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.