American Film Studies Commons^™

Apocalyptic Films: Don't Look Up, A Case Study, Elyse Kuperus

Student Work

"This idea that in the end, while science can offer reasoning and understanding, only faith can offer comfort, is not lost on the characters, and should not be lost on the viewer either."

Posting about ­­­­­­­­the movie Don't Look Up from In All Things - an online journal for critical reflection on faith, culture, art, and every ordinary-yet-graced square inch of God’s creation.

https://inallthings.org/apocalyptic-films-dont-look-up-a-case-study/

Apocalyptic Films: Questions To Ask, Elyse Kuperus

Student Work

"When faced with our own world falling down around us, how will we act? Where will we turn?"

Posting about evaluating cinema from In All Things - an online journal for critical reflection on faith, culture, art, and every ordinary-yet-graced square inch of God’s creation.

https://inallthings.org/apocalyptic-films-questions-to-ask/

Children And The Cold War: Race & Hypocrisy Amid Fear Of Nuclear War, Richard D. Mctaggart Jr.

Theses and Dissertations

During the Cold War, American propaganda centered the wellbeing of the child in its messaging warning of atomic attack at the hands of the Soviet Union. However, despite American claims that all children were valued by the United States, this was proven untrue by its unequal treatment of Black children.

Me, Myself, And My Muppets, Sara Jones

Emerging Writers

In this personal narrative, the author explores her relationship and upbringing in relation to Jim Henson’s Muppets. She illustrates her experience at puppet camps, on long Muppet-filled road trips, and the special connection her mother and her share with the Muppets. Find out how the Muppets have shaped the author’s life, morals, and aspirations, as well as how Jim Henson’s creations have influenced and brought joy to past generations and future generations to come.

Naruto And Naruto: Shippuden Through The Lens Of Campbell’S Monomyth, Victor Ayon

Literary and Intercultural Studies | Senior Theses

“Naruto and Naruto: Shippuden through the lens of Campbell’s Monomyth” is a comparative analysis of the anime television series Naruto (2002-2007 Japan, 2005-2009 USA) and its sequel Naruto: Shippuden (2007-2017 Japan, 2009-2019 USA) with Joseph Campbell’s monomyth as delineated in his The Hero with the Thousand Faces. These Japanese anime television series that are considered one of the most popular worldwide, and yet the hero’s quest in each series is often overlooked. This study both compares and contrasts how the Campbellian stages of monomyth intersect with Naruto and Naruto: Shippuden animation narratives.

Conceive And Control: Cultural-Legal Narratives Of American Privacy And Reproductive Politics, Emily Naser-Hall

Theses and Dissertations--English

Law and literature share a foundation in narrative. The literary turn in legal scholarship recognizes that the law itself is a form of narrative, one that simultaneously reflects socio-cultural norms and creates social and political regulations with a complex matrix of power. Cultural narratives from the 1950s to the mid-1970s pertaining to reproductive politics, domesticity, and national identity both produce and are productive of legal rulings that govern and restrict private acts of sexuality and speech. The Supreme Court used cases concerning sex and reproduction to enumerate, explicate, and complicate the right to privacy, which appears nowhere in the U.S. …

Scarico: It’S Only A Movie, Most Of The Time, Thomas Nelson

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Exploitation cinema is a domain of motion picture content catering to a viewership interested in imagery that is more provocative than what mainstream audiences desire to see. These types of films are typically considered lowbrow entertainment and have been made in every era, albeit in a limited capacity proportional to the niche audience demand for them. Some time periods see a rise in exploitation film productions in response to a growing demand for such content from a larger share of the broader cinematic audience. This relationship indicates that period-specific cultural factors can cause mainstream audience members to seek out more …

Masculinity In American Movie-Musical Films, Christopher Sparks

Spring Showcase for Research and Creative Inquiry

My presentation explores the relation between American masculinity and film musicals. I demonstrate how the dominance of the musical at the box office in the middle of the 20^th century reflects historical events and technological change. Drawing on both scholarly and popular criticism, I show how the images of masculinity that Americans once encountered on the silver screen have transformed as musicals became marginal to popular culture in the United States. My research considers both classic 20^th century musicals, such as Wizard of Oz (1939) and 42^nd Street (1933), and more recent experiments with the genre, including …

Is Superman Circumcised? The Complete Jewish History Of The World’S Greatest Hero By Roy Schwartz, Gabriel C. Salter

Mythlore: A Journal of J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, Charles Williams, and Mythopoeic Literature

In Is Superman Circumcised?, Russell Schwartz provides a historical overview of Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster's creation of the comic book character Superman, arguing that Siegel and Shuster's backgrounds in Jewish immigrants gives a particularly Jewish subtext to their character. Schwartz builds on this argument with a larger historical overview of American comic book publishing, showing how Judaism and Jewish-American immigrant experiences have informed that industry from its earliest days.

Emerald Fennell's Promising Young Woman (2020): A Psychoanalytic Review Of Masculinity And Rape Culture, Marjorie A. Briones

Access*: Interdisciplinary Journal of Student Research and Scholarship

TW: mentions of sexual violence and rape

When it comes to the subject of sexual violence, there are systemic and cultural effects that prevents assaulters from being properly prosecuted. In the U.S., perpetrators of sexual violence largely consists of heterosexual, white men (RAINN, 2022). So, we begin to question the ways in which sexual violence and masculinity are interconnected. By conducting a psychoanalytic analysis of Emerald Fennell’s 2020 film Promising Young Woman, the ideas of toxic masculinity and “rape culture” will be deconstructed in regard to Cassie’s–the protagonist–story. Theories by Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung will be connected to real-life …

“Started By A Mouse” An Examination Into The Character Of Walt Disney, And The Company That He Built., Micah P. Bellamy

Bound Away: The Liberty Journal of History

Walt Disney's legacy reaches all over the world, which is a far stretch from his humble beginning delivering newspapers in Kansas City. This study will examine Walt Disney's life, starting with his humble beginnings on the farm, his early days as a cartoonist, to the rise of the Walt Disney Corporation. The examination will look at the man, Walt Disney, focusing on his upbringing and the various challenges that he faced throughout his life that shaped the leader that he would later become, and will reveal how, despite the adversities, obstacles, and challenges that Walt faced, and how they shaped …

Audiovisual Afterlives: The Soundtrack Of Liberal Nostalgia, Max W. Kaplan

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Following the 2016 American Presidential election, celebrity endorsements proved to be a more narrow gauge of public opinion than ever. The symbolic alignment with popular musicians, which had long abetted the Democratic Party’s standing with youth and particular identity groups, seemed only to reaffirm the party’s establishment status, drawing disavowal in a wave of anti-establishment sentiment on both the left and right. ‘Retromania,’ a term first coined by Simon Reynolds in 2010, can be tracked conceptually from the nostalgic inclinations of twenty-first century popular culture to the ideological sphere, where nostalgic, essentialized constructions of community, identity, and progress have coalesced …

Panic At The Picture Show: Southern Movie Theatre Culture And The Struggle To Desegregate, Susannah L. Broun

Swarthmore Undergraduate History Journal

This paper explores the complex desegregation process of movie theatres in the southern United States. Building off of historiography that investigates regulations of postwar teenage sexuality and recent scholarly work that acknowledges the link between sexuality and civil rights, I argue that movie theatres had a uniquely delayed desegregation process due to perceived sexual intrigue of the dark, private theatre space. Through analysis of drive-in and hardtop theatres, censorship of on-screen content, and youth involvement in desegregation, I contend that anxieties of interracial intimacy and unsupervised teenage sexuality produced this especially prolonged integration process.

John Wick: Keanu Reeves’S Epic Adventure, Ann C. Hall

Heroism Science

Three films create the John Wick universe and franchise: John Wick (2014), John Wick: Chapter 2 (2017), and John Wick: Chapter 3, Parabellum (2019). A fourth film is scheduled to be released in March 2023. All are wildly popular, and all are criticized for violence, particularly gun violence. I argue, however, that by examining the visual references that appear in all the films, it becomes clear that the films are defending themselves from such attacks through their allusions to ancient and classical epics from around the world. As Wick battles his way through museums and beautiful cities, the film reminds …

Downsizing The Silver Screen: An Analysis Of Covid-19'S Impact On The American Filmmaking Industry, Andrew Paxson

Information Systems Undergraduate Honors Theses

The following case analysis details the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on the American entertainment industry, with particular commentary given to ethical considerations amongst the changing landscape of consumer behavior. While the entertainment sector suffered at great lengths due to prolonged closures, multimedia firms such as Warner Bros. and Disney elected to modify their service methods, delivering continued programming at the expense of business partners and creatives. Through legally ambiguous and precedent setting business decisions, cinema chains were neglected and employed talent disenfranchised, thereby setting a trend in the industry that seeks to both eliminate communal theater experiences and reinterpret …

Possession: The Struggle For Female Bodily Agency In Exorcism Cinema, Michelle Lynne Pribbernow

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

A dominant trope of the possession genre of horror cinema is the spectacle of the white female body that extends beyond narrowly-proscribed boundaries as being too active, too loud, too sexual, and too uncontrolled. This excess is depicted as monstrous, revolting to patriarchal ideology and in need of containment. In this dissertation, I argue that the long-standing horror genre of possession narratives reveals social anxieties about a loss of control over the productive and reproductive capabilities of the undisciplined female body in U.S. patriarchal, white supremacist, late capitalist culture. This study critically examines three sets of possession films: the Paranormal …

Movie Review: Everything Everywhere All At Once, Thomas J. Clark

Faculty Work Comprehensive List

"[This movie] takes on tough questions and may yield some valuable answers."

Posting about the movie Everything Everywhere All at Once from In All Things - an online journal for critical reflection on faith, culture, art, and every ordinary-yet-graced square inch of God’s creation.

https://inallthings.org/movie-review-everything-everywhere-all-at-once/

Seeing And Interpreting Visions Of The Next Age In Interstellar, Nancy Wright

Journal of Religion & Film

Christopher Nolan’s Interstellar (2014) uses multiple styles of cinematography – documentary, painterly and expressionistic – to guide interpretation of its apocalyptic review of history. Within the prologue and epilogue of the science fiction film, clips from interviews originally filmed for Ken Burns’s The Dust Bowl (2012) invite questions about how to interpret documentary, revisionist and eschatological reviews of history. Cinematography functions as a self-reflexive cue to spectators within and outside the mise-en-scène to engage in eschatological interpretation. The representation of spectatorship and vision reveals the challenge of interpreting prophetic visions of the last things and the next age, which are …

Gender, Race, And Religion In An African Enlightenment, Jonathan D. Lyonhart

Journal of Religion & Film

Black Panther (2018) not only heralded a new future for representation in big-budget films but also gave an alternative vision of the past, one which recasts the Enlightenment within an African context. By going through its technological enlightenment in isolation from Western ideals and dominance, Wakanda opens a space for reflecting on alternate ways progress can—and still might—unfold. More specifically, this alternative history creates room for reimagining how modernity—with its myriad social, scientific, and religious paradigm shifts—could have negotiated questions of race, and, in turn, how race could have informed and redirected some of the lesser impulses of modernity. Similar …

Disorientation Of Memory: Trauma, The 9/11 Novel, And Don Delillo’S Falling Man, Julia Walsh

English Honors Theses

This paper explores the literary devices and motifs used to portray 9/11 trauma on the page as representation for survivors and depictions of trauma for non-survivors. The paper focuses specifically on Don DeLillo's Falling Man as the quintessential 9/11 novel to provide analysis on the larger genre. DeLillo is experimental in his form within the novel, using fragmentation and disorientation to explore the nuances of memory function during and after a traumatic event. These nuances of memory delve into complications of remembrance such as PTSD, memory impairment diseases, and the impact of media on memory.