Porn and script analysis lessons

So--having thumbnail-sketched the approach I use in my script analysis classes yesterday, I can get to the thing I teased yesterday: one of my favorite lessons.

A quirk of the artificially strict exercise I teach in script analysis is that I insist (along with Hornby) that student-critics approach the script bracketing off everything but the script itself. No playwright biographies. No social-historical research. And no production-oriented considerations. In particular, when students analyze a particular dramaturgical choice, I ask them to consider the choice in relation to other choices in the script--not in relation to the choice's immediate effect on an audience.

Thus, when Hamlet starts with the guards and the ghost (rather than with the Prince of Denmark himself), I steer students away from explaining the "why" of that choice by Shakespeare by saying something like "it catches the audience's interest" or "it gives the audience a good scare." Both those effects may be true. Who knows, they may even explain why Shakespeare originally wrote it that way. But in terms of dramaturgical analysis, explaining a playwright's choice via an audience's immediate emotional reaction doesn't get you very far.

I give students several reasons why immediate emotional reactions aren't good endpoints for discussions of dramaturgical choices. 

On the simplest level, explanation via audience reaction is unreliable. As anyone who's performed knows, audiences are funny, mercurial entities whose dispositions shift radically from night to night. A serious scene one evening may garner tense silence, only to provoke nervous titters the next evening. Actors (and directors and designers) must of course take audiences and their reactions into account as part of a production process and performance. But at the level of script analysis--in the artificial, build-this-kind-of-mental-muscle exercise that I teach--a hypothetical audience's hypothetical reactions must be blocked out.

On another level, analyzing choices via their immediate emotional effects leads to a frustrating circularity. It's like explaining why a joke is funny by saying, "Well, because it makes you laugh!" Or it's like explaining how the horror in John Carpenter's Halloween (the original) works by saying, "It makes the audience jump." Such an explanation traps you at a surface level. How does this race-car achieve such high speeds? Well, it does it by passing up all the other race cars. Trivially true, but not very revelatory or useful.

I do want students to notice the effect a script choice has on them (the closest stand-in to an audience they have while reading a play). Does tension rise or fall? Is the shift sudden or gradual? Is information dumped or dribbled? Does the emotional atmosphere change? All those are important to note. But those effects must be accounted for and analyzed themselves, put into relationship with other effects in a script.

For example, if scene B features a graphic, shocking act of violence, then the analyst must note the shock, yes, but then go on to ask how that shock relates to what happened in scene A and how it affects scenes C, D, and so on. Is this a play about a single shock and its aftermath? Is this a play of increasingly tense shocks? What happens to that shock over the course of the script? What does the shock do, what function does it serve, in relationship to other choices and effects in the script?

All that said, I finally allow that there are in fact some performance forms whose entire being--all their dramaturgical and production choices--aim toward a singular, immediate emotional reaction.

We call those kinds of performance porn.

Announcing this gets titters from my classes.

By "porn," I elaborate, I don't just mean depictions of sex. I mean any performance whose sole aim is to provoke a single kind of reaction. Take, for instance, subReddits like r/aww or TV shows like Too Cute. R/aww features nothing but video snippets of puppies and kittens. You watch one, you go "aww!", you upvote, and you scroll on. Too Cute's dramaturgy likewise has one goal: to get you to go, "Oh, cute!"

This is cuteness porn.

There's other kinds.  Reddit has another subreddit called r/shockwaveporn. It's videos and pictures of shockwaves radiating out from explosions. I told my class about that yesterday. One woman in the back went, "Cool!" That's the emotional reaction shockwave porn aims to provoke.

Reddit is arguably 99% this kind of porn: posts intended to provoke a quick, strong reaction of a particular sort. Nothing more.

There's nothing wrong with porn per se, I tell students. There are times where all I want to do is go aww! or Cool! or OMG WTF?? Reddit--indeed much of the internet--is perfect for that. Sometimes I need me some tearjerker porn, and so I watch movies guaranteed to make me sniffle. Or I need some superheroic porn, so I watch a good superhero movie.

Sometimes (though I don't go into this with students) I watch regular old sexy porn, precisely to produce the kind of singular reaction that kind of porn is intended to produce.

One big problem with porn of any kind (but particularly with sexy-type porn) is that it can easily be exploitative, turning real people's lives into means rather than ends. Disaster porn (such as r/catastrophicfailure) can be fascinating to watch, and it can also sometimes turn real people's tragedies into something to gawk at and upvote.

Another problem is that porn presents a very limited view of what performance (live and screened) can do. The kind of plays we read and study in class, I tell students, operate at levels a bit more complex than producing a single emotional response. We're after bigger fish.

And that's one of my favorite lessons in script analysis classes.

JF