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JUSTICE AT 24 FRAMES PER SECOND: LAW AND SPECTACLE IN THE REVENGE FILM By Robert John Tougas B.A. (Hons.), LL.B., B.A. A thesis submitted to the Faculty of Graduate Studies and Research in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Masters of Arts in Film Studies Carleton University OTTAWA, Ontario (May 15,2008) 2008, Robert John Tougas Library and Bibliotheque et 1*1 Archives Canada Archives Canada Published Heritage Direction du Branch Patrimoine de I'edition 395 Wellington Street 395, rue Wellington Ottawa ON K1A0N4 Ottawa ON K1A0N4 Canada Canada Your file Votre reference ISBN: 978-0-494-43498-7 Our file Notre reference ISBN: 978-0-494-43498-7 NOTICE: AVIS: The author has granted a non L'auteur a accorde une licence non exclusive exclusive license allowing Library permettant a la Bibliotheque et Archives and Archives Canada to reproduce, Canada de reproduire, publier, archiver, publish, archive, preserve, conserve, sauvegarder, conserver, transmettre au public communicate to the public by par telecommunication ou par Plntemet, prefer, telecommunication or on the Internet, distribuer et vendre des theses partout dans loan, distribute and sell theses le monde, a des fins commerciales ou autres, worldwide, for commercial or non sur support microforme, papier, electronique commercial purposes, in microform, et/ou autres formats. paper, electronic and/or any other formats. The author retains copyright L'auteur conserve la propriete du droit d'auteur ownership and moral rights in et des droits moraux qui protege cette these. this thesis. Neither the thesis Ni la these ni des extraits substantiels de nor substantial extracts from it celle-ci ne doivent etre imprimes ou autrement may be printed or otherwise reproduits sans son autorisation. reproduced without the author's permission. In compliance with the Canadian Conformement a la loi canadienne Privacy Act some supporting sur la protection de la vie privee, forms may have been removed quelques formulaires secondaires from this thesis. ont ete enleves de cette these. While these forms may be included Bien que ces formulaires in the document page count, aient inclus dans la pagination, their removal does not represent il n'y aura aucun contenu manquant. any loss of content from the thesis. Canada 11 Abstract Revenge-themed films often depict the practice of justice-making through violent means. Two general aesthetic techniques are engaged that allow violent action to be recognized as attempting to properly compensate for past offenses. First, poetic justice is achieved through ironic reversals that repeat inflicted harms back against the wrongdoer. Formal techniques of repeating specific shots, sounds, cuts, and camera actions create aesthetic connections that intuitively and synoptically express necessary proportion in punishing violence. Second, justice requires it be publicly recognized and revenge cinema makes this by creating literally, impliedly, and intertextually ostentatious spaces for witnessing and recognizing justice-making. Formal analysis therefore reveals the spectacular qualities of vengeance cinema and, in turn, reveals the place and function of spectacle in law and courtroom practices as well. Thus, revenge-themed films exist in a courtroom of attractions that resists law's coolly rational facade and reveals its spectacular foundation. iii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS This thesis was originally intended to include various film stills. For a range of reasons, these images have not been included in this final version. Accordingly, I would like to recognize the Film Studies Association of Canada and their efforts promote the fair use of cinematic material for scholarship. Thanks to my friends and colleagues in the Masters program at Carleton and back home in Winnipeg, as the success of my work is owed to their influence and kindness. My gratitude particularly goes to my friend and colleague, Mike Freethy, who has generously reviewed my writing throughout and has never let this process be taken too seriously. Thanks to the faculty at the Department of Film studies who have each let me darken their door with this little project - in particular, Chris Faulkner, who greatly altered the focus of this thesis for the better, and Mitsuyo Wada-Marciano, who was the first to review many of the ideas herein and has been a great supporter since. Great thanks to my supervisor, Andre Loiselle, whose encouragement, insight, and good humour has been invaluable. He is the best. Special thanks to my wonderful and always encouraging parents, Bobbie and Sonny - without whom, I would be nothing (literally and figuratively). I cannot express how grateful I am that both are around to see the conclusion of this project. And thanks most of all to Jenn, whose love, patience, and devotion has been this project's greatest inspiration and motivation. CONTENTS ABSTRACT ii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS iii CONTENTS iv INTRODUCTION 1 1. REPETITION AND PROPORTION 15 Talking the Talk 20 Walking the Walk 25 Compensating on Celluloid 28 2. DISPLAY AND PUBLICITY 38 Wearing Your Harm on Your Sleeve 43 Staging Justice 47 Making Justice-Stages 51 Screening Justice-Making 55 Cinema's Legal Spectacle 62 A Traumatic Aside 67 3. EXCEPTIONS AND CLARIFICATIONS 71 The Brave One: Selective Justness 74 Ocean's Thirteen: Avoiding a Generic Heist 82 Ichi the Killer: Law's Masochistic Inversion 88 4. SPECTACLE AND LAW 101 The Courtroom of Attractions 102 Restoring Violent Spectacle 104 The Fallacy of the Word 113 The Imaginary Life of the Law 120 Tempering Hyperlegality 129 CONCLUSION 138 BIBLIOGRAPHY 1 INTRODUCTION Dr. Evil: "I'm going to place him in an easily escapable situation involving an overly elaborate and exotic death. " Scott Evil: "Why don't you just shoot him now? I mean I'll go get a gun. We '11 shoot him together? It'll be fun. Bang! Dead. Done. " Dr. Evil: "ONE MORE PEEP OUT OF YOU AND YOU ARE GROUNDED, MISTER, AND I AM NOT JOKING!" Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery (Jay Roach, 1997) Since Louis Lumiere filmed a gardener discipline a mischievous, young boy in Arroseur arose (1895), the cinema has continued to show the desire for justice and the spectacle of punishment to be an ever popular subject. Vengeance-themes cross film genres and even modes, whether it is undertaken by frustrated secretaries in 9 to 5 (Colin Higgins, 1980), at the end of a six-shooter in The Bravados (Henry King, 1958), or on the frozen artic of Atanarjuat the Fast Runner (Zacharias Kunuk, 2001). Revenge has similarly crossed industrial and national boundaries to create avengers as varied as kung fu experts in Shaolin Master Killer (Chia-Liang Liu, 1978), Jack Hill's blaxploitation heroines Foxy Brown (1974) and Coffy (1973), the poisonous seductress of Female Demon Ohyaku (Yoshiro Ishikawa, 1968), and even a comic book rocker returned from the dead in Alex Proyas' The Crow (1994). In fact, the variety and sheer number of films with revenge content is remarkable.' This should not be surprising as vengeance themes abound in ' A search of the Internet Movie Database (www.imdb.com) of the keyword "Revenge" identifies no less than 3,606 titles. Reviewing some of these titles leads me to believe that this list is by no means exhaustive and that a truly complete list would notably be still larger, http://www.imdb.com/keyword/revenge/ (accessed April 10,2008). 2 other media. Examples of revenge-themed literature appear similarly limitless - including contemporary works such as Death Wish, Death Sentence, and other books by Brian Garfield and extending back to Hienrich von Kleist's Michael Kohlhaas, Shakespeare's tragedies, the Icelandic Sagas, Biblical stories, and still earlier works. Revenge narratives are so pervasive that they have established their own conventions and, thus, become fodder for parody, as demonstrated in the exchange between Dr. Evil (Mike Myers) and Scott Evil (Seth Green) reproduced above. Dr. Evil resignedly observes shortly after the cited exchange, "Scott, you just don't get it, do you?" And while we appreciate Scott's straightforward approach to villainy informed, no doubt, by numerous James Bond films, we nevertheless understand his father's view. The triumphant meaning derived from Dr. Evil's violent actions is found not merely in the results of those acts, but also by the form and presentation of the violence itself. David Bordwell observes in classical narrative cinema "an extrinsic norm, the need to resolve the plot in a way that yields 'poetic justice,' provides a structural constant, inserted with more or less motivation into its proper slot, the epilogue." Bordwell fails to explain what is meant by 'poetic justice,' appearing to assume that the expression coined by Thomas Rymer in The Tragedies of the Last Age Considered (1678) is now self-explanatory and that its conventions of ironic reversal are intuitively recognizable. In the following pages, poetic justice will have central importance, particularly within the context of the contemporary and frequently violent revenge films 2 David Bordwell, Narration in the Fiction Film (Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press, 1985), 159. 3 reviewed herein.31 maintain that cinema's poetic justice requires that harms be accounted for through a process that involves specifically aesthetic components related to notions of creativity, repetition, proportion, and spectacle. In the context of films containing brutal avengers attempting to account for their losses, formal techniques associated with poetic justice create contextualizing cues that identify violent acts as belonging to legal thinkers and not maniacal individuals "gone postal." Further, this emphasis on the style of punishing acts exists because the manner of the actions themselves is a measure of the poetic justice sought. Ultimately, an understanding of some basic socio-legal principles associated with accounting for harm and punishment provide insight into the formal techniques that comprise the vocabulary of justice-making in film narratives. In turn, the spectacle of poetic justice, as a popularly imagined system of justice-making, provides access to the normally hidden nature of courtroom practices.