Throughout the course of Michael Gondry’s Be Kind Rewind, we are shown scenes from a documentary on the life of Fats Waller. The documentary is amateurish with low production value by most modern standards. Near the end of the film it is revealed that those clips are from the documentary produced by a small cadre of townsfolk about the local legends of Fats and represent their personal vision of what the documentary would be like. This film becomes then an articulation or and artifact of the structure of feeling. In William’s Analysis of Culture he identifies structure of feeling as the particular living result of all of the general elements of an organization. In other words, the structure of feeling is this cultural consciousness of all the little bits of culture within a group. This documentary that the people of this New Jersey town make represents that. There are elements of the individual lives and personalities of the people as well as the myths and ideologies that are fed into the documentary.
This plays into Williams identification of the 3 levels of culture. The first he identifies is the lived culture. We cannot know what that is unless we were a part of it ourselves. Then there is the recorded culture. This is where the documentary comes in to play. It is a recorded instance of that lived culture or culture of feeling. The elements reflected in this artifact are the visual aesthetic of the people, based upon their consumption of the artifacts of the cultural industry (Hollywood films), and the mythology of Fats Waller in their neighborhood. Much of the story of Fats’ life is composed of half memories and all out fictions. So the neighborhoodites also slide into the 3rd level which is selective tradition. In this way the film represents a selective tradition of its own. The neighbors have distilled the mythology and memory of Fats into this single artifact.
This is the nature of all of the “sweded” films as well. The selective tradition has a “greatest hits” quality to it and this is what Jerry and Mike do with the films. There are moments in the films that are memorable and perhaps iconic and provide the gist of what the film is about narratively and thematically. These moments represent the selective tradition and these scenes are what are utilized in the sweded versions. In an extraordinary sequence shot, we see the cast and crew of these sweded films reenacting various key scenes from films of note, like 2001: a Space Odyssey and Last Tango in Paris. These scenes are not necessarily the most memorable or important scenes in the film, but they are the scenes that are significant to the members of the neighborhood and as such represent part of the selective tradition.
Interestingly these films represent what Hall calls a negotiated code. The negotiated code concedes the legitimacy of the hegemony but sets own ground rules in small things. The hollywood films are part of a hegemonic system and Mike and Jerry create a negotiated articulation of each film. They still love the dominant culture and are being clearly imitative of that ideology. Even so their articulation of the film also is indicative of their unique system of values (culture of feeling perhaps). This negotiated code is viewed as demonstrably subversive by the dominant culture and suppressed by the destruction of the individual articulations of that negotiated culture. The people then move to a oppositional stance, rejecting the hegemonic hollywood in favor of creating their own story, their own structure of feeling. The documentary on Fats Waller is that articulation. It works not only contrary to the Hegemony of Hollywood but also in opposition to the capitalist structure in general. They charge no admission to the showing of the film, rather accepting donations to save their building, their home.
Be Kind, Rewind is deceptive in its presentation. It has all of the trappings of a hollywood comedy: Big stars (Danny Glover, Mia Farrow, and Jack Black), crossover star (rapper Mos Def), ridiculous premise, and inspirational message. But when viewed within the context of cultural studies it reveals a more interesting and, honestly, subversive subtext. The film itself appears to take a negotiated stance, occupying both spaces of opposition and hegemony. In many cases it seems that this is the best we can do. The system is far to large and complex to take down through pure opposition, articulations like this film indicate the potential success of cultures and sub-cultures subverting the system within the system. They take their stand but still get the word out. That little wrinkle seems to be where cultural studies is the most powerful.
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