The London Film Media Reader 4

Visions of
Identity
Global Film & Media
The London Film & Media Reader 4

Edited by Phillip Drummond
published by The London Symposium
on behalf of Academic Conferences London Ltd
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Visions of
Identity
Global Film & Media
Essays from FILM & MEDIA 2014
The Fourth Annual London Film & Media Conference
Edited by
Phillip Drummond
Associate Editor Dorothy Leng
The London Symposium
Conference Proceedings Series
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The London Film and Media Reader 4
Contents
i-viii
Contents Table
Notes on Contributors
ix-xvii
xviii-xxxiii
Editor's Introduction
Phillip Drummond
i
1 / National and Institutional

Contexts
1.1 Authorial Identities
1 / The Director as Star: Alfred Hitchcock 1-12

Nadine Seligmann
2 / The Identity of Fear in the Work of

Michael Night Shyamalan 13-21
Anna Tarragó and Sue Ramspott
1.2 Cinema and National Identity
3 / British Identities on Film: The Long Good Friday,

My Beautiful Laundrette, and The Full Monty 22-33
Douglas Muzzio
4 / Contestations of Identity
In Contemporary Thai Cinema 34-43
Unaloam Chanrungmaneekul
ii
1.3 Continental and Regional Regimes
5 / The Crime Genre and Social Practice

In Latin America 44-53
Luiza Lusvarghi
6 / The Challenges of Otherness: The Politics of

Representation in the Hausa Film Industry 54-61
Maikudi Abubakar Zukogi
1.4 Trans-national Projections
7 / Representations of Russian Identity

In the James Bond Films 62-72
Katerina Lawless
8 / From ‘National’ to ‘Global’: Luhrmnn’s

Re-interpretation of Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby 73-83
Cláudio Roberto Viera Braga
1.5 Intercultural Adaptations
9 / The Challenges of Re-making

Comedy across Cultures: Kath & Kim 84-94
Caroline Grose
10 / National Identity and Global Television:

Re-making Australia’s Rake for American Audiences 95-105
K. Brenna Wardell
iii
1.6 The Practice of Journalism
11 / Understanding Professional Routines and

Identities: Print Media in Brunei 106-112
Siti Ummi Kalthum Othman
12 / Journalism and the Virtual World: Second Life 113-119

Bahar Ayaz
2 / Critical Tropes
2.1 Place
13 / Tropes of the Sea: The Mediterranean

as Cinematic Sign of Liminality and Difference 120-131
Phillip Drummond
14 / Sensory Transgressions
for a Re-imagined Australia 132-142
Felicity Ford
2.2 History
15 / History on Russian Television:

Solzhenitsyn’s In The First Circle 143-151
Tatiana Suprun
16 / Archiving Balkan Film History:

The Films of the Manakia Brothers 152-162
Geli Mademli
iv
2.3 Ethnicity
17 / Will Smith and the White Imaginary

In Science Fiction Cinema 163-173
David E. Isaacs
18 / Racial Identity in a Post-Modern World:

Django Unchained
Golnaz Sarkar Farshi 174-179
2.4 Youth Culture
19 / Youth Identities on Nigerian Screens 180-188

Ellison Domkap
20 / Public Intimacy and Popular Music:

The Libertines 189-197
Eileen White
2.5 Cultural Anxiety
21 / The Construction of Identity

In CSI: Crime Scene Investigation 198-207
Laetitia Boccanfuso
22 / Vampire Identities in Contemporary

Youth-Oriented Cinema and Television 208-219
Magdalena Grabias
v
2.6 The Production of Identity
23 / Migrant Film-making in Switzerland 220-229

Sandra Mooser
24 / The Construction of Self

in Personal Documentary Films from Iran 230-241
Persheng Sadegh-Vaziri
25 / Film-making with a Mobile Phone in Pakistan 242-249

Ahmad Bilal
3 / Gendered Identities
3.1 Female Transformations
26 / Queering Feminine Identities

In Spellbound and Now Voyager 250-260
Yael Maurer
27 / Gender, Labour, and the Media:

The Changing Representation of Businesswomen
In U.S. TV Drama 261-271
Natalya Vodopyanova
3.2 Women at War
28 / The Changing Role of Women in the U.S. War Film 272-279

Marina Loginova
vi
29 / Torture, Performance, and Post-feminism:

Zero Dark Thirty 280-291
Odile Bodde
3.3 Bollywood Women
30 / Identities Mistaken and Discovered:

The Lunchbox 292-298
Aarttee Kaul Dhar
31 / Female Identity and the New Bollywood: 299-308

Goliyon ki Raas Leela Ram Leela, Race 2, and Gulab Gang
Gauri Durga Chakraborty
3.4 Technology and Femininity
32 / Neoliberalism, Identity, and Agency:

Israeli Teenage Girls and Facebook 309-318
Sigal Barak-Brandes and David Levin
33 / Faith, Fashion, and Femininity

Muslim Fashion Blogs in Indonesia 319-328
Aulia Rahmati Wimboyono
3.5 The Gendered City
34 / Reconstructing Visions of Social Identity

In Nigeria: Funke Akindele’s Omo Ghetto 329-336
Muhammad O. Bhadmus
35 / Lonely Men in the City:

Refn’s Drive and McQueen’s Shame 337-348
Heike Steinhoff
36 / Masculinity and the Family

In American Independent Cinema 349-378
Sven Weidner
vii
3.6 Stardom and Masculinity
37 / Stardom, Genre, and Masculinity:

The Case of Robert Mitchum 359-370
Patrick Pilkington
38 / Questions of Masculinity:
Daniel Craig’s James Bond 371-379
David Muiños García
3.7 Serial Disturbances
39 / Autism on Television? The Big Bang Theory 380-388

Pascale Fauvet
40 / Masculinities Constructed and Deconstructed:

Game of Thrones 389-398
Judith Fathallah
3.8 Masculinity in Crisis
41 / Gender and Erotic Performance

In Allouache’s Omar Gatlato 399-409
Sabrina Zerar
42 / Kierkegaard, Seduction, and Hitchcock’s Vertigo 410-418

Constantino Pereira Martins
43 / Masculinity in Crisis: Gender Trauma in

Isherwood’s A Single Man and Ford’s Film Adaptation 419-430
Gerardo Rodriguez-Salas
viii
PROF. MUHAMMED
Contributors OMOWUNMI BHADMUS
teaches English and Literary
Studies at Bayero University,
Nigeria, where he heads
the recently formed
Department of Theatre and
Film Studies. He is working
on a book entitled Nigerian
Cinema: Reading Film as
Literature.
DR. AHMAD BILAL teaches

Communication Design, Film,
and Media at the University
of the Punjab, Pakistan. He
holds a PhD in Film and Media
from Nottingham Trent
University, UK.
LAETITIA BOCCANFUSO is
BAHAR AYAZ is a Research researching a PhD in English
Assistant in the Department and Film Studies at the
of Journalism at Gazi University Paris Ouest,
University in Ankara, Turkey, France, focusing on the
where she is also studying inscription of limits and
for a PhD. She holds a first thresholds in American TV
degree in Journalism, an d series 2000-2010. She
an MA in International teaches English as a Foreign
Relations. She has served as Language to students of
a reporter for the news Psychology and Political
portal of the Turkish Grand Science.
National Assembly.
DR. ODILE BODDE was
SIGAL BARAK-BRANDES is a a w a r d e d a PhD in 2016 by
Lecturer at Tel Aviv the University of Leiden, The
University, Israel. Netherlands, with a thesis on
ix
Screening the 'War on Terror': DR. UNALOAM

The politics and Aesthetics of CHANRUNMANEEKUL is a
Torture in American and Lecturer in Film, Journalism,
European Cinema. She holds Media and Communications
a BA in Literary Studies and at Sukothai Thammathirat
an MA in Cultural Analysis Open University, Thailand.
from the University of She previously founded the
Amsterdam. She is now a Film and Television
primary school teacher, Department at Burapha
specialising in Dutch and University. She holds MA and
English language skills and PhD degrees in Film, Media,
reading. and Mass Communications
from the University of
DR. CLÁUDIO R.V. BRAGA is a Leicester, UK and from
Professor and Researcher in Loughborough University,
Literatures in English at the UK. Her latest film is The Third
University of Brasilia, Brazil. Eye and her most recent
He h old s a PhD in textbook is Thai Film
Comparative Literature from Management (co-author,
the Federal University of 2015).
Minas Gerais.
ELLISON DOMKAP is a
GAURI DURGA Lecturer at the University of
CHAKRABORTY is an Jos, Nigeria, whose BA and
Associate Professor and Head MA degrees in Theatre Arts
of Department (Technical he holds, together with a
Services) at the Amity School Certificate and Diploma in
of Communication, Noida, Film-Making from the New
India. She is pursuing a PhD in York and London Film
Cinema Studies after Academies. He has directed
teaching film-making and films, music concerts and is
Film Studies for over a also the writer/director of
decade. She is also a more than thirty unpublished
practicing classical Indian plays, including Dancing in
dancer. the Desert for the Open Air
Theatre of the University of
Jos (forthcoming, 2017).
x
PHILLIP DRUMMOND was University of Burgundy,

educated at the University of France, since 1992. Her PhD
Oxford before becoming one in English Civilisation and
of the pioneers of UK Film Semiotics focussed on The
and Media Studies in the Rise and Fall of the
early 1970s. He introduced American Dream: Images of
the University of London’s the Hero from Kennedy to
first Masters degree in Film Reagan.
and TV in 1980 at the start of
two decades’ graduate FELICITY FORD is researching
teaching at the Institute of a PhD in the School of
Education. He now teaches Culture and Communication
Cinema Studies for New York at the University of
University in London. He is Melbourne, Australia,
the founding Director of the focussing on cinematic
Annual London Film and discomfort and displeasure.
Media Conference, and
G e n e r a l Editor of The DR. MAGDALENA GRABIAS is
London Symposium ebook an Assistant Professor in the
imprint, with seven volumes, Department of Cultural
comprising over 200 essays, Studies at Maria Curie-
published since 2013. Skłodowska University,
Poland. She holds a PhD in
DR. JUDITH FATHALLAH is a Humanities. Her publications
Lecturer in Media at Bangor include Songs of Innocence
University, UK. She read and Experience: Romance in
English at the University of the Cinema of Frank Capra
Cambridge and holds a PhD (2013).
from Cardiff University. Her
publications include CAROLINE GROSE is a Senior
Fanfiction and the Author: Lecturer in Screenwriting in
How Fanfic Changes Popular the Department of
Cultural Texts (2017). Performing Screen Arts at
Unitec, New Zealand. She
DR. PASCALE FAUVET has previously worked for over a
been a Lecturer at the decade as a screen industry
Polytechnic of Le Creusot, executive.
xi
DAVID E. ISAACS is an DOROTHY LENG is The

Assistant Professor of English London Symposium’s
at California Baptist Associate Editor. She was
University, USA. He holds an educated at the University of
MA in Faith and Culture from London. She holds the
Trinity Graduate School, an University of London’s MA in
MA in Christian Apologetics Film & TV Studies for
from Simon Greenleaf Education. A director in a
University, and is pursuing a London-based Management
PhD in Cultural Studies at Consultancy, she has
Claremont Graduate School. extensive managerial
experience in British Further
DR. AARTTEE KAUL DHAR is a and Higher Education,
Ramayana scholar, writer and including UNL (now London
editor based in India. She Metropolitan), SOAS, and
holds graduate degrees in Oxford Brookes.
both English and
Management, and has DR. DAVID LEVIN is a Senior
worked for The Times of Lecturer in the School of
India, the National School of Media Studies, College of
Banking, as well as various Management Academic
universities. Her most Studies, Israel. He co-
recent publications are Sita authored Communications as
Transposed: Multiplicity in Culture: Media as Culture
Retellings and Sita in the Environment (2013) and
Ramayana Traditions (both Communication as Culture: An
2016). Inside Look at the World of
Media (2014).
KATERINA LAWLESS is
researching a PhD at the MARINA LOGINOVA is a
University of Limerick, qraduate of the School of
Ireland. She holds a BA in World Politics based at the
Teaching English and State Academic University of
German and an MA in Humanities, Moscow. She is a
Comparative Literature and postgraduate at the Russian
Cultural Studies. State University of
Cinematography n.a. S.
xii
Gerasimov (aka VGIK), Studies from the University

researching representations of Amsterdam, and an MA in
of war in contemporary non- Cultural Studies from the
Russian cinema. National University of
Athens. She has worked for
DR. LUIZA LUSVARGHI is an several years as a journalist
Associate Professor in the and as a regular collaborator
Centre for Latin American with the Thessaloniki
Studies in Culture and International Film Festival.
Communication at the
University of São Paulo, DR. YAEL MAURER teaches
Brazil. She holds BAs in in the Department of English
Journalism and in Brazilian and American studies at Tel
Literature, together with an Aviv University, Israel. Her
MA and a PhD in PhD centred on Salman
Communication Sciences Rushdie's re-writing of Indian
from the University of São history as a ‘ science
Paulo. Her postdoctoral fictional’ site, leading to her
research on Latin American book The Science Fiction
Crime TV Fiction was Dimensions of Salman
supported by the Capes Rushdie (2014).
Programme. She is a Board
Member of the Brazilian SANDRA MOOSER is
Association of Cinema Critics. researching a PhD at the
Institute of Social
GELI MADEMLI is researching Anthropology at the
a PhD in the University of University of Bern,
Amsterdam’s School of Switzerland. She is a
Cultural Analysis, sponsored member of the Swiss
by the Greek State Graduate Programme in
Scholarships Foundation, Anthropology. She previously
focussing on issues of studied Social Anthropology
object-oriented ontology in and History at Bern. Her
the digital film archive. She PhD, funded by Swiss
holds a BA in Journalism National Sciences
from Aristotle University of Foundation, focusses on
Thessaloniki, an MA in Film audio-visual forms of self-
xiii
representation in trans- SITI UMMI KALTHUM

national contexts and the OTHMAN is researching a
related processes of PhD in Journalism Studies at
identification. Cardiff University, UK. She
previously worked as a
DAVID MUINOS GARCIA is an journalist for The Brunei
Independent Scholar based in Times and as an assistant
Spain. He holds a BA in manager at KRISTALfm, a
English Philology and an MA commercial radio station in
in Advanced English Studies, Brunei.
specialising in Cultural
Studies and Gender, from CONSTANTINO PEREIRA-
Universidade Da Coruña, MARTINS is researching a
Spain. He has taught English PhD in F ilm Theory in the
in Spain, and Spanish as a Department of
Fulbright Foreign Language Communication at
Teaching Assistant at Ursinus Universidade Nova de Lisboa,
College, USA. Portugal. He holds a first
degree in Philosophy,
PROF. DOUGLAS MUZZIO together with MAs in
teaches Political Science at Contemporary Culture and in
the Austin W. Marxe School Political Philosophy. He is
of Public and International also an independent film-
Affairs, Baruch College, New maker.
York, USA. A specialist in
American public opinion, DR. PATRICK PILKINGTON
voting behaviour and city holds a PhD from the
politics with extensive University of Warwick,
political, governmental, and funded by the UK Arts and
media experience, he has Humanities Research Council,
published widely. His focussing on representations
forthcoming book is Silent of the courtroom trial in
City: The Reel American City classical Hollywood Cinema.
Before Movies Talked. At Warwick he has taught in
both the Department of Film
and Television Studies and
the School of Law.
xiv
PROF. SUE ARAN-RAMSPOTT Tehran, Iran, and from a

teaches in the Blanquerna Kurdish background, she has
School of Communications produced. and directed
Studies at Ramon Llull several personal
University, Spain, where she documentary films on Iranian
is a former Director of the and Middle Eastern topics.
Media Studies Department.
She is the lead researcher of GOLNAZ SARKAR FARSHI is
the Research Group on researching a PhD in M e d i a
Television Representations Philosophy at the
and Social Imagery and a Bauhaus University Weimar,
member of DIGILAB. Germany. She holds a BA in
Architecture from the
DR. GERARDO RODRIGUEZ- University of Tehran and an
SALAS holds an MA in MA in Dramatic Literature
Gender Studies from the from the University of Arts,
University of Oxford and a Iran. She is translator of the
PhD from Granada philosophy of art for
University, Spain, where he Chesmeh Publications in
is a Senior Lecturer in English Tehran.
Literature. His extensive NADINE SELIGMANN has
publications include three worked in the film and arts
books on the writer sector for a decade, including
Katherine Mansfield and jobs in art gallery
Community and the English management, exhibitions, art
Novel (co-ed., 2013). consulting, and film funding.
DR. PERSHENG SADEGH- She holds a Masters in
VAZIRI teaches Documentary Aesthetics and Art History,
Film and Media Studies in the Media Studies and American
Communications Literature from the
Department of Pennsylvania Brunswick University of Art
State University, USA. Her and the University of
research focusses on Iranian Brunswick, Germany, and is
documentary cinema since currently completing a PhD at
1997. Born and raised in the University of Art and
Design Linz, Austria.
xv
DR. HEIKE STEINHOFF is a ANNA TARRAGÓ teaches at

Junior Professor of American the University of Barcelona,
Studies at Ruhr-University Spain, TecnoCampus Mataró-
Bochum, Germany, where Maresme, and in the
she previously studied Blanquerna School of
English / American Studies Communication at Ramon
and Media Studies. She is the Llull University, where she is
author of Queer Buccaneers: completing a PhD in Media
(De)Constructing Boundaries and Horror Fiction.
in the ‘Pirates of the
Caribbean’ Film Series (2011) NATALYA VODOPYANOVA is
and Transforming Bodies: researching a PhD in the
Makeovers and Monstrosities Communications Media and
in American Culture (2015). Instructional Technology
programme at the Indiana
DR. TATIANA SUPRUN has University of Pennsylvania,
taught English, specialising in USA. She holds an MBA from
Cultural Studies, in the Faculty IUP’s Eberly College of
of Economics at Moscow Business and Information
State University, Russia, since Technology and has extensive
1989. She is a graduate of the experience in teaching and in
University’s Faculty of business.
Philology.
DR. K. BRENNA WARDELL is
PROF. SUE ARAN-RAMSPOTT an Assistant Professor of Film
is a member of the Studies at the University of
Blanquerna School of North Alabama, USA. The
Communications Studies at holder of an MA from the
Ramon Llull University, University of California,
Spain, and a former Director Berkeley, and a PhD from the
of the Media Studies University of Oregon, she
Department. She is the lead focusses on Cultural Studies
researcher of the Research and media aesthetics.
Group on Television
Representations and Social SVEN WEIDNER is a PhD
Imagery. Candidate in Film/Media
Studies at the University of
xvi
Applied Arts Vienna, Austria, DR. SABRINA ZERAR is a

researching American Maître de Conferences in the
Independent Cinema of the Department of English at at
1990/2000s. His MA thesis Mouloud Mammeri
was published as Künstler im University of Tizi-Ouzo,
Big Apple: die filmische Algeria, and Director of a
Darstellung von Künstlern in research project on gender
New York City im Spiel- und studies commissioned by the
Experimentalfilm (2011). Algerian Ministry of Higher
Education and Scientific
EILEEN WHITE teaches Research.
Media Theory and Film
History at Queensborough MAIKUDI ABUBAKAR
Community College, New ZUKOGI is a Lecturer in the
York. She is an award- Department of English and
winning film-maker whose Literary Studies at Bayero
films have been exhibited at University, Nigeria. He is
numerous festivals. She is researching a PhD on
currently working on a Kannywood Cinema.
documentary about the fan
base for The Libertines.
DR. AULIA RAHMAWATI

WIMBOYONO is a Lecturer in
the Communication Studies
Department of the University
of National Development in
East Java, Indonesia. In 2016
she was awarded a PhD by
Cardiff University’s School of
Journalism, Media and
Cultural Studies for her thesis
Faith, Fashion and
Femininity: Visual and
Audience Analysis of
Indonesian Muslim Fashion
Blogs.
xvii
Visions of Identity: Global Film & Media

An Introduction
Phillip Drummond
FILM & MEDIA 2014

The essays in this volume are based on Papers presented at
the Fourth Annual London Film and Media Conference,
organised by Academic Conferences London and held at the
University of London Institute of Education on 26-28 June
2014. The central theme for 2014 was Visions of Identity:
Global Film & Media, which has become the title of the
present volume. As we had found in previous years, our Call
for Papers met with a powerful global response. In the end the
event brought together 185 scholars from a total of 36
countries to enjoy three days of lively presentations,
discussions and debate. The cohort of 155 academic Papers
scheduled offered lively intercultural exchange and learning in
xviii
the course of a multitude of Panels, together with refreshment

breaks and a most convivial Conference Reception. The latter
event was itself in turn enlivened by a brilliant short recital, by
opera singer Evie Anderson, of songs from Verdi, Gershwin,
and Bizet. As usual, our massive Conference Programme book,
also available online, kept us well-informed and on our toes.
In addition to a complex schedule of 76 Panels we were
delighted to welcome a trio of distinguished Keynote Speakers
to deliver illuminating and challenging plenary lectures.
Lawrence Grossberg, Morris Davis Professor of
Communication Studies and Cultural Studies at the University
of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, USA, took as his title 'Stranger
in a Strange Land: Cultural Studies versus the World'. Coming
to us hotfoot from his participation in the 50th Anniversary
Celebrations of the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies
at the University of Birmingham, UK, Larry saluted the rich
legacy of his former tutor, the late Stuart Hall, as he looked
back at some of the hard-fought developments in Film, Media,
and Cultural Studies as the subject struggled to achieve its
rightful and yet still often precarious place in the world of the
academy.
We looked to the UK for further Keynote contributions on
important aspects of the field of study. Our expert on matters
to do with ‘Identity, Celebrity and Stardom’ was Mandy Merck,
Professor of Media Arts at Royal Holloway, University of
London. In a sparkling lecture Mandy considered the various
ways in which these interests – familiar enough in the
traditional experience of film and television - have changed
and yet remain central in the era of digitally accelerated
communication, consumer participation, and the ‘information
society’. These issues were still more broadly framed in the
rich and revealing panorama offered by our third and closing
xix
Keynote Address, 'Identities in Change in the Era of Global

Media and Communication', presented by Daya Thussu,
Professor of International Communication and Co-Director of
the India Media Centre at the University of Westminster in
London - the world’s first academic centre dedicated to the
study of media in India and its globalising tendencies.
Our regular conference goals are to celebrate, analyse,
critique, but in 2014 the event also bore sadder obligations.
The Conference also mourned the recent passing of legendary
Cultural Studies pioneer Stuart Hall by means of an opening
screening of John Akomfrah’s archival elegy, The Stuart Hall
Project. In the same vein of remembrance Prof. Lucia Nagib
(University of Reading, UK) also led a Commemorative
Roundtable on the work of the great Brazilian film-maker
Eduardo Coutinho, with invited Speakers Michael Chanan,
Professor of Film and Video at the University of Roehampton,
UK, and Dr. Igor Krstic, a Postdoctoral Fellow at the University
of Reading, UK.
Turning our attention to present and future needs, and
reflecting the work of British activists for media change, we
were also pleased to be able to offer an Invited Panel entitled
Reclaim the Media! The Campaign for Media Pluralism.
Chaired by Prof. Sylvia Harvey (University of Leeds, UK), this
Panel featured presentations by Prof. Des Freedman
(Goldsmiths, University of London, UK) on ‘Media Ownership:
The ‘Elephant in the Room’?’, Prof. Julian Petley (Brunel
University, UK), on ‘Media Power: The Question of ‘Free
Speech’’, and Judith Townend (City University, UK), on ‘Media
Plurality: From the Hyper-local to the National’.
xx
Thanks are due to all our many Speakers and Delegates,

especially those who made often monumental journeys - and
sometimes significant personal sacrifices - in order to attend;
to members of our Advisory Board who lent us their skills as
Plenary and Panel Chairs; and especially to Dorothy Leng in her
role as Director of Conference Services, and for her highly
skilled work as Associate Editor on the present volume. We
were also ably supported at FILM & MEDIA 2014 by our new
Conference Assistants, Anna and Sadie Fletcher. At the
Institute of Education, venue supremos Michael Walker and
Sharon Fisher provided their customarily impeccable degree
of institutional oversight and support.
The IOE technical team again marshalled our resources with
energy, efficiency and patience, while the Catering Team
ensured that we were always well-refreshed. As always, the
team of Carmen, Maria and Paul at The Printing Centre,
Bloomsbury, performed wonders on our behalf. My sincere
thanks to all concerned for making such a large and complex
event once again such an efficient and productive gathering.
It was once again a labour of love, created by means of
extensive voluntary labour and supported by the financial
subsidy provided by its organisers. We look back on it with
great fondness as a truly global gathering characterised by the
very highest standards of mutual support, collegiality, and co-
operation.
The Conference Vision

Our original Call for Papers interpreted ‘identity’ as follows,
creating a simple overall agenda out of myriad complexities. It
asked us to consider first the reality of Identity in a World of
Scarcity. In a world divided between apparent abundance and
true scarcity, the question of identity is paramount for many
xxi
reasons. In a world of scarcity, human beings struggle to

satisfy basic needs and to establish the most basic forms of
identity: to confirm themselves as human, against the
overwhelming forces of the natural world which limit their
potential and which threaten the very foundations of their
existence. In this struggle, notions of identity are of necessity
immediately focussed on material need, and are often, in an
urgent quest for solidarity, more collective in nature.
The Call went on, by way of contrast, to contemplate the
prospects for Identity in a World of Abundance. In a world of
seeming abundance, the notion of human identity appears to
be more expansive in terms of the choices made available for
its development. At the same time it is often difficult to
separate from the sheer multiplicity of social agencies and
forces - including those of the media - which surround and
underlie the human subject. Human identity, for all its
privileged access to these apparent riches, can be seen as
determined and conditioned by them in their sheer variety
and power. Challenges thus arise here for underlying
assumptions about liberty, the self, the individual, and
about the relationship of the individual to the wider social
community.
How then, we asked potential contributors, does the business

of Identity Formation take place? Identity, we might propose,
emerges through the tension between felt scarcity and
perceived abundance in terms of a number of specific
determinations. The twin drives of genetic history and
the processes of socialisation – nature versus nurture – ensure
an over-arching, lifelong tension. The categorical imperatives
of nation, race, gender, age and social class provide critical
and often dynamic parameters, whilst family and creed
provide further perhaps more flexible
xxii
templates. Running through these categories, the interplay

between conscious and unconscious realms, in all its dreamy
intangibility, casts a further shadow upon this complex matrix.
The Role of Media Institutions is of course a central focus here.

The institutions of the media, for their part, come into the
frame by playing their own complex roles in the processes by
which human beings acquire and negotiate identity. At
economic and institutional levels, they express the powerful
imperatives of State or commerce, or - less frequently
- suggest forms of opposition to these powers. Where media
authorship is concerned they express the identities of media-
makers with variously privileged or subordinated roles and
voices.
The final category in our Call for Papers tackled the world of
media representations in terms of Identities on Screen. On our
screens, film and media project a range of audio-visual
identities, often dominant and sometimes marginal.
Individual spectators and mass audiences are variously invited
to consume, emulate or contest these in a complex process
of identification which makes its own ongoing contribution to
the wider process of identity formation at large. Here the star
system is the supreme embodiment of this aspect of film and
media as sites for the circulation and negotiation of images
and narratives of what we might call ‘identity in process’.
The Conference Reader

The engagement with these issues on the part of the FILM &
MEDIA 2014 cohort produced a host of intriguing Conference
Papers and responses to them, which has led eventually to the
current sizeable volume. The 43 essays which came forward
for publication may represent rather less than a quarter of the
xxiii
research on show at FILM AND MEDIA 2013, but we think that

the collection as a whole, drawn from nearly two dozen
nations, nonetheless offers a very good overall sense of the
wider offerings of the gathering. The Papers, submitted after
discussion at the event, were strictly limited in length - so that
they resembled the scope of the original Conference Paper -
and their authors were confined to a modicum of footnote
references. We have enjoyed the great challenge, and the
attendant pleasures, of submitting all of this extraordinary
material – a remarkable snapshot of a moment in the
evolution of the field worldwide - to an extensive and rigorous
editorial process in relation to their origins in a wide variety of
linguistic, cultural, and academic backgrounds.
The result, we hope, is a compact and highly readable

collection of essays by authors old and new. The book, forging
a new identity for the Papers originally presented under
different conditions, naturally takes a somewhat different
course than the event itself. It has been crafted into three
main parts, dealing with ‘Institutional Contexts’, ‘Critical
Paradigms’, and ‘Gendered Identities’. The essays are then
spread across the more specific subsections of the Reader.
These divisions are inevitably artificial and hence highly
porous, with many essays joining up at numerous points of
contact across these mere boundaries of convenience. A high
degree of inter-connectedness, we believe, emerges from the
collection as a whole.
National and Institutional Contexts

The first part of the Reader is entitled National and
Institutional Contexts. It offers a variety of perspectives on the
industrial, institutional frameworks which support and govern
media output, both directly and indirectly. Our traditional
xxiv
starting-points here are Authorial Identities as they arise in the

case of directors Alfred Hitchcock and Michael Night
Shyamalan. As Nadine Seligmann shows in meticulous detail
in her essay ‘The Director as Star: Alfred Hitchcock’, the author
is sometimes at work not only in his films but in the wider
cinematic institution beyond the text. Hitchcock, for example,
created his particular ‘brand’ not simply through the
representational preoccupations beloved of auteur theory,
but by means of his personal involvement in the industrial
apparatus of film promotion and publicity. Drawing upon a
long generic history, the author works within characteristic
generic and textual protocols, whereby an atmospheric
‘mood’ or component such as ‘fear’ can become almost a
‘character’ in its own right, as Anna Tarragó and Sue Ramspott
illustrate in their examination of ‘The Identity of Fear in the
Work of Michael Night Shyamalan.
Questions to do with Cinema and National Identity are to the

fore in the second and third pairings in this section. The
relationship of the cinema to powerful systems of political
influence, and to highly conventionalized protocols for
national identity, are the first central focus here. The UK
politics of Thatcherism provide the backdrop for Douglas
Muzzio’s essay ‘British Identities on Film’, with its chosen case-
studies - The Long Good Friday, My Beautiful Laundrette, and
The Full Monty - seen as vital reactions, from independent
cinema and television, to the dramas of a period marked by
rampant entrepreneurialism, complex multiculturalism, and
devastating de-industrialisation. The efforts of film-makers to
explore and context notions of national identity in Thailand
are the parallel focus of Unaloiam Chanrungmnaeekul’s
account of the history of ideas about Thai-ness – a complex
compound of religious and secular concerns, namely devout
xxv
Buddhism and intense monarchism - and its bold alternatives,

in her essay ‘Contestations of Identity in Contemporary Thai
Cinema’.
Related concerns inform the third unit of this part of the

Reader, Continental and Regional Regimes, here focussing on
Latin America and Africa. In her essay ‘The Crime Genre and
Social Practice in Latin America’ Luiza Lusvarghi illustrates
some of the complexities of genre categorisation in respect of
cinema from the region, and analyses some of the social
implications of selected crime films from Argentina, Paraguay,
Brazil, and Mexico. In ‘The Challenges of Otherness: The
Politics of Representation in the Hausa Film Industry’, Maikudi
Abubakar Zukogi’s analysis concentrates on a single African
country, Nigeria, to show how internal differences between
the country’s ethnic groupings creates a cinema with its own
tendencies to stereotyping as well as moves towards inter-
cultural integration.
This leads to a pair of essays variously concerned with the

character of Trans-national Projections in the case of the
cinematic medium as it traverses global spaces, encountering
and mediating difference along the way. The outcome may be
highly restrictive, as Katerina Lawless suggests in her discourse
analysis of ‘Representations of Russian Identity’ in the James
Bond Films. Turning a locally specific novel into a major motion
picture for the world audience may lead to a different set of
accommodations and distortions, as Cláudio Roberto Viera
Braga proposes in his essay ‘From ‘National’ to ‘Global’:
Luhrmnn’s Reinterpretation of Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby’.
Intercultural Adaptations, for their part, are further

symptomatic resources for the analysis of otherness and
difference. The focus here is the transition of popular TV
xxvi
programmes from Australia to the United States. Comedy is a

particularly difficult form for adaptation in a different social
context, since its materials are often so specific and so locally
embedded, as Caroline Grose shows in her study ‘The
Challenges of Re-making Comedy across Cultures: Kath & Kim’.
This form of intercultural migration is also fraught with
difficulty for a different kind of dramatic genre, as K. Brenna
Wardell argues in her essay ‘National Identity and Global
Television: Re-making Australia’s Rake for American
Audiences’.
The final contributions to this part of the volume move away

from Film and Television, but return us to the issues of
authorship and personal expression with which this part of the
Reader started out. Concentrating on The Practice of
Journalism. Siti Ummi Kalthum Othman shares the early fruits
of her research into ‘Understanding Professional Routines and
Identities: Print Media in Brunei’, where she begins to tackle
questions of professionalism and independence, especially
within the world of Islam. In her essay ‘Journalism and the
Virtual World: Second Life’, Bahar Ayaz broaches a very
different socio-geographic domain. Her account explores the
new forms of social reality and professional identity which are
at stake in Journalism’s engagement with one powerful branch
of the new technologies, in a quest to understand what
‘virtual’ journalism can tell about such activities in the ‘real’
world.
Critical Tropes
The second part of the Reader, ‘Critical Tropes’, covers a
wide range of themes, starting with Place as a foundational
issue in two contributions which examine the cinematic role
of land and sea in different parts of the world. In ‘Tropes of
xxvii
the Sea: The Mediterranean as Cinematic Sign of Liminality

and Difference’, editor Phillip Drummond considers the Med
as a great marine crucible for dramas of intercultural identity
in a wide range of European and American films. New visions
of landscape are the focus of the essay by Felicity Ford,
‘Sensory Transgressions for a Re-imagined Australia’, in which
she shows how alternative representations of the continent
are forged through the very form and visual style of Cate
Shortland’s film Somersault.
Place is where History is formed, the subject of the next unit

here. Writing from Russia, Tatiana Suprun considers ‘History
on Russian Television: Solzhenitsyn’s In the First Circle’,
looking at the ways in which the author’s work was adapted
for television, and the troubled issues of historiography with
which Russians grappled as they looked back via television on
a desperate history of intense totalitarianism and repression.
In ‘Archiving Balkan Film History: The Films of the Manakia
Brothers’, Gail Mademli uses the case of the Greek film
pioneers to develop a wider discussion not only about film’s
relationship to history, but about the wider issues involved in
archiving the history of the cinema itself.
Ethnicity is our third focus here. The emergence of major black

stars, while of course a welcome development, is not in itself
necessarily capable of eradicating the deeper psychic
dispositions which govern the organisation and consumption
of the film text, argues David E. Isaacs in ‘Will Smith and the
White Imaginary in Science Fiction Cinema’. Where a different
genre is concerned, the latterday western, with all its capacity
for generic reflexivity, sometimes also addresses the racial
divisions which underlie a West which has too often been
mythologised in favour of a dominant white identity, as Golnaz
xxviii
Sarkar Farshi illustrates in her essay ‘Racial Identity in a Post-

Modern World: Django Unchained’.
The extent to which media are closely bound up with the lives
of younger people is the central concern of the two essays in
our next section, Youth Culture. In a further contribution from
Africa, Ellison Domkap examines the ways in which the lives of
young people have been figured in Nollywood Cinema, in his
essay ‘Youth Identities on Nigerian Screens’. In what is, most
regrettably, our only contribution on popular music, Eileen
White tells the story of a controversial British band inspired by
a new approach to making music, notably in terms of their
interactions with fans, but riven in turn by youthful
instabilities, in her essay ‘Public Intimacy and Popular Music:
The Libertines’.
The next pair of essays looks at film and television texts which
play out and resolve moral dramas whilst allowing audiences
to indulge in darker and indeed immoral fantasies, engaging in
symptomatic Cultural Anxiety along the way. In ‘The
Construction of Identity In CSI: Crime Scene Investigation’,
Laetitia Boccanfuso examines how the serial format governs
the construction of both agents of the law and their criminal
opponents. A different kind of negotiation with disorder is
analysed in the essay ‘Vampire Identities in Contemporary
Youth-Oriented Cinema and Television’, whose author
Magdalena Grabias reconsiders the modern humanisation of
a terrifying figure committed to the erasure of the
conventional boundaries not only between youth and age, but
also even life and death itself.
Moving on to new perspectives on the processes of media

authorship, this part of the Reader closes with ideas about The
xxix
Production of Identity. Sandra Mooser’s essay ‘Migrant Film-

making in Switzerland’ is a contribution to wider studies of
migration from Africa to Europe, in its account of the uses of
media by Nigerian migrants to make imaginative connections
with their country of origin under new conditions of
displacement and re-location. A similar theme emerges in a
different national context in Persheng Sadegh-Vaziri’s ‘The
Construction of Self in Personal Documentary Films from Iran’,
but here the film-makers are seen as mediating from within
the confines of their own country as they explore questions of
identity through cinematic means. In the context of
development and innovation, fresh generations of film-
makers can now access new technology to establish
innovatory forms of production, distribution, and
consumption as Ahmad Bilal explains in the concluding essay
here, ‘Film-making with a Mobile Phone in Pakistan’.
Gendered Identities: Femininities

The third and final part of the Reader is dedicated to
consideration of Gendered Identities, opening with a series of
essays focussing on both traditional and emergent
representations of men and women in film and television.
Female Transformations have a long tradition of cinema, as
Yael Maurer demonstrates in her essay analysing narrative
and ideological meanings in two classic Hollywood texts,
‘Queering Feminine Identities in Spellbound and Now
Voyager’. As Natalya Vodopyanova then shows in her essay
‘Gender, Labour, and the Media: The Changing
Representation of Businesswomen in U.S. TV Drama’,
television has had mixed success in mediating the slowly
changing status of professional working women in American
society at large.
xxx
The war film is the generic focus for the essays that follow
under the title Women at War. Marina Loginova’s overview of
‘The Changing Role of Women in the U.S. War Film’, with its
typology of the varying positions of women in relation to the
genre, links with Odile Bodde’s case study of a woman’s
involvement in the U.S. mission to assassinate of Osama bin
Laden, and Kathryn Bigelow’s complex rearrangement of
trope to do with women and violence, in her essay ‘Torture,
Performance, and Post-feminism: Zero Dark Thirty’. Women
in India face many of the same challenges as their American
counterparts, as we learn in the next unit, Bollywood Women.
Focussing on a single film, Aartte Kaul Dhar examines a
woman’s self-discovery through a chance relationship, in
‘Identities Mistaken and Discovered: The Lunchbox’. Gauri
Durga Chakraborty then paints a broader picture of emergent
identities, taking a trio of Bollywood films as her material, in
her essay ‘Female Identity and the New Bollywood: Goliyon ki
Raas Leela Ram Leela, Race 2, and Gulab Gang’.
Advances in the social status of women, and the development

of female subjectivity, are variously explored in film and
television but are in turn enabled by new technological
innovations, as we see in the next unit, Technology and
Femininity. In their essay ‘Neoliberalism, Identity, and Agency:
Israeli Teenage Girls and Facebook’, Sigal Barak-Brandes and
David Levin research the ways in which young women in Israel
create new forms of personal identity and friendship through
social media, and the challenges they experience in
negotiating more serious forms of social drama. Such
interactions in the world of representation which is
contemporary fashion also impinge on important issues to do
with religious identity, as explored by Aulia Rahmati
xxxi
Wimboyono in her essay ‘Faith, Fashion, and Femininity:

Muslim Fashion Blogs in Indonesia’.
Our next unit, explores Gendered Spaces. Pre-eminent

amongst these is the city itself, that apparent symbol of
human inter-connectedness and civilised progress and where
male and female identities connect, collide. That troubled
urban enclave, the ghetto, is a key feature of struggles for
identity in a number of the world’s great cities. Turning back
to Africa, and to the cultures of young women struggling on
the margins of society, this is the focus chosen by Muhammad
O. Bhadmus for his essay ‘Reconstructing Visions of Social
Identity in Nigeria: Funke Akindele’s Omo Ghetto’.
Gendered Identities (2): Masculinities
The great cities of America are by contrast places of apparet

freedom where men roam in various searches for personal
identity, as Heike Steinhoff shows in her analysis of ‘Lonely
Men in the City: Refn’s Drive and McQueen’s Shame’. Those
important extensions, the suburbs, once provided the promise
of escape from the dramas of the inner city, but in turn
perhaps inevitably became the breeding ground for re-
stagings of male disaster, as Sven Weidner argues in his essay
on ‘Masculinity and the Family in American Independent
Cinema’.
Our attention then moves to questions of Stardom and

Masculinity. A classic male star is symbiotic with the
ambiguous generic moods and values of film noir, as Patrick
Pilkington demonstrates in his essay ‘Stardom, Genre, and
Masculinity: The Case of Robert Mitchum’. Under the impact
of social change, new forms of masculine identity are clearly
visible - but not invariably so - in the later stages of a legendary
xxxii
male icon, James Bond, as David Muiños García proposes in his

essay on a single star embodiment of this extended character,
‘Questions of Masculinity: Daniel Craig’s James Bond’.
Our penultimate unit, Serial Disturbances, focusses on the

ways in which television drama series/serials variously treats
male figures and their problems. In her essay ‘Autism on
Television? The Big Bang Theory’, Pascale Fauvet considers the
role of television comedy in handling the delicate links
between the medical condition of autism and the world of the
‘geek’. For her part, Judith Fathallah delves behind the facade
of a popular series to discover its remarkable and often explicit
treatment of psychoanalytic motifs to do with human
subjectivity - and thus rendering the show a much more
serious form of ‘fantasy’ - in her study ‘Masculinities
Constructed and Deconstructed: Game of Thrones’.
The third part of the Reader concludes with a unit entitled, in

what has become something of a critical cliché, Masculinity in
Crisis. This draws the Reader to a close with three case-
studies. Sabrina Zerar examines a pioneering cinematic satire
from Algeria on male braggadocchio, and the undermining of
the fantasy of male potency, in ‘Gender and Erotic
Performance In Allouache’s Omar Gatlato’. Men undergo
complex challenges to their identity as they pursue the
chimerical seductions of female phantoms, as Constantino
Pereira Martins demonstrates in his philosophical reading of
‘Kierkegaard, Seduction, and Hitchcock’s Vertigo’. Our final
contribution, introducing a comparison between literary and
cinematic treatments of troubled homosexuality, male grief,
and human mortality, is Gerardo Rodriguez-Salas’ study of
‘Masculinity in Crisis: Gender Trauma in Isherwood’s A Single
Man and Ford’s Film Adaptation’.
xxxiii
1 / National and Institutional

Contexts
1 / The Director as Star: Alfred Hitchcock

Nadine Seligmann
Brand Hitchcock
By the time the Showman’s Manual for The Birds (1963) was
recommending “use portraits of Hitchcock who is better
known than any movie star”1, director Alfred Hitchcock had
attained celebrity status with a series of thrillers culminating
in Psycho (1960) and, most notably, as the TV host of Alfred
Hitchcock Presents (1955-1962) and The Alfred Hitchcock Hour
(1962-1965). His fame as an entertainer was critically elevated
by the publication of the pioneering study by Chabrol and
Rohmer in 1958; a retrospective of his films at the Museum of
Modern Art in 1963, accompanied by a monograph by Peter
Bogdanovich; Robin Wood’s 1965 book; and Truffaut’s
interview volume the following year.2 These all contributed to
the director’s reputation as a serious artist and as a film-maker
1
with a distinctive world-view. The key salesman of the TV

shows named after him, and also of his successful feature
films, Hitchcock, like Cecil B. DeMille before him, was one of
the first directors to achieve stardom and become known as a
brand.
Hitchcock’s media presence was unsurpassed. He became the

face of major campaigns including trailers, posters, cardboard
standees and voice recordings. Numerous items of
merchandise bore his name, such as the LP Alfred Hitchcock
Presents: Music to be Murdered by (1958), Alfred Hitchcock’s
Mystery Magazine (from 1956) and the board game Alfred
Hitchcock presents WHY (1958). In the 1950s, the film-maker
became a highly recognised public figure and turned into a
‘star’, a status usually reserved for actors and actresses.
Pioneering the academic study of stardom with his influential

book Stars (1979), Richard Dyer reminds us that “Star images
are always extensive, multimedia, intertextual”.3 In this
regard, Hitchcock, who used different platforms and
performed across various media to establish and develop his
image, seems to be an especially interesting subject in the
context of stardom. Apart from his many cameo appearances
in his own films, such ‘paratexts’, as Gerard Genette has called
those marginal elements surrounding the main text in
literature, are the focus of this essay.4
Alfred Hitchcock Presents and The Alfred Hitchcock Hour

It is important to give credit to the publicity machinery that
actively contributed to the creation and build-up of the
Hitchcock ‘brand’. In 1930, when the director still lived in
Great Britain, he founded the production company Baker
2
Productions Ltd, dedicated primarily to the director’s public

relations activities. In the U.S., he was first under contract to
Selznick-Joyce and since 1945 was represented by the Music
Corporation of America (MCA). It was actually Lew
Wasserman, president of this highly influential agency, who
convinced the film-maker to host Alfred Hitchcock Presents.
This decision proved to be a stroke of genius: the show not
only turned out high profits for Hitchcock, but also introduced
him to a broad television audience, thus turning the director
into a TV star.
Although the series was named after Hitchcock and was

produced by his own company, Shamley Productions, he was,
in fact, only marginally involved in the production: of 361
episodes in total, he only directed 20. The lead-ins and lead-
outs of each episode that Hitchcock presented were written
by James B. Allardice, who was not mentioned in the credits at
all, but who, until 1964, prepared all of his famous speeches
including the trailer manuscripts. Hitchcock’s participation in
the show may have been minor; however, in terms of function
and presentation his on-screen performances were of major
importance for the success of the series.
Whereas the story and cast constantly changed, Hitchcock was

the only continuous character. Introducing and concluding
each episode with witty as well as macabre remarks, he gave
the show its identity. As the host of Alfred Hitchcock Presents
and The Alfred Hitchcock Hour, he did not act in the tales of
mystery, horror and suspense he presented, but provided
them with a framework. Directly addressing his audience in a
transitory zone between reality and fiction, he was the one to
accompany the viewer into the world of the diegesis and back
again.
3
The exceptional position that Hitchcock takes in the TV shows

is equally reflected in the title sequence of Alfred Hitchcock
Presents which becomes slightly modified over the following
seasons and complemented by Gothic elements in The Alfred
Hitchcock Hour. As the opening demonstrates, the visual
doubling of Hitchcock’s face plays a vital role in the
construction of his star persona. Accompanied by François
Gounod’s Funeral March of a Marionette (1872), each episode
begins with the famous profile drawing of Hitchcock which
could already been seen on a neon sign in Rope (1948).
Representing a simple and abstract sign, it forms a logo which
finds its completion in the name ‘Alfred Hitchcock’ that, as
part of the title, is eventually superimposed on the drawing.
Image and text form a unit. Finally, Hitchcock’s shadow
appears and merges with the profile drawing.
Styling Hitchcock
The symbolic use of shadow is of course an important stylistic
device in Expressionist silent cinema, film noir, and the thriller,
and furthermore is often used to invoke a Doppelgänger or
‘double’. It raises questions regarding the reliability of its
object of reference and may be interpreted as a hint at
Hitchcock’s ‘true’ identity behind the star persona, which
remained shrouded in mystery. On the one hand, his
silhouette is a realistic depiction of his figure; on the other
hand, it cannot be more than an ephemeral, fragmented trace.
Both the profile and the shadow oscillate between presence

and absence. Star images are constructed, which is already
implied in the use of the Latin word ‘imago’ to describe a death
mask, thereby referring to a different plane of reality, one
beyond life itself. As Paul McDonald observes: “Stars are
4
mediated identities, textual constructions, for audiences do

not get the real person but rather a collection of images, words
and sounds which are taken to stand for the person.”5
In the TV shows, as in public, Hitchcock was always formally

dressed in a tailored black suit, usually with a tie and white
shirt. This ‘uniform’ conveys seriousness, decorum, and
conservatism, linked to an emphasis on ‘manners’ and
‘Britishness’. The strong appeal of his performances results
from the discrepancy between his stiff posture and his sharp-
tongued speeches on-screen. Revealing a characteristically
‘English’ sense of humour, Hitchcock’s lead-ins and lead-outs
can be characterised as witty and ironic. The film-maker
thought of them as appropriate counterpoints to the macabre
crime stories he was announcing and concluding.
Carefully executing his movements and facial expressions,

Hitchcock acts in a very calm and controlled way. Moreover,
he is mostly shown head-on, in centre frame. Continuity
editing and an unobtrusive camera put emphasis on the
steady and solid presentation of the host’s performance.
Whereas long shots and medium long shots allow some
orientation, medium shots and close-ups concentrate on facial
expressions or gestures. Likewise, the mise-en-scène serves
the sole purpose of Hitchcock’s ideal representation on-
screen. Whereas high-key lighting guarantees a balanced
illumination by eliminating shadows, the key light rests on
Hitchcock, who is stressed as the central figure. The setting
seems rather simple and clearly arranged, the background
generally being reduced to a grey surface. Nothing is to
distract the viewer from Hitchcock’s performance.
5
The Hitchcock ‘Look’

Most of the time, Hitchcock did not wear any form of costume.
If he dressed up, only minor accessories would change his
usual look, such as hats, beards or wigs. Contrasting with his
elegant suit and his rigid manners, those details underscored
the absurdity of his appearance. The number of props
Hitchcock performed with was equally limited, but of
considerable significance for the manifestation of his star
image. The ‘Master of Suspense’, as he was regularly dubbed
in the press, was often presented alongside weapons like
knives, pistols, axes, poison, instruments of torture or other
symbols of death, for example coffins or graves. The
symbolism of imprisonment associated with steel bars
completes the morbid repertoire of objects associated with
the crime genre with which Hitchcock is identified.
Apart from his English accent (Hitchcock had moved to the

United States as long ago as 1939) and the black humour
revealed in his speeches, Hitchcock emphasised his Britishness
by drinking tea, wearing a bowler hat and carrying an
umbrella, or dressing like Sherlock Holmes. Sports equipment
and food are further recurring elements that allude to his
weight. Depicting him as a gourmet, the main course at a
dinner party, or as a sportsman, demonstrates his ability to
make fun of himself. A weakness is turned into a strength and
instead embodies power and awareness. Hitchcock’s
corpulence, which alone guarantees a striking physical
presence, is stressed as a comic trademark.
Similarly, his luxurious lifestyle and wealth are put on display:

caviar, champagne and money are used as props claiming
Hitchcock’s membership of a lofty social class. Likewise, his
6
appearances on TV ironise the stereotyped images of women

who were associated with him. In The Greatest Monster of
Them All (1961) the film-maker finds himself surrounded by
women in a harem. Equipped with a cigar as a phallic symbol,
he plays the ‘big boss’ adored by his entourage until an
explosion blows him up into the air in the lead-out from the
episode.
As well as demonstrating the ability to ridicule his privileged

position, he also picks up on clichés about the working
practices of Hollywood. Alfred Hitchcock Presents and The
Alfred Hitchcock Hour offered the perfect platform for the
build-up of Hitchcock as a star. Strategies of doubling and
repetition, as they are revealed on various levels - ranging
from the representation of Hitchcock’s face and ‘look’ over his
witty monologues to the use of props - are important for the
value of this special instance of ‘brand recognition’.
Hitchcock on Film: The Trailers

Greatly contributing to the success of the TV show, the
director also played an increasing role in the promotion of his
feature films. One important element of film marketing is the
trailer of which usually whole sets were produced. Effectively
a genre in its own right, its primary function is to arouse
interest in the film it is promoting. Condensed to key images
and isolated plot points, trailers raise expectations by
appealing to the viewer on various levels and by offering
different stimuli. In the 1950s, Hitchcock increasingly
capitalised on in his campaigns to lure the film audience into
the films, and appeared more and more often in his trailers. A
valuable side benefit of this marketing strategy aiming at the
promotion of Hitchcock’s films was the solidification of the
film-maker’s public image.
7
In The Wrong Man (1957) the shape of the silhouette that is

known from the title sequence of Alfred Hitchcock Presents
recurs as a stylistic device. A long shot captures the director
frontally, in full figure. In a shot dramatically lit from a single
source in the background, a distorted shadow is cast into the
foreground. Hitchcock introduces himself to the audience to
establish his identity before he alludes again to his favoured
genre by referring to his characters as “murderers, swindlers,
thieves, many of them geniuses at the business of crime”. Now
telling the story of a “different person”, Hitchcock’s voice-over
comments on scenes from the film.
In the context of a film based on real events, the prevailing

mood is sinister, whereas the trailer for the romantic spy
thriller North by Northwest (1959) creates a light and cheerful
atmosphere. Slipping into the role of a travel agent, and
promising entertainment and adventure. the director
promotes his movie as a ”holiday fun trip“ of about 2,000
miles from New York via Chicago to Mount Rushmore. As
opposed to this guided tour, the one he offers in the trailer for
Psycho (1960) seems rather ambiguous. Presenting no actual
material from the film, Hitchcock introduces the viewer to the
crime scene: the Bates Motel and its adjacent house of horror.
Constantly shifting between a sense of ease and eeriness

underlined by the musical score, he teases his audience with
clues and red herrings. Hitchcock’s allusions to horrific details
combine disgust and sensationalism, supported by absurd
gestures and facial expressions, functioning as humorous
counterparts to the shocking events of the film. Interestingly,
before the trailer reaches its climax - with Vera Miles,
masquerading as Marion Crane, screaming as Hitchcock pulls
open the shower curtain - the director is visually doubled by
his shadow profile, referencing the TV shows as well as
8
emphasising Hitchcock’s strong personal presence and

significance.
The trailer for his next film, The Birds (1963), which was part
of a highly ambitious campaign, again focused on the director.
In a dryly witty monologue, Hitchcock gives a lecture on the
relationship between man and birds, evolving his theories
from caveman sketches to the traditional turkey. Once again,
the film’s heroine does not appear until the end of the trailer.
When Hitchcock gets bitten by his canary, Melanie Daniels’ cry
“They’re coming! They’re coming!” announces the attack of
the birds in the film. All of the following trailers, however,
include extracts from their films - and so allow space for the
protagonists themselves - but Hichcock himself remains a key
figure.
In one of the Marnie (1964) trailers, Hitchcock floats down

from the ceiling with camera in hand and sits in his director’s
chair, establishing himself as the creator of the film.
Introducing himself by name and referring to his two previous
films, in voice-over he comments on scenes from the film,
concentrating on “two interesting specimens: a man and a
woman”. In the trailer for Frenzy (1972) Hitchcock even takes
the place of a corpse drifting in the River Thames, leading the
viewer into several scenes involving the London neck-tie
murderer at the centre of the film. His taste for the macabre
becomes obvious when he reclaims his tie from a strangled
victim.
The trailers for Hitchcock’s last completed film, Family Plot

(1976), explicitly and repeatedly refer to the TV shows by
opening with their theme music, Funeral March of a
Marionette, and depicting the director digging a grave or, as in
another version, as a master spiritualist. Generally speaking,
9
Hitchcock’s star persona as it was thoroughly established on

television was further consolidated in the trailers, conveying a
well-defined and consistent image of the film-maker.
Hitchcock and the Still Image: The Publicity Photographs

Whereas the moving image and its accompanying soundtrack
are able to capture performances through bodily movements,
facial expressions, and the use of voice, print media including
posters, newspaper and magazine ads, lobby cards or
postcards are obliged to focus on one key image which may
combine text and visual elements. While all of these
categories deserve close analysis, my concluding remarks
focus on selected star portraits of Hitchcock. The pictures
taken by photographer Philippe Halsman for the promotion of
The Birds are particularly illuminating in this regard.
The photo which appeared on the cover of Life magazine in

early 1963 shows Hitchcock standing in an upright position in
the centre of a coastal scene. A raven spreads his wings behind
the director’s head, while Hitchcock likewise stretches his
arms to offer seating for two further birds. On the one hand,
an eerie atmosphere is conveyed by the highly symbolic
animal as well as by the threatening sky; on the other hand,
Hitchcock, whose shape resembles a cross, appears majestic.
His gesture and uplifted head point to the film-maker’s role as
creator and mastermind.
This attitude of powerful superiority is also visible in another

photo which presents Hitchcock with a crow atop his cigar.
With Hitchcock in half-profile, his gaze is firmly fixed on the
beholder. Besides confidence and power, Hitchcock’s posture
expresses a stereotypical image of masculinity that is carried
to extremes and is satirised by the blatant use of the cigar as
10
a phallic symbol. At the same time, the twinkle in his eyes

reveals his sense of humour and his awareness. Another photo
by Halsman more explicitly demonstrates Hitchcock’s comic
talents: while in the foreground Tippi Hedren is being attacked
by ravens, in the background a straight-faced Hitchcock calmly
enjoys a chicken meal.
Again, it is the director who is in control of the situation. His

strong visual presence may leave the impression that he not
only has the power over his films, but also over the images
related to his work and his star persona. In this context,
publicity shots which show Hitchcock cheerfully posing with a
dummy of his head during the filming of Frenzy could be
interpreted as ironic statements. Functioning as a form of
mise-en-abîme these contain recurring images of a macabre
image. The fact that it is the dead replica of a head raises
questions concerning the relation of original and
reproduction, appearance and reality, authenticity and
construction. In addition, the photograph itself becomes a
kind of Doppelgänger: even though the medium seems to
guarantee a mimetic depiction, like film, it represents a person
who is absent.
A crucial role in the construction of a star persona is played by

the human face, just as it is humorously deconstructed in the
publicity shots of Frenzy discussed above. The reproduction of
a face creates further images just as star images are multiplied
through a publicity-generating machine, as Hitchcock’s
various appearances in the media have demonstrated. Even if
the cameos in his films may be regarded as simply ‘signatures’
or minor product placements, his outstanding performances
in para-texts like trailers, TV lead-ins and lead-outs, posters
and publicity stills are clearly the main attraction in their
11
contribution to the build-up of the distinctive and unique

brand that is ‘Hitchcock’.
Notes and References
1
Universal Pictures, Showman’s Manual for The Birds, 1963, p. 33.
2
Eric Rohmer and Claude Chabrol, Alfred Hitchcock, Paris: Editions
Universitaires, 1957; Peter Bogdanovich, Alfred Hitchcock, New
York: Museum of Modern Art Film Library, 1963; Robin Wood,
Hitchcock’s Films, London: Zwemmer, 1965; François Truffaut, Le
cinéma selon Alfred Hitchcock, Paris: Editions Robert Laffont, 1966.
These pioneering works have passed into several further editions
amidst the later plethora of critical work on the director.
3
Richard Dyer, Heavenly Bodies. Film Stars and Society, New York:
St. Martin’s Press, 1986, p. 3.
4
See Gerard Genette, Paratexts: Thresholds of Interpretation,
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997.
5
Paul McDonald, The Star System: Hollywood’s Production of
Popular Identities, London: Wallflower Press, 2000, p. 6.
12
2 / The Identity of Fear

in the Work of Michael Night Shyamalan
Anna Tarragó
Sue Aran-Ramspott
The History of Fantasy and Horror
In 1999, a new young director surprised critics and audiences

alike with a film which transformed the hitherto established
narrative formulas of fantasy film: the director was Michael
Night Shyamalan; the film, The Sixth Sense.1 The genre had
enjoyed several prolific years, largely thanks to Tim Burton
who, during the 1990s, had become the great re-creator of
modern monsters, neo-Gothic worlds and distinctive
iconographies which are now part of the collective
imagination. In order to understand Shyamalan’s motivations
as a film-maker, we need to go back to the origins of fantasy
storytelling. This essay will consider mankind’s relationship
with the inexplicable and the fantastic throughout history,
through the different periods of growth, boom and decline in
13
fantasy literature, right up to the viewer’s current relationship

with fantasy film and, more specifically, with the work of
director M. N. Shyamalan and his treatment of fear.
If we acknowledge that the first recorded ghost story is in the

form of a letter to Licinius Sura by Pliny the Younger (c. AD 61-
113), we see how horror and fantasy literature have existed in
different civilisations and in all their narrative forms.2
However, the 19th century merits special consideration as one
of the most prolific as far as fantasy literature, especially
horror, is concerned. On the one hand, the tradition was based
on anthologies of folk tales which were both fantastic and
instructive, and at that time considered a minor form of
literature aimed at the moral education of children, dealing
with fear and horror through supernatural characters. On the
other hand, a series of Victorian writers had made timid
attempts to revive medieval epics and narrative in the shape
of stories full of darkness and frightening characters that
warned of dangers and sent moral messages to defenceless
youngsters.
With the advent of Romanticism, however, fantasy literature

aimed at adults began to enjoy popular success. This literature
was full of new universal archetypes reminiscent of the most
primitive horror, involving legends, monstrous characters, and
mythological, super-human heroes. Mary Shelley’s
Frankenstein, Stevenson’s Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr
Hyde, Stoker’s Dracula, and the phantasmagorias of the works
of Poe are amongst the key works of writers who in this period
devoted part or even all of their work to fantasy, and focused
on fear as a central element. The names of Hoffmann, Balzac,
Hawthorne, Gautier, Dickens, James, Lovecraft, Borges and
Cortázar can be added to this list of literary forays into the
world of horror.
14
Storytelling in Fantasy Film

But what happened when film offered a new way of telling
stories? The earliest fantasy films (which might be said to date
back to 1902 with Journey to the Moon by Georges Méliès)
focused on adapting the great figures of horror and bringing
them to a mass audience. The monsters of the 19th Century
were re-visited with varying degrees of success: in silent films
such as Frankenstein (Dawley, USA, 1910), Das Cabinet des Dr.
Caligari (Wiene, Germ., 1919); Nosferatu (Murnau, Germ.,
1922), The Hunchback of Notre Dame (Worsley, USA, 1923)
and The Phantom of the Opera (Julian/Chaney, USA, 1925),
among many others.
These figures evolved and acquired new forms and

characterisations as actors like Bela Lugosi and Vincent Price
became icons of classic horror films. In addition, new figures
emerged, such as that of the zombie, a monster figure heavily
charged with symbolism as a metaphorical representation of
society in the first half of the 20th Century.3 In the 1970s and
1980s we find parallels which allow us to analyse the narrative
and stylistic contributions, re-creations and deviations of a
number of fantasy film-makers with respect to ‘traditional’
storytellers. This generation offers us a comprehensive picture
of the legacy of postmodernity and the birth of modern
cinematic adventure fantasy.4 In a sense, it was film theorists
who grouped together the directors of adventure fantasy of
the 1970s and 1980s, establishing the first generation of
storytellers within the fantasy genre.
Indeed, many of these are still working and continue to create

films which are fully consistent with the characteristics of the
generation in question. Film-makers such as Spielberg, Lucas,
Kubrick, Zemeckis, Cronenberg and de Palma, among others,
15
took full advantage of the emergence of new technologies and

visual effects which enabled them to transport viewers to
fantastic worlds, without distancing them from day-to-day
reality. For the first time in film, adventure fantasies were no
longer simply adaptations of novels and stories; directors
became creators of stories, characters and original settings of
their own.
And almost always, in most of the films which defined that

generation, there was an innate presence within the fantastic
element: fear, a vehicle used constantly by many of these film-
makers to articulate their narratives, to moralise or instruct
audiences, and for greater impact on the big screen. Among
many, many examples, we develop an interest in extra-sensory
perceptions such as telekinesis thanks to Carrie (de Palma, USA,
1976); we witness the rebirth of Kafkaesque monsters with The
Fly (USA/UK/Can., 1986; a David Cronenberg re-make of Kurt
Neumann’s 1958 American original); we experience the fear of
tortured characters thanks to Stanley Kubrick and gems like A
Clockwork Orange (UK/USA, 1971) and The Shining (USA/UK,
1980). At the end of the 1990s, Shyamalan drew on these
influences and combined all these elements with his own
innovations.
A New Generation: Shyamalan

Thus we move from the first generation of storytellers, those
directors who created or recreated modern adventure
fantasies in the 1970s and 1980s, who introduced new visual
formulas while respecting the narrative canons of the horror
and fantasy genres, to those film-makers who, like
screenwriter, director, and producer Shyamalan, innovate in
terms of narrative, re-invent fantasy, and turn it upside down.
Shyamalan confesses to being a disciple of the ‘first
16
generation’. He cites Spielberg, Lucas and Zemeckis as great

teachers and sources of inspiration, as well as Hitchcock who,
while impossible to classify as a film-maker, was
unquestionably the master of suspense and the first to
incorporate everyday, intangible fears into his films.
Shyamalan, however, does not deal with fear in the same way
as his predecessors. Rather, he goes one step further and
dares to turn fear into another character in his films. It
assumes an identity which does not merely serve as a
narrative vehicle in the stories he tells. Fear is another
presence which accompanies the characters, which
determines their behaviour and even generates changes of
direction in the screenplay, as if it had a life of its own. Fear is
no longer used as an excuse or as a message; rather, it is part
of the cast and, together with the other characters, drives
central themes, storylines and plots.5
The type of narrative and visual structures Shyamalan tends to

employ, and the way in which characters and actions are
created and develop, always have a very personal, individual
stamp; at the same time, he re-creates earlier archetypes and
structures, usually set in ordinary, very realistic environments,
where the fantasy element ends up seeming plausible, no
matter how incredible it may be. The same can be observed in
his inspirations, themes, tributes and nods to the films of his
major cited influences.
A closer analysis of the contents of his complete body of work,

however, shows that the director has a personal way of
presenting the fantasy component: Shyamalan is telling us
fantastic tales. And in most cases, these are horror stories,
stories about fear. He does not adapt earlier literary
references (as film-makers from the 1950s to the 1970s did -
17
for example Laughton’s The Night of the Hunter (USA, 1955),

adapted from the novel of the same name by Davis Grubb);
rather, he creates new stories which he himself writes or
which he tells his daughters as bedtime stories.
The Sixth Sense (1999) was thus the embryo of a body of work
which recreates ordinary worlds with irruptions of fantasy, like
the films of his forerunners. However, he does so in such a
natural, spontaneous and discreet way, and draws settings and
characters which are so plausible and easy for the viewer to
identify with, that his films in some way start to break their ties
to those of the previous generation. And one of the principal
ways in which he breaks away from the previous generation is
in his treatment of fear.
Structures of Fear
Shyamalan’s work has gone through many stages. In The Sixth
Sense (1999), fear appears timidly in the form of collective
rejection of somebody who is different. The possession of
extra-sensory perception - “I see dead people” - becomes
almost a curse. When the protagonist, Cole (Haley Joel
Osment) finally understands that only through association with
the antagonist (his gift or curse) will he be able to live in peace,
he also finds out that, sadly, the benevolent intruder who has
helped him in the process, the psychiatrist Malcolm Crowe, has
to learn to live with his own fear, accept his own death and his
consequent disappearance from daily life.
In Unbreakable (2000), Shyamalan sets up an apparently classic

clash between the hero who discovers a power (David Nunn,
played by Bruce Willis) and the antagonist (Elijah Price, played
by Samuel L. Jackson), and does not reveal until the end that
the true antagonist was fear: fear of frustration, of not doing
18
one’s duty in every situation, of not being a good person and of

one’s most unpleasant side, the most selfish side. This is
illustrated in the protagonist’s vulnerability when faced with
one of the most conventional, everyday elements: water. With
Signs (2002), a clear tribute to B-movies, Shyamalan goes a step
further and dares to frighten the protagonist, Reverend
Graham Hess (Mel Gibson) with the loss and subsequent
recovery of his faith, while the rest of his family, including his
brother, Merrill (Joaquin Phoenix), an atheist, face an invasion
of extra-terrestrial beings.
In The Village (2004), Shyamalan goes further, rejecting

conventional narrative structure and creating something of an
anti-story. In this film, fear is recreated by the village elders
themselves, who transform themselves into their own
antagonists by means of clumsy disguises. While at first they
control the villagers, they later end up destroying the very
ideals which first led them to that isolated place. The heroine,
a young blind girl called Ivy Walker (Bryce Dallas-Howard),
manages to overcome the collective fear thanks to her
blindness and her faith in love. Thus fear, in this case, is a
mismanaged obsession centred on the pursuit of an aim based
on the common good. (Here we have an underlying message
which is very relevant to certain current forms of power.)
Lady in the Water (2006) marked the director’s return to classic

stories, paying homage to his maestro, Spielberg, and E.T
(1982) as the most obvious re-creation of the benevolent
intruder archetype. In this film, Shyamalan presents a group of
characters who have to work together to return a water nymph
to her fantastic homeland. Successions of mythological
monsters are the antagonists who try to prevent the nymph
from going home. Despite the dramatic effects and the sudden
appearances of these beings, they are not the incarnation of
19
fear in this story. Rather, fear is a character camouflaged in the

initial distrust of the characters, in the insecurity of Cleveland
Heep (Paul Giamatti) and in his traumatic past. The true fear of
the heroes of this story lies in their uncertainty and lack of faith
in the strength they can possess if they help each other.
With The Happening (2008), Shyamalan evolves again with a

new form of science fiction linked to the environment. For the
first time, he explicitly reveals the antagonist from the very
start of the film. In a ground-breaking, innovative – even
surreal – way, Shyamalan turns the world’s flora into a weapon
of mass destruction aiming to wipe out humanity. In revenge
for being mistreated for millennia, nature has become a
terrifying lethal weapon.
Finally, we come to Shyamalan’s latest film at the time of

writing, the futuristic and dystopian After Earth (2013), which
incorporates an analysis of fear rarely before seen in the
cinema. Here, fear, or cowardice, takes the shape of a physical,
sensorial element which betrays the presence of humans.
Monstrous blind creatures eradicate the population by using
their sense of smell to track humans down. If there is no fear,
the creatures cannot detect their target. The relationship
between a father (Will Smith) and son (Jaden Smith) progresses
from estrangement to admiration precisely because of the way
in which the protagonists deal with their respective fears, the
fear that each feels regarding the other’s well-being, and their
mutual fear concerning survival.
By way of a provisional conclusion we might go so far as to say

that that Michael Night Shyamalan tells us modern fantasy
stories and, without our realising it, speaks to us of fears,
hidden in impossible characters, which are closer to us and
more relevant than we can possibly imagine: fears around
20
topics such as marginalisation, solitude, difference, corrupt

power, contempt, underestimation and cowardice. These are
feelings inherent to mankind which, today more than ever, are
relevant in an age of communicative overload, so-called
‘infoxication’. Shyamalan tells us that these feelings,
sublimated in frightening characters and identities, touch on
our most hidden fears. Is it possible that he, who hates film
critics so very much, is himself a critic of modern society?
1
See Richard Mathews, Fantasy: The Liberation of Imagination,
London: Routledge, 2000, pp. 132-136.
2
The Younger Pliny, The Letters of Pliny the Younger, London:
Penguin, 1969, Book 7 Letter 27, pp. 202-205.
3
David Flint, Zombie Holocaust: How the Living Dead Devoured the
Pop Culture, London: Plexus, 2009, p. 26.
4
Carlos Aguilar, El cine fantástico de aventuras, Málaga: Diputación
Provincial de Málaga, 2004, pp. 87-91.
5
Interview with M.N. Shyamalan: The Sixth Sense, Buena Vista
Pressbook, 1999.
21
3 / British Identities on Film:

The Long Good Friday, My Beautiful
Laundrette, and The Full Monty
Douglas Muzzio
Transformations of Identity
This essay addresses issues of British national identity through

discussion of three key films from the period 1980 to 1997.
Each engages with an era marked by ‘Thatcherism’ – the
dominant political philosophy associated with Margaret
Thatcher's election as Prime Minister in 1979, perpetuated
under her successor John Major from 1990, prior to the victory
of Tony Blair's New Labour in 1997. My trio comprises John
Mackenzie’s The Long Good Friday (1980), Stephen Frears’ My
Beautiful Laundrette (1985), and Peter Cattaneo’s The Full
Monty (1997). I examine these films in terms of their powerful
and often complex negotiations of issues around identity –
individual and collective, personal and political – in the fast-
22
changing and hard-pressed conditions of Britain in this

monumental period of upheaval, where overarching
questions of race and gender were particularly significant.
In a 1991 essay, Stuart Hall announced that “the question of

identity has returned to us in British policy and British cultural
politics […] not the traditional conception of identity.” Hall
located its source in the historical transformation caused by
“the rise of other cultures to prominence” and the
fragmentation and erosion of collective social identity.”
Identity, for Hall, thus marks “a point at which, on the one
hand, a whole new set of theoretical discourses intersect and,
on the other, a whole new set of cultural practices emerge”.1
(It is also, we might add, a point at which others can be
submerged.)
On the political front, Margaret Thatcher, already Britain’s first

female leader, was on her way to becoming, with her three
General Election victories, the longest serving UK Prime
Minister of the 20th Century. Thatcher and Thatcherism
dominated and transformed British social and political life,
with her Tory government both fostering and subverting
identities. The oldest was the identity of Britain as ‘two
nations’, reflected long before in Mary Gaskell’s North and
South (1855). The North was in decline, with manufacturing
and mining collapsing, the victim of global movements in
capital, labour, and technology, caught amidst seismic shifts
which were intensified by Thatcherism. The South, centered
on the global city of London, was the nation’s economic,
social, and cultural engine-house.
Thatcher’s bêtes noires were the trade unions. Her crushing of

the 1984-1985 national miners’ strike led to growing worker
disenchantment with unions and a devaluing of traditional
23
unionised working class identity. Artists in turn were repelled

by what they saw as her middle-class Victorianism,
philistinism, and cultural crassness. Film-makers had highly
practical reasons for their opposition: the 1984 Films Bill
abolished the 1947 Eady Levy, which had distributed a
percentage of box-office receipts to British-made films.
Thatcher also abolished a 25% tax break for investment in film

production, and privatised the National Film Finance
Corporation, thus eliminating any direct government
involvement in film production. Nonetheless, the 1980s saw
something of a renaissance in British film-making, and many
of the films that emerged were inevitably reactions to
Thatcher’s policies, the ethos she espoused, and the version
of culture she helped create.
A New Dispensation: The Long Good Friday

In Mackenzie’s The Long Good Friday (written by Barry Keeffe),
life is good for London gangland boss Harold Shand (played by
Bob Hoskins). He lives in a penthouse, has a yacht on the
Thames, and hobnobs with politicians. He sees himself as the
chief architect of a resurgent England in the recently created
European Common Market. He is also volatile, ruthless,
sadistic, and a sociopathic killer. While he is away in New York
with American mobsters setting up a deal to redevelop
Docklands, his associates become involved with the shady
activities of a local politician and a developer, in a plot
ultimately involving the IRA.
He invites his American investors to see for themselves the

vast potential in developing the deserted wastes of East
London’s Isle of Dogs. However, just as he launches his charm
24
offensive his empire comes under attack by an unknown foe

with even more determination and ferocity than Shand – the
IRA. In the course of a fateful Easter weekend, Harold’s dream
is shattered: a sidekick is stabbed in a swimming pool changing
room; a bomb rips through his lovingly restored pub; another
destroys his Rolls Royce, killing his driver; an unexploded
device is found in his Mayfair casino. The American mafiosi
grow increasingly jittery and call off the deal. The film ends
with Shand being mysteriously abducted and driven away to
what we can only presume is his doom.
Gangsters and Entrepreneurs

Shand epitomises Robert Warshow’s tragic and
quintessentially urban gangster with his “unceasing
commitment to enterprise”.2 This is directly linked to the
enterprise culture encouraged by Thatcher and the logic of
international capital, and is tellingly embodied in Shand. If the
film focusses on him, then images of femininity have also
toughened up under Thatcher: Victoria, Shand’s mistress, up-
ends the genre convention of the gangster moll as available
but not very bright. Victoria (Helen Mirren) is, indeed, not only
sensual but also smart, resourceful, and tough. A shrewd and
sophisticated negotiator, she has nearly sealed the deal with
the Americans when Harold begins to crack up.
On the deck of his yacht on the River Thames, as Tower Bridge

recedes in the background, Shand links himself to the
Docklands regeneration project which was an early flagship of
the new Tory Government in the early 1980s. His famous
speech is ripe with irony: unknown to him, his Rolls, with its
driver waiting to collect Shand’s mother from church, has just
been destroyed by a bomb planted by his enemies:
25
“Ladies and gentlemen … I’m not a politician … I’m a

businessman … with a sense of history. And I’m also a
Londoner…and today is a day of great historical significance
for London. Our country’s not an island any more … We’re a
leading European state. And I believe … that this is the decade
in which London will become … Europe’s capital. Having
cleared away the outdated … We’ve got mile after mile, acre
an[d] after acre of land … for our future prosperity. No other
city in the world … has got right in its centre … such an
opportunity for profitable progress.”
Shand is not only an archetypal Thatcherite entrepreneur -

hard-working, industrious, full of the entrepreneurial spirit but
also chauvinist and racist. Towards the end of the film, on his
arrival at the American mobsters’ suite in the Savoy Hotel, he
discovers that they have abandoned the deal and are about to
leave for New York, put off by the violence they have
witnessed around Harold, and drawing negative international
comparisons with the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre, “a bad
night in Vietnam”, and claiming that London is “worse then
Cuba”, in effect “a banana republic”. A proud British
nationalist, Harold retorts in a snarling London demotic:
“No wonder you got an energy crisis your side of the water. Us
British … we’re used to a bit more vitality … imagination …
touch of the Dunkirk spirit – know what I mean? The days when
Yanks could come over [h]ere an[d] buy up Nelson’s Column,
and] an [H]arley Street surgeon an[d] a couple o[f] Windmill
girls are definitively over […] What I’m looking for is someone
who can contribute to what England has given to the world …
culture ... sophistication … genius … a little bit more than an
[h]ot dog – know what I mean? We’re in the Common Market
now … an[d] my new deal is wiv Europe. I’m goin[g] into
partnership with a German organization – yeah, the Krauts!
26
They’ve got ambition, know-how, and they don’t lose their

bottle.”
Harold’s boast is deeply ironic when seen in the aftermath of

the 2016 UK referendum decision to withdraw from the
European Union. Within the film itself it bears no fruit: on
leaving the hotel and getting into his chauffeur-driven
limousine, Harold discovers that he has been abducted and is
being carried off to his fate by undefined opponents
(presumably the IRA).
Race and Sexuality: My Beautiful Laundrette

Frears’ My Beautiful Laundrette (written by Hanif Kureishi)
centres on Omar (played by Gordon Warnecke), a young,
unemployed British-Pakistani, who cares for his ailing,
alcoholic father Papa Hussein - once a noted journalist in
Bombay - in a decaying South London flat overlooking a
railway line. Omar’s father (Roshan Seth) urges him to go to
college, but in the meantime gets him a job washing cars in his
brother Nasser’s garage. Nasser (Saeed Jaffrey) is impressed
by Omar's business sense and ambition and gives him the job
of running a dilapidated laundrette.
Following a party at Nasser's house, Omar and others face a

volley of verbal and physical abuse from a gang of racist
youths, amongst whom is Johnny (Daniel Day-Lewis), an old
school-friend of Omar's and a former member of the National
Front. Johnny and Omar begin work together on the
laundrette and become lovers. After the re-opening of
‘Powders’, Johnny's old gang wait for the opportunity to
smash up Salim's car. They beat him up and, when Johnny
comes to Salim's aid, attack him too. The bond between
Johnny and Omar survives.
27
My Beautiful Laundrette re-casts the perennial ‘State of

Britain’ question. As immigration into Britain from the nations
of the former Empire rapidly increased, issues to do with
cultural assimilation, national identity, and ethnic domination
became subjects of competing narratives. By the mid-1980s,
British national identity was increasingly being contested as a
paramount social, cultural, and political concern resulting
from massive unemployment, the resurgence of fascist
organisations like the National Front and the subsequent rise
in violence against people of colour as well as the
riots/uprisings in 1980 in Bristol, Liverpool and Brixton and the
subsequent 1982 Scarman Report highlighting problems
associated with racial disadvantage and the decline of the
inner city.
For Kureishi, “it is the British, the white British who have to
learn that being British isn't what it was. Now It is a more
complex thing, involving new elements. So there must be a
fresh way of seeing Britain and the choices it faces, and a new
way of being British after all this time … and how difficult it
might be to attain.”3 Kureishi moreover intended the film as
“an amusement”, adopting the ironic mode as “a way of
commenting on bleakness and cruelty without falling into
dourness and didacticism”.4 With its personal focus on the love
affair between Omar and Johnny, the film uses traditional
romantic conventions to naturalise gay sexuality and to
celebrate a love affair that transcends race, class, and
restrictive socialisation.
New Asian Voices

The rise of mass immigration into Britain in the decades after
WWII posed key challenges for the new multiculturalism. If the
28
mainstream media portrayed Asians (from India, Pakistan,

Bangladesh, and Sri Lanka) at all in the 1970s and 1980s, they
typically relied on negative stereotypes, often representing
them as people who were “money-grabbing, inarticulate,
‘stuck-between-two-cultures’, repressed and favouring (or
passive victims of) what are assumed to be oppressive systems
such as ‘arranged marriages’.”5
My Beautiful Laundrette gives voice to the Black and Asian

experience in Britain by challenging traditional
representations of these groups. The result is complex. The
film’s Asian characters are a mixture of the ‘positive’ and the
dubious: the jocular Nasser is an enthusiastic adulterer and a
ruthless landlord, while Salim is a suavely aspiring and
determined drug trafficker. In other words, films like My
Beautiful Laundrette and Sammie and Rosie Get Laid (Frears,
UK, 1987) “do not attempt to give expression to one ‘authentic’
or ‘essential’ ‘black’ or ‘Asian’ experience, or offer
straightforwardly ‘positive’ images, but rather place the stress
on heterogeneity and, what Hall has referred to, [sic] as the
‘living’ of ‘identity through difference’.”6
In My Beautiful Laundrette, the quest for identity and for

‘belonging’ affects everyone. The leader of the skinheads,
Ghenghis, breaks up a violent confrontation between Johnny
and his gang to ask: “Why are you working for these people -
Pakis? Johnny replies: “It’s work, that’s why. I wanna to work
for a change instead of all this [h]anging around. What, you’re
jealous?.” Ghenghis pleads: “No, I’m angry, Johnny. I don’t like
to see one of our blokes grovellin[g] to Pakis. Look, they came
over [h]ere to work for us – that’s why we brought them over,
OK? Look, don’t cut yourself off from your own people. Look,
there’s no one else who really wants you. Everyone [h]as to
belong.”
29
While My Beautiful Laundrette is critical of Thatcherism and

the materialism and selfishness it is seen to generate, the film
also identifies how, for some British Asians, the enterprise
culture also provides opportunities which cut across
traditional relations of power and furnishes them with access
to wealth and status. My Beautiful Laundrette thus presents
both the demographic and cultural inbetween-ness of the
characters, a psychological, emotional, and behavioural space
at the intersection of race, ethnicity, class, and culture in an
increasingly diverse Britain.
Nasser, for his part, is a pragmatic entrepreneur: “In this damn

country, which we hate and love, you can get anything you
want. It’s all spread out and available. That’s why I love
England. Only you have to know how to squeeze the tits of the
system.” When reluctantly helping him to evict a black tenant,
Johnny points out that critics won’t see Pakistanis in a
favourable light as a result of such an action. Nasser responds
by defining himself as a “professional businessman, not a
professional Pakistani … and there is no question of race in the
new enterprise culture”.
Post-Industrial Masculinity in Crisis: The Full Monty

Cattaneo’s The Full Monty (written by Simon Beaufoy) moves
us from London to the North. Set against the difficulties of
personal and social life in post-industrial Sheffield, The Full
Monty concerns a group of men who have lost their jobs in a
devastated steel industry and who, inspired by The
Chippendales, resort to putting on a strip show in a local
working men’s club. Their ring-leader, Gaz (played by Robert
Carlyle), is about to lose access to his son Nathan because of
sizeable arrears in his joint custody maintenance payments.
His friends and former co-workers have their own problems:
30
Dave (Mark Addy) is overweight, depressed, and impotent;

‘Lomper’ (Steve Huison) has a job as a security guard at the
abandoned factory, but has an ailing mother to care for and
only joins the group after being rescued by Gaz and Dave when
he attempts to commit suicide.
Their ex-foreman Gerald (Tom Wilkinson) has been lying to his

wife for six months about his unemployment and, while taking
on the role of the group’s dance teacher, becomes increasingly
anxious about his life-long priapism; ‘Horse’ (Paul Barber) is an
outsider in various ways, a black middle-aged Liverpudlian
who – contrary to stereotype – is anxious about the adequacy
of his manhood; the carefree Guy (Hugo Speer), contrariwise,
is proud of an apparently impressive male endowment, and,
falls unexpectedly into a relationship with Lomper. This
musical tragicomedy follows the recruitment and training of
this motley crew as they prepare for a show in which they
intend to appear nude – going for ‘the Full Monty’ – but by
means of which they manage to restore a degree of pride,
solidarity, and self-confidence.
Social Class
Just as the British New Wave films of the 1950s and early
1960s demonstrated an anxiety about the demise of the
traditional working class under the impact of consumerism,
suburbanisation, and Americanisation, the working-class films
of the 1980s and 1990s focused on the decline of the
traditional British urban industrial working class (and their
resulting social impotence) under the pressures of de-
industrialisation and globalisation.
Moreover, by the end of the 20th Century, traditionally white

male working class identity faced a new challenge in the job
31
market: an increasing proportion of manual workers (close to

50%) were either women or Black people. The screenwriter,
Simon Beaufoy, while visiting Sheffield over an extended
period, recalls that he would “wander the streets with the slow
tread of those who have nowhere to go and a lot of time in
which to get there … There were thousands of us, nearly all
men, On the Wander… “.7
The growth of long term unemployment precipitated a

weakening of the ideologies of masculinity which have
traditionally underpinned both work and trade union action.
The result was a crisis in masculinity involving the
disintegration/disappearance of the roles of bread-winner and
family head which had traditionally defined male identity. Gaz
wants joint custody of his son, rather than a return to his failed
marriage; Gerald is thrown out by his wife; Lomper and Guy
come together as a gay couple (something, nonetheless, over
which Gaz and Dave are obliged to snigger).
The Full Monty has been criticised for its utopian view of the
possibilities of collective action, with the film marketed as a
comedy rather than a piece of social realism (although it owes
much of its style to the British New Wave of the late 1950s and
early 1960s). Like its contemporary, Brassed Off (Herman, UK,
1996), the related drama of life in a Yorkshire town as miners
undergoing a pit closure try to keep the works brass band
alive, the film has an upbeat, ‘feel-good’ ending, with the men
no longer workers but entertainers. Unresolved questions
remain, however, over the ongoing challenges they face.
As in other national contexts, cinema has helped define British

national identity and to create a sense of identity for individual
Britons. In particular, British Cinema during the era of
Thatcherism was confronted by a complexly changing social,
32
political and economic landscape and in response projected a

range of audio-visual representations which amounted to a
complex amalgam of actual and potential British identities.
The three films discussed here variously embody, then, some
of the dominant and subsidiary narratives to do with the
multiple emerging identities in Britain in this period.
1
Stuart Hall, ‘Old and New Identities, Old and New Ethnicities,’ in
Anthony King (ed.), Culture, Globalization and the World System,
London: Macmillan, 1991, pp. 42-44.
2
Robert Warshow, ‘The Westerner’ (1954), in The Immediate
Experience: Movies, Comics, Theatre and Other Aspects of Popular
Culture, Harvard, Mass: Harvard University Press, enlarged ed.,
1962, p. 106. Warshow’s famous essay ‘The Gangster as Tragic
Hero’ (1948) also re-appears in The Immediate Experience.
3
Hanif Kureishi, ‘The Rainbow Sign’, in Kureishi, ‘My Beautiful
Laundrette’ and Other Writings, London: Faber, 1997, pp. 101-102.
4
Kureishi, ‘Introduction’, in ‘My Beautiful Laundrette’ and Other
Writings, p. 5.
5
Sarita Malik, ‘Beyond Identity: British Asian Film’, Black Film
Bulletin, vol. 2 no. 3, Autumn 1994, p. 13. See also Cary Rajinder
Sawhney, ‘Another Kind of British’: An Exploration of British Asian
Films’, in Hill (ed.), Contemporary British Cinema, pp. 58-61.
6
John Hill, British Cinema in the 1980s: Issues and Themes, Oxford:
Oxford University Press 1999, p. 209. He is quoting Hall, op. cit., p.
57.
7
Simon Beaufoy, The Full Monty, Eye: ScreenPress, 1997, p. ix.
33
4 / Contestations of Identity
in Contemporary Thai Cinema
Unaloam Chanrungmaneekul
Conditions of Thai-ness
Buddhism and Monarchism have existed as the dominant

ideologies of Thailand for centuries. In the past two decades,
however, the country has encountered dramatic changes
relating to globalisation, and a long period of political conflict
between the largely working class ‘Red Shirts’ and the Thai
élite has posed challenges to dominant ideologies. After the
economic crisis of 1997, the Thai film industry turned to
international markets. I concur with Stuart Hall that the
transformation of identities is associated with “the continuous
play of history, culture and power”1 , and in this respect I argue
in this essay that ‘globalisation’ is one of the key
transformative influences on recent Thai Cinema in its
dealings with questions of identity.
34
According to Sattayanurak, the mainstream construction of

‘Thai-ness’ has strong links with Theravada Buddhism, which
has been closely associated with the monarchy. Prince-
Patriarch Wachirayanwarorot (1860-1921) created the
concept of the ‘Thai nation’ and ‘Thai-ness’, writing a number
of textbooks for the education of Buddhist monks. The
concept of Thai-ness, closely related to the secular meaning of
Buddhism, was employed by a number of prominent
intellectuals, especially M.R. Kukrit Pramoj, about whom we
shall learn more shortly. As a result, Buddhism and Thai-ness
coincided: morality, complete loyalty to the monarchy, and a
pride of culture originating from Buddhism as a vital source.2
As one of the key features of Thai-ness, loyalty to the

monarchy has been attached to the ten royal virtues (or
duties) of the King, a central principle of Buddhism. The
defining agents of Thai-ness were thus King Mongkut (reigned
1804-68), King Rama V (reigned 1868-1910), Prince-Patriarch
Wachirayanwarorot, and Krom Phraya Damrong Rajanuphab
(1862-1943), the founder of the modern Thai education
system, who helped to strengthen the centralised social and
political hierarchy which is characteristic of Thai society.
At the end of WWII, Luang Wichit Watakan (1898-1962), who

played an important role in the change from an absolute
monachy to a constitutional one, and who pioneered the
country’s change of name from ‘Siam’ to ‘Thailand’, amended
the key point of Thai-ness in the face of the spread of
Communism in Asia. Thai-ness was changed because Thailand
was a small country faced by the Cold War and its powerful
antagonists. Soldier, politician, author and historian, Watakan
drew upon anti-Communist sentiment in order to seek
American support. The definition of Thai-ness now
35
emphasised a resistance to Communism in order to maintain

the three key institutions - nation, religion, and monarchy.
The writer and polymath M. R. Kukrit Pramoj (1911-1995), was

Thailand’s 13th Prime Minister (1975-6). He had earlier found
time to play the role of the Prime Minister of the fictional
country of ‘Sarkhan’ in George Englund’s The Ugly American
with Marlon Brando (USA, 1953). Pramoj played a vital role in
developing Thai-ness in terms of its close relationship with
Buddhism and the monarchy. His ideas have dominated Thai
society in several ways. First, he emphasised that Thai-ness -
including the monarchy, the national language, art (especially
literature and theatre), as well as Thai etiquette and customs
- made Thailand a better place than some others.
He accepted Khmer Thevaraja’s belief that the king must be

seen as a holy and sacred ruler who rules the people with
morality and mercy as in a father-son relationship. Pramoj
always underlined the concept of the king as the lynchpin of
the nation, and his tenfold virtues or duties in relation to
Buddhism. Highlighting this concept rendered the king a
significant institution beyond the level of civil government.
Thanks to Pramoj, Buddhism also became a vital ingredient of

Thai-ness through its secular relationships with art, the Thai
alphabet, and national etiquette and customs. Since Thai
rulers were always religious and used power fairly, in this
vision of society checks and balances were unnecessary.
Pramoj therefore persuaded the people of Thailand that a
society without politics was a good society; Thai-ness thus
created a long period of political silence and subsequently
enabled a totalitarian system based on a clearly demarcated
hierarchical society.
36
Globalisation and Political Conflict

It is not easy to specify precisely when Thailand first
encountered globalisation. In this essay, I would like to go back
to the period of the Bowring Treaty of 1855 signed between
Britain and the Bangkok Administration. By giving the British
trading rights in Bangkok and limiting import taxes in the
interests of ‘free trade’, Thailand was integrated into an
unequal international trading partnership which had a crucial
impact on the country, giving Britain control over Thailand’s
foreign trade. Thailand eventually entered more fully into the
world economic system when other Western states - the U.S.
France, Denmark, Portugal, the Netherlands and Germany -
gained similar rights.3
During the 1950s and 1960s, Thailand adopted a definition of

‘national development’ which identified strongly with the
growth of industry. The first television station was launched
in 1952 by the Thai Television Company with the Government
Public Relations Department as the main shareholder, and the
remaining shares distributed across other state agencies,
including the Army, Navy, and Air Force. In addition to
instructing the people on its cultural mandate, the
government mobilised broadcasting as a key weapon against
Communism, which was seen as the major enemy.4
In this period, the influence of the U.S. and the World Bank
was extended to Thailand. Globalisation in this period,
therefore, was primarily the product of the relationship
between the Thai State and the U.S. Since the 1980s Thailand
has been extensively transformed by the process of
globalisation and by the export-led growth policy promoted by
the World Bank. Industrial growth has benefited considerably
37
from the influx of foreign investments. Economic growth has

supported a rapid growth in personal consumption.
New entertainment businesses, such as Grammy and RS

emerged, and became power players in the cultural industry
of Thailand. Celebrity culture expanded, promoted by Thai
pop music in Western and Japanese styles, television dramas,
music video, and product advertising. In 1997, however,
Thailand was hit by the economic crisis that affected all Asian
countries. In 2000, Thaksin Shinnawatre, a telecommunication
tycoon, won the election with his ‘Thai Rak Thai’ slogan (‘think
new, act new’), projecting an image of novelty, reform,
modernisation, and globalisation.
Thaksin became Prime Minister after the 1997 economic crisis,

launching a consumption-led growth policy to try to re-boot
the Thai economy. Thaksin extended the new consumer
culture into the countryside, supported by the growing reach
of mass media and telecommunication, particularly mobile
phones, computers, the Internet, and satellites over all the
regions of Thailand. This of course had a substantial impact on
values, especially among the younger generation.5
Thaksin’s government was toppled by the military coup d’etat

of 2006. The United Front for Democracy Against Dictatorship
(UDD - the ‘Red Shirts’ movement) emerged with the support
of rural people in the Northeast (Isan) and North Thailand, the
urban working class in Bangkok, and some intellectuals. Exiled
former Prime Minister Thaksin has been seen as a key
supporter of the ‘Red Shirts’ but many groups who go by this
name deny that they have been supported by him, and do not
in any case agree with some of his policies and concepts.6
38
The movement has fragmented, although all its members

believe in equality, democracy and support the interests of the
rural grassroots. Some writers, musicians and film-makers
have come out in support, criticising the unjust power of the
Thai élites, including the Bangkok middle-class and the
military. They urge respect for religious and ethnic diversity
and encourage concepts of Thai identity which do not depend
on the mantra ‘Nation, Religion, and the King’. This was a
significant turning point in understandings of Thai-ness in
contemporary Thailand, and contestations of Thai identity
have now begun to appear in Thai Cinema.
Constructions of Identity in Thai Cinema after 1997

In the year following the 1997 economic crisis, Thailand
produced fewer than ten films. The film market crashed in the
context of concurrent political and economic crisis in Thailand,
and many producers and directors turned to the international
markets. Ong Bak (Prachya Pinkaew, 2003) and Tom Yum Kung
(Prachya Pinkaew, 2005) reached the top five at the
Hollywood box office and elsewhere, the first time that Thai
films had done such good business in the U.S.
Most Thai films, however, have enjoyed success in Asian

rather than American markets, including Youngyooth
Thongkonthun’s comedy Satree lek (The Iron Ladies, 2000) and
some horror films, such as Banjong Pisanthanakun’s and
Parkpoom Wongpoom’s Shutter (2004). Several young
directors, including Pen-Ek Ratanaruang, Apichatpong
Weerasethakul, Aditya Assarat, Urupong Raksasut, Nawapol
Thamrongrattarit and Anocha Suwichakornpong, have
created independent films offering stories critically exploring
varying notions of Thai identity. In terms of critical acclaim, the
younger Thai directors have achieved numerous international
39
awards since 1997. Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s Uncle

Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives, an exploration of
death, the past and the afterlife shot in a variety of cinematic
styles, was awarded the Palme d’Or at Cannes in 2010.
In recent cinema Thai identity has been presented more

diversely than at any previous time, although some films
remain locked into an older world-view. Prince Chatrichalerm
Yukol’s historical epics, such as The Legend of Suriyothai
(2001) and his three-part The Legend of King Naresuan (2007),
for example, are vested in historic nationalism and
monarchism. All focus on the need for Thai unity in the face of
struggles against other countries, especially those nearby;
disunity is seen as the main threat. The King and the monarchy
are invariably seen as crucial in maintaining national
sovereignty and as ruling according to established Buddhist
virtues.
Other films construct a sense of national identity rather

differently, through what we might regard as exoticism.
Prachya Pinkaew’s Ong-Bak: The Thai Warrior (2003) and Tom
Yum Kung (The Warrior King, 2005), for example, construct a
sense of national identity through the spectacle of martial arts
and are pioneering works in the genre. They also embody
visions of local life style which feature ancient Buddhist
statues, elephants, and rural-historical locations. The version
of Thai identity being projected here in this sense still sticks
with the nostalgic Thai-ness of the past, with its culture and
arts; the signs of Buddhism are frequently presented to stress
the significance of the national religion in the creation and
maintenance of Thai ‘norms’.
40
Cinema is of course a key feature of popular culture in

Thailand. Romance, comedy, and horror are popular genres,
as well as in several Asian countries. These films are commonly
involved with such themes as love, sex, music, superstition,
and teenage lifestyles, with Buddhist belief still a common
element, but the idea of resistance is also important here. The
distribution of Shakespeare Must Die (Ing Kanjanavanit, 2012),
for example, was blocked by the Thai censor because of its
perceived threat to Thai unity.
The film is based on Shakespeare’s Macbeth, the story of the

bloody usurpation of a medieval Scottish king. It tells the story
of a theatre group in an unnamed country who are staging a
version of the play. Manit Sriwanichpoom, the producer and
director of photography, regards the ban as a political issue.
He claims that the film does not represent an attack on the
Thai monarchy, but that it tells a universal story about the
virtues and vices of those in power anywhere.7 The film was
certainly perceived in ambiguous ways in Thailand: it was
interpreted by some royalists as an attempt to undermine Thai
unity by critiquing the leadership of the King, while at the
same time, some groups, especially supporters of the ‘Red
Shirts’, interpreted the film as an attack on former Prime
Minister Thaksin.
Other independent film-makers such as Pen-Ek

Ratanaruang, Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Aditya Assarat,
Urupong Raksasut, Nawapol Thamrongrattarit and Anocha
Suwichakornpong also explore issues of resistance in politics,
culture, and education more directly. Urupong Raksasut’s
Agrarian Utopia (2009), for example, explores the suffering of
poor farmers living in Northern Thailand, and political conflict
between the ‘Red Shirts’ and The People’s Alliance for
Democracy in Bangkok. Both sides fail to solve the farmers’
41
problems and eventually the farmers are left to their fate

within an unfair, hierarchical society.
The main challenge here for any contestation of Thai identities

in film is that only the first three of the paradigms I have
outlined above – nationalism, monarchism, and exoticism -
are accepted by the authorities and, inevitably as a result, by
the mainstream Thai market. Attempts to deal with ideas of
resistance struggle to exist within the controlled economic,
cultural and political spaces of Thai society. Nevertheless, the
growth of Thai independent cinema seems to open up new
spaces for discussion at both national and international levels.
1
Stuart Hall, ‘Cultural Identity and Diaspora’, in Jonathan
Rutherford (ed.), Identity: Community, Culture, Difference, London:
Lawrence and Wishart, 1990, p. 223.
2
My understanding of ideas about Thai-ness is indebted to the
account provided by Saichol Sattayanurak, Creating Mainstream
Thainess (vols. 1 & 2, in Thai, 2015), available online at
http://v1.midnightuniv.org/midnight2545/document9581.html and
http://v1.midnightuniv.org/midnight2545/document9580.html.
See also see Scot Barmée, Luang Wichit Wathakan and the Creation
of a Thai Identity, Singapore: Institute of Southeast Asian Studies,
1993.
3
See Chris Baker and Pasuk Phongpaichit, A History of Thailand,
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005 and also Walden
Bello, Shea Cunningham and Li Keng Poh, A Siamese Tragedy:
Development and Degradation in Modern Thailand, London: Zed
Books, 1999.
42
4
See Ubonrat Siriyuvasak, 'Journalism and Mass Communications
Education in Thailand (in Thai), in Anon (ed.), Development of Thai
Mass Media (in Thai), Bangkok: Faculty of Communication of Arts,
Chulalongkorn University, 1983, p. 186.
5
See Unaloam Chanrungmaneekul, The Globalised Village:
Grounded Experience, Media and Response in Eastern Thailand,
PhD Thesis, Loughborough University, 2009, and Rangsun
Thanapornpan, 'Consumption-Led Growth', 21 January 2004, online
at http://www.nidambe11.net/ekonomiz/2004q1/article2004jan27
pl.htm.
6
See Pasuk Phongpaichit and Chris Baker, Thaksin, Chiang Mai:
Silkworm Books, 2nd. ed., 2009 and also Andrew MacGregor
Marshall, A Kingdom in Crisis: Thailand’s Struggle for Democracy in
the Twenty-First Century, London: Zed Books, 2014.
7
Manit Sriwanichpoom, the producer and the director of
cinematography on Shakespeare Must Die, in an interview with the
author, 6 May 2014.
43
5 / The Crime Genre and Social Practice

in Latin America
Luiza Lusvarghi
Genre and Sub-Genre
This essay discusses crime thriller and action films in Latin

America in terms of genre as social practice, focusing on the
relation between contemporary Latin American film
production and film noir and its contemporary offshoots –
neo-noir, neo-political cinema, and ‘dark drama’. The revival
of cinema in Latin America since the 1990s - motivated by a
wide range of factors - has produced successful films such as
Nine Queens (Bielinsky, Argentina, 2000), Amores Perros
(Iñárritu, Mexico, 2000), and City of God (Meirelles and Lund,
Bazil, 2002), which targeted the overseas market and at the
same time were responsible for a consolidation of local film
production.
44
In terms of the Hollywood genres these films could be

categorised respectively as a crime drama, a thriller, and a
gangster film. Spanish Latin American critics and producers
also employ the word negro (noir) and neopolicial to classify
some of these movies, in which conflicts and crime are seen as
a result of a turbulent social environment, and whose plot is
not entirely concerned with solving a crime. Noir and neo-noir
arose more generally as concepts to discuss post-modernity in
the audiovisual industry and the widespread disenchantment
with globalised society.1
Indeed, there have always been Latin American crime and

political thriller films, all labelled as products of ‘Argentinian’,
‘Brazilian’ or ‘Mexican’ cinema, in an attempt to confer a
national identity upon these productions. Recent movies like
The Secret in their Eyes (Campanella, Argentina, 2012), 7 Boxes
(Maneglia and Schembori, Paraguay, 2012) and A Wolf at the
Door (Coimbra, Brazil, 2014) can be analysed as Latin
American crime films related to neo-noir and neopolicial
genres. The Golden Dream (Quemada-Diez, Mexico, 2013), for
its part, is a Latin American road movie targeting what we
might call the negative side of the American Dream.
Crimes of History: The Secret in their Eyes
Juan José Campanella’s El secreto de sus ojos (The Secret in

Their Eyes, Argentina/Spain, 2009), based on Eduardo
Sacheri’s 2005 crime novel La pregunta de sus ojos (The
Question in Their Eyes), can be described as a crime drama, a
crime thriller, or even as a ‘dark drama’. These differences are
due not only to cultural differences in the fields of audiovisual
and literary production, but also to the kinds of narration
involved. The film brings together the platonic passion of a
retired penal court official, Benjamin Espósito (played by
45
Ricardo Darín) for his muse Irene Hastings (Soledad Villamil)

with the investigation of a brutal and still unsolved crime
which was committed during the Argentinian dictatorship.
Twenty-five years later Espósito decides to write a fictional

account of the rape and death of Liliana Colloti, which took
place in 1974. From the outset, the possibility that she was a
‘subversive’ victim is suggested. This hypothesis is shown to
be inconsistent and her unhappy husband wanders around the
station where he last saw her, accompanied by Espósito's
supportive look. The truth is that the killer is in factor a
supporter of the regime, and a member of the police.
Campanella uses the justifications for the crime based on the
social context of the time, and maintains the initial focus of
the narrative, that is, the solving of the mystery.
The recent past interweaves with the present as Espósito

gathers together his memories for the business of writing his
novel, but the answers he finds are no consolation for the pain
he experiences: his love for Irene does not come true, and the
widower continues on his lonely way. Revenge does not
provide redemption. The locations, almost always interiors,
emphasise the claustrophobic character of the work - in
contrast with the film's only long take, a shot with a duration
of some five minutes, in a soccer stadium – and render the
lively and musical Buenos Aires of Gardel oppressive and
enclosed.
The dialogue and social imagery of the film are equally

relevant for the understanding of the film's narrative, as a
social practice and experience. The lonely investigator can
only solve the crime because he is no longer a member of the
Establishment, forced to condone the transgression and hush
up the crime; the Civil police acted as a branch of the military
46
dictatorship and turned a blind eye to the methods and

character of its collaborators. Campanella's film won the Oscar
for Best Foreign Language Film in 2009 - matching the feat of
Puenzo’s The Official History (1985), the Argentinian film
which was awarded the very first Latin American Oscar - and
led to the re-launch of Sacheri’s novel for the European
market as El Secreto de sus ojos.
A Crime of Passion: A Wolf at the Door

Fernando Coimbra’s O Lobo atrás da Porta (A Wolf at the Door,
Brazil, 2013) featuring Leandra Leal and Milhem Cortaz, is
based on the 1960 story of an ordinary woman, Neide Maya
Lopes (played by Leal), who fell in love with a man who
eventually revealed that he was married and had a child. By
way of revenge, Lopes abducted and murdered the four year-
old and burned the body. She was dubbed the ‘Beast of
Penha’, a suburban neighborhood in Rio de Janeiro. In this
dark account of female passion, betrayal, and dreadful
vengeance, the characters do not have any internal conflict,
but operate instinctively according to the basic drives
described by Freud.
In updating the story Coimbra retained the setting of the Rio

suburbs, with its decaying houses, the same in which the
original case took place over 50 years previously. He took a
distanced perspective on the development of the plot,
avoiding any direct involvement with contemporary reality,
moving towards a conclusion that surprises with its
unpredictability and gruesomeness, besides giving the plot a
universal character. The background is nonetheless extremely
pertinent to Brazilian reality. The number of missing children
is high - families with low income are the preferred target of
47
human traffic gangs - and inspires headlines, articles,

campaigns and soap operas.
In Coimbra’s vision, the suburbs are standardised and sterile.

The peripheral neighborhoods of Marechal Hermes,
Madureira, and Nossa Senhora da Penha Church, where
Inspector Bernardo (Cortaz) works, could be situated in any
Latin-American country. There is none of the touristic Rio de
Janeiro of beaches and Sugar Loaf fame. Suburban space –
effectively a city within a city - is shown in terms of enclosures
and ghettos. There is no connection between this region and
South Zone, where the upper classes live, or with people from
other social classes.
The darker visual tonalities chosen for the interiors - filled with
the kind of furniture and utensils that can be acquired in any
major store through endless monthly payments - emphasise
the drama and intimate tone of some scenes, and also help to
highlight these people's feelings of isolation. The police
interrogation session leading to the resolution of the case
takes place in a run-of-the-mill police station and the
Commissioner (Juliano Cazarré) is the antithesis of any police
TV show investigator, his appearance almost resembling that
of a criminal.
Fantasies of Migration: The Golden Dream

La jaula de oro (The Golden Dream, Guat/Sp/Mex, 2013) marks
the directorial debut of the experienced cinematographer
Diego Quemada-Díez, who deploys the action formulae of a
road movie, targeted at teen audiences, a common enough
choice in Mexican and Central American Cinema. Juan
(Brándon Lopez), Sara (Karen Martínez) and Samuel (Carlos
Chajon), three young teenagers from the slums of Guatemala,
48
leave their families in search of the Eldorado that they expect

to find on the other side of the Mexican border: the United
States.
Along the way, as they ride freight trains and walk the railroad
tracks, they meet an Indian boy, Chauk (Rodolfo Domínguez),
who does not speak Spanish, and is rejected by the group,
except for Sara. In spite of the film’s action thriller use of the
camera, some of the techniques used by the director to build
the diegetic universe of the film remind us of the work of
Loach - for whom Quemada-Díez worked as a camera assistant
on Land and Freedom in 1995, and whose influence on
narrative construction he acknowledges here - and also of the
Brazilian director Fernando Meirelles. The young actors had
no previous experience of acting, and the Brazilian coach
Fátima Toledo (City of God, Elite Squad, Central Station) was
needed to train the cast.
The true ‘golden cage’ of the original title is the American city
promoted by Hollywood, the city of spectacle, the artificial
paradise of which Juan and his friends have a vague notion. It
will be glimpsed only once, in the magnificent final shot, as a
vision, closing with the image of a starry sky and a distant and
unattainable constellation. The global city exists, in effect,
only in their imagination - never actually shown, simply
suggested by their clothes and even by the photos they take
along the way. When we see the dead poultry hanging in the
freezer where Juan works, it might be a human being, such is
the horror stamped on his face – a face which conveys
abandonment and emptiness, with unfulfilled expectations for
the future.
The ‘golden cage’ is also the title of a popular song performed

by Mexican band Los Tigres del Norte (‘The Tigers of the
49
North’), and largely associated with the narcocorridos, the

controversial ballads associated with the Mexican
borderlands. The lyrics inspired the earlier film la jaula de oro,
directed by Sergio Véjar, which they produced in 1987 and
which also deals with contemporary Mexican immigration into
the USA. In contrast to what happens to the protagonist of the
song and of Véjar’s film, Quemada-Díez does not show images
of the family the young people left behind, even their homes,
just the road and its dangers, the traps, in the spirit of a teen
adventure film.
If there are no clues about the slums they left behind, then
neither is there any concrete evidence of the big city that will
be their final destination. The United States of America
represent for the quartet the utopia of freedom, and the
access to culture, power, wealth and a new identity. Come
what may, however, their destiny will always be in limbo as
illegal workers, in peripheral neighborhoods, where they will
live haunted by the fear of deportation.
The Action Thriller: 7 Boxes

Finally we come to Juan Carlos Maneglia’s and Tana
Schémbori’s 7 cajas (7 Boxes, Paraguay/Spain, 2012), an action
thriller mixing suspense and black humour, and the first
Paraguayan box office hit in years. The directors are known for
their short films and their work in television. The creation of
avowed cinephiles, this is an action thriller with a very
Paraguayan context, but in 7 Boxes we can also spot the wider
cinematic influences of Guy Ritchie, the Coen Brothers, and, of
course, Hitchcock.
Víctor is a 17 year-old barrow boy in Municipal Market

Number 4, the most famous in Asunción, who dreams of
50
becoming famous. He receives an unusual proposal, to

transport 7 boxes of unknown content in exchange for a torn-
off half of a $100 note. The other half will be given to him
when he finishes the job. Víctor, who has never seen a bill of
such a value, has no idea how many guaraníes it is worth. With
a borrowed cell phone, Víctor embarks on the journey.
Without even realising, Víctor and his pursuers will get
involved in a crime of which they have no knowledge.
The film is spoken part in Guaraní, the popular language of

Paraguay, as well as Spanish, the official one. Crossing the
eight blocks that constitute the market seems easy but things
get complicated along the way, and they will be chased by
others - barrow boys, gangsters, and policemen. References to
Hitchcock are clear enough in the scenes of police persecution,
and Victor’s confrontation with the other carriers and with the
gangsters.
New Cinematic Imaginaries

In the new millennium the cinema of Latin America arises
under different conditions that those which influenced its
‘New Cinema’ and ‘Third Cinema’. The goal of these more
recent films, often made by producers and directors from TV
and from advertising, is to seek new audiences by targeting
the domestic market as well by forging an identity within the
independent world cinema circuit. To this end they have
adopted new narrative strategies, informed by Hollywood
Cinema and popular TV.
Paradoxically, this new cinema reveals the increasing role

played by the global cities of Latin America in our imagination,
represented by nightmares of violence, social exclusion and
chaotic traffic. These are the ‘paranoid’ cities described by
51
Garcia Canclini, featuring the new relationship between social

classes and social exclusion, and revealing the evil face of
global capitalism.2 Cinematic images of these cities introduce
a new element to the plot, leaving behind the big cities, the
cities of the spectacle, like London, New York, Barcelona, Rio,
Lima, City of Mexico - no longer the paradises they once were,
even in noir movies.
The cities of the spectacle, as in The Matrix (The Wachowski

Brothers, USA, 1999), hide conflict under standardised
architecture and new technologies. They provide
overwhelming and bewildering visual stimuli, in a context
where the relationship with the Other starts with the look.
There is a fundamental connection between me and the other,
different from my relationship with objects, as Sartre argues
in Being and Nothingness.3 We can find the Other, so essential
in order to solve this dilemma, only in risky zones, in the
broken promises of humanism, given that the ‘Matrix’ for
example has created a richly false reality in order, precisely, to
reinforcing the invisibility of daily life.4
Sartre is no idle reference-point for considerations of films

such as those discussed above. The world of noir, we might
say, has a direct connection with the philosophy of
existentialism. In recent cinema and television, for example,
the frequent focus on the business of drugs arises not in the
interests of real social criticism, but in terms of blurry
perceptions of the inherent condition of the post-modern
social organisation of the world. What Jameson terms the
cognitive mapping of the representations of the social worlds
envisioned in these works can then contribute to the deeper
understanding of contemporary ways of life, especially
articulating the local and the global.5
52
From Argentina, in The Secret in their Eyes the dreadful errors

of the past are revisited and partly resolved; Brazil’s The Wolf
at the Door maps an historic crime on to contemporary world;
the fantasy of migration from the impoverished global South
to the dominant and wealthy North is dramatised in
Guatemala’s/Mexico’s The Golden Dream; while Paraguay’s 7
Boxes explores the seductive promise of ready money in
exchange for an illusory modicum of simple manual labour.
Exploring and empathising with a world so profoundly
characterised by processes and outcomes of exclusion,
displacement and division, such films, we might say, go some
way to creating a critique of the powerful and, with all the
limitations of the cinematic text, also to restoring a degree of
power to those who otherwise are seemingly forever
powerless.
1
James Naremore, More than Night: Film Noir in Its Contexts,
Berkeley: University of California Press, new ed., 2008, pp. 1, 227.
2
Néstor Garcia Canclini, Imaginários culturais da cidade:
Conhecimento / Espetáculo / Desconhecimento, in Teixeira Coelho
(ed.), A Cultura pela Cidade, São Paulo: Editora Iluminuras/Itaú
Cultural, 2008, p. 23.
3
Aline Ibaldo Gonçalves, ‘O Encontro com o outro em Jean-Paul
Sartre’, Griot: Revista de Filosofia, vol. 8 no. 2, December 2013, p.
14.
4
Fredric Jameson. Signatures of the Visible, New York: Routledge,
2007, p. 1.
5
Ibid., p. 74.
53
6 / The Challenges of Otherness:

The Politics of Representation
in the Hausa Film Industry
Maikudi Abubakar Zukogi
Locating Kannywood
The Hausa Film industry, nick-named ‘Kannywood’, is a part of
the mainstream Nigerian film industry, popularly referred to
as ‘Nollywood.’ These designations refer to no more than the
location in which the industries are sited, and, with their
implicit homage to ‘Hollywood’, offer a poignant reminder of
the ways in which colonialism and cultural imperialism have
continued to influence and define the thinking of the
colonised. It represents an attempt, either consciously or
unconsciously, to link the film industry in Nigeria with the
biggest film industry in the world. In post-colonial terms this
might be explained as an attraction to the ‘metropole’ or to
the ‘myth of the metropole’ – in short, to the attraction of the
colonised to the perceived centre of civilisation, the West.
54
In other words, this simply demonstrates the entrenchment

and perpetuation of the power relations between the centre
and the periphery. The former is occupied by the
colonial/imperialist club whose members include America,
Britain, France, and others, while the latter is occupied by the
colonised world, including Nigeria. By implication, the drive to
associate or affiliate the film industry in Nigeria with America’s
Hollywood clearly brings to the fore the question of identity
and ‘otherness’ in our art and practice, and is the central topic
of this essay.
The evolution of the Hausa Film industry can be understood in

three different phases. The activities of drama groups led, in
the period 1980-84, to the rise of Hausa video films, notably
Hukuma Maganin Yan Banza, Yan Daukar Amarya, Auren Dole
and Bakar Indiya (by the Karate Association, and the Gyaranya
and Gwauron Dutse groups respectively). The video films
were preceded by other films produced by the Federal Film
Unit and various television broadcasters.
The emergence of the Hausa film industry is closely tied to the

role of the culture-specific non-governmental organisations
whose civic advocacy functions were carried out through
drama productions. Although the standard was initially low,
works like Turmin Danya, Gimbiya Fatima (by the Tumbin-
Giwa Drama Group), Tsoron Allah Garkuwa Ne, Ka Ga Irinta
(by Janzaki Motion Pictures) and Munkar (by Jigon Hausa Film
Production) were pointers towards the emergence of what is
known today as the Hausa film industry. According to Abdalla,
the first major Hausa video film was Turmin Danya (Hog Plum,
1990). Between 1991 and 2000, as he points out, “there was
an avalanche of new producers, directors, actors, marketers-
and increasingly, singers and choreographers.’’.1
55
We should be wary of assuming, however, that Hausa home

video is the exclusive property of the ethnic Hausa. It can be
argued that there are more film locations outside Kano than
within it - in Kaduna, Jos, Abuja, Maiduguri and Minna. Abdalla
quotes from research published in the April 2001 issue of the
Kano magazine Mumtaz: ‘‘The ethnic tribes that overrun the
Hausa home video industry include Kanuri, Igbos, and most
significant of all, the Yoruba. In a table we drew, about 42% of
the Hausa home video producers and artistes were of Yoruba
extraction, 10% were Kanuri, 8% were Igbos. Thus only about
40% are true ethnic Hausa’’.2
Regarding the Other

The starting point for any discussion of the question of the
‘Other’, and those factors which constitute otherness in post-
colonial discourse, is naturally Edward Said’s seminal text
Orientalism (1978). The text interrogates the basis upon which
the Other is constructed in colonial discourse, perceiving this,
essentially, in terms of power and control. This therefore also
provides a model of analysis for discourses of representation
in literature and art. More than dealing simply with discursive
representations of the Orient, however, the Orientalism thesis
also demonstrates the means by which cultures constitute and
re-constitute themselves and maintain their hegemony over
other sub-cultures.
Said’s analysis of identity difference rests on binary

oppositions between ‘self’ and ‘other’. Otherness is a state
that is both discursive and psychological in which one defines
one’s own ‘self’ or one’s own ‘identity’ in relation to others in
the processes of social, political, and cultural interaction.
Following Said, we can propose that Otherness has more to do
56
with the point of view and discourse of the person who

perceives the Other than to any essential ‘difference’ to be
found in the Other.
As Staszak observes, ‘‘Otherness is the result of a discursive

process by which a dominant in-group (‘Us’, the Self)
constructs one or many dominated out-groups (‘Them’, Other)
by stigmatizing a difference - real or imagined - presented as a
negation of identity and thus a motive for potential
discrimination.” To put it in simplistic terms, difference
belongs to the realm of fact and Otherness belongs to the
realm of discourse; according to Staszak, for example,
‘‘biological sex is difference, whereas gender is otherness.’’3
In the context of this essay, no instrument better exploits the

power and efficacy of otherness as a tool of domination than
colonialism. By stigmatising the colonised as Other, barbarian,
savage, or ‘people of colour’, the coloniser is able to dominate
and relegate such people to the margins of humanity.
While the West is the source of a dominant global culture
which imposes its values on the Other - including the Hausa -
the power relationship changes when cultures in turn confront
other sub-cultures. In this case, Hausa culture, representing
the dominant values of northern Nigeria and Kano in
particular, emphasises its particularity while at the same time
de-emphasising and even devaluing the particularity or
identity of the local Other.
The Politics of Representation

The Hausa Film industry suffers from the general imposition of
the dominant culture as it struggles to align or affiliate itself
with dominant film cultures from America and India. The
industry believes - that is to say, it is psychologically ingrained
57
- that the only way to acquire some measure of significance is

for it to be subsumed under a dominant culture, in a line of
descent from Hollywood to Bollywood to Nollywood - and
then Kannywood. Complex questions of self-identity and
otherness are involved here.
The Hausa film industry cannot escape the key political issues
which play out in mainstream Nigerian Cinema, comprising
the primary triad of Igbo, Yoruba and Hausa, and then other
emerging sub-cultures like Tiv, Igala, Igbirra, Nupe, Kanuri,
Efik, etc. The Nigerian film industry generally feeds not only on
the existing stereotypes but also the suffocating political
tension and increasing insecurity resulting from the menace of
Boko Haram in the North-East, armed robbery and
kidnappings in the South-East, the vandalising of pipelines and
oil theft in the Niger Delta, and assassinations and ritual
killings in the South-West.
Across the geographical spread of Nigeria, there is thus plenty

of material for profiling and stereotyping the Other. Far from
being immune to this, cinema is central here. Claiming, with
many others, that ‘‘film is the most effective medium for the
promotion, propagation, and preservation of culture”, Dul
Johnson believes that “it is the Hausa film maker in particular
who fully appreciates the power of film as a pipeline for
culture, even though the Hausas are latecomers into the film
business, especially the video film.’’4
It is naturally important to understand the political, economic,

and socio-cultural economic constitution of the north, which
is the catchment area for the Hausa film industry. Although
the great city of Kano - second only to Lagos - is a melting pot
for politics and business, and a point of convergence for many
ethnicities, it does not truly reflect the ethnic variety of the
58
people catered for by the industry. The dominant culture of

the industry is Hausa, and it is that identity which it constantly
valorises over others. Other subcultures within the industry
include Kanuri, Fulani, Babur, Gbagyi, Jaba, Kataf, Yoruba,
Igbo, Nupe, and others. The message constantly emanating
from Hausa films, however, be it implicit or explicit, is that
Hausa is the ‘self’ - and that these subcultures are ‘other’.
In some of these films the style is comic and the tone un-
serious, but the social meanings are quire evident. To
generalise: the Gbagyi is constantly portrayed as a heathen
who eats pork and gleefully drinks his local gin and is dull in his
social interactions and poor in his mastery of the dominant
language, Hausa; the Igbo is the quintessential Shylock, one
who is mean and grasping in business and money matters;
while the Yoruba, for his part, plays the clown, the talkative,
rambling character who repeatedly interferes in matters that
do not concern him. The playful comedy does not disguise the
deep-seated portrayal of characters with an inherent cultural
deficit when compared to the superior values of the dominant
Hausa culture.
Familial and Ethnic Identities: Maja

Maja (‘merger’) is a recent film which exemplifies some of
these intercultural tendencies. The film was produced by Uzee
Concept in early 2014, shortly after the merger of five
opposition political parties to form a conglomerate, the All
Progressives Congress (APC). The coming together in spite of
difference is what this social comedy explores within the
micro-politics of the family. The film dramatises the discovery
and coming together of two brothers separated by time, space
and culture. It features two stars of Kannywood and
59
Nollywood, the late Rabilu Musa (playing as his stage name,

‘Ibro’) and Nkem Owo (who plays ‘Osuofia’).
Mai Aya (played by Hafsatu Sharada) is married to an Igbo

man in far away Onitsha, with whom she has a child, Ndubuisi.
Upon the death of her husband, Mai Aya returns north to start
life afresh, leaving behind her only child. On arrival, and after
completing the mandatory four-month period of mourning,
she marries again to the father of Ibro, who then dies while
Ibro is still a child. She is thus twice widowed. Ibro grows up to
inherit a handsome sum of money from his late father.
After a long period of disconnection spanning over thirty

years, Ndubuisi makes it to the north and re-connects with
both his mother and his younger sibling. It is, therefore, this
reconnection or reunion that explains the maja/merger in the
film’s title. But beyond this simplistic coming together, there
is the symbolic connection of two cultures, Hausa and Igbo,
joining to form a bond of love, peace, harmony and
understanding.
Unfortunately, this reunion/merger is short-lived, owing

largely to Ndubuisi’s increasing inability to adjust and be
subsumed into the Hausa culture as distinct from his imbibed
Igbo culture. Even as Ndubuisi is well received by his mother
and sibling, Ibro, he is exhibiting signs of growing impatience
and of the unfulfilled hopes for a better life. It is amidst these
tensions that Ndubuisi discovers a large sum of money
inherited by Ibro from his late father. It is a big catch that
proves irresistible for Ndubuisi and he doesn’t waste any time
in heading for Abuja to live a life of extravagance and luxury.
60
One readily sees the political implications behind the

cinematic facade. In spite of the concerted effort by the
director to prepare Ndubuisi for integration, he betrays this
effort through his mannerisms and inappropriate costumes. In
other words, he exhibits the stereotypical signs of Igbo
shrewdness and lust for money irrespective of the source, a
trait not usually associated with the dominant culture
represented by Ibro. Not that Ibro is a serious character: he is
presented as rash, unorganised and tardy. Nonetheless, the
film endorses him as the emblem of a culture that is normal
and established.
1
Abdalla Uba Adamu, ‘‘Currying Favour: Eastern Media Influences
and the Hausa Video Films’’, Film International, vol. 5 no. 4, Issue
28, 2007, pp. 78.
2
Abdalla Uba Adamu, Hausa Home Videos: Technology, Economy
and Society, Kano: Centre for Hausa Cultural Studies/Adamu Joji
Publishers, 2005, p. 13.
3
Jean-François Staszak, ‘Other/otherness’, in Rob Kitchin and Nigel
Thrift (eds.), International Encyclopedia of Human Geography,
Amsterdam: Elsevier, 2009, vol. 8, p. 43.
4
Dul Johnson, ‘Culture and Art in Hausa Video Films’, in John
Haynes (ed.), Nigerian Video Films, Athens, OH: Ohio University
Centre for International Studies, 2000, p. 200.
61
7 / Representations of Russian Identity

in the James Bond Films
Katerina Lawless
Questions of Dialogue and Discourse

Since the acquisition of attitudes both positive and negative
towards the self and others is predominantly discursive, the
public discourses of mass media are a primary source of
shared ethnic prejudices and ideologies. This is manifested
textually through a number of linguistic indicators, such as
specific lexical items which construct positive ‘in’-groups and
negative ‘out’-groups, along with a variety of linguistic
dimensions such as adjectives, verbs, metaphors, and the
attributes which they create. Discourse analysts and
sociolinguists have become increasingly aware of the
significance of language use in fictional representations as well
as everyday interactions. Nevertheless, it is the case that film,
62
for example, ‘‘has not yet found due attention as a

sociolinguistic site of inquiry’’. Audio-visual fiction is a
‘‘neglected area of language performance in sociolinguistics’’,
just as the ‘‘sociolinguistic aspect of language seems neglected
in film studies’’.1
While film dialogue should not be mistaken for a absolutely

faithful representation of its real-life equivalents, fictional
conversations can be used as sources for the study of language
ideologies and linguistic stereotyping. The decisions made by
directors and scriptwriters on such questions as storyline and
setting all influence screen dialogue and characterisation in
the course of the production process.2
Language can act as a way of affecting the film audience

subconsciously through the careful selection of words to
conceal certain things and emphasise others. This is clearly
one of the ways in which cultural stereotypes can be created.
Therefore, film can further be seen as the source of ethnic
prejudices and ideologies, which are manifested textually
through a number of linguistic indicators and so ‘‘Dialogue is
often the first place we should go to understand [sic] how film
reflects social prejudices’’.3
Representing Russia
Launched in 1962 with Dr. No, the Bond films are a cinematic
and cultural phenomenon. The 24 films in the Eon Productions
cycle up to Spectre in 2015, with secret agent James Bond
incarnated by six different actors to date, make it the best-
established - and one of the most lucrative - of modern film
cycles. It has been estimated that between a quarter and half
of the world’s population has seen a James Bond film by one
means of delivery or another.4
63
The conspiracy plots of the Bond films have reflected changes

in the international political situation as well as, more
recently, the greater prominence of women in society since
the 1960s. But the Bond films can still be seen as quite
reactionary in their representation of gender, race or national
identities, with their narrative structure often based on crude
binary oppositions between nationally-specific characters,
ideologies and values. As an upholder and enforcer of in-group
values, Western cinema has always required outsiders, with
Russians seen as key candidates from the Cold War onwards.5
Not so many Westerners, for example, have ever met a person
from Russia or from the former USSR - a country from which a
number of Bond villains derive - which has made it easier for
Russians to be both stereotyped and marginalised in Western
cinema.
Stereotypes of Russians differ from other national/ethnic

stereotypes. They are not based on racial factors; rather they
are deep-rooted in years of distrust and contain a strong
element of fear. Because the mediation of Russians is an
important influence on the symbolic construction of Western
perceptions of Russians, systematically exploring those
representations is clearly a worthwhile endeavour.6 However,
the image of Russians in Western cinema has been under-
studied, with limited research carried out on the
representation of Russians in Hollywood films; few scholars
give Russians represented in Bond films a passing mention in
the context of the politics of Cold War, or treat them in the
broader context of Bond villains in general.
The data presented in this chapter forms part of a broader

project which generated both quantitative and qualitative
data concerning language representation and stereotyping of
Russia in the first 23 Bond films from Eon.7 The study applied
64
both quantitative and qualitative analysis to the data. First,

the quantitative analysis established how many films had
references to USSR, Russia or Russians, how many films
featured Russian characters, and how many Russian
characters were featured across the cycle. All Russian
characters were then coded according to the following
categories: linguistic features, socio-demographic, narrative
importance, and narrative evaluation.
Characters were considered Russian if they spoke and

understood the Russian language, spoke English with strong
Russian accentual features, had Russian names or were
referred to as being of Russian origin. In terms of the linguistic
representation of Russia the study looked at the description of
Russian culture, traditions, men and women. Russian
characters were analysed in respect of the description of their
appearance, actions, temperament, mental state and the way
they are addressed. Additionally, the study examined the
words used by Russian characters in relation to other
characters, and the quantitative analysis of the Bond films’
lexis concluded with analysis of the words most frequently
used in relation to Russians and their culture, and their
occurrence in the text.
Analysis revealed that out of the 23 films under consideration,

only eight do not feature Russians: Dr. No (1962), Goldfinger
(1964), On Her Majesty’s Secret Service (1969), Diamonds are
Forever (1971), Live and Let Die (1973), The Man with the
Golden Gun (1974), Licence to Kill (1989) and Skyfall (2012).
However, exactly half of those do contain references to either
Russians or their culture, and three still contain references to
East-West relationships. Out of the 23 Bond films in question
only three have no direct reference to Russians or their
65
culture; only a single film, Skyfall, has no reference to Russians

at all.
Analysis of the films featuring Russian characters revealed that

overall there are 59 characters representing Russians, some of
whom appeared in a number of films across the series. All 59
characters were included in the analysis. Overall, the results
obtained from the analysis could be subdivided into four main
categories: the English proficiency of Russian characters; the
use of Russian language; representations of Russia, with
reference to national identity and culture; as well as
stereotyping and ‘othering’. The overview which follows is
focussed on the third of these, the analysis of representations
of Russian national identity and culture.
National Identity and Culture

One of the main factors which differentiates Bond films from
other action movies is their grounding in ideas of ‘Britishness’.
The construction of the national identities of the ‘other’ is
performed through the ideology of national identity and
patriotic values which are explicitly British. Bond’s adventures
are correspondingly steeped in the discourse of Orientalism
which positions the East as shadowy and incomprehensible in
order to justify Western imperialism and to provide a way for
Britishness ‘‘to continue to be defined in opposition to the
‘dark’ people of the world”.8
All the values associated with Bond and, thereby, the West
gain dominance over those associated with the villain.
Although Russians are not the only ‘other’ featured in Bond
films, the examination of the nationalities of Bond’s
adversaries reveals that throughout the series Russians are
featured on numerous occasions as villains working against
66
the interests of Britain and/or its (former) Empire and likewise

as a threat to the rest of the world. Even if the main villain
does not originate from Russia or the Soviet Union, the
Russians are still wrongly assumed to be the perpetrators of
evil schemes for the majority of Bond’s missions. The themes
of treachery and deception, furthermore – so common in the
series - are frequently associated with Russian characters.
Examination of the Bond lexis reveals that the explicit

meanings of the words used in relation to Mother Russia - a
collocation taken directly from the dialogues in the Bond films,
like all the terms quoted here - stand for the common
knowledge of what Russian culture is about and could be
perceived as quite neutral. Bond movies thus tend to re-affirm
some of the existing stereotypes about Russian food and
drinks (borscht, beluga, vodka); maintain the general
knowledge about Russians being good at ballet (Ballet, Bolshoi
Theatre); provide references to Russian history, heritage and
cities (the Romanov star, Tsar Nicholas, the Russian royal
family, Moscow) as well as to the USSR’s and Russia’s political
apparatus and leaders (KGB, FSB, Stalin); and also preserve the
immediate association of Russia with cold climatic conditions
(Siberia, winter).
The extensive use of words related to the armed forces and

military conflict in ‘classic’ Bond films implicitly identifies
Russia with military or nuclear power and, consequently, with
the danger posed to the rest of the world. Repeated
references to the USSR/the Soviet Union maintain clear
boundaries between the West and the East, reminding the
audience that Russia belongs to the ‘other’ side. Extensive
references to the KGB depict Russia as a highly controlled state
with a totalitarian regime, which no-one is permitted to leave.
The sense of brutal control and poor standards of living is
67
retained through reference to the desire of Russian characters

to defect to the West.
In the last seven Bond films considered, post-Communist

Russia is not much referenced. However, the hallmark of post-
Communist Russia is taken to be chaos. Frequent references
to Russians as they presuppose the audience’s awareness of
who they are and of their status as outsiders. The negative,
out-group description of Russia is based mainly on the
ideological values associated with it. Although Russia is
supposed to be very different now and a land of opportunity,
it is still represented as a place which is fiercely controlled,
disregardful of human rights, and typified by the chaos which
was perceived to reign after the collapse of the Soviet Union.
Gendered Russia
The Bond discourse not only invokes already existing
stereotypes about Russia but also offers one-dimensional,
exaggerated and dehumanised depictions of Russian
characters. Although Russia and its system has changed
dramatically since the break-up of the Soviet Union, and given
that Russian identity is of course not stable outside the world
of Bond films, it is still possible to analyse the ‘stable’
representation of Russian characters. The Bond audience
repeatedly encounters villains who come from Russia, speak
Russian, and supposedly look Russian. The stereotypical
presentation of Russians thus becomes normalised through
constant repetition within the film series.
In the films considered there is only one collocation referring

to the physical appearance of Russian male characters – as a
gold-encrusted buffoon, which refers to Bull, one of Zukovsky’s
bodyguards in The World is not Enough (1999). The lexis used
68
in reference to their temperament, mental state and activities

is in fact quite broad, with a prevailing negativity. Russian male
characters are usually described as tough and ruthless people
who often act mad and psychotic and are usually involved in
killing, stealing and betraying their countrymen.
General Orlov, for example, is a disgrace to the uniform, a

common thief who wants to satisfy his personal paranoia
(Octopussy, 1983); General Koskov is a defector who betrayed
the Russians, the British and even Kara, while General Pushkin
is sick like Stalin (The Living Daylights, 1987). Zorin is a
physiological freak who is certainly psychotic (A View to a Kill,
1985). General Ourumov is not just a criminal, but a traitor
who killed a lot of innocent Russians, Zukovsky is a tough
mother who sent an uninvited guest home air freight in very
small boxes, Boris is an insider and a traitor, mad little Alec is
nothing more than a common thief (Goldeneye, 1995), while
Renard is the world’s greatest terrorist whose only goal is
chaos (The World is not Enough, 1999).
The same pattern can be traced in the portrayal of Russian

associates, who are mostly described unfavourably. Grant is a
homicidal paranoiac (From Russia with Love, 1963), Kristatos
is a double agent who uses Bond to do his dirty work for him
(For your Eyes Only, 1981), while Glaub is said to have
experimented with steroids on pregnant women in
concentration camps (A View to a Kill, 1985). Moreover, the
integrity of Russian male characters is further undermined by
their liaisons with murderers and smugglers, who are referred
to as their usual friends.
Russian men can be perceived as symbols of Russia’s power

and supremacy. Bond discourse closely identifies them with
the military power and nuclear threat and this identification
69
shapes them as the ideological enemy. Stereotypes of Russian

men contain a strong element of fear and by downplaying
their abilities and mental stability Bond films lessen their
authority, thus depriving them of their power and reducing
them to the level of a bunch of criminals and traitors.
Different from the treatment of male characters, the

evaluation of Russian female characters is quite limited and
based almost exclusively on their physical appearance.
Analysis reveals only one word evaluating the mental state of
female characters - mental - and only two descriptions of their
temperament (and temper): horrible woman and possessing a
tendency to violence. Usually, when a Russian woman is talked
about she is recurrently labelled as beautiful and lovely and
often her looks and sexual life are openly discussed. The fact
that Russian female characters are not taken seriously is
evident through the description of their actions. Unlike
Russian men, who are associated with power and threat,
Russian women in the films are more closely associated with
the world of the arts.
Tania is one of the most beautiful girls Bond has ever seen who
had three lovers and trained for the ballet (From Russia with
Love, 1963); Ania has a figure hard to match and was more
than friends with one of Russian agents (The Spy who Loved
Me, 1977); Pola danced with Bolshoi Theatre (A View to a Kill,
1985); Kara is a talented scholarship cellist (The Living
Daylights, 1987); and Camille had a beautiful Russian mother,
a dancer (Quantum of Solace, 2008). The aggression of the two
villainesses featured in the film series is downplayed. It is
directed predominantly towards their own countrymen as
opposed to the aggression of the male characters, whose aim
is to gain control of the whole world. The impotence of Russian
70
female characters also manifests itself through their use of

name-calling and curse words.
The analysis offers valuable insights into the processes by

which sociolinguistic difference is scripted and performed. It
shows that the Bond discourse perpetuates patterns of
negative stereotyping with regard to the use and the speakers
of Russian language. The Bond series tends to uphold and
enforce in-group Western values by portraying Russians as
outsiders and subjecting them to negative labelling,
generalisations and marginalisation. Through the construction
of binary oppositions between ‘us’ and ‘them’ the linguistic
choices help to frame Russians as the ‘Other’.
Their ‘otherness’ is revealed through English spoken with a

strong Russian accent, erratic behaviour, and sexual
availability. The image of Russia and its citizens presented in
Bond films can be said to wield enormous influence and
authority over their audience, particularly in the absence of
consistently reliable alternative information. The menace of
the formation of negative attitudes towards Russian
characters is that they may be carried over into the real life.
It is difficult to draw any final conclusion about the place of

Russians in Bond films while the series is still ongoing.
According to British minister in Quantum of Solace (2008), The
Russians aren’t playing ball. However, they are still present in
the film series and are still talked about. Moreover, their
representation in the new millennium has hardly changed. It
seems to be firmly typified, within in the stereotypical frame
of the ‘classic’ films, on the one hand in terms of male coldness
and ruthlessness, and, on the other, in terms of female beauty
and sexual desirability.
71
1
Jannis Androutsopoulos, ‘Introduction: Language and Society in
Cinematic Discourse’, Multilingua, vol. 31 no. 2, 2012, p. 139.
2
On these points, see Lukas Bleichenbacher, Multilingualism in the
Movies: Hollywood Characters and their Language Choices,
Tübingen: Narr Francke Attempto Verlag GmbH & Co. KG, 2008, p.
1, and ‘Linguicism in Hollywood movies? Representations of, and
Audience Reactions to, Multilingualism in Mainstream Movie
Dialogues’, Multilingua, vol. 31 no. 2, 2012, p. 155.
3
Sarah Kozloff, Overhearing Film Dialogue, Berkeley: University of
California Press, 2000, p. 27.
4
James Chapman, Licence to Thrill: A Cultural History of the James
Bond Films, London: I.B. Tauris, 2007, p. 1.
5
Harlow Robinson, Russians in Hollywood, Hollywood’s Russians:
Biography of an Image, Lebanon, NH: University Press of New
England, 2007, p. 1.
6
Elizabeth M. Goering, ‘(Re)presenting Russia: A Content Analysis
of Images of Russians in Popular American Films’, Russian Journal of
Communication, n.d., online at
http://www.russcomm.ru/eng/rca_biblio/g/goering_eng.shtml.
7
Katerina Lawless, ‘Constructing the ‘other’: Construction of
Russian Identity in the Discourse of James Bond films’, Journal of
Multicultural Discourses, vol. 9 no. 2, Spring 2014, p. 79.
8
Cynthia Baron, ‘Dr. No: Bonding Britishness to Racial Sovereignty’,
in Christopher Lindner (ed.), The James Bond Phenomenon: A
Critical Reader, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2009, p.
136.
72
8 / From ‘National’ to ‘Global’:

Luhrmann’s Re-interpretation of
Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby
Cláudio Roberto Vieira Braga
Globalising the American Dream
More than ninety years after its publication, The Great Gatsby
(1925) continues to be Francis Scott Fitzgerald’s undisputed
masterpiece. Read and researched worldwide, the narrative
has acquired expanded meanings, which I wish to discuss in
this essay, as I compare the literary classic to Baz Luhrmann’s
filmic re-interpretation (Australia/USA, 2013). I work from the
principle that a novel should be confronted with its filmic
transposition through a dialogic relationship that overcomes
obsolete binary oppositions such as ‘original’ and ‘copy’,
‘better’ and ‘worse’. I therefore propose to assess the re-
interpretation by the Australian director as a re-reading that
73
globalises Fitzgerald’s notions of the ‘American Dream’, the

‘land of opportunity’ and the ‘self-made man’, each of them
seen as foundational myths that sustain the construction of
the United States as a nation state.
In 1931, James Truslow Adams proposed that in the ‘American

Dream’, “each man and each woman shall be able to attain to
the fullest stature of which they are innately capable, and be
recognized by others for what they are, regardless of the
fortuitous circumstances of birth or position.”1 This is only
possible in a land of endless opportunities, such as the United
States, seen as the ideal place for hard-working immigrants
who seek to improve their living conditions.
The emblematic figure of the self-made man is an intrinsic part

of this scenario. Despite being born in unfavourable
conditions, he treads a path of social improvement, often
associated with financial gain. He is, though, part of the
perverse logic of valuing a single winner. For each one who
reaches the top, there will be many losers who will continue
to struggle, driven by the irrational hope that they, too, will be
winners one day. The American Dream, the land of
opportunity, and the self -made man, are thus made
problematic in Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby.
Gatsby’s goal seems to be simply a dream of material

possessions that he obtains through illegal businesses.
Gatsby’s mentor and partner Wolfshiem is a gambler who
becomes rich after fixing the World Series through bribery.
Fitzgerald uses Wolfshiem to turn the land of opportunity into
a land of opportunism, in which dishonest strategies are
commonplace and even accepted as means of attaining
wealth. However, Gatsby eventually fails and Fitzgerald’s
appears to conclude that any attempt to pursue the American
74
dream implies that it is an obsession and that those who strive

to become self-made men refuse to see that most searches
often end in frustration.
These premises, so far related to Fitzgerald’s novel, have been

renewed since the première of Luhrmann’s Gatsby, triggering
questions such as: has Luhrmann retained Fitzgerald’s
criticism of the three myths that create the sense of American-
ness, binding the United States together as a nation-state?
Was the Australian director in fact interested in their
retention? Why? How could Luhrmann managed to re-tell an
American story to a global audience? Answers were to be
found in an examination of Luhrmann’s re-interpretive
choices.
Global Cultural Flows

The worldwide acceptance of Luhrmann’s The Great Gatsby
suggests that the director succeeded in transforming an
American literary classic into a cinematographic product
appealing to different cultures. Statistics published by the Box
Office Mojo website show that following its première, the film
came first or second in countries such as Australia, South Africa,
United Kingdom, and Japan. In addition, it is relevant to note that,
in terms of total lifetime grosses of just over US$351 million, 41.
3% came from theatres in the United States and 58.7% from
overseas.2
These figures endorse the relevance of the U.S. domestic market

for Hollywood super-productions, but they also point out to a
significant downward movement in the American market share.
The great success of Luhrmann’s The Great Gatsby in the rest of
the world, involving more than 50% of its initial revenue, leads us
75
to think about the director’s strategies for addressing such a

general, global audience.
In this context, the concept of globalisation is helpful to

understand the reception of Luhrmann’s film across the
continents. Roland Robertson discusses global awareness and
globalisation as “the crystallisation of the entire world as a
single space.”3 This awareness of global existence comes from
increased worldwide mobility and its main consequence,
connectivity on a world scale, which functions as the driving force
behind globalisation. John Tomlinson calls it “complex
connectivity”, explaining that it refers to worldwide multiple
articulations, “varying from the social-institutional
relationships that are proliferating between individuals and
collectivities worldwide, to the idea of increasing ‘flow’ of
goods, information, people and practices across national
borders.”4
Arjun Appadurai, in turn, proposes that global cultural flows

can be seen in terms of five landscapes: ethnoscapes,
mediascapes, technoscapes, finanscapes, and ideoscapes.
These refer, respectively, to the flows of people, information
and mediatic images, technology, capital and ideologies,
always on a global scale. Appadurai’s landscapes portray a
world of “disjunctures between economy, culture and
politics,”5 which cannot be simplified through binary
oppositions such as centre and periphery, West and East. They
flow on uneven surfaces or, according to Anthony King, they
constitute “non-isomorphic flows.”6
Luhrmann then makes choices that deliberately insert his film

into the colossal territory of global cultural flows. The director
does not exempt himself from the critique of the American
Dream, the land of opportunity and the self-made man originally
76
introduced by Fitzgerald, but he confers on it a new look, with a

global audience in mind. Luhrmann’s main strategy is perhaps
the suppression of some specific traits of American culture that
make little sense outside the U.S. Changes in space, the
insertion of a hybrid soundtrack, and a historical economic re-
contextualization are some examples of Luhrmann’s strategy.
Re-configurations of Space, Time, and Sound

Luhrmann sets his film in the New York of 1922, but its dynamics
are those of a contemporary global metropolis, a New York
that belongs to the world. Robin Cohen’s notion of the ‘global
city’, which best applies to Luhrmann’s New York, refers to
metropolises with great concentrations of power and finances,
regardless of where they are located. They are centres of
mobility and communication on a global scale; they are
cosmopolitan, with significant foreign presence.7
Luhrmann recreates New York from generic pictures or

postcards of a vertical urban landscape that can found
anywhere in the 21st century. The director removes specific
references to Madison Avenue, Central Park, the Pennsylvania
Station, and the Yale Club in both the images and the
screenplay. In Fitzgerald’s, these places help to create the
narrative’s atmosphere thanks to their local and national
meaning. In other words, Luhrmann’s New York is made of
images and urban symbols that could be found elsewhere - in
Tokyo, London or São Paulo.
The re-configuration of space can also be seen in Luhrmann’s

version of Long Island. Fitzgerald chooses it for his novel
because Long Island is a paradigmatic upper class suburb for
Americans, a symbol of status. In the film, Long Island loses its
national symbolism and becomes impersonal, resembling the
77
expensive contemporary condominiums built for elites in

cities as various as Luanda, Lisbon and Rio de Janeiro. The
opposing aspect of East Egg and West Egg, fictional
neighbourhoods that harbour the traditional rich and the new
millionaires in Fitzgerald, is retained in the film, but it can also
be equated to non-fictional neighbourhoods in other cities in
the world. In São Paulo, for example, East Egg is Morumbi and
West Egg can be easily compared to Jardim Analia Franco,
where newly rich Brazilians live nowadays.
Another interpretive choice that positions The Great Gatsby in

the contemporary global scene involves the film’s soundtrack.
Music director Craig Armstrong and supervisor Anton Monsted
invited the rapper Jay Z to co-produce the soundtrack, resulting
in songs that blend contemporary hip-hop, pop and techno with
twenties foxtrot, charleston and jazz. The insertion of
contemporary rhythms, which is part of what Luhrmann calls
cultural weave, connects today’s audiences to a modernity
that was perceived in the Jazz Age.
This is an audacious project involving being modern in the

present and the past simultaneously through music, which is
put into practice by celebrities from the world pop scene such
as Beyoncé, Fergie and Lana Del Rey. By this means the music
producers also seek to communicate with younger
generations, capturing the excitement of the parties of the
Roaring Twenties by creating contemporary musical
connections.
In duet with Andre 3000, Beyoncé sings Amy Winehouse’s ‘Back

to Black’ in melancholic style, helping to build moments of
discouragement in which the singer laments the return of her
lover to another partner. Sung by a male voice, ‘Back to Black’
comments on Gatsby’s disappointment at seeing the dream of
78
having Daisy fading away; sung by a female voice, Back to Black

suits the moments in which Myrtle Wilson realises that Tom will
always prioritise his marriage. The techno beat of ‘A Little Party
Never Killed Nobody’, sung by Fergie, confers on Gatsby’s
parties the same sense of fun found in contemporary
nightclubs worldwide.
The love song ‘Young and Beautiful’, written by Lana Del Rey,
Baz Luhrmann and Rick Nowels, depicts the fear of losing a
beloved’s affection as someone grows old. As Daisy
Buchanan’s theme, the song reveals that she is aware of what
she really means to Tom and Gatsby: both of them wish to
possess her physical beauty and youth. In other words, she is
able to realise her condition as an object to men. In addition,
‘Young and Beautiful’ is the song chosen to promote the film,
possibly because its lyrics puts together nostalgic elements to
describe an idealised past through images of “summer nights”
and “playful games between lovers”, illuminated by
“diamonds” and “city lights”.
The Historical and Economic Context

The historical and economic context of recent years is also
associated with the global nature of Luhrmann’s perspective.
Where the U.S. is concerned, the economic and cultural
circumstances of 1925 are very specific: it is a time of
economic growth and expansion. It differs from the changes
in income inequality violently in progress since the
implementation of neoliberal economic policies in the U.S.
since the 1980s. According to Robert Reich, the 400 richest
individuals in the United States today have more wealth than
the bottom 150 million Americans combined.8
79
There are, at the lowest level of such a chart, millions of

citizens whose buying power has rapidly declined, as
exemplified by those who lost their homes in the financial
crisis of 2007 and 2008. Considered the most serious since the
Great Depression, this crisis casts great irony - to put it mildly
- on the notion of the American Dream. Nevertheless, this is
not to say that Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby was a text which
was indifferent to the social inequalities of its time. In fact, the
author portrays, in chapter 2, the excluded American citizens
as inhabitants of a “valley of ashes”, a desolate area where
human beings are covered by a greyish, powdery air.
Another historical circumstance relevant to The Great Gatsby

and the global scene of 2013 is the new world order of the last
quarter-century, marked by the opening up of the Communist
regime of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR), the
dismantling of the bloc of socialist republics in Eastern Europe,
and the gradual implementation of a free market in China. In
this period we witness the introduction of capitalism in these
countries, and with it, the ideology of consumerism, which
gains new life, now well beyond U.S. borders. This perhaps
explains the acceptance of Luhrmann’s The Great Gatsby in
countries like Russia and China, in which contemporary
capitalism seems to reiterate strategies similar to those of
American capitalism in the 1920s, encouraging consumerism,
something previously repressed in these parts of the world.
A Global Classic?
In an explanation for his love of Fitzgerald’s novel, Luhrmann
proposes that “anything that becomes a classic is a classic
because it moves through time and geography [...] what I
mean by that is it’s relevant in any country and at any time.”9
Luhrmann ratifies his own re-interpretive choices: the film in
80
effect globalises the literary narrative by expanding Fitzgerald’s

initial critique of the myths of the United States, pushing it to
beyond national contexts. To achieve such a goal, Luhrmann
suppresses traits that give the novel its quintessentially American
quality.
The dissemination of Fitzgerald’s narrative in the context of a

new global order has also been carried out with a series of
communicative strategies and modern narrative modes through
which globalisation is made possible. Ninety years after its
publication, the story of Jay Gatsby finds itself enriched,
sometimes disjointed, by multiple layers superimposed by a
number of translations, adaptations, and all kinds of academic
and non-academic studies. At the core of the structure
supporting these layers one can find a contemporary multimedia
axis with a variety of digital channels that re-make the narrative
within a computational framework.
The Great Gatsby is fragmented in different online sources,

sometimes referring to the literary text, sometimes images or
scenes of its filmic transpositions. For instance, it was possible to
follow the news about Luhrmann’s film on Facebook and Twitter
for many months before and after its première. It is possible to
download trailers, digital pictures and explanatory texts on the
production from the Warner Brothers website. Fans can debate
the interpretive choices made by Luhrmann in a number of blogs.
One can also make a free download of the e-book or purchase
the audiobook.
The emergence of such complex apparatus around the story of

Jay Gatsby does not leave any doubts as to the new condition of
the literary text. It is made up of new connections with other arts
and means of communication, an obvious circumstance for most
literary classics (and one that is yet to be fully scrutinised).
81
Paradoxically, as Luhrmann in one sense de-territorialises

Fitzgerald’s literary work, his film ends up strengthening
literature and literary studies in another. The film prompts
members of its audiences to search for the novel in bookshops
and libraries and forces the reader/spectator to think
comparatively within and without the academy. Democratically,
millions of fans take part in group discussions on Luhrmann’s
interpretive choices, often pointing to ‘better’ solutions for the
transposition of literature to film.
Another paradox arising from popular criticism involves a

certain embarrassment caused by Luhrmann’s allegedly
‘excessive’ visual and sound effects, reinforced by a large
number of impassioned reports on the Internet. By ‘over-
doing’ cinematography and sound, the director seems to be
worshipping an intensity of glamour and materialism which
are, in a deeper analysis, condemned in the novel (even if some
passages demonstrate how seductive the Jazz Age can be, with
its champagne, automobiles and mansions). Even though
Luhrmann retains some aspects of Fitzgerald’s disapproval of
money and luxury, the critique of rampant materialism seems
to lose out to glamour in the film version.
Nevertheless, Luhrmann’s ‘excessive’ style has come to serve

the purpose of a type of amplified warning which is perhaps
more apt in recent times. Today, Gatsby’s murder and his
solitary funeral represent again the end of an era of illusions
in which a superficial and profligate lifestyle leads to economic
depression and scarcity. Fitzgerald's warning to the society of
his era is thus in fact expanded in Luhrmann’s The Great
Gatsby, its wide global reach warning other nations about
their fond embrace of capitalism and also its accompanying
uncertainties and risks.
82
1
James Truslow Adams, The Epic of America, Boston: Little Brown, 1931,
p. 402.
2
Figures taken from
http://www.boxofficemojo.com/movies/?id=greatgatsby2012.htm.
3
Roland Robertson, ‘Globalization and Societal Modernization: A
Note on Japan and Japanese Religion’, Sociological Analysis, vol. 47,
1987, p. 38.
4
John Tomlinson, Globalization and Culture, Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1999, p. 2.
5
Arjun Appadurai, ‘Disjuncture and Difference in the Global Cultural
Economy’, in Simon During (ed.), The Cultural Studies Reader, London,
New York: Routledge, 1999, p. 221.
6
Anthony D. King, Culture, Globalization, and the World-System,
Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press, 1997, p. 11.
7
Robin Cohen, Global Diasporas: An Introduction, Seattle: Washington
University Press, 1997, pp. 165-168.
8
Robert Reich, ‘Os ricos não criam empregos’, Época Magazine, 4
November 2013, p. 46.
9
Baz Luhrmann, About the Production, online at http://
thegreatgatsby.warnerbros.com/about-the-film/, 29 June 2013, p.
7.
83
9 / The Challenges of Re-making

Comedy across Cultures: Kath & Kim
Caroline Grose
Sitcom Specificities
As Jeffrey Miller has pointed out, cross-cultural adaptation is
a fraught process, especially in the case of situation comedy,
with its “depth of coding and ideological structuring”, making
the sitcom, “based on a very different set of signifiers”,
inevitably “a dicey proposition”. In his analysis of the original
screen-to-screen cross-cultural success story – the British Till
Death Us Do Part becoming the American All In The Family –
he refers to three vectors, external to the sitcom form itself,
that shape the environment for this successful cultural
translation: new understandings of audience demographics;
social changes which exceed these basic demographics; and
“an individual producer who sought both to address those
developments and to give birth to a new form of television
author.”1
84
When a TV series is developed from scratch, producers must

hypothesise about the elements of that idea that will connect
with an audience, such as theme, character, narrative and
genre. In the case of a re-make, some of that guess-work has
been removed. At first, this might imply that there are a
number of elements that could potentially be transposed from
the original and re-located to the new environment with
relatively little change. Even a brief historical exploration,
however, indicates that this is frequently not the case.
The potential disadvantages of starting with an existing work

that operates with a certain seamlessness in its original culture
is that it can easily lead to the conflation of elements and
devices that work against their own untangling - thereby
reducing their chances of being sufficiently understood,
replicated and/or transposed. In fact, most productions that
achieve a successful crossing often adjust major elements of
the on-screen environment of their original to accommodate
their new cultural context – from the ground-breaking All in
the Family that successfully, as Miller puts it, “decoded and
recoded” Till Death Us Do Part for an American audience,
through to the BBC’s The Office, that saw two six-episode
seasons successfully remade as nine seasons on US network
television.2
In hindsight, it can be tempting to judge harshly projects that

don’t succeed, because once a work is finished, mis-
translations can be more easily identified. The U.S. re-make of
Kath & Kim generated its fair share of criticism on both sides
of the Pacific, but it goes without saying that no-one sets out
to make something that doesn’t work. The primary purpose of
this essay, then, is to identify interventions that may be
available to project developers at the watershed moment
between the success of the existing text and the creation of
85
the re-make in order to think about what might improve the

potential for success.
As Sue Turnbull has commented, “The cultural specificity of

comedy … constitutes a possible sticking point for sweeping
theories of Western media globalisation, pointing instead to
what Koichi Iwabuchi might describe as a more
‘heterogeneous and contradictory’ process. And nowhere is
this contradictory process more apparent than in the process
of translating a television comedy series from one national
context to another.”3
The scale of the associated industrial imperatives is also

potentially a significant threat to the integrity of their
transposition. Many of the comedies that are re-made in the
U.S. from both Australia and the UK come out of public
broadcasting systems where the values are more
idiosyncratic, and therefore less easily adaptable to a broad
audience. Kath & Kim, for example, with its origins in the ABC,
often exhibits behaviours identified by Brett Mills as
potentially “unsocialised” and “unacceptable”.4
All of this is important because, as Andy Medhurst has argued,

“comedy plays an absolutely pivotal role in the construction of
identity” and an understanding of how it works involves a
“reckless promiscuity of paradigms” both inside and outside
the traditional parameters of academic analysis.5 My own
approach draws on a similar diversity of critique, as the re-
make is born out of a specific environment – the society where
it was originally successful, and the variety of writings that
emerge to discuss it as a popular cultural entity. By imagining
ourselves back into the development space of this particular
re-make - circa 2007 - looking at the original, and the texts it
generated, populist, journalistic and academic – we should be
86
able to identify certain sites of meaning and audience

connection within the originating culture in the intersection of
the television text and its responses. Subsequently it may then
be possible to assess whether it is fruitful (or, in fact, possible)
to feed these back into the industrial development and
production process within the new cultural environment.
The Australian Kath & Kim

Understanding the television audience is easy, claim Lee
Rabkin and William Goldberg. In a contrast with other forms
of business, “All it takes is sixty seconds in front of a TV set. All
you have to do is watch the opening main title sequence.”6
Kath & Kim offers a revealing test-case here. In the original
Australian series, the title sequence introduces us to the
show’s central characters through costume, make-up, attitude
and gesture. Character wigs, as well as extravagant, yet poorly
chosen, outfits (verging on clownish), point to character blind
spots that will be expanded on in the series.
These will include Kath’s aspirations towards the celebrity

lifestyle; Kim’s delusional self-image as a trophy wife; and
Sharon’s penchant for asexual sporting attire despite an oft-
articulated desire to snag a man. The cast pose, pout, stumble
and intrigue their respective ways through what appears to be
some kind of photographic shoot, whose soft lenses and
generic background create a superficial, manufactured
glamour.
Another element that will become increasingly evident within

subsequent episodes is casting – the five central actors are
around the same age, despite the fact that they are playing
out inter-generational relationships. Orbiting around the
central mother/daughter dynamic of Kath and Kim are Sharon
87
(Kim’s second-best friend), as well as Kath’s fiancé Kel and

Kim’s estranged husband Brett. This casting choice displays a
heightened, non-naturalistic comedic style.
Coupled with this exaggerated, self-conscious character

introduction is a full-throated cover of the song originally
made famous by Shirley Bassey, ‘The Joker’. Culminating in the
line “The joker is me”, the thematic territory of this song is self-
knowledge – and its juxtaposition with the visuals opens up a
gap between the performed self and self-awareness that will
mark out the comedic space of this sitcom. The dramatic irony
encapsulated in this title sequence will then be repeated every
week – the generator of the “endless number of stories” Phil
Kellard identifies in his discussion of what networks look for in
any prospective series.7
Suburban Identities
Thus the comedy is based on satire, and insight is awakened
in the audience in a way that it (thankfully) never will be in the
characters, or it would be the death of the series; in comedy,
a character’s ability to become involved in endless stories is
often fundamentally linked to their blind spot. There is a third
element in the opening sequence that clues us into a key
discourse and satirical target of the programme – the show’s
geographic and social setting, conveyed through several aerial
shots of the Australian suburbs that take us ever closer to the
specific house in which the series will play out. At stake here
is the veracity of the show’s representations of Australians and
their social milieu.
For Michael Idato, “Kath and Kim are real Australians, like the
rest of us who regard world affairs and our waistlines with an
equally cautious eye and aren’t afraid to own up to our
88
suburban roots – a world of over-the-back-fence conversations

populated by permed, polyester mums and aunties who cast a
loving, but disapproving, eye over everything, and G-strung
cousins and sisters who truly understand the slimming power
of the cigarette.”
In the same debate, Bruce Elder took a very different view,

criticising the show for simplistic gender stereotyping in
respect of the suburbs, a topic that can be fraught and
ambivalent for Australians: “Anyone with a modicum of taste
should know that when it comes to satire of Australian
suburban life, Barry Humphries’ early work – Sandy Stone,
early Edna Everage – is still a benchmark. A comedy that relies
so heavily on malapropisms (such as ‘effluent’ for ‘affluent’) is
relying on a one-dimensional joke and the assumption that
suburban women of small pretensions would use (and confuse)
such terms.”8
If we were in any doubt that conventional gender stereotypes

are being subverted in the original Kath & Kim, the central
triumvirate of female characters – Kath, Kim and Sharon –
dispels that. From the outset, the actor/creators revel in their
characters’ non-mainstream physicality – Kath’s eighties
fashion sensibilities from her frizzy perm to her shoulder-
padded glory; Kim’s obliviousness to donning figure-hugging
clothes that are clearly several sizes too small for her; and
Sharon’s frequently disfiguring health conditions and sporting
injuries. Such warts-and-all depictions of female characters
are all too rare in popular culture.
These unusual characters are rendered in an innovatory

manner for television fiction in the period, defined by Sergio
Angelini as “a vérité style that recalls Paul Watson’s 1993 fly-
on-the-wall documentary ‘Sylvania Waters’”.9 It indeed
89
appears to be the case that elements of self-absorbed,

confessional reality television are making themselves visible
here.
The very first episode, for example, gives both Kath and Kim
opportunities to speak directly to the audience. These
audience addresses are not the overheard interrogatory
thought-tracks that might show characters examining their
motives or behaviours. Instead, they are the declarative self-
assessments we are familiar with from reality television. As a
result, this crossover between genres is not only embedded in
dialogue referencing other television shows, but is reinforced
through the visual storytelling style itself.
Kath & Kim in America

In the American re-make, every element of the title sequence
is different – the choice and depiction of characters, the
location, and the song lyrics. The visuals present images of
sexy desirability in the performances of the characters of Kath
and Kim, undercut by the lyrics of the song, with its pumping
beat: “Walking down the street/And a man tries to get your
business/‘Cause you’re filthy/Oooh… you’re lookin’ gorgeous”.
Something aggressive, dangerously compelling - and yet

clichéd - about female attractiveness is suggested by the
soundtrack, and reinforced by the lingering gaze of the two
male supporting characters, Phil and Craig, who appear unable
to look away. This aesthetic mirrors the music video clip and
its associations of power wielded through exhibitionistic
sexuality - and in turn suggests that these U.S. characters have
already achieved the trappings of celebrity to which their
Australian counterparts perennially - and comically - aspire.
90
The sequence plays out in a mall, which suggests it is this

aspect of their lives that is central to the world of the series,
rather than the suburbia of the original. Consumerism and
mall culture, however, is an object of satire in the earlier
version, so from the opening title sequence, it is unclear
whether this remains a satirical target in the re-make – and if
not, what has replaced it. As a result, an entirely different
expectation is created by this opening sequence. The comedic
gap between self-awareness and self in relationship to
materialism and celebrity that is opened up by the Australian
credit sequence is absent here. This, in turn, means that the
dramatically ironic territory in which this comedy will play out
has not yet been established.
In the American version, the meanings of the audiovisual style

have also changed. When the American episodes begin, it
becomes clear that the cinéma vérité approach has been
maintained, but without its satirical edge. Voice-over is no
longer boldly declarative, instead morphing into the
interrogatory ‘thought’ tracks more relevant to the drama
genre. In the first episode, for example, Kath debates for a
second not telling Kim she has a boyfriend, then immediately
blurts it out. Without its satirical function, this choice of visual
style contributes to genre uncertainty rather than to clarity of
meaning.
Changing Identities
A shift in audiovisual style is accompanied by changing
definitions of characters and casting. In the U.S. version,
casting overall is far more age-appropriate, thus the quarter-
life self-absorption of Kim’s character feels familiar rather
than satirical (when we see a woman in her forties behaving
in this way). Likewise, the U.S. Kath struggles with ageing,
91
unlike Aussie Kath, whose inflated opinion of her own sex

appeal is overwhelmingly reinforced by super-dork fiancé Kel.
Thus the U.S. Kath tends towards the pitiable, where her
Aussie alter ego is deliciously and obliviously narcissistic.
Significantly, second-best friend Sharon is absent from the
U.S. version – which in turn means there is no exaggerated
player of physical comedy within the show’s discourses on
gender. Thus the manifestations of unconventional female
behaviour - such as Kim’s constant eating (without
corresponding weight issues) - are not comically reinforced.
For Michelle Nadar, the Executive Producer of the American

Kath & Kim, the show is about “what we do as Americans: we
go to the mall, we’re obsessed with celebrities, we all love
shopping. It’s very much a distillation of popular culture.”10 But
Nadar’s take, as articulated here, is not really what the show
is about for Australian audiences. Because when Aussie Kath
and Kim go to the mall, or obsess about celebrity, it can only
be ironic, because of the huge - and preposterously fertile -
gap between their lived reality and aspirations. It is that ironic
idea that sits at the heart of the success of the original, and
that is absent in the U.S. version. Without it - or without
finding an equally ironic, culturally-specific take on this gap
within the story and thematic territory around which to base
a re-make - what made the original so successful cannot be
adequately translated.
Norman Lear’s approach to re-making Till Death Us Do Part

reinforces the centrality of the thematic core over and above
the specifics of narrative content and execution in cross-
cultural adaptation. For Lear, a key inspiration was reading
that “somebody had done a show in which a father and son-in-
law were arguing, were totally apart – not just a generation
gap, but were divided on every issue … That was all I needed
92
to excite me, because I had lived that with my father.”11 This

indicates that Lear transposed the comedic idea at the heart
of Till Death Do Us Part (and, as is evident, little else).
Conversely, analysis suggests that the U.S. version of Kath &
Kim transposed many of the stylistic elements of the original,
but lost the central ironic idea in the process – the satire on
materialism, gender stereotypes and celebrity that is so
powerfully present in the original Australian version.
1
Jeffrey S. Miller, Something Completely Different: British
Television and American Culture, Minnesota: University of
Minnesota Press, 2000, pp. 140-141.
2
Ibid., p. 150.
3
Sue Turnbull, ‘Television Comedy in Translation’, Metro Magazine,
vol. 159, 2008, pp. 110-115.
4
Brett Mills, ‘New Jokes: Kath and Kim and Recent Global Sitcom’,
Metro Magazine, vol. 140, 2004, p. 101.
5
Andy Medhurst, A National Joke: Popular Comedy and English
Cultural Identities, Abingdon: Routledge, 2007, pp. 1, 2.
6
Lee Rabkin and William Goldberg, Successful Television Writing,
New Jersey: John Wiley & Sons, 2003, p. 57.
7
Phil Kellard, ‘Writing the Half-Hour Comedy Pilot’, in Linda Venis
(ed.), Inside the Room: Writing Television with the Pros at UCLA
Extension Writers' Program, New York; Gotham Books, 2013, p.
151.
93
8
Bruce Elder and Michael Idato, ‘Icon or Con? Kath & Kim’, Sydney
Morning Herald, 29 December 2004. Sue Turnbull offers a detailed
analysis in ‘Mapping the Vast Suburban Tundra: Australian Comedy
from Dame Edna to Kath and Kim’, International Journal of Cultural
Studies, vol. 11 no. 1, March 2008, pp. 15-32.
9
Sergio Angelini, “Kath & Kim Series One”, Sight & Sound,
1 September 2006, p. 90.
10
Michele Nadar, quoted in Sarah Kuhn,
http://www.backstage.com/news/walter-is-not-an-actor-one-
relegates-to-the_2/, 28 August 2008.
11
Miller, op. cit., pp. 141-2.
94
10 / National Identity and Global

Television: Re-making Australia’s Rake
for American Audiences
K. Brenna Wardell
Trans-national TV and Globalisation: The Re-make

This essay considers questions of Australian and American
identity, focusing on the U.S. remake of the Australian TV
series Rake in order to unpack ideas to do with national and
trans-national media. The U.S. Rake, which was launched in
January 2014 by Fox Broadcasting, is of interest because the
series complicates long-standing trends, including U.S. media
dominance and the British heritage of most foreign re-makes
on U.S. television. The U.S. Rake’s short, tumultuous history
also exemplifies the diverse challenges of re-makes, many of
which have had limited success or have failed completely, such
as the U.S. re-makes (NBC, 2008-2009; NBC, 2003) of the
Australian Kath & Kim (ABC, 2002-2005) and the British series
Coupling (BBC2, 2000-2004).
95
Given the voracious desire and disruptive behaviour

traditionally associated with the figure of the rake,
transferring the original’s frank tone and content to the U.S
proved delicate work, complicated by the relatively restrictive
nature of American network broadcasting, although the direct
involvement of the original’s creators, particularly Peter
Duncan, suggests a close connection between the Rakes.
Key differences are evident in the broadcasters (the

commercial Fox in the U.S.; the government-funded ABC1 in
Australia); cast (Greg Kinnear in the U.S.; Richard Roxburgh in
Australia); the nature of their respective television audiences;
and the dissimilar rules governing each nation’s TV content.
The resulting negotiation and its conclusion provide a rich
background for an exploration of intertextuality and questions
of national identity against a global television landscape.
The evolution of that landscape is due, in part, to the move to

trans-national TV ownership and production facilitated, as
Barbara J. Selznick discusses in her 2008 book Global
Television: Co-Producing Culture, by privatisation and
deregulation in the 1980s and 1990s. The result, Selznick
argues, is a global culture that is overtaking national culture
despite a continued preference on the part of national
audiences for local programming with domestic stars in a
familiar language.1
American TV offers a complex case regarding national TV and

global culture. Early development and promotion led to a
significant global presence, enhanced in recent years by the
immense reach of U.S.-owned media conglomerates such as
Time Warner, Viacom, and Disney. These export U.S.
programmes both ‘as is’ and as formats to be re-made to suit
national tastes. While U.S. TV spread globally, other nations’
96
TV has on the whole found less success in the U.S., resulting in

a close alignment of nation and national TV in the U.S. and also
a certain cultural myopia.
This is shifting, however, owing to the increased presence of

and access to foreign content, in its original form or re-made,
on U.S. screens. British programming is especially prevalent:
the number of British shows re-made for the U.S., for example,
dwarfing those sent by the U.S. to Britain. Of these, reality
shows figure prominently, though comedies and dramas have
thrived - Sanford and Son (NBC, 1972-1977), based on the
1960s/70s British Steptoe and Son (BBC, 1962-1965; 1970-
1975), The Office (BBC2, 2001; NBC, 2005-2013), and Queer as
Folk (Channel 4, 1999 and 2000; Showtime 2000-2005).
Australian Television
While Britain and the U.S. have influenced each other to
varying degrees, both have shaped Australian TV. This is due
to the latter’s relative late arrival, and hybridity in structure (a
combination of government-funded broadcasters, as in
Britain’s BBC, with commercial broadcasters, as in the U.S.,
whose Big Three broadcast networks are NBC, ABC, and CBS,
with Fox a later addition). Such hybridity extends to content,
with a mix of foreign and national programming impacting
Australian discourses of nation and culture. As Sue Turnbull
has noted, Australians watched imported - largely British - TV
such as Steptoe and Son (BBC, 1962 onwards) and The Rag
Trade (BBC, 1961-1963) until the first Australian sitcom aired
in 1964.2
Efforts to foreground Australian programming include the

work of the Australian Communications and Media Authority
which, like the U.S.’s Federal Communications Commission,
97
handles regulation and censorship. Unlike the FCC, it also

works to foster a vigorous home-grown TV, mandating that
commercial broadcasters broadcast at least 55% Australian
content. Despite such efforts, foreign programming,
particularly British and American series, comprise a significant
portion of the schedules and exert substantial influence. A
2011 list of the ten most popular TV programmes from 2009-
2011 reveals that an average of four are from the U.S., with
two to three from the U.K., meaning that at least half or more
of the popular programmes are foreign.3
The challenges Australian programmes face at home are

echoed by difficulties abroad. Australian film has had an
international presence for decades, yet Australian TV largely
remains domestic despite Australian production companies’
advantages in creating programmes for the international
market. As Stuart Cunningham and Toby Miller have shown,
these include low production costs, a history of efficiency, and
English-language production.4
When Australian exports have succeeded, that success has

often been linked to genre, with soap operas such as
Neighbors (Seven Network, 1985; Network Ten, 1986-2010)
and, to a lesser extent, dramas including The Flying Doctors
(Nine Network, 1986-1993) doing well in multiple countries.
Cunningham and Miller argue that the British market has been
the most amenable. The U.S. has been less welcoming,
demonstrated by the failure of the imported Neighbors in the
early 1990s and the U.S. remake of Kath & Kim in the mid-
2000s. One success is the comedy Wilfred, first aired in
Australia (SBS, 2007 and 2010) and then re-made for American
audiences, running on the basic cable channels FX (2011-2013)
and FXX (2014), both owned by the Fox Entertainment Group.
98
Comments about the two Wilfreds anticipate the feedback

from critics and audiences regarding the Rakes. The re-make
of Wilfred was tailored to comply with the greater regulation
of language and nudity on American TV, while greater
emotional depth was injected into the characters to appeal to
this new audience. Critics noted that the Australian version
was edgier in content and darker in tone than the U.S. one,
despite close similarities. This combination of toned-down
content and emotional affect re-appears in the U.S. Rake.
The Australian Rake’s critical success attracted the attention

of Fox executives, but rather than re-air the original the
decision was made, as with Kath & Kim and Wilfred, to re-
make it. This decision underlines a crucial difference between
the nations and their television systems. U.S. programmes
normally air on Australian TV in their original form, which
assumes that Australian audiences should easily understand
and enjoy TV from other nations, as Turnbull notes. 5 In
contrast, foreign programmes are usually re-made for U.S. TV.
Factors which have been identified as hindering Australian
exports, particularly to the U.S., include unfamiliar accents
and language use, low production values, and the
inappropriateness of foreign material on commercial
broadcast television.6
The Australian and American Rakes

Rake is a particularly challenging text to re-make in line with
U.S. standards because of the identity of its main character, a
rake - a libertine who relentlessly pursues his appetites,
particularly for sex. Originating in literature, the rake figure
appears at a particular moment and place - the Restoration
England of Charles II - yet has antecedents in other times and
locales, from the Spanish picaro to the ‘Vice’ figure of English
99
morality plays. Circulation is an essential trait: the rake moves

from person to person, and from place to place, in pursuit of
his desires. Texts featuring rakes likewise circulated nationally
and globally; for example, John Gay’s 1729 The Beggar’s
Opera, featuring the rakish highwayman Macheath, gained
fans not only in Britain but also worldwide. That the rake is
deeply linked to both the nation and the globe is particularly
apt in thinking about the two Rake productions and their
association with the national and trans-national.
The original Rake, co-created by Duncan and actor Richard

Roxburgh, who plays the title character, captures the rake’s
transgressive aspects: he is always on the move - physically,
verbally, and sexually - and constantly crossing social and
sexual borders. An exchange in Season 3 between the rake,
barrister Cleaver Greene, and a woman succinctly
encapsulates the character. As Greene drinks, the woman - a
friend, fling, and fellow barrister - notes: “You’ve always been
a sexual version of ‘Doctors Without Borders … Sex Sans
Frontières!” This Rake takes full advantage of Australian
broadcasting’s verbal and visual freedom to detail Greene’s
picaresque adventures and complexity: he’s a passionate
defender of the law who is perpetually embroiled in trouble
and constantly in chaos - with no proper office, outrageous
clients (largely guilty), and a voracious appetite for booze,
gambling, and sex.
The show has largely been embraced by Australian critics and

audiences, who praise Roxburgh’s performance, the ensemble
cast, and the show’s darkly comic tone. Filmed in locations
such as Sydney’s Central Business District, a commercial
centre which is also home to law courts and barristers, this
Rake is connected to the local - Sydney law and politics - and
the nation. This Australian essence is a quality that
100
commentators on the Australian independent news website

Crikey pinpoint as desirable and enjoyable, yet one that
forestalls easy translation to the U.S.7
The U.S. Rake shares staff with its Australian predecessor,

particularly co-creator Duncan, who shepherded the U.S.
version with U.S. show runner Peter Tolan of Rescue Me
(2004-2011) and U.S. director Sam Raimi, whose experience
producing TV for global audiences includes the syndicated
Hercules (1995-1999) and Xena (1995-2001). This continuity
promised that the re-make might build on the original’s
success, but differences between the two series in terms of
broadcasters, protagonists, and audiences, made such
continuity a burden as much as a benefit.
Despite the re-make inheriting many of the original’s

narratives and characters, a number of factors limited direct
reproduction and provide challenges, including dissimilarities
in running time and differences in permissable content. To
accommodate commercials, the U.S. Rake ran 42 minutes in
contrast to the Australian original’s 60, allowing less time to
develop the characters around the protagonist and the his
world as a whole. Differences between the Aussie broadcaster
ABC1, a government broadcaster, and Fox Broadcasting, and
content rules in each country are also significant. Nudity and
language are given greater latitude on Australian TV, while
U.S. TV is more restrictive, especially in the case of broadcast
networks such as Fox.
Cultural Differentiations
The respective Rake protagonists and the actors who play
them also differ, their variance reflecting the diverse nature of
each show and audience. The Aussie Cleaver Greene is an
101
unapologetically glorious mess, a menace to everyone, though

primarily himself. The series plays with the dichotomy of the
character’s intellectual and verbal dexterity, his wit getting
him into greater trouble, not less. The visual disjunction
between the professional Greene, clad in formal court gear,
and his often-dishevelled private appearance in mussed suits
or bathrobes is just one way in which this dichotomy is
highlighted.
Roxburgh, a veteran of theatre, film, and TV, is often cast as a

villain, from Moulin Rouge’s Duke of Monroth (2001) to Van
Helsing’s Dracula (2004), and he brings to the character a
devilish streak. With his deep, rich voice, wolfish face, and
unkempt hair, his rake is handsome and disreputable, mighty
and broken. His vaguely aristocratic air – that of a nobleman
who is slumming it - recalls the rake’s roots in the court of
Charles II, the ‘Merry Monarch’.
The film and TV star Greg Kinnear plays the U.S. protagonist,
re-named Keegan Deane, as a softer figure in a series with a
lighter tone overall. Kinnear’s roles have alternated between
heroes and villains; his Deane is less wolf than dog, albeit a
naughty one. Writing of the shows’ and protagonists’
differences for The Huffington Post, Maureen Ryan notes:
“Perhaps the squishy ambivalence of ‘Rake’ is somehow
appropriate to the show. Its lead character, Keegan Deane,
can't quite decide what kind of man he wants to be, and the
show can't seem to decide what it wants to be, either.”8
The manner in which each version introduces its main

character and his world is also different. The Australian pilot
sets the series’ darkly humorous tone, depicting Greene
defending a government economist - and cannibal - who is
accused of murder. Early promotions for the U.S re-make’s
102
première cited the same narrative, but when it aired a

different episode was shown instead: episodes were moved
around and re-written, with the former première airing as
Episode 4.
Discussing the U.S. première and the larger issue of creating

shows for a competitive TV landscape with little room for
middling choices in terms of form and content, Alan Sepinwall
of entertainment website HitFix notes: “The first pilot was
already emblematic of the struggle to do cable-style weirdness
and moral ambiguity in a broadcast network context; the new
pilot […] sands off several of the edges that survived the first
time.”
In the same article Sepinwall cites the concerns of showrunner

Peter Tolan, who says: 'We found that we had an episode that
had maybe an overload of not drama [sic], I’ll say, but maybe
a little sadness [...] which worked against the episode. And so
we refigured it, sort of toning that down."9 The result was a
softened protagonist and show, in contrast to the more full-
throttle naughtiness of the original, and American critics and
viewers found the results so-so.
Rake’s generic status as a ‘dramedy’ also presented a problem,

straddling the provocative, difficult to balance, overlap
between drama and comedy. Historically, humour is
challenging to translate, particularly across nations. As
Turnbull points out, echoing other commentators, the
specificities of humour with regard to character and place
makes it “stubbornly resistant to broad-based exploitation in a
multiplicity of markets”, as Cunningham and Jacka put it in
their 1996 study of global television markets. Turnbull
comments that “it might be more correct to suggest that
‘some’ humour is more ‘stubbornly resistant’ than others”, and
103
argues moreover that this might be particularly the case

where Australian humour is concerned.10
So what was the aftermath of this negotiation featuring one

concept, two nations, and two similar but different shows?
The Aussie Rake completed its third season in 2014 and
Roxburgh said it would be the last. Yet the original Rake
refuses to disappear: Roxburgh will return in 2016 for a fourth
season. Kinnear’s series is not so lucky. The fate of the U.S.
Rake echoes that of the earlier U.S. re-make of Kath & Kim and
provides a cautionary counter to the promise of re-making
another nation’s hit TV series: cancellation after a single
season.
1
Barbara Selznick, Global Television: Co-Producing Culture,
Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2008, p. 3.
2
Sue Turnbull, ‘Missing in Action: On the Invisibility of (Most)
Australian Television’, Critical Studies in Television, vol. 5 no. 1,
Spring 2010, pp. 112-113.
3
Amanda Meade, ‘Aussies Love US TV Shows’, The Australian,
online, 20 September 2011.
4
Stuart Cunningham and Toby Miller, Contemporary Australian
Television, Kensington, NSW: University of New South Wales Press,
1994, p. 113.
5
Turnbull, op. cit., p. 112.
6
Cunningham and Miller, op. cit., p. 120.
104
7
Ben Neutze, ‘At Home and Abroad: Rake in the Ratings War’, Daily
Review, online, 10 February 2014.
8
Maureen Ryan, ‘’Rake’s Review: Greg Kinnear as a Lawyer Gone
Wrong’, The Huffington Post, online, 25 March 2014.
9
Alan Sepinwall, ‘Review: In Fox’s Rake, Greg Kinnear is Bad - but
only to a Point’, Hitfix, online, 22 January 2014.
10 Turnbull, op. cit., p.112. She is quoting Stuart Cunningham and
Elizabeth Jacka, Australian Television and International
Mediascapes, Cambridge University Press, 1996, p. 249.
105
11 / Understanding Professional Routines

and Identities: Print Media in Brunei
Siti Ummi Kalthum Othman
Researching the Press in Brunei
This essay focusses on the practice of journalism in Brunei

Darussalam, an under-researched topic. I was interested to
examine to what extent organisational structures and policies,
which are deeply influenced by the Brunei Sultanate, affect
the way journalists and editors perceive their professions,
thus making an impact on how news is produced. My pilot
study in this area, which is my focus here, explored the
backgrounds of news workers, their job training, and their
daily routines. The first part of the essay offers a brief
background of Brunei, its national philosophy, and current
socio-political situation, together with a short introduction to
the various newspapers published in Brunei. I go on to explore
the working practices of two journalists working there.
106
Brunei is a former British protectorate in a small part of the

island of Borneo in Southeast Asia. It has a size of 5,765 square
kilometres and a population of about 410,000, with 60% of its
population concentrated in approximately 20% of its overall
area. The discovery of oil in the Belait district in 1929 was the
main contributor to Brunei’s ongoing wealth and
development: it is a tax-free state which provides free medical
services and free education, enabling a literacy rate for those
aged 10 and above of 96.4%.
The country has been ruled by the same royal house since its
inception. Authorised by the 1959 Constitution, His Majesty
Sultan Haji Hassanal Bolkiah Mu’izzaddin Waddaulah rules as
the Supreme Head of State, the 29th in his line. This position
was strengthened after an unsuccessful rebellion in 1962. As
Head of an Islamic state, the Sultan also presides over the
regulation of Islam. Furthermore, the implementation of the
Syariah penal code (law according to the Quran), the first
phase of which was introduced in May 2014, has strengthened
the Sultan’s hand in this area.
Melayu Islam Beraja

The country’s national ideology is summed up in the phrase
‘Melayu Islam Beraja’ (MIB, ‘Malay Islamic Monarchy’),
shaping the political and cultural structure of the country. This
phrase is also used to reflect and explain certain cultural
practices in Brunei, commonly used to instil a sense of
patriotism and belonging. As Haji Adam has explained, this
ideology has been significant in the defence and preservation
of traditional beliefs and ideas of ‘heritage’ in Brunei.1 As the
Brunei Darussalam Newsletter puts it, MIB “calls for the
society to be loyal to its ruler, practice Islam and make it as a
way of life in adherence to all the characteristics and traits of
107
true Malays of Brunei Darussalam, including making the

Malay language the prime language in the country.”2
The stress on the ‘Malay’ dimension of the national philosophy

focuses on its people and the government’s adherence to
Malay cultural values. It is deeply rooted in the daily life of
Brunei, given that 66% of the population is Malay; the official
and most spoken language in Brunei is Malay; and its way of
life has dominance over other cultures in Brunei. Malay values
have always been intertwined with the teachings of Islam in
Brunei so the national philosophy promotes the practice of
Islam as a way of life.
In other words Islam is identified for a majority as part of the

Malay culture in Brunei. The introduction of the Syariah Penal
Code has of course strengthened that view. Where the
monarchy is concerned, the national philosophy represents
the Sultan as an embodiment of the executive power of the
State. This part of the national philosophy fosters a sense of
loyalty to the Sultan but the lengthy tenure of the current
monarch means that in effect its people have already
accepted this as normal.
Newspapers in Brunei
There are just four newspapers in Brunei: Borneo Bulletin,
Media Permata, The Brunei Times and Pelita Brunei. Founded
in 1935, Borneo Bulletin is the oldest of these and hence the
most trusted, covering mass appeal ‘life-style’ stories and ones
that are more community-driven. It is owned by the
investment company QAF Brunei through its media and
communications investment arm, The Brunei Press. Its
circulation currently averages around 20,000. Media Permata
is a Malay language newspaper, founded in 1995 as an affiliate
108
of Borneo Bulletin in the company’s attempt to embrace

Malay-language readers. It is also owned by QAF Brunei
through The Brunei Press. Its circulation averages about
10,000.
The Brunei Times is the youngest of its kind. It was launched in

2006 as a daily English-language newspaper, owned by Brunei
Times PLC, a public limited company controlled by a variety of
shareholders. As of 2011, the newspaper’s circulation
averages around 15,500. Its stories mostly feature news
analysis and commentaries. A competitor to Borneo Bulletin,
the publication has opted for a more analytical view of events,
competing for the elite and professional readership in contrast
with Borneo Bulletin’s mass market constituency.
Launched in 1956, Pelita Brunei is the second oldest

newspaper publication in Brunei. It is a state-owned
publication from the Information Department of the Prime
Minister’s Office and acts as the government’s, as well as the
Sultan’s, official newspaper. The publication is directed at the
mass audience but as it uses the Malay language, its
readership largely consists of the same audience as that of
Media Permata. Its circulation averages about 40,000 – it is
distributed for free and delivered to all government ministries,
in which 60% of the population is employed.
Education and Training

My initial pilot study was conducted by means of one-to-one
interviews with just two participants who have experience of
the journalism sector in Brunei. ‘Alice’ is a sub-editor in one
of the English-language newspapers, and ‘Mary’ is a former
journalist from an English-language newspaper in Brunei, who
has now found a working opportunity in another media-
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related industry in the country. The names of individuals and

organisations have been changed or omitted to fulfil the
participants’ wish to remain anonymous.
My initial research revealed that a background in journalism

or a media-related area, although advantageous, is not really
a prerequisite to join the world of journalism in Brunei. For
example, a journalist with a background in teaching is most
likely to cover stories that are related to education and a
journalist with an I.T. background is most likely to report on
technological stories, but educational attainments anywhere
between those of ‘A’ Level and the Master’s degree were cited
- Alice holds an undergraduate degree and Mary has a Masters
- and prior work experience is an advantage.
Both interviewees agreed that fluency in English and Malay

languages is the most important asset in terms of educational
background. At first, Mary stressed the ability to write and
speak English fluently, but when asked about fluency in Malay,
Mary admitted to her own weakness in it. She explained that
as the Malay language used in newspapers is slightly different
than the daily Malay dialect spoken by Bruneians, she finds
difficulty in writing formal Malay for publication.
Following appointment, training is given ‘on the job’. Alice

explained that journalists sometimes get sent to other
countries on a Fellowship, perhaps spending a few months at
the Jakarta Post in Indonesia. Training at the beginning,
however, is mostly in-house, involving the shadowing of senior
reporters and learning style guides. Journalists are also given
basic training in photography, as only a limited number of
photographers are employed. Predictably, a photographer is
most likely be assigned alongside a journalist on an
assignment that involves high profile people, such as an
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opening ceremony or a major sports event rather than a

simpler human interest story such as charity work or school
competitions.
Working Practices
The actual practice of reportage, as a process of analysis and
representation, involves a steep learning curve. Alice stressed
that “gathering information is one thing but structuring it into
an actual story and finding the most important parts, I think
that takes a lot of practice.” Mary commented: “I learned
more with experience. There were many trial and errors and
bothering my editor to ask things I wasn’t very sure of before I
could go to an event and knew exactly what I wanted to get
out of it … I still make the mistake of gathering information
that in the end I would chuck out anyway.”
Daily routines are divided into day and night shifts. Working
rotas are variable and subject to last-minute change. Mary’s
working day usually involves going straight to the event she is
supposed to cover. There are usually two of these each day,
and she is expected to produce at least two articles per week.
She always tries to write two stories for each event: one article
containing the basic facts, and another on a particular ‘angle’
which interested her during the event.
For example, at a library opening she created one article about

the ceremony itself and another broader piece on the state of
libraries and what initiatives have been taken at higher levels
to increase library visits. On her return to the office, she will
thus usually already have a ‘slug line’ (a basic summary of the
news content) for each of her stories that she will then pitch
to her editor. Lengthy working days and intensive editorial
processes are part-and-parcel of the process, with particular
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responsibility devolving upon the night-time editor for

finalising the paper for publication the next day.
The participants in this pilot study were from the English-

language newspapers in Brunei, and my future research will
obviously need to broaden this base. Taking into account the
reports of daily routines supplied by my interviewees, I will be
attempting to strengthen these by means of fuller
ethnographic work. I need to ask further questions about what
influences them, and how they view themselves as
‘professionals’. Both participants have casually stated that
their papers follow MIB ideology and protocol and this is
clearly a key area for further exploration in relation to the
goals of journalistic practice: so far, the examples they have
given involve the need for modesty in pictorial
representations, and, crucially, their unwillingnness to criticise
government .
1
Haji Abdul Manap Haji Adam, The Evolution of Radio Broadcasting
in Brunei Darussalam, Cardiff: University of Wales, 1995, p. 27.
2
Johari A. Achee, Berita Televisyen dan Pembangunan Negara:
Kajian Kes Radio Televisyen Brunei [Television News and National
Development: Radio Televisyen Brunei as Case Study], Cardiff:
University of Wales, 1995, p. 12.
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12 / Journalism and the Virtual World:

Second Life
Bahar Ayaz
The Virtual World of Second Life

Second Life is a constantly growing virtual world launched by
San Francisco’s Linden Labs in 2003. Deploying 3-D user-
generated content, users (known as ‘residents’) represent
themselves by means of avatars to interact with the SL world
(‘the grid’), interact with ‘people’ and ‘places’ as though in the
‘real’ world as well as with other avatars, places and objects.
Residents can build virtual objects and use the virtual currency
of the Linden dollar.
Unlike online games, Second Life has no ‘levels’, is not based
on competition, and there are no enemies to be killed. Within
a decade Second Life was supported by a million regular users.
This virtual world is a prime example of Baudrillard’s theory of
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‘simulation’, and yet, however mediatised, ‘reality’ is never far

away: TV news channels were quick to report when, in a
complex circularity, U.S. President Barack Obama’s
presidential nomination campaign featured in Second Life.
Second Life thus offers an environment in which people can do
things that they cannot in real life. Although boasting many
positive aspects, this virtual world naturally has some negative
aspects too - for instance, Second Life has been criticised for
its sexual content. But it can be said that Second Life is a
powerful social media environment in the sense that it
provides an opportunity for people to communicate with each
other and to build a form of community. It can also interact
productively with ‘reality’ by offering job opportunities and
having a currency which can be converted to U.S. dollars and
spent in the ‘real’world.
Although Second Life has a large entertainment content, a
number of academic researchers and institutions have shown
considerable interest in the implications of its virtual world,
such as opportunities for virtual conferences and for lifelong
learning. The University of Nottingham, for example,
investigated the question of bullying in Second Life, while
Plymouth University and the Thomas Jefferson University
contributed an education platform about sexuality and HIV,
and an important study of post-traumatic stress in Second Life
was conducted by Cornell University. Researchers such as
Bailenson and Hancock appreciate Second Life as an
unprecedented opportunity to investigate the behaviour of
social groups.1
In my own case, I am particularly interested in the role of

newspapers and magazines in this environment, and the
emerging understandings of journalism which it exemplifies:
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virtual offices, emancipated working conditions for journalists,

user-generated content, virtual news and the many other
novel ideas prompted by this platform. The central method
used in this study is participant observation: I participated in
this virtual world for a period of one month, recording my
conversations and experiences throughout.
Second Life and the Practice of Journalism

In this virtual world, there are many newspapers, television
channels and much media content. The most important player
is undoubtedly CNN, one of whose reasons for joining was the
chance to develop a ‘citizen journalism’ project. With the CNN
I-Report Application, people can follow the latest news and
share their observations by taking a photograph and
describing the event. The experience of Reuters has been
more negative: the company opened a news bureau in Second
Life but closed it after a year when dogged by technical
problems on the site (although technical innovations have
since made Second Life stronger in this respect).
Perhaps the main reason for the closure of the Reuters bureau
was to do with the nature of the correspondent’s existence in
‘real life’ and his efforts to report virtual world news. It
appears to be the case that for people who are fully immersed
in Second Life the reporting of news is something ‘closer to
home’ than for people who are relative strangers. CNN’s
citizen journalism project confirms this. Second Life
adminstrators, for their part, recommend that if you want to
find a job you should first be sure that you are satisfied with
the platform.
Of course, in addition to well-known ‘real world’ media

organisations, there are newspapers, magazines and some
115
other media organisations which belong to Second Life

residents themselves. One of them is the SL Newspaper (2009-
13). The most important reason for closure, according to
editor Bixyl Shuftan, was founder James T. Juno’s decision to
leave both the virtual world and the newspaper in 2009,
compunded by co-founder Dana Vanmoer’s decision to leave
the newspaper because of real life family problems.
Shuftan chose to re-name the paper Second Life Newser,

working along with those who wanted to continue. Second Life
Newser is produced by an editor and ten reporters. The paper
has a building in the virtual world. Around the building there
is a beautiful garden of a kind that we are perhaps not used to
finding in such places in real life. There are also lots of ‘fun’
applications to be found there.
Another noteworthy newspaper, the SL Enquirer (established

in 2005), calls upon residents to share news about art, culture,
music, and fashion. Lanai Jarrico, a communication student
and a blogger in real life, is the founder and the CEO of the
paper. SL Enquirer also offers job opportunities to people who
want to work in the field. The paper pays its journalists per
article and investigative reporters per task.
It also employs marketing officers and event co-ordinators.

The most attractive aspect of these jobs is the flexible work
schedule. In job postings SL Enquirer notes that it is looking for
people who not only have a professional working attitude and
ethic, but who have had at least a year’s residency in Second
Life.
Another publication in Second Life is The Grid Weekly News,

where I was able to chat with reporter Emanuelle Brooks, who
joined Second Life six years ago. For Brooks, who is not a
116
journalist in real life, the most important thing in Second Life

is to have fun. Brooks wants it to look like a real newspaper.
Many familiar features are included, even to the extent that a
prominent ‘relationship’ column is written by ‘agony aunt’
Cyndell Wonderan, who responds to the notes requesting
advice which readers leave on her ‘desk’.
The Grid Weekly News has a majestic HQ building. Although it

may seem as though there is no one else in the building, you
can communicate with reporters, writers and all other
employees when you send a message to their boards. The
building also features advertising and promotion boards; to
place an ad with 20 rows of text for a period of four weeks
costs 500L$.
The Alphaville Herald has the kinds of sections you might find
in ‘real world’ papers – news, business, media, opinion, as well
as hacktivism and uncategorised content. The Alphaville
Herald does not only provide information and news about
Second Life, but also it reports from other virtual worlds such
as Sims Online. Tenshi Vielle's article about struggles with
mental illness in Second Life shows that Second Life news is not
simply fun-oriented.2
Vielle explains the difficulty of finding a solution, but says that

it is important to identify and help people with mental illness
who cannot distinguish between ‘real life’ and ‘fiction’, who
experience extreme emotional reactions, and who tend to
join events which contain sexual elements. The Best of SL
Magazine, with its interviews, presentations, articles,
contests, and much other visual content, is only one further
example of the many other magazines which form part of the
communicative landscape of Second Life.
117
Problems and Prospects

In the new media environments of Twitter, Facebook and
YouTube, entertainment content is evermore to the forefront.
Second Life reporters inevitably follow this trend, but the
emphasis on user-generated content also allows for a wider
range of emphases. Indeed, Second Life newspapers and
magazines thus have the ability to offer content to which we
are unaccustomed in the ‘real world’.
This is also partly due to the changed working conditions of

reporters themselves. Thanks to new technologies, reporters
in both ‘real’ and ‘virtual’ worlds no longer have a fixed
working environment. As Pavlik observes, reporters will
increasingly be in touch with newsrooms without being there,
something borne out in the case of the journalists of Second
Life.3
Whereas real journalists have a mission to produce copy

rapidly and live in constant fear of losing their jobs, Second Life
reporters are very differently placed, with flexible working
hours and comfortable working conditions. There are no
gatekeepers to control or restrict content: reporters set their
agendas according to their own wishes. People engage in
virtual journalism because they really want to be a journalist -
and if they lose interest they can easily leave. On such points,
is there a lesson for ‘real world’ media institutions to learn
from Second Life?
The extent to which ‘reality’ can be accessed via social media

is of course unknowable, and is indeed a highly controversial
topic. It is clearly very difficult, for example, to ensure reality
in a virtual environment where people do not reveal their true
118
identities. In this respect alone it can be argued that

traditional media continue to offer more reliable sources of
news and information.
While virtual media products such as The Grid Weekly News

try to resemble real world newspapers, their interest in
challenging reality means that fundamentally they often differ
from actual papers; their commitment to ‘fake’ identities and
topics all too often means that they miss the basic notion of
‘reality’ completely. But then are ‘real world’ newspapers
themselves any more real? Perhaps Baudrillard is right:
perhaps we are living in a world where everything appears to
be ‘real’ - but where in fact nothing really is?
1
See Greg Miller, ‘The Promise of Parallel Universes’, Science, vol.
317 no. 5842, 31 August 2007, p. 1341-1343.
2
Tenshi Vielle, ‘Dealing with Mental Illness in Second Life’,
The Alphaville Herald, 3 Oct. 2012, online at
http://alphavilleherald.com/2012/10/dealing-with-mental-illness-
in-second-life.html.
3
John V. Pavlik, ‘New Media and News: Implications for the Future
of Journalism’, New Media & Society, vol. 1 no. 1, April 1999, pp.
54-59.
119
2 / Critical Tropes
13 / Tropes of the Sea:

The Mediterranean as Cinematic Sign
of Liminality and Difference
Phillip Drummond
The Modern Argonaut, Jason Bourne

Seen from below – that is, in this case, from under water - a
human body floats on the surface of a stormy sea which a
caption identifies as the Mediterranean. A location device
attached to the body eventually attracts the attention of a
passing Italian fishing boat. The man is barely alive. Under
examination, his body reveals two bullet holes, and, surgically
implanted in his neck, a chip containing a Swiss bank code.
Recovering, the man cannot remember who he is. His quest
for self begins: disembarking at Imperia in Liguria, the man
goes on a European quest - from Switzerland to Prague to Paris
and back to the Med - in a dangerous attempt to retrieve his
lost identity as Jason Bourne.
120
I am describing here the opening of Doug Liman’s blockbuster

thriller The Bourne Identity (2002), starring Matt Damon.1
Here, a gritty, brooding variation emerges upon the traditional
hermeneutics of the espionage drama as identity itself
becomes the key goal, rather than any external McGuffin. The
configuration is not unusual - man on the run, up against the
powers of the State - but the variations are critical. At the level
of geopolitics, Europe is here the terrain over which an
American protagonist fights his way against his compatriot
enemies, the CIA, reminding us of the significance, in the
Mediterranean films, of Europe as a teeming playground for a
wide range of critical scenarios of national identity and
difference. In short, under such conditions is the American
Jason Bourne, a new argonaut, re-born from the ‘Middle Sea’
of Europe.
Where its beginning is concerned, the film also reminds us of

the importance of the sea itself as symbolic location, medium,
and vector. The opening is ambiguous: it marks the fragility of
the solitary human, adrift and yet incapacitated, upon the
stormy Mediterranean. It marks an attempt to dissolve human
identity, and hence represents a reservoir of repressed
history. At the same time it marks human technological
prowess: Bourne is saved by the sight and sound of a tracking
device which can attract human attention in spite of the
storms raging all around him. Eventually, however, the film
will want to see the sea in a quite different light, as it returns
to it, but differently, to resolve the human relationship at its
centre. In the final shots, emphasising the bright sunlight of a
Mediterranean island, we find ourselves on land - but never
out of sight of the sea - in a taverna on Mykonos (unnamed in
the film, but easily identifiable by its trademark windmills).
121
It is with this circular return to the Mediterranean – to a more

secure relationship between land and sea, and, still further, a
more secure relationship between man and woman – that the
film concludes, far from the stormy and endangered union of
man, boat and sea we shared at the beginning. In The Bourne
Identity, in other words, the Mediterranean book-ends the
urban paranoia of the central narrative. In between the
stormy sea which provide the opening disruption, and the
calmly sunlit island which provides a resolution, we have
ranged across the threatening body of the film, the
threatening urban corpus of the inland European continent.
An Earlier Salvation
These narrative, iconographic and ideological ingredients,
freshly nuanced in The Bourne Identity, go back in another
sense to the early days of narrative cinema. Salvation from the
Mediterranean is also a key motif in Frances Marion’s The Love
Light (USA, 1921), starring Mary Pickford, but with a very
different set of meanings. The film is one of the earliest
attempts by Hollywood to deploy the Mediterranean as a
source of allegory and symbol in its account – in turn comic,
sentimental, melodramatic – of the impact of the First World
War on a small Italian fishing village.
Here there are a number of discourses on the sea, in a fable

which rails against the inhumanity of war and celebrates the
power of women. War takes away the menfolk of the village,
and if they return they are no longer themselves. The central
character, Angela, rescues from the sea a sailor, Joseph, who
dupes her into believing he is American, not German. They
marry. Joseph tricks her into using the lighthouse to send out
not a message of love (as she thinks) but a signal which allows
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a German submarine to sink a ship carrying, amongst others,

her brother, Mario, returning from the war.
After the unmasked Joseph escapes the villagers by jumping

to his death on the rocks, Angela bears his child, but, believing
her to be unstable, nuns at the local convent give away her
baby to Maria, whose own child has died. When Angela begins
to suspect the truth, Maria decides to escape to Genoa with
local profiteer Tony, but their boat struggles in a storm. Angela
creates a new kind of love light by setting her house on fire to
save the boat and to retrieve her child, whom she begins to
raise with her war-blinded, long-term suitor, now her
husband, Giovanni.
Davies thus sets in train numerous discourses about the sea. It

is the setting for the life and work of the village, whose
inhabitants live on its shores; the German sailor is rescued
from the beach, where he later meets his death. Its central
emblem, the light house, is the source of tragedy, and there
are in total two shipwrecks – the sinking of the ship by the
submarine, and the final wreck from which the baby is
rescued. The symbolic plan is writ large in the opening titles:
“When great storms rage at sea, far off coasts are lashed by
cruel waves, tempest born. Like sullen legions they come – to
batter frail craft in peaceful waters/ --- and Life is like the
Sea./From vast upheavals born of lust for world dominion,
come waves of misery, surging on to buffet helpless lives on
distant shores.”
The symbolic vision once announced, a more naturalistic

approach takes over: “Caressing the rock-girded coast of Italy
are the waters of the calm Mediterranean/Flashing blue in the
sunlight, its plumed waves curl about the feet of a little fishing
village.” But the accompanying image does not particularly
123
support these words, showing merely a dark sea traversed by

a blade of light. The sunshine, or, proleptically, the lighthouse?
The symbolic mode soon returns: “Far beyond the horizon

clouds are gathering – sullen, sinister, menacing./And then the
storm broke. A tidal wave of war engulfed humanity, sweeping
to destruction the splendid manhood of the world.” Later, the
naturalistic and symbolic modes merge: “And at midnight
Angela flashed her ‘I love you’ message across the waters to
the waiting Joseph.” Finally, “During the dark hours the storm
whips itself to fury.” The eventual resolution is still imagined
in terms of the relationship between the water and the land:
“After Angela’s marriage to Giovanni they sought the harbour
of his home.”
Modalities of Place
Fundamental to these understandings are the different
modalities of place which inform the narrative arrangements
of the Mediterranean films. In many instances, the
Mediterranean is resolutely ‘here’, a place which the films fully
occupy throughout the volume of their narrative. The
Mediterranean thus ‘contains’ the narrative, as it were, and
hence there is nowhere else to go, no other possible or likely
world. But often the meanings of the Mediterranean are called
up through broader forms of dramatic interface. The Med can
be a destination to be achieved, rather than an already
acquired given, and the journey towards its acquisition will be
of considerable significance, usually in relation to the
eventual, culminating arrival itself.
Where France is concerned, these journeys are usually those

from the urban north to the maritime south. A number of
motivations drive these journeys forward, ranging from
124
holidays in which the tensions of the north can be addressed

or evaded (Demy’s La Baie des Anges, Preminger’s Bonjour
Tristesse, Schlesinger’s Darling, Rohmer’s Le Rayon Vert) and
escape routes found, sometimes comic (Owen’s That Riviera
Touch, Bendelack’s Mr. Bean’s Holiday) sometimes in darker
registers (Clément’s Les Félins, Godard’s Pierrot le Fou).
Sometimes, on the other hand, the Mediterranean is

narrativised as a special kind of dramatic interlude in a wider
fiction principally set elsewhere. In Loach’s Ae Fond Kiss,
(UK/It/Sp/Belg, 2004) largely set in Glasgow, an impromptu
holiday to a Spanish seaside resort releases the first major
moment of conflict between the film’s young lovers Roisin and
Casim when he confesses to her the imminence of an arranged
wedding to someone else. In Terence Davies’ House of Mirth
(UK/USA/Fr/Germ, 2000) a Mediterranean passage, once
again a holiday, punctuates the film’s ongoing discourse on
turn-of-the-century New York where the heroine is socially
betrayed and cut adrift by a duplicitous friend, triggering her
descent into material impoverishment and isolation which will
mark her final period in North America in the concluding
segments of the film.
This interlude can, in turn, act as a moment of liberation rather

than anagnorisis. In Paolo and Vittoria Taviani’s Padre
Padrone (Italy, 1977) the sea only figures in the brief passage
where the hero has escaped the gloomy world of rural Sardinia
and the world of his father, to join the navy, and the escape it
seems to offer. In the geographical promiscuity of the James
Bond films, the Mediterranean is almost invariably only one
staging-point amongst several: Venice (From Russia with Love,
Moonraker), Monaco (Goldeneye, Never Say Never Again),
Sardinia (The Spy Who Loved Me), Turkey (From Russia with
125
Love, The World is Not Enough), Spain (For Your Eyes Only),
Greece (For Your Eyes Only), Gibraltar (The Living Daylights).
In Ronald Neame’s WWII drama The Man Who Never Was

(UK/USA, 1956) a body in the sea becomes a different kind of
geographic lure. We open with a shot panning from the sea to
a body washing in the surf on a beach lit by the long rays of a
low-lying sun, an image which stays with us solemnly
throughout the credits. We then proceed to wartime London
and the politics of war seen against a resolutely urban
landscape. Eventually the film resolves its riddling start by
taking us back to Huelva, Spain, where a British submarine will
deposit the body of an unknown man disguised as a British
naval office, ‘Major Martin’, carrying bogus papers, designed
to fool the Germans by announcing the Allies’ intention to
invade via Greece rather than through Sicily.
The sea is the medium connecting and mediating between the

great powers as two bodies are then exchanged within the
broader narrative economy of the film, as a German spy is
despatched to Britain to ascertain the truth or otherwise of
the discovery. If the first half of the film revolves around the
ingenious but macabre detail of the mechanics of the plot over
the ‘false’ body, the second half reverses the hermeneutic
logic as the spy himself becomes the investigative figure,
actively rather than passively invading a different socio-
political space, and one who tracks the mystery back to its
roots with surprising facility before an eventual showdown.
The film returns to Huelva, for its haunting coda, via a dissolve
from the face of intelligence expert Commander Montagu to
the waves of the Mediterranean and then to the earth of the
Spanish cemetery in Huelva where ‘Martin’ finally lies.
126
Fabling the Past

The sea also provides a variety of invocations not just of space,
but also time, its connective powers fusing past and present in
a host of pressing rhythms. In a simple and profound example,
in Preminger’s Exodus (USA, 1960) a shipful of post-WWII
Jewish migrants is attempting to make its way to the new
world of Palestine, caught between the recent horrors of war
and drawn to the uncertain futurity of a new Jewish
homeland. In other words the film plays on two histories, two
diegeses, one of them immediate, repeating the one held at a
mythical distance of an earlier, Biblical passage from tyranny
to freedom.
This idea of the past comprising multiple diegeses, here seen

in repetition, takes a different form in Fellini’s And the Ship
Sails On (It/Fr, 1983). Here, the main purpose of the voyage is
to commemorate a personal past, that of the great Italian
opera singer ‘Edmea Tetua’, whose ashes are being returned
to Erimo, the island of her birth. But a different sense of
history explodes into the personal when the ship is obliged to
take on Serbian refugees escaping to Italy in the aftermath of
Sarajevo 1914. All hell breaks loose as they are claimed by an
Austro-Hungarian battleship, insisting that the refugees
include a number of anarchists, and in the mayhem of a
surreal Fellini finale both ships are lost.
Sometimes the connections with a fabled past occurs through

the deployment of ancient artifacts and settings. Relics of the
past are sometimes incidental, as when the secrets of the past
are eventually revealed to the heroine, far into the film, in the
ruined Cretan Temple of Apollo in Neilson’s The Moon-
spinners (UK/USA/Arg, 1964). Sometimes, however, relics are
127
more powerful. In Negulesco’s Boy on a Dolphin (USA, 1957)

the fate of an ancient statue found on the seabed at Hydra
furnishes the title of the film, and a drama centering on the
commercial versus national value of ancient artefacts.
In Rozier’s Manina (Fr, 1952), a Phoenician amphora found on

the seabed sends the hero on a quest from a Parisian lecture
theatre, where history is dry, to the liquid realms of the
Mediterranean where he learns the value of contemporary
personal relationships. The ancient world also intersects with
the world of modern emotions in Rossellini’s Journey to Italy
(It/Fr, 1954). At Pompeii, Katherine’s encounter with the
traces of past peoples engulfed by natural disaster provides an
imaginative outlet, and a fresh context, for the dissolution of
her marriage.
Seeing an earlier civilisation as a context for marital decay is

also an important theme in Godard’s Le Mépris (Fr/It, 1963),
which builds its account of marital disenchantment – the
‘contempt’ of the film’s title – around a film company’s
attempt to re-make The Odyssey on the island of Capri. Here
complex juxtapositions are created between the statues of the
past and the characters of the present, and between the
ancient mythology of heroism and the modern-day bull-
headedness of Hollywood’s determination to corral the past
for consumption in the present.
Odysseus/Ulysses remains a constant reference-point for

journeys into Mediterranean identity. In Luna’s modern-day
amalgam of seagoing myths, Sound of the Sea (Spain, 2001)
the protagonist is once again Ulises, no less, a teacher who is
haunted by a sea fantasy from the Aeneid, and whose
mysterious sea journey during the film brings him home years
later for a further, final voyage to disaster. Links to mythology,
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and to the making of myth, are repeatedly inscribed in the

Mediterreanean films.
They are explicitly announced in the opening titles of

Thompson’s war film The Guns of Navarone (UK/USA, 1961).
The film opens with a caption thanking to the Greek
authorities and people for their help in the making of the film,
seen over a master image of a ruined temple. The temple is
explored in a photographic and graphic montage as the
narration continues, weaving a rhetoric around issues to do
with legend, war, and civilisation, and the relationships
between gods and mortals, between past and present,
between islands and the sea.
The Historic Present

Sometimes the relationship between the past and present is
more personal, and also the organising principle of the film. In
the case of Ozon’s 5x2 (Fr, 2004) we go backwards through a
crumbling romantic relationship to discover, in the end, its
origins in an encounter on the coast of Italy. Preminger’s
Bonjour Tristesse (USA/UK, 1958) is indeed an exploration of
the existential emptiness and anomie of late adolescence
amongst the wealthy of Paris, but these contemporary
‘moods’ have a material basis in the actualities of the recent
past: the film is told in a gigantic flashback, from the black-
and-white of Paris in the present to the colours of the
Mediterranean, remembered by the teenage Cécile just as it
was a year ago.
That was when her father Raymond’s lover Anne met her
death – whether by accident or suicide remains unclear – her
car crashing into the sea off the coastal road as she raced away
from the scene of her emotional betrayal by Raymond.
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Raymond has survived unchanged, and has quickly resumed

his playboy lifestyle. But his daughter has learned a key lesson
in life, and, as she grows into womanhood, she remains
shadowed by the fate of another, older woman in the recent
past.
For Cécile, the lessons from history are more profound. In a

film which has developed its own discourse on the differences
between the young and old, lessons learned a year ago at the
age of seventeen continue to haunt her as an eighteen year-
old, and prevent any simple passage to maturity. Still more
dramatic examples of the past erupting into the present occur
in Mackenzie’s Voyage (USA/UK, 1993) when a Mediterranean
cruise designed to heal a marriage is invaded by a
psychopathic friend from the past in a form of identity
vampirism which also informs Plein Soleil (Clément, Fr/It,
1960) and the Ripley films.
The difficulties of the past are sometimes also overwhelmed

by the historic present. Modern international terrorism, for
example, shockingly terminates the gentle and genteel
discourse on history which has occupied so much of the
minimalist dramatic space of character and setting in de
Oliveira’s A Talking Picture (Portugal, 2003). Here the past is
something to be explored and mourned in what at first
appears to be an unusually didactic and pellucid vision of the
past. As a cruise progresses from Lisbon towards Bombay via
Marseilles, Naples, Athens, Istanbul, Cairo and Aden, a
Portuguese history professor, Rosa Maria, gives her daughter
Maria Joana a potted history of the significance of each port
of call.
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‘History’ is both safely ‘past’, but also essential to recall, the

film seems to be suggesting, engendering a stately progression
into the film’s second ‘act’, where language takes on a still
more central role. Here, at the table presided over by the
ship’s captain (played by John Malkovich), a different kind of
talk develops, around notions of language, nationality and
identity, with intercultural contributions by his guests
Delphine (Catherine Deneuve), Francesca (Stefania
Sandrinelli) and Helena (Irene Papas), each speaking their own
language (French, Italian, and Greek respectively).
The third and final ‘act’ is both punctual and brutal: after
leaving the Mediterranean for the Gulf, the ship is destroyed
by a terrorist bomb. A film made in 2003, telling a story set in
July 2001, thus offers us a fateful reconfiguration of
contemporary history: the history of the Mediterranean, its
expert and her offspring, have been wiped out by unexplained
forces which terminate both history and with it the story of
the film. A serene highway has become a disaster zone. Where
does history start now? And how should it be recalled? Does
talking, or a talking picture, or even ‘talking pictures’, really
help?
1
There are two film versions of Robert Ludlum’s 1980 novel The
Bourne Identity: Doug Liman’s version, starring Matt Damon,
appeared in 2002, following Roger Young’s 1988 version, starring
Richard Chamberlain.
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14 / Sensory Transgressions
for a Re-imagined Australia:
Shortland’s Somersault
Felicity Ford
Sensuous Transgression and the Abject
Film scholarship has long been preoccupied with the complex

relationship between spectator and screen. More recent
discussions have shifted the focus from what is seen to what
is felt, heralding a renewed emphasis on the sensuous
potential of the cinematic text. Drawing upon the work of
Vivian Sobchack, Laura U. Marks and Jennifer Barker, I
consider how these approaches may extend to a global
sense: can nationhood be touched, sensed and felt? In this
essay I investigate how a fictional Australia fantasised by
white male colonisers is challenged by Cate Shortland’s 2004
film Somersault through sensory transgressions of the visual
field. Somersault is a coming-of-age Australian drama about
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a young woman called Heidi who escapes to the icy

snowfields of Jindabyne in search of connection. The film was
nominated for a record 15 Australian Film Institute awards in
the year of its release, winning 13 of those. It received
considerable critical acclaim and continues to mark an
important development in the consumption and discussion
of Australian films by a local audience.
This investigation is anchored by the understanding that the

cinematic image is a powerful tool in the construction of
national identity and that by transgressing the visual codes of
cinema a new national identity can be brought into being. In
my analysis of Shortland’s film, I will isolate three key ways in
which the visual register challenges the conventional
cinematic representation of Australia through sensory
transgression. My definition of sensory transgression is
informed by the work of Julia Kristeva and, in particular, her
theory of the abject.
In Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, Kristeva defines

the abject as that which “lies outside, beyond the set, and
does not seem to agree to the latter’s rules of the game. And
yet, from its place of banishment, the abject does not cease
challenging its master.”1 Transgression is understood here in
a structural sense as a distinct break in the visual form.
Existing as either as an excess or an absence, transgression
subverts the structuring laws and through this draws
attention to the boundaries that govern the cinematic text.
The Australian Image Revised

Australia is routinely imagined in the cinematic sphere as a
sunburnt desert with pathways of bitumen country roads
melting under the tireless gaze of the sun. Quintessential
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Australian films such as Crocodile Dundee (Faiman, 1986) and

Mad Max (Miller, 1979) present this imagined Australia as a
hardened landscape of golden sands, sapphire blue skies and
glistening masculine bodies that either wrestle crocodiles or
participate in dangerous road races on deserted outback
highways. Australia in this common imaginary is white, male
and colonised. Shortland’s decision to position the narrative
of her film in the icy snowfields of regional Australia thus
marks a notable shift in geographic focus.
This shift replaces the traditional colour palette of red dust

and golden, sun-soaked deserts with an icy kaleidoscope of
blues from a bright sapphire and cobalt hue to muted indigo
and powder blue shades. The dry barren deserts of the
outback are exchanged for frozen lakes and a constant
stream of snowflakes that dance across the screen.
Shortland’s Australia is still seemingly desolate and
unforgiving, but there is movement underneath the frozen
surface and the possibility of the ice breaking, melting, and
becoming a potentially life-giving source. Drifting away from
the harsh, unrelenting sunburnt outback, this re-imagined
Australia is fluid and changeable.
Shortland’s revision of the Australian image is not simply a

matter of a new colour palette but, more importantly, a
structural shift in the way in which these colours are used.
There is an excess of blue that floods the frame and drowns
the image. Colour, here, becomes a colonising force that
saturates the visual imaginary. It spreads out over the
cinematic image, pushes up against the frame and dominates
the space. The saturation of the visual field in blue may be
understood at some level as a technical mirroring of the
colonial violence of Australia’s past: a horrific and traumatic
134
history that continues to haunt the stories, discussions and

imaginings of today.
Boundary and Colour

If this saturation is understood as a transgression of the
structuring laws of colour balance, then it is perhaps useful
as this juncture to ruminate on the etymology of ‘colour’
itself. The online OUP Oxford English Dictionary defines
‘colour’ as the “property possessed by an object of producing
different sensations on the eye as a result of the way it
reflects or emits light.” Colour is therefore directly connected
to sensation: it touches us and is perceived through this
touch. If colour is capable of touching the spectator then
Shortland’s surplus suggests a much more intimate - and
possibly intimidating - sensory experience.
This excess of colour is an excess of sensation that

transgresses the balance of colour in the frame and tests the
governing borders of the cinematic image. Shortland’s
revision of the colour palette and chromatic excess fosters a
more intimate sensory relationship between the spectator
and the image by drawing attention to the permeability of
the boundary. This is a distinct shift from the Australia
fantasised by white male colonisers. In order to appreciate
the sharpness of this departure, it may be beneficial to
consider Faiman’s Crocodile Dundee as a useful counterpoint
to Shortland’s blue, blurred, and bleeding frame.
Faiman’s frame is clearly divided between an even balance of

red land and blue sky. There is no blurring or distortions to
the focus. The colour palette is balanced and prioritises
natural shades that lend an air of realism to the scene. The
seemingly organic use of light, shading and texture ensures
135
that the spectator is not distracted by the question of excess

or absence. Instead colour here complements the visual
image and provides the spectator with clean lines of
distinction and the ‘right’ amount of saturation. The tanned
muscular body of Paul Hogan defiantly stands on top of the
conquered land, mirroring the order found within the frame.
Here, Australia is wild, but with the right knife and know-
how, the land is tameable. This imagining of Australia as
something fixed and certain does not lend itself easily to
inquisitive enquiry and keeps the spectator’s questioning
gaze at a distance. Giving the impression that everything is in
its place and more so that this structure is natural, the form
and structure of colour here presents the borders as
impenetrable and closed off to any unauthorised breaches in
saturation, tone, or texture.
If form then functions as a potential ally in the policing of

visual borders, then Shortland’s structural sensory
transgressions radically re-envision what Australia looks like
and how the spectator engages with this re-imagining. In
direct comparison to the clean lines, sharp focus and
naturalised shades and textures of Crocodile Dundee,
Somersault’s visual field is one of fluctuating absence and
excess with varying degrees of focus and meandering camera
movements. By blurring the cinematic image, Shortland
problematises the spectator’s vision and breaks the
unspoken agreement between the spectator and the screen.
An Alternative Vision
This technique draws attention to the act of viewing. We
become aware of our own role in the images being projected
on the screen. In one scene, a high-powered hose against the
136
window of the petrol station effectively dissolves the image

of a face. This destruction of the face mirrors the dissolving
boundaries governing the visual field. As the force of the
water blasts against the glass, the face becomes unreadable.
Water here becomes a force of destruction but also suggests
the possibility of a new beginning after the storm. Through
these formal and structural sensory transgressions, the film
draws us into the re-imagined Australia: a place of excess,
fluidity, and change.
In order to explore how these cinematic disruptions might

engage with the structuring ideologies of nationhood, it is
perhaps useful to consider Tina Chanter’s contention in
which “Identificatory regimes operate according to
imaginaries that facilitate and support symbolic matrices in
ways that remain inarticulate or invisible to dominant
representations.” Chanter goes on to suggest that by
disrupting these systems “film can bring into relief alternative
imaginaries, and in doing so can open up the possibility of
transforming the terms in which dominant socio-symbolic
representations construct identification as normative.”2
Shortland’s formal and structural transgressions, here,

become tools in which to radically revise the image of
Australia fantasised by white colonials. They directly
challenge the traditional representation of nationhood by
drawing attention to the constructed nature of the imaginary
and provide an alternative vision of Australia in the liminal
space of this transgression. By linking these disruptions to
the sensory, Shortland encourages the spectator to become
physically complicit in these changes, to feel the excess, and
to be moved.
137
Movement and Tactility: Australa in Flux

Movement is of course central to the sensory experience of
watching a film. Motion pictures are indeed pictures in
motion: the magic comes from how convincing that
movement is. A successful film may move us, sweep us off
our feet, or transport us to another place. Cinematic
movement can be found in the gestures of characters but
also in the way in which the camera is manoeuvred to
capture that action. In Somersault, Heidi dances in slow
motion and covers her eyes as if to question the reliability of
vision. Her movements are mirrored by the gentle camera
that creeps along the snowfields and lingers on the quiet
expanse of the frozen lake.
The actual physical act of a somersault involves an energetic

burst of movement in which a person flips over in the air and
lands on their feet. It requires the body to spin 360 degrees,
a movement that brings the body almost back to where it
started: the same, but different. Much like a somersault, the
film viewing experience encourages spectators to propel
themselves into filmic space. It is a space that exposes them
to a series of different visions and sounds that seek to
provoke a sensory response and then, as the film draws to a
close, spectators ‘return’ to their seats, but in a different
place from where they started.
In The Address of the Eye Vivian Sobchack understands film

as “an act of seeing that makes itself seen, an act of hearing
that makes itself heard, an act of physical and reflective
movement that makes itself reflexively felt and understood.”3
Through listening, watching, and feeling we become
entangled in the sensory experience of the film. Through this
138
entanglement, the imagined fantasy of nationhood is able to

reach out to the spectator and connect on a sensory level.
In The Tactile Eye, Jennifer Barker draws upon the idea of

“ambidexterity” to explain how we, as spectators, “are
doubly situated. We have the distinct feeling of being in two
places at once, even if we never literally leave our seats.”4
Spectators are therefore encouraged to situate themselves in
the cinematic body and move with it. By responding to the
movement of the characters and the camera, the spectator
becomes further entangled in the imagined vision of
nationhood.
This contrasts sharply with the motionless landscape shots of

the outback found in films such as Miller’s Mad Max. While
his film may engage with movement in relation to
choreographed car chases and high-energy action sequences,
the gestures of the camera and those of the characters
within the frame are always dependent on the narrative and
never operate as a separate entity, of their own accord. In
contrast, the slowly creeping camera in Somersault keeps the
image in constant movement. It suggests that the re-
imagined Australia is one in flux.
By tenderly caressing the frozen landscape with its gaze, the

camera creates a sense of intimacy between vision and
touch. The gentle touch of the camera is echoed in the
gestures of Heidi as she reaches out to touch, taste and test
the boundaries of sensation. In several key scenes, the
spectator is urged to consider the sensations of tactility and
the look as a finger caresses paper; to think about what it is
like to have your palm stroked by another hand; to imagine
how the tattooed skin feels under the hesitant touch; and to
follow fingers as they trace the patterns on bathroom tiles.
139
Movement, here, encourages the spectator to draw upon

memories of tactile experiences to ‘colour in’ the sensory
imaginary.
Watching as Heidi’s hands reach out and caress paper, skin,

and tiles, the spectator is reminded of what it means to
touch. Barker explains that “Exploring cinema’s tactility thus
opens up the possibility of cinema as an intimate experience
and of our relationship with cinema as a close connection,
rather than as a distant experience of observation, which the
notion of cinema as a purely visual medium presumes.”5
These moments of touching and reaching out thus allow the
spectator to become further entangled in the cinematic text.
They close up the space between the spectator and the
screen and blur the differentiation between what is being
seen and what is being felt.
Challenging the Authority and Centrality of Vision

This echoes Barker’s sentiment that cinema “has significance
for us, […] it comes close to us, and […] it literally occupies our
sphere. We share things with it: texture, spatial orientation,
comportment, rhythm, and vitality.”6 The sensory
entanglement created by the soft camera movements in
Somersault and the repeated imagery of touching, feeling
and reaching out invites the spectator to occupy this re-
imagined Australian landscape and to share Heidi’s tactile
journey. By using the visual field to repeatedly draw our
attention to motion, gesture and tactility, Shortland’s film
questions the authority and centrality of vision.
Somersault can then be understood as a reaction against the

vision-centric language of cinema. The film repeatedly
problematises the spectator’s vision and breaks the
140
unspoken agreement between the spectator and the screen.

Shortland plays around with focus to obscure the defining
borders within the frame and to dissolve characters, objects
and places into shapeless blurs of colours and movement. As
the camera tracks Heidi walking across the snowfields, the
focus drops out, blurring the image and allowing the dark
blue landscape to bleed into the pale grey skies as a
disembodied figure dissolves into the image.
Our compromised vision in these fleeting moments means

that we are unable to distinguish the precise contours of the
scene and draws attention to our desire for a clear,
identifiable image. The focus then returns and brings
definition and a sense of order to the previously structure-
less blue haze. This shift accentuates the structuring
boundaries of the image and the spectator is made
reflexively aware of the act of viewing.
If cinema is indeed the “apotheosis of the visible [that] offers

itself to the plethoric deployment of fantasies”, as Kristeva
contends, then these sensory transgressions, both formal
and structural, nurture the possibility for renewal and the
reinvigoration of the national identity. 7 These disruptions to
the visual field suggest that the boundaries are much more
permeable than we may realise; that these outdated
fantasies of nationhood are not fixed; and, in order to
properly engage with the dramatic social, political and
economic fluctuations of modern day life, that they should
regularly be brought into question through such sensory
transgressions.
141
1
Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, New York:
Columbia University Press, 1982, p. 2.
2
Tina Chanter, The Picture of Abjection: Film, Fetish, and the
Nature of Difference, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2008,
p. 1.
3
Vivian Sobchack, The Address of the Eye: A Phenomenology of Film
Experience, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992, p. 4.
4
Jennifer Barker, The Tactile Eye: Touch and the Cinematic
Experience, Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009, p. 84.
5
Ibid, p. 2.
6
Ibid.
7
Julia Kristeva, The Powers and Limits of Psychoanalysis, vol. 2,
Intimate Revolt, New York: Columbia University Press, 2002, p. 69.
142
15 / History on Russian Television:

Solzhenitsyn’s In the First Circle
Tatiana Suprun
Russian History and the Media

The freedom of the media became one of the most striking
features of Russian society in the early 1990s, with substantial
coverage being devoted to mass persecution of a political,
religious or racial character. However, the general public
appeared to be reluctant to give serious attention to the
period of fierce repression which began soon after the
revolution in 1917 and lasted for almost forty years. Alexander
Solzhenitsyn, the author of The Gulag Archipelago and other
books about this most tragic period in Russian history, thus
remains a controversial cultural figure.
The writings of Solzhenitsyn do not belong to the kind of

literature usually called ‘fiction’ because, being strongly
autobiographical, they have a documentary value and need to
143
be understood as forms of historical evidence. Without being

fully objective and precise they are extremely valuable in that
they help readers understand an important former epoch and
the people who were living in it. This is why the release in 2006
of the TV series In the First Circle, based on Solzhenitsyn’s
autobiographical novel of 1968 - directed by Gleb Panfilov,
and narrated by Solzhenitsyn himself - became such a
significant event in both social and televisual terms.
The series was widely seen: nearly a quarter of the television

audience watched all ten episodes, and there was an even
larger audience for the televised discussion which followed
the final episode.1 This essay looks at the ideas expressed by
the film-makers and at reactions to the series on the part of
the academic, media and political community. The current
political situation in Russia seems to increase the
contemporary relevance of the series: it reminds the viewers
of some of the tough moral and political choices they may face
in the foreseeable future.
In the early spring of 2014 one of the Russian National TV

channels again showed the series, soon after several so called
‘colour’ revolutions had occurred in the former Soviet
republics. The series has been perceived as an historical item
par excellence, primarily paying tribute to people’s sufferings
during the Stalin years, although the idea of its universal
relevance and educational value for future generations has
always been there. Now, a decade or so later, those self-same
choices are staring us in the face. The future proved to be
closer than expected.
Panfilov’s series is not the only adaptation of the novel. In

1973 Alexander Ford made his Danish/Swedish version of The
First Circle, starring Gunter Malzacher, and in 1992 Sheldon
144
Larry released his American/French co-production with

Robert Powell in the leading role. The latter was considered by
the novelist’s wife Natalia Solzhenitsyn to be a more serious
attempt to create a cinematographic version of the book, but
unsuitable for the Russian viewer, who would burst out
laughing at the sight of the State Security Minister pouring
vodka from a samovar (a kitchen utensil for boiling water).2
Folllowing on from these, Panfilov’s version intends to convey

ideas about individual moral and political dilemmas,
suggesting that viewers should think, compare and make
choices for themselves. Hence the three most important
aspects of the series: first, what people say, second, how their
subsequent actions relate to their words; and third, why it may
be relevant to those who watch it.
Ideas and Images

The film shows the two worlds of the post-war Soviet Union:
the world of the imprisoned, and the world of the free. The
prisoners are mostly scientists and engineers; those who are
free include people in some way connected with the gaol
where the main action is unfolding - KGB officers with degrees
in science or engineering, members of their families, guards of
all ranks and even Stalin and Minister of National Security
Abakumov.
The imprisoned specialists are working on inventing various

devices for the needs of the army and, primarily, for the Soviet
Secret Service. Their living conditions are bearable: it is warm,
there is enough food, decent clothes and good company. But
moral choices remain difficult and those who refuse to
collaborate return to the hardships and privations of the
deadly labour camps.
145
Tough dilemmas also face people who are not living in

captivity. The most controversial story is that of a successful
young diplomat, who gradually begins to understand the evil
aspects of the system and tries to prevent something that he
sees as a great disaster. He telephones the American Embassy
and tells the person at the other end of the line that Soviet
spies are going to steal nuclear secrets and, if they are
successful, the Soviet Union will make the atomic bomb. Later
a device made by the prisoners helps the secret police identify
the voice and arrest the diplomat.
The film also shows the lot of prisoners’ wives, who sometimes
spend decades in waiting; young women officers who fall in
love or lust with the men they had been taught to believe were
terrible criminals and evil-doers; jailers with and without
degrees thinking about careers, feeling scared or furious –
they all have to make highly consequential decisions. And
before making a decision, and before acting in accordance
with it, characters talk.
They are in acute need of discussion and argument and they

speak again and again about things of universal importance.
The authors of the film emphasise this point in particular. One
of the most heated discussions about the relations between
the state and the individual occurs in a prison room around
1947, but suddenly behind the two arguing men the viewer
sees present-day Moscow with modern cars moving against
the background of the towers of the Kremlin – all very
unexpected and probably a little naïve, but most
unambiguous.
In the course of the film its characters pose questions

regarding the past, present and future of their country, they
talk about individual ethics and the State, arguing about the
146
principles of a good and fair society, what kind of people make

up the nation, and what to do with technical progress. One of
the core issues is treachery/treason/betrayal, again both in
relation to the State and to individual people: friends,
colleagues, wives, and husbands.
Messages and Responses

When the series was broadcast , many were delighted to see
that it was faithful to Solzhenitsyn and his ideas. Back then I
tried to talk about it with nearly everyone I met, but, sadly,
few had seen it or read the book. The TV film together with
the book can and must be thought of as evidence, in a spiritual
rather than a factual sense. It is not only evidence of the
regime’s crimes, obviously important though this is; it also
testifies to the possibility of retaining a sense of humanity,
dignity and inner freedom within the confines of a totalitarian
state.
Several prisoners are seen to be prepared to give up their

comparatively comfortable living conditions and return to
labour camps, thus retaining their dignity and inner peace. In
this choice there is no explicit religious motivation, but there
is a mystery. Panfilov is pointing to the presence of something
very important, which made the whole situation feel really
optimistic, because, despite all tragedies, there is in it a certain
manly vigour: he is the winner who does not sell out, who does
not give up his honour and dignity, regardless of the
consequences of that choice - whether they relate to our
material well-being or even our physical existence.
This kind of attitude, of course, is often found in people with

religious convictions. In the book religious implications are not
very strong; they are still weaker in the film, but it is possible
147
to discern them. The writer, born in 1917, had been an

enthusiastic member of Communist youth organisations and a
sincere follower of Lenin. His view of the world was to change,
but the theme of religion was never explored fully enough for
the reader to be sure about his attitudes in this sphere.
Everything became clear in August 2008, when his wife - now

his widow – explained that he had chosen to have a proper
Confession and Communion before dying. As regards the
political relationship between the man and the state, the
director’s understanding of the film’s message is that people
actually did not want to be in opposition to the state. They
wanted to enjoy their own position as individuals, but the
state had made opponents of them and then treated them
accordingly.
Several TV and radio programmes were devoted to discussions

around the series, with many telephone calls from viewers and
listeners. The overall impression was that the historical and
spiritual aspects of the series were so important that they felt
it was not appropriate to use too many ‘artistic’ cinematic
techniques. Still, almost everyone applauded the excellence of
the acting while some viewers found the film rather weak
artistically.
It is significant, however, that when the writer Alla Bossart

expressed her disappointment in a somewhat condescending
manner in the radio programme Echo Moskvy, the majority of
listeners who phoned in did not share her attitude, saying that
the film was really interesting, and that what was really
holding the viewer was its quality and the question of the
match between its style and content.
148
Bossart belongs to the ultra-liberal camp, whose members are

typically rather hostile to Solzhenitsyn and to his work, which
may seem strange given his life-long commitment to social
and individual freedom. The reason for such attitudes is that
instead of uniting the nation (youth in particular) in
opposition to the ‘Red renaissance’ and ‘nuclear orthodoxy’
(meaning the Russian Orthodox Church), instead of assisting
in the creation of the new (liberal) national ideology, the film
- like the original book in relation to its readers - invites
viewers to watch and contemplate actions and ideas that as
such are not suitable for any simple ideological construction.
Besides, the film “does not give a direct assessment of the
Stalinist regime”.3
Less surprising is the position of some Russian conservatives

who strongly disapprove of the film (and novel) because of
one of the characters attempts to prevent the USSR from
having the nuclear bomb. As Elena Tchudinova put it: “The
Russian reader does not have any need for a ‘good’ literary
character who commits treachery against his country.
Empathy and sympathy with Volodin [the character] will not
help future diplomats and other young people to become
patriots and defenders of their homeland”.4
Again, just as in Soviet times and earlier, many want books and
films and pictures to serve as teaching material for the direct
inculcation of attitudes required by a given social group. We
may argue that the book can remind us that we should not
mistake what we do not see for the non-existent or, in the
words of Nicholas Taleb, mistake the absence of evidence for
the evidence of absence.5 We could add that it is important to
acknowledge the sheer complexity of life. Sixty years down the
line, for example, it is perhaps understandable that Soviet
Russia really did experience an urgent need to obtain the A-
149
bomb as a geo-political factor in the re-balancing of world

power. In the late 1940s, however, it was far from obvious -
particularly for impressionable young diplomats.
The position of the viewers who found the film artistically

weak reminded me of how some of my more liberal friends
had talked about the book long before the film was made:
“nothing artistic, all publicistic” (an attempt to translate a
quote from Mayakovsky’s epic poem Vladimir Ilytch Lenin).6 I
prefer what I see as the more imaginative vision of the novel
expressed by Heinrich Böll, who admired its
“enormous span, numerous girders, and several dimensions; In

this novel we see huge vaults, a multitude of arches, several
dimensions: literary, philosophical, political, and social […] it is
a cathedral among novels with a stress precisely calculated to
endure […] By way of Camus and Sartre and beyond,
Solzhenitsyn concludes the age-old discussion of ‘imprisoned’
and ‘free’, not metaphorically, not philosophically, but within
the material itself …. “.7
Soon after the series was shown, in one of the discussions the
question arose as to whether the release of the film had
become a socially significant event. There was no agreement
among the participants: even some of those who recognised
the artistic qualities of the film and relevance of its content
argued that one-quarter of the viewing audience represented
a relatively small number of viewers. And yet, in Russia as
elsewhere, the true scale and significance of cultural
phenomena sometimes becomes clear only decades later.
This was the case, for example, with Bulgakov’s novel The
Master and Margarita. Written between 1928 and 1940, but
not published until 1967 and then in uncensored form as late
150
as 1973, it was only discovered by most Russians in the post-

Soviet era. I believe that the televising of Panfilov’s series was
a significant event. The lessons from history seem to have
been learned; official propaganda is never taken uncritically
nowadays; people check and re-check what they hear -
relatively easy given business trips as well as friends and
relatives which many have all over the country and in the
former Soviet republics. The least critical, perhaps, are those
who have lived abroad for a long time – one finds that they
often get overwhelmed by nostalgia.
1
‘Telelidery s Arinoy Borodinoy’, online at
http://www.kommersant.ru/doc/650063, 6-12 February 2006.
2
‘Сериал В круге первом’, online at
http://www.vokrug.tv/product/show/The_First_Circle/.
3
‘Сериал В круге первом’, loc. cit.
4
Elena Tchudinova, ‘Kak ‘Krug Pervy’ Okazalsya Vtorym’, Expert
Online, no. 6, 2006, online at
http://expert.ru/expert/2006/06/v_kruge_pervom_60567/.
5
Nassim Nicholas Taleb, The Black Swan: The Impact of the highly
Improbable, New York: Random House, 2007, p. 55.
6
Vladimir Mayakovsky, Vladimir Ilyich Lenin: A Poem (1924),
University of Hawaii Press, 2003.
7
Heinrich Böll, ‘The Imprisoned Word of Solzhenitsyn’s The First
Circle’ (1969), in John B. Dunlop, Richard Haugh, and Alexis Klimoff
(eds.), Aleksander Solzhenitsyn: Critical Essays and Documentary
Materials, New York: Macmillan, 1975, pp. 219-220, 225.
151
16 / Archiving Balkan History:

The Films of the Manakia Brothers
Geli Mademli
Journeys in Film History

In Theodoros Angelopoulos’ film Ulysses' Gaze (Greece et al.,
1995), the lead character is a prominent Greek-American
director (played by Harvey Keitel) who returns to his
hometown in Greece for the première of his latest film. At the
same time, he pursues a secret mission to locate and reclaim
three reels of undeveloped film shot in the early 1900s (and
the earliest in Greece) by pioneer film-makers the Manakia
brothers, Yannakis and Milton, which seem to be missing
from the original collection of the Macedonian National Film
Archive in Skopje. His odyssey takes him from Greece to
Macedonia and then on to Bulgaria, Romania, Serbia, and
Bosnia.
152
While this narrative schema serves the director's purpose to

portray the conditions and the sense of anguish in the
Balkans after the war in Yugoslavia, at the same time it
encapsulates some of the main questions for contemporary
archival practice in the cinema. Are the archives inherently
and literally situating knowledge, and do they need an actual
physical territory as their field of reference?
Do archives, whether analogue or digital, and regardless of

their form, incline to mapping and de-limiting domains? Or is
it the case that the analogue to digital transition has altered
the spatial experience of the archive, leading to what David
Harvey described as time-space compression, turning the
archival process into a system of representation which, like
any other of its kind, includes a “spatialization of sorts which
automatically freezes the flow of experience and in so doing
distorts what it strives to represent”?1
This essay will attempt to map the variants of this set of

questions, drawing on the case of the collection of the films
of the Manakia brothers, shot within a time span of almost
three decades (1907–late 1920s), and digitally restored and
digitised by early 2013. This collection provides a fruitful
example, and not only because it provides a key reference-
point for the long, ethnocentric discussion on issues of state-
formation and the construction of national identities in the
Balkan region.
There are certain specificities of the cinematic medium which

help us examine the relation between filmic representations
and material inscriptions on film, and therefore issues to do
with the physical and virtual space before and beyond the
advent of digital. This essay will attempt to examine the way
in which digital archives - contemporary deposits of
153
knowledge, according to the definition offered by Derrida -

insinuate a model of governance over space, despite the fact
that they purport to transcend historical narratives or
territorial limits and borders. If this particular analogue film
archive is connected with a series of diplomatic activities of
geopolitical empowerment, access to the digital version of
the same archive can help us examine and specify whether or
not the archive is any longer subject to a special form of
spatial experience.
The Line between Two Frames

The protagonist of Angelopoulos' film was not the only one
who was committed to a road-trip through the heartlands of
the Balkan peninsula for the sake of the Manakia collection.
In real life, Igor Stardelov, the Head of the Cinémathèque of
Macedonia and the lead curator in charge of the digitisation
of the collection, has recounted his experience of transferring
the reels to a laboratory in Budapest for the initial restoration
of the film. This involved the careful handling of nitrate stock
and, “since travelling by car all the way in the Federal
Republic of Yugoslavia is too dangerous, we had a police
escort, to avoid any unexpected, unpredictable troubles”.2
The reason for this precarious journey, however, was directly

connected to a material aspect of the fragile film stock. The
standard copying/printing machine which was available in
the vicinity wasn't appropriate, because of a problem in the
position of the frame: unlike standard films, where the line
which separates two frames is drawn in the interval between
the perforators on either side of the frame, in the case of the
Manakia footage it was situated right on the perforations
(which were equally remarkably ample), a deviation of 2mm
from the standards of the era. When a standard projector is
154
used for the screening of this material, the result is flickering

and unstable. However, this instability does not only apply to
the filmic images found in the 2,840-metre film material
(double-negative and double-positive), but also to the larger
history of the region, as seen through the personal lens of the
life and work of these early cinematographers.
Yannakis and Milton Manakia lived and worked in Macedonia

- a term which was applied by the Ottoman Empire, from the
late 19th Century onwards, as a territorial designation for the
region contained within the three Ottoman vilayets
(provinces) of Salonica, Monastir, and Kosovo, which included
no less than twelve millets (clusters of the subjugated
populations according to religion). The Manakias were of
Vlach origin. The Vlachs were “mainly transhumant
shepherds speaking a Latin-based language, formed scattered
enclaves mainly in southern and south-western Macedonia;
they were fairly numerous in the Pindus range and cities like
Monastir”.3 They were largely marginalised by other local
communities and were the last to be recognised by the
Ottoman regime.
In 1898 the Manakias established a photographic studio in

Ioannina (in present-day Greece) and in 1904 one in Bitola
(Monastir, present-day Macedonia). In 1905, Yannakis bought
a motion picture camera (a Bioscope 300) from London and
started filming their first films in their hometown, Avdella.
They subsisted on little money whilst creating photographic
portraits of distinguished people - kings, politicians,
diplomats, bishops, educators, and so on.
Their films, meanwhile, focus on everyday activities and

events involving anonymous people. Their body of work,
which amounts to approximately 12,000 photographs and 47
155
film titles, was shot in 125 different locations in the Balkans,

in a period of history marked by the two Balkan Wars,
independence from the Ottoman Empire, and the Great War.
In the 1950s, after a number of negotiations, Milton Manakia
sold their archive in the Socialist Federal Republic of
Yugoslavia.
Ever since, as Stardelov explains, the main danger facing the

archive is not the probability of physical decay, but the claims
of territorial authority articulated on both sides of the Greek-
Macedonian border. The archive is at the same time
instrumentalised (so that it can function as a map of the
geographical region) and also territorialised, (used as a means
of display of power, where the contextualization of the
archive is based on dominant historical, space-oriented
narratives that get in the way of the content and its material
analysis). A major question arises: can digital technology
remove the thin line that constitutes the border between two
frames of mind, in the same way that it did in the case of the
frames on a film strip?
Keepers of the Frame

The medium of film has often been analysed by cognitive
theorists as a medium that is per se used for the mapping of
mental models, where narrative structures are spatial
visualisations of one’s efforts towards comprehension,
constituting what is known as ‘narrative cartography’. 4 The
photographic film strip constitutes the raw material that
provides the recording surface, the light-sensitive layer that
interacts with the external environment, and dictates the
process as well, since only the film’s trajectory around the
projector lamp achieves the desired result.
156
On another level, the consumption of this art of ‘recorded

movement’ (to recall the early experiments of Muybridge), is
governed by a paradox. That is to say, while viewing
conditions demand the spectator’s complete physical
engagement and the concentration of all his/her sensory
organs while the film plot unfolds (and, while the film strip
unwinds from one reel and is taken up by the other), s/he is
offered in return the endless permutations of virtual forms
and auditory stimuli. At the same time, every film is an
archive of frames (in analogue technology, the film is an
archive of photographs, in digital formats we can equally
speak of a certain number of frames per second). In that
sense, spatiality in the film medium is a constant negotiation
between a mobile space and ‘a space of places’.
Applying the ideas of Terry Eastwood, who asserts that there

are common characteristics in any kind of archive, regardless
of their format or content,5 one can propose that the
photographic artefacts in a film print are interrelated
(through logical coherence and time sequence); natural, (as
they belong to the physical world); authentic and unique
(even in a number of copies). They form a closed system
where audiovisuality is the regulatory system.
If we take a look at a film print, both images and sounds are

products of graphic representations – photographic
negatives, wave-forms, and pixels. In digital formats, this
distinction becomes more obvious, as then the source is
reduced to a set of algorithms and diagrams. In other words,
the audiovisual doesn't apply as a term to the ‘nature’ of the
medium itself, but to its ability to address certain areas of
human perception.
157
The Archive and the Dispositif

In the case of archiving film, we are confronted by a
procedural mise-en-abîme, the issue of archiving the archive
in the era of digital. The impact of digitisation on traditional
analogue preservation technologies has been discussed by
Giovanna Foassati amongst others. Examining various major
film archives, such as the National Danish Film Museum in
Copenhagen, Amsterdam’s EYE Film Institute and Anthology
Film Archives in New York, she observes that they follow
different philosophies, basing their decisions on whether
they perceive film as an object of art, or as a dispositif.
In the first case, the politics of presentation in the institution

demand that the film will be screened in its original format,
raising issues of ‘aura’ of the kind famously raised by Walter
Benjamin. In that respect, materiality is defined in its more
pure and primordial essence, linking the material to the
sensorial world. In the second case the notion of the
dispositif implies a different approach, not only to film
preservation, but possibly to the construction of different
fields of knowledge.
Fossati herself defines it, in broad terms, as the viewing

situation where “film meets its user”6, recalling the theory
introduced by Jean-Louis Baudry, which is most commonly
known in English as “apparatus theory”. The French theorist
distinguishes between “the appareil de base, which implies
the equipment and the operations needed for making a film
and projecting it, and the dispositif, which implies exclusively
the projection, including the subject to whom the projection is
directed. In this way, the appareil de base includes the film
stock, the camera, the processing, the montage in its
technical aspect, as well as the projection dispositif.” 7
158
Two main questions arise when reading Baudry. First, what

was it eventually that was preserved and restored throughout
the history of film archives? The evident answer would be the
different examples of appareils de base – indeed, the early
photo-chemical and later digital restoration methods
concentrate on the recovery of the film stock, which is getting
increasingly rare. The paradox, however, is that the
foundation of different institutions devoted to the history of
the medium - the cinémathèques that are, in a way, the
physical interfaces of the analogue film archives - was based
simply on the exposition of the vast variety of screening
apparatuses.
If film stocks are the archives, then cinémathèques function

as museums that attempt to collect reproductions of
dispositifs, which are essentially fragmented: while the film
stocks are kept in vaults located usually on the outskirts of
cities, on the margins of the urban webs, film museums try to
familiarise visitors with their archives by stimulating with
digital tools the technique of the dispositif – and not the
technology of the medium. In other words, the priority is the
preservation of a spatial referent.
The second question that arises brings us to the digital realm:

how does Baudry’s model look in the digital age? What is the
material, conceptual, or strategic framework that makes the
filmic experience possible? Is it the set of algorithms and
codes in which the film is encoded at the point of its
conception and the machinery that allows its reproduction by
means of similar terminals? Could it be that the further we
elaborate and excavate the potential for the making and
preserving digital films, the more we encounter cases where
the appareils de base are identified with the dispositifs? And
how does the experience of time and space alter the above?
159
Archive Fever
As more and more cinémathèques complete the processes of
digitisation, they present their collection as a form of archive
which is accessible to the audience - thus the archive is
misinterpreted as the dispositif - where he/she can navigate
databases of audio and video material, using tags and
keywords, in other words by means of a language-dependent
system of navigation. Object recognition software, which is
being developed in order to overcome this hurdle, leads to
another debate, over the transformation of the user’s
experience of time, compressing - if not annihilating -
different time levels between the production and the
perception of the visual signal. Finally, this dispositif gets
closer to the Foucauldian reading of the term as a panoptic
apparatus, which “has as its major function at a given
historical moment that of responding to an urgent need.”8
One of the most influential works of archival theory, Derrida's

Archive Fever, is of course a site-specific text, determined by
the place and the occasion which gave rise to it - the 1994
conference Memory: The Question of Archives held at
London’s Freud Museum, the house to which the Freud
family moved when they emigrated to England in 1938 after
the annexation of Austria. It comes as no surprise, therefore,
when he introduces his philosophical take by tracing a
topological essence in every archive, explaining thus the
etymology of the Greek word arche, meaning equally ‘origin’
and ‘commandment’: “initially a house, a domicile, an
address, the residence of the superior magistrates, the
‘archons’, those who commanded”.9 According to Derrida,
each archive is a privileged territory, with contradictory
elements and states of existence: the private and the public,
concealment and visibility, inscription and erasure.
160
Derrida gave his early nineties lecture long before the

Internet “turned the notion of the archive into a metaphor for
data retrieval”.10 Ever since the radical diffusion of digital
technologies, the main challenge to his thesis, and also to the
spatial turn in archival theory, revolves around the argument
that there is no memory in spatial terms (unless understood
metaphorically, in the sense of the symbolic spaces within the
digital archives themselves). Praising the eternal recurrence
of the archived elements in real time, and the powerfully
present tense of data retrieval, critics tend to overlook that
strong material and even spatial basis in the structure,
function and definition of the archive which as a dispositif
situates knowledge.
The conservator of analogue film stock regularly confronts

what is false, erroneous, and damaging for the film itself:
dust, scratches, nitrate damage, the decay of cellulose and
other problems that are either products of human activity or
of human ignorance. However, it is in these errors where we
can experience time in a different perspective - discovering
layers of temporality, as well as the traces of the passing
years and their physical consequences.
Eventually, instead of producing digital images that stimulate

restored analogue films, instead of presenting homogenised
pictures that don't state their origins, would it be possible to
emulate the work of preservation, drawing an object-
oriented approach to archiving, as a way of cutting across the
imposition of national narratives? Would drawing an
'unwanted' line, such as the line between the frames in the
films of the Manakia Brothers, help to separate the elements
that we need to forget from the ones we need to remember,
challenging the conventions of archives, history, and
knowledge production?
161
1
David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity: An Enquiry into the
Origins of Cultural Change, Oxford: Blackwell, 1993, p. 206.
2
Igor Stardelov, ‘Preservation of Manaki Brothers Heritage’, Journal
of Film Preservation, vol. 57, April 1997, p. 30.
3
Dimitris Livanios, The Macedonian Question: Britain and the
Southern Balkans 1939-1949, New York: Oxford University Press,
2008, p. 19.
4
Marie-Laure Ryan, ‘Cognitive Maps and the Construction of
Narrative Space’, in David Herman (ed.), Narrative Theory and the
Cognitive Sciences, Stanford, CA: CSLI Publications, 2003, p. 214.
5
Terry Eastwood, ‘What Is Archival Theory and Why Is It
Important?’, Archivaria, vol. 37, Spring 1994, p. 129.
6
Giovanna Fossati, From Grain to Pixel: The Archival Life of Film in
Transition, Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2009, p. 117.
7
Jean-Louis Baudry, ‘Ideological Effects of the Cinematographic
Apparatus’, in Leo Braudy and Marshall Cohen (eds.), Film Theory
and Criticism, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004, p. 351.
8
Michael Foucault, ‘The Confession of the Flesh’, in Foucault,
Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, New
York: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1980, p. 195.
9
Jacques Derrida, Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression, Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1996, p. 19.
10
Wolfgang Ernst, ‘Agencies of Cultural Feedback: The
Infrastructure of Memory’, in Brian Neville and Johanne Villeneuve
(eds.), Waste-Site Stories: The Recycling of Memory, New York: State
University of New York Press, 2002, p. 117.
162
17 / Will Smith and the White Imaginary

in Science Fiction Cinema
David E. Isaacs
Sci Fi Cinema and the Problematic of Race
In offering a spectacular form of popular entertainment

Science fiction cinema is also an important vehicle for ideas
and ideologies. For example, a frequent generic trope posits
that, in the future, racism will no longer exist: whether in a
computer matrix or on a starship trekking through space, all
future civilised cultures will supposedly ignore race as a
significant factor in judging another person, and those that
use race to justify violence are seen as backwards or less
civilised. Examples include Petersen’s Enemy Mine (USA/W.
Germ, 1985), Baker’s Alien Nation (USA, 1988), and
Blokamp’s District 9 (S. Afr./USA/NZ/Can, 2009).
163
Science fiction, however, reflects our contemporary times

and their anxieties as much as any possible future. That is to
say, while cinematic treatments seem to portray a potential
utopian view of race relations, popular science fiction cinema
instead reflects - usually subliminally - current ideologies of
race, dominated by practices associated with white privilege.
This becomes evident when we consider that black
characters who are positioned in power often seem to
represent forms of whiteness rather than their own racial
makeup.
Sci fi cinema often re-envisions African-Americans as ‘cultural

Whites’ by removing almost any overt associations to
African-American culture. Sean Brayton asserts that a
“suspicious disavowal of white racism ... occurs ...
distinctively in sf film” as seen through such films’
performances of the alien ‘other’ which create subliminal
political contradictions even while imagining a ‘post-white’
mythology.”1 In this sense, even a Black superstar like Will
Smith can be seen as embodying ideological forms of
whiteness.
Whiteness is formed through historical and social processes,

and, according to George Yancy, when “reproduced through
circuits of desire and power, whiteness strives for totalization;
it desires to claim the entire world for itself and has the
misanthropic effrontery to territorialize the very meaning of
‘human.’”2 ‘White’ as used here refers not to a specific
classification or race but to “a historically specific formation
of meanings that characterize social, political, and individual
experiences. Like ‘race,’ ‘white’ as a category of human
beings is determined by history” which is centered on
privilege and power.3
164
This can be seen in the treatment of black bodies in film,

especially those of box office stars which serve to work in the
here-and-now imaginary of the movie audience. While it
sends a positive message to see African-Americans as in-
charge heroes, this is often superficial: as has been suggested
these black heroes tend to become ‘white’ in subliminal
ways, making them ‘safe’ for white consumption. In other
words “the Black body’s subjectivity, its lived reality, is
reduced to instantiations of the white imaginary.”4
The Black Body: Will Smith

Yancy theorizes that the body is central to propagating
ideology. The body is not essentialised but instead has
plasticity and becomes “a site of contested meanings”; it is
“less of a thing/being than a shifting/changing historical
meaning” which is “subject to cultural configuration/
reconfiguration.”5 He concludes that the body’s primary
meaning is symbolic. Hollywood especially reifies this
concept in how it handles the black hero in mainstream
science fiction films: Will Smith, in Roland Emmerich’s
Independence Day (1996), in particular exemplifies how
hegemonic cultural values make him appealing (or safe) to all
audiences. Instead of being a breakthrough artist, Smith
might ironically be seen to embody the ideals of white
ideology perpetuated through this blockbuster film.
Smith is one of the most successful science fiction action

stars in history. His sci fi movies alone, starting with
Independence Day, have generated over $5bn and have
made him one of the few actors able to earn $20m or more
per film. He is also to date the only African-American/Native
American actor to reach this status (he claims multiple racial
165
heritages). Audiences of all types have embraced him as a

film star after his similar successes on television and in music.
Smith’s films are distinctive in that they all tend to focus on

his body as much as on his personality. This not only chimes
in with Hollywood’s tendency to fetishise its stars, but it also
connects to a major tendency in science fiction film to use
the hero’s body as a palimpsest for inscribing cultural values.
The male hero body in sci fi cinema indeed has shifting
meanings; the male body in such films, often portrayed in a
hyper-masculine way - think of Sylvester Stallone or Arnold
Schwarzenegger - has a de-stabilising effect and allows
audiences to assign onto the body multiple cultural values.6
The body, in short, becomes a focus for ideological
performativity. And when the body conveys racial
information, it has a tendency, paradoxically, to transmit
both progressive and conservative messages.7
The ideas of Mizejewski can be applied to the stardom of

Smith to show how both his skin color and his physicality
allow film-makers - in this case Roland Emmerich in
Independence Day - to use his body as a conveyor of
ideology. In ID4, our first glimpse of Smith as Captain Steve
Hiller finds him in bed next to his lover. We assume, given
the boy who wakes him, that he is married. A few scenes
later, he gets out of bed in just his underwear, and we see his
very fit body. As he comes down the hall we get a good view
of his torso and hear his dog tags jingle.
This is one of the longest continuous shots in the film focused

on a single character - the camera pans as he moves into the
bathroom and urinates, rather than cutting. As he looks out
of the window over the toilet, he sees panicked neighbours
fleeing the newly arrived alien ships. In this early sequence,
166
we write a number of meanings on to Smith’s body. First, we

associate him with masculinity (sleeping with a lover, father
figure, standing up to urinate, prolific flow). The dog tags hint
at his military career, a manly profession. Thus, his patriotism
- his defence of the white people who predominate in this
film - is subtly tied to his body.
Recuperating Blackness
Furthermore, the placement of this scene, and those that
quickly follow, hint at a desire to frame this black body in a
white context. Smith, while given top billing, does not appear
for a full twenty-six minutes into the film, well after all the
other major characters/actors, who are all Caucasian: Bill
Pullman, Randy Quaid, Jeff Goldblum, Mary McDonnell.
Vivica A. Fox, as his stripper girlfriend Jasmine, and her son
are the only other important black characters, and they
appear simultaneously with him.
By means of the manner in which he is introduced, one

ideological message comes across in these scenes:
Smith/Hiller reassures audiences, especially whites, that he is
‘safe’. He is positioned in a normal, tasteful middle class
home. When Hiller goes outside to get the paper, only then
do we see that most of his neighbours are white. Hiller,
though, is the last one to see the space ships, so his character
is offered as something of a kindly buffoon - he jokes about
the neighbours and trips over the toys in the yard, and
despite being a military officer, he is the last to know about
the new alien arrivals, implying ignorance or a lackadaisical
attitude.
167
Throughout these shots, the film offers Hiller as a black man

who is normal and even a bit of a joker; indeed, while the
white neighbours are panicked, he stays calm and reassures
his lover. “Look” he says, “I really don’t think they flew 90
billion light years to come down here and start a fight and get
all rowdy. Look, why don’t you just relax?”. He embodies
reason and calm - he is not looking for a fight either with
Jasmine or the aliens. Even if the aliens are threats, he is
looking to get along, and we ironically see the military man as
the peace-maker.
In fact, the only time Hiller gets truly angry is after an alien
pursues him, causing the death of his friend and the
destruction of his plane. The alien ship also crashes, allowing
Hiller to attack the pilot. While doing so, his speech reverts to
slang and what we might call a ‘ghetto’ speaking style:
“Where you at?” he asks when he opens the alien vessel. He
taunts the alien and defeats it after hitting it with his bare
fists. “Who’s the man?” he yells, then says jokingly,
“Welcome to Earth” and “Now that’s what I call a close
encounter.” In this first close encounter, Smith is at the same
time seen as privileged: he alone is able to defeat an alien,
through both his intellect (he blinds the alien ship with his
parachute so that it crashes) and his body - his bare fist.
When he is angry, however, he sounds more like a gang

member protecting his turf. He thus has to give up some of
his ‘white’ identity to defeat the alien, as seen when he loses
the highly advanced airplane, and the non-use of his military-
issued gun. A few moments later, when he performs the
Herculean task of dragging the alien through the desert in his
muscle-revealing undershirt, we focus again on his body. This
time, though, it looks as if he is tied to a plow or chained to
something, conjuring images of slavery.
168
Thus, in one brief sequence, we see Hiller defend humankind,

yet at the same time he must do so by becoming less ‘white’,
or civilised. Resorting to a more ‘primitive’ state allows him
to achieve success since strength is more important here
than intelligence. He is safe in the eyes of those around him
when in uniform, but not out of it, for when he comes to the
gate of the restricted military base, still in his undershirt, he
scares the guard into granting him access. He is the only
character to undergo these kinds of encounters with the
aliens - later, when the same alien attacks the President, his
white bodyguards simply shoot and kill it.
The Sexualisation of Hiller

The rest of the film also writes meanings on his body through
frequently sexualising Hiller. For instance, immediately after
the opening scene with the toilet, he goes into the kitchen,
now ‘dressed’ in the undershirt, and makes out with Jasmine
against the refrigerator; she has to push him off. A short time
later, when inviting Jasmine to come stay at the base so he
can look out for her, he jokingly mentions his “other
girlfriends”, encouraging us to see him as the stereotypical
sexually hyperactive black male. When he goes to the base,
he joins his friend Jimmy (Harry Connick, Jr.) who frequently
calls him “big man” and “big daddy”, and in a comic scene,
Jimmy jokingly gets down on his knee and proposes
marriage, much to the dismay of a passing soldier.
Soon after, we see Hiller linked to a decidedly phallic symbol

- a fighter jet.8 His and Jimmy’s ritual after a successful flight
is to smoke cigars together, a ritual later re-enacted with
scientist David Levinson (Jeff Goldblum), who replaces Jimmy
as a sidekick. Thus, Smith/Hiller’s body keeps being redefined
even as he is ultimately portrayed as reassuring. He is
169
sexually dominant yet easily pushed away by his lover, a

heterosexual pilot not threatened by suspicions of being gay,
and a good friend but a deadly enemy. In other words, he is
the hero with whom we are meant to identify.
Eventually Smith is relegated in ID4 to playing the ‘black

buddy’ who, as he says, is the first black man to save the
world even though he is, at best, the helper to the white men
who do this. By having white men as partners, Capt. Hiller
embodies a white view of the black man who knows his
place. Hiller finally gets to fulfill his dream of flying into space
only after he marries his girlfriend, and he saves the world
only after partnering with a white scientist.
Indeed, the producer intended Smith to be seen as the

“heart” of the film alongside Goldblum’s “brains” and
Pullman’s “soul” so that he was cast to fill out a white trinity
representing the total human experience.9 (One suspects,
though, that if a white actor such as Tom Cruise had played
Hiller Emmerich would have been given quite different
dialogue and characterisations, certainly where the mock
marriage proposal between the buddies is concerned).
The ideology is underscored when we see that it is only when

Hiller works with whites that things start going better for
planet Earth. In other words, Hiller must join the white
scientist, but not because of Hiller’s intellect: he is the
pilot/driver who gets to chauffer the real saviour (David
Levinson) to the mothership. Hiller, because he has seen an
alien ship fly, is thus somehow qualified to fly such a ship.
This linkage hints at the idea that the aliens are in a sense
another type of black person. With dark skin and tentacle-
like features echoing dreadlocks, they are described as
170
“smelly and disgusting”; Smith is the only one able to subdue

an alien by using his fists while taunting the creature as if he
were in a street fight. Being physically tied to the creature
when he drags it through the desert as well as being qualified
to fly the alien ship also links him with them. Thus, he can
only be successful in combating destructive forces when he
joins the white hegemony and serves its ends, as symbolised
by his handshake with the President at the end of the film.
Blackness and the White Imaginary

In these ways, Independence Day continually frames its black
star as ‘white’, but only when he is on the side of the
American enterprise. White consumers identify with him as
their protector even as they see links between him and the
alien. Thus, we see in Independence Day a subliminal
discomfort with race; the alien as other becomes the threat
to white hegemony - especially white American hegemony -
and must be destroyed. Only those who follow this ideology
will survive the conflict.
Independence Day thus offers an exploration of race

ideology, yet it ultimately sends the message that the black
body must be made safe by conforming to a white imaginary
in order to become integrated into society. “The past”, Stuart
Hall argues, “is always constructed through memory, fantasy,
narrative and myth. Cultural identities are the points of
identification, the unstable points of identification of suture,
which are made, within the discourses of history and culture.
Not an essence but a positioning.”10
The same can be argued about the imagined future society. If

Independence Day serves as an exemplar of mainstream
science fiction film, then whether through technology,
171
career, friendship, or possible romance, the black male hero

in sci fi cinema cannot stay as he is. He is the one who must
change; his body becomes the site for political ideology to be
worked out. Only then, this film implies, can a utopian
society be built. Only when stars such as Smith find ways to
position themselves more clearly in oppositional ways to
established Hollywood formulae, therefore, can the ideology
embedded in their films truly challenge subliminal racist
ideology.
1
Sean Brayton, ‘The Post-White Imaginary in Alex Proyas’s
I, Robot’, Science Fiction Studies, vol. 35 no. 1, 2008, p. 72.
2
George Yancy, ‘Whiteness and the Return of the Black Body’,
The Journal of Speculative Philosophy, vol. 19 no. 4, 2005, p. 238.
3
Daniel Bernardi, ‘The Voice of Whiteness: D.W. Griffith’s Biograph
Films (1908-1913)’, in Daniel Bernardi, The Birth of Whiteness: Race
and the Emergence of U.S. Cinema, New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers UP,
1996, p. 105.
4
Yancy, op. cit., p. 216.
5
Yancy, ibid.
6
Linda Mizejewski, ‘Action Bodies in Future Spaces: Bodybuilder
Stardom as Special Effect’, in Annette Kuhn (ed.), Alien Zone II: The
Spaces of Science Fiction Cinema, New York: Verso, 1999, p. 154.
7
See David E. Isaacs, ‘Brothers of the Future: Minority Male
Cyborgs and the White Imaginary in Modern Science Fiction Films’,
in Nicholas Van Orden (ed.), Navigating Cybercultures, Oxford, UK:
Inter-Disciplinary Press, 2013, pp. 135-144.
172
8
See Teresa Santerre Hobby, ‘Independence Day: Reinforcing
Patriarchal Myths about Gender and Power’, The Journal of Popular
Culture, vol. 34 no. 2, 2000, p. 52.
9
Jan Berenson, Will Power! A Biography of Will Smith, Star of
‘Independence Day’ and ‘Men in Black’, New York: Archway Pocket,
1997, p. 108.
10
Stuart Hall, ‘Cultural Identity and Cinematic Representation’,
Framework, vol. 36, 1989, p. 72.
173
18 / Racial Identity in a Post-Modern

World: Django Unchained
Golnaz Sarkar Farshi
The Frontier Epic

On first watching Quentin Tarantino’s Django Unchained
(2012) it may take some time, thanks to the film’s eclectic,
post-modern deconstruction of the genre’s familiar structural
elements, to realise that this is indeed a western. How then
does the film’s hybridity, intertextuality and abundant
allusions produce meaning in a film which is also, amongst
other things, perhaps an example of Blaxploitation cinema?
Westerns hark back to the genre of the literary epic and
process the fundamental conflict between right and wrong,
between system and environment, which is at the heart of a
society in its early phases of evolution.
174
As in the epic, the hero is the representative of a society which

is facing a conflict with the environment; the time frame
covers the early phases of the differentiation of the society
from its environment; and the space is located within the
confines of the society’s geo-political boundaries. Motifs
specific to Westerns include bloody encounters with
indigenous peoples, bar-room fights, and the protagonist’s
journeys or wanderings in the wide-open lands of the Wild
West. Whilst demonstrating some of the structural properties
of the Western, Django Unchained also deconstructs them in
order to criticise the racial content of the genre.
The literary Western emerged in the 19th Century and the early
20th Century in the United States when the young American
society was seeking a principle of differentiation, was in need
of a strong system of law in order to put an end to the societal
violence of previous times and to unite under a single identity
the multiple groups which claimed a right to a rapidly
expanding society. In 1893, Frederick Jackson Turner
introduced his famous ‘Frontier Thesis’.
According to Turner, settlers in the eastern coast of America

had pushed the boundaries of their settlement westwards to
‘civilize’ the so-called ‘Wild West’ – which was dominated
either by indigenous tribes or by Spanish colonists – and it was
this westwards expansion of the frontier, geographic and also
psychic, which has dominated the formation of American
identity from the colonial era up until the 20th Century. As
Turner puts it, “the frontier is the line of most rapid and
effective Americanization … Little by little he [i.e., the
frontiersman] transforms the wilderness, but the outcome is
not the old Europe, not simply the development of Germanic
germs, any more than the first phenomenon was a case of
175
reversion to the Germanic mark. The fact is, that here is a new
product that is American.”1
Where cinema is concerned, if we follow Tudor then a

Western is “a film set in the Western United States between
1860 and 1900 and involving as its central theme the contrast
between garden and desert.”2 The space in which Westerns
take place is usually a small frontier town. Here we witness the
establishment of civilisation’s early technological and
institutional sub-systems, namely the railroad system, the
bank, the municipality and a sheriff who is usually incapable of
eradicating criminality all by himself. If the town is already
fairly ‘civilised’, it also has a church and a school.
The Western protagonist is often a white, nomadic cowboy

who travels from town to town, bringing law and order to
regions which are on the cusp of ‘civilisation’. The cowboy is
the knight of modern America, while Western antagonists are
mostly members of racial ‘others’, that is, either indigenous
people or Spanish settlers. The dominant Western theme is
the conflict between the social system of the emergent United
States (the epic ‘right’ represented by the cowboy
protagonist) and an environment populated by non-American
‘others’ (who represent the epic ‘wrong’).
Tarantino’s Critique
What Tarantino has done in his movie is a second-order
observation of race in the epic interpretation of the history of
the formation of American society, in that he critically
observes Westerns as first-order observations, by American
society, of its own identity. According to Luhmann, “on the
level of second-order observation one can also see that which
176
the observed observer sees and that which the observed

observer does not see.”3
Tarantino deconstructs Westerns along their Derridan ‘fault

lines’ – those points which the genre intentionally or
unintentionally neglects – in order to criticise a racialised
American identity which has been formed through repeated
statements made in artistic media and other systems.
Tarantino appears to be trying to re-write history in a bid to
re-identify American society, embracing African-Americans in
the societal epic. This is central to the characterisation and to
the narrative development: Django himself leaves behind his
identity as a slave, seeking a new identity as an American epic
protagonist, as a cowboy.
Django, an African slave, is freed by a German bounty hunter,

Dr. King Schultz, in order to help him find and kill three outlaw
brothers. After hunting down the criminals, Schultz asks
Django what he wants to do next, to which Django replies that
he wants to find and free his wife, Hildie. Schultz trains Django
as a cowboy and accompanies him to Candyland, a plantation
in Mississippi, where Hildie is held slave. Django must act
alone when Dr. Schultz is shot dead after having killed
Monsieur Candy in a rage, and the African cowboy proceeds
single-handedly to take revenge and free his wife.
The Reversal of Generic Codes

Django Unchained alludes to the 1966 Spaghetti Western
Django, directed by Sergio Corbucci, in its title, music and even
the presence of the latter’s leading actor, Franco Nero, in one
sequence. It complies, structurally, with the generic codes of
the Western: the story takes place in 19th Century America,
Django dresses and acts like a cowboy, he is a wanderer and
177
his ultimate purpose is to rescue a woman in distress – namely

Hildie, his wife. There are, as per convention, saloon scenes,
duels and gun fights galore. But Tarantino alters a number of
structural elements in order to reverse the typical direction of
the genre.
Where characterisation is concerned, the protagonist is not

only an African-American, but a slave who is considered
strictly inferior to white settlers in the world of the narrative.
With his cowboy hat, suit, guns and horse, he is nevertheless
a cowboy. The antagonists, on the other hand, are white
settlers with all the trappings of civilisation: they play classical
music, live in modern-style European mansions, and enjoy all
the latest luxuries available to aristocrats. They are the ones,
however, who commit the most terrible crimes against
humanity.
By reversing the conventional generic roles of these racially

identified groups, Tarantino critiques the genre and shows us
its other side, namely its characteristically deep-seated
racism. Race is also marked by the film’s musical preferences.
In addition to the country and ‘Spaghetti Western’ music (à la
Morricone) familiar in the Western, Tarantino includes rap
music – the protest music of racially-marginalised groups
originating in the United States in the 1970s - in sequences
which star the protagonist.
The film considers another contemporary historical theme

which is typically neglected by the Western, namely that of
slavery. Instead of bringing civilisation, in the name of law and
order from the East to the West, the protagonist brings an
anti-racist movement from the South to the North and from
the West to the East (i.e. from Texas to Mississippi). Indeed,
the film tells us at the outset that the story is set “in 1858, two
178
years before the Civil War”. This historical anchorage at the

beginning of a film which opens with black men in shackles
being herded through the landscape, heralds a Western with
an explicit anti-slavery theme: an eclectic, post-modern
narrative which will, as it unfolds, undermine several of the
generic rules of the traditional Western.
Django Unchained thus undermines the racial principle of

differentiation originally used by American society. And it does
so in order to re-embrace one group of excluded racial others,
namely African-Americans, and to re-establish their identity as
Americans by giving them a leading role in an epic account of
the key origins of U.S. society. The film has its own anti-racist
method, subverting the structural order of colonialist and
racist generic discourse through the eclecticism of post-
modern art.
1
Frederick Jackson Turner, The Significance of the Frontier in
American History [1893]. This seminal essay appeared as the first
chapter in Turner’s The Frontier in American History (New York:
Henry Holt, 1920). The book was re-published by Dover in 2010,
with an introduction by Allan G. Bogue. The essay appears on pages
1-38.
2
Andrew Tudor, ‘Genre’, in Barry Keith Grant (ed.), Film Genre
Reader III, Austin: University of Texas Press, 2003, p. 4.
3
Niklas Luhmann, Soziologische Aufklärung 5: Konstruktivistische
Perspektiven, Opladen: Westdeutscher Verlag, 1990, p. 16.
179
19 / Youth Identities on Nigerian Screens

Ellison Domkap
Introducing Nollywood
“Nollywood, the Nigerian video film industry, has become the

most viable form of cultural machine on the African continent.
[ … ] Nollywood has become a truly pan-African affair [...] shot
on video, edited on personal computers, and copied onto
cassettes and discs, Nigerian video films travel the length and
breadth of the continent connecting Africa, particularly
Nigeria, to its diverse and far-flung diasporas elsewhere”. 1
Film has been part of the social evolution of Nigeria at

different points in history – during the colonial period, in the
era of the nationalist movement, in the period of post-
Independence and the military periods, as well as during the
current democratic dispensation. Today, the post-military era
180
is characterised by a myriad of social upheavals involving

questions of ethnic, regional and religious identity, leading to
wide-ranging contention across the country and a scramble
for political and social space along ethnic, regional and
religious lines.
Today, in spite of the turbulent political situation that

confronts Nigeria's post-military democracy, Nollywood
continues to produce large numbers of films. What started as
an insignificant venture, dominated largely by enthusiastic
business-minded folks who were not professionals, has not
only assumed the status of a key form of national popular
culture, but has equally established its presence on the
international scene.
Three main stages in the growth of the film industry in Africa

can be identified - the colonial/pre-independence, the post-
independence and the ‘maturation’ periods. Of these, it is the
‘maturation’ period that that saw significant improvement
and advancement in production quantity and quality.
Examples include Jeta Amata's The Amazing Grace (2006), Izu
Ojukwu’s Sitanda (2007), Kunle Afolayan's Irapada (2007) and
Stephanie Okereke's Through the Glass (2007).2
According to Jedlowski, The Amazing Grace “was developed

explicitly around the idea of pushing the video industry to a
new level - improving technical standards, and targeting
international audiences through film festivals ... this movie
started a trend still followed by some new releases. For
example, Balogun's ‘Tango with Me’ (2011) and Jeta Amata's
‘Black Gold’ (2011) were shot on celluloid and produced in
Nigeria with an international crew".3
181
In an effort to assert its presence on the international scene,

the industry is exploring a series of collaborations with film-
makers in the UK, America and in other regions around the
world. Besides economic gains and diplomatic courtship, this
partnership has continued to improve production quality in
the industry. The films that have emerged from such
collaborations and previous ones produced at local level over
the years feature diverse themes and issues peculiar to
Nigeria.
Key Themes and Case-Studies

With an estimated population of over one hundred and fifty
million, Nigeria is multicultural, heterogenous, and diverse.
Nigerian films thus explore cultural materials that abound
amongst different nationalities in different regions of the
country. For example, the recorded stage plays of the Yoruba
Travelling Theatre explore themes that identify with the
popular social identity of its environment. Likewise,
Ogunsola’s first film Aje Ni Iya Mi (1988), followed by
subsequent productions largely championed by the Ibos from
the eastern part of the country, express particular thematic
issues and identities.
Such works met with wide acceptance as the industry

boomed. The most popular films are Yoruba and Hausa
productions, which are phenomenally successful in Nigeria
and Africa at large. Another trend in Nigeria video film is
religious in identity, for example the Gospel film ministry
pioneered by The Mount Zion Faith Films, led by Mike
Bamiloye. Like Nollywood, this trend started in an
unfashionable but genuinely ‘popular’ manner - stage plays
recorded by enthusiastic spectators. Presently, Mount Zion
182
has extended its reach beyond Nigeria, growing international

collaborations in Africa, America, Asia and Canada.
Across the divergent cultural and religious backgrounds of

these varying trends, there is a common denominator
amongst their themes - youth issues. And this is significant in
terms of the social and economic challenges that the sizeable
youth population is facing. Today, in spite of the turbulent
political situation that confronts Nigeria's post-military
democracy, Nollywood continues to produce large numbers of
films.
Against such a backdrop this essay seeks to examine the

construction and reconstruction of youth identities on
Nigerian screens in relation to two recent films. Sylvester
Obadigie’s BlackBerry Girls (2011) - the first of half-a-dozen
episodes in the series in 2011-2012 - satirises a clique of
university students who are unduly obsessed with BlackBerry
phones. Funke Akindele’s The Return of Jenifa (also 2011),
meanwhile, also focusses on university life to tell the story a
village girl as she encounters the wider world.
Along the way we reference Lancelot Oduwa Imaseun’s Yahoo

Millionaire (2007), which focusses on the wavering personality
of Oyinka Coker, who deserts her fiancé Chizie for Jerry, a
fraudster who lives life in the fast lane. My analysis is
influenced by interactionist theory, based on the idea that
human behaviour involves choices based on the definitions of
reality that people form as they interact with others. The
discussion engages questions of social class, costume,
language and music as influential elements in youth identity
construction vis-à-vis the socio-cultural implications for
Nigerian society.
183
It is imperative in my view that young people exercise caution

in their interaction with media images that seek to redefine
cultural heritage. The essay in effect cautions Nigerian film-
makers and audiences to be concerned that indigenous
identity is not lost to emergent identities on screens. How
then do Nigerian youths perceive film and media icons with
respect to influence and identity construction? What kind of
identity do they find in Nollywood films? And what is the
socio-cultural implication of these identities on Nigerian
society?
Questions of Language and Social Class

In The Return of Jenifa the campus lifestyle that confronts
protagonist in her new-found university setting is in stark
contrast to her background as a village girl and daughter of
aged parents, who are emblematic of people struggling to
survive in a harsh economic climate. Flamboyant lifestyles,
prostitution, drugs and truancy are some of the behaviours
that Jenifa contends with on campus. In spite of obvious social
dichotomies and limitations, she forces her way into a circle of
friends who introduce her to vices that lead her to contract
HIV-AIDs. As a result of exam malpractice, Jenifa is expelled
from the university.
For Kimberly and friends in BlackBerry Babes, ownership of a

BlackBerry phone determines identity, worth and social class.
The obsession with such phones rules their world and by
extension, the definition of life on campus. In Yahoo
Millionaire, Oyinka Coker uses social incompatibility as the
reason to jilt Chizie. Unfortunately her new lover, Jerry, is a
fraudster who implicates her in a deal that sends her to jail.
184
Language, with its “dual character: it is both a means of

communication and a carrier of culture”4, is a key component
in these films, playing out as a means of the expression of
identity among a youthful female group. For instance, one of
the first things that Jenifa confronts on campus is the use of
the Yoruba and English languages. Back in the village, before
university, she had the impression that her Yoruba dialect
would be unimpressive at the place of interaction and
communication.
So, from the start of her life on campus, Jenifa struggles to
learn certain mannerisms and expressions from the female
‘cult’ group. Part of the routine orientation for prospective
members of the group is to define a linguistic template that
projects the class identity of the group. To fit into this linguistic
mould, Jenifa regularly struggles to impress every one with
what is an embarrassingly deficient grasp of English. She
eventually neglects her Yoruba dialect and drops ‘Suliat’ (the
name her parents gave her) for ‘Jenifa’.
Discourses of Fashion and Music

Since the early days of video film-making in the country,
costumes have always stood out in both for their style and for
their commitment to verisimilitude; the costume departments
in Nollywood are conspicuously generous in this respect,
paying considerable attention to this aspect of representation
across the genres. Costumes in Nollywood have come to be
understood, across varying audiences, as significant social
indices that signpost influence and identity, particularly for
young people.
Just as the fashion tastes of influential women leaders in the

country inspired styles amongst women in the 1980s and
1990s, today this form of repetition on the part of young
185
people has taken place in another cultural dimension.

Nowadays, the costumes and dress codes of film, media,
sports and music icons are the main sources of influence, with
young people reflecting identities (in dress, hairdo, makeup,
music, dance or props) inspired by film and media icons.
In BlackBerry Babes, for example, the outlandish costumes

worn by some of the key characters are popular on the
campuses of tertiary institutions. In times past, when one's
outfit on campus was considered to be 'off' like that of
Apollonia (BlackBerry Babes) and Jenifa (The Return of Jenifa),
it usually attracted derision. Skimpy clothes and those
exposing or revealing sensitive parts of the body were
frowned on. But, interestingly, today such dresses are
accommodated under what is defined as 'colour blocking’. For
example, the lengths of some of the costumes sometimes stop
far above the knee, while the tops can be very slim and
revealing. In the Nigerian cultural context this can generate
tension.
Jenifa's taste in fashion, for example, derives an obvious

influence from media icons that she has seen on screen. We
see this played out when she goes shopping. It is her
description of the clothes worn by screen stars that helps the
clothes seller to know what she wants. Jenifa takes her fashion
crusade back to the village, not only posing as a ‘city’ girl from
the university, but appearing in outfits that reflect the
identities of popular film and music stars. To prove her social
allegiance to these artistes, Jenifa dedicates her time to
teaching local young women how to imitate their make-up
and fashion style.
It is worth noting that The Return of Jenifa is made up of three

parts. Jenifa’s return to the village takes up the final part,
186
narrating the consequences of her untoward behavior. Our

appreciation of the final part arises from our understanding of
previous episodes with their plethora of materials for identity
construction on the part of Jenifa and her friends on campus.
Jerry's sleazy appearance, meanwhile - a bowler hat, and an
array of chains and necklaces - are features of the popular
fashion diet among young people, irrespective of whether the
star is playing a positive or negative role. Their interest is in
the name and fame that comes from affiliation with such an
identity.
Alongside fashion, music also plays an important role in

Nigerian films in establishing mood, contributing to narrative
development, and referencing cultural identity. In addition to
the activist function to be found in the inflammatory rhetoric
of songs by the late Fela Anikulapo Kuti, popular songs in
Nigeria often become inspirational materials to be used at
social functions. The Yoruba theme song for example, in The
Return of Jenifa derides Jenifa’s stupidity in ‘disowning’ her
identity and offers a significant input at social functions,
counselling young people about the importance of staying
close to their roots wherever they may go. On the other hand,
the funky upbeats of BlackBerry Babes and Yahoo Millionaire
may inspire expressions of identity at parties.
The cardinal thematic thrust of BlackBerry Babes is to do with

social class in relation to the craze for the BlackBerry phone.
In this satirical narrative, the phone is given a status that
defines social class for those who acquire one. Keisha,
Kimberly, Natalie, Duke, Alhaji Muktar and Vivienne would not
hesitate to drop anyone who does not own the phone,
especially the latest version. Summarily, thanks to the
BlackBerry, these girls see themselves as social role models for
the female population on campus.
187
1
Matthias Krings and Okoome Onokome (eds.), Global Nollywood,
Bloomington, IND: Indiana University Press, 2013, p. 1.
2
See John Afolabi, ‘The African Video Film and Images of Africa’ in
Foluke Ogunleye (ed.), Africa through the Eye of the Video Camera.
Swaziland: Academic Publishers, 2008, p. 166, and Duro Oni,
‘Context and Nature of Contemporary Nigerian (Nollywood) Film
Industry’, in Ogunleye, ibid., p. 19.
3
Alessandro Jedlowsky, ‘From Nollywood to Nollyworld: Processes
of Transnationalization in the Nigerian Video Film Industry’, in Krings
and Onokome, op. cit., p. 38.
4
Ngugi Thiong'o, Decolonising the Mind: The Politics of Language in
African Literature. London: James Currey, 1981, p. 13.
188
20 / Public Intimacy and Popular Music:

The Libertines
Eileen White
The Significance of The Libertines
The Libertines have been one of the most revered, reviled,

photographed, interviewed and analysed of bands since their
founding in the late 1990s, spawning a renaissance of British
homegrown talent like the Arctic Monkeys and The Kooks as
well as recent acts such as The View, The Vaccines, Kasabian
and the Palma Violets. Fronted by the volatile partnership of
Peter Doherty and Carl Barât, the rise and fall of The Libertines
includes love, betrayal, burglary, drugs, prison stints and a
recent reunion and European tour that kicked off with their
largest gig ever, attended by 64,000 people in London’s Hyde
Park. 1
189
Although they produced only two studio albums in their brief

heyday from 2002 to 2004, the Libertines were music industry
game-changers in several key ways. Besides their energetic,
lo-fi sound and their legendary shambolic yet dynamic live
performances, the Libertines, in opposition to a globalisation
that currently blurs cultural lines, expressed a literate,
resolute ‘Englishness’ in their lyrics and presentation,
referencing the May Day Riots, Oscar Wilde, as well as the
classic TV sitcoms Steptoe and Son and Hancock’s Half Hour.
The primary legacy of The Libertines is, however, their

relationship with fans. Using the then new-ish medium of the
Internet, The Libertines cultivated a young, newly tech-savvy
fan base that was ready for a future beyond the carefully
orchestrated and cautious universe of Britpop. Announcing
now often imitated ‘guerilla gigs’ in pubs, parks and even their
apartment on various fan forums, they took their
exceptionally intimate live relationship with fans to a new
level.
Doherty himself was a frequent contributor on these boards,

posting poetry, unreleased songs, as well as chronicling his
battles with Carl and his growing addictions, thus erasing the
traditional barrier between musician and fan.1 With their
extraordinary use of various forms of ‘public intimacy’, The
Libertines managed to cultivate one of the most fervent and
enduring fan bases in British music.
Formations
In 1997 the two front-men, Carl Barât and Peter Doherty, were
introduced while Carl was sharing a squat with the one friend
he had, Amy-Jo Doherty. She asked Carl to look after her
brother, an aspiring poet named Peter. Initially repulsed by
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what he thought was Doherty’s body odour, they nonetheless

bonded over a shared love of music and all things British as
well as Peter’s William Blake-derived musings on ‘Albion’ and
‘Arcadia’, which eventually became a central tenet musically
and perfomatively in The Libertines’ philosophy. Peter was
impressed by Carl’s guitar skills while the dream of sailing the
good ship Albion to Arcadia, a utopia without stifling rules or
authority, struck a real chord with Barât.
They soon quit university to devote their lives to music, taking

themselves off to London’s grungey Camden Town to seek
their fortune together. Before bringing British indie music
back from the stadium extravaganzas of Oasis, The Libertines
lived the life of rock-and-roll bohemians, playing wherever and
with whomever they could, laying the foundation of their fan
base in assorted minor venues. Their manager, Banny
Pootschi, made it her mission to get the band signed to Rough
Trade, home of The Smiths and The Strokes. She had them
ditch their acoustic poet/troubadour sound for a harder-
edged, post-punk revival vibe. Out went the skinny ties and
the ageing drummer Paul Dufour and in came red vintage
Crimean War jackets and a buff Gary Powell on drums.
A Nostalgic Englishness
Just like Madonna and her legion of look-alike fans in the
1980s, exercising their opposition to dominant social ideology
through excessiveness The Libertines provided a clear entry
portal for fan identification and for the veneration of a
nostalgic English identity on the part of those left adrift by the
homogenised sound of post-Brit Pop bands such as Coldplay
and Snow Patrol. With a final line-up in place that also
included bass player John Hassell, early songs included ‘Up the
Bracket’ - slang for a punch in the throat - and the anthemic
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‘Time for Heroes’, which celebrates working class Britain.

Rough Trade’s James Endeacott was won over not just by the
music, but by the dynamic performance of the two partners in
close physical proximity to their fans, reminiscent of the
Beatles in Hamburg at the beginning of the 1960s. The
Libertines saw no difference between personality and product
or capitalism and alternative ideology in this respect. Everyone
could be a Libertine. The fansite, www.libertines.org, helmed
by Kirsty Want and Kirsty Rideout, would be the key force in
the rising popularity of their music, rather than the traditional
method of selling albums.
Though they beat Coldplay and Radiohead for Best New Band
at the NME Awards, their single ‘What a Waster’ charted at a
lowly number 37, as it received no airplay as a result of their
insistent, poetic and liberal use of very British obscenities. The
raw-sounding album, Up the Bracket, produced by Clash
legend Mick Jones, met with mixed sales, never charting above
number 35 as the general public was not quite ready for their
rough sound after the polish of Britpop. The Libertines, draped
in the Union Jack on the cover of Britain’s influential music
magazine New Musical Express, remained the heroes of their
own lives, continuing their trademark live performances in the
intimacy of pubs and living rooms even after their record deal.
Creating a template for future bands, the gigs, announced

with little if any advance notice, became insular and cultish - if
packed-out - affairs. In keeping with their utopian ideas of
Albion and Arcadia, The Libertines did not limit photography
or audio and video recording at their gigs and fans quickly
posted these online. Members of the band, especially Peter,
were readily available on the Internet.
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The most legendary of all their ‘guerilla gigs’ was when Carl
moved out of their flat in Bethnal Green, ‘The Albion Rooms’.
Peter did the usual and posted a notice that a gig was to take
place in the flat the next night. The gig was, understandably,
raided by the police. Barât and Doherty famously serenaded
them with The Clash’s ‘Guns of Brixton’ and gave the fans a
kiss or a handshake upon their exit, with Peter telling them
“Everything’s for sale. Buy it all”, eliminating yet another
barrier between fan and artist.
Decline and Disintegration

The solo foreign tours began. On tour in Japan, Doherty
increasingly turned to the fan forums to vent his frustration at
the perceived constraints being placed on him by the label,
management and Carl. Under the login ‘heavyhorse’ - an
unsubtle allusion to the heroin to which he had become
addicted - his postings were alternately paranoid, tragic,
ecstatic and poetic. While Doherty was still offering himself
freely to his fans, for Barât the relationship with the fans was
becoming unsustainable. Anything from food to phones to
clothing was disappearing from backstage.
Their U.S. tour went no better. Peter’s escalating drug use and
the company that required him to keep was damaging to the
band and his relationship with Carl. Somehow, several albums
of new material were recorded in New York in what later
became the Babyshambles Sessions. Doherty then went on
the boards to find an digital expert to put a couple of songs
online; in the end, three CDs’s worth of material was posted.
Ever restless and with his relationship to Carl deteriorating,

Peter was was already thinking ahead to his next band,
confusingly also named Babyshambles. Once back in the U.K,
193
the differences between Doherty and Barât came to a head.

Doherty had begun to play acoustic guerilla gigs that gave him
money to feed his growing appetite for hard drugs. Doherty
announced a special gig for Barât’s birthday but Carl did not
attend, forcing Peter to play the gig himself. When Peter in
turn failed to turn up for a European tour, it fell to Carl to call
Peter from Paris and tell him he was no longer welcome in the
band until he cleaned up. Peter sought solace with fans on the
Internet.
Up until then, the drama of The Libertines had played out

primarily online and in the music press, but Peter’s unravelling
was about to become even more public. While The Libertines
honoured previous commitments in Japan, Peter was arrested
for burgling Carl’s flat. Turned in by the mother of his young
son, Peter was sentenced to six months in prison. The
Libertines were now tabloid fodder and the fan base and the
boards were never to be the same. A new rising self-
awareness emerged, mocking newbies for asking such
questions as to where they could buy red jackets like the band
wore.
The line had been drawn between the old, Arcadian guard and
the new fans, gawking at the crash. Carl, however, was not yet
ready to give up on his friend and when Peter was let out of
prison early, Carl was there to meet him. Peter’s ‘freedom gig’
(advertised on the boards, of course) marked the comeback of
The Libertines. NME photographer and documentarian Roger
Sargent’s emblematic picture of Carl and Peter showing their
Libertines tattoos, done in Carl’s handwriting, would become
the second album’s cover image. The photo symbolises the
love story of The Libertines as Carl stares at the camera,
challenging the viewer to interfere while protectively cradling
Peter.
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The euphoria of the reunion wore off and there were fights
and recriminations. Suicidal, Carl turned his anger inward,
bashing his head against a sink so hard that he almost lost an
eye, whereas Peter would go online with his complaints. The
attitude towards him in the forums, however, was different
now. He was used to the Internet as a place in which to be
unconditionally loved but now the fans were becoming
cynical, and for good reason, since Peter was again using
drugs.
Three blistering nights of concerts at London’s Forum, a sold-

out U.K. tour, and 2004’s NME Award for Best Band could not
stave off the inevitable disintegration. A fist fight broke out
between Peter and Carl the first day of recording the new
album, and most of Peter’s parts on the second album were
pieced together from the few sessions he actually attended.
After another attempt at rehab, Doherty, in a very un-
Arcadian manner, sold his version of events, including the
news that he was no longer a member of the band, to the
tabloid paper The Sun. Peter lasted three days in yet another
attempt at rehab in a notoriously difficult program at a Thai
monastery, before he loosed himself upon a country with
some of the purest heroin anywhere.
In an remarkable turn of events, fans sent him money to get

home but Peter was sacked from The Libertines for the last
time on 30 June 2004. The second album, The Libertines,
instantly went to number 1 when released in August. ‘Can’t
Stand Me Now’, charted at number 2 and their last single was,
prophetically entitled ‘What Became of the Likely Lads?’ –
alluding to the British 1970s TV sitcom and its 1960s
progenitor The Likely Lads, as well of course as the Libertines’
own squandered prospects.
195
Reinventions and Recuperations

From his numerous drug arrests, his relationships with Kate
Moss and the late Amy Winehouse, and the early, high-
charting hits with Babyshambles as well as solo work, Peter
has rarely been out of the public eye. He performs solo
frequently and in 2013, he released another Babyshambles
album that charted at number 10. Barât, for his part, has acted
on stage in the West End as well as in several indie films and
in an opera. He has released two albums with his follow-up
band Dirty Pretty Things, a solo album and a memoir (and used
Facebook to assemble his new band, The Jackals).
The Libertines enjoyed a highly paid one-off reunion in 2010

for the Reading and Leeds Festivals, where they gave a tight
but measured performance in front of thousands. In this
abbreviated cycle of nostalgia, these two young men have
found another way to cement their relationship with an ever
more jaded, fickle public: thousands pledged money for
photographer Roger Sargent to finish his documentary of the
reunion, There are No Innocent Bystanders.
The 2014 European tour and its huge Hyde Park launch
followed on from warm-up shows which sold out Glasgow’s
Barrowlands in a record five minutes, and they also played a
sold-out run at London’s historic Alexandra Palace. Doherty
recently completed another stint in rehab in Thailand, where
he was joined by the rest of the band to announce their signing
to Virgin/EMI for a new album, Anthems for Doomed Youth,
released in September 2015.
The Libertines introduced a new way of creating and

maintaining a fan base that has been adopted at all levels of
the music industry. Guerilla gigs, once so revolutionary, now
196
have websites devoted to them. Doherty imitators pop up on

X-Factor; too many people have taken to wearing trilbies. The
recuperation and commercial of alternative culture would
appear to be inevitable, but there is no denying that the
shambolic, intelligent and volatile legacy of the Libertines,
with their brief yet complex history, looms large in British
popular music. They have shaped a generation of independent
musicians both in terms of their sound as well as in regard to
how they see themselves and their fans, particularly with
reference to social media and their now completely
normalised forms of ‘public intimacy’.
1
Amidst the widespread coverage, see Nathan Yates and Pete
Samson, Peter Docherty: On the Edge, London: John Blake
Publishing, 2005; Pete Welsh, Dave Black, Kids in the Riot: High and
Low with The Libertines, London: Omnibus Press, 2005; Anthony
Thornton and Roger Sargent, The Libertines Bound Together: The
Definitive Story of Peter Doherty and Carl Barat and How They
Changed British Music, London: Little, Brown Book Group, 2006;
Alex Hannaford, Peter Doherty: Last of the Rock Romantics,
London: Ebury Press, 2006; and Spencer Honniball, Beg, Steal or
Borrow: The Official Babyshambles Story, London: Cassell, 2008.
For autobiographical perspectives see Dave Black, Pete Doherty

Talking, London: Omnibus Press, 2005; Peter Doherty, The Books of
Albion: The Collected Writings of Peter Doherty, London: Orion
Books, new ed., 2009 and From Albion to Shangri-La: Journals and
Tour Diaries 2008-2013, London: Thin Man Press, 2014, and Carl
Barât, Threepenny Memoir: The Lives of a Libertine, London: Fourth
Estate, 2010. For a mother’s perspective, see also Jacqueline
Doherty, Pete Doherty: My Prodigal Son: My Prodigal Son - A Child
in Trouble, London: Headline, 2014.
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21 / The Construction of Identity in

CSI: Crime Scene Investigation
Laetitia Boccanfuso
Identities and Identifications
As a casual viewer, I found the historic U.S. TV police series

CSI: Crime Scene Investigation both highly normative and
worrisome, because of its moralising tone as well as its
fascination with voyeurism, surveillance - and indeed with
corpses. However, I grew to admire the way the show
combines both simple and complex aspects where narrative
and character are concerned, something which I explore in
this essay. For example, what kinds of identity are
represented by the recurrent characters? Are they ‘round’ or
‘flat’, presented in outline form or fully-fledged? Are other
characters perhaps more complex, and if so, why? And does
an awareness of these issues help viewers understand the
various narratives of CSI?
198
CSI is an episodic TV show broadcast by CBS since 2000 which

has generated a franchise with CSI: NY and CSI: Miami, and,
briefly, CSI: Cyber. As a series, it contains changing elements
and recurring elements, and as a franchise, it is a series with
a ready-made structure, easy to use and reproducible to a
certain extent. CSI: Crime Scene Investigation is set in Las
Vegas and exposes The Strip and the casinos as its main
setting; CSI: NY portrays the lives of Manhattan city dwellers;
CSI: Miami focusses on the lives and deaths of the inhabitants
of Miami and its suburbs.
In each of the three versions of CSI, the city and its local
customs are not only a backdrop but define the series as one
autonomous part of the franchise with a specific identity. As
such, the different cities represent the elements of change in
the formula of the series, influencing the episodic plots, the
lighting, costumes and décor. Cutting across these changing
elements are the recurring elements, the characters.
In the pilot, the audience thinks that they are going to

identify with the newcomer, Holly Gribbs, as is usually the
case with TV serials. She is first seen at a distance
immediately after the opening credits, the camera moving
closer to shoot her through various objects, which provides a
feeling that she is displaced in this world of dead things. She
dies off-screen during the second episode. As a result, the
audience comes to understand that part of the fun of the
series does not rely on our sympathy for recurring characters.
However, one is also given to understand that, once a victim,
Holly Gribbs in fact becomes a great deal more important.
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CSI: Characters and Roles

Roles CSI CSI: NY CSI: Miami
Head Investigator Gil Grissom Detective Mac Taylor Lieutenant Horatio Caine
1st female investigator Catherine Willows Stella Bonasera Calleigh Duquesne
Younger male Nick Stokes Danny Messer Eric Delko

investigators Warrick Brown Sheldon Hawkes Ryan Wolfe
Greg Sanders
Coroner Dr. Al Robbin Dr. Sid Hammerback Dr. Alexx Woods

David Phillips (Medical Examiner)
Police investigator Captain Jim Brass Don Flack Detective Frank Tripp
nd
2 female investigator Sarah Sidle Lindsay Monroe Natalia Boa Vista
Lab technician David Hodges Adam Ross Michael Travers
3
Visible and Invisible Identities

Some characters change category, disappear for good, or
come back a few seasons later. The narrative roles do not
always translate into similar official titles; each series has its
own specificities. As a consequence, what is local is specific
whereas what results from human behaviour in the
workplace is all-encompassing and standardised to a high
degree. As the characters embody CSI's consistency, they act
alike and they do not have an over-stated private life. Only
bits and pieces are intimated in order to maintain an illusion
of verisimilitude; that is to say that they remain ‘sketches’.
They are supposed to reflect the audience's work

environment more than the audience's intimate life. What
matters here is the fact that the characters are at work –
contrary, for example, to ER, where intimate and professional
aspects of the character’s lives are equally important. But ER
can mix both aspects because it has both an episodic content
and a serial content. In CSI, the personal lives appear as a
backdrop to work and the serial content is not as present as
in other series, although it is not totally obliterated.
Stabilising the series, helping the audience see what's

important, the characters embody functions that actually
prevent evolution on their part. However, CSI team members
are sporadically endangered in some season finales, and
these moments characterise the recurrent characters in a
different manner. When they play the part of the victim, the
audience has access to their personal background, their fuller
identity. For example, at the end of season 3, Nick is
abducted and locked inside a transparent coffin equipped
with video. At the end of season 7, Sarah Sidle is abducted by
the Miniature Killer and nearly dies. The only time when the
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audience gets to know the CSI team members better, in other

words, is when they become victims.
But the process may go as far as the death of one of the

recurrent characters, like that of Holly Gribbs's (Series 1,
Episode 2) or like Warrick Brown's at the end of season 8
(Episode 17). Before his death, at the local diner the CSI team
shares a breakfast and everyone is happy. The music
underlines the mood and it comes as a shock when Warrick is
killed. After his death, the season concludes, leaving the
viewer with no choice but to watch it again. Then, the scene
becomes virtually a re-enactment of the Last Supper
although Warrick's killer – Under-sheriff Jeffrey McKeen – is
absent. Previously involved in a dark case, we can argue that
with this ending Warrick is cleansed of his sins because he
dies a victim.
When Greg Sanders and Sarah Sidle come to fetch a suit for
Warrick's funeral, they check his apartment just as they
would check a crime scene. This is when they discover private
things that Warrick has kept from them as colleagues, and
from us as audience. Since we do not come into contact
intimately with the characters, we cannot fully understand
their identities and share their feelings. But when the
recurrent characters become victims the audience gets to
share some of their intimacy and to know them better, then
is it possible to say that the audience is led to identity with
the episodic victims more than with the recurrent characters?
Recurrent Characters as Visual Devices

Because they scrutinise everything, from objects to corpses
to suspects, the recurrent characters are here to ‘ease in’ our
vision as spectators, which means that they are here so that
202
the viewer gains access to the invisible. As Baudry has

proposed, film viewing involves a primary identification with
the very process of showing things on the screen, which
provides the basis for a secondary identification with on-
screen characters.1 There may, however, be a third form of
identification, which takes place when the viewer is shown a
character who is watching something that the external
viewer cannot see, and when he or she is eventually
introduced to what is under scrutiny.
For example, prior to the murder of Marion Crane in

Hitchcock’s Psycho (USA, 1960), Marion's murderer Norman
Bates is first seen taking a painting off the wall of his office
and peeping through the hole hidden behind it. The audience
is then shown what he is watching through a subjective shot.
This is exactly what happens in CSI: the viewer is shown
characters that enable him or her to have access to what
previously remained hidden. The audience is thus led on a
voyeuristic path to which only the recurrent characters have
access.
The Crime Scene Investigators are rather flat characters

because they have a two-fold function within the narrative.
First, they embody stability within the franchise; second, they
are the devices that enable the audience to have access to
evidence and to see what remains hidden to the naked eye.
As such, they cannot have a distinctive identity and tend to
be ‘seen through’: that is to say, the audience needs to ‘see
through’ them and beyond them to access the elements
which make up the narrative of the victim's death.
203
Episodic Victims and Serial Killers

As long as the episode is not over, the audience does not
know what really happened. In the end, the missing
chronological link is revealed and the divide between right
and wrong annealed. But to this end, the series aims to show
the audience everything there is to see, even the things that
no-one could ever witness. To have access to the victim's
story, specific procedures most be followed. The CSI examine
the crime scene closely, gather around the corpse at the lab,
investigate the crime scene to gather evidence, analyse the
scientific evidence, question suspects, gather more evidence
and further analyse it, and eventually obtain the confession
of the culprit.
For the CSIs, the aim of the search is to discover the murder
scenario, which is the metonymy of the victim's life narrative.
Having access to this missing moment is the key to creating a
link between the audience and the episodic character. Thanks
to the inquiry led by the investigators, the culprit confesses
and his or her confession becomes a flash-back that ushers
the viewer into the past up to the moment of the victim's
death. The flash-back represents an attempt at retrieving the
missing moment of the murder through narrative but it is
also a way to give the victim an identity. The murder destroys
life and identity; the narrative gives it back.
The final reconstruction gathers together everything that has

been previously collected in the course of the episode. The
narrative reconstruction joins together again a fragmented
reality. There is a movement from what has been fragmented
within the body to the bits and pieces of truth buried in the
past. Only the narrative can collect them back again. The
‘opening’ of the corpse by means of the postmortem enables
204
the reconstruction of the time-line leading to the murder; the

subsequent closure of the body coincides with the closing of
the case. As such, the remembering of the facts runs parallel
to the re-membering of the victim's body.
In the course of the episode, however, multiple flash-backs or

visions of the murder arise. They may amount to lies
delivered by the suspects, hypotheses imagined by the CSIs,
or truths revived at the end of the episode. When the truth
of the murder and murderer is finally revealed, then the
victim's identity is given back to the victim. The flash-back
comes to close up the corpse and the case, enabling the
victim to acquire a proper narrative identity.
Peculiarly enough, the serial killers who figure in the series

benefit from the same treatment as the victims, if not more
so. They come under closer scrutiny because they are
developed during more than one episode, which turns them
into semi-recurrent characters, and because typically they
have been through terrible ordeals in the past, which makes
them too some kind of victim. Their narrative identity is far
more important than those of their victims because they
appear more than once. As such, they embody a serial
principle that the series is lacking. When a serial killer's
narrative is revealed, it works as a glue for the whole season,
holding together the episodes featuring the serial killer.
The serial identity is an acknowledgement of a craftsmanship

which is equal to writing or investigating. The narrative may
be told by the serial killers themselves or by a relative. For
example, Paul Millander (the very first killer, who appears in
the pilot) tells his own story, whereas in Season 7, the
Miniature Killer's story is told by her father. Both life stories
are seen in terms of the consequences of childhood trauma.
205
The serial killers bear the series' identity and reproduce on a

larger scale the thing that obsesses the series : the origin,
either murder or trauma, that triggers the action.
Reading the Body

The opaque partition walls that can be seen at the very
beginning of the series have later been replaced by
transparent ones, as Gérard Wajcman has pointed out.2 This
perhaps points to something which happens in the show on a
larger scale. As a whole, the show, with its interest in the
opacity and transparency of lived experience, and the
importance of vision as a pathway to the truth, often sees the
world through intermediate, transparent surfaces, especially
featuring the now famous microscopic visions to be found in
every episode.
In such cases, the audience follows the process previously

described with reference to Psycho, looking at minute and
very important details through a microscope or a magnifying
glass. These shots display details far beyond extreme close-
ups, indeed beyond what is normally visible, and are often
located inside the body of the victim. We might say that the
viewer enters the recurrent character's vision to watch ‘inside’
an episodic character.
Opening up the body on the morgue table is much like

studying a text: in CSI the secret lies in the details of the
crime scene and inside the corpse ; the search for evidence
takes place in both places and follows the same pattern. The
idea behind the search is that something very minute is
deeply hidden by other things, but that a sufficiently
thorough study is sure to unveil the truth. Thus, truth is
assimilated to a secret lying in the dense stone (the body) of
206
the transparent fruit (the crime scene). As a symbol, the

inside of a fruit – the stone – typically represents an
ontological and spiritual quest. As such, showing the inside of
a corpse by means of a camera is equal to the search for the
essence of being or for the essence of a text. Following a
literary trail, one might think of the blason, a genre of poems
that praised a woman by singling out different parts of her
body and finding appropriate metaphors to extol them.
The blason transforms the body into a fragmented text, just

as the Medical Examiner does on his or her table. This is tak-
en to its extreme in CSI: NY, Series 2, Episode 10, where a
corpse is transformed into the final chapter of a novel by a
killer who has written on the skin with invisible ink and has
then rolled the corpse into a rug – another famous metaphor
for that which is woven, namely a ‘text’. All of this points to
the fact that, for CSI, what really matters is the business of
reconstruction, and that is why the victims - even more than
the investigators - are so important to the series.
1
Louis Baudry, ‘Effets idéologiques produits par l’appareil de base’,
in L’Effet cinéma, Paris: Editions Albatros, 1978, p. 13-26.
2
Gérard Wajcman, Les Experts: La police des morts, Paris: Presses
Universitaires de France, 2012, p. 52.
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22 / Vampire Identities in Contemporary

Youth-Oriented Cinema and Television
Magdalena Grabias
The Romantic and Monstrous Vampire
The fascination with vampires and related themes was

popularised in 19th century European literature by poets such
as Goethe and Byron, reflecting the interest of the Romantic
period in supernatural fantasy. One of the first mentions of
vampires in prose is attributed to John William Polidori, who,
in an 1819 edition of New Monthly Magazine, published his
story The Vampyre - A Tale, the prototype of the modern
vampire genre. Polidori outlines what would eventually define
the archetypal vampire: handsome, charming, mesmerising,
and endowed with dark powers enabling him to seduce his
victims and bend their will toward his own sinister purposes.
This model was used in numerous literary tales, and later
208
accepted as an established norm around which a set of

attributes characterising vampires was created, as much for
cinema as for other aspects of popular culture. Polidori's name
has forever been over-shadowed, however, by that of Bram
Stoker, and his 1897 novel, Dracula.
Stoker's novel is probably the most renowned example of

vampire fiction and one that, until recently, has served as the
authoritative guide to the vampire genre. Unlike Eastern
European visions of the vampire, Stoker’s Dracula seduces
with aristocratic charm and manners. These features quickly
transformed him into one of the most fascinating fictional
characters in the history of horror. The 20th Century brought
with it dozens of film versions of Dracula in which a curious
change in the nature of the central character can be observed.
In the silent classic Nosferatu: A Symphony of Horror (1922) by

German expressionist director F.W. Murnau, Count Orlok
(Dracula) is depicted as a cold and calculating creature devoid
of all human emotion, unquestioningly following his natural
instincts. This version also introduces some of the most
recognisable visual codes, symbols, and imagery of the horror
genre. Nosferatu is presented as a grotesque figure with a mis-
shapen body, pale rat-like face, dead eyes, and with teeth and
nails resembling the fangs and claws of a predator, evoking an
overwhelming sense of disgust and fear. All this leaves the
audience with little space for compassion or identification
with the main protagonist.
In Tod Browning's 1931 Hollywood sound version of the story,

Bela Lugosi's Dracula is no longer just a frightful corpse
roaming through the ruins of an abandoned castle. He is a
handsome, alluring aristocrat with exquisite manners. It is
these physical attributes, in addition to the vampire’s power
209
to hypnotise his victims, that lure the audience into

sympathising with him – even though his deeds remain
intrinsically wrong according to human moral sensibilities. His
undeniable charisma notwithstanding, Lugosi's Dracula
remains an abominable creature of the night, and an affront
to nature.
Humanising the Vampire

A conspicuous alteration to the pattern appeared in Francis
Ford Coppola's 1992 version, in which Dracula acquires
numerous human traits, together with a backstory of tragic
circumstances that justify his actions, and his eventual
transformation into a vampire. Vlad Dracula returns home
after a victorious war against the Turks only to find that his
beloved wife has committed suicide after receiving false news
of his death. In his all-consuming grief, the Count renounces
God, and promises to swear allegiance to the forces of
darkness if they help him avenge his wife’s death. Centuries
later, he believes himself to have found the reincarnation of
his dead wife in the person of the fiancée of a young
businessman who visits him at his Transylvanian castle.
Dracula’s conviction leads to a series of events in which we see

him depicted not only in the familiar role of handsome,
supernatural Count, but also as a cruel warrior, and as a tragic
romantic in desperate search of a long-lost love. His actions
are therefore driven, and tempered, both by his newly
acquired vampire nature and his older, innate human feelings.
Nevertheless, unlike his predecessors, Coppola's Dracula
never questions his vampire identity; nor does he fight his
instincts. His life choices are his and his alone. It is the
audience which, thanks to this romantic dimension, is led to
210
sympathise with the character, subconsciously interpreting

him as a tragic, romantic hero.
Neil Jordan’s 1994 film adaptation of Anne Rice’s novel

Interview with the Vampire further enhances the subject of a
‘humanised’ vampire. At first glance, the story repeats the
classic pattern. Louis, a young man lost in grief over the
premature demise of his brother, is bitten by Lestat, an
ancient vampire who sees Louis as a possible companion.
However, Louis soon becomes torn and tormented by moral
dilemmas not shared by his master. He retains his human
sensibilities and, most peculiarly, his humanity, as well as a
strong sense of morality and code of ethics. He perceives
himself as a beast, and is revolted by his insatiable need to
feed upon human flesh.
Nevertheless, his attempts to sustain himself on animal blood

alone fail, and the character is left to ponder upon the
aimlessness of his life and his self-hatred. His frame of mind
changes radically with the introduction of Claudia, a five year-
old girl turned into a vampire by Lestat, for whom Louis
develops fatherly sentiments. In time, Louis and Claudia leave
Lestat, and the shallow, primary-instinctual life he represents,
and go in search of a more meaningful existence. (In the
course of the story, however, Claudia is killed, and after many
decades of renewed solitude, Louis once again becomes a
bitter, miserable creature riven by human dilemmas).
Interview with the Vampire breaks more than one convention

of the traditional vampire story. First and foremost, vampires
are by nature solitary creatures, unable to embrace any kind
of affective relationship. The vampire universe presented
here, however, is filled with complex relationships: Lestat
seeks a companion and ultimately becomes genuinely
211
attached to Louis and Claudia; the vampire coven found in

Paris is a hierarchical, well-organised underground
community; the relationships between Louis, Claudia and
Lestat are of a familial nature. Eventually, both Louis and
Claudia come to hate their vampire nature and the lifestyle
from which they fail to escape. Louis is the epitome of an
unhappy vampire, which signals a significant fin de siècle
change in the perception of the vampire species, as well as a
growing tendency to romanticise vampire characters and re-
interpret traditional legends.
The Vampire Family: Moral Imperatives

In Catherine Hardwick’s Twilight (2008), the first in a series of
adaptations based on Stephanie Meyer's record-breaking
novel series of the same name (2005-2008), we encounter a
vampire family bound not by blood, but by moral imperatives.
In Carlisle Cullen, a father to five ‘adopted’ children, we find
the first attempts to characterise the vampire as actively
fighting his vampire nature. The son of a priest who hunts
supernatural creatures, Carlisle is transformed into a vampire.
Terrified by what he becomes, he resolves to undertake a
‘vegetarian’ diet, and to work in the service of humans as a
surgeon. Eventually, Carlisle builds a coven governed by the
codes of morality and strict rules against the consumption of
human blood, and succeeds to live a life described by Brendan
Shea as "the paradigm of meaningful life".1
Carlisle's youngest son, Edward, is an idealistic, Byronic

character who falls in love with a human girl, Bella Swan.
Edward considers himself a monster, devoid of soul and
humanity, and therefore forever damned. This conviction
restrains him from fulfilling his girlfriend's wish to be turned
into a vampire: an act which, in Edward's view, would be a
212
crime against her life, and condemn her to an eternal non-

existence as a member of the undead. It is the appreciation of
human experience and a strong belief in moral rights and
wrongs that determine Edward's choices. Their relationship is,
however, destined for a different fate and, as the plot unfolds,
Bella becomes a vampire out of necessity when her mortal life
becomes endangered.
The characters of the TV series The Vampire Diaries (2009-),

developed by Kevin Williamson and Julie Plec from the book
series by L.J. Smith, are faced with similar problems. Elena
Gilbert, a high school student in the town of Mystic Falls,
becomes entangled in a love triangle with the Salvatore
vampire brothers, Stefan and Damon, both of whom fall in
love with her. Elena turns out to be a descendant and
Doppelgänger of Katherine Pierce, also a mutual love of the
brothers back in 1864. It is Katherine who transformed Stefan
and Damon into vampires after deceiving each of them into
believing they were the love of her life.
The brothers part company for many years, and evolve

vampire lives distinct from each other. As a newborn, Stefan
becomes a cruel hunter dubbed "the Ripper". He is later taught
to control his lust for blood by a friend who convinces him that
being a vampire promises more than the savage life he has so
far led. Stefan ‘regains’ his humanity, begins to consider his
actions through the prism of human morality, and, like Louis
and the Cullens, resolves to feed only on animals. Damon, on
the other hand, comes to enjoy the delights of his new life,
adjusting to his vampire nature and embracing his vampire
instincts.
Despite their choice of different directions, there exists an

unspoken brotherly bond between the Salvatores, which time
213
and again guides their actions. After his conversion, Stefan

becomes the very picture of an old-fashioned gentleman
guided by morality and by a clear distinction between good
and evil. He is painfully aware of how easy it would be to cross
the line between humanity and bestiality, and therefore
resolves to embrace the good side. Damon, however, proves
to be a somewhat ambiguous character. Deceptively easy to
read at first glance, the handsome, seemingly self-interested
rascal turns out to be much more complex and multi-
dimensional as the film unfolds. Even though he openly admits
his attraction to the dark side, and refuses to restrain himself
from drinking human blood, he displays many human
propensities throughout the story.
The vampires in The Vampire Diaries are given the option to

choose for themselves. They can literally decide to switch on
and off their humanity. Switching it off means the avoidance
of any inhibitions or restraints, but also dispels feelings of love,
hate, pain and disappointment, therefore making life easier.
Nonetheless, despite his cheeky pose and displays of violence,
Damon's actions in many cases appear to be governed by a
sense of loyalty and an adherence to a moral code. This is
made especially clear when it comes to people he loves.
In spite of the disdain he feels for Stefan’s meekness, he

watches over him and defends him against their common
enemies. His human nature also comes to light in his
relationship with Elena, who, like Katherine before her, at first
chooses Stefan over Damon. Although heartbroken over the
repeating history, Damon respects Elena's choice. In the
course of the story, the girl's affections are transferred to
Damon, which fully exposes his human side and his values. He
becomes the epitome of a modern teenage superman: a
loving, passionate man, who is adventurous, exciting – even a
214
bit dangerous at times – as well as being loyal to those he

loves.
The Complexities of the Modern Vampire

A contemporary vampire would therefore seem to evoke the
idea of a superhero - equipped with unearthly strength, speed,
night vision and almost unbearable beauty, and frequently
endowed with other special abilities. Both the Cullens and the
Salvatores can refrain from human blood, and killing humans
is for them a matter of choice. Another variation from the
original Dracula pattern is the search for communal
experience. Modern vampires are no longer solitary creatures,
preferring instead to exist, like humans, in covens based on
blood-lines and bonds of friendship. The importance of human
nature – or the longing for it – is reflected in many of the
actions and choices made by a good number of the 21st
Century vampire characters.
Edward, Stephan and Damon are driven by their love for a

woman, and love itself turns out to be a much stronger force
than their instincts. They are capable of denying their
predatory nature in the name of love, a feeling that was
unknown to Dracula and their other traditional predecessors.
Until recently, a vampire remained far from being tormented
by ethical questions or philosophical dilemmas. They slept in
coffins and woke up at nights only to satisfy their thirst for
blood, and were back and buried in dirt before sunrise.
Louis, however, begins to question the meaning of his

existence: “I am a spirit of preternatural flesh. Detached.
Unchangeable. Empty!” he proclaims. This conclusion gives
rise to an utterly new, modern approach to fictional demonic
creatures. Suddenly, vampires no longer belong to a simplistic
215
if frightful supernatural world. Instead, they think, suffer, and

become romantic and romanticised characters.
In accordance with myth and legend, Edward Cullen sustains

the belief that vampires are by nature devoid of souls. And so,
no matter how he conducts himself, he can never act in
entirely human terms. The question of humanity and human
identity is a crucial element in his life. He clearly associates
humanity with the possession of a soul, ignoring other
possible human attributes such as affection, compassion or
excellence of virtue. According to these indicators of
humanity, Edward and his family constitute perfect examples
of what he craves to be.
If virtue equals humanity, then the Cullens fit into Plato’s and
Aristotle's understanding of the notion, which involved
courage, justice, temperance and generosity, wit, friendliness,
truthfulness, magnificence, and greatness of soul. Although
Plato and Descartes perceived the immortality of the soul in
different terms, both claimed that the soul is separate from
the flesh, and as such continues to exist after the demise of
the body. While Plato claimed that it is the soul which
animates flesh and is the source of every action of its ‘owner’,
Descartes defended the concept of a body-soul duality by
claiming that the two elements exist independently as
separate entities with no relation to each other.
It is therefore tempting to question folkloric belief that

vampire characters, either undead or re-animated, are by
nature devoid of souls. If a soul is immortal, then by definition
it cannot be affected by the death of the body. It therefore
seems plausible to posit that it should remain within the body
even if the body in question were to be ‘undead’. This perhaps
216
explains the attachment to human virtues and moral

dilemmas on the part of the Cullens and the Salvatores.
The Mystic Falls vampires can switch off their humanity, that
is, their ‘soul’, allowing them to choose how they would like to
manifest themselves - as instinctually driven vampires, or as
beings with humane sensibilities. For the Twilight vampires,
the situation is more complicated, as they are not endowed
with such a handy ‘off-on’ switch. Just like mere humans, they
face moral questions and are forced to live with the decisions
they make for all eternity.
Humanity is therefore a choice in both cases. “I'm a monster”,

pronounces Edward in a conversation with Bella. And
undoubtedly, he can be such by nature. The case is similar for
the Salvatores; while their humanity is switched ‘off’, they are
capable of dreadful deeds. Nevertheless, human and vampire
identities seem to be intertwined in the contemporary
vampire characters.
The Social Meanings of the Contemporary Vampire

The early fascination with the cinematic horror genre, as well
as the nature of the characters presented in the films of the
1930s, can be viewed as an artistic commentary on the gloom
of America in the era of the Great Depression.2 Supernatural
characters like vampires, Frankenstein's monster, and others
can for the large part be considered creatures devoid of moral
dilemmas and questions of identity.
They symbolised their times and highlighted the painful

uncertainty of the future. As outlined here, the cinematic
image of the vampire softened over the years, acquiring more
and more human features. The rise of the new, ‘good’ vampire
since the 1990s has given rise to the extremely attractive idea
217
of ‘the perfect species’, combining the strength and immunity

of supernatural beings with the purity and goodness to which
humans aspire.
The modern vampire exists on a new metaphysical level. As

never before, vampire characters force the audience to reflect
on existential questions about the meaning of life and death,
moral choices and their consequences, and the value of the
individual. The modern vampire combines supernatural
features like strength and immortality with human traits like
love, compassion, ethics and a respect for morality. The ‘good’
vampire of contemporary film and television is thus a
reflection of human dreams and desires for perfection,
representing a chivalric notion of honour and virtue
incarnated in a indestructible and eternally youthful body.
Vampirism continues to fascinate perhaps because, as Claude

Kappler has suggested, it presents a powerful picture of
contemporary humanity, and indeed of the society which is
ultimately responsible for its monsters: “the monster is
everywhere …. It is [ … ] our society which secretes monsters …
It is the society which is the monster”.4 Nevertheless, as this
essay has tried to show, numerous 21st Century media
vampires are multi-dimensional creatures driven just as much
by dilemmas of an ethical nature as they are by their loyalty to
the codes of their covens. The drama of the characters lies,
therefore, in the duality of their nature, combining a vampire
and human identity within a single body.
218
1
Brendan Shea, 'To Bite or Not to Bite', in Rebecca Housel and J.
Jeremy Wisniewski (eds.), Twilight and Philosophy, New Jersey:
John Wiley & Sons, 2009, p 87.
2
Noël Carroll, The Philosophy of Horror, or, Paradoxes of the Heart,
New York: Routledge, 1990, pp. 208-9.
4
Claude Kappler, Le Monstre: Pouvoirs de l’Imposture, Paris:
Presses universitaires de France, 1980, p. 12.
219
23 / Migrant Filmmaking in Switzerland
Sandra Mooser
The Global Emergence of Nollywood

A remarkable video film industry has emerged in Nigeria in the
last few decades. Also known as ‘Nollywood’, this
entertainment industry produces audio-visual narratives in
VCD- and DVD-formats which not only excite viewers
throughout Nigeria but are also consumed far beyond the
national border. Thanks to global migration and the Internet,
Nigerian video films, and especially the ones in English, are
popular in many African countries and can also be found in
more distant places such as Brazil, Jamaica, the United States
of America, Papua New Guinea, Great Britain, France and
Switzerland.1
220
The key to this global popularity lies, according to Haynes,

primarily in Nollywood’s focus on stories that reflect “the
values, desires and fears” of African viewers and its modes of
production.2 For Marston, Woodward, and Jones, Nollywood
brings “lived practice and its representation together in ways
that make the films deeply accessible and entirely familiar to
their audience“.3 With its appealing story-telling patterns and
unique aesthetics it produces new post-colonial forms of
performative self-expression and has become a point of
reference for a wide range of people.
But Nollywood not only entertains a large number of viewers

inside and outside Nigeria. It also inspires some of them to
become active themselves and make their own films. In these
cases, Nollywood serves as a source of inspiration and a role
model for independent film production. Based on my current
field study of film production on the part of first-generation
African migrants in Switzerland, this essay aims to show that
Nollywood motivates film-makers outside Nigeria in various
ways and strongly influences their film practices.
Following the tradition of social anthropologists such as Jean

Rouch, Victor Turner, and Johannes Fabian, as well as scholars
working in the field of Performance Ethnography, my field-
work is based on a participant research method. In order to
find out more about migrants’ film practices in relation to
Nollywood, I have established a partnership with a group of
young African amateur filmmakers living in Switzerland.
At the time of writing (early 2015) I am taking part in their film

production activities. This means that I worked as production
manager during shooting and I am one of the editors in the
still on-going post-production process. Both positions have
allowed me to experience the forms of expression the crew
221
and cast members have chosen - in total about 60 people of

various African, Swiss, or other European origins - and to
observe the complex social interactions related to their
performances.
Considerations of Identity
Researchers such as Appadurai, Ginsburg, and Marks point to
the fact that migrant film-makers experience a particular need
to express themselves through media.4 As minority group
members in their country of residence, they not only wish to
reflect upon their situation and illustrate their everyday
struggles as foreigners but also wish to express their own
views and ideas in order to challenge dominant public opinion,
to “talk back to the structures of power” they live in.5 In the
process, their audio-visual works become a means of response
and an answer, as Mitchell puts it, “to a previous presentation
or representation”. Their representations can be understood
as “the relay mechanism in exchange of power, value, and
publicity”.6
During the film project in which I am currently participating,

several cast and crew members expressed feelings of being
under- or even mis-represented in the dominant Swiss media
discourse. As an example of a misguided form of presentation,
they have especially expressed their concerns about the ever-
present image of the Nigerian drug dealer which is often used
by right-wing politicians to illustrate problems to do with
migration and integration. Although the actual number of
Nigerian drug dealers in the country is small, this stereotype
seems to affect the entire African community.
The issue has been further intensified during these ongoing

public debates by the fact that the perspectives of the
222
approximately 3,100 Nigerian citizens and about 60.000

Africans living in Switzerland have mainly been expressed by
others speaking on their behalf.7 As a consequence, they
understand their participation in community film projects,
amongst others, as a chance to give themselves a voice, and
as a means to adjust and correct the stereotypes which they
constantly have to confront.
Nollywood and its unconventional ways of making films offer,

in this context, a vivid source of inspiration for the creation of
their own film narratives. On the one hand, it combines
Western technologies with African story-telling patterns and
thus represents in a way the inbetween-ness of the migrants
themselves. On the other hand, with its informal approach
Nollywood provides them also with a benchmark that fulfills
the migrants’ wish to express themselves as a minority group
in a foreign country and to “transpose the intensity of their
migration experience into art”.8
Material Considerations
Nollywood, however, is not only a source of inspiration. Its
informal distribution structures also provide diasporic film-
makers with a potential trans-national mass media platform.
By selling their films in Africa, they intend to spread their
message across the borders of their current country of
residence and to reach a mainstream audience in their country
of origin. Political aspirations and access to a wider range of
potential viewers, however, are only two aspects of the
strategy these African migrant film-makers deploy.
Their reference to the Nigerian home video industry also

responds to economic considerations, since they are quite
conscious of Nollywood’s commercial success and financial
223
prospects. Nollywood is known as a lucrative business and

even expatriates have heard stories of the nouveaux riches
who made fortunes thanks to their involvement in the
industry. Just like their colleagues in Nigeria, migrant film-
makers aspire to be successful. It is their goal to earn a living
by making films.
During my fieldwork I realised, nonetheless, that this desire to

become wealthy and famous was not based on economic
interests alone. Rather, I got the impression that this pursuit
of prosperity goes in hand with the film-makers’ desire for
social status and prestige. The participants have
simultaneously understood their media involvement as a
potential springboard to individual success and social as well
as professional advancement. In a media world full of casting
shows, TV contests, and other formats that suggest a quick
and easy way to become rich and famous, Nollywood seems
to offer the same promise to those who wish to become
celebrities.
This appeal may be further intensified by the fact that African

migrants often suffer from a low social status in Europe and
face a series of everyday struggles in their host society, all
because they are viewed as aliens. In this situation, Nollywood
gives them hope and allows them to dream of a life as
respected and appreciated members of the society in which
they live. To sum up, Nollywood can motivate African migrant
film-makers in various and often much more complex ways
than is apparent at first sight. In most cases, their motivations
and approaches are multi-dimensional as well as multi-
directional in nature, and they pursue different objectives at
one and the same time with their productions.
224
Representational Considerations
Whatever their reasons for referring to Nollywood, Nigerian
film practice has a crucial influence on the ways these migrant
film-makers represent themselves. They produce their
Nollywood-inspired films in a very complex set of trans-
national connections and multi-layered interactions between
themselves, Nollywood, a potential African audience, and
their European host society. In order to create films which
address all these different parties, they constantly have to
negotiate conflicting interests, images, and forms of
representation. They are confronted by a range of questions.
Who exactly are they addressing? How can they communicate
their ideas in a way which everyone understands? How do
they want to be represented to their potentially varied
audiences? How can they mediate conflicting images?
In the course of the shoots, I realised that many members of

the production team functioned as quasi-cultural interpreters
and translators in order to meet this challenge. They started
to explain to me (as a Swiss member of the team) why they
had staged scenes in a certain way or why they did not. One
day I recognised that a certain scene had been changed
completely and everyone on the film set seemed to acquiesce.
I was curious as to why and asked an actor for explanation. He
explained that it was necessary to change some scenes in
order to make them more realistic for Nigerian viewers. He
clarified that “if you want to show Nigerian culture on screen
and want to make sure that Nigerians take this movie
seriously, you have to really do it like them”.
A few days later there was a discussion between an actor and

the director. The young actor, who had been living in
Switzerland for only a few months, did not feel comfortable
225
about overtly flirting with his screen partner in a public park.

He argued that as a Nigerian he would never exhibit such
direct forms of affection and intimacy in public. While I
understood his concerns, the director, who was a Nigerian
himself but had lived in Switzerland for more than a decade,
rejected his ideas and called him old-fashioned and
unprofessional. Moreover, he told him that a Swiss audience
could never understand that they were falling in love if he did
not show it properly.
These two examples clearly arise from the complex processes

of identification and ‘othering’ that accompany Nollywood-
inspired film productions such as these. During the shoots, the
participants were constantly asking themselves how they
wanted to represent themselves, how they wanted others to
recognise them, and how they saw others. They were re-
positioning themselves on a permanent basis and made their
decisions depending on each situation and each scene.9 What
was eventually shot was the result of negotiations amongst
the people present. While some of these negotiations ended
up in power struggles and endless discussions, others were
agreed upon through a process of tacit consent.
The Social Construction of Migrant Film-makers

In the context of theories of identity, the performative
production of these film-makers can be understood as a social
construct which changes its shape according to the specific
context and which develops around questions of power
relations, social negotiations and the constant re-definition of
the “boundaries between the Us and the Other”.10 At the same
time, however, the two examples also show that such
processes of identification occur along a double line: while
they are highly context-driven and pragmatically actualised,
226
they are also profoundly shaped by the individual search for

long-term belonging to a certain community. Despite the
constant situational negotiations, they seek to answer the
fundamental questions of who am I? and where do I belong?
In this context, Nollywood’s popular films offer these migrant
film-makers a set of shared cultural codes they can refer to in
order to stress their African heritage and bring to light their
‘one-ness’ as migrants of African origin.
Nigeria’s video film industry motivates African film-makers all

over the world. It inspires them and influences their work in
different ways. As the Swiss example of my current field-work
shows, migrant film-makers recognise Nollywood as a useful
tool by means of which to express their opinion and to
respond to common images in the societies they live in.
Moreover, the Nigerian entertainment sector offers them a
potential mass media platform and thus a site for potential
economic and personal progress.
The trans-national inter-connection of Nollywood and its film-

makers, however, also has major effects on their working
processes. In particular, migrant film-makers operate in a very
complex environment in which they constantly have to re-
position themselves in order to find appropriate forms of self-
representation. These negotiations over how to express
themselves profoundly shape their considerations as film-
makers. Concomitantly, they also reflect their permanent
quest for belonging – not only as film-makers, but also as
migrants in a foreign land.
227
1
Jonathan Haynes and Onookome Okome, ‘Evolving Popular
Media’, in Jonathan Haynes (ed.), Nigerian Video Films, Athens, OH:
Ohio University Centre for International Studies, rev. ed., 2000, pp.
51-88; Peter Böhm, ‘Ohne Schweiss und Studio’, Südwind:
Internationale Politik, Kultur und Entwicklung, vol. 4, 2008, online
at http://www.suedwind-magazin.at/ohne-schweiss-und-studio,
n.p.; Françoise Ugochukwu, ‘The Reception and Impact of
Nollywood in France: A Preliminary Survey’, Paper presented to
International Symposium on Nollywood and Beyond - Transnational
Dimensions of an African Video Industry, Mainz University, 13-16
May 2009, online at
http://oro.open.ac.uk/25340/2/nollywood_in_france.pdf; Sandra
Mooser, ‘Nollywood meets Switzerland: Nigerianische Videofilme
und ihr Publikum in der Schweiz’, Arbeitsblätter des Instituts für
Sozialanthropologie der Universität Bern, vol. 54, 2011.
2
Jonathan Haynes, ‘Nollywood in Lagos, Lagos in Nollywood Films’
Africa Today vol. 54 no. 2, 2007, p. 133.
3
Sallie Marston, Keith Woodward and John Paul Jones, ‘Flattening
Ontologies of Globalization: The Nollywood Case’, Globalization,
vol. 4 no. 1, 2007, p. 57.
4
Arjun Appadurai, Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of
Globalization, Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press,
1996, p. 53; Faye Ginsburg, ‘Screen Memories and Entangled
Technologies: Resignifying Indigenous Lives’, in Ella Shohat and
Robert Stam (eds.), Multiculturalism, Postcoloniality, and
Transnational Media, New Brunswick, CA: Rutgers University Press,
2003, p. 78; Laura Marks, The Skin of the Film: Intercultural Cinema,
Embodiment, and the Senses. Durham, NC: Duke University Press,
2000, p 21.
228
5
Ginsburg, loc. cit.
6
William J. T. Mitchell, Picture Theory, Chicago, IL: University of
Chicago Press, 1994, pp. 420-421.
7
Swiss Federal Statistical Office, Ständige und Nichtständige
Wohnbevölkerung nach Kanton, Geschlecht,
Anwesenheitsbewilligung, Altersklasse und Staatsangehörigkeit:
2010-2012, Bern, 2012, available online at
http://www.bfs.admin.ch/bfs/portal/de/index/themen/01/07/blan
k/data/ 01.html.
8
Mariagiulia Grassilli, ‘Migrant Cinema: Transnational and Guerilla
Practices of Film Production and Representation’, Journal of Ethnic
and Migration Studies, vol. 34 no. 8, 2008, p. 1239.
9
Kathrin Oester and Bernadette Brunner, ‘Selbstdarstellungen
Jugendlicher in transnationalisierten Lebenswelten: Performance
Ethnografie als Forschungspartnerschaft und medienpädagogisches
Lernarrangement’, Forschungsbericht der Pädagogische Hochschule
Bern, Bern: PHBern, 2011.
10
Myria Georgiou, Diaspora, Identity and the Media: Diasporic
Transnationalism and Mediated Spatialities, Cresskill, NJ: Hampton
Press, 2006, pp. 42-44.
229
24 / The Construction of Self

in Personal Documentary Films
from Iran
Persheng Sadegh-Vaziri
The ‘Personal’ Documentary

Documentary films in Iran are made in various styles, inspired
by Iran’s poetic aesthetics, as well as by Western trends and
by the preferences of the state institutions that fund them.
Social documentaries with a personal voice can be traced back
to the 1950s with the films of Ebrahim Golestan and his
collaborator, poet Forough Farrokhzad. Forough made House
is Black (1962) about a leper colony in North-West Iran as a
commission for a women’s charity, but she accented it with
her own voice and poetry. The film impacted her personal life
reciprocally, as she adopted a child from the colony.
230
As Bill Nichols suggests, documentary films also contribute to

the formation of popular memory, which in Iran began to be
explored by means of film in the context of the 1979
Revolution. 1 The expression of popular memory was closely
monitored in the 1980s during the war with Iraq, but grew
again in the early 2000s when young and inexperienced film-
makers employed new digital technology to make hundreds of
documentaries in a period when political restrictions were
partly eased.
In Iran information that is allowed into the public domain must

be aligned with the discourse of the ruling bodies. For
example, at the time of the Iran-Iraq war, themes that
adhered to the discourse of martyrdom, sacrifice, and spiritual
purification on the battleground, were deemed worthy of
treatment in documentary film. The late documentarist and
theoretician of Islamic Cinema Morteza Avini believed that a
revolutionary film-maker’s mission was to promote Islamic
values, inspired by God. 2 His Revayate Fat-h (Narration of
Victory) series about soldiers and their understandings of the
war - he himself was killed by a landmine whilst filming - was
the longest running television documentary series in Iran,
broadcast almost daily by state-controlled television. It can
now be seen on YouTube.
In traditional documentaries the subjective voice is minimised,

even though the film-maker is always ‘present’ through
his/her choice of shots and stylistic decisions. In the context of
the development of understandings of subjectivity in its many
manifestations there is indeed a growing acknowledgement
that representations of the historical world are bound up with
personal experience. In these films subjectivity works as a
231
filter or experiential compass that guides the film towards its

goal of embodied knowledge.3
According to Naficy, sacred subjectivity is based on

martyrdom and the union of the self with God, and not based
on the individual.4 But even in Avini’s films, the film-maker is
present in the opening scenes and his voice is frequently heard
in the films, as he ponders the devotion and sacrifices of the
soldiers. Several episodes begin with Avini looking at the
images on the screen of his editing table. In one a soldier says
he loves the Imam (Khomeini). Avini begins to write, and his
poetic voice-over declares that his duty is to recount the story
of the war, “but how could language express what is
happening?”.
Changing Approaches to Documentary

Historically, Iranian documentaries have seldom embraced
the all-knowing, objective stance that has characterised
expository documentaries in the West. Even though a number
of films follow the expository form, with its god-like voice-
over, the narrations have poetic characteristics that bear the
hallmark of Iranian literary expression. With its use of
metaphor and allusion, this type of narration takes historical,
industrial, or even war documentaries away from the
certainties of scientific expression. Whether it is used for
aesthetic purposes or to provide an emotional or spiritual
dimension, poetic language softens the objective stance and
scientific certitude. In Iranian films it usually elevates the
narrative to give it a philosophical or spiritual dimension.
In the West in the 1990s personal films began to be made

under the influence of second-wave feminism. According to
Michael Renov, these films foregrounded “politics in everyday
232
life [and] encouraged the interrogation of identity and

subjectivity …. Struggles for equity in the public sphere were
now joined by interrogations of personal conflict, of private
histories and interiorized struggles.” 5 Documentary-like
ethnography moved away from universal truths towards a
depiction of what Clifford Geertz noted was dependent on
where it was seen from and what it was seen with. It became
evident that the cultural identity of the observer also
influenced the observation. The women’s movement in the
West brought with it awareness that identity issues to do with
race, sexuality, and ethnicity were politically charged and
needed to be foregrounded.
Personal documentaries are usually made by film-makers who

are on the margins of their society and who are facing difficult
or traumatic experiences. In Iran subjective and personal films
have recently become popular among a younger generation of
film-makers, who are marginalised. They are not interested in
following the edicts of the Islamic nation state, and in their
effort to circumvent the problem of documentary truth and
the role of the film-maker in mediating reality, they choose to
honestly examine reality by looking at their own lives, and
voicing their own views.
With the relaxation of the social climate after the war,

documentary film-makers like Rakhshan Banietemad, Ebrahim
Mokhtari, and Pirooz Kalantari returned to documentaries on
topics such as housing problems in Tehran, elections, women,
and youth issues. Rakhshan Banietemad’s Who Do You Show
These Films To? (1994), for example, is a significant film about
the dislocation of poor householders in a Tehran
neighbourhood.
233
The film focuses on the poverty-stricken residents and their

problems. It is made in the observational style, with occasional
interviews, though Banietemad’s presence in the film makes it
an interactive film that shows her and her crew as characters,
influencing the events shown. They are film-makers who
appear to care about the fate of their subjects, and sometimes
intervene on their behalf to improve conditions. Such a role is
accepted and praised in the Iranian context, and Banietemad
remains a popular, socially engaged film-maker.
The shift towards more personal films, where the subject of

the film is the self, is a big step for Iranian film-makers. Iranian
culture traditionally demarcates the private and public,
evident in its preference for the veil and traditional
architectural designs that allow for interior spaces to be
separated from public spaces in homes. The
andarooni/birooni designations for what should remain
interior and private and what is exterior and for public use are
well defined in the architecture and in the culture. Breaking
this mould was helped by the influence of trans-national
media and the popularity among Iranian intellectuals of
alternative and independent films from the West, notably the
personal films of Ross McElwee.
Pir Pesar (Reluctant Bachelor)

The production of some of the most impactful personal films
in Iran was indeed initiated by Western broadcasters. Three
of the best-known personal films of recent years were made
under the guidance of Katayoon Shahabi, an Iranian producer,
who was commissioned to make a series for a European
channel. She hired Iranian film-makers to advise selected
young directors. In 2011 Shirin Barghnavard made 21 Days
and Me about her decision to have a child; Mina Keshavarz
234
made Unwelcome in Tehran, about her separation from her

husband and her quest for independence; and Mehdi Bagheri
made Reluctant Bachelor, about his difficulties with his father.
Though the films were produced with the European market in
mind, they resonated with Iranian audiences who reacted with
admiration and sometimes harsh criticism to the films because
they challenged long-held values, such as family values and
women’s place in society.
Pir Pesar (Reluctant Bachelor, 2011) opens with scenes of

Bagheri’s brother’s wedding. Though he is not present, he is
the main focus, as his voice-over explains his absence from the
celebrations. At one point his father walks out of the party to
call him, but he doesn’t answer. We first see him in a scene in
a small, dark room, looking at footage of his father on a hiking
trip when they were on better terms. The film is shot in an
observational and personal style, with the film-maker
inscribed both as the film-maker and also as the subject of the
film.
Mehdi’s character is ever-present, and his continuous voice-

over tells viewers how, at the age of thirty, he feels that he
cannot move forward. Reminding us of the difficult lives of
younger people in Iran, he is stuck living at home because of
his financial problems, which he blames on his father. He talks
to his friends, grandfather, and brother about his money
problems. His brother says that he is thankful for their father,
and that it is necessary to make a sacrifice in order to reach his
goals, to start a family. The film shows vulnerable men
burdened by difficult economic times. His father’s generation
had fought for the Revolution and boasted about bringing
down the Shah’s statue, while Mehdi and his friends could
only play a lesser role in the 2009 uprising, which was not
235
successful. In the final scene Mehdi’s triumphant bungee jump

signifies a new beginning.
Pir Pesar enjoyed many sold-out screenings, met with glowing

reviews, and won prizes in national festivals. In response to
those who criticise him for attacking his father, Mehdi
defended himself by claiming that members of his family had
a choice to participate or not, and that they gave him feedback
about their role in the film. He claimed that the film is
cathartic for viewers in similar situations, and proposed the
therapeutic potential of personal films at large, in which the
film-maker expresses a traumatic situation, and through the
process of film-making, overcomes his or her difficulties. He
revealed that in the process of making the film he came to
understand his father for the first time.6
Profession: Documentarist
Disillusioned and fearful in the restrictive cultural and political
climate after the unsuccessful uprisings of 2009, seven female
film-makers decided to gather together with the idea of
making a collective film about their experiences of the
Revolution and their work as women film-makers. They
decided to make personal contributions to an omnibus film,
Profession: Documentarist (2014). They used their personal
archives and home movies, filming mainly in interior spaces
where they did not need permits, and helping one another to
formulate and edit their stories.
Most of the film-makers, in their thirties and secular, firmly

believe in personal and gender freedoms for women. In the
film they tackle such themes as their memories of the Iran-Iraq
war; their childhood in the shadow of war and Revolution;
their fears of another war; the importance of music in their
236
family; emigration; and the professional difficulties which they

experience in living in a restrictive State. None of the films
express a specifically gendered experience, though gender is
present in their voices and in their focus on familial topics.
The various segments feature first-person narration and the

dark atmosphere of life in conditions of confinement and
oppression. Shirin Barghnavard’s is the first segment and
begins with a scene from Battlefield 3, a war game that shows
a U.S. military raid on Tehran. Shirin’s voice-over explains that
the area the American fighters are about to enter is a part of
Tehran where she grew up. Her narration recounts her
personal story, her return to Iran after some years in Australia,
and her worries about the threat of war.
In Sahar Salahshoor’s segment we see her packing, while she

voices her thoughts on moving out of her apartment with its
view of the notorious Evin prison. The entire film takes place
inside her modern apartment, and the large windows that
overlook the highway and the prison on the other side.
Gradually and calmly she recounts her inability to work during
the year she lived in this apartment. She reveals the terrible
story of her parents’ arrest in the 1980s and their
imprisonment in Evin when she was a little girl. We are privy
to her simultaneous attachment to the view, and also to its
implicit horror.
In experimental vein, Sepideh Abtahi’s segment, for its part,

looks back at her family’s memories of the Revolution, and a
beautiful aunt who was an activist, but who died just before
the Revolution began. Through archival footage of the family,
and repetition of images, she tells the story of the lost hopes
of the 1979 revolution, when she herself was only three years
old.
237
Firouzeh Khosravani’s contribution, meanwhile, recounts her

experience of being stopped at the airport and questioned.
She was accused of Siāhnamāyi (expressing a dark version of
reality) because her earlier film contemplated the headless
and breastless mannequins in Tehran store windows. Only
Nahid Rezai’s concluding segment offers an optimistic view.
She reviews what she did during the months when she could
not make films. Her segment ends with the euphoria of the
2013 elections among the cheering voters who were
celebrating the victory of reformist President Rouhani.
Reading Salinger in the Park

Essay films which feature the film-maker’s voice and thoughts
about a topic are another type of personal expression, even if
they are not about the film-maker’s life as such. Pirooz
Kalantari is an activist film-maker whose view of documentary
is that it should be focused on individuals and their ordinary
lives, rather than on large events and structures. He is known
for writing about documentaries as well as a making them, for
example A Few Richter Degrees (about the possibility of an
earthquake in Tehran) and In Unfinished Streets (about poets
in Tehran).
Kalantari points out that that film-makers like him, who make
personal or essay films usually come from a writing
background, so this style is natural for them.7 Reading Salinger
in The Park (2013) expresses the director’s preoccupation with
the city of Tehran. The film is narrated by him and expresses
his long relationship with Park-e Shahr in Tehran, but, unlike
many personal essay films, it is shot by a cinematographer
rather than by the film-maker himself/herself, which further
separates Kalantari’s character in the film from his role as the
director.
238
The film begins in the streets surrounding the park, with

Kalantari explaining that this was an old part of the city that
was torn down 60 years ago to construct a new Tehran. We
see him walking along the fences of the park, as he recounts
that he is only a few years younger than the park itself. The
camera then enters the park and lingers on scenes of trees,
families, women, and old men.
He recounts his early childhood memories: stories of his

family’s carriage rides to the park to picnic, and as a student in
the park, where he read novels instead of studying. One scene
is re-enacted: an occasion in the park when a girl was sitting
to Kalantari’s right, a boy to his left. The boy placed a wrapped
paper on his book, which the girl picked up, and then they left.
What we see is a tight shot focused on the book, and hands
that place the small packet and remove it.
Kalantari is a stroller, as he walks aimlessly and observes, in

the tradition of Walter Benjamin’s flâneur. For him the park
and the city are defined by individuals and not by buildings.
Benjamin connected the activity of strolling with the dawn of
modernity, which is possible only in a modern city like Paris or
Tehran. The film’s open ending comes with night shots of an
empty park. We then see him seated in the metro train,
quoting Salinger, who famously said that stories do not end,
the narrator simply comes to a halt.
Benjamin and other thinkers found estrangement in the

instances of modernity, notably the oppressive ‘realism’
installed by technologies such as photography, which record
an instant and freeze it. He connected photography with death
and alienation. 8 However, Iranian filmmakers revel in the
ever-present residents of Tehran, who are very much alive,
239
making this major city quirky, unpredictable, and a fertile

source of stories.
While traditional Iranian documentaries are characterised by

the devotional/self-sacrificial exemplars of religious films, the
idealised subject of ethnographic films situated in pristine
rural regions, and civic individuals in difficult situations who
are depicted realistically, the de-stabilised subjects of playful
or satirical documentaries by the younger generations of film-
makers, together with personal films and self-portraits, are
becoming more prevalent. In the last twenty years, thanks to
the advent of small format cameras and global trends that
value individual experiences, in Iran reality is now mediated
more and more in highly personal terms.
1
On documentary and popular memory, see Bill Nichols,
Representing Reality: Issues and Concepts in Documentary,
Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991, p. ix.
2
Roxanne Varzi, Warring Souls: Youth, Media and Martyrdom in
Post Revolution Iran, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006, p.
96.
3
Michael Renov, The Subject in Documentaries, New York:
Routledge, 2004, p. 176.
4
Hamid Naficy, A Social History of Iranian Cinema, vol. 4, Durham,
NC: Duke University Press, 2012, p. 12.
5
Renov, op. cit., p. 171.
240
6
Hadi Alipanah, ‘The Camera Heals Me’, Cinéma Vérité, vol. 1 no.
2, Summer 2014, p. 142.
7
Pirooz Kalantari, Interview with the author, Tehran, 10 July 2013.
8
Patrice Petro, Fugitive Images: From Photography to Video,
Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995, p. 221.
241
25 / Film-making with a Mobile Phone

in Pakistan
Ahmad Bilal
Old and New Cinema in Pakistan

Cinema in Pakistan has suffered a great deal from the
colonial inheritance of censorship policies, which were
introduced to restrict nationalist ideology and to maintain
the hegemony of the ruling élite. Policy-makers always tried
to control the film industry, and film, as a medium, was
regarded as the work of infidels, as well as a ‘boys’ night out’
kind of activity. The strict censorship policy meant that
established cinema was diverted from critical realism to a
more straightforward social realism; that formal education in
the subject was missing in the first fifty years; and that
production quality suffered and market reach diminished.1
242
But alongside the decline of the established cinema, an

‘emergent cinema’ has been evolving in Pakistan. Khuda Kay
Liye (KKL)/In the Name of God (2007) by Shoab Mansoor, a
director from television, enjoyed box-office success and
motivated a whole new crop of film-makers to experiment
with the medium. The film deals with the post 9/11 scenario
and highlights the sufferings of Pakistanis and the
aggravation of the inherent issues of a post-colonial society.
Pakistan has been facing the War on Terror at the North-

West border since 2002, which has damaged the economy
and the peace of the country. More than 80,000 Pakistanis
had died by 2013 as a consequence of the war.2 On the one
hand, emergent film-makers have responded to this crisis by
representing the life which goes on in the midst of such a
‘war’. On the other hand, the Media Liberation Act of 2002
has favoured the expansion of media, and allowed the
exploration of more diversified subjects. 3 It has been
accompanied by the transformation of technology from
analogue to digital, in turn increasing and improving the
human resources available.
With Pakistan the centre of socio-political events arising from

the War on Terror, a new generation of film-makers has
emerged who want to share the other side of the story with
the world. Digital and convergent media have helped them to
acquire film production skills and knowledge, reducing the
cost of production and thus allowing film-makers greater
access to the medium. In that context, I recently made a
short film, Sohni Dharti: An Untrue Story, using technology
which is readily available to many film students - a mobile
phone and a Digital Single Lens Reflex Camera (DSLR), on a
negligible budget.
243
The Mobile Phone Film

A number of efforts have already been made in Pakistan to
initiate films within very limited resources. For instance,
short TV films made by young film-makers were screened by
the Goethe Institute in 2008. Waderai Ka Beta, a satirical
music-video by Ali Gul Pir, made with a digital single lens
reflex camera (DSLR) and released on social media in 2012,
shows the expansion and influence of new media tools in
Pakistan. An institutional initiative took the form of the 60-
Second International Film Festival in Islamabad, Pakistan,
organized by the US Embassy, which was attended by
youngsters from Lahore, Peshawar, Mardan, FATA, and
Quetta.
Mobile phone film-making has been emerging as a new genre

all over the world, and the Internet can provide a valuable
space for exhibition. In the case of my film Sohni Dharti: An
Untrue Story, the emphasis was on the basic art of
storytelling, rather than producing a technology-oriented
project which looked like something out of Hollywood, or a
more formal documentary based on the events of daily life.
At the same time, the film was planned and produced like
any other film: at each stage the main emphasis, inevitably,
was on saving money.
The story of Sohni Dharti: An Untrue Story is derived from

Gunnar Järvstad’s short film Tune for Two (Sweden, 2011),
but it is naturally more concerned with national issues within
the context of Pakistan, raising a number of questions about
the recent state of the society, for instance the mysterious
killings of Pakistanis by other Pakistanis. The media are
constantly circulating contradictory statements so that the
majority of people are unaware of the complete picture -
244
that is to say, the relationship between the ‘untrue story’ and

what is in fact true.
Political or ‘parallel’ theatre in Pakistan, which started out

during General Zia-ul-Haq’s period of martial law (1977-
1985), also provided a source of inspiration for the
production of Sohni Dharti. Political theatre created a much
liberated cultural space when art and culture were facing
restrictions in the 1980s, managing to survive, with limited
resources, in private spaces.4 For example, Juloos/Procession
(1984), an Ajoka theatre group adaptation of Indian
playwright Badal Sircar’s Michhil/ Procession (1972), was not
allowed to be presented in any of the main theatres, but was
performed on the lawn of a house in Cantt, Lahore.5
New Ways of Working

In Pakistan, as often elsewhere, questions of funding and
policy-making have controlled film narrative. Investors want
projects which can pass scrutiny by the censor and earn
money, while the authorities have their own agendas.
Established film-makers like Syed Noor and Shahzad Rafique
mention in their interviews with the author that government
and the private sector are not interested in simple
entertainment, and so most of the independent film-makers
are pooling resources to make their own films. Additionally,
in a zero budget project the most difficult part, naturally, is
to gather and convince a team to identify with the project
and to work on a voluntary basis.
New media have also helped to develop a network inside

Pakistan, and the production team for Sohni Dharti was
finalised using social media, almost three months before the
final shoot. The team consisted of nine people, a blend of
245
recently graduated practitioners, and students from arts

institutes and early career editors, so that the practice
remains relevant to the film students and future directors of
Pakistan. The process also helped to achieve a ‘bottom-up’
method of producing a film.
Another aim was to avoid the need for approval from the
authorities, as lengthy permission procedures and huge sums
of money are required to book a shooting location. The
decline of the film industry has further impacted these
procedures. In countries like India, for reasons of history,
tradition, and religious belief, links through social networks
are more important than institutional ones. 6 In these
societies, social networks can thus be helpful in arranging the
location, makeup and props.
From Production to Distribution and Exhibition

The rehearsal sessions were arranged by one of the team.
The film was rehearsed with a DSLR and mobile phone
camera, equipment readily available within the group
(camera rehearsal was not easy prior to the arrival of digital
technology). The weaknesses and strengths evident were
shared with the group, which helped the crew and cast to
respond in the best possible way on the final day. The local
community was engaged to finalise a location, and they
helped further by providing human resources, changing
rooms, and refreshments. As a result, the film-maker enjoyed
extreme freedom in experimenting with his ideas.
The film is exceptionally small-scale: it runs for just two

minutes, hence requiring limited production activity during a
a shoot of only four hours. A brief visit was made a couple of
days before the shoot to mark the spot and to finalise timing
246
for the best possible light. The eventual editing was also
determined by the resources of the group: volunteers
finished the job in their spare time. The final product,
produced within a week and at negligible cost, was ready for
its local audience within a week.
The business of film distribution via the Internet is a tricky

matter in post-colonial societies. YouTube was banned in
Pakistan at the time, but, the video was uploaded on the
video-sharing website Vimeo. This suggests that new and
convergent media have the capacity to bypass local
constraints to some extent. Initially, it was planned to share
the film via social media within local community; now it can
also be viewed anywhere in the world. In this connection,
sub-titles were of course needed to cater for the
international audience (for example, the group also wanted
to share the project at some international film festivals).
The original Urdu was voluntarily translated into English by

Professor Shahnawaz Zaidi. In the process he tried to provide
generalised meanings for the words, so that everyone could
relate to it. All this has made this little film a unique case
study within the context of Pakistan. With the involvement of
the local community, it has achieved a bottom-up method of
film production. The process also revealed the problems that
accompany new technologies of production and distribution,
ranging from the question of ‘amateurism’ to an engagement
with a fuller sense of the national and international context
in which film-makers often work.
247
Acknowledgement
I am most grateful to leading figures in the Pakistan Film Industry
for granting me interviews, on which I have drawn here: Shoab
Mansoor, Syed Noor, Samina Peerzada, and Shahzad Rafique.
1
See my essay ‘New Developments in Pakistani Cinema’, in Phillip
Drummond (ed.), The London Film and Media Reader 3: The
Pleasures of the Spectacle, London: The London Symposium, 2015,
pp. 527–535, and my article ‘Recent Quest For Distinctive Identity
in Pakistani Cinema’, IJELLH (International Journal of English
Langauge, Literature, and Humanities), vol. 3 no. 3, May 2015,
pp.58–76, online at http://ijellh.com/papers/2015/May/06-58-76-
May-2015.pdf.
2
Physicians for Social Responsibility (PSR) in collaboration with
International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War (IIPNW)
and Physicians for Global Survival (PGS), Body Count: Casualty
Figures after 10 Years of the ‘War on Terror’: Iraq, Afghanistan and
Pakistan, Washington, D.C.: IPPNW Germany, 2015, online at
http://www.ippnw.org/pdf/2015-body-count.pdf.
3
Marco Mezzera and Safara Sial, Media and Governance in
Pakistan : A Controversial yet Essential Relationship, Brussels:
Initiative for Peacebuilding, October 2010, online at
https://www.clingendael.nl/sites/default/files/20101109_CRU_pub
licatie_mmezzera.pdf.
4
See Asma Mundrawala, Shifting Terrains: The Depoliticisation of
Political Theatre in Pakistan, University of Sussex, DPhil thesis, 2010.
5
Fawzia Afzal-Khan, ‘Street Theatre in Pakistani Punjab: The Case of
Ajoka, Lok Rehs, and the (So-Called) Woman Question’, in Fawzia
248
Afzal-Khan and Kalpana Seshadri-Crooks (eds.), The Pre-Occupation

of Postcolonial Studies, London: Durham, NC: Duke University Press,
2000, pp. 171–199.
5
See Mark Lorenzen and Florian A. Taeube, ‘The Banyan and the
Birch Tree: Family Ties and Embeddedness in the Indian Film
Industry in Bollywood’, Creative Encounters Working Papers no. 40,
Denmark: Copenhagen Business School, 2010, available online at
http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.613.17
39&rep=rep1&type=pdf.
249
3 / Gendered Identities
26 / Queering Feminine Identities in

Spellbound and Now Voyager
Yael Maurer
Figures of Psychoanalysis
In Irving Rapper's melodrama Now Voyager (USA, 1942), and
Alfred Hitchcock's thriller Spellbound (USA, 1945), feminine
identity formation is presented as a psychoanalytic journey.
Both films question the ‘normal’ roles of wife/mother/lover by
offering their female protagonists different forms of feminine
identification. Ingrid Bergman plays the role of a psychiatrist/
detective in Spellbound and Bette Davis plays a transformed
and re-born woman who liberates herself from her mother's
domination following a nervous breakdown in Now Voyager.
Both protagonists challenge accepted feminine roles and their
journeys reflect an emerging femininity that is always already
‘other’. The films thus share an investment in different forms
of feminine jouissance.
250
In Spellbound, traditional gender roles are reversed: the

(active) woman psychiatrist, and Freud-like figure, saves the
(passive) male patient and lover despite his continued
objections to her mastery. The film's ‘happy ending’ depends
on the man's acceptance of woman as saviour. In Now
Voyager, the female protagonist who manages to break free
from her (monstrous) mother with the help of a (male)
psychoanalyst refuses the option of a normative heterosexual
relationship. The film ends with the protagonist in the
quintessentially queer role of the unmarried ‘aunt’. Both films
utilise the psychoanalytical process as a metaphor for their
protagonists' personal and professional journeys which end in
fulfilment and actualisation and offer different visions of the
figure of the psychiatrist as saviour.
In both films, a favourable view of psychoanalysis as a
transformative and liberating process is pitted against social
resistance to the idea of therapy in general and to the figure
of the psychoanalyst in particular. The films thus champion
psychoanalysis as a way of overcoming, as the epigraph to
Hitchcock's film puts it, the "devils of unreason" in the human
soul. Psychoanalysis is viewed as a cure for normal people who
need to confront their demons and regain their selfhood. Both
films also dramatise, however, in both form and content, the
ways in which these demonic forces of the psyche are not
always that easily overcome.
Thus, although both films have some kind of ‘happy ending’,
they nevertheless enact the many obstacles on the way to
realising selfhood. As both films are firmly Freudian in their
approach to sexuality and their location of childhood trauma
as the cause of adult neurosis, their female figures - although
seemingly on opposite sides of the spectrum, one being a
patient and the other a psychoanalyst - nonetheless face
251
similar societal expectations regarding their roles as women in

a male-dominated world. Both protagonists emerge as strong-
willed women who navigate their way successfully in a
patriarchal society. But they are still in need of ‘father figures’
to guide them to the promised land of contented selfhood and
blissful self -actualisation. In both cases, the father figures are
psychoanalysts.
Detecting Identity in Spellbound

As Thomas Leitch points out, the film is Hitchcock's "most
determined attempt to employ the jargon and the images of
psychoanalysis".1 This is obvious from the solemn rolling title
which introduces the film's aims in the most explicit of ways:
“Our story deals with psychoanalysis, the method by which
modern science treats the emotional problems of the sane. /
The analyst seeks only to induce the patient to talk about his
hidden problems, to open the locked doors of his mind. / Once
the complexes that have been disturbing the patient are
uncovered and interpreted, the illness and confusion disappear
… and the devils of unreason are driven from the human soul.”
This is preceded by the adaptation of a famous quotation from
Shakespeare's Julius Caesar: “The fault … is not in our stars/But
in ourselves ...”2
The two quotations thus frame the film, highlighting the
concern with guilt and the ways it shapes the human mind and
consciousness. The film, however, turns out to be not so much
about driving "the devils of unreason" from the human soul as
it is about the role of sexual fantasies in the formation of male
and female subjects. However, although the film so clearly
announces its subject matter, Hitchcock never intended this
story to be taken as an accurate depiction of the process of
psychoanalysis. In the Truffaut interviews, we should recall,
252
Hitchcock referred somewhat derisively to the film as “just

another manhunt story wrapped up in pseudo-
psychoanalysis”.35
The film tells the story of John Ballantine (Gregory Peck) who
arrives at the Green Manors insane asylum at the beginning of
the film, unaware of his own past. Suffering from amnesia, he
initially believes himself to be Dr. Edwardes, arriving to replace
Dr. Murchison (Leo G. Carroll) as director of the asylum. After
his false identity is exposed, Ballantine searches for the truth
about his past with the aid of psychiatrist Dr. Constance
Peterson (Ingrid Bergman), with whom he is falling in love, and
her mentor, Dr. Alex Brulov (Michael Chekhov).
After solving the riddle of a surreal dream (presented in an

elaborate and surreal sequence designed for the film by
Salvador Dali), he eventually returns to the site of his apparent
murder of the real Dr. Edwardes. After Ballantine is charged
with murder and jailed, Constance confronts Murchison with
evidence that he is the real murderer. Murchison shoots
himself, and Ballantine is finally released - both from prison
and from the guilt that has haunted him throughout the film -
and is reunited with Constance.
As this summary reminds us, Hitchcock presents us with a

female psychiatrist who fulfils the dual role of mother/lover in
relation to her patient/lover, but who is also the astute
detective figure responsible for solving the murder mystery
which is central to the plot. This dual role is at the heart of the
film’s engagement with female sexuality, which is apparent
from the opening scene, where Constance is faced with a
female patient who openly flaunts her sexuality and seems to
threaten the seemingly cold and professional woman
psychiatrist.
253
Female Sexuality and the Evolving Heroine

The film's opening scene thus clearly foregrounds Constance’s
dilemma in the film. In this highly dramatic yet somewhat
comic scene, Dr. Peterson is confronted by the prototypical
‘nymphomaniac’. The patient, a sultry sex kitten who tries to
seduce the male nurse in order to avoid the meeting with
Peterson, and who scratches his hand, cat-like, when he
refuses her amorous advances, proves to be more than the
therapist can handle. Shocked by the patient's flagrant and
violent sexuality, we see the bespectacled, cigar-smoking
professional woman caught off-guard despite her attempts to
remain distant and objective.
The patient, so openly displaying her hatred of men while
openly flaunting her sexual power over them, is a foil to the
apparently cool and remote therapist. When Constance first
meets the alleged Dr. Edwardes, however, her immediate
attraction to him undermines this cool exterior and she ends
up breaking all the rules as their relationship develops. This
scene demonstrates the film’s concern with female sexuality
as a threatening (and murderous) option while also vividly
showcasing the resistance to therapy.
The "drooling science", as the female patient so mockingly
describes it, becomes the object of attack later in the film
when John Ballantine resists the mastery of his female
therapist turned mother-figure/lover. The effects of female
mastery over a male patient are too hard to handle.
Ballantine's resistance to therapy, foreshadowed in the
opening scene, is made explicit later on as he accuses
Constance of trying to dominate him, in terms which closely
mirror the powerful opening encounter.
254
As Amy Yang rightly notes, "’Spellbound’, like so many

Hitchcock films, conveys an overt oedipal overtone. Constance
is depicted in the film as a mother figure, and Ballantine’s guilt
over the murder and her attempt to save him can be
interpreted as his guilt over the murder of a 'missing father'
and his desire for the mother figure".4 David Boyd concludes
that “if the fantasy material of the film, with its familiar
parental figures and Oedipal guilt, sometimes verges on the
banal, Hitchcock's narrative manipulation of that material can
nevertheless be seen, not merely […] as the product of
ideological confusion, but rather as reenacting a central and
tenaciously unresolved conflict in Freud's own thought”.5
Boyd’s view, however, still places the male protagonist at the

centre of the film. But it is Constance's transgressive journey
and her debunking of the ‘father figure’ (Dr. Murchison) whom
she first held in such high esteem, and the realisation of her
sexual impulses, that become the driving forces of the film. As
Thomas Hyde rightly claims, "It is not really even John
Ballantine's film, for, while the sensational psychoanalytic
murder-mystery plot holds our immediate surface attention,
Hitchcock's sustained, essential focus here is on the emotional
and moral development of Constance Peterson in her relation
with Ballantine".6
While one might question the "moral" aspect of Constance's
actions - after all, she is not sure of Ballantine's innocence and
relies on her feelings for him rather than her rational judgment
- the film nevertheless focuses on her transformation from the
‘constant’ Constance of the first scene, to the passionate
mother/lover/saviour in the second part of the film. If
anything, it is Ballantine who emerges as the ‘feminine’
element: he swoons, faints, has temper tantrums, and has to
be rescued from himself by the strong woman and the
255
benevolent father-figure, Dr. Brulov, a stand-in for the missing

father in his life.
Now Voyager: The Journey to Female Selfhood

The journey to self-actualisation is rendered even more clearly
in Now Voyager. The film tells the story of Charlotte Vale
(played by Bette Davis), an aging spinster hailing from a rich
Bostonian family. Charlotte lives at home with her
domineering mother, who effectively imprisons her in the
domestic sphere. Charlotte's sister-in-law Lisa, worried about
Charlotte's mental state, invites her friend, the psychiatrist Dr.
Jaquith (Claude Rains), to assess her condition. He manages to
befriend the lonely Charlotte and convinces her to accept
treatment in his facility. Charlotte undergoes a remarkable
transformation, both physically and mentally, which is
showcased when she takes a cruise to South America under an
assumed identity. She meets a married man, Jerry Durrance
(Paul Henreid), and falls in love with him. Since the man
cannot leave his wife and daughter, the couple separate, but
not before spending the night together.
Charlotte returns to her mother's house where the mother

tries, and nearly succeeds, to push her back into the old
submissive role. But the transformed Charlotte does not let
her mother enslave her again. After her mother's death,
Charlotte becomes the mistress of the house. She also ends up
in the role of surrogate mother to her married lover's
daughter, whom she meets when she goes back to Dr.
Jaquith's facility to recuperate. The girl is clearly a mirror
image of the young Charlotte. She too suffers from
mistreatment by her mother and longs for love.
256
The film's ending has Charlotte and Jerry discussing their

future as they make their way out on to a balcony at night,
with Charlotte asking for his help “to protect that little strip of
territory that’s ours”. When Jerry asks “And will you be happy,
Charlotte?” she proclaims, in a legendary closing line: “Oh,
Jerry, Don’t Let's ask for the moon. We have the stars.” The
camera moves between them and up into the sky as Max
Steiner’s score swells to a finale. This pronouncement seems
to signal her willingness to settle for ‘less’.
The film borrows its title from Walt Whitman’s pithy lines on
the “untold want”: The meaning of Whitman’s lines - "The
untold want, by life and land ne'er granted,/Now, Voyager, sail
thou forth, to seek and find" - is changed by the film’s
message, as Lynda Ely has noted. In the film, "the voyager,
Charlotte Vale (emblematic of all female readers and viewers),
is doomed never to find out that which is lacking. In both the
novel and the film, she replaces lonely spinsterhood for lonely
surrogate motherhood [sic]. Thus she represents, finally, not
the transformed voyager, but rather the untold want, choosing
instead of physical and psychic fulfillment the public
approbation of her personal sacrifice".7
I would suggest, however, that this ‘lack’ is in fact the very

thing that Charlotte desires and that her needs are fulfilled,
although in a different way than the (male) poet might have
intended. The film employs Whitman's metaphor of a
transformative journey to a more ‘healthy’ selfhood by
presenting the figure of the psychiatrist as a benevolent
surrogate father. As the film’s ending makes clear, Charlotte's
role is not to be married and confined to a normalising
domestic sphere. This double substitution - the stars for the
moon, a lover's daughter as a surrogate daughter instead of
fulfilling the relationship with the (married) man - shows how
257
the ‘thing’ itself (be it the male role as lover/father/ protector,

or the conventional female roles of mother/lover/dependent)
are traded in for their alternatives.
Charlotte will not be a mother in the conventional sense but

she will become something more: an independent and self-
fulfilled woman who turns her mother's dour and forbidding
house into a place of joy. Although she briefly contemplates
the normative option, and writes a letter to Dr. Jaquith stating
that "every woman wants a room of her own, a house of her
own, a child of her own", she nonetheless does not marry Elliot
Livingston, to whom she is briefly engaged, the widowed man
with two sons who would have provided her with those
solutions.
Mothers, Daughters, Resolutions

How then then are we to read the psychoanalytic part of this
film? If in Spellbound, fantasy played a major role and the
Oedipal drama was at the centre, here the mother-daughter
relationship is seen as the root cause of Charlotte's mental
breakdown. Without a father figure to help her mature,
Charlotte remains at the mercy of a widowed mother who
enslaves her precisely because she depends on her constant
presence. When the daughter wants to break free of her
mother, the mother brutally denies her that option.
The introduction of a benevolent father figure in the form of a

psychiatrist is meant to provide Charlotte with the kind of
acceptance and guidance she lacks at home. Charlotte learns
to reject her mother’s constricting inner voice in favour of the
counsel of the male father figure/doctor. Charlotte takes on
the same role when she becomes a mother figure and mentor
258
to her lover's troubled young daughter, and teaches her the

lessons she had learned.
The resistance to therapy which is prominent in Spellbound is

almost non-existent here. The doctor wins over Charlotte in
one short scene, and the magical transformation from a
neurotic, closeted spinster to glamour puss is glossed over. We
don't see how Charlotte overcomes her problems; all we see
is the result. Charlotte emerges as a beautiful butterfly who is
now able to get back at the niece who patronised her at the
beginning of the film - by becoming thinner, more popular,
and more flirtatious than she is. What makes the film
persuasive, however, transforming it from a clichéd
melodrama/’women's film’ into a much more radical work of
art, is its refusal to provide the classic ‘happy ending’.
Charlotte will not be reunited with her lover; he will not leave
his wife for her; there will be no wedding scene to round out
the plot. Instead, the independent, childless ‘aunt’ will have
the last word. No longer ‘veiled’, she will emerge as a force to
be reckoned with, making her own choices (which are of
course distinctly class-based: The rich Bostonian can allow
herself to indulge in charity and give elaborate parties
whenever she chooses). The dream ending is replaced with an
alternative lifestyle: it does not feature a heteronormative
family, but a different kind of family unit, and there is no
marriage between a man and a woman, but a bond between
an older woman and a younger girl. In this unconventional
ending, the film does what other films, even today, still rarely
dare to imagine, let alone celebrate.
259
1
Thomas Leitch, Find the Director and Other Hitchcock Games,
Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 1991, p. 130.
2
This advice is given by Cassius to Brutus in William Shakespeare,
Julius Caesar (I, ii, 140-141) in The Complete Works, New York:
Walter J. Black, 1937, p. 861: "The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our
stars,/But in ourselves, that we are underlings."
3
Alfred Hitchcock in François Truffaut, Hitchcock, New York: Simon
and Schuster 1967, p. 165.
4
Amy Yang, ‘Psychoanalysis and Detective Fiction’, Perspectives in
Biology and Medicine, vol. 53 no. 4, Autumn 2010, p. 604.
5
David Boyd, ‘The Parted Eye: Spellbound and Psychoanalysis’,
Senses of Cinema, no. 6, May 2000, online at
http://sensesofcinema.com/2000/conference-for-the-love-of-
fear/spellbound/.
6
Thomas Hyde, ‘The Moral Universe of Spellbound’, in Marshall
Deutelbaum and Leland Poague (eds.), A Hitchcock Reader,
Chichester: John Wiley & Sons, rev. ed., 2009, p. 157.
7
Lynda M. Ely, ‘The Untold Want: Representation and
Transformation Echoes of Walt Whitman's ‘Passage to India’ in
Now, Voyager’, Literature/Film Quarterly, vol. 29 no. 1 , January
2001, p. 51.
260
27 / Gender, Labour and the Media:

The Changing Representation of
Businesswomen in U.S. TV Drama
Natalya Vodopyanova
Women and Leadership

Views of the role of gender in acquiring leadership positions in
business are divided and the source of considerable
controversy. Some claim that organisations are gender-
neutral and that reaching the top is not affected by gender,
but rather by personal abilities, skills and professional
characteristics. Although the number of working women
continues to increase, however, the number of women in
senior positions remains unchanged. According to Catalyst,
the leading U.S. non-profit organisation for the progress of
women through inclusion in the workplace, in April 2016
women made up 46.8% of the U.S. labour force, but only held
4% of CEO positions at S&P 500 companies.1
261
This discrepancy might well be attributed to the ongoing

negative understandings of a primary social category such as
gender, and of women being seen erroneously as lacking
managerial characteristics and thus being less capable than
men of becoming successful business leaders. This creates
huge obstacles for women in their careers as well as
preventing them from pursuing moving up the organisational
ladder.
Gender stereotypes, crucially affecting the judgments of an

individual’s competence, ability, and worth, often derive from
assumptions that men ‘act’ while women ‘feel’. This viewpoint
is supported by surveys in which men endorse more
‘instrumental’ characteristics and women endorse more
‘expressive’ features. Broad stereotypes of men and
leadership suggest that men are capable of independent
actions, are goal-oriented, and logically grounded, while
women are communal, expressive and nurturing - but less
independent, mild and too caring.2
Current research on gender portrayal argues that television

today renders a relatively different image of female characters
at work than those to be seen in earlier periods. This essay
asks if there have been any significant changes in the depiction
of working women, and particularly women in leadership
positions, over the past forty years; whether the current
television image of working women supports or opposes the
claim that women typically hold inferior professional
positions; and looks at the kinds of characteristics which need
to be enacted by female characters in order to achieve
professionalism, leadership, and success in their business
careers.
262
The Role of Television

Television is of course a powerful means of creating,
cultivating and supporting gender stereotypes, reinforcing
general expectations of self and others. Through the
enactment of professional and personal roles, characters in
prime-time television series display the most basic social
functions as bread-winners and dependents, and provide the
content for gender stereotypes. However, along with the
ongoing differences in portrayals of male and female
characters, with women typically inhabiting the more
interpersonal roles and men the work-related ones, there
have recently been a number of TV series whose central plot
centres on a woman as a business professional.
The earlier tendency to assign leadership roles to middle-aged

male characters - holding occupational power and striving for
professional goals while female characters were playing more
interpersonal and domestic roles - has changed so that it is
quite common today to see middle-aged females as central
characters, performing business-related tasks. We may indeed
be witness to “the rapid evolution of the portrayals of gender
in prime time”, with “a new, more progressive type of female
character becoming commonplace”.3
However, placement of the female characters in the work-

place does not necessarily mean they are actually seen
performing work-related tasks. Traditionally female TV
characters are to be found performing more interpersonal and
relational actions such as motivating, socialising, counselling,
and other actions which develop worker relationships, but
carrying out fewer decisive, operational, and political actions
than male characters. Even in scenes of women in the
263
workplace, we might argue, the characters continue to play

essentially domestic, communal and interpersonal roles.
On the other hand, communal functions enacted by female

characters in the working environment might emphasise their
ability to motivate, counsel, contributing to the development
of worker relationships through inspiring, empowering,
creating enthusiasm, trust and intellectual stimulation among
the work-force. These characteristics are specific to the
‘transformational’ leadership style, which has lately gained
popularity in theories of management. Transformational
leadership significantly differs from the previously dominant,
‘transactional’ leadership style, which is by contrast
characterised by autocracy, authority, and the most basic
clearly defined exchanges between a leader and a follower.
‘Transformational’ and ‘transactional’ leadership styles are

sometimes thought to possess gendered characteristics, with
a tendency for women to be more transformationally oriented
than men owing to what are assumed to be innate gender
qualities. The research on gender and leadership suggests that
female leaders are able to exhibit transformational leadership
more easily and frequently compared to their male
counterparts. 4 That said, interpersonal and communal
characteristics currently assigned to female characters placed
in business environments might emphasise their being
transformational leaders, in contrast to holding inferior
business roles in the earlier TV shows influenced by the
dominance of the transactional leadership style.
Constructing the Evidence: Character Positions

Six U.S. TV series representing two periods in the portrayal of
businesswomen on television were selected, using two major
264
criteria: a primary business setting for the show, and a female

character as a main character. The first group comprised series
produced in the 1970s and 1980s, when, according to Cantor,
“the single woman living alone, devoted to her work and her
workplace made her first appearance”. 5 Prior to the 1970s,
women on prime-time television typically did not work for
wages, and female roles on TV were largely limited to those of
of loving and caring wives and mothers, perfect housekeepers
happy to perform domestic and family duties.
The shows in my first group are the CBS sitcom The Mary Tyler
Moor Show (1970), Designing Women (1986), and Murphy
Brown (1988). The second group comprises series from the
2000s: Season 2 of Desperate Housewives (BC, 2005-2006)
Ugly Betty (ABC, 2006-2010), and The Good Wife (CBS, 2009).
The main female characters were observed in three randomly
selected episodes from each series and were compared in
terms of the following parameters: physical characteristics
and appearance, occupation, work-related duties and
assignments, personal traits and behaviours, and leadership
style.
Overall, the physical characteristics and appearances of the

main female characters are quite similar in these shows. Aged
variously between their twenties (Ugly Betty) and their fifties
(Sue Ann in The Mary Tyler Moore Show), all but Murphy
Brown (Murphy Brown) and Betty Suarez (Ugly Betty) have a
similar ‘look’: tall, slim, pretty, well-dressed, made up, with
nicely done hair and the correct posture. The Ugly Betty show
is sometimes claimed to be “a part of a larger cultural shift
away from the unreal perfection of stick-thin and airbrushed
models and the fashion fetishism of the ‘Sex and the City’”, but
Betty does not in fact differ much from her peers. Her
‘ugliness’ is not that ugly, or, rather, “the show’s definition of
265
ugliness is quite flexible”.6 In general, but for Betty’s too-bright

dresses and prominent dental brace, she would look rather
organic in that type of the environment.
In this respect the only character whose physical

characteristics and appearance stand out is Murphy Brown.
Although she is tall and slim, there are traits in her appearance
which seem to be more ‘masculine’: she stoops; walks fast,
stepping wide; her hair-style is simple, natural, and
unlaboured. She is usually dressed in formless, ‘male’ business
suits in varying shades of grey and brown. Compared to
Murphy Brown, Mary Tyler in The Mary Tyler Moore Show,
Lynette Scavo in Desperate Housewives, and Alicia Florrick in
The Good Wife follow more ‘feminine’ style in their business
attire, wearing clothes which are more tailored, featuring
many smaller details and accents, and wider colour schemes.
There are two tendencies related to female characters’

occupations in the later shows. One is for smart and hard-
working characters to be promoted to the top positions in
organisations in the course of the series: Betty Suarez starts
out as a secretary and gets promoted to the editorship of
Mode; Alicia Florrick starts as a lowly litigator and gets
promoted to a partnership in a law firm; Lynette Scavo gets
promoted to Vice President of Accounts with her advertising
company. Another tendency is to assign female characters to
top leadership positions from the very outset: Diane Lockhart
is a senior partner at a law firm in The Good Wife, while
Wilhelmina Slater a creative director in Ugly Betty.
In the earlier shows the female characters were generally

assigned lower management positions with no history of
promotion or clear opportunity for advancement, pictured
instead as reporting to male top managers. Murphy Brown
266
works as a Journalist and news anchor throughout the whole

series; Mary Tyler Moor plays associate producer of a news
programme. Comparing the two groups of shows in terms of
occupations assigned to female characters, it might be argued
that by the 2000s the stress is being placed on women’s ability
to climb the professional ladder as well as performing top
roles in their chosen organisations. The Good Wife and
Murphy Brown, for example, could be considered as rather
realistic as they depict hard work and ability to cope with
peers and supervisors as a crucial basis for the successful
performance of professional duties.
Designing Women, however, supports the argument that a

character’s depiction in a workplace setting does not
necessarily entail the performance of work-related tasks.
Though placed in the working environment and assigned
particular business duties, the four main female characters in
the show spend most of the time talking fashion, love affairs,
and other topics not related to business and leadership. The
show thus creates quite a misleading image of business
operations and women doing business. Though basically
depicting enactment of work-related roles, some episodes of
The Mary Tyler Moor Show and Ugly Betty also concentrate on
personal topics during the scenes taking place in the office.
Character Traits and Behaviours

Personal traits and behaviors assigned to female characters in
the selected shows are quite different. The main female
characters might be divided into three broad groups: those
enacting purely ‘feminine’ qualities, ones demonstrating
‘mixed’ gender traits, and those with arguably ‘masculine’
qualities prevailing over ‘feminine’ ones. All four characters in
Designing Women might quite obviously be placed in the first
267
group. As discussed earlier, although being placed in the work-

related environment the characters play mostly interpersonal
roles, simply hanging around: all are quite sweet-natured,
compassionate, supportive, caring, stereotypically concerned
with their relationships with men and their motherly duties.
The majority of the women depicted in the shows, however,

combine both feminine and masculine traits. Mary Tyler
Moor, Betty Suarez, Alicia Florrick, Lynette Scavo and Diane
Lockhart are not only people-oriented, democratic,
participative and caring, but variously display clearly
masculine traits and behaviours in certain episodes. Mary
Tyler Moore is generally supportive, democratic and
compassionate; in an episode where she decides to hire a
female swimmer as a sports news reporter in the face of her
supervisor’s and subordinates’ objections, she is shown to be
strong in her intentions, full of agency, and independent in her
judgments, even rather authoritarian with her subordinates.
Betty Suarez, as well as being very compassionate, people-

oriented and caring, is strongly goal-oriented, striving for
success and independence. Alicia Florrick and Lynette Scavo
demonstrate even stronger masculine traits and behaviours.
Both are caring mothers and democratic co-workers and then
supervisors; in many work-related scenes they are depicted as
quick-witted, independent thinkers, active, strong and even
quite authoritarian. Alicia, for example, is an integral member
of an intense and stressful law practice. She demonstrates
toughness, confidence, and self-reliance. She is wise, forceful,
has strong opinions, and she is direct in her judgments.
Murphy Brown stands out amongst these female characters as

the one with masculine features prevailing over feminine
ones. Murphy Brown is sharp-tongued and is as hard as nails.
268
In her profession she is considered to be ‘one of the boys’,

being dominant, forceful, authoritarian, and even coarse. She
looks people straight in the eye, speaks her mind without
caring for the listener’s feelings; independent and demanding,
she recognises no authority but her own.
These traits and behaviours can be linked with the leadership

paradigms outlined earlier. As we have seen,
‘transformational’ leaders can be thought of as mentoring and
developing their followers on both professional and personal
levels, meaning that this type of leader is strong, goal-oriented
and professional as well as democratic, communal and caring
for people. Characters from the group with mixed traits and
behaviors best suit these requirements, relating to their
followers by means of enthusiasm, empowerment, and
intellectual stimulation, building professional relationships by
inspiring and motivating co-workers and subordinates. The
character of Murphy Brown, to whom mainly masculine traits
and behaviours are assigned, might be considered as adhering
to the ‘transactional’ leadership style, one characterised by
autocracy and authority.
Gender roles and the division of labour have promoted men

and women to different occupations and positions in
organisations. There is a common perception that there are
several similarities between a ‘typical’ man and a ‘typical’
leader, but there are few such perceived similarities between
femininity and leadership. It seems to be the case, however,
that the social roles of men and women began to change
during the 1960s, and that a shift in the portrayal of female
characters on TV since the 1970s is a reflection of those
changes. Meanwhile, there are indications that people
perceive gender differences to be decreasing, but at greater
speed for women’s than for men’s roles.7
269
My analysis and conclusions are based on observations of the

characters present a very limited number of TV shows. Further
research with a larger number of shows and improved coding
and statistical methods might produce more refined and
nuanced results. Future research might also include some
additional questions about the relationship between the ‘real’
world and its mediations via television fiction. For example,
how do viewers understand the roles of working women? How
do they understand and relate to the images of working
women on television? And do images of successful, high-
ranking female characters help to change powerful, long-term
stereotypes in terms of both perceptions and real-world
attitudes and practices?
1
Statistical Overview of Women in the Workforce by Catalyst,
available online at
http://www.catalyst.org/knowledge/statistical-overview-women-
workplace.
2
See David J. Schneider, The Psychology of Stereotyping, New York:
The Guilford Press, 2004.
3
Martha M. Lauzen, David M. Dozier, and Nora Horan,
‘Constructing Gender Stereotypes through Social Roles in Prime-
Time Television’, Journal of Broadcasting and Electronic Media, vol.
52 no. 2, 2008, pp. 203.
4
See Steven H. Appelbaum et al., ‘Upward Mobility for Women
Managers: Styles and Perceptions’, The Industrial and Commercial
Training Magazine, vol. 45 no. 2, 2013, pp. 110-118.
270
5
Muriel G. Cantor, ‘The American Family on Television: from Molly
Goldberg to Bill Cosby’, The Journal of Comparative Family Studies,
1991, vol. 22 no. 2, p. 207.
6
Madeleine S. Esch, ‘Rearticulating Ugliness, Repurposing Content:
Ugly Betty Finds the Beauty in Ugly’, The Journal of Communication
Inquiry, vol. 34 no. 2, April 2010, p. 169.
7
See Amanda B. Diekman and Alice H. Eagly, ‘Stereotypes as
Dynamic Constructs: Women and Men of the Past, Present, and
Future, Personal and Social Psychology Bulletin, vol. 26 no. 10,
October 2000, pp. 1171-1188.
271
28 / The Changing Role of Women

in the U.S. War Film
Marina Loginova
Typologies of Women in Wartime: Victimhood
After WWII changes in women’s role accelerated dramatically,

and so too in cinema, especially in the war film. Although
involved in major wars in the 20th Century, the United States
of America was not engaged on its own territory, and women
were thus less directly involved in representations of
‘masculine’ wars fought entirely overseas. Early in the 21st
Century, however, the U.S. experienced an event in some
ways equal to a military invasion – on a day we recall in
shorthand as simply ‘9/11’. Those terrorist attacks opened a
new page in the American history and announced what had
now become a global ‘War on Terror’.
272
Coming out of this history of change, four types of female

representation can be identified in the contemporary war film
– woman as victim, the waiting woman, the female warrior,
and the woman as mediator of war. If women are often
victims, and if their fate is often death at the hands of men,
they can also be positioned as survivors who are rescued
rather than eliminated by men. This recurrence of the historic
‘damsel in distress’ stereotype is found, for example, in Act of
Valor (McCoy and Waugh, USA, 2012), where Navy SEALs save
a beautiful female CIA agent, and at the same time eliminate
a major terrorist threat.
The most traditional role attributed to women, however, is

that of a fated victim caught up in, and unable to escape from,
the violence and atrocities of war, as for example in Kubrick’s
Vietnam film Full Metal Jacket (UK/USA, 1987). During the
Battle of Hue, a patrol tracks down an enemy sniper who turns
out to be a young woman. Wounded, she begs to be killed,
which Joker eventually does. A remarkable and cunning
enemy turns into a victim of war. On the other hand, In Home
of the Brave (Winkler, USA/Morocco, 2006), the death of an
unarmed girl is accidental, one which haunts soldier Jamal
Eiken on his return and leads him to accuse the world at large
of injustice and cruelty.
Brian de Palma’s Redacted (USA/Can., 2007) goes much

further in its critical analysis of the fateful encounters
between American soldiers and female enemies,
controversially dramatising the real-life case of the rape and
killing of a fifteen year-old Iraqi girl by American soldiers. The
film is made in documentary style, including home videos, web
clips, and so on, but is also highly posed and staged.
Underlining the gendered craziness and inhumanity, during
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the scene of the pregnant woman’s murder we hear one of the

main characters comment “it was like gutting catfish”.
The Waiting Woman

The story of the woman who waits is at least as old as Greek
myth, and the story of Penelope’s long wait for the return of
Odysseus. Symbolising the peace and domesticity of civilian
life, the female character can heal or reject a hero. We find
this image In Kathryn Bigelow’s The Hurt Locker (USA, 2008) –
that rare thing, a war film actually made by a woman - despite
the fact that the film is concentrated, perhaps predictably, on
a male protagonist.
The central figure here is Sgt. William James (played by Jeremy

Renner), the new leader of a U.S. bomb disposal squad in
Baghdad with just over a month to go before their tour of duty
ends. He keeps a ‘hurt locker’, a box containing the shrapnel
that has practically killed him, a church ring, and a photo of his
son. On his return home a simple task – going shopping –
becomes stressful, and the support and care of his beautiful
wife Connie (played by Evangeline Lilly) turn to discomfort and
suffering. He returns to Iraq to face the job, and the threat,
which he knows so well but with which he appears to find
himself much more ‘at home’.
The case is rather different in Jim Sheridan’s Brothers (USA,

2009). Grace Cahill (played by Natalie Portman), the wife of
missing Marine Captain Sam Cahill (Toby Maguire), and their
daughters Isabelle and Maggie, struggle to accept the return
of the traumatised Sam. Life at home has gone on without
him, and Grace has grown closer to her husband’s ex-convict
brother Tommy (Jake Gyllenhaal) while the daughters have
coped with their apparent loss thanks to their uncle.
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Sam returns home overwhelmed by his secret guilt at having

been forced to kill a fellow solider whilst in an enemy prison,
and is hospitalised after attempting suicide. The possibility of
a future life with his wife and family remain uncertain. The
words of Olivia Pitterson (played by Samantha Morton), the
wife of a dead soldier in The Messenger (Moverman, USA,
2009) are symptomatic here: “When Phil re-enlisted for a third
tour, he needed to go. Staying home was no longer an option
in his mind. Or in mine. I was relieved to see him go. I missed
him, but ... I didn’t miss the guy who just left. I missed the man
he was a long time ago.”
In Stop-loss (Peirce, USA, 2008), similarly, a girlfriend of the

main hero states openly that she will not wait for him if he
goes to Iraq again. In most cases, therefore, female characters
do not accept the changes which have affected soldiers at war.
Everyday life rejects them and they return to war, which in this
sense becomes their home, their eternal fiancée or wife.
Badland (Lucente, USA/Germany, 2007) carries the idea of
rejection to its ultimate. The main character, Jerry Rice,
returns from Iraq a broken man and kills his pregnant wife,
who has been unfaithful.
There are of course exceptions, Taking Chance (Katz, USA,

2009) amongst them. Lt. Col. Michael Strobl (played by Kevin
Bacon) accompanies the body of nineteen year-old Marine
Chance Phelps back to his hometown in Wyoming. During this
painful journey women acknowledge his mission with the
traditional words “Thank you for your service”, creating an
atmosphere of support and recognition and personifying a
homeland accepting her protector with love and tenderness.
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The Female Warrior

The third image, reflecting many changes in the society, is that
of woman as warrior. Since the military establishment has
typically been a pre-eminent locus of masculinity, the
presence of women has long seemed to be unnatural and
exceptional. The first major change was brought about by the
Women's Armed Services Integration Act of 1948, which
allowed women to serve as regular members of the armed
forces. This was reinforced by the changing notions of
personal and social identity championed by the women’s
rights movements of the Sixties and by the end of the draft
system, which introduced an all-volunteer army in 1973.
During the First Iraq War the U.S. committed the largest-ever
female group to a military conflict. Today, some 15 percent of
the U.S. armed forces are female, nearly ten times the 1973
figure. From 2016, women are also permitted to serve in
combat units, including front-line infantry. In such a context,
how have women fared in these new roles, with all the
implications concerning changing gendered roles? Can
documentary film, for example, with its traditionally simpler
protocols and production base, react faster to social change
than fictional drama?
Soldier Girls (Broomfield and Churchill, USA/UK, 1981), for

example, offers a pioneering case-study where women and
the military are concerned. Following three young women
during their Basic Training at Fort Georgia, the film reveals the
tough conditions and harsh experiences that these women
undergo in order to learn how to protect themselves. But what
happens when documentary seeks wider horizons and tackles
the role of women in actual war zone overseas?
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In Iraq and Afghanistan women have not been allowed,

officially speaking, to participate in combat, even if they have
been subject to the same overall jeopardy as men - bombing,
gunfire, kidnappings, and so on. The documentary Lioness
(McLagan and Sommers, USA, 2008), however, was dedicated
to the first group of women in U.S. military history to join the
front-line infantry in defiance of official prohibition.
They were deployed initially to communicate with

civilians/non-combatants, for example searching and calming
children and women - but in the end they were involved in one
of the bloodiest fights with insurgents. In Lioness war is thus
shown from a female point of view as we witness their
attitudes to events and their return home. We see them
suffering from post-traumatic stress; on her return one
character continually hears explosions.
In fiction films the image of woman as warrior has developed

from that simply of a member of the male military world to a
full participant in combat. Ridley Scott’s G.I. Jane (USA/UK,
1997) – re-gendering the deep-seated national heroic
stereotype, ‘G.I. Joe’ - stars Demi Moore in the role of a Jordan
O’Neill, who is allowed, thanks to the efforts of a female
Senator, to join Combined Reconnaissance Team training.
Contrary to expectations, Jane copes with hell-ish conditions
to prove that she is equal to her male counterparts.
In the process, her physical appearance changes dramatically.

For Jordan, cutting her hair short is an important step from the
female world to the world of men. A similar change in the
‘look’ of a key female character is evident in The Kingdom
(Berg, USA, 2007), in which an elite group of government
agents sets out for Saudi Arabia to investigate a terrorist
attack on a U.S. facility, hunting for Abu Hamza, the terrorist
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leader. It is Special Agent Janet Mayes – played by Jennifer

Garner, and unmarked by traditional notions of female
attractiveness - who provides the narrative impulse and insists
on an immediate reaction.
In my earlier discussion of woman as victim I referenced

Winkler’s Home of the Brave in connection with a soldier’s
guilt over the killing of an Iraqi girl. This account of the
attempts at readjustment on the part of a group of soldiers
who suffer an ambush just a fortnight before returning home
also includes the story of soldier Vanessa Price (played by
Jessica Biel) who returns home having suffered the loss of a
hand. The film explores how she readjusts to everyday life,
where simple tasks – like making breakfast for her son –
become great new challenges, and painfully remind her of the
recent past: in her dreams she re-lives the ambush in Iraq that
has changed her life forever.
In Bigelow’s Zero Dark Thirty (Bigelow, USA, 2012) Jessica

Chastain plays CIA agent Maya, who is focussed on catching
the al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden. She directly
participates in the operation; witnessing the torture of
prisoners and coming to accept it, she crosses the boundary
between female and male roles. She is a part of a traditionally
male world and moreover in the end that world obeys her.
The notion of the female warrior is not the exclusive domain

of the war film, however, since it pervades other genres too.
For example, Strouse’s Grace is Gone (USA, 2007) appears to
be a classic road-movie as Stanley Phillips (played by John
Cusack) sets out on a trip with his two daughters. But war, and
the death of a soldier, lie behind the journey: the missing
member of the family unit is Stanley’s wife Grace, who died on
military service in Iraq.
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Women as Mediators of War

My final category features female civilians who are
responsible for military actions and public opinion, especially
war correspondents, who work on the borderline between
civilians and the military. Their role is all the more significant
in the new information society where communications are so
powerfully enabled and yet where, because of the sheer
weight of information and representation, they may distort
and displace the very reality which they are trying to mediate.
Female journalists play significant roles in a number of recent

war films: Lawrie Dayne (played by Amy Ryan) in Paul
Greengrass’s Green Zone (USA, 2010), a drama centering on
the failed hunt for weapons of mass destruction following the
first Gulf War; Janine Roth (played by Meryl Streep) in Robert
Redford’s Lions for Lambs (USA, 2007); and Anna Molyneux
(played by Connie Nilsen) in Philip Haas’s The Situation (USA,
2006). In The Situation an American journalist investigates
suspicious deaths in Iraq. She rushes fearlessly into the
confused and largely masculine world of local authority, the
American military, and civilian life in a war zone.
Lions for Lambs also deploys a solitary female journalist

navigating amongst various male interests. The film links three
situations: an interview between sceptical reporter Janine
Roth (Meryl Streep) and Republican Senator and Presidential
hopeful Jasper Irving (Tom Cruise) as Irving tries to use her as
a mouthpiece for his strategies for victory in Afghanistan;
beyond the niceties of debate, two soldiers find themselves in
difficulty amidst the realities of war; while their former
political science professor, Stephen Malley (played by Redford
himself), uses their example to urge a disaffected student to
do something meaningful with his life.
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29 / Torture, Performance and

Post-feminism: Zero Dark Thirty
Odile Bodde
Witnessing Torture
Much has been written about Kathryn Bigelow’s Zero Dark
Thirty (US, 2012) and its controversial depiction of the
torture of Muslim detainees in the course of the search for
Osama bin Laden. The plot builds on real events by
centralising the ten-year manhunt for the Al-Qaeda leader
following 9/11, balancing entertainment and political
sensibilities and so blurring the intricate boundary between
‘reel’ and ‘real’. Critical analysis of the film is roughly divided
into two camps: those writers (including Naomi Wolf, Slavoj
Žižek, and Michael Moore) who focus on the film’s depiction
of torture per se, and those (including Robert Burgoyne,
Agnieszka Piotrowska and Hasian Marouf Jr.,) who discuss
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the depiction of torture predominantly in terms of the

gender of the protagonist, Maya (played by Jessica Chastain),
judging her first and foremost in terms of her femininity.
This essay aims to show how in Zero Dark Thirty the

expression of femininity and the proximity to torture are
interwoven: Maya moves from ‘female’ when functioning as
a witness, to ‘gender neutral’ when acting as an interrogator,
and then back to ‘female’ in the course of the film’s
emotional finale. This oscillation in Maya’s expression of
femininity, as well as the discussions of the film in terms of
Maya’s gender, suggests that the film is interesting not only
for its depiction of political torture, but in dovetailing
representations of such torture with the representation of a
female protagonist.
I also attempt to illustrate how conflicting messages in the

narrative, pertaining to Maya’s impervious character and
fluctuating gender role, and to the film’s overt and covert
messages concerning the use of torture, expose conflicting
ideologies at work in the narrative. Often overlooked in
analyses of Zero Dark Thirty, these conflicting ideologies are,
I will argue, responsible for the film’s political and ethical
difficulty, but simultaneously inspire an emancipated
spectatorship.
Zero Dark Thirty’s torture scenes, which make up the first

third of the film, introduce the CIA’s interrogation methods.
The scenes start in medias res, two years after 9/11, and
depict the interrogation and torture of detainee Ammar
(Reda Kateb), a follower of Osama bin Laden, by CIA agent
Dan (Jason Clarke). Ill-informed at first, the spectator
gradually learns that Ammar functioned as a messenger boy
for the 9/11 hijackers and other crucial suspects in terrorist
281
networks. In order to prevent further attacks by his terrorist

organisation, the ‘Saudi Group’, he is abused and gradually
broken in a series of carefully orchestrated sessions.
Maya’s first assignment in Pakistan is to watch how Dan

interrogates Ammar. There is a clear distinction between the
first part, in which Maya only witnesses Ammar’s torture,
and the second part, involving her search for Bin Laden, in
which she supervises the interrogations herself. These
differences construct Maya as a character and appeal to the
spectator in different ways.
In order to break Ammar mentally, CIA agent Dan switches

back and forth between ‘good’ and ‘bad’ cop, first appealing
to Ammar’s reason and personality and then torturing him by
means of waterboarding, exposure to loud music, and
deprivation of food and sleep. Under the guise of extracting
information about a terrorist network, an abusive and
psychological form of role-play emerges, in which Dan
achieves Ammar’s gradual breakdown by repeatedly
emphasising Ammar’s inferiority, positioning and defining
him as a terrorist, animal, and murderer.
The abusive role-play gradually develops a perversely

gendered scenario. When Dan takes down Ammar’s pants for
his female colleague to see, he coerces Ammar into revealing
his genitals to Maya’s gaze. By continuously conflicting and
withholding pain, by forcing Ammar to reveal his deemed
animality by having him walk like a dog, by breaching his
privacy and bodily integrity, Dan forces Ammar to actively
engage in his own degradation. As such, the role-play
consists of a predetermined dramatic unfolding
(information), a character development (Ammar’s
breakdown), and an audience for this grim spectacle (Maya).1
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Maya and the Spectator

The creation of an audience is crucial here: although Dan’s
role-play has to ensure Ammar’s breakdown, the
performance is aimed specifically at Maya, who is positioned
as a third party, a female witness. Maya refrains from
touching Ammar or from intervening and keeps herself aloof
and distant. Her point-of-view shots of Dan’s abuse are
dovetailed with medium close-ups of her facial expressions,
providing the viewer with some insight into her psyche. She
frequently closes or covers her eyes and is barely able to hide
her aversion and disgust.
Aligned with Maya as an additional party to and reader of

this scene, the spectator witnesses the debasing
performance of torture through Maya’s eyes; her focalisation
subsequently encourages the spectator to identify with her
standpoint and to find the scene disgusting, as she does.
Although Ammar’s debasement and embarrassment is the
product of Dan’s torture, his position is reinforced through
Maya’s gaze as his abuse becomes outrageous and
inhumane.
In this way, through Maya’s focalisation, Ammar becomes

depicted as more human than the relentless and abusive
Dan, despite his proven complicity in terrorist crimes.
Although the dehumanising psychological game played out
between Dan and Ammar seems depicted as less atrocious
than the vivisectionist torture in a film like Unthinkable
(Jordan, US, 2010), which equally depicts political torture,
Dan’s abusive role-play, combined with Maya’s embarrassed
gaze, reveals the brutality of the CIA’s interrogation of
suspects during their search for Bin Laden in the film.
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In the first part of Zero Dark Thirty, Maya’s focalisation and

gender are thus rhetorically employed: Maya functions as a
female witness with whom the spectator’s point of view
becomes aligned, identifying with the idea that Dan’s torture
practices are outrageous. However, when Dan soon after
decides to leave to do “something normal for a change”,
Maya replaces him as the interrogator (and role-player).
This marks a transformation in Maya’s character of female

witness to gender-neutral, self-proclaimed “motherfucker”.
Her perspective becomes more ambivalent as she moves
from abhorrence at the sight of torture to someone
discovering that torture may after all be useful in locating
terrorists. In other words, both Maya’s gendered character
and position in relation to torture become ambivalent, which
mitigate her compliance with torture practices.
Along the way, Maya becomes increasingly captivated by her

search for Bin Laden, scrutinising every lead and bit of
information she can gather. The initial scenes with Ammar
lead to footage of hooded and cuffed detainees being
tortured; Maya’s obsessive examination of this footage
suggest that the interrogation and abuse of suspects is daily
business.
Moreover, Maya is gradually transformed from someone

who winces at the sight of abuse into a rational interrogator,
increasingly tempted to force detainees to speak at any cost.
Affected by the death of several colleagues during the hunt
for Bin Laden, she believes that she has been spared to finish
the job. Her moral judgment seems to shift, sliding towards
the conviction that torture could well be a necessary
objective in finding Bin Laden and other terrorists whom she
wants dead.
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At the same time, Maya’s internal focalisation remains

limited and her point-of-view shots become less frequent
throughout her search, and information concerning her
thoughts and personality become obscure. She moves from a
passive witness and onlooker to an active terrorist hunter,
and the medium close-ups of her facial expressions shift from
revealing abhorrence to restrained annoyance, hostility, or
outright frustration and despair. She becomes a lonely and
frustrated individual who alienates her colleagues, and the
spectator thus moves from being sutured to an appalled
witness of torture to watching an obsessed and sleep-
deprived fanatic.
Maya’s ‘Gender-Neutrality’
This depiction of Maya as an active terrorist hunter occurs in
tandem with a de-feminisation of her character. Initially
positioned as Dan’s female colleague, now her intelligence
rather than her gender is emphasised. She has no boyfriends
(or any friends outside work) and denies to her colleague
Jessica that she would ever sleep with their male co-workers.
She makes herself as indistinct as possible as a woman by
wearing wigs and headscarves to cover her striking ginger
hair (these are not appropriated for religious or cultural
reasons, as she often enters public space without a
headscarf).
Her appearance in dark suits or bland clothes distracts

attention from her body and erases any remarkable physical,
feminine traits, but emphasises her rationality and
perseverance. Operating in the male-dominated world of the
CIA, she is resolutely not presented as the eroticised female
lead, as an unstable and emotional intelligence agent (think,
for example, of Homeland’s Carrie Mathison), or as a
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masculine tomboy or G.I. Jane. She becomes a ‘gender

neutral’ or ‘non-male’ (neither male nor female) protagonist.
Maya’s cleverness, wit and autonomy are highlighted to

recruit support for her character and the spectator might
almost forget that she becomes co-responsible for the
violation of several human rights along the way. For this
reason, Maya’s character has attracted support as well as
criticism. Critics aver, for example, that Maya’s character
combines the politics of radical feminism and liberal
individualism to create an ambivalent post-feminist
protagonist who creates the allusion of gendered equality in
the CIA, while erasing or obfuscating the structural barriers
that are still in play in such organisations; Zero Dark Thirty’s
gendered narrative is thus only superficial.2
At the same time, Zero Dark Thirty is considered as covertly

garnering support for exceptionalist U.S. torture policies
through the narrative deployment of a female protagonist.3
Although Carrie Mathison in Homeland is associated with
torture practices (predominantly in the first season) and
drone attacks (in the fourth season), her bipolar disorder,
visible emotions and overt sexuality position her as a familiar,
actively desiring and desired post-feminist subject.4 As such,
she is a less complicated character than Maya.
Whereas Homeland revolves around Carrie’s complex

character, by contrast the under-exposure of Maya’s
character traits and development or personal background -
clearly also the effect of the compressed time of the decade-
long hunt for Bin Laden and the emphasis on action and
intelligence gathering - position her as an impervious
character. Only rarely does she show signs of emotions (such
as gagging after interrogating, and suppressed distress
286
following her colleague Jessica’s death), which suggests that

she presents herself as tougher than she really is. This
emotional opacity turns Maya into a problematic female
figure of identification and into an ambivalent character, in
terms of gender as well as of morality.
The Personal Cost of Political Violence

Maya’s ambivalence is reinforced by her refraining from
abusively or sexually touching the detainees (or anyone, for
that matter). Although Maya supervises the interrogations,
she neither touches nor harms the detainees herself, but has
her male colleagues inflict abuse on her behalf. What
remains obscure is whether she does not want to abuse
because she cannot (since the act continues to repel her), or
because she does not want to engage in something which is
morally or physically repugnant to her.
Maya benefits from the seemingly successful interrogations

that she and her colleagues carry out, as she manages to find
Bin Laden’s hiding place at least partially by means of the
information extracted. Yet refraining from engaging with
physical violence leaves her with conveniently ‘clean’ hands.
Although Maya’s character is based on a composite of real-
life female operatives and resonates with the female
perpetrators of the horrors of Abu Ghraib, these conflicting
messages concerning her position and beliefs complicate our
association with her as spectators.
Moreover, Maya’s ambiguous position is paired with several

short scenes in Zero Dark Thirty which indicate that the CIA
unit functions autonomously and acts against official
governmental policies and statements denouncing the use of
torture. This discrepancy separates the juridical
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unjustifiability of torture as a violation of basic human rights

from Maya’s and her colleagues’ ambivalent perspectives
and actions. As a film, Zero Dark Thirty thus expresses
conflicting messages concerning the use of torture, which are
predominantly condensed in its protagonist Maya.
Despite her clean hands, however, as a witness of the

interrogations Maya sees the effects on her body and
personality. Not only does the violation of bodies pertain to
the detainees but there is a correlation between Maya’s
increased involvement with interrogations in the search for
Bin Laden and her ‘de-feminisation’. Her connection to the
suspects’ bodies is established not through touch, but
through voice and gaze, in which she supresses her emotions
by hiding them behind rationality and wit. Covering her head
and body makes her less exposed and accessible to her male
colleagues, to the male detainees, and to the gaze of the
spectator.
When the agents finally find Bin Laden and Zero Dark Thirty
ends with the raid on Bin Laden’s compound and his
subsequent assassination, Maya breaks down when
transported home. She is ‘feminised’ again: she regains a
recognisable gender and again establishes a familiar figure of
identification. She thus moves from possessing the gaze (at
first female and appalled, then ‘gender neutral’ and
obsessed) when witnessing torture, to receiving the gaze and
becoming a ‘to-be-looked-at’ female protagonist when the
job is done.
We can propose that Maya’s fluctuating gender portrayal

thus reveals the embodied and gendered, male-dominated
reality of war and violence. 5 Instead of seeing Maya’s
character as combining radical feminism and liberal
288
individualism, which creates the allusion of gendered

equality in the CIA while covertly garnering support for
American torture policies, Maya in fact moves from feminine
and passive to ‘gender neutral’ and active, then back to
feminine and passive once again.
Towards Emancipated Spectatorship

In this sense, the post-feminist character that is constructed
combines feminist as well as anti-feminist themes.6 Maya’s
de-feminisation suggests that she can only be successful in
her search for Bin Laden when she represses or annuls her
femininity at work and becomes a ‘gender-neutral’ agent.
Moreover, the wider effects of violence on her mind and
body render additionally explicit some of the hidden
implications of torture during the war on terror.
Both the fluctuating expression of her femininity as well as

the criticism directed towards the shape and function of her
feminism suggest the problems for narrative cinema not only
in depicting political torture, but of dovetailing a female
protagonist with acts of political torture. This is in line with
the observation that both Maya and Carrie Mathison, in
various critical discussions, are evaluated in terms of their
personality and femininity, while, for instance, Jack Bauer
from 24 (covering similar war on terror themes) is analysed,
not in terms of his masculinity, but in terms of the political
situations and the torture he occasionally inflicts.
As we have seen, when Maya is positioned as a recognisable

female figure of identification, before and after interrogating
suspects herself, the spectator is aligned with her position by
means of point-of-view shots and the emotional cues
provided by her facial expressions. During the interrogations
289
and her search for bin Laden, however, her frantic, hostile
and ‘gender-neutral’ character hinder a similar identification.
Maya’s ambiguous and shifting positions and the opacity
concerning her beliefs leave the viewer hovering between
feeling uneasy and feeling un-obliged to take a position
morally: Maya’s clean hands, effected by her physical
distance and the spectator’s distance from her character
when she interrogates, are also in this sense those of the
spectator.
At the same time, it is precisely the film’s ambiguous and

conflicting messages pertaining to torture which inspire an
‘emancipated spectator’ with an active and critical viewing
attitude.7 The many critical reviews and articles about Zero
Dark Thirty indicate that, instead of normalising torture and
lowering the viewer’s ethical standards, an argument that
builds on the idea of a passive spectator, we are far from
being passive recipients of films that appear to normalise
torture and continually question Hollywood ideologies
pertaining to gender and violence.
1
For analysis of torture as a form of role-play, see Jon McKenzie,
‘Abu Ghraib and the Spectacle of the Scaffold’, in Patrick Anderson
and Jisha Menon (eds.), Violence Performed: Local Roots and Global
Routes of Conflict. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009, pp. 342-
343.
2
For example, Marouf Hasian Jr., ‘Zero Dark Thirty and the Critical
Challenges Posed by Populist Postfeminism During the Global War
on Terrorism’, Journal of Communication Inquiry, vol. 37 no. 4,
290
October 2013, pp. 322-343. Hasian appropriates his conception of

Maya’s post-feminism predominantly from Rosalind Gill (see
endnote 4 below).
3
Hasian Jr., op. cit., p. 323, and Slavoj Žižek, ‘Zero Dark Thirty:
Hollywood's Gift to American Power’, The Guardian, 25 January
2013.
4
Rosalind Gill, ‘Postfeminist Media Culture: Elements of a
Sensibility’, European Journal of Cultural Studies, vol. 10 no. 2,
2007, pp. 152-154.
5
Robert Burgoyne, ‘The Violated Body: Affective Experience and
Somatic Intensity in Zero Dark Thirty’, in David LaRocca (ed.), The
Philosophy of War Films, Lexington: University of Kentucky Press,
2014, p. 249.
6
Hasian Jr., op. cit., p. 323. See Rosalind Gill, op. cit., pp. 147-166
for a lucid analysis of the contradictory elements in post-feminism.
7For a fuller explication, see Jacques Rancière, The Emancipated
Spectator, London: Verso, 2009.
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30 / Identities Mistaken and Discovered:

The Lunchbox
Aarttee Kaul Dhar
An Epistolary Romance
The Indian epistolary romance The Lunchbox (2013) started

life as a project in which writer and director Ritesh Batra
envisaged a documentary about the famous dabbawalas of
Mumbai, the tiffin couriers who collect hot food in lunch boxes
from workers’ homes in the late morning, delivering them to
the workplace - using various modes of transport,
predominantly bicycles and trains - and returning the empty
boxes to the customers’ homes in the afternoon. They are also
made use of by food suppliers large and small in Mumbai
where they ferry ready-cooked meals from central kitchens to
the customers.
292
Batra was to hear many interesting stories whilst spending a

week with the dabbawalas in 2007, which provided the basis
for what became a feature film, a joint production between
India, Germany, France, and the U.S. The plot revolves around
a mistaken delivery by the dabbawalas which leads to a
relationship between an about-to-retire, childless widower
oddly named ‘Sajan’ (male beloved or husband), Fernandez, a
character played by Irrfan Khan, and an unhappy housewife,
‘Ila’, played by Nimrat Kaur.
Ila is a housewife living in Malad, a middle-class locality in

Mumbai, with her husband Rajiv and a daughter. She is in a
loveless marriage, with only the memories of her honeymoon
to hold on to. Her husband neither notices nor appreciates her
efforts to keep house, cook delicious food, and to re-kindle the
romance between them. In despair, she tries some new
recipes for her husband’s lunch, guided by her neighbour, Mrs.
Deshpande (referred to as ‘Auntie’). It is delivered in error to
Sajan Fernandez, who enthusiastically devours the lot. Ila
sends a note of thanks to him the next day for doing justice to
the food and thus complimenting her culinary talent.
Ila’s note at first receives a cold and terse response - quite

characteristic of Sajan - which upsets Ila and ‘Auntie’. But this
is the start of an exchange of notes which soon turn into
letters, in which the two main characters share their loneliness
and their musings on life, resulting in a delicately intimate and
positive relationship. The film is a subtle drama which starts
out feeling like a documentary before modulating into an
idiosyncratic story tinged with humour, tension, despair,
sadness, nostalgia and a hint of romance. The viewer perhaps
longs for a happy ending, but that is not the objective of a film
which dismantles the stereotypes of the love story and
focusses instead on a basic, crucial question: is a simple
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lunchbox capable of changing human lives and the direction

which they take?
The film is set in Mumbai, the otherwise glamorous film and

fashion capital of India, but none of this is to be seen anywhere
in the film. The dynamics of the city are symbolised by the
metro system of Mumbai, the crowds, the dabbawalas on
bicycles and trains, and the traffic, always on the go. The
drama is set in a space that comprises a middle-class flat and
a government office and it deals with the trials and tribulations
of ordinary people sans glamour.
Images of Masculinity in The Lunchbox

A key male character is Ila’s negligent husband, Rajiv, who
hardly takes note of his wife’s efforts around the house, her
feelings and expectations, and is disloyal to her. When Ila
becomes aware of the depth of his infidelity she decides to
leave for Bhutan, a place with a high rating for national
happiness. For her and for the plot, a more important and
more responsive character is Sajan Fernandez, a middle-aged
widower with whom she strikes up an accidental relationship.
He is at times terse, at other times nostalgic, but most of the
times simply stiff. His is an underplayed, restrained but power-
packed performance.
He is the source of some humour in respect of the congestion

of Mumbai, for example when he mentions a suggestion that
his wife’s coffin be buried vertically instead of horizontally
owing to a lack of space in the city. He is lonely and connects
with Ila in spite of the yawning distance between them and
the huge gap in terms of age, family, society and religion. Sajan
and Ila are indeed both solitary characters, struggling to
identify and cope with radical changes in their lives. They
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share their despair, their thoughts on the complexities of life,

their memories, and their sense of loss.
Sheikh (played by Nawazuddin Siddiqui) is the junior who will

replace Sajan. Sheikh is an orphan who is nonetheless in the
habit of referencing the opinions of his mother – whom he has
never met - to give his utterances greater impact. Quite
adaptable, he gets a good office job, develops interpersonal
skills, sucks up to the stiff and unfriendly Fernandez, and lives
in the present. He is gregarious, garrulous and carefree; a little
sly at times, he is also an opportunist. He is resilient; he has
been to Saudi Arabia; he believes in getting things done his
way; and he manages to use people for his own purposes
come what may.
Sajan becomes Sheikh’s ticket to respectability in both

personal and professional life. It is thanks to Sajan that he
gains acceptance in the office and from his father-in-law.
When he arrives to replace Sajan in the office, larger issues are
potentially at stake: Sheikh is a Muslim, Sajan Fernandez, a
Christian. Indeed, the three main characters all belong to
different religions. The film, however, stresses their common
humanity; the religious aspect is only suggested by their
names, and, avoiding the lure of stereotypes, the film does not
explore this topic further.
Key Femininities
The film features two minor female characters - Meherunnisa,
Sheikh’s girlfriend, and his mother (to whom the film only
refers). If we include the deceased wife of Sajan Fernandez -
who is very much present in the film in spite of her absence,
as a powerful memory which he invokes on several occasions
- there are four main female characters in the film. The central
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character is Ila, a woman in her thirties with a seven year-old

daughter, her life of domestic drudgery centring on her
husband and her child.
Ila is presented without any attempt at glamour, wearing a

bindi (the decorative dot on the forehead commonly worn by
women in South Asia, especially India), and a mangalsutra
(the necklace of gold and black beads that clearly signifies her
married status). She is dressed in an ordinary salwar kurta (the
traditional Punjabi dress, now more widely worn for its
convenience) and her entire look has been carefully crafted to
foster both character and plot. When she is tired, for example,
she treats herself to a cup of ‘chai’ in a glass as it is served in
modest dhabas (the local food shop or roadside food place),
not in a mug or cup.
Like Ila’s, the life of her mother (played by Lillette Dubey) is

also male-centred; in her case it revolves around her
permanently ill husband. She does everything for him, and
worrying about the financial cost of his treatment is also a part
of her job as a committed Indian wife. Over the years she has
totally forgotten herself, and as he dies, instead of being
distraught, she realises that she has re-discovered herself.
The husband of Ila’s neighbour Mrs. Deshpande (played by

Bharati Achrekar), similarly, has been in a coma for fifteen
years. She nurses him and does everything for him. But her
relationship with Ila is supportive in a different way: she is a
provider of music, spices, and pieces of advice – notably
recipes. Through the characters of Ila, her mother, and Mrs.
Deshpande the films reminds us of the troubled sense of duty
experienced by women who are trapped in conventional
marriages in India and elsewhere, especially where their male
partners are in some way incapacitated.
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Narrative and Ideological Directions

The dabba or tiffin box is at the heart of the film and functions
almost as a character in its own right. It smells of a sumptuous
and an ambrosial meal, thus symbolising everything that
creates rasa (the nectar or juice of life, or any of the basic nine
emotions of life described by Bharata’s historic text The
Natyashastra - anger, amazement, fear, sorrow, happiness,
disgust, beauty/love, peace and so on. It is also the container
of affection, anger, and reconciliation as well as the pathology
of connubial relations). This symbolism expands throughout
the film.
After the initial confusion, the plot accelerates when notes

between Ila and Sajan grow into letters and when Fernandez
divulges his feelings for Ila, while dining with Sheikh and his
girlfriend. When Ila wants to meet Fernandez, she waits for
him eagerly at a local restaurant and he watches from a
distance but doesn’t show himself; Sheikh advises the
audience that at times the wrong train also leads one to the
right place; Ila considers her mother’s daily drudgery and
realises that her life is no better.
The most outstanding moment is when Ila is let down by both

Rajiv, her disloyal husband, and Sajan, who fails to show up.
Ila embarks upon a journey in search of herself after she sells
her jewellery for money, packs her stuff with her daughter in
tow, and leaves for Bhutan in search of her own identity as a
woman, and a new kind of happiness. The film thus goes
beyond a mere rejection of the image of the stereotypical
Indian woman and wife. The very act of leaving home finally
establishes that it is her own life and hence her personal
journey. It is not the destination that is significant, rather, this
very experience is the journey’s reward. Thus the act of getting
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married and settling down, as the Indian idea goes, may not
suffice in future, whereas the act of self-discovery is vital if she
is to truly understand who she is.
The theme of troubled conjugality is at the very base of the

film and ties together all its characters in one way or another.
The wives in the film, and their life-situations, together compel
the audience to explore questions of identity and of self-
discovery. The search for Bhutan upon which Ila embarks in
her quest for self-hood takes her away from the constrictions
and suffocations of the patriarchal order of Indian society,
with the family its smallest and most essential unit. Given the
enormity of the challenge which it is facing, however, the film
cannot offer a conclusion to this quest, and the ending
remains open.
The central relationship which inspires Ila to a new

understanding of herself and of her value, we should recall, is
also open-ended; the two never actually meet. The
‘happiness’ of the film is of a different order: the dialogue is
concise, impactful without verbosity, and in nostalgic mood
the film privileges scribbled notes in an era of e-mail and
mobile messaging. The locations are mundane and familiar.
The film plays out in crowded buses and local trains, an office
and a middle class flat, but the daily incidents of ordinary
urban life are precisely what bring about a radical change in
the lives of the characters.
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31 / Female Identity and the New

Bollywood: Goliyon ki Raasleela Ram-
Leela, Race 2, and Gulaab Gang
Gauri Durga Chakraborty
The Changing Role of Women in Bollywood Cinema

It is an inevitable truth that the commercial mainstream film
industry in India has long been governed by patriarchal
concerns, profoundly affecting its depiction of men and
women. The ‘middle of the road’ period in Indian Cinema,
however, from the early 1960s until the mid-1970s, with its
closer engagement with human relationships and conditions,
was largely responsible for creating a renewed perspective on
representations of women, which are the central focus of this
essay. Films like Shyam Benegal’s Ankur: The Seedling (1974),
for example, had the courage to express a previously unseen
perspective on the female character on screen.
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Between the mid-1970s and the late 1980s, feminism was at

its combative best, scrutinising media images for regressive
sanctioning based on the broad cultural heritage. The main
platform being a government-owned TV channel, the absence
of mass exhibition spaces for ‘middle cinema’ films, however,
meant that these non-conventional narratives did not reach a
regular audience.
The decade of the 1990s was a significant period in forging a

new identity for Bollywood. Supported by economic
liberalisation, the advent of satellite television and the rising
industrial status of film-making, the commercial film format
underwent a visible change. The establishment of the
multiplex exhibition platform with a steady decline in single
theatre viewership, especially in metropolitan areas, created
the need for cinema to go beyond the formulaic and to
address niche tastes.
This development allowed low-budget, alternative narratives

to emerge alongside the masala genre films in conventional
cinemas. Spectatorship patterns changed. Gender equations
in social life also underwent change, with Indian women
entering professional spaces, even those hitherto completely
dominated by men. This decade saw the advent of soap
operas and TV shows with women in the lead both as heroines
and villains, influencing both audience habits and, in turn,
production schedules.
From 2010 onwards, with the entry of women film-makers and

the release of further films with female protagonists, one can
clearly see how gender relationships are changing on-screen –
including creative and novel renditions of leading women in
films like Maneesh Sharma’s Band Baaja Baraat (2010),
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Prakash Jha’s Raajneeti, Parmeet Sethi’s Badmaash Company

(all 2010) - and within the industry at large.
In parallel, the number of female technicians involved in film

production has also been steadily rising. The Hindi film
industry is beginning to see a clear growth in the number of
female executive producers, first assistant directors,
cinematographers and sound engineers. Although of course
female participation in production, even in the role of director,
doesn’t guarantee the creation of a feminist film, the rising
participation of women has certainly created the scope for a
female-oriented cinema. Since the ‘feminism’ of a text is also
inter-connected with its reading and reception by spectators,
films with women-led narratives enjoyed success at the box
office as well as receiving critical acclaim and winning prizes.
Women’s Cinema, it could be argued, has reached the
mainstream.
New Forms of Femininity

In earlier Indian cinema, woman was usually depicted either
as the creator of life or the sacrificial lamb, and if she was not
a police officer - as in Samay (2003) - only the vamp had the
psychological licence to be comfortable with male trappings,
including guns. A heroine was also allowed to pick a weapon
only in self-defence or if her motive to kill/connive was for the
larger good, as in Vaastav (1999). Mostly this representation
was based on religious and mythological characters like Kaali
or Durga, ready to destroy in order to rid the world of evil.
In the early years of the new millennium, however, there were

some distinct examples of women characters with new forms
of identity, among them high-earning films such as Kiran Rao’s
Dhobi Ghat (2010), and, in 2011, Zoya Akhtar’s Zindagi Na
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Milegi Dobaara, Imtiaz Ali’s Rockstar, Ali Abbas Zafar’s Mere

Brother ki Dulhan, Farhan Akhtar’s Don 2, Milan Luthria’s The
Dirty Picture, Raj Kumar Dupta’s No One Killed Jessica,
Tigmanshu Duhlia’s Saheb Biwi aur Gangster and Maneesh
Sharma’s Ladies vs Ricky Bahl. These films opened up a new
phase in reception, and the success of some of the films
suggests that that these new portrayals were reaching both
male and female spectators.
Although the top-earners perpetuated the dominant

patriarchal view of women, films which enjoyed significant
success deviated dramatically from the well-worn model of
representation and might be considered a form of counter-
cinema. A prime example is Sujay Ghosh’s Kahaani (2012), in
which a pregnant heroine goes looking for her husband in a
city which is unfamiliar to her, and in which the spectacle of
the female body and female identity are strongly challenged.
Other relevant films that followed in 2012 are Habib Faisal’s

Ishaqzaade, Shoojit Sircar’s Vicky Donor, Gauri Shinde’s
English Vinglish, Homi Adajania’s Cocktail, Bela Bhansali
Sehgal’s Shirin Farhad ki Nikal Padi, and Madhur Bandarkar’s
Heroine. But a key question remains. Are these images,
displacing the male protagonist of an earlier patriarchal social
praxis, more than a reflection of a contemporary social
arrangement which has tended to favour women in the
economically liberalised India of today?
The crime and action genres in Bollywood have always treated

the female character as a muse, a victim, or as a sacrificial
lamb, hardly ever as the agent or prime catalyst of narrative
action; men always got the bigger and better stunts and action
scenes, while the use of weapons by women has been rooted
in either the mythological identity of empowerment or the
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activist avatar. The early to mid-2000s, however, saw an

increase in the action roles offered to mainstream actresses,
for whom Bollywood became keen to establish ‘action girl’
credentials.
The main focus of this study, therefore, is on the use of

gadgets and machines - and the associated traits - which were
earlier associated with the Indian male/villain. I attempt to
understand the ways in which, in this emerging space for the
new heroine, female characters are allowed to replace earlier
male heroes and their array of physical, mental and social
power attributes. The essay considers recent female
characters in films from different genres in the commercial
domain - Sanjay Leela Bhansali’s romantic tragedy Goliyon ki
Raasleela Ram-Leela (2013), Race 2, directed by Abbas and
Mastan Alibhair Burmawalla (2013), and Soumik Sen’s crime
drama Gulaab Gang (2014).
These films attempt to re-define stories about women,

although raising largely the same reservations we might bring
to bear on those films featuring male heroes. Does this use of
‘male’ gadgets, new body language, and intimate familiarity
with crime and violence initiate a new paradigm or simply
borrow from - and distort - the earlier values associated with
male-ness and machismo? Does the use of gadgets suggest
new forms of power relationships and changing mindsets in
the domain of gender?
Hyper-femininity in Gulaab Gang
Set in the heartlands of the rural North, Gulaab Gang is one of

the first films which aims to cross the divide between
dominant and counter cinema. Based on a narrative in which
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both the protagonist and antagonist are women, the film

experiments with the spectator’s capacity to absorb a radical
feminist text in the commercial film format. Directed by a male
film-maker, the film is full of hyper-femininity. Although the
film-maker denies any direct connection with the real-life
exploits of the activist Sampat Pal, Gulaab Gang is certainly
similar in terms of text and context.
The authors’ intention to base the film on reality and then

convert it into formulaic fantasy is what compromises the
status of feminism as an emerging subtext. The cinematic
address in this film is repeatedly faux male. Gulaab Gang is in
fact a highly traditional story of good versus evil, styled in the
tired way such films have always been. If in earlier films the
male would force himself upon the woman, in this film men
are sexually insulted by women. In a sequence where a
politician puts a price on a girl’s rape, the gang castrates the
rapist. The film reverses power/gender/sex equations rather
than re-inventing them.
The staff and sickle is a rural weapon, the emphatic symbol of

a feudal, agrarian society. The use of the staff/lathi by women
in rural Uttar Pradesh for self-defence is realistic but the form
adopted here is deliberately commercial. Dominant cinema,
with its highly specific set of rules for film editing and the
mobilisation of these rules, has important consequences for
cinematic signification in given genres.
An entire action sequence comes into play, for example,

where Rajjo (played by female superstar Madhuri Dixit) fights
off thugs, with the form reducing the realism of
empowerment to a masquerade. The awkward combination
of realism and Bollywood style means the loss of cause-and-
effect relations and hence results in a dilution of purpose and
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impact. The intention to break away from conventions and

stereotypes, but to retain a Bollywood song as Rajjo performs
a dance can be seen as attributable to the insistence of the
star icon.
Women and Crime: Goliyon ki Raasleela Ram-Leela
Laden with feminist excess, the title Goliyon ki Raasleela Ram-

Leela elides the primary distinction between two important
figures in Indian mythology, Krishna and Ram: Raasleela refers
to Krishna’s dance with Gopis, while Ram-Leela refers to a
dramatic folk re-enactment of the life of Rama. An adaptation
of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet set in violent times, the
film relies heavily on the grandeur of the sets, the ensemble
of traditions on screen, and the finesse with which all of this is
rendered by director Sanjay Leela Bhansali. Deeply embedded
in the diegesis is the emergence of the new combination of
tradition with power/gender roles and relations, with crime as
a backdrop.
Bhansali makes strong use of visual signifiers, particularly

guns, introduced immediately and pervasive throughout, and
which in spite of being wielded by literally almost everyone in
the film are never treated casually. The key signifier in the
original Raasleela would have been Krishna’s flute and the
peacock feather but here the Leitmotif is the gun. The main
recurring reference, skewering male vanity and pride gently
though unsubtly, is to peacocks, which make a number of
rhetorical and physical appearances. The romantic
connotations of Raasleela have been deliberately skewed in
favour of the weaponry of crime, but the framework
nonetheless reeks of traditionalism.
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Leela (played by Deepika Padukone) and her mother Dhankor

Baa (Supriya Pathak) are the prime catalysts and remain on the
edge of being figuratively male. Ram, the male protagonist
(played by Ranveer Singh), replaces the earlier female figure
in cinema, a creature of spectacle, while the narrative action
remains firmly with the mother-daughter duo. The mother, a
hard-core ‘Godmother’ from the world of crime, navigates a
villianous trajectory. In one scene, Rasila (Leela’s sister-in-
law) is molested and when Dhankor Baa learns of this, she
sends her men to assault Kesar, her opponent’s young widow.
The film pits woman against woman in the context of rape and
assault. Leela is ready at a moment's notice to kiss or kill (or
both), never passive, never merely a photographic subject or
muse.
The film deliberately violates conventional codes and

continuously challenges gender roles in a starkly traditional
mise-en-scène which further highlights the contrasts. The film
knowingly challenges the Ideological position of the Indian
women on screen. The dialogues also convincingly reaffirm
the intention of the author to challenge conventional
cinematic address and to reaffirm the position of the active
female over the passive male in the new gender relationship.
The elder Dhonkar and her props include a ‘bidi’, a gun, a
mobile phone and a betel-nut cutter, which she uses to chop
off her daughter’s engagement ring finger. To link women
socially and sexually with guns in traditional get-up is a
metaphorical attempt to shake up deep-rooted gender
equations in the Indian psyche.
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Woman as Conspirator: Race 2
In the action thriller Race 2, stereotypes are also de-

constructed and challenged. The woman remains a figure of
bodily display and spectacle, but is armed with more muscle
where crime is concerned, notably in the case of Alina Malik
(played by Deepika Padukone) and Omisha (played by
Jacqueline Fernandez). The new genre of realist gangster films
is not just made up of stereotypical female criminal roles such
as those of the prostitute, the love interest, the partner in
crime, or even the femme fatale. Instead, she’s ruthless,
aggressive and cares about nothing other than the fulfilment
of her own wants and desires.
The Race series establishes the new action heroine and female
criminal. This new genre in Hindi Cinema initiates the woman
into the criminal fraternity and emphasises her self-
indulgence. The woman character in this film is an equal but
she is a radical woman on the same plane as the chauvinistic
man. Questions of identity, moral ambiguity, and pseudo-
male positioning, along with the use of weaponry and high
adrenaline stunts performed by women engage audiences in
a new paradigm of the action heroine largely influenced by
popular Hollywood Cinema.
The emergence of the action heroine in Hindi commercial

cinema creates interesting and fluid dynamics in the area of
gendered identity. The rise of new exhibition spaces addresses
the growing female audience with new types of female
protagonist and female action, leading to new arguments over
‘third wave’ Feminism. In the case of Goliyon ki Raasleela,
Raam-Leela, the film reflects the author’s imagination, yet
within its traditional mise-en-scène we are witness to the
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modern resurrection of the female character. The mother as

the head of the family and the daughter replacing her position
as the supreme leader in crime is definitely a new proposition
for the average Indian viewer: the film makes a clear resolve
to establish the woman’s participation as an equal or
sometimes dominant force in the professional world of crime.
In earlier hardcore gangster films like Ram Gopal Varma’s

Company (2002) or Satya (1998), the female characters were
peripheral to the main narrative impetus. Race 2 changes that
completely; the invincible woman of crime comes equipped
with both modern paraphernalia and also a bold and
unapologetic attitude to life. In all three films discussed here,
blood and gore are integral to narrative action and woman is
the initiator.
The new Bollywood is creating a female identity which is both

well located in social praxis in films like Kahaani, as well as
creating a new form of the ‘action heroine’. This new emphasis
on female representation is, in my view, an embryonic stage.
In the coming years, the number of film narratives led by
women is surely bound to increase with the rapid rise of
women in the socio-political milieu following economic
liberalisation and their increasing presence as workers,
activists, professionals, and leaders.
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32 / Neoliberalism, Identity, and Agency:

Israeli Teenage Girls and Facebook
Sigal Barak-Brandes
David Levin
The Israeli Facebook Generation
This study crosses over various theoretical fields: Girls’

Studies, Internet Studies and the pioneering studies of social
protest in the era of new media. The 1970s saw the first wave
of studies into girls and popular culture following
acknowledgement of Western girls’ unique experiences and
points-of-view as distinguished from those of youth as a
general social category.1 Additionally, there has been growing
academic interest in online social networking sites (SNSs) -
chiefly Facebook - particularly regarding their place within the
social world of youth, where they serve as the main arena in
which to discuss an issue of vital importance to teenagers: the
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nature of social relationships. Furthermore, since the Arab

Spring a pioneering academic study has been developing
regarding the question of the civic/social/political role and
influence of the Internet in general, and of SNSs in particular.
Today’s generation, we know, has grown up in a multimedia

environment, with the Internet serving as their key source of
information and entertainment, as well as an important
communication tool, especially in the form of online SNSs.2
The most significant of these networks today is undoubtedly
Facebook. As a rule, it appears that women and girls use social
network sites more than men to communicate with existing
friends and make new ones. Moreover, girls, unlike boys, base
most of their social network connections with other girls on
close friendships rather than on distant ones.3
The influences of the Arab states’ revolutions on the Israeli

public is evident in the Cottage Boycott, which was initiated in
June 2011 by a small Facebook group whose members called
the public to boycott products in general, but first and
foremost cottage cheese, in a bid to pressurise dairies to lower
their prices. Their success in achieving a temporary reduction
in the price of cheese as well as other dairy products was
portrayed by the media as a major victory for a non-politically
oriented public employing the virtual social network.
A couple of weeks after the start of the Cottage Boycott, a

protest against the cost of living (especially housing) got going,
also known as the ‘Tents Protest’. It centred on a compound
of some 50 tents which sprang up in the business and luxury
area of downtown Tel Aviv, Israel’s largest city. This was
rapidly accompanied by mass demonstrations across Israel
involving tens of thousands of protestors. These events
involved individuals with neither organisational resources nor
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explicit political orientation, once again relying on the

constitutive power of Facebook.
How then do Israeli teenage girls construct their social

relationships on the Facebook social network, and what
meanings do they attribute to their social conduct there? Our
appreciation of the feminist critique regarding girls' exclusion
from the public sphere and their assignment to a private
‘bedroom culture’, and our experience of the climate of
protest in Israeli society in the period of the research, led us
also to examine the girls' online engagement in the public
sphere, so stormy in this period. 4
The analysis offered here is based on work done with eight

focus groups made up of thirty-five Jewish Israeli girls, aged
12-18, of diverse socio-demographic profiles and mostly from
an upper-middle class background. Acquaintance with
Facebook was a precondition for participation in the
interviews. All interviews included four or five participants, for
whom parental permission had been obtained.
The Youth Dynamic

Analysis of the girls’ conversations shows that they admire and
practise youthful dynamism. Girls of all ages in all the groups
described their private, intra-personal encounters with the
social network as tempestuous. They characterised the
intersection between head, hand, keyboard and network page
as impulsive. They reported logging on and off quickly, and
aimlessly browsing from page to page while doing other
things.
The public expression of this dynamic inner tempo takes place

on the inter-personal level. The quick messages girls send to
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their friends or to the open space, such as ‘good morning’ or

‘miss you’, serve as a phatic invitation to talk or send a 'like':
"Suppose I posted a status two hours ago, ‘Gone to the mall,
doing some serious shopping ’ and no one posted a like, so it’s,
you know … no one had a look. Sad … So I immediately wrote
to I [her friend]: ‘Like my status’" (HA, 14).
Girls also attested that they did not exercise serious decision-
making in confirming their network friends. Their statements
show this sphere to be dominated by the wish to be both
popular and perceived as such, manifested by the great
importance attributed to the number of friends, comments
and support in the form of hitting the ‘Like’ button. As a rule,
there exists a wish to parade social achievements and build an
identity or image that can be displayed to others: “You try to
make yourself look as good as possible” (A, 15).
Border Controls
Another important use of the network is to establish symbolic
borders, mainly for practical reasons. These borders were
influenced by three motives: to be as free as possible from the
presence and surveillance of adults, to be linked to their
gender, and to faithfully reflect Jewish Israeli nationality to the
exclusion of all ‘others’. Generally speaking, it seems that the
Facebook page is identified by girls as their private domain,
and therefore, girls fiercely guard the entrance to this space:
"I blocked my mother on Facebook … We were friends and then
I realised she like logged in and saw … There are things I want
to keep away from my mum …. or like when there was this girl
I wasn’t good friends with … I confirmed her as a friend … and
then I saw loads and loads of statuses. Non-stop … so I just
blocked her, because I was tired of seeing it" (M, 13).
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This selective policy stems from the wish to censure and avoid
leakage of information that is meant to be kept from parents,
siblings or distant acquaintances. As a matter of fact, girls
described their wish to avoid any embarrassing situations that
might be caused by family members, mostly ‘blundering’
parents, and added that they didn’t want the family’s
awkward, embarrassing conduct to come to light,
compromising their image.
In this context, they also expressed their sense of

condescension and superiority over them, as some 13-year-
olds made clear: "Mums are not like friends. Mums can be
embarrassing and friends usually aren’t“ (N); “One of the
reasons I blocked her was that I was afraid she would comment
on my status … sorry … that means mega-embarrassment …. I
love my mum … but not when my friends are online” (M);
“Facebook is a friends’ venue" (D).
Furthermore, an interesting gender-related distinction

emerged, as, for many girls, the functions and interactions
which they and their girlfriends exercise on Facebook differ in
quality and nature from those practised by boys. Moreover,
some girls interpret it as the boys’ attempt to emulate their
online interactions. Accordingly, for instance, when referring
to boys on Facebook, some 14-year-olds explained: "so now
they started saying 'I love you' and stuff” (HG); “Yeah, I’ve
noticed that. They post one another hearts” (HA); “I haven’t
seen hearts yet” (M); “They imitate us. With girls it’s 'My love,
the love of my life'” (HG).
It is unclear whether these assertions are objectively true, yet

it should be noted that the critical literature indeed reveals
gender-based differences in patterns of online
communication and suggests that girls are more inclined to
313
use the Internet in a manner that places weight on

interpersonal communications.5 Given the subjugation of
women in patriarchal society, it is significant that if girls indeed
feel their online conduct to be a model for boys to follow, it
can serve to empower them, giving them a sense of gender
superiority.
Finally, as part of their attempts to establish symbolic borders

- and employing discourse that was non-politically correct and
to a high degree racist - many girls reported encounters with
“dangerous individuals”, mainly defined by them as "Arabs".
In these cases the ‘confirm friend’ request function enabled
them to avoid communication with anyone identified as an
Arab. To cite two 15-year-olds: "Whoever needs to know -
knows. I don’t want all those Arabs around to be able to see it,
do I?“ (J); “If someone introduces himself as Arab, I wouldn’t
want to confirm him on Facebook" (AM).
Arabs and Jews in Israel and Palestine are locked in a decades-

long conflict, with a long history of mutual hostility and
violence. The Arab minority within Israel is perceived by some
to be hostile to the State, which in turn is constantly dealing
with serious security issues. Jews and Arabs alike often cling
to negative stereotypes of each other. Many Jewish Israelis
therefore tend to shy away from familiarity with Arabs,
perceiving them to be violent and morally inferior.6 On this
point, and in the spirit of neoliberal discourse, the girls
stressed the issue of personal responsibility in negotiating the
risks posed by the social network, while stating their deep
confidence in themselves and their power to manage their
social connections on Facebook.
314
Political and Civil Pseudo-activism

From the girls’ perspective, online activity produces a sense of
action. Online they frequently came across political and civil
information, which, as stated, was very prevalent in Israeli
discourse during that period. They were also approached with
offers to join activities and sign petitions. We found that they
were exposed to abundant information about the miracle-
working powers of the Internet in anything to do with social
initiatives: "Many organisations today operate on Facebook …
that in this way can promote demonstrations and agree on the
date, time and place, and it’s not like making phone calls and
worrying about it. If you’re doing it on the phone, you get
fewer participants than you initially wanted. On Facebook it’s
much more massive" (G, 15).
Exposure to online activities and to the public mood inspired

the girls’ initial interest in this kind of information. They joined
protest groups and were happy to sign petitions, whatever
their causes. Some of them viewed it as an expression of
political efficacy, the ability to make a change. In addition, girls
from all groups reported that they had joined Facebook
groups that upheld a social-economic message. These
included Israeli and global groups. In the context of protest,
they also cited friendships in fan communities that petitioned
to bring one artist or another to Israel, and every so often, in
mock-protest groups, such as ‘Restore Kinder Egg to its
Original Shape’. One group acknowledged that signing various
protest petitions had become not only a popular fashion, but
also a banal and derided undertaking.
We also found that girls from all groups were exposed to

information distributed by protest groups, but that they
merely glanced at it while quickly browsing through pages. It
315
may be that this form of reading resulted in them finding it

difficult to understand the background of some of the
protests. Similarly they preferred to keep updated by, and
even act as part of, protest groups associated with “youth” or
the “global village”, as opposed to those that tackled the
specifics of reality in Israel.
The girls cited functional logic as the driving force behind their
decisions as to which information to focus on. The self-
enforced affiliation with youth led them to focus not only on
global issues, but also on protests concerning local affairs that
revolve around consumerism, a trend that is age-distinctive in
itself, such as a protest against popcorn prices in cinemas:
"The popcorn thing is really annoying! Especially if I get pocket
money and I have to give it all, like, from my money” (N, 13).
Identity and Agency

In other words, the girls made their own interpretations of the
climate of protest, using it to express their wish to lay down
the rules of the game. It also seems as if the girls felt that their
online actions were some kind of activism but that they were
actually largely a form of ‘pseudo-activism’, without any
serious and ongoing involvement in civic/social/political
activity. The study demonstrates that the virtual social
network does allow Israeli girls to exercise agency, control,
power, and choice in their social world, providing them with a
liberating space in a domain which is supposedly private, but
which is in fact public. Facebook allows these teenage girls the
ability to project an image of their own choosing, while giving
them a sense of gender, national, and age superiority in
contrast to their experience of age and gender inferiority in
their offline world.
316
The public climate led girls to take an interest in ‘protest’ and

to feel as if they were actually taking part in it. This utopian
perspective thus exudes a neoliberal spirit of autonomy and
individualisation, contributing to a sense of empowerment
and to the perception of themselves as strong and even
invincible (though of course these positive effects may not
carry over into their offline lives). A more critical view, on the
other hand, points to the limitations on the power and
freedom enjoyed by girls; they remain subject to existing
social structures as well as to parental supervision, experience
a lack of privacy, and at times they face the possibility that the
image they have been trying to generate will be compromised.
These negative experiences may also involve what are

perceived as dangerous and hostile attempts to infiltrate their
lives. In addition, their interest in ‘protest’ - and the many
ways of protesting without even leaving the house - often
meant that their participation was little more than virtual.
These actions were coupled with an urge to encompass the
massive abundance of the online world, which compromised
their ability to look deeply into issues and which often led the
girls to meaningless ‘pseudo-activism’ rather than to true civic
socio-political activity.
Acknowledgment
The authors wish to express their gratitude to the Research Authority
of the Academic College of Management Studies, Rishon LeZion,
Israel, for its financial support.
317

_______________________
1
Angela McRobbie and Jenny Garber, 'Girls and Subcultures', in
Stuart Hall and Tony Jefferson (eds.), Resistance through Rituals:
Youth Subcultures in Post-War Britain, London: Hutchinson, 1976,
pp. 209-221.
2
Danah Boyd, 'Why Youth ♥ Social Network Sites: The Role of
Networked Publics in Teenage Social Life', in David Buckingham
(ed.), Youth, Identity, and Digital Media, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press,
2008, pp. 119-142.
3
Mike Thelwall, 'Social Networks, Gender and Friending: An
Analysis of MySpace Member Profiles', Journal of the American
Society for Information Science and Technology, vol. 59 no. 8, 2008,
pp. 1321-1330.
4
The age groups in Israel using SNSs sites most intensively are 12-
14 year olds (89%) and 15-17 year olds (87.6%). See Yuval Dror and
Saar Gershon, Israelis in the Digital Age 2012. Rishon LeZion Israel:
The College of Management Academic Studies, 2012 p. 16.
5
Auren Hoffman, 'The Social Media Gender Gap', Bloomberg
Businessweek, 19 May 2008, online at
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2008-05-19/the-social-
media-gender-gapbusinessweek-business-news-stock-market-and-
financial-advice.
6
Sammy Smooha, 'Arab-Jewish Relations in Israel as a Jewish
Democratic State', in Efraim Yuchtman-Yaar and Zeev Shavit (eds.),
Trends in the Israeli Society, Tel Aviv: Open University of Israel, vol.
1, 2001, pp. 231-363.
318
33 / Faith, Fashion and Femininity:

Muslim Fashion Blogs in Indonesia
Aulia Rahmawati Wimboyono
The Fashion Blog

Fashion blogs, broadly defined as Internet web-logs in which
authors post news about their daily outfit, emerged most fully
in the early 2000s and have enjoyed considerable popularity
ever since, with major fashion magazines such as Vogue and
Harper’s Bazaar dedicating a section on their website to the
topic. Fashion blogs can be easily identified by the pictures
regularly posted by their authors to document their outfits.1
One thing that distinguishes fashion blogs, predictably, from
other social media platforms is the issue of intense chronology
- authors or bloggers typically update their post daily.
319
Fashion blogs also can also be used to show various images

from runway shows, magazine pictorials and can also be
integrated with YouTube or other video-sharing sites.2 In
Indonesia, fashion blogs have been very popular since 2007.
Diana Rikasari, with her blog Hot Chocolate & Mint, became
one of the first fashion bloggers in Indonesia and became a
local celebrity. Her popularity paved the way for the success
of her shoe line and also attracted many product
endorsements, showing just how influential fashion blogs
could be in self-promotional campaigns.
Commercial potential aside, fashion blogs have become

increasingly interesting because of their ability to transcend
locality and nationality and in terms of how they depict
ordinary people who are free to express themselves and dress
according to their own tastes.3 Especially prominent is the rise
of the Muslim blogger, popularly known as the ‘hijab’ blogger.
In a way similar to other personal fashion blogs, Muslim
bloggers (who usually wear headscarves) gained popularity by
posting ordinary ‘women’s stuff’ such as their daily Muslim
outfits, make-up tips, food recipes and stories of their family
lives.
In spite of their importance to the fashion scene, little

attention has been given to how fashion blogs are consumed
by their readers, how their meaning is negotiated, and how
they are challenged and subverted (if indeed this is the case).
This essay attempts to understand the relationships between
bloggers and their audience, questioning how fashion blogs
make meaning for both authors and their readers.
The essay focusses on how Muslim fashion blogs in Indonesia

function, looking at their role not just in terms of marketing,
but with regard to the ways in which the blogs have been
320
consumed and negotiated by their readers, especially in terms

of the tension between fashion, faith and femininity. It is
based on interviews with three young Muslim bloggers to gain
an understanding of how and why they use blogs for self-
expression and as virtual historical diaries for self-
transformation.
I also conducted a focus group discussion with a total of five

readers which suggested that although readers may see these
blogs as a creative medium by means of which to challenge
the dominant narrative construction of Muslim women - who
are usually seen as being oppressed and unable to speak for
themselves - they are also questioning the representation of
femininity and social class, which are often problematic for
most of them.
Blogging, Changing, and Self-Empowerment

In Muslim Women Online, Piela concludes that “websites and
blogs are extensively used by Muslim women across the world
to express their views, explode myths and stereotypes, and
oppose dominant discourses which are aimed at controlling
them”.4 Her research explores the ways in which Muslim
women from various geographical locations engage in news-
groups and discuss various topics such as religion, gender,
race, class. Included in their debates is consideration of the
issue of feminism and women’s independent readings of
sacred Islamic texts.
Earlier research on Muslim women online by Bastani (cited in

Piela) also supports the conclusion that through the Internet,
women can find a space where they no longer feel physically
and socially isolated and that through the network,
participants support each other.5 (Although one of the
321
discussion topics was to do with gender equality, Bastani did

not extend this further into women’s reading of Islamic
scriptures and focussed instead on social interactions in the
network, and whether that affected the participants’ off-line
interactions as well).
The ways in which Muslim women generate blogs, including

video blogs, to create their own spaces has also attracted
some research, although it remains sparse. We know
something, for example, about how such blogs have enabled
the self-expression of women living in Iran, with the country’s
media controlled by one of the strictest governments in the
world. Blogging, for Iranian woman, enables them to be visible
and functions as a safe place in which to re-negotiate the
gender segregation which has applied since 1979.
The research on Iranian women as bloggers by Amir-Ebrahimi,

for example, challenges the traditional image of Muslim
women by exploring the ways in which they write about sexual
experience and femininity.6 Sreberny-Mohammadi, for her
part, researching the vibrant discussion surrounding women’s
rights, politics, and strict media censorship, in the form of
blogs in Iran, offers a very optimistic vision of the potential of
blogging for creating a new form of intellectual space.7
A Virtual Diary of Self-transformation

In line with many of these findings, my research discovered
that fashion blogs allow women a new means of self-
expression. Coincidentally, the time when they started writing
blogs typically corresponds to the time when they decided to
cover themselves (wearing a veil or the hijab). For the bloggers
I interviewed, writing blogs enables them to write their
personal histories as new Muslims and new women, sharing
322
their self-transformation process from the moment they

started wearing the hijab.
For Anissa, a 20 year-old-college student who started blogging

when she started wearing the hijab, blogging allowed her “to
express my personal thoughts and experiences including when
I first started to cover myself. I remembered that my friends at
school teased me when they saw me one day coming to school
with [the] hijab. They teased ‘what possessed you?’. But I’ve
made up my mind that this is the right thing”.
The fact that Anissa and two other bloggers felt that their
decisions to cover themselves were important enough to be
recorded in their blogs, suggests that for them, blogs serve not
only to display their fashion style or their outfit-of-the-day,
but also to bear witness to just how much they have changed
and transformed themselves within Islamic conventions. They
also stated that their fashion style is still very much based on
their own personal taste, although now that they are now
covering themselves this must be in line with Islamic
conventions.
The three of them, however, have quite different views on
how those conventions are manifested in terms of their
appearance. Elsa, an 18 year-old college student, prefers to
wear long flowing skirts and vibrant colours and she posts her
outfit in her daily blog, commenting that Muslim women
prefer wearing a skirt rather than trousers. Nana, a 27 year-
old doctor, said that her fashion blogs have captured her
changing style over the years: “If you look into my blog, you
can see my transformation. At first, I love androgyny style, a
bit of goth. But now, if you look into my style in recent years,
I’ve changed into more feminine looks, mature, lady-like, I
wear more pastel colours and drapery.”
323
Here, once again, blogs serve as an historical record and as a

virtual diary of self-transformation, not just from the pre-hijab
to the post-hijab period, but also in terms of their longer
fashion transformation. Anissa states that sometimes she
faces criticism in the commentary section of her blog, as some
readers feel that her look (which she says is mostly inspired by
the Japanese Harajuku ‘street’ style) seems to stray from
Islamic definitions of modesty.
Anissa, who is majoring in Japanese literature, admits that her
non-conventional hijab style sometimes shocks readers, but
the virtual world of the blog allows her to express herself
freely, and gives her the liberty to choose her own fashion
style at will: “Islam is simple, why do people make such a fuss?
Islam is only suggesting that women should cover their hair
and avoid wearing tight or transparent clothing. It does not
say that we can only wear monochromatic or black outfits
every day. I don’t see why people should criticise others who
like to dress differently, like me”.
The three bloggers also tend to write their posts in English,
rather than in the Indonesian language, mainly because they
want their blogs to be read and understood across borders
and barriers. All of them admit that they are proud to see their
blogs’ reading statistics, which show that they have been read
by people from outside Indonesia, who also sometimes leave
comments on the blogs.
Social Class and Femininity: The Reader’s Perspective

Since I live in the UK and the people I wanted to interview were
living in Indonesia, my friends helped me in finding potential
informants by posting a request on Facebook, looking for
those who would like to read hijab or Muslim fashion blogs.
Three people responded and they also had other friends with
324
the same hobbies. In the end, five informants were recruited

for this research, with ages ranging from 21 to 25, involving a
mixture of college students and professional workers. These
women (who all wear the hijab) agreed to be interviewed on
Skype and to be recorded. They gathered at my friend’s house
for an interview which lasted around 75 minutes.
All five admitted that reading hijab or Muslim fashion blogs
was a significant part of their leisure time; they read them two
or three times a week. Two of them, Briefing (25) and Silvi (22)
admitted that they read blogs almost daily, stating that they
love fashion and want to know the latest trends in fashion and
style in general.
One reason for their interest in reading fashion blogs is that
they relate so much to the lives of the bloggers. They feel that
the bloggers are ordinary women like themselves, and almost
all of them admit that Muslim fashion blogs are equally
important in changing perceptions of Islam, especially
concerning the general perception that Muslim women are
being constantly oppressed, subjugated and inferior to men.
As Sinta commented: “I like their blogs, because they seem
relatable. They are just like us, you know ... some of them are
mothers, but they are very creative and have passion in
fashion. They are smart in mixing and matching their clothes”.
Similarly, Zakiyah also stated that even though bloggers are
ordinary people like themselves, one thing makes them
special, namely their ability to be creative in fashion. As she
explains, “I like them because they are just ordinary people
doing ordinary stuff. Like they tell stories of their activities, but
because they are fashion enthusiasts, they seem really stylish,
even just taking their children to school, they are doing
everything in style.”
325
It is clear that the bloggers are relatable to the readers as

fellow Muslim women. The ordinary lives of these bloggers
have become something very special, because they are doing
everything ‘in style’, which also seems to be political in the
sense that the readers feel that fashion and ‘style’ are
important in challenging negative impressions of Islam. This
political reading of how bloggers are trying to change the
image of oppressed Muslim women become more obvious
when I went on to ask them how they perceived the bloggers
as Muslims.
Briefing clearly confirmed her view of the political motivation

behind these blogs: “I like them because they are creative, and
I think, to some extent they try to pave the changing
perception of Islam”. Fani extended this argument,
highlighting the issue of socio-economic class: “well, of course
they are rich, can dress beautifully, they can buy whatever they
want. But they try to challenge the impression of poor,
unfashionable, fundamentalist Islam [that] we often see and
read in the papers”.
From what Fani said, it appears that she thinks there is some
distance between herself and the bloggers, instead of the
general feeling that the bloggers are ordinary people like
their readers. The issue of socio-economic class is implicit in
her comments, suggesting that although she can relate to
the bloggers’ stories and perceives that they are on a mission
to defy the stereotype of oppressed Muslim women, she
feels that, in terms of social and economic class, the bloggers
are very different than their readers.
Ambiguities such as these also emerged from other readers.

Some of them even highlighted the dangers of changing the
image and representation of Islam by displaying beautiful
326
clothes and material things – in their opinion this could turn

out to be counter-productive and make Muslim women
appear as little more than shallow and narcissistic. Fani
highlighted this ambiguity when she said: “well, although I
appreciate what they do, I don’t think the correct way of
changing perceptions of Islam is by projecting the image of
rich Muslims only. I think it should be more than just
appearances”.
Sinta also comments on the difference between herself and

the bloggers whom she loves to read, adding that
empowering women and changing perceptions should be
more than just being beautiful: “ … so much news about
Islam and terrorism. It’s good that their blogs are showing
the glamorous, fun, stylish side of Islam. I don’t think it’s
wrong at all, it’s just that not all women are like those
bloggers. I mean I definitely can’t afford all expensive
branded stuff they have”.
It seems that in terms of their reading-for-pleasure purposes,
these might be called ‘ambiguous readers’. In one sense, they
are proud and feel that they can relate to the bloggers as they
are fellow Muslim women and they do ordinary things like
raising a family and household chores. Secondly, in some
respects the bloggers are also positively perceived as agents
of change, mainly in terms of the frequently negative
perception and representation of Muslim women, often seen
as backwards and inferior behind the veil.
My findings are in line with other research which concludes
that the Internet, for some Muslim women at least, functions
as an important space of self-expression. On the other hand,
these glamorous, seemingly shallow and ‘fun’ portrayals of
fashion and beauty also create tensions, conflict and distance,
mainly because readers believe that they are not in the same
327
social and economic status as the bloggers. The reading of

fashion blogs thus becomes quite complex, indulgent and
political by turns.
1
Agnes Rocamora, ‘Personal Fashion Blogs: Screens and Mirrors in
Digital Self-Portrait’, Fashion Theory, vol. 15 no. 4, 2011, p. 408.
2
Tara Chittenden, ’Digital Dressing Up: Modelling Female Teen
Identity in the Discursive Spaces of the Fashion Blogosphere’,
Journal of Youth Studies, vol. 13 no 4, August 2010, p. 505.
3
Brent Luvaas, ‘Indonesian Fashion Blogs: On the Promotional
Subject of Personal Style’, Fashion Theory, vol. 17 no. 1, 2013, pp.
55-76.
4
Anna Piela, ‘Piety as a Concept Underpinning Muslim Women’s
Online Discussions of Marriage and Professional Career’,
Contemporary Islam, vol. 5, 2011, p. 249.
5
Anna Piela, Muslim Women Online, London: Routledge, 2012, p.
45.
6
Masserat Amir-Ebrahimi, ‘Blogging from Qom: Behind the Walls
and Veils’, Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle
East, vol. 28 no.2, 2008, p. 238.
7
Annabelle Sreberny-Mohammadi, ‘Global News Media Cover the
World’ in John Downing, Ali Mohammadi, and Annabelle Sreberny-
Mohammadi (eds.), Questioning The Media: A Critical Introduction,
London: Sage, 1995, p. 428.
328
34 / Reconstructing Visions
of Social Identity in Nigeria:
Funke Akindele’s Omo Ghetto
Muhammad O. Bhadmus
Girls and the Ghetto
Funke Akindele's Omo Ghetto (Child of the Ghetto, Nigeria,

2010) is a Yoruba film which tells the story of a gang of girls -
Lefty, Nicky, Skoda, Omo jo Ibo, Iya Abete, and Busty – who
wreak havoc on the streets of Badiya and the suburban
ghettos of Ajegunle in Lagos state. The film focusses on twin
girls who were separated at birth – gang-member Lefty, who
was raised in the Ajegunle ghetto by her parents in a life of
hardship and petty crime, and her sister Ayomide, who has
grown up with a wealthy foster mother in the smart suburbs
of Lagos. Lefty's life of crime eventually brings her into
contact with the law, and, ironically, with her long-lost twin.
329
Ayomide, the well-to-do sister, embarks on the rehabilitation

of Lefty and the other girls in her gang, with the aim of
empowering the youths of the ghetto by engaging them in an
agenda of social change. She revitalises the slum and its
inhabitants. Omo Ghetto is thus a story of girls from the
ghetto who eventually turn around their lives of crime to
become responsible members of society.
Akindele's vision of society focusses on a gang of girls who

live life on the edge of the larger society. The opening scene,
with a group of girls running, chasing and being chased,
unambiguously establishes the ghetto setting of the film
through a variety of aerial shots and cacophonous
background music, punctuated by the sound of breaking
bottles. It is in fact a quick tour of Ajegunle in all its squalid
glamour, cruelty and lawlessness. The sound-track of Omo
Ghetto punctuates this blistering opening scene with its
metallic and chilly music, which becomes the signature tune
of the film in its entirety.
This scene quickly establishes the essentials of the

slum/ghetto of the film in all its violence and turbulence and
provides the ideological platform for the film’s politics. In
contesting patriarchy, and problematising the ghetto and
femininity within the structure of class and power relations,
Akindele creates memorable if coarse, troubled and even in
some senses ‘negative’ female characters. In this sense Omo
Ghetto thus perhaps signals the return to Yoruba screens of
the so-called ‘bad’ girl, as in the case of the legendary
matriarch who is the eponymous heroine of Bankole Bello’s
Efunsetan Aniwara (1981).1
Omo Ghetto is therefore not the traditional Yoruba film; it is

remarkably different in its theme, settings, characterisation,
330
plotting - and above all in its politics and ideology.

Traditionally, Yoruba films - especially the early ones, such as
Ajani Ogun, Taxi Driver, Ko Se Ko, Asewo to Re Mecca, Eku
Meji, Ti Oluwa Ni Ile, Ole Ku - are about an idealised Yoruba
society with a romanticised view of the past, or marked by an
esoteric surrealism.2 In contrast, Omo Ghetto is about the
empowerment of girls and youths from the mundane,
contemporary world of the ghetto. At its centre are well-
developed female characters, in contrast to the male heroes
of traditional Yoruba films.
These heroines are not the traditional ‘good’ girls or girls

born into privilege; they are largely drawn from the wretched
of the society, petty crooks and street girls who eventually
turn their lives around for the better. Omo Ghetto is in this
respect remarkable in its questioning and challenging of the
status quo. Akindele's social vision of identity posits that
women/girls, especially those from the ghetto, can and
should be leaders and not just followers and that the ghetto
and its people have the potential for change and even
greatness.
Markers of Identity
In the traditional ways of the street and slum, the girls
demonstrate their rebellion against society by adopting
unusual and classic gang names. Omoshalewa is Lefty, Nike
answers to Nikky, Simbi is Iya Abete, and we also have Busty,
Omo jo Ibo and Skoda. However, in Nigeria, especially in
Yoruba society, names are value-bearing entities and
markers of lineage. The rejection of real names, with their
connection to Oriki (songs in praise of lineage) therefore also
represent a rejection of the values of the established social
order. By adopting street names in opposition or protest, the
331
girls now live on the fringes of society, undermining its ethics

and values in their lives of brawling and petty crime.
They also do this through their wild ways of dressing, with

costume a marker of status and a way of narrating sexuality
and gender politics, as Van Raalte has suggested in her
analysis of Johnny Guitar.3 The costumes of the gang of girls
in Omo Ghetto are as wild as their code of ethics, involving
bright colours and de-sexualised carriage and deportment.
The tight-fitting dresses are not only masculine, but
deliberately chosen to free them from the decorum and
etiquette of femininity as they run, jump, climb, slide and
tumble without let or hindrance.
Busty and Nikky in particular have the habit of constantly

pulling up their pants or doing up their flies in public and
turning their backside with legs raised to fart offensively,
especially on guys during skirmishes. Lefty holds her crotch
even when under interrogation and admonition by her
parents. Likewise, the hairstyle of the girls is rendered in
shocking punk-like exotic colours unknown in the world of
the traditional Yoruba film. Their make-up, in addition, is
expressionistic.
The use of foul slang and curses are second nature to the
girls. These are issued in the booming tones of street thugs,
well beyond the artistic needs of the rap/singing competition
in the ghetto’s shows and carnivals. Lefty, played by Akindele
herself, is at her best in the film when cursing, brawling and
using street-slang to talk or rap. Her first encounter with the
law at the police station where she met the foster mother of
her twin is a case in point.
332
The police officer interrogates and speaks to her in regular

Yoruba language but she replies heatedly in colourful slang. It
is not only her street clothes that shock Ayomide's foster
mother and friend, but equally her language and diction as
they mistake her for Ayomide, her twin. Ayomide speaks
modestly, whereas Lefty raps in obscenities and expletives:
Police Officer: “Why are you trying to pretend that you are
not Ayomide?”
Lefty: “I beg, sir, who is Ayomide, you are just doing theatre
here and turning me into a superstar of Surulere.”
Foster Mother: “Ayomide!”
Lefty: “Have you kept your eyes in your pocket, or have you
used chewing gum to seal your eyelids? I am not your
returning joy but your returning calamity.” [NB The name
Ayomide means, in English, ‘my joy has come’, which Lefty
angrily replaces with the reference to a “returning calamity”].
Femininity and Social Class

Ghetto gangs, in conformity with patriarchy, are traditionally
largely made up of boys and men, with little or no space for
women. It is interesting to note here that, even in the
appropriation of negatives, women are routinely
discriminated against. Akindele reverses this trend and
pattern with her problematisation of women and slum
dwelling. The girls contest territorial control of the crime
zones of the slum with male gangs and give male crooks and
thugs a run for their money by asserting their authority and
breaking the stronghold of patriarchy in the arena of crime.
For Akindele and even for the other girls, however, it is not
so much of a gang war but a gender war to be fought on all
fronts, even in this supposedly negative territory, as a way of
333
critiquing not only gender relations but social power more

generally. Analysis of the scene in which the gang of girls
attack their fellow women further clarifies the gender politics
of the film. At one of the live band parties in the film, three
other ‘posh’ university girls attend and snub the gang girls as
uncultured and lacking in manners. The gang girls leave the
party in anger but later punish their opponents in their own
strange - and disgusting - way.
They carefully gather their faeces into buckets of slimy paste

which they poured over the posh girls, messing up their
designer bags and dresses - to their victims’ understandable
shock and bewilderment. What we have here is not a gender
war or contradiction but a war between the classes; the
other girls are not attacked for their gender but rather for
their class aspirations and pretensions. In the same way, the
gang of girls contesting the space of crime with men is about
sexual politics and moral philosophy, and not just about
morality per se. Taken together, these seemingly
contradictory conflicts could be better and more profitably
understood within the larger context of problematising
femininity, slum dwelling and a life of crime as aspects of a
social vision of identity.
The film-maker does not only find her heroines in a gang of

ghetto girls together with Ayomide, Lefty’s alter ego, from
the more affluent parts of Lagos, but at the same time in the
ghetto at large. Heroism in the film goes beyond traditional
individualism to become a communal dream and vision as
Ayomide collaborates with others to get the young slum-
dwellers off the streets and into sports, music, fashion,
cosmetics and the entertainment industries, to encourage
them to work and to become empowered. She uses the gang
involving her sister, Lefty, as the motor for her project and as
334
a platform upon which to reach out to other youths of the

ghetto. As a result, Nikky becomes a professional boxer,
Busty becomes an event manager/chef employing others,
Lefty returns to school, and other youths of the ghetto are
trained in various skills and are supported to start small-scale
businesses.
Akindele avoids the sexism and individualism of the hero who

dominates Yoruba films, offering a more communal and
gender-sensitive heroism in line with her social vision of
identity. She looks to a society in which females are not only
to be seen, but can be heard and realised as active
individuals in their own right, and productive contributors to
society at large. Omo Ghetto, therefore, provides a breath of
fresh air in terms of characterisation and, perhaps, gender
relations. It is a film where the main roles and major
plots/scenes are dominated by female characters, with men
– for example Ayomide’s runaway fiancé and Lefty's
estranged boyfriend – playing, for once, subordinate roles.

__________________________________
1
Sarah Appleton Aguiar laments the lack of “even a hint of feminine
wickedness among the scores of virtuous victims of oppression” in
representations of women, in her provocatively titled The Bitch is
Back: The Return of Wicked Women in Literature, Carbondale, IL,
Southern Illinois University Press, 2001, p. 1.
2
See Jonathan Haynes (ed.), Nigerian Video Films, Carbondale, IL:
University of Southern Illinois Press, 2000, and Foluke Ogunleye,
Africa through the Eye of the Video Camera, Manzini, Swaziland:
Academic Publishers, 2008.
335
3
Christa Van Raalte, ‘Gender, Dress and Power: Transvestite
Heroines in the Post-WWII Western - Johnny Guitar’, in Phillip
Drummond (ed.), The London Film and Media Reader 2: The End of
Representation?, The London Symposium, 2013, ch. 17, pp. 165-
175.
336
35 / Lonely Men in the City:

Refn’s Drive and McQueen’s Shame
Heike Steinhoff
Gender, the City, and the Cinema

In 2011 two films were released to critical acclaim that focused
on lonely white men in the contemporary American city.
Nicolas Winding Refn’s film Drive (USA, 2011), based on a
novel by James Sallis and starring Ryan Gosling, is an 80s-style
neo-noir thriller about a Los Angeles car mechanic, stunt- and
getaway driver who becomes embroiled with gangsters whilst
developing a precarious personal relationship with a female
neighbour and her child. Steve McQueen’s Shame (UK, 2011),
for its part, is a drama that tells the story of a ‘sex-addicted’
advertising executive, played by Michael Fassbender, who
seeks erotic stimulation in the streets, bars and subway of
New York City whilst engaging with a troubled sister.
337
Although the two films represent completely different genres,

stories and protagonists and thus at first sight seem not to
have much in common, they both focus on a silent male loner
whose alienation and distress is articulated through an
intricate cinematic inter-relation of masculinity and urban
space. In this essay I will elucidate how Shame and Drive both
(re)produce a discourse of white western masculinity in crisis
that links notions of male anxiety to urban imagery.
Both cities and genders are socio-historical constructions.

Neither gender nor the city is an essential, static entity, but
both are discursive, historically and culturally contingent
constructs. Media, including film, are central to the
(re)production of these constructs. As Teresa de Lauretis has
convincingly argued, films are technologies of gender1, and I
would add, using her terminology, they are also technologies
of urban space. Just as films construct, question or reinforce
particular notions of masculinity or femininity, cities and
discourses of the city are shaped by the filmic imagination.
These two processes are not separate. On the contrary,

gender and space are intricately intertwined, just as they both
intersect with further cultural categories such as class, race,
ethnicity, age, sexuality, and so on. This correlation is
particularly true for films and other cultural texts, which
consciously use cityscapes, often symbolically. As this essay
will show, in Drive and Shame the representation of the
American metropolis is particularly intertwined with the films’
constructions of masculine identity, and contributes
significantly to their constructions of what could be referred
to as a narrative of hegemonic masculinity in crisis.
Hegemonic masculinity has been described by Connell as “a

configuration of gender practice which embodies the currently
338
accepted answer to the problem of the legitimacy of

patriarchy, which guarantees (or is taken to guarantee) the
dominant position of men and the subordination of women” –
as well as the dominant position of certain men, mostly white,
heterosexual, often middle-class, in relation to ‘other’ men.
Hegemonic masculinity is more an ideal than an actuality.
Going back to the gangster films of the 1930s, but especially
since the 1990s, white hegemonic masculinity in cinema has
repeatedly been declared to be, or represented as being, in
some kind of crisis.
The Crisis of Masculinity

This crisis, which as Connell points out, should rather be
conceptualised as “crisis tendencies […] in the modern gender
order”2, has been attributed to particular economic, political,
and social shifts that have de-centered the white male. These
include feminism, the gay and the civil rights movement, and
the transition towards a post-industrial economic order. While
there is some validity to this epochal view of a ‘crisis’ or rather
different periods of ‘crisis’, such a view also bears the danger
of implying that there is something like a stable masculinity in
the eras in-between.
In fact masculinity continuously needs to be constructed and

reconstructed. As Walter Erhart has argued, the crisis of
masculinity should therefore not primarily be conceptualised
as a psychological or historical condition, but as a moment in
a particular narrative structure through which masculinity has
been constructed ever since.3 The following analysis will show
that the construction of masculinity in both Drive and Shame
involves such a narrative of crisis and links it to the experience
of the white male in the American city. Despite their
differences in class and their different representations in
339
terms of generic conventions, the protagonists of both Drive

and Shame at first sight not only display a tough and stoic
character that evokes notions of hegemonic masculinity, but
their position of masculine power is particularly established
through their control of urban space.
Drive most obviously evokes archaic and conventional notions

of chivalric and tough masculinity. As a bricolage of film noir
and the western, the film represents its unnamed working-
class hero as an urban cowboy. The Driver’s car stands in for
the horse, with which he navigates the nocturnal maze of Los
Angeles, this last urban frontier and wilderness that the Driver
seeks to master. The car connotes mobility, freedom, and the
American Dream, but also functions as the (knightly) Driver’s
armour and shield, while his knowledge of the city and its
streets puts him in a position of power and control in his job
as a getaway driver.
Shame’s protagonist Brandon, a New York business executive,

at the beginning of this film likewise seems to be in control of
his life. He is successful in his job and has casual sex with
various women and prostitutes, thus displaying another facet
of hegemonic masculinity: professional and sexual success.
Whereas the Driver’s more archaic masculinity is rooted in the
American West and male-dominated genres about the
American West, Brandon’s masculinity is more immediately
set in the context of the contemporary post-industrial
American metropolis, which is likewise predominantly coded
as a male-dominated space.
New York City is where Brandon continuously proves his

masculinity, most often by seducing or purchasing women
whom he subjects to his masculine gaze and control. On closer
inspection, however, in the course of the films it becomes
340
evident that these urban characters and their performances of

hegemonic masculinities are deeply troubled. One source of
this trouble in both films is, predictably, women.
The Challenge of Femininity

In Drive, it is the entrance of the Driver’s neighbour Irene into
his car and his life that shakes his daily routine. The Driver’s
attempt to protect Irene and her little son draw him deeper
into criminality and violence, so that eventually he ends up
severely wounded and possibly dying. Though Irene is more an
innocent damsel-in-distress than a real femme fatale, in
(stereo)typical film noir fashion, the film represents the
woman as fatale for the Driver, after all.
In Shame it is the appearance of a female relative, Brandon’s

sister Sissy, that de-stabilises the protagonist’s sense of
masculine control. As Barbara Braid argues, Sissy represents
femininity “understood as those aspects of one’s identity
which are externalized and rejected by hegemonic
masculinity.”4 Brandon continuously tries to reject Sissy and
thus to disavow her feminine influences or – if read
metaphorically – his own feminine side. Drive and Shame thus
suggest that hegemonic masculinity is a rather unstable and
continuous process of construction. Both films portray their
protagonist’s masculinity in a much more ambivalent light
than has been critically suggested so far.
In his reading of Drive’s representation of masculinity, for

example, Tim Edwards points out that the representation of
the driver is “far more nuanced, feminized, and sexually
ambiguous than that of many of his [filmic] predecessors”.5
Edwards attributes this to the feminising influences of 80s
pop-music and the casting and fetishistic dressing of Ryan
341
Gosling, which produce an ambiguous sexuality or eroticism

that could appeal to both straight female and gay male
viewers. Moreover, despite his neo-cowboy appearance, the
Driver is established as a soft, even caring surrogate father
figure.
On an extra-diegetic level, Shame represents its male

protagonists in ‘feminised’ or ‘eroticised’ ways that counter-
balance the character’s overtly masculine and heterosexual
performance. While on a diegetic level the film shows Brandon
perpetually subjecting women to his masculine gaze and thus
continuously reinforcing his hegemonic position, on an extra-
diegetic level, the male protagonist himself is also frequently
subjected to the gaze of the camera - and, by implication, the
viewer’s gaze as well - in a way that puts him in a vulnerable
and culturally feminised position. This is particularly true for
the much-discussed scene of full-frontal nudity in the film.
Navigating the Noir City

While Drive and Shame represent urban masculinities as
ambivalent and troubled, they often represent the city as the
reason for this, and use urban imagery as an expression of the
male protagonists’ distress. In contrast to the romantic and
mythological western and urban frontier imagery that at times
surfaces in Drive, the film for instance also mobilises a
discourse on Los Angeles as the city of noir. As Megan E.
Abbott has argued in her examination of white masculinity in
hard-boiled fiction and film noir, “it is not just any city that
serves repeatedly as the setting for the white male loner. It is
the ‘last city,’ the frontier’s end, the supposed promised land:
Los Angeles” that turns into an “urban hell” of “unnerving
hollowness”.6
342
Drive uses this noir imagery to represent the driver as an

alienated and lonesome man. In this context, the car functions
not so much as a sign of freedom but as a sign of isolation and
(urban) alienation: shots through the windshield of the
driver’s car show empty sidewalks and blurry neon lights,
creating a sense of anonymity and discomfort. The car
becomes a site of entrapment, the windshield separating the
driver from the city outside, while the road ahead is always
blurred, suggesting that the chance of opportunity and
progress are uncertain. Reminiscent of Travis in Martin
Scorsese’s Taxi Driver (USA, 1976), the Driver eventually
seems to have nowhere to go.
Moreover, besides women, it seems to be the conflicted

multicultural urban world of L.A. that threatens the white
male hegemonic position. As the driver tries to protect his
neighbour and her child by trying to help her husband, he is
dragged deeper into L.A.’s criminal underworld and
repeatedly threatened by various ‘Others’, who in accordance
with the conventions of both genres, the western and the noir
film, are explicitly marked as ethnic and racial Others (e.g.
Jews and Hispanics).
The film’s hero and his masculinity turn out to be increasingly

troubled and, as frequent reflections in mirrors indicate,
fractured. Horrific forms of violence, which the protagonist
employs, function not so much to restore his masculinity, but,
through their excess, point towards the character’s desperate
attempt to live up to the hegemonic ideal of white male
protector (of woman and child) and Hollywood hero. While
the film reproduces and partly romanticises this ideal, it at the
same time implies that this ideal is no longer possible – if it has
ever been – either in such an urban space as L.A. or on the
Hollywood screen.
343
Lost in Non-Place
Similarly to Drive, Shame also uses urban imagery to construct
its protagonist. The film evokes the mythical associations of
New York City as the city of the American Dream. However, as
in numerous other literary and filmic texts, in Shame New York
appears as a dream, perhaps pursued, but lost. It is a city in
which people kill themselves and whose endless possibilities,
for instance, for casual sex, are not fulfilling, but destructive.
Accordingly, Shame does not represent the monumental New
York, but as Mark Fisher has pointed out, “New York is
transformed into a ‘non-place’”.7
Fisher takes this term from Marc Augé, who introduced it to

refer to “ephemeral” and “transient” spaces like airports,
motorways, hypermarkets, which increasingly dominate
contemporary culture. According to Augé, in opposition to
what he calls anthropological place, a ‘non-place’ “creates
neither singular identity nor relations; only solitude and
similitude”. 8 Brandon’s New York, which consists of sterile
apartments, anonymous hotel rooms, bars, large office
spaces, and empty streets, could indeed be considered as such
a ‘non-place’.
In particular, Brandon’s rides on the subway - truly one of

those non-places to which Augé refers - express his loss of
identity as Brandon is repeatedly shown passively drifting
through the dark tunnels of the city. Los Angeles, in The Driver,
can similarly be considered as a non-place, consisting only of
highways and motel rooms. Both, Brandon and the Driver are
lonely men in lonely, de-personalised spaces. The minimalist
interior of Brandon’s apartment emphasizes the character’s
solitude and functions to reflect his own emotional
minimalism. As Fisher observes, “the interchangeability of the
344
spaces Brandon occupies are directly linked to his own

indifference to both the city he lives in and the interactions he
has with other people, be they carnal or not”.9
Thus, though the city provides the perfect playground for

Brandon’s masculine prowls and sexual excesses, it at the
same time seems to be this very “access to excess” - to use the
words of Steve McQueen10 - that also proves to be destructive
to the male hero by making him cold and indifferent. The film
perpetuates a discourse about the post-modern city that can
be traced back to sociologist Georg Simmel, who claimed at
the beginning of the 20th Century that “metropolitan man” is
characterised by a “blasé attitude”, an indifference towards
the world around him, as a result of nervous over-
stimulation.11
Gender, Space, and Flânerie

Sex, for Brandon, is not an expression of human interaction or
relation, but a mechanized reaction to an inner compulsion
and an abundance of stimulation. Brandon is caught and lost
in urban space and the urban trap mirrors the character’s
entrapment in his own desiring male body. Whether he is
jogging, walking or riding on the subway, the mise-en-scène
always suggests that he is not progressing. Accordingly, also
Brandon’s (psychological) downfall is visualised through a
descent in nocturnal urban space. A montage sequence shows
the deterioration of his mental state and highly self-
destructive behaviour as he wanders through the dark streets
of New York City, trying to pick up women and provoking other
men to beat him up.
In a highly troubling manner his deterioration is eventually

equated with an entrance into gay urban subculture, which is
345
represented as a world of darkness and as a shame to his

heterosexual masculinity. The lowest point of his descent
takes place in an anonymous apartment somewhere in the
non-place of New York, where Brandon has sex with two
women in a scene that eventually looks more like a form of
self-torture than of sexual gratification. The fact that these
scenes are cross-cut with telephone calls from his suicidal
sister Sissy emphasises Brandon’s inability to bond with
anybody as well as his own suicidal tendencies.
Like Drive, Shame displays a tendency towards masochism on

the part of its male protagonist, “an aesthetic” that according
to Sally Robinson has ruled “representations of dominant
masculinity in crisis in the post-sixties era.”12 Eventually, the
wounded man merges with the wounded city: as Brandon
breaks down and cries on the banks of the Hudson River, the
city also cries – it starts to rain. Brandon ends up in the subway
again, drifting through a dark anonymous urban space. In the
end, just like the Driver, Brandon is a wounded man, moving
through the American city in what could be a downward spiral,
or an eternal loop.
As urban loners Brandon and the Driver are at the centre and
at the margins, they are purveyors of the urban hegemonic
order and at the same time, as the films make clear, they are
alienated and wounded men. The filmic representation of
urban space functions to underline this ambivalence and to
comment particularly on the character’s interiority, which is
otherwise often closed to the viewer owing to the characters’
outward display of stoic masculinity. In fact, the two
protagonists are so rooted in the respective urban spaces in
which the films are set that they appear more as urban (and
generic) types than as truly developed individuals:
346
biographical information is sparse in Shame and not given at

all in Drive.
In a way, Brandon and the Driver appear as updated and

transformed cinematic versions of the 19th Century flâneur,
namely as a troubled 21st Century urban prowler on the one
hand and as an equally troubled 21st Century urban driver on
the other. The films use urban discourses, including types of
mobility, associated with two of the most mythical American
cities, New York and Los Angeles, to construct these particular
masculine characters, while at the same time the
representations of these characters (re)produce urban
(masculine) myths. Conclusively, the representation of urban
masculinities in both films constitutes neither a radical shift in
the urban or cinematic gender order, nor a simple
reproduction of some kind of hegemonic ideal.
1
Teresa de Lauretis, ‘Technologies of Gender’, in de Lauretis,
Technologies of Gender: Essays on Theory, Film, and Fiction,
Bloomington: Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1987, pp. 1-30.
2
Raewyn Connell, Masculinities, Berkeley, CA: University of
California Press, 1995, pp. 77, 84.
3
Walter Erhart, ‘Das zweite Geschlecht: ‘Männlichkeit‘,
Interdisziplinär - Ein Forschungsbericht’, Internationales Archiv für
Sozialgeschichte der deutschen Literatur, vol. 30 no. 2, 2005, p. 223.
4
Barbara Braid, ‘‘You Force Me into the Corner and You Trap Me”:
The Crisis of Hegemonic Masculinity in Steve McQueen’s Shame
(2011)’, Iner-Disciplinary.Net, Third Global Conference, May 2013,
347
Prague, available online at http://www.inter-

disciplinary.net/critical-issues/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/FM3-
B-Braid-e-book-chapter.pdf.
5
Tim Edwards, ‘Lone Wolves: Masculinity, Cinema, and the Man
Alone’, in Cynthia Carter, Linda Steiner, and Lisa McLaughlin (eds.),
The Routledge Companion to Media and Gender, New York:
Routledge, 2014, p. 46.
6
Megan E. Abbott, The Street Was Mine: White Masculinity in
Hardboiled Fiction and Film Noir, New York: Palgrave Macmillan,
2002, pp. 8-9.
7
Mark Fisher, ‘Non-Film: Steve McQueen’s Shame’, online at
filmquarterly. org, 24 Jan. 2012, n.p.
8
Marc Augé, Non-Places: Introduction to an Anthropology of
Supermodernity, London: Verso, 1995, pp. viii, 83.
9
Fisher, op. cit., n.p.
10
Kin Woo, ‘Shame on Michael Fassbender’, online at
dazeddigital.com, 15 Feb. 2012, n.p.
11
Georg Simmel, ‘The Metropolis and Mental Life’ (1903), in
Richard Sennett (ed.), Classic Essays on the Culture of Cities,
Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1969, p. 51.
12
Sally Robinson, Marked Men: White Masculinity in Crisis, New
York: Columbia University Press, 2000, p. 13.
348
36 / Masculinity and the Family

in American Independent Cinema
Sven Weidner
The Cultural Omnipresence of the Family
This essay explores the depiction of masculinity and the family

in two examples of American Independent Cinema, Todd
Solondz‘s Happiness (Solondz, 1998) and Noah Baumbach‘s
The Squid and The Whale (2005). Focussing mainly on
dysfunctional family units and unconventional male roles
outside the Hollywood mainstream, I start by illustrating the
relevance of the family as an omnipresent theme in American
art and culture before going on to observe some important
milestones of the historical and cultural context in the U.S. in
the period. The essay tries to understand the role and status
of independent cinema before offering some analysis of my
chosen films in order to show the heterogeneous models of
gender and family depictions which they embody.
349
In the course of a lengthy tradition, the family has been the

core theme in world-famous American novels such as Thomas
Wolfe‘ s Look Homeward Angel (1929) or Margaret Mitchell’s
Gone with the Wind (1936). Family sagas spanning the
generations and their inherent structures unfold, often with
tragic overtones and resolutions. The bonds created by these
familial structures are however strong enough to help fight
against the hardships of life, nature or war. High on the agenda
are the conflicts within the circle of the family, especially
father-son and mother-daughter struggles.
In the troubled 1960s, in particular, a umber of complex and

psychologically subtle novels - with Revolutionary Road (1961)
leading the way - thematise intra-familial conflicts, with their
dysfunctional relationships within the micrcosm of surburbia.
From the 1990s onwards, Philip Roth’s American Pastoral
(1997), Jonathan Franzen’s The Corrections (2001) and
Freedom (2010), and Richard Ford’s Canada (2012), continued
to explore different versions of the family.
On stage Eugene O’Neill had prevailed with his well-known

plays such as Mourning Becomes Electra (1931), and Long
Day’s Journey Into Night (1957), showing the corrosive power
within families, the psychological impact on the individual
resulting from unstable or destroyed familiy relationships, and
the complexity of father-son conflicts, as did Tennessee
Williams in A Streetcar Named Desire (1947) and Cat on a Hot
Tin Roof (1955). In tandem, slowly changing images of
masculinity are also to be found in these works.
Where the cinema is concerned, there are countless films

dealing with the depiction of family and masculinity, including
the adaptations of the novels and plays mentioned above. The
identity of the family and the role of the male - coming home
350
from war, or involved in the minutiae of suburban life - were

to be central themes in the melodramas of Sirk, Minnelli and
Kazan. The implosion of traditional family values caused by the
youth revolution is famously dramatised in Ray‘s Rebel
without a Cause (1955), while his Bigger Than Life (1956)
brilliantly depicts the destruction of a family caused by a
manic, drug-addicted father.
From the new independent cinema came unconventional

depictions of family and male roles, as in the films of
Cassavetes, such as A Woman under the Influence (1974) and
Love Streams (1984). In the former, Gena Rowlands plays a
troubled wife and mother who upsets the the fragile
structures of the family. The frailty of communication within
the family, meanwhile, is explored in Robert Redford‘s
chamber drama Ordinary People (1980).
A Fundamental Shift
A fundamental shift occurs in Independent Cinema from the
1990s onwards, in a period when, broadly speaking,
dysfunctional families and male figures are depicted in
comedies as well as in dramas. Whilst Little Miss Sunshine
(Dayton/Faris, 2006) is a subtle comic portrayal of an average
family with all its highs and lows, with Shotgun Stories (2007)
Jeff Nichols presents a revenge-tragedy, featuring a quarter of
brothers, of almost ‘Greek‘ dimensions. The film is a telling
examination of the roles of family and masculinity in an
inhuman environment. Certainly, there are hybrids with both
tragic and comic elements, among them About Schmidt
(Payne, 2002) and Juno (Reitman, 2007).
From this decade on there is an increasing number of films

reflecting families retrospectively in earlier decades.
351
Examples, with highly heterogeneous aesthetic structures,

include The Ice Storm (Lee, 1997) The Virgin Suicides (Coppola,
1999), Far From Heaven (Haynes, 2002), Revolutionary Road
(Mendes, 2008), and A Serious Man (Coen Brothers, 2009). As
a group they reveal the dysfunctionality of suburbia and its
residents.
In such films the core family often faces dissolution. The fabric
of the family is threatened by its unreliability and vulnerabiltiy,
its inner anxieties as well as dangers from outside. In addition,
questions over gender roles and, in particular, changing
notions of what a man should be, and the challenges he faces,
are common themes. Interestingly, these stories are
predominantly situated in suburbia, which has become a place
where a kind of hidden horror reigns.
As Vermeulen comments, “In recent years, Hollywood´s

landscape has become increasingly suburbanized [...] the
arthouse has become home to predominantly white, middle-
class, nuclear families. [...] Suburbanization has become so
widespread, and so diverse, that it is close to impossble to
locate it within just one medium“.1 The diversity of families in
suburbia is depicted in films like Sling Blade (Thornton, 1997),
You Can Count on Me (Lonergan, 2001), In the Bedroom (Field,
2001), Little Children (Field, 2006), The Fighter (O’Russell,
2010), Take Shelter (Nichols, 2011), The Place Beyond the
Pines (Cianfrance, 2012), and Boyhood (Linklater, 2014) – as
well as in almost all the films of Todd Solondz.
Historical and Cultural Context

The war in Iraq, the dissolution of the Soviet Union, and the
final Fall of Communism - implying the definitive end of the
polarisation between East and West - determined the first half
352
of the 1990s. In the U.S. the presidency of Clinton was

associated with high expectations after the conservative years
of Reagan and Bush. The promise of a government-funded
health care system, and improved rights for minorities and
women, entailed in turn the gradual rise of alternative family
models.
In 1992, however, the L.A. riots were a cruel proof of the deep
inner tensions of the country. A ‘culture war‘ began to divide
society, mercilessly seperating conservatives and liberals. Gay
rights, gun control, multiculturalism, and abortion were
controversial topics. Globalisation and with it the idea of a
new economic reality caused anxiety as well optimism, with
the resurgence of nationalism one negative outcome. In 1998
the Clinton-Lewinsky scandal, and the attempted
impeachment, tainted the politial scene in Washington.
Moreover, the tensions between media’s status as business
enterprises and their role as purveyors of information were,
as ever, hotly debated.
Questions of gender, male and female roles, and various forms

of identity were discussed afresh.At the beginning of the
1990s, Judith Butler published her pioneering (if abstruse)
book Gender Trouble, which developed a pioneering discourse
on questions to do with gender, heterosexuality, and
queerdom. In the same year another important theorist, Eve
Kosofsky Sedgwick, made a profound contribution to ideas of
homophobia and to queer theory with her book Epistemology
of the Closet.2
In the universities these insights heavily influenced the

Humanities. Film-makers, too, began to reflect in new ways on
gender models and alternative concepts of identity. Their
visions became much more courageous and ambitious,
353
opening spaces for ambivalent and daring themes. At the start

of the following decade, however, 9/11 entirely changed
American society. Among the many consequences, the United
States was to become an isolated power whose erstwhile
strength was weakened by long-lasting polarisation within
American society itself.
The Rise of Independent Forms and Institutions

The 1990s saw a number of entertainment conglomerates
controlling most parts of the entertainment industry. The
apparent mantra of mainstream/blockbuster cinema -
‘spectacle‘ over ‘storytelling‘ - dominated, with the simple aim
of increasing box office profitability. While mainstream
Hollywood mainly focused on entertaining its audiences with
conventionalised stories based on linear plots, independent
cinema took a different path. Biskind sums it up thus:
“Hollywood reproduced conventional wisdom and mainstream
ideology, whereas indies challenged both - sometimes.“3 New
visions of society were explored here. In the words of Emanuel
Levy, “the imagery of 1990s indies is urban and multiracial,
rather than rural and white.“4
Social issues that were largely absent in the mainstream

cinema became a focus for independent film-makers. The
removal of taboos on portrayals of issues such as violence
within dysfunctional families, paedophilia, incest, drug-abuse,
homosexuality and transsexuality, violent youth culture,
become characteristic themes for independent films. An
overlapping juxtaposition of violence and sexuality, with a
somewhat nihilistic worldview and also ironic elements, were
frequently to be found in independent films. The New Queer
Cinema, to take just one example, offered new depictions of
homosexuality, queerness, and other marginalised identities.
354
In addition to the difference represented by their chosen

thematics, the narrative and aesthetic of independent films
are in most cases significantly different from those to be found
in Hollywood, as King has suggested: ”In general, independent
features are more likely to employ devices designed to deny,
block, delay or complicate the anticipated development of
narrative, to reduce clarity or resolution and in some cases to
increase narrative self-consciousness.5
Unusual audiovisual and narrative structures, involving the

abandonment of the dominant sequentiality, irregular or
elliptical editing, the frequent use of the handheld camera,
the avoidance of non-diegetic music – all of these innovatory
tendencies go hand in hand with a characteristic focus on
ambivalent characters, whose aims, ambitions and
motivations are either mysterious or even occasionally
grotesque.
Nonetheless, what became known as ‘hybrids’ gradually

dominated the scene – films shot independently, with the
director making the essential decisions, but financed by
smaller studios and/or co-financed by majors (which in many
cases also distributed the films). Indie directors began to
abandon their strong rejection of Hollywood, and to a certain
extent moved away from their avant-garde niche, in order to
reach a larger audience. The end-product of this process is the
quasi-institution known, by way of homage, as ‘Indiewood’.
The shifting role of stardom should also be taken into account.

Compared to the stars of the Golden Age of Hollywood, plenty
of actors do not see it as a problem to work in the indie sector.
In so-called ‘high concept‘ or big studio films, ambitious actors
and actresses have no real opportunity to experiment, and
hence the attraction of Indiewood. It is a two-way process:
355
famous actors such as Sean Penn, Billy Bob Thornton, Vincent

Callo all started their careers in independent film.
Case-Studies: Happiness and The Squid and The Whale

In Baumbach’s The Squid and the Whale Bernard Berkman
(Jeff Daniels) and Joan Berkman (Laura Linney) are writers
living with their two sons Walt (Jesse Eisenberg) and Frank
(Owen Kline) in bohemian Brooklyn in the 1980s. The first
scene is on a tennis court where Bernard and Walt form a
team against Joan and Frank. The atmosphere is tense and we
very soon realise that the competition on court, and the net
between the players, symbolise the estrangement of the
parents from each other. Bernard, certainly a better player, is
overbearing towards his wife; and Walt, who obviously
admires his father, accepts the arrogance of his behaviour.
Bernard starts to play unfairly, leading to the ending of the

game. With only the staccato diegetic sound of the tennis ball
to be heard, we are introduced to the family drama. Later on
we learn about the dysfunctionalities of Bernard and Joan. The
film is about the brittleness of their marriage, and also about
the time-honoured battle of sexes. While Joan is successful as
writer - being published in the prestigious New Yorker –
Bernard‘s success as a writer has faded. Regularly turned
down by publishers, he is forced to teach literature to college
students.
When Joan falls in love with a younger man, Bernard flirts with
a student from his class who is at the same time admired by
Walt. Over and above the inability of the parents to live in
harmony and to give up their mutual competition, there is an
apparent frailty of communications between members of the
family. The intra-familial dysfunctionalities are presented
356
unsentimentally, and are at the same time both moving and

comic.
With his film Happiness, the tangled story of three sisters living
in New Jersey, Solondz twists the knife further. As the various
storylines play out, the suburban landscape is scarred not only
by social isolation and adultery, but by rape, paedophilia, and
murder. Dysfunctional masculinities and broken family
structures are here the norm. Of greatest interest for my
discussion is the character of Bill Maplewood (Dylan Baker),
though there are many other complex and ambivalent male
characters such as Allen (Philip Seymour Hoffmann) who are
undoubtedly worthy of analysis.
Dr. Maplewood is a psychologist living, apparently happily, in

an ideal family in a suburban home. He is himself in treatment,
however, because he has pleasurable and liberating visions of
killing people. We see him enter an idyllic park where people
are enjoying a warm summer day before he abruptly and
brutally mows people down with a machine-gun. We cut to
the room where Maplewood is in session with his therapist,
and learn to our relief that the park scene was just a fantasy.
Maplewood is also a paedophile who rapes two of his son‘s

classmates. When the crime is uncovered there is a final
conversation between father and son. The dialogue is boldly
painful. When being asked by his on if he likes sleeping with
boys he answers “Yes“; but when his son asks if he would also
rape him, Maplewood replies “No, I would rather jerk off“.
Rarely in American Cinema have we have witnessed such an
intimate and forceful avowal as Solondz reveals, with brutal
honesty, some of the darkest and most horrific aspects of
masculinity, the family and suburbia in modern America.
357
1
Timotheus J. V. Vermeulen, ‘The Suburbs‘, in John Berra (ed.),
Directory of World Cinema, American Independent Cinema, vol. 1,
Bristol: Intellect, 2010, p. 27.
2
Judith Butler, Gender Trouble (New York: Routledge, 1990; the
book went into a second edition the same year) and Eve Kosofsky
Sedgwick, Epistemology of the Closet (Berkeley, CA: University of
California Press, 1990).
3
Peter Biskind, Down and Dirty Pictures: Miramax, Sundance, and
the Rise of Independent Film, London: Bloomsbury, 2004, p. 13.
4
Emanuel Levy, Cinema of Outsiders: The Rise of American
Independent Film, New York: New York University Press, new ed.,
2001, p. 507.
5
Geoff King, American Independent Cinema, Bloomington, IN:
Indiana University Press, 2005, p. 63.
358
36 / Stardom, Genre and Masculinity:

The Case of Robert Mitchum
Patrick Pilkington
Mitchum and Noir: The Thriller and the Western
First coming to major attention in 1945 with his performance

in William Wellman’s The Story of G.I. Joe, Robert Mitchum
became one of the major stars of classical Hollywood and, with
his laconic performing style, the epitome of screen ‘cool’. In
this essay I discuss three films that contributed to the
formation of Mitchum’s star persona – Jacques Tourneur’s Out
of the Past (1947), Raoul Walsh’s Pursued (1947), and Robert
Wise’s Blood on the Moon (1948) - and consider how they
modulate two of Hollywood’s hyper-masculine archetypes,
the private detective and the western hero, by invoking the
more ambivalent characterisations of film noir. This is the kind
of cinema with which Mitchum remains most often
359
associated, and the series of films made in the first decade of

his star career are now seen as exemplary.
Noir, alternately seen as genre, style, mode, and mood, is a
contested term, but one way to approach it is by considering
the specific types of masculinity it introduces into Hollywood
cinema. Noir masculinity runs on a scale from the tough, in-
control investigative hero of the hard-boiled thriller,
epitomised by Humphrey Bogart’s characters in The Maltese
Falcon and The Big Sleep, to the weaker, victimised male,
typically seen as simultaneously passive and self-destructive,
in such films as Double Indemnity, Detour and The Lady from
Shanghai.
An alignment with the noir hero through subjective narration

often reveals a neurotic figure whose crisis of masculinity is
evident in his interaction with a criminal underworld and his
(related) uncontrollable attraction to the character type of the
femme fatale. This ambivalently situated hero diverges from
the hard-boiled Bogart figure, who survives unscathed while
the noir victim spirals towards death or trauma. The crises of
masculinity evident in much noir would also seem
incompatible with the dominant model of masculinity
proffered by the Western genre.
When considering the Western, a series of potent but

unambiguous images emerge: heroes wearing white, villains
dressed in black, the cowboy as lone, laconic outdoorsman
who protects the community before riding off into the sunset.
Yet critics have examined the post-war shifts within the genre
that modified its focus on myth and history and gave a
renewed emphasis to the fallibility and vulnerability of the
Western hero. This work is often undertaken in relation to the
series of 1950s psychological Westerns directed by Anthony
360
Mann and starring James Stewart. But critics have also located
a noir western strand, concurrent with the ’40s contemporary
thrillers, that anticipates Mann in its inflection of the
Western’s conventional models of masculinity with the
neurotic masculinity of noir.
The contemporary noir and the noir Western share Robert

Mitchum as a key star presence, one who must fit with both
the aforementioned masculine archetypes and their noir re-
configurations. Dennis Bingham has explored how James
Stewart’s star persona fed into Mann’s westerns,1 yet there
are few examinations of how Mitchum’s persona inflected his
work in the genre, despite the fact that he plays the lead in
one-third of the examples James Ursini provides of the noir
Western hybrid.2 Similarly, Mitchum’s prominence in the noir
thrillers of the 1940s-50s, although undeniable, has gone
largely unexamined. By considering his work, we can
understand how the star negotiated the intersection of stable
and unstable male identities at play in the noir-inflected
cinema of the 1940s.
Out of the Past: Quintessential Mitchum Noir?

One of the most enduring screen images of Mitchum remains
his role as ex-private detective Jeff Markham in Out of the
Past. The plot of Out of the Past is deliberately complex. It
concerns Markham’s attempt to settle into small-town life as
a gas station owner. However, his past mistakes, personified
by the presence of gangster Whit Sterling (Kirk Douglas) and
devious ‘dame’ Kathie (Jane Greer), return to haunt him,
dragging him back into an underworld of crime and double-
crossing. Out of the Past is frequently posited as the
quintessential film noir, with Mitchum’s character considered
the archetypal noir protagonist both iconographically (the
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trench-coat, the cigarette, the heavy-lidded features) and in

terms of characterisation - a detective-hero distinguished by a
cool, laconic demeanour and effortlessly conveyed toughness.
Frank Krutnik, however, contextualises and interrogates this
presumed generic typicality by looking at the film in relation
to earlier detective thrillers, arguing that Out of the Past
“relies upon a knowledge of the hard-boiled private-detective
thriller precisely as a conventionalised Hollywood cycle”.3
Krutnik contrasts Jeff Markham with Bogart’s Maltese Falcon
detective-hero, describing the former as “chaotically divided”
and describing Out of the Past’s multiplicity of locations and
narrative complexity as suggestive of Jeff’s inability to
maintain control over both the story and his identity.4
It is in terms of this representation of a crisis of masculine

identity that Krutnik regards Out of the Past as “an inversion
of the overtly ‘tough’ masculinisation which so strongly marks
‘The Maltese Falcon’”.5 Thus, it could be suggested that Out of
the Past is quintessentially noir in part because it collapses
into one figure, played by Mitchum, two dominant male
character types - the in-control investigative hero, and the
victimised male led astray by female allure and his own
weakness. Mitchum is given the task of embodying and
negotiating these discordant masculine figures.
Masculine Identities: Out of the Past

Mitchum’s first on-screen appearance in Out of the Past
situates him as another type, the romantic lead, as he meets
up with his small-town girlfriend, Ann. It is not until the
following scene, where Jeff encounters Whit’s right hand man,
Joe, who has tracked him down to the rural location, that we
see the emergence of a more conventional tough guy figure;
362
the Jeff who is introduced in the initial sequence is almost

entirely absent in the one which follows. The cryptic
conversation between Jeff and Joe suggests a criminal past,
just as the prior scene with Ann has imagined a domestic
future.
Mitchum’s body language is guarded, as he alternates

between folding his arms, placing his hands in his coat
pockets, and slowly smoking a cigarette. This sequence grants
us a second introduction to the character and to a Mitchum
that is more in line with the familiar hard-boiled archetype,
but which is crucially not our first impression. Thus, we gain a
sense of the hyper-masculine tough guy role now displayed as
somewhat performative. The notion of a split between
identities is emphasised through Jeff’s name change; we learn
with Ann in the following sequence that the Jeff Bailey we
have been introduced to is actually the ex-private detective
Jeff Markham.
Pivotal to this disconnect between masculine identities are the
subsequent uses of flash-back and voice-over as Jeff discloses
his past to Ann. The combination of voice-over narration and
a flashback structure in noir aligns the viewer with the
protagonist’s subjectivity. In this instance, Jeff’s flashback
narrative tellingly prioritises his ill-fated romance with Kathie.
The early scenes with Kathie again suggest a yearning for
domesticity and a sense of the romantic which is also glimpsed
in the scenes with Ann, imbued with a potent sexuality
(another central feature of Mitchum’s persona). The regular
interjections of voice-over are often employed to convey Jeff’s
emotional attachment, with Mitchum’s deep baritone voice
simultaneously conveying not only toughness but tenderness.
363
The vulnerability that is thus central to the ‘real’ Jeff is evident

for extended portions of the film. Yet the narrative requires
Jeff/Mitchum to shift between this and the professionalised
masculinity of the detective a number of times. The series of
fluctuations thus allows the generically familiar hard-boiled
characterisation to be retained alongside the vulnerability
displayed elsewhere. When we return from the flash-back to
Jeff’s present as he struggles to outmanoeuvre the
machinations of Whit and Kathie, he does not exhibit an
escalating loss of control but oscillates between mastery and
defeat. The features of Mitchum’s persona and performance
style allow Jeff to retain a generically normative masculinity;
this may be a man in crisis, but he’s not going to show it.
This assertion of masculinity is evident in a scene late in the
narrative. Jeff is up against three adversaries – Kathie, and
another pair of Whit’s associates – who are in league to frame
him for two murders. Forced into a confrontation with the trio
in one associate’s office, Jeff retains a level of control. He
physically commands the space, sitting himself down at the
desk and lighting a cigarette. His stillness and assurance is
contrasted with the other characters, all present within the
frame, all standing yet powerless next to the effortlessly
authoritative Jeff.
At the end of the sequence, Jeff gets up to leave. As he stands
at the door he states: “I’ll give you a little extra time to figure
out how to cross me” before adding “But you won’t.” He then
flicks one of his ubiquitous cigarettes to the floor in a last mark
of cool disrespect. This sequence exemplifies several of the
key features of Mitchum’s persona. Here we see control over
a space and a situation conveyed through minimal action. The
simple act of sitting down displays dominance; Mitchum’s
364
physical presence is almost so overtly imposing that the threat

of violence does not need to be emphasised.
Descriptions of Mitchum and noir’s male protagonists are too
often reduced to the adjective ‘passive’, but it’s clear here that
what could be seen as passivity actually both masks and marks
Jeff’s active intelligence. Additionally, Mitchum’s
underplaying fits with the scripting and treatment of the
scenario to ensure that Jeff’s ‘cool’ reads as authentic.
Although Out of the Past does not allow Jeff to maintain
control ultimately, he is still capable of exhibiting it even in the
latter stages of the narrative. Jeff Markham may be chaotically
divided, but Mitchum’s presence ensures a level of unity,
convincingly embodying a series of contradictory features:
toughness and tenderness, stillness and agency, lucklessness
and ‘cool’.
The noir Western Hero: Pursued and Blood on the Moon

Two other star-making Mitchum films of the late 1940s
challenge and complicate an even more prevalent masculine
archetype of the American cinema, that of the Western hero.
Pursued, released earlier in the same year as Out of the Past,
casts Mitchum in a role Smith considers both the “first full
expression of [Mitchum’s] persona as the eternal outsider”
and a “noirish mutation of the western hero,” one who
reconstructs the Westerner’s “stoic reticence [as] neurotic
passivity”.6 The film centres on Jeb Rand, who is rescued in
childhood during a shootout that kills the rest of his family by
Ma Callum (Judith Anderson), and who is raised alongside her
two children. The adult Jeb (Mitchum) finds himself pursued
by both the blurred memories of his childhood trauma, and
Grant (Dean Jagger), a mysterious stranger seemingly
determined to see him dead.
365
Pursued anticipates Out of the Past in playing with an existing

archetype through the use of noir elements. The film’s
chiaroscuro black-and-white cinematography and
predominantly interior and/or night time settings evoke noir’s
visual style, and these are coupled with a narrative focus on a
protagonist haunted by a traumatic past that is conveyed
through the devices of voice-over and flash-back. Both the
subject of alienation and the use of noir conventions to convey
it immediately appear to make the film veer away from what
would be considered typical of the Western genre. Jeb’s
constant articulation of his feelings is alien to the sensibility of
the traditional Western hero, conflicting with the genre’s
masculinist anti-language stance whereby verbalisation is
equated with lack, and neurosis with femininity.
Pursued’s play with the Western hero archetype is also bound
up with the fatalistic narrative structures of noir. The few
instances of conventionally masculine - and generically
familiar - Western heroic agency granted to Jeb only lead to
tragedy, resulting in the deaths of two men and plunging him
further into confusion. Perhaps the key example of this is Jeb’s
shooting of his adoptive brother Adam.
In a jealous rage incited by the manipulations of Grant, Adam
shoots at Jeb while out on the plains. He misses, and Jeb’s
instinctive response – in line with the Western hero’s skilled
gunplay - leads him to kill the figure whom he only afterwards
realises is his brother. The disastrous consequences of Jeb’s
attempts to fulfil the Western hero role are in line with the
lucklessness of the emergent Mitchum persona, but also
suggests the problematic aspects inherent to the Western
hero type, disguised in the traditional Western, that the noir
western often brings to light.
366
The Performance of Heroism: Pursued

Central to Pursued’s complication of the Western hero
archetype is Mitchum’s performance style. We should
consider what Imogen Sara Smith terms the sense of “numb,
somnambulistic remoteness” with Mitchum performs the role
of Jeb, and her assumption that other actors may have
“worked harder” to convey the character’s neurosis.7
Mitchum’s underplaying evokes performance styles of other
Western stars such as John Wayne and Gary Cooper. Yet part
of the film’s play with convention has involved re-figuring this
Western hero stoicism as a sign of otherness within the
narrative.
When Grant exclaims to Ma “What makes you think that boy
loves you?” he presents to her the possibility of an innate
amorality situated within Jeb that she cannot erase.
Mitchum’s underplaying, and Jeb’s inscrutability at times,
correlates with an alienated Western hero who is shown to be
incapable of understanding himself and others, who states he
cannot ‘return’ the love of his adoptive family. Pursued
produces two possible readings of its star’s performance of
the Western hero: one asserts the fit of star and character
within the genre’s dominant model of masculinity, and the
other de-familiarises this model through the subversion of
genre convention. As in Out of the Past, Mitchum coheres
these divergent readings.
Blood on the Moon also uses Mitchum’s emerging persona in
ways that anticipate the broader shifts in representation
within the genre. Jim Garry, Mitchum’s character, is
immediately presented as a lone outdoorsman, self-sufficient
and rugged in line with the traditional Western hero. But once
again the film challenges the implications surrounding the
367
Western’s dominant, affirmative model of masculinity. Garry

anticipates the ambivalent heroes of Mann’s psychological
Westerns in his collapsing of the masculine roles typically
offered by the genre, struggling to find a stable masculine
identity within the limited options available.
We learn that Garry, our assumed hero, has actually been
hired as a gunman by Riling (Robert Preston), who aims to
drive a group of cattlemen off their land so that he can buy it.
Garry is crucially both unhappy with this role and insistent that
it is unfamiliar to him, which illustrates the motives and
circumstances underlying archetypes to which an assumed
moral value is typically attached. The lucklessness now
ingrained in the Mitchum persona – Riling states that “You
can’t afford to be particular” when Garry protests he’s never
been hired for his gun before - is the narrative context for a
collapsing of the ‘good’ Westerner and the ‘bad’ gunfighter,
oppositional Western character types emblematic of its
traditional moral clarity, into one figure.
This interrogation of the genre’s male archetypes is partly
enabled through the specificities of Mitchum’s emergent
persona, including the lucklessness, the loneliness, and the
laconic inscrutability that can be made to suggest amorality.
Yet it is in the depiction of violence that Blood on the Moon
comes closest to highlighting the moral ambivalence disguised
in the traditional Western hero. The gravity given to scenes of
violence is accompanied in one key instance with a mode of
representation that situates in Garry - and Mitchum - a barely
controlled rage.
The confrontation with Reardon, another of Riling’s hired
gunmen, begins with the two men situated on either side of
the generically familiar space of the empty street. Garry,
368
having knocked unconscious Reardon’s accomplice,

approaches the latter. A series of shots convey his approach
as the camera, paralleling Garry’s movement, pushes closer in
on Reardon. In static reverse shots of Garry/Mitchum he
increasingly fills the frame. Coupled with the use of slightly low
angles, this confers on Garry/Mitchum a menacing impression
that emphasises his physical bulk. Finally, he shouts “I won’t
wait”, a verbal outburst uncommon in Mitchum’s characters.
Despite the fact that Garry is acting in line with our
expectations of the Western hero in this sequence, defending
the innocent cattleman against the murderous gunfighter, the
presentation of Mitchum/Garry is deliberately frightening,
and emphasises in its intensity the violence of his approach
rather than the moral value of his actions. Blood on the Moon
highlights the violent potential underlying Mitchum’s physical
presence in order to complicate our response to the Western
hero.
Bingham, discussing the role of underplaying in the James
Stewart/Anthony Mann Westerns, argues that “Stewart’s
restraint serves as a contrast to the moments when the
character ‘cracks’, revealing the toughness as a construction”.8
With Mitchum it is the civility, rather than the toughness, that
‘cracks’. His persona, which combines an inherent toughness
with a cool stillness, can be inflected in the Western through
the hero’s expected use of violence, re-configuring such
violence as an outburst, and revealing a streak of psychosis
rarely evoked in Mitchum’s contemporary noir characters. The
conventions of genre, archetype and Mitchum’s star persona
are subverted and problematised.
To conclude, the films of Robert Mitchum provide ideal case
studies for interrogating the post-War Hollywood cinema’s
369
problematisation of masculine types which are often

considered to be stable and coherent. Mitchum embodies the
contradictions that emerge in his films’ explorations of the
private detective and the Western hero. Through his persona
and performance style, he simultaneously fits with the
traditional type and allows for the nuancing, complicating and
challenging of the type. This might explain Mitchum’s
prominent position as the face - and voice - of film noir.
1
Dennis Bingham, Acting Male: Masculinities in the Films of James
Stewart, Jack Nicholson, and Clint Eastwood, New Brunswick, N.J:
Rutgers University Press, 1994, p. 55.
2
James Ursini, ‘Noir Westerns’, in Alain Silver and James Ursini
(eds.), ‘Film Noir’ Reader 4: The Crucial Films and Themes, New
York: Proscenium Publishers, 2004, pp. 247-260.
3
Frank Krutnik, In a Lonely Street: Film Noir, Genre, Masculinity,
London: Routledge, 1991, p. 27.
4
Ibid., p. 103.
5
Ibid., p. 112.
6
Imogen Sara Smith, ‘Past Sunset: Noir in the West’, Bright Lights
Film Journal, 31 October 2009, online at
http://brightlightsfilm.com/past-sunset-noir-in-the-
west/#.WGoQDPmLRhE.
7
Ibid.
8
Bingham, op. cit., p. 55.
370
38 / Questions of Masculinity:
Daniel Craig's James Bond
David Muiños García
A New Bond?
The promiscuous British cultural icon James Bond has been
admired as a paragon of virility over the course of more than
50 years. Critical analysis of his exploits has revealed his
Oedipal behaviour, the phallic symbolism in his adventures
and his sexual/ideological re-positioning of women. The films
have become a playground for discussion of sexual politics as
well as his institutional role as a moderniser and his position
as an agent of the State in relation to the British Secret
Services and their global enemies. There is, however, a more
recent Bond whose masculinity shares much with his
predecessors but also exhibits new characteristics, namely
the Bond portrayed by Daniel Craig in key films from the last
decade of the series - Casino Royale (Campbell, UK/USA et al,
371
2006), Quantum of Solace (Forster, UK/USA, 2008), Skyfall

(Mendes, UK/USA, 2012). The ‘new’ Bond in these films
invites analysis from a feminist point of view and in terms of
an alternative mode of masculinity.1
This essay takes into account Bond’s treatment of women

from a position of dominance, his relationship with M as a
surrogate parent, his status as an icon of new Englishness
within MI6, and the multi-faceted struggle between old and
new modes of masculinity as exemplified by Skyfall (Mendes,
UK/USA, 2012). I aim to illustrate the slow progression that
Craig's Bond is making towards a more positive treatment of
women on screen and the potential for a more mature and
nuanced mode of masculinity.
Traditionally, James Bond's relationships with women have

been defined in terms of a submissive position on the part of
the female character. It is part of the oft-debated 'Bondian'
formula. As Bennett and Woollacott comment, “it is ... always
a girl he encounters, never a woman". They add: "'The girl
departs from the requirements of femininity as specified by
patriarchal ideology ...[she] has been either insufficiently or
faultily positioned sexually".2 It is up to Bond to re-position
the ‘girl’ by means of sleeping with her. If it cannot be done
this way, then the alternative is death.
This is what happens to Vesper Lynd in Casino Royale. She

also bears marks of ‘out-of-place-ness’ mentioned by Bennett
and Woollacott: the pendant binding her to her treacherous
boyfriend, and the lack of a father. The next two films also
attach similar symbols of damaged sexuality to their 'girls':
Camille in Quantum of Solace has burn scars on her back,
caused by one of the villains in the past; and her position
relative to Bond is that of a student with her mentor. Sévérine
372
in Skyfall, Bond deduces, has been a victim of the

overpowering nature of male sexuality through her long
history as a prostitute, and bears a tattoo which identifies her
as such. For Bennett and Woollacott they are "the fantasy
object of the male reader, licensed, through Bond, to go
whoring by proxy".3
Patriarchal Symbolism
The Bond novels provide the films with a rich store of phallic
symbols as they negotiate related fears of castration. State
Security agent Tatiana Romanova sees him thus in From
Russia with Love: "The tall figure of James Bond, straight and
hard and cold as a butcher's knife, coming and going".4 At this
moment, 007 himself has become an emphatic phallic
symbol. Additionally, the phallic code present in the stories is
sublimated in the relationship between Bond and M, the
latter acting, in the earlier films, as a surrogate father for the
former. Bond often rebels against his boss's authority and in
Daniel Craig's incarnation he is reprimanded and even
persecuted for doing so, not to mention that he is explicitly
described as pathologically rejecting authority. But M's role
extends even further.
We can thus see M, with Bennett and Woollacott, as "the

Symbolic Father defined by Lacan ... the source of an identity
that is complete and full in relation to itself".5 He is the
beginning and the end. He represents the phallus in relation
to which sexual difference is defined. As such, he endows
Bond with a network of technology, weaponry, associates and
objectives that complete the agent's masculinity while
rendering him fully dependent upon a provident but
controlling figure of paternity. The difference, of course, is
that for Daniel Craig's Bond, M is a woman.
373
As Judith Halberstam has discussed, masculinity is

conventionally understood exclusively in terms of the male
body.6 In her perfectly female body, however, M remains the
single most masculine character in the trilogy under analysis.
Her authority, assertiveness and dominance of law and
knowledge are second to none. She endows Bond with her
power and she is his ultimate authority. In a particularly
interesting scene in Casino Royale, she makes her first
appearance while bemoaning Bond's recklessness. In a
humorous quip she laments: "Christ, I miss the Cold War!",
referencing a fondness for war-mongering commonly
associated with men.
The modern M however proves such structures skewed, as

her ‘masculinity’ envelops the whole of MI6 while there is no
questioning of her womanhood. Initiating her complex
relationship with her operatives - she is of the opinion that
orphans make the best agents - it is M who is responsible for
the shooting of Bond by Moneypenny (“take the damn
shot!”) which will launch the long story of Bond’s ‘death’,
resurrection and struggle back to fighting fitness. The only
one who dares mock such a figure, as I will show later, is
Silva, the villain in Skyfall.
If the novels and films are infamous for their abundance of

sexual themes they are no less so for their fascination with
violence. But it is violence of a certain kind, and contained
within a particular system of ethics and control. As Black puts
it: "In the Bond films, there can be no qualms about killing or
about admiring killing, although it is sanitized, at least until
‘Licence to Kill’ (1989). In part, such an approach depends on
the presentation of the Secret Service's opponents as villains,
malevolent, dangerous and sadistic. There is also an inherent
rectitude in the British Secret Service. It is a mixture of
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gentlemen and harder-edged characters, the latter still,

however, motivated by a sense of ‘fair play’ as defined in
traditional British terms.".7
This play between violence and rectitude is embodied in the

appearance of Bond himself, who typically complies with a
sharply masculine dress code marked by smart shirts, jackets,
tuxedos, and expensive watches, all contributing to the
stylisation of the figure. Broadening our perspective to MI6 as
a whole, we can see that there are no beards, no shaven
heads and no long hair among its members. Their looks are
purely elegant, clean, well-groomed, aseptic and almost
monochromatic; M herself wears her hair very short. This
emphasises the difference in rectitude between the Secret
Service and other organisations.
For instance, CIA agent Felix Leiter sports a beard and his
position is generally relaxed, reinforcing the notion of
stalwart Englishness. The villain Silva, a former agent of MI6,
wears his hair longer and quite possibly dyed. His jacket is
also white instead of black, his shirt is rather colourful, and
he changes outfits several times during the film. There could
hardly be a stronger opposition to the concept of purity and
strength posed by MI6.
The Villainy of Silva

Silva is a fascinating character precisely because of a theme
to which Black calls our attention, the 1960s as an era of
"traitors within and failures without."8 Fleming's novels and
the 007 films avoid this by making MI6 and its denizens as
reliable as possible. Skyfall challenges this notion by making
Silva a former MI6 agent who used to be loyal to the Secret
Service and has an Oedipal obsession with M. We learn that
375
she ruthlessly sacrificed him in exchange for other agents in

the course of the British handover of Hong Kong to China in
1997. Compounding his ideological and emotional
monstrosity, he masks a facial disfigurement caused by the
cyanide capsule provided to agents, which in his case failed to
kill him.
In the first encounter between Bond and Silva, it is strongly

implied that Silva is homosexual – he invades the Bond's
personal space, undoing his shirt and stroking his chest and
thighs (even though he doesn't seem interested in "physical
stuff"). Bond's reaction is a key element that sets him apart as
a moderniser. Clearly, Silva is indulging himself with the
deviancy of tormenting the tied-up Bond, which the hero
brushes off with a playful quip about this not being his first
time. This is the figure of the moderniser - not directly
rejecting his rival's advances, but rather demonstrating cool
resistance.
Silva goes on to attempt to shatter the parental relationship

between Bond and M by revealing the truth about Bond’s
return-to-service tests - about which M strategically lied,
sending Bond back into action before he was officially ready.
Previous villains in the films have talked to Bond like fathers,
twisted versions of M's phallic authority. Silva, however, talks
to Bond like a brother who has found out about their
mother's duplicity and who wants his younger sibling to join
him in his rebellion against maternal authority. His greatest
mistake is to see M as a mother when she is effectively more
like a father. Her strictness guarantees that she never does
anything deviant, which Silva considers "her loss".
Bond is untied, putting a stop to the deviancy, and allowing

Silva to boast that he is the moderniser instead. His superior
376
technical knowledge makes him over-confident and he even

challenges Bond to a shooting contest with flintlock pistols -
in a mockery of the MI6's shooting tests - using Sévérine as a
target in a reversion to the classic image of the bound woman
in peril, who is readily dispensable in favour of the ongoing
context between protagonist and villain. She is threatened by
Bond and Silva's guns in a contest of symbolic phalluses.
The latter even kisses her in a forceful and objectifying

manner, a sign of his callous disregard for traditional
sexuality. She is shot dead with no major consequences and
Bond manages to get the upper hand, summoning a swarm of
helicopters and arresting Silva. He has been tracked from
base by means of a simple miniature radio, a powerful
symbol of reliance on tried and trusted methods which was
the subject of mocking exchanges over old and new
technologies, and over the tensions between youth and age,
when the youthful Q issued Bond’s simplified equipment
earlier in the film.
The Passing of the Old Order

The opening credits, with their characteristic mixture of
symbols of eroticism and death, announce the film's main
theme: the passing of the old and its replacement by the
new. The cockfight between 007 and the villain Silva
represents the struggle between tough old-fashioned
methods and the latest technology, both of them traditionally
associated with masculinity, as discussed by Patricia Sexton in
The Feminized Male.9
There is a parallel conflict going on in relation to this topic:

the elderly M versus Gareth Mallory, the man who, at the end
of the film, will take over her position once she is forcefully
377
retired. The most interesting aspect of this relationship is the

way in which Mallory talks to M almost as a husband might
do with his wife, the MI6 environment standing in as their
household. It seems as though this new male force is coming
to take over the household by means of a more traditional
image of masculinity.
Regardless, M will have none of it and strives to finish her

mission: she will be damned if she's going to leave the
department in worse shape than she found it. She is an older
woman but she knows the world she lives in, and has been
doing so for decades. As is typical with 007 stories, M is the
one who possesses full knowledge of the situation, and who
is able to command a poignant overview reflected in her
quotation of key lines from Tennyson’s ‘Ulysses’ to members
of the government committee examining her record. A wider
symbolism surrounds the longevity of M, both a mother and
a kind of long-serving monarch, as Silva’s mocking words and
computerised caricature make clear.
She eventually dies at Skyfall, the Scottish Highland estate

where many of the film’s interests in gender, family, and
lineage converge as the film returns to Bond’s beginning. It is
Bond’s family home, and his late parents rest in the graveyard
there. This is the place where Silva will alternate between
violent rage, and crazed affection, for the ‘mother’ who
abandoned him. He wishes her to kill them both with a single
bullet, but she is already dying at his hands in a scene where
Silva once again indulges himself and gets uncomfortably
close, thus achieving the culmination of his Oedipal phase
without seeing it through. M takes her last breath while
cradled by Bond, the ‘mother’/’father’ dying in the child's
arms. Visually it is an ingenuous inversion of Michelangelo's
Pietá akin to the one seen in Francis Ford Coppola's third
378
installment of The Godfather trilogy. The twist here is that

even though the male figure and the female ones are re-
arranged, the latter has been in effect a fatherly role model
for the former.
1
Spectre (Mendes, UK/USA, 2015) was released after this essay was
completed. I must admit that this latest Bond film does not support
my overall view that the Bond films are in the process of adopting a
more progressive view on gender.
2
Tony Bennett and Janet Woollacott, Bond and Beyond: The
Political Career of a Popular Hero, New York: Methuen, 1987, p.
115.
3
Ibid., p. 123.
4
Ian Fleming, From Russia with Love [1957], London: Vintage
Books, 2012, p. 294.
5
Bennett and Woollacott, op. cit., p. 131.
6
Judith Halberstam, Female Masculinity, Durham, NC: Duke
University Press, 1998, p. 269.
7
Jeremy Black, The Politics of James Bond: From Fleming's Novels to
the Big Screen, Westport: University of Nebraska Press/Praeger-
Greenwood, 2000, p. 105.
8
Ibid. pp. 105-107.
9
Patricia C. Sexton, The Feminized Male: Classrooms, White Collars
and the Decline of Manliness, New York: Vintage Books, 1970, p. 15.
379
39 / Autism on Television?
The Big Bang Theory
Pascale Fauvet
New Forms of Male Identity in Crisis

This essay discusses the emergence of new minorities, so far
largely unexplored by TV or film, in the area broadly associated
with autism. The essay proposes that functioning autistic
people are not so distinct from another minority, ‘geeks’,
whose preferred interactions are usually with technology,
especially computers, in a society itself increasingly
characterised by the absence of physical contact between
people. I focus on the celebrated and immensely popular U.S.
TV sitcom The Big Bang Theory (2007 onwards). The show
centres on a group of physicist room-mates who work at the
prestigious Caltech University: Sheldon Lee Cooper (BSc, MSc,
MA, PhD, ScD - former child prodigy, obsessive-compulsive,
380
socially inept) and Dr. Leonard Hofstadter; their scientific

friends Howard and Raj; and their socially adjusted neighbour,
the waitress and aspiring actress Penny. The essay explores the
debate surrounding the characterisation of Sheldon, whom his
creators insist that they do not see as autistic, but who
certainly bears many of the classic signs of this condition.
What is most interesting in the concept of Big Bang Theory is

the introduction of characters who each have a ‘handicap’ of
their own. Originally a series on the life of the ‘geek’
community, it has become through the seven seasons released
at the time of writing a depiction of how people with any kind
of ‘handicap’ can eventually find their place in the USA, a
country usually described on TV as relatively homogeneous.
After Black and Gay people, geeks and ‘Aspergers’ have
perhaps now found a place in American television.
Are the male characters, especially Sheldon, then simply

‘geeks’, people (usually male) who are passionate about a
subject - often computers, new technologies or videogames -
and who in the process may have become socially inept as they
become evermore immersed in the world of their hobby, even
their addiction? Our Big Bang Theory heroes are indeed geeks,
but ones who luckily enjoy food, sex, scientific discussions,
drinking and other earthly pleasures. Nonetheless, they
represent a new generation of socially handicapped people
with marked inadequacies where real human contact is
concerned.
We find ourselves here, we might suggest, on the delicate and

confused borders between geekism and autism. Autistic
people, for instance, often have a strange response to
emotional and physical contact. In real-life contact, autistic
people will also take a sudden liking or hatred to you for no
381
apparent reason, they will also scream if you scream, even if it

is not out of simple empathy. Sheldon tells Leonard: “You are
my best friend, I’ve known you for seven years, and I can barely
sit on the couch with you”. In another episode he asserts:
“Quite frankly, if I could afford the rent by myself, I would ask
you to leave.”
Contradicting John Donne and echoing Paul Simon, Sheldon

pronounces, in Season 7, “I am an island”. He is stating the fact
of his brilliant individualism but also revealing the
disconnectedness of life in post-modernity. This, then, is the
territory across which the show moves, marked by both
comedy and pathos as it satirises the world of the geek whilst
playing – naturally at some risk, where issues of political
correctness are concerned, since it is mediated through
comedy - with ideas about the medical condition known as
autism.1
The World of the Geek

Sheldon Cooper is a theoretical physicist with two doctorates
obtained before he was 16 (the reason why he cannot drive?
he was already giving lectures abroad); an eidetic memory
(which started when his mother stopped breast-feeding him –
“it was on a drizzly Tuesday”); who cannot bear to be touched
or to have physical contact with others; and who has a very
strictly established routine to guide his everyday life. All these
signs point towards a high-performing autistic person, and we
can infer that Sheldon Cooper has Asperger Syndrome. He is
very comfortable with the new social networks, which allow
him to have many friends on Myspace, Twitter and Facebook,
whom he of course never meets (“that’s the beauty of it!”).
382
Sheldon’s room-mate Leonard Hoffstadter is a scientist in

Applied Physics - which according to Sheldon is a minor
subject, not worth studying - who is so unattractive that he
cannot have any stable relationship in spite of his professional
achievements. He wears big black glasses, sloppy clothes, is
short, lactose-intolerant, shy, the ideal companion for Sheldon
because he is so easily dominated and manipulated by others,
including his own mother, an expert on childhood and also a
brilliant scientist. Howard plays videogames with Sheldon,
speaks Klingon (the language of Star Trek’s alien villains), goes
to Renaissance fairs and costume parties, and of course loves
role-playing games.
These enable him to assume different personalities (which is

why truly autistic people can be remarkable actors and may
indeed communicate with each other more easily through
theatrical roles). It should be noted that all the characters
prefer to wear costumes when they interact with real life, as if
they were reluctant to reveal themselves. The many layers of
clothes they wear to go to work, even though they live in
California, also suggests they are not comfortable with their
physical appearance and need some sort of protection against
other people.
The third key character, Howard Wolowitz, is the epitome of

the Jewish stereotype: he lives with his mother, wears false
shirt-fronts, and is “trying not to burst into flames” when
visiting a Catholic church - but he finally marries a Catholic girl.
Although (or perhaps because) he is promiscuous, he has the
greatest difficulties in his relationships with women. He is the
only one with a relatively normal social life, although he
masturbates a lot during the first two seasons. He only holds a
Master’s degree from MIT, and no doctorate (which might
suggest that the higher the degree of academic attainment,
383
the more disabled one may become in terms of real human

interaction).
The fourth key character is Rajesh Koothapally, with his

selective mutism – he cannot speak to women unless he is
drunk - and who may or may not be gay, an ongoing question
in the series. Even though all the characters are in their late
twenties, they seem to suffer from the sexual identity crisis
which usually appears in teenage years. A fifth important
character, meanwhile, and one who compensates for the
others’ social shortcomings, is Sheldon’s and Leonard’s
neighbour Penny, a girl from rural Nebraska.
Her first name is perhaps generic, so that she represents all the
well-adapted girls of her age; her last name remains unknown.
She is a Community College drop-out whose handicap is the
difficulty she faces in finding a rewarding job (that is, as a
Hollywood actress) and in simply making ends meet as
Cheesecake Factory waitress. She appears to fulfil the blonde
stereotype but she turns out to be not ‘dumb’ at all, and unlike
her male counterparts she is fully functional in relation to
others.
The only major female character, Penny is the stabilising

element, who reminds the others that there is a life outside
the digital world, although she almost becomes an addict
herself in Series 2, Episode 3. Frustrated that she has missed
yet another audition, she plunges into the Age of Conan role-
playing game, until she realises that she is being courted in the
game by the avatar of Wolowitz, whom she finds creepy, and
she responds by throwing away her computer. Rajesh falls in
love with Siri, the voice-recognition figure on his cellphone,
whilst Sheldon has the perfect solution for his desire to
procreate with Amy: in vitro fertilisation.
384
Encountering Autism
The term ‘autism’ covers a wide range of conditions and
disorders. Science currently understands the various forms of
autism - ASD (Autism Spectrum Disorder) or PDD (Pervasive
Developmental Disorders) - as including five types of disorders:
Autistic Disorder (classic autism); Asperger’s disorder
(Asperger Syndrome); PDD-NOS (Pervasive Developmental
Disorder – Not Otherwise Specified); Rett’s Disorder (Rett
syndrome); and CDD (Childhood Disintegrative Disorder).2
Most people suffering from these forms of disability are male.
Only Rett syndrome affects more girls than boys; it is also the
only form in which children are born ‘normal’ and regress to
autism. There are currently estimated to be 440,000 autistic
people in my own country, France, and as many as 67 million
worldwide.
Can Sheldon’s ‘symptoms’ be linked to those of autism? Well,

Sheldon’s status as a potential sufferer from autism is not
immediately apparent in terms of his general self-
presentation, since sufferers indeed often display average or
above-average language skills and may well be highly capable
in terms of cognitive ability and speech. But Sheldon often
feels the need to justify the strangeness of his behaviour,
issuing the reassurance that “I’m not crazy, my mother had me
tested!” – a fact confirmed by Mrs. Cooper herself, although
she twice regrets “not having followed up with the specialist in
Houston”. There are, indeed, plenty of other shared
characteristics.
For example, as we see on numerous occasions, Sheldon is

unable to understand sarcasm or jokes, which he takes at face
value – similar to children with ASD who may fail to notice
subtle social clues which would help them with their social
385
relationships and understandings. The body language of

children with ASD is often unusual, not matching what they are
actually saying, and their strange tone of voice may not reflect
their actual feelings. Sheldon’s biggest dream, we learn from
Series 4, Episode 2, is to fuse his consciousness with that of a
robot, and he often chooses to impersonate the Star Wars
android C3PO. The actor, Jim Parsons, also acts with a poker
face, and when he laughs - which is in itself extremely rare - he
makes the laughter feel very unnatural.
Children with Asperger Syndrome often lack conversational

skills; they tend to talk at length about a favourite subject, not
allowing others a chance to respond and failing to notice when
others react indifferently. It may be argued that in his specialist
field Sheldon must always be always right, since he has two
doctorates and an eidetic memory, but in fact he refuses to be
contradicted even if the subject is not within his comfort zone.
Asperger Syndrome is also often associated with a need for
routine, accompanied by distress when faced with changing
circumstances or environment.
As Sheldon grandly confirms in Series 6, Episode 2, “I am a

great friend of homeostasis”. He has his “Monday pajamas”,
and will refuse to change even if he has spilled grape juice on
them (Series 2, Episode 3). Every evening meal is also
dedicated to a certain type of cuisine: on a Chinese food day,
Sheldon is devastated because the takeout does not come
from the restaurant he is used to (as the restaurant is closed,
Leonard must buy special food containers in a bid to persuade
Sheldon that the food indeed comes from there). He has to
knock on a door three times, and, inevitably, he also has a well-
defined journey to work.
386
The Condition of Sheldon
It would be fair to conclude, in spite of what the producers

claim, that Sheldon does not suffer from excessive ‘geekism’,
but rather from Asperger Syndrome, the mildest form of
autism. It permits relatively normal behaviour towards others,
akin to the relationships a geek might have with another geek,
although social skills are markedly impaired and sufferers are
often awkward and lacking in physical co-ordination.
Sheldon’s friends or students are apt to comment that he looks

“like a giant insect” or “like a praying mantis”, and he often
lacks co-ordination; he is incapable of driving, and cannot
adapt his gestures to the feelings he needs to share. Similarly,
his words are not fully co-ordinated with what he means to
express: he can say something very offensive without realising
it. When Wolowitz becomes an astronaut in Season 6, Sheldon
imagines that his room-mate “must be contemplating space
with his dim uncomprehending eyes, like a cat in an airport
carrier. “
The mildness of Asper Syndrome has led some medical experts

to call it a ‘high-functioning’ form of autism, but even so it
entails a high risk of anxiety and depression. Where Sheldon is
concerned, he is devastated. In Series 3, Episode 1, he returns
from the North Pole and discovers he has been betrayed by his
friends and colleagues. When his friends fight in Series 3,
Episode 7, he is saddened and goes to the comic book store
where he “builds himself a little nest”.
In the series pilot, certainly, Sheldon does not display all of

these signs. He is portrayed as a geek, no more, but his
symptoms escalate to reach their peak in the seventh episode
of the third season as mentioned above. His ritualistic knocking
387
on doors, for instance, does not appear until the middle of the
first season. We might say that his character’s evolution
follows a curve, from basic geekism to absolute Asperger
Syndrome in Season 3.
His ‘symptoms’ slowly regress after he meets his girl friend

Amy in Season 4, but a disturbing symptom - amongst the well-
known links between Asper syndrome and gastro-intestinal
disorder - remains the classic obsession with faeces, which is
emphasised here throughout Season 6, in which Sheldon hires
an assistant to go through his “potty training journals”. At the
final episode of Season 7 he is still not functioning properly,
but he is improving steadily - which, mercifully, appears to
often be the case in real life.
1
For descriptions of the lived experience of people with Asperger’s,
from which I have drawn here, see for example Daniel Tammet, Born
on a Blue Day: Inside the Extraordinary Mind of an Autistic Savant,
London: Hodder & Stoughton, 2007, and John Elder Robison, Look
Me in the Eye: My Life with Asperger's, New York: Crown Publishers,
2007.
2
I draw my technical understandings of autism principally from the
U.S. Department of Health and Human Services information available
online at http://www.cdc.gov/ncbddd/autism/index.html.
388
40 / Masculinities Constructed and

Deconstructed: Game of Thrones
Judith Fathallah
Gender and the Body
VARYS: I must be one of the few men in this city who doesn’t
want to be king.
BAELISH: You must be one of the few men in this city who isn’t
a man.
VARYS: You can do better than that. […]
VARYS: Do you spend a lot of time wondering what’s between
my legs?
BAELISH: I picture … a gash. Like a woman’s. […]
VARYS: Do you lie awake at night fearing my gash?
This curious exchange takes place In HBO’s multi-awarding

winning series Game of Thrones, Series 1, Episode 10. The
389
noble eunuch Varys engages in a bout of verbal sparring with

his friend/enemy Lord Petyr Baelish as Varys gazes
contemplatively at the vacant Iron Throne. It is precisely this
gash, this rupture, that Game of Thrones’ intense
performativity opens between gender and bodies, that I wish
to explore in this Paper.
While I am not drawing any conclusions or offering definitive

alternatives for new configurations of masculinity, I find it
exciting and productive that such a high profile text is
currently staging this intervention in what Foucauldians might
call the order of knowledge of gender. I want to use two
complementary approaches to investigate this work: firstly, a
Gender Studies perspective informed by Butler’s theories of
performativity, and secondly, some perspectives from
disability studies on how bodily impairment and social
constructions of disability intersect with the performance of
masculinity.
Game of Thrones
With an average Season 4 viewership of 18.4 million, Game of
Thrones (2011 onwards) has become the most-watched show
ever on HBO, and has had numerous awards heaped upon it.
Its global reach and cultural capital are considerable. The
medieval fantasy drama adapted from George R. R. Martin’s
book series A Song of Ice and Fire (1996 onwards) concerns
the struggle for control of/independence from the ‘Iron
Throne’ of the ‘Seven Kingdoms’. It features a vast web of
characters and identities, and is a self-consciously
performative text in many respects, featuring explicit
discussions of public and private behaviour. The active and
390
violent lives of male characters result in frequent physical and

psychic wounding including castration, amputation and
paralysis.
A range of scholars have discussed the ways in which

masculinity and disability intersect problematically. As Morris
puts it: “The social definition of masculinity is inextricably
bound with a celebration of strength, of perfect bodies. At the
same time, to be masculine is not to be vulnerable. It is also
linked to a celebration of youth and of taking bodily functions
for granted.”1 Consequently, as Connell argues, “The
constitution of masculinity through bodily performance means
that gender is vulnerable when the performance cannot be
sustained - for instance, as a result of physical disability.”2
Whilst I am using disability in the sense defined by Tom
Shakespeare as a social relation,3 I argue that physical and
psychic wounding in Game of Thrones causes a rupture in the
social relations of gender, and with it, the order of popular
knowledge by which gender is understood.
In the patriarchal societies of Westeros, patriarchal figures are

generally monsters. Either cruel and scheming as the
Dickensian Tywin Lannister, or gross and shameful like the
degraded Robert Baratheon, they tend to meet cruel and
abrupt ends involving some form of phallic piercing. Tywin is
shot with a crossbow whilst on the lavatory, and in Robert’s
case, as a minstrel puts it: “the lion ripped his balls off and the
boar did all the rest” (Season 1, Episode 10). The lion refers to
the heraldic sign of Robert’s wife, who has explicitly told him
that she should be wearing the armour and he the gown in
their relationship (Season 1, Episode 6). The boar refers to the
animal that pierced him fatally with its tusks.
391
In many ways, the cases of Robert and Tywin are the least
interesting from a Gender Studies perspective: relics of
another age, they die and go nowhere. Neither is the torture
and castration of Theon Greyjoy particularly productive.
Theon, before his breaking, was characterised as a callous
womaniser shown up militarily and socially by his sister. He is
rebuked by his father for improper masculinity performance,
allegedly having been softened and feminised by time as a
ward of the Starks, and responds with a display of badly
executed military violence that results in his capture and
torture. By this he is broken, reduced to crying and begging,
losing at last even his name. Again, though his narrative is
explicit concerning the tenuous linkage of gender, body and
behaviour, there has so far been no opportunity for new
possibilities to arise from the violent, on-screen separation of
identity and body.
Reliance, Re-formulation, and Rejection

Elsewhere, however, the text seems to offer more
possibilities. Gershick and Miller propose three kinds of
response to impairment seen in male subjects, which they
name ‘reliance’, ‘re-formulation’, and ‘rejection’.4 The terms
are more or less self-explanatory: reliance on a hegemonic
model of masculinity compared to which the self is measured
as failed and lacking; a re-formulation of that model in
negotiation with the subject’s new situation; or a radical
rejection of it in favour of a new gender identity. Bear in mind
that no one subject exhibits one response completely and
continually, since there is always slippage, change over time,
and negotiation between them. Most gender performance
following injury in Game of Thrones can be understood
through this model of post-impairment.
392
For instance, our first presentation of Jaime Lannister is as

ideal knight in public, secret incestuous lover and potential
child killer in private. Though by his own admission hardly
living up to his vows, he is associated with action, wealth,
power, violence, heterosexuality and its symbolic complement
in swordsmanship. In a moment of rare candour, he admits:
“it’s a good thing I am who I am, I’d have been useless at
anything else - my life has left me uniquely unfit for constraint”
(Season 2, Episode 7). Moreover, reflecting on the fate of the
paralysed Bran Stark, he asserts that he would rather be dead
than “a cripple” or “grotesque” (Season 1, Episode 2).
The rupture in gender here is the metonymic amputation of

his sword-hand. As he says explicitly, “I was that hand”
(Season 3, Episode 4). Following an initial period of depressed
‘reliance’, Jaime moves through ‘re-formulation’ to develop a
more egalitarian relationship with Brienne, a swordswoman
he has previously mocked for improper gender performance.
He apologizes and is physically vulnerable before her, finally
and crucially giving her his sword.
This symbolic transfer of masculinity enacts the separation of

gender and bodies at a phallic level: still, of course, relying on
a hegemonic symbol. He goes on to protest against his
tyrannical father’s plans for dynastic succession, marking
himself out from the patriarchal schema. Unfortunately, the
television producers chose to enact a dramatic scene of
regression to embittered, violent ‘reliance’, depicting Jaime
raping his sister/lover in a fit of bitter rage (Season 4, Episode
3). In the source text, the encounter is consensual.
‘Re-formulation’ is more successful in the case of Tyrion

Lannister, who was born with what we now recognise as
achondroplasia, the most common cause of dwarfism. When
393
Jaime expresses his wish to die rather than live as a

“grotesque”, Tyrion responds: “speaking for the grotesques,
I’d have to disagree. Death is so final whereas life – life is full
of possibilities” (Season 1, Episode 2). As Shuttleworth notes,
people with ‘early-onset impairments’ are frequently
positioned as more fundamentally ‘other’, more ‘monstrous’
or ‘abject’ than people who acquire them later in life.5 This is
borne out by the string of de-humanising names which the
other characters have for Tyrion: he not a man but a
“lecherous little stump”, an “imp”, a “beast”, a “monster”, a
“twisted demon monkey”.
He is physically incapable of the kind of warrior feats that help

define masculinity in a feudal society: his first battle instinct is
to hide. Yet his dependence on his ‘mind’ to do his part for the
honour of his house is not a novel innovation in the
performance of masculinity: Tyrion belongs to the tradition of
Odysseus rather than Achilles, living by his wits and making up
in the bedroom for what he lacks on the battlefield. His status
is reinforced by social class: he throws money around to exert
power and persuade others to do violence on his behalf,
(Season 1, Episode 6), freely admitting that were he a villager’s
son he would have been left out in the woods to die (Season
1, Episode 2).
His ability to substitute rhetoric for bodily violence is

crystallised in a speech at the Battle of Blackwater, when,
realising there is no-one else to lead the attack, he galvanises
the troops with the challenge, “They say that I am half a man,
but then what does that make the lot of you?” (Season 2,
Episode 9). To be a man is to bodily defend the city, its wealth
and women. Tyrion succeeds with his speech, but as soon the
fighting starts, he is immediately wounded and almost killed.
His character thus performs elements of the ‘reformation’
394
theory: he may not be able to fight, but he can love and lust,
and until the fourth season displays more sensitivity to the
position of women in a feudal system than any other male
character, defying his father by refusing to consummate
marriage with his teenage bride.
The culmination of his love story, formerly portrayed as one of

the few egalitarian love matches in Westeros, is his murder of
his father and lover after her defection to the Lannister
patriarch, sexually and politically (Season 4, Episode 10). He
then flees Westeros and gives up his family name. This Oedipal
act both assaults the patriarchal system and upholds it via the
exchange and violation of women. Nothing in Tyrion’s gender
performance, then, could really be called a radical ‘rejection’
according to Gerschick’s and Miller’s schema.
There is potential for this in the story arc of Bran Stark,

potential heir to the Northern realm of Winterfell. He is the
second legitimate son of a Lord, though his older brother dies
relatively early in the narrative. The first we see of him is in
terms of the failure of the performance of masculinity
struggling with archery despite his half-brothers’ warning that
‘father’s watching’ (Season 1, Episode 1). Bran is undergoing
gender and class training, brought out to watch his father
execute a defector and quizzed to make sure he understands
the event, praised for not looking away from the killing blow.
He is then paralysed from the waist down after being thrown
from a wall.
Older male characters encourage ‘re-formation’ tactics,

suggesting he will never be a knight but might sit on a lord’s
council, or ride a horse with a modified harness. However,
Bran is increasingly troubled by prophetic dreams, seeing
through the eyes of his dire wolf. He comes to realise he is a
395
‘warg’, capable of entering the body of other beings and

experiencing the world through their perspective, a
phenomenon his tutor dismissed as an old wives’ tale.
Bran’s new identity is developed through feminine association

with mysticism and a form of nature-religion predating the
current religious institutions of Westeros. Exiled from
Winterfell after Theon Greyjoy’s coup, Bran relies on women
and a servant for physical protection, using his new
empathetic abilities to guide their path. So after an initial
period of depressed Reliance, in which Bran asserts he would
rather be dead than living paralysed, Bran comes to largely
reject his culture’s hegemonic models of masculinity and
builds a new identity in their place.
This is crystallised in his climactic encounter with the Three-

Eyed Raven, an embodiment of the old religion which has
served as a guide in Bran’s dreams. Until this point, Bran had
been clinging to a vague hope that the Raven would somehow
restore him physically. The Raven’s proclamation, “You will
never walk again, but you will fly” (Season 4, Episode 10) is
loaded with meaning. Bran will never perform the active,
physical, violent masculinity of his culture: his body can no
longer support it. But in the gap torn between body and
gender, new and exciting possibilities for identity performance
arise.
Varys the Eunuch

The mention of gaps brings us full circle to the character of
Varys the eunuch, the man who is not a man. He too has an
inhuman nick-name - ‘The Spider’ – and typically presents as
feminine, dressed in silk robes and makeup. Varys is the
consummate outsider, actor and chameleon. He claims to
396
have been born in Lys, and refers to Westeros where he lives

as a “strange land”, advising Tyrion’s foreign lover that “we’ve
learned the language, but we’ll never be [the Westerosis’]
countrymen” (Season 3, Episode 10).
He has no family name and is unmarried, thus existing outside

the patriarchal system, and claims to have been born a slave
before joining a troupe of actors. After sneaking disguised into
a dungeon for a last exchange with the condemned Ned Stark,
he informs him that the troupe “taught me that each man has
a role to play. The same is true at court. I am the Master of
Whisperers. my role is to be sly, obsequious and without
scruples. I am a good actor, my lord” (Season 1, Episode 8). He
can change his voice, appearance and manner at will.
Varys claims to serve ‘the realm’ as opposed to any particular

master, and his intentions are mysterious. At this point in the
series not much has been revealed about his ultimate end
(there is more in the books), but what is clear is his success in
navigating the court. He has risen from a position of
powerlessness to join the select Small Council of Westeros,
one of the very few characters who has survived service to the
insane tyrant of the old Targaryen dynasty, weathered the
rebellion that established the new order, and who remains to
serve and influence the new ruling house.
In a critical scene in Season 2, Episode 2, he and Tyrion

exchange barbs. Varys goes to leave a room and Tyrion stops
him with a hand on the door. Feeling that Varys has subtly
threatened him, he warns quietly, “threaten me again and I
will have you thrown into the sea”. Tyrion then goes to open
the door himself, and Varys stops it with one finger. Utilising
this camp gesture to assert force is a double-coded piece of
performativity, power and effeminacy combined. Varys
397
replies: “You may be disappointed in the results. The storms

come and go, the big fish eat the little fish, and I keep on
paddling”.
It would be going too far to claim that Game of Thrones totally

succeeds in re-coding masculinity. In many ways, it is invested
in a hegemonic model of active, violent masculinity. and the
sexualised subordination of women. Yet in this mass appeal
show with global reach, there are demonstrable ruptures
between masculinity and male bodies. This is further
demonstrated in the ability of some female characters to
appropriate the performance of masculinity, especially Arya
Stark and Brienne. Thus new possibilities of gender
performativity present themselves, disrupting and revealing
the untenable gashes in the order of knowledge of gender.
1
Jenny Morris. Pride Against Prejudice: Transforming Attitudes to
Disability, London: Women’s Press, 1990, p. 93.
2
Raewyn W. Connell, Masculinities, Berkeley: University of
California Press, 2nd ed., 2005, p. 54.
3
Tom Shakespeare, ‘The Sexual Politics of Disabled Masculinity’,
Sexuality and Disability, vol. 17, 1999, pp. 53–64.
4
Thomas I. Gerschick and Adam Stephen Miller, ‘Gender Identities
at the Crossroads of Masculinity and Physical Disability’,
Masculinities, vol. 2, 1994, pp. 34–55.
5
Russell Shuttleworth, N. Wedgwood and N.J. Wilson, ‘The
Dilemma of Disabled Masculinity’, Men and Masculinities, vol. 15
no. 2, 2012, p. 183.
398
41 / Gender and Erotic Performance

in Allouache’s Omar Gatlato
Sabrina Zerar
A Celebration of Virility
“My name is Omar. My friends nicknamed me Gatlato [in

English: ‘virility kills me’]. That is I’m obsessed with the idea of
virility and macho. […] They’re right. Virility is the only thing
that matters.” This is the confession that Omar Gatlato, the
eponymous hero of Merzak Allouache’s film, makes in a voice-
over narration before he makes his very first appearance on
screen. Though Allouache’s film was produced in 1976, it
features an erotic performance of virile identity which sheds
light on the celebration of virility which characterises today’s
Arab world in general and Algeria in particular.
Omar Gatlato lives with his war-widowed mother, his two

sisters, one of them divorced with five children, and a senile
399
grandfather in a decrepit two-room flat located in Chevalley, a

popular neighbourhood in the upper Algiers Kasbah. His
poverty notwithstanding, the second shot of the film
corroborates the hero’s proclaimed virility through the
description of his physical appearance. The focus of the close-
up falls on the tufts of wiry black hair on his chest, appearing
through an open shirt that he is buttoning up quickly to get
dressed for work early in the morning.
As the camera moves down his tall, manly body, it briefly stops
on the big toe of his right foot, protruding through his worn-
out sock. Admittedly, the material misery of the image, as
Armes claims, can be seen as offering an ironic comment on
the central character’s affirmation of virility when viewed from
the limited perspective of a capitalist Western audience for
whom the economic vision of man is paramount.1 However,
operating within what Bourdieu calls the symbolic economy,
this image, with its highly sexual connotations, stand for the
sexual virility associated with such symbolic goods as honour,
the one form of capital that distinguishes between males in the
society of men in the Arab world.2 It is also a cover for the
director to talk about sex and eroticism without breaching the
social decorum surrounding sexual life in Algerian culture.
Omar’s virile identity is not only self-proclaimed but also

recognised more widely in his huma, a popular neighbourhood
of Chevalley which to all appearances constitutes a kind of
harem for the central character. Apart from being the
dominant male of the home, he is portrayed as the leader of a
youth gang and as fiercely jealous of the honour of his small
community. When someone from another neighbourhood is
surprised marauding in his, it is Omar who is urgently solicited
- by a character with a significantly dwarf-ish stature - to fulfil
400
his assumed and recognised role as guardian of the harem by

repulsing this honour-damaging incursion.
Circumcised Love: A Harem of Towns

The idea of the ‘harem of towns’ in South Mediterranean
societies is already sufficiently developed in Germaine Tillion’s
Le harem et les cousins to need further illustration here.3 One
can only add that Omar’s acknowledged custodianship of the
harem extends to the whole city of Algiers, which has recruited
him as a member of a fraud squad charged with the repression
of the trade in faked golden jewellery practised by women. The
Algerian viewer, though familiar with the sociological
phenomenon of female gold counterfeiters known as the
Dalalat in the Algerian vernacular, cannot fail to make
connections between the selling of counterfeited gold
jewellery by females and the illicit sexual commerce known as
prostitution.
Seen in the context of the symbolic economy, the raids against

the veiled female gold counterfeiters in which Omar
participates smack of police raids against street prostitutes,
who, as far as the political establishment is concerned,
undermine the moral order and the honour of a whole city by
selling their precious wares in public. Omar has come close to
strangling the male in charge of this fraudulent practice - i.e.,
the pimp - when he comes to the Fraud Squad’s office to
complain about police repression.
Our hero’s exacerbated sense of virility, and yet his disability

where love is concerned, seem to derive from two major
sources, both of which are explicitly identified in the film. The
first one is his traumatic experience in the Algerian Liberation
War against French occupation (1954-1962). Omar is a war
401
orphan. As he tells us the war experience is “not something to

be easily forgotten”. Not only did he participate in the wartime
demonstrations, but after his father’s assassination during the
war he was burdened with the duty of protecting the family.
The second source of the hero’s sexual malaise is an indistinct
absorption of gender-marked cultural values.
The physical separation of the sexes in Omar Gatlato’s culture

occurs at an early age, generally at the time of circumcision,
when the male child is violently expelled from the world of
women into the world of men. One of the consequences of
such spatial discrimination is the psychological estrangement
of the two sexes and an impoverished sentimental education.
The second is the traumatic effect on the male potential for
love, a traumatic effect that Abdelhak Serhane captures in the
term “circumcised love”.
This is the term which Serhane employs as the title for his book
retracing the sexually incapacitating impact of the obsessive
‘quest for masculinity’ in traditional Moroccan society which is
inaugurated at circumcision time when children are expelled
from the female world.4 Malek Chebel establishes the same
dialectic between Algerian psychological virility and male
sexual impotence, fostered by what he names the “spirit of the
seraglio”.5
Melos, Eros and Shaabi

To use Northrop Frye’s terms for the basic characters of
Ancient Classical comedy, Omar Gatlato is an alazon (a self-
aggrandising impostor) of the miles gloriosus (glorious soldier)
type. Virility for him is a social mask which hides a sexual
weakness that makes him incapable of living out an immediate
love story with Selma, heard and talked about among his
402
friends but never seen until the last shots of the film. His love
for Shaabi music fully reveals his incapacity to be involved in a
physical erotic experience. Suggestively, the hero’s
appreciation of Shaabi is similar to that of virility: “Shaabi kills
me”, he tells the audience in voice-over.
The protagonist-narrator remains true to his word since we see

him taking erotic pleasure in listening to this music and
recording it, and by attending, together with other males,
wedding parties and variety shows featuring Abdelkader
Chaou, one of the most popular musicians of the Shaabi in the
1970s. The association of virility and Shaabi is not gratuitous,
for in addition to being a music peculiar to males who know
how to appreciate it - what tradition refers to as the duak
(‘tasters’) - it develops a platonic idea of love whose roots go
as far back as the 8th Century Udhri (platonic) poetry of the
Omayyad period and its revival in the 17th Century in the
vernacular form of the chanted poetry of the Melhoun in North
Africa, particularly in Algeria and Morocco.
One of the major characteristics of Shaabi love poetry is the

physical inaccessibility of the beloved, which under the impact
of the Sufi (mystic) tradition to which the Shaabi is also
affiliated, turns the loved one into an absent and veiled object
of mystical worship through which the believer seeks divine
contact. Shaabi, as in the sample of songs by Chaou heard in
the film, is blatantly erotic in its lyrics. However, the experience
of this music by males is regulated by the listening convention
of the Samma, the meaning of which is best captured by the
saying “shame on him who evil thinks”.
In short what is said in the songs is not what is meant as far as

the male connoisseurs of this music are concerned. Shaabi
songs are essentially love elegies in which the beloved appears
403
as an always already lost object of passion recoverable only

through memory in this world. Physical and erotic contact with
the beloved is very often deferred to the hereafter, access to
which is reserved for the chivalrous, or those warriors of love
who have managed to bring their sexuality under control in this
fleshly world of ours.
It follows that the virility of which Omar speaks so proudly in

Allouache’s film has its roots in Algerian popular culture as
expressed by Shaabi music. Viewed from this cultural
perspective, Armes’s claim that Omar’s love of Hindi and
Shaabi music reveals a “feminine weakness” in his character
calls for some qualification. As argued above, the eroticism of
Shaabi has a religious resonance that Hindi music, for example
lacks because of its provenance from a different cultural area.
Whilst the Algerian audience sublimates physical eroticism in
Shaabi through the tradition of the Samma, it degrades the
spiritual eroticism of Hindi music into its purely physical form.
Hindi music, often chanted in duos, loosens the bounds of

virility that demands erotic restraint from the lovers of Shaabi.
Omar’s assertion “If I were a woman, I could cry listening for it
[Hindi music]” sharply contrasts with his previous assertion
that “Shaabi is my passion: it kills me”. As seen in the film,
Shaabi is solemnly listened to in variety shows, whereas the
musical scenes from the Hindi film Mongana trigger in the
male audience an uncontrollable physical, erotic, violent
reaction. As soon as the lights go down and the Mongana
songs start, Allouache’s film closes up on one of the spectators
slashing with a pocket knife between his legs at his leather
seat. It is through this close-up on this destructive, perhaps
symbolically masturbatory scene that Allouache unveils the
emotional misery of Algerian youth and their disability where
healthy interpersonal love is concerned.
404
The illusion of Omar’s virility comes to full light in the second

part of the film when Selma’s recorded voice arouses his
interest in the female sex. Our miles gloriosus at last musters
up his courage and goes in quest of the erotic voice that has
challenged his virility. He approaches his old friend Moh to
ferret out the necessary information about the source of the
voice. In due course, he learns from him that Selma is a typist
and a trade unionist: “One day I got fired and she fought for
me”, Moh tells him admiringly. He proceeds to the description
of her physical appearance - “She has dark hair. Not much
makeup. She’s not all stuck up” - before he changes tack and
asks Omar why he is so curious about a woman he has never
seen.
Confronted by Omar’s persistence, Moh baulks at the prospect

of becoming a marriage bureau; “Who said anything about
marriage?” responds Omar as if he has overcome the
traditional notion of virility that confines gender encounters to
the framework of wedlock. When Omar surprisingly explains
that he wants to meet Selma simply to hear her voice, to talk
to her, the comedy seems to be taking a new direction towards
the birth of a new society, a society in which Eros will have the
right of residence. If the film had stopped at the stage when
Omar is given Selma’s phone number, the comedy would have
assumed the conventional contours of a romantic comedy in
its suggestion of a new social order indicated by the apparent
psychological transformation of the obstacle character, Omar,
from a ‘humour’ into an eiron figure.
For Frye, “the contest of ‘eiron’ and ‘alazon’ forms the basis of
the comic action”.6 Contrary to the alazon figures, the eiron
figures are self-deprecating ones that the “dramatist tends to
play down and make rather neutral and unformed in
character”7 in accordance with the movement of comedy from
405
a “society controlled by habit, ritual bondage, arbitrary law and

the older characters to a society controlled by youth and
pragmatic freedom [...] from illusion to reality. Illusion is
whatever is fixed or definable, and reality is best understood as
its negation.”8 If Allouache had stopped the film at the point
where Omar obtains Selma’s phone number, he would have
left his character as an undefined eiron figure, a character
freed from the ritual bondage of virility and ready to undertake
the redemption of his society.
A Satire on Virility
The director decides otherwise, however, by extending the
action of his film. Contrary to the romantic expectations of the
audience, he further underlines Omar’s charade of virility by
giving an ironic twist to the rest of the film. The next scene
shows Omar in his office trying to contact Selma. The exchange
of sarcastic looks between his colleagues as he attempts to do
so shows that he is still an impostor, an alazon figure. Our
suspicion that his conversion is just a sham is strengthened by
the hesitation he displays before making another attempt to
contact Selma.
For example, we see him taking a horoscope ticket from a

‘fortune’ machine as if the emotional and erotic life of a person
depended on mere chance. We also see him trembling in front
of phone boxes, going in and out before hesitatingly making his
phone call. When Selma finally picks up the phone, Omar
softens his virile voice and introduces himself using all the
information at his disposal: Moh’s friendship, the cassette
recorder, and the recorded tape.
The emotion is such that Omar starts talking as if Selma was a

long-time date of his: “You see, you can’t keep secrets from me.
406
I know everything”, he says after reminding her of the tape-

recorded details of her life such as the red flowers on the wall
and the cranky child in her room who troubles her sleep. His
bravado goes so far as to avow his erotic attraction to her
voice: “I hear your voice every night. It lulls me to sleep”. The
phone-call ends with the arrangement of a face-to-face
meeting for the following day with Omar coming out of the
phone box in a state of euphoria which is expressed in his lively
walking pace and the film’s soundtrack. He immediately calls
up Moh to share the happy news and to arrange for a
celebration of his erotic victory.
Everything goes according to plan. The telephone scene gives

way to a scene in a car showing the highly excited Omar and
Moh driving through central Algiers. However, the change of
scene is accompanied by a change of mood from euphoria to
disphoria, or melancholy. Our two friends are shown as heavily
intoxicated, listening to the sound of melancholic Arab music
issuing from a jukebox in the corner. Among the songs, we can
easily recognize the Shaabi lyrics “My creator is my master. He
alone knows my secret. He has destined me, forced on me her
beauty. He showed me her wonder, her charm. What came
over me on Thursday? I met Fatma of the long eyelashes and
her love destroyed me.”
The love complaint in the song returns us full circle to the

dialectic of psychological virility and heterosexual impotence,
which as observed above, is a dominant trait of Omar’s
psychology. Omar is terrified by the idea of not being able to
live up to the appropriate standards of virility, of losing the self-
control expected of Muslim males when the time comes to
meet Selma. The song reminds him of what he really is and
what he can really do with women. In exasperation, he
mutilates his malfunctioning body by stubbing out a cigarette
407
on the back of his hand. This corporeal mutilation reminds us

of the tears that the bridegroom shamelessly sheds during the
wedding party that Omar and his friends attend at the start of
the film. Both actions speak of the paralysing fear experienced
by Algerian men at the prospect of losing face in their
immediate erotic relation with the female sex - seen as a
potential threat to the masculinity which Muslim males work
so hard to conquer in order to secure a place among the
community of believers.
It follows that Omar Gatlato is not free from the powerful

values of virility which can inhibit the performance of gender
and prevent men from engaging in loving relationships.
Exacerbated by the traditional separation of the sexes, the
trauma of the Algerian War of Independence, the loss of his
father at an early age, and a culture of poverty peculiar to all
underdeveloped nations, virility indeed “kills” Omar in both
literal and metaphorical senses of the word. Omar emerges as
an erotically disabled man, an eiron figure incapable of
establishing erotic relationships outside violent male
groupings.
Allouache disavows the homosexual overtones of the film,

preferring to speak of a culture-specific form of male
friendship.9 The director’s euphemism for this other taboo
subject in the film notwithstanding, male friendship emerges
as a substitute for a ‘healthy’ hetero-eroticism. A victim of the
virile mode of being in the Muslim world, Omar nearly turns
this comic, ironic film into a tragedy in his attempt to break
away from the mediated forms of hetero-eroticism allowed by
his culture. We are given to understand that as long as virility
regulates gender behaviour in the Muslim Arab world, Ares
(the Greek god of war) rather Eros (the god of love) will hold
pride of place in the community of male believers.
408
1
Roy Armes, Post-Colonial Images: Studies in North African Film,
Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2OO5, p. 1O5.
2
On ‘symbolic capital’, see Pierre Bourdieu, The Logic of Practice,
Cambridge: Polity Press, 2013, pp. 112-121.
3
Germaine Tillion, Le harem et les cousins, Paris: Editions du Seuil,
196, pp. 35-64.
4
Serhane Abdelhak, L’amour circoncis, Paris: Editions Eddif, 2000.
5
Malek Chebel, L’esprit du sérail: mythes et pratiques sexuels au
Maghreb, Paris: Payot, 1995.
6
Northrope Frye, Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays, Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 199O, p. 172.
7
Ibid., p. 173.
8
Ibid., pp.169-170.
9
Tamzali Wassyla, En attendant Omar Gatlato, Algiers: Editions
ENAP, 1979, pp. 94-95.
409
42 / Kierkegaard, Seduction and

Hitchcock's Vertigo
Constantino Pereira Martins
The Vertiginous World of Vertigo
This essay offers a series of philosophical interpretations of

desire and seduction in the cinema. Addressing the thoughts
of Kierkegaard, and in particular his first published work,
Either/Or: A Fragment of Life (1843), this interpretation looks
at a number of correspondences in Hitchcock's Vertigo (USA,
1958).1 in Vertigo a former San Francisco detective, John
‘Scottie’ Ferguson (played by James Stewart), has retired
because of his fear of heights and an incident involving the
death of a fellow officer. He is now drawn into a deadly game
of double-cross. Helped by his former fiancée, painter and
fashion illustrator Margorie ‘Midge’ Wood (Barbara Bel
Geddes), Scottie battles various forms of ‘vertigo’ in a riddling
scenario intense with issues of desire, illusion and
misunderstanding.
410
The game begins when Scottie is hired by Gavin Elster (Tom

Helmore), a wealthy shipbuilder and former college
acquaintance, to follow his wife Madeleine (Kim Novak) on
account of her allegedly suicidal preoccupation with the past,
especially in the form of a local woman from the 19th Century,
Carlotta Valdes, who committed suicide at the age of 26, the
same age as Madeleine is now. According to Gavin (but
unknown to his wife), Carlotta is Madeleine’s great-
grandmother. Falling in love with her, Scottie saves Madeleine
from drowning but then witnesses her death in what appears
to be a suicidal plunge from a museum tower. Unable to
conquer the vertigo which led to his retirement, Scottie is
crushed by guilt and depression.
Some months later he comes across another woman, Judy

Barton (also played by Novak), who bears an uncanny
resemblance to Madeleine and with whom he in turn
becomes involved and whom he indeed attempts to turn into
a replica of the other woman. She is in fact Gavin’s
accomplice; he killed his wife after setting up Scottie to follow
the fake Madeleine in order for him to become a credible
witness to her instability and suicidal tendencies. Scottie
belatedly realizes that he has been duped and, in a dramatic
replay of the earlier ‘suicide’ (and also echoing the death of
his former colleague), he loses ‘Madeleine’ again when she
accidentally falls from the same tower. He ends the film in
recovery in a psychiatric hospital.
Kierkegaard, Sorrow and Seduction
In its preoccupation with the oneiric and seductive power of

appearances, film is also embedded in a sort of melancholy
and sorrow that Kierkegaard identified as key components in
the puzzle of aesthetic dizziness. As we shall see, some
411
passages of Vertigo indeed explicitly encapsulate different

tones of the movement of seduction, which in its different
forms mirrors the Kierkegaardian process of thinking through
images. In Either/Or Kierkegaard not only reflects upon
seduction, but also on forms of art and aesthetics in general.
His main distinction is that between psychic love and sensual
love, between the abstraction of reflection and the
concreteness of the immediate. While the immediate seducer
is an absolute winner, the reflective seducer is closer to the
artist, operating in terms of mediation. Here we could say
that there is a radical difference between what we might call
intensive and extensive seduction.
But if there are so many beautiful films variously depicting

the process of seduction – such as Frears’ Dangerous Liaisons
(USA/UK, 1988), Anderson’s Magnolia (USA, 1999), and
McQueen’s Shame (UK, 2011) - why then Vertigo? The
answer is because it has all the elements that allow us to
wander through the concepts of seduction, sorrow,
immediacy and reflection. It also exhibits in cinematic form
the the rise and downfall, the circular journey of excitement
that is involved in the process of seduction. It is this
complexity that interests us here (but without the usual
psychoanalytical premises).
It is interesting to note that Kierkegaard himself had ideas

about the cinema. Besides discussing other forms of art, he
was particularly interested in the succession of images, which
is fundamental to cinematic form. Like cinema, reflexive
sorrow demands a succession of moments. If seduction rests
ultimately on sorrow and loneliness, in a direct correlation
with boredom and repetition, we might then recall that of
course Vertigo is full of such repeated tropes as falling,
chasing, regression, projection, and death.
412
Kierkegaard’s ideas about seduction find a happy correlation

with the film’s title. In this sense, vertigo relates to anxiety,
the dizziness of a diffuse spiral/vortex that confronts one with
mortality and the bewildering freedom of choice. This kind of
dizziness is also identified by Nietzsche when he warns, in
Aphorism that “when you stare for a long into an abyss, the
abyss stares back into you”.2 This sort of existentialist flavour
can also be found in the Hitchcock film, where despair and
the dread of death appears in different forms, a mood which
is particularly marked in the scene by the sea where
Madeleine surrenders to Scottie - and where love is a form of
salvation from death - and also in the woods where they kiss
and where, as though in a trance, she wanders away.
The notion of vertigo, caught up with fear and death, implies

a distortion of perception that involves the figure of the fall:
Scottie and Judy both fall, and there is also the question of
‘fake’ falls. But mainly we are talking here about ‘falling in
love’. In Vertigo love is an essential premise in the existential
sense, pointing towards deception and entrapment - love as a
dangerous place, an abyss which can indeed induce vertigo.
In this sense vertigo is one of the main axes of the film.
If we divide it into ‘external’ and ‘internal’ forms in relation

to Scottie and Madeleine/Judy, we can suggest that in the
first part of the film he is possessed by an external vertigo
while she undergoes an internal vertigo, and that in the
second part he is caught in an internal form of vertigo while
she is engaged in an external one. (Moreover they are both
inhabited by a common vertigo towards the past, both locked
and looking to re-enact the past).
Ambivalence
413
Following Kierkegaard, we might suggest that the main

structural axis of the film regarding seduction is between the
immediate and reflexive tone, exhibiting a certain pendularity
and ambivalence. As we have seen before, different sorts of
seducers engage in different sorts of seduction. Let’s start by
excluding Scottie’s friend Gavin Elster, the mastermind behind
the entire plot (but of whom we see little). Let’s also pretend
that the plot isn’t mainly a suspense detective story (which in
fact it isn’t). We can then divide the film in two, a first part
involving an immediate form of seduction and a second part
concerning a reflexive seduction. In spite of this artificial
division we must emphasise the reversibility of seduction
according to the pendularity principle - which also means the
reversibility of the masculine and the feminine element.
This creates a game of power and seduction: he wants to

possess her, but she is possessed by the past, with its deathly
ghosts. It is a vital dance between Eros and Thanatos. In
general, the two parts of the film correspond to two different
seductive forms. The first, where Madeleine plays a kind of
femme fatale, takes immediate hold of Scottie. It is a strange
situation because the usual procedure of the seducer is
represented by Scottie's pursuit of his prey, when in fact he is
the one being hunted down.
It is a twisted form, where she sets the trap, but paradoxically

reveals the vertigo of death in her relation to the past, to the
obsessions that are generally more in accordance with those
of the reflexive seducer. In fact, although the first part of the
film is concerned with an immediate seduction, she is indeed
partly a reflexive seducer, that is to say, a fake reflexive
seducer. In this spiral of repetitions within repetitions, we
414
later discover that all of this has been played out according to
a previous plan. But interestingly enough, there is a micro
signal that something is wrong: when the seducer
(Madeleine) surrenders to Scottie by the sea, she says, in
abandon, “I don´t want to die”.
The second part of the film belongs to the reflexive seducer,

who takes his or her time, engaged in a slow and careful
process of construction. Scottie re-builds Madeleine in Judy.
In his wandering - looking for the woman in all women - and
in his obsession with the past, he selects his prey and then
starts working on her. His particular attention to detail, from
clothing to hairstyle, shows the construction process to
perfection, until the final surrender: Judy says” If I do what
you want will you love me?“. Scotty is now the perfect
reflexive seducer - a ghost projecting ghosts, trying to regain
desire again and again.
The Hybridity of Midge
The film embodies different forms of love and desire. The

reversibility of seduction becomes more complex - not only
the masculine-feminine dialectic, and not only that the
seduced undergoes a particular form of reversibility in the
form of consent (for example in Scottie’s apartment following
the river rescue). In the case of Midge in particular we can
observe the essential mixture of seduction and sorrow, of the
reflexive and the immediate. Midge also reveals Scottie's
anxiety and vertigo: he has to choose a woman, but
confronted with the vertigo of freedom of choice, he knows
that the possibility of choice doesn’t just depend upon
rationality.
415
The way Scottie deals with this is to define Midge as a ‘friend’

because her love is maternal, or even, as in the final scene in
a psychiatric hospital, the love offered by a nurse. She is there
for him unconditionally, without any chance of realising her
own deeper wishes. That is Midge’s own form of vertigo, the
frustration of an unhappy love, trapped in the obsessively
repetitive process of not understanding why it isn’t working.
The despair becomes absolute with the discovery of her
rival´s power; the tragic triangle is then complete: the lover,
the beloved, and the love rival. In the choice between Midge
and the stranger who brings him alive, Scottie opts for the
unknown Madeleine.
Midge, for her part, is doomed to hybridity, the reflexive

seducer who is also marked by endlessly reflexive sorrow.
Midge is a curious character. We know exactly how it begins
but we don't know how it ends – she simply disappears from
the film. Did she give up? She is a strange combination that
corresponds perfectly to Kierkegaard’s notion of the
silhouette. Is she just a failed seducer? Or do we need to
create more categories for our analysis such as ‘passive’ and
‘active’ seduction?
Midge performs her characteristic mixture of seduction and

sorrow in a series of scenes. In the first two examples she is
quietly integrated in Scottie's life as a friend, accepting the
development of events. It all seems to change in the third
scene, with the discovery of her rival in possession of her
supposed territory. This scene marks the end of the motherly
figure, weak and dependent, patiently waiting for Scottie's
love. In the fourth scene we witness Midge re-born: she slips
notes under Scottie's door and presents herself as a direct
competitor to her new rival.
416
Sadly, her immediate action is quickly replaced by instant

desperation. But we must not forget that its her reflexive
sorrow, disrupted by her rival’s existence, that calls her
seduction into play in its full declaration and transparency. In
this scene we witness the outcome of an impossible
competition determined by Scottie’s choice. He is angry at
Midge’s painting of herself as Carlotta Valdes (the woman
with whom Madeleine was obsessed) because it transforms
an abstract and general mood into a concrete form that is no
longer manageable. Midge’s reaction is full of despair: she
destroys the painting that was supposed to show her in the
place of Scottie's object of desire and passion. She is now
totally defeated.
It would be understandable if this were the final scene, but

this is not the case. Her last appearance is at the hospital.
Where she returns as a friend, accepting her destiny after
fighting for the impossible and enduring sorrow and defeat.
She asks Johnny to try. Speaking of the different moods which
can be created by means of music therapy, she is perhaps
suggesting that there are different types of love and that she
is there for him, just as Scottie was there for Madeleine when
she surrendered to him by the sea. She is there for him even
if he still loves her rival. But nothing is going to help, not even
Mozart. Midge walks out of the final scene down a lonely
corridor, leaving Scottie's melancholia and guilt behind,
gazing at the floor in sorrow.
417

__________________________________
1
Søren Kierkegaard, Either/Or: A Fragment of Life [1843], vols. 1
and 2, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1987; abridged
edition, London: Penguin, Books, 1992.
2
Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil: Prelude to a
Philosophy of the Future [1886], Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2002, p. 69.
418
43 / Gender Trauma in
Christopher Isherwood’s A Single Man,
and Tom Ford’s Film Adaptation
Gerardo Rodríguez-Salas
Ego Formation and Gender Performativity

This essay analyses the gender trauma that dominates
Christopher Isherwood’s novel A Single Man (1964) and which
is radically softened in Tom Ford’s film adaptation of the same
name (USA, 2009). A Single Man tells the story of a day (30
November 1962 in the film) in the life of George Falconer
(played by Colin Firth), a Los Angeles college professor, as he
mourns the death of his lover Jim in a car accident some
months earlier, interacts with friends and neighbours, teaches
a literature class, and eventually dies in his sleep. While a
number of critics have argued that the protagonist of the
novel transcends the limits of gayness and becomes a
universal archetype or Everyman, my analysis here explores
419
the complexity of gender in his ego formation through his

unassimilated homosexuality and the threats of hegemonic
masculinity, women and biologism, and bisexuality.1 I argue
that the character of Doris - Jim’s former lover, who is dying of
cancer in the novel but who is absent from the film - is the
catalyst that problematises critical attempts to placidly
universalise the complexly-structured character of George.
The restrictive process of ego formation – involving Lacan’s

‘Name of the Father’ as the set of societal laws and restrictions
that guarantee ego stability, closely linked with Althusser’s
‘Ideological State Apparatuses’, those entities that
‘interpellate’ the subject to prescribe imposed identities
(‘misrecognition’) and connections to social institutions - is
clearly reflected at the beginning of the novel. Here, as George
awakes and prepares for a painful new day, the narrator plays
with the pronouns it – an impersonal reference associated
with the stage prior to ego formation, linked with natural
drives and chaotic identity - and he, when George goes
through the mirror stage and acquires a fixed, artificial, gender
identity: “Staring and staring into the mirror, it sees many
faces within its face […] Obediently, it washes, shaves, brushes
its hair; for it accepts its responsibilities to the others […] It
knows its name. It is called George. By the time it has gotten
dressed, it has become he”.2
Although in Ford’s film the linguistic game it/he is lost, the pen
lying on the bed beside George, and the large stain it has
caused, suggest George’s situation prior to the acquisition of
language: the use of a pen points to the rationality of
language, but the bed is the place where George and Jim
shared their irrational love and where George is naked before
his cultural interpellation. This Lacanian formation of the ego
serves to present George’s gender identity as an artificial
420
construct - symbolically connected with clothes and theatrical

costumes. George performs gender, following Judith Butler’s
concept of “performativity”, which is supported by “the tacit
collective agreement to perform, produce, and sustain discrete
and polar genders as cultural fictions”.3 George is aware of this
artificial construction, which explains why he presents himself
in terms of theatre and the stage: “He is all actor now; an actor
on his way up from the dressing-room, hastening through the
backstage world of props and lamps and stagehands to make
his entrance.” (pp. 29-30)
Heteronormativity and Homosociality

This gender performativity becomes the source of George’s
trauma. His insecure position as a homosexual is justified with
the invisibility imposed upon him by the world of
heteronormativity. During the phone conversation with Jim’s
cousin where he is informed of Jim’s death, we discover that
Jim’s parents did not want to call him and that he is not invited
to Jim’s funeral; he is not part of the family, paradoxically after
having been Jim’s partner for sixteen years. This invisibility is
marked by the symbolism of the two dogs that Jim and George
used to have - in a flashback, when they are seen lying on the
sofa, the two dogs look like a projection of the human couple.
When Jim dies, George asks about the dogs, but Jim’s family
are only aware of one of them; the fate of the other, a female
dog, is unknown (the symbolism of the dogs is not to be
underestimated: in the film, George is obsessed with tracing
the lost dog). George’s gender insecurity explains his self-
protective attitude against what he perceives as the triple
threat to his ontological position as a homosexual:
heteronormativity, female biologism and bisexuality. In the
heterosexual model, homosexuals are perceived as deviant,
421
which is why George, instead of openly coming out of the

closet, prefers to play safe within the subtle separation of
homosociality and homosexuality.
George’s self-protective attitude corresponds to what critics

such as Sedgwick label “homosexual panic”, that is, the
homophobic blackmail experienced by men who fear that
their homosocial bonds might be perceived as anti-social
homosexuality, as when Mr. Strunk, in a college football
portrait, is described as a “living doll” (p. 16).4 Tired of such
homosexual panic, in the novel George fantasises a form of
revenge against heteronormativity that exposes his
internalisation of hegemonic masculinity.
A local newspaper has started a campaign against “sex

deviates”, and George fantasises turning the most prominent
members of society into precisely such people, aware of the
gender performativity that his action involves. He imagines
taking them - the newspaper editor, staff writers, Police Chief,
Head of the Vice Squad, and ministers of the cloth who
endorsed the campaign - to a secret film studio and forcing
them to perform “every possible sexual act”, with the results
being shown to the world in public cinemas.
He is fully aware of the gender performativity that his action

involves, and of its discursive implications: “They understand
only one language: brute force.” (p. 25). Then he appropriates
the ideological discourse of heteronormativity by becoming
‘Uncle George’, the organiser of a cohort of “at least five
hundred highly skilled killers and torturers, all dedicated
individuals” in a grisly campaign of “systematic terror” (pp. 25-
26). As George sees it, gender involves competition, and so he
constantly displays his authority through masculinity as a way
of covering his insecurity with age and with homosexuality.
422
George’s prejudiced attitude towards his own homosexuality

is revised in the film. During the lecture episode, he speaks
about minorities in general, but “if that minority is somehow
invisible, then the fear is much greater”. While describing that
invisible minority - a clear reference to homosexuals - the
camera focuses on a student, implying that he is the novel’s
Wally Bryant character. However, this student is not openly
camp. His reaction is to cover himself, as if he were exposed
by George’s discourse. When George finishes his explanation
of minorities, reminding the class that they are “just people,
people like us”, there is a final close-up of the boy who no
longer hides but stares in recognition and there seems to be a
connection between him and George, rather than the
rejection of which we read in the novel.
Women and Biologism

A side effect of George’s rejection of heteronormativity is his
trauma in relation to women. Although depicted as the
negative other in heteronormativity, women are privileged
over other alterity groups, since they are a basic tool needed
by patriarchy for procreation. Indeed, biological determinism
is the predominant discourse in heteronormativity, one which
keeps women under control but simultaneously provides
them with a privileged position over other minority groups.
Paradoxically, then, George displays the same panic in relation
to women that heterosexual men sometimes experience in
relation to gays.
His misogyny is projected on to Doris, the woman who

temporarily steals Jim from him. She epitomises womankind
and the ambiguous privilege of the female biological
condition: “I am Doris. I am Woman. I am Bitch-Mother
Nature. The Church and the Law and the State exist to support
423
me. I claim my biological rights … Doris, then, was infinitely

more than Doris, was Woman the Enemy, claiming Jim for
herself. No use destroying Doris, or ten thousand Dorises, as
long as Woman triumphs.” (p. 75).
The final verb indicates that everything in George is involved

in a struggle over gender. In order to appease his sense of loss
in the battle with Doris and women in general, George uses
Charlotte, his best friend, to have the final word and triumph
over womankind. He portrays her as the negative stereotype
of women who are tragically romantic and doomed to
emotional dissatisfaction: “Do women ever stop trying? No,
they learn to be good losers” (p. 117).
In Ford’s film women’s biologism is also present. Since Doris is

left out, Charlotte is given more prominence and epitomises
Doris’ biological determinism. In the name of
heteronormativity, she rejects Jim’s and George’s relationship
and fantasises about having “a real relationship and kids” with
George. When George angrily dismantles Charlotte’s
unfulfilling heteronormative model, she admits her emotional
void, but curiously returns to her prejudice and concludes: “if
you weren’t such a God-damned poof we could have been
happy”. In addition, Doris’s sexual animalisation is extended
to Charlotte through a joke with George. Narrating an episode
at the car wash, she was asked by a young man if she was a
natural blonde, and she replied: “If I stood on my head, I would
be a natural brunette with lovely breath”.
Apart from this free adaptation of the character of Doris,

George’s trauma in relation to women in Ford’s film is
enhanced and becomes a throbbing obsession. The image of
the neighbours’ son hammering away at the abandoned set of
bathroom scales is maintained in the film, but the boy is
424
replaced by a girl, Jennifer, whose femininity is marked by her

pink dress with its flamboyant ribbons, and the cat she is
holding, a clear symbol of her feline condition and women’s
threat to homosexuality (whose animal symbol in the film is
the pair of dogs). Towards the end of the film, George
confronts Jennifer again at the bank in another highly symbolic
scene.
She introduces George to a scorpion, a family pet called Ben

Hur - an image taken from the novel to stand for aggressive
masculinity: “Every night we throw in something new and
watch him kill it”. We discover that her father says it is like
being at the Colosseum, and prompts the children to support
that aggressiveness. The girl reveals that “Daddy says he
wants to throw you into the Colosseum”, thus clarifying that
women are not the real threat but a heteronormative pattern
that works in association with patriarchy to make minorities
disappear (this realisation might explain George’s apparent
reconciliation with the girl - and by extension with women).
This final reconciliation with women’s biologism is the

outcome of the film’s steady engagement with scopophilia, or
the power of the look. The fear of women is symbolically
referenced by the poster for Hitchcock’s Psycho, portraying
Janet Leigh’s wide-open eyes; this symbolically severed head
reminds of Medusa and her ability to turn men into stone, a
symbolic source of George’s anxiety. While George is with the
Spanish escort, their ephemeral conversation takes place as
they turn their backs on the poster, but this temporary escape
comes to an end when George drives away and has to confront
the woman’s eyes in order to start the car. The symbolism
goes further, however, to suggest that women’s control is not
real, as the protagonist of Hitchcock’s film is terrified rather
425
than in control. Prior to this realisation, George’s attempts to

cover his insecurity are rendered through close-ups involving
the visual fragmentation of women (e.g. the secretary, Lois,
Charlotte and Jennifer) in a repeated attempt to control the
female threat through fragmentation.
Bisexuality
George’s misogyny also leads him, in the novel, to
straightforwardly reject bisexuality. With straight men he feels
comfortable thanks to the homosocial/homosexual
continuum and the sense that this confrontation takes place
on equal terms, but with women he simply cannot compete
because of the insuperable biological difference. This
obsessive rejection of bisexuality can be observed in George’s
revenge on Doris. When he seems to be at peace, we discover
how his gender trauma is fully alive in the ambiguous
relationship with his student Kenny and the latter’s seeming
bisexuality.
Although George insists in presenting their relationship as

flirtatious, we can never be sure, thanks to the ambiguous
narrative focalisation in both novel and film. Even in the
climactic ocean scene, however, where physical contact is
suggested, always filtered through George’s perspective -
“their bodies rub against each other, briefly but roughly. The
electric fields of the dialogue is broken. Their relationship,
whatever it now is, is no longer symbolic” (p. 131) - Kenny tries
to counteract his seemingly homoerotic game with George
behind a masculine pose, “like a fearless native warrior, to
attack the waves” while George finds them “too big for him”
(p. 132). The film version is more suggestive of Kenny’s
homoeroticism: he does not want to speak about Lois and he
426
undresses in front of George in the course of openly erotic eye

contact.
Back home, the homoerotic game ends by openly exposing

George’s trauma with bisexuality when confronted by Kenny,
a scene that does not appear in the film. Even though Kenny
insists on his affair with another student, Lois, George radically
rejects this idea and urges him to understand his deeper
drives: “No, my dear Kenneth - you came here this evening to
see me; whether you realised it or not. Some part of you knew
quite well Lois would refuse to go to that motel again; and that
that would give you an excuse to send her home and get
yourself stranded out here.” (p. 143). He goes on to warn
Kenny against the temptation to engage in “Flirtation instead
of fucking” (p. 144).
Another scene absent in the film symbolically clarifies

George’s final trauma with bisexuality. While he masturbates
in bed, his sexual fantasy fluctuates: he starts with Kenny and
Lois; she de-materialises to be re-placed by the Mexican-
looking man from the tennis court; Kenny fails because “he
isn’t taking his lust seriously” and is replaced with the other
tennis player. The ultimate image is that of “fierce hot animal
play” (p. 147).
While throughout the film George’s sexual drive is linked with

ideas of animality, Kenny is no longer the “water creature
absorbed in its element”, as he had been in the scene on the
beach (p. 132), but after George’s verbalisation of his gender
trauma, the homoerotic game is over. Indeed, his rejection
from the fantasy might hint at George’s realisation that Kenny
is not gay after all or that he is bisexual, which might explain
his lack of full involvement in the fantasy.
427
One of the most radical changes in the film version is the

reversal of Jim’s and George’s gender roles, which distorts the
novel’s intention to problematise George’s trauma. Jim is
presented as gay and George as having flirted in the past with
bisexuality in a temporary affair with Charlotte. In the film, Jim
shares George’s confusion over bisexuality in the book. In a
film where filters are used to portray George’s ordinary
existence (in faded colours) and his sensorial perceptions in
the present and in the past (in bright primaries), it is shocking
to find a scene in black-and-white, which coincides with this
central revelation of gender trauma and thus highlights
George’s dissatisfaction with bisexuality, symbolically
reflected by Jim’s nakedness - in contrast with George’s
artificial gender pose, as reflected in his clothing.
Beyond Gender?
At the end of the novel, George tries to persuade the reader
that he is a sociopath who does not need anybody, as if
suggesting his evolution beyond gender - indeed, this sense of
closure is portrayed in the film through the image of two
closing doors at the end of the stories with Charlotte and
Kenny. Maybe, after all, the critics I mentioned at the
beginning of this essay were right and George transcends
gender limitations. Indeed, in spite of his harsh silent battle
with Doris and his sadistic happiness at her imminent death,
there is a brief moment where they connect.
In line with Nancy’s inoperative model of community5, they

become singularities who expose each other through the
confrontation of death beyond the restrictions of language:
“And, holding her hand, he feels less embarrassed by her
sickness; for the gesture means, we are on the same road, I
shall follow you soon” (p. 77). Indeed, they share their finitude
428
apparently beyond gender restrictions. However, the final

note is that George’s death due to a heart problem is tainted
with gender implications: the suggestion is that his coronary
disease started the day he met Jim. The film offers two final
symbols that help to understand the gender scope. After
closing Kenny’s story and coming to terms with his gender
trauma - in opposition to the novel - he encounters an owl and
a full moon (traditional symbols, respectively, of wisdom and
of femininity), suggesting that he has overcome his misogyny.
This essay has hopefully shed new light on Isherwood’s dark

portrayal of gender and has ultimately presented Ford’s
impossibly ideal adaptation as an example of what
Christopher Pullen has considered to be a larger impulse in re-
writing Isherwood, related to ‘harmonising’ homosexual and
heterosexual discourses.6 By leaving aside the character of
Doris and concentrating on the idyllic portrayal of George’s
and Jim’s relationship, Ford’s adaptation glosses over
Isherwood’s poignant depiction of gender trauma from the
perspective of a seriously compromised homosexual position.
Although there are occasional moments when George seems
to transcend his gender limitation, he ultimately proves to be
a serious victim of the heteronormative pattern deeply
ingrained in early 60s America.
His (un)conscious attempt to emulate heteronormative

behaviour exposes, as argued by Butler, the artificiality of
gender in all its possible manifestations, including
heteronormativity: “The replication of heterosexual constructs
in non-heterosexual frames brings into relief the utterly
constructed status of the so-called heterosexual original. Thus,
gay is to straight not as copy is to original, but, rather, as copy
is to copy”.7 The changes and additions in Ford’s adaptation
are an attempt to redeem George from his encapsulated
429
gendered existence in Isherwood’s novel, but the gender

implications are inescapable amidst the pervasive symbolism
of a film ultimately marked by a commitment to sensorial and
semiotic jouissance.
1
For the critical perspectives with which I am engaging for the sake
of this argument, see Carolyn Heilbrun, Christopher Isherwood,
New York: Columbia University Press, 1970; Paul Piazza,
Christopher Isherwood: Myth and Anti-Myth, New York: Columbia
University Press, 1978; Claude J. Summers, Christopher Isherwood,
New York: Frederick Ungar, 1980; David Garrett Izzo, Christopher
Isherwood: His Era, His Gang, and the Legacy of the Truly Strong
Man, Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2001.
2
Christopher Isherwood, A Single Man [1964], London: Vintage,
2010, pp. 2-3. Subsequent page-references to the novel appear in
parentheses in the text.
3
Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of
Identity, Abingdon: Routledge, new ed., 2006, p. 190.
4
See Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Between Men: English Literature and
Male Homosocial Desire, New York: Columbia University Press,
1985, pp. 88-92.
5
Jean-Luc Nancy, The Inoperative Community, Minneapolis:
University of Minneapolis Press, 1991, p. 14.
6
Christopher Pullen, ‘Ford’s A Single Man and Bachardy’s Chris and
Don: The Aesthetic and Domestic Body of Isherwood’, in Pamela
Demory and Christopher Pullen (eds.), Queer Love in Film and
Television. Critical Essays, New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013, pp.
233-244.
7
Butler, op. cit., p. 43.
430
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The London Film Media Reader 4

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Visions of

The London Film & Media Reader 4

This ebook is copyright material, protected by the laws of the

The individual essays which make up this ebook are copyright

This collection copyright The London Symposium &

Individual chapters copyright the authors 2016

This ebook was created in PDF

Individual chapters are bookmarked

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1 / National and Institutional

1.1 Authorial Identities

1 / The Director as Star: Alfred Hitchcock 1-12

2 / The Identity of Fear in the Work of

1.2 Cinema and National Identity

3 / British Identities on Film: The Long Good Friday,

1.3 Continental and Regional Regimes

5 / The Crime Genre and Social Practice

6 / The Challenges of Otherness: The Politics of

1.4 Trans-national Projections

7 / Representations of Russian Identity

8 / From ‘National’ to ‘Global’: Luhrmnn’s

1.5 Intercultural Adaptations

9 / The Challenges of Re-making

10 / National Identity and Global Television:

1.6 The Practice of Journalism

11 / Understanding Professional Routines and

12 / Journalism and the Virtual World: Second Life 113-119

13 / Tropes of the Sea: The Mediterranean

15 / History on Russian Television:

16 / Archiving Balkan Film History:

17 / Will Smith and the White Imaginary

18 / Racial Identity in a Post-Modern World:

2.4 Youth Culture

19 / Youth Identities on Nigerian Screens 180-188

20 / Public Intimacy and Popular Music:

2.5 Cultural Anxiety

21 / The Construction of Identity

22 / Vampire Identities in Contemporary

2.6 The Production of Identity

23 / Migrant Film-making in Switzerland 220-229

24 / The Construction of Self

25 / Film-making with a Mobile Phone in Pakistan 242-249

3.1 Female Transformations

26 / Queering Feminine Identities

27 / Gender, Labour, and the Media:

3.2 Women at War

28 / The Changing Role of Women in the U.S. War Film 272-279

29 / Torture, Performance, and Post-feminism:

3.3 Bollywood Women

30 / Identities Mistaken and Discovered:

31 / Female Identity and the New Bollywood: 299-308

3.4 Technology and Femininity

32 / Neoliberalism, Identity, and Agency:

33 / Faith, Fashion, and Femininity

3.5 The Gendered City

34 / Reconstructing Visions of Social Identity

35 / Lonely Men in the City:

36 / Masculinity and the Family

3.6 Stardom and Masculinity