One may even speak of a culture, in which senseless killing and violence now belong to the Serbs’ sense of themselves: as a wounded people that keep on wounding themselves, and even their best friends and neighbours. We can apply Mark Seltzer’s notion of America’s “wound culture” to modern Serbia. The wound stands paradigmatically as a metaphor for a culture that is traumatized by endless war and everyday violence, and morbidly obsessed with it.

-Igor Krstic, Serbia’s Wound Culture: Teenage Killers in Milosevic’s Serbia. p. 101

The social and psychological impact of genocide on a people is undeniable. In the wake of such a catastrophic event, the mind must attempt to process the hows and whys of what has happened and find a way to live in the aftermath of those events. The pain and suffering of the genocide become a part of the cultural identity of both victims and perpetrators and the evidence of this newfound component of their cultural identity trickles down through all levels of society. An excellent example is the media which a culture produces in the wake of genocide. The artists who create these creative works are not any more or less affected by the genocide than any other members of society and, deliberately or subconsciously, their works of art will reflect the changes that have occurred in the wake of genocide or other devastating cultural event. In this paper we use Srdan Dragojevic’s Rane(which translates as “The Wounds”) as a case study to explore the role of film and media in understanding the advent and consequences of genocide to a people. Due to the restriction of space, we will assume that the reader has a general familiarity with the Bosnian genocide, though all information pertinent to the examples given from the film will be included. While, optimally, we would spend a thousand words on both the Bosnian genocide and critical film theory, this would prevent us from achieving the level of analysis required to answer the question. We will also assume that readers have seen Rane and a copy has been included with this submission. Let us begin with a short summary of the interpretive methods we will use to analyse Rane.

The first thing we must acknowledge, when critically examining a film, is that it is completely constructed, an artifice which has been created through an enormous process of deliberation and arrangement. Each component of a film has been placed there to the exclusion of thousands of other possible choices. From the soundtrack to the lighting, the character names to what appears in any given shot, every detail has been deliberately placed before us on the screen. In the academic jargon of cinema studies, this construction is referred to as mise en scene. This stems from a French phrase which literally means “putting into the scene” and was first applied to the practice of directing plays. It was adopted by film scholars to describe the director’s control over what appears in the film frame. Secondly, we must briefly outline a key concept in cinema studies, that of the auteur. Like photography, when film first appeared, it was considered too industrial to be an artistic endeavour.  It used machinery to reproduce an image and studios mass produced films for public consumption. As a result, film makers were relegated to the category of technicians, rather than artists. At the very least, particularly in France, a distinction was drawn between commercial film (typically American) and the European Art Film movement. This changed in the mid-1950s, when a group of young French filmmakers published a number of articles in Cashiers du Cinema, a prominent French film journal, which asserted the idea of the film director as artist. They argued that, of all the hundreds of people who contributed to a film, the director had the most broad-reaching control and, thus, authorial voice. They claimed that, over the career of particular directors, we can see certain trends or preoccupations in their films and it is these directors that can truly be considered artists or auteurs. It is very important that we bear these two concepts in mind because, in our analysis of Rane, we will be regarding Srdan Dragojevic as an auteur and referring to his manipulation of mise en scene to educate his audience about the Bosnian Genocide. Now, without further delay, we will examine what we can learn from Rane about the cultural legacy and impact of the Bosnian Genocide on the Serbian and Croatian people.

At its heart, Rane is a film about what happens to a generation of young men who are disconnected from their cultural inheritance of masculinity and community, and the new cultural practices which they introduce to replace those which have been lost. Using the classic structure of a Hollywood Film Noir (two friends, torn apart by a femme fatal and a corrupt world) Rane presents us with a picture of progressive social and economic deterioration in Serbia between 1991 and 1996. It follows the descent of two young Serbian boys, Pinki and Svaba (which loosely translates to ‘Kraut’) into the expansive criminal underground which arose in Serbia during the Yugoslav wars. The film is almost obsessive in its exploration of the disappearance of Serbian traditional folk culture and its replacement with kitsch trash culture and, particularly among young men, wound culture. We will begin by exploring the idea of the rise of trash culture in Serbia during the 1990s, we will then explore the idea of wound culture.

Over the course of any protracted conflict a great number of people die. When we add genocide to the mix, the number greatly increases. Let us consider for a moment the demographic most likely to engage in, and die as a result of, warfare. On both sides of a conflict it is the 18 to 30 year old males who fight. In the case of Serbia, not only did many men die during the Yugoslav wars of the 1990s, many had died during the Yugoslav People’s Liberation War (which occurred during World War II in Yugoslavia). The natural effect of this was that many young people growing up in Serbia and Croatia in the 1990s did not have fathers or grandfathers from whom they could inherit their cultural rites of passage, celebrations or religious practices. Even when these rites or events were observed, such an observation became a pale, superficial imitation of the original practice. The result is the amalgamation of traditional Eastern European folklore with popular culture which fills the void left from the severed familial link to the original beliefs and practices of the culture. This cultural heritage is replaced by a “trash culture” which is “replete with signs, commodities and symbols of kitsch, camp and trash” (Krstic, 98). We can see countless examples and representations of this trash culture in Rane, in fact the mise en scene is relentless in its depiction of the new Serbian culture of the 1990s.

The most immediate example of trash culture presented to the viewer in Rane is the blaring Turbofolk soundtrack which assaults the audience during the opening credits and continues as a prominent feature of the film’s soundtrack. Dutch anthropologist, Mathijs van de Port describes Turbofolk as an amalgamation of text, vision and music which draws upon the traditional and modern. Classic folk melodies are used to sing about contemporary topics such as “foreign currency, weekend romances, tractors and bio-energy” (Mathijs van de Port, 57). The traditional meanings and significance of the songs are lost, discarded in favour of the trappings of modern, commercial life. There are several clues which suggest to us that Turbofolk serves a greater function than merely acting as a soundtrack or audio context for the film. Significantly, if we look to Kure (which is an affectionate shortening of a Serbian name, the loose equivalent to “Dickie” or “Sammy”) and Suzana (Pinki and Svaba’s first mentors in the ways of the Serbian criminal underground) we find stellar examples of Turbofolk culture. Suzana herself is a Turbofolk singer and both her and Kure surround themselves with the material symbols of trash culture; gold crucifix pendants, a BMW and brand clothing and shoes. Kure wears a crucifix, but doesn’t attend church or express any faith in the film. The crucifix has ceased to be a symbol of Christianity and become a symbol of Serbian cultural heritage. Similarly, while shooting heroin Kure demands that Pinki and Svaba sing Serbian folk songs not because he believes in the message of the songs, but because (like his crucifix) they are one of the handful of things he has to connect him to his culture.

At the other end of the spectrum, we find Svaba’s grandmother who lives in an urban apartment, surrounded by chickens and living in the glow of her television screen. Fed copious amounts of narcotics by her grandson, she exists in a twilight world in which the modern and traditional merge, where she recounts stories of the massacres of the Second World War in a fairy tale narrative format. With the exception of her grandson, Svaba, all of her family are dead (or at least absent) and her only connection to the world is through the trash culture lens of her grandson and her television. We can see from this that Rane presents us with a society which is experiencing a cultural vaccum, which is in part being filled by trash culture. Trash culture, however, is not the only thing which fills this void nor is the primary concern of the film. There is a darker consequence to the cultural void left by the Yugoslav wars and Bosnian genocide; Wound Culture.

From the very first scene of Rane, Dragojevic presents us with a world dripping with violence and the after effects of violence. This violence and violent culture is often intimately paired with the images of trash culture which we discussed above. For example, the film begins in (and spends much of its time in) a graveyard, which houses both graves and the rusted chassis of old cars and buses. This amalgamation of scrap-yard and graveyard images suggests a close link between the mass-production and consumption of trash culture and death. Similarly, while Kure does push-ups and watches Puls Asfalta (a television show in the film in which criminals are idolized and interviewed) we can see an image of the Last Supper in the background, another marriage of the religious or spiritual simulacra of trash culture and the death and violent crime which were rife in 1990s Serbia. The very first image we see in the film is a crucifix pendant (complete with crucified Christ figure) which is immediately paired with the introduction of the main character, Pinki, who is nursing what appear to be grievous gunshot wounds. Repeatedly, Dragojevic pairs the cultural vacuum of trash culture with death, injury and pain. Perhaps the ultimate instance of this pairing occurs in a scene in which Kure engages in a titanic brawl (in which he wields an entire spit roasted pig as a bizarre bludgeoning weapon) in the club in which Suzana works, while she weeps and sing a Turbofolk song as the fight rages beneath her. While the mise en scene of Rane contains an abundant amount of pairings between the violent and the kitsch, suggesting a cultural centrality of violence in 1990s Serbia, we need not limit ourselves to the subtleties of mise en scene to understand the film’s message about Serbian wound culture; we need only look to the film’s protagonists, Pinki and Svaba.

From the start of the film, we know that violence, and in particular wounds, are central to the film. When we are introduced to Pinki and Svaba they are in a car, driving through the tumultuous anti-Milosevic protests of 1996, Pinki nursing some grievous wounds. The violent and frenetic aesthetic of the riots (much of the footage we see of them is archival) suggests a general violence and destabilization in the characters’ environment, while Pinki’s wounds (and the casual way in which he relates to them) firmly grounds that violent aesthetic in the realm of the personal. We then flashback to the previously mentioned graveyard / scrapyard in which Pinki and Svaba play Serbs vs Croats (essentially cowboys and Indians) with their friend Dijabola. Teams are not chosen, but are allocated based on the ethnicity of the boys fathers, this means that Pinki and Svaba default to Serb and Dijabola defaults to Croatian. We know from the dialogue that these boys have grown up together and consider one another friends, but now one of the ways in which they ritually relate to one another is to throw rocks at each other because of their ethnic differences. When Dijabola cries and asserts that he isn’t a Croat, Svaba replies “Serbs don’t cry like pussies”. This may seem like an inconsequential moment, which could be attributed to male adolescence, but in the context of the ethnically motivated stoning of Dijabola and the arbitrary system of categorization we are given a window into the bizarre nature of the Yugoslav wars. These boys have no reason to hurt one another, but they do, ritualistically, as if it were expected.

Earlier, when discussing the rise of trash culture, we noted that one of the central factors in creating this cultural vacuum is the absence of paternal figures and this is central, perhaps even more so, to the rise of wound culture. As mentioned above, Svaba’s parents are completely absent and he lives with his grandmother in an urban apartment, completely devoid of a father figure. Pinki lives with his parents and, while he has a father, he’s somewhat of a buffoon. While Pinki loves his father it is clear that he does not respect him however, unlike Svaba, he at least has a male role-model. Svaba substitutes his absent father with one of the only prominent figures of masculinity in the neighbourhood, Kure. Kure never fought for any cause and places little or no worth in traditional Serbian culture. As we have described earlier, Kure is the poster child for trash culture and a gangster. Svaba introduces Pinki to Kure and the two begin to work for him, dealing drugs. Svaba is the most loyal and zealous to Kure’s lifestyle and philosophy. He eagerly engages in violent crime and Kure’s initiation ceremonies (such as running headlong into Kure’s fist repeatedly as a measure of withstanding pain) while Pinki remains distant. This resistance to the violent lifestyle and philosophy of Kure and Svaba abruptly ends when Pinki’s father kills himself. He joins Svaba in a spiralling descent into drugs and violent crime, and even explicitly states “Torture helped me forget my stupid dead father”. The two become obsessed with being gangsters, not with the profits of crime, but the status of it. Ultimately, however, there is no greater example of Wound Culture and the results of a cultural vacuum from a war than the chilling final scene of the film.

After a dispute over a lover Svaba shoots Pinki five times. Pinki prematurely leaves hospital, finds Svaba and the two travel to the graveyard to complete an unspoken pact. There is no malice or hatred between the two boys, just an understanding that in order to level the score, Pinki must shoot Svaba five times. They even stop at a pharmacist to get bandages and gauze so that Svaba won’t bleed to death. For these boys this is the only way to resolve the situation. Dijabola arrives with an automatic weapon and, in a grim parody of the opening scene the boys play out their Serbian vs Croatian game, this time with bullets instead of rocks. The result is a harsh condemnation of the Milosevic regime and its effects on subsequent generations, particularly the young men of those generations.

To conclude we can see, even from this brief overview that Dragojevic’s Rane is completely fixated on the cultural devastation which occurred as a result of the Yugoslav wars and Bosnian genocide. More than exploiting a moment in history for dramatic effect, Dragojecic shows us the consequences of the loss of patriarchs from a traditionally patriarchal society. We can see that when Serbia lost its connection to its traditional, cultural heritage a cultural vacuum was created, which was filled with trash culture and wound culture and Dragojevic is a true auteur in the sense that he has a clear agenda to educate people about post-Tito Serbia. At every moment he meticulously manipulates the mise en scene of his film to communicate the trappings of trash and wound culture. There was, unfortunately, much we did not have space to cover and this author encourages you, and anyone interested in the cultural impact of the Yugoslav wars, to look closely at Rane. It is a powerful and convincing model for the things we can learn from fictional films which explore historical events.

Bibliography and Further Reading List

• Benson, L. Yugoslavia: A concise history. Palgrave MacMillan. London: UK. 2002.
• Bordwell, D. & Thompson K. Film Art: An Introduction, 7^th edn, McGraw-Hill, New York: New York. 2004.
• Gabrino, J. Beyond the Body Count: Moderating the effects of war on children. In R. Lerner (ed) Handbook of Applied Developmental Science. Volume 2. Sage Publications. Thousand Oaks: California. 2003.
• Krstic, I. Serbia’s Wound Culture: Teenage Killers in Milosevic’s Serbia. In Horton, A. (ed) The Central Europe Review: The Celluloid Tinderbox. www.ce-review.org published 2000. Viewed on 5/10/2009.
• Leavitt, L. & Fox, N. The Psychological Effects of War and Violence on Children. Laurence Erlbaum Associates, Hillsdale: New Jersey. 1993
• Mcleod, M. Saw and spectre of 9/11 in contemporary horror. Published 10/11/2008 www.pleasantfluff.com/saw viewed on 10/10/2009.
• Norwell-Smith, G. (ed) The Oxford History of World Cinema, 1^st edn, Oxford University Press, Oxford: New York. 1996.
• Rane, Srdan Dragojevic (dir), Performances: Dusan Pekic & Milan Maric. DVD. First Run Features. 2000.
• Van de Port, M. Gypsies, Wars and Other Instances of the Wild. Civilisation in a Serbian Town. Amsterdam, 1998.

By virtue of much academic deliberation, it is legitimately possible to separate screen violence into two distinct periods: that of classical and modern film (spanning roughly from the nineteen-thirties to the nineteen-fifties), which was imbued by its elegance and theatricality with innate meaning, and that of post modern film (the late sixties onwards), which was simply too obsessed with the act itself and how that violence could be exploited to have any of the classical meaning of its historical predecessor. Through example of three films: Raoul Walsh’s White Heat (1949), David Fincher’s Fight Club (1999) and Kinji Fukasaku’s Battle Royale (2000), this essay intends to show how valued judgments about the measure of ‘meaning’ present in a depiction of violence based upon opposing classical or post modern cinematic treatments is entirely too insensitive to the subjective and philosophically nuanced nature of meaningfulness.

The first thing to be established is what constitutes classical and modern cinematic violence. Stephen Prince, in his introductory essay Graphic Violence in the Cinema: Origins, Aesthetics, Design, and Social Effects, quite stringently unifies this period of screen violence with Hollywood’s Production Code, an administrative board that operated up until the late sixties, reviewing all Hollywood film content and verifying that there were no socially irresponsible treatments of themes before approving its production. It was the Code that ensured, in Prince’s words, “[the] countless Westerns[’] and urban crime dramas[’]…shooting victims frowned and sunk gracefully out of frame, with their white shirts immaculate” (Prince 2000, 3).

With reference to the “urban crime dramas”, the films Prince discusses are from the early years of the gangster cycle, the thirties. This is because he is very interested in the social science of how screen violence affects its audience, and this period of films saw the birth of the so-dedicated Payne Fund Studies. However, it is interesting to note that even with these films emerging as early as 1930, the Production Code deemed them tasteful enough that they could be fit for public consumption.

This much stayed the same for a long time: after James Cagney’s chilling performance as gangster Tom Powers in The Public Enemy (1931), he could be found again playing a chilling Hollywood gangster eighteen years later in our first film of discussion, White Heat. Purely in relation to the aesthetics and design of the violence, Prince has this to say of White Heat’s climactic shoot-out:

[A] government sniper repeatedly shoots Cody Jarrett (James Cagney)… but Jarrett refuses to fall. He takes the high-powered shots without succumbing in an episode of sustained and brutal violence. The visual treatment, though, makes the violence implicit and surprisingly indirect. The action shows Jarrett at a distance, in longshots that make it difficult to see that he is, in fact, being shot repeatedly. Furthermore, in keeping with the period’s filmic norms, none of the bullet strikes on Jarrett are visualized. The pictorial treatment glosses the scene’s exceptional brutality by hiding its details (Prince 2000, 5)

What Prince seems to imply is that audiences may be freer to feel the thematic or visceral meaning of Cody Jarret’s death because, by virtue of cinematic treatment, we don’t have to think about the literal physicality of his bloody demise. Such an observation calls to mind other scenes of violence in White Heat: the suspenseful scene in the first act, for example, where Fallon is forced to resort to violence in the vaccination queue to avoid being recognized by Creel, or Jarrett’s execution of Parker where he simply fires a number of rounds through the boot of the car. These scenes of violence do, as Prince notes, “hide the details”, and their impact within the story fares very well for it.

As will be discussed with the next two films shortly, the narrative context of the film’s violence is equally important. White Heat is about the world of crime, and so the titillation of potential vicarious violence is a key factor in the film and why audiences would watch it. Probably the most ‘classical’ aspect of the film comes in the way Walsh chose to interpret this sense of titillation and anticipation in viewers: he applied it to the gangster character, not necessarily the gangster acts. While Cody Jarret has a number of violent scenes, they are indirectly handled and paced out over the entire film, and so what they lend their credence to is not violence as an act and a reality but Cody Jarrett as a scary and charismatically intense killer.

This is a fair approach to explaining the argument for post modern cinematic violence lacking meaning: it is, truthfully, more difficult to reconcile the thematic and characterized place of screen violence when it is impinging so directly on the visceral responses that undercut the cerebral (such as in graphic gore). However, this is where discussions about the subjective nature of meaningfulness must arise and seek to raise the question of whether ‘meaning’ in the cinema can legitimately transcend the boundaries of classical cinematic ideology and exist in the realm of the post modern and the metatextual.

In other words, can meaning be derived from the very literalness of post modern cinematic violence and its visceral effects? Prince, in another of his essays, notes that “[c]onsiderable evidence exists showing that viewers respond to media violence with increases in their levels of heart rate, skin temperature, and blood pressure, and that these responses have some duration – that they linger after the stimulus is gone” (Prince 2003, 249). While not the sole manner in which representations of violence in post modern film can illicit meaning, the act of witnessing such violence can be so visceral that the viewer themselves can’t control it, and succumbs to reacting to images with real fear. It could be argued that whereas the violence of White Heat achieves meaning by the measure of art on art’s terms – as a “work in its inert, objectal form… taken as a clue or a symptom for some vaster reality which replaces it as its ultimate truth” (Jameson 59) –violence such as that seen in Fight Club and Battle Royale may achieve meaning by the measure of art on life’s terms – as works that are not ultimately (or, at least, completely) replaced by vaster reality, but which corroborate with their audiences to reconcile themselves with that reality.

Naturally, of course, violence in post modern cinema can have greater and more multifaceted effects on an audience than the simple immediate shock of its image. With reference to Fight Club and Battle Royale, I’d like now to discuss how the aforementioned model for viewing post modern violence can be extrapolated. The ideas being expanded on here are that graphic or ‘gratuitous’ violence is not only capable of galvanizing meaning in the responses of viewers but across an entire society, and that even while remaining graphic and explicit, death and violence can retain some of the classical ‘meaning’ of modern cinema.

Fincher’s Fight Club, made half a century after White Heat, is a film that treats its violence in a most radically different manner to that of Walsh. As far as post modern cinema is concerned, Fight Club could almost be categorized in genre as ‘a violent film’, because it is about violence in every way, and refuses to treat it as merely a device or an aesthetic or even an act but some kind of ideology or philosophy. In Fight Club, we witness violence repeatedly, we witness violence having effect on not just the protagonist but an entire imagined society and generation, we are subjected to violent filmmaking techniques and soundtrack, and when none of this is happening, characters simply sit around and talk about violence. In its obsessive density, it is a film thoroughly concerned with the tenuous nature of masculine civilization as being drawn by some dark and violent siren. Here two manners in which the post modern representations of violence in Fight Club attain meaningfulness will be discussed.

The opening scene begins with an extended (beginning at molecular level) zoom-out from the brain-matter of the protagonist that concludes by intimately traversing the length of a gun-barrel until what we are left with is the head-on visual frame of a pistol, extended from the camera and into Edward Norton’s mouth. The intimacy is key – this entire sequence shows both a visual and thematic intimacy with violence, and also with cultural treatment of violence (the pistol is an automatic weapon for utmost sleekness and sexiness). Even the Narrator of the film is strangely intimate with and articulate about the most horrific of violent circumstances: “With a gun-barrel between your teeth, you speak only in vowels,” he informs us, by way of introduction.

Violent images in Fight Club continue with this trend, in that they are at their most graphic and ‘gratuitous’ when they correlate thematically with a heightened moment of ‘intimacy with violence’ for the Narrator. Here we can discern some of the methods of treatment that classical and modern films use for violence: as legitimate moments in storytelling that relate back to the central character. The post modern twist is that the moments in Fight Club are extreme and detailed, underscoring the intensity with which this particular central character skews his world violently, and making us all the more intimate with him: the blood-mask on the basement floor, the lye-branding scene, the climactic violent image of Edward Norton shooting himself through the face. All these scenes are brutal in their depictions, and all mark highly significant moments of the main character intimating himself with violence, for various purposes (to feel alive, to hit ‘rock bottom’, and finally to ‘kill’ Tyler Durdan).

So the meaning of the violence in Fight Club is, at least from a classical perspective, its own literalness in relation with the narrative. To be told this post modern fable, and to appreciate it in its entirety, it is imperative that we see the full extent of what the men of the film do to each other. And, the film is insistent: we see the Narrator treated for his grievous injuries, and his face remains in increasingly bruised and broken states of aftermath throughout. Angel Face (Jared Leto) emerges supremely symbolic in this light: a young and beautiful boy beaten nearly to death by the Narrator in a true instance of psychopathic aggression, and left for the rest of the film disfigured beyond all recognition. In both cases, images and aesthetics of violence (in the form of the wounded face) are present even when the physical act is past, which of course is what the lye-branding serves to galvanize. These images are all crucial to understanding how the Narrator and subsequently the film relate to violence as a condition of life, which underlies the more powerful moments of violent action.

Aside from the classically derived uses of graphic violence as meaningful to a narrative and to a character, Fight Club’s violence achieves another and much more post modern meaningfulness. It is simply of Hollywood stars like Brad Pitt and Edward Norton, glossed with seductive production that erupts with product placement, committing brutal and unconscionable acts of violence. This meaningfulness of violence is acknowledged in the film as ‘subversion’, but it is really something much more specific than that. What the representations of violence in Fight Club illuminate is that

this whole global, yet American, postmodern culture is the internal and superstructural expression of a whole new wave of American military and economic domination throughout the world: in this sense, as throughout class history, the underside of culture is blood, torture, death and horror (Jameson 57)

Most principally, then, it is the application of post modern theories to the images of violence in Fincher’s film through which the violence can be read as meaningful. Handled as though it were a product of the very cultural memes it attacks with furious vigour, Fight Club’s violence seeks to puncture the bubble of American cultural “domination throughout the world” and impose upon it “the underside of culture”, the ugly truth about what societal problems may be attached to this cultural wave.

The theme of screen violence facilitating a satirical clash between societal problems and cultural waves is also prevalent in Battle Royale, made one year later and on the other side of the globe. Fukasaku’s film is not as grandly and brazenly post modern as Fincher’s, in that there is less evident metatextual awareness: Battle Royale frames characters who unreservedly take their world to be real and legitimate and it is only through our own perspective as audience that we can detect satirical element, whereas Fight Club has a Narrator aware he’s telling a story, characters that comment on the formal structure of the film and a joke that operates under the façade of a misplaced frame in the projected reel providing the movie’s images (which became even more post modern on VHS and DVD release).

Although its nature as a satire gives Battle Royale a post modern edge, the majority of post modernity in the film is more to do with the very gruesome attention paid to detail regarding violence. The almost torture-porn approach in the film to acts of violence caused considerable controversy during its release – it received an R15 rating in Japan, which Fukasaku strongly objected to (he appealed the rating to parliament) and it was never theatrically released in the US (Mes and Sharp 62).

The main controversy at work is the application of graphic and ‘gratuitous’ violence to children, and how that violence is used to demonize existing social and cultural institutions (national education system, contest-oriented cultural entertainment). It must be admitted, firstly, that the violent representations in Battle Royale, if they are demonizing institutions such as these, automatically achieve ‘meaning’ in the metatextual and post modern sense discussed above, because they are working in the minds of viewers as metaphorical devices.

However, the controversial element of Battle Royale had little to do with discussion over whether the violence of the film was meaningful, and more to do with whether it was appropriate. Battle Royale stands as a fine example of post modern screen violence not just because of its controversy but because it does indeed display meaningful post modern treatments of screen violence. Before talking too much more about this, we should briefly note that, similar to Fight Club, Fukasaku’s film supports the extremity of its violent acts with a more pervasive feel of a world skewed with violence.

The world of Battle Royale is some strange cross between rampant capitalist culture and strict totalitarian society – children are culled and kept in line by random mass death-matches, but a cheerful J-Pop-themed video demonstration is played to them first, and a news reporter waiting for the survivor after. For Nanahara, the film’s protagonist, his environment of violence is not just societal but domestic, having already been faced with his father’s auto-asphyxiated corpse on his first day of high school. In a school corridor, Nobu stabs Kitano almost arbitrarily, a simple ejaculation of violence for lack of anything else to express. Another interesting thing to note about the culture of social violence, or the “system of violence handed down from generation to generation” (Mes and Sharp 63) imagined in Battle Royale is that although unclear in the film, the source-material novel dictates that it portrays an alternate reality where Japan has won the second World War.

This establishment helps to legitimize the graphic screen violence of Battle Royale, because it assures us that, at least, the film is treating violence very seriously, and dealing with it more than visually. The way we begin to view its violent representations as meaningful in the context of the narrative is informed by this establishment, which ends more or less the moment the first death takes place. The scene is grotesque; that of a young girl pierced through the head with a pen-knife. However, its narrative meaningfulness is clear: it shocks the children, and clarifies for them the violent reality of their world. The next violent representation, of Nobu’s death collar blowing open his throat, is one of enormous narrative weight, as the protagonist’s best friend is killed.

Many key violent scenes (the axe in Nanahara’s classmate’s head, the lighthouse massacre, the final confrontation with Kitano) carry narrative weight nearly equal to that of these first scenes. They detail the protagonist not becoming intimate with violence, as in Fight Club, but become implicated in it. Battle Royale also does an exemplary job with using the kinetic theatricality of violence and the body to film the scenes with a grand performative air. A front-on shot of Nobu being punched in the face by an army officer sees his whole body spiralling into the pandemonic mass of children behind, in a physical take that resembles anime in construction.  We see other examples of this later on in the submissive-dominant powerplay between Mitsuko and Megumi, and in Kiriyama’s first killings. However, the representations of violence in Battle Royale achieve, for the most part, a much more post modern meaningfulness: one where aesthetics and design influence the real-world filters with which we view them.

Take, for example, the climactic scene of the shootout in the lighthouse – in one mutual burst of automatic gunfire, a high-angle camera shot allows us to see the three pubescent girls simultaneously collapse in a circle, the image a bloody and perverse take on the childhood institution of ‘Ring Around the Rosie’. Kiriyama manages the most blatantly post modern representation of violence, and one that is very relevant specifically to him: when he kills Mitsuko, the gun is held in front of the camera, as the camera stalks Mitsuko. The gun is the camera’s focus, the girl at its end reduced by framing to a mere representation, a body that jerks and tumbles every time the gun fires a round into it. This shot stylistically mirrors the interface of First Person Shooter games, and serves to reinforce the sociopathic nature of Kiriyima: he is a product of a culture of social violence, and he sees the wholesale slaughter of innocent children as entertainment indistinguishable from a violent videogame.

These are all perfect examples (especially the aforementioned narrative weight-bearing violence) of what Devin McKinney calls “strong violence”. Battle Royale’s violence is ‘strong’ through the conceptions of McKinney’s ideology because while “it often has the physical effect of the body genres, [it] also acts on the mind by refusing it glib comfort and immediate resolutions” (McKinney 100), and it “often enables…shifts in one’s moral positioning” (McKinney 106). None of the film’s violence, in other words, is without place or meaning in either the world of the narrative or the real world, which is the mark of McKinney’s “strong” violence, existing against the “weak”, which is violence purely for entertainment (blockbuster actions films are prime examples).

The representations of violence seen in White Heat, Fight Club and Battle Royale are all meaningful. What responses toward post modern screen violence being “gratuitous and meaningless” betray is a moral aversion to the idea of using violence knowingly and graphically, where in the past it had been used deftly and indirectly. The classical meaningfulness of Production Code-era films is a manifestation of the kinds of post modern meaningfulness that have also been discussed here; the period simply dictated certain restrictions that entailed a different stylistic approach. Filmmakers’ fascination with violence and insistence that representations of violence have a meaning in our society and culture have always been an innate quality of the medium, and filmmakers will continually seek to explore the potential meanings of violence in as many ways as they can.

Works Cited

Battle Royale. Dir. Kinji Fukasaku. Perf. Tatsuya Fujiwara, Aki Maeda, Taro Yamamoto and Takeshi Kitano. Toei, 2000.

Fight Club. Dir. David Fincher. Perf. Brad Pitt, Edward Norton and Helena Bonham Carter. 20^th Century Fox, 1999.

Jameson, Frederic. Postmodernism, or The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Duke University Press, 1992.

McKinney, Devin. “Violence: The Strong and the Weak.” Screening Violence. Rutgers University Press, 2000.

Mes, Tom and Jasper, Sharp (ed.). “Kinji Fukasaku.” The Midnight Eye Guide to New Japanese Film. Stone Bridge Press, 2004.

Prince, Stephen. “Graphic Violence in the Cinema: Origins, Aesthetics, Design, and Social Effects.” Screening Violence. Rutgers University Press, 2000.

Prince, Stephen. “Violence and Psychophysiology in Horror Cinema.” Horror Film and Psychoanalysis: Freud’s Worst Nightmare. Cambridge University Press, 2003.

White Heat. Dir. Raoul Walsh. Perf. James Cagney, Virginia Mayo and Edmund O’Brien. Warner Bros, 1949.

Here at pleasantfluff.com, we’re all massive fans of Fight Club and today marks the 10th anniversary of its general release in cinemas. In order to celebrate, we’re going to publishing Mr. Bailey Smith’s article on it and (one of) its Japanese counterparts, Battle Royale. We had hoped to get it out by today, but we’re all bogged down in the end of semester quagmire.

Enough bleating! Happy Birthday Fight Club, may you inspire many more young men to adopt an iconoclastic stance in our increasingly alienating world.

Part I

Introduction

Mulvey’s psychoanalytic feminist film theory had many implications for the study of cinema, and this essay aims to first delineate the way in which these implications have influenced and challenged feminist film theory. Mulvey’s article “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” raised several issues which have been taken up by feminist film theorists since; as primary examples in relation to horror cinema I use Barbara Creed and Carol Clover, whose works on the monstrous-feminine and the slasher film (respectively) are both seminal and deeply indebted to Mulvey’s theory. The examination of those sources in relation to Mulvey’s theory concludes Part I of this essay.

Part II will analyse two modern horror films which, I argue, take as their subject woman and the feminine in ways which challenge and oppose what Mulvey calls “the language of the dominant patriarchal order” (Mulvey 485). This essay will argue that it is now possible to attempt an analysis of some – by no means all – modern horror cinema, which occupies a position outside of traditional or mainstream patriarchal codification, a position referred to (and henceforth described) as primal sisterhood. ¹

Laura Mulvey’s psychoanalytic feminist film theory and its implications.

In her paper “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” Mulvey posits that “the unconscious of patriarchal society has structured film form,” but that “the paradox of phallocentrism in all its manifestations is that it depends on the image of the castrated woman to give order and meaning to its world” (Mulvey 483). She goes on to describe woman’s central place in the ordering of the patriarchal, and her constitution as signifier of phallic lack; symbolically, woman “as representation signifies castration, inducing voyeuristic or fetishistic mechanisms to circumvent her threat” (Ibid. 493).

It was this idea of woman not only as signifier of castration, but as deadly castrator herself, that Barbara Creed theorised in The Monstrous-Feminine (1993), taking as her starting point a lack of discussion of “the representation of woman-as-monster. Instead,” Creed states, “emphasis has been on woman as victim of the (mainly male) monster” (Creed – Monstrous-Feminine 1). But Creed’s analysis by no means suggests that the presence of the monstrous-feminine in cinema indicates a break from the structures of patriarchal language which Mulvey aimed to attack (Creed – Monstrous-Feminine 7, Mulvey 484 respectively). Instead, the monstrous-feminine “speaks more to us about male fears than about female desire or feminine subjectivity” (Creed Ibid.). In effect, whilst theorising the monstrous-feminine gives us access to images of woman previously repressed, it does not constitute a theory of the “female unconscious” independent of phallocentric theory. Nonetheless, to challenge the phallocentric ordering of the unconscious as represented in film is what Mulvey sought.

Carol Clover took Mulvey’s theory (among others) and used the slasher film to demonstrate how the gaze has changed in modern horror – and not just the gaze, but the modes of gender identification at work in cinema. Sue Thornham states in Feminist Film Theory: a reader that Clover argues for an “ambiguous and oscillating gender identity of the slasher film’s Final Girl (which) allows its male spectator, too, to oscillate between ‘feminine’ and ‘masculine’ viewing positions” (230-231).

But in Clover’s own words it is more than that; in relation to Mulvey’s theory (here quoting Mulvey’s “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema”):

“The classic split between ‘spectacle and narrative, which ‘supposes the man’s role as the active one of forwarding the story, making things happen’, is at least unsettled in the slasher film. When the Final Girl…assumes the ‘active investigating gaze’, she exactly reverses the look, making a spectacle of the killer and a spectator of herself.

(…)The gaze becomes, at least for awhile, female. More to the point, the female exercise of scopic control results not in her annihilation, in the manner of classic cinema, but in her triumph; indeed, her triumph depends on her assumption of the gaze.” (Clover 245)

What Clover argues the slasher film does, and I argue, what the following films attempt, is what Mulvey called for in her article; a breaking down of dominating, structuring convention, and a constitution of the feminine which does not depend solely on the codes of the patriarchal unconscious in order to be made intelligible. ²

Part II

Primal Sisterhood versus Female Solidarity in Ginger Snaps.

“Woman, animal, death,” Barbara Creed argues, “they are inextricably linked” (Creed Phallic Panic 25). For Creed, they form the essential features of what she calls the primal uncanny (Ibid. 24). In Ginger Snaps, we are clearly in the realm of the primal uncanny; it is the accompanying idea of “sisterhood” which gives us trouble here. ³

In Sue Short’s analysis of Ginger Snaps she quotes Molly Haskell, “framed very much as a lament”, asking the question “where…is the camaraderie, the much vaunted mutual support among women?” (Short 88-89). One of Short’s concerns is “the difficulties of establishing female solidarity, and the greater tendency to depict women in competition with one another” (Ibid.88). The idea that there should be any kind of female solidarity at all is something Ginger Snaps toys with; the sisters Ginger and Brigitte, despite a blood pact which appears twice in the film – and at the end, its import is magnified and transformed by the transference of the lycanthropic virus from one sister to the other – are still divided in the realm of sex, puberty and identity, to the extent that one sister must kill the other, but not before becoming her. For Haskell, this undermines “feminist” notions of unity; but for critical feminism, and by extension I argue the female unconscious (because when we are in the realm of the primal as we are in Ginger Snaps, I argue that we are dealing with issues of the female unconscious) this is the issue of the female subject – within feminism, within society – described perfectly.

Sue Short points to the depiction of women in competition with one another in order to draw this link with Haskell’s lament, essentially arguing that female characters such as Ginger and Brigitte represent the disintegration of the female subject, pointing to rivalry, jealousy and aggression as things which attack female kinship and ultimately destroy it – “Brigitte holds her dead sister…more wolf than human…‘not even related any more’” (Short 98). According to Short, “Brigitte is ultimately forced to make a separation, exclaiming… ‘I’m not dying in this room with you’” – a separation which I do not believe exists, as Brigitte, infected voluntarily with lycanthropy, holds her sister in her arms as she dies. The phrase “I’m not dying in this room with you” can be read to emphasise Brigitte’s wish for Ginger to survive, breaking not only the curse of lycanthropy but the suicide pact the sisters have made and renewed with lycanthropy. Here, it is the “camaraderie” and “solidarity” of the female – expressed by blood pact – which must be broken in order for the feminine to survive, suggesting that the survival of the feminine is more than just a matter of keeping the female subject “solid”.

Ginger Snaps is more than a cautionary tale; it is a complex rendering of the fight to define the female subject against a flattened, “universal” image, regardless of whether any of the females concerned achieve success. It is this fight which Short labels “competition” and “rivalry”, setting the struggle against an unfortunately sexist background which dictates that women should stick together, and that competitive, aggressive behaviour towards other females is “masculine”, a stance Creed criticises and which I refer to above in Part I.

The cautionary aspect of such a reading is further undermined by the “accidental kill” – of all the murder and mayhem executed by Ginger, it is the off-hand, accidental death of Trina which threatens the sisters the most. This is a motif found in both Ginger Snaps and The Descent, but its wider significance is beyond the scope of this essay.

Instead, if we can view the overriding themes of Ginger Snaps as the unifying factors of a kind of primal femininity – blood/fluids/death, woman/sexuality/violence, animal/nature/the pre-patriarchal – then we can examine Ginger (who represents almost all these aspects) and Brigitte (seemingly a pre-patriarchal, pre-sexual girl who nonetheless gets her hands dirty, assuming Ginger’s “identity” as a werewolf in order to find a cure for her sister by engaging in a tense relationship with an overtly mature male figure and eventually killing her sister in a bloody battle), and the other significant female figures of the film (Pamela, the mother who takes responsibility for Trina’s death against all logic, and Trina, the school bitch who Ginger accidentally kills with little aggression and less sympathy), as signifying not aspects of a divided self but aspects of a female subject which, by nature, is in competition with itself and which is constituted (not deconstituted) in the violence of such exchanges. If this is not an obviously “empowering” view of the emergence of a female unconscious order to rival the patriarchal, then we must question the assumption that such an emergence should be “empowering” at all.

Feminism, Cannibalism, and the Female Subject in The Descent.

Here too we are clearly in the realm of the primal – six women descend into the twisting bowels of the earth, muck about in a lot of mud, blood and guts, and finally die there – though it is more the abjection of Creed’s theory (Creed – Monstrous-Feminine 8-14) than the primal uncanny itself. However, abjection in relation to the feminine face of the monstrous does not adequately describe the horror delineated by The Descent – of which the abject constitutes only a third of the film’s horrific or monstrous content. Before the six women encounter the deformed, evolved/devolved humanoids which pursue them through pools and caverns full of human and animal remains in all stages of decomposition and eventually eat them, they first voluntarily elect to descend, and in the final sequence each of their deaths (and Sarah’s entombment in her own madness, both physical and symbolic) is in fact a result of each woman’s transgressions against one (or more) of her sisters. It is this painful exercise in subtle horror – the horror of the female subject essentially eating itself, without the use of teeth – that we find compelling in the first two thirds of the film, and which bears fruit in the overt form of the abject in the last third.

Of no small import is the fact that, with the exception of Juno’s accidental butchery of Beth, and Sarah’s subsequent butchering of Juno, all these transgressions are forgiven – or rather, dismissed. Even when it is only us, as an audience, who can comment on the transgression – as when Sarah first enters the cave, finds a bloody fingerprint, but neglects to say anything about it and thereby allows the entire group to descend unwitting into a trap full of cannibals. We forgive her, because she – and we – are then distracted by a flock of bats bursting out of the darkness to frighten Sarah – and us.

Even Juno’s betrayal of Beth, and Beth’s dying message to Sarah, has this element of forgiveness/dismissal – Juno “kills” Beth by stabbing her in the neck with an ice-pick, but Beth’s response is to plead, “don’t leave me”. When Sarah later finds Beth, dying but not yet dead, Beth’s words again are “she did this to me – she left me”, not “she killed me”, or “she stabbed me in the bloody neck”. For Beth, the transgression is not in the accident, but in the emotional betrayal that proceeds it – both hers, when Juno leaves her, and Sarah’s, when Beth rips the necklace from Juno as she falls and discovers Juno’s affair with Sarah’s now-dead husband. It is not the killing female which Beth (and the spectator) finds monstrous, but the idea of the female abandoning itself. This notion is repeated in the final exchange between Sarah and Juno – even though we have followed Sarah’s parallel descent into the primal, animalistic, pre-patriarchal state closer perhaps than we have followed Juno’s, it is still with Juno that our sympathies lie when Sarah butchers her, exacting revenge and leaving her for the monsters. All of this is Juno’s fault – it was her “ego” and misguided wish which trapped the women in the uncharted cave in the first place – yet we sympathise with her because she has been betrayed by her sister.

We can view this interplay between females – females who take on “masculine” roles without recourse to the presence of the male order within the film, females who continuously affect each other with each decision, good or bad, that they make – as describing the problematisation of the female unconscious. Drawing from Creed and Clover, these women are not merely “phallicised” protagonists; they operate in a world which is too female, too abject, too primal – marked as it is by nature, the animal or non-human, by blood, fluids, death, and the pre-patriarchal “cave” or womb of genesis without recourse to sex, where Sarah and Juno are reborn as their primal selves without recourse to the male – to allow them full expression as mere stand-ins for male counterparts. What is described is a spectrum of the female subject, a map of transgression and forgiveness in relation to the self, where the path home is never discovered. But it is a path charted without necessary recourse to the phallic; that there is no clear way out speaks deeply of the feminist nature of the journey.

Conclusion

If Carol Clover was “deeply reluctant to make progressive claims for a body of cinema as spectacularly nasty towards women as the slasher film is,” despite the fact that it does “in its own perverse way and for better or worse, constitute a visible adjustment” (Clover 247), then this essay can profess no such reluctance towards a brand of horror which is uniquely feminine, if no less nasty to its subject.

The Descent and Ginger Snaps may both be purchased on DVD from our online store.

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Jung’s understanding of individual evil is not a supernatural one; rather, he defines evil as something people are capable of. Individuals are not, themselves, evil. The personal nature of evil, he claims, simply consists of characteristics and urges rejected by the ego, or consciousness. Such inclinations are repressed by the ego, as it cannot countenance that within itself which it regards as evil. These characteristics then constitute the shadow, therefore “to become conscious of [the shadow] involves recognizing the dark aspects of the personality” (1951: 145), that which the ego calls evil.

In “The Role of the Unconscious” Jung describes the compensatory function of the unconscious. Instincts “which we have repressed and suppressed… gradually accumulate and, in time… begin to influence consciousness” (1918: 18, 25). The shadow therefore retains those aspects defined by the ego as ‘evil’, and their constant repression causes them to build in intensity until they burst forth with far greater passion than if their manifestation had been allowed. When it is a potentially dangerous urge that is called evil and thus repressed, aggression for instance, the bursting forth of that aggression is unbridled and can become highly destructive. Evil thus occurs, not in the acknowledgement of dark urges, but in their violent expulsion as a result of repression.

Jung sees the same tendency in nations, “for nations are made up of individuals” (1918: 27, 45).  He attributes to Christianity and rationalism the repression of what he calls ‘primitive’ urges, particularly in Germans. The accretion and release of these urges, he claims, brought about the First World War, in which he sees a modern global manifestation of “the primitive’s distrust of the neighbouring tribe” (1918: 27, 44). It is clear that Jung sees this war as an expulsion on an international level of the darkness within the unconscious of nations. It is in the act of genocide, though, that evil on a national scale makes its most blatant manifestation. Rafael López Pedraza understands one example of genocide, the Holocaust, as “a shadow conflict” (1990: 73) in which Nazi Germany attempted to annihilate the Jews, onto whom they had projected their collective shadow. He also identifies the archetype of purity operating within Germany as a powerful repressive function, “[constellating] intolerance” (1990: 73) and drawing the Jews into its “dark shadow” (1990, 73) It is therefore possible to see two of the most serious conflicts of the early 20^th Century as expressions of repressed urges functioning within the shadow.

For this reason, more than any other, Jung claims that it is imperative that Europeans come to understand their shadows. It is in the recognition and acceptance of internal evil that he proposes more devastating, external evil can be prevented. Given that he considers modern Christianity and rationalism responsible for much of the repression that led to such expressions of national evil, his approach to this reconciliation is not only psychological, but also religious. It is in the unconscious that the potential for evil develops, and the language of the unconscious is that of myths. To address the evil that forms in the shadow, therefore, it is necessary to address the myths and archetypes that govern people’s lives. He proposes, therefore, a new understanding of God that takes into account the dark, visceral and destructive aspects of the Christian God, and attends to the needs of the collective unconscious, in which the potential for evil has accumulated through constant repression.

This proposed revisionism is not merely a utilitarian suggestion to prevent repeated upsurges of evil; it is in fact consistent with Jung’s own religious convictions. In his autobiography, Jung recounts two events of momentous religious significance to him. The first is a dream in which he feels he was presented with the vision of a chthonic deity which took the form of an enormous enthroned phallus. Jung asserts that “the phallus of this dream seems to be a subterranean god “not to be named” (1961: 13). If it is indeed God then it is one that responds to the visceral needs of the collective unconscious. The connection between the visceral and this image of a phallus is clear enough, its placement in the earth also ties it to desire and aggression, what Christian morality regards as base and earthy. Jung’s first vision of God is one divorced from the moral deity of Christian dogma; it embraces the desires held in the shadow.

The vision, nonetheless, is tied to Christianity, as it takes place within the cemetery outside Jung’s father’s church. Furthermore, while the burial of this object renders it dead, the phallus is a symbol of life. This thing that is ‘dead’ cannot truly be considered dead, but regenerates eternally. It is possible that Jung sees this as an aspect of the Christian God that is dead and yet regenerating. The second event involves the vision of God on his throne defecating on the cathedral in Basel, destroying it utterly. The act of defecation of course identifies this vision of God with the visceral, while the destruction of the church represents God’s vengeance against the structures of morality and prudishness that Christianity has imposed. Together, these visions of God express not only Jung’s understanding of the baseness of God, but also demonstrate the vengeance of such a god against the bonds of Christian dogma.

Heretical as it may seem, this vision of God as a dark and visceral entity is not inconsistent with the Judeo-Christian tradition. While contemporary Christianity may espouse a God of love, it is at odds to explain the actions of Yahweh in the Torah. This is a god whose wrath annihilates Sodom and Gomorrah (Genesis 19:23), who hardens Pharaoh’s heart against the Israelites and then sends plagues when he does not comply with Moses’ demands (Exodus 11:9) and who slaughters the firstborn son of every Egyptian household (Exodus12:30). Yahweh may love the Israelites but the experiences of the Egyptians and others are of God as evil, and this is to say nothing of the untrammeled violence that awaits us at the End of Days. Further, there is something particularly primal about the pleasure Yahweh derives from the smoke of animal sacrifices (Genesis 8:21). In “Answer to Job” Jung discusses the precedent set in the Old Testament for a God not subject to later Christian morality. He identifies in Job’s experience a raging, immoral God, attributing this to the fact that God is “not human” (1952: 547).

This essay arose when Bailey and I (both long time Cronenberg fans) had an opportunity to write an essay about him in the same class. Naturally, a competition ensued. Here was my entrant:

For Cronenberg sex represents intimacy, betrayal, sublimation, absorption and the merging of identities all at once. Cronenberg has stated that the body is the “first fact of human existence” (Günberg 95). For Cronenberg our physicality and sensual experience of the world is all that we can know for sure (Günberg 95) and, because it is perhaps the ultimate physical act, sex is the intersection of thought, identity and biology. Any pretence of a higher, non-physical person is subsumed in this act of raw physicality and passion. Videodrome, Naked Lunch and Crash are excellent case studies in Cronenberg’s obsessive pre-occupation with human sexuality because each features a central character whose latent sexuality blossoms over the course of the film, for better or worse. This essay will examine the methods Cronenberg uses to expose and explore the expansive and polymorphous entity that is human sexuality in his films.

Cronenberg was heavily influenced by C. S. Lewis’ work The Allegory of Love, which puts forward the idea that romantic love, as it is known in the western world, is a construct of poetry that arose in the twelfth century (ctd. in Günberg 117). Prior to that point it was unheard of for a gentleman to kneel before a lady or serenade her from the base of a tower. It is apparent that to Cronenberg the western notion of love is a contrived lie. True love, as it appears in his films (and his philosophy), is a more deep-seeded primal experience with its roots in biochemistry (Günberg 122). In essence, love and sex are tied to “a desire to fuse with, to absorb and to somehow cut beneath the surface of” a lover (Günberg 117). The ultimate intimacy lies within the body for Cronenberg. Furthermore, if the west’s accepted ideal of love was invented and taken up in the twelfth century then the implication is twofold. Firstly, there was another, alien, notion of love prior to that and secondly (perhaps more importantly) concepts like love in our society that are presented as absolutes are “variable and they’re open to change and transformation” (Günberg 122).

This notion of nothing being absolute is essential to understanding Cronenberg. He has an obsession with shattering the aesthetics of the modern age and opening the possibility of new ones (Günberg 92). This has an intimate relationship with Cronenberg’s obsession with the body. His films continually attempt to redefine the definition and limitations of the human body and, as a result, human sexuality. In the Videodrome Commentary Cronenberg states, “I love to re-invent the human body”. He goes on to say, “In society now we are allowing the expression of things that a few years ago would not have been allowed … [people] think of these things as sexual delights or explorations. They don’t even want to call these things perversion … but if you [called them] new forms of expressing love, people would probably get very upset.” (Günberg 123). This is evident in Videodrome in many places (such as the ear piercing and sadomasochistic scenes) but also in Videodrome’s general exploration of society’s limits on what the media can and can’t depict (a debate which Cronenberg’s films have often fuelled). Are sex and violence something that will corrupt people from the outside or are they lying dormant within us? For the protagonist of Videodrome, Max Renn, they appear to be very much an existing part of his psyche, waiting to surface.

With societal restrictions and enforcement of a ‘norm’ we’re much less likely to get to the full spectrum of something as complex and varied as human sexuality. People will not readily admit to being aroused by something that is branded ‘perverse’, so how can we hope to know how ubiquitous any sexual fantasy is? This results in the creation of an outward sexual normality which, Videodrome, Nikki Brand is the physical manifestation of. In the television interview with Max she condemns his TV station’s broadcasting of violent and pornographic material despite dressing in a very provocative fashion and flirting with Max off air. Publicly, she presents herself as socially and sexually conservative but, in private, her social and sexual realm of experience very much align with (and exceed) those of Max. Max, on the other hand, is the physical manifestation of the latent perversion. We know that Max always had sadomasochistic tendencies (as evidenced by his branding the series Samurai Dreams ‘too soft’, expressing a desire for something ‘harder’ and more ‘extreme’) but it took meeting Nikki Brand to bring them out.

It is interesting to note the way in which Nikki opens the dialogue on sadomasochism with Max. She goes through his videos, looking for pornography (which she claims ‘gets her in the mood’) and finds Videodrome. The dialogue is as follows:

Nikki: What’s this? Videodrome?

Max: Torture, Murder…

Nikki: Sounds great.

Max: Ain’t exactly sex.

Nikki: Says who?

Nikki then has Max pierce her ears with a needle. Cronenberg comments “For a kind of mini-sadomasochistic experience ear-piercing was quite potent. If you want to introduce someone into the world of sadomasochism then maybe getting them to pierce your ears is the way to do it” (Cronenberg Videodrome Commentary). Just as Nikki is peeling away the layers of what Max finds sexually permissible, Cronenberg is doing the same to his audience. First we are introduced to the notion that there exists a link between pain and sex. Then there is a miniature foray into sadomasochism with the piercing of the ears. The images layer and accumulate until we are flung with Max and Nikki into an alien sexual space; the Videodrome set. The juxtaposition of strong eroticism generated by the sex scene and resonant violence left by our last experience of the Videodrome set combine to violently change our perception of Max and Nikki’s relationship. As their relationship escalates Nikki leads Max through more extreme acts. When she invites him to burn her with a cigarette Cronenberg comments “Nikki’s drawing him into a part of himself that would be better left unexplored. Does this movie draw its audience into places that would be better left unexplored?” (Cronenberg Videodrome Commentary).

As Max is drawn deeper and deeper into his Videodrome hallucination his body, technology, violence and eroticism merge into a single perverse continuum. Nikki’s image appears on Max’s television, the camera zooming in to focus on her red, luscious lips. Max is drawn to the television set, which grows a series of veins and arteries and begins to sensuously pulsate as Max caresses it.  The screen, with Nikki’s lips projecting from it, billows out into a breast shaped dome which Max buries his face in while he caresses the rest of the television set. Beard (134) comments that this organic transformation of the television set “transfer[s] technology into the intimate and personal realm of the body”. For Max and Nikki, Videodrome (and by extension, television) and sex have all bled into one. His aberrant sexual practices with Nikki while watching Videodrome have made television and technology a part of the spectrum of things he finds erotic. When Bianca O’Blivion comes to visit Max, he flies into a rage and slaps her when she mentions Videodrome. For an instant Bianca becomes Nikki as Max slaps her. This is further reinforcement that for Max Nikki, violence and television\Videodrome are intimately linked. We can see from these examples that, at its core, Videodrome is a hallucinatory journey through Max Renn’s innermost desires and this is a common thread that ties all of Cronenberg’s work together.

Of all of Cronenberg’s literary adaptations, Crash and Naked Lunch are the most sexually charged. Both focus on a protagonist who undergoes a journey of transformation in which their latent sexuality manifests itself as a powerful force of change in their lives. In Cronenberg’s adaptation of William S. Burroughs sprawling, anarchic and hallucinatory novel, Naked Lunch, we are presented with a torrent of raw biology and human sexuality. William Beard (282) claims that in order to understand the rampant sexual imagery present in Naked Lunch we must look to Burroughs own psychopathology before we can understand the ways in which Cronenberg co-opts and transforms it in his adaptation.

Burroughs was, at his core, a self-loathing homosexual (Beard 297). He was a man who struggled, through his writing, to rationalize his sexual desires which he equated with “cruelty, violence and a deep [revulsion]” (Beard 297). As a result, Burroughs writings are riddled with images of cruel homosexual sexual predators that prey on young men and transform into monsters during the sexual act. The following example is just one of many:

During the sex act he metamorphosed himself into a green crab

from the waist up, retaining human legs and genitals that secreted

a caustic erogenous slime, while a horrible stench filled the hut.

-Burroughs 91-2

This self loathing resulted in Burroughs developing a number of paranoid fantasies to explain away his sexual urges, most involving a clandestine power conspiring against him and forcing sexual perversion onto him as a means of control (Beard 300). This seems to have been Burroughs’ only way to account for his utter self loathing and ongoing drug addiction. This is the final crucial thing we must understand about Burroughs before we can talk about Cronenberg’s adaptation of Naked Lunch; Burroughs was a drug addict. While heroin played a large role in Burroughs life (as evidenced by his autobiographical book Junky) Burroughs didn’t limit himself to any one drug. In the Naked Lunch DVD Commentary Peter Weller (who stars as William Lee in the film and researched Burroughs extensively) claims that the first thing Burroughs would do when he landed in a new city or country was to explore the drug trade (Weller Naked Lunch Commentary). As a result of his extensive experience with narcotics and addiction Burroughs developed some very strong ideas about the nature of addiction. He felt that drug addiction was an analogy for anything that placed barriers between a person and self understanding or clarity (Beard 2006, Weller Naked Lunch Commentary). For Burroughs drugs, alcohol, sexual pleasure and any number of other human distractions were a part of the aforementioned ‘conspiracy of control’ which prevented people from really living. Ironically for Burroughs, rather than both heroin addiction and homosexual drive being barriers to self understanding, it was perhaps drug addiction that Burroughs used to avoid the ultimate truth of himself; that he was homosexual. When we consider these three elements; self-loathing sexuality, outside control and layers of deception we can see why Cronenberg would be drawn to such a project.

In order to adapt Naked Lunch Cronenberg was faced with the problem of inserting a narrative structure to what was a rambling, incoherent, apocalyptic miasma of social and political discourse. His solution was an elegantly simple one; he took events from Burroughs life and other short works and weaved them together with the hallucinatory discourses and treatments from Naked Lunch. The result is a psychotic hallucination of a man coming to grips with his true nature. Burroughs’ surrogate on screen, William Lee (which was Burroughs pen name for many of his works) frequently encounters giant cockroaches which have a large anus on their backs out of which they talk. Cronenberg claims that this was his way of “employing Burroughs’ device of the talking ass-hole without being censored in every country” (Cronenberg Naked Lunch Commentary). There is more at play here, however. Peter Weller comments that Burroughs uses the talking anus as a metaphor for the part of us that we “don’t want to address” or acknowledge (Weller Naked Lunch Commentary). We cannot ignore the fact that these talking anuses often appear alongside scenes linked to Burroughs homosexuality. In the first instance of the bug typewriter appearing (complete with talking anus) William Lee is instructed by it to “type something into me, it’s not something you’re going to like”. The typewriter instructs Lee to type the phrase “homosexuality is the best cover an agent can have” into his report and seems to receive great sexual gratification from Lee’s touch and typing. This is a clear moment of Lee’s psyche partitioning itself in such a way that it can admit it’s darkest secret to itself. Furthermore, this secret is delivered via the Burroughsian trope of the talking anus which stands for everything about ourselves which we cannot face. Lee would not offer this information freely, it can only manifest itself as hallucination of an outside, controlling force instructing him to associate with homosexuality. It is also significant that Lee’s homosexual subconscious manifests itself as a talking anus when we consider that anal sex is the default association that most people have with male homosexuals.

At first ‘meeting’ (for it was, after all, a hallucination) between Lee and the ‘talking bug’, Lee is instructed (by the bug) to kill his wife. The bug claims that she’s an ‘enemy agent’ and a member of an ‘alien species’ (which alludes to both women and heterosexuals as ‘alien’ and incomprehensible). Not only does Lee accept the bug’s presence and murderous instructions, he actively carries them out, shooting his wife in the head. The hallucinatory bug powder (which is revealed to be a highly addictive substance) which Lee works with on a daily basis has given his homosexual psyche a way to communicate his dissatisfaction with his marriage and instructs him to kill his wife, in effect killing heterosexuality. As we have seen in Videodrome, hallucinations are a vital storytelling device in Cronenberg’s films because they allow him to expose the fears and desires of his character’s subconscious, a device he shares intimately with Burroughs.

Over the course of the film Lee jumps through many addictions in an attempt to hide from his true, homosexual nature. He begins with a bug powder habit, which he inherits from his wife. Dr. Benway exposes Lee to the Tangierian centipede powder, which Lee consumes with gusto, going so far as to move to Tangier after killing his wife so that he can be closer to the source (which his subconscious rationalizes as a trip to get closer to ‘the enemy’, Interzone). Each successive addiction is ultimately unsatisfying and, finally, in his descent into drug induced psychosis, Lee turns to homosexual sex when he is rescued from living on the streets by a Tangierian boy, Kiki. After a brief affair with Kiki, Lee cannot cope with the truth and takes Kiki to the house of the gay sexual predator,  Cloquet. He effectively trades Kiki’s innocence for information by allowing Kiki to be raped by Cloquet after receiving ‘dirt’ on Interzone agents. Cronenberg reveals the rape of Kiki in a classically Burroughsian style. Cloquet is transformed into a gigantic crustacean whose pincers painfully pierce Kiki’s flesh, resulting in painful, weeping sores while Cloquet’s giant carapace undulates and thrusts from behind the young boy. When Lee attempted to live with his true nature (by engaging in a homosexual relationship with Kiki) his psyche couldn’t handle it. He rejected it, casting the boy into the hands of a sexual predator and once more seeing homosexuality as a state inhabited by monsters. Ironically, by delivering Kiki to Cloquet, Lee is a crucial component of this monstrosity. Without his interferance, Kiki and Cloquet would not have met.

Finally we turn our attention to Crash, Cronenberg’s adaptation of J. G. Ballard’s novel. More a case study in the evolution of human sexuality than a feature film, Crash explores the marriage of technology and eroticism. The protagonist, James, is involved in a series of car crashes. While in hospital he meets Vaughn, a man obsessed with car crashes and “the eroticism of wounds”. As James spends more time with Vaughn his sexual associations shift and he becomes consumed by an erotic obsession with cars, in effect becoming Vaughn. The parallels with Cronenberg’s other works are clear. Obsession, control, a bridge between the biological and technological and a pervasive, mutable sexuality are present. It is likely that the core of Cronenberg’s attraction to Crash as a novel to adapt to film lies in a simple passage:

The crash was the only real experience I had been through in years.

For the first time I was in physical confrontation with my own body, an

inexhaustible encyclopaedia of pains and discharges.

-Ballard 39

If, for Cronenberg, the body is the “first fact of human existence” (Günberg 95) then this revelation by James is telling. James is a disillusioned, disconnected member of society who has been distanced from his body. It took the violent and sudden trauma of a car crash to reintroduce James to an intimate relationship with his own body. The logical extension of this is the pairing of any intimate experience for James with violence and technology.

James and Catherine (the other crash victim) develop a relationship which quickly evolves into a sexual one. James’ sex with his wife becomes stale and unsatisfying compared to the sex he has with Catherine. Beard (400) asserts that this is because, for James, the sex with his wife is too “beautiful” and “perfect”. After his car crash, James’ marriage and sex life with his wife have become just as stale and superficial as everything outside of the crash. Because Catherine has not only experienced a car crash, but the same car crash as James, his sex with her is filled with the intimacy and bodily communion that he experienced at the moment of his crash.

Catherine introduces James to Vaughn, although they briefly met in hospital when Vaughn admired James’ wounds. If James is beginning to embark on a journey of erotic rebirth then Vaughn is the end-point of that journey. His body a litany of scar tissue, Vaughn is a “creature who delights in [his] creatureness” (Beard 401). Vaughn occupies his time working on “the project”, an umbrella term for a wide range of activities which marry car accidents and eroticism. These activities include photographing car accidents, having sex in car washes and deliberately causing car accidents. Cronenberg films these accidents in a remarkably sexual fashion. Vaughn stalks his potential victims, his gaze upon them a clearly sexual one. He initiates contact with his target by thrusting towards them and breaking suddenly. His thrusts into the car in front of him become increasingly powerful until he connects with them. For Vaughn the separation between man and machine no longer exists. His car is a phallic extension of himself which he uses to violently penetrate the cars of others. This behaviour eventually kills Vaughn, James resurrects his car and assumes Vaughn’s persona in the film. He then uses Vaughn’s car to crash into his wife and has sex with her mangled body while they lie beside her mangled car. It is only after he has forced his wife to endure the same trauma he experienced that James can have a fulfilling sexual experience. He has at once merged his old and new sexualities together by incorporating the extreme elements of Vaughn into his personality and drawing his wife into the same sexual realm.

In conclusion, when we examine Videodrome, Naked Lunch and Crash we can see that not only is the cinema a sexual entity for Cronenberg but his consuming obsession with human sexuality manifests itself in the protagonists his films. In each of the three films we examined in this essay we see character whose latent, abnormal sexual urges are brought to the surface by external forces. For Cronenberg the body is the central focus of human existence, but there could be no body without sex. In effect sex takes on a hyper-real status in Cronenberg’s films. As Cronenberg said himself, during the Criterion Collection Naked Lunch Commentary, “sexuality transforms you into something more than human”. Nothing could be truer for Max Renn, William Lee and James Ballard.

Works Cited

• Ballard, J. G. Crash London: Vintage 2004
• Beard, William The Artist as Monster: The Cinema of David Cronenberg
  Toronto: University of Toronto Press Incorporated 2006
• Burroughs, William S. Naked Lunch New York: Grove  1966
• Burroughs, William S. The Soft Machine New York: Grove 1961
• Crash dir. David Cronenberg. Perf. James Spader & Holly Hunter. Alliance Communications Corporation 1996. DVD Newline Home Entertainment 2005.
• Günberg, Serge David Cronenberg: Interviews with Serge Grunberg London: Plexus Publishing Ltd. 2006
• Naked Lunch dir. David Cronenberg. Perf. Peter Weller & Judy Davis. Film Trustees Ltd. 1991. DVD Criterion Collection 2003. DVD Commentary by David Cronenberg and Peter Weller.
• Videodrome dir. David Cronenberg. Perf. James Woods & Deborah Harry. CFDC 1983. DVD Criterion Collection 2004. DVD Commentary by David Cronenberg and Mark Irwin.

Columbus’ first action on Caribbean soil was to plant a flag and claim the land in the name of King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella of Spain. This action was the first to take place with both Europeans and Taino present and both would have viewed the event in a completely different light. The Spanish would have seen the planting of the flag as very significant and reflective of the way in which the Feudal system of Spanish governance operated. This is evident in the special attention that is placed on the planting of the flag in the accounts of the occasion, in which particular emphasis is given to the King and Queen that the land is being claimed for. Columbus himself notes in his journal that he “had taken possession of the island … for his sovereigns.” This theme of claiming land and resources continues strongly through the Journals and they make many references to “Your Highnesses”, indicating that they were written for the Monarchy who had funded the voyage.The Taino, on the other hand, seemed to view the situation with initial curiosity and “swam out to the ship’s boats in which [the Europeans] were sitting”. After receiving “red caps, glass beads … [and] many other trifles” they appeared to view meeting the Spanish as a lucrative trade opportunity and “they willingly traded everything they had”. The Spanish had brought with them many things that the Taino had never encountered before and that would have represented a high market value for trade. While “glass beads, hawks and bells” would have seemed somewhat worthless to the Spanish, their rarity in the Caribbean made them worth a great deal to the Taino.

After this initial meeting and trading, Columbus was very concerned with fostering good will with the Taino to create a favourable impression among them. He writes “I was anxious that they should think well of us so that they may not be unfriendly when your Majesties send a second expedition here.” Columbus also made great efforts to open the communication barrier between himself and the Taino by “[taking seven Taino] aboard so that they may learn our language”. Unfortunately, until the Taino and Spaniards breached the language barrier there were some serious communication problems.

The main method of communication between the two groups was with “signs”. Signs, however lend themselves to subjective interpretation. In one such interpretation Columbus says “We understood them to be asking if we came from the sky”. This would be a fairly complicated concept to communicate in sign language, especially when between groups with significant cultural differences. The Taino in question could have been trying to communicate a great number of different concepts. Columbus’ interpretation gives us a good example of what Europeans might have thought about Non-European cultures with respect to their notions of spirituality or religion. It is unfortunately also an example of how limited the accounts can be in accurately depicting the culture and perspective of the Taino.

Columbus also states after his first encounter with the Taino that they “appeared to me to have no religion”. Like the assumption that the Taino believed the Europeans came from the sky, this also gives us a clue to what constituted religion to a European in 1492. While the Taino show evidence of being religious when Columbus discovers “many statues in the shape of a women, and finely crafted heads like masks”, they did not appear to worship in a church or create religious iconography that would be recognisable to a European.

Some of these attitudes regarding the Taino’s spirituality begin to change toward the latter half of Columbus’ voyage. When he discovers the statues in the shape of women and masks he cannot decide if they are for “decoration or worship”. Columbus even begins to doubt his interpretations of what the Taino have said to him, admitting “I do not know their language”[16]. It is especially interesting to note that towards the end of the journal entries Columbus doubts his ability to interpret the Taino language. In the letter he writes on his return voyage, however, he appears more convinced that his observations about the Taino with regards to the presence of gold, their belief in the Europeans as Gods and their suitability as Christians are correct, rather than taking his earlier doubts in the effectiveness of communication into account.

This is a major limitation of the Journals as a source of information on the Taino because they are written from a European perspective, which carries with it notions of what religion and civilization are. This is coupled by their inability to accurately communicate with the Taino. While the Taino had been settled in the East Indies for a long time, they were not settled or civilized to European eyes because the way that the Taino existed was radically different from that of Europeans.

The documents are also limited by the apparent European spirit of conquest. This is evident in the numerous references about the resources of the East Indies and their suitability for settlement that Columbus notes. On the first island that he encounters, Columbus dedicates an entire day to surveying its coastline “to decide where a fort could be built”. This seems to be another direct comment to Ferdinand and Isabella and he invests a great deal of time emphasising the Taino people as a resource in and of themselves. Columbus makes many comments about the suitability of the Taino as both slaves and Christians. In one journal entry he says that “I believe they would be easily made Christians” and in another (directly addressed to Ferdinand and Isabella) he says “All the inhabitants could be taken away to Castile or held as slaves on the island, for with fifty men we could subjugate them and make them do whatever we wish”. This is another clue about the European attitude towards Non-European peoples that designated them as a resource rather than people.

The comments about the Taino people are few compared the huge attention that Columbus pays to the resources available in the East Indies to cement their worth to the Spanish Monarchy. We can presume this was in order to secure funding for a return trip as special emphasis is paid to these resources in his letter to Ferdinand and Isabella. The most frequent resource discussed is gold; in fact the first Taino word to appear in the documents is “Nucay”, which is the Taino word for gold. In one of the biggest selling points of his letter Columbus speaks of an island the Taino tell him about “in which there is incalculable gold”. Gold, however, is not the only thing Columbus deliberately notes about the island’s contents.

Columbus makes many references to the abundant flora and fauna of the islands. He says that “it grieves me extremely that I cannot identify them, for I am quite certain that they are valuable”. In fact, so great is Columbus’ desire to find proof of the spices on the islands, when he discovers a spice he can identify, Aloe, he orders his men to collect all they can find.

This desperation to sell the value and profitability of the East Indies, coupled with a limited ability of the Europeans to communicate with the Taino forms the crux of the usefulness of these documents as a source on the interaction between the two cultures of the Tainos and Europeans. While we can certainly learn a lot about the Europeans, based on what observations they make in their accounts of the East Indies and the conclusions that they draw from them, we are limited in what we know about the Taino because of the subjective nature of these conclusions.

Disregarding these subjective conclusions, we are left with the observations that these conclusions arose from. If we are to learn anything about the Taino we need to separate these observations that the Europeans made from the opinions they offered to explain them. While we cannot avoid the cultural influences that coloured the Europeans view of the Taino, these journals and other personal accounts are all that we have left of these people. If we wish to learn about them we can only use the resources available to us and read them aware of the factors that may have influenced them.

Further Reading

• Cohen, J.M., (ed.) The Four Voyages of Christopher Columbus, Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1969, pp. 50-76.
• Cummings, John, The Voyage of Christopher Columbus, London, Wiedenfield and Nicholson, 1992, pp. 109-112.
• Jane, Cecil, The Journal of Christopher Columbus:
  , London, Anthony Blond, 1968, pp. 191-202

]]> http://www.pleasantfluff.com/2009/09/06/christopher-columbus-the-tragic-poster-child-for-colonialism/feed/ 2 http://www.pleasantfluff.com/2009/08/08/smoke-signals-a-turning-point-in-indginous-media/ http://www.pleasantfluff.com/2009/08/08/smoke-signals-a-turning-point-in-indginous-media/#comments Sat, 08 Aug 2009 08:35:29 +0000 Morgan http://www.pleasantfluff.com/?p=1794

Depictions of Native Americans in film have existed since the beginning of the film industry and similar depictions existed before film in the form of wild-west shows. Historically these depictions have been created by and for Euro-Americans and, as a result, present a skewed and stereotyped image of Native American people. While Native people have been involved in the film industry for over a century, it took until 1998 for a completely Native American production to arise with a Native writer, director and crew. Smoke Signals premiered at a time when, regrettably, many people thought that Native Americans no longer existed as a distinct culture or people. This essay will explore how Smoke Signals challenged contemporary and historical views of Native Americans in American film. However, before we can understand the significance of Native American depictions in Smoke Signals we must first gain and understanding of how Native Americans have been historically depicted in American films and entertainment and why such depictions are significant. Since the late 19^th century Native Americans have been exploited for the purposes of entertaining Euro-American audiences and it was during the late 19^th century that many of the media stereotypes relating to Native Americans were popularized. These began in the Wild West Show phenomenon, a traveling entertainment show which in equal parts reenacted and embellished upon “renowned battles” from the American frontier (King 12). These shows emerged at a time when the American frontier was essentially considered civilized and the focus on relations with Native Americans had shifted from a militaristic to an administrative nature (King 12). This presented a problem for the American public because it meant that a people who had, historically, been viewed as an enemy or threat were now, effectively under their care. The Wild West Shows “encouraged Americans to grapple with questions of racial difference and cultural evolution, while prompting nostalgic yearnings for nature, tradition, and indigenous communities destroyed by progress and manifest destiny” (King 12). In effect, with the war over, the Euro-American population needed ways to rationalize the treatment and ultimate fate of the Native American people and the Wild West Shows presented them with a set of cultural stereotypes which allowed them to do that. Native Americans were divided into a collection of archetypes; the noble savage, the brutal warrior, the loyal sidekick, the chief, the princess and the squaw (King 5). These early archetypes combined with a handful of narratives (civilization conquering the frontier and progress vs. primitive life were the most common themes) to create what would become the predominate Euro-American perception of Native Americans (King 12).

It is estimated that over 2000 films and over 10,000 television shows have been produced which feature Native Americans since the end of the 19^th century (Churchhill 43). The majority of these productions were created by and for the Euro-American market and perpetuated many of the stereotypes established by the Wild West Shows (the two, in fact, overlapped with the last of the Wild West Shows occurring in the 1930s) (King 12). More than any other culture, the Native American’s image has been defined through film (Rollins ix). The question arises then, how is it that these media depictions can define a people’s image and why does such a definition matter? For one thing, Native Americans represent a very small portion of the American population and, for many Americans, media such as film and television are the primary way in which they are represented (King 6). The ways in which people, places and ideas are presented in the media shape the conceptions of those who access that media (King 7). This is problematic for Native Americans when we consider that while there has there been a huge saturation of media with Native American content, the overwhelming majority of that content works to reinforce negative 19^th century stereotypes (King 7).  This has created a positive feedback loop where the Euro-Americans who had the means to produce this media had been consumers of it all their lives. After several generations of this style of media production the media is completely removed from any truth about Native Americans (or even from a deliberate intention to create anti-Native American propaganda) and relies on simulacra of Native Americans which were created at the turn of the century. Rather than producing films and television shows based on Native Americans, the industry was creating films and television shows based on earlier film and television shows. It is for this reason that Smoke Signals is such a significant film. For first time, Native Americans had the opportunity to represent themselves in film and to challenge many of the stereotypes which had plagued them for the last century. A major departure from the classic treatment of Native Americans, Smoke Signals is an outwardly human story, riddled with subversive political comment. Amanda J. Cobb, a Native American Studies scholar who has researched Native depictions in film extensively, attributes much of the film’s success to its quietly political nature and the fact that its political subtext “never becomes overtly political” (Cobb 213). The narrative is one which many could relate to, with its focus on human relationships and redemption. Two young men, Victor and Thomas grew up together on a Reservation. When the two boys were young there was a house fire on the fourth of July which killed Thomas’ parents and many of Victor’s relatives. Victor’s father, Arnold, saved the two boys from the fire, but was emotionally crippled by grief and turned to a life of alcohol and violence. Arnold eventually leaves the Reservation and, years later, Victor receives word that his father has died in Arizona. Someone must collect the Arnold’s estate but no one in Victor’s family has the money to travel to Arizona, and Victor has little but bad memories of his father. Thomas, who never experienced the alcoholism or domestic violence that plagued Victor’s childhood, idolizes the man who saved him from the fire and offers to give Victor the money to travel to Arizona, as long as he can tag along. On the surface, Smoke Signals is structured as a classical Hollywood buddy road movie, in which two friends or companions travel across the country together. Beneath this veneer of comedy and character development there exists a barrage of references to Native American history and culture (Cobb 210). The Reservation in which Victor and Thomas grew up is utilized extensively by the screenplay’s author, Sherman Alexie, who uses humor and elements of mise en scene to establish the poverty and socio-economic issues which still plague reservation life, while challenging the perceptions that people hold about life on reservations. The first thing we encounter on the reservation is the sounds of the KREZ radio station, accompanied by the housing and local businesses of the reservation. The radio station crosses to its weather and traffic van, which broke down years ago and whose driver\reporter still sits atop of.  This serves a two-fold symbolic purpose. Firstly, the reservation we are presented with is relatively modern, with individual housing, cars and commerce. The Native Americans here are living a comparatively modern existence (no teepees or longhouses). There is, however, a flip side to this modern depiction. Despite the modern veneer there are serious economic problems on the Reservation. We can speculate that while the community has a traffic and weather van, there is so little money that the van cannot be fixed when it breaks down (even after a number of years). This is echoed later when Victor and Thomas encounter their relatives, Velma and Lucy, who are driving a car which only travels in reverse. Anywhere else in the country the car’s gearbox would be replaced but here there is simply no money for such repairs.  Where many film makers would deal with these reservation related issues with heated political debate, Alexie uses strong political statements, “subtly veiled” (Cobb 210) with wry humor. Appropriately, much of the film’s political subtext relates to Native American representations and identity. In a particularly telling exchange between Victor and Thomas it is revealed that the negative impact of inaccurate media representations is not restricted to Euro-American consumers. Thomas, who styles himself as a latter day medicine man and dresses in cheap suits, is berated by Victor for not knowing how to act like a “real Indian”. Victor jeers at Thomas for styling himself as a medicine man and for being too influenced by films like Dances with Wolves. However, when Victor tells Thomas that he should look “stoic” and like he’s “just killed a buffalo”, Thomas counters this by telling Victor that their tribe, the Coeur d’Alene, never hunted buffalo and were fisherman. This exposes both young men as victims of the same cultural whitewashing that has shaped Euro-American’s perceptions of Native Americans through film and television. In this respect Native Americans are not only “objects of popular culture” but also “consumers and participants” in the same media and culture which capitalize on their image (Cobb 216). Ultimately, however, the real symbolic core of Smoke Signals exists in the personal relationships of the characters, particularly those they have with their parents. The precedent for this is established at the beginning of the film, during Thomas’ opening monologue: You know there are some children who aren’t really children at all, they’re just pillars of flame that burn everything they touch. And there are some children who are just pillars of ash, that fall apart when you touch them… Victor and me, we were children of flame and ash.

-Thomas, Smoke Signals

By styling himself as a latter day medicine man, with his incessant stories, Thomas seems to have little regard for hurting others feelings with his tales in fact, it often lands him in a great deal of trouble. In this respect, Thomas is a pillar of flame that burns everything he touches. Victor, conversely, is so emotionally devastated by his past that it is impossible for him to emotionally engage with anyone and, in effect, “fall[s] apart” when anyone touches him.  This is not only a neat metaphor for the psychological profiles of Victor and Thomas, but for those of many Native Americans. Let us consider those living on the Pine Ridge reservation during the 1973 occupation of Wounded Knee. The reservation was under the control of tribal chairman, Richard Wilson who ruled the reservation with an iron fist (Iverson 152). Firsthand accounts of those living on the reservation allow us to categorize them into these two loose psychological profiles, laid out by Alexie in Smoke Signals. Many of those who lived in the reservation with Wilson (and his vigilante squads) lived in absolute fear and either became violent themselves (fire) or withdrawn (ash) (Iverson 152). Wilson and those who responded violently to him and the FBI could easily be described as “pillars of fire” like Thomas, “burning everything they touch”, while the more subdued members of the community simply could not. Both the Native American council on the reservation (Wilson) and the United States government (represented here by the FBI) had completely failed them and thus they “[fell] apart when [anyone] touches them”, like Victor whom family, government and ideology have failed. Ultimately, the greatest parallel between the narrative Smoke Signals of and the legacy of injustice between Native and Euro-Americans is the constant theme of betrayal at the hands of a father. Victor and Thomas have both been dramatically affected the absence of Victor’s father. Native Americans have a history of referring to the President of the United States as the “great white father” and this gains a special resonance when we consider Thomas’ closing monologue in the film: “How do we forgive our fathers? Maybe in a dream. Do we forgive our fathers for leaving us too often, or forever, when we were little? Maybe for scaring us with unexpected rage, or making us nervous because there never seemed to be any rage there at all? Do we forgive our fathers for marrying, or not marrying, our mothers? Or divorcing, or not divorcing, our mothers? And shall we forgive them for their excesses of warmth or coldness? Shall we forgive them for pushing, or leaning? For shutting doors or speaking through walls? For never speaking, or never being silent? Do we forgive our fathers in our age, or in theirs? Or in their deaths, saying it to them or not saying it. If we forgive our fathers, what is left?“ This final meditation on Thomas’ part is a reflection on the relationship between a colonial power and the indigenous people it takes in its charge. The colonial past of Euro-Americans placed them in a traditionally antagonistic and authoritarian position, i.e. in the role of the father. By the tail end of the 20^th century, when Smoke Signals appears, Native Americans still find themselves subservient to an abusive, neglectful father. How are you supposed to feel towards this father who has alternately neglected and interfered with you? How do you heal a legacy of pain which has existed for generations? Finally, if you do decide to forgive this awful parent, what comes next? It is by virtue of these astounding layers of complex symbolism and political comment that makes Smoke Signals a departure from other depictions of Native Americans in film. While the significance of Native American involvement at all levels of the production cannot be ignored, it is the thoroughly human and emotional level with which Smoke Signals appeals to its audience in order to communicate its message that sets it apart from other attempts. Bibliography

• Churchhill, W. “American Indians in Film: Thematic Contours of Cinematic Colonization”, in Reversing the Lens: Ethnicity, Race, Gender and Sexuality Through Film, Jun Xing and Lane Ryo Hirabayashi, eds. Boulder, Colorado: University Press of Colorado, 2003
• Cobb, Amanda J. “This is What it Means to Say Smoke Signals”, in Peter C. Rollins and John E. Connor, Hollywood’s Indian: The Portrayal of the Native American in Film, Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2003
• Iverson, Peter. We Are Still Here: American Indians in the Twentieth Century, Illinios: Harlan Davidson, 1998
• King C. R., Media Images And Representations. New York: Chelsea House Publishing, 2006
• Rollins, Peter C. and John E. Connor, Hollywood’s Indian, Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2003.

• Smoke Signals Dir. Chris Eyre. Shadowcatcher Entertainment. 1998

When we consider the modern sexual politics of the Catholic Church they are, in comparison to those of the broader secular world, quite conservative. What many don’t realise is that much of what makes up the contemporary sexual politics of the Catholic Church stems from the works and thinking of one man: St. Augustine. This essay will explore the life and works of St. Augustine and how it was that he profoundly affected the thinking of both the Catholic Church and the broader secular community right up to the present day.

Essential to understanding the works of St. Augustine is an understanding of his background leading up to his career as a member of the Catholic Church. Augustine lived from 354CE to 430CE and was born to a devout Christian mother and devout Pagan father in Thagaste, a Numidian town. His mother was earnest to raise her son a Christian and this, coupled with Augustine’s brilliant scholarly ability and the patronage of a wealthy benefactor led to his education in Carthage. Augustine took easily to education and he exhibited an insatiable lust for knowledge, coming quickly to grasp Latin and the finer points of rhetoric. Early in his life Augustine had become a teacher of Pagan rhetoric at Carthage, regardless of his mother’s wishes. Augustine was very much his own man who not only went against the wishes of his family (especially his mother) but seemed to often behave in an actively antagonistic fashion. Augustine had a self-professed and over-active libido and, much against his mother’s wishes, Augustine took a concubine with whom he had a child, named Adeodatus, meaning “the gift of god”. Riling against his mother’s desire for him to seek Christian spiritual guidance, Augustine joined a Persian derived sect called the Manichaeans who related evil to matter and the realm of the physical. His devotion to the Manichaeans was shaken, however, when he met Bishop Ambrose at the request of his mother. Ambrose answered many of the Manichaeans’ objections to the Old Testament and exposed many of the flaws of Manichaean thinking with an eloquence and intellectual strength that amazed Augustine. The influence of Ambrose on Augustine was profound, as Bainton notes “here was a man who grappled with the problems of faith and who showed that one could be an intellectual and a Christian”. During Easter in 387CE Augustine and his son were baptised by Ambrose. Soon after this Augustine became a monk and then, in 396CE became a bishop in the town of Hippo in Northern Africa.

Throughout his career Augustine never lost his love of the scholarly pursuits and spent much of his time reading about and writing on Christian theology. Much of this seemed to be fueled by his apparent obsession with his own sexuality and with the nature of human sexuality in general. This is best displayed in his reflective autobiography and spiritual treatise Confessions which first appeared in 397CE. This document formed the core of what would become Augustinian sexual politics and, eventually, Catholic doctrine. Central to Augustine’s notion of human sexuality is that of Original Sin. According to Augustine, man was irreversibly corrupted by the fall of Adam and is inescapably tied to his sin against God. Adam’s (and by association man’s) punishment for disobedience to God was one of forced disobedience to one’s self. This is essentially the notion that the human body and mind became separate and opposed to one another. The free will of the human mind could no longer exert itself to control the base desires of the flesh. This is most notably present, Augustine claims, in the sexual passions of human beings. Augustine observed that sexual arousal seems to occur automatically, regardless of what the mind desires. Augustine saw this as proof that the body’s disobedience of the mind often manifested itself in the form of lust. The central problem for this explanation of the uncontrollable sexual desires of mankind was explaining how it is that something that Adam did could condemn every subsequent human.

Unlike the archaic biological notion of preformationism (which suggested that a child existed perfectly formed in miniature inside of its parent’s sex cells, extending all the way back to Adam and Eve), Augustine contended that the entire human lineage had not existed within Adam but that the whole of Adam had been corrupted, including his semen. This meant that every child that Adam created was imbued with evil, sinful seed which passed his sin onto all of his children. Therefore all descendants of Adam (that being the entire human race) were created with fundamentally flawed semen and inherited the Original Sin from all of their descendants. The implications for Augustine arriving at this conclusion were enormous. If all human beings were inherently flawed and sinful, then that meant they could not possibly be trusted to administer to anything without the constant guidance of God. This meant that perfection or a utopian, peaceful existence was impossible for mankind. Furthermore, if we couldn’t trust our bodies to behave appropriately towards sexual desire (because of the rampant influence of lust) then how were we to know what kind of sexual interaction or attraction was safe in the eyes of God? The only safe solution, according to Augustine, was to only have sex for the purposes of procreation which meant that only sex within marriage was acceptable. Augustine contended that the physical act of sex itself was not sinful, but that it was inexplicably linked to a lustful sexual desire that caused man to lose his rational control of himself and his body. However, because God ordained the marital bond, the lustful experience of sex within marriage was far more acceptable than sex outside of marriage that wasn’t for the purpose of procreation.

There was naturally opposition to these views. The transition from the writings of one man to official Church doctrine was by no means an instant or unanimous one. Julian of Eclanum was appalled at the notion that human sexuality or semen could in any way be sinful or anything but completely natural:

God made bodies, distinguished the sexes, made

genitalia, bestowed affection through which bodies

would be joined, gave power to the semen, and

operates in the secret nature of the semen – and

God made nothing evil.

-As quoted in Elaine Pagels, Adam, Eve and the Serpent, p. 132

So why would St. Augustine’s beliefs become adopted by the Catholic Church as doctrine? One possible explanation is that it would have been a very effective way for the Church to assert its place and power within society. If mankind cannot be trusted to control his base physical urges and requires a constant spiritual communion with God to save his eternal soul, then the Church is there, ready to offer spiritual guidance. If human beings cannot be trusted to govern themselves without the guidance of God, and the Church is the representative God on Earth, then that places the Church in a unique position of power. This alone could not account for the adoption of Augustine’s stance on Original Sin. Elane Pagels suggests that is the simplicity and compelling nature Augustine’s theory that allowed it to endure. In the face of human suffering, it answers the question of “why is this happening to me” by simply and efficiently removing the immediate blame from the individual and placing it on our collective ancestors, Adam and Eve. Augustine’s thinking tells us not only the cause of our suffering but also gives our suffering meaning and significance. The other advantage in this kind of thinking is that it removes much of the responsibility or guilt which stem from suffering or wicked behaviour by removing the blame from the individual. If good and evil are predetermined and we’re all sinners, then we can do anything we like as long as we ask God for forgiveness and absolution.

Let us now consider the legacy that St. Augustine has left and where it endures to this day. The Catholic Church still has a hard-line policy with regards to sex. Sex before marriage is unacceptable, sex is to be strictly for procreation and, as a result, contraception is strictly forbidden. Catholic priests are celibate, in order to turn their attention wholly towards matters spiritual. We need to understand, however, that St. Augustine’s thinking has had a wide-reaching and insidious effect on broader, secular society. We are very body conscious and have a number of nudity taboos (such as the generally negative view of public breast-feeding or nude swimming) and tend to frown on excessive premarital sex (especially in the case of women). While contraception is more acceptable in secular society it is often more for its uses as a means to prevent sexually transmitted diseases or allow for family planning amongst married people or couples in ‘committed relationships’.

In conclusion, the works and thinking of St. Augustine has had a powerful effect on both the thinking of the Catholic Church and broader secular society. The concept of Original Sin provided both a platform for the Church to assert itself within society and a mechanism with which the lay person could rationalise and understand suffering in their lives and in the world in general. Many of the central elements of Augustinian politics are preserved in the beliefs and social conventions of both the Catholic Church and secular society to this day. St Augustine may not be a figure of popular conversation but when we examine his life and his works we can see how profoundly one individual can personally alter the thinking of millions.

Further Reading

• Bainton, Roland, The Penguin History of Christianity, Vol. 1, London, Nelson, 1964, pp. 129-135
• Chadwick, Henry, The Early Church, London, Hodder Stoughton, 1968, pp. 216-236
• Pagels, Elaine, Adam, Eve and the Serpent,New York, Random House, 1988, pp. 98-150

Hilltop Hoods have matured something shocking. It began in 2006 with The Hard Road, an album that underscored the standard Hilltop hedonism with genuine ideological passions, and this was stylistically emphasised the following year, when the group rereleased the album with remixed symphonic orchestral backing. Their ambition, however, is only crystallized with 2009’s State of the Art, which is a record altogether more comfortable with its own seriousness than The Hard Road is, and yet a good deal more serious than A Matter of Time or The Calling. State of the Art feels like the real deal, where the prior four releases were varyingly insufficient drafts (no pun intended, although it’s worth noting that the album, particularly “Last Confession”, is very Drapht-esque).

In fact, Hilltop Hoods have achieved an artistic status that puts them squarely between Drapht and Bliss n Eso – they share the former’s personalized, vaguely spiritual, maudlin contemplation and the latter’s larger-than-life, self-aggrandizing, double-MC theatricality. What nonetheless makes them a unique Australian hip-hop experience is the integrity and cohesion they lend to these two elements. State of the Art represents a mastering of duplicitous tone – celebratory and furious, silly and serious, introspective and anthemic. And if I tend to focus on nuances like this rather than lyrical intricacy, exciting musicality and lavish production, it’s only because Hilltop have always been technically infallible. The subtle character changes and tonal sophistication on State of the Art, however, are new, and they’re very interesting.

For starters, MC Pressure has calmed down. We’ve already seen some of the potential benefits of this on The Hard Road, where he humbly sat out of ”An Audience with the Devil” and let MC Suffa tell the epic tale of conversing with the Prince of Darkness. The song is a moving high point of the album. This is not to say that Pressure’s performative presence is wholly bad… but prior to State of the Art, there is an aggressive neediness to his serious efforts and an unnerving meanness to his comic that simply seems to have mellowed and balanced with this release. He has achieved humility and a perspective on things.

Perhaps this is most greatly reflected by “Parade of the Dead”. The song, for reasons that will become clear, is very dear to those of us at Wonderbread. It is an acerbic electronic whirlwind that facilitates the story of two characters trapped in an Adelaide Zombie apocalypse. Naturally, the premise begs to be played for comedy, but today Hilltop Hoods are smarter than that. Pressure’s verse in this song is the delightful highlight, waxing lyrical with a number of classic zombie conventions and breathing poetry into them. His gunshot bow lays the perfect stage for the socially conscientious chorus lament, “They built my city on top of a grave/and now the dead run the street like a rotting parade.” Here, Pressure’s integration of serious ambition and silly comedy is infectious; it brings the best out of DJ Debris and Suffa in the interest of a single stylistic vision. “Parade of the Dead” is probably the most cinematic Australian hip-hop song I’ve ever heard.

Still, it must be conceded that the album’s centrepiece is its final track, “Fifty in Five”, which dazzles purely on the merits of its beautiful construction, both lyrical and musical. For specifics, you need consult the album itself, because I can’t bring myself to dissect it, but the song is an exemplary text for the universal anger of our age, and it has more conviction, persuasion and relevance than anything else the group have ever done.

Meanwhile, of course, the Hilltop hedonism I mentioned is still alive and well. It finds the occasional bit of substance to adhere to, such as the pride of “Still Standing” or the sheer punchiness of “Chris Farley”, but we can catch it exposed and adolescent in “Super Official”, “The Light You Burned” and the staggeringly misogynistic “She’s So Ugly”. For many, I’m sure it’s this very uncouth sensibility that keeps Hilltop at an arm’s length: for fans, it’s an unnegotiable part of the package. And, it must be said that with all its distaste, “She’s So Ugly” is a gorgeous piece of hip-hop. Like Birth of a Nation (1915), it’s to be admired… even though it’s going to Hell.

But gosh darn it, isn’t that almost a summation of all good hip-hop – to be admired, even though it’s going to Hell? The good thing about State of the Art is that it reveals minds that know this – Suffa and Pressure are men who consistently categorize themselves as Damned. They, like the great pioneers of rap, recognize that there is almost no greater artistic commodity than the view of a soul who is only going down. Simultaneously, they recognize that there is a wide and diverse world of entertainment at the fingertips of such souls. State of the Art is a great start. I don’t think they’re the least bit done. You can pick up State of the Art from Amazon.com, or wherever good music resides.