Arts and Humanities Commons^™

Intolerable Masculinity: Screening Men's Shame And Embracing Curious Futures, Cole Clark

Film and Media Studies (MA) Theses

This thesis argues that to critique hegemonic masculinity and patriarchy in good faith, film and television must focus on the futures created through men’s ethical action in the present, rather than inert displays of men’s horrific behaviors that rely on audience shame as a tool for reclaiming men’s pride. Men’s freedom to change their situation is introduced through Manon Garcia’s (2022) notion of masculinity as an “impasse,” preventing men from authentic connection with others. This concept is furthered using David Buchbinder (2013), with the television examples Mad Men (Weiner 2007-2015) and Black Mirror (Brooker 2011-2023) each presenting a different masculine …

Cinema's Poetic Function: Creating An Amorous Distance, William Yonts

Film and Media Studies (MA) Theses

The aim of this thesis is to examine how cinema can embrace its poetic function to avoid its assimilation into preexisting hermeneutic structures, which would leave it vulnerable to myth as defined by Roland Barthes, and instead be a generative force, encouraging its viewer to engage with the full potential of the text. This mode of spectatorship is termed the “amorous distance,” which Barthes describes as his simultaneous fascination with the film and that which exceeds it. The amorous distance finds further articulation through the work of Roman Jakobson and Julia Kristeva. Jakobson’s schema of six language functions describes the …

Embracing The Wound Of Contingency: Transcribing Reality In Supernatural Horror And Found Footage, Mason Dax Dickerson

Film and Media Studies (MA) Theses

To counter both the form of critical thought first outlined by Kant that dispels absolute knowledge, as well as the dogmatic necessitarianism that asserts the universe must be one way for an absolute originary reason, Quentin Meillassoux argues for the “non-facticity of facticity” to implicate an absolute contingency or unreason structuring reality: in effect, anything could happen for no reason at all. Meillassoux suggests the trauma of the contingent event and the sudden impossibility of inductive science in its wake may be explored in an “Extro-Science Fiction” text (XSF) – but limits his examples to science fiction literature. Framing the …

From Film Sets To Front Lines And Back Again: Reinventing Star Image In Post-World War Ii Hollywood, Livia Belen Lozoya

Film and Media Studies (MA) Theses

When World War II broke out in 1939, and as the United States entered the conflict after Pearl Harbor was bombed in 1941, men and women all across America left their homes to serve the war effort, some of which included Hollywood stars. There were famous actors in the 1950s and 60s who served as unknown young men, but this thesis focuses on established movie stars who voluntarily left their lives of luxury to serve and returned to a changed postwar film industry, specifically James Stewart, Robert Montgomery, Marlene Dietrich, and Myrna Loy. By looking at each of these actors’ …

Real To Reel: The "Third Gender" Narratives And Queer Identity In Rituparno Ghosh's Bengali Films, Manjima Tarafdar

Film and Media Studies (MA) Theses

This thesis critically explores the third gender space that Rituparno Ghosh created in his later films, where he either featured and/or directed the films. The Bengali filmmaker, Rituparno Ghosh was one of the very few filmmakers in India who consciously and vocally spoke for the sexual minorities and represented them in his films. Focusing on the films, Arekti Premer Golpo, Memories in March and Chitrangada: The Crowning Wish, the thesis looks at the films that negotiated through the in-betweenness of gender identity, not solely lying within the binary of gender. Through this representation of the third gender space, …

Independent Visions Of Marginal America: Reimagining A Nation Through Outsiders, Searching, And Non-Arrival, Z Evan Long

Film and Media Studies (MA) Theses

This thesis explores critical responses to American-ness, American identity, and most significantly American myth, in independent films about America in cultural terms, and their attempts to deconstruct the myths of nation and culture. The independent films about America analyzed in this thesis range from the 1960s to the 1990s, made by filmmakers across movements and cultures, but they all contain in some measure three key concepts: the “outsider,” the “search,” and a narrative “non-arrival.” Easy Rider (1969) will be explored as the prototype for this paradigm, contrasted with films that reinterpret the road-movie structure away from existential angst and toward …

Bluey And Adult Fandom: The Importance Of Play In Culture, Olivia C. Gerzabek

Film and Media Studies (MA) Theses

This thesis explores the animated children’s show Bluey(2018 -), its ever-growing appeal to millennials, and the online fandom that these millennials have formed. The thesis outlines a brief history of media aimed at children and families, starting with the children’s matinees of the 1930s to children’s educational media of the 1960s through the 2000s with shows like Spongebob Squarepants (1999 -) and Shrek (2001) appealing to a broad audience of all ages. Compounding on the history of animation and family-centered media, the advent of social media allows users to revisit media they have nostalgia for, share with others, and create …

Animating Gender: Conflicting Narrative And Character Design In Gravity Falls, Laine Marshall

Film and Media Studies (MA) Theses

This thesis analyzes the character designs from the Disney XD animated series Gravity Falls (Alex Hirsch, 2012-2016) through a third-wave feminist lens, arguing that these designs reflect an essentialized perception of gender that is in conflict with the themes of acceptance present in the series’ narrative. The series’ narrative pushes forth the idea that female characters are the moral center of the series and serve as an example to their peers, that they are self-assured and in control, and that men can push past any ignorance to care for the people around them, but this effort is undermined by the …

How Donald Trump And The 2016 Presidential Election Eclipsed Frank Underwood’S Election In ‘House Of Cards’, Charna Flam

Film and Media Studies (MA) Theses

In 2016, the U.S. faced a seismic change in national politics and the evolution of the entertainment industry. As the rise of streaming services had finally hit its stride, Netflix, the industry disruptor, had released a steady stream of critically acclaimed series, most notably beginning with the platform’s first original program, House of Cards. The series’ main character, Frank Underwood (Kevin Spacey) would become a fixture within the television landscape at the time, as both political dramas and anti-hero series were at all-time high, but what the writers of House of Cards did not expect was how their plotlines would …

The Audrey Hepburn Image: Stardom, Gendered Authorship, And Creative Agency, Livi Edmonson

Film and Media Studies (MA) Theses

Female stardom was an essential component to the star system and film industry in Hollywood’s Golden Age. During the postwar era, one of the most influential female stars was Academy award winning actress, Audrey Hepburn. Hepburn’s emergence in the industry, as well as her branding as a “postwar Cinderella,” was representative of the emerging intersection between fashion and film. The association of Hepburn’s stardom with the two mediums --- especially to that of haute couture --- was solidified through her association with French couturier and close friend, Hubert de Givenchy. However, Hepburn’s agency becomes subverted in scholarship and popular culture …

The Rape-Revenge Genre In The Digital Age Of Heightened Visibility: The Rise Of Female Storytellers And Fourth-Wave Feminism, Marynell Dethero

Film and Media Studies (MA) Theses

The rape-revenge cinema genre has continued to evolve since its initial emergence in the 1970s. Many of the most popular films belonging to the genre produced in the 1970s, like Meir Zarchi’s I Spit on Your Grave (1978) or Wes Craven’s directorial debut The Last House on the Left (1972), have been criticized heavily by film critics and scholars for their exploitative tropes. However, I argue that regardless of the production value of the films, the rape-revenge genre is inherently feminist because sexual violence is and always has been an inherent issue to the feminist movement and because the genre …

Balancing Multiple Worlds: The Multiverse And The Fractured Asian American Experience In Everything Everywhere All At Once (2022), Austin Kang

Film and Media Studies (MA) Theses

This thesis examines the ways in which the 2022 film Everything Everywhere All at Once (2022) employs the philosophical ideas concomitant with the multiverse hypothesis in order to narrate an emotionally poignant, yet somewhat typical story about a multi-generational Asian American family. This thesis argues that the film uses its characters as vehicles to not only illustrate the multilayered nature of Asian American realities through the allegory of “auto verse-jumping” across the multiverse, but also to philosophically contemplate and respond to the existence of the multiverse via its presentation of conceptual parallels. The film employs the hypothetical existence of the …

The Disintegration Of Marriage In Ryusuke Hamaguchi’S Happy Hour (2015), Afra Nariman

Film and Media Studies (MA) Theses

By using Happy Hour as a case study, this thesis argues Ryusuke Hamaguchi's approach to the Japanese home drama genre presents a changing perspective on the institution of marriage in contemporary Japanese society, reflecting shifts in gender roles and the growing trend of singlehood amongst Japanese youth. This perspective contrasts with the values portrayed in Ozu's films, which emphasize the vitality of marriage and the necessity of forming a family for happiness. The thesis analyzes the thematic and narrative elements of Happy Hour, focusing on the portrayal of marriage as a source of alienation and loneliness. It also discusses the …

Desire For Transformation: The Actualization Of Self-Identity Through Change In The Films Raw And Titane, Owen Bradford

Film and Media Studies (MA) Theses

The aim of this thesis is to illustrate a distinction between the films of The New French Extreme and Ducournau’s Raw and Titane, in their handling of gender and identity, primarily in regard to how these films handle transformation and self-identification. Ducournau explores themes of cannibalism, the linking of desire and violence, and transformation in order to disrupt hegemonic conceptions of sex and gender binaries. the disruptions to these binaries are initially perceived as monstrous, due to the implementation of genre conventions, they play on perception of the monstrous feminine, to reveal cultural perceptions that these transgressions are dangerous, …

What Are You Crying For?: Renegotiating White Masculine Hegemony Through Melodramatic Excess In The 1990s Films Of Tom Hanks, Bryce Thompson

Film and Media Studies (MA) Theses

This thesis studies the emergence of a renegotiated masculinity in the 1990s predicated on the expression and containment of anxieties around White masculinity and an appropriation of the melodramatic mode. By establishing a historical and theoretical foundation from which to understand and analyze this unique cultural moment, this thesis demonstrates how such a renegotiation acted in tandem with a larger reactionary project. This foundation includes a critical review of the “crisis of masculinity” of the 1990s defined in Sally Robinson’s (2000) work; an engagement with the nature, reproduction, and self-preservation of hegemony, as explored through traditional theorists like Raymond Williams …

Obsessed With The Image: Vulgar Auteurism And Post-Cinematic Affect In The Late Films Of Tony Scott, Ethan Cartwright

Film and Media Studies (MA) Theses

Beginning in the mid-2000s and carrying through the next several years, a small, dedicated group of critics and cinephiles worked at reevaluating certain contemporary Hollywood genre filmmakers whose work had been largely maligned or ignored by both critics and mainstream audiences. This group, termed as “vulgar auteurism,” distinguished directors like Michael Mann and Paul W.S. Anderson for their audacious and unique formal styles, often using digital technologies and imagery. This thesis proposes that the films and filmmakers associated with vulgar auteurism are connected through how they uniquely portray life in the early 21^st century using three of Tony Scott’s …

Cinematic Palimpsests: Polysemy And In(Ter)Dependency In The Spectator Experience, Lyric Luedke

Film and Media Studies (MA) Theses

The model of the cinematic palimpsest helps us to critically reevaluate formal aspects of film language, relationships between film texts, and the construction of cinematic meaning in conversation with the spectator. Originating in Medieval Europe, a palimpsest is traditionally defined as a book or similar physical text “created by a process of layering whereby the existing text was erased, using various chemical methods, and the new text was written over the old one” again and again (Dillon 2005). Palimpsests rely on the core principle of in(ter)dependency, wherein each element or layer is both independent and interdependent, inherently affecting the significance …

Re-Animating Post-Digital Cinema: [Animated] Fluidity And Hybrid Aesthetics In Tomm Moore’S Celtic Trilogy, Thomas James Schwaiger

Film and Media Studies (MA) Theses

Tomm Moore’s Celtic Trilogy, consisting of The Secret of Kells (2009), Song of the Sea (2014), and WolfWalkers (2020), displays an inter-medial hybridity and synergy of commercial and experimental elements that encourage a redefinition of animation with a focus on the innate qualities of fluidity in animated aesthetics. This fluidity in visual aesthetics and narratology honors the legacy of studio animation over the past century, while reintroducing technological and creative experimentation. This freedom further allows for authentic cultural (self-)representation of Celtic traditions in film.

Paralleling a history of cinematic theories by Arnheim, Cholodenko and Manovich projects a shared space for …

Layer Cake: Post-Cinematic Aesthetics And The “Social Justice Impulse” In Kaneza Schaal's Jack &, Amber M. Power

Film and Media Studies (MA) Theses

Kaneza Schaal is a New York City-based theater artist who consistently utilizes a collaborative and hybrid approach to performance making, privileging demographic diversity alongside formal diversity. Drawing on intermedial performance discourse, early television scholarship, and social practice theory, I argue that Schaal’s citation of 1950s sitcom aesthetics in her 2018 theatrical work Jack & self-consciously stages a critique of the cultural hegemony that structured twentieth century television in order to contest the contemporary US media-incarceration nexus.

As a critical second layer to my analysis, I look at the ways Schaal utilizes the tools of the avant- garde (intermediality, collaboration and …

Pennies From Heaven: Death And The Afterlife In World War Ii Fantasy Films, Elise Williamson

Film and Media Studies (MA) Theses

Wartime fantasy films produced by major Hollywood studios during World War II integrate the supernatural (i.e., ghosts, angels, and the afterlife) into wartime settings with relevant protagonists and themes to address the psychological trauma of wartime death and loss. Three case studies – The Human Comedy (Clarence Brown, 1943), A Guy Named Joe (Victor Fleming, 1943), and Between Two Worlds (Edward A. Blatt, 1944) – explore fantasy narratives and conventions unconventionally blended with the war film genre, and illustrate how the war film setting (home front vs. combat front vs. war zone) influences character focus (civilians vs. military), the …

(De/Re)Constructing Chicanx/A/O Cinema: Liminality, Cultural Hyphenation, And Psychic Borderlands In Real Women Have Curves And Mosquita Y Mari, Diana Alanis

Film and Media Studies (MA) Theses

When discussing ChicanX/a/o cinema, as situated in the United States, its relationship to “American” cinema is one of decoloniality that interrogates the contradictions of a diverse yet homogenous national identity. The formation of cultural identity in conjunction with national identity is inherently contradictory when nationalism requires allegiance that negates differences among communities. ChicanX/a/o identity is one of hybridization that rejects a fixed category of meaning in favor of a liminal landscape of potentiality— a psychic Borderland of identity. Contemporary ChicanX/a voices in Real Women Have Curves (Patricia Cardoso, 2002) and Mosquita y Mari (Aurora Guerrero, 2012) use feminist and feminine …

The Ben-Hur Franchise And The Rise Of Blockbuster Hollywood, Michael Chian

Film and Media Studies (MA) Theses

The Ben-Hur films were some of the most popular, controversial, and financially successful films of the 20^th century. As a result, Hollywood mindset and practices were heavily influenced by the marketing strategies and discourse surrounding these films, as many studios and filmmakers wanted to achieve the same, if not a higher, level of success. Thus, the current state of the blockbuster oriented American film industry owes a great debt to the Ben-Hur films for helping to popularize blockbuster filmmaking. While the blockbuster marketing, fandom, and discussions of today are more profuse and sophisticated than that of the past, the …

Beyond The Image: Marilyn Monroe, Shelley Winters, And The Method, Emily K. Oliver

Film and Media Studies (MA) Theses

Sexist gossip for women and professional celebration for men is a longstanding, detrimental trend within popular culture, society, and film studies scholarship. While this tendency can be traced consistently throughout film history, it is particularly apparent within the discourse surrounding the transitional period of postwar Hollywood (1945 - 1960). Though frequently disassociated from one another for their seemingly oppositional contemporary legacies, Marilyn Monroe and Shelley Winters began their careers synonymously as studio- created ’blonde bombshell’ archetypes. Monroe’s and Winters’ early acting credits represent severe industry illustrations of objectification and sexist tactics to utilize female bodies to sell performances. Following variable …

Curation Of The Video Art Exhibition In The Museum, Kamla Thurtle

Film and Media Studies (MA) Theses

The goal of this thesis is to illustrate the importance of video art through a spatial and aesthetic phenomenological framework, revealing the critical nature of aesthetic experiences for forming meaning between art-objects and viewers facilitated through acts of curation. Video art, emerging in the 1960s and heavily intertwined with the museum, marks a unique, novel, and profound disruption of the representative regime of aesthetic experiences and objects through its nature to question cultural systems of the world as a radical medium. By evolving from anti-art movements in tandem with technological innovations, video was distant from art history, discourse, and tradition, …

Bong Joon-Ho’S Transnational Challenge To Eurocentrism, Lisa - Marie Spaethen

Film and Media Studies (MA) Theses

Through a narrative analysis of three of Bong Joon-ho’s films: The Host (2006), Snowpiercer (2013), and Okja (2017), this thesis explores the impact of global media flow of transnational cinema, foregrounding its potential to convey broader (but more effective) social and ecological political messages through its wider reach to audiences. Each film selected highlights a specific aspect of transnational cinema – postcolonial transnationalism (Shohat and Stam, 1994), transnational odor (Koichi Iwabuchi, 2002), and ecocinema transnationalism (Kääpä Pietari, 2013) - illustrating the fluidity of cinema in the 21st century and further, the unique position Netflix holds in our contemporary mediascape as …

Revitalizing Hollywood Stardom: Classical Star Power And Enduring Marketability At Warner Bros. In The Beginning Of New Hollywood, Tham Singpatanakul

Film and Media Studies (MA) Theses

New Hollywood was foundationally a debatable period in the course of American film history, with distinctive characteristics of new directorial emergence and innovative film style. However, the contemporary industrial context suggested a prominent power of stardom to effectively sustain the business in the new wave of new youth and counterculture. In the inception of the period, Warner Bros., one of the major film studios since the classical Hollywood era, exemplified a star-driven marketing approach using classical glamour and the narrative of nonconformity to attract the target audience. Proven by the studio’s archival evidence, major Hollywood stars in the 1960s made …

Unreal Reality: Post-Socialist China's Massive Infrastructural Agenda In Jia Zhangke's "Three Gorges Films", Weiting Liu

Film and Media Studies (MA) Theses

This thesis focuses on Chinese Six-Generation film director Jia Zhangke’s “Three Gorges films” Still Life (2006) and Ash Is Purest White (2018) to demonstrate the impact of post-socialist China's massive infrastructural agenda on Chinese citizens’ lives and psyches in contemporary Chinese society. Starting with the analysis of Still Life, this thesis first examines Jia’s experimentation with the computerized UFO imagery incorporated into the film’s realist narratives and themes to deliver the sense of unreality people feel towards the construction of the Three Gorges Dam, the world’s largest hydroelectric power station and post-socialist China’s largest infrastructural project. Revisiting the subject …

Smell As Self-Identity: Capitalist Ideology And Olfactory Imagination In Das Parfum’S Multimedia Storytelling, Xinrong Liu

Film and Media Studies (MA) Theses

This thesis explores smell as a cultural signifier in Perfume’s multimedia storytelling. By establishing the theoretical ground upon the historical importance of scent, the thesis focuses particularly on its close interrelationships with the politics of identity, an issue elaborated in Patrick Süskind’s novel Das Parfum–Die Geschichte Eines Mörders (Perfume: The Story of a Murderer, 1985) as well as its two screen adaptations--the film Perfume: The Story of a Murderer (dir. Tom Tykwer, 2006) and the television series Parfum (Netflix, 2018). In virtue of textual analysis and cultural studies on Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer’s discussion …

Representative Biodiversity: The Ecosystem Of Cartoon Network, Carl Suby

Film and Media Studies (MA) Theses

As a capitalist organism the television program, as explained by Todd Gitlin, uses its slant to sell itself to advertisers with similar leanings on contemporary social issues to maintain its flow of revenue. However, this concept of slant does not account for the broader network, which, like the singular program, cultivates a catalog of programming into a singular slanted message becoming an ecosystem of shows relying on each other to maintain viewership. The successful televised ecosystem will then be home to programs who enjoy long runs and display an easily recognized shared slant. As an example of the televised ecosystem, …

Bending Family Friendly Into Fear: Nostalgia, Minstrelsy And Horror In Bendy And The Ink Machine, Isabelle Williams

Film and Media Studies (MA) Theses

When one thinks of Disney’s Mickey Mouse, fear and horror are not terms normally associated with this iconic American cartoon character; however, the video game Bendy and the Ink Machine turns animated bodies (cartoons) into bodies the player fears. In this game family friendly cartoon characters are transformed into figures of fear. Furthermore, Bendy and the Ink Machine does this by making the bending of Black bodies visible through what I call the gameic gaze. The transformation from family friendly into fear happens through the resistive gaze, the gameic gaze, which lingers on the bending of the diegetic cartoons. Bendy …