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critical spectator, who appreciates the way in which he was tricked. (For these two types of Model Reader, see above, ch. 3, Intentio Lectoris.) |
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In the case of Bananas, we are at a different level: the spectator with whom the text establishes an implicit agreement (tongue-in-cheek) is not the ingenuous one (who can be struck at most by the apparition of an incongruous event) but the critical one who appreciates the ironic ploy of the quotation and enjoys its desired incongruity. In both cases, however, we have a critical side effect: aware of the quotation, the spectator is brought to elaborate ironically on the nature of such a device and to acknowledge the fact that one has been invited to play upon one's encyclopedic competence. |
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The game becomes complicated in the "retake" of Raiders, that is, in Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom. Here the hero encounters not one but two giant enemies. In the first case, we are expecting that, according to the classical schemes of the adventure film, the hero will be unarmed, and we laugh when we discover that instead the hero has a pistol and easily kills his adversary. In the second case, the director knows that the spectators (having already seen the preceding film) will expect the hero to be armed, and indeed Indiana Jones quickly looks for his pistol. He does not find it, and the spectators laugh because the expectation created by the first film is this time frustrated. |
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The cases cited put into play an intertextual encyclopedia. We have texts that are quoted from other texts, and the knowledge of the preceding onestaken for grantedis supposed to be necessary to the enjoyment of the new one. More interesting for the analysis of the new intertextuality in the media is the example of ET, in the scene where the creature from outer space (an invention of Spielberg) is led into a city during Halloween and he encounters another personage, disguised as the gnome in The Empire Strikes Back (an invention of Lucas). ET is jolted and seeks to hurl himself upon the gnome in order to embrace him, as if he had met an old friend. Here the spectators must know many things: they must certainly know of the existence of another film (intertextual knowledge), but they must also know that both monsters were created by Rambaldi and that the directors of the two films are linked together for various reasons (not least because they are the two most successful directors of the decade); they must, in short, have not only a knowledge of the texts but also a knowledge of the world, of circumstances external to the texts. One notices, naturally, that the knowledge of the texts and of the world are only two chapters of the encyclopedic knowledge possible and that, therefore, in a certain measure, the text always makes reference to the same cultural patrimony. |
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