Skepchick: Girls, Violence and Dragon Tattoos

Girls, Violence and Dragon Tattoos
by Jen
Skepchick



Like many another crime fiction junkie, I’m mildly obsessed with Steig Larsson’s Millennium trilogy. I pounced on the first book, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, when it first appeared in the States, and was rather thrilled to discover a good crime story with a startling unique and complex female character at its heart – an unfortunately rare occurrence. All too often, especially historically, women only occupy the backdrops of noir genre tales.

But beyond the story itself, the (anti-)heroine Lisbeth Salander has also seemed to find herself in the middle of a popular criticism debate about women, violence and the representation of both in art. The graphic depiction of both the violence – extremely sexual in nature – she is subject to and the violence she delivers in return has been the justification for critics to discuss whether or not her story deserves to be taken seriously or if it’s nothing but salacious drama only befitting the pulp from which tradition it springs.

Let’s say this immediately and clearly – misogynist imagery does not equal a misogynist work of art. That’s a lazy correlation too many readers, watchers and reviewers currently make about books, films and the like, and it’s simplistic and shallow. Rape scenes do not automatically mean sexual content is being using gratuitously. Descriptions of women being victimized do not immediately point to exploitation.

The impulse to label it as such is of course well-intended, and sometimes well-suited. It’s a sign of progress and, in general, a step in the right direction. But it’s not truly progress if it’s only an impulsive leap to the opposite end of the spectrum instead of a carefully considered conclusion about a terribly complicated and nuanced topic.

Let’s also be clear about this – it’s entirely possible for a book to be feminist without featuring a single feminist in it. Lisbeth Salander, for example, is not a feminist. She’s an extremely emotionally damaged individual focused on survival, although she seems to be at least on the path to improvement by the close of the trilogy. She’s a victim of systematic abuse and torture, and she’s committed to self-preservation and revenge by any means possible. She’s not a necessarily noble figure. She doesn’t have to be to prove Larsson’s point. The fact that she isn’t proves it even more successfully.

To Read the Rest of the Essays

Reel Injun: On the Trail of the Hollywood Indian (October 18 and 21)

(Extra credit opportunity for all of my students)

Reel Injun: On the Trail of the Hollywood Indian



Cree filmmaker Neil Diamond takes a look at the Hollywood Indian, exploring the portrayal of North American Natives through a century of cinema. Traveling through the heartland of America, and into the Canadian North, Diamond looks at how the myth of “the Injun” has influenced the world's understanding—and misunderstanding—of Natives. More information on the film.

Reel Injun Screenings

October 18, 2010 6:00 PM
Lexington Public Library, Central Branch
140 East Main Street
Lexington, KY 40507

October 21, 2010 3:30PM & 6:00PM
Fern Creek High School
9115 Fern Creek Road
Louisville, KY 40291

KET partners with the Louisville Film Society and the Lexington Public Library to host Community Cinema and hopes to include more cities across the state. If you would like to discuss the possibility of Community Cinema screenings in your Kentucky location, contact Sara O'Keefe at KET.

Chris Hedges: Reinterpreting War

Reinterpreting War
On the Media



Vasily Grossman covered the Eastern Front of WWII for the Soviet Union and fictionalized his reporting as the novel “Life and Fate.” Curzio Malaparte covered the Eastern Front for the Axis Powers and fictionalized his reporting as the novel “Kaputt.” Veteran correspondent Chris Hedges talks about the two books and why he thinks fiction is the better way to capture the full scope of war.



To Listen/Read

Evangelos Tziallas: Torture porn and surveillance culture

Torture porn and surveillance culture
by Evangelos Tziallas
Jump Cut

Surveillance is everywhere, and its social ubiquity has led to it being a common element or mode of representation in contemporary moving image culture. As Thomas Levin has argued,

“By the 1990s…cinematic narration could be said, in many cases, to have effectively become synonymous with surveillant enunciation as such.”[1][open endnotes in new window]

Surveillance has become a mode of visual production, as in reality television shows like Big Brother (US, 2001) or films like Timecode (2000); it has become a narrative and thematic element, as in Caché (2005), Disturbia (2007) The Borne Ultimatum (2007); and sometime it serves as both a mode of production and narrative theme, as in The Conversation (1974), Sliver (1993), The Truman Show (1998), or the British sitcom Peep Show. When surveillance functions as both mode of production and major script element, as Levin puts it,

“It is this ambiguity—between surveillance as narrative subject, i.e. as thematic concern, and surveillance as the very condition or structure of narration itself—that will become increasingly characteristic of the cinema of the 1990s.”[2]

The prevalence of surveillance in contemporary media is now so vast that, for the purpose of this paper, I would like to focus on a small group of films that exemplify contemporary discourses on surveillance in a specific way. This group of films is collectively known as “torture porn.”

The label “torture porn” refers to a loose association of feature fiction films featuring scenes of extreme violence and torture. David Edelstein coined the phrase in his 2006 New York Magazine article as he quickly surveyed a common trend of violent representations in popular cinema. The catchy term became a trendy buzzword and now torture porn is considered a horror sub-genre in its own right.[3] Although I will in part investigate torture porn as a cinematic sub-genre, my goal is to demonstrate the centrality of surveillance in these films as shaping narrative elements, modes of presentation, and iconographic motifs in ways that convey deep anxieties about the alteration of “the gaze.”

Surveillance in torture porn allegorizes larger cultural and political trends in panoptic (the few watching the many) and synoptic (the many watching the few) subjectivities. Surveillance metonymically encompasses looking and the complex and ambivalent nature of looking and being looked at, and these elements of human social life are currently undergoing radical transformation due to technological advancements spurring on a “culture of surveillance,” or “surveillance culture.” As Nicholas Mirzoeff has noted,

“Since the 1970s, one of the striking phenomena that have come to make visual culture seem a vital topic has been the convergence of spectacle and surveillance.”[4]

“Surveillance” and the larger category, “image,” are merging together into surveillant images. If these two methods of representation have united, then this union requires us to investigate how the act of looking follows this social and technological change and what the ramifications of this merged, or altered, cultural gaze are. Looking is biological; gazing is cultural. As culture evolves, so too does the gaze.

To Read the Rest of the Essay

Sakuntala Banaji: Seduced ‘Outsiders’ versus Sceptical ‘Insiders’? -- Slumdog Millionaire through its Re/Viewers

Seduced ‘Outsiders’ versus Sceptical ‘Insiders’?: Slumdog Millionaire through its Re/Viewers
by Shakuntala Banaji,
Centre for the Study of Children, Youth & Media, UK
Participations



Slumdog Millionaire (Dir. Danny Boyle, 2008) is now best known for winning numerous Awards at the Baftas, Golden Globes and the Oscars. After being publicly championed by an unprecedented number of film critics, it caused something of a media sensation when celebrities in Bollywood and some (but not all) viewers in India publicly labeled it exploitative and unfair to India and Indians. Told in flashback from the point of view of a young man, the film narrates the story of two brothers from a shantytown in Bombay, who choose different pathways in life. In the opening sequence of the film, one of the brothers has reached the final of the much-vaunted TV quiz show, the Indian version of ‘Who wants to be a Millionaire’. Arrested, apparently for cheating, Jamal Malik ‘explains’ to his police interrogators how it is possible for someone like him, a slum child with little formal education, to know the answers to the most seemingly esoteric questions: he has learned the answers through bitter experience. And in the process of recounting these, he opens for the audience (what is displayed unashamedly by the film as) a window on the world of two Muslim children born in a Bombay shantytown in the 1980s. Via fast-paced sequences full of jump cuts – depicting communal riots, professional begging and child molesting gangsters – the boys and the camera travel across India and back again. They return in search of an old girlfriend as Bombay’s/Mumbai’s economy goes neo-liberal and gated communities spring up, isolating the rich from the poor. In tandem, the younger brother, Jamal, stays honest, innocent, hard-working and loyal – a tea-boy in a call centre; the older brother becomes a gangster’s lackey, corrupt and aggressive, taking the quickest possible route to what seems like financial success.

A viewing of the film during a year of media hype, followed by a series of random but heated discussions about it, crystallised into an urge to discover whether and how different kinds of knowledge and experience – about cinema, about Hindi cinema, about India, about Bombay, about urban poverty (Indian style) – played into critical responses to the film, by viewers or by established film critics. Saying that the same film and the same set of circumstances can call up wildly different even contradictory viewpoints from people, or from the same person at different times should no longer be much of a surprise. Meaning does not reside solely in media texts; this has been established over the decades via painstaking theoretical critique and empirical scholarship (see, among others, Austin 2002, Buckingham 1993, Barker and Brooks 1998, Mankekar 1999 and Staiger 1999). Although there are still those new to the subject who might write as though texts are all-powerful and hold ultimate sway, enough has been done to challenge a text-centric understanding of meaning and effects to obviate the necessity for another paper on this topic. What is interesting about people’s reactions to this particular film is not, in fact, the divergence of opinion per se. What is intriguing however is, first, the vehemence and types of the feelings called forth by what might seem a fairly prosaic rags to riches story, albeit set in a (to most Western audiences) exotic setting: delight and jubilation, inspiration, tears, disgust, anger and humiliation are only some of the emotions expressed by those who watched it. Second, and more confusingly, perhaps, it was read as an educational – almost an ethnographic – tale by some re/viewers, a contrast to Bollywood glitz and to the mawkish sentimentality of documentaries about India. Additionally, and more problematically, perhaps, opinions expressed about the film contained tropes of quasi-orientalist (Said 1978) or re-orientalist (Lau 2007) cultural and political discourse. Indeed, the quaint assumption of an ethnographic subject when a film or book happens to feature non-white and non-western protagonists is a classic feature of such discourse in relation to fiction genres. In a fascinating paper delivered on this subject, Ellen Dengel-Janic argues that ‘[w]hat the film negates and helps to mask in a pleasurable visual manner is a translocated fear of poverty and the abject…. the film’s appeal reflects not only the West’s exoticism of India, but also its repressed fear and paranoia of becoming abject and poor’ (2009: NP). But given the wide range of viewers who ultimately encountered the film, can such a critical reading be sustained? Understanding the combinations of circumstance and experience, contextual and technical knowledge and generic expectation that led to particular discourses or technical sequences in films being picked up and enjoyed or selectively critiqued has been the aim of much of my work on Hindi cinema to date (see Banaji 2006 and 2008) and remains at the core of this paper. However, even these combinations do not capture fully the investments people have in their judgments about films or indeed the complexity of the emotional and cultural histories that inflect these judgments.

To Read the Rest of the Essay

The Center on Law and Security: 24 -- Torture Televised Panel featuring Jane Mayer, Richard Slotkin, Tony Lagouranis, Stephen Holmes ...

Open Forum: 24 -- Torture Televised
The Center on Law and Security

featuring Jane Mayer, Richard Slotkin, Tony Lagouranis, Stephen Holmes, and Karen Greenberg.

To Listen to the Panel Discussion

Henriette Gunkel and Christiane König: ‘You are not welcome here’ -- post-apartheid negrophobia and real aliens in Blomkamp’s District 9

‘You are not welcome here’: post-apartheid negrophobia and real aliens in Blomkamp’s District 9
by Henriette Gunkel and Christiane König
DarkMatter

When District 9 (D9) was released in August 2009, the film was an immediate box office hit in several countries. This was much to the surprise of critics, reviewers and bloggers, who seemed astonished by the fact that a science fiction film with this impact could originate from South Africa. Internet forum discussions and an E-Symposium emerged as a response to the film, which continues to be the subject of controversial discussion.[1] While many celebrate the film in relation to the ‘generic’ genre of Science Fiction as a promising representative of a thriving African Cinema, others reject the film on the basis of its socio-political message, as yet another racist movie about Africa – with reference to the depiction of both ‘the Nigerians’ and the aliens.[2] In this article, we would like to move beyond a crudely metaphorical reading of representation (‘the aliens stand for X in reality’), and explore the degree to which the film foregrounds its own mediality. This focus moves us beyond a polarizing position that immediately rejects the film as racist, and allows us to engage with a complex and original text unlike so many other films that take ‘Africa’ as their subject.

From its first image, D9 is hyper-reflective on its own status as a medium. As viewers, we are confronted with a flamboyant play of remediation, as sketched out by Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin.[3] There, the two strategies of immediacy (a medium makes itself transparent on the referent: ‘looking through’) and hypermediacy (a medium reflects on itself by differentiating itself from another: ‘looking at’) struggle in manifold ways to constitute a complexity not only of the narrative and its semiotic significance but also the overall status of the depicted. In D9, documentaries from the 1980s are used to depict the arrival of the aliens in South Africa. TV-reports are added, which not only show the (militant) conflicts between the local population and the aliens but also the struggles of the aliens with the local police over the following years. In interwoven faux documentaries ‘experts’ express their opinion concerning all social and political issues that the film raises within its course, culminating in a fictitious TV-report with a well-known news anchor man from the SABC network. Visual and aesthetic strategies from Hollywood movies, surveillance cameras and computer games complement and complicate this overloaded genre play.

This form of hypermediacy not only references surveillance societies and 24-hours news cycles but characterizes the film from its beginning as hybrid. As a hybrid the film systematically denies the viewer easy access to the authenticity of what is portrayed. By doing so the film unsettles dichotomies such as ‘us’ and ‘them’ as well as understandings of difference and identity. This needs to be understood as a strategy of subversion but more importantly as the productivity of the film itself. The reality that the film pretends to represent is in fact only produced through the film. In this way it becomes clear that the authenticity or putative origin of any identity (and therefore of any social reality depicted in the film) did not exist beforehand but is rather the effect of its positioning through media. Accordingly, it is important to look closely at the media strategies that are initiated through the film at particular moments and examine their purpose to either authenticate referents or to display their constructedness. We will return to these strategies throughout this article.

To Read the Rest of the Essay

Atticus Narain: Rethinking post-colonial representation after Slumdog Millionaire

Rethinking post-colonial representation after Slumdog Millionaire
by Atticus Narain
Dark Matter



Sound bites: poverty porn, slum tourism, imperialist guilt flick, post-colonial inequalities continued, Bombay’s underbelly revealed- revelled, brilliant, feel good movie, accurate portrayal, gross misrepresentation, a visual Lonely Planet guide to Mumbai, an (anti-)Indian movie, Bollywood mania. On television Boyle takes questions from enthusiastic BrAsians; in The Guardian Rushdie laments the “impossibility on impossibility”; and angry Amitabh Bachchan writes back – sounds jealous; my own contribution would be Angelina Jolie and Madonna tussling at the Oscars over adopting the movie’s child actors.

The American and British film industries’ acclamation of Slumdog Millionaire has raised much media debate. Issues of authenticity, cultural ownership,‘burden of representation’, the nationality of its director, its content and stylistic aesthetics, and Eurocentric and/or re-Orientalist visions, have created a vast contact zone for analyzing cinema, identity, and nationalism. None of this is new of course – contention of where Kurosawa and Ray belong continues; Spike Lee’s criticism of Quentin Tarantino’s use of Afro-American linguistics replays these debates – albeit with different histories of race, empire and exploitation. Using child actors as allegories of post-colonial development is characteristic of new national cinemas. This is brilliantly done in Amir Naderi’s The Runner; Salam Bombay is a little geographically closer, and numerous Indian socials of the fifties and sixties deployed children as central to narrative development and critique.

Slumdog Millionaire does not confirm to the contexts of such debates usually associated with World – Third – Alternative – cinemas, certainly not in the political sense that these cinemas are often discussed. Every now and again a film’s popularity transcends the categories accorded them and is propelled to a much higher and holy accolade. Slumdog Millionaire is City of Joy for the twenty-first century, informed by an anthropological attempt at readdressing inequalities of representation by “giving” the camera to the Other and erasing the need for white protagonists – well almost. If Boyle’s ethnicity was different would all this discussion be taking place? What happened to Gurinder Chadha’s aesthetic and agenda? Forced to succumb to funding desires of reproducing the East for the West- Bride and Prejudice- or producing minority narratives that tick every possible identity ‘clash’? Gentle, unassuming, had never even been to India prior to filming, Boyle does it better!

To Read the Rest of the Essay

Simon Augustine: Mental Illness in American Cinema

All of America is a madhouse waiting to make a break for it in one direction or another; we are all image-makers, movie-makers, mental patients, grindhouse perverts, aspiring saints. If the mental hospital is a place where dreams and nightmares are tyrants, overwhelming touch and cry, then often the everyday world "on the outside" does not dream enough—loses sight of the spiritual, transcendent, creative elements of our minds. We go the movies, because in a practical sense, we need to be insane for a couple of hours. Unlike the (officially) committed patients of the asylum, however, afterwards we usually get to go home.

--Augustine, Simon. Minds In Progress: Mental Illness in American Cinema." Green Cine Daily (September 1, 2009)