Spectacles of history: Race relations, melodrama, and the science fiction/disaster film

Camera Obscura

Volumn 17, Issue 2, 2002, Pages 109-152

  Kakoudaki, Despina ^a  

^a HARVARD UNIVERSITY   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 33144460439     PISSN: 02705346     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1215/02705346-17-2_50-109     Document Type: Review

References (30)

1. Neal Gabler, "This Time, the Scene Was Real," New York Times, 16 September 2001.
2. Some critics have already identified déjà vu as a characteristic of this experience and have tried to move beyond simply referring to these films. See, for example, Michiko Kakutani "Struggling to Find Words for a Horror beyond Words," New York Times, 13 September 2001;
3. A. O. Scott, "Film: A Buffer for the Terror," New York Times, 13 September 2001;
4. also Elvis Mitchell, "Good at Action Films: Maybe Too Good," New York Times, 18 September 2001.
5. Recent books that discuss disaster films and their political implications include Wheeler Winston Dixon's Disaster and Memory (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999)
6. Stephen Keane's Disaster Movies: The Cinema of Catastrophe (London: Wallflower, 2001).
7. Also see Richard Dellamora's Postmodern Apocalypse: Theory and Cultural Practice at the End (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1995) for historical and theoretical perspectives on apocalyptic expectations.
8. But the street location of the Empire State Building was changed to appear as if it stood on an intersection and to allow for maximum visibility of the spaceship and the destruction of the building. The World Trade Center towers were actually on an intersection, so perhaps the shot style is a relevant referent between the film and the attack, even if the buildings are not. The familiarity in this case would be to the traditional shot highlighting the tall, narrow, perspectival street grid of New York City, as seen for example in Roland Emmerich's films Independence Day and Godzilla (US, 1998).
9. Amy Taubin, "Playing It Straight: R.E.M. Meets a Post-Rodney King World in Independence Day," Sight and Sound 6.8 (1996): 6-8.
10. This essay emerged out of a graduate seminar offered by Linda Williams, titled "Melodramas of Black and White" (Departments of Rhetoric and Film Studies, University of California, Berkeley, spring 1998).
11. In that seminar and her book, Playing the Race Card: Melodramas of Black and White from Uncle Tom, to O.J. Simpson (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001),
12. Peter Brooks, The Melodramatic Imagination: Balzac, James, Melodrama, and the Mode of Excess (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1995), 200.
13. For a discussion of melodrama in film, see Christine Gledhill, ed., Home Is Where the Heart Is: Studies in Melodrama and the Women's Film (London: British Film Institute, 1987).
14. Also, see Steven Neale, "Melodrama and Tears," Screen. 27.6 (1986): 6-22.
15. William McDonald, "Dazzled or Dazed? The Wide Impact of Special Effects," New York Times, 3 May 1998.
16. Franz Lidz, New York Times, 17 May 1998.
17. Furthermore, Lidz's response reminds the fourteen-year-old crowd that "baby boomers" (who, according to Lidz, long for the "old Godzilla" of their more innocent childhood) will hate the "new Godzilla." This play on generational appeal is in itself a guarantee of the film's success. For a discussion of the production process and budget demands of blockbuster films, see Thomas Schatz, "The New Hollywood," in Film Theory Goes to the Movies, ed. Jim Collins, Hilary Radner, and Ava Preacher Collins (New York: Routledge, 1993), 8-36.
18. For a more detailed exploration of these questions, see Rick Altman, Film/Genre (London: British Film Institute, 1999).
19. In The Classic Hollywood Cinema: Film Style and Mode of Production to 1960 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985),
20. Bruckheimer and Leder qtd. in McDonald, "Dazzled or Dazed?"
21. My decision to blend traditional genres is motivated by a need to explore the unconscious fantasies and political implications of these films. Sharon Willis explains this approach best: "Because popular films read, consume, and even offer partial analyses of fantasies and anxieties circulating in the social field, they are always ambivalent, and their address to us is ambivalent. If we recognize that films may tell us what we are really thinking about - are really anxious about, collectively - then we have to assume that we do not automatically understand these anxieties any more than the films do, because surely the unconscious is at work in the social field as well" (High Contrast: Race and Gender in Contemporary Hollywood Film [Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1997], 58).
22. Robyn Wiegman, American Anatomies: Theorizing Race and Gender (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1995), 2.
23. For a complex reading of the white male action hero in Hollywood, see Willis, High Contrast, chap. 1.
24. Taubin, "Playing It Straight," 6-8.
25. Judith Butler, "Endangered/Endangering: Schematic Racism and White Paranoia," in Reading Rodney King/Reading Urban Uprising, ed. Robert Gooding-Williams (New York: Routledge, 1993), 15-22.
26. Neale, "Melodrama and Tears," 7. Emphasis original.
27. According to Neale, tears are "the consequence of loss, the loss, particularly, of a sense of union with the mother. However, crying isn't simply an articulation of this loss, it is also a demand for its reparation - a demand addressed most commonly to the mother, who thus is situated in fantasy as a figure capable of fulfilling that demand. Crying, therefore, is not just an expression of pain or pleasure or nonsatisf action. As a demand for satisfaction, it is the vehicle of a wish - a fantasy - that satisfaction is possible, that the object can be restored, the loss eradicated" ("Melodrama and Tears," 22).
28. Eric Bentley, The Life of Drama (New York: Atheneum, 1964). From Shakespeare's use of the moving forest in Macbeth, to Emily Brontë's description of the Yorkshire moors and weather as "the very devil," Bentley sees the animation of the landscape as a major tool in the representation of what is evil, or what the characters of the melodramatic plot see, in paranoid fashion, as out to get them. "Popular Victorian melodrama," Bentley continues, "made extensive use of bad weather and dangerous landscape. High seas and deep chasms threaten to swallow our hero up. The very fact that I describe such events as 'swallowing up' shows that a little of the animism rubs off, even on a critic" (202).
29. Mike Davis, "Uprising and Repression in L.A.: An Interview with Mike Davis by the CovertAction Information Bulletin," in Gooding-Williams, Reading Rodney King, 150.
30. I understand these two components of the sublime in relation to David E. Nye's discussion in American Technological Sublime (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1994).