Where many critics can only see international popular culture engulfing and suppressing domestic expressions, there remains a rich popular knowledge about a contemporary multinational culture, or what Simon During might describe as a fledgling form of global popular, one that "Felt Internationalism' 237 could serve dominant discourses of national community or could offei foothold for an alternative. The politics of such a turn are far from set in stone, for there is ample evidence of both rightist and leftist critique rooted both in forms of national' ism and internationalism. In this respect, while identifying the way cosmopolitanism and nationalism play into efforts to smooth the logic of world capital \ Robbins perceptively highlights the overwhelming presence of anticapitali i convictions in the antiglobalization movement, itself a community with a highly developed international consciousness. He goes further in suggest) u I that the romance involved with a certain brand of leftist politics can become a dominant form of American nationalism, especially among a privileged class of i intellectuals and scholars.17 Similarly, Canadian critics have been notoriou 1 | uniform in their apprehension of popular cosmopolitanism as a problem to Del attacked and ridiculed, yet they have actively championed other strains of international awareness. The result has been the domination of left critique bvaf narrow band of rhetoric, squeezing out other progressive possibilities tlnt| might give full due to popular practices and understandings. f Returning to the lessons of Gramsci on the national-popular is edifying, fori among his writings is a battle with the implications of new forms of internationalism, especially for the making of a progressive historical bloc. He recommended that putting together a class of democratic political agents necessitates > an engagement with the everyday language of people. This vernacular may consist in pieces of cultural life that spring from unlikely and far-flung sources. For pundits of an autonomous and authentic national culture, these popular pieces of cultural life may be seen as illegitimate, especially if those pieces arrive from other shores. Yet, and at times seemingly against his own better judgment, Gramsci advised a genuine scrutiny of the stockpile of materials that are part of popular everyday consciousness. Such an analysis will lay bare the thinking of a time and place and will provide the raw resources required to tap into that thinking. As Marcia Landy puts it, Gramsci's conception of language is divided between normative and "spontaneous" or "immanent" linguistic practices. The normative linguistic practices relate to traditional practices. The sources of conformism and of inno- 3 jpyation are identified by Gramsci as radiating from the schools, the chuich Jjppite and popular writers, theater and film, radio, popular songs, public assemblies, and local dialects... . Hence one must be aware of these many Klines traversing and feeding into language in order to effect any change.18 ifecpm exactly these varied media sources emanates a widespread sentiment of ^connection and participation in a contemporary transnational moment. This Belt internationalism"—that is, the potential condition for a global popular—is Sfibt'evenly distributed and has multiple appearances, but it exists as a powerful ^organizing feature of ordinary cultural life. »A As an international and internationalizing formation, the contemporary film industry ignites the global circulation of culture. Among other outcomes, * the apparatus of the lived space of cinemas arranges a localized encounter with i transnational commercial film culture. A moviegoing public seems to be beckoned into a cosmopolitan demeanor. What, then, are the implications of the public consumption of a slice of that global cultural traffic of images and II" sounds in those regulated cinema spaces? What relations of the local and the global are articulated in the megaplex? The cinema complex is but one urban P and suburban intersection of the two, where the proximate and the distant collide. Emphasizing the metropolitan experience at the root of global culture, m Saskia Sassen proposes, "globalization is a process that generates contradictory tj| spaces, characterized by contestation, internation differentiation, continuous border crossings. The global city is emblematic of this condition."19 The cinema entertainment complex is a now visible component of the global city environment. The examination of cities has appeared as an unsettling category between the abstractions of local, global, community identity, and national identity. Most certainly, as Sassen puts it, "A focus on cities allows us to capture not only the upper but also the lower circuits of globalization."20 Given the history of the relation between cities and cinema,21 and in the context of the developments I have elaborated throughout this book^mega-plexes and the upgraded multiplex are among those lower circuits of globalization. Corralling screens across continents into coordinated openings and closings of films paints an image in which the variegated traces of cultural expression connect people to geographically distant and temporally synchronized com- 238 STRUCTURES OF CINEMATIC EXPERIENCE "Felt Internationalism" 239 1 munities.jcinerna complexes are sites for an encounter with one dimensí.in global cultural traffic. The "everywhere" of the current cinema accents this rol "l of motion picture theaters further. Ulf Hannerz describes cosmopolitanism "a mode of managing meaning" about city and national space in light of idea ' about globalization.22 "We often use the term 'cosmopolitan' rather looselv t " describe just about anybody who moves about in the world."23 This feelin r,t movement has less to do with global mobility than an image of travel. "A more" genuine cosmopolitanism is first of all an orientation, a willingness to enaia with the Other."24 So, what does it mean to be cosmopolitan without intercity mobility but instead with what Friedberg calls a mobilized visuality? In