Rant

I was a discussant at the conference the other week for a paper on Vertigo. The paper was incredibly interesting and insightful; however, I also had serious substantive disagreement with the author, which I articulated in my comments. Afterward, the author and I had a discussion of his paper in which he claimed that he did not care about the meaning of the film (or implicitly, whether I'd better captured the film's meaning or whether he had). He said he did not care about the film's meaning because he was doing critical theory (I think the literary kind as opposed to the political theory kind, although I'm not sure). I was baffled, I mean really baffled by this. As someone who studies the history of political thought, I work with texts. There are debates over which sorts of texts one should consider and how you relate those texts to contemporary issues. However, we all agree (as far as I know) that there are texts and that those texts have meanings and that we're concerned, first, with correctly understanding the meanings of those texts. Now, of course, this is complicated by a film, which is a production that involves lots of different people. But still!: there's a director and a screenplay. There's a starting point that appears to me to have a meaning. And so I was incredibly baffled by this idea that that meaning doesn't matter. If that is the case, then I'm confused as to why critical theory wants to work with texts at all. Why not discard them entirely?