This dissertation argues that slapstick films conventions, including the gag, humiliation and violence, and comic business, produce the screen figure body-object, which operates as the substrate and the cause of slapstick. Slapstick creates body-objects that are passive, inept and failing, or active and successful. I contend that industrial and economic modernization in the United States increased the need for perceptual learning, a process through which the subject develops the ability to process new percepts, creating a new sensorium that responds to modernitys pressures through new attentional abilities. Slapstick models how attention should be allocated both inside and outside the exhibition space. The slapstick viewer is not a spectator because to be a spectator is to be isolated and silent, whereas the slapstick viewer participates in a collective viewing position. Slapstick reception focuses on the viewers body because slapstick film generates laughter, a bodily response that connects the individual viewer to other viewers within the exhibition space, with the screen figure as the pivot. Slapstick evokes four kinds of laughter: superior laughter, the laughter of analogy and recognition, laughter resulting from incongruity, and laughter resulting from release of tension. Viewers feel empathy toward each other though a direct encounter with the other. They also feel empathy both toward the screen figure that exhibits pain and humiliation and toward the screen figure playing the gag, a kind of empathy that involves mirror neurons, which fire both when a subject commits an action and when the subject sees that action committed. Finally, they experience empathy toward the film as an art form with which they cooperate to produce meaning.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:VANDERBILT/oai:VANDERBILTETD:etd-07222011-140243 |
| Date | 28 July 2011 |
| Creators | McColl, Kimberly M |
| Contributors | Ben Singer, Rachel Teukolsky, Mark Wollaeger, Paul D. Young |
| Publisher | VANDERBILT |
| Source Sets | Vanderbilt University Theses |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | text |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Source | http://etd.library.vanderbilt.edu/available/etd-07222011-140243/ |
| Rights | unrestricted, I hereby certify that, if appropriate, I have obtained and attached hereto a written permission statement from the owner(s) of each third party copyrighted matter to be included in my thesis, dissertation, or project report, allowing distribution as specified below. I certify that the version I submitted is the same as that approved by my advisory committee. I hereby grant to Vanderbilt University or its agents the non-exclusive license to archive and make accessible, under the conditions specified below, my thesis, dissertation, or project report in whole or in part in all forms of media, now or hereafter known. I retain all other ownership rights to the copyright of the thesis, dissertation or project report. I also retain the right to use in future works (such as articles or books) all or part of this thesis, dissertation, or project report. |
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