Pub Date : 2023-01-02DOI: 10.1080/01956051.2023.2171660
Jennifer Ann Rea
Abstract The TV show Supernatural (2005–2020) features itinerant brothers Sam and Dean Winchester battling pagan gods from ancient Greco-Roman mythology who pose a threat to the present-day American way of life. The show utilizes two key concepts to define perils to American culture and values: the frontier myth and the myth of American exceptionalism. In a remote town in Alaska (i.e., the frontier), the brothers encounter the Roman goddess Fortuna, who reveals to the Winchesters how they can protect America. Fortuna’s appearance signifies a shift in how the show’s heroes, Sam and Dean, see themselves: they are forced to experience the despair everyday Americans feel when their luck runs out. A critical analysis of several key episodes will demonstrate that as the series advances, the focus on the brothers’ erasure of pagan threats to America is replaced by a critique of monotheistic religion, a reexamination of the myth of American exceptionalism, and social commentary on the problems with a culture based on consumerism.
{"title":"Heroes Never Sweat the Small Stuff: Fortuna in The CW’s Supernatural","authors":"Jennifer Ann Rea","doi":"10.1080/01956051.2023.2171660","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/01956051.2023.2171660","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract The TV show Supernatural (2005–2020) features itinerant brothers Sam and Dean Winchester battling pagan gods from ancient Greco-Roman mythology who pose a threat to the present-day American way of life. The show utilizes two key concepts to define perils to American culture and values: the frontier myth and the myth of American exceptionalism. In a remote town in Alaska (i.e., the frontier), the brothers encounter the Roman goddess Fortuna, who reveals to the Winchesters how they can protect America. Fortuna’s appearance signifies a shift in how the show’s heroes, Sam and Dean, see themselves: they are forced to experience the despair everyday Americans feel when their luck runs out. A critical analysis of several key episodes will demonstrate that as the series advances, the focus on the brothers’ erasure of pagan threats to America is replaced by a critique of monotheistic religion, a reexamination of the myth of American exceptionalism, and social commentary on the problems with a culture based on consumerism.","PeriodicalId":44169,"journal":{"name":"JOURNAL OF POPULAR FILM AND TELEVISION","volume":"31 1","pages":"39 - 48"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2023-01-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"88641291","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-01-02DOI: 10.1080/01956051.2023.2171681
Sylvie Magerstädt, M. Cyrino
{"title":"Introduction: The Ancient Classical World from Film to Television","authors":"Sylvie Magerstädt, M. Cyrino","doi":"10.1080/01956051.2023.2171681","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/01956051.2023.2171681","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":44169,"journal":{"name":"JOURNAL OF POPULAR FILM AND TELEVISION","volume":"22 1","pages":"2 - 7"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2023-01-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"82378904","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-01-02DOI: 10.1080/01956051.2023.2171657
Kirsten Day
Abstract In recent decades, scholars have recognized close connections between Western film and Greek and Roman antiquity, a relationship HBO’s Westworld brings into sharp relief through classical themes, characterizations, and allusions. Two episodes from season 2 in particular have a heavy classical bent. Episode 4 (“Riddle of the Sphinx”) casts park owner James Delos as an Oedipus figure who, in attempting to avoid his fate, runs right into it, as he is confronted with the truth about his nature and identity. In episode 9, William too is identified with Oedipus, when his wife commits suicide after recognizing her husband’s true nature, and William murders his own kin through a failure of recognition, while quotations from Plutarch and Plotinus highlight the issues of identity, fate, and self-knowledge that resound throughout the episode. While the series more broadly is concerned with patriarchal overreach and issues of free will and identity, these two episodes, when examined through a classical lens, offer a concentrated view. In the end, much like its Sophoclean predecessor, Westworld works as an implicit criticism of unbridled ambition, patriarchal narcissism, and lack of self-awareness.
{"title":"Oedipal Anxieties in HBO’s Westworld","authors":"Kirsten Day","doi":"10.1080/01956051.2023.2171657","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/01956051.2023.2171657","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract In recent decades, scholars have recognized close connections between Western film and Greek and Roman antiquity, a relationship HBO’s Westworld brings into sharp relief through classical themes, characterizations, and allusions. Two episodes from season 2 in particular have a heavy classical bent. Episode 4 (“Riddle of the Sphinx”) casts park owner James Delos as an Oedipus figure who, in attempting to avoid his fate, runs right into it, as he is confronted with the truth about his nature and identity. In episode 9, William too is identified with Oedipus, when his wife commits suicide after recognizing her husband’s true nature, and William murders his own kin through a failure of recognition, while quotations from Plutarch and Plotinus highlight the issues of identity, fate, and self-knowledge that resound throughout the episode. While the series more broadly is concerned with patriarchal overreach and issues of free will and identity, these two episodes, when examined through a classical lens, offer a concentrated view. In the end, much like its Sophoclean predecessor, Westworld works as an implicit criticism of unbridled ambition, patriarchal narcissism, and lack of self-awareness.","PeriodicalId":44169,"journal":{"name":"JOURNAL OF POPULAR FILM AND TELEVISION","volume":"31 1","pages":"18 - 28"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2023-01-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"76546070","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-01-02DOI: 10.1080/01956051.2023.2171659
Aimee Hinds Scott, Maciej P Paprocki
Abstract This article focuses on Black representations of Greco-Roman goddesses in film and on television, exploring the historical and ideological conditions which have allowed audiences to react neutrally or favorably toward such representations. Adopting the transmedial perspective, the intersecting forces that have gradually disjointed conceptions of the gods and goddesses of Greek mythology in popular culture and imagination are considered. Such forces include nonspecialist understandings of ancient gender and its artistic interpretation, race versus colorism, and the commodity culture of cinema. Some portrayals of Black goddesses examined in this article appear in works imagineered or influenced by Disney: Hercules (1997 film, 1998–1999 animated series), The Little Mermaid (1989 film, 2008 Broadway musical) and Once Upon a Time (2011–2018 television series), whereas others appear in Syfy’s The Magicians (2015-2020 television series) and Rick Riordan’s Percy Jackson (2010 film and the upcoming television series). Casting Black women as Greek goddesses gradually weakens the conceptual entanglement between the Whiteness and the Greco-Roman divine, priming audiences to accept alternative representations of deities through cultural accretion.
{"title":"Casting Black Athenas: Black Representation of Ancient Greek Goddesses in Modern Audiovisual Media and Beyond","authors":"Aimee Hinds Scott, Maciej P Paprocki","doi":"10.1080/01956051.2023.2171659","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/01956051.2023.2171659","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract This article focuses on Black representations of Greco-Roman goddesses in film and on television, exploring the historical and ideological conditions which have allowed audiences to react neutrally or favorably toward such representations. Adopting the transmedial perspective, the intersecting forces that have gradually disjointed conceptions of the gods and goddesses of Greek mythology in popular culture and imagination are considered. Such forces include nonspecialist understandings of ancient gender and its artistic interpretation, race versus colorism, and the commodity culture of cinema. Some portrayals of Black goddesses examined in this article appear in works imagineered or influenced by Disney: Hercules (1997 film, 1998–1999 animated series), The Little Mermaid (1989 film, 2008 Broadway musical) and Once Upon a Time (2011–2018 television series), whereas others appear in Syfy’s The Magicians (2015-2020 television series) and Rick Riordan’s Percy Jackson (2010 film and the upcoming television series). Casting Black women as Greek goddesses gradually weakens the conceptual entanglement between the Whiteness and the Greco-Roman divine, priming audiences to accept alternative representations of deities through cultural accretion.","PeriodicalId":44169,"journal":{"name":"JOURNAL OF POPULAR FILM AND TELEVISION","volume":"46 1","pages":"29 - 38"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2023-01-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"89774492","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-01-02DOI: 10.1080/01956051.2023.2171649
Dan Curley
Abstract The Netflix time-travel series Dark exhibits many motifs found in ancient Athenian tragedy, from themes to modes of presentation. These include the use of myth, emphasis on houses and family trauma, mirror scenes, and other techniques for showing parallel events across generations, acts of murder and incest, preoccupation with fate, and divine intervention in the form of deus-ex-machina appearances. Together these motifs encourage Dark to be viewed as a tragic enterprise for the twenty-first century.
{"title":"Time-travel Tragedy: Netflix’s Dark and Athenian Drama","authors":"Dan Curley","doi":"10.1080/01956051.2023.2171649","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/01956051.2023.2171649","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract The Netflix time-travel series Dark exhibits many motifs found in ancient Athenian tragedy, from themes to modes of presentation. These include the use of myth, emphasis on houses and family trauma, mirror scenes, and other techniques for showing parallel events across generations, acts of murder and incest, preoccupation with fate, and divine intervention in the form of deus-ex-machina appearances. Together these motifs encourage Dark to be viewed as a tragic enterprise for the twenty-first century.","PeriodicalId":44169,"journal":{"name":"JOURNAL OF POPULAR FILM AND TELEVISION","volume":"57 1","pages":"8 - 17"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2023-01-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"84786917","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-10-02DOI: 10.1080/01956051.2022.2140099
Caryn Murphy
Abstract This article examines a 1962 episode of The Defenders as a landmark scripted drama that staged a debate about unplanned pregnancies and abortion access in the early network era. “The Benefactor” served as a test of television networks’ authority, and its success created space for more open discussion of controversial topics in prime time.
{"title":"The Defenders’ Abortion Case: Revisiting a Television Controversy","authors":"Caryn Murphy","doi":"10.1080/01956051.2022.2140099","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/01956051.2022.2140099","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract This article examines a 1962 episode of The Defenders as a landmark scripted drama that staged a debate about unplanned pregnancies and abortion access in the early network era. “The Benefactor” served as a test of television networks’ authority, and its success created space for more open discussion of controversial topics in prime time.","PeriodicalId":44169,"journal":{"name":"JOURNAL OF POPULAR FILM AND TELEVISION","volume":"1 1","pages":"168 - 177"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2022-10-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"90293527","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-10-02DOI: 10.1080/01956051.2022.2141028
V. H. Pennanen
All persons are born single, and most eventually die without a partner. In today’s West these truisms, combined with high divorce rates and an accelerating trend toward lifelong singleness, could imply singleness is (at least) “a” new normal. Yet stereotypes persist, and women especially report pressures to find romance, get married, and embrace the traditional “happily ever after.” The growing field of singleness studies invites us to explore, question, and challenge traditional attitudes toward singleness and measure them against realities old and new. In their introduction to Single Lives, University College Dublin in Ireland professors Katherine Fama and Jorie Lagerwey cite recent works analyzing female singleness from an historical, sociological, psychological, or literary perspective, but they argue for a much broader understanding of singleness “as a flexible and varied state emerging throughout an individual’s life span, including the never-married and the widowed, separated, and divorced” (5), and they stress the need to welcome insights from multiple branches of the humanities.1 Five of Single Lives’ ten essays deal largely or entirely with screen portrayals of single women. They include two studies of literature-to-film adaptations: Jennifer S. Clark’s “Reclaiming Single Women’s Work: Gender, Melodrama, and the Processes of Adaptation in The Best of Everything” (28–47) and Martina Mastandrea’s “F. Scott Fitzgerald and ‘The Sinking Ship of Future Matrimony’: The Unmarried Flapper in Literature and on Screen” (81–101). Clark sifts through a rich array of archives (“letters, memoirs, production reports, publicity, and correspondence [concerning production]”) (29)—documenting women’s creative involvement in the 1959 film version of The Best of Everything, Rona Jaffe’s fact-based tale about urban, white-collar “girls.” Besides Jaffe herself, who resisted the boundaries imposed on her as “mere” consultant, the women who helped prepare Best of Everything for the screen, included Phyllis Levy; Jaffe’s editor; Dusty Negulesco; the director’s wife; and Edith Sommer, scriptwriter. Clark argues that despite the film’s glossy visual effects and use of melodramatic pathos—in lieu of the novel’s more complex realism—it retains more of the novel’s strengths than casual viewers might realize, thanks largely to women’s involvement. She reveals how Negulesco’s feedback helped restore humanity to the character of Amanda Farrow, the hard-edged boss acted by Joan Crawford, and how Jaffe’s refusal to be just a trivia expert sparked real-life drama. Clark also states that “secretaries at 20th CenturyFox” helped “shape” the film (29), but she provides no evidence for this intriguing claim. Mastandrea considers three Fitzgerald tales depicting intelligent, marriage-averse “flappers” vis à vis how they were or might have been interpreted for the screen. “Might have been” applies to This Side of Paradise because the film was never made, even though Fitzgerald him
所有人生来都是单身，大多数人死时都没有伴侣。在今天的西方，这些老生常谈，再加上高离婚率和加速的终身单身趋势，可能意味着单身(至少)是一种“新常态”。然而，刻板印象仍然存在，尤其是女性报告说，她们面临着寻找浪漫、结婚和接受传统的“从此幸福地生活在一起”的压力。单身研究领域的不断发展邀请我们探索、质疑和挑战对单身的传统态度，并将其与新旧现实相比较。在《单身生活》的介绍中，爱尔兰都柏林大学教授凯瑟琳·法玛和乔里·拉格威引用了最近的一些研究，从历史、社会学、心理学或文学的角度分析了女性的单身状态，但他们主张对单身有更广泛的理解，“单身是贯穿个人一生的一种灵活多样的状态，包括未婚、丧偶、分居和离婚”(5)。他们强调有必要欢迎来自人文学科多个分支的见解《单身生活》的十篇文章中，有五篇主要或完全讨论了单身女性的银幕形象。其中包括两个关于文学电影改编的研究:詹妮弗·s·克拉克(Jennifer S. Clark)的《恢复单身女性的工作:性别、情节剧和最好的一切中的改编过程》(28-47)和玛蒂娜·马斯特安德里亚(Martina Mastandrea)的《F。斯科特·菲茨杰拉德和《未来婚姻的沉船》:文学和银幕上的未婚少女》(81-101)。克拉克筛选了大量的档案(“信件、回忆录、制作报告、宣传和[与制作有关的]信件”)(29)，记录了女性在1959年电影版《最美好的一切》中的创造性参与。《最美好的一切》是罗纳·贾菲根据事实改编的关于都市白领“女孩”的故事。除了贾菲本人(她抵制强加给她的“纯粹”顾问的界限)之外，为电影《最好的一切》做准备的女性包括菲利斯·利维(Phyllis Levy);贾菲的编辑;Negulesco落满了尘土;导演的妻子;伊迪丝·索默，编剧。克拉克认为，尽管电影有着光鲜的视觉效果，并运用了煽情的感伤手法——取代了小说中更为复杂的现实主义——但它保留了小说中更多的优点，这在很大程度上要归功于女性的参与，而不是普通观众可能意识到的。她揭示了内古勒斯科的反馈如何帮助琼·克劳馥(Joan Crawford)饰演的冷酷无情的老板阿曼达·法罗(Amanda Farrow)这个角色恢复了人性，以及杰夫(Jaffe)拒绝仅仅做一个琐事专家如何引发了现实生活中的戏剧。克拉克还表示，“20世纪福克斯公司的秘书们”帮助“塑造”了这部电影(29)，但她没有提供任何证据来证明这一有趣的说法。马斯特安德里亚考虑了菲茨杰拉德的三个故事，这些故事描述了聪明、厌恶婚姻的“时髦女郎”，以及它们在银幕上的表现。“本可以”适用于《人间天堂》，因为这部电影从未被制作过，尽管菲茨杰拉德自己写了一个简介。他计划更多地描写轻佻的埃莉诺和罗莎琳德，把她们“置于她们的历史和社会背景中，玩弄刻板印象和类型”(90)。马斯特安德里亚没有说明，到底是因为菲茨杰拉德对女性的看法被认为对银幕来说过于激进，还是因为让菲茨杰拉德和他的妻子塞尔达(Zelda)主演的计划被证明是行不通的;也许没人知道然而，好莱坞确实制作了《迈拉遇见他的家人》和《离岸海盗》的版本;这两部影片都被认为已经失传，但正如马斯特安德里亚精心展示的那样，它们在当时(1920-1921年)得到了充分的记录和欢迎。在“迈拉”的例子中，文本和电影之间的对比是尖锐的，她在文本中“选择了自尊和单身”(91)，而不是嫁给一个爱操纵别人的富人，但在银幕上，她成了“丈夫猎人”，并嫁给了她的猎物。在原著和电影《离岸海盗》中，女主角拒绝与一个潜在的追求者——她叔叔想让她嫁给的男人——见面，但在他假扮海盗时爱上了他。马斯特安德里亚认为，影片通过渲染阿尼塔的冒险和狂野行为，促使观众希望她能结婚;另一方面，通过让阿尼塔知道托比的身份，这部电影给了她额外的自我代理和智慧，这是工人阶级(包括黑人)女性观众可能会喜欢的。在随后的几十年里，年轻、单身、有“自己的想法”的女性角色继续在银幕上闪耀。值得注意的是由桑德拉·迪饰演的加州少女吉吉特，以及由朱莉·安德鲁斯饰演的可爱的保姆玛丽亚小姐和玛丽·波平斯。帕梅拉·罗伯逊·沃西克关于《小吉特》系列的书《成为单身:小吉特的‘Between and Between’》(69-80)中有一章探讨了小吉特成为单身成年人的“工作和过程”，她尝试着恋爱和性感，试图弄清楚自己想要什么。
{"title":"SINGLE LIVES: MODERN WOMEN IN LITERATURE, CULTURE, AND FILM. Edited by Katherine Fama and Jorie Lagerwey. Rutgers UP, 2022. 240 pp. including bibliography and index. $36.95 softbound.","authors":"V. H. Pennanen","doi":"10.1080/01956051.2022.2141028","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/01956051.2022.2141028","url":null,"abstract":"All persons are born single, and most eventually die without a partner. In today’s West these truisms, combined with high divorce rates and an accelerating trend toward lifelong singleness, could imply singleness is (at least) “a” new normal. Yet stereotypes persist, and women especially report pressures to find romance, get married, and embrace the traditional “happily ever after.” The growing field of singleness studies invites us to explore, question, and challenge traditional attitudes toward singleness and measure them against realities old and new. In their introduction to Single Lives, University College Dublin in Ireland professors Katherine Fama and Jorie Lagerwey cite recent works analyzing female singleness from an historical, sociological, psychological, or literary perspective, but they argue for a much broader understanding of singleness “as a flexible and varied state emerging throughout an individual’s life span, including the never-married and the widowed, separated, and divorced” (5), and they stress the need to welcome insights from multiple branches of the humanities.1 Five of Single Lives’ ten essays deal largely or entirely with screen portrayals of single women. They include two studies of literature-to-film adaptations: Jennifer S. Clark’s “Reclaiming Single Women’s Work: Gender, Melodrama, and the Processes of Adaptation in The Best of Everything” (28–47) and Martina Mastandrea’s “F. Scott Fitzgerald and ‘The Sinking Ship of Future Matrimony’: The Unmarried Flapper in Literature and on Screen” (81–101). Clark sifts through a rich array of archives (“letters, memoirs, production reports, publicity, and correspondence [concerning production]”) (29)—documenting women’s creative involvement in the 1959 film version of The Best of Everything, Rona Jaffe’s fact-based tale about urban, white-collar “girls.” Besides Jaffe herself, who resisted the boundaries imposed on her as “mere” consultant, the women who helped prepare Best of Everything for the screen, included Phyllis Levy; Jaffe’s editor; Dusty Negulesco; the director’s wife; and Edith Sommer, scriptwriter. Clark argues that despite the film’s glossy visual effects and use of melodramatic pathos—in lieu of the novel’s more complex realism—it retains more of the novel’s strengths than casual viewers might realize, thanks largely to women’s involvement. She reveals how Negulesco’s feedback helped restore humanity to the character of Amanda Farrow, the hard-edged boss acted by Joan Crawford, and how Jaffe’s refusal to be just a trivia expert sparked real-life drama. Clark also states that “secretaries at 20th CenturyFox” helped “shape” the film (29), but she provides no evidence for this intriguing claim. Mastandrea considers three Fitzgerald tales depicting intelligent, marriage-averse “flappers” vis à vis how they were or might have been interpreted for the screen. “Might have been” applies to This Side of Paradise because the film was never made, even though Fitzgerald him","PeriodicalId":44169,"journal":{"name":"JOURNAL OF POPULAR FILM AND TELEVISION","volume":"39 1","pages":"196 - 197"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2022-10-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"74418126","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-10-02DOI: 10.1080/01956051.2022.2141557
Johnnie Young
In the foreword to Better Living through TV: Contemporary TV and Moral Identity Formation, Martin Shuster contends that television is a “site for serious moral contemplation” even though the act of watching television will not, in and of itself, “make you more moral” (x). Editor Steven A. Benko concurs with Shuster’s observation. Benko holds that “television is a place where important identity work and moral reflection can occur” (1). For this to happen, viewers must engage in a dialog of sorts with the programs on their screens. Of course, the nature of these conversations has changed drastically in recent decades with the prolifso, she adds, “Mary Poppins ... provides an alternative to domesticated femininity ... [since Mary’s] magical nature ... makes her entirely immune to social regulation” (182). Mary “specifies her [own] wages and schedule” (183), enjoys Bert’s company but (unlike Maria) has no interest in marriage, and flies away with her umbrella when she knows it’s time. (The notion of Mary-Poppins-as-role-model may strike readers as odd, but from a child’s viewpoint it makes perfect sense; as a girl I was more impressed by Mary’s aerial stunts than by anything she did for the Bankses.) More soberingly, Mattis finds recent and contemporary “nanny” narratives in fiction, film, and TV to be, like their predecessors, socially conservative, aimed at pleasing comfortable white audiences. In “Neither Betwixt nor Between: Divorced Mothers in the United States, 1920– 1965” (102–17), Kristin Celello explores how cultural anxieties about divorced mothers were reflected and addressed in popular media—including novels, magazines, and films—and academic writing from those decades. She notes how the 1927 film version of Children of Divorce exploits the theme of lives wrecked by “scheming and frivolous” (107) mothers and presents the suicide of one such mother, Kitty (Clara Bow) as a heroic way to break the cycle and let a better woman take her place. Celello also analyzes the Mildred Pierce novel and its 1945 film adaptation (starring Joan Crawford), wherein the title character’s pursuit of sexual pleasure is punished by her daughter’s death; and she notes how, as late as 1962, The Lucy Show’s producers avoided making their comedy about two divorced women. Even so, and despite the culture’s lack of attention to working-class and/or ethnic minority women and families, “the growing visibility of divorced mothers ... challenged what Americans thought they knew about motherhood and the family in these decades” (114). Regarding their choice to limit Single Lives’ scope to US and British culture from the “late nineteenth to the early twenty-first centuries,” the editors cite “parallel demographic spike[s]” and accompanying cultural fears of the nineteenth century fin de siècle with today’s (5–6). Indeed, as early as 1851, one-third of all British women were single (Craig 19), and while some Victorians agonized over this, others, including Charles Dickens,
在《通过电视改善生活:当代电视和道德认同的形成》的前言中，马丁·舒斯特认为电视是一个“严肃的道德沉思的场所”，尽管看电视的行为本身不会“使你更有道德”。编辑史蒂文·a·本科同意舒斯特的观点。Benko认为，“电视是一个重要的身份工作和道德反思可以发生的地方”(1)。要做到这一点，观众必须与屏幕上的节目进行某种形式的对话。当然，这些对话的性质在近几十年里随着电影的激增而发生了巨大的变化，她补充说，“玛丽·波平斯……为被驯化的女性提供了另一种选择……(因为玛丽的)神奇天性……使她完全不受社会管制”(182)。玛丽“规定了自己的工资和日程安排”(183页)，喜欢和伯特在一起，但(与玛丽亚不同)对婚姻没有兴趣，当她知道是时候带着伞飞走了。(把《欢乐满人间》(mary - poppins)作为榜样的观念可能会让读者觉得奇怪，但从孩子的角度来看，这是完全有道理的;作为一个女孩，我对玛丽的空中特技印象深刻，而不是她为班克斯家做的任何事情。)更清醒的是，马蒂斯发现，小说、电影和电视中最近和当代的“保姆”叙事，和它们的前辈一样，在社会上是保守的，目的是取悦舒适的白人观众。在《既不在中间，也不在中间:1920 - 1965年美国的离婚母亲》(102-17)一书中，克里斯汀·塞洛探讨了关于离婚母亲的文化焦虑是如何在那几十年的流行媒体——包括小说、杂志和电影——和学术写作中得到反映和解决的。她指出，1927年的电影版《离婚的孩子》(Children of Divorce)利用了“诡计多端、轻浮”的母亲毁掉生活的主题，并将其中一位母亲凯蒂(Kitty，克拉拉·鲍饰)的自杀表现为打破这种循环、让一个更好的女人取代她的英雄之举。切莱罗还分析了米尔德里德·皮尔斯的小说及其1945年改编的电影(琼·克劳馥主演)，其中主角对性快感的追求受到了女儿死亡的惩罚;她还指出，直到1962年，《露西秀》的制片人还在避免制作关于两个离婚女人的喜剧。即便如此，尽管文化缺乏对工人阶级和/或少数民族妇女和家庭的关注，“离婚母亲越来越多的出现……挑战了近几十年来美国人对母性和家庭的认知”。至于他们选择将单身生活的范围限制在“19世纪末到21世纪初”的美国和英国文化，编辑们引用了“平行的人口高峰”，以及伴随而来的19世纪和今天的文化恐惧(5-6)。事实上，早在1851年，就有三分之一的英国女性是单身(Craig 19)，当一些维多利亚时代的人为此感到痛苦时，其他人，包括查尔斯·狄更斯，知道并想象了女性(和男性)单身的多种可能性。把对贝特西·特拉伍德、普洛丝小姐和其他狄更斯笔下的英雄老处女的银幕解读，以及对银幕上的简·爱尔斯的分析纳入这本合集，或许是可行的，也是值得的。《单身生活》拥有丰富的原始材料——从日记、信件、回忆录到短篇小说和烹饪书——以及学术观点，并承诺会有更多的内容出现，它值得在女性研究、媒体研究和流行文化的本科和研究生课程中占有一席之地。
{"title":"BETTER LIVING THROUGH TV: CONTEMPORARY TV AND MORAL IDENTITY FORMATION. Ed. Steven A. Benko. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2022. 352 pp. $120.00 hardback/$45.00 eBook.","authors":"Johnnie Young","doi":"10.1080/01956051.2022.2141557","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/01956051.2022.2141557","url":null,"abstract":"In the foreword to Better Living through TV: Contemporary TV and Moral Identity Formation, Martin Shuster contends that television is a “site for serious moral contemplation” even though the act of watching television will not, in and of itself, “make you more moral” (x). Editor Steven A. Benko concurs with Shuster’s observation. Benko holds that “television is a place where important identity work and moral reflection can occur” (1). For this to happen, viewers must engage in a dialog of sorts with the programs on their screens. Of course, the nature of these conversations has changed drastically in recent decades with the prolifso, she adds, “Mary Poppins ... provides an alternative to domesticated femininity ... [since Mary’s] magical nature ... makes her entirely immune to social regulation” (182). Mary “specifies her [own] wages and schedule” (183), enjoys Bert’s company but (unlike Maria) has no interest in marriage, and flies away with her umbrella when she knows it’s time. (The notion of Mary-Poppins-as-role-model may strike readers as odd, but from a child’s viewpoint it makes perfect sense; as a girl I was more impressed by Mary’s aerial stunts than by anything she did for the Bankses.) More soberingly, Mattis finds recent and contemporary “nanny” narratives in fiction, film, and TV to be, like their predecessors, socially conservative, aimed at pleasing comfortable white audiences. In “Neither Betwixt nor Between: Divorced Mothers in the United States, 1920– 1965” (102–17), Kristin Celello explores how cultural anxieties about divorced mothers were reflected and addressed in popular media—including novels, magazines, and films—and academic writing from those decades. She notes how the 1927 film version of Children of Divorce exploits the theme of lives wrecked by “scheming and frivolous” (107) mothers and presents the suicide of one such mother, Kitty (Clara Bow) as a heroic way to break the cycle and let a better woman take her place. Celello also analyzes the Mildred Pierce novel and its 1945 film adaptation (starring Joan Crawford), wherein the title character’s pursuit of sexual pleasure is punished by her daughter’s death; and she notes how, as late as 1962, The Lucy Show’s producers avoided making their comedy about two divorced women. Even so, and despite the culture’s lack of attention to working-class and/or ethnic minority women and families, “the growing visibility of divorced mothers ... challenged what Americans thought they knew about motherhood and the family in these decades” (114). Regarding their choice to limit Single Lives’ scope to US and British culture from the “late nineteenth to the early twenty-first centuries,” the editors cite “parallel demographic spike[s]” and accompanying cultural fears of the nineteenth century fin de siècle with today’s (5–6). Indeed, as early as 1851, one-third of all British women were single (Craig 19), and while some Victorians agonized over this, others, including Charles Dickens, ","PeriodicalId":44169,"journal":{"name":"JOURNAL OF POPULAR FILM AND TELEVISION","volume":"26 1","pages":"197 - 198"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2022-10-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"74078960","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-10-02DOI: 10.1080/01956051.2022.2151299
Sam L. Grogg, J. Nachbar, Michael T. Marsden, Gary R. Edgerton
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Pub Date : 2022-10-02DOI: 10.1080/01956051.2022.2145454
Summit P. Osur
Abstract Although alternate histories have been present since the early days of televised science fiction, the genre didn’t take off until the streaming era of television began. Direct-targeted advertising, a glut of content, the maturation of the genre, and the historical instability of the twenty-first century intersected in the alternate-history genre, making it not only an important artistic genre but an important political one as well. Traditionally, the alternate-history genre, on a whole, has been criticized for its closed narratives that support the Great Man theory of history through an overemphasis on battles and royalty. A case study of six recent televised alternate histories—Russian Doll, Undone, Bandersnatch, Loki, Watchmen, and For All Mankind—shows that the televised version of the genre has matured into a revisionist genre that is focused on the natural determinism and personal agency as well as on the social factors that impact both. Taken together, these six shows suggest a unique maturity in the alternate-history genre, one that questions Anglo-Saxon spheres of narratological power and the very linearity of Western history.
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