Mimesis, Movies and Media: the 3 Annual Conference of The

Mimesis, Movies and Media: The 3rd Annual Conference of the Australian Girard Seminar 18-19 January 2013 University of Western Sydney Paper Abstracts Session 1 Dr. John O’Carroll (Charles Sturt University), “The All-Too-Human Machine: Mimesis, Scapegoat, Medium”. Media theorists of social crisis frequently have recourse to work in the tradition of Stanley Cohen’s Folk Devils and Moral Panics (1972) to explain the bursts of scapegoating that have, since the advent of mass media in the early twentieth century, dominated public life. More recent social media phenomena, such as hate-pages, trolling and flaming have revealed the inadequacy of such approaches, and indeed, that these approaches never were adequate even to what they purported initially to explain. This is so on two levels, the first of which concerns the way such mechanisms work anthropologically, the second, in terms of how these systems are themselves now interpenetrated with techniques and technologies of mediation. Cohen’s book can be challenged on each of these levels, as the theme of this conference on René Girard and the media suggests. The first challenge arises from Girard’s work because he grasps mimetic behavior not just in the usual terms of copycat imitation, but in terms of acquisitive relations. The second challenge to be posed is more difficult to establish: I draw from a reworked communications tradition extending from Jacques Ellul to Jean Baudrillard. Such a synthesis enables a grasp of how such mimesis is embedded in communications techniques themselves. The trajectory of this inquiry as a whole makes it a shuttle-work of sorts. That is, this paper places media at the centre of the inquiry, taking its departure point from Cohen’s classic text, but from a Girardian standpoint, questioning the priority he gives to deviance and difference. Then, however, it returns to the scene of the medium, to pose fundamental questions about a much longer, and it turns out, quite explicable historical pattern. Rev. Canon Dr. Scott Cowdell (Charles Sturt University), “Against Romantic Love: Mimeticism and Satire in Woody Allen’s Vicky, Cristina, Barcelona and To Rome With Love”. In two of his most recent films, Woody Allen appears explicitly to embrace mimetic insight into the nature of desire, with particular reference to romantic love. His exposure of the ‘borrowed desire’ of Vicky and Cristina in the earlier film becomes explicit to the point of savagery in To Rome with Love, with a mimetically aware narrator played by Alec Baldwin who spells it all out for us in case we miss it. Girard’s discussion of ‘desire by another’s eye’ draws on such texts as Shakespeare’s ‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream’ and Dostoyevsky’s The Eternal Husband, though he counsels some Shakespearean reserve in the presentation of this discovery, lest the audience be alienated. The relative unpopularity of these two films by Allen, reflected for instance in much negative comment posted on the At the Movies website, shows that mimetic insight into desire in general and romanticism in particular proves problematic for an audience of modern romantic individualists. In this paper, Girardian theologian Scott Cowdell presents Girardian themes as illustrated in the two films, drawing some implications for the relationship business today. Dr. Rosamund Dalziell (Charles Sturt University), “Media, Murder and Memoir: Girardian Baroque in Robert Drewe’s The Shark Net (2000)”. Robert Drewe’s memoir The Shark Net revisits the novelist’s West Australian childhood and early career as a journalist. The memoir creates disturbing links between Drewe’s own story and identity and that of serial killer Eric Cooke, who terrorised the inner suburbs of Perth in the early 1960s. In this paper I suggest that The Shark Net develops a Girardian mimetic doubling between the middle-class teenaged Drewe and the disadvantaged and physically disfigured Cooke. Drewe depicts the isolated coastal city of Perth in the throes of a mimetic crisis produced by Cooke’s random violence, with local police and journalists in pursuit of scapegoats and sensational stories. The memoir deploys a Baroque emphasis on death, sensuality and the grotesque to convey the feverish atmosphere of the mimetic crisis and the sacralisation of the criminal as victim. The Shark Net was adapted as an ABC miniseries first screened in 2003. Session 2 Dr. Joel Hodge (Australian Catholic University), “Superheroes, Scapegoats and Saviours”. The superhero genre has been undergoing a revival in film, with the making of movie series utilising the characters of such superheroes as Batman, Superman and Spiderman (amongst others) in philosophically interesting or sophisticated ways. The genre of superhero films presents interesting questions about justice, human finitude, violence, the scapegoat mechanism, mimetic modelling and Christian archetypes. I intend to explore these questions in relation to two superhero characters recently made into new series, Batman (the Dark Knight trilogy) and Superman (Superman Returns). In particular, I will examine the films for how they treat the following themes: justice and violence; the escalation to extremes and scapegoating; and, mimetic modelling and saviour-figures (as Christ-like archetypes, drawing on Christian insights into desire, scapegoating and morality). I will show that these superhero genres seek to provide a way out of negative mimesis and injustice through a saviour-figure, who has the mimetic and moral traits of a Christ-like figure. On the other hand, while these films show penetrating insights into mimetic violence, rivalry and moral/spiritual values, they still contain problematic aspects that emerge with the use of violence and super-powers; some of which are explored in the movies themselves. Dr. Matthew Tan (Campion College), “Conversion in Dexter”. This paper would apply Girardian analyses on the novel to the television series Dexter. It begins by arguing that the series constitutes a dramatised novel written by Dexter Morgan, in view of the constant reflections not only of his life, but also the lives of others, all of which form a narrative backdrop to each episode in the series. Framing Dexter as a novel helps explain two interconnecting things: the prevalence of Dexter's engagement with religious motifs and his transformation from self-serving enthusiast to other-centred family man and rescuer. However, the transformation seen in Dexter as the Dexterian novel progresses falls short of a Girardian conversion in which “the last distinctions between novelistic and religious experiences are abolished”, a failure evinced by the continuation of Dexter's pattern of killing forming the primary backdrop of the whole series, even whilst the transformation is taking place. With reference to Gil Bailie's analysis of the trial of Susanna in the Book of Daniel in Violence Unveiled, this paper attributes the continuation of Dexter's pattern of violence to the continuing temporal immanence of his religious encounters and responses. Dr. Nigel Zimmermann (University of Notre Dame Australia), “The Butler did it: A Girardian reading of the problem of class in the popular British period drama, Downton Abbey”. In this paper, the themes of religion and class in the popular British period drama, Downton Abbey, will be read through the critical lens of René Girard’s theory of mimetic violence. By utilising a Girardian reading of a television depiction of post-Edwardian aristocracy, it will be argued that problems of hierarchy and class are not absent from the popular imagination in contemporary culture. Two distinct classes are apparent in the drama, those of the Crawley family and the household staff who serve the Crawleys with varying levels of personal commitment. Downton’s complex arrangement of interweaving desires and social assumptions makes for compelling viewing because the presumption of class on some inherently ontological level is held by most of the characters most of the time. Of particular interest here is the Butler, Mr Charles ‘Charlie’ Carson (‘Mr Carson’), whose stoic commitment to class differentiation appears perplexing to the modern mind, and at other times endearingly cultured. The hints of religious commitment to an establishment in which class violence helps some to prosper and hurts others only accentuates a lack of Christian imagination in such a social model. Paper Session 3 Concurrent Session 1 Carly Osborn (University of Adelaide), “Dreams Decaying: American Utopias and Tragic Violence”. Postwar America was a fertile breeding ground for a revitalised utopian idealism, based on the tenets of the American Dream. But as the nuclear threat of cold war escalated, and the gaudy trinkets of mass consumerism failed to satisfy, suburban America became a site of disillusionment, decay, and cultural crisis. My paper is an expressly Girardian reading of two late-20th-century tragic novels in this context: Rick Moody’s The Ice Storm and Richard Yates’s Revolutionary Road. In each of these novels, the promised utopia of suburbia becomes instead a place of crisis, violence, and blame. Each of the novels I am studying has been made into a major film. I will do a reading of the movies specifically at the AGS Conference. I consider, from a Girardian perspective, the function of tragedy for American suburban communities in crisis. I explore the Judeo-Christian influence on American culture, and ask to what extent the American Dream is rooted in Scriptural values, and to what extent it is rooted in what Girard would call the ‘tragic’, the rivalrous, the sacrificial. An examination of these ideals’ roots leads to speculation about their consequences: if the American Dream is, by its nature, rivalrous, then is it a catalyst for inevitable sacrificial crisis and catastrophe? Debra MacDonald (University of Auckland), “The Dark Knight and My Community Gotham”. Christopher Nolan’s 2008 Batman film The Dark Knight was inspired by the Joker's comic book debut in 1940, Moore and Bolland’s graphic novel The Killing Joke (1988) and the 1996 series The Long Halloween by Loeb and Sale.

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