How do we watch a film? Re-viewing ‘video replay’ in the light of affective processes. Unfinished draft

Valerie Walkerdine’s (1986) paper analysing a working class family’s reactions to watching a video of the box office hit Rocky II has made an invaluable contribution to film, media and cultural studies. It underlined power relations implicit in participant observation , challenged the application of a differential between ‘high’ and ‘low’ culture as applied along class lines, and developed a framework for understanding viewers’ engagement with film that included the researcher’s reactions to the film in this process. Finally the paper makes a transcript of the video-viewing available for subsequent analysis. Here I re-read the transcript in the light of the contemporary context and my affective responses to the material. This reading draws attention to the identifications at play between family members and film characters and within the family-plus-researcher. It underlines the significance, for this family, of establishing a harmonious domestic scene in allowing violent material to be viewed in relative safety. Arguably forefronting affective processes in analyses allows fantasy to be perceived as having constitutive effects. It also moderates some of the deterministic implications of focusing primarily on signification.
KEY WORDS: affect, identification, fantasy, Primal Horde, popular culture