March 16, 2009

Still looking for ways to frame this project, I've hit upon the idea of situating it within the genre of urban mysteries. City mysteries are serial and novelistic genre that was popularized in the mid-nineteenth century and are typified by Eugene Sue's Mysteries of Paris and G.W.M Reynold's Mysteries of London, though they spawned many imitators and offshoots, particularly in the U.S. Apparently the best U.S. iteration is George Lippard's Quaker City, (about Philadelphia) though there are of course many city mysteries of New York (most notably, New York by Gaslight and New York in Sunshine and Shadow). I briefly took a look at David Reynolds introduction to Quaker City and it notes that Lippard, apparently, was a sort of proto-Marxist, though he probably never read Marx, he shared many of his views about the power of labour etc. 

A better resource though, are books by David L. Pike, a contemporary scholar who has written three books on the imagination of underground and subterranean cities. I think this will be a better guide than Rosalind Williams more well known Notes From the Underground: An Essay on Technology, Society, and the Imagination . 

Chapter 3 of Pike's book Metropolis on the Styx: The Underworlds of Modern Urban Culture, 1800-2001 is great. It addresses the city mysteries genre extensively, and ends by talking about film noir and Blade Runner.  Pike also writes about cinema and has a somewhat interesting article in Wide Angle from 1998 about post-war literature and film about living underneath cities, though he doesn't cover extensively enough the visual representations of these undergrounds, focusing primarily on narrative elements without reference to visual construction. 

On p. 164-165 in Metropolis on the Styx though, Pike mentions the ways in which the city mysteries genre was constructed upon an idea about verisimilitude in its reference to real locations and social and economic realities -- in contradistinction to the genre that it ultimately was born out of, the gothic (of which Radcliffe's Mysteries of Udolpho was the first to use the word "mystery" in the title) which was concerned with metaphysical incarnations of evil. I could eventually tie this in with a chapter I am considering that deals with location photography and the construction of verisimilitude (I think this is a somewhat fraught topic. Realistic settings and appeals to verisimilitude require just as much construction and labour -- as French Connection DP Owen Roizman notes -- as studio settings. There is a "reality effect" going on here. Will have to read Barthes on this.) 

Focusing on the idea of city-mysteries in my own project, instead of merely detection, frees me to engage a number of topics related though not directly under the rubric of detection/investigation. I even toyed with the idea of separating out my project into conceptual vertical and horizontal spaces: above ground, underground, up high, inside, outside, urban, suburban, exurban, etc. But I'm not sure this would really work that well. 

March 9, 2009

- Looked at Paul Cobley's The American Thriller. It's interesting so far for the way it defines "thriller," in terms of literary production, which may be useful. Also, the index contains an extensive list of film, TV, and print thrillers, sorted by subgenre.

- Cobley's book referenced another literary study Bestsellers: Popular Fiction of the 1970s by John Sutherland. Though fairly theoretically light, Sutherland's analyses seem fairly illuminating. I read his chapter on Death Wish, which compares Garfield's two books (the second being Death Sentence in 1976) with the film adaptation. Sutherland determines the roots of the story in the tradition of the Western, but also usefully compares it to Kubrick's/Burgess's A Clockwork Orange, noting the complexity of the transformation from victim to victimizer/vigilante and argues that in reality there is a struggle between generations being enacted here, where the old are killing the young, "for if society can find no way of living with the young, it is doomed." (161).

But also: "The appeal of Death Wish is not merely its retributive fantasy of counterattack in the grim war of generations [a theme developed in Joe for example]. Garfield's novels (Death Wish and Death Sentence) and Winner's film celebrate the release of the individual from the complex tensions of modern city life and 'responsible' adulthood. Benjamin [the Kersey character of the books] has an emancipated area of his life, a free-fire zone unknown to his office colleagues, where his will is absolute; where he can do what he feels to be right without interference from authority, or the dictatorship of 'civilized values.' The liberal's well-meaning paralysis is periodically relaxed by the sastisfactions of the cold-blooded executioner . It is, as Garfield presents it, highly therapeutic. Benjamin develops a 'positive' attitude to his daytime work... His is a Jekyll and Hyde personality that works, a functional schizophrenia. The most potent appeal of Death Wish does not lie in its superficially crude code of vengeful violence, but in the suggestion (which was also being made by the 'Playboy philosophy' of the period) that one could profitably absorb into one's middle-aged existence elements of youth's 'swinging' irresponsibility." (162)

This is great. Refuted here is the idea that Death Wish -- and I would have to somehow make a similar argument for the film version -- is some right-wing fantasy. It actually a liberal fantasy. Kersey advocates, after all, a liberal philosophy towards crime at the beginning. His turn to vigilantism is not so much a political conversion, as a realization of long-held fantasies. These needs to be developed more, but I think following the lines of the therapeutic nature of the killing, as well as "functional schizophrenia" will be interesting. Also, what of the relation btw. Death Wish and Looking for Mr. Goodbar, which also features a somewhat similar Jekyll and Hyde, night/day split (Also -- is split personality really szhizophrenic? Must check.)

Also somewhat interesting -- in the Garfield book the Benjamin is an accountant, in the film Kersey is an architect. There is a medium relation here maybe (novel-->paperwork, film--->space?)

- Also looked at Noel Carrol's "The Future of an Allusion: Hollywood in the Seventies (and Beyond) from October 20 (Spring, 1982). He develops an idea of filmmaking in the seventies as being dominated by films that allude to film history. Another take on the fate of genre and popular/intellectual American film and the Hollywood "Renaissance." Some items on detective films.

March 3, 2009

- Read Chapter 4 of Adam Lowenstein's Shocking Representation - "United States/'Only A Movie: Specters of Vietnam in Wes Craven's The Last House on the Left". This chapter and the book as a whole in more interesting to me as a model/paradigm for how my project could eventually look, rather than for its specific ideas -- which are actually good. In the chapter, Lowenstein discusses the film, its publicity and reception in relation to anxieties across bourgeois/countercultural distinctions, and the specific affect the violence engages, with a brief comparison to Deliverance. There are numerous references to books and articles about screen/allegorical violence which may be useful.

- One of these references was to Carol Clover's Men, Women, and Chainsaws. Clover has a chapter called "Getting Even" about revenge films which I skipped through. I found some of her analysis a bit uneven, and it seemed to lack an acknowledgment of visual/formal elements involved in filmic construction.  (She also says that in Wolfen, "animal-related Native Americans living and working in Manhattan... bring a a halt to a new development on their ancestral land." This is inaccurate -- the Native Americans in this film are not shown to be the wolf-gods that have emerged to protect their land, the Natives tell the investigator about the Wolfen, but are not, in fact, the Wolfen.)

Nevertheless, she coins the word "urbanoia" to describe a series of films where country folk enact revenge on city-folk, arguing that these films explore how city wealth is contrasted with country poverty and that they engage the economic guilt of the city. This is done primarily through an analysis of Deliverance and a film called Hunter's Blood (which excises the subtleties of the former). The one problem I have with this analysis is that it may be too much based in narrative/structural elements and lacks reference to the historical conditions that the films might refer. The "city-folk" in these film are more precisely suburban folk; the spatial encroachment that is being avenged is of suburban development. Particularly, during this time (the 1970s -- though Hunter's Blood  is from 1986, 14 years after Deliverance) the economic boom of the "New South." In contrast, the North-eastern cities of the rust belt were suffering economic decline. I think that while the city-country dynamic is interesting, in terms of its reference to US class politics, I think it may be a narrative displacement. The country people are "Others" -- nightmarish people conjured from National Geographic photologues (a fact that Clover does acknowledge). 

- My criticism of Clover may be a bit overwrought. If it is, it may be simply because I think the term "urbanoia" as a reference to city people's fear of the country is misplaced. The fear here is of middle-class whites of the country, a fear that co-exists with a fear of the inner city -- and there are just as many inner-city urban revenge films -- Death Wish being the primary one.  Not only that, but there are whole cycle of films, perhaps beginning with Walking Tall (Phil Karlson, 1973), which was immensely popular (according to David Cook in Lost Illusions -- see also Cook for films of the New South) which deal with revenge in a non-city/country way.