One of the ways that the topic of pleasure has entered academic research on film and television is, as John Corner points out, “an appreciation of popular culture (at times, a celebration) for its expressive qualities and its relation to ordinary living and ordinary pleasures”.[1] Pleasure is a reaction or effect, which may be connected with knowledge and expectation, genre and reception, and that “is, for instance, very clearly the product of the use of images and talk, it is often generated from forms of narrative”.[2]
John Fiske draws on the distinction made by Roland Barthes between plaisir and jouissance.[3] As Corner explains, plaisir is a confirmatory pleasure that results from an engagement with aesthetic elements, requiring a specific type of attention and disposition that is communal. Jouissance has been translated as bliss.[4] It is a sensual pleasure that is individual instead of social, it becomes “a kind of utopian category, a category of escape, its experience providing opportunity for a temporary, personal transcendence of everyday necessity which gestures toward a better way of living and being”.[5]
Perhaps there is a third type of pleasure: delight. It is a pleasure that is individual as much as communal (that is, it is personal), illuminating the relationship between me and you, your and my pleasure. It is the pleasure of being charmed and enlightened as one takes in the shared and magnetic mystery of moving images.
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[1] John Corner, Critical Ideas in Television Studies (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 94.
[2] Ibid., 93.
[3] John Fiske, Television Culture: Popular Pleasures and Politics (London: Methuen, 1987), 230.
[4] See Roland Barthes, The Pleasure of the Text [1973], trans. Richard MIller (New York: Hill and Wang, 1975).
[5] Corner, Critical Ideas in Television Studies, 101.
