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"I was drawing a comparison not based on race or gender."1 So says Griffin Mill (Tim Robbins) to Detective Susan Avery (Whoopi Goldberg) during a critical scene in Robert Altman's The Player (1992). Griffin's words tumble out of him as if they are foreign to him, as if he's an unrehearsed actor of little depth woodenly reading fresh lines from a new, previously unseen script. His words fall upon deaf ears: they won't convince Susan Avery (who's chattering away distractedly, anyhow); they certainly won't convince the spectator who has learned that Griffin's notions of reality derive solely from the movies. Ironically, though, Griffin himself controls a lot of cinematic content, so the seemingly informed spectator-creator has become uninformed by seeking education from what he has created. Altman's film criticizes this "trickle down" system of assumed reality where the wealthy, white male studio executives infuse their products with "truths" about American society, and in turn, the movie-going public begins to believe in the stereotypes which pervade these mass-consumed texts. Griffin, as executive-cum-spectator, barely survives in a world where women and African- Americans don't behave cinematically.
Scholar Stuart Hall asserts that "[t]he culture industries do have the power constantly to rework and reshape what they represent; and, by repetition and selection, to impose and implant such definitions of ourselves as fit more easily the descriptions of the dominant or preferred cultures" (232-3). This essay sees Altaian's independently financed and distributed text as an expansion on this theme, where the "culture industry]" in question is the cinema; Griffin, as the "dominant or preferred [culturel," holds all of the "power" which is nearly usurped by various females (one of whom - the aforementioned Avery - is black) because the "definitions of ourselves" that he has "impose[d] and implant[ed]" cause him to misinterpret the world outside of the studio and flounder to the point of near ruin. As such, this essay explores The Player in terms of spectatorship. After all. Griffin becomes for Altman the ultimate spectator - an amalgam of buyer and seller, the person who has imposed his misinformed set of values on the movie-going public and is then forced, as a spectator, to rely on all that he has learned from the film- watching experience.
I will...