Today’s guest post is from screenwriter Jeremy Pikser.
When we say, “know your audience,” what do we mean, exactly? What defines the characteristics of an audience? Is an “audience” identical to a “market?”
Is the audience, as Hollywood (and, really, the entire ideology of market consumerism) would have us believe, a natural expression of human nature, the zeitgeist, or what people “want now?” To think so would be to ignore the domination of our sense of what all these are by exactly the cultural forces who are selling us what we “want.”
The creation of desire is a well worn concept, but it’s worth keeping in mind when we think about the “audience” for art. The requirement, for instance, of virtually every popular story to have somewhere in it a hot chick, a beautiful woman, a fair maiden isn’t, obviously, something that’s been created by Hollywood out of whole cloth. It has a long tradition in popular (and not so popular) art. But the entertainment industry has cultivated this notion into a much more powerful and self perpetuating “necessity.”
