mall and department store effectively insulated the consumer against theelements, providing the conditions of an endless summer (1993: 3), a simulacralenvironment detached from any sense of nature. Here, Friedbergs reading playsinto Sontags notion of mass culture as artifice, detached from nature or the real.And with the decontextualization of goods from various parts of the globe,rendered equivalent by their commodity status, spatial co-ordinates are jumbled.Such spatial disorientation for Friedberg is matched by a temporal disjunction:these architectural spaces were, in a sense, machines of timelessness, producing aderealized sense of the present and a detemporalized sense of the real (1993: 4).

Within this analysis of a newly commodified gaze, cinema assumes a position of priority offering a convergence of the tourist and consumer gaze: Cinemaspectatorship, argues Friedberg, brought together the mobilized gaze of theshopper and tourist into a virtual mobility (1993: 147).The presentation ofimages from elsewhere (often unidentifiable places or studio constructions ofplace), and from another time, coupled with the techniques of editing thatfacilitate the manipulation of sequence, produce what Friedberg identifies as theemergent virtual gaze of postmodernism. The past is rendered a commodityexperience with a price attached, available to the consumer at any time, open to repetitive viewing. Drawing on Bergsons account of the temporal in Matterand Memory, whereby duration becomes the contemporaneity of the present andpast, Friedberg cites the cinema as the privileged vehicle for an understanding ofsubjective time in opposition to standard time. Indeed, the argument is pushedfurther to claim that the mobile virtual gaze, residing at the nexus of tourism,consumption and cinema, becomes paradigmatic of a postmodern subjectivity(1993: 132).

Friedberg provides a lucid and complex account of the various historic transfor-mations that converge at the moment of cinemas emergence.There is, however,too great a sweep in the claims for a generalized shift in subjectivity, eliding thedouble meaning of the term mobility. For Friedberg, mobility refers predomi-nantly to a form of social meandering in the metropolis, a flnerie, characterizedby a restless, distracted gaze across the displays of commodities.The second senseof mobility as a social fluidity, the ability to move within the hierarchical systemof social categories, plays at the edges of the account. In a passage drawing out theimplications of the argument, Friedberg states the fluidity of flanerie (onceoffered predominantly to men) was now offered as a pleasure to anyone of anyrace, ethnicity, or gender who had the capacity to consume (1993: 147). Thealready generalized sensibility, the mobile virtual gaze, becomes a levelling socialpractice. Pushed into the present, the mobile virtual gaze reaches its apex in thecontext of the multiplex. Effectively relocating the cinema to the shopping mall,the multiplex is the realization of a spatial and temporal dissolve. Private time

FILM CULTURES

46