American Film Studies Commons^™

The Successful Façade: The Powers Of Postmodernism Within The Comedy, Abigail Muller

Schultz-Werth Award Papers

The comedy has always been an incredibly versatile genre: although it certainly contains rote story formulas meant to provide lighthearted entertainment, the comedy can also reveal interesting perspectives pertaining to darker underlying issues, allowing audiences to process these hypocrisies as from behind a screen of safety. Such is the case of the movies The King of Comedy (1982), Wag the Dog (1997), Bowfinger (1999), and Grand Budapest Hotel (2014), all of which can be classified as comedic escapades yet fail to conceal their corrupted underbellies from a prying viewer. The four films, despite occurring in wildly different worlds and containing …

Children In The Films Of Alfred Hitchcock, Debbie Olson, Jason Mcentee

English Faculty Books

Jason McEntee is a contributing author, "'The Future’s Not Ours to See’: How Children and Young Adults Reflect the Anxiety of Lost Innocence in Alfred Hitchcock’s American Movies.”, pp.31-46.

Children and youth perform both innocence and knowingness within Hitchcock's complex cinematic texts. Though the child often plays a small part, their significance - symbolically, theoretically, and philosophically - offers a unique opportunity to illuminate and interrogate the child presence within the cinematic complexity of Hitchcock's films.

‘The Future’S Not Ours To See’: How Children And Young Adults Reflect The Anxiety Of Lost Innocence In Alfred Hitchcock’S American Movies., Jason Mcentee

English Faculty Publications

Introduction:

In The Man Who Knew Too Much (1956), the Ambassador, while plotting to kill the Prime Minister, orders the kidnapped American child Hank McKenna killed, telling his would-be gunman, Edward Drayton: “Don’t you realize that Americans dislike having their children stolen?” Earlier in the movie, Jo McKenna entertains her son and husband by singing “Que Sera Sera,” and its playfulness becomes darkly ironic when she sings “the future’s not ours to see” on the eve of her son’s kidnapping.
The movie unfolds as a cat-and-mouse game in which the McKennas desperately try to locate and save their kidnapped son, …

Post-9/11 Sf Films: Terrorism, Warfare, And Dystopia, Jacob Herrmann

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The 9/11 event has had a profound impact on all forms of contemporary narratives. After 9/11, the Bush Administration waged The War on Terror as a way to bring about the imperialist pride that the United States once maintained before Vietnam and to restore what Tom Englehardt refers to as “victory culture.” The United States government and its military have utilized the media to construct a national purpose since 9/11: a purpose largely understood as a mission to combat and eradicate terrorism as well as to police third world nations. This thesis examines post-9/11 SF films, such as The Dark …

The Novel-To-Film Translatability Of Satire In The The Day Of The Locust And Wise Blood, Jason Mcentee

English Faculty Publications

It comes as no surprise that the critical work focusing on Nathanael West's The Day of the Locust (1933) and Flannery O' Connor's Wise Blood (1952) sheds much light on the motifs satirical and otherwise at work in the novels. However, the film versions of the novels, those by legendary directors John Schlesinger (1969's Midnight Cowboy) and John Huston (1941's The Maltese Falcon), respectively, remain open to investigating how satire works within them. On the one hand, for instance, the popular vein of criticism regarding West and his Hollywood novel seems focused by the Frankfurt school of thought-mostly Adorno, and …

The Gendered World Of Disney: A Content Analysis Of Gender Themes In Full-Length Animated Disney Feature Films, Beth A. Wiersma

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Research has focused on the gender messages portrayed in television programs, cartoons, advertisements, literature, picture books, and fairy tales. One venue that has not received as much attention in the research is the Disney 1 full-length animated feature films. This is a qualitative study of the gender themes and portrayal of gender roles in full-length animated feature films by The Walt Disney Company. The findings in this research indicate there has been little change in the stereotyped portrayals of Disney characters from the release of the first full-length animated feature film Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs in 1937 to …