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Full-Text Articles in Arts and Humanities
“You’Ll Never Meet Someone Like Me Again”: Patty Jenkins’S Monster As Rogue Cinema, Michelle D. Wise
“You’Ll Never Meet Someone Like Me Again”: Patty Jenkins’S Monster As Rogue Cinema, Michelle D. Wise
Languages, Literature & Philosophy Faculty Research
Film is a powerful medium that can influence audience’s perceptions, values and ideals. As filmmaking evolved into a serious art form, it became a powerful tool for telling stories that require us to re-examine our ideology. While it remains popular to adapt a literary novel or text for the screen, filmmakers have more freedom to pick and choose the stories they want to tell. This freedom allows filmmakers to explore narratives that might otherwise go unheard, which include stories that feature marginal figures, such as serial killers, as sympathetic protagonists, which is what director Patty Jenkins achieves in her 2003 …
Something To Do With A Girl Named Marla: Eros And Gender In David Fincher’S Fight Club, Vernon W. Cisney
Something To Do With A Girl Named Marla: Eros And Gender In David Fincher’S Fight Club, Vernon W. Cisney
Interdisciplinary Studies Faculty Publications
David Fincher’s 1999 film, Fight Club, has been characterized in many ways: as a romantic comedy, an exploration of white, middle-class male angst, an existentialist search for meaning amidst the moral ruins of late capitalism, an anarchist manifesto, and so on. But common to nearly every reading of the film, critical and laudatory alike, is the assumption that Fight Club is indisputably a celebration of misogynistic, masculinist virility and violence. On its face, this assumption appears so overwhelmingly obvious as to render superfluous any argumentation in support thereof, and absurd any opposing argumentation. Consider the ubiquitous homoerotic adulation of the …
'Tomboy' Is Anachronistic. But The Concept Still Has Something To Teach Us, Lynne Stahl
'Tomboy' Is Anachronistic. But The Concept Still Has Something To Teach Us, Lynne Stahl
Faculty & Staff Scholarship
This article explores the tomboy trope in film and literature and the "taming" that characterizes it, framing both in relation to contemporary debates about gender and sexual identity as well as cultural anxieties around queer, trans, and nonbinary identity. Examining texts from Louisa May Alcott's Little Women to the 1980 film Little Darlings, the article argues that even while the term tomboy may be obsolete, tomboy narratives document processes of rebellion that hold continuing value.
Bat Meets Girl: Adapting The Dark Knight’S Love Life To The Big Screen, Brandon Bosch
Bat Meets Girl: Adapting The Dark Knight’S Love Life To The Big Screen, Brandon Bosch
Department of Sociology: Faculty Publications
It is no secret that Hollywood loves a good romance. What is perhaps sometimes overlooked however is how important romance and female characters are to male-dominated action films. Esma Kartal argues women and romance are deliberately placed into action films to create “romantic relief” and attract female viewers for greater crossover appeal.1 In addition to romance, Yvonne Tasker observes how women in action films serve as a witness for “the hero’s suffering” and humanity in action films.2 Finally, a classic use of women and romance in action films is that of the damsel-indistress, which continues to this day …
“In The Beginning Was Body Language” Clowning And Krump As Spiritual Healing And Resistance, Sarah S. Ohmer
“In The Beginning Was Body Language” Clowning And Krump As Spiritual Healing And Resistance, Sarah S. Ohmer
Publications and Research
In the neighborhood of HollyWatts in Los Angeles, dance allows a shift from existing as bodies presented as sites of threat and extinction to sources of spiritual empowerment. Clowning and Krump dancers—their subjectivity and their dancing bodies—negotiate survival from trauma and socioeconomic marginalization. I argue that the dancers’ performances act as embodied narratives of “re-membering in the flesh.” The performance acts as a spiritual retrieval and re-integration of traumatic memories and afflictions into memory through the body. Choreography and quotes from dancers support the claim that Krump and Clowning is “re-membering in the flesh” that enacts self-worth, self-defined sexuality, and …
Romancing Beale Street (Review), Robert J. Corber
Romancing Beale Street (Review), Robert J. Corber
Faculty Scholarship
The author reviews Barry Jenkins’s 2018 film adaptation of Baldwin’s novel, If Beale Street Could Talk, finding that Jenkins’s lush, painterly, and dreamlike visual style successfully translates Baldwin’s cadenced prose into cinematic language. But in interpreting the novel as the “perfect fusion” of the anger of Baldwin’s essays and the sensuality of his fiction, Jenkins overlooks the novel’s most significant aspect, its gender politics. Baldwin began working on If Beale Street Could Talk shortly after being interviewed by Black Arts poet Nikki Giovanni for the PBS television show, Soul!. Giovanni’s rejection of Baldwin’s claims that for black men …