Mr Bataille's little girl

Daughter to George Bataille and Michel Foucault, sister to Sallie Tisdale (Talk Dirty to Me) and Carole Vance (editor of Pleasure and Danger), bell hooks uses jargon to talk about what she sees at the movies. Most often a film is "interrogated" or "counterhegemonic", and thus supports (some version of) the white capitalist homophobic heterosexist patriarchy. Well, yes.

hooks likes language abstracted from life (although "pussy" does intrude now and then); she enjoys constructing a theoretical after-image of a film, a project she insists is revolutionary work.

She argues for surrender and submission through choice, not force, as the basic principle of love and sex. She fetishises choice such that freedom is the difference between yes and no, at least for white women. According to hooks, Mike Figgis's Leaving Las Vegas "is a daring work in so far as it suggests that within patriarchy female masochism need not be disempowering, that it can be the space of abjection and surrender wherein the powerless regain a sense of agency". The female lead, Sera, is a white prostitute, "the quintessentially sexually liberated woman in modern society". When Sera is brutally gang-raped on the job - a touch of real life in an otherwise absurd film - Figgis, says hooks, "succumbs to the usual stereotypes and has the 'bad' girl punished".

But in Spike Lee's She's Gotta Have It, when the sexually voracious Nola Darling consents and is brutally screwed, hooks is unequivocal: "Rape as an act of black male violence against a black woman was portrayed as though it was just another enjoyable sexual encounter, just another ****".

The heart of her ambivalence is to be found in her enthusiasm for sadomasochism. In Isaac Julien's The Attendant, she sees choices and possibilities: "Significantly, S/M pleasure becomes the context for mutuality, where subject positions are fluid. One can play at being object, slave, the one who is beaten, and one can play at being subject, master, the one who beats. Pleasure is the space of utopian possibility." In fact, these are scenarios of dominance and abuse.

In the same essay, hooks makes a distinction between power and domination - a distinction without a difference - and once again endorses and romanticises passivity: "(the female character) wants to be taken to a higher, purer plane of existence ... It is her mysterious passivity throughout The Attendant that is alluring. She is totally without a story, completely abject." For hooks, sadomasochism appears to be the geography of liberation - black/white, gay/straight, male/female - and she celebrates it as "the shared pleasure of transgression". I would call it the shared pleasure of oppression.

hooks maintains a running dialogue with Spike Lee, though he appears never to answer. She is obsessed with his work, which she "interrogates" in detail; and there is a heart-rending desire to be acknowledged by him that is not subtle, "progressive", or "counterhegemonic".

It is, I think, Lee's commercial success that makes him an object of hooks's intellectual desire; he is in a different league by virtue of money and fame, and no repudiation of capitalism dims the attraction. Of course, when white women are being bought and sold, hooks has no critique of capitalism at all.

The best piece in Reel to Real is a discussion between hooks and film-maker Camille Billops, whose films Suzanne, Suzanne and Finding Christa are autobiographical and familial documentaries. Here hooks, whose narcissism disfigures these essays, gets over herself (and Bataille) to discuss life and art with this pioneering black film-maker, who was over 60 at the time.

hooks is curious, smart, well-read; she is also prisoner of jargon and an apologist for sadomasochism. In the end, she seems to call for literal, positive images, especially of black women and black heterosexuality - a kind of Soviet-style social realism that exposes the opportunism and dishonesty of her oft-repeated postmodernist creed. Meanwhile, one surmises, the film and sex industries will continue doing their joined-at-the hip good work in liberating white women, prostitution being that liberation.

Andrea Dworkin is the author of Intercourse and Pornography.