[Re]Framing Violence: Hollywood Cinema and Late Capitalism, 1967–2001

Description

In the first section, "Concepts and Constitutions," Chapter One explores how recent cultural, critical, and philosophical trends have framed violence as a concept in ways both concordant and discordant with the violent imaginary and its historio-cultural foundations, while Chapter Two situates the cinematic apparatus as not only a central and vital mechanism in those processes, but also as an intrinsically violent machine that accommodates us to and implicates us in the violence of the violent imaginary. The second section, "Functions and Formations," extends and examines the implications of the first, focusing on how they come to bear on the late-capitalist mode of existence. Chapter Three emphasizes the political, examining how traditional conceptualizations of violence are problematized by contemporary transformations in bourgeois class consciousness. Chapter Four emphasizes the experiential, exploring how affective considerations may help us distinguish between "images of violence" and "the violence of images." Chapter Five returns to the epistemological, political, and experiential, tracing how pervasive tropes of melancholia, apocalypse, and suicidality in millennial Hollywood films point to specific resignations (and even new potentialities) in the full bloom of what Guy Debord calls "the integrated spectacle."