Sarah Byrd
Annotated Bibliography Assignment
Nov. 4, 2003

Article #1: Giroux, Henry A. "Private Satisfactions and Public Disorders: Fight Club, Patriarchy, and the Politics of Masculine Violence." JAC: A Journal of Composition Theory, 21:1 (2001 Winter), pp. 1-31

Henry Giroux's article is a discussion on two basic levels; firstly, it addresses the dangers of a free market economy and consumer culture as a preface to his discussion of Fight Club; secondly, the article goes on to explain that outwardly the film appears to be a critique concerning the effects of consumer culture on masculinity but, he says, Fight Club (with its anachronistic notions of masculinity defined in opposition to femininity) creates multiple skewed messages about the crisis of masculinity, and he relationship between the sexes in a late capitalist economy.
The first section of Giroux's article discusses the current situation of neoliberalism and corporate culture. He says that in the era of late capitalism that we find ourselves in, the prevailing attitude is so overwhelmingly individualistic, as to be anti-community and anti-democracy. He writes, "Within the growing marketization and privatization of everyday life, democratic principles are either scorned as holdovers of an outmoded sixties radicalism or equated entirely with the imperatives of capitalism" (2). It is Giroux's assertion that democracy has been entirely replaced by the machinery of Capitalism which absolutely does not take into account human concerns, i.e. welfare, education, etc.. His view is that the general public is much more concerned with individual economic pursuits, than with effecting social change for the better. He says, "The consequences [of the free market economy] include not only a weakened state, but a growing sense of insecurity, cynicism, and political retreat on the part of the general public"(4). Giroux presents this first section of the article as sort of a preface in order to inform the reader of the realities of the consumer culture of the new millennium in which Americans live that the film Fight Club is centrally concerned with.
Giroux says that the consumer culture that emasculates men in Fight Club (who choose to deal with the emasculating effects in the form of explicit violence in an attempt to regain their masculinity) says something about societal perceptions about masculinity and femininity. This is largely because a big-budget Hollywood production is invariably going to reflect conventional attitudes concerning gender relations. Giroux writes, "In doing so, I address the representational politics that structure Fight Club--especially its deeply conventional views of violence, gender relations, and masculinity-and I examine how such representations work in conjunction with a deeply entrenched culture of cynicism" (6). Thus, Giroux "reads" the film as being a "powerful pedagogical and political text" (7), that reflects conservative notions of gender that assume that masculinity is necessarily defined in opposition to domestication and the white collar worker's daily existence.
Giroux says that Jack and Tyler embody two polarized forms of masculinity- the passive, domesticated Jack who represents masculinity in its crisis state, and the renegade Tyler who in his refusal to be drawn in to the lure of consumerism is seen as regaining his masculinity. He writes, "Consumerism in Fight Club is criticized primarily as an ideological force and existential experience that weakens and domesticates men, robbing them of their primary role as producers whose bodies affirm and legitimize their sense of agency and control" (14). The "weakened domestication" is undoubtedly equated to feminization
Essentially, Giroux writes that Fight Club is a film fraught with purposeless violence, and misogynistic and anti-democratic under currents.
Article #2 Clark, J. Michael. "Faludi, Fight Club, and Phallic Masculinity: Exploring the Emasculating Economics of Patriarchy." Journal of Men's Studies: A J Scholarly ournal about Men and Masculinities, 11:1(2002 Fall). pp.65-76.
Michael Clark's article is primarily about how the film Fight Club and Susan Faludi's ecofeminist text, Stiffed: The Betrayal of the American Man both center on the emasculating effects of consumer culture. The article also addresses the negative impact of globalization on the world's poor, such as population growth and environmental racism and how, ultimately both phenomenon are inseparably bound to white male masculinity. Finally, the article goes on to suggest that Fight Club and Faludi "part company" in terms of their solutions for the crisis of white male masculinity in a consumer culture.
Clark asserts that Faludi attributes the crisis of masculinity in males to economic reasons. He writes, "At the risk, perhaps, of oversimplifying her argument, Faludi (1999) contends that the dynamics destabilizing American masculinity are primarily economic ones: consumer culture has emasculated men, pushing them increasingly into ornamental and passive roles traditionally associated with the feminine sphere"(66). Thus, according to Faludi, as Clark summarizes, American men are suffering from an identity crisis in terms of masculinity. Faludi asserts that masculinity can no longer be defined as the purposeful and powerful agent in control of society as it was sixty years ago- instead,masculinity is "measured only by participation in…consumer culture" (66). She also says that men often respond to these kinds of pressures by turning to violent attempts to assert a kind of dominance. This is how Faludi's text ties in with Fight Club, according to Clark. He writes, "…we encounter in both Faludi's (1999) text and the Fight Club's images a problematic version of phallic essentialism-that testosterone-driven men must somehow be "up" against some enemy or other (or even themselves) or else be "up" against the wall of emasculating self-doubts"…(67). In other words, in a consumerist society like the one of the new millennia, men suffer in terms of their own concept of what it means to be masculine and how they deal with the masculinity question (often unhealthy). The way this phallic essentialism is played out in Fight Club is by men brutally fighting it out with one another. This is one example of an exaggerated solution to reclaim masculinity, according to Clark.
The section of the article titled "Economics in Ecofeminism and Ecotheology is centrally concerned with the devastating worldwide effects of rampant consumerism- an economy with predominately white males in control. Clark says:
While an economic system ought to insure continuation of life in a community, Rasmussen contends that Western-style economics actually does the opposite by treating nature as mechanistic, interchangeable, or replaceable parts, not as an organic and communitarian whole; by generating affluence for a privileged few humans (mostly men); and by shifting the economic focus from the household and the local community to corporations-mostly controlled by men(Rassmussen,pp.91-92). (Clark, 69)

Clark goes on to assert that it is the white male's responsibility (and those of the affluent and dominant nations) to stop producing children which place a much larger strain on the earth's resources than those children born from less developed nations.
Finally, Clark points out that the solution in Fight Club for dealing with threatened masculinity is a bad one and is not in accordance with Faludi's smart text. He says, "The solution, however lies not in the masculine or patriarchal paradigm of targeting consumerism as one more macho enemy…"(74), as it is dealt with in Fight Club through means of extreme violence. Clark believes that the solution lies in reimagining what it means to be masculine in a consumerist society rather than reverting to hyper-aggressive solutions in the name of a false masculinity as in Fight Club.
Article #3: Peele, Thomas. "Fight Clubs Queer Representations". JAC: A Journal of Composition Theory, 21:4 (2001 Fall), pp. 862-69
Thomas Peele's article is essentially a queer reading of Fight Club. He argues that the film simultaneously "reinforces heteronormativity by using homoeroticism to represent self-destruction, but also makes available some queer representations of masculinity that subvert heteronormativity" (863). He begins with a response to Henry Giroux's argument that "film not only entertains, but also teaches subjectivity" (862). In other words, films actually condition thought in that they teach the public what is possible to conceive in a more subtle way than other pedagogical tools. Peele argues that films teach the public about gender and what it means to be male or female. He writes, "That is, films teach us how to be gendered, raced, classed, and sexed objects, and even what genders, races, classes, and sexualities are available" (862). In this respect, according to Peele, films are teaching tools that shouldn't be taken lightly.
Peele asserts that the homoerotic undertones in Fight Club are multiple, and can be seen in the sexual tension between Tyler and Ed Norton's character as well as in the symbolism in the film. He writes, "For example, the film begins and ends with Jack, Ed Norton's Character, sitting on a chair, restrained, with Tyler Durden's gun in his mouth. He goes on to say that while he does not assert that Tyler and Jack really are gay, just the nature of their relationship is decidedly homoerotic. He also points out the flashing images of penises and other symbolically homoerotic elements of the film. Peele writes, "Thus the film depicts three, screen-sized images of male genitals as well of the suggestions of male-on-male fellatio that begin and end the film and countless other homoerotic references" (864). Peele makes it clear that the homoeroticism is very present in Fight Club.
His other strong argument is that while Fight Club is certainly misogynist, it is also anti-gay in some respect but more accurately it illustrates "the indeterminate space of the queer"(866). This indeterminate space, Peele suggests, is perhaps best illustrated in the character "Bob". He says, "Bob, played by Meatloaf, a man who as a result of Cancer had his testicles removed and consequently developed breasts, might be considered by some to be a symbol of misogyny because as an emasculated man he is somehow less than a man and therefore the object of scorn that is usually reserved for women" (866). Therefore, the gender space that Bob occupies is ambiguous, according to Peele.
Finally, Peele says, that the film has an anti-gay, pro-heternormativity message because Tyler Durden is destroyed. He writes, "Even though the film might be popular among gay men, the film does ultimately end with a man and a woman holding hands at the top of an important, downtown building. The homoerotic element-Tyler Durden-has been eliminated, proven to be nothing more than a figment of the heterosexual imaginary" (868). So, with all of the homoerotic elements in the film, Peele says that, ultimately, Fight Club reinforces heteronormativity. Peele's closing point is that the queer elements of Fight Club , as a big budget Hollywood film (and as a pedagogical tool, says something about the ambiguousness of gender in contemporary culture.

Geoff Hughes
ENG 4133
Burt
11/5/2003
Annotated Bibliography
Griffith, James. "Psycho: Not Guilty as Charged." Film Comment, 32:4 (July-August 1996), pp.76-79.
Griffin outlines the various accepted critical views of Psycho, including Modleski's theory, that through voyeurism and the auspices of the male gaze, viewers of the film are complicit in the carnage at the hands of the Bates duo. "[W]ithin the film not only are women objects of the male gaze, they are also recipients of most of the punishment." Griffith's thesis counters this theory in detail, and in the end said author comes to the conclusion that the viewer is not complicit in the slaughter, in any "real" way. He says that Psycho is a healthy viewing experience because the viewer comes into contact with social elements that are very real, but that usually couldn't be viewed or defined in any other objective manner.

Rhodes, Eric B. "Lost Highway." Film Quarterly, 51:3 (spring 1998), pp.57-61.
"Lost Highway's greatest success is that it deftly subsumes its experiments in structure and form under the aesthetics of hallucination and the iconography of horror." Lynch's use of forms that provoke visceral reactions and psychological discomfort are explored in this article, where Rhodes explains the seemingly chaotic structure of the film in terms of a "theme-and-variation narrative". "Lost Highway's labyrinthine construction enables Lynch to subordinate traditional cinematic concerns with dialogue and plot to a visual language that communicates moods and emotions…The theme-and-variation form of narration is non-linear and uses the subject material as a thematic resource to develop variations on the central theme of the film; here, mirroring…The theme-and-variation narrative form enables Lynch to use devices of duplication, opposition, repetition, deviation, and inversion." In this way, Rhodes is able to explain the connection between the two seemingly unconnected worlds that converge in the film. The author also treats the subject of the femme fatale in some depth.

Biga, Tracy. "The Female Gaze: Blue Velvet." Film Quarterly, XLI:1 (fall 1987), pp.44-49.
(Compare with: Frankel, David "Milestones: David Lynch's Blue Velvet." Artforum International, April 2003, pp.89.)
A somewhat pedestrian view of the film where the author predictably cites early shots: through an analysis of these shots (namely the insect infestation that threatens to destroy the logging base of the town's economy) she tries to make the reader realize that Lynch is revealing symbolically the "dark" and unseen underside of Lumberton. She continues to look deeper, and inevitably comes upon the Oedipal conflict in the film. The article's worth is found in the analysis of Sandy's "look," a gaze "directed throughout Blue Velvet almost exclusively at Jeff, [that] can be divided into two major functions which may operate simultaneously: investigation and affirmation…'The harlequin heroine [Sandy] probes for the secret underlying the masculine enigma, while the reader outwits the heroine in coming up with the 'correct' interpretation of the puzzling actions and attitudes of the man.'" In the end, Sandy remains a somewhat shallow character (in comparison to Jeff) who ends up with Jeff because she has no other option: on the one hand, she is strapped by a pseudo-moralistic, bland ideology becoming of such a "normal" girl. She will "stand by her man," as it were. And on the other, the reality of her dead-end Lumberton life/situation warrants little escape or hope of anything better. Biga's discussion of the other conflicts in the film unfold in a linear manner following the film's plot development and are psychological in bent, centering around the film's Oedipal conflict.

Glass, Fred. "Brazil." Film Quarterly, XXXIX: 4 (Summer 1986), pp.22-28.
"Brazil is a tragicomedy about the relationship between imagination and fantasy, and about the ability of a society ('somewhere in the 20th century,' as the opening sequence informs us) to constantly transform the energy of the former into the dead weight of the latter." Besides the obvious weight of paper work and bureaucracy, Glass' article has the novel attraction of being written in 1985, a year after 1984, where the author has the opportunity to pontificate (and he does in some length) on the reality of the modern world versus the dystopia that George Orwell predicted some years before. Glass also, among other things, explores the Oedipal conflict within Brazil, and describes the final scene as well as is humanly possible.

Hitchcock, Alfred, dir. 1958. Vertigo MCA/Universal Home Video. Sound, col., 128 mins. VHS.

Susan White's article is an ambitious endeavor. In her own words, "This is… a critical review of the essays on Vertigo that seem to me most relevant to feminist theory. My aim is to identify certain fundamental problems in some of the most interesting of these readings." The centerpiece of her criticism is Laura Mulvey's essay, "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema." From then on, she talks about critics that either support or dispel Mulvey's ideas. One of her first subjects is the "male gaze." She mentions critics like Robin Wood, Karen Hollinger, and Tania Modleski, all of whom see the redeeming quality of Vertigo as feminist picture. Next, White talks about the mother-daughter connection throughout the picture. The criticism of Stanley Carvell is used to debate the role of the woman within Hitchcock's masterpiece. White then talks about the theory of "the unknown woman" and the role of bisexuality. This section is concluded by discussion of realism: what it is and whether it exists in Vertigo. The second part, entitled Allegory Story, seeks out this narrative tool within the film. White uses critics like Virginia Wexman, Paul de Man, William Rothman, and Frederic Jameson to search for the allegories. After a myriad of theories, White concludes that what we see is "real," cannot be definite and the best we can do is interpret what we see. "Real" exists only as our desires to impart meaning into something we do not understand.

Huntjens, Joyce. "Vertigo: A Vertiginous Gap in Reality and a Woman Who Doesn't Exist." Image (&) Narrative, 5 (2003), (no pagination). Electronic publication.

Hitchcock, Alfred, dir. 1958. Vertigo MCA/Universal Home Video. Sound, col., 128 mins. VHS.

Joyce Huntjens' article covers the topics of man-woman relationships, the power of man, the male gaze, and the existence of a real woman, all through the frame of Hitchcock's Vertigo. In the introduction, the author calls the film a "detective story with a tragic-romantic twist." Huntjens mentions Freud's article, "The Uncanny," and goes on to say that the article will deal largely with this phenomenon. The piece is divided into eight sections. First is The Perspective. Huntjens describes the point of view in which the viewer is placed throughout the film. The Difficult Communication Between the Sexes deals with just what it describes. More specifically, it details the failed relationship of Scottie (James Stewart) and Midge (Barbara Geddes). The next section, Male Identity, deals with the "freedom" and "power" that Scottie wishes he had. In Women as an Object of Art, the author talks about how Kim Novak's character, Judy/Madeline, is objectified and how that relates to the painting of Carlotta Valdes. Lecan and the Thing talks about the male gaze and how Madeline is the subject of Scotties objectification, but in truth, she represents "materialized nothingness." The Woman Who Doesn't Exist expounds further on the notion of "materialized nothingness." Huntjens believes that, in Vertigo, the woman does not exist. Judy's Inevitable Destiny describes the downfall of Judy, how it comes about, and how it affects Scottie. The last section, Distorted Sight and the True Nature of the Uncanny, wraps up the points that Huntjens has made and fits it into the notion of "the uncanny." The author concludes, "In John's blindness and in the possible tyranny of someone's gaze over another person we encounter the truly uncanny moment of Vertigo."

Wollen, Peter. "Compulsion." Sight and Sound, 7:4 (1997 Apr), pp. 14-18.

Hitchcock, Alfred, dir. 1958. Vertigo MCA/Universal Home Video. Sound, col., 128 mins. VHS.

This article takes a look at one of Hitchcock's greatest films, Vertigo, and attempts make a connection between the movie and the surrealist movement (the movement of art that attempts to express the subconscious through fantastic imagery). It begins by giving some background information about how the story of the film originated. It mentions the novella Entre les duex morts (The Living and the Dead), which was written by Pierre Boileau and Thomas Narcejac. Wollen then moves on to talk about the difference between mystery and suspense and how Hitchcock used the latter to amaze his viewers. He transitions this into talking about how Vertigo is a "ghost story" that makes the detective the victim and straddles the line between reality and the uncanny. Wollen then talks about Kim Novak and the impact of her character. He mentions that Vera Miles was originally intended for the part, and this desire to have another actor ends up being visualized in the film. The author then talks about how Novak's character, Madeline/Judy, ends up driving Scottie (James Stewart) to the brink of insanity. In the last section, Wollen talks about other artists whose work was similar to Hitchcock's. He brings up Edgar Allen Poe as being a large influence on Hitchcock. Then he mentions the film Nadja, by André Brenton. This film displays many of the uncanny characteristics that Vertigo does. Wollen concludes his article by nothing that Hitchcock's best films deal with the uncanny and maybe Brenton, Poe, Boileau, Narcejac, Hitchcock all have some unexplainable connection.

Eddie Geller

Chris Glenn ENG 4133
TECHNICAL NOTE: Underscores represent underlining (ex: _A Journal Title_) Single quotations represent italics (ex: 'An Article Title')
Article 1.)Chang, Chris. "Future Shock" _Film Comment_ July/Aug. 2002: 44-45
FilmSpielberg, Steven, dir. 2002. 'Minority Report'. USA. Sound, col., 146 min. DVD edition
Article Description: In Chris Chang's, 'Future Shock', he discusses and reviews parts of Steven Spielberg's 'Minority Report', then goes to discuss the further implications of the film and its "perennial moral puzzles" based in the future. Chang starts by citing one of Aristotle's classic logical conundrums, where if there is an event with two factors and subsequently a binomial outcome (two people will go to war tomorrow, A and B, and only one can win, thus the other will lose) the future has already been predetermined, as the result that will be true tomorrow is true today (if A is the winner of the war tomorrow, then it must be true today that A is the winner of the war) Chang then describes Spielburg's world of 'Minority Report' and how Tom Cruise's character, John Anderton, must fight to clear his name in "this over stimulated environment where every move is monitored, cross-checked, and coded for future use, where even consumer desires have been entered into customized databases that allow the vacant flash and dazzle of commodity culture to come on to you like a sex slave".

Article 2.)Romney, Jonathan. "The New Paranoia: Games Pixels Play" _Film Comment_ Nov./Dec. 1998: 39-43
FilmProyas, Alex, dir. 1998. 'Dark City'. USA. Sound, col., 103 min. DVD edition Article Description: Romney's article involves the resurgance of paranoia in recent film and film noir and describes the entrance of technology into social realities. Romney starts this hypothesis by describing the beginning of this paranoid age in the seventies where "policical and social anxieties about the state of the world in the wake of the Kennedy assasination, Vietnam, and Watergate - anxieties about the status of truth might be in such a world." He then goes on to describe the evolution of this paranoia in film and how it became less about political anxieties, and more to do with the "feeling that there is little verifiable reality in the screen image itself and, by extension, in the world we know through visual media." Romney says, "It's no longer a question of 'who' is to be trusted, as in the Seventies, but a question of whether 'anything', any image, any evidence of the state of things, can be trusted."

Article 3.)Lavery, David. "From Cinespace to Cyberspace: Zionists and Agents, Realists and Gamers in 'The Matrix' and 'eXistenZ'" _Journal of Popular Film & Television_ Winter 2001: 150-157
FilmsCronenberg, David, dir. 1999. 'eXistenZ'. USA. Sound, col., 90 min.Wachowski, Andy and Larry, dir. 1999. 'The Matrix'. USA. Sound, col., 150 min. DVD edition
Article Description: In Lavery's article the contemporary conception of "reality" is challenged and analyzed. Lavery states how the original purpose of cinema was as an outlet for art or artists, and how it and the "myth of total cinema" have changed and progressed. Laverly describes how reality is so easily blurred, due to perhaps our "psychological blind spots." He goes on to further explain this in the example of 'The Matrix' saying how the computer reality of the Matrix is fully realized, yet entirely virtual and despite this, it is "over-whelmingly accepted by the vast majority." The article continues to relate this perception of reality to "eXistenZ" and describing how its "un-Hollywoodized text" causes the viewer to have to contemplate its narrative timeline, only to realize that there is no real narrative ending, thus it does not make "real" sense on either the first pass, or the second or the third. Therefore, "only after reaching the end do we realize that the entire story has an entirely different frame, and that after experiencing four levels of reality we are proposed the question, "Are we still in the game?"

Hartman, Geoffrey. "Memory.com: Tele-suffering and Testimony in the Dot Com Era." Raritan, 19:3 (2000 Winter), pp 1-19.

Memory.com discusses TVs traumatic shocking images; in the news, on primetime, and on trash talk shows. It suggests that the "reality-effect" of the televisual apparatus is hightened and diminished and creates a unique viewing situation in which the viewer is repreatedly barraged with shocking images and this leads to a hyperarousal and this is a sort of psychic trauma. "What others suffer, we behold." The paper suggests that some people (particularly younger people) experience the flow of images on TV in an undetached way, and that this, coupled with the effect of the intrusion of TV's images more generally, creates a derealization of real life. No more importance or speicalness is ascribed to the real world than the world that TV shows us. Some people experience real life as no more and no less than a movie to be acted out. The Matrix can be seen as illustrating this derealization of the real. Everything in the program is simulacra; this Neo's great revelation. But the external images of the program do have an internalized effect on its real subjects in the form of physical pain. The paper argues that movies like The Matrix strive for a redemption of physical reality. The goal of the One is to free us from that which governs our perceptions and liberate us to experience the real real world. Hartman constrasts TV images and flow with that of a more sober attempt at portraying historical violence. He argues that his Holocaust survivor documentary should have a greater imapact beecause it, unlike television shows, does not disappear into the flow of images, into the simulacra. It focuses on one person at a specific time and place. The violence-flaunting news media and the survivor stories are both representations of historical memory, but the viewing subject identifies with each one differently. The author believes that the problem here deals with identification, specifically what level of identification the viewing subject ascribes to the visual images he takes in. The pressure to respond with empathy is very powerful, and may force strong emotions and attachment to the victim of trauma; but there are other ways to respond to this empathy-crisis too. It could turn inward as a form of self-disgust and develop into depression, or it could explode outwards in a violent action that completes the cylce. The author also argues that art and literature, when viewed through this framework, take the sympathetic imagination to its limit. Thus it tries to unite the emotional and cognitive dimesions of thought; the sympathetic and the objective. It is the hyperreality of the TV image that makes it seem so close and so easily controlled, and it is this hyperreality which must be seen as such in order to break its spell. It must be seen for the simulacra that it is, and thereby create a more deepened sense of the real.

Meares, Russell M.D. "The 'Adualistic' Representation of Trauma: On Malignant Internalization." American Journal of Psychotherapy, 53:3 (1999 Summer), pp392-402.

In The "Adualistic" Representation of Trauma, Dr. Russell Meares explores the way in which traumatic memories are formed in comparison to non-traumatic memories, and he examines the way in which these memories differ from everyday memories. He explains a theory of traumatic memory based on the idea that the concept of self is actually made up of two parts: the "subject unconsiousness" and the "object consciousness." The former is completely unconscious, the latter is the awareness of the stream of consciousness and thus is a conscious activity. The doubling of the self (i.e. the emergence of awareness of the stream of consciousness) happens relatively late among the development of children's mental structures. And according to Meares' sources, a psychological trauma forces the psychic system into a reatreat (a "dissolution") back down the evolutionary path, and so these object consciousness functions are the first to be lost when mental trauma strikes. Meares also believes that whatever affects the mind also affects the brain; this is the theory of parallel concomitance. So any trauma brought against the mind-brain system, whether it be electrical, toxic or psychological, will have some dissolution effect, however small. Meares gets at the problem of trauma by way of the concepts of memory. Memory consists of two parts: the event itself and the recognition that this event comes from one's own past. Thus the two parts of memory correspond to the two parts of the self; that which cannot be consciously changed and the awareness of that unchangeable data. So memory, like the self, is a dualistic structure. As opposed to this sensory "episodic" memory there is also another type of memory which is "adualistic" i.e. it consists of only one dimension. This is called semantic memory and it consists of facts, names, dates, algorithms, those things which have a purely "intellectual" rather than experiential quality. Since both episodic memory and the object consciousness require the capacity for reflection, Meares speculates that they appear together along the evolutionary path of the developing mind. This completely matured version of episodic memory is called autobiographical memory; basically this is a long-term episodic memory in adults. Meares argues that severely traumatic incidents (large enough to cause dissolution) are not recorded in episodic, everday memory but in a more primitive form of memory such as semantic memory. So particularly jarring insults surface consciously as a form of semantic, verbal "knowledge" like an internal dialogue rather than a snapshot of episodic memory. If the trauma happens early enough, it will be stored in an even more primitive memory system, one that is wordless but probably involves images, and this will lead to bodily imprinting, such as affects and the desire to act. Trauma brings about a diminution of reflectivity, a relapse into "primary consciousness" in which the person is only aware of the traumatizer and his bodily sensations; essentially he has become uncoupled; he is focused only on the immediate present. Meares' tells of an interesting case study involving a woman whose seperation anxiety trauma was re-triggered by her therapist leaving on vacation. The woman wandered the streets and stumbled into a graveyard, where she saw her therapist's name on a headstone next to her mother's. However, there was noone with the therapist's name buried there. Meares' explanation is that the re-triggering of the trauma uncoupled the woman's consciousness, and she lost her capacity to reflect on the episode as it was happening. No reflection, no episodic memory. So the "false" memory was the construction of her semantic memory system and she was "sunk within it, precipitated into the traumatic system that had been triggered." So it is in this way that a traumatized subject creates his own reality; his own semantic rules apply to his memories (and therefore his reality), since there there is no conscious awareness to moderate the encoding.

Huyssen, Andreas. "Present Pasts: Media, Politics, Amnesia." Public Culture, 12:1 (2000), pp21-39. [Burtnote: See also Huyssen's Twilight Memories.]

In Present Pasts, Andreas Huyssen explores the postmodern obsession with recycling images and narratives of the past, a phenomenon he calls the "memory boom" of the late 20th century. He sees this in connection with one of the great philosophical and moral crises of the last century, the Holocaust. So much of Holocaust discourse is devoted to holding on to the memory of the event and somehow drawing significance from that memory. Huyssen argues that the Holocaust can be thought of as a metaphor for historical trauma in general, and he believes that it functions in this way because it simulataneously encapsulates modernity's tragic metanarratives of enlightened modernity, racial oppression, and organized violence. By way of this analysis, Huyssen then goes on to theorize how historical trauma is connected to the individual. He investigates the widespread phenomenon of "self-musealization" (creating and preserving video and pictures of oneself and one's family) and the postmodern mass media's obsession with narratives of the past. He suggests some interesting ideas about memory and historical trauma, and notes that the movie Titanic is the epitomy of a cultural product obsessed with memory images; it combines memory, entertainment and trauma in one narrative. Huyssen wonders if these sorts of "marketed trauma" actually exploit cultural memories of the horrors of modernity (such as the Holocaust) or whether they displace anxieties about the future onto the past. Huyssen's main argument is that anyone who tries to study memory, whether individual or collective, must take the mass media into account, because essentially the culture industry creates and distributes personal and historical memories for consumption. He sees traumatic memories and entertainment memories as occupying the same space in contemporary culture. He also argues that these traumas experienced through media are genuine psychological traumas, not simply entertainment or emotional identification. This is one way we can think of the mass media bringing about a sort of cognitive violence through its schocking images of real life. This cognitive violence can have consequences both in conscious and unconscious dimensions. Unconsciously, Huyssen believes, the mass media's semiotic system changes our "perception and temporailty," essentially changing the way we relate to our environment. Huyssen argues that this subtle yet unconsciously felt impact on our temporality might be linked to the "memory boom," specifically the way in which it priveliges memory and the past. He links this obsession with the rise of the computer network, and sees the "anchoring" of memories onto the past as a reaction against the decentrality and globalization of computer and communication culture. As computers strive to hold more and more data in ever-increasing schemes of memory, they also provide the means to destroy all memory by way of a crash. By collecting all memory, they render it vulnerable to the system in which it is collected. He sees cultural memory practices as an attempt to anchor oneself in the vast globalizing network of modern communication systems.

Josh Berman

Hall, Edward T. 1966, The Hidden Dimension. Doubleday & Company, Inc.
Garden City, New York.

Hoffer, Eric. 1951, The True Believer. Harper & Row, Publishers.
New York, New York.

Toffler, Alvin. 1970, Future Shock. Random House, Inc.
New York, New York.

The chapter descriptions are as follows

The Hidden Dimension by Edward T Hall
Ch XIV - Proxemics And The Future Of Man

This book emphasizes that virtually everything that man is and does is
associated with the experience of space. Man’s sense of space is solely the
synthesis of many sensory inputs: visual, auditory, kinesthetic, olfactory, and
thermal. Each of these is molded and patterned by culture. Hence, there is no
alternative to accepting the fact that people reared in different cultures live
in different sensory worlds. This leads to the conclusion that one’s idea of
his/her immediate reality is not only the result of their senses, but also
their “culture” which itself is a product of sensory inputs. “Man and his
extensions constitute one interrelated system.” Furthermore, no matter how hard man
tries it is impossible for him to divest himself of his own culture, for it
has penetrated to the roots of his nervous system and determines how he
perveices the world.

The text inspires notions of man’s entrapment in modern times by presenting
information in regards to animal experiments. The book claims that ethologists
have been rather “reluctant” in suggesting that their findings apply to men.
Apparently animal studies have shown that, even though crowded, overstressed
animals are known to suffer from circulatory disorders, heart attacks, and
lowered resistance to disease. This data fuels fearful and (dare I say)
paranoid sentiments of man’s current position in regard to his apparent progress.

The animal studies also showed that crowding per se is neither good nor bad,
but rather that overstimulation and disruptions of social relationships as a
consequence of overlapping peronal distances lead to population collapse. It
is suggested that proper screening can reduce both the disruption and the
overstimultation, and permits much higher concentrations of populations. Screening
is said to result as “what we get from rooms, apartments, and buildings in
cities.” This “screening” with apartments etc. is a doorway to whole words of
artistic interpretation in regards to the film and literature. However,
locking one’s self away in an apartment is not the answer to proper healths.
Individuals need both excitement and ideas and “we will discover that both are more
apt” to be found in people than in things, in structure that content, in
involvement rather than
in detachment from life.

This chapter talks at some length about man’s “aboriginal state.” The
author states that “by domesticating himself, man has greatly reduced the flight
distance of his aboriginal state, which is an absolute necessity when population
densities are high.” This “flight reaction” which the author defines as
“the keeping of distance between one’s self and the enemy” is apparently one of
the most basic and succesful ways of coping with danger. However, there must
be “suffcient space” if it is to function properly.

The flight reaction (keeping distance between one’s self and the enemy) is
one of the most basic and succesful ways of coping with danger, but there must
be sufficient space if it is to function. Through a process of taming, most
higher organisms, including man, can be squeezed into a given area provided
that they feel safe and their aggressions are under control. However, if men are
made fearful of each other, fear resurrects the flight reaction, creating an
explosive need for space. Fear, plus crowding, then produces panic. This
just futher reinforces how dangerous urban areas, especially cities, can be to
the individual. Historically speaking, “the wilderness we must now master is
one requiring brains rather than brawn.”

The True Believer by Eric Hoffer
Ch 1 The Appeal of Mass Movements

This book is largely philosophical ramblings on the human condition within a
world of economics and politics. This chapter in particular discusses the
somewhat irresistible charm of “mass movements.” The text considers an
individual’s personal identity, environment, and even belief system when assessing
their desire (or lack there of) toward revolution.

The book instructs that where self-advancement cannot (or is not allowed to)
serve as a driving force, other sources of enthusiasm have to be found if
“momentous changes are to be realized and perpetuated.” These changes range from
the awakening and renovation of a “stagtous society” or radical reforms in
the character and pattern of the life of a community. In essence, revolution
will always be born.

There is in us a tendency to locate the shaping forces of our existence
outside of
ourselves. Success and failure are unavoidably related in our minds with the
state of things around us. Hence it is that people with a sense of
fulfillment think it is a good world that we live in and would like to converve it as
it is, while the frustrated ones favor radical change. Futhermore, discontent
by itself does not invariably create a desire for change. The author claims
that other factors have to be present before discontent turns into disaffection
and one of these is a sense of power.

Offhand one would expect that the mere possession of power would
automatically result in a cocky attitude toward the world and a receptivity to change.
But it is not always so. The powerful can be as timid as the weak. What seems
to count more than possession of instruments of power is faith in the future.

Those who are awed by their surroundings do not think of change, no matter how
miserable their condition. When our mode of life is so precarious as to make
it patent that we cannot control the circumstances of our existence, we tend
to stick to the proven and the familiar. We counteract a deep feeling of
insecurity by making of our existence a fixed routine.

For men to plunge headlong into an undertaking of vast change, they must be
intensely discontented yet not destitute, and they must have the feeling that
by the possession of some potent doctrine, infallible leader or some new
technique they have access to a source of irresistible power. They must also have
an extravagant conception of the
prospects and potentialities of the future. And lastly, they must be wholly
ignorant of the difficulties involved in their vast undertaking.

Future Shock by Alvin Toffler
Ch 6 People : The Modular Man

Urban lifestyles disintegrate personal relationships. “Urbanites” meet and
view one another in highly segmental roles. Their dependence upon others is
confined to a highly fractionalized aspect of the other’s round of activity.
For instance, an urbanite is only interested in the efficiency of the shoe
salesman in meeting his/her needs and their personal life. What this means is
that we form limited involvement relationships with most of the people around us.
Whether it is on a conscious level or not, we define our relationships with
most people in functional terms. All of this of course further widens the
gulf of personal detachment in an individual.

Men are classified according to their present jobs. This labeling process
dominates one’s duties, environment, and mindset all of which mold immediate
bubble societies. One begins to see themselves as a “computer programmer” or
“machine operator” and thus thinks within those perimeters. The individual
begins to function within their own specific sub-environment existing within the
city they already inhabit. This suited-lifestyle for individuals reinforces a
comfort in routine. Any change in job, for example, entails a certain amount
of stress. The individual must strip himself of old habits, old ways of
coping, and learn new ways of doing things. Even when the work task itself is
similar, the environment in which it takes place is different.

Much of the social activity of individuals today can be described as search
behavior. This impels people (especially educated people) toward cities and
into temporary employment patterns. For the identification of people who share
the same interests and aptitudes on the basis of which friendship my blossom
is no simple procedure in a society in which specialization grows apace. The
increase in specialization is present not merely in professional and work
spheres, but even in leisure time pursuits. Seldom has any society offered so wide
a range of acceptable and readily available leisure time activities. The
greater the diversity available in both work and leisure, the greater the
specialization, and the more difficult it is to find just the right friends.

We begin to glimpse the complexity of the coping behavior that we demand of
people today. Certainly, the logical end of the direction in which we are now
traveling is a society based on a system of temporary encounters, and a
distinctly new morality founded on that belief. It would be absurd to assume that
the future holds nothing more than a straight-line projection.

It is time now to look at those intangibles that are equally important in
shaping
experience, the information we use and the organizational frameworks within
which we live.

Josh Stephenson

general film article source on the web
www.metaphilm.com

its a discssion board where people post their reactions to deeper articles about films. At the beginning of each board is a link to the full text of each article.

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Article 1
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“DOING TIME ON PAPER STREET” Mike White
http://www.impossiblefunky.com/archives/issue_12/12_fightclub.asp?IshNum=12
(no date given)

I had to read and discuss this article because each time I have watched Fight Club I too was wondering the significance of why David Fincher had such a long such of a superficially pointless shot of the street sign where most of the film took place, on Paper Street, and this article has single handedly found the extraordinarily obscure reference. The author saught the answers from the novel. That did not seem to help him, however, while reading he (some how) recalled watching Puff the Magic Dragon on tv when he was a child. The author asserts Puff was Jackie Draper’s power animal, and the really funnny thing is that this is not far from the truth at all. The author explains that when Puff drew a replica of Jackie (Draper) , and cut it out of paper, and named it Jackie Paper. He took the “living thing” from the real boy’s left ear and gave life to the paper one. Puff then took Jackie Paper on a fantastical and outragous journy to Horah Lee. Once they were done Puff returned the “living thing” to the real boy’s left ear. The article then realizes that in the movie it is the left ear that Jack/the Narator has to shot himself in to get rid of his own alter ego. Thus Paper Street is small reference to a similar story to Fight Club.
There is so much more than merely what is written to be gained from this article. It is no mistake that Fincher included this reference in his film. Puff the Magic Dragon is representative of the first onset of consumer culture subjegation in every person’s life now-a-days. And that is exactly the media subjegation that causes the events of the film. Thus references even as small as Paper Street can be part of a director’s overall message (even if they are totally coincidental and some overthinking webloger assumes they were done on purpose!!!)

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Article 2
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“Plato’s Cave and The Matrix” John Partridge. March 20, 2003
http://whatisthematrix.warnerbros.com/rl_cmp/new_phil_partridge.html

A movie’s official website would normally be a strange place to find philosophical articles regarding the movie, but The Matrix is no ordinary movie. On the website there is a link to original essays by philosophers under a link called none other than “philosophy.” I chose one by John Partridge, who writes about the Cave as explained by Plato in his most famous work, the Republic, nearly twenty-four hundred years ago! The author very effectively demonstrates the similarities between the Cave and The Matrix, by quoting a passage and then explaining that this was not written about the movie. In the quote, Plato hypothesizes that some prisoners in a Matrix like situation, may want to remain imprisoned. Plato does however clearly state that being released from the prison is superior, because they would possess the genuine knowledge. Further, when returned to the prison this person would be treated with hostility. That definitely sounds like The Matrix. The article states that Plato does not directly address the subjegation but instead the true benefit of being free and fully aware of one’s true condition. That the most crucial discovery, is the discovery of one’s self. This directly implicates that being in such a prison or the Matrix is in fact inherently bad and should not be accepted, no matter how similar or “real” it may seam. The mere fact that you are being lied to, is reason enough even to suffer a less desirable true reality. Cypher is of course character that represents the opposite of these beliefs.
Because the subjectors of such cruelty in the Cave are not addressed the author contends that the reader is left to fear the worst, specifically mentioning a totalitarian government and mass media, as capable of such a ruse. Socrates says “They are us” which is more true of a film like Fight Club, which discusses our self imposed confines of consumer culture.
It is not until part III of his essay that the author finally compares the Cave and The Matrix. The author points out that ironically the real world in The Matrix is more similar to the conditions in the cave, and visa versa, the conditions inside the Matrix are nearly identical to what we consider reality now. Most importantly though, if we were unsure of the true value of the being oblivious you are in the Matrix, it is only when Neo has the fullest understanding of himself that he is able to fully understand the Matrix and thus manipulate it. Due to the fact that the Matrix is the Cave, it is the fact that full understanding of the environment is not given, i.e. the author seems at least (possibly unknown to himself) that if everyone in the Matrix understood the Matrix and themselves, it would no longer be the cave. I guess it must be added that one must be able to come and go from such a ‘prison’ for it to no longer have any negativity. Essentially the Matrix is not inherently bad, it is the fact that information is withheld (and they have no choice of being there) that is bad. Allow everyone free exit and explain the Matrix is not really like reality and it is fine. But that is of course my own synthesis of the author’s assertions.
The Article is quote thought provoking, including the author’s. But very deep which again is not what one would expect from a film’s official website

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Article 3
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TITLE:
Glam Gnost (Gnostic Action Movies Provide Role Models For Men, Paradigms For The Role Of Art In Society!)

SOURCE:
Susan Faludi, Art Issues magazine no64 16-19 S/O 2000
Copyright the Foundation for Advanced Critical Studies, Inc.

This article relates The Matrix, and Fight Club (and The Ninth Gate) to Gnostic Christian idealogies. It helpfully explains Gnosticism, a sect of christianity from the second and third centuries. Due to its beliefs that 'reality' is just an illusion set forth by some malevolent higher power, the sect was subsequently eliminated by the ruling Roman Christian powers. It was rediscovered in 1945 by finding hidden texts in an Egyptian cave.
The article first addresses The Matrix as directly and purposely influenced by Gnostic concepts. It relates to my paper topic by claiming that man kind is malevolently imprisoned through the use of media, namely "a coded mosaic of fragmentary superficial entertainments formed into a seamless unity." The writer varies slightly by using different imagery of the media control by saying that each person released from the matrix is "poking their finger into the sore of their media womb even as they take sustenance from it." He says that this film is unique in that the false reality from which the main character has trouble escaping is more similar to true Gnosticism than other films in which the false reality is most often a film itself, an example of which the class just viewed, Perfect Blue.
Next, the article discusses Fight Club. It points out that the narrator is enslaved this time by "material culture," and asserts that the events of the movie, including all of Tyler Durdens activities is the narrator's awakening from his false world. In this instance it is not a genuine fake reality, but symbolic, but the point of the author and thus the director of the film is that even a symbolic enslavement is evil and must be avoided. The author points out a hand full of stylistic similarities between the two films. I agree with a few, including he observation that both films depict the awakened world as less clean than the fake one.
Then the author discusses The Ninth Gate and then rambles on about how movies now-adays are more “slackerish.” When he finishes that, he completely obfuscates his own conclusion by employing only the most outlandish discriptors to explain all three of the movie’s conclusions. One might aswell not read the conclusion because dispite the valuable insight offered through out the body of the article, the ending is purely the author’s successful attempt to merely claim he knows the most obscure vocabulary on the planet. Just to give a little taste of how this helpful article ends, here’s the last sentence: “Otherwise, we'll be stuck here, immanentizing the eschaton until the cows come home.”

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Text of the Article 3
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An outsider, intrigued to the point of obsession, disrupts a group of well-heeled black-robed Satanists performing a ritual at an isolated estate in one of my favorite, as well as one of the most unjustly snubbed movies of last year. I'm not referring to Stanley Kubrick's much-discussed Eyes Wide Shut but to Roman Polanski's The Ninth Gate, starring Johnny Depp as a book dealer who undergoes an occult initiation in the form of a Maltese Falcon-like search for a rare book cowritten and illustrated by Satan.
The Ninth Gate was the third in a series of recent releases that caught me off-guard. Beneath their action/thriller exteriority, the trio comprises a set of proposals for resolving the crippling conflicts inherent in the current cultural parameters of masculinity and surrounding the function of art in society--all filtered more or less directly through a heretical mystical Christian doctrine from two thousand years ago. It started with The Matrix. I had heard that the blockbuster film was worth seeing for its dazzling special effects and beautifully choreographed martial-arts sequences, but, having seen Keanu in his other cyberthriller Johnny Mnemonic, I waited until it got to the cheap second-run theater to check it out.
I was expecting an off-the-shelf storyline about good guys fighting bad guys over something-or-other inside the amazing virtual reality of cyberspace. A ragtag bunch of hackers who didn't even know each other in the real world would be a buff and Versaced super-team probably fighting cyberterrorists. And, in spite of unusual references to psychedelics and surprisingly explicit anarcho-libertarian political attitudes, this seemed to be the case for the first half-hour or so. Then, in a mind-bending sequence of awakenings, Keanu's Neo character comes to the realization that what he had believed to be the real world was, in fact, a simulation generated by an evil artificial intelligence to enslave mankind. I was starting to identify.
The Matrix is a breathtaking pastiche of self-conscious stylistic borrowings, visually and thematically cribbing from Blade Runner, The Crow, Alien, Naked Lunch, martial-arts films, westerns, film noir, fashion, and advertising, as well as the literary sci-fi works of Philip K. Dick and William Gibson. The script is full of wordplay, quotations, and references, including--swingers will like this--the sly use of an impossibly antiquated edition of Jean Baudrillard's Simulacra and Simulation as a hollow dummy for hiding pirate software. The movie is particularly rife with Christian allegory, which runs the gamut from deep structuralist archetypal resonance to winking ham-fisted cliche--or vice versa, according to your taste (one of the primary functions of camp parables being the exclusion of noncognoscenti through a barrage of embarrassing insults to the intelligence).
The Matrix is a film whose self-consciousness extends all the way through, rendering itself to be only as ironic as is the viewer. Of course, this could be said about many great films, from Citizen Kane to Natural Born Killers. What is different about The Matrix is its predication on the Gnostic concept of another, more real world beyond the limits of its own subjectivity. While films have often explored the metaphorical connection underlying this schism between the cinematic and "reality," they have almost always done so at the expense of the autonomy of cinema as a reality unto itself. The Truman Show, Peter Weir's disappointing stab at post-McLuhan mysticism, is curdled by the same unearned sentiment that rendered The Dead Poets Society unwatchable. In contrast, The Matrix seethes with the cool modulated rage of hordes of tired and skeptical post-boomer doubting Thomases, each poking their finger into the sore of their media womb even as they take sustenance from it. The Matrix is a coded mosaic of fragmentary superficial entertainments formed into a seamless unity. In this sense, it mimics the flatness of "the Matrix" reality construct in its own story, with the implication that the film itself may be a Gnostic false world from which an awakening will occur. The Matrix II?
Gnosticism is a strain of Christian thought that reached its initial peak in the second and third centuries C.E., after which it was virtually eliminated by the centralized Roman authorities. It existed mostly as a footnote in the history of religion, or hidden in esoteric traditions such as alchemy, until the discovery in 1945 of over fifty mostly unknown ancient texts in a cave in Nag Hammadi Egypt. Since then, popular and academic interest in Gnosticism has exploded. Gnostic ideas lie close to the heart of psychoanalyst Carl Jung's legacy, and scholars and practitioners of depth psychology have continued to expand upon his researches in the Gnostic vein. The Gnostic Gospels, a surprising 1979 nonfiction bestseller by Elaine Pagels brought gnostic concepts to the literate public Fantastic American religious mythologies--such as Scientology and Mormonism--closely resemble its elaborate and paranoiac cosmology. As American rebellion reached a peak in the late nineteen sixties, concurrently with the widespread dissemination of psychedelic drugs, Gnosticism began to stand out as a viable Western spiritual tradition that eschewed submission to authority and embraced the pervasive sense that nothing is as it appears.
In spite of the fact that The Matrix contains no mention of religion, the soul, or God (except as an expletive), many key Gnostic concepts are found in it: including the beliefs that the world we perceive is an illusion generated by a malevolent higher power; that man is a slave to this illusion and ignorant of his state; that a revelation from outside may awaken him from this state; and that the awakening of any individual is a cosmic event. The allegorical Gnostic content of The Matrix is obviously deliberate, and hinted at by the actors and writer/director team in several interviews. Fight Club, the second film in my triumvirate, is more problematic.
Marketed as a story about bored, restless white-collar drones who start a fistfighting club that subsequently gets out of hand, Fight Club was supposed to be a comeback vehicle for Brad Pitt. I was again intrigued just enough to catch it at the cheap theater, only to have an almost equally disconcerting experience as I had in viewing The Matrix. In a hilarious and dizzying rush of narrative, a bored insurance claims adjuster played by Edward Norton meets the charismatic outsider Tyler Durden (Pitt), who mocks his enslavement to material culture. When Norton's condo goes boom, he winds up crashing at Durden's crumbling Victorian and, yes, starting a fight club. As they explore their newly tapped yang energy, Norton enters a gleeful freefall out of conventional society. So far so good--but nothing is as it appears. As Durden's escapades escalate, he appears to be organizing a paramilitary network out of the legions of disaffected workers who flock to his Fight Club. They start to blow shit up. Norton is frozen out, and becomes convinced that Tyler's a madman. The catch is that Ed Norton is Tyler Durden, and Pitt his schizophrenically exteriorized other personality. In fact, the whole adventure is a ritual to drag Norton kicking and screaming into an awakening from the false world, which in this case is explicitly identified as consumerist culture.
The Matrix and Fight Club share many stylistic similarities--both begin with animated sequences plummeting through microscopic space, end with impossibly corny twists on boy-meets-girl watching fireworks, and recklessly plunder and reinvent pop cinematic conventions to a block-rockin' beat. I have this hunch that the directors of The Matrix edited their film to stroboscopically mimic and elicit the slow brainwave frequencies associated with religious feeling and numinous experience, while Fight Club's director put scissors in the hands of one of his characters to insert full-frontal single-frame subliminals in commercial movies--including the very one he's inside. Both films depict what the normal media call "terrorist" activities as reasonable responses to an evolutionary dead end. Both are only ambivalently heterosexual: Nobody has sex even once in The Matrix, and the relationship between Norton and Pitt in Fight Club is clearly more erotically charged than that between the ostensible sexual duo of Pitt's Tyler Durden and Helena Bonham Carter's goth street waif. Both picture the post-awakened world as substantially less clean and comfortable than the simulation. Ultimately, Fight Club's down-and-out dynamic may come up short as a Gnostic parable, for it suggests that the sensual world may be redeemed if the Fisher King's wounds are healed. The transcendence of its oppressive false world is achieved not by rejecting the senses but through descending from identification with our dissonance-producing higher brain functions into a reconciliation with Nature, by any means necessary.
At first glance, The Ninth Gate doesn't appear Gnostic at all, but rather Satanist or alchemical. In its more worldly view, the politics of cupidity aren't about to be overcome through organized opposition. The noir protagonist Dean Corso (Johnny Depp) is looking out for Number One. He considers himself a pragmatist, and is driven by greed and fear, as well as a tremendous ego. In the end, finally getting it on with the whore of Babylon beneath the fireworks, he becomes one with "the absolute power to shape his own destiny." So, The Ninth Gate winds up more Gnostic than either Fight Club or The Matrix, albeit mediated by the occult traditions that preserved Gnostic beliefs through the dark ages. Apart from a few fires and a couple of unlikely jumps, The Ninth Gate uses almost no special effects. And when hard-to-identify-with Corso shakes off his false cinematic world, we don't go with him, we are left behind. In this way, The Ninth Gate more truly transcends the dualism of its medium, whereas The Matrix and Fight Club actually multiply the layers of voyeuristic remove between the audience and the real.
Yet, something apart from their Gnostic content links these three movies; something about the timing of their reception, their place in the very world of glamorous legerdemain they seek to disrupt. All three protagonists are in the midst of a gender crisis rooted in their emasculation by materialist society, and are, not coincidentally, portrayed by matinee idols with expired shelf-dates. Both The Matrix and Fight Club revel in po-mo self-referentiality. Conversely, the professedly bibliophilic Ninth Gate only subtly breaks the fourth wall, elegantly and invisibly transforming its literary source into the complex argot of occult and suspense cinema, with just the occasional self-reflexive ripple disturbing its narrative surface. (With Kubrick gone, Polanski is now the master of making films that are far better than their source materials.) This comparison may reveal a contemporary tendency for slacker auteurs to compensate for their lack of cinematic chops with a gaudy patchwork of redirected attentions, but before reaching that conclusion we have to watch the movies from the perspective of their clearly shared hypothesis: that all art, in fact all sensory experience, is exactly that--surface movement alone.
Any movie whose protagonist finds out things are not as they appear, and goes on to realize his own power to define reality, may be presumed to hold particular allegorical meaning regarding the filmmaker and the filmmaking process. These three movies, in particular, assert a promiscuous continuity between the very construction of their cinematic worlds and the construction of what their audiences take for reality. They provide possible solutions to the crisis of men with no place in our glamour-commodity patriarchal society and offer a millennial apocalyptic revelation, then propose three different systems of psychological/spiritual technology with which to realize this awakening. And you thought it was just some bitchin' kung fu!
The three models of action are as follows: The Matrix suggests that freedom lies forward, in an as yet unrealized critical density of awareness engendered by an implicit cybernetic/psychedelic gnosticism encoded in the nonhierarchical and information-pickled structure of the Internet. It is Neo's ability to evolve in time with technology that allows him to transcend it. The model of art-making it offers is a tech-driven one, with humanity creating ever more complex artforms toward which our consciousness must evolve.
Fight Club posits a ritualized social cleansing rooted in a Luddite privileging of the physiological over the intellectual. The nature/culture schism vanishes when we stop clinging, and civilization becomes a baroque expression of our fear of not having enough manna stored up for Winter. Art is trangressive, explicitly political, arresting habitual rationalization, and occasionally it is reactionary: Many of the actions in the Operation Mayhem phase of Fight Club's activities resemble big-budget versions of art pranks.
The Ninth Gate is more cautious. Keeping the metaphor contained within the film until the very end, awakening, when it finally occurs, is almost tantric in its explosiveness. As solipsistic as Mark Twain's "Mysterious Stranger," it gives no weight to the hero's intentions apart from a will to know. Nevertheless, The Ninth Gate emphasizes a literary and narrative theater of incremental enlightenment--implying that art's function is ancient, hardwired, and only superficially changed by technology. The seeds of human evolution will sprout with whatever nourishment they can get.
Choose whichever model you like, the most unique aspect of the philosophies embodied in these movies is their refusal to renounce the spectacular, glamorous mode of communication that their scripts decry. Obviously, none of these solutions are adequate, or we'd wake up already. But the fact remains that these films are addressing spirituality, politics, the nature of art, and the medium of filmmaking in radical ways that they and their creators don't apprehend. As the dissipation of authority reaches the limits of our perception, it may render any distinction between the real and the artificial meaningless, generating an art that functions as the world-redeeming tool it is frequently rumored to be. Otherwise, we'll be stuck here, immanentizing the eschaton until the cows come home.
ADDED MATERIAL
Observing stutters and glitches in the fabric of broader culture, lapses in continuity, locked grooves, awkward breaches of protocol, rude noises, and other indications of creative activity, Doug Harvey's Skipping Formalities occurs regularly in Art issues.
Fight Club © 1999 Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation, Monarchy Enterprises, and Regency Entertainment Inc.
The Matrix © 1999 Warner Bros.
The Ninth Gate © 1999 Artisan Pictures Inc.

Mike Fogel

Annotated Bibliography

Horne, Philip. "Martin Scorsese and the film between the living and the dead." Raritan: A Quarterly Review, 21:1 (2001 Summer), pp. 34-51.

Scorsese, Martin, dir. 1999. Bringing Out the Dead. USA. Sound, col., 121 mins. DVD edition.

This article compares Bringing Out the Dead to a few other movies, namely The Last Temptation of Christ, The Sixth Sense, Taxi Driver and a documentary entitled "Near Death," but focuses on the first film for the most part (mere sentences about the others, and some paragraphs about the documentary). Here he explores several ideas: the distinction between living and dead, the frustration of the medical professions (particularly those of doctor and paramedic), and delusion, among others. The bulk of the article analyzes parts of the film in order to establish the author's points. This article does not really have a main thesis, but rather makes somewhat objective observations about Bringing Out the Dead. Horne explores the religious symbolism of the movie: the paramedic as God, a girl who undergoes immaculate conception, the Catholic backgrounds of the characters. He discusses the idea of the life-support system and the extent to which a person connected to it is actually alive (the main character, played by Nicholas Cage, is haunted by a man that he brought back to "life" throughout the film). He refers to the characters' inclination to following procedure, hinting that it is done merely as a way to make the dying (or dead) person's family happy.

Horne often explains scenes from the movie in detail, and quotes dialogue extensively. This does not act as filler, though. To those who have not seen the film, it should certainly be helpful; and, to those that have, it acts as a tool helpful in vividly recalling parts of the movie. He dismantles the scenes and dialogue, pointing out irony or stylistic elements, giving a clear example of what he is trying to say at certain points.

Silvio, Carl. "Refiguring the radical cyborg in Mamoru Oshii's Ghost in the Shell." Science Fiction Studies, 26:1 (March 1999), pp. 54-60.

Oshii, Mamoru, dir. 1995. Ghost in the Shell. Japan. Sound, col., 82 mins. DVD edition.

Carl Silvio presents the animated film Ghost in the Shell and analyzes it from two perspectives: 1) that the film helps to disintegrate the traditionally binary nature of gender, gender roles, and sexuality and 2) that the film ultimately adheres to the idea of the female as being inferior to the male. He writes about technology and the possibility of its being able to destroy social inequalities, but says that it ultimately reinforces social power roles. He warns that he views the film in a primarily American context, despite its origins.

Silvio points out that we, at the surface, see a powerful character that is presented as female (if you have not seen the film, it deals greatly with the idea of "cyborgs" and artificial intelligence; while the main character is, at her core, a living female [due to having living brain cells], she is mostly composed of robotic parts, so that her being female is mostly arbitrary). She is capable of superhuman feats due to her augmentations: acrobatics, becoming invisible. The main character also takes a leading role when with her partner, a mere human male, commanding him even though their partnership is likely to be mutual; id est, she becomes the natural leader, not one made so because of rank.

However, Silvio says, this view of her is destroyed when looked into more deeply. The character, while a strong female, is given a body that adheres to the Western male's vision of beauty. In addition, there are gratuitous shots of nudity throughout the film, but not for any of the male characters. Therefore, the woman becomes objectified. At the end of the film, she merges with an entity that is pure data (represented as a male voice). While their union defies the biological concept of procreation; since the two beings literally join to become a third, separate, being; the dialogue in the film presents it as a traditional union, a man entering a woman to produce "offspring." Nothing in the film suggests that this is the case, but this is how the male entity put it. An interesting article.

Nofz, Michael, and Phil Vendy. "When Computers Say It with Feeling: Communication and Synthetic Emotions in Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey." Journal of Communication Inquiry, 26:1 (January 2002), pp. 26-45.

Kubrick, Stanley, dir. 1968. 2001: A Space Odyssey. USA. Sound, col., 156 mins. DVD edition.

This article primarily discusses artificial intelligence and its role among humans, but makes extensive use of 2001: A Space Odyssey as example. The main point that Nofz and Vendy present is that machines (id est, current AI and the HAL character from the film) do not necessarily feel emotion; rather, they act it.

The authors say that human beings do the exact same thing. A person, especially in the work environment (flight attendants are given as an example), typically acts a certain way or hides certain feelings in order to please others or avoid conflict. This is what computers are modeled after, particularly those with advanced AI (used in experimentation). The computer senses certain reactions by a person and adjusts tone to accommodate.

Nofz and Vendy venture to interpret HAL in this way. While HAL is presented as a machine with feelings, they say that "he" is merely adjusting to the people that interact with him. A good example is when the character Dave is shutting HAL down and the computer pleads with him to not do it. Nofz and Vendy note that HAL's tone changes a few times while trying to convince Dave not to turn him off, as if HAL is trying to find the thing to say that will stop Dave.

Another aspect of human communication with machines that is explored is the extent to which humans become attached to their computers/machines when they seem to have emotions. They argue that 2001 is showing the error in this. When Dave first speaks to his partner about shutting HAL off, he does so in a place where HAL cannot "hear" them (but oops, HAL reads lips) and expresses that he is worried about how HAL will feel about it. By the end of the movie though, after HAL has killed every other person aboard the ship, Dave has realized that this was a misjudgment, and coldly ignores all of HAL's pleas. This is an interesting article discussing the relationship between man and his creations.

--Robbie

Taubin, Amy. "Masculinity in Fight Club", Polity Press in association w/ Blackwell Publishers, Sight & Sound, Nov. 1999.

Taubin begins her essay on Fight Club by asking "what is masculinity?" She then says she will try to answer the question during the course of the essay through Fight Club.
She goes into a paragraph of her idea of masculinity. Some of the characteristics she mentions are, strong, confident, rugged, etc. She then says Jack is the opposite of all of these. She describes Jack as we all know him, and calls him unmasculine under the terms of R.W. Connell who she then quotes.
She then goes into the situation that Jack is in. Going to group therapy for healing. She stresses the importance of these meetings emphasizing on the testicular cancer group. She addresses the role of Jack's crying in these meetings and identifies them with feminine behavior.
Next Taubin explains Jack's resentment for Marla. In this portion of the essay she explains how much Jack hates himself through Marla because she is a double of his. She says that Jack "does not want to be feminine like Marla." She says that he hates everything feminine and with beauty and later displays this when he beats a member of fight club because he " wanted to destroy something beautiful".
She then explains that Jack's urge to fight is the same as his desire to attend the meetings. He has a need to feel alive. This need to be alive is also underlined by the reminders that today’s generation of men have no purpose. Taubin believes this feeling of no purpose is because so many working class men are not the to be the sole "bread earner" and because of it feel as though they have failed at their primary purpose.
Taubin connects this thought to Tyler saying that "we are a generation of men raised by women, and I'm starting to wonder if another woman is really what we need." She says this also adds to why he hates Marla.
Next Taubin speaks of the importance of the basement at Lou's Tavern. She says it is significant to the theme because there are no women, there is no class distinction, and the primary goal is for men to deal with taking a beating.
She then spends time on Brad Pitt as Tyler Durden. She says Pitt is "cool" in Fight Club, not because he is good-looking, but because he is intelligent, has interesting clothes, and has a way with words.
In her conclusion, Taubin comes back to what she thinks masculinity is defined as. She says that simply being male is not enough to be masculine, and says that masculinity has more to do with gender than sex. Taubin only finds masculinity to work when it is contrasted with femininity. She ends her essay with a quote which she believes proves why the theory of masculinity cannot be pinned down in such a way as psychoanalytic theory can.

Reed, Adrienne "Masculine identity in the Service Class", 2000

Reed begins her essay by comparing the themes of Fight Club to Natural Born Killers. She also starts her essay by saying the film would be misinterpreted if one would think it to be only about violence. Now that she has this out of the way she gives a brief summary of the film.
Tyler Durden is then analyzed through Reed. She breaks down the hidden psychological meaning of his name. Speaks of Jack's multiple personalities and notes this is Norton's second time playing a character with a spit personality. Reed says "Fight Club is really about what it is to be a man who serves others and how such men construct identity and meaning in their lives". This section of Reed's essay addresses intimacy between Jack and Tyler through three scenes. The bathroom talk about their fathers, the chemical burn Tyler gives Jack, and when Tyler hurts Jack by walking out on him, "My father dumped me, Tyler dumped me."
Reed says she finds another potential masculine meaning in the way women are not what the men need in their lives, insinuating that male companion would be better for them. She reaffirms this with how Jack is jealous of Tyler and Marla's relationship, how Jack says he cannot get married because he is a thirty year old boy, and through Tyler's statement in the bathroom, "I'm starting to think that another woman isn’t the answer."
The next paragraph states that the film is non-sexual. Reed sees no love between any of the characters, and no homoerotic undertone. She believes the only love in the film is self love and the desire for more of it. She sees this through Tyler's love for his penis, and the "nagging fear" of castration throughout the film. Reed uses Bob as an example for the castration anxiety seen and the masculine shortcoming tone in the film.
One of two other pivotal phrases that Reed says regard to masculinity are the occasions when Tyler tells the members of fight club that they are slowly realizing they will not all be millionaires. Reed says this ties into the American dream. The other is in the same speech given by Tyler. He says that they [the contemporary male generation] have no cause. Consequently Reed believes this means they have no way of proving their toughness or self-worth.
Reed also addresses the haiku that Jack sends to his co-workers. The poem shows disdain for class distinction. Another time Reed says this is seen is when they sell rich women back their own fat.
Reed goes into many examples of why she thinks the film is filled with concern for the working class man. A powerful theme she sees through the portrayal of the middle class in the movie is how the film suggests that only the upper class are masculine. They are the ones who are real men because they are good providers and anyone less than them is just vulgar and violent. She believes another masculine theme is that men who are not successful feel as though they can not be gentle.
In Reed's conclusion she states that the film is about escaping conventional society.

Lee Terry’s analysis of Fight Club is primarily about the impossible expectations society places on young men. Terry states in his opening paragraph that “men have been conditioned to think that certain behavior is naturally masculine or not, and therefore abhorrent”.
He goes into a theory of how in the beginning of the nineteenth century, boys were socialized to male sex roles based on prevailing ideology of the time, which believed that, “real men held their emotions in check” (Kimmel 128). He adds that men could have emotions as long as they were socially acceptable. He speaks of a man called the “public man” who is too busy for anything, even his sexuality.
Lee says Fight Club traces the social construction of contemporary manhood. In this segment of the essay he touches on how the film suggests consumer-materialist culture defines masculinity and what men desire. He reinforces these statements with the significance of Jack being co-dependent with his furniture.
The next paragraph compares Jack to Shakespeare’s Hamlet. Lee finds a correlation between the two through the demands that their cultures place on their masculinity. Lee says that Hamlet just wanted to be a student and be with Ophelia, but had to fulfill the role of the hero. He compares Tyler with Hamlet’s father. He then speaks men dealing with contradictory masculine roles.
Lee gives seven examples of these roles and how men are consequently confused because of them. An example of this list is [not showing emotion, bucking up (only women and sissies cry) and being the compassionate house husband, sharing the emotional burden of the family].
According to Lee the violence in Fight Club must be interpreted from a psychological point of view. With this Lee says Fight Club appeals to young men on two levels. A psychological level and on a sociological level. Lee explains the sociological part through Jack’s relationship with material possessions, and explains the psychological level through Jack fighting with his psyche.
Lee finds that the fighting and the destruction in the in the film is an external manifestation of an internal destruction of Jack’s old ego position, and of his socially constructed masculinity. He compares this manifestation to a transformation, or “change over”. This would represent a boy changing into a masculine adult.
Lee throws in brief comments made by the producer, and writer about what they believe the film does, or least they hope it does.
Lee finds it important that once Jack becomes conscious of what is going on he tries to stop it. He throws in statements by Joseph Campbell about a hero’s quest and how he must “re-emerge from the kingdom of dread”.
The essay is concluded with theories on the film in general. One of Lee’s stronger idea’s is that the violence reminds men that they can fight against harmful models of masculinity.
--
SADOW,ZACHARY FORD

Hunter, L., The Celluloid Cubicle: Regressive Constructions of Masculinity in 1990s Office Movies, Journal of American Culture, Mar2003, Vol. 26 Issue 1 p71.

The article begins by touching on the film Billy Elliot. This film is about a boy that is a ballet dancer. The impact of the film on young boys shows that boys that are involved in dancing were more comfortable with being dancers after seeing the film. The article then moves on to show a young man that would pray that he would get into a fight. He loved the movie Fight Club. Next point is how the movie The Boiler Room taught a new group of young businessmen how to do business.

After presenting a few films the article exemplifies the point that boys and young men use movies to explain or model their identities and masculinities. These are examples of how film has helped to shape our culture’s perception of what a man should be. The history of film presenting these ideas can go back to the post war period. At this time film present the man being at home and shaping the family structure. More recently are films with characters like Rambo. The article suggests that these films are in response to a strong feminist movement. More recently, films of the nineties have suggested the middleclass male as being belittled to a corporate drone. The film Fight Club is presented as a type of anti-office genre. Making men aware of their routine, boring lives.
The article brings up a key point in that boys are unable to find a masculine identity due to a rise in fatherless families. Thus leaving these young boys to look elsewhere for men to look up to and identify with. The article isn’t blind by saying that films are the only influence left. It also brings up the point of technology’s tremendous growth in the last decade. Suggesting that youth are influenced by many things that children might not of been subject to in earlier times.

The idea that we also live in a culture that has changed quite a bit due to the set up of the economy. After Reganomics, men are needed in the corporate world for our society to continue to survive and grow at the pace we are going.

The main film that is of importance to this idea and the article is Fight Club. The article brings up the point that these types of films can be dangerous. They assume that most men, ages twenty-five to fifty-five, are unhappy with their mundane lives. This unhappiness builds and builds until the day when they wake up and snap. The article then discusses the film’s blame for the male imprisonment to corporate brand names and the purchasing of things you don’t need. In the scene in which these ideas are presented he never refers to himself as “I”. He always says, “We and Us”, attempting to include all the males that feel this way.

The article then makes three points that separates a movie like Fight Club from the other stereotypical men, violent movies. The first is that it doesn’t alienate a character as a hero that defeats the bad guy. It shows men coming together. Second, is that the violence in Fight Club is believable. They fight until one has had enough and taps out. The fights don’t present a winner and a loser. The violence doesn’t contribute to how much a man is worth. The third point is that the film shows the fighters at their real jobs. They aren’t larger than life fighters. The fighters are real men that work in the office. The final point is that after fighting the men began to see things differently.

The article does bring up other great films that further point out film’s representation of today’s male. Most of these movies show these men breaking free of their devices and enjoying life for the first time in a long time.

The article begins by bringing up the point that our culture naturally carries certain roles of masculinity that males are to live up to. The culture suggests that some emotions are ok and some are not, because they are too feminine.

It continues by going back to the turn of the nineteenth century and looking at the expectations of man. Men are supposed to control their emotions and use them productively in the work force. He should be very focused on his work. Work is something that should consume all his physical, emotional, and sexual energy if he is to succeed. A measure of a man is by his success at his job. It was unacceptable for a man to use his “juice” for anything destructive. Masturbation is an example of this type of self-destruction. Kellogg’s Corn Flakes were even invented by J.H. Kellogg for men as a massive anaphrodisiac to temper and eventually reduce sexual ardor in men. The meaning behind this mind set is for men to practice self-restraint. (Lee 2002)

At the turn of the next century, the man needs devote time to sports. Thus proving his masculinity by his success on the field or court. This release of activity comes from his inactivity in the office or the factory and sports are an acceptable way.

The article now brings up the film Fight Club, where IKEA furnishings replace Corn Flakes. In the first, men are leaning to control their sexual desires. In the second, men are replacing their sexual desires with consumer desires. The article brings up a point by film critic Gary Crowdus that says Jack is “de-humanized” and enslaved to “life-style consumerism” and when they establish the fight club it provides a temporary physical and emotional release for men. (Lee 2002)

The article then brings up another male character, Shakespeare’s Hamlet. This character is confused on which male role to be, either possess domestic masculinity or the masculine hero. This character in the end became suicidal over this confusion and thus became a negative example. The article says he became violent in an unhealthy way. In contrast the film Fight Club presents men who “destroy harmful masculine gender roles, rather than letting harmful masculine gender roles destroy them.” (Lee 2002)

The character in the film confronts his unconscious and then goes through a self-exploration. One scene even promotes the loss of the male ego. When Tyler (Jack’s unconscious) purposely loses a fight. In this film and in many religious stories the hero must descend downward into darkness to ascend into the light. This idea is found here when Jack in theory breaks himself. But it is at the end when Jack must truly break himself and kill this character of his unconscious.

The article then suggests that even though the film presents violence, it is channeling violence in a positive way. They are fighting against the culturally defined masculine roles of society. Each man must confront his own ego and unconscious. He must decide to align with these so-called dangerous, dark forces or choose to overcome and ascend into an enlightened consciousness.

The article begins with the male writer discussing growing up watching the western film genre. Leith discusses how watching a western was very serious to him. It was more than just cowboy verse indian or white hat versus black hat. Even just the experience of going to see a movie influenced him. It was the largest place he had ever been and it’s massive screen and larger than life sound was overwhelming to him. It was from cinema, not books that he learned.

>From Leith’s first western, Shane, he was a young boy confronted with conflict between men. He was beginning to make sense of a male society. As a young boy Leith began to identify characters in the film with his father and the men in his life.

The article then brings up points made by western film critic Martin Pumphrey that “playing cowboys was a dominant memory from childhood.” Another point is that he would “absorb the styles of the heroes of TV westerns.” The article suggest that the way that the western depicts men, in the way the walk, talk, dress, and act it is only natural that young boys would begin to ask how their own male subjectivities compare with the ones on the screen. (Leith, 2002)

The article even suggests that part of the popularity of the western film is that it deals with issues of masculinity that were not addressed elsewhere in society. The film presents interactions that are homosocial. They show men in same sex situations that distinguish men according to age, race, ethnicity, and class. At the top of this hierarchy is the hero. He knows how to use guns and can demonstrate restraint in any situation. In contrast to the villains, he is protective of women. The hero’s body is tough and athletic. And to end this portrayal, the hero is usually working in a lawless environment.

The article then comes out of explaining film characteristics and scans the audience. The gaze upon the screen is brought up and even discussed as “a gaze of repressed homosexuality.” The men and the characteristics that the audience looks at changed. Marlon Brando and James Dean possessed a certain complex "feminised masculinity." (Leith, 2002) But as the years moved on the characteristics changed to the tough guy. The actors that projected such characteristics were John Wayne and Gary Cooper.

As time continues to move on the portrayal of men seem to be more realistic. They are showed as passionate, having self-doubt, and capable of hysteria. The last of these points is the most important because we see a weakness. Also more realistic is the portrayal of the bad guy. He is not always wearing a black hat and at times he is even likable.

The article then examines the western film, The Man from Laramie. It explores the characters relationships in the film including the main male character and his interaction between children, women, mother, other men, and the villain.

The author of the article then looks at his life and the involvement of these male icons from the western film. He felt less of a man in comparison with his father and his brother. They seemed to carry more of the characteristics shown in the film. He felt as if he didn’t measure up simply because his masculinity was different. This caused him as a boy much personal conflict.

Trey Lineberger—Masculinity in Film

Jennifer Rahimitabar

Annotated Bibliography

· Lyons, Donald. "La-La Limbo." Lost Highway Film Commentary. Film Comment magazine (January-February 1997). http://www.lynchnet.com/lh/lhfc.html.
Lyons gives a summary of the plot and sequence of events while exploring the deeper meaning behind Lynch's Lost Highway film. It is a short but informative article on his assessment of the film. He brings up a lot of different questions about the film and touches on the answers without becoming too in-depth. He focuses on the visual and psychological intentions of certain aspects of the film including the camera as the eye and visual placement of the camera in relation to the characters. He also discusses the characters, their roles both visually and as a part of the story line. He praises the actors and their acting abilities. He describes Robert Blake's character (the Mystery Man) as a wizard, a Magister Ludi, "a sadistic toyer with space and time." He believes that his purpose is to alert Fred of his metaphysical danger in the film. He also compares the Mystery Man to Dennis Hopper and Dean Stockwell's characters in Blue Velvet, like them he is the unsettling voice of another dimension. Lyons is a fan of Lynch which is apparent in his appraisal of the film and gives commentary on the significance of Lynch as the director. He mentions that Lynch is not only a director but has many other hobbies including painting. This is apparent in the direction of the film. He portrays the face of the main characters, Fred and Renee, in the way they would be seen in a painting with the lighting illuminating just their facial features. He also uses color like the red of Renee's lips to draw attention to specific details. Lynch is also a composer and the music of this film is carefully chosen to give the feeling of different emotions with each song. Lyons lists major singles used in the film. Placement and scenery is also important to Lynch. The videotapes given to the main characters in the opening sequences show unusual angles of the house in which they live. Architecture is a focal point yet nowhere is it told where the movie takes place. The way in which the videotapes are recorded alone give them an eerie feeling that sets the feeling of the rest of the movie to come. The unknown also fascinates Lyons. He talks about the way in which Lynch chooses to present the movie in pieces rather than a whole. The pieces are meant to be thought about and put together by the viewer. Lynch plays with the known and unknown in almost every aspect of this film. Although Lyons does appreciate this film, he describes it as a disaffirming work compared to other Lynch films. "The highway that is really lost here is the highway of reason, of closure, of coherence, of the Ego." The double is a reoccurring theme within the movie, the most obvious examples being the two lives and the two Patricia Arquettes. He also names some other examples of double including male duality, cops and cars and etc. Overall it is a very good and informative review of Lost Highway.

· McCarthy, Todd. "Lost Highway Review." Premier Magazine (January 20-26 1997).
http://www.lynchnet.com/lh/lhvariety.html
McCarthy summarizes the movie Lost Highway in a play-by-play account of the action of the film. He describes in detail every major event within the film. This summary is a more superficial account of the plot and characters of the film, as opposed to going into depth about the deeper meaning of the picture. This review doesn't seem to appreciate the psychological meaning behind some of Lynch's details used in the film. Although McCarthy does not seem to understand some aspects, it is interesting to read a review from an author who watches the film not to understand it and psychologically dissect it, but to appreciate the entertainment value. McCarthy does give some credit to the director saying, "Lynch's visionary, impressionistic approach to the deep, murky and vile recesses of the psyche is again boldly on display, as is his talent for putting memorable im- ages on the bigscreen in concert with extraordinary sounds." He does not call this film one of Lynch's best but does not rank it as his worst, saying that it is superior to "Fire Walk With Me" and "Dune." He takes a look at the characters from a superficial view. The role of the Mystery Man for instance, is described as "an insinuating man who resembles a malevolent clown." Robert Blake's character role is described as ambiguous but reoccurring for a skin-crawling effect. "None of this stuff can be explicated rationally, making this a dream-film that will leave its partisans attempting to puzzle out its mysteries and non-fans out in the cold." This shows that he does not understand any meaning behind the details and plot of the picture yet can dissect it from a unknowing point of view. McCarthy does give some credit to the picture by saying "as usual in Lynch's carefully crafted pictures, all technical contributions, notably the artful lensing of Peter Deming and production design by Patricia Noris, are aces."

· Knapp, Matt. "Handgun Control?" Videodrome movie analysis. Deep Focus.Stephen Shuck
Annotated Bibliography 1
11/5/03
Prof. Burt

Nacek, Steve. "The Political Uses of the Neo-Noir City: Ideology, Genre, and the Urban Landscape in 8mm and Strange Days." Journal of American & Comparative Cultures, Vol. 25 (Fall 2002), pp. 375-83.

The primary topic in Nacek's essay is to point out the different political ideologies that can be viewed in modern neo-noir. He uses two recent films, Joel Schumacher's 8mm and Kathryn Bigelow's Strange Days, as examples. 8mm, he states, comes from a right-wing, conservative viewpoint that was seen traditionally during the film-noir's of the 1950's, particularly in its depiction of the urban city as desolate, unremitting, and bleak. Strange Days, on the other hand, has a radical anti-racist, proto-feminist, left-wing stance. Nacek states that not only do both films show the neo-noir city as desolate and depraved, but both address voyeurism with opposing views. 8mm shows the viewing of "snuff" films and pornography as not only degrading, but also lacking in eroticism and titillation. This kind of voyeurism can also lead to violent behavior, through either amorality or vigilantism. The villains of 8mm are evil men, possibly driven to their rampant amorality through pervasive encounters with pornography and violence. The hero, played by Nicolas Cage, is the patriarch of the traditional 1950's nuclear-family (male as dominant breadwinner, female as passive housewife) who eventually turns to vigilantism when he witnesses the horrors of "snuff" and the gloomy urban-city landscape. Nacek points out the ending of 8mm as a confirmation of its conservative views: the villain has no sociological motivation for his crimes, and the hero, after dispatching each bad guy, finds solace in his understanding wife and middle class suburbia.
Strange Days takes a much more radical approach to the neo-noir landscape, according to Nacek. The Los Angeles of this film, as opposed to the gloomy oppressiveness of the L.A. and New York of 8mm, is dark yet flashy, showing signs of progressive hope. Whereas 8mm shows an urban decay, full of undesirables who have embraced their perverse decadence and amorality, Strange Days shows the realities of race relations in the United States, showing police riots involving minorities and others who are impoverished. 8mm states that evil is inherent, not socially acquired. Strange Days, which has a major subplot involving the murder of an influential rap star, says that crime is linked to other sociological and racial factors. Nacek points out that the director, Kathryn Bigelow (who once helped shoot a film with underground feminist Lizzie Borden), wanted to make a "wake-up call" to race relations in Los Angeles (the film disturbingly evokes the Rodney King beating and subsequence riots). Bigelow also depicts voyeurism much differently than Schumacher did in 8mm. Characters in this film wear a SQUID, a device that can playback the past experiences of other people. The hero, played by Ralph Fiennes, sells these "snuff" films to customers who usually want harmless pleasures, such as three-way sex or the experience of being an 18-year old girl showering. These moments offer titillation and eroticism to its customers, and the audience as well. But when a clip of a woman being brutally raped falls into the hero's hands, his position on voyeurism drastically changes. He now understands the misogyny (a typical element of past and present film-noir) and violence that pervades modern society. And finally, when the murder of the rap star is experienced by the hero, Bigelow states that although voyeurism can be dangerous, it can also expose the truth and harsh realities of the world. Nacek seems to conclude Strange Days by observing that voyeurism should be used for the pursuit of truth instead of mere titillation.
Stephen Shuck
Annotated Bibliography 2
5 November 2003
Prof. Burt

Morris, Christopher D. "Psycho's Allegory of Seeing." Literature Film Quarterly, 24:1 (1996), pp. 47-51.

Morris begins his article by considering the theories that surrealism, or surrealist photography and film was created as a revolt to the Cartesian self, or in other words, to the idea of ocularcentrism. The belief of ocularcentrism basically states that what the eye perceives is a general truth. This essay's main focus is to show how Hitchcock's Psycho uses the idea of surrealism, particular in the use of the characters eyes, perceptions, signs, delusions, identities, and notions of truth. Morris looks at Psycho as an allegory on the perception of seeing as a means of understanding.
Take the last shot of Marion Crane for example, as the camera dissolves from the shower drain to her dead eye. Her eye is wide open, almost as if she has seen some sort of inexplicable truth or revelation that led to her death. But it has to be realized that what she has really seen is a misperception: her last image is of Norman's "mother," which the audience will learn later is not really true. Other characters, including Arbogast, Sam, and Lila will later make these same mistakes in regards to Norman's "mother." Morris points out that both Marion and Arbogast die under complete misconception. Both either hear or see the "mother" and believe her to exist. As far as they are concerned, their death is by "her" hands. But Lila and Sam have the benefit of having doubts about the "mother" as a real person; they eventually see Norman in his mother's clothing and survive. Morris also states that all the characters never truly "see," but live under misconceptions in the pursuit of truth. Examples include Marion's theft as love or greed, or the psychiatrist's explanation for "mother" as reason or cause.
The audience of Psycho, Morris claims, plays an integral part in the notion of "seeing." Hitchcock shows several scenes of ambiguous revelation, never fully explaining the true intention. For example, before Marion dies, she subtracts the money she spent for the car from the $40,000 she has stolen. She does the math, tears up the paper, throws it in the trash, and finally takes the paper again and throws them in the toilet. Why has she done this? Is she just being meticulous in her crime, or is she going to return home and seek restitution? Morris does not answer this question, rather just throws it out there to spark discussion on how the audience perceives events.
Finally, Morris points out that not only do several of the characters act as voyeurs, but so does the viewer as well. In addition to Norman's leering of Marion through the peephole, or Arbogast's gaze into the second floor of Norman's hosue, the viewer of Hitchcock's film takes a distinctive role in as a voyeur. Morris uses the opening sequence as an example, as the camera slowly moves through Phoenix in a steady tracking shot, zooming closer to the hotel window, finally to reveal Marion and Sam in post-coital bliss. Morris seems to be stating that as a voyeur we use our gazing of others as a means of truth and perception, but as it has been shown earlier, what we see may not be truth.

Del Rio, Elena. "The Body of Voyeurism: Mapping a Discourse of the Senses in Michael Powell's Peeping Tom." Camera Obscura, 45:15 (Sept. 2000), pp. 114-49.

Del Rio opens her long essay by introducing the idea of voyeurism in connection with Michael Powell's controversial film Peeping Tom. She states that the film wants to show the difference between the voyeur as murderer and the voyeur as a spectator. The main character of the film is Mark Lewis, a photographer/filmmaker who supplies the film's voyeuristic center. He plays the part of a classic voyeur; he does not wish to engage in sensual or sexual acts with the women he kills, and he tries desperately to keep a great distance between himself and his victims (his method of murder is hiding a bayonet in the tripod of his camera. Del Rio introduces the concept of hysterical conversion coined by Sigmund Freud and Josef Breuer, in which a person's insistent speech seems to be shut down, along with the rest of the bodily symptoms, and the vision of the voyeur takes center stage. It brings up the question; can the body communicate using other means? Is voyeurism a way to communicate? Del Rio also points out in her essay the idea of a child using a mirror as a means to find his or her own identity. An example from Peeping Tom that Del Rio uses is the opening sequence, where Mark photographs two different women. The first, beautiful but vacuous, he keeps his distance from, through his photographs and speech. The second woman, described as "bohemian" in the essay, Mark is able to identify with more. She is ugly yet beautiful at the same time. She is Mark's "mirror" in a sense, and this is how he identifies with himself.
Del Rio looks at Mark's voyeurism as paternal conflict. We learn that Mark was forced in front of the camera by his father, who attempted to study children's fear through his own son's emotions. He rewarded his son with a camera for his humiliation, leading Mark into a life of pathological narcissism. The fear he felt in front of his father's camera transposes into the fear his victims feel right before their death. He now sees his own past as a series of films instead of real life experiences.
Mark sees his camera, as stated by del Rio, as a physical representation of his own language and sexuality, two aspects of life in which he is socially dysfunctional. Phallic imagery is seen vividly in Mark's camera, including some masturbatory elements as Mark almost sensuously fondles his camera. Del Rio really underlines the idea of the voyeurism as a person's repression creating a new form of bodily communication. Although the voyeur may be limited in their own speaking voice and verbal communication, they have used voyeurism and scopophilia as their own way of communicating with others.

Morris, Christopher D. "Psycho's Allegory of Seeing." Literature Film Quarterly; 1996, Volume 24, Issue 1, pp. 47

Morris draws on the studies of Krauss and Jay in relation to the film Psycho in order to argue against the status of the sense of vision as the nexus of theoretical interpretation, against theoretical perspective itself. His main thesis is relative to the shot of Marion Crane's eye interposed within shots of the shower drain; vision (i.e. personal interpretation) as the "aperture to nothingness." The first series of examples that the author uses is the misrecognition of the main characters of their own goals, for instance Marion's delusion of money as solving her love issues. Next we learn that the principle motivation in the film, that of Norman's mother, is both ineffectual and nonexistent. The paper goes on to show that the search for meaning in what is not there is a repetitive theme in the remainder of the film, citing Arbogast's search for a dead woman and the psychiatrists referral to Norman's mother. Morris draws on Scheider's theory of the psychiatrist as the modern analog of the Deus ex machina.

Recchia, Edward. "Through a Shower Curtain Darkly: Reflexivity as a Dramatic Component of Psycho." Literature Film Quarterly; 1991, Volume 19, Issue 4, pp. 258

Recchia begins his essay by giving the examples of the novels of Thackeray and the films of Woody Allen as reflexive works, those which point to their own representative elements. His main idea is that when films consciously allude to their own illusory natures, they are also assuming that the audiences recognize that the message of the films affect their own social attitudes. Following from this, Recchia assumes that the viewer can now distinguish the design of the premises of their own life and the ways that it relates to the filmic presence, possibly as inseparable entities. Furthermore, he asserts Hitchcock's Psycho as being above and beyond in applicability, due to the observance of general cinematic narrative conventions in the first half of the film and their utter destruction and self-degradation in the second half. What he refers to as the 'dual-consciousness' of the film, the perspective of Marion subtly interplayed with the normal viewer perspective, culminates in the murder scene. He uses the themes addressed in this scene in the film to relate to the duality of the remainder of the film, and concentrates on the incorporation of these perspectives with the audience interaction for a certain "three-dimensionality" of the total message.

Scheider, Irving. "Deus Ex Animo, or Why a Doc?" Journal of Popular Film & Television; Spring 1990, Volume 18, Issue 1, pp. 36
This article explores the use of diegetic psychiatric analysis of roles in film, in the form of a character that is a psychiatrist. The author examines four instances of this, in "The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari," "Home of the Brave," "Psycho," and "The Immoral Mr. Teas." In some cases, the article goes in depth into the historical circumstances and influences of these movies as they pertain to the character of the psychiatrist. The author tends towards noting the use of this archetype in new genres of film, and explains their significance as a need of the filmmakers to explain and justify new patterns of behavior and new motivations that may not be familiar to film audiences. According to the text, the psychiatrist is sometimes nothing more than a convenient device to incorporate a descriptive monologue by a supposed expert. Further, he says that the psychiatrist descends as a 'deus ex animo' to provide some closure to a tangled tale. In a closer analysis of Psycho, the author advances the notion that the psychiatrist protects the audience as observers by providing the groundwork to elucidate them and ultimately, to either accept or reject.

Gledhill, Christine. "Klute 1: A Contemporary Film Noir and Feminist Criticism."
Women in Film Noir. Ed. E. Ann Kaplan. London, England: The British Film Institute, 1978. 20-33.

Gledhill explores the stereotypes placed upon Hollywood genres that trade truth, credibility, and realism for illusion, myth, and conventionality. She explores "Klute" within the context of film noir and its elaborate style of baroque-ian proportions, particularly with regards to the emergence of the "femme fatale" and the somewhat disjointed, inconsistent plot structure of film noir. Subsequently, Gledhill delves into the fictional structure of film and the ideological suppositions made by the bourgeois artistic practices. Instead of approaching the intertextuality of film and the feminist movement, Gledhill insists on reworking the text within the umbrage and framework of feminism itself. Gledhill captures the contradictions between the forces and relationships in driving the "social formation of class interests."
The article discusses the emergence of the sexual division of labor and reproduction and its effects on society as a social problem. Gledhill relates this social evolution of gender, sexuality, and sex as it places women against a mythical "other" (man), this deriving their definitions and functions in society. Within this context, there is a female discourse in many films that speaks to the inherent oppositions in society and its introduction into a subversive aesthetic. This discourse is expressed through social practices and different articulations through central characters in film. Thus, the filmic text is composed of various subsets of this discourse that include connections and discussions of race, class, or gender. With film noir, a new emergence of film culture defined a new era of social commentary in film. With its formal structure, consisting of specifically defined features, film noir developed complicated and un-cohesive plot lines with an investigative structure to the narrative, an expressionist visual style (with emphasis on sexuality in the cinematography of women), and oscillation between different points of view. Within this new medium, the advent of the sexually liberated and murderous "femme fatale" invited a somewhat subversive psychoanalytic discourse in that gender roles became flipped, and in essence, the woman began to perform her gender. This aberrant style of film incorporated various moods meant to convey the angst, despair, and nihilism of what the genre endeavored to explore. In this mix, there are two kinds of women: (1) the women who exist in the underworld and are defined by the ambience of male criminality (2) the women who get by on the outskirts of the modern world who are either the subject of male crime or the object of a hero's protection.
However, Gledhill subverts this dominant paradigm by recognizing that these placements are the result of the conventions of defining a world of action in male terms, wholeheartedly ignoring the feminist discourse in film. This sets up feminine roles in male thrillers, where suddenly the woman becomes the object of the investigation. The enigma of the female figure displaces the solution of the plot as the main premise of the film. This feeds into classic psychoanalytic perspectives whereby women inhabit the libido of the male (or traditionally, of the male) and occupy his gendered space and in a sense, re-inventing as her own domain. Although male sexuality has been the prominent theme of psychoanalysis, the advent of the "film noir woman" replaced the violent and vigorous libido of the male with a sexually alluring, mysterious, and fatally seductive woman.

Straayer, Chris. "Femme Fatale or Lesbian Femme: Bound in Sexual Differance."
Women in Film Noir. Ed. E. Ann Kaplan. London, England: The British Film Institute, 1978. 151-163.

The conception of the modern femme fatale arose out of a post World War II mentality in sync with film noir's stagnant definition of a presupposed normal masculinity. After the war, an American crusade began to get women out of the workplace and force them back into the realms of domesticity. Women in the workplace were viewed as a threat to male aspirations and destroyers of male power and control. Because of this questionable shift in dominance, film noir emerged, representing a world full of decadence and perversion, where the historical definitions of ideological hegemony within the family were challenged as an oppressive location for females. (p.116) Thus emerged the masculine fantasy of sexual difference, where role reversal portrayed man as a woman's plaything, and a woman was defined solely based on her sexuality and sexual allure. The assumption here became that the femme fatale had the power to destroy, thus signifying a projection of masculine impotence. The femme fatale permutated from a sexually liberated woman to a woman who "causes death", thus marking the downfall of man, and confirming psychoanalytic theory that indeed, females represent the castrated male, and thus pose a direct threat to masculine dominance in society. The femme fatale, while seemingly dangerous and threatening in her rebellion against male dominance, exhibits a duplicitous persona in her "unknowableness", as deception becomes her tool to destroy man and conceal her vulnerability. In fact, the femme fatale arose because she was able to possess the male, not through sexual pleasure, but through violence. Thus, violence displaced sexual pleasure as the primary means to which the femme fatale achieved her end. Sex often permutated into violence, and the femme fatale realized; sex could be made into a crime, and it could motivate crime as well.
Bound exhibits the most unfalteringly static femme fatale character yet. Even further, the film develops its femme fatale character despite her homosexual tendencies, and this relationship furthers her self assurance and decisiveness. Violet is a classic example of a femme fatale transplanted in a modern context. She is highly sexualized (to the point where she attracts and is a attracted to both men and women), indulges in prostitution (sex with men is called 'the business' as opposed to something pleasurable), maintains a façade of being committed to a heterosexual relationship, yet deceives those around her as she engages in a romantic connection and sexual relationship with another female. Beneath her façade as docile housewife/sex-kitten, Violet hides her deeper desire and need for female sexual companionship, and in Corky found a masculinity more attractive than any male's. Violet and Corky exploit traditional sex roles, while using that sex as a motivation for crime. Subsequently, the femme fatale's timeless desires for money, power, and sex can be fulfilled altogether. Although Violet's predilection for Corky and lesbianism seems valid, her desire for another female is another way of destroying male power and dominance in society. Violet represents the ultimate rejection of masculinity as she murders her husband, and determines her heart and loyalty belong to another woman.
Whereas the film noir femme fatales may have resolved their sexual difference, distrust of men or themselves, and have consistently turned out not to possess the "fatale" part of the equation as much as the next character, Bound's Violet succeeds in fully satisfying the pre-requisites for a femme fatale by completely rejecting male influence or dominance and murdering a man as well. The transplantation of the femme fatale from the 40's and 50's film noir thrillers to the 90's Blockbuster smashes reveals a return of the femme fatale to popular culture. The "new" femme fatale satisfied libidinous cravings through sexual pleasure and fatal violence, mutating into a psycho-femme killer parading through huge box office successes. Inasmuch as the concept of the femme fatale retains a certain sameness, the noir vixen versus the postmodern fatal sex-goddess is a very different creature. This is a result of two entirely different film eras based on methods of production, distribution, and marketing concepts that are completely separate and distinct from one another.

Place, Janey. "Women in Film Noir." Women in Film Noir. Ed. E. Ann Kaplan.
London, England: The British Film Institute, 1978. 47-67.

Women's roles in film have traversed many avenues of psychoanalytic interpretation. As Laura Mulvey notes, it is the contemplation of the female form that arouses castration anxiety in the male. This of course, is derivative of him having learned that his mother was castrated as well. In being the object of the look, women in film noir emerged as being a source of visual pleasure, alleviating some of the fear and anxiety in men. Because these women are often depicted as glamorous and seductive beauties, replete with cunning intelligence and humor, they became a vehicle for male transgression - and in 'gazing' upon the female form and succumbing to her deviousness, the male unwittingly loses his powers of domination and patriarchy. However, this is the feminist discourse, and in traditional cinematic interpretations, the placement of women as the object of the gaze leaves them little room to be anything else but vessels for male pleasure. Place suggests that film noir supplanted prior art forms obsessed with the mysterious woman (also known as "the dark lady, the spider woman, or the evil seductress" who brings about the destruction of man, and accordingly, much of psychoanalysis' premises) by portraying the film noir woman as liberated. Despite her depiction as male fantasy, she challenges her "place" and revels in her definition as sexual creature. Ironically, film noir promulgates women who are active, not static characters, are intelligent and powerful, and derive this energy from their sexuality, utilizing its advantageousness over male existence.
Film noir invented its own myths as well. These myths circumvented dominant ideologies and provided an outlet for artists to reveal their repressed emotions. This provision in cinematic technique gave voice to an oppressed gender and the stigmatized sexuality of psychoanalysis. The way in which film noir constructed and expressed its women was a more visceral, fluid, and sensual acknowledgment of women. Previously, women's sexuality was repressed and misunderstood, but film noir unlocked the secrets and passions of a woman's sexuality and allowed her to use that sexual allure to wield power over man, sometimes resulting in the destruction of fatality of patriarchal figures.
Silhouettes, shadows, mirrors, and reflections were amply utilized to emphasize man's lack of control. The woman was constantly emerging out of darkness and shadows, creating an entrancing atmosphere by which she could exercise her power. These illusory images, where the woman's face or tresses are the only illuminated images on the screen convey the dominant world view expressed in film noir: paranoia, phobia, duplicity, and instability. Man is portrayed has having been stripped of his identity, so ensconced in the behavioral attributes of the woman that he loses sight of his personal goals, and usually becomes enveloped in a destructive or tragic romance.
The source of a woman's sexual power and its threat to male domination is expressed visually in film noir through visual iconography and style. The iconography of the woman is explicitly sexual; she has long hair, significant make-up, and gaudy jewelry. Cigarettes became a very important tool for film noir women, as it the hazy streams of smoke on-screen became emblems of "dark and immoral sensuality" and unnatural phallic power. Alternately, in scenes of violence, women held guns to assert their phallic power and in doing so, manipulated phallic symbols of male power by thwarting their original targets and betraying their creators. The film noir woman resorts to violence, perhaps to eliminate the obstacle in the way of achieving her independence. This independence is portrayed in film noir through the female character's self absorption and narcissism. This provides a context for the woman to ignore the man and focus on her goals of sexual domination.

On "Nolan's Memento, Memory, and Recognition"

Adrian Gargett, a freelance author and critic, discusses memory and recognition in Christopher Nolan's Memento. He sees memory in this movie as chaotic because from the unfolding of the Lenny's, the protagonist, memories many associations are formed. "All conspire towards the instability of what is assumed to be perceived." As the story develops, it becomes clear that what is assumed is not what is.
Gargett sees this film as a new spin on the film noir/private-eye genre where the protagonist's beliefs are opposed by a "self-conscious critique of the formula carried by the film's structure, a critique that sees the hero's control over his world as an illusion." According to Gargett, Memento defies the genre by stepping out of the realism that is seen in Chandler's The Simple Art of Murder by exposing itself as fiction through its editing.
The portrayal of memory and use of editing in Memento allows Lenny to become a "surrogate for the spectator." Like Lenny, the audience must unravel a mystery and is required to do so because of the film's construction. The only difference being that the audience has a short-term memory and can therefore piece together the truth. However, even with the ability to remember what just happened the narrative resists being understood. It creates a kind of "blockage." The narrative stops just before some sort of comprehension can be attained about the story. Even when the information given can be understood something else arises causing a renewed sense of confusion.
Gargett goes on to reference Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari about their ideas on abstract time, thought and film, etc. The Deleuzean "time-image" fits into this film because there is an incongruent time pattern in which bits and pieces of past and present are being jumbled together. "…In a film such a[s] Mement[o], the past/present/future are no longer any semblance of succession, but are implicated simultaneously." Deleuze has a theory about time "sheets" and when a person is placed in that sheet, "whether it is past, present, or future [it] 'becomes' [the] present."
The essay continues by explaining that one way Lenny tires to capture time is through photography-specifically Polaroids. Each picture is labeled so Lenny has an idea of whom or what is in it. These are supposed to be facts, but as the story progresses Lenny's facts start to disintegrate. He lies to himself in order to give purpose to his life.
Adrian Gargett believes "Memento's prelude ushers the viewer into a wondrous piece which imitates brain function in itself being like a sizzle of connections across the collective synapses as it takes you on multiple detective trails into the past." He thinks the elements of the movie are a metaphor for the way the brain works and is related to Deleuzian thought.

Gargett, Adrian. "Nolan's Memento, Memory, and Recognition." CLCWeb: Comparative
Literature and Culture: A WWWeb Journal. 4.3 (2002) : 27 pars. 2 Nov. 2003
<http://clcwebjournal.lib.purdue.edu/index.html>.

Nolan, Christopher, dir. 2000. Memento. USA. Sound, col., 113 mins. DVD edition.

On "Coping with Loss in the Human Sciences: A Reading at the Intersection of Psychoanalysis and Hermeneutics"

Marsha Lynne Abrams attacks this article in two parts, first by examining and interpreting Freud's essay "Mourning and Melancholia" and by discussing Gadamerian hermeneutics and Derridean deconstruction.
In "Mourning and Melancholia," Abrams points out Freud's argument that there are subtle but distinguishing factors between mourning and melancholy. They are both are similar in that when a person feels melancholy or is in mourning that they are in pain from the loss, they become withdrawn, and become uninterested in activities and love. Sufferers become introspective and nostalgic. However, there is something that separates to the two. According to Abrams, "mourning is considered psychologically 'healthier' than melancholia." One who is in mourning relives the past in order to deal with it and eventually move on from the loss. This is a common sentiment of people who have lost a loved one.
Melancholia, on the other hand, is a bit different. It is not necessarily connected with a physical loss. "'…It pertains to objects covering a range of degrees of abstraction….'" With melancholia, a person has an obscure relationship with what is lost. They have a sort of love/hate relationship with it. Not only is the relationship between the melancholic person and the thing they lost unclear, but so to is what is lost. The person is not exactly sure what they have been stripped of causing them be stuck in a state of perpetual sadness. It is not really possible for them to recover because they are not sure of what they are missing. "'In mourning it is the world which has become poor and empty; in melancholia it is the ego itself.'"
This article then tries to tie the divergence or mourning and melancholia in with hermeneutics and deconstruction. Abrams suggest that Gadamerian hermeneutics and mourning are closely tied, while deconstruction and melancholia are somewhat similar. Hermeneutics deals with interpretation and the meaning of what is interpreted, but deconstruction questions truth. It asserts that there is a contradiction behind the meaning of things.
Abrams seems to be associating hermeneutics with mourning because in hermeneutics a meaning can be found. This is similar to mourning because when one mourns they eventually come to a resolution and are able to move on. Conversely, deconstruction sees meaning as opposing force with itself if one were to delve deeper. This is related to melancholia because the whole problem with one who is melancholic is that they are grieving over something that has been lost although they do not know what it is and they may never have even had it. Basically, Abrams takes the work of Freud, Derrida, and Gadamer and shows how it all relates.

Abrams, Marsha Lynne. "Coping with Loss in the Human Sciences: A Reading at the
Intersection of Psychoanalysis and Hermeneutics." Diacritics. Spring 1993: 66-82.
JSTOR. George A. Smathers Library West, Gainesville. 3 November 2003.
<http://www.jstor.org>

Sondra M. Smiley

On "Against the Photograph as Memento Mori"

Memento mori is defined as a reminder of death. Paul Edwards says that there is a myth regarding the photograph as memento mori. Photographs are considered to be " a stencil of the world" which captures the past-preserving it so that every time we look at it we are reminded of death because we can never regain that moment in time. It becomes "an object of melancholy." Edwards disagrees with this theory.
Edwards acknowledges others' belief in photography as memento mori and as an inspiration to many works of literature, but asserts that photo-theorists are "more concerned with existentialism or film theory than with the possibilities of photography…[photography as memento mori] constitute[s] no more than the popular idea of what photographs are and what emotions they prompt." There have been debates as to the correct use of photography. Realists such as Andre Bazin believe in the separation of man and art, but his ideas were opposed by modernists and photo-theorists who believed in the camera as a tool for manipulation, not pure reproduction.
Bazin supports the idea that photography is the only artistic medium that takes out the "hand" man. Paintings, sculptures, literature are all controlled by man. The camera, even though man holds it, captures what is really in front of it, not just what the photographer intends for the audience to see. Modernists and photo-theorists "see a way to make photography a metaphor and a manifesto for their own use.
The article goes on to talk about Susan Sontag's On Photography. Edwards summarizes her work into four ideas-the real, the relic, memento mori, and nostalgia. The photograph is a capsule of all of these things because it is a remnant of something real that happened and is a reminder of what has past and leaves one melancholy.
Edwards also presents the ideas of photo-theorists Roland Barthes and John Ruskin, but asserts that the photograph is not a memento mori. Barthes believes that photography turn the image into a corpse. "The photograph and its referent are 'stuck together ... limb against limb, like the condemned main chained to a corpse in certain forms of torture….'"
Edwards does not disagree that photos capture the real and can remind us of death or loss, but believes from an ontological perspective, everything in nature can be a "potential photograph." Photographs do not have to be seen as negative and people do not have to reflect on them nostalgically. Therefore, to Edwards the photograph is not "a reminder of death, but a reminder that we are experiencing a change in our apprehension of the depicted reality."

Edwards, Paul. "Against the Photograph as Memento Mori." History of Photography Vol. 22,
Issue 4. (1998): 380-384.

Lee, Terry. "Virtual Violence in Fight Club: This is what Transformation of Masculine Ego Feels Like." Journal of American & Comparative Cultures. (2002 Popular Press)

This article is on Fight Club, male masculinity and its roles in past and present. All facets of our culture have been put into place to implement and enforce the roles men have been made to play. Emotions of anger and other "tough" feelings are permissible while those emotions considered vulnerable are not. In the nineteenth century, male emotions were held in until these feelings could be made useful as competitiveness in the workplace. In Fight Club, furniture from IKEA, and a consuming need for more belongings, define masculinity by what men desire. It is these belongings that also substitute the place of human relationships. Since men are trapped in two differentiating roles when it comes to materialistic things as well as the masculine role, they become frustrated which can lead to psychological problems such as Shakespeare's Hamlet. Hamlet's gender role issue stems from his desire to stay with Ophelia domestically while he feels the pressure from his father's ghost to play the part of the strong fighter ready to avenge his father's death. In Hamlet's case, only when he is dying can he express his love for Ophelia, something that takes away from his masculinity. As opposed to Hamlet, Fight Club expresses the breaking down of the gender roles strategy. It is the breakdown of Jack's defenses against Tyler that bring out the more masculine side to him. Tyler was the super male side of Jack that he wanted to see and it was Tyler that could accomplish all that Jack wanted to do for his father in real estate purposes while maintaining Jack as a different person. The end of the movie symbolizes the need for the old Jack, as well as Tyler, to go so the new side of his persona can come to life.

Clark, J. Michael. "Faludi, Fight Club, and phallic masculinity: Exploring the Emasculating Economics of Patriarchy." Journal of Men's studies: A scholarly journal approach

This article on Fight Club and the aspects of consumerism display the effects of the switch in gender roles under normal circumstance. It supports the idea of implementing a system to rid the world with money and other possessions. All of this information and overall phenomena is closely related to Susan Feludi's book on male masculinity entitled Stiffed. Consumer culture has emasculated men by pushing them more into passive roles that women were more likely to take in the past. It is the men that now stand by and wait for the car are the men that are easy to tell that they were raised up with the right amount of feelings. It is the suppression of emotions that allow for the man to open himself up more that he has before. It also brings about the subject that whatever we think has to be kept quiet while still the consumerism market holds possession of people. It is this hold that material items and consumerism has that has made our drive the way it is now.

The Mothman Prophecies deals with sightings of a mysterious creature that resembles a Barn Owl if it was the size of a man, had no neck, and red glowing eyes. This movie was based on a true story that took place in the mid-1960's when the strange creature was sighted all over the place, whether looking for an office, a conversation, etc. The article mainly summarizes the movie while discussing what the Mothman symbolizes, whether it is a warning to get out of town, or that it is what brings the tragedy. The people of Point Pleasant, OH along the Kentucky border were all seeing the strange images that appeared before them and slowly drove them to paranoia. Is the audience supposed to believe the eyewitness reports that describe the creature as something that almost couldn't exist, or is it to believe that it is just an owl and everything will be just fine? Is the situation heightened due to a growing sense of panic or does it not effect anyone directly? These are questions the article addresses about the Mothman Prophecies.

http://www.deep-focus.com/flicker/videodro.html
Knapp summarizes the actions of the movie Videodrome including his own synopsis and interpretations of the film. To begin he gives the movie a grade A and describes it as "a dark parable for the television age as well as a horror movie about the very nature of horror movies." The writer and director of this picture is David Chronenberg who uses violence and explicit sexual references to "turn the oft-repeated claim that violence in the media catalyzes violence in society on its ear." He is therefore being explicitly hypocritical to prove his point. He describes James Woods' character, Max Renn as someone who wants to push boundries and buttons by airing things that no one else wants to air. The new video that Max wants to air is "videodrome" which is the whipping of a female victim. When the videodrome is found to be coming form a signal that they did not believe it to be from, it is presented that it is from the mind, or vision of someone. Knapp presents the theory that "The television screen has become the retina of the mind's eye." This follows the idea of the camera as the eye. Knapp describes the events in Videodrome as the result of Max's hallucinations. When reality stops and the hallucinations begin is never clear to him. To explain this, Knapp takes a look at the director of the film. Cronenberg is known for playing with normalcy. His film is a representation of this diversion from normalcy and the way in which the characters do not lead normal lives. "In significant ways, a Cronenberg film is a requiem for the normal life, a metaphysical horror story that mourns what has been lost rather than simply wallowing in obligatory transgression." Chronenberg also plays with the double of television as realism, "Television is reality, and reality less than television." He says that you can't indentify a Chronenberg film because of the "fascination with questions of perception versus reality, of physical versus mental transformation, and of the beleagured human spirit and the siege on normalcy." Knapp appraises Videodrome for its creative use of body make-up and visual distortions. He also praises Chronenberg's cutting style which mimic's the patterns of a dream and makes this distortion of reality seem that much more distorted. The visual imagry, although cheesy at times is perfect for the context of the picture. "Cronenberg is the ideal auteur -- a director whose aesthetics are as consistent and pleasurable as his ideas, and whose collaborators consistently follow through on his singular concepts." In the end Chronenberg's message of media and violence is less condemning as it is analytical. He wants us not to watch violence but to analyze it for what it is. He wants us to find out why violence disturbs us and sexuality makes us uneasy. This is a very good look at what the movie Videodrome means and the message that the director intends to give.

http://www.latrobe.edu.au/screeningthepast/firstrelease/fr1201/anfr13a.htm
Ndalianis, Angela. Paul Verhoeven and his hollow men. Screening the past,
Issue 13.

~Ndalianis critiques the films of Paul Verhoeven. She analyzes the “thematic
concerns” of Robocop, Total Recall, Starship Troopers, and Hollow Man. She
“tracks [Verhoeven’s] growing concern with the effects of ever-advancing,
technologically mediated realities on the construction of subjectivity, and the
intensification of globalisation and multi-national corporatism” (Ndalianis).
The essay also includes political and technological discussions on each of these
films. The first film she discusses is Robocop in which she covers the cyborg,
postmodernism, its similarity to the Western and the frontier myth, and humanity
in a capitalist society. The next film is Total Recall in which she explores
the concepts of (prosthetic) memory, reality, capitalism and the media,
identity, and humanity. For Starship Troopers, she covers ‘the bug’, media
technology, democracy and communism, globalization, the melodrama, and
militarism. The final film she critiques is Hollow Man. Her discussions for
this film include military power, normality and psychosis, identity, voyeurism.

Mizejewski, Linda. Action bodies in futurist spaces: Bodybuilder stardom as special effect. Alien Zone II, ed. Annette Kuhn. London, 1999

~ Mizejewski focuses on the use of the male body in the action/sci fi film. The protagonists of these films are usually males with very muscular bodies. She discusses four films: Terminator I & II, Demolition Man, and Total Recall (on which she focuses the most). In Total Recall, the "decentralizing of identity and narrative...are strikingly at odds with its masculinist concerns for the coherent male body of action cinema." She also claims that the star's physical performance impacts the narrative structure of the films. In these films, there is a question of who is in the body. Total Recall, for example, uses "futuristic memory-reprogramming technology, which creates virtually 'new' subjects inside the same physique." She also covers issues of maternity, male birth, the male form, and the loss of [gender] identity within the above films.

Landsberg, Alison. Prosthetic Memory: the ethics and politics of memory in an age of mass culture. Memory and Popular Film, ed. Paul Grainge. Manchester and New York, 2003

~ Landsberg's main discussion focuses on what she calls the 'prosthetic memory'. These are memories derived from the engagement with mass media. For example, watching television, film, and using the internet. The subsequent set of prosthetic memories condition a person's thoughts/beliefs of the world. Prosthetic memories are facillitated by the proliferation of the massive amounts of commodities supplied by our capitalist society. These commodified memories are not necessarily bad--the "offer choices...which have the potential to challenge the status quo and subvert social norms and hierarchies..."and also "enables ethical thinking."

***the book Alien Zone II has lots of articles concerning the futuristic cities of Sci Fi films if anybody is interested.

Ashley

Journal of Popular Film and Television, Summer 1992 v20 n2 p26(9)
The Terminator, Terminator 2, & the exposed body. J.P. Telotte.

Artificial human beings taking the forms of robots, cyborgs and androids have always played central

roles in American science fiction. In the 'Terminator' films, the scriptwriter succeeded in depicting cyborgs

as reflections of the technologized self. Both films unravel the impact of technological innovations on the

humanity of man. It reveals the tragic flaw of individuals in revealing themselves. In their effort to define

their self-concepts in accordance to society's norms, people tend to lose their individual identities. Such

is the adverse effect of technological advancement.

Franklin, Sarah. Postmodern mutant cyborg Cinema.
New Scientist; 12/22/90, Vol. 128 Issue 1748, p70, 2p,

Alot of Recent science fiction films have a growing facination wth what it really mans to be a human

bieng in the mids of modern scinece and tech. This artical talks about the progressian of technology and

what it means to be human. It Discusses organ donation. "Does some part of the organ donor live on

inside it's host ( In realtion to a discussion about Robocop).

Rushing, Janic Hocker. Projecting the shadow: The Cyborg Hero in the American Film, 1995, PN 1995. 9. C9 R57 1995

The things that are most important about this book are the Chapters talking about Blade Runner,

Terminator 1 and Terminator 2. It discusses the parellel with technology and humans and how we try to

use technology to somehow improve on the human form. It also discusses some things about how these

films use cyborgs as some type of metaphor of technology. To be honest I didnt really get some of the

reading but I did take the time to read some of the chapters so Im writing it in here. Somebody might get

more out of it then I did.

Edwin Rivera

Annotated Bibliography (due November 4). Please send as one word document, and please put your name somewhere on the document title.

You will first need to research and find three articles related to your paper topic. (We'll meet one class in the library to help you learn how to use the library research resources.) is to be a paragraph (half page max) account and summary of the article. The idea here is to let others know what the articles are about so they may decide to read one or more or them or ignore some or all of them.
Each of your three annotations should summarize the articles, highlighting the author's argument in each case. 500-1000 words each. Please send as one word document. (Don't send one word document for each entry--send all three in one document.) And please put your name somewhere on the document title

After each of you has annotated your articles, I will post your annotations on this page so that you all have a collective bibliographic resource.

Note: be sure to include the biblio info about the film and articles.

Author / director, title of article or book chapter or film, title of journal or book, date of publication, etc.

Here are examples:

Clark, J. Michael. "Faludi, Fight Club, and Phallic Masculinity: Exploring the Emasculating Economics of Patriarchy." Journal of Men's Studies: A Scholarly Journal about Men and Masculinities, 11:1 (2002 Fall), pp. 65-76.

Gallen, Joel, dir. 2001. Not Another Teen Movie! USA. Sound, col., 89 mins. DVD edition.

Note: All parts of the final project must be completed and turned in on time for you to receive credit. All parts of the course must be completed and turned in on time to pass the course.