People/alecmchoul/seminv/10.html
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Semiotic Investigations: Towards an Effective Semiotics
Alec McHoul
Part Two
From Formalism and Ethnomethodology to Ethics
Chapter 10
Signing in the Rain
As an example of an actual site in which indexical expressions are left open and indeterminate as a part of a specific textual design, and as part of the practical accomplishment of a community's basic understanding of its representational materials, I want to look at how a particular community, musical comedy fans, "read" popular Hollywood films.1 I will focus on one such fan's detailed reading: Alain Masson's account of the 1951 film Singin' in the Rain.2
Masson deals with the song-and-dance routine around "Good Mornin'" which is set in the Hollywood villa of Don Lockwood (Gene Kelly). He shows how the villa is filmed in such a way as to turn it into a completely impossible and unrealizable architectural space. At the same time, this utter indeterminacy of space is not a problem for him or for any musical comedy enthusiast, by virtue of the fact that "fan" readings expect and require that precedence will be given, in such films, to dancing and human movement generally, so that logical spatial relations take a back seat. The set, in such cases, should become an ideal dance floor, even to the point of overlooking and subverting the everyday, commonsense assumption that actual interior spaces should be both spatially consistent and stable in design. The filmic dance floor both multiplies the theatrical space (by adding levels) and transgresses it by adding and subtracting "logical" spaces in the service of an almost complete freedom of movement. If a wall or an alcove which is clearly shown in one shot happens to get in the way of the choreographical requirements of the next shot, it is simply removed, or else turned into a doorway leading to another, previously non-existent, room. In this way, a continuous viewing of the film will not allow the viewer to "reconstruct" the exact dimensions and design of the building in which it takes place. More than this, though, it will not allow the reconstruction of any physically possible space whatsoever. For example:
The camera enters the villa through a window, thus proclaiming the wall's penetrability. But why enter this way? In fact, where is the door? Apparently, nothing could be simpler: for at the end of the hallway, behind Kathy Selden (Debbie Reynolds), one can make out a double door. The only problem is that when the actors cross the few stairs between the dining room and this room, we certainly recognise the hallway but, where the door previously was, there is now a lot of room to dance, between these stairs and the magnificent chest, which was barely visible behind Kathy. The double door is nowhere in sight. Where we expected a way out, there is now the outline of a kind of alcove. But it hardly seems to matter. The three accomplices go down a few steps and we see them in the lower entrance hall. There's no door here either. Where there should be one, to the left of the bar, in front of the staircase, there is now a further extension: the small lounge room.3
In this sense, architectural spaces can open and close "at will" - that is, according to the logic of choreography rather than geometry - in order to allow the passage of the dance and the dancers.
Here are some further examples. At one point, the characters go into the kitchen and the camera follows them until they end up next to a window recess. Then the camera moves to a point inside the kitchen to "receive" them: but now they are shown in a different position, next to the fridge. At another point, the dancers ought to pass through a space which has previously been established as a doorway but, in order for the camera to follow them along, its platform must take the place of the door's jamb-posts so that the "logical" set is cut through by the camera itself. Later, the camera moves continuously and unhindered through the hallway, showing it as a completely open and uncluttered space. But a few seconds afterwards, this same space is occupied by a hatstand which Masson describes as resembling a candelabra. Its sudden and unexpected arrival on the scene is far from being a continuity error. In fact, the characters themselves appear bewildered by its appearance - they seem to be drawn to it and are prompted to point it out explicitly. Masson is led to the conclusion that "The space is transparent, the filmic area unlimited."4
If we add to this the fact that, from time to time, it is necessary for the film to switch around the spatial relations between objects (for example, exchanging a parallel arrangement for a perpendicular one) or else making space for a stool to be used in a dance routine, where no such space (let alone the stool) previously existed - and if we also consider that the shapes of major internal items (particularly stairways) can change according to the number of musical beats or choreographical steps required - and, more remarkably, that solid walls from where the camera/viewer ostensibly films/watches can simply give way into an extra proscenium, effectively breaking the boundaries of the screen itself - then it's clear that, for example, no routine application of the documentary method of interpretation and no prospective-retrospective sense-making procedure is going to work here, even for such simple and factual matters as getting a sense of the layout of the building.5 "The rooms' distribution lacks logic and makes it difficult to conceive of any relationship with the outside world. From room to room, the house seems to be forever growing."6 What is important about this example is, I think, the following.
Indexical particulars (shots) can clearly be exploited as much "for" their indeterminacy as "against" it. Indeterminacy of this kind is not a problem for members of certain communities (in this case, musical comedy enthusiasts). Though it may defeat commonsense background assumptions just as much as any ethnomethodological "breach study," it needs no "repair," and leads to anything but disjunctive or anomic relations between the text and its viewers. This is clearly a question of the form of life or community in which the text routinely occurs, and not a property of anything that could be called "the text itself." In a court~room, for example, and by way of contrast, such "reality disjunctures" would have to be resolved or reduced to questions of determinate versions of time and place with logically possible and empirically specific co-ordinates.7 On the contrary, the spatial and architectural indeterminacy, in Singin' in the Rain (for song-and-dance fans), is an expectable part of the mise-en-scène in musical comedies. Its absence would cause problems: not of logic but more of magic and, at least, of taste. That is, for Masson-as-fan, physically possible and logically consistent (let alone actual or "naturalistic") interior structures would only lead to highly uninteresting (unviewable) dance routines and to a "feeling" of being inside "a stable with its row of stalls."8
Without the opening up of the indexical potential of the camera shot, the genre of the musical comedy would be without - what is for its fans - an essential ingredient: what Masson calls the "intimist" dance routine.9 The term is significant, for the idea of intimism is borrowed from painting where it refers to works which are carried out devant l'objet (in the actual presence of the object) and which impart a "mundane," "intimate" and "immediate," or even "life as usual" character to their object. In this sense, ordinary members of particular communities can be said to have routine expectations of quite massive indeterminacies when it comes to particular forms of "life as usual."
Accordingly, we have - via Masson's exceptionally detailed insights into how enthusiasts such as himself view musical comedies - not been able to investigate a series of signs (camera shots) at anything other than the level of their intelligibility (R1). The level of socio-logical problems (R2) has not been broached. As I have said: these transgressions of logic are specifically not a problem for this particular community. The case of a musical comedy without such devices might, by contrast, throw up certain problems for the community - though this would always be speculation in the absence of a complex empirical inspection. In this sense, investigations of indexicality will not necessarily provide us with semiotic insights at the levels of actionability (R2) and community-historical meaning (R3). But it is clear by now that different communities act in distinct ways, even with regard to the basic intelligibility (R1) of signs. (For example, we could imagine topographers or topologists treating the spaces used in Singin' in the Rain in a very different way.)
The importance of these considerations - ethnomethodological theory notwithstanding - is that they lead us towards a discursive characterization of the concept of a community which we have previously only characterized in terms of "locale." In fact it could be said that a community is (at least, among other things) an ensemble of methods where at least one possible way of characterizing those methods would be to ask how they act with regard to "opening" or "closing" the indexical potential of the signs they work on and as (for methods are a productional constituent of signs rather than separate from them). The signs, one wants to say, are what they are - for a community - by virtue of, among other things, how it produces them as indexical "openings" and "closings." More importantly still, perhaps, we have seen that these specific kinds of method are tightly imbricated with a community's identity. Thus, for example, to read a scenic "impossibility" in Singin' in the Rain as a "continuity error" would be to mark oneself as clearly being an outsider. "We," in any given case, might be directly understood as, for example, "those who read so as to proliferate and appreciate the indeterminacy of architectural spaces in musical comedies," "those who require a specific set of mathematical symbols to have a definite and restricted domain of applicability" (see chapter 12), and so on.
But is it the case that what we might call the "polyvalency" of signs - their "working" or "effecting" towards multiple meanings - always remains at such extremes? The cases of communities which work the opposite way - towards delimiting semiosic "uptakes" of the signs in their domain - are legion, particularly in religious and scientific communities. (Think here of the precise value of certain physical constants, or the charges of blasphemy to be brought against those - like Salman Rushdie - who "invade" the sacredness of religious signs.) But, along this imaginable array which extends from "open" to "closed" forms of intelligibility (R1), are there any "medial" cases? Such cases would be communities which would go "so far and no further" in opening up their semiosic activities to polyvalency. If these communities exist, an effective semiotics would want to know the methods by which such practical limits between open-endedness and semiosic closure are achieved. It would want to know - in terms of actionability (R2) - the details of the socio-logical problems involved in finding such points of closure and solutions used to effect them. One possible community of this kind is a group of fans of the comic (or comic book), Batman. In the next chapter, I want to look at how these fans limit the semiosic potential of the words and graphics they read.
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This page incorporates material from Garry Gillard's Freotopia website, that he started in 2014 and the contents of which he donated to Wikimedia Australia in 2024. The content was originally hosted at freotopia.org/people/alecmchoul/seminv/10.html. The donated data is also preserved in the Internet Archive's collection.