Classic Hollywood Spectators

Through the years, Classical Hollywood Cinema has made a name for themselves by establishing a standard for the type of movie people want to see. David Bordwell and his article “Classical Hollywood Cinema: Narrational Principles and Procedures” have been the topic of our class blog entries and discussion for the past week. I feel that we’ve mostly analyzed Bordwell’s list of the elements that characterize classic Hollywood films, specifically the dual plot lines. I wanted to look at another aspect that Bordwell brought to my attention, the idea of classical spectatorship, specifically in Nora Ephron’s 1993 American romantic comedy, Sleepless in Seattle.

I think we talk about spectatorship a lot more than we realize. The effect of film on an audience is essentially what drives the whole industry. When I think about spectatorship, I consider the sappy emotional women of the world, and what exactly drives us to laugh hysterically and cry uncontrollably through every movie we see. Really, it’s a bizarre concept: a moving picture, completely void of reality, causes us to react like we’re living the lives of the characters we’ve met. This doesn’t just happen by chance. Every amateur film director longs to pull at the heartstrings and jerk some tears out of their viewers. But what exactly separates those in the DVD collection from those other forgettable flicks?

According to Bordwell, the logic of classical spectatorship relies on “a series of particular schemata, hypotheses, and inferences” (28). He finds that cinema depends on spectator’s previous knowledge and expectations to determine their film experience. As they are exposed to the narrative and effect of the film, the reaction they have is mostly controlled by the hypothesis formed and either confirmed or denied. We feel that we learn the character well enough to predict what they are going to do, or that we have followed the director’s style enough to anticipate what’s coming. In fact, we’re usually pretty accurate, which makes us happy. Bordwell believes that spectatorship thrives from the validated hypotheses, especially in classical Hollywood cinema.

When looking at Sleepless in Seattle with all this in mind, the spectator’s emotional saga makes so much sense. As we are introduced to Sam and Annie, we predict that they will get together because of our premise to the notion that they are perfectly compatible and the idea that love can heal all wounds. In reality, we are convinced of these due to our societal expectations of romance, as well that the film techniques Ephron uses to match Sam and Annie as an ideal couple in our heads. I think that the culmination of the characters’ hardships and our expectation of a classical romance lead us to the seemingly inevitable catharsis of tears. When the timing and coincidences finally line up and Sam and Annie meet on the top of the Empire State Building, the spectators feel like they’ve won. Through the magic of cinema, we manage to get sucked to the passions of those we’ve never met. I may just be a hopeless romantic, but I definitely think Bordwell’s onto something.