Pub Date : 2019-04-03DOI: 10.1080/10436928.2019.1597403
Candice Wilson
In the 1956 melodrama Written on the Wind, director Douglas Sirk introduces the spectator to a Texan oil family, the Hadleys, matched in their wealth only by their dysfunction. Opening on a sports car speeding through dark, empty roads against a skyline dominated by oil wells and derricks, one by one we meet the main characters as they react to the arrival of Kyle Hadley, the drunk driver of the car. Moving from the bright yellow sports car that overloads the frame, to the husband who drunkenly spills off frame, Sirk’s camera cants at a low angle, causing the Hadley mansion to hover eerily above the spectator: the scene is a surreal combination of vibrant colors and abundant shadows that haunt the filmic frame, in the dramatic gusting wind and leaves that herald the entrance of the alcoholic husband, Kyle, and in the amplified melodramatic codes that set the stage for spousal betrayal. Surrounded by spectating characters who trace Kyle’s path of destruction, Sirk’s swelling soundtrack emphasizes performative spaces dominated by wind and dying leaves, reminding the spectator both on and off-screen that “a faithless lover’s kiss is written on the wind [and] just like the dying leaves our dreams we’ve calmly thrown away.” Cutting from a shot of the dutiful and frightened wife, Lucy, struggling weakly from bed, to her concerned love interest and honorable best friend, Mitch, and Kyle’s sultry, nymphomaniac sister, Marylee, in her nightgown, Sirk balances his key characters in a series of consecutive, fixed framings that build an ominous narrative tension at odds with the melancholic non-diegetic score. A gun fires. A woman falls. Throbbing with a sense of otherness in its emotional excess and artificiality, Sirk sets the stage for a critical examination of the American family and postwar materialism. This stage, I argue, escapes the narrative drive of the film to become something else in its delirium – a performative space that allows the spectator a different type of emotive entrance into the cinematic frame. Rather than a conventional understanding of melodrama as a dialectic of excess, where emotion builds and collapses in a process of catharsis, I contend that melodrama enters into a realm of invisibility through the embodiment of the spectator within performances of violent emotion. These heightened emotive moments of the spectator – both within the screen and in the audience viewing the film – allow for the fleeting visibility of the
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Pub Date : 2019-04-03DOI: 10.1080/10436928.2019.1597611
Anna Ioanes, Douglas Dowland
In the second half of this special double issue of LIT: Literature Interpretation Theory, we continue to explore the forms and effects of violent feeling in contemporary literature, film, and culture. Taken together, the essays in this issue help us to connect violence and feeling through the vectors of racial identity, spatial politics, trauma, neoliberalism, and embodiment. Working at a number of different scales–from the broad sweep of Hurricane Katrina and its aftereffects to the inhalation and exhalation of a single breath–these essays show how violent feelings operate at multiple scales to connect the minor to the epochal, the social to the embodied. These essays address violent feelings across the twentiethand twenty-first century, beginning with the large-scale use of violent aerial technologies in World War I and concluding with considerations of police violence as it has been critiqued by the Black Lives Matter movement. In order to apprehend large-scale formations of violent feeling like these, however, wemust also look to local, particular, even private manifestations of violence and feeling. The looming threat of large-scale violence, after all, manifests in the individual body, its anxieties and its pain. As Sean Austin Grattan notes, there are “intersections between violence, belonging, and publics in the United States” that are in need of study (63). He notes the “overwhelming fear of difference” that saturated the American public sphere in the 1990s, that manifested in the Los Angeles riots and the rise of Giuliani in New York City, but that is also evident in an array of texts by Anna Deveare Smith, ToniMorrison, andChuck Palahniuk. Seen in this way, the 1990s seem stuck between the affective intensities of violence and the emptiness of boredom, suggestive of a broader disorder in “the competing models of citizenship” which emerged in the decade (73). As a flashpoint where new forms of citizenship emerge, and, with them, new formations of affect and sociality, the 1990s are also a meeting point of, for example, the tensions of the Cold War and the slow violences of late capitalism. We know, as Grattan does, that violence creates new assemblages in its very act of destroying others. For a moment, its punch connects aggressor and victim, and just as instantly, it clarifies the incommensurable relationship
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Pub Date : 2019-04-03DOI: 10.1080/10436928.2019.1597404
Kyoko Shoji Hearn
In the climactic hurricane scene in Zora Neale Hurston’s 1937 novel Their Eyes Were Watching God, the narrator depicts southern black migrant workers waiting in silence for the attack of the storm: “The wind came back with triple fury, and put out the light for the last time. They sat in company with the others in other shanties, their eyes straining against crude walls and their souls asking if He meant to measure their puny might against His. They seemed to be staring at the dark, but their eyes were watching God” (Hurston 160). Hurston’s 1937 depiction of a hurricane conjures up memories of other southern storms, especially Hurricane Katrina in 2005. Indeed, Keith Cartwright’s reading of Their Eyes suggests that Hurston’s novel “will be read with new poignancy following Hurricane Katrina’s destruction and the exposure of many of our old wounds” (741). Hurston’s black workers waiting for judgment bear an uncanny resemblance to those who were left in the deluge in New Orleans. The violent weather described in the novel completely eliminates a sense of time and instead makes visible the repetitive image of black bodies helplessly waiting “in company with the others in other shanties” (160). Linking Hurston’s hurricane to Katrina is especially relevant when we think of the unnatural aspect of natural disasters whereby southern black working-class communities are disproportionately affected, followed by failure and indifference of local, state, and federal governments in the rescue effort. Both storms expose racial aspects and the concentration of poverty unseen in these events’ public narratives, making visible the dead black bodies in the deep southern water. A similarly violent representation of a southern storm can be found in Beyoncé’s 2016 visual album Lemonade. The album and its complex imagery of southern water tell a stormy story of love, anger, and anguish over an uneven power relationship that can be linked to the larger social and cultural context of contemporary black experiences. While Lemonade is not the singer’s first attempt to create a “visual album” (her prior release Beyoncé is in the same vein), it achieves a breakthrough in its effort to visually weave a black woman’s psychological journey from loss and pain to redemption into a larger collective narrative. The fluctuations of the female protagonist’s flooding emotions arguably reflect the singer herself. However, Beyoncé links
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Pub Date : 2019-04-03DOI: 10.1080/10436928.2019.1597402
A. I. Gleisberg
In the spring of 2006, one of my lovers wanted to experience what it would be like to cross-dress in public. Having been assigned female at birth (AFAB) and having spent the majority of her life subscribing to a hyper-feminine expression and embodiment, her endeavor was to understand, for at least a moment, the affective aspects of passing as a man. Upon her transformation, she decided to go out to a local gay bar as a “test run” for her passing ability and to confront her own discomfort with expressing gender variance in public. Angles, located at the corner of Seaside Avenue and Kūhiō Avenue in Waikīkī (an area highly populated by tourists), was the gay bar of her choice, and one that would be conceivably a “safer” environment than attending a straight bar if she was unable to successfully pass as a man. To honor her request that I accompany her on this adventure as her “lady” counter-part, my more “feminine” accoutrements stood in stark contrast to her baggy jeans, long-sleeve button-down shirt, baseball cap, boots, and masculine, rugged aesthetic. Once we arrived at Angles and settled down for drinks with friends, my lover candidly expressed a sense of freedom that she attributed to how others at the bar responded to her current masculine expression. In a predominately white, cisgender, gay male bar, the performance of her masculinity was revered and desired. Her “success” with passing as a gay male was not just the result of her accurately performing a generic or normative version of masculinity; rather, it was also attributed to how she was being racially encoded as Latino by the other patrons. Although she has a darker complexion and is Irish American, she was able to appear and be coded as a young cholo by other white, cisgender gay men – several of whom hit on her and made remarks regarding the racialized otherness of her masculinity. Here, most of these men interpreted her racialized otherness as a product of the performative aspects of her masculine aesthetic. Among these white gay men, the fantasized brown body is often tied to a specific aesthetic that my lover was able to achieve in this moment, but would have been unattainable for her as a white woman. The circulation of a shared imaginary about the fantasized
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Pub Date : 2019-04-03DOI: 10.1080/10436928.2019.1597609
Iro Filippaki
Contemporary film-making is faced with a challenge: as news of violence, mass murder, and criminal horror constantly flood an ever-increasing number of screens worldwide – from cinema to television to cell phones – film violence risks being labelled irrelevant. Olivier Assayas and Yorgos Lanthimos respond to this challenge not by depicting ultraviolence in their films, as other contemporary film-makers like Darren Aronofsky have done, but by communicating an atmosphere of violent intensity and horror that, despite the absence of gore, colonizes the characters and permeates their reality. Two contemporary films, Assayas' Personal Shopper (2016, hereafter PS) and Lanthimos' The Killing of a Sacred Deer (2017, hereafter The Killing), use suspenseful strategies to depict violent affect through the exchange of emotional and material goods. In both films, violent affect is bookended by a suspenseful mise-en-scène which cannot be separated from the workings of neoliberal economy: the body in suspense is revealed as a body in debt, while the evocation of violent affect is inseparable from capitalist debt. As Marco Abel writes, what constitutes violence and influences the response to it does not necessarily depend on a visual representation of violence, but rather on a pre-existing affect surrounding violence (5). In PS and The Killing, the cinematic birth and sustenance of this horrific affect is routed through cinematic suspense and tied to the debt economy of neoliberal family relationships. Most film studies scholarship discussing violence and affect centers on the ability of violence and horror to alter the spectator’s mood or on the influence of traditionally violent aesthetics in crime and horror films. While there is no doubt that violent affect has a profound effect on the viewer, films can also deploy suspense as a violent affect – a technique that is central to what Patricia Pisters terms the neurothriller: the suspenseful film that is constructed around affective evocation rather than emplotment. Thus, I read these films along the lines of what Pisters calls the “primacy of affect” in the neurothriller (1), in which affect is used as a lever to uncover contemporary neoliberal dynamics far more horrific than the supernatural horror that is often represented in films. As neurothrillers, the films I address
当代电影制作面临着一个挑战：随着暴力、大规模谋杀和犯罪恐怖的新闻不断涌入全球越来越多的屏幕——从电影院到电视再到手机——电影暴力有被贴上无关紧要标签的风险。奥利维尔·阿萨亚斯（Olivier Assayas）和约戈斯·兰蒂莫斯（Yorgos Lanthimos）对这一挑战的回应并不是像达伦·阿罗诺夫斯基（Darren Aronofsky）等其他当代电影制作人那样，在他们的电影中描绘极端暴力，而是通过传达一种暴力强度和恐怖的氛围来应对，尽管没有血腥，但这种氛围还是殖民了角色并渗透到他们的现实中。两部当代电影，阿萨亚斯的《个人购物者》（2016，以下简称PS）和兰蒂莫斯的《神鹿之杀》（2017，以下简称《杀戮》），使用悬疑策略，通过情感和物质商品的交换来描绘暴力影响。在这两部电影中，暴力情感都以悬疑的mise en scène结尾，这与新自由主义经济的运作密不可分：悬疑中的身体被揭示为负债中的身体，而暴力情感的唤起与资本主义债务密不可分。正如Marco Abel所写，什么构成暴力并影响对暴力的反应，并不一定取决于暴力的视觉表现，而是取决于围绕暴力的预先存在的影响（5）。在《PS》和《杀戮》中，这种可怕影响的电影诞生和延续是通过电影悬念进行的，并与新自由主义家庭关系的债务经济联系在一起。大多数关于暴力和情感的电影研究学术都集中在暴力和恐怖改变观众情绪的能力上，或者集中在犯罪和恐怖电影中传统暴力美学的影响上。虽然毫无疑问，暴力情感对观众有着深远的影响，但电影也可以将悬疑作为一种暴力情感来运用——这是Patricia Pisters所说的神经收缩者的核心技术：悬疑电影是围绕情感唤起而非充实构建的。因此，我读这些电影的思路是，Pisters称之为《神经杀手》中的“情感至上”（1），在这部电影中，情感被用作揭示当代新自由主义动态的杠杆，远比电影中经常出现的超自然恐怖更可怕。作为神经收缩者，我所拍摄的电影
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Pub Date : 2019-04-03DOI: 10.1080/10436928.2019.1598225
Yan Tang
Yan Tang is a PhD candidate in English at the University of Victoria, Canada. Her research areas include 20th Century British literature, International Modernism, and affect studies.Two examples in...
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Pub Date : 2019-01-02DOI: 10.1080/10436928.2019.1561127
M. Ferguson
In a restaurant scene during the 2008 film In Bruges, after Ray punches a woman in the face who is defending her date, whom he has also punched, he deflects: “I would never hit a woman! I’d hit a woman who was trying to hit me with a bottle!” (33). The second statement immediately undercuts the first, retracting Ray’s stated values and calling attention to Ray’s idea of himself as the kind of man who would never hit a woman – a fiction that reveals its hypocrisy in the moment of its utterance. Significantly, Ray articulates a chivalric form of masculinity (claiming he would never hit a woman), which is belied by hypermasculinity (by punching the woman). This moment illustrates a key tenet of films written and directed by Martin McDonagh: embattled masculinity represented by an idea presented and then retracted. Thus, repetitive retractions in the films serve as a metaphor signaling the constructed, always-vulnerable nature of contemporary masculinity. Through feminist theories of masculinity as performance and accomplishment, this article addresses how hypermasculinity creates shame, which subsequently drives violence in McDonagh’s films In Bruges (2008) and Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri (2017). In close-reading these two films, I argue that McDonagh’s technical and thematic use of repetitive retraction – placing an idea on screen only to undermine it – offers a subversive critique of how hypermasculinity propels a cycle of violence. Characters in the films must accomplish masculinity, an effort that becomes humorous when made visible. By conspicuously staging and then removing hypermasculine utterances, McDonagh’s films suggest the potential for alternative forms of masculinity that allow men to connect with others and exercise their emotional range, such as fatherhood and friendship. McDonagh built his career as an Anglo-Irish playwright, earning a following for writing black comedies set in Ireland including The Beauty Queen of Leenane (1996) and The Lieutenant of Inishmore (2001). He then turned to writing and directing films, notably winning an Academy Award in 2006 for
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Pub Date : 2019-01-02DOI: 10.1080/10436928.2018.1561128
E. Brinkema
Yet it is this entirely a-referential, a-phenomenal, a-pathetic formalism that will win out in the battle among affects and find access to the moral world of practical reason, practical law, and rational politics. [...] Theoreticians of literature who fear they may have deserted or betrayed the world by being too formalistic are worrying about the wrong thing: in the spirit of Kant’s third Critique, they were not nearly formalistic enough. – Paul de Man, “Kant’s Materialism” (128)
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Pub Date : 2019-01-02DOI: 10.1080/10436928.2019.1560877
Joshua Gooch
After the cascade of allegations of sexual assault made against Harvey Weinstein, Quentin Tarantino’s longtime producer, what can one say about Tarantino or the violence of his films? According to Uma Thurman, star of his reputation-making Pulp Fiction (1994), Tarantino learned that Weinstein tried to sexually assault her prior to shooting Kill Bill, Vol. 1 (2003); Thurman has indicated that this may have soured their working relationship on the two-part film (Dowd). Richard Rodriguez, Tarantino’s longtime collaborator on films such as From Dusk Till Dawn (1996) and Sin City (2005), asserts that he wrote his segment of Tarantino’s next release, Grindhouse (2007), for Rose McGowan in response to her claims of having been raped by Weinstein. After hearing McGowan’s story, Rodriguez remarked: “I ... revealed to Rose right then and there that I was about to start writing a movie with Quentin Tarantino, a double feature throwback to 70’s exploitation movies, and that if she was interested, I would write her a BAD ASS character and make her one of the leads” (Lang). When the allegations against Weinstein appeared, Tarantino explained to the New York Times that he knew about the alleged assaults of Thurman, McGowan, and Mira Sorvino, and admitted, “I knew enough to do more than I did” (Kantor). At the very least, Tarantino, by his own admission, is implicated in a Hollywood culture pervaded by abuse. To engage with his films now means that one must grapple with the ways in which his work conjures and justifies violent feelings. Such issues have marked Tarantino’s work from the start, from the opening dialogue about Madonna in Reservoir Dogs (1991) to the questionable critique of media in Natural Born Killers (1994). However, Tarantino’s films subsequent to his apparent knowledge of Weinstein’s alleged crimes mark a renewed focus on the revenge plot. Death Proof (2007), Inglourious Basterds (2009), Django Unchained (2012), and The Hateful Eight (2015) present viewers with representational questions about violence in terms of gender and race, and attempt to build an aesthetic and ethical project to examine the production of feelings that encourage, justify, or incite violence. To recognize the nature of this project does not mean that one should accept at face value
在针对昆汀·塔伦蒂诺(Quentin Tarantino)的长期制片人哈维·韦恩斯坦(Harvey Weinstein)的一连串性侵指控之后，人们对塔伦蒂诺或他电影中的暴力又能说些什么呢?根据《低俗小说》(1994)的主演乌玛·瑟曼(Uma Thurman)的说法，塔伦蒂诺得知韦恩斯坦在拍摄《杀死比尔》第1卷(2003)之前曾试图性侵犯她;瑟曼表示，这可能会使他们在两部电影(Dowd)上的合作关系恶化。理查德·罗德里格斯是塔伦蒂诺的长期合作伙伴，曾合作过《从黄昏到黎明》(1996年)和《罪恶之城》(2005年)等影片。罗德里格斯声称，他为塔伦蒂诺的下一部影片《刑房》(2007年)写了一段台词，以回应罗斯·麦高恩声称被温斯坦强奸的指控。听完麦高恩的故事后，罗德里格斯说:“我……当时我就告诉罗斯，我要开始和昆汀·塔伦蒂诺一起写一部电影，一部回溯到70年代剥削电影的双长片，如果她感兴趣，我会给她写一个坏蛋角色，让她成为主角之一。”当针对温斯坦的指控出现时，塔伦蒂诺向《纽约时报》解释说，他知道对瑟曼、麦高恩和米拉·索维诺的性侵指控，并承认，“我知道得足够多，可以做得更多”(坎特)。至少，塔伦蒂诺自己承认，他与充斥着虐待的好莱坞文化有牵连。现在，要参与他的电影，就意味着人们必须努力理解他的作品是如何唤起并证明暴力情绪的正当性的。从1991年《落水狗》(Reservoir Dogs)中关于麦当娜的开场对白，到1994年《天生杀手》(Natural Born Killers)中对媒体的质疑，这些问题从一开始就标志着塔伦蒂诺的作品。然而，塔伦蒂诺显然知道韦恩斯坦涉嫌犯罪后，他的电影标志着对复仇情节的重新关注。《死亡证明》(2007年)、《无耻混蛋》(2009年)、《被解放的姜戈》(2012年)和《八恶人》(2015年)向观众呈现了关于性别和种族方面的暴力的代表性问题，并试图建立一个美学和伦理项目，以检验鼓励、证明或煽动暴力的情感的产生。认识到这个项目的本质并不意味着我们应该接受它的表面价值
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Pub Date : 2019-01-02DOI: 10.1080/10436928.2019.1560878
Anson Koch-Rein
The monster is a ubiquitous figure in transgender rhetorics. Mary Shelley’s nameless creature, who has circulated under the name of his scientistcreator ‘Frankenstein’ since the 1830s, is often the specific trope used to cast transgender people as “monstrous, crazy, or less than human” (Rubin 12). Shelley’s nameless creature has been used to denounce transgender people as “synthetic products” of a “medical empire” (Raymond 12, 165) and as products of a “Frankenstein phenomenon” of “ghoulish gynaecologists” (Daly 69, 70). References to Frankenstein also frequently appear in transgender narratives and trans-affirmative scholarship (Barad, Cromwell, Noble), from titles like Susan Stryker’s “My Words to Victor Frankenstein Above the Village of Chamounix” to Rebecca Duke’s “Rendering ‘Frankenstein’s Monster’ Intelligible” and from memoir (Bono, Breedlove, Link & Raz, McBee) to poetry (Cannon, Ladin). For artist Anthony Clair Wagner, struggling with ‘monster,’ “this derogatory word,” is about nothing less than the question: “How can we own the transgender imaginary?” (341). The particularly prominent, affectively intense place of Frankenstein in the transgender imaginary is the starting point for this essay. While transphobic uses of Frankenstein’s monster as a trope generally draw on ideas of monstrous bodies and physical monstrosity, transgender metaphors of the monster use his rage-fueled agency to carve out a transgender speaking position in the face of the silencing gestures of transphobia. Trans studies scholar Harlan Weaver, for example, notes: “Stryker’s essay has made an indelible mark in transgender theories in the ways it takes up the monster’s rage as a means to elucidate a new form of doing and understanding trans bodies” (133). Rage is not the only means of understanding trans affect through Frankenstein, however. As a figure laden with negative affect, the monster offers transgender readers a way of addressing feelings of shame, gender dysphoria, and alienation from heteronormative gender and sexuality. Stryker uses the monster as a figure of bodily
怪物是跨性别修辞中无处不在的人物。玛丽·雪莱的无名生物自19世纪30年代以来一直以其科学创造者“弗兰肯斯坦”的名义流传，经常被用来将变性人塑造成“怪物、疯子或不如人”（鲁宾12）。雪莱的无名生物被用来谴责跨性别者是“医学帝国”的“合成产物”（Raymond 12165）和“残忍的妇科医生”的“弗兰肯斯坦现象”的产物（Daly 6970）。对弗兰肯斯坦的提及也经常出现在跨性别叙事和跨性别平权学术中（Barad，Cromwell，Noble），从苏珊·斯特里克（Susan Stryker）的《我对查穆尼克斯村上方的维克托·弗兰肯斯坦的话》（My Words to Victor Frankenstein Above the Village of Chamounix）到丽贝卡·杜克（Rebecca Duke。对于艺术家安东尼·克莱尔·瓦格纳来说，与“怪物”作斗争，“这个贬义词”无非是一个问题：“我们如何才能拥有变性人的想象？”（341）。弗兰肯斯坦在跨性别想象中特别突出、情感强烈的位置是这篇文章的起点。虽然对弗兰肯斯坦怪物的跨性别恐惧使用通常借鉴了怪物的身体和身体怪物的概念，但对怪物的跨变性隐喻利用他愤怒的代理，在面对跨性别恐惧的沉默姿态时，开辟了一个跨性别的发言位置。例如，跨性别研究学者哈兰·韦弗（Harlan Weaver）指出：“史崔克的文章在跨性别理论中留下了不可磨灭的印记，因为它利用怪物的愤怒来阐明一种新的方式来做和理解跨性别身体”（133）。然而，愤怒并不是通过《弗兰肯斯坦》理解跨性别情感的唯一手段。作为一个充满负面影响的人物，这个怪物为跨性别读者提供了一种解决羞耻感、性别焦虑以及对非规范性别和性行为的疏离感的方法。史崔克使用怪物作为身体的形象
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