This essay (1000-1500 words) should be your own considered response to the critical material that we have read and discussed in class. Please consider carefully the importance of developing your own original perspective on this material. This essay is not about summarizing the readings or bringing in excessive external sources; it is meant to be a sustained and argumentative engagement with the texts that demonstrates your own understanding. You should have an argument and it should be supported by specific evidence from the text and film, not just what you think generally. This essay is about focus, not range. Be specific and demonstrate that you understand the text, but also show your own thinking about the issues raised by the text. You should build your argument as a conversation with what you are discussing. This will require you to reread the essay and rewatch the film that you are writing about. For this essay you should engage in an extended manner with at least one of the following films: Running Man, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, Dirty Harry, or Rambo: First Blood Part II. Your essay should involve a close examination of specific scenes from the film that you are analyzing. For this purpose you should use time stamps (0:00-0:32 for example) to specify what you are referring to in the film.
Please write on one of the following topics:
1) In “Film Bodies: Gender, Genre, and Excess,” Linda Williams writes: “Rather, what may especially mark these body genres as low is the perception that the body of the spectator is caught up in an almost involuntary mimicry of the emotion or sensation of the body on the screen along with the fact that the body displayed is female.” What is the status of Williams’s claim in the context of the action genre? Does the action genre’s emphasis on the male body change the type of emotion or sensation that the body mimics? How is bodily and emotional sensation articulated in the action genre as distinct from the female body genres that are the focus for Williams?
2) In “Postmodernism and Consumer Society,” Fredric Jameson writes: “It seems to me exceedingly symptomatic to find the very style of nostalgia films invading and colonizing even those movies today which have contemporary settings, as though, for some reason, we were unable today to focus our own present, as though we had become incapable of achieving aesthetic representations of our current experience.” What is the status of the nostalgia that Jameson analyzes in the action film, which is often set in the present or the future? How does the action genre express the unrepresentability of the present that Jameson identifies? Or does the action genre necessitate a reconception of postmodernism as understood by Jameson? Is the violence and speed that are central to the action genre expressive of the necessity of representing our present condition in motion rather than being able to isolate a static instance?
3) In “Masculinity as Spectacle: Reflections on Men and Mainstream Cinema,” Steve Neale writes, “…in a heterosexual and patriarchal society, the male body cannot be marked explicitly as the erotic object of another male look: that look must be motivated in some other way, its erotic component repressed.” What are the formal and narrative mechanisms through which this erotic component is repressed in the action genre? How does the action genre manage the spectacle of masculinity? How are the elements of violence and velocity incorporated into the particular forms of masculinity as spectacle in the action genre.
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