Violence and American Cinema

Description

First Published in 2001. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company. Cover Half Title Title Page Copyright Page Table of Contents Acknowledgments Introduction: Violence and American Cinema: Notes for an Investigation Part One: Historicizing Hollywood Violence 1. Violence and Film Notes 2. The Violence of a Perfect Moment Boom Gone Crash Speed Notes 3. Violence American Style: The Narrative Orchestration of Violent Attractions The Cultural Reinscription of The Wild Bunch American NOVA: The Narrative Orchestration of Violent Attractions The Violent Orchestration of Hybridization and Hysteriain Bonnie and Clyde A Futuristic Vision of Violent Representation in A Clockwork Orange Fast-Forward to the Super-NOVA of the 1990s The Spectacle of Violent Subjectivity in Natural Born Killers Pulp Fiction as Database Narrative Muscling in on the Action: Ethnicity and Masculine Violence The Elliptical Verbal Rhythms of Menace II Society Hong Kong’s Choreographed Crossovers to Hollywood Notes Part Two: Revisiting Violent Genres 4. “Clean, Dependable Slapstick”: Comic Violence and the Emergence of Classical Hollywood Cinema Executing Comic Violence: Buster, Fatty, and The Butcher Boy Positioning Comic Violence: Violent Attractions and Hollywood Classicism The Persistence of Violent Attractions Notes 5. The Spectacle of Criminality Notes 6. Murder’s Tongue: Identity, Death, and the City in Film Noir Out of the Past Habeas Corpus City of Night Coda: Postwar Necropolis Notes 7. Violence in the Film Western Just Looking? A Man Being Beaten Necrology “The Value of Violence” and the 1960s Notes 8. Passion and Acceleration: Generic Change in the Action Film Passion History: Scapegoat and Idol Body: The Honorable Wound Pleasure: “Fucking around with the Law” Acceleration History: Acceleration and Inertia Body: His Majesty the Ideal Ego Pleasure: Supreme Certitude Repetition History: Aggravated Redundancy Body: No Point of View and Nothing to See Pleasure: Simulated Stimulation Notes Part Three: Hollywood Violence and Cultural Politics 9. Black Violence as Cinema: From Cheap Thrills to Historical Agonies Notes 10. Documenting Domestic Violencein American Films Popular Conceptions Myths about Domestic Violence Communicated by Films Myth 1: Beatings leave no permanent damage and there are no consequences. Myth 2: Batterers are not like us—they’re mobsters, or immigrants, or lower class. Myth 3: Women enjoy rough sex and secretly want to be raped. Myth 4: Women who are battered are asking for it. Myth 5: Women are batterers too, so men are victims of “spousal violence.” Myth 6: Ordinary men don’t batter or abuse mates and children. Myth 7: Women can stop the abuse by leaving the batterer. Myth 8: Women who successfully escape their batterer do it all by themselves Melodrama and Recent Depictions of Family Violence Notes 11. Splitting Difference: Global Identity Politics and the Representation of Torture in the Counterhistorical Dramatic Film Inspired Truths and Historical Fictions Symbolic Safety and Real Harm: The Spectacle of the Wounded Body Notes 12. Holocaust Film Criticism and the Politics of Judeo-Christian Phenomenology Notes Contributors Index