"Stop Reading Films!": Film Studies, Close Analysis, and Gay Pornography

In a column entitled Q & A, the February 1996 issue of Art Forum breathlessly confides, Today, pornography seems to be on everyone's mind. Can this be called a porno moment?' The presence of a workshop entitled Pedagogy and Porn at the 1995 meeting of the Society for Cinema Studies suggests that cinema studies may indeed be experiencing such a moment, as does a recent issue of Jump Cut that features a series of articles on teaching sexual images. According to the implications of this workshop and these articles, pornography has the potential to disrupt established ways of working in film. It can allow us to confront some of our most treasured disciplinary pretensions, procedures, and assumptions. The force of that potential is blunted, however, when pornography is treated as just another film genre to be covered by the film studies curriculum.3 In fact, the possibility remains that the study and teaching of pornography may not in any way disrupt business as usual for the discipline of film studies. Instead of calling into crisis the way the discipline constructs its object of study, for example, pornography might become just another set of texts to be included in the curriculum. This is one of the dangers that arises when a course in pornography is organized around the practice of close textual analysis of the porno image in particular-a real likelihood, given the ubiquity of close analysis within the discipline. At times, it seems difficult to imagine a film studies devoid of close analysis, so dependent are we upon this method of study. When alternative approaches to close analysis are proposed, they are often greeted with an exasperated Well, why can't we continue to do close analysis, too? What's wrong with close analysis?4 In this essay, I want to suggest polemically the absurdity and perhaps even perniciousness of submitting gay porno films in particular to close textual analysis. Obviously, I will not be arguing that close analysis produces no knowledge whatsoever. It is the status and function of that knowledge that I want to question here. I also want to suggest something of the way that close analysis has historically taken the place of other kinds of necessary inquiry and how it particularly obscures both the social and historical conditions in which certain kinds of texts circulate and the everyday uses to which subjects put such texts. Shoring up the discipline of film studies at a historical moment when its integrity is under attack from a variety of different sources