The Devil You Dance With: Film Culture in the New South Africa.


Edited and with an introduction by Audrey Thomas McCluskey.
Urbana: University of Illinois Press, March 2009. Cloth: ISBN 978-0252033865, $65. 240 pages.

Reviewed by Roberta Di Carmine, Western Illinois University

In The Devil You Dance With: Film Culture in the New South Africa, Audrey Thomas McCluskey interviews twenty-five artists who live and work in South Africa. The author’s choice to let filmmakers, producers, screenwriters, and actors from different generations and racial and ethnic background speaks to the hopes and struggles of creating a new culture. This provides the reader with an understanding of the complex reality of today’s post-apartheid era in South Africa.

In the interviews released to the author, there are two important critical observations that emerge: the filmmakers’ desire to tell stories that do not reflect a Western ideology but are meant to mirror the unique creative site of South Africa, and a willingness to forget what colonialism has left behind and find the next stage of what film culture represents in South Africa. These artists offer an insight into how today’s culture is formed through the political oppression and cultural annihilation endured because of colonialism. McCluskey’s compelling study introduces the reader to film culture in one of the most politically and culturally divided countries in Africa.

In an approach meant to discuss and better understand African cinema’s dilemma, the past two decades have seen an increasing scholarly interest in the subject. The works of Frank Ukadike, Manthia Diawara, Imruh Bakari, and Mbye Cham, for instance, have proven helpful in understanding the significant place that cinema has in Africa and the development of a consciousness in post-colonial black Africa. These scholars emphasize that a main task black African filmmakers deal with is the development of their own film language that also portrays the recovery of a culture appropriated for so long by colonialism. African filmmakers face ideological obstacles rooted in post-colonialism as well as problems with the production, distribution, and exhibition of their films. They also share the unfair competition represented by the domineering presence of Hollywood, and the urge to educate African audiences to accept representations that reflect their own realities. The need to better understand the ideological and artistic complexities behind film culture as cultural phenomenon in a continent as diverse as Africa is at the core of McCluskey’s study of South African film culture.

McCluskey adds a significant voice in the study of African cinema. Her analysis of current South African media fills a void in film studies by gathering the voices of those artists and peoples actively engaged in building a film culture in South Africa, a country which, after apartheid, had to recuperate traditions lost in political oppression and reinvent a new culture through films and television.

In the introduction to her book, the author offers an historical analysis of the general situation of African cinema, an important overview that gives the reader a better understanding of what cinema means in South Africa. The insularity of the country, the difficult process of recovering memories and identity after the apartheid, and the strong presence of European-descendant Afrikaners are some of the main issues discussed to suggest the presence of a film culture that is profoundly split.

Dividing the introduction into short sections and referring to the present state of cinema in South Africa as well as critical issues found in African cinema allows the reader to contextualize the past and current situations of film culture in South Africa and comprehend its uniqueness.

The diversity of the artists interviewed gives the reader the chance to learn about this film culture from a multiplicity of voices. Most of these artists share a common goal: the hope for a film culture that reflects and respects the diversity of the country. For instance, several artists highlight that much has been done in their own country since the end of apartheid, including the establishment of film schools and the presence of professional crew members trained in South Africa. However, they also raise important issues like gender inequality and the struggle to produce narratives that attract and entertain local audiences, both of which suggest a film culture still facing struggle.

McCluskey’s approach in her interviews ranges from practical questions about the difficulty of financing films or television programs to ideological ones about, for instance, the impact that American and European television has had in the past decades in South African youth culture. This results in an investigation of South African artists’ desires and hopes, as well as a testimony of the struggles in building their own culture while reflecting the spectatorship’s expectations, which often conflict with the filmmakers’ artistic beliefs and politics.

Regardless of the diverse experiences of these artists, one common element seems to emerge from these interviews. Film is an important tool because it lets people speak of different racial and linguistic groups, and ultimately helps people work out “who you are and who could be as human beings” (190). The strong belief in what cinema represents can also be found in several of these artists’ personal experiences. Although several of the people interviewed studied and worked in the United States, they all returned to South Africa. Their hope to build a culture combined with their willingness to make films that speak to the people still prevails over international and personal achievement.Film studies welcome such as significant work on today’s film culture in South Africa. By allowing the artists to talk about their personal experiences, the author effectively links the personal life with the public roles that artists have in building their own culture. In doing so, McCluskey succeeds in creating a dialogue among artists who envision a prosperous South African film culture. Their hope remains to find stories that entertain as well as educate audiences, and create a film culture that lets South Africans achieve national recognition and, most of all, appreciation.

Orson Welles and the Unfinished RKO Projects: A Postmodern Perspective.

By Marguerite H. Rippy.

Carbondale: Southern Illinois Press, April 2009. Paper: ISBN 978-0-8093-2912-0, $35. 248 pages.

Review by Chris Pallant, Bangor University, United Kingdom

Orson Welles and the Unfinished RKO Projects: A Postmodern Perspective proves a useful addition to film scholarship, particularly in its dissection of the Wellesian star persona. Divided into four chapters, Rippy’s study details the unfinished Life of Christ, Heart of Darkness, and It’s All True RKO projects, while also spending time discussing Welles’s early radio work, his First Person Singular performances, and the completed Citizen Kane (1941).

Welles’s name commonly features in debates concerning the film auteur, yet Rippy argues that the maverick figure be reconceived as a “star director,” in order “to emphasise the director’s commercial connection to a work while avoiding the tendency to assign the director sole artistic authority” (3). Early in the study, Rippy illustrates how, in addition to being one of the first star directors, Welles, by revealing specific artistic constants, which RKO then publicized, anticipates many of the strategies of contemporary branding. The postmodern nature of the Welles brand is most visible in its malleability. Rippy writes: “The essence of the Welles creation tale is that he is a cosmopolitan genius. The specifics of the tale vary according to the audience (or potential consumer)” (23-24). Ultimately, the decentered nature of the Welles brand, which included a proclivity towards both commercial and commercially unpalatable ventures, led not only to the abandonment of projects such as Life of Christ, but also his break with RKO.

Later in the study, Rippy discusses the unfinished It’s All True, arguing that, because of its well documented incompletion, the project provides a rare insight into the politics of national identity and Hollywood commerce in the mid 1900s. Welles was, albeit unintentionally, central in orchestrating one of the most damaging exploitations of South America during this period. In a typically uncompromising attempt to fuse truth and fiction during the production of It’s All True, Welles sought to recreate a famous civil rights event, where four jangadeiros (impoverished Brazilian sea fishermen) sailed to Rio de Janeiro to meet President Vargas. As Rippy observes, while Welles’s decision to hire the four original jangadeiros would have undoubtedly have been part of a scheme to romanticize their plight, it “still held the potential to let poverty speak for itself, a revolutionary concept for mainstream Hollywood” (119). However, during an ocean shoot, the boat carrying the four capsized, resulting in the death of Manoel Olimpio Meira—known as Jacaré to the jangadeiros.

Welles has been the subject of much scholarly interest. The Films of Orson Welles, (Robert Garis, 2004), Despite the System: Orson Welles versus the Hollywood Studios (Clinton Heylin, 2005), and Discovering Orson Welles (Jonathan Rosenbaum, 2007), have recently added to earlier editions such as Orson Welles: The Road to Xanadu (Simon Callow, 1996) and This is Orson Welles (Orson Welles, Peter Bogdanovich and Jonathan Rosenbaum, 1998). The Medium and the Magician: Orson Welles, the Radio Years, 1934-1952 (Paul Heyer, 2005) and and It's all True: Orson Welles's Pan-American Odyssey (Catherine L. Benamou, 2007), partially anticipate Rippy’s study, yet neither offers such a consistently postmodern revision of the star director. In addition to demonstrating an awareness of current research, Rippy also makes good use of archival material. Ultimately, despite Orson Welles and the Unfinished RKO Projects suffering from some minor editorial lapses (resulting in occasional repetition), Rippy’s text provides a good starting point for those wishing to learn more about Welles’s unconventional early career.

Interestingly, Rippy discusses how recent projects, such as The Passion of the Christ (Mel Gibson, 2004), War of the Worlds (Steven Spielberg, 2005), and The Daily Show (Comedy Central, 1996-present), reveal artistic and ideological debts to Welles’s work. There is room, perhaps, to extend this debate to include figures such as Sacha Baron Cohen, who, at times, also exhibits a strong inclination towards Wellesian “truthiness”—the negotiation of the line between news and entertainment. Rippy closes by identifying how contemporary media have provided viewers with the means to return to Welles’s unfinished texts, and, rather than seek ways to “complete” them, enjoy their hermeneutic freedom. Welles’s unfinished projects are, as Rippy concludes, ideally suited for “interactive presentation as a series of fragmentary texts, audio files, correspondence, photographs, interviews, blogs, storyboards, and media ephemera” (169).

Screening Nostalgia: Populuxe Props and Technicolor Aesthetics in Contemporary American Film.

By Christine Sprengler.

New York: Berghahn Books, January 2009. Cloth: ISBN 978-1845455590, $60. 208 pages.

Review by Greta Methot, Rhode Island School of Design

In this ambitious first book, author Christine Sprengler takes as her focus a specific form of nostalgia: the cinematic “visual pastness” made up of props, costuming, and other material cues and signifiers employed to evoke past eras. This nostalgic mode is often criticized for seemingly replacing history with an inferior aesthetic stand-in, in other words, for “turning the 1950s into Fiftiesness” (2). Screening Nostalgia asks, does this most derided expression of nostalgia sever our connection to history as some scholars charge, or, does it offer critical potential? Sprengler wants to rescue this form by delving into the aesthetic materials of nostalgia to reveal their semiotic potential. Even when not intended to critical ends, the author maintains that the visual apparatus of nostalgia film can, “reveal something about our own historical consciousness and what we expect history to do for us” (90).

Sprengler’s detailed and absorbing history of nostalgia informs us that the term originated as a medical diagnosis applied to the physical manifestations of homesickness suffered by Swiss soldiers serving abroad during the seventeenth century. Over time, this geographic conception of nostalgia morphed into a kind of nationalism; to be nostalgic for one’s homeland equated to patriotism. Such an ideological shift meant nostalgia could be harnessed for political purposes. While a medical definition of nostalgia persisted into the twentieth century, the upheavals of nineteenth-century industrial capitalism saw nostalgia increasingly characterized as a temporal longing—a pining for simpler days, for an idyllic past—what Sprengler calls a “necessary coping mechanism with the capacity to make modernity inhabitable” (15).

By 1970, nostalgia had become an industry. Material goods, television, radio, and film all catered to a consumer base craving a taste of halcyon days bygone. At the same time, the politicization of nostalgia crested as the battle continued to rage between conservatives advocating for a return to “traditional values,” and social liberals seeking reform. This resulted in a stigma for nostalgia in that it came to be associated with a kind of propagandizing conservative agenda, particularly in the employ of Ronald Reagan’s political juggernaut. Chief among the disparagements leveled at nostalgia by academics and cultural critics was the concern that it commodified, falsified, or fetishized the past. Not until quite recently have scholars begun to argue, as Sprengler does, for the critical potential of nostalgia.

In chapter two, Sprengler investigates how the Fifties came to be the privileged object of American nostalgia for later eras. The proliferation of visual mass media during this period, particularly advertising and domestic television sitcoms, produced a canon of objects to signify the lauded values of the American Dream. Populuxe items such as the exaggerated styling of cars, fashions, and household appliances created a visual language evoking the economic values of the postwar years. As nostalgia for the Fifties gained ground in the 1970s, especially in films and television, these material objects were employed as visual shorthand for Fifties ideology. In what is an otherwise thorough and fascinating discussion, Sprengler neglects examination of the 1960s—a period when the defenders of the “traditional” values of the postwar years came into conflict with the social renegades of the various arms of the counterculture. Though the impact of this period has been considered thoughtfully elsewhere (see Daniel Marcus’ Happy Days and Wonder Years: The Fifties and Sixties in Contemporary Cultural Politics, for example), some brief attention here would have been helpful to bridge the 50s-70s gap.

After defining the parameters of the nostalgia film genre and engaging briefly with its chief critics in chapter three, the remaining chapters examine specific aesthetic devices employed in several recent Hollywood films. First, Sprengler investigates 1950s automobile tail fins as a metonym for post-war consumerism in Frank Miller’s Sin City. The ostentatious, rocket-like design of the tail fin operates as an emblem of postwar technology, futurity, and prosperity. Sin City’s highly stylized, comic book-inspired vision of 50s noir and the corruption and crime evoked by that realm contrasts with the film’s fetishizing of the tail-finned car. Thus, Sprengler concludes, the film manages to offer oppositional views of the Fifties and provides a glimpse of the competing mythologies of that era.

The most engaging of Screening Nostalgia’s close readings provides compelling analysis of the use of costuming and color to suggest characters’ unexpressed desires and allegiances in Todd Haynes’s Far From Heaven. Rather than reference the historical period overtly, Haynes’s film relies on sets, props, colors, and costumes to manifest the atmosphere established in the 1950s melodramas of filmmaker Douglas Sirk. Sprengler examines how the film strategically employs costume color and 50s fashion styles to convey the values of the era while simultaneously revealing the repressiveness and hypocrisy of those values.

Next, Sprengler takes on The Aviator’s use of what she terms a “technicolor aesthetic,” referring to that film’s digital recreation of mid-century film processes and palettes. Acknowledging that such films are frequently criticized for being overly indulgent in surface at the expense of substance, Sprengler attempts to recoup the historical value of Martin Scorsese’s film. While The Aviator may not faithfully reproduce Howard Hughes’s story, Sprengler finds that Scorsese’s painstaking replication of the look of two and three strip color film processing, “does important historical work” by informing audiences of the color film technologies of the 20s and 30s (149).

Finally, all the tools of visual pastness—props, costuming, black and white film— are put to work in The Good German in order to recreate the look and feel of a 1940s film. “Style is its alibi,” Sprengler asserts, and such a strategy allows director Steven Soderbergh to indirectly indict America for current geopolitical offenses while safely cloaked in the visual pastness of a nostalgia film (172).

Screening Nostalgia provides a cogent summary of the history of America’s love affair with nostalgia as well as offering useful examples of how to mobilize nostalgia in critically sophisticated ways. The text is engaging and accessible and should have wide appeal, particularly among scholars and students of film and American cultural history.

Hollywood’s Ancient Worlds.

By Jeffrey Richards.

New York, London: Continuum, September 2008. Cloth: ISBN 978-1847250070, $29.95. 227 pages.

Review by Laurence Raw, Baskent University, Ankara

Hollywood’s Ancient Worlds chronicles the history of ancient epics, from the Victorian period to the present, beginning with melodramas in the British and American theater and culminating in recent cinematic examples of the genre such as Troy (2004) and 300 (2007).

It begins by showing how notions of the ancient world—more precisely expressed as Greek, Roman, or Biblical societies—achieved a peak of popularity during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries through the work of artists such as Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema and Gustave Doré. Sir Henry Irving even engaged Alma-Tadema as designer on productions such as Cymbeline (1896) and Coriolanus (1901). Sir Herbert Beerbohm Tree enjoyed three of his greatest stage successes with Herod (1900), Ulysses (1902), and Nero (1906). Richards argues that such productions appealed to popular dramatic tastes: “Performance and visual imagery combined to create a popular memory of history, but one which looked to romance, myth and melodrama for inspiration rather than to academic research” (18). By 1916 this genre had all but died out, as audiences turned to the cinema rather than the theater. However, George Bernard Shaw did enjoy one of his greatest successes with the mythic adaptation of Pygmalion (1914).

Richards really gets into his stride once he begins to discuss cinematic reconstructions of the ancient world. Megalomaniac producers such as Cecil B. de Mille revived something of Victorian spectacle by portraying the life of Christ in King of Kings (1927): “It [the film] is certainly taking the story into a new dimension but it should not be overlooked that the film is securely based in the existing traditions of Christian music and Christian art” (38). In the era of the talkies, De Mille’s Cleopatra reflected 1930s values in its combination of art-deco design and luxuriant orientalism.

Richards divides his analysis of ancient epics of the 1950s and 1960s into three sections: the Roman Empire, the Bible, and Greece and Egypt. Many of the films discussed are very familiar—Quo Vadis (1951), Spartacus (1959), and Cleopatra (1963). However, Richards is nothing if not thorough in his research: lesser-known films such as The Prodigal (1953), Helen of Troy (1955), and The Story of Ruth (1960) are also included. Several themes emerge from his analysis: the majority of epics during this period made political statements about America during the McCarthy era, focusing in particular on issues of democracy and free speech. This was hardly surprising, as several screenplays were penned by blacklisted writers. Most ancient epics established an aural paradigm: the good guys were played by clean-cut white Americans (Robert Taylor, Kirk Douglas, Jeff Chandler), while their adversaries were invariably performed by Britons, whose cut-glass accents could well express sadistic intentions (think of Peter Ustinov’s Nero in Quo Vadis). Several films proved box-office bonanzas: Ben Hur (1959) almost single-handedly guaranteed MGM’s future as a producing studio. However, the critical reaction was not always so enthusiastic: Richards quotes several British reviewers whose choice of epithets was often depressingly predictable (“boring,” “three hours of vulgarity,” “atrocious,” “vast, loud [and] awful”). He argues that reviewers disliked the genre’s emphasis on excess; they preferred “documentary realism, literary quality and a middle-class improvement ethic” (54). I suggest there was a tangible anti-American tone to many British reviewers’ observations, almost as if they believed that ancient history had somehow been devalued once it had been given the Hollywood treatment. Not that the filmmakers themselves took much notice: De Mille freely admitted that his pictures had corn, and he was proud of it (112).

By the mid-1960s the fashion for the genre had passed, as audiences gradually became more specialized in their tastes, while the old studios (which had freely squandered millions of dollars on casting and sets) were gradually superseded by independent producers. Ancient epics remained in the doldrums until 2000, when Ridley Scott’s Gladiator cleaned up at the box-office and won a clutch of Oscars into the bargain. This film provoked a spate of imitations, including Wolfgang Peterson’s Troy (2004), which Richards identifies as a criticism of George W. Bush’s presidency, as it adopts a stance of opposition to aggressive, imperialistic wars (179).

The book ends rather abruptly with an analysis of the BBC/HBO miniseries Rome (2006-7), which combines politics and domestic drama with a liberal dose of sex in its infinite variety. I’d have welcomed some kind of conclusion, drawing together the various themes running throughout the book and offering some pointers as to how the genre might develop in the future (if it has a future, that is—Richards is particularly scathing about films like 300, which he calls “a comprehensive celebration of Fascist ideology” (184)). But perhaps Richards was constrained by the strict word-limit imposed on the volume, which he claims prevented him from discussing comic ancient epics such as Roman Scandals (1930), Carry on Cleo (1964), or Monty Python’s Life of Brian (1979). Hollywood’s Ancient Worlds is an entertaining book offering a comprehensive guide to a genre whose combination of “spectacle, action, conflict, inspiration and larger than life characters” proves irresistible to filmmakers and filmgoers alike (195).

Mysterious Skin: Male Bodies in Contemporary Cinema

Edited by Santiago Fouz-Hernández. New York: I.B. Tauris, May 2009. Paper: ISBN 978-1845118310, $32.50. 272 pages.

Review by Nathan G. Tipton, University of Tennessee Health Science Center, Memphis

Ever since Laura Mulvey famously declared, in her groundbreaking 1975 Screen article “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” that in narrative film the woman is consistently represented as the passive object of the active male gaze, various critics have been quick to challenge the fixed male-female binarism inherent in Mulvey’s argument. Film theorists Richard Dyer, Corey Creekmur, Steve Neale, and Peter Lehman, for example, have demonstrated that masculinity cannot be equated uniformly with activity or dominance precisely because, in terms of cinema spectatorship, there are always multiple gazes in play including, importantly, males gazing at males and male bodies. However, the potential for the male body to become a “spectacle” for other men, even within the safe confines of simple curiosity ostensibly extant in the viewing mechanisms of heterosexual men, almost immediately provokes profound anxiety, repression and, oftentimes, outright homophobia. After all, the very act of males gazing at other males presents a constant threat to the secure, comfortable “norm” of masculinity.

In his edited collection Mysterious Skin: Male Bodies in Contemporary Cinema, Santiago Fouz-Hernández has gathered together a multinational array of contemporary film theorists who explore not only the complex mechanics of the male gaze, but also show how cinematic representations of the gazed-at male body communicate and engage with inbuilt national identity anxieties surrounding race/ethnicity, gender, and sexuality. Although Fouz-Hernández notes that the collection makes “no claims to global coverage” (4), Mysterious Skin nonetheless has an impressive reach, with contributors presenting interpretations of male bodies that are variously (and literally) “put on display” in non-Westernized cinemas of Francophone Africa, China, Vietnam, Taiwan, and India, as well as in films from Western countries such as Australia, Germany, Great Britain, Mexico, and Spain. This emphasis on the male body, along with Fouz-Hernández’s global disavowal, serves the collection well, as it effectively backgrounds the myriad cultural differences existing among these disparate countries in favor of emphasizing the more universalized “crisis of masculinity” and its attendant anxiety over the “looked at” male body.

Mysterious Skin is divided into three thematic sections: the body and ethnic/national identities; dissections/textures/close-ups (or what Fouz-Hernández eloquently calls “the body as cinematic canvas”); and sex/sexuality, which explores the vulnerability and versatility of gendered identities typically associated with masculinity. At first glance these groupings seem logical in terms of compartmentalizing the articles, but there is also considerable overlap that is perhaps unavoidable given the collection’s overarching (inter)national focus. For instance, Heidi Schlipphacke’s “Fragmented Bodies: Masculinity and Nation in Contemporary German Cinema,” which appears in the collection’s first section on national bodies/national identities, is concerned mainly with exploring contemporary German cinema’s linkage of masculinity to the formulation of a more average qua “normal” national identity. Schlipphacke explains that this “new normal” nationality was formulated as part of an overarching governmental mandate that sought to mitigate Germany’s tortured history, and especially its psychic connection to the fervent neoclassical nationalism and patriotism appropriated and perversely applied by the Nazis.

The author, however, dovetails from her discussion of this fundamentally redefined German normality (what Schlipphacke refers to as “Neue Unbefangenheit”/new unselfconsciousness) into a fascinating exploration of the almost schizophrenic fragmentation this normalization provoked among German males. As Schlipphacke notes, not only does this schizophrenic identity signify a psychic split between past and present conceptions of what it means to be German, but it also becomes the locus for a body undergoing literal fragmentation by way of dissection. This occurs particularly in the film Der freie Wille/The Free Will (2006) where Theo, the movie’s ostensible protagonist (ostensible because although he is a rapist, his overarching desire is simply to be normal), recognizes the futility of trying to reconcile his split selves and, ultimately, slits his wrists with a razor blade.

Indeed, the motif of fragmentation appears in various physical and/or psychical permutations throughout Mysterious Skin, thus providing a further commonality binding together the collection’s chapters. An outstanding example of this fragmentation occurring on both mental and bodily levels is highlighted in Aparna Sharma’s “The Square Circle: Problematising the National Masculine Body in Indian Cinema.” Sharma discusses the Indian film Daayara/The Square Circle (1996) by focusing on unpacking the shifting identities undergone by the film’s unnamed transvestite protagonist. What makes this chapter so successful is Sharma’s application of Judith Butler’s notion of performativity as it relates to what Sharma calls the transvestite’s “prerogative for migration” (94). This migration is multi-faceted, as the transvestite—who is portrayed as a rural, nomadic figure wandering from village to village—not only crosses and re-crosses gender lines but also traverses class, religious, socio-historic, and regional boundaries. Sharma ultimately views the transvestite figure as a representative critique of India’s carefully constructed, if entirely imagined, traditional value system that overtly emphasizes heterosexuality (which is, by definition, indicative of modernity, technological/industrial mobility, and national superiority). Thus the transvestite, through “his” muddying of socio-sexual conventions and national norms, effectively confronts and de-legitimates the hegemonic frameworks set up to police and regulate any and all boundary crossings.

These affective, transgressive border crossings, both physical and psychical, are foregrounded in varying degrees in all the entries in Mysterious Skin, but some chapters succeed better than others at conveying how these crossings are deployed cinematically. D. Cuong O’Neill’s exploration of homosexual cruising in Taiwanese director Tsai Ming-liang’s film Bu san/Goodbye, Dragon Inn, for example, is strangely complex and disjointed. This is perhaps partly due to the disconnectedness inherent in the film Bu san, which utilizes a film-within-a-film approach in order to combine a cinematic homage to the martial arts genre (in this case, the martial arts classic Long men ke zhan/Dragon Gate Inn) with the concept of the “moving body” exemplified by the homosexual men who cruise the dilapidated theatre in which the film is being screened. Yet throughout his chapter, O’Neill never seems to be sure how or where to focus his discussion until he arrives, late in the entry, at what appears to be the argumentative crux. O’Neill notes that the moving bodies displayed both on-screen (in Dragon Gate Inn) and “on screen” (the men cruising the theatre) represent “a contested terrain of competing identities” and “a world shaped by another form of mobility… where sexuality becomes not a type of identity but a type of loss of identity” (203-204).

While O’Neill’s cogent observation occurs within the context of an otherwise cumbersome chapter, it nevertheless neatly encapsulates the larger theoretical ethos that informs the collection and makes Mysterious Skin a continual delight. Fouz-Hernández and his coterie of international film theorists have provided an important, fascinating, and welcome addition to studies of masculinity, gender, and extra-Hollywood cinema. Despite its limitations—including some overly complicated and heavily theoretical entries—Mysterious Skin ultimately proves successful at not only showcasing the various permutations of gazed-at male bodies deployed in contemporary films, but also exploring how these incarnations provoke and promote negotiations over how these bodies define or defy international conceptions of masculinity.

Hollywood Bloodshed: Violence in 1980s American Cinema

By James Kendrick. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, March 2009. Paper: ISBN 978-0809328888, $35.00. 272 pages.

Review by Sarah Boslaugh

The most important thing James Kendrick does in his new book Hollywood Bloodshed: Violence in 1980s American Cinema is to bring some much-needed clarity to the discussion of violence in movies. As Kendrick argues (with ample supporting evidence), violence in film is nothing new: The Execution of Mary, Queen of Scots (Edison Co., 1894) used stop-motion substitution to present a quite convincing beheading of the title character, and the most celebrated single shot in Edwin S. Porter’s 1903 The Great Train Robbery is the one in which actor Justus D. Barnes appears to fire directly at the audience.

Kendrick argues that “violence” means so many different things to so many different people that without further clarification it’s useless to discuss it, and that reactions to violence often rest more on how violence is used in a particular film rather than the specific acts portrayed on screen. Even the Production Code did not prohibit the portrayal of specified violent acts or content (as it did with sexuality), but specified that they “must be treated within the careful limits of good taste.” This was the regulation that gave us on-screen violence without pain and suffering by requiring directors to developed a screen language which indicated violent acts (such as shooting someone) without showing the consequences of those acts.

Most film historians agree that American cinema changed radically in the period from the late 1960s through the most of the 1970s. Several factors played a role, including the collapse of the Production Code, the failure of several big-budget films leading to increased interest in marketing to a youth audience, and the emergence of the Film School generation of directors, who learned filmmaking in universities rather than as apprentices in the studio system. One major change in the films of this period was a marked increased in portrayals of graphic violence (violence whose consequences are actually portrayed on the screen): the most famous example may be the death of Bonnie and Clyde in Arthur Penn’s film of the same name. However, Kendrick and many other critics believe that the violence in this and similar films was not gratuitous but part of a larger social critique heavily influenced by graphic television and newspaper depictions of the consequences of real violence in the Vietnam War.

In contrast, the 1980s are usually interpreted as a period in which the radical innovations and social criticism of the previous decade went into retreat and the self-satisfaction and prosperity of the Reagan years were mirrored on film screens across America. Kendrick does not disagree, but notes that screen violence did not disappear during this period: rather it was repackaged in order to support the new ethos of the time. He illustrates his point with a case study of Red Dawn, directed by John Milius in 1984. Red Dawn began as a dark, anti-war script written by Kevin Reynolds in the late 1970s which had thematic similarities to William Golding’s novel Lord of the Flies. By the time the film went into production in 1983, it had become a conservative fantasy dressed up as an action movie which celebrates violence while glorifying a band of teenage vigilantes heroically fighting off Communist invaders (Red Dawn was listed in the Guinness Book of World Records for containing more acts of violence than any other Hollywood film).

The teenage heroes could be considered a collective example of a type of hero often featured in the action films of the 1980s: characters who use violence to triumph over a simplified, demonized enemy and who are neither limited by self-doubt nor restrained by any considerations beyond winning. The enemy could be terrorists (Die Hard), drug runners (Beverly Hills Cop; Lethal Weapon), Vietnamese (First Blood), Soviets (Top Gun) or unnamed guerrilla fighters (Predator) because all that mattered was that the hero triumph over them. Critical and social outcry over the violence in these films was muted, often non-existent, a response which could be reasonably interpreted as: violence which reinforces dominant social values is good and should be celebrated, while violence which challenges them is bad and should be prohibited or denounced.

After setting up his historical argument, Kendrick devotes chapters to analyzing how violence was used in 1980s action films, Vietnam films, horror films, and children’s films. The latter chapter includes a fascinating discussion of how the PG-13 rating came into existence and what it implies about the whole system of rating movies in terms of their content and suitability for different age groups. The book concludes with a discussion of how screen violence was used and interpreted in films of the 1990s, followed by extensive end notes, a 13-page reference list and a detailed index.

Hollywood Bloodshed is an exemplar of modern film criticism which integrates the careful analysis and theoretical knowledge expected of academics with the sense of immediacy and well-crafted writing required in popular writing. This is a book about movies and the experience of watching them, not a book about what other critics and theorists have said. Perhaps not surprisingly, the author has a foot in both worlds: Kendrick earned his PhD from Indiana University and is a professor at Baylor, but he’s also been a film critic for Q Network since 1998. The film studies world needs more writing of this type, and I hope there’s a scholar out there who can bring a similar perspective to examine another great hot-button issue, the portrayal of sex and sexuality in the movies.

Red, White, and Spooked: The Supernatural in American Culture

By M. Keith Booker. Santa Barbara, CA: Praeger, December 2008. Cloth: ISBN 0-313-35774-9, $49.95. 232 pages.

Review by Tamar Gablinger, Humboldt Universität Insititut für Sozialwissenschaften, Germany

In his book, Red, White, and Spooked: The Supernatural In American Culture, M. Keith Booker provides the reader with a review of conspicuous (and less conspicuous) elements of the supernatural in contemporary American popular culture. Through this review, Booker hopes to demonstrate how “the evident fascination with the supernatural in American popular culture arises largely from an attempt to satisfy utopian longings that result from the lack of genuinely supernatural elements in day-to-day American life” (x). Booker, a professor of English at the University of Arkansas who specializes in Science Fiction, has already written several books that have added to our understanding of American culture and its visual representations. With Red, White, and Spooked, Booker has undertaken quite a task, first of all because of the prominence of the supernatural in so many contemporary (and historical) works of popular culture; and also because of the rigorous effort to link between these supernatural elements and his thesis.

Red, White, and Spooked certainly accomplishes those purposes. Booker has limited himself to representations of the supernatural in film and television from the early 1990s onward, such as Lost, Heroes, or Pushing Daisies, alongside more “veteran” examples, recent “role models” to the whole genre - Buffy the Vampire Slayer and The X-Files. He attempts to uncover the underlying link between takes of the supernatural and political and social agendas.

Despite this concentration in the contemporary, Booker does not neglect a much-needed review of the place of this current fascination with the supernatural in the wider context of the supernatural in popular culture altogether. Booker divided his work into three parts: a historical analysis of the “longing for adventure” in American culture; a discussion of the place of the supernatural heroes and anti-heroes in American popular culture; and an analysis of the link between belief in the apocalypse, the modern conspiracy narrative, and the supernatural. The first part of the book also mentions non-American depictions of the supernatural, namely the Harry Potter series and the Lord of the Rings books and films. Harry Potter's quintessential Britishness is contrasted with the classical American high-school tales, but unfortunately, Booker makes no reference to the popular “tweenie” Twilight series, which could serve as the perfect example for Booker's argument at this point. Booker, however, discusses in several passages of the book, the place of the high-school and teenage years in general in tales of the supernatural, from Buffy to the X-Men. Critical analysis indeed suggests (92) that corporations create works such as Buffy or Charmed to fill what seems like a spiritual void in contemporary teens' lives.

In such a wide academic work, a reader might always find some aspects less explored, and Booker's comprehensive study is not an exception. Booker, for example, neglects the flourishing religious popular culture and the representations of the aforementioned “secular” supernatural elements in it, especially the highly popular Left Behind series, which includes books for adults and teens, films, graphic novels, and even a video game depicting the apocalypse. Similarly, no reference is being made to the link between the supernatural in popular culture and the foundations of several American religious groups, most strikingly Scientology. The link between the “religious” and the “secular” supernatural might be the next realm that should be explored in a further study about the supernatural in American popular culture, especially given Booker's hypotheses about the role of the supernatural as a compensator for the lack of magic in a country awash with the rationalized religion that is the capitalist, Protestant ethic.

Nevertheless, Booker succeeds in demonstrating how the mythology of the supernatural relates to several important contemporary political and social questions, such as prejudices against homosexuals, free choice, exploitation of workers, environmental destruction, and the development of nuclear energy or weapons. Booker, however, is fully aware that “the corporate entities that produce popular culture are not likely to introduce products that are intentionally subversive” (175-76). Some of the works analyzed by Booker provide, nonetheless, the challenge to the prevailing system that could be used as entry points for critical discussion and change.