Film and Media Studies Commons^™

Cinematic Abuse: A Critical Analysis Of Disney’S “Happily Ever After” In The Little Mermaid, Aladdin, And The Princess And The Frog, Erin Michelle Gough

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation examines the manner in which three animated Disney princess films cultivate stereotypes and gendered behaviors consistent with domestic violence and thereby encourages viewers to accept and tolerate abuse against women. I argue that due to the dangerous, constricting, and sexist gender roles encouraged by the Walt Disney Corporation, films prime young girls and boys to react to social situations and encounters in a way that mirror the characters’ reactions. Because of the films’ entertainment value, most of the characters’ inappropriate, stereotypical, and often violent behaviors either go unnoticed or are passively accepted. The violence does not have to …

Reparative Cuteness: Summer Camp Island’S Obfuscated Streaming Distribution Reveals Our Dependence On Monetary Care, James R. Hanjian

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Summer Camp Island exhibits the culmination of the animation styles and ethics of dependent care produced within contemporary Cartoon Network animations. As part of the production cycle of Warner Bros. animated television programs following Adventure Time, Julia Pott’s animated program depicts networks of collaborative care informed by the lived realities of the creator-animators. By employing a reparative reading of the narratives and cute aesthetics which appear in the program, I maintain that the care networks presented within the diegesis of Summer Camp Island depict alternatives to the precarious economic and industrial realities that actively shaped the show’s production and distribution. …

Awful, Yet Awe-Full: The Sublime Dystopia Of Blade Runner 2049, Charles E. Butt

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Blockbuster dystopian sci-fi features stories of environmental collapse, authoritarian governments, out of control corporations, unbounded consumerism, and other awful possibilities. Scholars of science fiction broadly agree that this genre explores collective fears, anxieties, and speculations about the present and future. At the same time, film scholars have established that dystopian sci-fi cinema is compelling, and audiences respond to their effects-driven visuals, photorealistic mise-en-scene, and dramatic narratives. This creates an apparent paradox: Blockbuster cinematic aesthetics portray undesirable worlds desirably. I resolve this paradox by arguing that the worldbuilding of spectacle-driven, dystopian sci-fi cinema is Romanticized. That is, the provocative style of …

The Manosphere’S Reception Of The Women Auteurs Behind The ‘Man-Eating’ Jennifer’S Body (2009) And ‘Man-Hating’ Barbie (2023), Hilda Sheridan-Hewlett

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Scholarship on women filmmakers has not significantly emphasized the burden women auteurs carry when bracing themselves for the reception from misogynistic community discourse online, the manosphere. Director Greta Gerwig and screenwriter Diablo Cody are not simply perceived as filmmakers but as birth mothers of their work: Barbie (2023) and Jennifer’s Body (2009) which convey inherently popular feminist narratives. I argue Cody and Gerwig faced the wrath of the men online because they are inextricably linked to their productions, the feminization of their work in the eyes of the manosphere equals personalization. Despite Cody having the freedom to write any film …

Protracting The Immediate: Time As Form In Contemporary Horror, Kennedy Kelley

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This thesis examines the expression and experience of temporality in horror films of the last decade. Whereas early twenty-first century horror was characterized by high-octane jump scares, current horror is marked by contemplative slowness. I argue that the elongated duration of recent horror extends an experience of indeterminate anxiety that attunes us to an expansive relationality, offering a corrective not only to contemporary logics of immediacy, but also to the frequently constricting nature of embodiment as a theoretical concept. Recent horror scholarship tends to center sensuous propinquity in response to a long history of gaze theory’s disembodied passivity. While these …

The Rust Belt Gothic: Charting The Affective Politics Of Deindustrialization And The Emergence Of A Great Lakes Horror Genre In Film, Micheal B. Raines

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Within the past decade, a string of notable horror films set within the Steel Belt has emerged. These works collectively invoke the specter of the ‘Rust Belt’ in their narratives: the industrial Midwest’s derelict urban and suburban sprawls in the wake of the economic decline and white flight of the USA’s once-mighty manufacturing sector. Scholarship has commented upon the subtext of these works individually but fails to observe their collective nature as an emergent subgenre in horror fiction, centered upon directly confronting the Steel Belt’s twentieth-century history of stagnation. In this paper, I examine films which share clear aesthetic and …

Zeros And Ones: Digital Video Aesthetics And Geopolitical Economy In Blackhat, Everett Barnett

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Film and media theory has been fundamentally altered by the advent of digital technology, both in terms of film production and broader aesthetic overtures but also in terms of greater digital mediation. Blackhat (Michael Mann, 2015), although not a commercial or critical success, articulates many of the exact circumstances and broader consequences of digital technology in relation to its digital video aesthetics but also its narratives content involving global telecommunication and data systems. As a wholly digital film, Blackhat is uniquely situated to speak not only developments in digital filmmaking but also, by way of its plot line involving stateless …

Unveiling Estrangement: The Ambivalence Of Iranian Cultural Identity In Documentary Films, Vahid Valikhani

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This paper examines estrangement within Iranian society as depicted in Iranian documentaries, which, I argue, regularly suppress the complexities of Iranian cultural identity. While Iranian narrative cinema has been studied in this context, documentaries have received less scholarly attention, despite their potential to illuminate the shortcomings of conceiving Iranian cultural identity. I examine three documentaries: Tehran Today (Ahmad Faroughi Ghajar, 1962), Newcomers (Kianoush Ayari, 1979) and Tehran Without Permission (Sepideh Farsi, 2009). Through this analysis, I uncover various forms of estrangement, including those induced by westernization, gender oppression, and the political control of what Hamid Naficy calls “mediawork.” Drawing on …

The Boundaries Of Melodramatic Film Music: Redefining Home Through The Score Of Douglas Sirk’S All That Heaven Allows, Meredith Donovan

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

In this project, I analyze the relationship between music and narrative in Douglas Sirk’s 1950 film All That Heaven Allows. Sirk’s melodramas are held in high regard by film scholarship, but their scores, especially those composed by Frank Skinner, are often dismissed as lazy or mere atmospheric mood assistance. I argue, however, that the score of Sirk’s All That Heaven Allows builds protagonist Cary both a home—and a “home key”—through its tonal structure, rejecting a rigid boundary between diegetic and non-diegetic music as a whole by offering a fluid musical space to express the conflict between Cary’s emotional home and …

From Displacement To Intersubjectivity: A Phenomenology Of Sound In Classic Film Noir, Thomas Goodchild

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This paper analyzes the use of sounds displaced from their sources in classic filmsnoir. Noir is often understood as a dark and solipsistic moment in American cinema. Interpretations of noir frequently emphasize isolated individuals who are physically, psychologically, and socially displaced from their environments. Although scholarship on noir has examined this alienation through various sonic motifs such as music and voice-over, I investigate how several noirs draw attention to the act of listening through acousmatic sound—that is, sound heard without a visible source. Far from being an ephemeral auditory experience, I argue that the separation between sound and image invites …

Reading Rent: Interracial Relationships And Racial Hierarchies, Susanna A. Perez-Field

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

In examining the musical Rent by Jonathan Larson (1995) and its film adaptation by Chris Columbus (2005), most scholarly work and analyses have focused on the work’s identity as a queer text. I assert that elements of this musical have been overlooked for its depth of racial and class hierarchies. Utilizing sociological theory and interracial relationships, I will examine characters and musical numbers to explore diversity and class positioning.

I will explore Rent for themes of racial, gender, and sexual identities and how they are presented through the friendships and romantic relationships of the eight principal characters (alphabetically): Angel, Benny, …

Selective Framing And Narrative As Anthropocentric Agents In Yellowstone: America’S Eden, Breanna Lee Hansen

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Yellowstone: America’s Eden is but one example of nature documentaries tackling the complexities of nature-culture relationships during the age of the Anthropocene. Yellowstone National Park, the first to be named, is a primary example of how our relationship to the natural world developed through conservation and commodification. Yellowstone: America’s Eden demonstrates how film techniques conceal nature as a human construct through selective framing and narrative. By analyzing editing techniques made in the representation of Yellowstone National Park, this thesis bridges anthropocentrism to nature documentaries. Drawing on interdisciplinary research from media studies, environmental humanities, and anthropology, this thesis analyzes the ways …

From Counter-Strike To Counterterrorism: How The Cheater Reconfigures Our Understanding Of Asymmetric Warfare, Enya C. Silva

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Around the turn of the century, as the United States increased its military presence in the Middle East in what was widely known as the War on Terror, computer games were also rising in popularity. Military inspired narratives and settings are very common in video games, especially in the genre known as the first person shooter – characterized by a single player, first person point of view. Alexander Galloway provides a vocabulary for understanding the video game, and the first person shooter in particular, derived from the framework of game studies. Scholarship around video games usually either seeks to affirm …

Motherhood In The Multiverse: Melodrama And Asian American Identity In Everything, Everywhere, All At Once, Aditya Sudhakaran

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

In what follows, I look to the visual and narrative composition of the multiverse between Everything, Everywhere, All at Once (The Daniels, 2022) and Doctor Strange: Multiverse of Madness (Sam Raimi, 2022) to develop a more precise understanding of the superhero blockbuster as a contemporary expression of sensation melodrama. To do so, I use two depictions of maternity to excavate two very different approaches to the multiverse: one that externalizes social conflict, which it answers with individuated and exculpatory violence, and another that internalizes social conflict, which it answers through collective care. I introduce the blockbuster’s mobilization of the multiverse …

Losing The Streaming Wars: What Netflix Loses In Television Narrative And Participatory Fan Cultures, Annabelle G. Naudin

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This thesis focuses on the rise of streaming television and subsequent “binge-watching” and its impact on the narrative structure of a series. By looking at shows such as Stranger Things, which pioneered the rise in this new form of television, one can see the shift in narrative structure in comparison to previous long- form television such as LOST. This shift can be seen in the slow disappearance of “game-changer” cliffhangers within episodes that build to a larger implication in a season arc in favor of one longer mystery that stretches throughout the season. In this thesis, I argue that this …

Ambient Athleticism: Politicizing Akira’S Accelerationist Olympiad, Thomas G. Chaplin

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This thesis politicizes Katsuhiro Otomo’s 1988 animated cyberpunk film, Akira, specifically through how it stages its myriad neoliberal crises as opportunities for accelerationist solutions mediated by the Tokyo Olympics. Akira’s display of fully animated and intense action physics produces an aesthetic relation to its own athletes that contracts around their bodies in an attempt to transgress classical and oppressive compositions. Akira’s vague utopic promise receives broad acceptance and affirmation by extant scholarship, often relying on the accelerative impulses found in the works of Gilles Deleuze to substantiate Akira’s hopeful ending. Invoking Gilles Deleuze’s notion of athleticism, this thesis critically rereads …

“Good War” On The Cool Medium: The Cold War's Influence On The Portrayal Of World War Ii On American Television, Michael A. Losasso

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation is a cultural history of the Cold War’s influence on the portrayal of World War II on American television. In it, I chronicle the production, reception, and presentation of the war of three prominent American-produced documentary series from three periods of the Cold War – Victory at Sea (1952-1953), The Twentieth Century (1957-1966), and The Unknown War (1978). The dissertation posits that from the 1940s-1960s, the television portrayal of World War II was an embodiment of the values- that the United Sates was “fighting” for through a “triumphalist” narrative of a “just war” which recast the role of …

Digital Realness: Queer Intimacy In Contrapoints, William S. Beaman

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Digital media comprises a diverse ecology of creative genres, institutions, communities,platforms, and entrepreneurial businesses. Yet despite its practical association with variegated social forms, digital mediation as such is often theorized as a logic of homogenization, problematically obscuring its heterogeneously contested character. This article reconceives mediation as an irreducibly multi-scalar and heterogeneous infrastructure, recasting online activity as contested participation in wider social contexts. I am contributing to a counter tendency in media studies that methodologically treats digital forms as polysemic, ambiguous and contested, rather than necessarily homogenizing, in the context of specific cases. Drawing out the theoretical implications of this methodology …

Visions Of Entanglement And Escape: In-Visible Voice In The Films Of Terrence Malick And George Lucas, Michael Lee Taber

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This thesis juxtaposes the unexpectedly parallel careers of the filmmakers George Lucas and Terrence Malick. Both popularly and academically, Lucas and Malick are typically conceived as divergent practitioners and are framed in oppositional terms. The goal of this thesis is – in part – to break down this oppositional understanding of Lucas and Malick as filmmakers. This traditional understanding of Malick and Lucas collapses when we consider their respective relationships to sensation and abstraction. Affirmations of sensation and Malick abound, as do critiques of abstraction and Lucas – all the while it is Malick who is aligned with abstraction and …

An Exercise In Exceptions: Personhood, Divergency, And Ableism In The Star Trek Franchise, Jessica A. Blackman

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

In 1987, more than two decades after Star Trek: The Original Series aired on television for the first time, the Enterprise returned to delight audiences with an all-new crew in Star Trek: The Next Generation. With the new generation came new issues and adventures for the crew and the audience to explore, and the popularity of the show lead to the production of three successful spin-offs. These four new shows in the Star Trek franchise dealt with more complex plots and commentaries than the original series before them; three characters in particular – Lt. Commander Data, Dr. Julian Bashir, and …

Restarting Plural Modernity: The Lyrical Tradition Of The Hometown In Kaili Blues, Huadong Fan

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

The dichotomous paradigm constituted by the realist tradition of Chinese cinema has become the epic and inertial discourse for understanding Chinese modernity. However, I argue that some new filmmakers after the sixth generation of directors have used the narrative and aesthetics of the hometown to change this dominant logic of Chinese modernity. The revolutions and wars of the twentieth century transformed the hometown from a relatively stable agrarian civilization to a modern society in violent turmoil. Recent hometown films are no longer satisfied with this realist aesthetic duality and strive for a pluralistic discourse of Chinese modernity, releasing it from …

Montage Music Videos: Racial Utopianism Vs. Abstract Cowboys And The Question Of Cultural Montage, Alan E. Blanchard

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Along with the explosion of consumer goods in America over the past century came the human impulse to alter these objects to produce new meanings the manufacturers never intended: commercial products become amateur artists’ raw material. We see this with custom cars and the curious blending of clothes. Inevitably, digital commercial products, like music videos, would undergo a similar treatment as seen in DJ Cummerbund’s “mashup” videos “Old Staind Road” and “Blurry in the USA” where he is painting with audio tracks and sculpting with video clips to create new digital art with new meanings uncoupled from industry’s original intent …

The Value Of Sleep: Aura And Aesthetics Of Cohabitation In Juha Lilja's Revision Of Warhol, Christopher Costabile

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This thesis positions Juha Lilja’s 2013 digital video work, Sleep, as a prime example of what the author terms an “aesthetics of cohabitation” — a newly suggested method of artistic creation set in opposition to capitalist society’s commodification of both space and time, represented here through the work of Robert Hassan and Jonathan Crary. Lilja’s eight-hour-long video work, which is accessible on YouTube, is a reimagining and re-envisioning of Andy Warhol’s film of the same name. It subverts the intended function of digital streaming platforms while using digital technology to meet aesthetic criteria in shot length and overall duration, which …

Four Hollywood Film Adaptations Of Little Women: Identifying Female Subjectivity In Characters, Plots, And Authorship, Haiyu Wang

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

My thesis examines the expressions of the limits and possibilities of female subjectivity in the four Hollywood film adaptations of Little Women, filmed in 1933, 1949, 1994, and 2019 respectively, by combining textual and audience analysis with adaptation theory, feminist film theory, and feminist adaptation theory. In exploring the disparate femininity of female characters, the different representations of plots, and the authorship and changes of structure, I argue that the 1933 and 1949 versions present evidently conservative and patriarchal characteristics in the text, but their female subjectivity can be obtained through the complexity of emotion of the female audience …

Threatened By The Outback: Landscape And Ecology In The Australian New Wave, Richard T. Dyer

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Scholarship discussing the Australian outback as a cinematic setting often conceives of this space as sharing a “frontier iconography” with the American west. A significant element of this conception is attributed to the natural features of these setting’s respective landscapes, which are said to share an arid climate, rugged geologic formations, and vast open spaces. In this project I instead strive to challenge the associations frequently conjured between these natural spaces by identifying an ecological stance within the Australian “new wave” outback film that is at odds with the presentation of the landscape in both classical Hollywood westerns and the …

Horror’S Aesthetic Exchange: Immersion, Abstraction And Annihilation, Ashley Morgan Steinbach

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This thesis uncovers a remote entanglement of phenomenological experience and abstract aesthetics in postmodern horror, a space that historically celebrates the former and critically undervalues the latter. Framed as a case study, I mobilize close readings of Alex Garland’s science fiction horror film, Annihilation (2018), to complicate the immersion/abstraction binary that implicitly structures much of contemporary horror scholarship. By recovering horror’s distanced and decentered forms and aesthetics I point to the interdependent faculty of a composite aesthetic collaboration.

These collaborations, which I refer to as aesthetic exchanges, place pressure on the localized emphasis of horror’s situated assaultive and reactive positions. …

Recurring Scream: Trauma In Wes Craven's Slasher, Ben Muntananuchat

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This thesis investigates trauma representation in the horror film trilogy Scream, by director Wes Craven and based on the story and characters by screenwriter Kevin Williamson. The franchise is a satirical body of work that uproots the formulaic narrative aspects of the slasher film subgenre, of which it belongs to. Craven and Williamson’s method of critiquing the subgenre employs the usage of its cinematic tropes, though elevating them to a level of postmodern parody. I analyze traumatic representation within the franchise’s layers of mediation and postmodern narrative elements, which are often highlighted in academic discussion. The trauma observed revolves around …

Redefining Representations Of Trauma & Modes Of Witnessing In Damon Lindelof’S The Leftovers, Mariana Delgado

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This project aims to better understand how and why traumatized subjectivity is framed by The Leftovers’ fictional narrative in a visual and sonic form that rejects these modes of representations of trauma that they themselves have become conventional tropes. This thesis proposes to further examine the way the moving image, specifically the televised image, contributes to our perceived notions of trauma aesthetics through The Leftovers’ use of monologues, along with how and why suffering is sonically framed by the exchange of silence and Max Richter’s minimalist score.

Modernist aesthetics have become the disruptive expectations of contemporary Western cinematic audiences as …

Lost Without A Connection: Analyzing Netflix's Maniac In The Digital Streaming Age, Eric Bruce

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

With the emergence and rise in popularity of streaming services such as Netflix or Hulu, the way in which audiences view and interact with media, as well as each other, has changed drastically. The move to digital streaming impacts how audiences everywhere experience and expect immediacy in media, connecting deeper with what they watch. Along with this transition in spectatorship comes a shift in visual aesthetics, a trend that can be seen across various digitally-streamed series. This thesis serves to address what this transition is and how it affects the cultural landscape of the digital age, continuing the conversation of …

How Audiovisual Composition Reveals Gendered Limitations And Possibilities In Lady Bird In The Wake Of #Metoo, Chandler Micah Reeder

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This thesis focuses on the film Lady Bird and the historical coincidence of its release one month after the online movement #MeToo began. By giving frame and sound equal importance in my analysis of the film, rather than opposing these elements, I emphasize audiovisual composition and reveal the mutual dependence within what are considered traditional divisions of theory in cinema. These oppositions relate to control and escape, as they are portrayed through the mother and daughter characters, Marion and Lady Bird, as well as through image and sonic elements. My work demonstrates how the audiovisual composition of the film mediates …