Film and Media

This paper concentrates on the reimagining of the domestication trope of feminine development and the celebration of resilient girlish plasticity in three American independent films about economic and housing precarity: Precious (2009), Winter's Bone (2010), and Beasts of the Southern Wild (2012).

Why is Hollywood so uncomfortable with ambitious women?

In this video, I look at Aaron Sorkin's 2017 film Molly's Game and explore how female ambition in American cinema is often framed as an illness.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1US-I4mKHzU

Filmography:
Dark Victory (Edmund Goulding, 1939)
Mildred Pierce (Michael Curtiz, 1945)
A Woman's Face (George Cukor, 1941)
Now, Voyager (Irving Rapper, 1942)
Lady in the Dark (Mitchell Leisen, 1944)
The Dark Mirror (Robert Siodmak, 1946)
Shock (Alfred L. Werker, 1946)
Possessed (Curtis Bernhardt, 1947)
Whirlpool (Otto Preminger, 1950)
All About Eve (Joseph L. Mankiewicz, 1950)
The Seven Year Itch (Billy Wilder, 1955)
Rocky (John G. Avildsen, 1976)
Baby Boom (Charles Shyer, 1987)
To Die For (Gus Van Sant, 1995)
Jerry Maguire (Cameron Crowe, 1996)
Working Girl (Mike Nichols, 1988)
Boiler Room (Ben Younger, 2000)
Maria Full of Grace (Joshua Marston, 2004)
Morning Glory (Roger Michell, 2010)
The Social Network (David Fincher, 2010)
I Don't Know How She Does It (Douglas McGrath, 2011)
Wadjda (Haifaa Al-Mansour, 2012)
The Wolf of Wall Street (Martin Scorsese, 2013)
Nightcrawler (Dan Gilroy, 2014)
The Intern (Nancy Meyers, 2015)
The Big Short ( Adam McKay, 2015)
Molly's Game (Aaron Sorkin, 2017)
Float Like a Butterfly (Carmel Winters, 2018)

We’re often a little too happy to classify as ‘feminist’ anything that presents lead female characters confronting gendered oppression, but we don’t always consider how these narratives might conceal and preserve other systems of oppression.

In 18S5, an event, fateful within the history of modern consciousness, occurred. In late August of that year, The New York Sun, one of the first mass, commercial media, published a series of articles on the astronomical discoveries of Sir John Herschel, made at his observatory at the Cape of Good Hope, Southern Africa. The articles were concerned with Herschel's telescopic surveillance of the moon. The first in the series described the telescope in some technological detail. The machine was a hybrid of science and magic: its lense was "24 feet in diameter, and weighed nearly 15,000 pounds after it was polished; its estimated magnifying power was 42,000 times." Herschel, the Sun reported, believed that his instrument would make him a seer amid the unfolding of technical discovery. It would allow him "to study even the entomology of the moon, in case she contained insects upon her surface."' The installments that followed were a temptation in the religion we call "progress." The next in the series provided readers with a look at the lunar surface, and soon.. .at the shady vegetation that reportedly flourished there. Then, encircled by woods, nestled by a valley, the scientist "beheld continuous herds of brown quadrupeds, having all the external characteristics of the bison." 2 The articles were the handiwork of Richard Adams Locke, a relation of John Locke, and a star reporter for the Sun. Needless to say, the articles were a hoax. The alleged source for the articles, the Journal of Science from Edinburgh, was-at the 1. Frank M. O'Brien, The Story of The SUN: New York, 18331928 (New York, 1928), p. 43. 2. Ibid., pp. 43-44. SYMPOSIUM ON NARCISSISM / 75 time-defunct. Herschel himself continued his works at the Cape of Good Hope, totally ignorant of the stories' appearance. He was a victim of one new development in modern communication: the mass circulation, commercial press. It would be decades before he could have been promptly informed by another: the submarine telegraph lines. As he sat there at the tip of Africa, the stories about him took on the character oifact in New York City. Despite the fictional roots of the articles, the most important thing about them was their facticity. People believed them. The burgeoning network of printed newspapers spread the word further. Even doubts that were expressed, were expressed cautiously. Academics sought out the printed accounts; in the spirit of inquiry. The crowd gathered. By the time that the silken, copper-colored humanoids appeared, many eyes were watching. Unlike the busy, urban, industrializing people who were reading about them, these moon creatures glided on diaphanous membranes linking hand and foot: they were "winged creatures" who far from being "engaged in any work of industry or art... spent their happy hours in collecting various fruits in the woods, in eating, flying, bathing, and loitering about upon the summits of precipices." 3 At the far end of mechanical science-it might have been argued-there lay paradise. People toiled under the truth of it. What was so believable about this world that stood beyond the edges of common sense? Clearly this is a question of historic significance. It speaks to the structures of perception and understanding that have germinated in the industrial epoch. Somewhere within the historical explanation is the confusion and incomprehensibility of modern existence: customary understandings are no longer adequate. Somewhere within the historical explanation, there also lies the rise of the mass media which have placed their version of sense and order upon existence. The ability to forge reality was an early capacity of print; a capacity built upon since then by subsequent devices for storing and disseminating information. As the word, as the image is reproduced, and again, and again, it becomes fact, known similarly by strangers. It is the life-blood of a mobile world system employing standardized meanings and requiring standardized understandings. Factl It is seen, over and over again. Repeated by itself, repeated by others. Where it is stored, it becomes a history. Against the picaresque and irretrievable quality of daily life, lies the tangible evidence of the printed word, of the graven image, of the fact. Its presence is awesome, and the tale of Richard Adams Locke's "moon hoax" reveals this power as a discovery. The mass media appear as basic to the modern, secular system of belief. While the printed Bible stood at the center of the Protestant revolt, its claims were primordial. The printed, widely circulated daily newspaper, on the other hand, was also a child of modernity. Its spectacle was the forerunner of all the media spectacles to come. Its audience was increasingly tossed in a mobile and expanding world; experience provided only a hazy tunnel of perception. Literacy stood ennobled as the tool of liberty, while the newspaper began depicting the world in broadside. Thomas Paine or Frederick Douglass may reveal the emancipatory promise of literacy; but the "moon hoax" reveals its awful power, during a time when today's commercial networks of images, messages and audiences were first taking hold. The publishers of these papers, scions of early industrial capitalism, were aware of their mighty force. While the Sun was the brainchild and property of Benjamin Day, another pioneer news merchant, James Gorden Bennett (publisher of The New York Herald) waxed eloquent about the historic potential of the daily, "penny 3. Ibid., pp. 50-53.

©2012 by the board of trustees of the universit y of illinois Early Video Pioneer: An Interview with Skip Blumberg melanie la rosa mel anie l a rosa is an award-winning filmmaker and educator whose work is distributed by Women Make Movies and has been screened and broadcast internationally and funded by several arts councils and foundations. She currently teaches in the Department of Film and Media Studies at Hunter College, CUNY, and holds an MFA from Temple University and a BA from the University of Michigan.

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In the chapter, "Playing with Fire without Getting Burned: Reimagining Blowback in Battlestar Galactica" (2008), I evaluate 9/11 as a form of blowback, the CIA-coined term for delayed revenge against US covert operations. The clandestine nature of the motivating activity makes the violence seem senseless to the public and lends credence to the dominant framing myth of America as an innocent victim. BSG deconstructs this myth and addresses what is unspeakable about 9/11, namely, our complicity in propagating violence that can be turned against us.

In the chapter, “‘Things in this Country are Gonna Change Pretty Fast’: Dissent, Mobilization, and the Politics of Jericho” (2010), I analyze Jericho, a serial drama in which a widespread terrorist attack allows a new, autocratic government to install itself over half the country, with the support of a conglomerate that owns a private security firm. I explore not only the thematic treatment of 9/11, occupation, and terrorism in the series but also fan discourse about the show and its meaning.

This chapter of A Companion to the Horror Film investigates cinematic discourses about the torture porn cycle (2004–2007), and the changing norms of the graphic depiction of body horror on screen. The cycle dominated the box office in the years between widespread press revelations about torture at Abu Ghraib and the end of the Bush Administration. I assess how the popularity of this subgenre, which features extended scenes of largely American characters undergoing torture, is related to larger concurrent debates about Abu Ghraib, and the morality of torture.

How does the depiction of female subjectivity and agency change when a Danish public broadcasting serial is adapted for an American commercial network? I compare Forbrydelsen (DR1, 2007–2012) with its remake, The Killing (AMC 2011–2013, Netflix 2014), to draw out the significance of postfeminism and neoliberalism as interpretive grids that limit feminist progress in the United States. Despite similar narrative and aesthetic strategies that center a strong female protagonist, female agency is undermined in The Killing through the postfeminist “bad mother” trope, which supplants Forbrydelsen’s Nordic noir left-wing critique of global capitalism and gender issues. This analysis illustrates that the cultural milieux of societies that are as egalitarian as Scandinavian states convey indirect feminist creative influence on cultural production, even when there is limited direct female creative input, an influence that may outweigh greater direct female creative control in the anti-egalitarian cultural context of a neoliberal and postfeminist United States.

Difficult Women analyses select case studies from international TV dramas to examine the unresolved feminist issues they raise or address: equal labor force participation, the demand for sexual pleasure and freedom, opposition to sexual and domestic violence, the need for intersectional approaches.

Drawing on examples from The Killing, Orange is the New Black, Big Little Lies, Wentworth, Outlander, Westworld, Being Mary Jane, Queen Sugar, Vida, and other television dramas with a focus on complex female characters, this book illustrates how female creative control in key production roles (direct authorship) together with industrial imperatives and a conducive cultural context (indirect authorship) are necessary to produce feminist texts. Placed within the larger context of a rise in feminist activism and political participation by women; the growing embrace of a feminist identity; and the ascendance of post-feminism, this book reconsiders the unfinished nature of feminist struggle(s) and suggests the need for a broader sweep of economic change.