“It Was a Scene of Life in the Rough”: Herman Melville, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Paracinema

Abstract

Jeffrey Sconce defined paracinema (“a most elastic textual category”) as a term that houses nearly every conceivable (non-pornographic) film subgenre of ill-repute. For Sconce, paracinema was “less a distinct group of films than a particular reading protocol.” In many ways, paracinema’s elasticity and approach to critique mirrors that of Susan Sontag’s articulation of Camp (“A sensibility”). What both concepts reveal, however, is a perspective into the history of taste as a critical feature of culture in the United States—something taking root in the highbrow/lowbrow debates in America catalyzed around the nineteenth century’s theater and publishing industries. Firmly in the center of it all was Nathaniel Hawthorne and Herman Melville; their literature and their legacies. Therefore, by tracing how matters of taste transformed American culture in ways that directly impacted how we conceived of and adapted the literature of Hawthorne and Melville, I bring paracinema (and its Camp tendrils) into focus to analyze two specific adaptations of their works: Twice-Told Tales (1963), starring Vincent Price, and Asylum Pictures’ (of Sharknado fame) 2010: Moby Dick (2010, naturally). The result is a critical insight into two otherwise unremarkable films that helps provide a backward glance at taste and its transformations over the past few centuries in the United States.