Civilized Violence: Subjectivity, Gender and Popular Cinema PDF
Preview Civilized Violence: Subjectivity, Gender and Popular Cinema
Civilized violenCe For Clare, with love Civilized violence Subjectivity, Gender and Popular Cinema david HanSen-Miller © david Hansen-Miller 2011 all rights reserved. no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise without the prior permission of the publisher. david Hansen-Miller has asserted his right under the Copyright, designs and Patents act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work. Published by ashgate Publishing limited ashgate Publishing Company Wey Court east Suite 420 Union road 101 Cherry Street Farnham Burlington Surrey, GU9 7PT vT 05401-4405 england USa www.ashgate.com British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Hansen-Miller, david. Civilized violence : subjectivity, gender and popular cinema. 1. violence in motion pictures. 2. Motion pictures--Social aspects. i. Title 791.4'36552-dc22 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Hansen-Miller, david. Civilized violence : subjectivity, gender and popular cinema / by david Hansen-Miller. p. cm. includes bibliographical references and index. Includes filmography. ISBN 978-1-4094-1258-8 (hardback) -- ISBN 978-1-4094-1259-5 (ebook) 1. violence in motion pictures. 2. Psychic trauma in motion pictures. i. Title. Pn1995.9.v5H35 2011 791.43'655--dc22 2011012888 ISBN 9781409412588 (hbk) ISBN 9781409412595 (ebk) V Contents Acknowledgements vii Introduction 1 1 From Scaffold to Cinema: Violence as a Force of Subjection and Subjectivation 7 2 Violence and Clinical Authority in ‘The Aetiology of Hysteria’ and The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari 37 3 Violence and the Passage from Responsibility to Desire in The Sheik 65 4 The Death of Popular Sovereignty in Once Upon A Time In The West 97 5 Deliverance and its Uses: Subjectivity, Violence and Nervous Laughter 131 Conclusion: Gender and Pervasive Violence 161 Bibliography 183 Index 199 This page has been left blank intentionally Acknowledgements The Department of English at Queen Mary College, University of London, and the Department of Sociology at Lancaster University each provided me with a remarkable home for interdisciplinary research, and I am grateful to everyone I worked with in both places. I would particularly like to thank Michèle Barrett, Morag Shiach and Cora Kaplan. A number of colleagues and friends have helped me put this project together through practical advice, reading and commenting on my work, and generally being supportive. My thanks go to Tina Campt, Anne Cronin, Megan Hiatt, Ranjana Khanna, Nayanika Mookherjee, Robyn Wiegman and Yoke-Sum Wong. On that same note Kate Nash and Jackie Stacey have to be singled out for their generosity. Special thanks are also reserved for Mary Evans, who championed the book when it needed a champion. And then, of course, there are the people who provided more general but just as essential inspiration and support for – as well as respite from – the work. My gratitude goes to Carolyn Rebuffel Flannery, Rosalind Gill, Laura Gowing, Ann Hemmings, Hilary Hinds, Laleh Khalili, Gretchen Miller, Martin Murray, Mark Paterson, Jane Rowley, Fran Tonkiss and Amal Treacher. Merl Storr and John Hemmings also belong in this group, at the same time that I must thank them both for careful proofreading and Merl for indexing. Ashgate, and my editor Neil Jordan, were a pleasure to work with. Finally, I would struggle to do justice to the role that Clare Hemmings has played in the development of this book. Her intellectual engagement, love and support have made it both possible and pleasurable. This page has been left blank intentionally Introduction The media violence debate and its concern with the effects of watching violence unquestionably takes up a significant amount of shelf space in university libraries, yet there are few substantive studies of why violent representations appeal to audiences in the first place.1 When reasons are provided as to why violence appeals to audiences they are often cursory. It seems that unexamined assumptions about innate aggressive drives and the desire to satisfy primitive impulses are doing significant, but unacknowledged, explanatory labour. Further, while there are many collections and monographs providing textual analyses of violent cinema, there is a general tendency to see violence as symbolic of, or in service to, more significant forms of social power. Another approach seems to assume that violent representations deliver, in fantasy, the satisfaction of basic justice or revenge that is so often denied in real life. In general, the prominence of violent representations and their obsessive consumption seems uncomplicated. One of the telling problems with such routine understandings is that they assume an audience that is generally removed from the experience of actual violence. Effects research generally starts from the assumption that representation introduces the idea of violence into an arena where it is otherwise minimal or even absent. Representation either stimulates the aggressive drives of an innocent subject or offers them previously unimagined forms of excitement. Meanwhile, some of the more prominent empirical research concludes that violent representations beget violence and aggression only within those spaces already marked by real violence.2 Within both approaches we can discern an understanding of the social world in which violent contexts and non-violent contexts can be readily differentiated. Within ‘civilized’ societies there is a degree of cultural confidence that audiences are not significantly touched by, or concerned with, violence. We can even entertain arguments that the extreme violence found in some forms of contemporary popular cinema exists for a young audience who are profoundly removed from the experience of violence – insulated by class or other privilege from the direct experience of war, street violence, police harassment and the like. Thus a niche market of spectators can test their masculine endurance at the movies. The embedded assumption seems to be what the historical-sociologist Norbert Elias identified as a central myth of civilization: the view that modern 1 Jeffrey Goldstein, ed. Why We Watch: The Attraction of Violent Entertainment (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998) is an excellent and broad-ranging exception. 2 Jo Groebel, The UNESCO Study on Global Media Violence (Paris: UNESCO, 1998).
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