techniques n theories that have helped me not get so mad over film

Growing up on cinema still firmly adhering to the (long extinct) production code (sex and violence must be punished, there must be a happy ending, our hero/ine must win), my first dip into film that transgressed old fashioned moralism was (surprise! i never shut up about it!) horror and exploitation film (which I was actually terrified of up until about the age of 12). First came slashers, most people's entryway -- excessive and pointedly shocking they almost always have someone you can root for and evil being punished even if only temporarily at the end. Like I've written about before (though its not my original thought at ALL), these movies are essentially fairy tales with acculturating purposes. And the main draw of these movies for a budding horror enthusiast but also baby feminist was the strong female character at the center of most narratives. So, going on, how does one begin to make sense of a movie like Last House On The Left where our female protagonists are raped and murdered? Or where the Strong Female Character is killed at the end? What does it mean to engage with cinema beyond identification? The number one rule always is context and tone. While something like Faster Pussycat Kill Kill clearly glorifies our outlaw trio of hellcats, something like El Topo is an irredeemable male leftist fantasy to me almost exclusively based on the horribly stupid corrective rape scene early on in the film. And while Lorna by Russ Meyer too has a plot-line where the victim falls in love with her rapist (a disgusting, useless trope), the fact that it's an independent sexploitation film from the mid-60s and entirely from the point of view of our sexually frustrated heroine gives it lots of redemptive reading to me and is a big reason I think its worthy of further analysis and appreciation even if it does not make the trope it employed okay. Most important to my enjoying films even as my moral convictions grew (and it getting increasingly harder to come to these things as an "objective viewer") was stopping reading things as straight. There's so many tools filmmakers use to express what they can't blatantly or don't wish to: defamiliarization/distancing techniques, camp, who the camera is focusing on and when, etc. Instead of taking narratives at face value, engaging with them critically has allowed me to enjoy so many things I otherwise wouldn't. While identification is important, active spectatorship is as well. You can still be critical, and identify, without entirely basing your experience of the film on projection. Which is why we can still like film noir -- the women are almost always punished for sins equal to if not less than the white male protagonists. They often have histories of abuse and exploitation as well. But we/I still love these films because they provide a glance at gender role subversion in an otherwise restrictive period of time. That doesn't mean the films aren't misogynistic, they often are, but it does mean that we don't have to hate them entirely because of it or that we can't get anything positive out of them. If I can be presumptuous about anyone caring about anything my dumb ass says, something I think I stress fairly often is how little most things are lacking in value and how so much can be gained from appreciating greys instead of black and whites (though there are certainly situations that each person will find irredeemable and that is perfectly okay! Objectivity can be and usually is a white male convention!). So hopefully this lil bit helps you go forth and enjoy what can be hard to navigate without these tools bcs there's sooooo much to offer in everything.