Close up on Research

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Eschewing the theory that deviant behaviour in films leads to deviant behaviour in audiences, Dr Martin Barker has been probing the storm of outrage which erupted on the release of David Cronenberg's film Crash. The film, adapted from JG Ballard's novel, delves into a sub-culture of literal auto-eroticists - people who derive sexual excitement from car crashes.

"I learnt some really important things about viewing strategies from work I did on the action-adventure film Judge Dredd. When the controversy broke around Crash in 1996 I wanted to see if some of the same things applied to a so-called arthouse film. I wanted to see what academic audience research could tell us that was of relevance to policy debates.

Together with two colleagues at my former university in Bristol, I won ESRC funding to research audience reactions to Crash. There were three strands to our research - an analysis of audience responses to the film, a deconstruction of the press reaction and an investigation into the way the film was perceived differently in three countries - the UK, France and the USA.

We set up a special screening of Crash, and we recruited a wide selection of people to attend the screening, through cold calling, direct calling, speaking to specialist film groups, leaflets in video shops - anything we could think of really. 163 people came to the screening and filled in a questionnaire afterwards. From the questionnaire we were able to group them into nine categories along the two dimensions of 'liking-disliking' and 'approving-disapproving'. In Britain it was clear people ran to extremes. This was also clear from the media reaction to the film. People either went for liking and approving the film or towards dislike/disapprove or dislike/neutral.

In fact, Cronenberg himself argued that the controversy about Crash was peculiarly British, and our research bore this out. In France, cinema culture sees film as a kind of organic presence. So there were quite extraordinary debates which centred on the premise that film is like a very difficult, demanding friend who will ask questions of us. Censorship was not an issue at all. And in America, the clear distinction between arthouse and mainstream film meant that the debate around Crash focused on whether it was an arthouse movie or not, and from there, whether it was any good.

In Britain, the Evening Standard set the terms of debate with its headline 'Beyond the Bounds of Depravity'. Those who wanted to argue against this viewpoint had to find a way of denying that the film was harmful before making any other assertion. They did that almost entirely by focusing on the film as 'cold' - in other words, not emotionally or sensually engaging.

In the follow-up interviews we did with 63 of the people who came to the screening, this view of the film as 'cold' also prevailed. People could then be really antagonistic to the film without calling for it to be censored. They had certain limit conditions for censorship which the film didn't transgress, like paedophilia or material which inculcates racist or sexist attitudes. People were sometimes very uneasy after first seeing the film, and categorised themselves as dislikers, but over a period of time they ended up saying - "You know, I'd really like to see it again. I though I didn't like it, but I'm wondering. It's made me think."

By far the most significant effect of the film was that it made people go away and think about their own reaction. This is crucial, because it shows that meanings are not encoded within a film, but are in the relationship people build up with a film over time. Research too often assumes a passive audience, but we need to focus on the enthusiastic audience, those who invest heavily in a film. In fact, one of the specific recommendations we'll be making to the British Board of Film Classification, who are interested in our research and whom we interviewed as part of it, will be to analyse people who invest heavily in a film, because then we are getting at the conditions under which it can be influential.

The 'effects' of a film are not to do with whether it will directly influence someone's behaviour. I think it's stupid to focus on whether someone is likely to go out and do what they have seen. There isn't the slightest bit of evidence that that goes on, or that that is what films mean in people's lives. If you want to talk about the consequences of films, you need to ask - what do people use movies for? They use them to laugh, cry, follow fantasies, have a scary experience, get involved, play imaginative games - and to dream."