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The Cinema Dreams Its Rivals: Media Fantasy Films from Radio to the Internet (review)

Paul Young, The Cinema Dreams Its Rivals: Media Fantasy Films from Radio to the Internet. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2007. xxxv+313pp. us$25.00 (pbk).Richard J. HandPaul Young's engaging and stimulating book is ambitious in both scope and intention. Taking as his impetus Carolyn Marvin's term 'media fantasy' (that is, the cultural negotiation of electrical media in the nineteenth century), Young offers an inspired and timely extension of this concept to analyse American cinema from its pioneering days to our own time. Essentially, Young endeavours to answer a 'deceptively simple question' (xiii). Well, three questions really:How has the American cinema represented the consumption of newer media, and specifically media that differ from film in terms of their liveness - the simultaneity of the transmitted event or text with its reception - and their situatedness in the private sphere? How do media fantasy films, especially those released when the future of cinema's rival was still an object of vigorous speculation, confront the fantasies that circulated about those media? And what do these films have to tell us about the history of Hollywood's conception of its audiences, as new media introduce more pointedly interactive models of media consumption than the cinema has historically offered? (xii)The posing of the 'simple' question above certainly reveals the stylistic challenge of Young's work, but by the same token, there are times when Young can be succinct and assertive, such as when he opens the first chapter proper with an avowedly 'blunt claim':Classical cinema is not a stage or a phase in the historical life of film. Nor is it a technological or even a technical trait intrinsic to, or waiting to be extracted from, the medium of film. Rather it is the definition imposed upon it by an institutional process. (1)Such boldness, when it occurs, is one of the factors that make Young's work such a refreshing read. At other points, Young is even anecdotal, as in Chapter 5 where he includes a particularly evocative account of watching The Truman Show (Weir US 1998) in a third-run decaplex in the late 1990s. He can also be witty. In his successful exploration of White Heat (Walsh US 1949), for instance, he demonstrates skills of close analysis as well as drawing attention to the intertexual relationship between the James Cagney vehicle and the Lumiere Brothers' L'Arrivee d'un train a la Ciotat (France 1895), playfully entitling the episode as 'L'arrivee d'un gangster' (166). The mixture of the bold, the anecdotal and the witty lends the book a 'living voice' at times, dynamic and assertive (and, needless to say, provocative), like being present at a particularly engaging lecture. The negative to this is that Young can sometimes come across as somewhat reflexive in analysis. For example, FeardotCom (Malone UK/Germany/Luxembourg/ US 2002) is described as 'a ludicrous cheapie' irredeemable for its 'misogynist stereotypes and brutal victimizations that just happen to expose a good deal of female skin' (240), but just when it seems that the film is to be summarily executed in this manner, Young comes back and offers a perceptive, if in this case overly concise, analysis of what feels like a particularly apt example given the subject matter of the book.With regard to a critical framework, although a Roland Barthes perspective felt rather conspicuously absent, Young prefers to use a range of theoretical perspectives - such as Jurgen Habermas, Walter Benjamin and Homi Bhabha - and does so very succinctly and beneficially without being enslaved to any overarching methodology. The resulting eclecticism is liberating and admirable, especially when Young demonstrates his considerable skills of historical and cultural contextualisation combined with solid, close reading. Ironically, despite the 'from Radio' starting point in the subtitle of the book, Young's treatment of pre-radio cultural technology - namely the pioneering days of cinema - is particularly noteworthy. …