I had picked this up with the intention of reading "The Sleazy Pedigree of Todd Haynes," but, as happens with a strong collection, I ended up getting sucked in and reading Tania Modleski's take on Doris Wishman, Chuck Kleinhans on pornography and documentary, an excellent look at "homo-military" films, and a stirring call for discernment even in the throes of cultish geekery.

As the volume's title declares, these are explorations of the margins (of cinema, of taste, etc.), but all of the contributors (at least the ones I read) express a nuanced understanding of how these "margins" are constructed and of the various interrelated registers of culture (high/low/art/mass/camp/trash/etc.). I appreciated the emphasis on hybridity, especially in the article about Haynes: it's too often that cinema is viewed as points along a (wholly arbitrarily constructed) spectrum, with, say, Russ Meyer at one end, one of my beloved mid-20th-century Europeans at the other, and Hitchcock or Welles squarely in the middle.

(Actually, this is something that I felt pretty strongly when reading Greg Taylor's "Pure Quidditas or Geek Chic? Cultism as Discernment." If cinematic geekdom has two extremes [using the spectrum above as the model:], my interests are located at the Artsy end...and yet I feel an incredible affinity for my fellow geeks at the Sleazy end. We're basically in the same boat: waiting for obscure treasures to show up in theaters or on DVD, endlessly picking apart scenes and fragments and trivia, obsessively educating ourselves and defending our predilections even when those around us--who just watch movies the way Normal People watch movies--think we're unhinged or perverse.)

Anyway, it's a fascinating collection--all over the place in terms of genres and directors and arguments--and there's a lot to ponder. Modleski's piece in particular gets into some reconsidering of traditional feminist film theory (and feminist theory more broadly), which is exciting (and very appropriately ends with the demand for bad girls to unite). Good, interesting stuff.

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