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* Pb Omslag Transfigurations FILM CULTURE IN TRANSITION VIOLENCE,VIOLENCE, DEATH,DEATH, ANDAND MASCULINITYMASCULINITY ININ AMERICANAMERICAN CINEMACINEMA TRANSTRANS-- FIGURATIONSFIGURATIONS ASBJØRN GRØNSTAD Amsterdam University Press Transfigurations Transfigurations Violence, Death and Masculinity in American Cinema Asbjørn Grønstad Front cover illustration: Still from the movie American Psycho (), starring Christian Bale Cover design: Kok Korpershoek, Amsterdam Lay-out: japes, Amsterdam isbn (paperback) isbn (hardcover) nur © Asbjørn Grønstad / Amsterdam University Press, All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this book may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise) without the written permission of both the copyright owner and the author of the book. Contents Acknowledgments Prolegomenon Introduction: Film Violence as Figurality I Screen Violence: Five Fallacies Empiricism Aristotelianism Aestheticism Mythologicism Mimeticism II Filming Death 1 The Transfigured Image 2 Narrating Violence, or, Allegories of Dying III Male Subjectivities at the Margins 3 MeanStreets:DeathandDisfigurationinHawks’s Scarface 4Kubrick’s The Killing and the Emplotment of Death 5 Blood of a Poet: Peckinpah’s The Wild Bunch 6 As I Lay Dying: Violence and Subjectivity in Tarantino’s Reservoir Dogs 7 One-Dimensional Men: Fincher’s Fight Club and the End of Masculinity Postscript 6 Transfigurations Notes Bibliography Index of Names Index of Film Titles Index of Subjects Acknowledgments Academic work rarely takes place in a void, and over the course of the research- ing and writing of this text I have incurred many debts to a number of institu- tions and individuals. The Faculty of Arts, University of Bergen, made this re- search possible by providing me first with a two-month research grant (- ) to write a thesis proposal, and then with a four-year stipend (-) to write the dissertation that became the basis of this book. I also wish to thank the Fulbright Foundation for a grant that enabled me to spend the - academic year at the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s excellent research facil- ities; the Norway-America Association and the Norwegian Research Council, whose grants facilitated subsequent visits to Madison; the L. Meltzers Høyskolefond for numerous grants which allowed me to present material from the dissertation at various international conferences; the Department of Com- munication Arts, University of Wisconsin-Madison, for assisting me in every way during my many sojourns there; and last but not least, the English Depart- ment, for always being so cooperative and accommodating. Thanks are also due to the Wisconsin Center for Film and Theater Research; UW-M’s Memorial Library; and, above all, the University Library in Bergen, whose staff members have been immensely perseverant in putting up with my seemingly never-end- ing loan requests. A second thank you to the Norwegian Research Council for generously providing me with a publication grant for this project. Several friends and colleagues have at various stages contributed valuable commentary to parts of the manuscript. My warmest thanks go to Ruben Moi, Øyvind Vågnes, Øyunn Hestetun, Orm Øverland, Charles Armstrong, Lene Jo- hannesen, Anne Holden Rønning, Andrew Kennedy, Randi Koppen, Janne Sti- gen Drangsholt, and Michael Prince for their input. For their helpful sugges- tions I am also grateful to the many scholars I have met at conferences in Europe and in the United States, particularly the participants at the conferences “Nordic Film Theory at the Turn of the Millenium” in Copenhagen in December and the “East-West American Studies Conference” held at the Johann Wolfgang Goethe-Universität in Frankfurt in May . My work has also benefited from conversations with David Bordwell, Per Persson, Panayiota Mini, Eija Niskanen, Erik Hedling, Torben Grodal, and Adriana Neagu. I also owe special thanks to Nick Browne and Anne Jerslev for their careful reading of the manuscript and for articulating their criticism so elegantly and constructively during my doctoral defense in December .I 8 Transfigurations am also grateful to my co-advisor Peter Larsen for his productive observations and incisive insights. Since I joined the Department of Information Science and Media Studies in , I have much enjoyed its convivial environment and the many stimulating discussions with my friends and colleagues there. I would also like to thank Thomas Elsaesser for his judicious reading of the manuscript and for suggesting alterations to it that proved to be composition- ally significant. I am greatly indebted to my editor at Amsterdam University Press and to its staff – Jaap Wagenaar, Jeroen Sondervan, Marieke Soons, An- niek Meinders, Randy Lemaire, and Magdalena Hernas – for their excellent work and efficiency. Kristian Jensen also deserves thanks for making the indices for me. A very special thank you goes to Željka Švrljuga, mentor, colleague and friend, for her unflinching encouragement, boundless patience, and inestimable guidance. Finally, my deepest thanks go to my friends and family, my parents Liv-Tor- unn og John Grønstad for their constant support and encouragement, and my dear Stephanie and Sunniva, for making the days radiant. Some segments of this book have been previously published in abridged or slightly different versions. Chapter has been published as “Mean Streets: Death and Disfiguration in Hawks’s Scarface,” in Nordic Journal of English Stu- dies, . (). Chapter has appeared as “As I Lay Dying: Violence and Sub- jectivity in Tarantino’s Reservoir Dogs,” in Karen Patrick Knutsen, Elin Nesje, and Eva Lambertsson Bjørk, eds. Modi Operandi. Høgskolen i Østfold, , and a version of chapter has been published as “One-Dimensional Men: Fight Club and the Poetics of the Body,” in Film Criticism . (). I thank the anon- ymous referees for helpful suggestions and the editors for the permission to reuse the material. Prolegomenon Please note: This exhibition contains extremely graphic and violent images, which may offend some viewers Poster outside the Porter Butts Gallery, Memorial Union One day during one of my field trips to the University of Wisconsin-Madison, I went to the Memorial Union’s Porter Butts Gallery to see an exhibition called “Representations of Violence: Art of the Sierra Leonean Civil War.” Consisting overwhelmingly of atrocious images, the works on display – nearly all of which were by young Sierra Leonean artists – transmitted a Boschian sense of horror whose lingering impression did not cease to repulse the spectator. Moses Sil- ma’s “Kamajors Attack on Koribondo” () and “The Bo-Freetown Highway Ambush” (), and Ayo Peters’s “January , Invasion” () rendered in a fashion suggestive of comic-book graphics the mutilation and torture of civilian Leonean men, women, and children by the Revolutionary United Front (RUF). At that stage of my book project I had already interrogated and aban- doned, examined and rejected a number of theories on the topic of both actual and artistic forms of violence, though my sole emphasis throughout has been on the latter. So, could it be that the caveat at the gallery’s entrance, quoted epigra- phically at the top of this page, was also intended for someone who in a mo- ment that in retrospect seems oddly foolhardy had decided to research a subject as elusive and recalcitrant as screen violence? Was I among the viewers of- fended by this exhibition’s images? The pictures appalled me more than any- thing I can recall having seen, except for perhaps the first twenty minutes of Gaspar Noé’s Irréversible (). But for all the unpleasantness of my gallery tour I found the encounter stran- gely rewarding, not necessarily in and of itself, but because of its experiential adjacency to the viewing of another work of art that had captured my attention only days before. This was Carlos Saura’s metafictional musical Tango (), a sumptuous yet minimalist homage to the gracefulness of the Argentinean dance. I was particularly drawn to a sequence near the end, where the film- maker within the film stages a theatrical, expressionistic ballet that references the misdeeds of Jorge Rafael Videla’s dictatorship in a coloramic choreography whose preternatural movements seemed to truncate the space between violence and art. I was reminded of the popular belief that the sequences of steps that 10 Transfigurations evolved into the tango allegedly were a derivation of the knife-wielding postur- al violence of the patrons of the brothels and bars of late th-century Buenos Aires. If the balletic convulsions of Bonnie and Clyde () and The Wild Bunch () could be described as dances of death by proxy, the tango ballet that was the climax of Saura’s film was a far more literal, yet at the same time no less figural dance of death. Somehow I sensed a connection, an amorphous si- milarity, between the Saurian performance and those of Arthur Penn and Sam Peckinpah. I also read that, according to Paula Ponga (), Videla’s henchmen would play loud tango music as they tortured their victims. Pondering what increasingly appeared to be the indissolubility of poetics and cruelty in Saura’s narrative, I became aware of the emblematic expediency of the tango as a meta- phor for the enigmatically intertwined phenomena of aesthetics and violence, imagination and destruction, desire and revulsion, narrative and spectacle, ethics and form. Here was a sequence of film that sublimated these contradic- tions, that not only made violence aesthetic but the aesthetic violent. I can think of no more apposite term for this numinous process than transfiguration. Enraptured by the film yet repelled by the exhibition, the peculiar incongruity of my response to these two artifacts elicited further questions. I began to re- contemplate Representations of Violence. Armed with a notebook, a pencil, a lap- top, and finally even a camera, I revisited the gallery for a second and then a third time. The more I scrutinized the pictures the less I came to like them.
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