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.