Mike Phillips

Southern Illinois University, School of Media Arts, Faculty Member

Graduate Center of the City University of New York, Comparative Literature, Alumnus

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Peer-Reviewed Articles by Mike Phillips

Through a Tube, Darkly: Critical Remediation in High and Low (1963)

Crime Fiction Studies, 2021

Akira Kurosawa's 1963 police procedural High and Low is, as its title suggests, intensely interes... more Akira Kurosawa's 1963 police procedural High and Low is, as its title suggests, intensely interested in the socioeconomic valences of spatial relationships, literalized in Yokohama's affluent hills and its low-lying slums. The central conflict between inhabitants of these two spaces articulates this local topography into a global framework, in which concrete spaces of social interaction and functional production become abstract places that act as conduits for flows of media and capital. Previous analyses have read the film as an historical reflection of and nationalistic reaction to Americanization. Attending to the film's transnational, transtemporal, and transmedial articulations reframes the film as a critical engagement with globalization rather than a symptomatic reflection thereof. The immediate context of the rapid adoption of television, concomitant with Japan's emerging consumerism, allows Kurosawa to figure abstract economic patterns through intermedial formal techniques. These textual practices associate the materiality of celluloid with manual labor, and the ephemerality of TV with speculative finance. By further linking the protagonist Gondo with the former pair and the antagonist Takeuchi with the latter, High and Low formally and structurally critiques economic globalization as a form of criminality.

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A Man Called Horse: Western Melodrama and Southern Gothic

Americana: The Journal of American Popular Culture, 1900 to the Present, 2020

This article concerns a relatively neglected Hollywood Western, rarely addressed in critical disc... more This article concerns a relatively neglected Hollywood Western, rarely addressed in critical discourse but vividly remembered by cinephiles, both lay and professional. A Man Called Horse, released in 1970, is an adaptation of a short story by Dorothy Johnson, first published in Collier's magazine in 1950. Johnson is best known as the source author for another cinematic Western adaptation, John Ford's canonical The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962). 1 A Man Called Horse belongs to a much older genre that has been subsumed into the Western, the so-called Indian captivity narrative. In this story form, a settler of European extraction is kidnapped by indigenous people, lives among them for a time, and is eventually redeemed to white civilization. Evincing an ambivalence endemic to the Western genre, the captivity narrative fluctuates between an exoticizing fascination with the primitive and an ideological imperative that the protagonist withstand the temptation to "go native." According to a longstanding theory, genre narratives foster social cohesion by imaginatively resolving intractable contradictions within dominant ideologies (Cawelti, Adventure 35-36). In the case of the captivity narrative, at least if the protagonist is male, his temporary encounter with this savage way of life is thought metonymically to rejuvenate his decadent culture, as is exhaustively elaborated in Richard Slotkin's frontier myth trilogy.

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Nose-gaping: The Smells of Mason & Dixon

Orbit: A Journal of American Literature, 2019

This article examines Pynchon’s evocations of smell in Mason & Dixon as a vehicle for critiquing ... more This article examines Pynchon’s evocations of smell in Mason & Dixon as a vehicle for critiquing notions of the rational subject and the bounded text. The nose is posed as a carnivalesque counterpart to the eye, the sense organ most readily associated with empiricism. The directional gaze, crucial to the eponymous characters’ work as astronomer and surveyor, often gives way to enveloping odors, producing an embodiment inimical to Enlightenment. Anthropologist David Howes has argued that smell is most vividly experienced in liminal spaces or at cognitive thresholds. I draw on his work to illuminate Pynchon’s association of smells with the dissolution of distinctions between abstract categories like civilization/wilderness, mind/body, past/present, and text/reader. I argue that this novel about the delineation of a boundary is primarily concerned with interpretive indeterminacy, figured and produced through textual smells.

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