Trash Aesthetics Popular Culture and Its Audience Deborah Cartmell, Heidi Kaye.... Pluto Press 1997 160 pp. english text isbn 9780745312026 21,00             Patterns of production and consumption are one of the foundation stones of media studies in the 1990s. Taking the audience as its starting point, this collection of essays focuses on aspects of audience response, interaction and manipulation in a diverse range of films, from "high culture" literary adaptations ("The Scarlet Letter", "Pride and Prejudice" and "Schindler's List") to comic book adaptations ("Tank Girl", "Judge Dredd") and genre horror movies such as "The Shining" and "Nightmare on Elm Street.". A concluding essay explores the differences and the similarities between adaptations of "high" and "low" cultural forms in a mass film media.   Trash aesthetics - fans, audiences, and exploitation across the literature/film divide; taking the extreme case - understanding a fascist fan of "Judge Dredd"; regendered reading - "Tank Girl" and postmodernist intertextuality; the readers feminism doesn't see - feminist fans, critics, and science fiction; double exposures - observations on the flesh and blood show; there's no accounting for taste - exploitation cinema and the limits of film theory; faecal phantoms - oral and anal tensions in "The Tingler"; seducing the subject - Freddy Kreuger, popular culture and the "A Nightmare on Elm Street" films; cinematic novels and "literary" films - "The Shining" in the context of the modern horror film; "It's Always 1895" - Sherlock Holmes in cyberspace.   postmedia • books