In an essay about Casablanca, Umberto Eco identifies what he
sees as the defining characteristics of cult movies. Rather than being
"whole" and cohesive, a cult movie must be "already ramshackle,
rickety, unhinged in itself," the coming together of various archetypes
and quotations, an unstable mixture of contradictions, gaps, and irresolutions.
Cult films like Casablanca or The Rocky Horror Picture Show
fall apart in our hands, "a disconnected series of images"
readily accessible as raw materials for our fantasies (Eco,1983). Timothy
Corrigan adopts the opposite perspective, arguing that films become
cult objects, not so much because of their intrinsic properties, as
through the process of interpretation and appropriation. Cult films
offer "touristic" pleasures for people alienated from everyday
life, an alternative world to visit where everything's up for grabs.
Within this debate, Eco stresses properties of texts (their fragmentation,
their excesses), while Corrigan emphasizes the properties of audiences
(their alienation, their appropriation). However, both describe an exchange
of meanings which is partially determined by the film text and partially
by the filmgoer. Eco and Corrigan are struggling with what literary
critic M.M. Bakhtin describes as "heteroglossia," the possibility
that texts may imperfectly contain or regulate meaning. For Bakhtin,
there is no moment when the text stands outside cultural circulation
and makes its meanings clear and unambiguous. The words and images writers
use don't come from some neutral place like a dictionary but rather
from "some one else's mouth" still dripping with meanings
and associations from their previous use. All writers are already readers;
their previous encounters with other texts shape what they are able
to create. They can only communicate within the terms their culture
gives them. Writers struggle to constrain the associations that accompany
their borrowed terms, so they may fit comfortably within their new contexts.
Yet, Bakhtin argues, this process never fully succeeds:
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