‘Disciplining the audience’: Audience experiences with MUBI

Abstract

Through the case of MUBI, this article inquires into the changing audience habits with the proliferation of video-on-demand services and the discourse of control and choice, increased mobility, and democratic access. Drawing on in-depth interviews with subscribers of MUBI Turkey, this article explores the ways the audience relates to the imagined audience that MUBI assumes, promotes, and celebrates as a cultural gatekeeper and artistic patron/expert; and how, in turn, being a MUBI user becomes a sign of cultural taste. This study argues that even though users appreciate MUBI’s limited choice model compared to Netflix, they still experience feelings such as frustration, stress, and inadequacy. These feelings mainly result from MUBI’s artistic authority over them, established through the discourse of expertise/artistic patronage and limited-time model. On the other hand, users do not automatically accept the service’s expertise. Some are more critical of it than other VOD services (such as Netflix) because they consider watching MUBI a form of ‘intellectual labor’. Even though MUBI discursively maintains the long-standing dichotomies of niche-mainstream, arthouse-popular cinema, or high-lowbrow culture, the users experience these dichotomies more complexly according to their multiple subject positions.