Heightened Genre and Women's Filmmaking in Hollywood: The Rise of the Cine-fille 3030709930, 9783030709938

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Heightened Genre and Women’s Filmmaking in Hollywood The Rise of the Cine-fille Mary Harrod

Heightened Genre and Women’s Filmmaking in Hollywood “Despite the widely publicised prejudice faced by women in Hollywood, since around 1990 a significant minority of female directors have been making commercially and culturally impactful films across the full range of genres. This book explores movies by filmmakers Amy Heckerling, Nora Ephron, Nancy Meyers, Catherine Hardwicke, Sofia Coppola, Kimberly Peirce, Kathryn Bigelow and Greta Gerwig, including many which are still critically neglected or derided, seeing them as offering a new understanding of genre filmmaking. That is, like many other contemporary films but in a striking proportion within the smaller set of mainstream movies by women, this body of work revels in a heightened genre status that allows its authors to simultaneously address ‘intellectual’ cinephilic pleasures and bodily-emotive ones. Arguing through close analysis that these films demonstrate the inseparability of such strategies of engagement in contemporary genre cinema, Heightened Genre reclaims women’s mainstream filmmaking for feminism through a recalibration of genre theory itself.” —Mary Harrod is Associate Professor in French Studies at the University of Warwick. She is the author of From France with Love: Gender and Identity in French Romantic Comedy (I.B. Tauris, 2015) and the co-edited collections The Europeanness of European Cinema (I. B. Tauris, 2015), Women Do Genre in Film and Television (Routledge, 2017, winner of the British Association of Film, Television and Screen Studies Best Edited Collection Prize 2019) and Imagining ‘We’ in the Age of ‘I’: Romance and Social Bonding in Contemporary Culture (Routledge, 2021). “Mary Harrod’s Heightened Genre and Women’s Filmmaking in Hollywood breathes new life into the feminist film theory debates we had nearly forgotten. Noting the increase in popular genre films directed by women, she responds to this important development with a challenge to us in the form of new theoretical terminology. Affect theory meets and mingles with genre convention in her concept of “heightened genre.” And if the female director is a “cine-fille,” as Harrod proposes, she may be even more “cineliterate” than male counterparts who may not be crediting their audiences with as much genre knowledge as they deserve. I predict that we’ll be engaging with “heightened genre” for years to come.” —Jane M. Gaines, Professor of Film, Columbia University; Author, Pink-Slipped: What Happened to Women in the Silent Film Industries?

“Harrod’s study of women filmmakers’ work in genre cinema represents an important contribution to feminist film studies and to genre studies. The book articulates persuasively the necessity of accounting for self-reflexive techniques as an element of genre filmmaking, one that involves powerfully emotive connections with audiences. Harrod’s lucid analyses of women filmmakers’ genericity gives space to films and filmmakers much discussed – Clueless, Bigelow – and those too rarely elaborated in the frame of authorship (notably Hardwicke’s Twilight). Across multiple genres including the gothic and horror, teen film, war movie and rom-com, Harrod’s analysis is consistently nuanced and perceptive. Heightened Genre fully demonstrates the feminist potential of genericity, analysing women filmmakers’ participation in genre, rather than extolling them for subverting genre codes.” —Yvonne Tasker, Professor of Media and Communication, University of Leeds “Perceptively identifying what she calls ‘women’s aptitude for heightened genre filmmaking,’ Mary Harrod incisively diagrams how a renewed attention to affect as both an aesthetic and an emotion can re-politicize not only films but also entire genres long thought to be incapable of that work. Analyzing female filmmakers’ self-conscious use of intertextual relay that goes beyond pastiche in order to make emotive address, Harrod upends received wisdom about genre film making. In so doing, she persuasively recuperates female-directed roms-coms, teenpics, fantasy film, and action movies for both the discipline of film studies, and—perhaps even more importantly—for their impassioned audiences.” —Suzanne Leonard, Professor of English, Simmons University “Through a theoretically informed and detailed examination of the aesthetics of a range of films by contemporary women filmmakers, Harrod examines how women filmmakers imprint their authorial signatures through foregrounding personal style in the midst of generic conventions. In her close analysis of teenpics to rom coms and war films to sport films, as well as the heritage film and docudramas, Harrod shows how the filmmakers heighten the conventions of mainstream genres, harnessing their affective power to negotiate the intimate relationship between experience and ideology, drawing the spectator into the cinephilic feminist orbit of the cine-fille filmmaker. In the midst of a new rise in popular feminism, this book opens up new space for feminist film studies to rethink the relationship between women and popular forms of cinema.” —Shelley Cobb, Associate Professor of Film, University of Southampton

Mary Harrod

Heightened Genre and Women’s Filmmaking in Hollywood The Rise of the Cine-fille

Mary Harrod School of Modern Languages and Cultures University of Warwick Coventry, UK

ISBN 978-3-030-70993-8    ISBN 978-3-030-70994-5 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-70994-5 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2021 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of ­ illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and ­transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the ­publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and ­institutional affiliations. Cover image © Isabel Seligman This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG. The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

To be a poet is to have a soul so quick to discern, that no shade of quality escapes it, and so quick to feel, that discernment is but a hand playing with finely-­ordered variety on the chords of emotion, a soul in which knowledge passes instantaneously into feeling, and feeling flashes back as a new organ of knowledge. —George Eliot, Middlemarch

For Hugo

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank for their key support over the period of researching and writing this book, non-exhaustively, Katarzyna Paszkiewicz, Hilary Radner, Celestino Deleyto, Yvonne Tasker, Ginette Vincendeau, Phil Powrie, Timothy Shary, Christine Gledhill, Frances Smith, Agnieszka Piotrowska and anonymous readers used by Palgrave Macmillan among other organisations. I would also like to thank colleagues at the University of Warwick and in particular Stella Bruzzi for inviting me to present a section of this work in the Film and Television Department, as well as Charlotte Brunsdon, Alastair Phillips, James MacDowell, Douglas Morrey and all colleagues in French Studies. I thank Raphaëlle Moine, Diane Negra, Suzanne Leonard, Belén Vidal, Diana Holmes and David Pettersen for support in general, Michele Pierson for an inspiring Media Aesthetics MA course at King’s College London many years ago without which I would likely never have undertaken this project, and for collegiality, among many others, William Brown, Tom Whittaker, Charlie Michael, Christopher Holliday, Roberta Garrett, Catherine E. Clark and Clara Bradbury-Rance. I am grateful to Alice Kelikian and the Genre Films in Cinema and Television class of 2017 at Brandeis University for allowing me to air the research in a teaching forum, as well as the Comparative Media and Writing Department at MIT, and particularly Eugenie Brinkema, for a Visiting Scholarship to pursue it; PhD and other students at Warwick for all their insights and Reece Goodall for additional support; and the organising committees of the BAFTSS 2017, DWFTVH 2018 and SCMS 2019 conferences where I presented related papers. Gratitude is also due to the staff of the British Library, the BFI Film Library and the Warwick ix

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Library—notably Kate Courage—in particular, for making research possible even in a pandemic; to Shaun Vigil, Camille Davies, Jack Heeney and all the editorial team at Palgrave; and to Isabel Seligman for her beautiful cover illustration. Parts of Chaps. 2 and 3 of this book were originally published as the book chapter ‘“As If a Girl’s Reach Should Exceed Her Grasp”: Gendering Genericity and Spectatorial Address in the Work of Amy Heckerling’, in Frances Smith and Timothy Shary (eds), ReFocus: The Films of Amy Heckerling (Edinburgh University Press, 2016) and I thank the editors, as well as Gillian Leslie at Edinburgh University Press, for facilitating their reproduction. Finally, I thank those closest to me for putting up with the ‘heightened’ states associated with academic work, especially in 2020. Nothing would be possible without the support of Hugo, Elodie, Kit, Marion, Jeric, Tanya, Henry, Lydia, Abbie, Kate, Rosie, Alix and Geli, as well as other friends too numerous to list but no less significant for it.

Contents

1 Introduction: Little Women and Cine-filles  1 Works Cited  16 2 Genre as Pastiche in Women’s Filmmaking 21 Gendering Film Authorship, Genre and Affective Address  21 Heightened Genericity and the Female Director  36 Works Cited  67 3 Pastiching the Popular 77 Remaking Romantic and Family Comedy  78 Timelessness and Transience in Amy Heckerling’s Teen-Worlds: From Clueless (1995) to I Could Never Be Your Woman (2007) and Vamps (2012)  98 Twilight (Catherine Hardwicke, 2008) as Teen Gothic 117 Cycles of War: Stop-Loss (Kimberly Peirce, 2008) 134 Works Cited 154 4 Art Imitating Life Imitating Art165 The War on Terror as Procedural Thriller in Zero Dark Thirty (Kathryn Bigelow, 2013) 166 Embodying History in Detroit (Bigelow, 2017) 184 Historical Biography and Heritage: Marie Antoinette (Sofia Coppola, 2006) 210

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Contents

The Sports Movie as Docudrama in Lords of Dogtown (Hardwicke, 2005) 221 Works Cited 238 5 Conclusion: Communal Autofiction and Public Subjectivity in The Bling Ring (Coppola, 2013)247 Works Cited 259 References261 Index289

List of Figures

Fig. 1.1 Fig. 1.2 Fig. 3.1 Fig. 3.2 Fig. 3.3 Fig. 3.4 Fig. 3.5 Fig. 3.6 Fig. 3.7 Fig. 3.8 Fig. 3.9 Fig. 3.10 Figs. 4.1 and 4.2 Fig. 4.3 Fig. 4.4 Fig. 4.5 Fig. 4.6 Fig. 4.7 Fig. 4.8 Fig. 4.9

Reflexivity in Little Women (2019) 3 Straight romance in Little Women (1994) 3 You’ve Got Mail ostentatiously embraces nostalgia 88 Camp Walden in The Parent Trap (1961) 92 Camp Walden in The Parent Trap (1995) 92 Pastel soft furnishings at Elizabeth’s home render feminine domestic space as a romcom cliché 97 Costumes in Clueless figure Heckerling’s exhilaratingly anti-historicist approach 104 Vamps: black and white and poor image quality evoke celluloid memories of former eras 113 The Cullens’ home in Twilight splices nature with culture 123 Robert Pattinson as Edward instantiates the Gothic sublime 124 Bella’s overdetermined lunch 131 A false split-screen compares civilian with military life in Stop-Loss139 Both archival footage and staged history resemble a war film in Detroit188 Bodhi escaping from Johnny Utah in Point Break205 A looter escaping from Officer Krauss in Detroit205 Frustrated masculinity in Point Break206 Frustrated masculinity in Detroit206 Ladies of the royal household in La Reine Margot217 Ladies of the royal household in Marie Antoinette217 Sport as industrial pastoral in Lords of Dogtown225

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List of Figures

Fig. 4.10 Fig. 5.1 Fig. 5.2

The overtly reconstructed Pacific Ocean Park pier Audrina Partridge’s house in The Bling Ring foregrounds the interpenetration of private and public life Marc’s gender ambivalence

230 249 252

CHAPTER 1

Introduction: Little Women and Cine-filles

Against a shaft of New England sunlight in a family home during the American Civil War, a girl reunited with her mother after travels for her career grudgingly acknowledges the unwelcome discovery that the human soul is not made for solitude—that she does need love. But, she spits, ‘Women, they have minds, and they have souls, as well as just hearts. And they’ve got ambition, and they’ve got talent, as well as beauty, and I’m so sick of people saying that love is just all a woman is fit for. I’m so sick of it!’ These lines spoken by Saoirse Ronan as Jo March in Greta Gerwig’s multi-award-winning Little Women (2019) and featuring centrally in its trailers, while drawn from nineteenth-century fiction, are evocative of a late twentieth- and early twenty-first-century feminist sensibility that it is the aim of this book to explore in female-directed Hollywood cinema. This sensibility is perfectly summed up by a focus on the triumvirate of minds, souls and hearts, taking the notion of the soul to indicate a bridge between the sentimental and intellectual realms that border it in Jo’s (more religiously informed) phrase and, therefore, the interpermeability of the two. Released during the final stages of research for this book, Little Women is a traditional ‘woman’s film’ par excellence. A domestic tale of family and romantic intrigues and dramas, it also boasts period costumes and a raft of heavyweight female talent headed up by Meryl Streep as Aunt March, alongside Ronan, Laura Dern and Emma Watson. The cultural capital brought to the film by such stars is further bolstered by © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 M. Harrod, Heightened Genre and Women’s Filmmaking in Hollywood, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-70994-5_1

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actress-turned-director Gerwig’s indie cachet and growing reputation as a talented filmmaker, not to mention the legacy of Alcott herself as the early feminist literary pioneer behind the strongly autobiographical source text. Yet rather than only embracing nostalgic pastiche of the genre of period melodrama, in line with its interest in the mutuality of hearts and minds, Little Women incorporates an intellectual tease into its potentially most rousing emotional scene: an openly fictional romantic kiss between Alcott’s undisguised alter ago Jo and a French professor played by Louis Garrel. It thus interrupts the swelling score and deadline structure hijacked from romantic comedy, which has Jo chase her departing suitor to the train station and beg him not to go to California, for our protagonist to note that this did not in fact take place, but features in the semi-autobiographical novel she is writing. This means that we understand the scene to have been added to her own novelisation of her life in a Russian doll textual figure layering fiction upon (auto)fiction, an effect further reinforced by the climactic scene’s visual echo of the ‘straight’ final one from the 1994 Little Women (Gillian Armstrong) (Figs. 1.1 and 1.2). With similar self-­reflexivity, elsewhere much humour arises from interactions between Jo and her publisher in which he suggests that the only possible endings for female heroines are marriage or death. However, in no way do such metafictional musings on the demands of popular fiction and its gendered strictures detract from the film’s emotive pleasures; instead, the romance moment is still played out for effect (rather than spoofed by foregrounding parodic elements) and comprises the film’s climactic high in terms of affective trajectory. The phenomenon of ostentatious fakery as a vehicle for emotive address in recent films by women working in Hollywood is the subject of this book. It looks at how this aspect of movies is conveyed by generic features in both relatively more implicit and more explicit ways. While its line of inquiry has arisen from considering feminist questions, this perspective uncovered the need to reconfigure understandings of genre itself, in the first place, before thinking about what this means for women’s recent cultural production itself, in the second. Beginning with film genre, a key claim I make is that genre studies, heavily informed by (post)structuralism in the latter half of the twentieth century (and earlier in its literary precedents), have not yet fully caught up with the material and emotional turns so influential elsewhere in cinema scholarship. Recent cognitive film studies influenced by theories of embodiment have given the lie to the notion of films engaging us

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Fig. 1.1  Reflexivity in Little Women (2019)

Fig. 1.2  Straight romance in Little Women (1994)

cerebrally in a fashion that is independent of their emotive address. Torben Grodal’s pioneering work in this domain is, however, unusual in centralising the question of genre per se, as ‘a set of dominant features of a given fiction, which shapes the overall viewer-expectations and the correlated

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emotional reaction’ (1999: 163), in relation to which he calls for a more holistic theory of engagement informed by neurobiology.1 Given genre texts’ defining referentiality to similar earlier works, Richard Dyer’s description of pastiche as ‘imitation that you are meant to know is imitation’ (2007: 1) yet as emotionally impactful (in cinema and beyond) also has much to offer for understanding genre as a mode of address that is affective as well as codified.2 Thus, Dyer notably analyses the melodrama and Douglas Sirk homage Far from Heaven (Todd Haynes 2002) to show that pastiche can channel the felt qualities of the previous texts it imitates (ibid.: 174–180). Informed by a comparable valorisation of emotions and feelings that preserves the legacy of poststructuralist thought alongside the more recent material turn, this book extends Dyer’s intimations about pastiche to the category of genre filmmaking as understood by Grodal and others whose work has, directly or indirectly, considered questions of address and viewer experience.3 While Dyer states that pastiche differs from straight genre filmmaking because in the former case the imitative structure is ‘the point’ (ibid.: 35), I argue that imitation bears the burden of ‘pointfulness’ in many mainstream films where the generic mode tends to draw quite self-­ consciously on previous (genre) texts and discourses, filmic and beyond, to create resonance. The book describes this phenomenon through reference to heightened genericity. The term is apposite first and foremost because of its frequent juxtaposition with emotional states, tallying with the important fact that such meanings encompass forms of address that are not only cerebral but also more bodily emotive. These are de facto inextricable in the contrivance of the genre film that solicits viewers to re-cognise its own generic machinery even as they are viscerally addressed by the latter’s effects. While the concept of heightened genre is offered not as an absolute category but as a hermeneutic that could fruitfully be applied to many films (even the earliest silent cinema exists in a potentially pastiche-like relationship to other genres, such as the circus attraction), it is likely to be particularly useful for more recent decades. In the postclassical period in particular, capitalism’s emphasis on predictable saleability and bankable properties, paired with the wider phenomenon of cultural belatedness, has made conventionality and overdeterminacy bywords for mass production in film industries.4 Hollywood remains emblematic here, for reasons significantly ascribable to its twentieth-century history of vertical integration. Even after the demise of the studio system, and as the globalisation of

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audiovisual imaginaries continues to become more striking, the US industry has retained both a legacy of devotion to genre filmmaking and major international selling power and influence; hence, it provides the focus of the current analysis. If the contemporaneity of formulism in cinema should not, then, be overestimated, since the ability to predict audience taste on the basis of past experience is evidently a key feature of classical Hollywood and many other historical cinemas, it is widely acknowledged that the post-1990s period especially has seen the release of films typified to an unprecedented degree by postmodern self-referentiality and meta-­ genericity.5 This is readily illustrated by the proliferation of such ostentatiously self-reflexive genre films as the Scream horror franchise (Wes Craven 1996, 1997, 2000, 2011), the teenpic Not Another Teen Movie (Joel Gallen 2001) or the romcom Date Movie (Aaron Seltzer and Jason Friedberg 2006), as well as the sustained growth of blockbuster franchises, including those relying on pre-existing properties.6 As Grodal observes, an increase in the quantity of intertextual fiction further parallels ‘the growing importance of fiction in the process of socialization’ (1999: 231)— which is only gathering further pace in our increasingly virtually conducted social world.7 In other words, there are also empirical reasons to embrace the theoretical modelling possibilities offered by centralising referentiality and imitation in our understanding of film genre. The twinned impetuses of history and theory also underpin this book’s focus on women’s filmmaking. Its premise was inspired by the desire to find a language to describe my own experience of watching recent genre films made by women, beyond the notions of subversion or deconstruction that punctuate existing feminist film studies of the mainstream. Looking at the work of women making popular films in post-1990s Hollywood, notably by Kathryn Bigelow, Amy Heckerling, Sofia Coppola, Nora Ephron and Nancy Meyers (who are of late attracting more scholarly attention) as well as Catherine Hardwicke, Kimberly Peirce, Greta Gerwig and others (who have received very little), it became apparent that heightened genre filmmaking is a common feature. Works by such filmmakers fall at a particularly extreme remove from any kind of mimetic approach to profilmic reality. Unlike Gerwig, most eschew the melodrama, a form with relatively strong links to realism, opting instead for the highly contrived genres of the romcom (Meyers, Ephron, sometimes Coppola), the teenpic (Heckerling, Coppola) and/or the teen fantasy-cum-horror film (Hardwicke) and the heritage costume drama (Coppola), as well as action genres, from sports to war movies (Peirce, Bigelow, Hardwicke).8

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Considered within a cultural context—including strands of feminism itself—that has discredited such activities by women, this development is arresting and important for reasons beyond economic ones (though these are nonetheless highly significant, as many of the films examined in these pages were blockbusters). More particularly, if heightened genre makes visible the inseparability of mind and body it is logical that female filmmakers should be drawn to such practices. This is because the structural oppression of women and other marginalised constituencies has often relied on the reifying of such binary oppositions in order to shore up patriarchal rationalism and disprize a ‘primitive’ female realm identified with feelings only—as Little Women registers. The book thus asks whether probing questions of affect, understood as a concept which binds emotion to aesthetics, can help elucidate the political meaning of women’s filmmaking in highly conventionalised cinematic modes that have been anathema to much (notably Continental) feminist theory historically. Here it dovetails with a converse, gradually growing feminist interest in the mainstream, stretching at least from Claire Johnston’s (2000 [1973]: 33) demands to take seriously ‘the entertainment film’ as a vehicle for exploring women’s desires (and not just their objectification) to Claire Jenkins’ current, industrially focused and explicitly revisionist $100 Million Women: Hollywood’s Women Directors project—via several other scholars whose work often informs my analysis.9 Tying emotion to politics of course also aligns the study with major strands in recent queer feminist theory. The work of exemplary scholars such as Sara Ahmed and Laurent Berlant is a recurrent reference point—notwithstanding both writers’ ambivalent views of the ideological consequences of affects on broad populations, which tend to differ from my more positive account of the potential significance of textual affects being harnessed in women’s cultural production.10 It is truistic by now to note that queer and feminist theory—not to mention critical race theory or any scholarly drive to re-centre a marginal position—are united in a vested interest in debunking the myth of a coolly objective political sphere outside of the ‘baser’ human passions. If these perspectives seek to denaturalise constructs that entrench power imbalances in favour of dominant groups, it is worth noting that the illusion of disinterested politics is becoming increasingly difficult to maintain in an age where at the time of writing, the politics of hate and fear are the subject of the renewed Black Lives Matter campaign. While such movements enshrine emotion as an ideological driver, embodied being itself has also become an overarching concern since people’s

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already increasing ineffectuality as neoliberal citizens due to mental and/ or physical health problems has been wildly exacerbated by COVID-19.11 At a structural level, too, any book championing women’s authorship in culturally impactful modes in general and in Hollywood specifically is unfortunately still much needed. Feminist entertainment journalist and advocate Melissa Silverstein (2017) was wise to be cautious in labelling 2017 ‘the year that could change everything or nothing’, since the number of female directors working in Hollywood on the 250 highest-­grossing domestic releases that year declined by 2% to reach 7% (also putting it lower than the 1998 figure) (Lang 2017).12 The research’s contribution to feminist film studies consists in the first place of simply promoting the visibility of a neglected area of filmmaking, answering to B.  Ruby Rich’s point that ‘without new names, we [feminists] run the danger of losing title to films that we sorely need’ (1990 [1978]: 279). This includes a focus on work that through its apparent conventional transparency otherwise falls into scholarly gaps. Such a perspective is of paramount importance more than three decades after Michelle Citron observed that what feminism vitally needs are ‘narrative films made by as many women as possible about as many things as possible’ (1988: 62–63), still widely and increasingly erroneously perceived to be lacking. During a period when the limited space for female agency offered by entertainment industries has come to be seen as paradigmatic of gendered social injustice (witness the Weinstein affair’s kick-starting of the #MeToo campaign), it is especially apt to consider that the first step to changing women’s roles off screen is to rewrite the cultural scripts offered to them—including in ways that transcend identity politics and notably the issue of how gendered characters’ personalities and social worth are portrayed. It is not essentialist to suggest that women themselves are well placed to reconfigure the forms of our cultural imaginaries along lines that are (not necessarily thematically but) formally more egalitarian. The particularities of the present theoretical arguments are equally ideologically freighted. Not only is Judith Mayne’s observation thirty years ago that ‘[v]irtually all feminist critics who argue in defence of female authorship as a useful and necessary category assume the political necessity for doing so’ (1990: 97) still true, but accounts of women in directorial roles in the mainstream especially remain thin on the ground. Yet it is precisely because women are particularly marginalised as directors that their work in this field demands attention. It is moreover logical to consider women’s authorship as ideologically significant in conjunction with

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the question of genre, when we recall that a film’s generic identifications offer a promise of what to expect from it. The idea that there should be different horizons of expectation engaged when it comes to works made by authors from marginal social categories is established (again, without recourse to essentialism) when we look to the case of diasporic filmmakers (see Naficy 2001). In other words, this study argues that ‘a Kimberly Peirce film’, functioning as ‘a metaphor for female agency’ (Cobb 2015: 15), constitutes a meaningful category for analysing how female-authored texts are received by audiences. Situating female authorship thus, in conjunction with genre specifically, combats marginalisation, notably at a time when cinematic criticism and promotion are increasingly interlinked (Tasker 2010: 227). Continuing the comparison with immigrant filmmaking, we might also draw a parallel between the view of women’s work offered here and Will Higbee’s (2016: 144) model of counter-heritage cinema in which beur and other hyphenated filmmakers reproduce narratives in one specific genre as a challenge to the cultural dominance of those in power (regardless of any ‘subversive’ textual features). It is worth underlining here the sacrosanct place of Hollywood in US cultural ‘heritage’, whose importance the historian David Thomson describes as alluding to ‘not just the history of American movies, but the history of America in the time of the movies’ (2002: 18): an overlap repeatedly acknowledged by filmic analyses in this study. Ideological critiques focused on identity politics, to which cultural studies have recently sometimes flirted with becoming reduced, also tend to ask different questions of texts than do those attuned to aesthetics and to fictions as simultaneously historical documents but also works of human expression and art. This book is not interested in a totalising account but rather a performative reading, including eschewing reductive statements about films as inherently feminist or otherwise, and instead holding them up in a certain light to make a feminist point. Given the centrality of issues of race to the politics of representation, not to mention the kinships claimed above with ethnic minority groups, it is nonetheless essential to acknowledge the ethnic homogeneity of the directors examined in these pages. The empirical research premise adopted looks at a particular approach to filmmaking espoused by many of the most successful female directors working in Hollywood in the past three decades, across a range of genres. That those who adopt it are White suggests it appeals to filmmakers with a certain (albeit still quite limited) history of penetration into the industry, which women of colour are just now beginning to achieve.

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Equally importantly, the relevance of the heightened genre model as a communicative one that transcends identities to recommend itself to filmmakers of colour in the future is outlined in Chap. 4, especially in relation to filmic representations of racial issues in Detroit (Bigelow 2017). It is suggestive to cite here Katy Guest’s (2019) review of the bestselling novel Fleishman is in Trouble in which the female author’s alter ego writer character tells a male friend’s story: ‘What [the author Taffy] Brodesser-Akner has achieved here, by Trojan-horsing herself into Toby’s point of view, is to quietly reveal the souls of the women in the story. But more than that, to show that all stories […] really are universal.’ While I would nuance this to suggest that all stories have universal elements, evidence of Black female audiovisual producers’ interest in working with a mainstream vernacular in a fashion comparable to their White counterparts has begun recently to amass, opening up avenues for future research. For instance, while Sanaa Hamri made two romcoms in the 2000s, Something New (2006) and Just Wright (2010), Ava DuVernay’s 2019 Netflix mini-series When They See Us is a docudrama about a racialised miscarriage of justice whose opening episode especially bears comparison with Detroit, and Melina Matsoukas’ film Queen and Slim, released in January 2020 to significant box-office success, also deals with police brutality against African Americans and is described by one of its own characters as offering a ‘Black Bonnie and Clyde’ narrative.13 Nevertheless, in its lack of intersectionality at the level of authorship, this book locates films in a cultural sphere still best described in terms of post- (rather than fourth-wave) feminism, with all the opportunities but also limitations the moment implies. Angela McRobbie (2007: 31) traces the development of the successful White bourgeois woman’s status as representative of postfeminism from the 1990s through to its consolidation by the turn of the millennium. The decision in Chap. 2 to offer the term cine-fille to designate the filmmakers whose work the study examines embraces postfeminist identification: it recognises the centrality of the figure of the girl in postfeminist discourse and deems the filmmakers (popular) cine-literate postfeminist figures who (though not necessarily or indeed generally young) bring renewed vigour to the industry and its output. Needless to say, the moniker also thumbs a metaphorical nose at the masculine and Gallic seriousness of auteur studies.14 The book therefore offers a paradoxical model of rebellion through superficial conformity to the mainstream. Here, it acknowledges that, if for thinkers such as Samuel Delany and Robert Reid-Pharr, writing after Marx, it is in fact not

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mainstream but radical expression that represents the luxury of privilege (Halberstam 2005: 16), while in Brand Hollywood Paul Grainge advises against moralising about the commercial underpinnings of cultural life (in Ferriss 2021: 244), bald resistance may be even less practical a political strategy in the era of corporations’ infinitely flexible control (Cubitt 1998: xi). The approach taken can also be seen to extend traditional postfeminist ones, which have sometimes been accused (in line with poststructuralism) of retreating from the material and biological.15 So too has postfeminism been critiqued for focusing on the experience of privileged women for whom feminist battles have largely been won. If such a claim is tenuous for culture as a whole, we have seen that it is absolutely untenable in the Hollywood context. Moreover, it has historically often been women enjoying elite benefits, such as education, who have led gendered social change across the class, race, sexuality and (dis)ability spectrum. In embracing work by women who are already privileged—and films that are often culturally derided as trivial—I take seriously Ahmed’s observations about the need for feminism to assume sometimes ‘uncomfortable’ forms (2004: 78). Of further note in relation to the ‘perilous’ activity of defining the ‘contact zone’ (ibid.: 14) comprised by the research corpus is the approach to both Hollywood and genre adopted. In sum, the second has largely determined the first, in the sense that films have been chosen on the basis of their overdetermination rather than industrial arrangements: a textual approach to genre. This means the inclusion of some films made on the outskirts of Hollywood; thus, for example, Coppola’s work frequently benefits from independent financing—indeed, her brand is all but synonymous with Indiewood (Lane and Richter 2011: 189)—while the Twilight movies have been credited with great importance to independent cinema. Nonetheless, the primordial importance of Hollywood genre forms to relevant films discussed here is the study’s key premise. On this front, if Hollywood’s historical imaginary is closely imbricated with that of the USA, in general, likewise genres in Hollywood and elsewhere retain enhanced national referentiality and resonance due to the primacy of domestic markets in film business models, even in the era of accelerated globalisation. The book’s purview does not, however, exclude transnational perspectives any more than it does transmedia ones, not least as both are highly relevant to the export of US cinema (e.g. in spin-offs and remediations of Lords of Dogtown [Hardwicke 2005]) and also sometimes its formal organisation (such as via the influence of European heritage

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drama on Marie Antoinette [Coppola 2006]). Selecting films on the basis of conventional genericity has also excluded some noteworthy contemporary women filmmakers. For example, independent director Kelly Reichardt’s arthouse take on the Western, Meek’s Cutoff (2011), remains largely outside generic affiliations in much of its formal detail, notably of narrative, despite its setting and iconography. Nor does DuVernay’s slow-­ paced, earnest period biopic of Martin Luther King Jr. Selma (2015) heighten the genericity of its form in the way that I argue Marie Antoinette does.16 However, these are of course differences of degree not category. Recent action films (broadly defined) by Karyn Kusama, Patty Jenkins and others have meanwhile been excluded lest narrative gender reversals distract from form. To illustrate this point with reference to a filmmaker who is examined, Bigelow, I have not chosen to focus on the apparently obviously feminist revisionist police drama Blue Steel, whose gendered signification lies partly in ‘the “surprise” of the woman’ (Lane 2000: 109) by casting Jamie Lee Curtis in the traditionally ‘masculine’ role.17 As Elizabeth Cowie puts it, ‘Blue Steel gives us both the fantasy and its lack—“quilts” a set of meanings while foregrounding their very non-sense’ (1997: 315). The deconstruction of the masculine generic ‘fantasy’ described here in psychoanalytic terms underlines subversion and distance, potentially distracting from my interest in films’ adhesion to generic prototypes.18 Chapter 2 looks at how the model of fictional genre and authorship proposed by this study expands on existing understandings and asks what this means for positioning, and valorising, women directors. The first section gives an overview of scholarly understandings of film authorship, genre and textual affect as they relate to the paradigm of female authorship proposed here, foregrounding their relevance to issues of gender. Then I elaborate on how reading films for heightened genericity might respond to problems within debates on film authorship, including feminist, and recalibrate the ideological value of women’s mainstream work. As well as film and embodiment or emotion scholarship, the chapter draws on relevant accounts in literary theory as well as musical and television studies to illuminate a concept of cinematic address that involves the cine-fille filmmaker, genre text and audience in a triangular dance.19 Constituting the meat of the book’s central argument about how popular genre films address us, Chap. 3 opens with a discussion of remaking romantic and family comedy through analysing Nora Ephron’s Sleepless in Seattle and Nancy Meyers’ The Parent Trap (both 1998). Taking the remake to literalise and epitomise the project’s concerns with reproducing

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pre-existing story structures and worlds to emotive ends, I draw substantially on literary studies in order to demonstrate the error of what I call the mimetic fallacy, that is, the idea that texts must adhere to realist ‘invisibility’ conventions to move us. This section also uses queer theory to explore the ideological value of unmooring carefully crafted generic spaces from sequential time in the female-authored remake. The next two sections focus on teenpics, and firstly those made by Amy Heckerling, which I argue can engage viewers by evoking mutability. I then broaden the inquiry to teen fantasy in Twilight (Hardwicke 2008). Despite numerous ideological critiques and fan studies of this franchise, and its phenomenal success, very little work has accorded serious attention to the form of the first film as directed by erstwhile production designer Hardwicke. I cite theorisations of the Gothic to illuminate the film’s postmodern intertextual dynamics and its inside-outside genre aesthetics and examine the affective properties of some of its most overdetermined images. Chapter 3 closes by engaging with Stop-Loss (Peirce 2008) as an Iraq War movie. It argues that formal and thematic aspects of the film evoke identities as constructed by conventionalised, collective discourses but in such a way that the body remains central. Thus, both the mechanics of the film’s address and the dynamics of its internal diegetic world are consonant with the understanding of how discourse embodies that underpins the book. Chapter 4 builds on the identification of a recurrent consciousness in contemporary popular films by women that mainstream genres structure lives, now by considering anti-real genres’ deployment as a means to explore the real in docudramatic formats. The first two sections consider Bigelow’s Zero Dark Thirty (2012) and Detroit (2017), respectively, as exemplifying well Foucault’s doctrine that subjectivity is the site of struggle that matters most, especially as developed by Ahmed. Detroit, for instance, suggests how socially constructed, individually experienced emotions engender material realities, at the levels of both content and style. These films demonstrate that even the largest-scale and/or most material of realities—including ethical or physical violence—are rooted in human emotions. Given recent negative comments about the absence of films either by or about minority groups in the 2020 BAFTA nominations, Detroit’s intersectional resonances also add a highly significant dimension to a book about White filmmakers, and I defend via critical race theory Bigelow’s engagement with African American histories of oppression even through a ‘suspect’ popular format.20 I then look at the biopic Marie Antoinette from the perspective of transnational intertextuality and a

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resulting trans-localisation of textual affect. Finally, this chapter analyses the generic affiliations and style displayed by Hardwicke’s 2005 sports docudrama Lords of Dogtown, suggesting that this different take on the remake format whose scrutiny launched the book’s textual analysis represents a hyper-fictionalisation of the historical real, and so the culmination of many of the claims for female-directed docudramas made in Chap. 4. The book’s Conclusion outlines a way in which Lords of Dogtown points towards and Coppola’s The Bling Ring realises more fully an expansion of the horizons of heightened genericity’s feminist potential with broader applicability for future research avenues: by intersecting with autofiction. It brings into view the overlaps between genre and personal account, by way of the profilmic real that genres refract. Conceiving autofiction as constructed by a public imaginary illuminates the apparent paradox of the book’s central claim that the most seemingly impersonal of fictional modes is predisposed to provide a (perceived) conduit between an implied author and their audience. This sums up well the argument that the films analysed in this book evoke an author who is an expert in the communicative art of the genre. Some of them—those of Bigelow and Coppola most obviously—enhance such an evocation through inevitably (re-)engaging an authorial style that is recognisable, at least for cinephile audiences; but all evoke authorship within their text. The Bling Ring renders the mechanism by which the author is textually imagined for audiences more evident by customising its generic world in the image of a real milieu associated with the director’s public persona. Discussing Coppola’s teen-focused docudrama in this manner underlines the ultimately global reach of expression conceived nonetheless at the level of the individual subject through heightened genericity in films by women. The example also provides a(nother) circular link to discussions of space in remakes at the start of Chap. 3 as also throughout much of Chap. 4 (notably via Hardwicke’s often markedly kinetic cinema and Bigelow’s ‘orientation towards geography and spatial relations established through camerawork’ [Lane 2000: 105]). In this way, the book structure itself partially mirrors the cyclical workings of genre. Using both scenic space and graphic figures meaningfully emerges as important when we consider the highly spatial terms adopted by Foucault and Ahmed for their accounts of the (bio-)power dynamics that attempt to bind subjects into submission to predetermined life paths and therefore women’s vested interest in spatialised articulations, since ‘paradoxically, the visibility of power also provides a blueprint for rebellion’ (Smith

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2020). It is pertinent to invoke here, in relation to the generic as well as (that is, including) profilmic space manipulated by women filmmakers, Ahmed’s (2014) description of ‘willfulness’ as an affective reaction to not being accommodated that comes into being physically, spatially and ultimately as a collective project—an apt description for cine-fille filmmaking. The book’s trajectory at the level of gendered genre also eschews the ‘straight and narrow’ path of linearity and discipline.21 While Chap. 3 superficially moves from focalising feminine-identified genres through more gender-ambivalent then ‘masculine’ ones, this distinction repeatedly breaks down, in individual films (Twilight stands out) and in terms of the book’s overall organisation, especially into Chap. 4. Such an architecture rejects these categories, as well as the earlier belief that women filmmakers need to focus on female characters to be important for feminism.22 Similarly, the study’s understanding of genre is dynamic to the extent of repudiating master definitions and relying in part on citations from films to establish its own norms. This point throws into relief the way in which, as a study of intertextuality, the book is about many more films than those listed in its section titles; for example, The Hurt Locker (Bigelow 2008) receives substantial attention in dialogue with Stop-Loss, as does La Reine Margot (Patrice Chéreau, France/Italy/Germany, 1994) in relation to Marie Antoinette.23 To combat the limitless reaches of such anarchic dialogue, however, and ensure sufficiently detailed attention to aspects of genre-inflected form involved in affective address, in several instances—for instance, discussing Vamps in Chap. 3 and Marie Antoinette in Chap. 4— close analysis of one or two sequences is privileged over any attempt to capture the whole film. (For similar reasons, but also because it is more interested in films as experienced by broad publics than in authorial intention, nor have interviews with directors been cited unless they have proven highly illuminating.) Such an approach recognises the central role of form in determining genericity, alongside the fact that, as Deborah Jermyn has pointed out in her work on Nancy Meyers, celebrating film authors can be ‘about a visceral sense of “style”, about reproducing something memorably violent to the senses’ (2017: 126). If this book is indebted to literary studies at times in Chaps. 2 and 3, by its close it draws much more extensively on strictly audiovisual or cinematic ones, as is appropriate for a model of genre and authorship arising from the specificities of the medium. This model is perhaps best summarised as articulating a cinema that exploits mainstream modes to work with Leo Bersani has called the

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‘correspondences of form, texture, colour and volume [that] trace designs of sameness in our relations with the universe’ (1995: 20–21).

Notes 1. For a later expansion, see Grodal (2009). 2. I use the term affect interchangeably with emotion, broadly defined, albeit often with a focus on reactions elicited through external stimuli (here, the film’s style and resulting ‘mood’ [Sinnerbrink 2012]; see also Pye [2007] on tone). 3. See Bordwell (1991), Bukatman (2003), Plantinga (2009) and especially Ndalianis (2012); however, these focus heavily on films designed to disorient the viewer. More recently, Colling (2017) provides a useful study of affect in ‘girl teen film’. 4. On belatedness in (literary) creation see Bloom (1997 [1973]). 5. Eleftheria Thanouli (2009) describes postclassical cinema as reaching its defining culmination post-1990. The term postmodern is also apposite. 6. For an overview of the trend, see Herbert (2018). 7. See for instance Annette Hill and Joke Hermes (2020) on television as ‘a platform for cultural citizenship’ after COVID-19. 8. Twilight also participates in melodrama but in a highly overdetermined fashion that itself underlines the anti-realist aspects of the genre, as I show in Chap. 3. 9. Including those featured in Harrod and Paszkiewicz (2017), a book which forms part of a vanguard (see ibid.: 1–2) also beginning to include a more transnational aspect and that continues to expand, as illustrated recently by a call for contributions to a collection to be published in Edinburgh University Press’ ‘ReFocus’ series on the Indian filmmaker Zoya Akhtar. 10. For Berlant in particular, ‘self-confirmation by repeating the dynamics of an affective scene’ offers merely ‘juxtapolitical’, or distracting, conciliatory and unproductive pleasures (Berlant 2008: 14, 10). 11. The fact that in this context corporeality and feelings both gain major cultural significance and currency could be read, ironically, as women having a last (hollow) laugh. It is highly suggestive that several commentators have observed how female leaders have reacted more flexibly and sensitively, therefore effectively, to the global health crisis than have populist male ones. See for example Lewis (2020). 12. The situation appears somewhat better in television, where the number working in creative roles in US broadcast and cable networks and streaming programmes was estimated at 28% in 2016/2017, a rise of 2% from the previous year (Tally and Kaklamanidou 2018). In other national contexts, similar complaints are often made, for instance in the prominent

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#MásMujeres (MoreWomen) campaign linked to the 2018 Spanish Goya Awards. 13. Kasi Lemmon’s 1997 Gothic drama Eve’s Bayou might be seen as a forerunner of the trend. 14. On the ‘girling’ of postfeminist women, see for instance Negra (2009). 15. For instance, Modleski (1991: 17–18), Tuana (2008: 189). 16. Queen and Slim also engages only somewhat self-consciously with its fatalistic gangster road movie overlay, by contrast with earlier precedents including Badlands (Terrence Malick 1973) and True Romance (Tony Scott 1993). 17. Lane here in fact describes an intratextual moment that recurs in this film and The Loveless (Bigelow 1981), for me therefore functioning as a mise-en-­ abyme of the overall textual work. My choice to ignore Blue Steel nonetheless acknowledges Lane’s suggestion that ‘Bigelow refuses to suggest that a mere substitution of a woman in a man’s role […] ultimately reverses male power structures. Rather, she privileges the slippage between gender codes and modes of power’ (2000: 117). 18. Anna Backman Rogers (2019: ‘Introduction’) is meanwhile scathing in her critique of the celebration of the ‘asinine’ Wonder Woman (Patty Jenkins 2017) as feminist merely because it features a female superhero. 19. Heightened genre’s relevance to television studies meanwhile emerges directly in discussions of the cross-media rendering of Clueless, and to media studies more generally both here and in relation to Twilight as a multimedia franchise, in Chap. 3. 20. For instance, by producer Mia Bays on The World at One on BBC Radio 4 on 7 January 2020 https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b006qptc. The 2020 Academy Awards bucked the trend, possibly in response. 21. Cf. Ahmed (2007). 22. Pace Citron et al. (1978). 23. Countries of production are only included for non-US (co-)productions.

Works Cited Ahmed, Sara (2004), The Cultural Politics of Emotion, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Ahmed, Sara (2007), Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others, Durham: Duke University Press. Ahmed, Sara (2014), Willful Subjects, Durham: Duke University Press. Backman Rogers, Anna (2019), Sofia Coppola: The Politics of Visual Pleasure, New York: Berghahn Books (British Library digital collection). Berlant, Lauren (2008), The Female Complaint: the Unfinished Business of Sentimentality in American Culture, Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

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Bersani, Leo (1995), Homos, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Bloom, Harold (1997), The Anxiety of Influence, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Bordwell, David (1991), Making Meaning: Inference and Rhetoric in the Interpretation of Cinema, Boston, MA: Harvard University Press. Bukatman, Scott (2003), Matters of Gravity: Special Effects and Supermen in the 20th Century, Durham: Duke University Press. Citron, Michelle (1988), ‘Women’s Film Production: Going Mainstream,’ in E. Deidre Pribram (ed.), The Female Spectator: Looking at Film and TV, London and Routledge: Verso Press, pp. 45–63. Citron, Michelle, Julia Lesage, Judith Mayne, B.  Ruby Rich and Anna Marie Taylor (1978), ‘Women and Film: A Discussion of Feminist Aesthetics,’ New German Critique 13, Special Feminist Issue (Winter): 82–107. Cobb, Shelley (2015), Adaptation, Authorship, and Contemporary Women Filmmakers, London: Palgrave Macmillan. Colling, Samantha (2017), The Aesthetic Pleasures of Girl Teen Film, New York and London: Bloomsbury. Cowie, Elizabeth (1997), Representing the Woman: Cinema and Psychoanalysis, Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press. Cubitt, Sean (1998), Digital Aesthetics, New York: Sage. Dyer, Richard (2007), Pastiche, London and New York: Routledge. Ferriss, Suzanne (2021), The Cinema of Sofia Coppola: Fashion, Culture, Celebrity, London: Bloomsbury. Grodal, Torben (1999), Moving Pictures: A New Theory of Film Genres, Feelings, and Cognition, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Grodal, Torben (2009), Embodied Visions: Evolution, Emotion, Culture, and Film, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Guest, Katy (2019), ‘Fleishman Is in Trouble by Taffy Brodesser-Akner,’ The Guardian, 29 June. https://www.theguardian.com/books/2019/jun/29/ fleishman-­is-­in-­trouble-­taffy-­brodesser-­akner-­review. Halberstam, Jack (2005), In a Queer Time and Place: Transgender Bodies, Subcultural Lives, New York: New York University Press. Harrod, Mary and Katarzyna Paszkiewicz (eds) (2017), Women Do Genre in Film and Television, London and New York: Routledge. Herbert, Daniel (2018), Film Remakes and Franchises, New Brunswick, New Jersey: Rutgers University Press. Higbee, Will (2016), ‘Counter-heritage, Middlebrow and the fiction patrimoniale: Reframing “Middleness” in the Contemporary French Historical Film,’ in Sally Faulkner (ed.), Middlebrow Cinema, London and New  York: Routledge, pp. 139–155. Hill, Annette and Joke Hermes (2020), ‘Television’s Undoing of Social Distancing,’ European Journal of Cultural Studies (May). https://journals. sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/1367549420927724.

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Jermyn, Deborah (2017), Nancy Meyers, London: Bloomsbury. Johnston, Claire (2000), ‘Women’s Cinema as Counter Cinema,’ in E. Ann Kaplan (ed.), Feminism and Film, Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 22–33. Lane, Christina (2000), Feminist Hollywood: From Born in Flames to Point Break, Detroit: Wayne State University Press. Lane, Christina and Nicole Richter (2011), ‘The Feminist Poetics of Sofia Coppola: Spectacle and Self-Consciousness in Marie Antoinette (2006),’ in Hilary Radner and Rebecca Stringer (eds), Feminism at the Movies: Understanding Gender in Contemporary Popular Cinema, New York and Abingdon: Routledge, pp. 189–202. Lang, Brent (2017), ‘Number of Female Directors Falls Despite Diversity Debate, Says Study,’ Variety, January 12. https://variety.com/2017/film/news/ female-­directors-­hollywood-­diversity-­1201958694/. Lewis, Helen (2020), ‘The Pandemic Has Revealed the Weakness of Strongmen,’ The Atlantic, 6 May. https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2020/05/new-­z ealand-­g ermany-­w omen-­l eadership-­ strongmen-­coronavirus/611161/. Mayne, Judith (1990), The Woman at the Keyhole: Feminism and Women’s Cinema, Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press. McRobbie, Angela (2007), ‘Postfeminism and Popular Culture: Bridget Jones and The New Gender Regime,’ in Yvonne Tasker and Diane Negra (eds), Interrogating Postfeminism: Gender and The Politics of Popular Culture, Durham: Duke University Press, pp. 27–39. Modleski, Tania (1991), Loving With a Vengeance: Mass Produced Fantasies for Women, New York and London: Routledge. Naficy, Hamid (2001), An Accented Cinema: Exilic and Diasporic Cinema, Princeton: Princeton University Press. Ndalianis, Angela (2012), The Horror Sensorium: Media and the Senses, Jefferson and London: McFarland and Co. Negra, Diane (2009), What a Girl Wants?: Fantasizing the Reclamation of the Self in Postfeminism, London and New York: Routledge. Plantinga, Carl (2009), Moving Viewers: American Film and the Spectator’s Experience, Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. Pye, Douglas (2007) ‘Movies and Tone’, in John Gibbs & Douglas Pye (eds), Close-Up 02: Movies and Tone/Reading Rohmer/Voices in Film, London: Wallflower Press, pp. 1–80. Rich, B. Ruby (1990), ‘In the Name of Feminist Film Criticism,’ in Patricia Erens (ed.), Issues in Feminist Film Criticism, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, pp. 268–287.

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Silverstein, Melissa (2017), ‘2017 – The Year That Could Change Everything or Nothing,’ Medium, 22 December. https://medium.com/ women-­a nd-­h ollywood/2017-­t he-­y ear-­t hat-­c ould-­c hange-­e verything-­o r-­ nothing-­1072a670bc72. Sinnerbrink, Robert (2012), ‘Stimmung: exploring the aesthetics of mood,’ Screen 53 (2) (Summer): 148–163. Smith, Ellie (2020), “Des plafonds dans les yeux”: Representing the New Town in Naissance des pieuvres, unpublished Master’s essay, University of Warwick. Tally, Margaret and Betty Kaklamanidou (2018), ‘Does it really matter? Female-­ driven and created TV shows in the era of Trump and Weinstein,’ Paper delivered at Doing Women’s Film and Television History IV: Calling the Shots  – Then, Now and Next Conference, 23–25 May, University of Southampton. Tasker, Yvonne (2010), ‘Vision and Visibility: Women Filmmakers, Contemporary Authorship, and Feminist Film Studies,’ in Vicky Callahan (ed.), Reclaiming the Archive: Feminism and Film History, Detroit: Wayne State University Press. Thanouli, Eleftheria (2009), Post-classical Cinema: an International Poetics of Film Narration, London: Wallflower. Thomson, David (2002), The Whole Equation: A History of Hollywood, London: Little, Brown. Tuana, Nancy (2008), ‘Viscous Porosity: Witnessing Katrina,’ in Stacy Alaimo and Susan Hekman (eds), Material Feminisms, Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, pp. 188–213.

CHAPTER 2

Genre as Pastiche in Women’s Filmmaking

Production and reception are truly interrelated: a re-vision of auteurism can only be performed through an act of re-reading. —Christina Lane, Feminist Hollywood

Gendering Film Authorship, Genre and Affective Address The concepts of both authorship and genre are cornerstones of film analysis. They dictate the title and focus of numerous books about cinema, as well as conferences and research projects. As topics, they are perhaps more likely than any others to feature on introductory contextual courses to the field, where they may be set up in broad opposition to one another, reflecting the historical rise of genre criticism since the 1970s as a reaction against the earlier dominance of Film Studies by auteurist approaches. Women’s filmmaking, meanwhile, has in the past maintained at worst scant and at best fraught relations with the notions of both the auteur and mainstream film genres. Few women attained anything like auteur status before the 1980s or even 1990s: Alice Guy-Blaché, Dorothy Arzner, Ida Lupino, Germaine Dulac, Maya Deren, Agnès Varda, Esther Eng and a handful of others stand as exceptions that prove the rule. Even in these cases, moreover, their visibility is not on a par with that of widely celebrated male directors of the major world cinemas of the past and is largely indebted to relatively recent revisionist historical work by feminist film © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 M. Harrod, Heightened Genre and Women’s Filmmaking in Hollywood, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-70994-5_2

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scholars. The debate that gave currency to auteurism, the politique des auteurs launched by the self-promoting critic-filmmakers of the French New Wave, included no women in the canons it established, any more than did its North American successor, the criticism of Andrew Sarris. As for genre, studies of women’s historically rare contributions to the mainstream have tended to emphasise the extent to which they express themselves in spite of, rather than through, conventionalised filmmaking practice. The problematic relations between women and key categories of cinephilic and cultural value are, then, sometimes reinforced by feminist film analysis. Thus, Judith Mayne notes that any enquiry into female authorship ‘risks appropriating, for women, an extremely patriarchal notion of cinematic creation’ (1990: 95), while what remains Film Studies’ most famous text to date, Laura Mulvey’s discipline-shaping ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’ (1975), argued for the structural incompatibility of mainstream genre cinema with explorations of women’s subjectivity.1 Yet auteurism—the promotion of ‘genius’ filmmakers whose creative stamp shapes their oeuvre—has never of course in practice been antithetical to genre filmmaking. The pronouncement at a 1969 round table discussion held by Cahiers du cinéma that the films of ‘auteur-directors’ such as John Ford, despite their genre affiliations, are distinct from more conventional fare due to ‘thinking about the interplay [jeu] of the elements of the film (characters, objects, etc.) in a concrete space, and, at the same time, rethinking them […]’ (Jacques Rivette in Fairfax 2017: 188) in fact sounds remarkably similar to some appraisals of postclassical (if not all) genre filmmaking. Nor does the a priori counterposing of women filmmakers against an embrace of either authorship or genre stand up to empirical scrutiny. This book’s starting point is the increasingly visible stamp of female filmmakers on a range of genre films over the past three decades. This is, moreover, a change that is coming to scholarly attention, if often in a piecemeal way. As I have noted briefly elsewhere (Harrod and Paszkiewicz 2017: 5), film and media scholars such as Yvonne Tasker, Sue Thornham, Deborah Jermyn and Sean Redmond, Shelley Cobb, Christina Lane and others have in recent years reinvigorated the field of women’s screen authorship by taking on board broader transformations that have occurred in the concept of authorship in cultural and critical studies since the birth of the auteur in the patriarchal climate of 1960s France, in ways that I shall explore further in this section. Within such studies, genre films of various kinds recur as a locus of women’s creativity. Yet prior to the

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publication of my own above-cited co-edited anthology, Women Do Genre in Film and Television, which focuses on various industrial and cultural contexts, no book-length study had put women filmmakers as a collective into direct dialogue with genre. Since then, my collaborator Katarzyna Paszkiewicz’s highly original and engaging monograph Genre, Authorship and Contemporary Women Filmmakers (2018) has shown that genre analysis can offer enhanced possibilities for drawing female filmmakers’ work into a ‘feminist orbit’ (Gledhill in ibid.: 30). The present research on women filmmakers in Hollywood follows in this line and, though initial theoretical elements of it were published earlier (see Harrod 2016a), its present iteration has evolved in direct—and mutually supportive—dialogue with Paszkiewicz’s analyses. In particular, the present study seeks to strengthen claims that there is a strong case for considering women’s potentialities within mainstream filmmaking, and for doing so by emphasising films’ generic qualities as such as opposed to deviation from and/or subversion or transgression of them. My approach, however, differs in emphasis from my fellow scholar’s. Thus, while Paszkiewicz’s book is to be esteemed for its wide-ranging purview, in considering several individual films by filmmakers across the board from the mainstream Meyers to indie directors such as Karyn Kusama and Kelly Reichardt, my own focus is on finding common ground between films, or attempting a more inclusive theorisation of women’s practice in genre filmmaking—albeit socially situated.2 This does not prevent several of the same names arising in both works: in addition to Meyers, we both examine films by Bigelow and Coppola (though not always or at least not all the same ones), suggesting a degree of overlap that is unsurprising given the still limited corpus of mainstream hits by women. However, my own specific criterion for selection has been the extent to which films not only clearly embrace genres, but also foreground that relationship of belonging (hence, for instance, focusing on Coppola’s more obviously generic films)—as opposed to posing the question of the various ways in which readings concerned with genre may illuminate the feminist possibilities of specific films, as Paszkiewicz does. My own understanding of many recent genre films by women in Hollywood in fact challenges not only pre-existing ideas about women’s authorship in cinema, but also the concept of genre itself—particularly in reference to its overlapping close cousin pastiche. Before elucidating how, I will recap relevant key theorisations of both authorship and genre. These are massive fields and I will limit myself to a necessarily schematic overview

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of arguments that have been well rehearsed elsewhere (including by Paszkiewicz), with a view to building further on explicitly or implicitly gendered aspects of existing understandings and models. Then I will discuss the imbrication of genre and pastiche with the culturally feminised sphere of emotion, drawing on relevant scholarship in the area broadly termed affect studies, in order to refute certain gendered potential misconceptions about how genre films engage us that arise within or alongside this field. These arguments will comprise the basis of a framework for understanding recent work by women genre filmmakers through (popular) cinephilia and especially a form of heightened genericity that, I argue, relies centrally on a particular mode of audience address. The Woman Director as Author ‘The Author’ has metamorphosed more than once in the last half a century. Despite Roland Barthes’ (1977 [1967]) attack on the material author arising from essentialist, pre-structuralist ideas of the unity of the individual subject, he (and emphatically not, at that time, she) rose again from the dead. Some director-focused film criticism reconstituted the figure, not as an agent of selfhood whose motivations and meanings might be decoded through pairing biographical excavation with meticulous examination of their oeuvre, but rather as a vessel through whose work wider repressed cultural issues were spoken, in excess of authorial control (Wollen 1997 [1969]). At the same time, just two years after Barthes’ publication, Foucault (1969) resurrected the author differently, as a discursive function: a projection associated with texts and paratextual conversations.3 This approach has proven more tenacious, propped up by the historical turn in the humanities gathering force since the 1970s, and which in film analysis has meant a shift towards industrial and audience-focused approaches. Such a focus asks not what cultural producers aim to achieve with their works, nor even what these unwittingly translate from the collective unconscious, but rather what form of cultural enunciations are facilitated by the conditions of films’ production and what multiple meanings might their consumers bring to them, paying attention to these individuals’ own socially situated-ness. Janet Staiger’s work is significant here, historicising 1960s and 1970s auteurism wherein the author took on a disproportionate role in shaping understandings of the film (see Bordwell 1979: 59) but arguing compellingly that ‘spectators [still] use authorship to make the experience coherent’ (Staiger 1993: 180); since then, the idea

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that consumers can be seen to contribute to constructing texts’ authorship has been concretised by the rise of highly visible, Internet-led fan fiction. Timothy Corrigan’s bold 1991 essay ‘The Commerce of Auteurism’ nuanced the debate further, by foregrounding the author as a public figure performing an identity via their works and other cultural manifestations: as a kind of brand. Like all stars, he points out, authors themselves—and not only texts—are partly created by both industries and audiences. It should be noted here that the change in scholarly emphasis from individual creative agency to industry- and consumer-led approaches tracks the move away from discussing auteurs to thinking about authors. The French term implies a host of historically specific connotations and for this reason I will discuss the female filmmakers who feature in this study in terms of authorship as opposed to auteurism—even if I do not exclude claiming for them the qualities of virtuosity associated with filmmakers who are frequently dubbed auteurs. Women have a vested interest in the Lazarus-like resilience of the author. Feminists have not failed to notice the dissatisfactory timing of the concept’s demise as a signifier of mastery and innovation, guarantor of a certain exposure and socio-economic power, at just the moment when women were beginning to gain more traction as film directors; in Staiger’s words, ‘Depriving us of our voices just as we are speaking more loudly seems like a plot’ (2003: 29). The scholarly genre of revisionist feminist film historiography alluded to earlier has responded to this apparent injustice by going some way to promoting the visibility of women directors obscured by existing narratives, with a degree of success, especially in academic and to a lesser extent highly cinephilic circles. This study aims to further this impulse. The celebration of women in a role that feminism has sought to destabilise for men might seem to smack of injustice, even female chauvinism. However, as Nancy K. Miller has eloquently observed: ‘Because women have not had the same historical relation of identity to origin, institution, production, that men have had, women have not, I think, (collectively) felt burdened by too much Self, Ego, Cogito etc.… [their] relation to integrity and textuality, desire and authority, is structurally different’ (1985: 106).4 There is certainly every reason to champion women’s work in the face of colossal adversity when the author as an agent of the ‘commercial performance of the business of [authorship]’ (Corrigan 1990: 47, original emphasis) remains a category with considerable cultural purchase.5 The present analysis offers a conception of authorship that draws

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on elements of Corrigan’s author, particularly as projected in the text (rather than via the paratextual materials Corrigan also considers). Proceeding from the claim that authorship can be seen as a textual feature (cf. Derrida 1988), and that the (here, figurative) speaking position should be considered integral to what is said (Benveniste 1971), it nonetheless distinguishes itself from existing models of authorship through the central importance it accords to genre as a communicative medium ripe for exploitation by filmmakers. This focus emphasises authors-in-relation, notably to audiences. One important, often retrospective impulse in the struggle to restore women’s creative engagement with cinema to visibility has concerned their authorship in roles other than as director, be these stars (in a plethora of studies at least since Bovenschen 1977 on Dietrich), writers (Francke 1994; Cobb 2015; Nelmes and Selbo 2015), costume designers (dating back to Leese 1976), producers (Stamp 2015) or combinations of these and/or others (Beauchamp 1998; Stamp 2010). Although this study privileges the category of the film director as the element around which it organises its consideration of women’s skill and artistry in cinema, it shares with such interventions (as with poststructuralist author theory more generally) an understanding of authorship as fundamentally unfixed and multiple. Star studies and adaptation studies in particular have proven fruitful for feminism in ways that illuminate my own project, in that they highlight the importance of authorship as a form of interpretation. To interpret, from the Latin interpetari, is to understand and explain or translate, to offer up a carefully considered rendering of some pre-existing version— much like the work of genre narratives, as I will show in more detail shortly.6 Perhaps closest of all to this book’s conception of authorship, however, is Shelley Cobb’s highly suggestive study of female-authored (usually written) film adaptations, where she borrows from literary scholar François Meltzer in order to illustrate the kinds of authorship she eschews: Western notions of individualistic […] authorship are sustained by an ‘insistence on the new, the creative, and the true’ which further reinforce another set of beliefs: in the individual and his—and I do mean his—sovereignty; in a patriarchal hegemony as dominating culture and metaphysics; in a concomitant feminine economy as eternally secondary, unable by definition to partake of an originary model; [and] in private property and the exclusionary systems that ensue. (Cobb 2015: 13)

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These comments begin to indicate the stakes of the debate about authorship as difference, originality and exception versus models that give prominence to the collective nature of enunciations and artefacts, both Cobb’s and the comparable one that I offer up in this book. Interpreting Film Genre The understanding of genre shaping this research is no less postmodern than that of authorship. In this domain, the arguments I wish to make have less of a clear precedent, although several studies of genre or genres offered by feminist writers and others do prove relevant in various ways, alongside literary and cultural theorisations of the related notion of pastiche. To illustrate this, a very brief overview of the large body of scholarship on genre in Film Studies is essential. I begin with ‘master’ theories of what film genre is, before moving to a focus on analyses of particular genres that have broader implications for the present topic. As with the question of authorship, genre represents a theoretical topos around which scholarly paradigms have evolved during Film Studies’ existence as a discipline. At the moment of film theory’s heyday, literary criticism bequeathed to it an interest in narrative form concerned with the relative continuity and coherence ancient story structures (Frye 1957; Bloom 1997). Theoretical investment in enduring features quickly lost ground to a fascination with periodisation, specific genres and cyclicality in the face of film studies’ fast-growing historical bent. However, although influential film theorist Andrew Tudor (1974) pointed out the ‘empiricist dilemma’ faced by structural genre criticism, whereby individual genres’ definitions are circular and static since only texts that meet their criteria are cited as examples of them, this second, structurally inclined and at worst taxonomic approach to genre has proven tenacious in cinema (and literary) studies.7 A prominent early intervention was offered by Thomas Schatz’s 1981 book Hollywood Genres, whose most notable—because much disputed—contribution may have been to argue that genres display increasing self-reflexivity about their formal criteria as they mature.8 Although Schatz’s oeuvre is centrally concerned with genres’ ‘mythic’ relation to American culture as a whole, it strains to contain genre within standardised, coherent models; it highlights conformity over invention and in so doing harks back to the Platonic view of forms that underpinned many earlier accounts of literary genre. More recently, David Bordwell (2006) has offered a more or less canonical account of mainstream

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Hollywood—and, as his study reflects, by extension many other—narrative cinemas based on a constructivist understanding of how genre films engage spectators. While Bordwell’s work gestures to the notional importance of affective engagement through aesthetics, it does not accord the latter much detailed attention beyond narrative concerns, and his neo-­ formalist catalogue of recurrent stylistic features itself represents a taxonomic study of texts grouped under the rubric of ‘narrative cinema’ that some might call a master genre. Other theorists have been less wedded to totalising accounts of genre. Steve Neale’s 1980 Genre ‘argued that genres are not discrete phenomena, contained within mutually exclusive boundaries, but also deal rather in a shared and changing pool of plot mechanisms, icons and discourses’ (Gledhill 2000: 223–224). He is also generally credited with initiating a new historicism in 1990s genre studies specifically that focused on how industry, and (secondarily, differently) critics, shape generic evolution. His discussion of audience address, through systems of ‘expectation and anticipation’ (Neale 1990: 49), looks forward to my own perspective on genre work as intimately bound up with both producers (in the broad sense) and viewers. Further examples of ‘new’ genre criticism focused on situating genre as an industrial category, associated with such scholars as Richard Maltby and especially Rick Altman, have underscored hybridity. This is significant for the question of heightened genre in the sense that prominent genre mixing tends to be a feature of meta-genericity: the conventionalised tropes of any one genre are likely to be more visible when these are combined with those of others, potentially troubling ‘generic verisimilitude’ (Neale 1990: 47, following Tzvetan Todorov). Such a claim is also invited by Dyer’s focus on recombination in pastiche, such that a sonnet becomes more than simply formulaic only when it resembles a different form, such as French symbolist poetry (Dyer 2007: 93). More recently, Film Studies as a whole has increasingly embraced openly fluid and subjectively defined critical categories that Neale’s description already pointed to (such as through reference to film noir), with the standardisation of critically delineated categories in serialisation studies epitomising the trend.9 Such approaches valorise a multiplicity of (intertextually informed) perspectives as illuminating different aspects of films, in the same way that the genre-literate viewer addressed by self-reflexive genre films draws on their own particular repertoire from a pool of collective references to animate the experience.

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Genre Pastiche, Affect and Women in Film Theory If such viewer-centric theories of popular cinema chime with ‘know[ing]’ pastiche, this concept has been taken up directly in a genre context, and one that also brings in authorship: Janes Gaines’ brilliant defence of the validity of championing female genre auteurs of the past leverages Dyer’s work to posit ‘the codification of emotional knowledge in genre as […] a highly developed social expertise in the ways and means of feeling’. Adopting a similarly strategic pseudo-essentialism about women filmmakers to this study’s, Gaines’ work symptomatises the pertinence to feminist approaches of critical theory’s growing investment in legitimising what she calls ‘emotional knowledge’ (Gaines 2012: 18).10 The latter is indeed striking. For instance, two decades after Grodal’s discussion of how emotion and cognition represent ‘two different aspects of one information system’ ‘within a functionally unified psychosomatic whole’ (1999: 81,1)—and more than four since Raymond Williams discussed ‘thought as felt and feeling as thought’ (1977: 132)—the work of the neuroscientific psychologist Lisa Feldman Barrett, substantially concerned with demonstrating that ‘we are architects of our own experience’ and so ‘believing is feeling’ (2017: 40, 78), enjoys visibility beyond the confines of the Academy (e.g. through TED talks). With such discoveries in mind, there can be no clear-cut line between ‘genres with high cognitive and low excessive-affective demands’ and others—a separation already rendered problematic by the aesthetic and structural hybridity now widely acknowledged to typify genre films. Rather, all genre films comprise an ‘aesthetic structure of expectation’ (Berlant 2008: 4) linked to particular feeling shapes: an apprehension that undermines the masculine privileging of abstracted, ‘intellectual’ form.11 By way of a brief illustration, if horror, pornography and melodrama (Williams 1991) as well as comedy are typically cited as the genres associated with the spasms and outpourings of the body, despite its name, as explored in Chap. 4, the thriller is often seen the archetypal ‘cerebral’ film. Thus, the first film that immediately stood out in a Google search for ‘cerebral movie’ was Memento (Christopher Nolan, USA 2000), a mystery thriller about memory loss where the viewer is positioned in such close alignment with the mentally impaired protagonist that they are constantly trying to piece together the story. Yet this is also the very film that forms the basis of a case study for an analysis of the heightened emotional impact of repeat viewings, related to the tragic dissolution of the self ensuing

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from memory loss (Renner 2006)—just as the phrase feeling shape is originally taken from Rebecca M. Gordon’s unpublished work on the ‘thriller-­ chiller-­comedy’ (see Harrod 2016a: 55). Hence, the emotional power of genre films—the reason people pay to experience the feelings cued by particular types of narratives—is contingent upon their codified address, and whose decoding relies on cognition. (Memento is also self-reflexive on this point by dramatising the nonexistence of a meaningful affective life in the absence of cognitive memory.) This applies at the levels of film narrative and also—inseparably from it—style, which can be seen as nothing less than a series of cues soliciting emotional experiences in the viewer (Smith 2007), and is true whether such interpretation is consciously reflective or not—a detail that proves a red herring for this analysis.12 Certainly postmodern genre films do invite the active cataloguing of allusions as a major source of cinephilic appeal; however, as Linda Hutcheon (1980: 7) has noted, the metafictional text demands that ‘the reader’ should ‘engage himself [sic] intellectually [but also] imaginatively and affectively in its construction’. This invocation of imagination and affect, albeit ‘actively’ engaged, implies the way in which referentiality can also be, and indeed often necessarily is, more diffuse than just identifying references, and operational at the borders of consciousness: it involves oscillations between ‘self-aware’ ratiocination and more unconscious thought. These cannot in practice be distinguished any more than can affect and cognition; as Grodal puts it, viewer engagement with the fiction as such (‘fictive context’) and with it as a ‘real-world’ alternate but ‘not in a simple either/or manner’ (1999: 157). Karen Renner’s analysis of watching Memento recalls Silvan Tomkins’ well-known theory of affects, which has been influential in Film Studies. Tomkins outlines the way in which repetition of a similar experience ‘either results in habituation [and thus relative imperviousness] or sensitization and generalization’ (Sedgwick and Frank 1995: 65). While it is impossible to predict when one reaction and not the other will occur, as multiple factors—most particularly previous audience familiarity with similar texts— bear on this, it seems likely that the most powerfully affective genre films engage processes of sensitisation.13 We need only to consider the familiar irritation of being moved by a formulaic text ‘despite ourselves’ to grasp, moreover, the way in which such affective responses can be cued even when processes of recognition are highly openly addressed; the pageant of contrivances characteristic of horror and pornographic films demonstrates the materially affective power of self-evidently inauthentic and staged

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audiovisual scenarios. This contradicts both the overemphasis on the real, indebted to classical film theory, found in some studies of film affect and also the more formalist-influenced tradition of separating affective and ‘cognitive’, notably narrative, features of cinema.14 The clear implication of Tomkins’ account of sensitisation through familiarity is, then, that powerful, embodied responses to mainstream films are not less discursively determined. They are if anything more so and thus fall firmly within the remit of calls for an account of cinema’s ‘affective semiotics’ (Matt Hills and Henry Jenkins in Jenkins 2006: 27). Ethnographic accounts of viewer engagement with films would appear to bear out the impossibility of separating cognitive and affective engagement in any meaningful way in relation to genre (or any) films.15 Ien Ang has described the pleasure of critique in her research into (feminised) viewing practices connected with the classic television soap opera Dallas (CBS, 1978–1991), where she cites Foucault to argue that the act of viewing in a distanced way itself affords pleasurable feelings through power play: ‘commentary is a type of discourse that has the aim of dominating the object: by supplying commentary to something, one affirms a superior relation to that object’ (1985: 2). As Alice Guilluy astutely observes in a study of romantic comedy’s reception: ‘In the context of film-viewing furthermore, the act of commentary […] is transgressive in itself too as it disrupts the silence traditionally associated with a cinephile mode of film-­ viewing […Thus] feminist critique can work against […] but also through and indeed alongside emotional engagement with the film’ (2021, my emphasis). While both Ang and Guilluy are concerned with articulated audience responses to popular culture, genre films can be seen to incorporate a form of meta-commentary on generic features into their DNA by virtue of their ‘knowingness’ of convention. In short, the kind of recognition on which the pleasurable familiarity of genre-viewing depends is predicated on knowledge. Such an apprehension undoes the opposition between distance and pleasure-as-proximity or immersion taken as read by spectatorship theory and also often implied by post-Bordwellian constructivism and cognitive models arising from the latter. The binary and in many instances enduring opposition of the emotions and thought is of course deeply entrenched in Western culture’s Cartesian subject. While affect is often distinguished from emotion by being seen as ‘pre-personal’, notably in the Deleuzian-Spinozist line taken up by Brian Massumi (1987: xvi), in other words autonomic and unconscious (see Seigworth and Gregg 2010: 1), in practice they overlap since, like me,

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many scholars use the term affect simply to designate feelings produced by encounters (see Colling 2017: 18). Certainly affect, perhaps even more than emotion in general, risks being tainted by a rationalist suspicion of corporeality when we consider that ‘affect tends to refer to a privileging of the body’ (Probyn 2004: 28). Although affects may be seen as more diffuse than straight emotions and circulate between individuals or groups, they are corporeally recognisable and experienced (Ahmed 2004). Indeed, if affect refers in this book to feelings produced by films, and notably film form and style, it is relevant to recall Terry Eagleton’s definition of aesthetics as themselves ‘born of a discourse of the body’, in line with the term’s Greek etymological roots denoting perceptual experience (in Ndalianis 2012: 17). I agree, too, with Emma Wilson that (in film viewing) ‘affect might also colour sense perception, so that the flow of emotive sensation is admixed in sensation, rinsing it, glossing it’ (Wilson 2014: 212). Yet if affect has been claimed as collective and recently even exclusively textual (Brinkema 2014), it cannot be separated from the discursive in the manner implied by its theoretical imprisonment in an unconscious and even unthinking body. Typical of this ongoing tendency is the political theorist William E. Connolly’s (2002) concept of ‘somatic markers’, or affective dispositions that are simultaneously corporeally experienced and culturally nuanced but working at a preconscious level. Connolly explains that these markers result when certain objects or ideas are repeated often enough to become sites of condensed meaning or feeling (as surely genres comprise), in such a way that, once formed, they can bypass cognitive function and critical reflection, producing responses that are unthinking yet emotionally intense. Making the conceptual leap from the body to the social through the prism of affect in itself strikes me is a compelling move entirely consonant with my arguments for what film scholar Jo Labanyi calls ‘a concept of subjectivity that is based on relationality with others and with things’ (2010: 223). However, rather than suggesting the elision of cognition in all such processes, such a view ‘question[s] the mind/ body divide’ (ibid.). Moreover, critiques of the ‘anti-intentionalist’ affective paradigm that distances affect from thinking interaction with the outside world can be marshalled from diverse disciplines (Blackman 2012: xi). Notably, the historian of science Ruth Leys (2011) has argued that seeing affect as an autonomic response yields a materialist theory of the body and relies on often unexamined premises. These tend to be drawn from a variety of not necessarily compatible sources, including

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nineteenth- and early twentieth-­century philosophy alongside contemporary neuroscience.16 In the latter domain, in addition to the already cited work of Barrett, evidence-based thinking supporting hypotheses that treat the brain and emotions, a contrario, as indistinguishable notably includes brain-based learning theorists’ much earlier assertion that the processing centres of memory and emotion coincide in the hippocampus (e.g. Caine and Caine 1991: 56). Needless to say, memory processes are perhaps the most important higher-level cognitive function addressed by genre texts.17 The affective qualities provoked by encounters, including through contextual association, emerge in this account as anything but pre-cognitive, or even unconscious.18 bell hooks sums up a recurrent opposing idea in feminist film studies when she notes that (affective) pleasure and (thinking) critique can coexist (1996: 4)—if not complement one another (Modleski 1991: 57). Polarisations of mind and body have been highly egregious for women—and other disempowered communities, notably colonial subjects and the ethnic minority groups also addressed by hooks, not to mention Ahmed—including in Film Studies. As the latter has noted, feminist thinkers such as Elizabeth Spelman and Alison Jaggar have shown how ‘the subordination of emotions also works to subordinate the feminine and the body’ (Ahmed 2004: 3; see also Bordo 2003 [1993]: 11). However, Continental feminist philosophers such as Hélène Cixous and Luce Irigaray have argued in different ways that women’s experience might necessitate a new ‘language’ attuned to their bodily difference; or, women’s specificity is located in their bodies. While these thinkers elevate feminine corporeality to a privileged position, patriarchy has been able to leverage their arguments in the service of a further sidelining of women’s voices, circumscribed to the realm of the physical, sensory and by extension sentimental. As Mary Ann Doane puts it: The image of the woman ‘wrapped in’ contiguity, deprived of the phallus as signifier of desire, has been taken up by French theorists […] in a sometimes hyperbolic celebration of the only picture of feminine ‘subjectivity’ available from psychoanalysis. These theorists activate the tropes of proximity, overpresence or excessive closeness to the body and continuity in the construction of a kind of ‘ghetto politics’ which maintains and applauds women’s exclusion from language and the symbolic order. […] The description by these theorists of a body wrapped up in itself too close is effectively political only in its hyperbole or its excess, for what they delineate is not a desirable place. In fact, it is a nonplace. (Doane 1987: 11)

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The profusion of work on tear-jerking female-oriented melodramas by Doane and others in fact has en masse risked feeding somewhat into this tendency. In the postclassical period, however, the visibility of female fan cultures around diverse genres severely challenges the pertinence of such exclusive associations, an impetus this study seeks to reinforce.19 Doane’s metaphor of spatial exclusion provides a useful counterpoint to the centralisation of generic spaces inhabited by women in both feminist melodrama criticism, this book and indeed Ahmed’s theories of emotion. Importantly, the latter have already spawned feminist extrapolations that recognise the problem of mind-body dualism underpinning much pre-­ existing work in affect theory yet seek to maintain this framework’s productive enquiry into feeling—with its connection to pre-existing strands of feminist thought—alongside poststructuralism’s focus on identity categories beyond universal humanism (Hemmings 2012; Fischer 2016).20 As for film studies, an analysis that has been a key inspiration for this research, Roberta Garrett’s 2007 Postmodern Chick-Flicks: The Return of the Woman’s Film, attempts with considerable success to rebalance scholarly emphasis away from the linkage of women with sentimental narratives through postmodern tactics that (implicitly) include pastiche. Garrett claims that postmodernity has allowed highly ‘feminine’ narratives that were frowned upon under second-wave feminism, notably romances and secondarily the melodrama, to flourish since the early to mid-1990s.21 Her central argument is that ‘new female-oriented cycles have increasingly incorporated self-consciousness and framing devices associated with postmodernist aesthetics and often used precisely to ameliorate the sentimentalism and feminine naivety associated with older female-identified forms’, and so make them more palatable for female viewers (Garrett 2007: 7). Examples cited encompass arthouse fare including Orlando (Sally Potter, 1992) and The Piano (Jane Campion, 1993), but also mainstream hits such as You’ve Got Mail (Nora Ephron, 1998) and other melodramatic romcoms by Ephron, Down with Love (Peyton Reed, 2003) and the Bridget Jones films (2001, 2004), which are more often ignored or held up in a negative light by academic analyses. While Garrett’s work differs from mine in the first place because the issue of female authorship does not definitively inform her conceptualisation of ‘chick-flicks’ (although several of her examples are directed by women), her persuasive case for the self-reflexivity of the recent femaleoriented films she examines is highly pertinent to my interests. As she notes, early 1980s accounts of postmodernism were associated with New

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Hollywood’s male directing pantheon, while in the 1980s and 1990s the linkage of postmodernist features with male-oriented cinema applies to both mainstream action filmmaking (such as the Die Hard franchise) and more experimental indie fare by the likes of David Lynch, Quentin Tarantino, Martin Scorsese, David Fincher and Michael Mann. Initial discussions of the relationship between postmodernist filmmaking and feminism focused on the form’s apparent desire to either exclude or offend the female audience, and even more recent accounts that pay attention to the articulation of gender reveal an underlying assumption of the links between postmodernism and male-oriented, often violent films. Meanwhile, Garrett attributes a critical reluctance to perceive postmodernist strategies at work in female-associated cycles to the traditional association of women’s films with affective intensity and female viewers with overengagement, in contrast to ‘the more cerebral, distanced “masculine” pleasures of reference-spotting’ (Garrett 2007: 5–7).22 Garrett’s work, then, nuances differently the ‘feminine’ associations of melodrama, and its flipside genre, romance (see Rowe Karlyn 1995; McDonald 2007)—also a relatively popular site for feminist analysis. As for the art films she examines, her postmodernist-informed analyses mitigate a scholarly overemphasis in studies of filmmakers such as Jane Campion and Sally Potter typically on how they address not only the female spectator’s emotions but her very sensorium, bypassing concern with conscious cognitive pleasures.23 However, important though it is to offer specific cases that show how women diverge from ‘mere’ association with the sensory-affective realm, seeing women’s use of relatively overt allusionism as transgressive, an opportunity for alternative readings, does little to disturb the binaristic logic on which such a conception of gendered spectatorship reposes: that is, it reverses rather than destabilising the opposition’s two poles. It strikes me as imperative to consider not only the extent to which such films contribute to the erosion of (always gendered) epistemological categories, but rather, as I have indicated, to question the very status of the category of epistemology—as divorced from embodied, affective sentiment. There can be no ‘masculine’ realm of cerebral pleasures into which women incur, no need to ‘ameliorate’ sentimentality or emotionality-cum-naivety, if the severing of affect and emotion from cognition in the first place is radically challenged. My own interest, then, is in thinking through how ostentatious referentiality actually encourages emotive address, by female directors to all audiences.

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Also helpful is Garrett’s description of the pastiche qualities of the films she examines. These are placed in the context of a contemporary Hollywood characterised by ‘meta-generic’ blockbusters and the bending of generic codes: propitious ground for genre-mixing to make features of particular genres stand out in a highly overt fashion. For example, I will show in Chap. 3 that Western elements of Stop-Loss are all the more noticeable for being housed in a war movie. For Garrett, the self-consciousness and irony of contemporary chick-flicks is differentiated by virtue of their very ‘in-your-face’ quality. This involves an allusiveness no longer aimed primarily at cinephiles but the audience as a whole (Garrett 2007: 27). I have already implied that it is perhaps more logical to view the directions being taken by the chick-flick in this account as overlapping with, rather than qualitatively distinct from, other recent trends in genre filmmaking. More importantly for my purposes, such a form of referentiality chimes with the claim I make that (inherently hybrid) genres pastiche themselves, meaning that they reveal themselves to be self-conscious (and even more hybrid, palimpsest-like) versions of generic forms and styles. This has special significance not only for notionally female-oriented films but for those made by women.

Heightened Genericity and the Female Director Perhaps we are less fascinated by reality itself than we are by the transformative strategies its narrators adopt. —Delphine de Vigan, Based on a True Story 24

Having adumbrated histories of authorship and genre studies that pertain to women’s contemporary mainstream filmmaking, in this section I build on existing theorisations of reflexivity itself to add precision to what I mean by heightened genre. I also flesh out the term cine-fille playfully proposed to describe female authors who engage in this type of filmmaking. To this end, I refer to notions of cinephilia, postmodernity and postfeminism, but also complement these with substantial reference to the concept of embodied address, as explored in both film studies and also other disciplines. The chapter finally draws out some of the ideological implications of this study’s approach, notably in dialogue with queer theory.

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Defining Heightened Film Genre While I have so far described the genre work in which this book is interested as meta, this prefix is encumbered by a history of modernist mind-­ body dualism that does not always prove helpful to the present arguments. Metafiction is routinely defined as being ‘self-conscious’. Fiction, on the other hand, traditionally references not itself but the world: as film theorist Jacques Aumont has observed, ‘since Classical antiquity the very notion of narrative has been thought of in relation to the notion of representation, or better yet, mimesis’ (1997: 184–185, original emphasis). This led to metafiction being set up in opposition to fiction, until the work of poststructuralist theory severed signifier from signified such that all experience available to human understanding might be considered textual, in some sense fictionalised. Metafiction is revealed, then, as a heightened variant of fiction, rather than its less mimetic antithesis. Considering fiction and fictionality as inevitably bracketed alongside, rather than in opposition to, self-consciousness highlights their increasingly close perceived relation to cognition, as well as the way in which both fiction and especially metafiction can be notionally contrasted with fact, or fictionality with both factuality and the European philosophical notion of facticity: the intractable material of existence—the unconstructed ‘real’. The gender implications of this argument interest me. Facticity may be related to authenticity. The positive attributes that collect around this concept bleed into the valorisation of ‘natural’ embodied femininity in many feminist studies, but as indicated only at the cost of silencing women from mass channels of communication whose male dominance is not challenged. Meanwhile, masculinity profits from ownership of a discursive sphere equated with intelligence, order and rationality. On the other hand, when women do ‘speak’ through popular forms, these tend to become— paradoxically, hypocritically—culturally coded as ‘trivial’: excessively discursive and flimsy—the mere cultural ‘chatter’ of women. Jermyn cites a pertinent distinction of men’s speech or ‘muthos’ as authoritative public parlance identified by the feminist historian Mary Beard, in the context of Nancy Meyers’ What Women Want (2000), which some commentators criticised for reinforcing hackneyed notions of women’s ‘chatting, prattling or gossip’ (Jermyn 2017: 79). There is a danger, then, that for a feminism concerned with the substance of lived experience (as feminism should be), meta-generic films might seem only to multiply genre films’

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‘insubstantial’ fakery, in negative contrast to the power of other types of cinema to engage bodies—including collective ones—meaningfully. Meta—literally meaning post—also potentially evokes spatio-­ temporalities whose problematic status for the affect debate has been elucidated. It should by now be apparent why understanding the inseparability—or notional simultaneity—of conscious and unconscious thought processes, including the moods and emotions which overlap with these, is imperative for capturing the significance of women making films that I contend are both highly artificial—openly discursive and carefully constructed in relation to pre-existing codes—and highly affecting for embodied subjects. In short, it is because of the enduring human history of speaking masculinity and femininity in close association with the realms of thought and sentiment, respectively: a history whose component parts must be scrutinised in order to be reassembled in the service of a transmuted social vision. Such an apprehension informs how we should understand women’s association with formula-based narrative forms. Without speculating about authorial agency in more than its metaphorical form, the contemporary association between female filmmakers and mainstream genre films suggests an instinct that histories must be engaged with in order to be rewritten. Because of the existence of such histories and their associative accretion around existing terms, I prefer to describe the films featured in this book in terms not of meta-genericity but rather heightened genericity. The approach taken incorporates Grodal’s suggestion that such fictions (including those positioned as avant-garde and deconstructive, from Alain Robbe-­ Grillet’s 1955 novel Le Voyeur/The Voyeur to Héctor Babenco’s 1985 film The Kiss of the Spiderwoman) at the same time ‘rely to some extent on encoded fascination to produce their affective charge’ (1999: 227). A similar word that sometimes proves useful is overdetermined; however, heightened is more redolent of emotionality and therefore seems a fitting label to complement a concept—genre—that has traditionally been associated more with men than women. Indeed, the phrase is a synecdoche for the work of this book as a whole, in reconciling apparently highly masculine and highly feminine modes and forms of self-articulation and being. Heightened genericity includes but goes beyond pastiche, as a quality that revels in its own constructed-ness, but without only referencing particular, highly recognisable other texts or styles. It indicates films with a strikingly pervasive, promiscuous and generically determined sphere of intertextual relay.

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Dyer, too, notwithstanding the contrasts between genre and pastiche alluded to in his work, elsewhere points directly to a linkage between the two implied by considering genre’s heightened potentialities in this millennium especially, arguing that ‘to be aware of a work as being of a particular genre is perforce to be aware of it as an imitation of an imitation’ (2007: 4). He responds to André Bazin’s well-known positing of a (false) distinction between ‘neutral’ westerns and ‘superwesterns’ by arguing that today—indeed, since a very few early examples—‘all Westerns know they are Westerns, are in this sense self-aware’ (ibid.: 118). The experience of many genre films is indeed awareness of their generic nature; however, sometimes the ‘awareness’ or ‘knowledge’ of their referentiality produced is more felt and instinctive than available for clear articulation. Needless to say, the foregoing description represents a subjective interpretation that varies widely between viewers, and during different moments of film viewing, with the likelihood of any form of generic recognition favouring a popular cinephilic competence. As Garrett’s work also suggests, this is increasingly widespread in the age of mass-availability of Hollywood films especially, not to mention of ‘active’ modes of controlled consumption, manipulation and even recombination and the fan cultures linked to these (Elsaesser 2005), while reading for heightened genericity has the further advantage of privileging generalised referentiality more likely to be resonant for a relatively high proportion of viewers over allusions to one or two specific ‘forefather’ texts. Nonetheless, knowledge still varies considerably—and this caveat applies even more obviously to the possibility of valorising authorship through genre, since some viewers will be entirely oblivious to the directing credit. Any desire to distinguish certain genre films as more reflexive than others is moreover in a sense condemned from the outset by the impossibility of generalising. Notably, the location of that point at which different viewers will lose interest in (meta) fictional constructions because they show too much of their contrivance is unknowable. This book cannot resolve these issues and is probably no better placed to avoid the risk of falling into patterns of binary ascription than earlier theorists’ interventions, not least since ‘[a]s soon as the word “genre” is sounded, as soon as it is heard, as soon as one attempts to conceive it, a limit is drawn. And when a limit is established, norms and interdictions are not far behind’ (Derrida 1980: 56). The aim of it is nevertheless to avoid labelling films as merely either heightened or ‘regular’ genre, during particular sequences or as a whole, while still championing the meaningfulness of forms of genericity and self-reflexivity even in the face

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of such complexities. In a situation where the contours of the landscape refuse to remain fixed to the compass points imposed to represent them in rude imprecision, the only response for those interested in continuing the struggle to reject oppressive norms can be creative orienteering. Hence my emphasis in this analysis on offering interpretations of my own. The film viewing experience is in any case surely one of the more obvious examples of situated knowledge in the sense described by Donna Haraway. Renouncing patriarchal notions of ‘objective’ knowledge, Haraway argues for politics and epistemologies of location, positioning, and situating, where partiality and not universality is the condition of being heard to make rational knowledge claims. These are claims on people’s lives. I am arguing for the view from a body, always a complex, contradictory, structuring, and structured body, versus the view from above, from nowhere, from simplicity. (Haraway 1988: 581, my emphasis)

As with all the closely related terms employed so far in this chapter (meta-­ genericity, pastiche, referentiality, allusivity and so on), the frequency of heightened genericity in mainstream cinema today should by now be amply clear. It is perhaps no more common in films by women than elsewhere. My point is, rather, that within the small sector of visible films by women it seems markedly common, on the one hand, and on the other— and in acknowledgement of my own (bodily) situated-ness—that this development, framed by a cultural context that has disfavoured and devalued such activities, demands to be accorded significance and visibility. The Rise of the Cine-fille If the trend for women making overdetermined genre films may be largely a consequence of the belatedness of today’s overall increase in genre films by women, more generally, empirical observation and theoretical articulation have tended anyway to become inseparable since poststructuralism’s recognition of the inaccessibility of the unmediated real to human subjectivity. This apprehension suggests that identifying the need to think differently about genre films reconstructs those films themselves—as experienced by us. In this way, this book both argues for the importance of and contributes to the rise of the cineliterate woman director of allusive movies. This is the figure referred to in the title of this subsection as the cine-fille.

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The specific choice of a term derived from cinephilia is also intended as more than a catchy jeu de mots. Thomas Elsaesser (2005) has famously suggested that this phenomenon can be divided into two key historical strands. For him, ‘take-one cinephilia’ is associable with the 1950s and 1960s masculinist politique des auteurs moment. It is now an object of widespread academic derision: ‘an uncritical buffism, condemned alongside the guilty pleasures of scopophilia, voyeurism, and fetishism’ (Richards 2013: 3). ‘Take-two cinephilia’, in contrast, designates the postmodern, contemporary variant, which is also associated with DVD viewing (now, by extension, streaming) and fan cultures. This type of cinephilia typically emphasises a critical proclivity for imaginative recreation of the historical past, and for putting this into dialogue with the present. According to Elsaesser, the latter tendency is especially visible in relation to films that invite cinephilic engagement—much as I am here arguing that recent genre films by Hollywood women have done. Furthermore, while the development of ‘take-two’ cinephilia speaks to the way in which empowering the consumer opens up hierarchies to a certain degree of democratisation, invitations to feminise cinephilia were surely abundant from the start. Specifically, cinephilic discourse has always been attuned to moments of heightened emotional interaction with texts, linked to ‘ineffable’ apprehensions—in apparent contradiction to masculine discourses of agency, authority and control. It has sought to champion, indeed, that which exceeds signification, at least in any graspable or expressible way—what Christian Keathley sums up in the subtitle to his 2005 study of Cinephilia and History as ‘[or] The Wind in the Trees’.25 While I believe that cinema does operate through signification to all intents and purposes, including when it addresses the body, considering the perceived points of contact between embodied feelings and cinephilia throws up odd contradictions in narratives that have sought at times to imprison femininity in affective realms but at others to annexe the latter for patriarchal prosperity. Nor is the enhanced Gallic component of the cine-fille label incidental. Not only does the term cinephilia originally come—alongside the idea itself—from French, but many eminent scholars of the phenomenon including Paul  Willemen, Antoine De Baecque and Colin MacCabe all still recently, decades after ‘take one’, situate it squarely within a French context (see Harrod 2016b: 70). Such a claim bespeaks a common (male) critical nostalgia for the substance as well as the semantics of the cinephilia of the politique des auteurs, including its gendering, which the rise of the cine-­fille charted in this book denounces. While acknowledging the

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significant problems implied by the postfeminist ‘girling’ of women, this term otherwise strikes me as a highly apposite designation for a group of filmmakers whose ‘in-your-face’ filmmaking styles chime with notions of female empowerment (‘girlpower’), irreverence and commercial savvy, for better as well as worse. It is important to underline here a potential contradiction between postfeminism’s linkage with not only girls (Projansky 2007: 42) but also reflexivity (McRobbie 2004) and its frequent bundling with notions of social power and especially individualism. Whereas Angela McRobbie discusses the deployment of ironic self-awareness about (un-) feminist ideologies as a pretext for embracing backward models of female self-surveillance and actualisation in Bridget Jones’s Diary (Sharon Maguire, 2001), generic reflexivity is inherently a question of individuation only in relation to others, such that in the present context the association with post-1990 postfeminism should not be simply conflated with (neoliberal) individualism. If filmmakers embrace heightened genericity, they flirt with the suppression of difference in films. Authors’ brands are thus positioned in this study along a continuum that is less concerned with deviance from norms than it is with appropriation and reinscription (in which context Sofia Coppola is an extreme case, as she literally leverages her auteur father’s brand for her work as his daughter, another meaning of fille [Handyside 2017: Chapter 1, passim]).26 Nonetheless, the term cine-­fille indicates, finally, an attitude of wanton ‘upstart’ impertinence towards the old idea of the cinephile auteur as a venerable (White) patriarch. While the historical male-gendering of the mainstream has been heavily emphasised in this chapter, discourse around the auteur of course reflects the fact that, despite being easier to access in economic terms, the artier strains of independent filmmaking have hardly welcomed women into their canons with open arms, either. From this point of view, when it comes to issues of cultural positioning by texts and their authors, the ‘trashy’ associations of popular forms, especially highly overdetermined or ‘formulaic’ ones, have some reasons to appeal to women on grounds of taste, in the Bourdieusian sense of self-definition. Put simply, some women directors might want to be associated with irreverential fare that eschews ‘masculine’ seriousness, in common with queer-invested directors more generally. That such an aesthetic chimes with heightened genre leaps out when we recall Susan Sontag’s classic 1966 definition of camp in terms of artifice, exaggeration and ‘things-being-what-they-are-not’. We find comparable terms employed, too, in feminist film studies works offering a

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precedent to Garrett’s and my interest in the specifically feminist potentialities of reflexivity in women’s cultural production. For instance, faced with the dominance of the publicly visible discursive realm by masculine histories, Johnston (2000 [1973]) called for a space to be opened up between signifier and signified, while Lucy Fischer (1989: 15) highlighted the possibility of appropriating (patriarchal) discourse in a self-­aware fashion, using, in the words of Roland Barthes, ‘quotations without inverted commas’ to carve out a space particular to women. At the same time, of course, the frequent presence of reflexivity in the avant-garde tradition at least as much as the mainstream underscores the problems with such oppositions in the first place, as hinted in a feminist context by Teresa de Lauretis (1988). Indeed, while Rachel Dwyer has suggested in a discussion of Hindi cinema that addressing cinephilic competence skews films towards the middlebrow (2016: 64), for the Anglo-Hollywood film viewer this strategy can leapfrog notional high-, middle- and low-brow boundaries to mark out a level playing field for valorising (gendered) contemporary authorship. Embodied Directorial Address Despite such foremothers to the present proposed conjunction of self-­ reflexivity and women’s filmmaking, the cine-fille author of genre films proposed here is much more heavily bound up with a particular understanding of embodied audience address than are the formulations of feminist positioning offered above. As already indicated, if the films analysed in these pages can be considered in terms of heightened genericity, the heightened qualities they engender are experienced by audiences.27 Indeed, Barrett (2017) reminds us—pace Eugenie Brinkema (2014)— that while we tend to consider affects the property of an object, this is a projection of our own experience. As I have argued, the category of audiences also encompasses filmmakers themselves. Hence, I will suggest here that address, in this case, denotes a mutually constitutive relation between dialogical partners. Just as directors need an audience, without a director (and others) to create the film there can be none. Moreover, the exchange is dialectical, since the film brings both parties into a notionally conspiratorial relation as co-interpreters of known formulae. As Grodal notes in relation to metafiction, a strikingly high level of artifice also cues the consumer to orient themselves positively to the audiovisual text. This is because they experience richness as a response to their own associations:

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‘One way of understanding a “readerly” text in a Barthesian sense is that it sophisticates the control of the addresser by letting the text be experienced as the addressee’s own work’ (Grodal 1999: 213). This formulation also neatly evokes the balance between skill and (perceived) reciprocity associable with the author of this kind of fiction. Precedents to the prioritisation of the viewer detailed above arise from within feminist reception scholarship. One of the complications of some feminist film theory of the past, related to the divided position of a school invested both in avoiding essentialism and promoting women’s concerns in a sphere where their voices have been extremely sparse, has been its attachment to different positions. This impetus has encompassed a body of scholarship casting female spectators as agents within various kinds of paratextual and experiential ‘discourse’ worthy of scholarly attention (e.g. Ang 1985; Stacey 1994; Stamp 2000; Coppa 2017). Such works speak to a desire to conflate the categories of viewers and authors that I share and intensify. For example, Francesca Coppa’s research into contemporary female-dominated fan art cultures collecting around superhero films uncovers a rich seam of creativity, even giving rise to cultural recognition in the shape of museum exhibition. It moreover foregrounds the extent to which engagements with popular screen fictions—the focus of all the scholarly critiques cited—provide women with means for searching self-­ expression. Overdetermined genre films may indeed be especially potent vessels for modelling the self when we consider Hilary Radner’s extrapolation of psychoanalyst Joyce McDougall’s concept of ‘theatres of the mind’ (originally théâtres du je) in the service of her argument that [c]inema and psychoanalysis illuminate the secret theater-self [, offering] templates of that self as it is defined within a culturally and historically specific context. While psychoanalysis explores the speaking subject, the ‘I’ or ‘je’, cinema offers a culturally defined ‘me’ or ‘moi’, an ego-image that represents the culturally unstable position of a subject that can never see himself or herself wholly, but only as a series of conflicting images, moving through constrained and repetitive patterns. (Radner 2011: 146–147, my emphasis)

If McDougall considers it a deep wound on human narcissism that we should not be understood without words, as in infancy, for Radner, ‘Cinema reproduces that “magical understanding,” and while we may see, we will never understand without putting our thoughts into words that are never fully our own’ (ibid., original emphasis). Her wording is cogent

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for the present interrogation, since the locution ‘never fully our own’ denaturalises ‘speech’—understood throughout this study in broadly Lacanian terms as the externalisation of subjectivity more generally—for both genders; it brings women’s knowing, calculated and non-essential manipulation of mainstream film discourse on a par with men’s. Like the title of one famous example of genderswitch popslash fiction discussed by Coppa that describes men and women as ‘The Same Inside’ (Helenish 2001), this apprehension reminds us that many of the points made in the present analysis are intended to advance the feminist goal of greater understanding and therefore loosening of the strictures placed upon people of any gender. However, my earlier citation of Hutcheon’s seminal work on engagement with metafiction reflects the fact that particularly explicit and compelling arguments to explain marginalised subjects being drawn to the very form of heightened genericity appear more prominently within literary than film theory—a hangover from the increasingly unsustainable view that films are more real than written texts. As Marjorie Worthington observes in an analysis of contemporary writer John Barth: ‘A text that thematizes its own self-conscious awareness of the process of its own construction unavoidably thematizes the importance of its creator’ (2001: 118). Similarly, the only general film studies-specific theorisation I have found directly putting the author and viewer into dialogue, Göksal Balsak Deniway’s ‘Authorship in Cinema: Author and Reader’ (2014), details the foundational place of literary and writerly concepts in auteur theory as a prelude to its persuasive claim that the ‘birth’ of the reader need not equate to the death of the author. In support of this position, Deniway invokes Barthes’ own argument that ‘the reader is the space on which all the quotations that make up a writing are inscribed without any of them being lost; a text’s unity lies not in its origin but in its destination’ (Lapsey and Westlake in Deniway 2014: 16, my emphasis).28 In other words, giving prominence to reflexivity (as well as style more generally throughout the article) here undergirds a theoretical attempt to bridge the author-­ audience divide, but in acknowledgement that any interpretation of the author as manifested by the text takes place in the mind of their audience. In an even more suggestive vein, an analysis of the recent work of David Foster Wallace offered by Lukas Hoffmann (2015) argues that the literary critic and writer’s metafictional work encourages his readers to engage with the consciousness behind the text that cannot be delivered by language. In support of this argument, he cites a discussion in which

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neuroscientist James Fallon lit upon lines from the last section, ‘Pop Quiz 9’, of the novel Octet: ‘This thing I can’t pin down … Do you feel it too?’. For Fallon, the ungraspable ‘thing’ at issue is communication between the author and reader. Recalling Peter Rabinowitz’s claim that such communication is only possible within the genre of autobiography, Hoffmann argues that the logical conclusion is that the discourse in question switches from fictional to factual narration, from the flimsy to the material realm, via its own self-awareness. I suggest that this apparent logic is, however, illusory. Thus, through shifting discursive codes to imply a new and more honest or open relationship with the reader, by sleight of hand the text authenticates the realism of new material through contrast with the earlier textual narration now (doubly) coded as ‘fictional’. However, Hoffmann’s discussion raises a number of important points for the present study. Firstly, recognition of the non-mutually exclusive relationship between autobiography, specifically, and fiction has for obvious reasons been an important element in the increasing recognition under postmodernity that metafiction is actually indistinguishable from fiction more generally.29 One symptom and cause of conceptual changes in this domain is the emergence of the literary genre of autofiction. This form blurs the divide between fiction and personal narration more explicitly than did traditional autobiographies. Like other metafictions (including heightened genre films), then, autofiction absorbs some margin of disturbance of fictional verisimilitude as tolerable within a framework of generic verisimilitude. The form has also been defined through reference to the particularly close allegiance it creates between authors, narrators and characters. This strategy in turn has implications for the genre’s capacity to engender an authentic-seeming experience, to evoke the real of its author or even a ‘hypertrophy of the author’ (Casas 2018). Despite its obvious eschewal of coherent subjectivity through the splintering of a self into more than one persona, autofiction is often much concerned with brute bodily realities, perhaps precisely in a bid to combat ‘the unbearable lightness of being’ (see Richard 2010: 45). It is not incidental, given my claims that women have reasons to be attracted to forms that are both openly discursive and have potential to be highly evocative, that autofiction has been strongly associated with women—including writers, filmmakers and other kinds of cultural producers—and, accordingly, a strikingly frequent focus of interest for feminist criticism.30 The appeal of both autofictional and broader docudramatic

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tendencies in recent women’s filmmaking in Hollywood is examined in Chap. 4 and the Conclusion of this book, the latter in Bigelow’s Zero Dark Thirty and Detroit as well as Hardwicke’s Lords of Dogtown and the former in Coppola’s The Bling Ring. However, autofiction’s close structural resemblance to metafiction generally guarantees the relevance of the present discussion not only to films that directly stake a claim to narrate real people’s specific experiences, but to the very strategy of heightened genericity. In fact, it has been claimed that autofiction offers literature a form of access to the kind of intersubjectivity already promoted by other media (Richard 2010: 17). It is certainly possible to argue, for instance, that the ‘imprint’ or expression of authorial subjectivity is more diffuse across film in the first place than in the case of a novel, residing less in explicit reference to narrating agents (except perhaps in some examples of voiceover or for films featuring director-stars in the Woody Allen mould) than in recurrent choices such as markedly familiar iconographies or overdetermined tropes. In dispersing subjectivities into other textual details, then, audiovisual media arguably facilitate an autofictional approach to self-expression. This propensity is only reinforced in the case of heightened genre films, as becomes clear if we consider autofiction as a form of prosopopoeia (see Tossi 2018). This figure gives a voice or face to an absent, dead or imaginary entity—it figures abstractions. If literature and autofiction in particular endow abstracted authorial subjects with a voice, genre cinema gives them a face made in the image of film history itself, as an intersubjectively constructed recognisable presence in the text.31 This is an indirect and refracted expression of the author, made prominent by the functions of choice and agency. The second point of interest thrown up by the passage from Wallace counterbalances the accent I have so far placed on authorial agency and discursivity, even abstraction, in extrapolations of autofictional theory and returns the body to the discussion of intersubjectivity at hand. I refer here to the use of the term ‘feel’ by Wallace in his interpellation of the reader. This is significant in gesturing to the linguistically instantiated but extra-­ linguistic and affective sense of shared—and mutually known of—existence between author and reader. Just as in Rabinowitz’s interpretation of autobiography, communication concerns an authorial function rather than a flesh and blood person, I have also until now given primacy to an abstracted author projection that bears a metaphorical rather than a literal relationship to a real author. That relationship is performative—all

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material objects are represented to subjectivities via discourse (and Demiray too is wise to sideline the flesh-and-blood author’s subjectivity, which evidently plays no part in the live scene of textual consumption on which analyses of film address focus); the above constitutes a modelled dynamic, focusing on the experiences of the reader/viewer alone. At the same time, a Butlerian conception of subjectivity as discursively constituted, in the present example through heightened genre ‘speech’, can help resolve some of the aporias of the historical authorship debate (cf. Callahan 2010: 129).32 As a means of understanding communication between always-incipient subjectivities, heightened genre engages with notions of implied authorship, responding to the attendant demand for explanations of ‘how readers [or other consumers] infer an “author” from a work of fiction’ (Lanser 2011: 157); and where theorisations of feminist film authorship have struggled to balance the significance of biography with a desire to unearth (usually unconscious) personal preoccupations inscribed in the text (see Grant 2001), the present approach—while it shares with some of the latter and notably Kaja Silverman’s work an emphasis on cinema as enunciation—de-­emphasises the author outside the text altogether. Given Butler’s (2004: 31) conviction that ‘if we are not recognizable, then it is not possible to persist in one’s own being’, this equates to arguing that for the purposes of analysis, during the film viewing experience the text instantiates (rather than translates) the author, and indeed the engaged viewer, in a relation of intimacy as, in Berlant’s terms, ‘an aspiration for a narrative about something shared’ (1998: 1). Just as intimation denotes subtle and indirect communication, a solicitation of tacit understanding if not approval, it is not difficult to see that one of the appeals of genre films is to reaffirm our own felt cultural competencies and therefore identities as viewers. Nor is the subjectivity of the author excluded from the model by their physical absence during viewing; the text invites the kind of intersubjective analysis of female authorship called for by Catherine Grant (2001). Paradoxically, such an approach allows for the historical to endure in the shape of the author brand—meaning the notions attached to an authorial signature in culture at large—to the extent that it understands authorship as ‘a metaphor for [socially situated] agency’ (Cobb 2015: 15; see also Corrigan 1990). Put simply, it is interested in what the directors in question represent, rather than a self outside discourse, but nonetheless  in acknowledgement of the ongoing relevance for twenty-first-century visual media of Merleau-Ponty’s 1960 observation about painting that it is ‘by lending [her] body to the world that the artist changes the world into [her art]’ (1993: 123).

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In sum, considered in conjunction with the material implications of self-conscious address, heightened genericity foregrounds not only the power of constructed narratives to connect with real subjects, but also to connect those real viewers’ subjectivities to worlds that are to all intents and purposes the products of their authors’ embodied subjectivity.33 Interpreting and inhabiting those worlds promotes a feeling of intersubjective communion, and there is likely to be a sense of the creative consciousness behind the text if its consumer feels they are sharing richly in the same kind of meaning-making process as its creator, such that the relation to the author encompasses at once a sense of both the latter’s skilled expertise and of their equivalence with the viewer. The heightened effects potentially unleashed by the control of and play on generic codes in the films explored in these pages thus provide a compelling communicative channel between the author and the viewer, as powerfully experienced by the (embodied) latter. Given the above emphasis on discursivity and literary models, it is worth pausing here to question the description’s appropriateness to film authorship, which is a considerably more collaborative exercise than is the literary writing from which concepts of authorial skill originally evolved. The heightened genre toolbox’s refusal to prize the brain over the body in a rationalist framework exerts a levelling impulse for the kinds of inequality often associated with this ideology, including as it permeates discussions of authorship. That is, in rendering notions of distanced intellectual control meaningless, the current approach offers a way out of the collaborative authorship impasse by at once championing skilled craft but also non-hierarchical relationality with other genre interpreters, including writers, filmmaking practitioners and viewers. Understanding film authorship in this way can in fact feed back into understandings of literary counterparts. This possibility comes into focus if we consider newly post-material understandings of (book) reading as akin to interaction with other technologies of fictionalisation in its ability to ‘reorient[…] subjectivity’, eliciting feelings of intimacy through ‘less mastery than mimesis’ (Silverman 2021, my emphasis). Moreover, equally relevant arguments are plentiful within film theory, notably from the body of work concerned with phenomenology and viewers’ sensoria associated especially with Laura U.  Marks (2000, 2002), Vivian Sobchack (2004) and Jennifer Barker (2009), which is prominent in rejecting any counterposing of fiction and materiality. Nonetheless, this analysis distances itself from the tendency to de-accentuate the role of the

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mind in embodied engagement discernible in Sobchack’s work in particular (Harrod 2016a: 70).34 Marks’ concept of ‘haptic visuality’, while still interested in how audiovisual media facilitate ‘contact with that which we do not know and for which we have no categories’ (2002: xi), proves more productively ambiguous. For Marks, ‘haptic visuality is an alternative model to the mastering optic visuality that vision is more commonly understood to be’, implying ‘a look that acknowledges both the physicality and the unknowability of the other […,] an ethical look’ (ibid.: xvii– xviii). While I am not concerned with haptic moments per se but all bodily, emotive aspects of popular films, Marks’ desire to preserve the ineffability of the film experience is compelling; I merely reiterate an emphasis on the simultaneity (to all intents and purposes) of what she conceptualises in terms of knowing and not knowing—the indistinction between seeing, discerning and interpreting, and how elements work on both (or all) levels at the same time.35 The straining within Marks’ description towards a projected ‘other’ in the encounter with the film could meanwhile be seen to point towards an author—even if they are subsumed within textuality in her exchange-based description of ‘spectatorship [as] a “scene” in which pleasure, responsibility and trust are negotiated between viewer and film’ (ibid.: xix). The related concept of ‘fellow feeling’ employed by Barker (2009: 76), drawing on Marks via a phrase from Robert Frost, to describe viewers’ muscular ‘empathy’ with films, for instance when they show haptic moments, might be equally usefully rerouted to describe the relationship between viewers and their imagined authors, as constituted by the directorial label. This process is not a moment-to-moment one during the process of watching a film (hence, the author is not perpetually evoked within my analyses) but rather describes an overall perceived affinity or shared understanding—a dialogic ‘rapport’ in dictionary definitions of ‘fellow feeling’—between viewers and makers.36 It is this line of intersubjective communion, the intentional sharing of a culturally constructed artistic vision attributable to female filmmakers with mass audiences, which I wish to emphasise when describing genre films. For Northrop Frye (1957: 246–247), genres in general are founded on the ‘radical of presentation’—‘the conditions established between the poet and his public’. Audience address is a concept which still has untapped

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potential for illuminating genre, notably for bridging the gap between textual and industrial approaches to the notion, since ‘in […] focusing on locatable origins and singular meanings—according to Neale, Maltby, and Altman more authentically found at the site of production—the renewed historicism threatens to undo much of the valuable work achieved in theorising generic textuality’ (Gledhill 2000: 225).37 In other words, the text cannot be elided if industrial genre is considered more closely as working through audience address, including not only marketing materials but, centrally, films themselves. However, I am more interested than were traditional approaches to textual genre in how this site must also both involve author brand and exist in the embodied mind of a viewer, producing feelings or emotional responses. Further, the importance of (perceived) intersubjectivity to the felt experience itself is demonstrated by the fact that empirical studies in psychology (for example of eating different food types, both pleasant and less so) have indicated that experiences are heightened simply by dint of being shared.38 Given this focus, analyses of music—so central to popular filmmaking— also present themselves as pertinent. Both contextually apposite and particularly useful is Ann Powers’ fascinating recent (2017) study of American pop music, stretching from slavery to the present day, in which she underlines the erotic function of the form, as philosophically defined in terms of an ‘inner surge’ that ‘animates both the spiritual and the emotional’ (ibid.: ‘Introduction’, loc. 398).39 We might add that the endurance of the rational mind in the feelings of intersubjective communion described here (pace the nineteenth-century view) can be foregrounded through reference to the origins of the term spirit, whose French predecessor esprit still primarily denotes the mind. The critic overstates the newness of such ideas, which are well known in theorisations of the erotic offered, for example, by Georges Bataille (Frueh 1996: 2), and indeed bear  a resemblance to Marks’ (2002: xvi–20) recourse to erotics in describing haptic visuality. However, it is Powers’ subsequent linkage of the idea to popular music as a communicative medium for ‘sharing […] the most personal, difficult to articulate, and indeed intimate aspects of the human experience’, a medium through which ‘communities formed and sustained themselves’, that interests me. Music’s ‘ability to open people to each other’ is instinctively obvious, highlighting its powerful role in erotic expression defined as ‘a kind of truth-telling, bringing out into the open the most joyful and painful

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aspects of living in a particular body at a particular place and time’. Powers elucidates, borrowing from the theorist of the body Joseph Roach: Through the drum and the guitar and the electronic thrum, people feel their own physical drives and longing for emotional connection. Rhythm is quite literally the reason. It’s the musical element that guarantees what scientists call ‘entrainment’—the merging of two ongoing processes like a heartbeat and a drumbeat. Scientists also call this process ‘coupling’: forgetting where one ends and the other begins. The musical experience of entrainment unites a listener with what is being played, the performers playing it, and everyone around her enjoying it, too; it encourages identification and produces sympathy. Entrainment is the reason people dance and what makes them feel a song speaks for them. (Powers 2017: ‘Introduction’, loc. 520–521)

Like the embodied theories of film spectatorship I have alluded to, and particularly Tarja Laine’s deployment of Siegfried Kracauer’s early film theory to describe in rhythmic and musical terms ‘the “resonance effect” between the spectator and cinema’ (2013: 66), this description emphasises fellow feeling through presence—rather than relying on the psychoanalytic model of absence central to 1970s film theory, including feminist— but here understood as sympathy between consumers and authors. It is not coincidental that the synonym earlier given for fellow feeling, rapport, is itself typically defined through reference to such musical terms as harmony and resonance. A key difference between considering author-­ consumer rapports in music and cinema, however, is that during a musical event, performers are even more inseparable from authors than is the case with films (and may literally be both). Clearly the physical presence of this (variant of) author shifts the model further away from mine. Nonetheless, the experience of watching a powerfully affective and skilfully crafted genre film—which both co-opts popular music and more generally relies on the pleasures of both rhythm and familiarity that are essential to the latter’s pleasures—can also promote a kind of entrainment, bound up and responding to human longings for emotional connection. Laine describes the film viewing process in comparable terms of intersubjectivity and self-­ instantiation, while limiting the spectator’s interactive encounter to the film itself, conceived as a kind of proxy subject in the philosophical tradition of ‘thinking cinema’ emblematised by the work of Daniel Frampton. In the context of women’s filmmaking, Fiona Handyside (2018) has

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suggested in a discussion of Coppola’s oeuvre—in particular the circular structures of 2017s The Beguiled—that films can encourage viewers to ‘identify’ with narrative repetitions themselves. To include the author explicitly in this model, we may not be tapping our fingers to the filmmaker’s heartbeat when we watch the movie, but that does not mean we do not feel a certain alignment with her imagined subjectivity (and those of other viewers sharing the film experience) as constructed through the film world interpreted by each of us. If in likening affective responses to media to prototypical ‘real world experience’ emotions, Jonathan Frome (2006: 16) includes in his list of such bodily responses that might be stimulated by media ‘a phenomenological feeling’, we might paraphrase this as a feeling of being in the world: being a person, but also being situated in relation to other selves, here as materialised through the film artefact. The imprint of this rapport surely endures after the fact of viewing or listening, hence the future saleability of the author label, as a marker of the affective experience their next films will likely bring to audiences. Indeed, consumer choices influence identity well beyond the moment of consumption in film or music. Thus, sociologist Martin Barker’s observation that ‘what we choose to engage with as audiences, from the most routine to the most devoted, is [precisely] part of how we conceive of ourselves’ (2006: 126) parallels Powers’ conception of the musical erotic as connected to ‘living in a particular body at a particular place and time’, and by extension to what Martin Luther King Jr called ‘somebodiness’ as ‘a sense of selfhood’ (Powers 2017: ‘Introduction’, loc. 410–430). A further parallel can be drawn here with recent pioneering work on mainstream ‘television of the body’. Thus, in a manner akin to Jennifer Barker’s analysis of kinaesthetic empathy, Claire Perkins’ research in this area attempts suggestively to grapple with the powerful feelings produced by onscreen displays, through associating excess with figures on screen, and I find several of the terms she deploys suggestive in ways that need not be confined to describing how audiences react to the movement of human bodies on screen alone. For instance, in examining an episode of the television show Girls created by and starring female author Lena Dunham, Perkins suggests that in producing overabundant speech, Dunham’s ‘body erupts through [the] cerebral realm as a site of excessive affect [, producing] a block of content that the art of the scene deterritorialises and takes into another kind of expression’. Yet dialogue is not the only overabundant ‘speech’ engaged by heightened genre films: all their codified ‘semantic’ (including dialogue and setting) and more diffuse ‘syntactic’ (such as

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story structure) qualities (Altman 1999) signify continually and profusely. Later in the same passage Perkins elaborates: The fact that […] physical qualities strike the viewer with such force shows up another unique pleasure of Girls as television, which is that the bodies of these characters and performers are intensely familiar [… O]nly television allows us to ‘live into’ places, people and objects—inhabiting the space as a dwelling and getting to know it intimately and experientially […] This familiarity opens up unique paths for the production of corporeal meaning[.] (Perkins 2014: 41)

Genre films work in a similar fashion to television in this regard, playing on the familiarity of semantic elements such as the stars and settings that track and populate them, but also of the syntaxes of their causal universes. The second point applies to both media but perhaps even more obviously to the tightly structured formulae of temporally delimited genre films— and especially heightened genre films, where the amplified role of semantic familiarity makes describing their codified function all the more challenging. Such an emphasis on affective familiarity is supported by a rare instance of using audience research to illuminate the investments of viewers in popular cinema, by Annette Kuhn in her work on popular cinema and cultural memory in the context of 1930s and 1940s British filmgoers. Drawing on both interviews and fan artefacts, Kuhn identifies recurrent ideas in contributors’ explanations as to why—or how—they were attracted to cinema, including: ‘a sense of entering or living in another world’, ‘an out-of-body state’ but also ‘a sense of oneself being “inside” the picture’ (Kuhn 2002: 216–217). The coexistence of the self in these conclusions with the inhabitation of the fantasy world of film militates against overidentification between individual onscreen characters and the viewer (as many post-psychoanalytic theoretical interventions on the topic have also argued).40 A fixed identification figure—of any gender—is superfluous to a bodily engagement with a film, even if different characters may often focalise viewers’ reactions intermittently. The leveraging of the otherworldly space of genre films provides creative practitioners unique paths for discursive presence and significance. This is implicit in Perkins’ discussion of Dunham but need not be confined to authors who are also performers; indeed, theories of dance—to which, like Powers, she is indebted—have suggested that this art form gives rise

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to ‘a shared sensibility between choreographer, dancer and spectator’ (Lebovici 2017: 300, my translation). Further, the intersubjective dynamics of such expressive forms work diachronically. Just as Kuhn notes the collective imagination at work in cinemagoers’ recurrently similar expressions of their experiences, Powers invokes Roach’s notion of the ‘kinaesthetic imagination’ as, in her words, ‘the metaphorical place where history is written into bodies and kept alive through movements and rituals that are passed down’ (Powers 2017: ‘The Taboo Baby’, loc, 685)—with the ‘history’ to which she refers exceeding individuals. Indeed, her phrase would provide a fitting description for popular genre films, in their negotiation of the collective via diverse agents across time. The Emotional Politics of Cultural Forms The political nature of Powers’ study as in part a valorisation of African American history via music and dance chimes with my own ideological interpretation of embodied entertainment.41 Here again there is a precedent in literary theorisations of ‘engaging’ narration, inter-human connectedness and ‘active responsibility’ (Warhol 1986: 815) enduring after reading—even if film viewing has traditionally implied a more collective situation from the outset. Cobb’s study of adaptations takes in both media and makes a similar point through notions such as dialogism (also, as we have seen, central to contemporary genre studies) and conversation between different authors—or rather, consumer-interpreter-authors, as the filmmakers behind adaptations must be conceptualised. A conversation, as she puts it, ‘demands the ability to share’ and ‘may prompt us to change our minds’ (Cobb 2015: 12). At the very least, women’s key input into new narratives changes how the world sees them, as they attain the status of skilled guides through cultural landscapes they have built on and remapped. While Cobb argues that ‘the discursive author is […] constructed by intertextuality’ (2015: 12), foregrounding the amplified emotive potential of overdetermined narratives reminds us that this process of mental ‘construction’ will also be affectively nuanced. In other words, it shows how women directors’ approach to genre filmmaking has of late enhanced their ability to construct worlds marked by their subjectivity, as well as secondarily to speak powerfully on specific themes. They do so through eliciting felt responses that are neither homogeneous nor unilateral in their potential effects. Instead, any attempt to apprehend such

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responses requires situated readings considering how texts address us as viewers, which will be the focus of the remainder of the book. Before turning to this enterprise, however, it worth stating explicitly that levelling differences between authors and consumers and promoting intersubjective communion might well be seen as acts commensurate with a feminist ethics. Secondly, this observation warrants complementing by fleshing out the further kinship this book claims with queer studies. While it is impossible for acts of speech (or any acts) to exist outside of histories that are gendered, many of the directors examined here make by their choice of project bold attempts to eschew pigeonholing via the frameworks of ‘women’s’ or indeed ‘men’s’ cinema. Indeed, not only the filmmakers under consideration, but also, as we shall see, very often the films they make seek to avoid mobilising the tired codes of gendered identity and genre, using formal choices (that nonetheless highlight construction) to eschew a mono-gendered spectatorial address, rather than to construct a woman-centric one in the way Teresa de Lauretis envisaged (1988: 180–183). If Sarah Banet-Weiser (2016) has noted that to mobilise gender is always to state what you are not, by creating self-conscious fictions these women are making a markedly positive statement that amplifies their enunciative possibilities and highlights gender’s very indeterminacy. It is in this sense that their interventions may be seen as quite radically queer, reading this not as signifying ‘homosexual stricto sensu but as a figure for the performative—subversive signifier displacing referent’ (Prosser 1998: 32; see also Warner 1993: xxvi; Halberstam 2005: 20; Freeman 2010: 9).42 One cognate recent study is Rosalind Galt’s (2011) appraisal of cinematic ‘prettiness’, which it enlists in the service of a feminist, queer and also anti-Orientalist aesthetic critique. Multifarious heightened genre aesthetics are evidently frequently distinct from pretty ones, not least as these are often associated by Galt with ‘world cinema’, which tends from an Anglocentric critical perspective to be (reductively) considered as art rather than popular cinema. Yet the scholar’s emphasis on decorative, ‘self-­ evidently designed’ and ‘self-promoting’ styles that eschew iconoclasm but may promote sensuality, and on prettiness as a political discourse (ibid.: 11, 16, 259), has much in common with the present approach. Teasing out a long history of denigration of cinematic prettiness, Galt argues that the category ‘enables us to return to the canonical debates of feminist film theory with a fresh eye, revitalizing its foundational questions and reimagining the potential of the feminized image’ (ibid.: 257). The

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present take is arguably more radical in engaging with the variously gendered images of many types of genre cinema (including strands of ‘art cinema’, as a crossover case such as Bigelow’s illustrates). Its approach chimes strongly, however, with Galt’s statements about the historical suspicion of not merely attractive images but the image as such in film theory across the board, which spills over into mistrust of the supposed inauthenticity and fakery of spectacle for its own sake. Like Galt, I refute the longstanding critical suggestion that style, however ‘excessive’, is meaningless; moreover, I also defend ‘overcrowded’ images as constituting a rejection of ‘the patriarchal aesthetic experience’ (ibid.: 143; 259)—although genre analysis considers such aspects of style in conjunction with narrative (not to mention sound) rather than seeking to isolate these from the latter as a counterweight to its historical privileging in Film Studies.43 Galt’s observations about prettiness point towards specific ideological resonances associable with heightened genre precisely on the basis of the latter mode’s intense production of (affective) meanings, which means that sequences are overladen with echoes of the past even where they may not be graphically dense. Writing about teen narratives on screen through the example of the television show Veronica Mars (United Paramount Network, 2004–2006), for example, Roz Kaveney links generic citation to heavily laden signification when she notes that ‘the subtextual erotic behaviour of […] characters is in part reproduced through quotation from earlier films and shows’ and ‘[t]hese games about sexuality are but one of the areas, albeit a particularly important one, in which the central films and television programmes of the teen genre are thick texts’ (2006: 10). This comparison foregrounds the significant point that if the valorisation of the detail as a manifestation of strong repetition with variation in heightened genre contravenes the norms of classical aesthetics, nor does it dovetail with realism—but instead encourages the erosion of categories—since blatant discursive referentiality foregrounds the creative process. It is useful to compare Deleuze and Guattari’s account of the way in which some minor literatures, such as the work of James Joyce, dislodge referentiality by freighting the hegemonic language to breaking point through semantic overloading, neologism and hypotaxis, which queer theorist Elizabeth Freeman (2010: xix) paraphrases in terms of such works’ ‘fat’ aesthetic. There is a difference of degree when comparing the present example, but not of category. In fact, genres in (audio)visual media lend themselves particularly readily to heightened effects of repetition, since images tend more towards overdetermination when they signify in the accessible

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vernacular of the time-constrained narrative feature film than do words: an establishing shot of a kitchen has a relatively limited repertoire of broadly comparable views at its disposal compared to a written passage’s potential to describe any minute aspect from any point of view while conveying information in the shorthand of the word kitchen. If Grodal describes how literary realists have ‘tried to tone down narrative patterns and simulate an open and undirected world by increasing the level of description’ (1999: 223), in narrative cinema ‘description’ takes the form of recognisably familiar objects—in genre, iconography, perhaps alongside mood music.44 Yet, more recognisable detail often suggests more contrivance, producing the curious situation that sees cinematic realism associated with minimalism in contrast to the accumulative impetus of, notably, the realist novel. Faced with this dilemma, rendered increasingly acute as the medium and its audiovisual relatives have exploded in cultural purchase, no wonder that, consciously or not, narrative filmmakers have often produced works that simply embrace their generic ability to communicate via shorthand means that are all the more affective for being effectively communicative.45 I have already drawn on queer feminist theorist Berlant’s writings on contemporary so-called intimate publics. These arise from a similar focus on performative identity dating back to the sociological theories of Jürgen Habermas and a modern world in which people ‘would learn (say, from novels and newspapers) to experience their internal lives theatrically, as though oriented towards an audience’ (Berlant 1998: 4), and thus, we can assume, espousing micro-conventions for perennial cultural legibility. She here defines intimacy today in terms of tacitly shared value systems, which she sees as highly aesthetically nuanced and arising from ‘mobile processes of attachment’ comparable to my view of our relationship to screen worlds and associated figures. While Berlant’s view of the work of such processes is often negative, her account of how what structuralist Marxists have viewed as ideological control of individuals is recast as no longer the province of State apparatuses but rather that of culture at large does note that collective experiences that afford ‘pleasure-knowledge’, including cinema, present a potential site of resistance. I add to this point the observation that the very notion of ‘pleasure-knowledge’ is itself a hand grenade for gendered ‘collective intimacy expectations’ or conventionally sanctioned modes of relational behaviour and identity. It is also logical to extend Berlant’s comments on the relationality of intimacy as arising from ‘connections that impact on people’ (ibid., original

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emphasis), but not always in predictable ways, to film genre studies. For Berlant, ‘[i]intimacy seen in this spreading way does generate an aesthetic of attachment, but no inevitable feelings or forms are attached to it’ (ibid.: 5). I make similar claims in this book for genre films’ inherent potential to be affectively powerful without being able to limit the terms or emotive patterns those affects may take in particular cases, both because different genres tend to facilitate different responses and because of the individual disparities in audience response due to multiple additional factors. In common with Freeman’s queer interpretations of experimental art, my approach seeks, however imperfectly, to undertake the difficult task of approaching cultural works ‘on an affective register irreducible to traditional historical inquiry’. Crucially, this intention hardly suggests that the present analyses exist outside such frameworks, since ‘close reading is a way into history, not a way out of it, and itself a form of historiography and historical analysis’ (Freeman 2010: xiii, xvii). Like the epigraph to this book and several earlier references within it, the title of this subsection is taken from a work that is equally invested in queer readings, Ahmed’s influential study The Cultural Politics of Emotion, which I have inverted. It is fitting to close Chap. 2 in dialogue with a thinker whose ideas coincide with mine at multiple turns. For Ahmed, queer ‘can work by working on the [hetero]normative’, ‘inhabiting norms differently’, as opposed to actively seeking ‘resistance’. As she perceptively notes in her discussion of lesbian customs and attitudes, assimilation or transgression are not choices available to individuals but effects of how subjects—and subjects collectively—‘inhabit’ social norms and ideals (2004: 153–154). They are a question of context, which makes them inseparable from effects of interpretation. Ahmed’s point is useful for considering genres when these are conceived as contextually determined, interpretive structures (indeed, Ahmed’s general emphasis on ‘world-­ making’ [ibid.: 10], expanding on similar terms in Berlant’s work and indeed a classic queer studies topos, speaks eloquently to notions of popular cinema).46 Shifts in discursive and cultural norms might, then, occur not necessarily by rejecting filmic conventions but as a consequence of actually inhabiting genre. Further, just as Ahmed (ibid.) describes a situation whereby ‘bodies fail to “sink into” spaces’, producing ‘a queering of space’ that has the potential for social transformation, so I would argue that female directors do not simply ‘sink into’ generic space in an unmarked way, textually or otherwise. If the fact that some lesbian families think they are just like any others reveals the ‘lack of direct translation

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between political struggle and the contours of everyday life given the ways in which queer subjects occupy very different places within the cultural order’ (ibid.), equally genre films made by women can look on the outside much like any others without that rendering them ideologically null for feminism. Describing postmodernism through reference to a changing relationship between opposition and authority, Steve Pile notes in this vein that ‘the map of resistance is not simply the underside of the map of domination’ (1997: 6). As contemporaneous critics such as Hal Foster and Andreas Huyssen have emphasised, postmodern ideologies are in any case always already ambivalent, limited by the conditions of their own production. These conditions certainly include the commercial system within which genre films are produced, but the same idea can also be applied to the limits of discourse itself. Metafictional strategies are of course one response to relativism’s denial of the possibility of human access to truth, both in general and through the cultural forms of capitalist society. Their popularity with creative practitioners across cultural forms suggests ongoing belief in the authentically expressive, and therefore broadly regenerative or progressive, possibilities of exceptionally codified forms. Not only that, but in the genre film context specifically, as Christine Gledhill notes, the practices and cultural imaginaries through which gender emerges as a set of widely shared social conventions provide materials to the dramatic purposes of film and television genre fictions. In media genres, the genericity of social gender is put to fictional and dramatic use, making its aporias and contests visible and opening up multiple possibilities of generic-gender play and transformation. (2017: x)

This range of expanded possibilities includes the film’s authorship as a textual element, or a paratextual projection determined by the text. These films are already political through authorship alone, and the ideological transformation this implies is reinforced by their heightened genericity, setting up a relationship to the form that is neither frankly deconstructive or subversive nor neutral. Lords of Dogtown need not eschew a ‘sexist’ love triangle subplot in order to be available for queer readings (in the sense of queering both gender and also genre itself, as reliant on conventionalised gender tropes)—if for no other reason than because the role of interpretation means that ‘ideologies are not the endpoint of film genres, but the

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beginning of their dramas’ (ibid.).47 Or, to reprise Berlant, if ‘[w]e notice [intimacy] when something about it takes on a charge’, revealing itself to be associated with ‘tacit fantasies, tacit rules, and tacit obligations to remain unproblematic’ (1998: 7), in my example that charge may arise from the unexpected generic element comprised by unexpected authorship alone. Interpreting genre films by women through their authorship is itself a queer act and thus one that by definition leads to certain features gaining more prominence than others, in an ‘imbalance’ that obtains with any reading but is embraced by queer ones. That queering (like genre production) is as much as anything an act of interpretation has recently been perhaps most strikingly articulated by Lee Wallace’s (2020) argument that the advent of gay marriage merely points up the way which all marriage has always been queer: a claim bearing striking resemblance to my arguments about ‘straight’ genre films’ queerness being thrown into relief when their authors’ gender deviates from the norm. Building on Berlant’s impulse to understand social relations through felt intimation constructing shared value systems, Ahmed proposes a ‘model of sociality of emotions [, in which] Feelings become a form of social presence rather than self-presence [… and…] emotions are crucial to the very constitution of the psychic and the social as objects, a process which suggests that the “objectivity” of the psychic and social is an effect rather than a cause’ (Ahmed 2004: 10; original emphasis). Considering that categories are only defined in relation to others, and that emotional attachments are crucial in this process, goes to the heart of genre studies. It is also noteworthy that, while Ahmed herself has written about the importance of such processes in constructing nationalistic ideologies, Rumi Sakomoto (2015: 163–169) draws on her work on ‘stickiness’ in a related context, to describe how a wealth of specific contextual detail can promote ‘thick’ narrativity to aid in emotive memorialisation of the historical past. This parallels the way in which the accumulation of associative resonances built up by overdetermined genre films’ intertextual relay (conscious and otherwise for viewers) helps determine their heightened emotive possibilities. Memory studies scholars in general underline the potential for both fictionalisations of the past and commemorative acts to unleash the highly affective dimensions of prosthetic memory that stake a claim to being the raison d’être of many films characterised by heightened genericity, through which—to reprise Kaveney’s suggestive example—millions of viewers all round the world experience ‘nostalgic’ affective yearnings about the US high school dynamics depicted by American Graffiti

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(Ron Howard, 1973) or Fast Times at Ridgemont High (Heckerling 1982), despite never having set foot in a high school.48 If sociologist Maurice Halbwachs’ (1925) pioneering work on collective memory showed that individual memory always takes place within and is nuanced by a social framework extending out from the family to larger community groups, stressing audiovisual texts’ affective power to lodge in our psyches underscores the need—already familiar in fan studies—to include cinephilic viewing communities, and indeed the frameworks of media platforms themselves, in this account; and the film author figures as one prominent facet of both of these. Just as Kuhn (2002: 11) claims that we both insert ourselves into film experiences and lose our bodies there, Pam Cook (2012: 33) suggests that we go to the movies as much to lose as to confirm our identities. Such statements look forward to my paradoxical arguments for feelings of fellowship as constitutive of selfhood—King’s ‘somebodiness’, in the context of African American entertainment cultures. More generally, Ahmed in the above-cited passage holds in admirably delicate and interconnected balance the notions of psychic life and collective allegiances or identities and therefore politics in ways that resonate with film studies including this one. Going back to Raymond Williams’ (1973, 1977: 128–135) and other pioneers of Cultural Studies’ call to see cultural practices and aesthetic responses to them as foundational of human societies, a belief in the intimacy between (embodied, affective) psychic experiences and ideologies, and the potential role of film genres in negotiating between them, propels the analyses that follow.

Notes 1. Other prominent examples proscribing the mainstream for feminist (and other anti-establishment) filmmakers include the work of Stephen Heath, Mary Ann Doane and, earlier in her career, Claire Johnston (see Garrett 2007: 27); see also Harrod and Paszkiewicz (2017: 1, 7) on the attendant privileging of the avant-garde by feminist film scholars. 2. Paszkiewicz’s decision to organise her study around a handful of key films from all different genres in fact arguably underscores difference more heavily than sameness, at least within the book itself. While she consistently and persuasively rejects discourses of exceptionalism undergirding traditional auteurism, the present approach of grouping films within sections corresponding to (broad) generic tendencies aims to enact the same ethics of

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inclusion and relationality promoted—so my argument—by its objects of analysis. It also simply facilitates discussing echoes and repetitions within genres. 3. This evolution has been of interest to feminist film histories concerned with female productivity and engagement for some years and its by now familiar contours are also detailed, for instance, by Anneke Smelik (1998: 38) and Christina Lane (2000: 42–44). 4. See also Tasker (2010: 214); Mayer (2015: 16). 5. Corrigan uses the phrase ‘the business of being an auteur’ but I find it unhelpful in a situation where the term auteur’s remit has hugely widened, arguably so as to simply indicate a culturally visible film author. 6. It is also thought that the second part of the word may come originally from roots meaning ‘to spread abroad’ and/or ‘to traffic in or sell’, which resonate equally strongly with concepts of generic narrative, especially in film. See http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=interpret. 7. Deleyto (2009: 2–3) brilliantly applies the critique of circularity to romantic comedy criticism. 8. For critiques of this view, see Williams (1984), Gallagher (1986) and Neale (1990: 58–59). 9. See, for instance, the current ‘Retrospective Serialization’ research project at the Freie Universität Berlin; Perkins and Verevis (2012). 10. See also Modleski (1991 [1982]); Ang (1985); Creed (1986); Gledhill (1987). 11. On the masculinity of formal approaches in general see Freeland (1996: 206), citing Irigaray. Janet Staiger (2000: 38) meanwhile critiques constructivist approaches to narrative cinema, notably in Hollywood, for privileging such ‘cognitive’ genres. On hybridity see also Staiger (1997). 12. Although Smith tends to treat style as independent of narrative. 13. A related problem concerns the fact that according to Grodal, in genre creation: ‘The more we strengthen the schematic relations between a given situation and possible future situations, and the more we limit the options [or overdetermine them], the more we increase the activation of tense or saturated experience [emotional engagement by the viewer]—up to a point’ (1999: 222, my emphasis). 14. On affect, see, for example, Pawel Prokopic’s ‘Affective Cinema’ project, which situates ‘affective significance’ as ‘outside of language, knowledge and (inter-subjective) communication’ and ties it to a ‘contingent manifestation of reality’. http://www.pavelprokopic.com/affectivesigns.html. For more recent examples of scholarship coloured by formalism, see Keating (2006), Smith (2007), who notably build on the work of Bordwell and Noël Carroll.

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15. Martin Barker (2006: 126) makes the same point that ‘audience responses are always emotionally charged understandings and educated emotions. That is to say, there is no way of separating out the cognitive and the emotional responses, regarding these as separately shaped or driven’ (original emphasis). 16. Blackman’s extrapolation from Leys points to a cavalier slippage here between a speculative philosophical notion of unconscious collective knowledge and the experience of lived bodies. 17. Around the same time, even more strikingly, highly regarded cognitive behavioural psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihályi (1990) modelled a theory of how mental absorption itself affords pleasure. 18. Claire Hemmings (2005: 264) suggests Massumi’s arguments on this point are moreover based on a misreading of Deleuze’s theories. 19. For early and more recent examples, see Penley (1997), Coppa (2017). 20. See also Hemmings (2005); Pedwell and Whitehead (2012: 119). 21. Similar arguments have been rehearsed in relation to postfeminism, which can in this specific context be seen as a kind of subset of postmodernism. See, for example, Projansky (2001); Gill (2005); Tasker and Negra (2007, especially p. 15). 22. For examples, see Harrod (2016a: 70, footnote 15), following Garrett. 23. For instance, Sobchack’s (2004: 61–66) analysis of The Piano. I have noted elsewhere, following Jermyn, that in 2014 Potter had been the subject of two monographs and Campion seven (and the Belgian avant-garde director Chantal Akerman four) (Harrod and Paszkiewicz 2017: 18). Since then a call for contributions to a collection on her for Edinburgh University Press’ ‘ReFocus’ series has been circulated, while Kate Ince’s 2017 award-­ winning study of The Body and the Screen in films by Claire Denis, Agnès Varda, Catherine Breillat, Lynne Ramsey and Andrea Arnold develops transnationally the trend for feminist film criticism focusing significantly on the body. Lucy Bolton’s earlier (2011) work extended a comparable approach to Coppola’s work, alongside Potter’s and Ramsey’s. 24. My translation from the French audiobook D’après une histoire vraie, Chapter 51. 25. This is uncannily close to the definition of ‘affective signification’ offered by Prokopic cited in an earlier note and at: http://www.pavelprokopic. com/affectivesigns.html. 26. These notions also underline the distance of the texts I will analyse from Tasker and Negra’s condemnation of reflexivity as potentially conservative in some female-oriented genres (Tasker and Negra 2007: 15). 27. Audience, in this study, conflates the notions of spectator and viewer, implying both subjectivity and social identity. 28. Cf. Feminist scholar Cowie’s earlier (1997: 26) observation that cinema always comprises ‘an utterance or enunciation, an organised presentation

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of reality which presupposes an intelligibility of the utterance; it is organized for understanding’. 29. For examples of theorists recognising the inseparability of metafiction from other fiction, see, for example, New (2001: 48), Schaeffer (1999). 30. For instance, Baillargeon (2014), Richard (2015), Willman (2016), Harrod (2017). It is also likely that women’s ongoing identification with the private sphere predisposes them to be attracted to genres focused on everyday and personal narratives. 31. Such a description of genre films as reanimating past forms echoes scholarly discussions of prosopopoeic figures’ functioning as vessels of Derridean hauntology, which has in turn been linked to recuperating marginalised (colonial) subjects’ experience (Sheratt-Bado 2014: 100). 32. For Vicki Callahan, ‘the author is not so much dead as dispersed across an array of subject positions and sites of production/consumption.’ 33. Needless to say, the women directors examined here are also embodied and it is very probable that their desire to create sensations in viewers is born out of their own similar experiences; however, this study is more interested in mass effects/affects than intentionality per se, without mentioning the challenges involved in measuring the latter, or the fidelity of results to intentions. 34. The same applies to the cognate work of Elena del Rio in film affect studies. 35. As I explore further shortly, Tarja Laine’s (2013: 1) approach is theoretically closer to mine in seeing affect and cognition as ‘inextricably intertwined’ in film viewing; however, in practice she still describes affect as operating through an ‘unthinking’ body. 36. https://www.thefreedictionary.com/fellow+feeling. 37. Gledhill notes, suggestively for my purposes, that an overemphasis on history is particularly inapt for melodrama as the woman’s film par excellence, since it is a form founded on plagiarism. She critiques, too, the risks that such approaches pose of returning genre scholars to the taxonomic trap. However, other scholars have an opposed view of Altman’s contribution to genre studies, with Lane (2000: 51) likening his work to Modleski’s and Mayne’s precisely on the basis of foregrounding textual multivocality. 38. ‘The Happiness Half Hour’, BBC Radio 4, 3 November 2020. BBC Radio Bristol—The Happiness Half Hour, 7. People like you more than you realise. 39. This and all subsequent references to Powers (2017) are to the Kindle edition. 40. In addition to the embodied spectatorship scholars already discussed, notable interventions include Doane (1987); Clover (1992); Smith (1995); Penley (1997).

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41. Cf. Research into the role of autofiction in reconstructing obliviated historical (post-)memories in post-war and post-dictatorship Latin America by Mauricio Tossi and Ana Casas drawn on earlier in this section. 42. De Lauretis looks forward to such a perspective, however, when she argues that ‘sexual difference’ is a limiting category and that a heterogeneous address reflecting ‘differences among women’ is required for ­(cinematic) ‘revision’, or seeing with fresh eyes, as, in Adrienne Rich’s words, ‘an act of survival’ (de Lauretis 1988: 185). Such ideas help to explain why for many, as the title of Mimi Marinucci’s book has it, feminism is queer (BradburyRance 2019: 176). 43. Sound is rarely considered in Galt’s book, although she notes that a decorative style can be defined by ‘an orchestrated system of sound, music, and image design’ (2011: 13). 44. Sound in (mainstream) narrative cinema must also conform to relatively predictable patterns to avoid simply confusing us. These arguments do not contradict Christian Metz’s (1974: 92–107) observation that paradigmatic choices in cinema are unlimited (in a way that is not true of verbal language) in the absolute. 45. As for Deleuze’s work on cinematic affects, there is much of use in his suggestion that films can produce sense not only at the narrative level but also through impersonal, auto-poietic processes that lend virtual intensities resonance (1990: 19, 187). His account of ‘automatic’ thinking seems to hint at the combination of rational and unconscious thought structuring my description of viewer engagement with genre, ‘arous[ing] the thinker in you’ (1989: 156) without limitation to representational aspects of the film: giving reason a passion through the power of cinema. Where I part company with Deleuze is in thinking that such processes are entirely divorced from representational aspects of film or that they require the kinds of anti-­mainstream grammar he gathers under the rubric of the ‘time-image’ in order to be engaged. 46. Although Berlant does note her desire in closing her Introduction for further research into how ‘attachments make worlds and world-changing fantasies’ (1998: 8), one slight difference in emphasis between the two thinkers’ complementary work seems to be a greater emphasis in Berlant on how feelings are structurally dictated while Ahmed looks more often to how feelings might alter social structures. For further comparison between the two bodies of thought, see Berlant (2011: 13–15). 47. Gledhill is elsewhere explicit about the need for feminist readings to look beyond texts’ ‘progressiveness’ (1994: 121). 48. Cinephilia’s affective qualities have led to it being explicitly associated with prosthetic memory with varying degrees of explicitness (see, for instance, Faulkner [2015], Harrod [2016b]). More generally, cultural theory has

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not always seen audiovisual media’s propensity to elicit nostalgia in a positive light, with Fredric Jameson famously attacking American Graffiti on these grounds in a critique taken up more recently by, among others, Ryan Lizardi’s scathing analysis of contemporary Mediated Nostalgia as promoting widespread narcissism and a failure of true historical consciousness (2015: 17–19).

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Websites http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=interpret http://www.pavelprokopic.com/affectivesigns.html https://www.thefreedictionary.com/fellow+feeling https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p08wy5qs

CHAPTER 3

Pastiching the Popular

By reversing the terms of the oppositions and the values of the hierarchies, we remain, of course, prisoners of the paradigms, only just barely able to dream a universe where the categories of general and particular, mass and detail, and masculine and feminine would no longer order our thinking and our seeing. —Naomi Schor, Reading in Detail

This chapter examines a range of films by different female directors that I argue can be seen as examples of heightened genre. A variety of genres comes under scrutiny in order to illustrate the claim that popular films cannot be separated into emotive or intellectual categories, with their attendant gendered tags. These evolve from chick-flick remakes focused on love, family and the domestic sphere (You’ve Got Mail and The Parent Trap) to the ‘masculine’ war film (Stop-Loss) via the notionally more gender-­ambivalent territory of teenpics and teen fantasy or Gothic (several films by Amy Heckerling as well as Twilight), which in itself gives the lie to rigid distinctions. The analysis attempts in each case to outline some of the different ways films’ affective address relies on blatant genericity; discussion thus encompasses a significant focus on the earlier films and other texts whose channelling colours the experiencing of viewing these ones (without attempting exhaustivity), and on the relationship between the two. While this relationship is conceived a priori in terms of © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 M. Harrod, Heightened Genre and Women’s Filmmaking in Hollywood, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-70994-5_3

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closeness—imitation not parody—I nonetheless probe degrees of adhesion to and variance within the overall model of replication, for instance giving prominence to nostalgia in certain instances as a function of the simultaneous presence yet sense of absence of earlier forms. I also evaluate the gender politics of particular ways in which genre texts are reimagined, paying attention not so much to narrative novelty as formal nuance achieved through practices of pastiche-style quilting of original models.

Remaking Romantic and Family Comedy It is logical for a study of generic intertextuality to offer the remake as Exhibit A, given such films’ status as ‘an unusually clear example of the operations of every genre’, which they achieve through ‘ritual invocation/ denial of discursive features’ (Leitch 1990: 148). Drawing attention away from profilmic referentiality from the outset, like the broader category of adaptations as a whole into which they fall, remakes foreground the performance of textuality as such; and they do so in particular through reference to an earlier text or, rather, texts—at the very least another film and its own written source(s). In light of this fundamental intertextuality, remake studies have veered from attempts such as Thomas Leitch’s (his conclusions about genre notwithstanding) to taxonomise or otherwise pin down the phenomenon to, more recently, privileging a view of remaking films as de facto indistinguishable from other discursive practices based on dialogue with predecessor texts: as well as adaptation and genre, translation, pastiche, homage and so on. While I subscribe to the view that remakes work textually in essentially the same way as other types of intertextuality, extratextual labelling is even more significant for them than for genre films. Although Rüdiger  Heinze and Lucia  Krämer consider as equivalent genre and remake labels’ ‘implicit contract between producers and consumers that establishes the possibility to engage with more than one text simultaneously’ (2015: 8), as a reception category, the ostentatious popular remake articulates a heightened version of genericity par excellence, if we understand genre in its broad sense of broadly predictable recursivity. This is because such films make a specific and richly detailed promise of what to expect; marketing cues delineate generic anticipation in general but the paradigmatic case of the remake that openly invokes its predecessor proffers a much tighter contractual obligation—and as a result of course runs a high risk of alienating viewers if it is seen to betray its own terms.1

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In this section, I begin by analysing film remakes in general as displaying a concentrated form of self-conscious genericity that offers women particular signifying possibilities. I then look at a loose case of remaking— but a strong example of heightened genericity—in the form of You’ve Got Mail (1998) by Nora Ephron. I finally focus on Nancy Meyers’ The Parent Trap (1998) as a more extreme illustration of the powers of remakes specifically to exploit the affects of particular past texts. Theorising the Female-Directed Remake In line with my intimation that remakes turn attention away from the real outside textuality, which is replaced by another mediated version in the signifying chain, I begin my theorisation of remakes by putting them in dialogue with a turn in critical theory towards the redefinition of the concept of mimesis itself. A scepticism towards any unsignified reality has held sway for some time in cultural studies, including of film, and Rosalind Galt champions the importance for feminism, queer studies and anti-­imperialism of challenging ‘cinematic modernity’s most sacred cow: the inscription of life’ (2011: 35). A move towards relativising mimesis along poststructuralist lines has exerted influence for perhaps even longer in literary studies, going back to the early twentieth century (at least), but been recently reinvigorated. If film adaptation studies cross over frequently over into literary ones, considerations of the cinematic remake can benefit from drawing on the latter, for in foregrounding discourse as such remakes and cognate forms of pastiche reveal their kinship with the written word. As the editors of the 2012 collection Rethinking Mimesis explain, the rise of cognitivism in literary studies as elsewhere has placed particular stress on the notion of fictional worldmaking—in a fashion that, they note, the medium of film was already predisposed to highlight.2 Rather than seeing this as anti-mimetic, they and others have sought to reimagine mimeticism as ‘dual aspect’, to encompass the notion of ‘meaning-making faced with everyday reality’ (Isomaa et  al. 2012: viii–x)—rather than everyday reality (or its copy) alone. Such an apprehension supports the present study’s arguments to the extent that it challenges the endemic perception that metafictionality interrupts immersion, which fails to acknowledge that even the most ‘realistic’ of fictions still involves what Bo Pettersson calls ‘a coupling of mind with a crafted construct’, such that fictionality is an integral part of the imaginative process, as opposed to an obstacle to it or an identity to be camouflaged. From this perspective,

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moreover, self-reflection can be seen as a continuation of a work’s emotional tone (Pettersson 2012: 94–95). Pettersson’s argument that imagining others’ lives in literature relies on conventions (ibid.: 103) feels almost banal in the context of popular cinema, where we have seen that even smaller examples of what semioticians call syntagmatic units have relatively limited surface variety. Similarly, Pettersson’s allusion to neuroscientific work that suggests the brain is activated in the same way for ‘manufactured’ as ‘real’ emotions (ibid.: 105) has a simple and graphic demonstration in the famous stories of audiences attempting to flee in early screenings of L’Arrivée d’un train à la Ciotat/The Arrival of a Train (Auguste and Louis Lumière, France 1896) when the train rushed towards the camera. Nonetheless, it is my argument that film remakes can be compared to writing as a kind of limit case for ‘dual-aspect mimesis’, that is, an understanding of representation that holds artifice in tension with real, felt responses that are sensory and emotive. This conjuncture is the backdrop to Yael Balaban’s analysis of sensory representation in literature as ‘double mimesis’, which rests on the persuasive claim that reading is an act of ‘mimetic’ sensory recreation ‘by way of another’ (2012: 167). Balaban’s account strongly recalls Linda Williams’ theorisation of body genres in cinema, which also foregrounds mimesis as an act of reception, in the sense of experiencing sensations similar to those portrayed, and representational distance as a paradoxical corollary to intimate sensory experience (onscreen pornography is her salient example). This study is most interested in the relevance of the second point to genre films and especially heightened ones. Balaban’s elaborations are therefore pertinent to the present corpus in general and, here, the emblematic case of remakes in particular, in a number of ways. In focusing on the productive conventionality of sensory evocations, such that language’s basic limitations become an advantage, Balaban advocates a search for ‘logos in the lexis [or] content in form, subject in object, what in how’ (ibid.: 176); he centralises form itself, not as an element to be effaced in the service of showing the external world but as a means to embroider on direct indexicality through novel arrangements of component parts. One effect of this focus is to preserve the triangularity of reader/consumer, author and text for which I too am arguing. Thus, Balaban situates his model of literature as enacting Theodor Adorno’s account of the ethical responsibility of art to embody ‘both painter and model’, with a focus (like mine) on the latter, ultimately so that the viewer can lose themselves (in ibid.: 169).3 While Adorno offers this account of aesthetic experience specifically as an

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alternative to capitalism, his underscoring of the ‘non-dominating’ nature of relations engendered in the context he describes, and which Balaban perceives in sensory evocations ‘by way of another’, offers a prism well adapted for viewing the popular genre remake, and illuminates its potential appeal for women directors. As a subcategory of adaptation, the remake also falls under many of the rubrics established by Shelley Cobb’s study of the authorship of literary translations to the screen, paving the way for similar claims to be explored in this specific case. The use of the word translation here is not incidental; Cobb directly juxtaposes the two practices as modes of implied co-­ authorship (2015: 13–14). In this comparison, she is not alone: Robert B. Ray adopts the term particularly fruitfully to argue that any new film version, whether adaptation or remake, constitutes a ‘citation’ grafted onto a new context (in Loock and Verevis 2012: 7). Citations and appropriations subtly shift control of discourse and so—as Cobb, following Hutcheon, notes—power relations. As such, translation offers an ideal mode for simultaneous cooperation and subversion (Cobb 2015: 13–14) that resonates strongly with the film practices on display throughout this book, when subversion is located at the level of authorship rather than genre. Remakes, then, offer a clear example of the ‘elusive’ phenomenon of ‘the feminine declaration of simultaneous obedience and disobedience’ (Zanger 2006: 123). While Cobb (2015: 68) exemplifies such disobedience through reference to ‘trickster’ figures’ practice of ironic resignification, in a way that perhaps emphasises distance rather than the simultaneous closeness to the originals with which I am concerned, resignification is a key idea to the extent that it also implies a revaluation of the original text.4 Importantly, no textual subversion or distancing is needed for such a transformation to obtain: the very notion of remake ‘implies that the original is not only what it is, but also that it exceeds itself’ (Cazdyn in Loock and Verevis 2012: 7). In this sense, filmmakers who engage in remaking very literally refashion the past. Further, much as in Judith Butler’s well-known theorisation of drag (1990: 186–187), the act of imitation is enough to introduce the distance of performative citationality without further transformative elements; or, as Luce Irigaray has observed, ‘[i]t is, paradoxically, through the imitation of its object that the speculum identifies it in the first place’ (in Zanger 2006: 126).5

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You’ve Got Mail (1998) and the ‘Ephron-esque’ 6 Romcom as Remake Women have directly remade films across various genres in the past two to three decades, with recently salient non-romcom/family film examples including Kimberly Peirce’s horror reboot Carrie (2013) and Sofia Coppola’s Western-indebted neo-Gothic The Beguiled (2017).7 However, the recent romcom provides a paradigmatic example of genre ‘remaking’ as such, in the sense of being markedly iterative. It is also arguably the (major) film genre pre-eminently associated with women, both directors and spectators (cf. Garrett 2007: 121; Burns 2011; Schreiber 2014), since melodrama’s relative decline, or at least evanescence and/or adoption by male directors for a focus no longer trained on women, in the postclassical period. As such, the romcom provides a cogent place to begin considering women’s aptitude for heightened genre filmmaking, including through remakes. Both the genre’s linkage to women creators and its association with past forms can be attributed in no small measure to the by now widely recognised pioneering work of Nora Ephron as both writer and later also director in the genre. To illustrate this point, Roberta Garrett’s (2007) analysis of the romcom as a variant of the female-oriented postmodern reprisal of past earlier films situates When Harry Met Sally (Rob Reiner, 1989), written by Ephron, as the origin of the recent cycle, while spilling outside academia the recent documentary Romantic Comedy (Elizabeth Sankey, UK 2020) accords it similar ‘masterpiece’ status; Tamar Jeffers McDonald’s (2007) study of the Hollywood genre cites Sleepless in Seattle (1993) and explores You’ve Got Mail, both (written and) directed by Ephron, as exemplary of a postclassical tendency for ‘diffuse cannibalism’ (that she largely decries); and Michele Schreiber describes the former as ‘the consummate nostalgia text’ (2014: 100).8 Both Sleepless in Seattle and You’ve Got Mail can be seen as remakes of a sort, the first in generic dialogue with An Affair to Remember (Leo McCarey, 1957), some of whose melodramatic tone it re-engages, and the second more properly though still loosely remaking The Shop Around the Corner (Ernst Lubitsch, 1940), through plot and character correspondences (cf. Herbert 2017: 65). Thus, a pair of antagonistic professional acquaintances fall in love through written correspondence without realising the other’s identity. Importantly, remake status is also acknowledged by the naming of the female protagonist’s shop after Lubitsch’s film.

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Ephron’s romcoms are typical of heightened genre. The director has often been credited with reinvigorating the genre, but only through a strongly acknowledged reliance on predecessors: as Mark Kermode puts it, Ephron was a filmmaker ‘who knew how to follow and break the rules at the same time’.9 Garrett also preserves potential contradiction in her description of the precise effects of Ephron’s self-aware yet emotive films, ‘saturated with references to screen romance’, constellating them in a tendency to undercut emotionality through metafictional recourses but later suggesting recent romcom cycles’ genericity is simply more ‘heightened’ than with predecessors (2007: 115, 102). Evidently, I agree with Meg Ryan’s lead character Kathleen, for whom even a hundred readings of Pride and Prejudice cannot stop her from holding her breath each time at the potential prospect of Elizabeth Bennett being united with Mr. Darcy. Jeffers McDonald likewise describes the way in which You’ve Got Mail draws emotional meaning not only from The Shop Around the Corner but other texts, including the aforementioned Jane Austen novel and classic love songs, in a characteristic blend of ‘specific and more generalised “middle-brow” references to popular culture’ (2007: 94). This approach targets a culturally savvy audience, setting up the key mode for the genre in the years since then to date; as Alice Guilluy explains, the postclassical romcom has integrated its own criticism and ‘both invites a “cinephilic” close viewing strategy (asking the audience to spot the references, for example) at the same time as it rejects critical examination by promoting its own escapism’ (forthcoming, my emphasis). Romcom emerges, then, as a site where the figure of the cine-fille director addresses audiences in such a way as to explode the cultural opposition of ‘cool’ postmodern maleness and female-oriented genres haunted by the ‘hopelessly uncool figure of the dimwitted, impressionistic female viewer’ (Garrett 2007: 7). As well as attributing to Ephron’s intertextual strategy efficiency in evoking feelings in general and perhaps creating viewer-character identification (though she feels this is a lazy approach), Jeffers McDonald rightly emphasises nostalgia itself as a dominant affective register for the film, as typically for remakes. In the first place, as Richard Dyer (2007: 177–178) foregrounds in his work on pastiche, such texts foreground the ‘loss’ of the original (film) text, as experienced at earlier stages in life that cannot be coterminous with this one; and in the second the film diegetically evokes loss. It is noteworthy on this topic that while Schreiber underscores nostalgia’s solicitation of a participatory viewer (specifically, communities of women in Ephron’s address) (2014: 96), Rey Chow (2001) has posited

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that the mode presents the fantastical as memory, to make us view a people, place, time or culture fondly. Such ideological work has troubled detractors of romantic comedy’s glittering vision of normative bourgeois lives.10 While romcoms do very often offer such a view, taken in tandem with this study’s proposal that art can textually instantiate its creator as well as the object it represents, it is noteworthy that women invoking nostalgia might predispose viewers to see them fondly, ‘belonging in what is handed down as cherishable from the past’ (Dyer 2020: 210), providing something of a corrective to the misogynistic discourses that are still culturally dominant when it comes to women’s quest for discursive purchase. Jeffers McDonald focuses, however, on themes of nostalgia within You’ve Got Mail, paralleling its textual work, and notably a seam of melodramatic daughterly yearning by Kathleen for her dead mother. She rightly observes the film’s discoursing on objects’ power to evoke memories (2007: 99); I expand this to take in the affective power of material structures generally, as we invest them with meaning. In addition to the books, quilt and typewriter listed by Jeffers McDonald, Kathleen’s bookshop itself is one such structure, destroyed by the spread of large-scale commerce in the shape of her unlikely future beau Joe’s (Tom Hanks) chain store opening up nearby. Not only does Kathleen describe its demise as like losing her mother—who founded it—all over again, but the sign she hangs on the door at its closure reads: ‘After 42 years we are closing our doors. We have loved being part of your lives’ (my emphasis). It is almost too obvious to mention, finally, that the film’s lead actors themselves, who had already starred together in the correspondence-based romance Sleepless in Seattle in addition to Ryan’s extreme identification with romcom ever since When Harry Met Sally…, constitute further overdetermined elements of the postclassical romcom via ‘celebrity intertextuality’ (Stam 1999: 337), both potentially adding nostalgia for their former (albeit recent) avatars and more particularly signalling the film’s likely feeling shape in advance. It will be apparent from this account that You’ve Got Mail could be seen not merely to quote but to loosely remake more than one past text, in terms of textual similarities complementing open allusion or homage. The parallels with Pride and Prejudice, notably, concern the discrepancy in wealth status between its female and male protagonists—even if, as with Austen (and most postclassical romcoms), the film’s orbit is nonetheless (upper-)middle-class, not to mention heterosexual, White and cisgender. This presents a highly mobile temporal referential relay and sphere,

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drawing out specific similarities with and differences from several past eras. For example, the early nineteenth and late twentieth centuries both legitimise Cinderella narratives where women’s insolvency is rendered unproblematic by the entrance of wealthy patriarchs (Joe’s business is named Fox and Sons and his father is a serial husband of younger gold-diggers); in 1998, however, the love-letters popular in earlier periods have been supplanted by online communication. Of more interest for formal analysis, however, is the non-linear temporality of the remake in and of itself. The cyclicality of generic romance narratives has been viewed somewhat negatively by Doane as offering a fatalistic form of ‘women’s time’, which arguably robs them of agency or access to narratives of progress (in Garrett 2007: 115–116). On the other hand, Julia Kristeva’s (1993 [1986]) original theorisation of cyclical women’s time proposed the concept in more positive terms as resistant to Western, masculine narratives of progress, which were based on systems of thought that have since been severely challenged, notably by the various populations they excluded. Doane’s evaluation may also be inapt for romantic comedy, as she focuses on classical melodramas; its invocation by Garrett typifies the critical tendency to privilege the romance elements of this genre at the expense of comedy in critical analyses of it—especially feminist ones. The temporal rhythms of comedy have also been linked to ‘repetition and adaptation’, everyday physicality rather than ‘crisis and apocalypse’, and comic time, in contrast to Doane’s description of romantic temporalities, has been seen as elastic and anti-deterministic (Bushnell 2018: 53, 50); we only have to think of the extended moments of physical jeopardy infinitely delaying real harm in slapstick or cartoons for this to make sense. Indeed, these features also inform the choice to focus on (romantic) comedy in a section concerned with playful recursion. More recently, strains in queer theory concerned with the rejection of goal-oriented (reproductive) futurity have valorised other temporalities. Freeman, for instance, argues that emotional, domestic and biological tempos—with strong suggestions of cyclicality as well as links to romantic comedy—while they are not outside culture, do offer potential resistance to incorporation by neoliberal market logics under patriarchal capitalism (2010: 7). Halberstam also celebrates repetitive, non-goal-oriented narratives, particularly in his account of animated films (like fairy tales) interpellating the queer aspects of childhood (2011: 119), as well as more generally critiquing theory’s and culture’s historical overemphasis on time to the detriment of space (2005). Bearing this in mind, it might be argued that

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the cross-period ontologies of genericity and remakes in fact invite an experience characterised by something approaching atemporality, a kind of eternal diegetic present, that can rebalance this equation, directing attention away from questions of time-based narratology towards other formal aspects of films. As Pirjo Lyytikainen notes, following Paul Ricœur, ‘mimetic’ world-creation works like metaphor, ‘sustaining a new referential design’ (2012: 66). Such an interpretative approach is akin, then, to the analysis of poetic writing—a form favoured by many women writers associated with elaborating a distinctive female voice through a language already full of meaning.11 As Rebecca Bushnell points out, even in literature different parts exist synchronically—we might say, ‘on the page’—as well as successively, as you read through (2018: 49). If it is poetry that brings this quality of writing out most obviously, the form bears perhaps unexpected similarities with overdetermined genre films. For Lyytikainen, the intelligibility of poetry as dependent on schemata relating to the inner life can be understood through literary critic Northrop Frye’s concept of mood (2012: 66). A similarly suggestive concept might be tone, understood as the ‘global or organizing affect’ determining a cultural artefact’s ‘general disposition or orientation towards its audience and the world’ (Ngai 2007: 28). Together, these statements point towards a theorisation of relational affect conceived spatially in iterative narratives like those examined in this book. Analyses of You’ve Got Mail and other Ephron films have certainly tended to prioritise questions of temporality—whose handling is not always seen positively—at the expense of a direct engagement with space, whether as a purely diegetic concept or in (potentially overlapping) terms of narrative patterning, despite the centralisation of place in the titles of both the romcoms she directed. There is more than a whiff of Jamesonian fidelity to vertical thought in the critical distaste for the filmmaker’s plundering of the historical past. It is the assumption that certain ‘spaces’ are more valuable than others that has allowed History to naturalise exclusionary narratives as merely temporal; in other words, the nature of History as a time-space construct has been occluded to prevent women making room for their voices. This is why it is in women’s interest to highlight spatial constructs as such and to signify spatially, including through feminised terrains like the domestic ones in which romcoms’ action typically unfurls: doing so can throw into relief the ways in which all cultural ideas about temporal constructs are also spatially inflected, if only by virtue of which people’s experiences of different times have been centralised

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in their cultural construction. Generic chronotopes are no exception, as implied by Thomas Schatz’s observation that when generic space is ‘indeterminate’, rather than the subject of central conflict (as in the Western), this speaks to ideological stability or conservatism (1981: 14–29). It is apposite that genre narratives’ identity is often described in terms of a ‘horizon of expectation’ (or similar), that is, a time-space construct that imagines the future as a discursive space shaped by the past.12 When it comes to gendered space, the world of You’ve Got Mail is reconciliatorily hybrid, initially counterposing and cutting between, before gradually merging, the sphere of masculine corporate business and the world of feminised small-scale consumerism contained in Kathleen’s cosy neighbourhood shop. Thus, the couple bump into each other in each of their shops or mingle at literary cocktail parties—even if Kathleen scolds Joe for rapaciously gobbling too much of the caviar intended as garnish. Such details point up the self-consciously classed nature of such an affluent utopia. Elsewhere, too, in addition to mining the fictionally generative possibilities of new configurations, Ephron’s film also discourses on them. The increased possibilities for human connection offered by virtual space are at the heart of this film, whose plot is far more plausible for the postmodern context than in the original where characters corresponded by letter; again, witness its title, taken from an early AOL online message notification, while the opening credits equally propel us into cyberspace. However, the immateriality of this form of interaction is humorously underlined on repeated occasions, as characters in whom Kathleen has confided about her liaison point out improbable passing figures who could be her interlocutor (although the film stops short of pointing out the cross-gender possibilities of virtual identities, by having characters consider that ‘NY152’ might actually be a woman). As the credits’ virtually reimagined New  York suggests, the function of cyberspace is here to denaturalise the familiar, reminding us that the fantasy elements integral to romance can be as much about ‘exotic’ spatial as temporal dislocation. The importance of repeat spaces, such as the café, in channelling affect from The Shop Around the Corner is also of note in You’ve Got Mail—playing down their socio-historical specificity. However, it is more so in a film that more directly remakes an earlier one. Before turning to analysis of such issues in one such film, The Parent Trap—and a filmmaker, Nancy Meyers, whose careful crafting of mise-en-scène has attracted a certain amount of detailed critical attention—there is one more major time-space construct of note in You’ve Got Mail for its pertinence to the affective

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address of the remake: childhood. Thus, Kathleen works in a children’s book store, where she and Joe first bond when he brings his younger relatives to a story reading at her shop. Hanks as Joe moreover evokes infantility through his star turns in family comedies including the classic time-bending comedy Big (Penny Marshall, 1988)—a history that is playfully engaged through the choice to make Joe the half-brother and nephew of two children under ten, thanks to his father’s younger-womanising ways. Childishness is a primordial value for genres of ludic romance in general, underscored by the light-hearted sparring identifiable with the screwball cycle to which The Shop Around the Corner belongs. Just as psychoanalytic theories have argued that romance induces a regressive state (see Radway 1991), Guilluy’s reception study of romcom viewers has also led her to conclude that the pleasures of romcom-viewing require a regression at least to an adolescent frame of mind (forthcoming). If nostalgia situates fantasy as memory, this is the effect of retrospection about an idealised mother-daughter relationship in You’ve Got Mail, including through a fantasy image of dancing together (Fig. 3.1). Through such a solicitation of nostalgia, the remake’s inherently regressive connection to the past is foregrounded, but in such a way as to enhance rather than undermine the importance the film bestows on originary histories, into which it is in turn inserted. Such a move looks forward to Halberstam’s discussion of the queerness of childhood in recent cinema (2011: 22, 27–52). If it seems paradoxical that romcoms include anarchic

Fig. 3.1  You’ve Got Mail ostentatiously embraces nostalgia

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elements refusing the normative shackles promised by their classic overall arc, likewise for Halberstam animated family films such as Toy Story (John Lasseter, 1995), Monsters, Inc. (Pete Docter, 2001), Finding Nemo (Andrew Stanton and Lee Unkrich, 2003) or Bee Movie (Simon J. Smith and Steve Hickner, 2007) erect familial and other social structures as a force to kick against, at least intermittently. Celebrating the lost Eden of childhood embraces stuckness and stasis, even regression, as opposed to incorporation into the social order; and here this positioning is further enhanced by that moment’s envisioning as a female-only space. At the same time, deploying such reflexive time-bending to bask in the reflected glory of the imagined past, the remake erects itself to a compelling cultural status. Transhistorical Replication in The Parent Trap (Meyers 1998) One means to define a remake’s textual closeness to an original is in terms of repeated narrative units (Verevis 2006: 21). On this basis, as well as thanks to its reprisal of the title of the first The Parent Trap (David Swift, 1961), Nancy Meyers’ directorial debut typifies the eschewal of a more classically mimetic approach to filmmaking in which this study is interested. Despite some attention having been accorded to Meyers’ more recent films, since she has attained the status of the most profitable and highly paid female director in Hollywood, her The Parent Trap has been largely overlooked by scholarship—and even, on the whole, the press— with the exception of a section dedicated to it in Deborah Jermyn’s book-­ length study of the director (2017a: 128–136). One explanation for this may lie in its genre hybridity, cross-hatching romantic comedy with a family-oriented focus on children that exceeds the figurative allegiance with childish concerns I have argued for in many romcoms—although a blend with child-oriented and/or family-focused comedy is hardly a major departure for a genre focused on bringing (usually) men and women together.13 Thus, it tells the story of twin girls, Hallie and Annie (both played by Lindsay Lohan in a star-making turn), separated unbeknownst to them as babies of divorcing parents, who accidentally meet years later at summer camp, work out the nature of their relationship and vow to reunite their parents so they can be together. They therefore swap places in secret, firstly to spend time with their respective long-lost parents but also to force the two together when the deception is discovered. The plan works; however, their father Nick (Dennis Quaid) has become engaged to an

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avaricious younger woman named Meredith (Elaine Hendrix), so the girls have to use their wiles to dispatch her and reinstate their mother Elizabeth (Natasha Richardson) in her ‘rightful’ place. This plot is identical to that of the first film, where twins Susan and Sharon (Hayley Mills) reconcile parents Mitch (Brian Keith) and Maggie (Maureen O’Hara): a story design in turn adapted for the screen from a German novel. The only key differences between the two film versions reside in the fact that the group finally converge on a smart hotel in California rather than Nick’s house, extending and rendering more luxurious the romcom section of the action; instead of one sister being from Boston, the homogenising effects of globalisation have made it necessary to root her further afield in London to preserve sufficient difference from her twin for various jokes (such as about accent) to function; and, as is appropriate for the different period settings as well as the kind of heroines characteristic of Meyers’ films, where Maggie was identified with domesticity, Elizabeth has a job, as a very successful designer of wedding dresses.14 One important point of contrast between this remake and You’ve Got Mail concerns the cultural visibility of the predecessor films. Despite the much greater scholarly attention accorded to The Shop Around the Corner, as both a member of the much theorised category of the screwball comedy and moreover a film by a venerated auteur, than to the original Disney movie The Parent Trap, the latter film took nearly $30m worldwide to the former’s $36,368—a discrepancy of striking magnitude.15 In other words, The Parent Trap was not merely a film but a cultural event and reference point for very large numbers of people; while Slate reviewer Nell Minow calls the 1961 release ‘a key life experience’ (in Jermyn 2017a: 131), the Netflix-distributed (and female-directed) romcom Set It Up (Claire Scanlon, 2018) doffs its cap to both versions when one protagonist suggests to another that in matchmaking their bosses they have ‘Cyranoed’ them, only for the other to correct them: ‘No, they’ve been Parent Trap-­ ped.’16 This means that the adult (presumably typically parental) viewer of The Parent Trap stands a considerable chance of being familiar with its predecessor. The fact that the second film is ‘remarkably similar’ (Bernstein et  al. 1998: 28) altogether to the first suggests the likelihood that the earlier experience will significantly bear on this viewing experience. To illustrate this point further, albeit anecdotally, my ten-year-old daughter, who has watched the Meyers film some ten times (more than any other film in her life), on being shown the earlier version, asked unprompted during the

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opening camp sequence, ‘Is it the same camp?’, then during a late sequence where the twins accompany Meredith on a camping trip commented, ‘Those rocks looks the same’. These responses convey the way in which choices of not just narrative unit, but also setting and more specific elements of mise-en-scène and even cinematography (including an aspect ratio much closer to the original’s than is common today), are exceptionally closely calqued on their source film text in this remake (Figs. 3.2 and 3.3). In this way, its amplification of the attention accorded to childhood within a film elsewhere adhering to screwball (remarriage) comedy conventions is germane: the film can return the viewer to a form of perceived contact with a positively coded past experience, much as its plot resuscitates the forgotten infantile utopia of familial wholeness for Hallie and Annie.17 It is interesting to cite here a line from Meyers’ most recent film The Intern (2015)—offering an aptly circular vision of the oeuvre—which Paszkiewicz picks out in her analysis of the genericity of that film: protagonist Ben’s (Robert De Niro) pronouncement about his repurposed former office that it ‘feels like home. Remodeled but home.’ Paszkiewicz astutely reads the line self-reflexively as a comment on Meyers’ approach to romantic comedy (2018a: 249); but while she pays most attention to the film’s updating of genre conventions, for me the key term here to describe Meyers’ films’ attitude towards their progenitors as epitomised by The Parent Trap is less ‘remodeled’ than ‘home’—as emphasised by the term’s placement at the end of Ben’s phrase. It is pertinent to note in this regard, too, that Meyers even describes her vernacular filmmaking style in terms suggesting familiarity and ease, when she expresses a preference for mainstream romcom as the mode in which she feels most ‘comfortable’ working (in Schreiber 2014: 144). If misunderstood artists in the Romantic tradition have been male, we might say that Meyers epitomises female genre film directors’ aim, rather, to be understood. Anat Zanger (2006) has argued remakes work through a Kristevan fascination with abject entities that elicit some discomfort. Emphasising the seemingly effortless appropriation of Hollywood genre cinema by women understands remakes’ legacy as ultimately neutralising or transcending Freud’s theorisation of gender difference through the uncanny (unheimlich, or literally un-homely) to which Kristeva’s theories of abjection are indebted. Women

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Fig. 3.2  Camp Walden in The Parent Trap (1961)

Fig. 3.3  Camp Walden in The Parent Trap (1995)

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directors’ attraction to remakes can thus  be seen to symptomatise an ostentatious rejection of female circumscription to the pre-verbal stage associated by Kristeva (1980: 20) with the maternal body and performatively smooth over any awkwardness associable with women in the ‘semiotic’ or discursive realm. Space is again to the fore in these figurations. As hinted, if Meyers’ authorial signature has been perceived in any one aspect of her filmmaking, it is her mise-en-scène—specifically, one of (homely) luxury (see Radner 2010: 172–189; Schreiber 2014: 140–155; Jermyn 2017a: 146–159). The reach of this notion, and of Meyers’ films’ powerful world-­ construction, into popular culture itself is demonstrated by the fact that showrunner Lena Dunham’s character Hannah in the TV romcom series Girls (HBO, 2012–2017) says of a well-appointed middle-class home, ‘I feel like I’m in a Nancy Meyers movie’ (Season 2, Episode 5). For Radner, in Meyers’ work ‘the self of the character is defined through its manifestations in its environment’; nevertheless, her opulent sets make her cinema identifiable with ‘neo-feminism’, which Radner understands as a distortion of second-wave feminist values through the superimposition of neoliberal consumerist ones onto ‘girly’ culture, while press coverage of the set design of Something’s Gotta Give renders cinema as ‘a literal shop window’ (2010: 180, 179).18 In tandem with the way Meyers’ sets both resemble home décor shoots and have served as them in magazines (see also Schreiber 2014: 152–153), while the London street used as Annie’s home in The Parent Trap has hosted a ‘lively fan pilgrimage’ (Jermyn 2017a: 135), such incursions into popular culture present a remarkable example of films exceeding their original textual space altogether that interests me more than the negative accusations of ‘lifestyle fetishism’ (Schreiber 2014: 23, 146) that have been a recurrent aspect of Meyers’ critical derision. Jermyn (2017b) has argued persuasively for the affluence of Meyers’ milieus as integral to their generic worldmaking (rather than merely evidence of pushing rarefied values on the masses) and, moreover, pinpointed a gaping double standard in the reception of films by male directors such as Douglas Sirk who have offered similarly opulent but self-consciously fantastical views of US society.19 While Jermyn zooms in particularly on What Women Want (2000) in this comparison, there is no doubt that the generic naturalisation of wealth is in fact denaturalised in The Parent Trap. Not only does Hallie at one point ask incredulously of her London life, ‘We have a butler?’, but Elizabeth invites this (also newly added) character to accompany her to

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California on the basis that ‘you’re like a lovable brother who just happens to wait on us!’—a comment so seemingly ingenuous that it becomes just the opposite. Even more striking is the extreme nature of the film’s aestheticisation of wealth, for instance, through opening credits that pastiche the parade of consumerist luxury associated with the contemporary wedding (another element added, where the earlier version celebrated family values more than wealth as such). Thus, the camera offers close-ups of crystal-ware, roses and an apparently special bottle of wine being tendered by a sommelier. Such a sequence parallels Schreiber’s descriptions of the presentation of romance in Meyers’ films as ‘elevated to such a level of excess and meaning so hyper-aestheticized that it becomes performative’ (2014: 147). It is significant that—while she is sceptical about the ideological implications of such an approach—Schreiber recognises the key alliance between genericity and emotion in such films’ meaning production, when she then asks ‘how many tissues and how much intertextuality’ it takes to resolve the plot of a Meyers film. In this way, Meyers’ debt to Sirk’s self-conscious ‘weepies’ is indeed clear, alongside her films’ typification of what we might in paradoxical spirit dub the extraordinary conventionality of heightened genre. Jermyn’s citation of various statements by Meyers about her mise-en-­ scène is also extremely revealing. Describing Something’s Gotta Give, the director claims that ‘the kitchen is the movie’; yet she also asserts: ‘It’s about depth of field, constantly looking from room to room, out a window, believing the beach is beyond’ (in Jermyn 2017a: 152–153). These statements hold a focus on carefully crafted (set) design in balance with a desire to reach beyond the set or the world of the film, to attain ‘depth of field’ in a metaphorical as well as literal sense. And one way that The Parent Trap seeks to do this is through the felt intersubjective connection facilitated by the remake format; Jermyn’s statement that the ‘golden age’ of classical Hollywood is ‘felt as a very consciously intended influence in [Meyers’] oeuvre’ (ibid.: 24) applies in spades to this film. Although I am concerned with the perception of this connection on the part of the viewer, as a motor for shaping attitudes towards women as skilled film directors, it is nonetheless relevant that the avowedly autobiographical influences on Meyers’ practice prop up a model of such communion, not least as they have been quite widely publicised. In The Parent Trap, the most glaring example concerns the naming of Hallie after Meyers’ own daughter, but Elizabeth’s creative profession and moneyed status are further additions to the original that speak to such an autobiographical perspective.20

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As for the nature of the affects circulating around this remake text, nostalgia is once again a dominant register for the cinephilic viewer. Music is key here, with the soundtrack not emulating its predecessor but rather privileging a score dominated by ‘Hollywood-style jazz’ alongside ‘more modern tracks with upbeat modern drum beats [sic] or steel-guitar (“Changes”) or steel drums (“She’s Gone”) and some Mozart influences in “Dad’s Getting Married”’ (Carlsson 1999), for a more diffuse, gently nostalgic yet not passé effect. Having said that, while waiting for a lift in the lobby of the hotel where her parents are to meet, Hallie sings under her breath the theme-tune of the 1961 film, Let’s Get Together (sung by Mills). This makes her almost as metatextually knowing as her sister, who during a dinner concocted to reconcile Elizabeth and Nick, requests, ‘Mood music please!’ and instructs her parents to ‘relax—sail through time, back to yester-years’. But the much more closely imitative mise-en-­ scène also has a potentially strong nostalgic charge, engaging perhaps largely unconscious visual memories for many viewers. The frisson of this effect arguably finds its own mise-en-abyme in the film through the moment—present in both versions—when one twin joins the other in experiencing for the first time uncontrollable goosebumps at the prospect of a dramatic revelation or change, when they realise they are sisters. That is, while the identical twins visually figure the film’s awareness of connections between different selves, this linkage is felt through the body situated in time through a relation of (genetic) origin. Aside from its status as a remake, I wish before finishing this discussion to briefly consider the related question of The Parent Trap’s identity as a heightened romantic comedy more generally. We have already seen that screwball elements have been reprised in later cycles; those present here (and in the first film) mirror a list provided by Kelli Marshall in an appraisal of Meyers’ later film Something’s Gotta Give (2003) as screwball, namely, ‘elite settings, romantic getaways, slapstick humor, verbal sparring, a plot that hinges on marriage, and lead characters who function both actively and passively’ (2009: 10).21 Fascinatingly, according to Lauren Jade Thompson, postfeminist romcoms articulate not just their genre but co-­ imbricated gender identities through the use of ‘residual’ cultural aesthetics. Thompson analyses the way production design in recent comedies focused on gender relations draws strongly on elements of the past and notably ‘the persistence of separate ideals of masculine and feminine domestic space’, albeit updating these in specific ways for the relevant era (Thompson 2013: 150, 157).

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A contrast between feminine and masculine domestic spaces persists in You’ve Got Mail, where Kathleen’s warm apartment sports bookish clutter and a handmade quilt, while Joe is almost exclusively seen alone at home in a minimally decorated office space. Meyers’ films, however, tend overall to move beyond the binaristic gendered characterisation typifying Ephron’s—which are generally credited with inventing the ditzy romcom heroine—offering accomplished women and ‘new men’ (see Burns 2011) (despite frequent comparisons being made between the two filmmakers, symptomatising Ephron’s influence on the genre). Paradoxically, this aspect in fact returns Meyers’ films to the cross-gender audience positioning of screwball and other early romantic comedies—in contrast to Schreiber’s claims that they target female consumers (2014: 148). On the other hand, her interiors do subtly but broadly conform to Thompson’s model, wherein female protagonists’ homes reflect their inner lives and are ‘characterized by an aura of cosiness, softness and homeliness’ (Thompson 2013: 157) while men’s spaces lack personal effects or clutter. While Elizabeth’s exceptionally upscale London home in The Parent Trap features no clashing chintz, as the film is closer to the screwball’s fascination with wealth than the ‘aesthetic banality’ of the 2000s ‘sex comedies’ with which Thompson is concerned, it does include lashings of ‘decorative furniture and ornaments and an abundance of soft furnishings, blankets and cushions within the design scheme’ (Hansen-Miller and Gill in Thompson 2013: 152, 157) (Fig. 3.4). Further indicating an approach to mise-en-scène as subjective enworlding, the director has detailed her choice of an orange colour scheme to anchor redheaded Hallie as ‘at home’ and evoke a sunny mood for her reunion with her mother in London (in Jermyn 2017a: 105). Meanwhile, Nick’s house— though no longer the ranch of the first film, dominated by an open range and dark wood—includes both a white-walled, neutral décor associable with (a more functional, familial version of) the bachelor pad and somewhat abstract art often seen in the ‘mancave’ (ibid.: 158–163), while close scrutiny of the living area even reveals a painting of the contemporary masculine space of a boardroom. Such a perspective fills out Jermyn’s claims about production design as generically conceived in Meyers’ films, once again expressing spatially a gendered temporal evolution. The fact that the details in Elizabeth’s home are lingered on by the camera walks the line between metafictionality and lush immersion in generic space so typical of the film.

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Fig. 3.4  Pastel soft furnishings at Elizabeth’s home render feminine domestic space as a romcom cliché

Romcom’s fundamental and powerful deployment of intertextuality in its modus operandi is perhaps the ultimate generic feature heightened by The Parent Trap. Noting David Shumway’s reflection that in romantic comedy ‘no ending can ever be assumed to be final’, Schreiber argues in relation to postfeminist US cinema that analyses should indeed look beyond plot in their appraisals of films’ attitudes towards the romance narrative, suggesting that romcoms are ‘so steeped in romance narratological strategies that romance still tends to be implied as future goal’ (2014: 12). This view of romantic union as potentially endlessly deferred, although Schreiber interprets it more in terms of ideological stranglehold, eschews a fatalistic sense of narrative progress towards fulfilment and instead turns the focus to the patterning of genericity, this time not only within but rather across films, in line with my conception of genre films as interconnecting spaces. It is no accident, then, that not only does The Parent Trap offer a seemingly potentially open ending, with the practical problems of Elizabeth and Nick’s desire to reunite heavily underscored rather than resolved, but the appended opening credits showing their earlier marriage

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highlight the entire narrative’s status as a continuation.22 Given the critical overemphasis on the contemporaneity of such self-awareness, it should finally be noted that similar savviness marks the classical film. In that case, the ending—a wedding sequence—was literally framed as a dream experienced by one of the twins that then takes over the diegesis as if it were reality, retaining ontological ambivalence. The 1961 film’s opening credits were, however, even more extremely jocular, offering nothing less than animated doll figures enacting the narrative of a ‘parent trap’. In one vignette here, ‘romance’ is evoked by the female doll rhapsodising, ‘John, it’s our song!’, to which he replies, ‘Marsha, what fools we’ve been!’ before they kiss. Here the remade romcom appears less as a ‘twice-told tale’ (Leitch 1990) than a mytheme structuring transhistorical fictions and lives (cf. Zanger 2006: 128), making Johns and Marlas, Mitches and Maggies, Elizabeths and Nicks, of us all. And if viewers are apostrophised in this way as experiencers of romance through structures of self-conscious recognition, we are also addressed as active participants in the narrative’s creation: as relatives of the not merely doubled but multiplied figures of Sharon/Susan or Hallie/Annie, and by extension Meyers herself.

Timelessness and Transience in Amy Heckerling’s Teen-Worlds: From Clueless (1995) to I Could Never Be Your Woman (2007) and Vamps (2012) As hinted in Chap. 2, teenpics are a paradigmatic genre for this study. In the first place, a focus on teen lives is in some ways perfectly suited to film genre representation itself. This is because generic meaning shortcuts rely on both stereotyping and, concomitantly, the externalisation of behavioural attitudes: both major features of teen interactions. Social comparison theory informed by evolutionary psychology has shown that our brains are hard-wired to store detailed information about small numbers of people, while modern life experiences from the onslaught of the culturally diverse schoolroom onwards require cognitive shortcuts (McAndrew 2016). Adrian Martin (2009: 9) attributes the foundational status of American Graffiti (George Lucas, 1973) within the genre in large measure to its portrayal of private life as public spectacle; and the kind of ‘showing off’ particular to young people’s struggles to fix their social identities is peculiarly well positioned for spectacularising the most personal and indeed bodily of human drives (often comically). It is also

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relevant in arguing for teenpics’ predisposition towards heightened genre, specifically, to note that eroticism features centrally among such teen impulses. This is reflected by studies according defining status to sexual coming-of-age plots in the genre since the 1980s (Feuer 1993: 125; Driscoll 2011: 2), while for Roz Kaveney One of the shared and defining aspects of genre teen films and television programmes is a free-floating atmosphere of sexual chemistry, much of it having to do with same-sex interactions that do not as a rule involve actual sexual activity, but clearly involve a level of romantic and sometimes erotic emotion that is not adequately described by terms like homosociality and bonding. (Kaveney 2006: 8)23

In this formulation, the onscreen teen narrative displays an intratextual— inter-character yet also ‘free-floating’—concern with the kind of broadly erotic intersubjective potentialities that are also a feature of heightened genre films’ embodied address as described in these pages. It is reasonable to conclude, in view of cinema’s powerful identificatory mechanisms, that this generalised and not merely sexual atmosphere rubs off on the viewer, a dimension further embraced by Kaveney’s following statement that some erotic charge may also be projected by the audience, as evidenced by massive bodies of fan fiction developing teen narratives in romantic and/ or sexual directions. Additionally, teenpics epitomise genre films’ ability to produce certain affects through their cyclicality and past-facing nature, due to adolescent narratives’ focus on a life-stage that humans tend to remember keenly: a phenomenon dubbed ‘the reminiscence bump’ (McAndrew 2016). Memory research has shown that the very sort of changes to the brain’s sensitivity to information during teen years outlined above are accompanied by strong emotions, to signal that important ‘events’ (here, social feedback) are taking place. Since ‘strong emotions equal strong memories’ (ibid.)—in the words of the novelist and essayist Siri Hustvedt, ‘what we don’t feel, we forget’ (2012: 248)—this explains why ‘those years [are] imprinted on our brains like nothing that comes later’ (McAndrew 2016). Such an apprehension points to teenpics’ multigenerational appeal, wherein ‘[a]n oblique refraction of the youth culture of the past—often that of the director themselves—can […] be regarded as a central feature of the genre’ (Smith 2017: 105).24 This may go some way to explaining

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why teenpics are often seen as ‘specially generic or conventional’ (Driscoll 2011: 65). More importantly, the authorial emphasis here again underlines the genre’s ideal status as a conduit for intersubjective affect. If the example foregrounds intergenerational communication, likewise studies of fandom and ageing have been one area to explore the interpenetration of media objects and the very construction of the subject in ways relevant to the teenpic, as ‘the self unfolds [in] dialogue with the media object that helps define and sustain it’ over time: a process dubbed ‘texistence’ by C. Lee Harrington and Denise D. Bielby (2010: 444). The possibility of a kind of texistence bringing cross-generational subjectivities into dialogue is interestingly gestured towards by a generically self-aware scene in Greta Gerwig’s 2017 high school coming-of-age film Ladybird, where the titular character imagines her mother experiencing for years before her the familiar locations and textures of their hometown of Sacramento, seen through the screen of a car windshield, during a moment of rare empathy in their otherwise strained relationship. Similarly, as we shall see, not only have teenpics examined throughout this chapter—especially Clueless and Twilight—comprised major fan texts in various ways, but Heckerling’s later films I Could Never Be Your Woman and Vamps also explore both ageing and specifically post-teen subjectivity as a form of texistence fairly explicitly. In gender terms, meanwhile, if romantic and to a lesser extent family films more generally have historically been associated with women, teenpics occupy an ambivalent position. Since the genre has existed in some form since at least the classical era—often referred to as part of its ‘prehistory’—and because of its links to the historically masculinist literary genre of rites-of-passage, it was naturally associated with male directors and concerns, notably in such well-known films as The Blackboard Jungle (Richard Brooks, 1955) and American Graffiti. This facet became even more striking in the 1980s, the decade when Amy Heckerling began writing and directing in the genre, through a focus on male sexuality in films such as Porky’s (Bob Clark, 1982) and Risky Business (Paul Brickman, 1983). At the same time, as Rachel Abramowitz notes dryly in a chapter on Heckerling, the low social status of teens (no doubt alongside teenpics’ relative cheapness to produce [Scheiner 2000: 141]) meant that this genre was in the 1980s relatively more penetrable than some others by female directors: ‘Teenagers were not considered full people, and neither were women’ (Abramowitz 2000: 144). Since then, the tendency to compare

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female and youth identities as notionally protean, liminal and self-­ reinventing, certainly as these are apostrophised by ‘girl’ consumer culture, has become widespread (see Tiqqun 2012 [1999]). This overlap is doubtless a factor in explaining the genre’s relatively common appeal for female directors in subsequent decades, including US films by Coppola, Peirce, Catherine Hardwicke, Greta Gerwig and Karyn Kusama, among others. Nor is it implausible to suggest Heckerling’s work has directly influenced this development, as well as the emergence and forms of the post-­1980s cycle of US teenpics as a whole, through her early teen comedy hits Fast Times at Ridgemont High (1982) and especially Clueless (1995), which with takings in excess of $50 million at the domestic box office was a stand-out success in the genre.25 The first film, as a pioneering female-authored teenpic, is characterised by a strategy of appropriative rerouting, notably with regard to gendered conventions (see Speed 2002; Wood 2003: 192–197). Scholarship has thus examined how Fast Times introduces a feminine perspective by tackling the issue of teenage pregnancy. What is more, the film accords equal importance to female friendships as to male ones, in terms of screen time and narrative impetus: a change preserved in many later films (and capitalised on further in favour of girls in Clueless, at Heckerling’s insistence [Hurd 2007: 27]). In formal terms, it also goes some way to undermining the camera’s ‘male gaze’, not only by ncluding an objectifying point-of-view shot of male behinds swathed in tight jeans but, more subtly, by locating its well-known titillating sequence, in which Phoebe Cates’ Linda removes her bikini top and kisses Judge Reinhold’s Brad, within a fantasy sequence that is, as Robin Wood (2003: 197) notes, comically punctured by her interrupting Brad’s masturbatory seclusion in the bathroom in search of a Q-tip. Although a cursory Google search for either Phoebe Cates or Fast Times suggests this frame narrative did not prevent viewers from deriving erotic pleasure from the ‘iconic’ scene, it does foreground distance and citational authorial positioning. However, given this study’s emphasis on deploying in differently nuanced contexts rather than substantially re-scripting generic conventions, this section will focus on films falling squarely within the post-1990 moment that many teenpic critics recognise to have marked a shift towards the genre’s contemporary format (Kaveney 2006; Smith 2017: 16). These are Clueless and two later Heckerling films, I Could Never Be Your Woman (2007) and Vamps (2012), that, while not necessarily positioned as

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teenpics or primordially identifiable with that genre to the exclusion of others, draw importantly on its resources, illustrating the exceptional versatility defining this genre post-1990 (Martin 2009: 16). A further advantage of this approach derives from points of contact between these and Heckerling’s own earlier films in the genre, allowing for a focus on genericity as such, in a markedly interwoven relationship with cine-fille authorship, as a textual function as well as in terms of intertextual meaning production across several decades. The analysis is therefore propitious for a direct consideration of one important aspect of pastiche texts, in addition to the channelling of the specific affects associable with any texts pastiched: their potential to engender a sense of the loss of the past, both ‘real’ and mediated. Textuality as Teen Aesthetic in Clueless and I Could Never Be Your Woman Clueless might at first glance appear a more obvious candidate for description in terms of meta-genericity than embodied address; yet I will argue that it exemplifies well a symbiosis of the two. The argument answers to a gap in scholarship on teenpics, where [g]iven that teen cinema delights in the surface of the image—its investment in the sartorial (Clueless (Heckerling 1995), Pretty in Pink (Deutch 1986)), its fascination with erotic touch and the body (Twilight (Hardwicke 2008), Ginger Snaps (Fawcett 2000)), and its grounding in textured teen interiors like the girl’s bedroom (Ghost World (Zwigoff 2001), Sixteen Candles (Hughes 1984))—it is curious that a sensuous reading of the teen screen surface is yet to emerge. (Bellas 2012)

This remains largely true in 2020, where, for instance, Frances Smith’s recent informative Rethinking the Hollywood Teen Movie (2017), while distancing itself somewhat from highly historical work by, notably, Wood or Timothy Shary, and despite including a chapter on nostalgia, is heavily indebted to Butlerian discursive readings. While we saw in Chap. 2 that Kaveney sometimes gestures towards affect—including in its relation to meta-generic allusivity—in the genre, only Samantha Colling’s innovative study of ‘girl teen film’ offers a direct if partial response to the lapsus, correctly noting the absence of mainstream films within phenomenological

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and affective theorisations of cinema (2017: 14) and conversely centralising the aesthetic pleasures of ‘fun’ in several female-oriented teenpics. Athena Bellas’ stress on the sensuous power of surface aesthetics in the passage quoted above also speaks clearly to textuality’s embodied address alongside its more ‘distanced’—visual, cognitive—pleasures. The latter have been the major source of interest for Clueless scholars, not least because of the film’s recurrence in adaptation studies. In this respect, it blends Jane Austen’s Emma with vestiges of both Fast Times and what Deirdre Lynch (2003: 75) has described as ‘a cornucopia of visual and aural allusions to the history and prehistory of the teen film genre itself’, including salient themes from Gigi (Vincente Minnelli, 1958), a James Dean lookalike in the character of Justin Walker’s (gay) love interest Christian (Walker also resembles 1990s teen star Jason Priestly, an intertextual relay further foregrounded by the fact that Priestly is referred to in the film), and many 1990s musical covers of 1970s hit pop songs. Additionally, the evocation of a dense network of pop (and high) cultural associations is facilitated by its quintessentially postmodern LA setting, epitomised by Cher’s ‘classic’ (as she puts it) neo-classical home, embodying the architectural mixing of styles that is, as Lynch acknowledges, one of Fredric Jameson’s targets of condemnation in his well-known theorisation of postmodernism (Lynch 2003: 74).26 The arcane slang used by the narrative’s characters could be seen to reproduce the ‘reinvention’ of generic language itself, just as Maureen Turim’s (2003: 42) assessment of the film’s lead character, Cher, as having ‘a logic all of her own’ might well be applied to Heckerling’s work, in its refusal to fit pre-existing moulds; however, such individuation relies precisely on a complex positioning in relation to textual others.27 Indeed, for all its purported originality, the film meets seven of the nine criteria for the prominent 1990s cycle of teenpics described by Wood (2002) (only departing from the model by including racial and sexual minorities, to an extent).28 An insightful analysis of Clueless as adaptation is facilitated by Lynch’s focus on the film’s negotiation of history. For her, Heckerling’s promiscuously referential aesthetic, in which Shakespeare’s Hamlet and Mel Gibson’s embodiment of the latter’s protagonist are indistinguishably valid sources of knowledge, spatialises time, deconstructs modernist notions of historical progress, and questions epistemological categories, with a particular emphasis on the gendered character of the latter: witness the self-reflexive joke that sees Cher read ‘trashy’ pop-psychology book Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Venus, while Josh, clad in dark

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clothes and sunglasses, consumes Friedrich Nietzsche. For Lynch, the motif of fashion in Clueless (and beyond) is particularly intricately bound up with the eschewal of linear history, given the participation of sartorial trends in temporal and geographical bricolage: Cher and Dionne sport garments ranging from Austenian Empire-line dresses to theatrical outsize hats, evoking a hodgepodge of past styles, and paired improbably with contemporary-looking A-line skirts and fitted jackets (Fig. 3.5). As Lynch explains, the role of fashion in the film is to shun referential power and to ‘cultivate the untimely’ (2003: 74). For her, the film rejects a Hegelian view of historical progress encapsulated in the notion that lends Cher’s history teacher her name, Geist, or spirit and its so-called coming-to-consciousness. It is certainly no accident that, as she notes, history classrooms are prominent targets of exuberant adolescent mockery— and, we might add, creative misunderstanding—in both Clueless and Fast Times. Moreover, Lynch’s observation that the ‘crisis of historical memory’ decried by Jameson has always been banal for women, excluded from official histories in the first place, lends further weight to the act of championing a postmodern referential aesthetic as propitious for exploration of women’s concerns (ibid.: 78). Such extreme referentiality and playful pastiche makes Clueless a forerunning and emblematic example of the trend for heightened genericity described in these pages (cf. Harrod 2016: 58–61; Colling 2017: 8–9),

Fig. 3.5  Costumes in Clueless figure Heckerling’s exhilaratingly anti-historicist approach

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when we remember that if pastiche is notionally distinguishable from straight genre by making imitation ‘the point’ (Dyer 2007: 35), ‘[s]ometimes the game of referentiality is part of the point of the [teen] film or television show’ (Kaveney 2006: 110). In this regard, then, once again, teenpics prove to tend from the outset towards heightened genericity, so that a film such as Clueless is doubly heightened by referencing the already typically heightened genre promiscuously. Colling thus draws on the film in the Introduction to her study of ‘girl teen films’, via Dyer, in terms strikingly similar to my own, precisely to exemplify the way in which ‘[p]leasure is found in the hyper-imitation of girl teen film conventions, in combination with the original films’ affective sentiments [, making] self-­ consciousness central to its affects and pleasures’ (ibid.). However, Colling’s allusions to what Umberto Eco has described as ‘double coding’ (recurrent in theorisations of romance), whereby irony can be used to offset the trite or hackneyed while still allowing earnest sentiments to be expressed, reproduces the same binaristic thinking as Garrett’s (2007) model of self-consciousness in chick-flicks. That is, while self-­consciousness is acknowledged as pleasurable alongside (‘in combination with’) affectivity, there is no sense that hyper-referentiality is itself affective at all levels (bodily as well as cognitive); affects endure in this schema ‘despite’ (ibid.: 28) rather than as a facet of self-consciousness. In contrast, Lynch’s semiotic reading of details of costume does not exclude an apprehension of their simultaneous functioning as sites of psychic and corporeal engagement, as she acknowledges how the intimacy between clothes and bodies overdetermines fashion’s responsiveness to desires and dreams (ibid.: 87). These elements of the film thus signify by alluding to historical eras, in ways that interpellate both conscious and unconscious registering, and also, simultaneously and through the same process, address the viewer’s senses. Indeed, if Lynch has argued that ‘costume can [both] introduce anachronism’ and also express ‘a woman’s desire to flee the era by which she is captured’, this expression is partly achieved through communicating an affectively generated sense of freedom, comparable to the experience of trying on a new outfit, or identity, ourselves. It should be recognised that the costumes in Clueless also convey dedication to capitalist consumption. Thus, Cher is willing to protest to a gun-­ wielding mugger that she may soil her designer dress if she lies on the ground, while new girl Tai (Brittany Murphy) is not accepted until she is made-over through shopping. Such class circumscription, mirroring the association between female progress towards emancipation and women of

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means, may limit somewhat the affectively generated sense of freedom associated with the sartorial theme—even as it winks at the teenpic’s privileged class identity, solidified by John Hughes’ suburban 1980s cycle. Nonetheless, Heckerling’s wildly anti-realist, colourful costumes in Clueless communicate a feeling of diffuse possibility and fun (an affect Colling does identify with costume in other female-oriented teenpics) as much as they address conscious processes of cognition. This multilayered address is equally a feature of the film’s soundtrack. Turim has shown how samples from such hits as Coolio’s ‘Rollin’ with my Homies’, The Muffs’ ‘Kids in America’ (a cover of Kim Wilde’s 1981 hit), Supergrass’ ‘Feel Alright’ and especially Jill Sobule’s ‘Supermodel’, ‘consciously mock the innocence of past generations of teenagers, and enclaves that try to retain that innocence, with self-consciousness and a flippant irony’ (Turim 2003: 43). She also argues that prior knowledge of segments of certain tracks, such as Beastie Boys’ ‘Mullet Head’ and Radiohead’s ‘Fake Plastic Trees’, endows the presence of these with more irony than does simply hearing the snippets featured in the film. In this case, the experience of the songs does not necessarily coincide with a retrospective, considered appraisal of them: the emphasis during viewing is once more on exhilaration and immediacy, evoking the high pitch of the teen years. Importantly, at least as much as it depends on what is said, the vibrancy of listening to these songs is a function of the sounds of the instrumental score alongside the timbre and delivery of the voices heard— not to mention the songs’ associations for individual viewers, which may depend, among other things, on familiarity with the music video, as well as a host of personal circumstances linked to previous instances of listening. Both Turim and Ben Aslinger—the latter in an article that claims Heckerling played a definitive role in the shift to treating film and television scores as authorial flourishes—single out the Sobule track for analysis from this perspective. While Turim (2003: 43) underlines simply what she describes as the ‘New York punk’ delivery, for Aslinger, ‘Sobule’s choice to affect a teen girl accent and a particular Californian vocal uptick at the end of phrases combines with her performance on guitar to simultaneously endorse and satirize gender norms.’ He goes on to cite Leslie C. Dunn and Nancy A. Jones’ observation that ‘[t]o move from voice to vocality […] implies a shift from a concern with the phenomenological roots of voice to a conception of vocality as a cultural construct’ (in Aslinger 2014: 129).29 Once again, the inherent qualities of an effect (here a sound) are inextricably bound up with its signifying potential, both of which produce

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a complex—but initially and primarily affective—response in the viewer. An enlightening paradigm for understanding such uses of music in many teen and other overdetermined genre films can be found in Phil Powrie’s work on film music, where he identifies the possibility of tracks moving from what Claudia Gorbman calls an ‘unheard’ status to being ‘heard’. Discussing the famous use of Rihanna’s ‘Diamonds’ in youth film Bande de filles/Girlhood (Céline Sciamma, France 2014), Powrie describes the ostensive use of this song as ‘un-sutur[ing]’ the listener from the diegetic illusion yet also notes that the consequence of this effect is to ‘produc[e] articulations of archaeological, conceptual and temporal layers that can engulf us, that can thrill’ (2020). I Could Never Be Your Woman is perhaps the Heckerling film that is most explicit about the power of the constructed, or textual, to impact on the body. Highly camp in its aesthetic yet loosely autobiographical in its subject matter, it focuses on the lives and romances in particular of a divorced television writer and her teenaged daughter in Los Angeles and took $9.5m worldwide at the box office.30 In genre terms, it includes elements of what Margaret Tally (2008) has called an ‘older bird’ romcom but is perhaps best described as a post-teenpic for various reasons. In the first place, the show on which the mother Rosie (Michelle Pfeiffer) works pastiches Clueless’ television show spin-off (United Paramount Network, 1996–1999). This series—of which Heckerling wrote and directed four episodes and executive produced another eighteen (as well as retaining a credit as series creator on all episodes)—is notable for an increased use, and salience, of formal distancing devices by comparison with the film, including highly stylised costumes, ostentatious uses of non-diegetic sound in connection with particular themes and an even more extensive use of voiceover, which is occasionally requisitioned by secondary characters. Like its predecessor, it is arch in tone, and also features many of the cast members from the film, namely Stacey Dash (Dionne), Donald Faison (Murray), Elisa Donovan (Amber), Twink Caplan (Miss Geist) and Wallace Shawn (Mr Hall), although Rachel Blanchard replaces Silverstone as Cher. Needless to say, converting Clueless to a sitcom format literalises the cyclicality with which teenpics are imbued. The television show featured in I Could Never, however, has Stacey Dash’s Dionne in the central role. Given that the mostly White (and upper-middle-class) nature of Heckerling’s film worlds, alongside textual naivety around the intersectionality of issues of race, class and gender, has been seen as a limitation for the progressive politics of her work,31 the

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promotion of Dash to star billing is not insignificant—although featuring an ethnic minority in the lead only in an embedded narrative appears something of a pyrrhic victory. More relevant to the question of the film’s blatant artifice is the way in which the cast and crew of the show are almost as improbably mannered and plastic as the world depicted—a stereotypically flamboyant gay hairdresser character in particular. Furthermore, textual and extratextual worlds are continually levelled by pop cultural references that disrupt the relationship between sign and referent. Thus, the character of Screech (Dustin Diamond) from well-known high school television show Saved by the Bell (NBC, 1989–1993) is referenced within the embedded show; a nonsense acoustic approximation of French, ‘the language of love’, replaces the real thing in a scene where Rosie is being courted by her love interest Adam (Paul Rudd); and most tellingly of all, Rosie is perplexed by the news that her ex-husband is writing the script for a ‘reality’ television show. I Could Never also includes teen rites-of-passage elements by paying a degree of attention to the teenage Izzie (Saoirse Ronan, who would later star as the older teen protagonist of mother and daughter-focused Ladybird). It equally deploys adolescent themes and aesthetics in relation to its much older main character, in conjunction with overtly deconstructing generational categories through overlaps in characters’ trajectories, in a fashion reminiscent of the older-younger woman age-swap comedy teeenpic subcategory that includes films such as Freaky Friday (Mark Waters, 2003) and 13 Going on 30 (Gary Winick, 2004) and tallying with definitions that see the teen in teenpics as a mode of behaviour between immaturity and maturity (see Colling 2017: 4). Indeed, themes of generational (ex)change and ageing are explicit in the film beyond the issues of texistence raised by the evolving versions of Clueless. For instance, during an early scene in which Rosie goes jogging and Mother Nature (Tracey Ullman) appears to her as a know-it-all, middle-aged harridan to tell her that no matter how slim and youthful an appearance she maintains, she can’t get away from the realities of mutability, her ‘internal organs […] rotting’. The ageing theme is developed through Rosie’s relationship with actor Adam, eleven years her junior—a number made more pronounced by the fact that Rosie is forty and Adam is twenty-nine. While Rosie’s anxiety about going to trendy bars with Adam and inhabiting a youthful role at his side speaks to both the performative qualities of generational identity (when you get to her age, she quips, all your clothes become ‘vintage’) and also Driscoll’s observation that notions of adolescence

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have bled out into adult media forms (in Smith 2017: 13), it also highlights the staged nature of courtship and dating rituals as a whole: the social construction of coupling culture and, to an extent, the most notionally subjective and embodied experience of erotic attraction itself. This idea is expressed formally by the externalisation of the process of falling for someone: in a point-of-view shot from Rosie’s perspective, Adam fulfils the criterion for love she has earlier elaborated to Izzie by appearing to her in slow motion. This breaking down of the barriers between externally constructed discourse and internal, bodily affect is quintessentially Heckerling. It is noteworthy that the chirpily-cum-inanely delivered theme song to the Clueless show describes Cher’s life as ‘literally a Polaroid of perfection’ (my emphasis). The notion of the literal Polaroid, like that of Mel Gibson’s Hamlet, once more evokes the simultaneity of discourse’s status as highly fake yet our experience of it as ‘real’ and/or affectively meaningful. Even more extreme in this vein is a metaphor used by Izzie in I Could Never when she describes teenage angst as a ‘wedgie on your soul’. Such a conflation of concepts associated with extremes of corporeality and contrastingly ‘transcendent’ immateriality is not incidental to Heckerling’s project. Just as Rosie ignores Mother Nature, who evaporates as she doggedly pursues her laps of the running track, earlier fears about and a brief breaking off of the relationship with Adam give way by the end of the film to a provisional union and an embrace of living in the immediacy of the present. Although any attempt by the narrative to dispel taboos around relationships between older women and younger men is severely tempered by Pfeiffer’s extreme conformity to ideals of feminine perfection in terms of appearance, suggesting that cultural choices can rewrite the script of biological determinism is an act of faith from a feminist perspective. All these examples bespeak, then, a highly poststructuralist notion of discourse—in this case encompassing both metaphor and indexical image—as supplanting unmediated or referential notions of the real outside representation. This concept is central to Heckerling’s work in ways that demonstrate a desire to rescue discursive practices of signification from being dislocated from the lived experience of individual subjects of any gender. Indeed, Stern’s analysis of Clueless foregrounds the non-­ contradictory impulses of what she calls ethnography and rhetoric at play in Heckerling’s films (Stern 2000: 229). Similarly, in an interview, Amy Heckerling has claimed that the keys to successful filmmaking are ‘to love your characters and to know how to make your audience feel how you

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want them to’ (in Cole and Dale 1993: 115): in other words, the generic qualities of her films do not detract from emotional engagement—including with characters even as they are, in the generic framework, inevitably endowed with archetypal qualities. Rather, as in the examples of the fashion motifs and soundtrack in Clueless, it is precisely the appeal these elements make to a mass audience that ensures their affective properties, through the Tomkinsean generic ‘sensitisation and generalisation’ discussed in Chap. 2. Ideas of collectivity, group address and relational identity are altogether crucial to the power of Heckerling’s genre pieces, just as group dynamics run to the heart of teen narratives. Moreover, Jean Schwind (2008) has examined the substitution of horizontal models of ‘coaching’ for vertical ones in Fast Times, where older peers are revealed to be as clueless as contemporaries, while Alice Leppert (2014) makes similar claims for Clueless’ reinvention of the makeover narrative as no longer absorbed through didactic magazine articles but rather enacted and circulated between friends. According to Leppert, indeed, Clueless had a considerable impact on retail fashion and most likely magazine culture too: its ‘glossy look and instruction in the rules of dating, fashion, and popularity helped pave the way for the girly culture of the late 1990s’ (ibid.: 147). This is a typical example of the tendency of Heckerling’s work to exceed its textual frames. I have already suggested that the director  cross-fertilises between film genres. Moreover, the existence of a serialised television version of Clueless, which in turn features in a highly autobiographical film narrative about a media producer in Los Angeles, muddies further both generic boundaries and the parameters of ‘reality’ and text. Clueless has furthermore given rise to several spin-offs and thus, as Kyra Hunting has shown, provides a striking example of convergence culture—not to mention a rare instance of a female-focused franchise, many of whose senior production roles were occupied by female executives. The film’s success was a platform for ‘a complete multimedia brand’, including, in addition to the television show, a video game and twenty-one novels, all featuring the film’s idiosyncratic, vernacular and referential linguistic style (Hunting 2014: 150, 145). Of particular interest are the interactive properties of the video game, in which players can, for example, take part in makeover and dressing experiences. As Hunting notes, the concept of worldmaking as integral to convergence may appear to privilege ‘male-identified genres’ such as sci-fi and fantasy (ibid.: 147). On the other hand, there are readily adducible

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explanations for women’s marked prominence in the comparably (­ inter-) active domain of fan fiction, as well as fan studies more generally (where even the academic field was originally dominated by female theorists such as Constance Penley and Camille Bacon-Smith), when we consider the prominence of erotics in this domain, emblematised by slash fiction and its study. As ever, I refer with this term to an inclination towards and potential for intersubjective mobility including felt experience. Both technological inventiveness and fantasy in the service of such aims are certainly key aspects of the new generic directions being taken by recent women’s filmmaking as a whole and Heckerling’s pioneering oeuvre in particular; and the move into interactive space merely extends the drive I have identified in her creations to involve consumers as much in a (shared) embodied experience as in hermeneutic games.32 Melancholic Genericity in Vamps (2012) Vamps superimposes a female buddy comedy narrative onto a fantasy backdrop by placing at its centre a pair of undead but non-violent female vampires. In its focus on unthreatening vampires, it follows in the footsteps of Twilight (2008), analysed next, and other texts of the recent female-­ accented teen fantasy fad. This trend builds on fantasy and horror’s history of hybridising with teen films stretching back at least to 1950s B-movies (see Doherty 2002: 115), and which Shary (2014: 218) ascribes to teen tastes for the melodramatic, as well as the success of the Buffy the Vampire Slayer franchise post-1990.33 If teenpics epitomise the kind of productively heightened genericity that is the concern of this book, it is suggestive that Driscoll takes teen horror ‘as a beginning point for discussing the importance of teen film’s systematic use of repetition and stereotype, including in the way it twists repetition to new ends’ (2011: 83, my emphasis). Heckerling’s ‘vamps’ are played by Alicia Silverstone and Krysten Ritter, the latter an actress associated with death through her role in the international hit television show Breaking Bad (AMC, 2008–2013) and with the Gothic through several of her television and film roles including Woke Up Dead (Sony Pictures Television, 2009) and 27 Dresses (Anne Fletcher, 2008). A very modest box-office performance is more likely to be explained by a limited distribution push following the poor returns of Heckerling’s Loser (2000) and indeed I Could Never (thanks to a high budget partly ascribable to the casting of Pfeiffer) than innate qualities, in an instance of industry fickleness  that sees women’s ‘failures’

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disproportionately affected (Cobb 2015: 51). The presence of various actors from Clueless and other Heckerling texts, now familiar as her ‘muses’, meanwhile points up the extent to which her work pastiches not only teenpics and teen fantasy but itself. In this case, the narrative conceit is that the pair of friends are frozen at the age at which they were turned into vampires. For Ritter’s Stacy, this is in her twenties. Silverstone’s Goody, turned as a married mother-of-two in 1840, is considerably older in both human and vampire years; however, she lies about both ages to make Stacy feel more at ease and spends the narrative posing as a student with the wisdom of a middle-aged woman who has seen the historical shifts of two centuries. Similarly to the way we have seen that an adolescent sensibility tends to transcend the teen years in contemporary culture (and certainly films featuring college-age characters can sometimes be seen as teenpics [Smith 2017: 14], or at least establish comparable horizons of expectation), Vamps’ set-up literalises many of the themes around ageing and the discrepancy it introduces between mental self-perception and external appearance that are to the fore in I Could Never—as well as affording further possibilities for pan-historical sartorial ensembles, as Goody puts together the styles she likes best from different eras. At the end of this film, the vampires decide to return to human form, in order to allow Stacy to have a baby. This requires them to kill the egotistical and rapacious vampire who originally turned them. This character is played by Sigourney Weaver, a star whose (gendered) overdeterminacy is acknowledged and exploited by the character’s temporary transformation, after being stabbed, into a kind of computer graphic skeleton, whose shoddy, superimposed look matches the film’s campy collage aesthetic as a whole and, by evoking a video game, supports the argument that ‘[p]astiche/genre stereotypes allow the viewer to accept an increase in the level of “signification” of the directedness of fiction because the decrease of freedom in the fiction is offset by […] underlining the spectator as player’ (Grodal 1999: 229). Killing their creator means the vampires assume their real age—Stacy thus becomes 40 but Goody is now 171, so her conversion means her imminent death. In the final moments of the film, in line with its time-bending postmodern approach, the (cosmetically) aged Goody’s life flashes before her in a series of shots of events occurring in New York’s Times Square that answers directly to the question of the links between history and the individual subject, including women. Thus, we see from her point of view the vista of the square— surely one of the most frequently represented in the history of cinema, as

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well as one of the most integral to the history of the performing arts in the USA—dissolve into earlier, remembered images of the same location: initially in colour, the temporal slippage signalled only by the replacement of contemporary brand advertising with retro avatars, then black and white, with poor and flickering image quality suggesting aged celluloid, redolent of the early years of cinema in the twentieth century (Fig. 3.6), and later sepia for nineteenth-century memories of her husband and children. Significant moments in Goody’s own life—notably around romance and motherhood—are replayed before her eyes, interspersed with cutaways to her face transfixed with wistful longing, which prompts Stacy to squeeze her hand in sisterly comradeship and embodied empathy, all to the gently melancholic strains of Gene Austin’s ‘A Garden in the Rain’ from 1929. The successive layering of different eras in memory is conveyed by the alternation of disparate periods, marked by differences of costume and graphics, as well as by the gradual dissolving of various sections of the image into other eras in such a way that elements of each

Fig. 3.6  Vamps: black and white and poor image quality evoke celluloid memories of former eras

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temporarily coexist, mimicking the subjective experience of recollection. Interestingly, these events are momentarily interrupted halfway through by an interlude in which Goody tastes her first food of the last couple of centuries and appears equally overwhelmed by this experience, conveyed by her widening eyes and a shared smile of incredulity with Stacy, who is doing the same, accompanied only by the banal pronouncement, ‘Oh, my God.’ The materiality of bodily subjectivity, which is best expressed both intra- and extratextually (for the viewer) by a (nonetheless discursively coded) exchange of looks, is underscored here as heavily as the materiality of the cinematic image—and even more so, through retroactive contrast, when Goody literally dematerialises into dust at the end of the scene, to leave Stacy in tears: as William James has observed, it is in experiencing thunder that we experience the silence that preceded it (in Thompson 2007: 328). Online discussion forums testify to the emotive power of this scene, with several viewers reporting being moved to tears, regardless of the film’s extreme anti-realism.34 Clearly onscreen deaths, not to mention scenes of romantic love and maternal intimacy, are classic ‘tear-jerkers’; however, it seems to me that part of this sequence’s affective force derives from the important role played in it specifically by evocations of pastness and transience. These are further reinforced for many viewers by the presence of Clueless’ Silverstone, now herself older at thirty-five, even without cosmetic enhancement: a prime example of texistence conceived as transient in the sense that the inseparability of the mutable status of media objects from that of real subjects (off screen) is underlined (on screen). The loss of the past is of course the defining feature of the affective states of mourning and melancholia theorised by Freud (2005). Texts that recall other texts, and thus point up the absence of the experiences associated with those earlier texts, partially through recreating them, mimic and prompt (the experience of) such affective states. This includes melancholia’s characteristic fixation on the absent object through trying imaginatively to reconstruct or cling onto it. From this perspective, heightened genericity reveals itself once again to be well equipped to tap into viewers’ feelings of nostalgia, whose experiencers are described by Susan Stewart (1993: 143) as ‘enamoured of distance, not of the referent itself’. The shadowy suggestion of prior texts, whose specificity may well be lost to the conscious mind but whose affective outline endures like the stain on a photographic negative, is likely to create the bittersweet sensation of nostalgia, which is itself characterised by the co-presence of material absence

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with mental presence. In this light, knowledge contributes to—rather than ameliorating or even working alongside—sentimentality. This may be more or less conscious—less so when it comes to a vague sense of familiarity—in a distinction that parallels Freud’s account of the difference between mourning, for a specific object, and melancholia, for an undefined one. It is important to note here that a text such as Vamps’ use of such pastiche falls from this perspective at one end of the spectrum of how pastiche works. That is, if heightened genericity is akin to pastiche as working through knowing imitation, then Vamps is relatively unusual in the corpus of contemporary female-directed films for placing more stress on the ‘knowing’ than on the ‘imitation’—hence relative distance coexisting with felt presence. However, these two values are always admixed in different proportions in heightened genre films’ address. Indeed, it is relevant, when we consider Vamps channelling affect from Clueless, that while I have suggested the affective qualities of the earlier film are frequently linked to exuberance and vitality, at least one exception to this pattern is provided by a moment towards the climax of that film, during the ‘low’ prior to the final act’s union of Cher and Josh, when Cher’s father tells her he has not seen so much good done around the house since the days of her mother. This unexpectedly mournful detail within such a narrative—at which I have witnessed viewers (including a male friend born in 1979) well up—can be seen as a figure for the push and pull of presence and distance within the film’s generic aesthetics, certainly as addressed to and experienced by older viewers, including as these age over time and one generation becomes the next. In psycho-physiological terms, the work of the states of both mourning and melancholia can be seen, in Eugenie Brinkema’s summary, as ‘the processual labour involved in directing libidinal attachments after a loss’. She notes how, because of the revelatory quality attributed to melancholia especially in later Freud, for whom the depressive had a keener eye for the truth than others, recent theorists of loss such as David Eng and David Kazanjian, as well as Butler, have sought to attribute to these experiences a creative and sensual quality (see Brinkema 2014: 65–68). This concept of re-direction of psychic energies chimes with enactive theorisations of emotion, which have defined the latter as a (not necessarily conscious) ‘endogenous initiation and direction of behaviour outward into the world’ (Thompson 2007: 365). Viewed from this angle, empathetic engagement with other subjectivities itself has an affective force, in the sense of

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implying an opening up onto the world whose parallels with erotics are again salient—in the words of the (queer) photographer and writer of intimate life Hervé Guibert, ‘[d]esire is not localised, it’s just a desire for closeness’ (in Besson 2017: ‘1984’, loc. 849, my translation). The human longing for closeness—complementing the nostalgic longing for earlier fullness—can obtain whether the other subjectivities concerned are constructed as fictional (onscreen) or notionally implied through a sense of shared collective identity that transcends textuality to encompass interactive engagement, including fan cultures. But narratives that colour this experience with a sense of shifting temporality up the stakes further: loss is surely the catalyst for the most extreme emotional states, characterised by a feeling of physical lack brought about by temporal knowledge (to never see, touch etc. someone or something again). It therefore demands radical shifts in psychic energies, eliciting that familiar sensation of sadness, yet simultaneously a pleasurable, inspirational feeling of opening up to the outside world and others in it, cued by sequences like the climax of Vamps. The importance of these arguments for gendering discursive communication should be apparent by now. If I have argued that Heckerling’s feminist strategy relies on a bold reimagining of material realities through tropes of liberating fantasy, the pertinence of the observation that ‘ongoing struggles with the potentialities of the past enable unique possibilities to imagine the world otherwise, to speak to (or for) and grapple with the new’ (Brinkema 2014: 68) is clear. Indeed, it is no accident that mourning and melancholia have been valorised for the related struggles of queer constituencies at times of oppression (Guibert himself was publicly associated with the AIDS crisis), that ‘[the] stubborn lingering of pastness […] is a hallmark of queer affect: a “revolution” in the old sense of the world, as turning back’ (Freeman 2010: 12). Queer and feminist camps can thus leverage that which is left for dead by future-oriented cultures and the strong affects associated with its loss to apostrophise and ‘engroup’ new constituencies across gender—and, to paraphrase Freeman, this divergence from teleology can afford ‘perhaps […,] a state to enjoy, rather than just mourn’ (ibid.: 12, xiii). For Heckerling’s part, as Lynch shows, the director’s requisitioning of genre to her own ends is in the first place a clear example of what John Frow, building on Michel de Certeau, has called tactics, the ‘tactful’ way in which unauthorised users temporarily occupy culturally valorised discourses (in Lynch 2003: 84). Additionally, the tactical pairing of narratives designed to elicit affect with extreme referentiality addresses a shared

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human subject position defined by the interpenetration of the mind and the body as sites of imaginative flight. To conclude by giving language the attention it deserves in Heckerling’s universe, we might look to the title of the opening episode of the Clueless television show, ‘As If a Girl’s Reach Should Exceed Her Grasp’: an ironically feminised twist on Robert Browning’s much-quoted lines, ‘Ah, but a man’s reach should exceed his grasp,// Or what’s a heaven for?’ Heckerling’s teen and related films strategically reach via discourse through beyond the potential limits of such codified communication, towards the phenomenological spectatorial response, in a way that makes hazy and thus exceeds the limits of ‘speaker’, ‘listener’ and ‘language’ itself.

Twilight (Catherine Hardwicke, 2008) as Teen Gothic It has already been noted that one of the most recently consolidated and major developments in teen story production exemplified by Vamps and epitomised by the Twilight phenomenon is the rise of written and audiovisual narratives in which such tales hybridise with elements of Gothic fantasy and horror. This wave can be dated back some decades, including films such as Once Bitten (Howard Storm, 1985), Rockula (Luca Bercovici, 1990), The Craft (Andrew Fleming, 1996), Tamara (Jeremy Haft, 2006) and the Harry Potter series (2001–2011). It is perhaps logical, given women’s strong association with Gothic literature and a 2010s ‘boom in studio/mainstream horror film created by-women/for-women unmatched in the genre’s history’ (Fazekas and Vena 2020: 230), that more recent examples of the trend are well represented within women’s filmmaking, including by Hardwicke’s Red Riding Hood (2011), Peirce’s Carrie and, adding a period twist on the outskirts of Hollywood, Coppola’s The Beguiled.35 While building on the increased cultural interest in female-­ oriented Gothic narratives since at least the 1990s (see Spooner 2006; Tincknell 2009), the first cinematic instalment of the Twilight series, based on Stephanie Meyer’s wildly popular book (and book series), has been described as ‘the first woman-centric horror phenomenon in modern [post-1980s] cinema history’ (Fazekas and Vena 2020: 232), and as such can be seen as a catalyst for the production of the later films. The Twilight movies alone have taken over a billion dollars, leaving aside book and merchandise sales and less easily quantifiable impact such as the vast body of

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fan creativity the series of fictions has spawned, including, infamously, the Fifty Shades of Grey book and film franchise.36 Moreover, Hardwicke’s film has elicited responses through an almost peerlessly extensive web of references across temporalities and media (along with the  spin-off merchandise) extending backwards and forwards from its appearance. As is well known, Twilight’s action—limited here to the first (book and) film, directed by Hardwicke—concerns a burgeoning love affair between a seemingly ordinary American teenager named Bella Swan (Kristen Stewart) and an impossibly handsome and altogether physically and mentally superior vampire, Edward Cullen (Robert Pattinson). Thus, it is situated at the intersection of genres including teen romance, fantasy and horror. Its success has been registered by cultural and feminist studies, giving rise to a large body of scholarship that includes a considerable focus on generic affiliation, very often situated with a trans- or inter-media purview and understood largely as a function of narrative.37 Within this corpus there remains, however, scant attention to questions of film style let alone authorship, with the majority of feminist and other politically ideologically inclined discussions focused on representation and/or (nonetheless extremely useful) reception studies, largely divorced from issues of form.38 It is evident by now that films’ adaptation status can be a stumbling block for engagement with questions of directorial virtuosity. In the case of the Twilight franchise, it is the novel series’ author Meyer whose biographical legend principally informs the narratives’ reception as a whole (Larsson and Steiner 2011b: 20–21). The situation is further complicated for feminist readings by the fact that, while Hardwicke directed only the first film, after rumours of creative differences with the studio in relation to the other three instalments, screenwriter Melissa Rosenberg adapted all the books for the screen and has made public statements about the feminist creative choices she made in doing so (Kapurch 2012: 195). Nonetheless, the lack of critical attention to Hardwicke is remarkable when we consider that Twilight broke the record for the highest-grossing opening for any film directed by a woman (ibid.: 183). As Ernest Mathijs and Jamie Sexton observe, a gendered double standard comes into sharp focus in light of the cult followings of all of Hardwicke’s films: ‘If one compares this to the rushed eagerness with which male directors such as Eli Roth or Quentin Tarantino are lauded through cult receptions, a picture emerges of cultism and auteurism as masculinist’ (2011: 75–76).39 The present analysis seeks to correct this imbalance by analysing Twilight as an example of genre-mixing lending itself to genre-­heightening.

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It will begin with a consideration of the key genres in which Hardwicke’s film can be situated, with a view to probing its knowing yet participatory relationship with these. The Gothic emerges as a master category for the analysis, emphasising a habit of ‘revealing while shrouding’ (Branch 2010: 64) shared by the mode and this film. In the latter case, this means highlighting the artificiality of generic elements while fully inviting the Twilight viewer’s willing multi-sensory ‘seduction’ (Wilson 2011, 2014: xii) by these, in a manner that simultaneously resonates with Pamela Craig and Martin Fradley’s (2010: 87) description of teen horror in terms of an enduring stress on ‘heightened subjective experience and psychological perception, appealing to emotional rather than objective realism’ (original emphasis). Discussion of such generic affiliations will further extend to including the genre of adaptation and valorise Hardwicke’s authorship in this context. Finally, I will explore the ways in which such an overall theory of textual work arising by and large from formal qualities of the film undercuts the many extant intratextual ideological readings of Twilight, as well as how it may complement and be enhanced by appraisals of the activities and experiences of the series’ massive fan base. ‘Cross-Gender’ Generic Participations Not only has Hardwicke been largely sidelined by criticism, but both the Twilight franchise and her film itself have occasioned significant negative attention from fans, critics and academics. The first group, sometimes crossing over into the second two, have often anchored their reactions in questions of genre. Here, the film’s adherence to some of the codes of genres identified with both feminine and masculine cultures, respectively, has presented predictable challenges. In particular, many horror aficionados were disappointed with the lack of gore on display in the series, and which is especially true of the first film.40 In Hardwicke’s and Meyer’s world, Edward and his family are ‘vegetarian’ vampires who only kill animals. Not only is Edward highly attractive and fang-free but his attitude towards Bella appears more that of protective patriarch than deviant menace, as he shields her from dangers such as the threat of sexual violence by strange men and draws on his centuries-long life to instruct her in culture. Some also critiqued Meyer as a bad genre fan or interpreter who had misunderstood the conventions of the vampire narrative; however, as Anne Morey notes, referencing Nina Auerbach’s work on sympathetic or friendly

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vampires, ‘there is a long lineage of mutability in vampire lore, suggesting that those who seek to police the genre are themselves potentially misreading it’ (2012c: 10). Such a reversing of the poles of the genre-text relationship echoes my own approach to this dialectic, according to which films ‘define’ genres in constantly evolving ways rather than being bound to be inside or outside the latters’ confines. The Gothic recommends itself as a conceptual tool for apprehending Twilight, as it has encompassed at different times, and non-exhaustively, the various genres strongly identifiable with it. These include, to recap, vampire stories, horror, fantasy, teen narratives and romance, as well as fairy tales. The Gothic novel has often been seen as comprising romance and horror—female and male, in Anne Williams’ account of the mode’s poetics (Driscoll 2012: 96). Moreover, in line with the fact that all the female-directed teen Gothic films cited at the start of this section represent adaptations and/or remakes of pre-existing artefacts, thus rendering visible heightened genre’s overt engagement with these, ‘Gothic as a genre is most profoundly concerned with the past, conveyed through both narrative settings and narrative interruptions of the past into the present[. It is] profoundly concerned with its own past, self-referentially dependent on other stories, familial images and narrative structures, intertextual allusions’ (Spooner 2006: 9–10). It should be noted that this description, while transhistorically framed, appears in a study of contemporary Gothic and shares much in common with conceptions of postmodern Gothic in particular (as opposed to, though evolving out of, the mode’s strong eighteenth- and nineteenth-century [pre-]modernist tradition). For instance, Alex Link (2018: 70) has suggested that despite (or perhaps consonant with) Jameson’s dismissal of the paradigm as exhausted, ‘postmodernism’s Gothic’ haunts his Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism as ‘the indeterminacy constitutive of postmodernism itself’. Such accounts chime strongly with teen Gothic especially, since teen Goth identities are shaped via performance. Catherine Spooner (2006: 87) adds to this observation that fashion consumption represents both self-expression and capitalist exploitation for teens. This paradox—also explored in the teen-focused Clueless, Marie Antoinette and The Bling Ring—foregrounds girls’ paradigmatic status as teen consumers and thus teen Gothic’s interpenetration with issues particular to girlhood. Emphasising this aspect of the Twilight franchise, Catherine Driscoll suggests that it appeals to young female audiences as a simultaneous adoption and rejection of contemporary girl culture. This is astutely argued with

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attention to the films’ screen genre affiliations, notably constellating the ‘feminine’ melodrama of the ‘suffering bride’ alongside the ‘masculine’ horror film with its final girl (Driscoll 2012: 96). It is quite accurate that the first film sports, in addition to its offbeat Emo soundtrack, a Bella who combines elements of the passive melodramatic—or romantic—heroine, not to mention a habit of dreaming in the prototypically feminised girl-­ space of the bedroom, with the unconventional pluck and somewhat androgynous look of horror’s final girl (see Clover 1992: 48–52). At the same time, her unfeminised appearance and courting of trouble bears comparison with the ‘angry girl’ (Roberts 2002) and ‘tough girl’ (Shary 2005: 90–95) archetypes of earlier teen narratives and as such overlaps to a limited extent with the intensified recurrence of this figure in recent teenpics by women, especially Kusama’s Girlfight (2000) and Jennifer’s Body (2009) but additionally, as Smith (2017: 17) also notes, the Hunger Games and Divergent franchises, which are based on female-authored novels (as well as the French Girlhood [Céline Sciamma, 2014]). Notably, this styling is a specificity of Hardwicke’s adaptation—in the book Bella wore lacy blouses rather than lumberjack shirts—and paying attention to these additions goes beyond Angie Fazekas and Dan Vena’s (2020) claims that Twilight’s focus on Bella’s desiring subjectivity simply rejects a putative masculine identification figure, point of view construction and spectatorial address that had been common in earlier horror films. More radically, in fact, the intersection of differently gender-coded qualities in this film’s protagonist and entire diegetic world foregrounds the way in which a rejection of binary gender labels via a model of interpermeability equates to a destabilisation of cultural and genre categories more generally; the laying bare of ‘the genericity of social gender’ through analysis of genre storytelling (Gledhill 2017: x) cuts both ways. Inside/Outside Culture, Genre, Discourse Generic teen girl culture is just one of the domains in which inside-outside dynamics can be seen to govern the generic textuality and address of Twilight, for which entire series of narratives liminality is something of a byword. This is most obviously true in thematic terms, as Edward is undead and Bella wants—and in later instalments manages—to become so, but it also pervades generic aesthetics. The Gothic itself is arguably typified by a vacillation between the forms of postmodern surface described above and a seemingly counteractive drive to express interiority, thrown

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into relief by its links to Romanticism (Spooner 2006: 23, 27). As numerous commentators have pointed out, this is made overt in the novels through references to various keystone Romantic literary works. These are substituted in Hardwicke’s film by the extensive use of the natural world to externalise aspects of the characters’ selves. In particular, the verdant rainforests around Bella’s hometown of Forks are the first thing we see and the setting of the film’s most romantic scenes, where she and Edward are enveloped in the scenery as they lie on the forest floor and camera pulls out above the canopy of trees; or when they fly together and land in a treetop, where it swirls like the mist around and away from them and the greenery. The pertinence of this ‘wet garden’ location for a story about female sexual awakening are blatant and invoke Romantic urtexts such as Wuthering Heights (which Bella repeatedly reads in the novel), a story comparably focused on nature-culture dialectics—not to mention its recent female-directed, landscape-heavy film adaptation (Andrea Arnold, UK 2011). Indeed, female sexuality has a strong tradition of self-­expression through nature in feminist cinema produced outside Hollywood, from auteur Jane Campion’s The Piano to the more middlebrow French adaptation Lady Chatterley (Pascale Ferran, France/Belgian 2006), where its address has often been theorised as haptic.41 Just as the Gothic takes in both surface and depth, Twilight works the interrelated seams of sensory-­ emotive evocation and cognitively produced signification together. There is no meaningful way to separate these scenes’ sensuous effects from their history of connoting (female-accented) sensuality: our sensory-emotive ‘insides’ are acted on and shaped by outside forces unavoidably embedded in culture and the discursive; indeed, Grodal suggests ‘romantic’ uses of the natural world (specifically, weather) drawn from melodrama, broadly defined, have been ‘(ab)used […] in music videos to simulate and evoke strong sensations of contact’ (Grodal 1999: 258), further expanding the scope of their extremely clichéd nature. Where this analysis may diverge from his is in associating their deployment with a blockage of ‘[en]active’ engagement: even if sensory experience is also the aim of such images, this appears a clear case of generic imitation so heightened as to also be ‘actively’ knowable as such. Little surprise, then, that the film refuses to polarise nature and culture, most obviously by having the vampires embody aspects of both the primitive (the urge to kill) and the highly rarefied (evidenced by Edward’s taste for fine art and classical music). While Karen Nykvist, arguing the same point, notes that in Twilight, ‘the body is always a sign, from the very start’ and ‘the body is inscribed with

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history’ (2011: 35), Tara K.  Parmiter implies that the choice of ‘old growth’ forests including many creepers and vines in the story further points to history. If for Parmiter the Cullens’ home represents a Gothic resolution of eco-phobia (2011: 221, 229), the inseparability of culture and nature is only emphasised by its architecturally cutting-edge openness (Fig.  3.7).42 The use of pale green for institutional spaces especially (though much of the film is desaturated or bathed in a light green tint), and notably the hospital where Edward’s vampire ‘father’ Carlisle works, also bridges the divide, combining the dark jades of the forest with sterile white. Indeed, Twilight offers a frenzy of generic signification, both broadly and narrowly defined. The choice of the vampire motif is important in this regard. Not only have vampires become associated with an urgent drive to signify discursively in general (Williamson 2005: 2), but Morey’s examination of Jane Eyre’s influence on Twilight illuminates their specific aptness as signifiers of romance, as an ideology based on extreme gender difference. As she points out, the ineffable qualities of yearning for the other are figured by a difference of species and even eschatological category standing in for, or enhancing, gender difference (2012a: 20). Here, parallels with the Gothic sublime stand out, when we consider that this has been defined by putting Lyotard’s pronouncements on ‘“the lack of reality” of reality’ into dialogue with Burke’s ideas of the sublime as rooted in terror. Drawing on these thinkers, Vijay Mishra defines the Gothic sublime as a state of mind characterised by pushing the imagination to crisis point (1994: 27–28). Thus, Edward represents vertiginous, dangerous desire

Fig. 3.7  The Cullens’ home in Twilight splices nature with culture

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for absolute otherness beyond expression. This is one meaning ascribable to his kind’s sparkling, luminous skin, particular to this series and rendered memorably by Hardwicke: a desire to signify ‘beyond signification’, through shifting effervescence and befuddling dazzle (Fig. 3.8).43 On the one hand, noting Mary Celeste Kearney’s association of sparkle with postfeminist girlhoods and celebrity culture in popular media, as well as Marina Warner’s work on enchanted shine in fairy tales, Colling (2017: 68) has argued that bright lights in contemporary teenpics ‘make visibility a visceral event’. In addition to this (already generically hybridised) teenpic resonance, such a use of supernatural species difference to exaggerate the conventional romcom trope of gender opposition makes Edward’s highlighted difference a prime example of genre hybridity lending itself to heightened genericity. Despite romantic yearnings being common in teenpics from Dirty Dancing (Emile Ardolino, 1987) to Edward Scissorhands (Tim Burton, 1990), Mad Love (Antonia Bird, 1995) or The Virgin Suicides (Sofia Coppola, 2001), the centrality of romance to Twilight was novel in the contemporary teen horror cycle. This foregrounds both the romantic and horror elements as such to the viewer by way of contrast; yet each still works together in an intensified rather than antithetical way. A very great deal of further cultural archetypes have been persuasively examined as key informants of Twilight’s enormous social resonance and popularity; indeed, the film’s mixing of such ideas is perfectly attuned to pastiche’s evocation of remembered impressions rather than one-to-one mapping. Its intertextuality with fairy tales, for example, recalling Carl Jung’s use of these in his theory of the collective unconscious (1968:

Fig. 3.8  Robert Pattinson as Edward instantiates the Gothic sublime

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56–57), or Bruno Bettelheim’s account of them as sites where ‘internal processes are externalized and become comprehensible’ (in Tenga 2011: 111), speaks directly to heightened genre’s mass recognisability as a mode of address.44 Suggestive, too, is Jackie C. Horne’s use of the franchise to argue that more attention needs to be paid to the emotional pull of the fantasy genre’s Tolkienian Secondary World creation alongside its intellectual engagement (2012: 45; see also Hui 2016). However, just as significant for Twilight’s hailing of a spectator at once inside and able to stand back from the text as discourse is its deployment of medium-specific generic and stylistic features. Here, the deployment of teenpic elements proves particularly double-edged, both emphasising and deriving affect from hackneyed cliché. According to Driscoll, a teenpic framework rendered apposite by the centralising of the ‘twinned domains’ of school and the bedroom lends even the Twilight novels (and the first especially, if such spaces are determining) a ‘cinematic style’ (2012: 98). Locations certainly immediately identify Hardwicke’s film with the high school movie subgenre, be it the gymnasium, cafeteria or hallways. Further, the nondescript appearance of Bella’s bedroom, at odds with the lavish pinks and feminine accoutrements supposedly more typical of girls’ rooms, is made a point of focus. Thus, when at the start of the film Bella relocates from Phoenix to live with her father, he says he had a shopkeeper pick out the bedspread in a (gender-neutral) bluish purple, adding, ‘You like purple, right?’ These lines serve to illustrate Bella’s father’s status as an overdetermined emotionally remote man and her solitude at the centre of a divorced couple, refracting the backstory of several Romantic literary heroines left without a family. But they also underline her ambivalent relationship to girl culture specifically as enshrined by teenpics. (Intentional or not, Bella’s voiceover registering moments earlier that the house has just one bathroom also ties the absent visual imaginary of girl culture to pampering and wealth.) If Bella’s teenpic bedroom in some ways departs from extreme clichés of this space, while acknowledging this in line with its ‘alternative’ Gothic sheen, it nonetheless functions in much the typical way. The cult high school film Heathers (Michael Lehmann, 1988) is a relevant precursor here, in offering another alternative and highly intelligent girl working through adolescence through her own voice in her room (in that case through a diary rather than straight voiceover format). Bella’s interactions with her peers at school are presented in a similarly generically self-aware fashion, when she suggests to the school

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newspaper’s editors a list of popular topics on which to run a story that bears close resemblance to rites-of-passage film plots: teen drinking, eating disorders and, more parodically, speedo-padding on the gym team. However, more obviously channelling affect through (now extreme) cliché during school sequences are aspects of style, including the generic look of these spaces, and most strikingly the use of slow-motion views of characters. This has become a staple of the genre deployed to memorably excessive-ironic effect, for instance, in supernatural high school horror The Faculty (Robert Rodriguez, 1999) as well as teen werewolf film Ginger Snaps (John Fawcett, Canada 2000), also cited by Driscoll as a forerunner to Twilight thanks to its suggestion of female adolescent sexuality threatening to spill out of bounds (2012: 98). Here it is first used quite subtly to show Bella on a school walkway. However, the power of slow motion to endow events with augmented significance and emotive impact is mined in the Gothic answer to romcom’s ‘meet cute’ sequence where the starcrossed Edward and Bella first lock eyes in the school cafeteria, when for Driscoll the music and editing ‘invite the audience to hold its breath at the appearance of Edward’s disdainful beauty’ (ibid.). If this—nonetheless affecting—moment’s reliance on ossified convention (a convention acknowledged, as we have seen, in I Could Never Be Your Woman) wasn’t itself tongue-in-­cheek enough, it is surely sent up by a mirroring one when Bella enters the biology class and a fan blowing behind her evokes overdetermined views of female display (epitomised by the iconic sequence from The Woman in Red [Gene Wilder, USA 1984] where the title character dances above a vent, itself a reference to Marilyn Monroe’s performance in The Seven Year Itch [Billy Wilder, 1955]). Here, though, Bella’s coy smile falters as she realises Edward is horrified by the wafts of her scent blowing his way, causing her to discreetly sniff her armpits as he rushes out of the room—a joke about the crude, utterly anti-romantic biological determinism of sexuality, especially during the hormone-governed years of puberty, if ever there was one. This bears comparison with Grodal’s account of direct-to-camera address in Pierrot le fou (Jean-Luc Godard, 1966) ‘creating a polar system combining a diegetic focus of address with a self-awareness focus’, whose very effect he sees as ‘more emotional than cognitive, as it provides a “feeling” in the viewer’ (Grodal 1999: 216).45 If such an example illustrates the cogency of the vampire as a representation of the extremes of romantic desire, even more apposite for teenpic signification is their figuration of transhistoricity, age-deferral and cyclicality. Such an association had already been foregrounded by the very title of

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one of Twilight’s major predecessor teen vampire movies: The Lost Boys (Joel Schumacher, 1987), which this film evokes through the presence of Phoenix, Arizona, from which Bella hails and whose landscape is shown at the start (and which Hardwicke remade as a television pilot in 2019).46 This is also the town that Schumacher’s protagonists leave at the start of his film when they move to California and for which they are nostalgic. Even more strikingly allusive is Bella’s comment a short way after moving to Forks, Washington that ‘things were getting a little… strange’, strongly recalling the cultishly popular title sequence of The Lost Boys in which an alternative tourist view of Santa Cruz’s punks and nonconformists is accompanied by ‘People are Strange’ by Echo and the Bunnymen, whose insistent chorus—like Bella’s use of elliptical delay—strongly emphasises the adjective. We have already seen that the inherent repetition of genre pre-eminently and often highly overtly structures the teenpic, anchored by school or occasionally college chronotopes (including the summer holidays, as in The Lost Boys). Driscoll has pointed out the lack of verisimilitude in the Cullens’ decision to endlessly repeat high school, surely rendering their lack of ageing as immortals more obvious than would a secluded existence, suggesting generic motivations for this authorial choice (2012: 100). If Meyer is the origin of this story detail, Hardwicke added the visualisation of this Sisyphean fate by introducing a display of numerous graduation caps to the mise-en-scène of the Cullens’ home, which she has Edward explain is a private family joke. The prom setting of the film’s penultimate sequence—excluding its tantalising epilogue in which the violent vampire Victoria’s bad intentions towards Bella point towards instalment two—follows a typically cyclical pattern for teen genre narrative, as well as strongly recalling an earlier ideologically contradictory and complex female-focused example teen Gothic, Carrie (Brian De Palma, 1976, to be remade by Kimberly Peirce five years after Twilight). Edward’s line in response to being asked to attend, ‘Now you’re really killing me,’ is a clear example of the humorous—yet emotively resonant—doubling of horror and adolescent tropes around, for instance, Edward’s social masquerade and estrangement from his body or, for Bella, the threat of failed romance as ‘death’. Adaptation and Style However, Edward’s remark at the film’s resolution could also be read as a meta-comment on his inscription within the teenpic, such that the

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end-of-­ school prom equates to a discursive death within the generic parameters of this film. Needless to say, the fact that the Twilight saga does continue after school has finished then underlines the status of even its first instalment as outside the teenpic as much as it is inside it, notably when it is constellated within its franchise framework. It highlights, in other words, the additional complexities of reading Twilight as series, adaptation and transmedia entity—not to mention in the context of the secondary narratives that it has engendered in both fictional and social domains. As ever, if I am arguing that aspects of a film’s genre aesthetics are integral to their emotive address and secondarily the audience’s relationship to their implied author, analysis should include consideration of their aesthetics as defined by such genres, in this case by Twilight’s identity as a (transmedia) adaptation. I here prioritise the relation to earlier texts since subsequent instalments of Twilight, or its remediations, are only somewhat identifiable with Hardwicke—although Mark D.  Cunningham points out her overarching influence even here, in establishing the general appearance of much of the series world’s setting and choosing the embodiments for its lead actors (2012: 201–202). Equally, unlike with many film franchises, it is apposite to see Twilight as already part of a series at the time of its release, thanks to its basis in a series of novels. In fact, Cunningham’s analysis, despite claiming to identify a greater directorial stamp on Hardwicke’s film than the later ones, argues that ultimately none of the Twilight film adaptations shows enough originality to be considered an auteur piece. Cunningham cites Hardwicke’s stated intentions to remain closely faithful to Meyer’s source text(s) in her rendering of the story, while several other commentators have picked out her close emulation of the use of the first-person point of view in particular.47 However, a less reductive perspective than Cunningham’s on the stylistic particularities of the novels’ adaptation for the screen is put forward by Pamela H. Demory. As she points out, film signifies in a different manner from writing; not only is a high density of information simultaneously conveyable in a single image, but even apparent first-person narration must generally be complemented by more objective views, which Demory shows is certainly the case in Twilight (Demory 2010).48 Such observations indicate that there is considerable creativity involved in translating literary effects to screen ones with a comparable impact. Further exemplifying this point, in order to convey Bella’s single-minded focus on Edward and the Cullens upon her arrival at school, consonant with the insistent discoursing about them in the novel, Hardwicke uses variable focus, such

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that a suitor from her own group of friends, Mike, is invisible in the foreground of her vision while Edward appears in sharp relief further away, as well as subjective sound to drown out her unfortunate interlocutor’s invitation to the prom (which he then has to repeat). These strategies use conventional cinematic resources to encode subjectivity and convey culturally generic views of both Gothic and teenage romance as obsessive. Such a complex cross-media rendering suggests curation of the film text-in-relation as an expression of the cine-fille author as self-in-relation that may be more palatable for many feminist understandings of interpersonal dynamics than monadic conceptions of the auteur. Further, Twilight seems almost to revel in this derivative status, just as there is ample evidence that fidelity to the novels is key to its appeal for their fans. The unnaturalness of a line such as Bella’s remark to Edward, when he makes small talk about the rainy weather, that she doesn’t like ‘any cold, wet thing’ (potentially including a cold-blooded vampire, as Edward’s recoil underlines) is rendered all the more obvious by its straight transplantation from written text to onscreen delivery; yet critical responses attest to the fact that part of the pleasure of viewing the films comes from their signature ‘clumsy dialogue’ (Wilson 2011: 5). Indeed, it is through analyses of the fandom of the Twilight narratives (notably the films) and their descendant Fifty Shades of Grey that scholars such as Bethan Jones, Sara Harman and Francesca Haig have elaborated theories of ‘snark’ fandom, wherein ‘the criticisms aren’t incidental to the pleasure taken in the texts; they appear, in large part, to constitute the pleasure’ (Haig in Harman and Jones 2013). Through ethnographic study, Anne Helen Petersen has proposed a similar explanation for the series’ many adult, feminist-identifying fans—a group emblematised by the erstwhile website www.twilightmoms.com, whose existence highlights comparisons with Clueless’ career and legacy of intergenerational address via what Petersen calls ‘that teenage feeling’ (2012: 63). However, instead of limiting that feeling to the ‘loss of self’ (ibid.: 59) often associated with erotic romance in a psychoanalytic framework, Petersen’s implied consideration of the double meaning of critical as not necessarily negative—or not traditionally so, if the effect is pleasure—so much as analytically active belies the passive, even masochistic model. Recalling Linda Hutcheon’s (1989: 93–117) emphasis on postmodern pastiche’s invitation to engage in this way with the past, snark fandom appears entirely compatible with the emotional transports associated by Dyer with self-aware forms. From this angle, the very machinery of (cross-media) generic translation can

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provide elements of the kinds of both intellectual and affective pleasures in which Twilight fans have clearly been heavily engaged. And the superfluousness of the question of mimetic, pseudo-authentic representation of the ‘natural’ to this point is further underscored through directorial choices specifically (in addition to the written dialogue cited above). In the discussion of weather, this includes the casting and direction of Kristen Stewart, an actress in whom unadorned phenomenological presence has come to be uniquely combined with performative awkwardness (Mijovic 2017: 20), while Smith (2017: 165) links ‘amateurishness’ to visual details such as the Cullens’ ‘slathered on’ makeup.49 Demory’s discussion of adaptation also points towards other traits of the cinematic medium that render it a suitable vehicle for heightened genericity. For instance, in her discussion of the use of both objective and subjective shots in Twilight she suggests that the inclusion of a more distanced perspective alongside Bella’s ‘allows us to be both outside and inside the narrative at the same time’ (Demory 2010: 207). To concretise claims about cinema’s dense signification, Demory looks at a moment at the school cafeteria where Bella drops a red apple and Edward catches it and returns it to her, which she rightly suggests has symbolic overtones of the Biblical apple of the Garden of Eden, also brought into frame for readers of the novels by the original cover of the first book. However, I am less convinced of Demory’s description as it stands as illustrative of film’s concise signification potential beyond that of written language; although she draws a contrast with the novel’s admittedly rather flat phrase ‘I picked up an apple, turning it round in my hands’ (ibid.: 208), the metaphor is still implied, not least in light of the first book’s epigraph from Genesis. In my view, what is glaringly missing in Demory’s description is a consideration of the affective properties of the image as such, in particular as dependent on symbols’ visual overdetermination. Even leaving aside the highly evident Biblical contexts for both the novel and in turn film under discussion (Meyer is probably the world’s most famous Mormon and religious perspectives on these texts have been all but compulsory to their criticism), what we see on screen when the apple falls from Bella’s grip in the cafeteria scene is not merely an apple; it is a particularly lush red apple whose deep hues—their shine picked up by lighting—stand out amid a mise-en-scène of Bella’s lunch on a counter dominated exclusively, with the exception of a small central patch of red cherry tomatoes, by greens, creams and steely greys (Fig. 3.9).

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Fig. 3.9  Bella’s overdetermined lunch

The significations here are multilayered. The profusion of green vegetables on Bella’s tray, apart from suggesting a borderline eating disorder, clearly evokes the Garden of Eden, whose innocent phase is chromatically opposed to the arrival of temptation through the apple. The redness of the apple also foregrounds in particular its shading in the Snow White remediation of this myth, immortalised by Disney among others—not to mention countless other onscreen derivations (for me, including the rural retreat sequence in ultra-postmodern classic Diva [Jean-Jacques Beineix, France 1981]). At the same time, the identification of red with sin and ‘scarlet women’ both draws on and constitutes an originary aspect of this myth.50 What is more, it is in practice impossible to draw a firm line between signification and felt suggestion in the meaning-making in which this image participates, with both surely operating largely unconsciously for many viewers. In regard to the latter, the presence of the sterile colours that I have already noted tend to characterise school and hospital locations in Twilight demonstrates a further dimension to add to that observation. Not only do whites, greys and ‘institutional’ greens connote such spaces, with their underpinnings of rational organisation, bureaucracy and cleanliness, but they evoke the feelings we associate with them—for instance, boredom or even despair. The role of cognition in this chain of understanding is inextricable. We do experience colour differently in visual representation from reading about it. For instance, the long wavelength of red is thought to make it appear closer to us than it is, hence grabbing our attention and perhaps raising pulses. It is also perfectly possible for some

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of the moods and affects arising from colour to owe a debt to biology—to continue the present example, menstrual and virginal blood spring to mind—or even pre-linguistic experience. However, as cognitive psychology recognises, our experience of colour is simultaneously always culturally symbolised. As ever, in the above analysis the affective charge of heightened genre comes with its rife significatory power, achieved not only through exploitation of both film genres and transmedia source texts but the cultural myths from which these draw their own power: emotion and the intellect work together and not in opposition. Body genres are also mind genres, such that it is less surprising than it might at first seem that fans of horror movies show greater intellectual and aesthetic curiosity than do their detractors.51 Ironically enough, there is also evidence that teen Goths have a higher-than-average likelihood of becoming high earners (Spooner 2006: 94), indicating strong analytical skills for a culture affiliated with playful retro-associativity if not anarchic anti-rationalism. Yet we have seen that the intersection of denotative and more loosely figural signification and affect-generation through processes spanning the rational and the unconscious is also a feature of theorisations of the Gothic sublime; indeed, the paradigm’s straining beyond conceptual limits, for Lyotard, equates to its desire for strong emotion (Mishra 1994: 28). Mishra also cites here a drive to valorise aesthetics without erasing the subject underpinning Kant’s work on the sublime, and which coincides with my approach to film genre. In this spirit, it is appropriate that Twilight should be the locus for a discussion of the way in which cultural narratives bleed into the social, influencing behaviours by shaping felt experience. Thus, Angela Tenga decries this situation in Meyer’s novel in relation to Bella’s reading of Romantic classics (2011), constructing her as implicitly a descendant of the sympathetic but self-destructive fantasist Madame Bovary. Although Bella’s reading list is excised from Hardwicke’s film, psychologist Jerome Bruner’s contention that ‘eventually the culturally shaped cognitive and linguistic processes that guide the self-telling of life narratives achieve the power to structure perceptual experience’ (in ibid.: 114) is if anything celebrated by it—such as when Bella’s nervous attraction to Edward is conveyed by a dream of her laid out on a sumptuous couch being bitten by a Dracula-esque figure, in a scene that arguably functions as a replacement for some of the literary allusions of the novel. A dialectical interplay between immersion in fiction and physically experienced feelings and orientations certainly undergirds Twilight’s complex

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and, for some, sublime appeal. Needless to say, the possibility of experiencing the imaginary runs to the heart of fiction in general and much romance and fantasy especially. Edward might as well be defending these genres when Bella says, ‘This sort of stuff just doesn’t exist,’ and he replies, in another wink to the audience that in no way undermines the romantic context, ‘It does in my world.’ Needless to say, Twilight is also ultimately a film whose material impact beyond its textual confines is particularly in evidence in the further ‘adaptations’ in the shape of fan fictions and other cult activities to which it has given rise. Fan analyses—in addition to reporting the extreme emotionality of reactions to the first film especially—testify repeatedly to the way in which interactive fans want aspects of Twilight (the franchise) to ‘grow in [their] head’ (Olin-Scheller 2011) or favour spin-offs as a way ‘to find pieces of their own lives in the stories’ (Cherry 2014: 185). The founding of a religion based on the way of life of the Cullen family is particularly striking, not least when constellated within a post-secular consumer society whose insistent marketing of superhuman ideals of physical and mental perfection are arguably incompatible with traditional Christian theology. As Pierre Wiktorin points out, in such circumstances it is precisely the Twilight characters’ perceived accessibility, including through their ‘hyper-­ real’ onscreen embodiments, that recommends them as a focal point for moral questions: ‘What would Bella do?’ (2011: 294–295). A development as bizarre as the promotion of vampires ‘to the possibility of enacting all the positions in a moral hierarchy’ (ibid.), as an example of mobile repurposing of the sign that draws on while nuancing differently past uses, also speaks to Twilight’s highly open textuality. Evidently the citationality that is a feature of heightened genericity multiplies spheres of reference and therefore possible interpretation; myriad texts cohabit and their many different meanings slide across each other with no fixed origin. Twilight is perhaps second only to Zero Dark Thirty in these pages when it comes to engendering a plethora of wildly dissonant interpretations. As so often with mainstream films, perhaps especially by women, disagreements about textual politics can often be pinned down to an apparent mismatch between overall ‘conservative’ story organisation (over the series, Bella gives up her own identity to become a wife and mother within the Cullen vampires’ patriarchal ‘family’) and aspects of form that suggest resistance. To cite just one specific example, the Cullens themselves have been variously described as embodying retardataire heteronormativity (Kane 2010;

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Stolar 2013) and a queer pastiche of the latter that broadly equates to anti-normativity (Bacon 2014; Hunt 2014).52 Twilight’s promiscuous exploitation of generic forms, styles and echoes to create resonances and meanings, in predisposing it for differing interpretations, also predisposes it for myriad fan appropriations. And its rich textual and extratextual afterlife only multiplies the effect—after all, in many fan remediations, Edward is not only proto-queer but in a loving relationship with his werewolf love rival Jacob!53 It also, more importantly, demonstrates the aptness of the author-as-interpreter model for heightened genre films, comprised of larger-than-life archetypes and stylistically overdetermined diegetic spaces, in which viewers’ subjectivities can merge with creators’ at leisure.

Cycles of War: Stop-Loss (Kimberly Peirce, 2008) This section turns its attention to a genre positioned very differently from those examined heretofore in this book: the war film. While we have seen a shift from genres viewed as exclusively feminine (romcoms and to a lesser extent domestic comedies more generally) to more neutral or ambivalent ones (teen films and fantasy), focusing on the war film takes us into prime masculine territory. Not incidentally, whereas all the genres examined so far but perhaps especially romantic comedy rank low in hierarchies of taste, war films enjoy higher status thanks to their perception as vessels for the exploration of serious issues in the shape of historical geopolitical conflicts. Indeed, Robert Burgoyne (2008: 2) has identified the war film—with its focus on what is surely History’s most privileged topic—as a key example of the broader category of historical film. Importantly, this relationship is conceived not only in terms of films’ reflective capacity but also their generative one: Robert Eberwein (2010: 50) notes that the historian Anton Kaes singles out this genre in a diagnosis of the determining role of technological (media) dissemination in constructing public memory—as well as conveying the point in lapidary fashion through a citation from a schoolboy who apparently said to his teacher, straight-faced, ‘World War II, isn’t that the one fought in black and white?’ (in ibid.: 53). In this way, the indistinguishability of war and its representation epitomises the two-­ way relationship between genre and the (perceived, lived) social espoused throughout this study. Such comments apply readily to Stop-Loss, as a film focalising a particular, eponymous current US Army policy that allows soldiers to be forced

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into further tours of duty even when several have been served consecutively. This focus conforms to Eberwein’s observations, following Burgoyne, about the highly national character of the war film as an element of what Mikhail Bakhtin has dubbed different cultures’ ‘genre memory’ (ibid.: 52). As with many of the films in this book, Stop-Loss’ scope is also at once epic and yet personal, in that director Peirce was prompted to make the film by her younger brother’s spell as a soldier in Iraq. Such biographical inspiration aside, this film has cemented Peirce’s reputation—alongside Kathryn Bigelow’s—as a woman director who ‘knows men’ (Potter 2010). Important here are the openly queer director’s playfully androgynous image, constructed through many photographs of her in a tuxedo and black tie or leather jacket, as well as her direction of the multi-award-winning Boys Don’t Cry (1999), dramatising the real-life murder of the transgender Brandon Teena. Thanks to such details, ‘Peirce’s public image is also defined by her outsider status. She’s frequently ben posited as a feminist/queer director with a maverick sensibility’ (Paszkiewicz 2018b: 47). However, Paszkiewicz problematises the notion of feminist subversion in relation to Peirce’s horror remake Carrie as projecting a discourse of exceptionalism that ignores the complexity of the original genre, in ways that resonate for Stop-Loss as well. I would go so far as to suggest we could see her filmographic choices, which take in films about protagonists of both genders and a transgender person, as embracing identitarian inclusivity or ‘insider status’. The release of both Stop-Loss and Bigelow’s seminal Iraq War film The Hurt Locker in 2008 is in any case certainly indicative of a growing trend for women making not merely ‘cross-gender’ but resolutely ‘masculine’ genre films (in which Kusama’s work also features quite prominently), receiving considerable media attention linked to Bigelow’s Oscar-winning film especially—lots of it negative, framed in terms of a betrayal of her gender (see Paszkiewicz 2015). Such critical attention to authorial gender in the context of (unexpected) gendered genre production itself warrants scrutiny. As Paszkiewicz (2018a: 103) has further pointed out, the contrastingly progressive work of feminist scholars including Rona Murray, Pam Cook and Deborah Jermyn in this area reveals the conservative and simplistic view of both genre and indeed gender, as reified by standard paratextual discourses of film genre, on which the need to highlight ‘transvestite’ genre production as remarkable depends—and which it shores up. Making the link to cross-­ gender audience consumption of differently coded genres, Murray asks, ‘if

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Bigelow chooses masculine subjects doesn’t that suggest that other women might want, at least, to watch the same?’ (cited in ibid.). The generic similarities between Stop-Loss and The Hurt Locker, as in many ways typical Iraq War films with a strong critical dimension, point to the fact that either would have provided a suitable case study for the present analysis. The choice to focus on Peirce’s film speaks to an impetus to give attention to a spread of women directors and include more culturally sidelined (or derided) films as well as exceptional success stories. Equally, in addition to the very many analyses of Bigelow’s film already published, Paszkiewicz (2018a: 100–133) has provided a highly knowledgeable and extensive exploration of The Hurt Locker’s interaction with the war film genre. Indeed, we have already seen that this intervention provides a useful way into considering Stop-Loss in context, and I will further preface my textual analysis of Peirce’s film with reference to Paszkiewicz’s analysis, in order to reiterate my own slightly different position on heightened genre films’ relationship with genre as a whole and limn conceptions of genres relevant to this analysis. Then I will proceed to consider Stop-Loss as both specifically an Iraq War film and a war film more generally. This analysis will give prominence to the generic apprehension of elements including technology and the body, as well as views of gender identity associable with postclassical war films. In particular, I will argue that formal and thematic aspects of Stop-Loss evoke identities as constructed by conventionalised, collective discourses but in such a way that the body remains central, in terms of its content and also its formal work. Thus, not only the mechanics of the film’s address but the dynamics of its internal diegetic world are consonant with the understanding of how discourse embodies us that underpins this book. Iraq War films: The Hurt Locker and Beyond Paszkiewicz sees The Hurt Locker, a film focused on a bomb disposal unit and typified by excruciating suspense as well as visceral corporeal detail, in terms of heightened effects and (following Shaviro) excess. Her approach is also admirably anti-dualistic in its understanding of the film’s appeal as straddling the ocular (with connotations of masculine mastery and distance), such as through extensive depiction of virtual technologies, and the ‘feminised’, proximate sensorial; the description of how Bigelow’s images ‘facilitate contact, a perception between the perceived and the perceivers as a part of the whole’ (2018a: 130) replicates my understanding

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of the text’s very functioning.54 Also bearing in mind The Hurt Locker’s use of genre clichés alongside its participation in more than one genre— notably the Western as well as the war film—leads her to conclude that Bigelow’s film is ‘meta-cinematic’; however, she suggests this introduces a defamiliarising distance from its genres, on which it facilitates ‘a sophisticated reflection’ (ibid.: 105). My approach coincides with Paszkiewicz’s in all aspects apart from the claim that metafictionality places the film at one remove from genre: dubbing this relationship heightened, I suggest it reengages the affects of the genres in question even as generic architecture is in relief. Any other conclusion risks, to my mind, underestimating the meta or self-consciously artificial aspects of predecessor texts. One of Paszkiewicz’s own examples, an intertext with the Spaghetti Western and especially Once Upon a Time in the West (Leone, 1968), serves as a neat illustration of the point. She notes an aural allusion to the earlier film’s famous score by Ennio Morricone in The Hurt Locker’s non-­diegetic music and later claims that the heroism of the Western is repurposed to ironic effect in The Hurt Locker’s desert-scapes. However, Once Upon a Time in the West is playful in its approach to generic narrative and the male hero at every turn. The score is prototypical, composed before the film was shot and providing a pointed example of the use of leitmotif to introduce characters, but in such a way as to strongly call attention to itself, for instance through the use of unexpected, jarring breaks. Such details give the lie to any suggestion that Leone’s film might exemplify what Grodal calls a ‘basic or canonical narrative genre’—and indeed he cites it as typical of an approach to filmmaking where features are melodramatically highlighted ‘so that the addresser establishes a complicity of fascinations between himself and the spectator and seems to say, “We want to re-enact, relive these signifiers of (past) pleasures”’ (Grodal 1999: 167, 229). Moreover, ironic references to the Western are practically a stock feature of US war films since the Vietnam period (see Anderegg 1991). Paszkiewicz’s identification of the (over-)familiarity of thematic war film tropes structuring The Hurt Locker can just as well be applied to Stop-­ Loss, which is described by Screen International as follows: ‘The confusion between 9/11 and Iraq, the PTSD suffered by troops, the army’s failure to tackle mental problem and alcoholism, and the suppression of disabled veterans all fight for space here with every war movie cliché in the book’ (Goodridge 2008). After an eleven-minute opening that functions like an extended flashback sequence (itself a clichéd trope of the contemporary genre) showing the front, the film portrays the experience of Brandon

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(Ryan Philippe) and other members of his company returning home to Texas after a tour of duty in Iraq only to discover they are being ‘stop-­ lossed’ back to the front. Like many Iraq War films, then, Stop-Loss situates much of its action off the battlefield. Disillusioned with the ideology of the war, Brandon hides out with his old friend Michelle (Abbie Cornish), who is unhappily married to a colleague, and flirts with the idea of escaping to Canada or Mexico, such that the film also participates for a spell in the road movie. The pair meet the family of Brandon’s dead colleague and discover he had been stop-lossed to combat zones multiple times. While visiting an injured fellow soldier, Rico (Victor Rasuk), they discover he is happy that horrific, disabling wounds rule him out of future service and may enable his Hispanic family to acquire green cards. Meanwhile, Michelle’s husband Steve (Channing Tatum) returns voluntarily to Iraq, fully indoctrinated into the army way of life to the detriment of his marriage, while a third friend and soldier, Tommy (Joseph Gordon Levitt), commits suicide after being discharged due to a drink problem. Brandon is finally forced to return to the front. This plot synopsis suggests the extent to which the Hollywood genericising of war itself troubles taste categories, such as Derek Paget’s avowed preference in depictions of the historical real for ‘the sober’ over the melodrama and sentiment he associates with the US mainstream (2011: ‘Introduction’). Following logically from the storyline, thematic general war film clichés identified by Paszkiewicz in The Hurt Locker that also appear in Stop-Loss are ‘dead and wounded bodies, bonding through violence, fatherhood and representations of the cultural, national, and religious other’ as well as ‘war as a drug or intoxication’ (2018a: 111). Equally prominent in my synopsis’ reference to Rico’s story is the fact that, as with The Hurt Locker, the film’s unflattering view of contemporary US life is not limited to the stop-loss policy or even to the military, an idea further formally communicated by the use of a kind of intra-diegetic ‘split-screen’ to juxtapose both walks of life late in the film through the use of a propaganda poster in the mise-en-scène (Fig. 3.10). The point is rammed home by the shot’s position directly after a sequence in which the dishonourably discharged, soon-to-be-suicidal Tommy plays on a guitar, and we hear the original version of, the same tune heard in an only slightly less ironic context in Iraq at the start of the film, Toby Keith’s ‘Courtesy of the Red, White and Blue (The Angry American)’ and whose strains spill into the next scene through a sound bridge. The plot and home-front setting, focused on an interrogation of

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Fig. 3.10  A false split-screen compares civilian with military life in Stop-Loss

the pity of war and an ultimately sardonic deployment of patriotic discourse and the US flag in particular (also featured on Stop-Loss’ poster and given to a dead soldier’s wife as woefully inadequate compensation for her loss) echo particularly closely a film released just a year earlier, Paul Haggis’ star-studded In the Valley of Elah (2007, featuring Tommy Lee Jones and Susan Sarandon as bereaved military parents). Such comparisons with contemporaneous films indicate the extent to which commonalities of genre are not only a question of direct borrowing but generalised cultural topicality, discursive purchase and structures of understanding—for filmmaking, notably through felt evocation. As for more formal qualities, the Western-esque iconography common to Iraq War films is also in evidence here less through the extended early Iraq sequence than the Texas setting of much of the action. This is notable in a camping interlude involving the group of soldiers on leave out in the country playing with guns, as well as through male characters’ typical costuming in cowboy hats. Playing on the coincidence between the two genres’ interest in US frontiers, there is a clear metaphorical interpretation to a comment by Brandon about his own home that ‘the ranch always felt so safe’, particularly in the light of the 9/11 attack on other architectural symbols of the USA.

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More strikingly, both The Hurt Locker and Stop-Loss sit firmly within a cycle of (post-)Iraq films adhering to a multimedia aesthetic (see Stewart 2009; Pisters 2010; Tasker and Atakav 2010: 59–60). Peirce’s film thus opens with home video footage of the front, signalled as such by a digital appearance, inelegant editing and framing and intermittent to-camera performances by actors. We then move into ‘straight’ filming of Iraq, although preserving a hand-held camera for many shots and tight framing that evokes disorientation and pressure. What is shown includes camaraderie (such as Rico looking at a picture Steve’s fiancée Michelle, sexualised by the men ‘accidentally’ seeing her breasts) and other overdetermined images of Iraq War situations (road blocks, street warfare and in particular the death of a beloved ‘brother’), as well as a later section that returns to an even more saturated video diary look and introduces through onscreen handwriting particular characters with nicknames and slogans—or epitaphs. This section, accompanied by the thematically explicitly apposite morose rap ‘Matter of Time’ by 4th25’s Live from Iraq album, after climaxing with an ever-faster battery of still photographs of soldiers, closes on the written words ‘We will not forget’, before dissolving from an image of flames, evoking the cliché of war as hell, to diegetic present action showing soldiers returning home. It is fascinating that the highly rhetorically framed, digital-looking sequences, which recur occasionally later in the film (particularly in dreams or via a soldier’s laptop), appear at once more and less real than the effect created by the still broadly continuous or realist-accented approach to mise-en-scène, editing and sound adopted by most mainstream postclassical cinema (see Bordwell 2002). Indeed, the adoption of a multimedia aesthetic that blends ‘fact’ and ‘fiction’ in recent war films as a whole is less a question of raising fiction to authentic status than levelling out these categories, which are rendered as to all intents and purposes inseparable because both are instantiated through experiential and even emotional ‘truth’. In Redacted (Brian De Palma, 2007), for example, it is ironic that an interpolated French documentary looks much more cinematic than other modes of representation, being composed of stately high-angle long shots that aestheticise the desert landscape.55 As David Ray Carter has observed, ‘fictional films that assert that they are depicting reality blur the line between the actual and the false and thus become hyperreal, rather than purely fictional or authentic’ (2010: 298). The harmonising of different manifestations of ‘reality’ and its representation constitutes a formal gesture reaching out beyond the upended hierarchies on screen to acknowledge the generic structure of profilmic

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events as well. Indeed, the ubiquity of technological surveillance in these films is microcosmic of not just the accelerated technologisation of modern warfare but the increasingly panoptic structure of contemporary reality more generally. Such a perspective bears in turn on films’ views of heroic masculinity, and identity in general, as performed, when we recall social sciences research into reality television carried out by health and criminology experts Camilla A. Sears and Rebecca Godderis astutely diagnosing the way in which awareness of being watched regulates individuals’ behaviour (2011: 183). Thus, in Stop-Loss, digital videoing practices are also in evidence at the homecoming (and later at a military funeral), along with a parade and a ‘Welcome home, heroes!’ banner, disturbing some soldiers, who are uncomfortable at demands to enact or embody heroic values following their real experiences of the messiness of the war. Iraq War films as a whole offer traditionally heroic views of masculinity only in inverted commas, if not altogether hollowed out, but without necessarily negating the generic viewing pleasures of being caught up even in heroism with elements of bombast at certain moments. For his part, Brandon reinvents heroism as inaction in the military context in a fashion reminiscent of the Vietnam protest movement’s exile into Canada after burning draft cards (Westwell 2008: 88): Philippe’s successful (decorated) yet principled sergeant personifies the rethinking of heroism along relativised lines in the contemporary era. While drawing elements from both of his colleagues, Brandon is a more admirable figure than the pitiful Tommy, or the hypermacho Steve who—like the protagonists of Home of the Brave (Irwin Winkler, 2006) and The Hurt Locker, who also opt to return to war—is in his wife’s words unthinkingly ‘married to the army’, unable to function in civilian life and thus to enact the heteronormative scripts required of classic alpha masculinity. Likewise, it goes without saying that violent homosocial bonding rituals peppering the film emphasise the continuities within difference between ideals of masculinity in civilian and army life, destabilising each as a worthy absolute ideal. Nonetheless, just as Brandon is a relatively more apt candidate for the romantic partner role, his courageously honest admissions of shame about the war’s lack of honour refract rather than rejecting notions of uncompromising and maverick masculinity, which are unleashed in a scene where he beats to a pulp and threatens at gunpoint some petty criminals who have broken into Michelle’s car but which is coded as disturbing through its excessive violence and Michelle’s negative reaction. There is a parallel to be drawn here with Paszkiewicz’s contrasting comments on The Hurt Locker as rejecting

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any ‘nostalgic exhibition of the archetypal hero’ (2018a: 117) for which, in turn, a brief detour into debates about the role of nostalgia in the related genre of the teen film is warranted. While Lesley Speed (1998) cites some films’ lack of adult narrational perspective as evidence for their eschewal of narratives of progress and absence of a nostalgic tone, I have argued that pastiche elements even in the seemingly anti-idealistic film Dazed and Confused do invite nostalgia: in fact, these elements themselves imply precisely the knowing authorial perspective that Speed suggests is required to engage the mode. The relative elusiveness of this implied author might actually facilitate nostalgia by failing to assert a definitively superior perspective in the manner of the in-text voiceover common in other rites-of-passage narratives (Harrod 2010: 7). In Stop-Loss (and The Hurt Locker), similarly, the pastiching of various ideals of masculinity rooted in the past does not render these merely contemptible but rather interpellates a more complex attitude that can include a drive to cling to historically positive values.56 The Shadow of ‘Nam Such a claim highlights Stop-Loss’ debt not just to other Iraq War narratives but to Vietnam films, which helped radically destabilise the more black-and-white moral framework of earlier war narratives. Similarities between the two conflicts have been recognised by cultural discourse around the subject in the 2000s: The tendency to refract tragedies of the present through the lenses of the past pervaded post-9/11 rhetoric about national history and identity, as exemplified by the ubiquitous description of Iraq as a ‘second Vietnam’ and the popular bumper sticker that read ‘Iraq is Arabic for Vietnam’. (King 2011: 122)

Fascinatingly, Claire Sisco King cites a member of the US Army’s Media Relations arm employed to consult on many war or disaster action movies, Lieutenant Colonel Bresseale, who observes both that ‘Hollywood has created the crazy ‘Nam vet’ and that in his view most of the movies made about Iraq have really been about Vietnam (ibid.). Pertinent to the comparison with Stop-Loss is Susan Jeffords’ analysis of one such film, Platoon (Oliver Stone, 1986), where she describes the process by which the inexperienced youthful protagonist Chris (Charlie Sheen) learns in combat to

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take on different personalities that encompass both the sadistic hyper-­ masculine Sergeant Barnes (Tom Berenger) and Willem Defoe’s more feminised and nurturing Sergeant Elias in order to survive (1990: 209). Jeffords suggestively describes such an approach to characterisation in queer terms, which Eberwein in turn applies to the cycle as a whole, just as he describes Iraq War films (especially Jarhead [Sam Mendes, 2005]) through reference to failed (hetero)sexuality  (Eberwein 2010: 101, 131).57 This is certainly resonant for Stop-Loss; while Michelle tells Brandon after Steve has hit her on his first night home that he ‘couldn’t … [get it up]’, after a dispute with his wife, alcoholic Tommy shoots his wedding gift cards in a moment of arrested development confused with hypermasculinity, which he later regrets. Even the good-looking, young Brandon and Michelle’s couple dynamic, structurally positioned to deliver the inevitable romance subplot common to most Hollywood films, remains unconsummated. While Janet S. Robinson (2014: 154) suggests that The Hurt Locker’s focus on soldiers on home soil is one aspect of a new ‘gendered geometry of war’ defying ‘the typical cinematic representation of gender difference (male/phallic/war versus female/vaginal/home)’, Clara Bradbury-Rance (2019: 84–85; 94–95) has implied, following Patricia White, that unrealised potential in film narrative is also queer. Ironically from my point of view, she offers a contrasting view of the supposedly limiting teleologies of mainstream genre narratives. In fact, the intertextual approach genre films demand (and which Bradbury-Rance espouses for queer melodrama Carol [Todd Haynes, 2015], albeit to advance a version of the familiar argument that the interesting independent film by a ‘marginal’ director is not ‘full[y]’ a genre film [ibid.: 133]) undoes such fixed and closed patterns of textual signification. While this point has wide applicability, it is highly cogent to note it for a film that makes its very raison d’être genre memory as coterminous with historical memory. The repeating structure of the ‘stop-loss’ experience has obvious affinities with the cyclicality of genre, especially in the context of the closely comparable patterns of different cycles of the war film. If the history of war is the history of its representation (Eberwein 2010: 83), seeing the connections between different films means understanding present conflicts with the benefits of a historical perspective. The poignant promise ‘We will not forget’ made by the implied collective authors of the soldiers’ video diary in Stop-Loss is rendered bitterly ironic by the film’s ending, in which Brandon sees no alternative, faced with the threat of court proceedings and of negative impact on his social identity, family and

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friends, notably Steve, than to return to Iraq. Hard though he tries, he is unable to mobilise his memory of the senselessness of war in a fashion powerful enough to impact on his future actions, just as the USA, it is implied, has forgotten the lessons of the past in its commitment to contemporary confused if not goalless conflicts in distant lands. The film’s genericity thus feeds into a queer sensibility that positions it in a critical relation to conservative ideologies spanning militaristic jingoism alongside heteronormativity. It is apposite that it is these two sets of values whose co-conspiratorial pairing provides the very emblem of that which queer temporalities reject in the opening Preface of Freeman’s influential study of these, Time Binds, where she considers Robert Graves’ World War I poem ‘It’s a Queer Time’, narrating the experience of a soldier’s reluctance to die for his country. For Freeman, this act responds to queer theory’s advocacy of the need to adopt trajectories painfully divergent from those sanctioned by normative society, such that the poem ties a story of gay and global lives intertwining to ‘military history’s failure to fully organize time towards nationalist ends’ (2010: x). Of even greater interest for the present study as a whole is the theorist’s extrapolation from this example to illustrate her book’s investment in the way in which ‘even nonnationalist cultural belonging is a matter of affects that inhere, in many ways, in shared timings’ (ibid.: xi), as well as her account of an evolution in her own thought leading her away from earlier valorisations of the avant-garde: Now I think the point may be to trail behind actually existing social possibilities: to be interested in the tail end of things, willing to be bathed in the fading light of whatever has been declared useless. For while queer antiformalism appeals to me on an intellectual level, I find myself emotionally compelled by the not-quite-queer-enough longing for form that turns us back to prior moments, forward to embarrassing utopias, sideways to forms of being that seem, on the face of it, completely banal. […] For queer scholars and activists, this cultural debris includes our incomplete, partial, or otherwise failed transformations of the social field: like the speaker of ‘It’s a Queer Time,’ we never hear the ‘Alleluia.’ (ibid.: xiii, original emphasis)

It is Brandon’s tragedy that even if he should hear his (victorious) Alleluia, it will ring hollow in the ears of the soldier who has seen ‘too much’. There is another allusion in Stop-Loss that reinforces my claims about its relationship with Vietnam and other relevant genre films through its attitude to masculinity in particular while further illuminating its interest in

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the generic-affective mentality of war. I refer here to the unexplained, fleeting appearance of an image of John Wayne rumpled on a flapping banner or flag amid those of deceased soldiers near the start. Michael Anderegg has examined Wayne’s discursive presence in Vietnam films as a signifier of precisely the ambivalence of martial heroism—‘simultaneously a potent symbol of toughness and a grim joke’ (1991: 22). Stanley Kubrick’s Full Metal Jacket (1987) is prominent here, for its famous early scene in which protagonist Joker (the morphology of whose name is echoed by that of the deceased comrade Preacher in Stop-Loss) mocks his superior officer Hartman’s racist and overblown speech to the new recruits at the barracks by mimicking the star actor’s voice to ask: ‘Is that you, John Wayne? Is this me?’—words he later repeats before an intradiegetic  camera. The most obvious interpretation of these apparently rather baffling lines relates to the confusion of different identities—notably enemy and ally—that became standard with Vietnam films. Such an idea has a cinematic history of retrospective imbrication with Wayne when we consider that Clint Eastwood’s famously pioneering take on the Battle of Iwo Jima from the perspective of the Japanese, Letters from Iwo Jima (2006), riffs off jingoistic Wayne vehicle Sands of Iwo Jima (1949). This indistinction is rearticulated almost slavishly in Peirce’s film, with Brandon stating: ‘The enemy aren’t out in the desert’—read, but closer to home—and ‘Everybody’s got a weapon. Nobody knows who’s who.’ As in The Hurt Locker, the issue is traumatically crystallised in the horrific accidental killing of a child. Eberwein (2010: 108) also rightly points out Joker’s lines’ acknowledgement of the influence of Hollywood behavioural models on the social. I further underscore the way in which they locate the process of constructing otherness inherent to Wayne’s overdetermined nationalistic-heroic persona very significantly at the level of the subject—much like Chris’ final declaration in Platoon that the enemy resides within ourselves. This situating by Full Metal Jacket of generic behavioural types within the individual also suggests a link between collective psychology and embodied experience structurally mimicking this study’s understanding of the social reach of the genre films it examines. Appropriately for a film that cites Kubrick’s, Stop-Loss shows evidence of a similar understanding through not only its generic form per se but other textual details as well. For instance, it is highly suggestive that Peirce cast ‘beefcake’ Tatum in the role of Steve, considering her view of the actor as ‘this macho guy who could kind of think with his body’ (in González Iñárritu 2008: 125). The embodied mind is foregrounded, too, in the narrative by various

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suggestions of PTSD, when a drunk Steve digs himself a trench in his garden or when Brandon hallucinates a drowning man in a motel pool, as well as during other flashback-like moments and dream sequences. Brandon also evokes Iraq itself in impressionistic terms to Michelle by citing ‘sheep on the highway’ as a defining feature, when she asks him to describe the war. The fact that she is driving and, misunderstanding, scans the horizon and asks, ‘Where?’, prompts his unadorned response, ‘In Iraq,’ and in so doing  conflates the spaces of remembered and present perception linguistically to evoke their interknitting in subjective experience: the fact that Iraq lives on his psyche. Evidently such claims can be extrapolated to the national collective level, again underlining the kinship with Vietnam—not least as, famously, the first mass-mediatised US war. The eye is perhaps the bodily organ most overidentified with the thinking self and therefore provides a convenient locus for the crossover between mental and corporeal processes. It is made prominent to similar ends a second time through Rico’s injuries, visible during a visit to the hospital where he is recovering.58 Describing this scene, critic Guy Westwell (2008: 87) writes that ‘in a brilliantly understated use of CGI, the scars on the soldier’s amputated limbs and his ruined blind eye speak eloquently of the destructiveness of the war and the mark it has left on the minds and bodies of the men who have lived through it’. It is worth noting here, too, that if this film evidences the shadow of any one ancestor text pre-eminently then, as numerous reviews acknowledge, that text is The Deer Hunter (Michael Cimino, 1978), also focused on soldiers returning home; on marital failure, with suggestions of partner shuffling between the soldiers; and centrally on the suicidal soldier as automaton, unable to break the corporeally remembered patterns of the past in the form of the Russian roulette played in Vietnam.59 When a conception of thought as embodied comes together with the post-Vietnam view of the meaningless destruction of war in Stop-Loss, further conclusions can be drawn. If, as I have suggested, ally and victim become almost impossible to separate in this era, Stop-Loss highlights their attendant interchangeability by having Steve, returning as a sniper, declare: ‘Let me be the faceless enemy’. The brutal chaos of war reduces all men to equals, ‘establishes a corporeal identity in the clinch of allies and enemies, victims and executioners’ (Virilio 1992: 5). In such a situation, precisely, corporeality supersedes the rational—including sense-making vision— which is rendered inadequate on the ground. Thus, allegiance is evoked in terms of proximity over all other organisational matrices through the

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strident camaraderie of the opening video footage, where one dead colleague’s epitaph is, ‘In peace, brother’, and another’s, ‘Kept the faith’, with all the phrase’s connotations of collective belief. More explicitly, Brandon tells Michelle that in Iraq ‘the only thing you can believe in is surviving…[and] protecting the guy to your left, the guy to your right’—a sentiment whose empirical basis in her extensive research with veterans Peirce has emphasised (González Iñárritu 2008: 125). Such an apprehension speaks to the fact that, like teenpics (and sports films), war films are centrally concerned with the sacrifice of individual identity, or soldiers’ need to ‘dump their subjectivity’ (Pisters 2010: 243), in favour of the shared affective time-space of the group; as Steve puts it to Brandon, ‘If you don’t fall in beside us, it all comes apart.’ These lines are suggestive in their reliance on a spatial metaphor of proximity, as well as mimesis, with falling in evoking scenes of group exercises, perhaps marching to the same literal or metaphorical drum. Choreographed practices such as these of course speak to the military ideology’s recognition of the need to create a sense of togetherness through visceral experiences, fanning outwards into the wider society as a drive to capture ‘hearts and minds’. Despite Stop-Loss’ awareness of the possibilities of emotional entrainment through mimicry and repetition, one of the major problems posed by the Iraq War as it is explored through genre cinema concerns a glaring mismatch between such experiences—the chaos of war—and the ideologies of togetherness they are supposed to serve. It is partly in the service of expressing this apprehension that, for all the technologisation of war, the body persists so centrally even in recent war films across the board.60 That is, the genre dramatises (rather than merely exploiting) the way in which history is not only written on but arises from the body as a key motivator of human thought and decision-making. Affective allegiances trump rational thought when it comes to who should die—and, in the end, perhaps Brandon’s decision to ‘fall in’ after all. The sense of belonging as realised through corporeal proximity and imitative performance emerges from this reading as a terrifyingly powerful force. Indeed, where Virilio (1992) startlingly described war as a way of seeing, Stop-Loss actually adopts a more extreme point of view, whereby war becomes a state of embodied mind, subject to all the human frailty that implies. The relevance of these ideas to everyday life beyond geopolitics comes into relief when we consider the extent to which Brandon’s company comprises a protectionist cell that is a synecdoche for the nation or multiple other social units in an era of rising populism.61

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In Peirce’s film, then, a conception of mind and body as inseparable is both a subject of the diegesis and a feature of the film’s approach to audience address. Similarly, in interview Peirce displays explicit understanding of the parallels in evidence throughout this description between the way genre films work and the way politics works—a dialogue to be further explored in Chap. 4 when conflicts drawn from actuality become the subject of docudrama. Thus, directly after discussing Brandon’s loyalties to his closest neighbours, she recalls the fact that one viewer complimented her on making relationships the focus of her film, adding, ‘I think it makes [viewers] feel safer when they can connect to somebody.’ Reducing abstract ideas to concrete situations is in a sense the work of all fiction; however, it is strikingly integral to the reduced pool of plots and characters particular to genre filmmaking, whose popularity indeed doubtlessly resides in part in the safe embrace of the familiar (with variation), which can provide a forum for testing more difficult ideas. We can extrapolate from Peirce’s implicit linkage of corporeality to community-building in her film to insert the body into her conception of what makes genre films a powerful means of building connections between text and viewer, under the custodianship of a tangible skilled author. In the present example, surely akin to the experience of actually taking part in contemporary war, the experience of contemporary war films is characterised by an affective mismatch: a frequent though not total discord between idea and felt experience. This is a particularly value-laden product of postclassical genres’ tendency to put themselves into quotation marks—as well as one that sits oddly with the notion of heightened genre, in the sense that for recent US war films, the affects ‘heightened’, when they are not horrific in several films depicting atrocities (see Eberwein 2010: 134), are regularly and paradoxically ‘flat’. Berlant’s account of such affect has been resumed in terms of how it ‘focuses attention on the ways in which events can be sensed, holding at bay or dilating the conventions which would quickly find an established and closed form into which perception can be drained’; visual scholars taking up her concept have linked it to the underperformance or even suppression of emotion in a way that can be interpreted politically (Duschinsky and Wilson 2015: 185–188).62 While positive affects have been held at bay throughout this film, which is significantly devoted to bureaucracy and the heroism of whose sparse combat scenes is undercut by jingoism that is extremely overdetermined by this point in the cycle, flat affect is evoked by Brandon’s impassive face as he returns to the front. In other words, typically for an

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Iraq War film, Stop-Loss aims to drill home the anti-epic ingloriousness of the conflicts it depicts, not least as characterised by grim déjà vu. Although filmmaker and critic F. X. Feeney has opined that eventually Peirce’s film will be regarded as a classic of our time on a par with Joseph Heller’s anti-­ war novel Catch 22 (2008: 22), little wonder, then, that these films have tended to be as unpopular as the war itself—and, as we shall see more explicitly with the related War on Terror narrative Zero Dark Thirty, sometimes to take their authors down with them.

Notes 1. On the remake as reception category, see also Leitch (1990: 139), Moine (2007: 33), Evans (2014: 305), as well as Hutcheon (2006) on adaptation. 2. Discussing cinema, Victor Perkins memorably notes that worldhood is ‘not primarily an issue of realism’ (2005: 36). 3. Grodal (1999: 131–133) also indicates that strategies foregrounding a layer of mediation in film representation ‘short-circuit[ing] evaluations of reality status’ not only ‘evoke feelings, although they pretend to say something about representations and epistemology in general’, but that they specifically draw us out of the introjective mode promoted by less selfconscious fiction. 4. Cf. Nacache in Forrest and Koos (2001: 28), Heinze and Krämer (2015: 12). Rebecca Bushnell (2018: 45) makes the same arguments about genre in a literary context. 5. While Butler stops short of ascribing automatically progressive value to drag (1990: xxiii), Galt is less reticent in her claims for the power of theatricality itself as posing a challenge to authoritarian regimes (notably White dominance), as her discussions of the work of the fantasy films of Tsai Ming-­Liang and the pastiche melodramas of François Ozon convey. She also describes aesthetically ostensive versions of pre-existing visual models as introducing new and intersubjective dimensions through the example of Zwelu Mthethwa’s ‘ethnographic’ but unusually colourful photographs and paintings of shantytowns (Galt 2011: 266; 16). 6. The phrase is Tamar Jeffers McDonald’s (2007: 152). The fact that You’ve Got Mail typifies a certain kind of romantic comedy is further underlined by the  existence of  a  loose remake of  it, in  the  shape of  the  spoof They Came Together (David Wain, 2014), which parodies the  genre with  particular reference to this film. 7. Within the genre broadly defined, Ephron herself also directed Bewitched (2005), remaking the homonymous television show; however, as (largely negative) reviews almost unanimously noted, despite its identical nomen-

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clature this film departs very substantially from its predecessor, to which it bears a strongly revisionist rather than pastiche relationship, hence its exclusion from this study. 8. You’ve Got Mail was co-written with Ephron’s sister Delia. 9. Secrets of Cinema: The Oscars, broadcast on BBC4 at 9 p.m. on 17 July 2018. 10. For instance, Negra (2008), Tasker and Negra (2007: 15); see also Illouz (1997) on romantic discourses in general. 11. For instance, Virginia Woolf or Marguerite Duras. 12. For instance, by Hans Robert Jauss (1982: 22), even before Neale’s (1990: 49) discussion of ‘expectation and anticipation’. 13. This is especially true in the late 1980s to 2000s, a fertile period for family fare in Hollywood. See among other hybrids The Princess Bride (1987), Groundhog Day (1983), About a Boy (2002), Love, Actually (2003), Lohan vehicle Freaky Friday (2003, sold in a double edition DVD with The Parent Trap) or even films in the Meet the Parents series (2000, 2004 and 2010, with a television series the latter year). 14. It is also the case that whereas it was assumed that Mitch’s wealth needed no explanation, Nick’s backstory constructs him as an equally neoliberal creation, self-made through a successful vineyard; however, this is not focused on to the same extent as Elizabeth’s creativity. 15. Figures sourced from imdb.com. 16. Dennis Quaid frames this cultural significance in terms of (gendered) star fandom, opining: ‘Ask any man over 35… Hayley Mills [playing the twins] was a babe.’ In Bernstein et al. (1998: 28). 17. If The Parent Trap foregrounds the way that remakes work like families through reproduction with variation, Celestino Deleyto (2009: 7) (among others) has made the same observation about film genres, invoking Wittgenstein’s apposite notion of ‘family resemblances’ to describe their nature. 18. Radner here diverges from the standard nomenclature and view of contemporaneous ‘post-’feminism as evolving out of earlier feminisms. 19. The Meyers stock character of the negatively coded younger woman ‘wrong partner’ also fits squarely within generic paradigms—without rendering it entirely unproblematic from a feminist perspective concerned with intergenerational sisterhood. 20. A further element blurring boundaries between text and author is Meyers’ overidentification with Hollywood itself, an image she has fed, such as by comparing herself to the lead actress of screwball His Girl Friday Rosalind Russell (Howard Hawks, 1940) (see Jermyn 2017b: 37). 21. With her then husband Charles Shyer, Meyers also co-wrote the neo-­ screwball I Love Trouble (Shyer, 1994).

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22. Jermyn (2017b) compares Meyers’ ‘happy endings’ to Sirkean ‘false’ ones in her analysis of What Women Want. 23. Teenpics that explicitly involve homoeroticism and/or homosexuality, as does female director Karyn Kusama’s teen horror Jennifer’s Body (2009), in this sense heighten that aspect of the whole genre. 24. See also Shary (2014: 2). 25. The fact that a recent feature-length teenpic remix featuring clips from over 200 teen films was entitled Beyond Clueless (Charlie Lyne, 2014) signals Clueless’ ongoing urtext status in the genre. Lesley Speed (2016: 224) also suggests Heckerling’s pioneering role in a trend for women to direct ‘low’ comedies, such as Joy of Sex (Martha Coolidge, 1984), Wayne’s World (Penelope Spheeris, 1996) and Private Parts (Betty Thomas, 1997), post-­ Fast Times. 26. Ben Aslinger (2014: 128) also notes that the use of covers ‘signals the importance of music from youth and early childhood to teenage aesthetics’. 27. For a detailed discussion of language in Clueless, see O’Meara (2014). 28. These are the theme of sex; the lack of focus on education, on familial situations, on politics, or on class; relatively equal gender presence; and textual status as a literary adaptation. 29. The issue of gendered delivery is picked up explicitly in I Could Never Be Your Woman when Rosie advises Izzie not to hold back on screeching to appear demurely ‘feminine’ for the sake of a boy she admires when delivering a (rewritten) version of Alanis Morissette’s ‘Ironic’. 30. Figures sources from www.imdb.com. 31. See, for example, Turim (2003: 45). 32. Turim too has observed that the existence of the Clueless video interface foregrounds how Clueless—like much popular culture—is about the formation of virtual group identities outside a purely textual model of identification or voyeurism (2003: 49). 33. With an eponymous film in 1992 and television show from 1997 to 2003 (on WBTV/UPN). 34. For example, see comments by users Maria Onaiza Pelayo and Jenaizaki Deviant on YouTube: ‘Gene Austin, A Garden in the Rain (1929)’: www. youtube.com/watch?v=zMu-­6bSCzlM. 35. See Spooner (2006: 104); for relevant discussions of feminist horror or Gothic elements, respectively, in Carrie and on The Beguiled, see Paszkiewicz (2018b), Backman Rogers (2019: ‘The Beguiled’). 36. Fazekas and Vena (2020: 239) provide an up-to-date reckoning of 220,000 stories on just one of several relevant sites.

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37. For instance, Clarke and Osborn (2010), Anatole (2010), Click et  al. (2010), Larsson and Steiner (2011a), Wilson (2011), Parke and Wilson (2011), Morey (2012b). 38. A very recent exception is Angie Fazekas and Dan Vena’s (2020: 238–239) brief commentary on Hardwicke’s evocative camerawork and use of colour. 39. Mathijs and Sexton make the same point about Kathryn Bigelow, for whom the situation—unlike Hardwicke’s—has arguably shifted somewhat since the time of their writing in 2011, if not before. 40. For a more detailed account see Edwards-Behi (2014). 41. For a famous example on The Piano, see Sobchack (2004: 61–66) (while relevant discussion of Ferran is cited in Harrod [2016: 70, note 16]). 42. See also McElroy and McElroy (2010) on the film’s ‘eco-Gothics’. Both this and Parmiter’s analyses link the issue to American frontier histories in ways that point to a relationship between the American Gothic and the Western, whose descendants I later argue include the war film and other stories of masculine conflict, such as Detroit. 43. For a different perspective on this detail and its possible sources of inspiration, see Osborn (2010). 44. On fairy-tale resonances in Twilight, see Kramar (2010), Ruddell (2014). 45. Grodal also points out that studies of art and film form, including Eisenstein’s well-known work, gave prominence to the emotional impact of ‘defamiliarization’ techniques before Brecht’s concept of Verfremdung came to dominate discussions (ibid.: 214–215). My interpretation differs from Smith’s (2017: 165), for whom this scene exemplifies Twilight’s general tendency towards ‘remain[ing] unusually earnest, heavy-handed even, in its portrayal of the growing romance between Bella and Edward’—if anything, the so-called heaviness of the narration equates to lightness of address, as my later comments on the fannish pleasures of ‘clumsy’ dialogue reflect. 46. As several commentators noticed, another is Bigelow’s Near Dark (1987), which—perhaps unexpectedly for a more formally experimental film— Simon Bacon (2014: 140) finds to be implicitly more conservative than Twilight in its neutralisation of the vampire clan as a possible alternative to traditional family structures. 47. For instance, Kapurch (2012), Driscoll (2012: 98). 48. While literary scholar Katie Kapurch (2012) tends to reduce her analysis of Twilight’s extensive ‘first-person’ narration to its use of voiceover. 49. Fazekas and Vena (2020: 239–240) list several critiques of Stewart’s acting, which they also see conversely as providing a point of entry for active engagement in its very ‘flatness’. The term resonates with later discussions of Berlantian ‘flat affect’ in Stop-Loss, conceived as a means to stop conventions sedimenting into unnoticeability. Smith indicates that she is basing

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her claims on Petersen’s data but I can find no such reference within the latter’s article. 50. For a conservative reading of the image of the unbitten apple in Twilight, see Averill (2011). 51. ‘The Curious Case of Rutherford and Frye: A Frytful Scare Part 1,’ BBC Radio 4, 30 October 2019 https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/ m0009qtl. Milly Williamson (2005) has further suggested that Gothic vampires in particular are popular with fans who enjoy a highly active interpretive relationship with their texts. 52. While all these analyses pertain to the entire series, many of Hunt’s arguments arise from the first film. Both his and Bacon’s (2014) work draw out suggestively the critical possibilities of pastiche as instantiating both closeness and distance. 53. See Jones (2012), focusing on how written slash fictions embroider upon the Twilight films in particular. 54. Although we have seen that I am less wedded than is Paszkiewicz to haptics as a paradigm. 55. Although Bruce Bennett (2010) accuses De Palma’s film of ultimately maintaining hierarchies of authenticity that naturalise cinematic ‘truth’ and superiority. 56. For Yvonne Tasker and Eylem Atakav, likewise: ‘The sort of “damaged” masculinity presented in The Hurt Locker is something of a cliché within the genre, one which the film relies upon rather than interrogates’ (2010: 66). 57. Eberwein classes both Iraq wars on film together, while also noting some evolutions in depictions. His extrapolations about gender delineate in fact the proto-queer contours of any cultural production in and of itself, as a potential contributor to (re-)writing subjectivities. It is as well to reiterate, then, that any oppressive hegemonic norms ‘rewritten’ remain putative. While Annemarie Jagose (2015) has pointed out that antinormativity does not necessarily produce desirable political outcomes for many marginalised subjects—as the Sergeant Barnes example illustrates—the ‘antisocial turn’ in queer theory specifically can risk treating all existing, multiplicitous and contradictory, norms monolithically as a body to be transgressed. This point resonates with genre films, whose infinitely deferential semantic structure negates the possibility of a perfect original against which change might absolutely define itself. 58. Paszkiewicz draws on Thomas Elsaesser and Malte Hagener’s claim that a focus on eyes in cinema can ‘be the occasion for an unrelenting demand for self-examination to the point of self-recrimination’ in her discussion of a comparable ‘hypertrophy of the visual’ in The Hurt Locker (2018: 107–108).

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59. For a fuller discussion of The Deer Hunter as a genre film, see Hellmann (1991). 60. If Eberwein (2010: 104) charts the process by which military commanders in war films become increasingly inhumane with the advent of the Vietnam cycle, this trajectory arguably reaches its apogee with The Hurt Locker, where the controlling ‘body’ of the bomb disposal device is literally inhuman. Pisters argues that ‘reality does not disappear but returns with a vengeance’ even when war is technologised in such films (2010: 250). 61. Both Burgoyne and Paszkiewicz in their readings of The Hurt Locker likewise emphasise what the former calls ‘war as a somatic engagement’. Burgoyne’s elaboration that this ‘takes place outside any larger meta-­ narrative of nation or history’ (cited in Paszkiewicz 2018a: 117) does not contradict my suggestion that such affects can be and (still, or perhaps even increasingly) are harnessed to the more unified emotional ends of nationalism or other political allegiances. 62. These scholars tie flat affect in Berlant specifically to genre when they cite her observation that ‘generic performance always involves moments of potential collapse that threaten the contract the genre makes with the viewer to fulfil experiential expectations. But these blockages or surprises are usually part of the convention and not a transgression of it’ (in Duschinsky and Wilson 2015: 180).

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Jeffords, Susan (1990), ‘Reproducing Fathers: Gender and the Vietnam War in US Culture,’ in Linda Dittman and Gene Michaud (eds), From Hanoi to Hollywood: The Vietnam War in American Film, New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. Jermyn, Deborah (2017a), Nancy Meyers. London: Bloomsbury. ——— (2017b), ‘The Contemptible Realm of the Romcom Queen: Nancy Meyers, Cultural Value and Romantic Comedy,’ in Mary Harrod and Katarzyna Paszkiewicz (eds), Women Do Genre in Film and Television, London and New York: Routledge, pp. 57–71. Jones, Bethan (2012), ‘Normal Female Interest in Vampires and Werewolves Bonking: Slash and the Reconstruction of Meaning,’ in Anne Morey (ed.), Genre, Reception and Adaptation in the ‘Twilight’ Series, Farnham: Ashgate, pp. 187–204. Jung, Carl G. (1968), Man and his Symbols, New York: Laurel-Dell. Kane, Kathryn (2010), ‘A Very Queer Refusal: The Chilling Effect of the Cullens’ Heteronormative Embrace,’ in Melissa A.  Click, Jennifer Steven Aubrey and Elizabeth Behm-Morawitz (eds), Bitten by Twilight: Youth Culture, Media, and the Vampire Franchise, New York: Peter Lang. Kapurch, Katie (2012), ‘“I’d Never Given Much Thought to How I Would Die”: Uses (and the Decline) of Voiceover in the “Twilight” Films,’ in Anne Morey (ed.), Genre, Reception and Adaptation in the ‘Twilight’ Series, Farnham: Ashgate, pp. 181–197. Kaveney, Roz (2006), Teen Dreams: Reading Teen films and Television from Heathers to Veronica Mars, London: I. B. Tauris. King, Claire Sisco (2011), Washed in Blood: Male Sacrifice, Trauma and the Cinema, New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. Kramar (2010), ‘The Wolf in the Woods: Representations of “Little Red Riding Hood” in Twilight,’ in Giselle Liza Anatole (ed.), Bringing Light to Twilight, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 15–29. Kristeva, Julia (1980), Pouvoirs de l’horreur: essai sur l’abjection, Paris: Éditions du Seuil. ——— (1993), ‘Le Temps des femmes,’ in Les Nouvelles maladies de l’âme, Paris: Fayard, pp. 297–332. Larsson, Mariah and Ann Steiner (eds) (2011a), Interdisciplinary Approaches to Twilight: Studies in Fiction, Media and a Contemporary Cultural Experience, Lund: Nordic Academic Press. ——— (2011b), ‘Introduction,’ in Larsson and Steiner (eds), Interdisciplinary Approaches to Twilight: Studies in Fiction, Media and a Contemporary Cultural Experience, Lund: Nordic Academic Press, pp. 9–28. Leitch, Thomas (1990), ‘Twice-Told Tales: The Rhetoric of the Remake,’ Film Quarterly 18 (3): 138–149.

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Leppert, Alice (2014), ‘Can I Please Give You Some Advice? Clueless and the Teen Makeover,’ Cinema Journal 53 (3) (Spring): 131–137. Link, Alex (2018), ‘The Mysteries of Postmodernism, or, Fredric Jameson’s Gothic Plots,’ Gothic Studies 11 (1): 70–85. Loock, Kathleen and Constantine Verevis (2012), ‘Introduction: Remake/ Remodel,’ in Loock and Verevis (eds), Film Remakes, Adaptations and Fan Productions, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 1–15. Lynch, Deirdre (2003), ‘Clueless: About History,’ in Suzanne R. Pucci and James Thompson (eds), Jane Austen and Co.: Remaking the Past in Contemporary Culture, New York: SUNY Press, pp. 71–92. Lyytikainen, Pirjo (2012), ‘Paul Ricœur and the Role of Plot in Narrative Worldmaking,’ in Saija Isomaa, Sari Kivitso, Pirjo Lyytikainen, Sanna Nyqvist, Merja Polvinen and Riikka Rossi (eds), Rethinking Mimesis: Concepts and Practices of Literary Representation, Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, pp. 47–72. Marshall, Kelli (2009), ‘Something’s Gotta Give and the Classical Screwball Comedy,’ Journal of Popular Film and Television 37 (1): 9–15. Martin, Adrian (2009), ‘Live to Tell: Teen Movies Yesterday and Today,’ Lumina 2: 6–14. Mathijs, Ernest and Jamie Sexton (2011), Cult Cinema: An Introduction, London and Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell. McAndrew, Frank T. (2016), ‘Why are High School Memories Burned into Our Brains?’ The Guardian, Thursday 2 June. https://www.theguardian.com/ commentisfree/2016/jun/02/high-­school-­memories-­teenagers McElroy, James and Emma Catherine McElroy (2010), ‘Eco-Gothics for the Twenty-First Century,’ in Amy M.  Clarke and Marijane Osborn (eds), The Twilight Mystique: Critical Essays on the Novels and Films, Jefferson, NC and London: McFarland and Co., pp. 80–91. Mijovic, Nikola (2017), ‘Film Review: Personal Shopper,’ Film, Fashion & Consumption 6 (1): 19–23. Mishra, Vijay (1994), The Gothic Sublime, New  York: State University of New York Press. Moine, Raphaëlle (2007), Remakes: les films français à Hollywood, Paris: CNRS Éditions. Morey, Anne (2012a), ‘“Famine for Food, Expectation for Content”: Jane Eyre as Precursor to the “Twilight” Saga,’ in Morey (ed.), Genre, Reception and Adaptation in the ‘Twilight’ Series, Farnham: Ashgate, pp. 15–28. ——— (ed.) (2012b), Genre, Reception and Adaptation in the ‘Twilight’ Series, Farnham: Ashgate. ——— (2012c), ‘Introduction,’ in Morey (ed.), Genre, Reception and Adaptation in the ‘Twilight’ Series, Farnham: Ashgate, pp. 1–14. Neale, Steve (1990), ‘Questions of Genre,’ Screen 31 (1): 45–66.

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Negra, Diane (2008), ‘Structural Integrity, Historical Reversion, and the Post-9/11 Chick-Flick,’ Feminist Media Studies 8 (1) (March): 51–68. Ngai, Sianne (2007), Ugly Feelings, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Nykvist, Karin (2011), ‘The Body Project,’ in Mariah Larsson and Ann Steiner (eds), Interdisciplinary Approaches to Twilight: Studies in Fiction, Media and a Contemporary Cultural Experience, Lund: Nordic Academic Press, pp. 29–46. Olin-Scheller, Christina (2011), in Mariah Larsson and Anne Steiner (eds), Interdisciplinary Approaches to Twilight: Studies in Fiction, Media and a Contemporary Cultural Experience, Lund: Nordic Academic Press, pp. 159–175. O’Meara, Jennifer (2014), ‘“We’ve Got to Work on Your Accent and Vocabulary”: Characterization through Verbal Style in Clueless,’ Cinema Journal 53 (3) (Spring): 138–145. Osborn, Marijane (2010), ‘Luminous and Liminal: Why Edward Shines,’ in Amy M. Clarke and Marijane Osborn (eds), The Twilight Mystique: Critical Essays on the Novels and Films, Jefferson, NC and London: McFarland and Co., pp. 15–34. Paget, Derek (2011), No Other Way to Tell It: Docudrama on Film and Television, Manchester: Manchester University Press (British Library digital collection). Parke, Maggie and Natalie Wilson (eds) (2011), Theorizing Twilight: Critical Essays on What’s at Stake in a Post-Vampire World, Jefferson, NC and London: McFarland and Co. Parmiter, Tara K. (2011), ‘Green is the New Black: Ecophobia and the Gothic Landscape in the Twilight Series,’ in Giselle Liza Anatole (ed.), Bringing Light to Twilight, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 221–233. Paszkiewicz, Katarzyna (2015), ‘Hollywood Transgressor or Hollywood Transvestite?: The Reception of Kathryn Bigelow’s The Hurt Locker (2008),’ in Christine Gledhill and Julia Knight (eds), Doing Women’s Film History: Reframing Cinemas, Past and Future, Chicago: University of Illinois Press, pp. 166–180. ——— (2018a), Genre, Authorship and Contemporary Women Filmmakers, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. ——— (2018b), ‘When the Woman Directs (a Horror Film),’ in Mary Harrod and Katarzyna Paszkiewicz (eds), Women Do Genre in Film and Television, London and New York: Routledge, pp. 41–56. Perkins, Victor (2005), ‘Where is the World? The Horizon of Events in Movie Fiction,’ in John Gibbs and Douglas Pye, Style and Meaning: Studies in the Detailed Analysis of Film, Manchester: Manchester University Press, pp. 16–41. Petersen, Anne Helen (2012), ‘That Teenage Feeling: Twilight, Fantasy, and Feminist Readers,’ Feminist Media Studies 12 (1): 51–67. Pettersson, Bo (2012), ‘Beyond Anti-Mimetic Models: A Critique of Unnatural Narratology,’ in Saija Isomaa, Sari Kivitso, Pirjo Lyytikainen, Sanna Nyqvist,

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Merja Polvinen and Riikka Rossi (eds), Rethinking Mimesis: Concepts and Practices of Literary Representation, Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, pp. 73–92. Pisters, Patricia (2010) ‘Logistics of Perception 2.0: Multiple Screen Aesthetics in Iraq War films,’ Film-Philosophy 14 (1): 232–252. Potter, Claire (2010), ‘Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell: Gendering War in The Hurt Locker,’ The Chronicle: Blog Network, 20 March 2010. https://www.chronicle.com/ blognetwork/tenur edradical/2010/03/dont-­a sk-­d ont-­t ell-­h ur t­locker-­writes/ Powrie, Phil (2020), ‘Music in Girlhood,’ Girlhood and Contemporary French Cinema Studies Symposium, King’s College London, 8 February 2020. Radner, Hilary (2010), Neo-Feminist Cinema: Girly Films, Chick Flicks, and Consumer Culture, London and New York: Routledge. Radway, Janice A. (1991), Reading the Romance: Women, Patriarchy and Popular Literature, Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina Press. Roberts, Kimberley (2002), ‘The Pleasures and Problems of the “Angry Girl”,’ in Frances Gateward and Murray Pomerance (eds), Sugar, Spice and Everything Nice: Cinemas of Girlhood, Detroit: Wayne State University Press, pp. 217–233. Robinson, Janet S. (2014), ‘The Gendered Geometry of War in Kathryn Bigelow’s The Hurt Locker (2008),’ in Karen A.  Ritzenhoff and Jakub Kzecki (eds), Heroism and Gender in War Films, New York: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 153–170. Ruddell, Caroline (2014), ‘The Lore of the Wild,’ in Wickham Clayton and Sarah Harman (eds), Screening Twilight: Critical Approaches to a Cinematic Phenomenon, London: I. B. Tauris, pp. 74–85. Schatz, Thomas (1981), Hollywood Genres: Formulas, Filmmaking, and the Studio System, Austin: McGraw-Hill. Scheiner, Georganne (2000), Signifying Female Adolescence: Film Representations and Fans, Westport, CT: Praeger. Schreiber, Michele (2014), American Postfeminist Cinema: Women, Romance and Contemporary Culture, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Schwind, Jean (2008), ‘Cool Coaching at Ridgemont High,’ The Journal of Popular Culture 41 (6): 1012–1032. Sears, Camilla A. and Rebecca Godderis (2011), ‘Roar Like a Tiger on TV?: Constructions of Women and Childbirth in Reality TV,’ Feminist Media Studies 11 (2): 181–195. Shary, Timothy (2005), Teen Movies: American Youth on Screen, New  York and London: Wallflower. ——— (2014), Generation Multiplex: The Image of Youth in American Cinema since 1980, Austin: University of Texas Press. Smith, Frances (2017), Rethinking the Hollywood Teen Movie: Genre, Gender and Identity, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.

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Sobchack, Vivian (2004), Carnal Thoughts: Embodiment and Moving Image Culture, Oakland: University of California Press. Speed, Lesley (1998), ‘Tuesday’s Gone: The Nostalgic Teen Film,’ Journal of Popular Film and Television 26 (1): 24–32. ——— (2002), ‘A World Ruled by Hilarity: Gender and Low Comedy in the Films of Amy Heckerling,’ Senses of Cinema 22. http://sensesofcinema.com/2002/ filmmaker-­profiles/heckerling/ ——— (2016), ‘Way Hilarious: Amy Heckerling as a Female Comedy Director, Writer, and Producer,’ in Frances Smith and Timothy Shary (eds), ReFocus: The Films of Amy Heckerling, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Spooner, Catherine (2006), Contemporary Gothic, London: Reaktion Books. Stam, Robert (1999), Film Theory: An Introduction, Oxford: Blackwell. Stern, Lesley (2000), ‘Emma in Los Angeles: Remaking the Book and the City,’ in James Naremore (ed.), Film Adaptation, London: Athlone Press, pp. 221–238. Stewart, Garrett (2009), ‘Digital Fatigue: Imaging War in Recent American Film,’ Film Quarterly 62 (4) (Summer): 45–55. Stewart, Susan (1993), Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection, Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Stolar, Batia Boe (2013), ‘The Politics of Reproduction in Stephanie Meyer’s Twilight Saga,’ in Barbara Brodman and James E.  Doan (eds), Images of the Modern Vampire: The Hip and the Atavistic, New Jersey: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press (Ebook). Tally, Margaret (2008), ‘Something’s Gotta Give: Hollywood, Female Sexuality and the “Older Bird” Chick Flick,’ in Suzanne Ferriss and Mallory Young (eds), Chick Flicks: Contemporary Women at the Movies, London and New York: Routledge, pp. 119–131. Tasker, Yvonne and Diane Negra (2007), ‘Introduction,’ in Yvonne Tasker and Diane Negra (eds), Interrogating Postfeminism: Gender and the Politics of Popular Culture, Durham and London: Duke University Press, pp. 1–25. Tasker, Yvonne and Eylem Atakav (2010), ‘The Hurt Locker: Male Intimacy, Violence, and the Iraq War movie,’ Sine/Cine: Journal of Film Studies 1 (2): 57–70. Tenga, Angela (2011), ‘Psychology, Intertextuality, and Hyperreality in the Series,’ in Maggie Parke and Natalie Wilson (eds), Theorizing Twilight: Critical Essays on What’s at Stake in a Post-Vampire World, Jefferson, NC and London: McFarland and Co, pp. 101–116. Thompson, Evan (2007), Mind in Life: Biology, Phenomenology and the Sciences of the Mind, Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press. Thompson, Lauren Jade (2013), ‘Mancaves and Cushions: Marking Masculine and Feminine Domestic Space in Postfeminist Romantic Comedy,’ in Joel Gwynne and Nadine Muller (eds), Postfeminism and Contemporary Hollywood Cinema, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 149–165.

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Tincknell, Estella (2009), ‘Feminine Boundaries: Adolescence, Witchcraft and the Supernatural in New Gothic Cinema and Television,’ in Ian Conrich (ed.), Horror Zone: The Cultural Experience of Contemporary Horror Cinema, London: I. B. Tauris, pp. 245–258. Tiqqun (2012), Preliminary Materials for a Theory of the Young-Girl, trans. Ariana Reines, Cambridge, MITS Press. Turim, Maureen (2003), ‘Popular Culture and the Comedy of Manners: Clueless and Fashion Clues,’ in Suzanne R.  Pucci and James Thompson (eds), Jane Austen and Co.: Remaking the Past in Contemporary Culture, New York: SUNY Press, pp. 33–52. Verevis, Constantine (2006), Film Remakes, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Virilio, Paul (1992), War and Cinema: The Logistics of Perception, London: Verso. Westwell, Guy (2008), ‘Stop-Loss,’ Sight and Sound 18 (5) (May): 87–88. Wiktorin, Pierre (2011), ‘The Vampire as a Religious Phenomenon,’ in Mariah Larsson and Ann Steiner (eds), Interdisciplinary Approaches to Twilight: Studies in Fiction, Media and a Contemporary Cultural Experience, Lund: Nordic Academic Press, pp. 279–296. Williamson, Milly (2005), The Lure of the Vampire: Gender, Fiction, and Fandom from Bram Stoker to Buffy, London: Wallflower Press. Wilson, Natalie (2011), Seduced by Twilight: The Allure and Contradictory Messages of the Popular Saga, Jefferson, NC and London: McFarland and Co. ——— (2014), ‘Foreword,’ in Wickham Clayton and Sarah Harman (eds), Screening Twilight: Critical Approaches to a Cinematic Phenomenon, London: I. B. Tauris, pp. x–xiv. Wood, Robin (2002), ‘Party Time or Can’t Hardly Wait for that American Pie: Hollywood High School Movies of the 90s,’ CineAction! 58: 4–10. ——— (2003), Hollywood: From Vietnam to Reagan… and Beyond, New  York: Columbia University Press. Zanger, Anat (2006), Film Remakes as Ritual and Disguise: From Ripley to Carmen, Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press.

Websites www.twilightmoms.com www.youtube.com/watch?v=zMu-­6bSCzlM www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m0009qtl www.imdb.com

CHAPTER 4

Art Imitating Life Imitating Art

I would argue that a politics that acts without reaction is impossible: such a possibility depends on the erasure and concealment of histories that come before the subject. There is no pure or originary action, which is outside such a history of ‘reaction’, whereby bodies come to be ‘impressed upon’ by the surfaces of others. —Sara Ahmed, The Cultural Politics of Emotion

This book has so far considered films based explicitly on other texts, then examined those that wear their engagement with generic conventions as such as a badge of honour. In Chap. 4, I explore narratives that claim a more direct relationship with the historical real by depicting specific individuals and/or events from actuality. Actuality here includes a range of spatio-temporalities, from very recent events arising within the context of the War on Terror (Zero Dark Thirty) to the history of America in the 1960s and 1970s (Detroit, Lords of Dogtown), but also that of eighteenth-­ century Europe (Marie Antoinette). Despite the focus on films with fairly pronounced credentials as to their (purported) rendering of the historical, this chapter spans fictional genres such as the procedural thriller, (true) crime drama, war film, horror film, sacrificial trauma film (King 2011), sports movie, biopic, autofiction and, once more, the teenpic: a master genre for this study intersecting with many of the films in the chapter. In other words, it preserves the reticular conception of how genres work that © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 M. Harrod, Heightened Genre and Women’s Filmmaking in Hollywood, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-70994-5_4

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has animated these pages until now, while simultaneously bringing a newly ‘realist’ element to bear. However, the approach adopted highlights the fact that, like all generic categories, the notion of the ‘historical film’ as distinguishable from other kinds of fictionalised genre films is, as Robert Burgoyne (2008) has also shown, a false one. More originally, I will argue that the films examined in this chapter signpost—often quite clearly—the generic nature of human experience of the social world, with pre-eminent reference to filmic and entertainment genres as well as other media forms. The films in Chap. 4, then, express most eloquently a sensibility I have attributed to Hollywood women directors’ recent popular cinephilic output, defined by a clear acknowledgement that mainstream genres structure lives. Another way to describe all the films in this chapter might be as docudramas, a term that has attracted critical attention with relevance for this discussion. Scholars’ attempts to pin down the docudrama are suitably expansive: Alan Rosenthal takes a typical line when he cites a television executive’s reference to ‘a spectrum that runs from journalistic reconstruction to relevant drama with infinite gradations along the way’, then qualifies this with a rejection of the criterion of relevance, preferring to focus instead on a narrative’s inspiration in either recent events or the lives of (particular) real people (1999: xv). While the form dates back to the earliest days of cinema’s actuality films, numerous commentators have also noted docudrama’s proliferation in contemporary media. Alongside a televisual explosion, this encompasses cinema, with Derek Paget claiming that docudramas including many biopics made up around 10% of the top 100 films screened in the UK in 2003 (while in 1998 he had dubbed it an ‘occasional’ genre) (2011). He hazards that an explanation for the trend’s expansion lies in the valorisation of perceived authenticity in what is now commonly referred to as the post-truth age, but also producers’ and audiences’ increased ease with the ‘play-off between fact and fiction’ (2015).1 Such a statement applies readily to the films examined in these pages.

The War on Terror as Procedural Thriller in Zero Dark Thirty (Kathryn Bigelow, 2013) The recurrence of not only films embedded in the context of the War on Terror—narratives that would surely be categorised as ‘[direct] products of historical reality’ in Geoff King’s (2017: 52) taxonomy of post-9/11

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and other films’ referential status—at the end of the previous chapter and the start of this one advertises the purposively functional nature of the generic labels employed in this study. Needless to say, both Stop-Loss and Zero Dark Thirty are involved in a complex and shifting negotiation between collective history and individualised narrative. Indeed, Stop-Loss’ intended status as an accessible vehicle for Peirce’s critique of US policy brings to mind Steven N. Lipkin’s description of docudrama in terms less of document than of argument (1999: 68–69, 79). Nonetheless, the rationale for considering (only) Zero Dark Thirty under the docudrama rubric concerns the specificity of the events depicted: while in Chap. 3, Stop-Loss (like Bigelow’s own 2008 The Hurt Locker) was principally seen as an Iraq War film, invested in probing dehumanising aspects of war in the context of a specific policy in one war, Zero Dark Thirty homes in on a version of the precise procedural events leading to the killing of Osama bin Laden in May 2011. This includes a basis in individual characters, notably the (subsequently much publicly criticised) female CIA operative Alfreda Bikowsky on whom Bigelow’s protagonist Maya (Jessica Chastain) was notoriously calqued. Equally, the extratextual status of Zero Dark Thirty as a film about one ‘true’ story imbues it with a greater claim to historicity than that of a generalised war film (the role of war reporter Mark Boal as screenwriter on both her war films notwithstanding), as does its intratextual positioning as a narrative based on historical research, through an opening title card stating: ‘The following motion picture is based on first hand accounts of actual events.’ Likewise, paratextual discourse foregrounded Bigelow and Boal’s access to classified CIA materials in researching the story, a detail that has been ascribed to a recent push by the organisation to cooperate with Hollywood producers in order to improve its cinematic image (Shaw and Jenkins 2017: 92–3). Finally, while crime fiction as a whole shares with realism such features as a preference for focusing on dark social themes and urban locales and an ostensibly logic-based approach to narrative causality, here a kinship with the cinematic genre is enhanced by Bigelow’s (from this point onwards signature) documentary-like style involving, in addition to the (relatively sparing) use of differently coded footage ‘types’ seen in recent war films: a hand-held camera, naturalistic lighting and crowded, open compositions with extraneous, indistinct foreground objects sometimes blocking sections of the screen. This section proceeds from the premise that Zero Dark Thirty’s aesthetics underscore historicity to a markedly great extent by applying a documentary-­style approach to the field of intelligence gathering. After

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briefly considering the ideological import of its deployment of horrifying themes of torture within this relatively muted aesthetic-generic framework, I consider anti-heroic tonality in the film, notably circulating around Maya’s character, to finally demonstrate how in this and other features the film nonetheless remains very much a genre piece, with particular reference to the procedural thriller-drama. I also show that, as with both Stop-­ Loss and other films examined in Chap. 3, Zero Dark Thirty actually tends to discourse with some measure of explicitness on the inseparability of the mind and body, in addition to addressing us in a mode coloured by this apprehension. Realism and Torture Porn If, according to Michael Parenti in an analysis of US supremacy and Hollywood, films’ ability to work as social control lies in their aptitude for ‘insinuat[ing] themselves into the fabric of our consciousness [in such a way] as to remain unchallenged, having been embraced as part of the nature of things’ (Shaw and Jenkins 2017: 102), it is no wonder that films that are coded as authentically ‘natural’ or unmediated are often held to particularly exigent moral standards (cf. Feldman 1986: 355; Rosenthal 1999: xv; Paget 2011, ‘Introduction’)—from whichever set of moral values such standards may be taken. Thus, the extremely heated controversy that has dogged several aspects of Zero Dark Thirty since its release is symptomatic of its pseudo-realism, including often (again) as related to the director’s gender. This highly visible debate has underlined cinema’s role in cultural discourse and as such merits some attention. Zero Dark Thirty may be peerless in recent US film history when it comes to media attention (Dequen 2013: 66); reactions to it have consequently already themselves been the subject of considerable meta-critical analysis. Michael Boughn (2013: 20) and Nick James (2013: 9) were among those to list the numerous critiques of the film that had already proliferated two years after its release, while more recently Tony Shaw and Tricia Jenkins (2017: 96–102) provide information about a range of official US—notably CIA—responses, as well as some negative reactions from outside the USA. The key criticism of the film concerned its apparently relatively even-handed depiction of torture and in particular its superficial elevation of the tactic to a pivotal status in the search for bin Laden, apparently in contradistinction to documented fact.2 Details such as this led ‘celebrity radicals’ (Boughn 2013: 20) Naomi Wolfe and Slavoj Žižek to

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condemn the film, with the former comparing it to Leni Riefenstahl’s Nazi propaganda piece Triumph of the Will/Triumph des Willens (Germany 1935). However, an opposing view held that the film depicted the CIA operation to kill bin Laden in a negative light; indeed, it was even briefly the object of a government probe, a development which The Hollywood Reporter remarked on as highly unusual (Gilmore 2017: 280). Other reproaches concerned almost every aspect of the film, from the distracting glamour of its protagonist (Westwell 2012: 87) to its cavalier approach to time (see Gilmore 2017: 280). Most strikingly, a range of views appears to have traversed the spectrum of respondents (whether officials, journalists, academics, men, women and so on). Zero Dark Thirty proved, then, an exceptionally divisive film. While the specific stance on contemporary US policies taken by any film is not the primary focus of this book, the identity positions with which its director becomes identified through their work, spanning narrative and aesthetic aspects, do come within its broad remit. Consequently, the question of how we should understand the value systems articulated by ‘a Bigelow film’, including evaluating the debate around this one, is not incidental. In the first place, if the reception of The Hurt Locker illustrates the unreasonable demands placed on female filmmakers to carry the burden of ‘feminist’ representation (Tasker and Atakav 2010: 68), Zero Dark Thirty is likely to have been affected by all the same prejudices and in addition represents the film through which Bigelow, now seen to have shattered the glass ceiling under which the Academy has for so long guarded its Best Film Award, was forced to confront ‘the unenviable task of picking up the pieces and making something equally worthwhile out of them’ (Nordine 2013: 76). Put simply, the film’s status as a follow-up to an Oscar win, let alone an Oscar  win by a woman, predestines it for censure—as does its publicised history as a text created in some sense under the aegis of a government organisation, at least as far as the left-leaning cultural press is concerned.3 As regards the film’s content, given the centrality of its torture scenes to this debate, the early sequences in which they principally feature provide an obvious place to briefly consider the cogency of claims about its ideology, including as they relate to generic signification. Zero Dark Thirty opens on a black screen, over which we hear original, harrowing audio recordings from the phone-calls made to emergency workers from inside the Twin Towers during 9/11. This prologue is immediately juxtaposed with a sequence of torture at a US ‘black site’, involving several Americans,

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including our protagonist Maya (initially masked) and their victim, Ammar (Reda Kateb). Close analyses of the torture scenes tend to concur that the use of close-ups and the editing patterns invite split identification between the victim and his oppressors (e.g. Boughn 2013: 2; Greer 2017). In other words, they potentially avoid the sado-masochistic voyeurism classically imputed to violent horror movies, the genre with which torture is more typically associated—but thereby could be seen to downplay the practice’s ethical transgressions and legitimise it (ibid.). While Amanda Greer thus sees attempts to humanise Ammar as superficial and evidence of bad faith, Hilary Neroni’s (2015) ‘biopolitical’ analysis argues that through torture Maya reduces Ammar to a functional body, a vessel from which information can be directly obtained, without subjectivity. As in the case of Stop-Loss, and as is also typical of Bigelow’s oeuvre generally, Zero Dark Thirty, however, is a film that is not only implicitly conscious of the meaninglessness of ‘subjectivity’ as divorced from the body but also explicitly dramatises this point, problematising claims that Bigelow trivialises bodily experience of any sort.4 Neroni undermines her own argument by highlighting the fact that the information the torturers glean from Ammar does not, in fact, result from brutality. Instead, violence and the threat of being put in a box leads neither to the desired results nor even a forgettable silence but rather to a striking gesture of defiance, as the victim refuses to specify a weekday on which terrorist activities took place and instead lists several, first in screams then in sullen, barely audible yet mutinous, increasingly nonsensical monotone: ‘MONDAY! … TUESDAY! … FRIDAY! … Monday … Thursday … Tuesday … Friday … Thursday. … Friday.’ This mocking response renders his flatly delivered ‘data’ meaningless through its context, making the opposite point from the significance  attributed by Neroni to these sequences. The body does not appear merely as a vessel for information here; instead, information is inseparable from the conditions of its production, within which the mistreated, angry, defective body is foregrounded. Raw data becomes, as Lisa Gitelman and Virginia Jackson (2013) have it, ‘an oxymoron’ and the incantation of undifferentiated possible answers figures the imprecision of the CIA’s information-gathering techniques. While this crucial detail may have been initially masked beneath a patina of control and officialdom, with Ammar’s disobedient tactic, cracks in the façade splinter into major chasms. Instead, useful information is gleaned only as a result of mental trickery, when Maya and her colleague Dan (Jason Clarke), at her suggestion, use new intelligence to persuade Ammar

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that he has given them information but forgotten having done so due to brain trauma, such that he gives up further details freely. While it is true that this takes place within the context of what Neroni calls ‘the torture fantasy’, it is naïve to suggest subjectivities, including mental processes, are subordinate to the body in this manoeuvre. Instead, they are involved in a complex two-way dialogue and indeed, if anything, the body is used primarily only to influence cognitive processes, which in turn reconstruct it through a form of implanted memory and determine its future actions. The charade of a civilised meal during which Ammar gives up the required information, which some commentators saw as implausible, is precisely a game of performance rooted in Maya and Dan’s careful negotiation of externalised subjectivities—the faces they present and demand in return. That is, this scene exemplifies a postmodern view of (even embodied) subjectivity as protean, rather than one based on the inner child of Freudian theory evoked by Neroni’s approach. In generic terms, we have seen that collapsing mind-body distinctions makes it impossible to oppose intellectual genres to visceral ones (and indeed I will argue that the body is strikingly underlined in the diegeses, as well as solicited by the aesthetic address, of all the films in this chapter), or here, arguably, realist procedural detective fiction to so-called torture porn. In fact, Torben Grodal has pointed out that this distinction is particularly prone to collapse when it comes to horror and crime fictions: Important writers and directors of crime fiction are often also writers or directors of horror fiction (Poe, Doyle, Hitchcock; see Grodal 1984), and this points to the importance of cognitive control in crime fiction and the link between this and ‘body’ control. Often horror fiction also deals with cognitive control, but, whereas the motivation in detective fiction is primarily cognitive gratification, in horror fiction the effort to gain cognitive control is mostly derived from a motivation to maintain personal body and mind autonomy, which is under severe attack from uncontrollable phenomena. (Grodal 1999: 236)

The possibility of reducing human subjectivity to either all mind or all body in genre cinema’s formal structure is particularly powerfully demonstrated here by bringing together the ‘low’ body genre of horror, linked to primal urges and exploitation positioning as well as high contrivance, with crime and detective fiction, which has traditionally connoted rationalism

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and, as we have seen,  overlapped with realism both in this respect and through its focus on social problems in everyday (urban) settings. In terms of the narrative itself, moreover, Cahiers du cinéma reviewer Charles Béghin also sees Zero Dark Thirty’s treatment of ‘insurgent’ bodies in terms diametrically opposed to Neroni’s, albeit with reference to a later sequence. The French critic thus contrasts this film’s vision of the raid on bin Laden’s compound with depictions of such operations offered by the CNN programme Situation Room (2005–), where action—including the real raid on this compound itself—is filtered through images of an anxious room of onlookers with their gazes trained on a monitor. By focusing only on the location of the attack, avoiding the predictable cutaways to Maya’s face, for Béghin, Zero Dark Thirty removes the technological perspective familiar from 2000s action and spy narratives such as Ridley Scott’s Body of Lies (2008) or ‘any other Hollywood film’ and therefore avoids ‘treating the bodies as data’ (Béghin 2013: 26). Tellingly, Maya also explicitly refuses to take part in the torture sessions as an onlooker watching a monitor, as proposed by Dan, facilitating our instead uncomfortably close, complicit view on events. A mediating perspective is a typical feature of detective fiction, and its meaning for ‘empathic relations’ a key area of definition for Grodal’s analysis of the genre, wherein he suggests the  intervening layer typical of metafiction is personalised through the protagonist. Indeed, just as the French nouveaux romanciers’ avant-garde experiments with novel form understood that in some ways the detective mystery story provides a pared down paradigm of the hermeneutics characterising all fiction, it has been argued that the detective is a representative of the film viewer (if not the voyeuristic ‘modern man’ as a whole) (see Grodal 1999: 240). Eschewing technological perspectives perhaps makes Zero Dark Thirty a little less ‘meta’. However, Maya’s human perspective is very much preserved as an organising structure for much of the film’s action, once again rerouting ‘objective’ technology through embodied human intervention, in a fashion that is quintessentially generic. Certainly in the early torture sequences, there are cutaways from Ammar’s pain and humiliation to reveal Maya’s sickened expression, flinching and looking away. This in fact leads Greer to argue that ‘[w]hile the film proposes a fully realistic depiction of torture through narrative and its notorious shakicam techniques, its editing— through the cut-away—works to place these tortuous acts within a structure of etiquette, so as to reimbue America’s military presence with etiquette itself’ (Greer 2017). Yet most often throughout the film, Maya

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as torturer is signalled to have mastered a cool detachment—including by exploiting a partially technological perspective, pace Béghin. This is thus the case both in interrogations themselves, where she calmly asks her colleague periodically to hit uncooperative interlocutors, and as she closely but apparently impassively scans multiple recordings of ‘enhanced interrogation’, so that we understand she is unmoved and eager only for useful information. This detachment, coded as control of emotion in the service of officially sanctioned ends, suggests ruthlessness rather than humane ethics. This is a trait characteristic of detectives in procedural narratives, the model to which we will see in the remainder of this analysis Zero Dark Thirty in many ways most closely hews. Maya’s (Anti-)Heroic Narrative Critics concerned with gender studies have also tended to interpret Maya’s embodiment of the figure of the detective specifically in a more positive light than do Greer and Neroni.5 Notably, writing from a perspective (like Neroni’s) explicitly informed by elements of psychoanalysis, Agnieszka Piotrowska (2014) likens her to Antigone, a highly recurrent if ambivalent figure for feminist thought, and attributes Lacanian ethics to her refusal to conform to hackneyed norms. Charles-Antoine Courcoux also draws on classical forebears in order to situate Maya within a ‘heroic realm’ so androcentric that it offers no word for female ‘heroes’, to which Hollywood war films are the heir. As he notes, the historical and enduring asymmetry of such cultural forms is increasingly evident in today’s more egalitarian gender landscape, yet which still sees ‘the generic protocols of [the Hollywood genre’s] male-centered narratives remain conventionally in the service of an overly masculine heroism grounded in an ontological gender antagonism’ (Courcoux 2014: 225–6). Courcoux goes on to compare the depiction in Zero Dark Thirty of Maya’s ‘modalities of access to the heroic mode’ (ibid.) favourably to that of both Carrie (Claire Danes) in Homeland and the other major female character in Bigelow’s film, CIA operative Jessica (Jennifer Ehle), who both exhibit certainly classically feminine characteristics in contradistinction to Maya (ibid.: 230–234). Fascinatingly, for Courcoux Jessica’s error is also rooted in traditional Occidentalism: she exhibits what Maya calls a pre-9/11 view of bin Laden, including imagining him holed up in a cave, at once betraying naivety about Eastern primitivism and exhibiting an outmoded view of masculine power specifically as rooted in a privileged connection with nature,

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notably excluding technological expertise. Courcoux describes Maya, by contrast, in terms resonant for a study of the gendered implications of genre films’ balancing of mental and bodily address, as ‘constantly in search of a fair distance between reflection and action, inside and outside, the East and the West, masculinity and femininity’ (ibid.: 233). Notes of caution should, however, be sounded in regard to the description of Maya as straddling East and West (or indeed equating these in any direct way with gender and other binaries), in the sense that the actions of the plot to which she is instrumental bring about the imposition of Western power over what postcolonial theorist Johan Höglund dubs a subaltern people; ‘[t]he only spaces where East and West intersect and interact are the sites of destructive terrorism, the interrogation cell, or locations where Special Forces mete out retributive violence’ (Höglund 2017: 298). While it is possible to see Maya’s final emotional collapse—which Höglund constellates within Frantz Fanon’s (1952) account of the damage exerted by colonial brutality on the coloniser as well as the colonised— as a function of the loss of self implied by partially ‘going over to the other side’, indeed very explicitly thinking herself into the mindset of bin Laden and his close associates in order to track him down, this revenge-­motivated shape-shifting impulse emphatically does not produce any form of utopian cultural hybridisation. In terms of gendered corporeality (in which I include the thinking body), however, Maya’s character can be seen through Courcoux’s formulation as embodying metonymically the work of genre films as described in these pages, which situate their potency at the intersection of ‘reflection [the mind] and action [the body]’. Not only that, but she is emblematic of Bigelow’s particular approach to genre filmmaking in the sense that ‘[h]er power stems just as much from her indifference to sociocultural gender prerogatives as from her aptitude to assume the masculine point of view of her superior or her enemy’ (ibid.: 234). The character reflects, then, an impetus not to reverse binaries but to reorder their very DNA.6 Paradoxically, in her total lack of association with sexuality—as she puts it on one occasion, ‘I’m not that girl that fucks’—Maya queers norms more fundamentally than a butch figure, rendering the outward signs of gendered and attendant sexual identities illegible so as  to question the language of clichéd appearance. Her beauty only further frustrates interpretation here, in its irrelevance to the narrative—although I agree that the improbably good looks of characters throughout the film are one element that jar with its pseudo-realism, while satisfying the requirements of popular generic verisimilitude for the glamorous format

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of Hollywood and other US onscreen crime fictions peopled by conventionally attractive actors. The discrepancy between readings of Maya’s character, like those of the film as a whole, points to a broader problem with analyses such as Neroni’s, according to which a film’s meaning is largely immanent to the text and moreover, as Boughn (2013: 21) notes in a bold and brilliant defence of the film, reducible to little more than details of the plot (or even its rough outline): an example of the type of approach Rosalind Galt (2011) moreover aligns with cisheteropatriarchy. For Boughn and many others, attention to the experiential details of the narrative as much as its story suggests an altogether more ambivalent stance towards the campaign shown within the War on Terror in the film, or to the outcomes of torture. In particular, he comments on the failure of the climactic sequence showing the capture of bin Laden to conform to the expectations of a heroic narrative (ibid.: 25). The perceived failure of the ending to offer heroic catharsis is also eloquently expressed by Cahiers du cinéma critic Joachim Lepastier, also due to its stressed irreality. For this critic, the final attack on bin Laden’s home [also] gives the impression of being filmed in real time, yet radiates an increasingly strong air of perceptual unreality. Against the backdrop of a night filmed like plastic matter, the vertical and labyrinthine ingression into the house approximates the assault to an abstract video-game and opens onto an almost derisory confrontation between Cyborg commandoes, night-shirt-clad bin Ladens and a pack of hysterical children acting as a potential human shield. Scattered with signs almost identical to those of 9/11 (the crashed helicopter in the courtyard, the children wailing in the dark, the targets defeated while almost sleeping and the incredulity and panic of the locals), the sensory rendering of this offensive, launched against an enemy who has remained until the end all but invisible, insidiously interrogates the relativity of notions of glory and heroism. (Lepastier 2013: 23, my translation)

Boughn also comments on an earlier divergence from the typical feeling shape of the war film genre. During and after the explosion in Jordan that kills several of Maya’s colleagues and seals her determination to wreak vengeance on bin Laden, ‘[t]here is no upwelling of emotion, no surge of vengeful feelings, except for Maya’s’ (Boughn 2013: 23). Although I will later discuss related (detective) genre films that have downbeat endings, I largely agree with these interpretations of both these key scenes, the ‘low’ at the end of the second act and the third act climax.

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In the case of the former, our sympathy for the dead is crucially mitigated by the clear CIA error that allowed it to happen, when Jessica instructs the security guards at the camp’s gate not to check her visitor lest he be spooked, and as underlined by the section’s title on an interpolated title card, ‘Human Error’.7 The facelessness of the enemy, whom we view only briefly and heavily disguised in robes, meanwhile, makes channelling anger against any figure difficult; undirected emotion dissipates in a subtler affect. As reference to a lack of ‘upswelling’ hints, the absence of emotive score here is equally important, and this is also true of the climactic sequence, where understated bars connoting menace are all that accompanies the long, ‘oneiric’ (Lepastier 2013: 23) helicopter approach to the target. With the following sequence providing only anti-climax, Michael Nordine (2013: 77) is astute in his observation that Maya’s final tears are as revealing of befuddled hopelessness and dissatisfaction as returning soldier William James’ glazed stupor before aisles of breakfast cereal in The Hurt Locker. However, it is not only the case that the Jordanian terrorist attack represents a pivotal plot point whose repercussions do not feel justified; more specifically, it constitutes a stand-out moment at which the viewer is cued to take a different stance from Maya’s. Several critics note the importance of the scene following events where Maya announces to a colleague, Jack, her plan: ‘I’m gonna smoke everyone…’. Boughn (2013: 23) observes Jack’s failure to meet her eye in response; even more striking is his bathetic response delivered in a muffled voice signalling antiphrasis, ‘Right…’. Tailing weakly off after her hyperbolic vitriol, this utterance represents a gesture towards humouring a mad person rather than comprehension or affinity. This is not the only time in the film when one of her peers undercuts her overblown statements. Later, too, when the team meet a high-­ ranking CIA official (played by James Gandolfini in an overdetermined choice for an authoritarian role), and he asks who she is, Maya responds, ‘I’m the motherfucker who found bin Laden.’ This is a line more at home within action comedy than ‘serious’ drama. No wonder, then, that another colleague questions incredulously, ‘Motherfucker?’, after the meeting, unable to gloss over the elephant in the room that is generic discrepancy, a stretch of conventions. From both of these moments, as well as Maya’s fatalistic admission to a third colleague that she believes she has been spared death in order to kill bin Laden, we can conclude that the elements of the film that most closely track what King (2017: 63) calls ‘frontier-resonant action-heroism’ are

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rooted in Maya’s own perception of her role. This echoes Boughn’s pronouncement that ‘[v]engeance […] enters Zero Dark Thirty, but as part of the emotional discourse in the film’ (2013: 23, original emphasis)—and not of it. There is a critical distance from the typical organisation of docudramas generally, in which characterisation ‘provides us with a familiar array of folktale characters’ (Feldman 1986: 349), and from the mythologies that derive from such Proppian generic archetypes, here linked to notions of American might unleashed in the service of Good. If Seth Feldman has further linked a simplistic approach to characterisation to the blurring of distinctions between producers and audiences in the service of promoting universalist ideology in docudrama, it stands to reason that Bigelow’s imprint is brought into view as part and parcel of the drive to complexify such modes of thought (ibid., 350–1). Not only does Zero Dark Thirty potentially upend nationalistic ideas about the motivations behind and methods of capture of bin Laden, but the film actually documents the process of harnessing subjectivities for jingoistic goals, supporting Lipkin’s demonstration in his aptly titled Real Emotional Logic that docudrama’s foregrounding of moments where personal and historical times intersect renders historical process itself accessible (2002, 32–46). By rooting Maya’s motivation for her actions in a personal vendetta due to her own experience of loss, or making ‘Maya’s transformation […] the heart of the film’s meaning’ (Boughn 2013: 24), the narrative points up the  entanglement of bodily affect and collective ideology—much in the way described in Sara Ahmed’s work on nationalism. Interestingly, Christa Van Raalte (2017) sees this structure of address signposted from the film’s opening audio sequence. She argues that the very juxtaposition of the horrors of 9/11 with those of the torture chamber suggests Bigelow’s desire to make us understand the ‘mindset’ of the USA at this time—one of pain and pseudo-righteous anger—rather than necessarily to share it. Certainly, the placement of both these scenes to directly cue juxtaposed retaliation plots seems to invite comparison between the brutality of behaviours on both sides. Burgoyne’s observations that in the opening sequence ‘the sounds of 9/11 serve to call up the emotional meaning of the events, giving them a personal focus, providing a direct rendering of the experience of victims, and placing the body once more at the centre of an event that has grown encrusted with visual cliché’ (2014: 248) reminds us of the embodied nature of the ‘mindset’ described

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by Van Raalte and therefore the role of feelings in determining decisions and actions, radiating out from individual anger to global politics.8 Fascinatingly, a focus on (selective, interpreted) emotional truth is not at odds with the project of docudrama; rather, analyses of even the most apparently realist modernist or postmodern war narratives repeatedly demonstrate these fictions’ status as brokers of culturally accessible feeling spheres. Even before the particular demand for culture to make ‘sense’ of 9/11, in war correspondent Michael Herr’s well-known 1977 Vietnam novel, Dispatches, for instance, the reader is overwhelmed with sensory detail and multiple data streams are ‘shoveled aside’ in favour of conveying the book’s ‘Truth’: ‘at once the destructive horror and reconciliatory allure, ironically enough, of violent death’ (Hawkins 2009: 132). This interpretation demonstrates precisely the fact that purveyors of feelings tend to be attributed the status of truthsayers. At the same time, the feminist significance of a focus on the personal in many docudramas is enhanced in Zero Dark Thirty when individual concerns underpin even the most major of geopolitical events. If the time-honoured focus in public discourse on such events has been amply shown to reveal masculine bias, Bigelow does not simply change the focus. Instead, her film makes apparent the untenability of any attempt to distinguish between the two and so maintain the existence of these exclusionary spheres of signification and experience. The Art of the Genre Ironic address is what ensures that the meaning of Zero Dark Thirty lies to a particularly great degree with its viewer. This is the dimension that prompts Boughn to elevate the film to the status of art, described as that which ‘introduces us to the incommensurable and invites us to an intimacy with it’ (Boughn 2013: 21), raising questions rather than closing them down (as, he argues, do interpretations typically offered by the film’s critics). For Boughn, drawing on theories by Jean-Luc Nancy and lines from Elmore Leonard’s novel La Brava, more specifically: ‘What makes possible […] the exuberance of [art’s] compensation, is the utter specificity of each detail that makes up “images whose meaning exceed [sic] the circumstances that provide their occasion”’ (ibid.). I am less interested in the way in which Boughn’s statements about the film under discussion contribute to the long-standing debate over Bigelow’s status as artist or mainstream filmmaker, given the overlap

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between these positions argued for in this book, than in the precise terms he uses—specifically, the notions of intimacy and of detail. Both these ideas appear again and again in appraisals of Zero Dark Thirty.9 In apparent contrast to Boughn’s implication, Lepastier (2013: 22) suggests that in earlier sections, the narrative may be too bogged down in detail to open onto bigger questions. However, I suggest that accumulation of details in the film is crucial to its generic worldmaking—within which variations on norms, like those described heretofore, are part of the ‘normal’ range of how genres work—and therefore the structure of (‘sticky’) affective engagement it promotes. All films are stuffed full of details of one sort or another, conceived intradiegetically or otherwise; the striking point here is that many of these are information-based, linked to the plot, as well as to known historical realities. This is of course one aspect of the film that aligns it with procedural thrillers—Nordine (2013: 76) makes an apposite comparison with David Fincher’s Zodiac (2006) from cinema, while a host of television dramas headed up by the various CSI programmes present their influence readily. But films concerned with investigative journalism such as All the President’s Men (Alan J. Pakula, 1976) or even the post-­ Zero Dark Thirty formulaic, Oscars-oriented Streep and Hanks vehicle The Post (Steven Spielberg, 2017), via many others, are also relevant points of comparison, as foregrounded by Lepastier’s description of early events in self-consciously cliché-ridden language: [Maya’s first day of ‘enhanced interrogations’ on the black site] is filmed with affectless gravity, as if it was nothing more than your average first day at work: making contact with new colleagues, noting how things are done (aggressively and questionably), followed by an informal debrief on the doorstep […]. The behind the scenes work […] looks like ordinary office life. (Lepastier 2013: 22)

Where I part company with Lepastier’s assessment is in judging such details ‘affectless’; rather, the very ‘aetheticiz[ation of] the gathering and processing of information’ (Gilmore 2017: 276–7) in Zero Dark Thirty produces a felt response. Van Raalte (2017: 23) hints at the difficult to capture mood-sphere that arises from depicting understated action infused with authenticity through formal codification in this film, referring to a ‘reality affect’. I echo this apprehension in suggesting that the affects associated with such details may be more subtle than the extreme emotions of fabular tales of Good versus Evil, and are probably more likely to circulate

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through what we think of as cognitive processes than take over the whole body in emotionally ‘saturated’ (Grodal 1999: 214–5) paroxysms of weeping, fear or libidinous excitement; but they are affective nonetheless—and generically so, situating us in the intimate Berlantian territory of the shared, including with their author. Notably, Berlant’s notion of ‘flat affect’ as detailed in relation to earlier War on Terror narrative Stop-Loss is also apposite here when we consider character impassivity as a feature of key films that have been seen as evoking such flatness. Maya’s characterisation oscillates between the latter and the intermittent bombast it undercuts, until her final (still understated) breakdown. Jackie Stacey’s (2015) application of Berlant’s notion to films starring Tilda Swinton homes in on this aspect. It is noteworthy that three of her examples are either squarely in the crime drama genre (The Deep End [Scott McGehee and David Siegel, 2001] and Michael Clayton [Tony Gilroy, 2007]) or include a detective (Teknolust [Lynn Hershman-Leeson, 2002]), while Grodal observes that the ‘paranoid’ subcategory of crime fiction often makes use of ‘a breakdown in the correlation between facial expressions and intent’ (1999: 251).10 Although I have been discussing Maya’s relative impassivity, this mirrors that of the entirely ‘faceless’ enemy the film depicts and adds to a paranoid atmosphere propitious for the dehumanising activities depicted. Recalling that paranoia is the flipside to delusions of grandeur like those indulged in by Maya foregrounds the character’s place, too, in a long line of troubled, fantasist detectives, memorable examples of which include the characters played by James Stewart in Vertigo (Hitchcock, 1958), Gene Hackman in The Conversation (Francis Ford Coppola, 1974), Jack Nicholson in The Pledge (Sean Penn, 2002) and many others. What I earlier called a ‘stretch of conventions’ in Zero Dark Thirty that renders Maya’s grandiosity absurd is thus itself a conventional example of generic particularity linked to hybridisation (between the war and detective film) and cyclical change (especially the advent of the War on Terror cycle of war films). Further, Grodal (1999: 239) suggests that the bleeding of such perceptions into the presentation of aspects of the entire diegesis, as I have suggested Bigelow ostentatiously foregrounds through contrasting moments of ‘flat’ awkwardness, is a stock feature of the detective genre. As Burgoyne’s description of Zero Dark Thirty as ‘conveyed in the aesthetic language of the procedural’ notes, this is ‘a form that proliferates its own forms of anxiety’ (2014: 247). Indeed, Burgoyne’s analysis as a whole bears several similarities with mine. Firstly, drawing on Steven Shaviro’s

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short (2013) analysis of the film, he emphasises the procedural narrative’s centralising of analysis and elevation of process to the status of an end in itself, and calls it both ‘one of the mainstream genres of the contemporary period’ (254) and ‘[i]n some ways the signature genre of the twenty-first century’, in the new approach to representing violence it offers. Needless to say, this account partly takes in televisual formats (whose episodic structure interestingly enshrines the lack of upbeat resolution that is actually quite typical of many paranoid detective fictions, though unusual in much genre filmmaking). This novel take identified by Burgoyne extrapolates from Anne McClintock’s (2009) account of the newly embodied understanding of ‘the enemy’ constructed by cultural ‘specters’ from Guantánamo and Abu Ghraib, in order to suggest that Zero Dark Thirty ‘conveys a deeper transformation, a first rewriting of the dominant fiction under the pressure of 9/11, where the old shapes of history are replaced by a new set of themes, a new setting, and a new dramatis personae’, notably by placing ‘the violated body at the center of the film’s articulation of history, providing a figuration that haunts the film and shapes the depiction of the main character’ (Burgoyne 2014: 249). Like The Hurt Locker, then, Zero Dark Thirty suggests the fantasy dimension of the more purely ‘technological’ views of warfare in vogue post-World War II and especially in films of the 2000s. Burgoyne’s description of the way in which ‘[t]he film presents the embodied reality of violence—the intimate experience of constant threat and response—as key to the period, with violence extending over broad geographic zones, penetrating daily life, defining and shaping the life and the actions of the main character, whose certainty of purpose is constructed as the crux of the work’ (ibid.: 251), points towards the suturing of individual and collective responses I have described in this film. Secondly, considering the generic implications of this apprehension, Burgoyne challenges Shaviro’s view of Zero Dark Thirty as offering potentially dramatic situations that are ‘drained of drama, and subsumed in proceduralist routine’, where ‘every affect, and every reason for doing what one does, is sucked into a black hole’ (Shaviro 2013), coming closer to my reading of the film’s depiction of Maya as (at least intermittently) ‘radiat[ing] a vivid emotional heat’ (Burgoyne 2014: 255). However, Burgoyne’s account of the workings of genre storytelling in the film adheres to a model of oscillation between the embodied real and the generic that I find unhelpful. Thus, he describes the movement from the early torture scenes to the middle sections of the narrative as follows:

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Hard lighting, urine-soaked cells, plain and unaccented camerawork—these scenes have an unadorned visual directness. […] The film pivots into more familiar generic convention, however, with the killing of Maya’s CIA colleague Jessica […] The existential gravity of [the film’s] violence—anchored by powerful images of the violated body—in many ways conflicts with the film’s generic procedural framework. (Burgoyne 2014: 252–6)

The claim that violated bodies are alien to the procedural appears particularly bizarre in view of the practically genre-defining status of the autopsy, a metonym for the imposition of rationality and order on brutality and chaos, in televised and filmic police dramas of the genre. More generally, Burgoyne’s paradigm of either/or is at odds with my understanding of innovative aspects of this film working through and expanding upon the resources of the genres on which it draws. If docudramas channel the aura of factual authenticity associated with documentary films (Lacey and Paget 2015), so does the adjacent (overlapping) form of the procedural. Authenticity here need not refer to cold data but can instead indicate felt knowledge—especially in the context of proliferant War on Terror docudramas, as described by Stephen Lacey and Paget. Paget has illustrated how the media reaction to 9/11 revealed a longing for evocation and sensation rather than mere reportage in the bid to make sense of the insensible and senseless. He argues that traumatic images, whether they come to us via media or otherwise, display a rawness, ‘whose flavour lingers on whenever the images are run again. Vivid recall of this kind goes beyond memory’s connected narrative […] but some events retain the capacity to trigger that fuller memory lived in body as well as mind’, which he dubs ‘a tear in the fabric’ (Paget 2015). While Paget alludes to images, his claims could well be applied the ‘rawness’ evoked through the use of real audio footage from 9/11 in Zero Dark Thirty. More tellingly, Lacey and Paget’s (2015) understanding of the War on Terror as a structure of feeling animated by a sense of crisis, rather than an ideology, in response to 9/11 identifies it primordially with media representations. The purported authenticity of many mediated evocations of this ‘war’ is thus crucial to their emotive function, denoting both ‘evidence and belief, and thus reach[ing] that [embodied] part of a viewer’s consciousness more usually private’. This can be readily applied to the purported authenticity of the documentary-like procedural format; indeed, if Paget likens television’s recurrent broadcasting of related images to the repetitive loops of the traumatised mind, the same might be said of authentically coded

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docudramatic War on Terror films that were recurrent on both television and cinema screens in the late 2000s and early 2010s.11 It is important to point out in this respect that the film as a whole does not in fact fully diverge from the kind of bombastic scripts of ‘frontier-­ resonant action-heroism’ associable with Hollywood action films. To probe King’s phrase in more detail, it is adopted to describe dynamics within US action films from the Western until the present day. King argues, in contrast to some other commentators, that such dynamics persist in post-9/11 films, rather than these marking a radical generic break with the past (2017: 50). While King rightly observes that Zero Dark Thirty is relatively unusual in offering no ‘direct action heroics’ for the protagonist at all, he convincingly identifies the ‘thematic resonances’ with other cognate films and subgenres established all the same. King’s observation that Maya’s heroism is framed as ‘a kind of dogged persistence’ chimes with the investigative journalism films cited above and he further notes that her characterisation shares with many traditional (post-)Western action films the fact that a ‘heroic’ existence is set up as antithetical to domesticity (ibid.: 58–62). These claims bear on the gender-queer facets of Maya’s characterisation, and its structure of identificatory audience address, not only because they take the woman out of the homestead at the level of representational politics but more fundamentally because their evocations of generic referentiality reveal the engagement of ‘multiple chains of vicariation that disrupt the singularity of gender and sexuality and the authenticity of its embodied form’ (Stacey 2010: 133). King gestures towards a similarly nuanced genre (and therefore gender) perspective when he argues that the parallels with older genre films show that a ‘frontier-type dynamic’ in Zero Dark Thirty ‘structure[s] a capacity to celebrate certain core traditional notions of American heroic values while at the same time providing a mechanism through which to acknowledge some difficulties at a wider level’ (2017: 63). This dual-stranded work, emulating conventions while throwing them, and so their provisionality, into relief, is the bread and butter of many contemporary genre narratives. In terms of affective viewer investment in Zero Dark Thirty, this equates to observing that our allegiances are mobile and unpredictable in viewing the film. Some commentators adopt a stance of critical distance from the central action but others seem to have been more wholly caught up in the revenge narrative; indeed, the greater ease with which may critics appear to have been able to become invested in this plot than was the case for The Hurt Locker—also related to the simpler

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moral framework associated with killing bin Laden than with the Iraqi occupation—is almost certainly reflected by Zero Dark Thirty’s much higher popular takings than the Academy Award-winning precedent.12 Nonetheless, Zero Dark Thirty’s constellation in the same broad generic line as war films ‘proper’ including Stop-Loss and The Hurt Locker, as well as adjacent male-focused action films, heavily determines its affective valencies. Perhaps more surprisingly, as we shall see, this is a line that also extends to informing the address of Bigelow’s next feature film.

Embodying History in Detroit (Bigelow, 2017) ‘All of them, all except Phineas, constructed at infinite cost to themselves these Maginot Lines against this enemy they thought they saw across the frontier, this enemy who never attacked that way if he ever attacked at all; if he was indeed the enemy.’ These are the final lines from John Knowles’ much studied classic American novel A Separate Peace (2016 [1959]), which examines the repercussions of World War II through the prism of relationships between pupils at a boys’ boarding school in New Hampshire. The passage’s intimation of the psychological drivers of conflict, whether local (adolescent rivalries prompting vicious aggression) or large-scale (an international war), is germane to interpretations of Zero Dark Thirty offered here and by some other scholars, which emphasise the ‘infinite [personal] cost’ Maya’s involvement in the murder of bin Laden implies. However, in this section I shall argue that seeing violence as a product of human minds and the bodies they are part of, even when it is to a greater or lesser degree externally legitimated by official frameworks, resonates even more with Bigelow’s subsequent Detroit. The film portrays the summer of 1967, when Detroit was the background to riots and civil unrest in which its African American population featured prominently. It homes in on an incident that took place one night at the city’s Algiers Motel, when a report of ‘gunshots’ fired by a man playing with a toy gun prompted the Detroit Police Department, the Michigan State Police and the Michigan Army National Guard to search and seize an annexe of the motel. In Bigelow’s account, several policemen soon start to flout procedure by forcefully and viciously interrogating guests in order to force a confession as to the shooter’s identity. By the end of the night, three unarmed men have been shot dead and several others brutally beaten. We suffer their protracted terror with them inside the

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motel as the police torture them to try to find a non-existent shooter. The police are later brought to trial but acquitted. References to torture in this synopsis echo discussions of Zero Dark Thirty. However, as I will illustrate, the overt and emotive manner in which Detroit broaches the psychology of conflict, as well as its use of tension, shocks and sometimes gruesome aesthetics, brings its drama perhaps even closer to that of The Hurt Locker—even if it shares with the more recent film the status of being a docudrama, and with both films the hybrid approach to popular generic and ‘documentary-realist’ aesthetics particular to Bigelow since the late 2000s. For reasons that this account of splintered referentiality begins to explain, in generic terms, reviewers were baffled by the sheer multiplicity of Detroit, making comparisons with genres including the horror film (Crook 2017, likening the film to Near Dark [Bigelow, 1987]), the psychological thriller (Greenblatt 2017: 45) and the courtroom drama (Crook 2017: 33, with special reference to its final act). Other genres in which the film participates include the musical biopic, through a storyline that follows two of the victims of the attack, Larry (Algee Smith) and Aubrey (Nathan Davis Jr.), in their bid to make it as a Motown band, not to mention the presence of actor Jason Mitchell who played the iconic Eazy-E in Straight Outta Compton (F. Gary Gray, 2015) as the ‘shooter’ Carl—murdered by the police—in Detroit; the ‘true crime’ docudrama; and the (male) melodrama. However, this analysis of Detroit as a heightened genre film will begin by asking what it tells us to think about this story as a war film (cf. Greenblatt 2017: 44), before moving on to situating it within the meta-­ generic category identified by Claire Sisco King (2011) as the ‘sacrificial trauma film’, encompassing elements of horror films, melodramas, disaster movies and other genres. The intention here is not to be exhaustive in accounting for the film’s many modes of address but rather to explore what its deployment of tropes from these particularly clearly emotive genres specifically might tell us about how it works. As with Zero Dark Thirty, these genres are seen to work within and alongside the higher-­ order umbrella of docudrama. Detroit fits to an extent with the true crime variety of these increasingly popular of late on television especially, even as its bodily address departs from any more exclusive appeal to cerebral knowledge-confirmation/enhancement of the kind often associated with the format. It may indeed itself have influenced this genre’s enhanced embrace of emotive appeal, which we also see, for example, in the

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thematically comparable female-directed mini-series When They See Us (Ava DuVernay, Netflix 2019): a highly melodramatic and at times expressionistic account of the miscarriage of justice that saw five innocent Black children convicted for the rape and assault of the ‘Central Park jogger’ Patricia Meili in 1989. Detroit in any case emerges from the present analysis as emblematic within the trend for women to combine referentiality and bodily address in bold and attention-grabbing ways, even when they are making historical films that flirt with documentary status. ‘Looks Like Fuckin’ Nam’: Detroit as War Film The war film has been difficult to pin down historically, as it constitutes ‘a genre whose seeming unity contains a hive of differences generated as much by political agendas as artistic ones’ (Boughn 2013: 22). Nonetheless, in his study of the genre, Robert Eberwein (2010) defines it as focalising the war itself, activities off the battlefield and, importantly, the effects of the war on human relationships. Replace the word war with conflict in this description and it appears an accurate account of the narrative of Detroit, whose final act examines the fate of survivor Larry, traumatised and unwilling to follow his dream of becoming a musical star because it would involve playing for White people. The genre’s close ties to the historical real harmonise with the docudrama format, whose facticity is underlined by the now familiar Bigelowian title card, this time featuring at the end of the film before the credits sequence. The text herein asserts that: ‘Portions of this film were constructed and dramatised based on the recollection of the participants and available documents.’13 Like Zero Dark Thirty, Detroit draws on the multimedia, broadly documentary-­like aesthetic characteristic of recent war films—grist to the mill for arbiters of taste such as Julian Petley concerned that docudrama might be ‘decreasingly marked out stylistically, from other forms of [television] drama’ (in Paget 2011: ‘Introduction’, original emphasis). In addition to opening with animated frames, it combines classically cinematic shots with both ‘badly’ framed, initially somewhat confusing shakicam sequences and now also archival photographic images of the kind seen, for instance, at the end of Redacted. It should be acknowledged that interpolated archival materials are also typical of the docudrama historically, and seen by Lipkin as lending reconstructed sequences ‘a kind of truth by association’. He elaborates: ‘Insofar as docudramas employ strategies based on perceived proximities, docudramas, at their most powerful,

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convince us that it is both logical and emotionally valid to associate cinematic proximity with moral truth’ (Lipkin 1999: 79, 82). However, I have already argued that the effect of levelling different reality ‘feeds’ can also be to relativise (moral) truth itself. The impetus to conflate reality and its representation in the context of war can be observed in certain other details of content and form. Most obvious among these are fairly explicit references, whether thematic (the presence of the National Guard), visual (Figs. 4.1 and 4.2) or underlined by dialogue. The latter category includes the line that provides the title of this subsection, ‘Looks like fuckin’ Nam’, spoken by Officer Krauss (Will Poulter) during the film’s third sequence to describe the riot-torn streets of Detroit, as well as two further references by Krauss to the city as a ‘warzone’ later. These statements demonstrate the extent to which Krauss’ understanding of his situation is derived from popular culture. The allusion to Vietnam appears particularly apposite, both because of this war’s crucial status in shifting the parameters of the war film genre— concomitantly with human understandings of war—and also because Detroit’s closest intertext within war films may be one of the best-­known examples of the post-1970s Vietnam cycle, the multi-award-­ winning blockbuster Full Metal Jacket (Stanley Kubrick, 1987). This film’s long final act famously limits its soldiers’ movements to the area around a tower from which a sniper is picking them off, much as the police imprison and work their way through killing a group of young men downstairs at the motel in Detroit, following a perceived sniper attack, since Carl fired his toy pistol from an upstairs window. More generally, Full Metal Jacket has contributed to the definitive muddying of the waters between ally and enemy in the war genre for which Vietnam films are known, when the sniper is revealed to be a diminutive woman who begs for death. This is a trope with which Detroit repeatedly plays. Strikingly, when two White girls who are taken hostage with the Black men are chaperoned to safety by a member of the National Guard, one of them, Karen (Kaitlyn Dever) asks, ‘Are we safe here?’, and her friend, Julie (Hannah Murray) elaborates, ‘She means, are you gonna tell the police where we are?’; later, the bruised and battered Larry flinches in abject terror when he is picked up fleeing the house by another police officer not involved in events, who exclaims, ‘My God, who could do this to someone?’. At moments like these, the ‘heavy narrational style’ (Lane 2000: 100) associated with Bigelow is accompanied by an unusually transparent ideological stance. Similarly, the presence of the National Guard underlines continuities between the police and the

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Figs. 4.1 and 4.2  Both archival footage and staged history resemble a war film in Detroit

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armed forces as repressive arms of the State—although here it is the police who are portrayed as the agents of senseless brutality, because the National Guard ‘diplomatically’ (i.e. basely) absent themselves when they become aware of the illegal actions being taken by police. As with Stop-Loss, it might also be said that in adopting elements of Vietnam films, Detroit embraces the major directions taken by the war film more recently. Generalisable tropes of the genre that Detroit deploys include the loss of innocence of young men, repeatedly insisted upon by Julie’s exhortations to the police to remember that they are ‘just kids’, as well as the very presence of Julie and Karen in secondary roles, by and large as objectification figures for the men. In war films, women who feature beyond photographs or presences from the home front are typically either prostitutes or rape victims. Both of these identities are flirted with for these characters. As regards the first, we are initially introduced to the pair of girls messing around by the motel swimming pool and joking about being prostitutes in an instance of 1960s liberationist over-enthusiastic silliness that befits their modern mini-skirts and sexual confidence, Julie’s in particular. Later, the police take a painfully long time to be convinced that the girls are not just that, imagining them to be at the service of a Black pimp—in reality a Vietnam veteran, such that war memory is literally inserted into present events—in a narrative that helps fuel their race hate, manifested though violence. These details at once comprise a meta-wink about generic overdeterminism and point to the echo of generic narrative constellations and conventions in determining real social attitudes—the girls’ ‘sexy’ clothing becomes simply synonymous with their bodily identities and agency. Even more startling in this vein is the scene in which an enraged police officer, who earlier pressed his pistol into the area at the top of Karen’s thighs underneath her skirt, ‘accidentally’ rips off Julie’s entire dress in an upstairs bedroom. This act leaves the bloodied, beaten, screaming girl clutching her arms round her to hide her breasts before a roomful of highly overexcited, macho men in uniform who have shown themselves to have little respect for either protocol or human rights. The threat of rape reverberates unspoken from this familiar, highly discomfiting visual setup. While Margaret Woodward (2019) has suggested that rape has been presented as an ‘inevitable’ feature of female captivity narratives in Hollywood action films going back to the Western, within the recent cycle of war films, the

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scenario is perhaps most redolent of the rape drama Redacted. Equally significant is an intertext with Sam Peckinpah’s brutal 1970s-set rape drama Straw Dogs (1971) picked out by the review in Entertainment Weekly (Greenblatt 2017), even if it makes no mention of the film’s infamous sexual subject matter and the comparison perhaps hinges more immediately on the use of siege as the backdrop to extreme violence in both narratives. Nonetheless, Straw Dogs is fairly unusual within films focused on the trauma of rape for casting rapists (actual and potential) not as strangers who assault women in public places but rather a group of men supposed to be providing a service to their victim and who attack her in domestic spaces (Heller-Nicholas 2011: 46), including (in the film’s second assault) a bedroom. Although in Detroit the threat of rape is not acted upon, the viewer’s fear comes from the social and codified knowledge brought to bear by similar narratives like these: our apprehension that ‘grammars of violence’ (McDonald 2013), or subjectively enacted scripts based on assigned roles dictated by generic norms, can contribute to determining behaviour in violent encounters.14 Comparisons with Straw Dogs simultaneously consolidate Detroit’s status as a narrative shaped by Vietnam war films in particular. If such a kinship is perhaps unexpected for a film focused on a metaphorical rather than actual war in the shape of the oppression of Black Americans during their slow progress towards gaining meaningful civil rights, in fact, both films imply the examples of ‘civil’ violence with which they are concerned may be in some ways more disturbing than acts arising in or from war proper. Where Dustin Hoffman’s academic David in Straw Dogs has left the USA to escape violent protests about the war and is led to commit shockingly violent deeds himself to defend his cottage in Cornwall against murderous local rapist thugs, the man accused of pimping Karen and Julie goes from enjoying, presumably, a relatively high status among his compatriots as a pilot in Vietnam to being savagely beaten, insulted and nearly murdered. The striking narrative and aesthetic choices that call up this referential domain for the film convey, then, a clear point about the extent of the violence, barbarism and hatred underpinning and in turn fed by the civil conflict at its heart. With this move, Bigelow and the other filmmakers involved in Detroit do not merely articulate the need to accord racially motivated conflicts an importance equal to that of any other ‘great war’ foregrounded by History, but they go further, elevating the acts of hate attendant on racism to that status within the psychosocial landscapes they invite their viewers to inhabit. They cue us to experience them through a

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set of affects akin to the increasingly unsettling ones collecting around the representation of horrific acts in the postclassical genre. The Trauma of Black Sacrifice Both war films and horror movies feature prominently in the catalogue of films discussed by King under the banner of the sacrificial trauma film. The generic terrain of horror is brought to mind both by the presence of gore and blood in the film and also structurally, through the narrative organisation also seen in Full Metal Jacket, where the majority of a group of more or less innocent individuals are slaughtered one by one. Along with the trope of the unknowability of the enemy, this parallelism underscores the close alliance between the body genres of war and horror films, as well as with the disaster movie format.15 Well-known 1970s examples of the latter genre such as The Towering Inferno (John Guillermin, 1974) evoke a period setting comparable to Detroit’s. In cult exploitation territory, meanwhile, Detroit’s unusually racially mixed cast means John Carpenter’s Assault on Precinct 13 (1976, remade in 2005 with action relocated from LA to Detroit) is another reference point; however, the racial politics of Bigelow’s film are more ostensive and pointedly critical. This becomes clear when Detroit is considered as a sacrificial film in the terms laid out by King. It should be noted from the outset that this category is to be distinguished from what Janet Walker has dubbed ‘trauma cinema’, by being less formally avant-garde and including graphic violence and ‘gross-out’ effects (King 2011: 34–5). Moreover, King argues that sacrificial trauma films typically offer a redemptive narrative in compensation for the traumas they depict (ibid.: 42–3). The films she analyses tend to be mainstream Hollywood movies and they are transhistorical, if mostly postclassical. Famous examples include, from the genres presently under discussion, the horror movie The Exorcist (William Friedkin, 1973) and the war film Saving Private Ryan (Steven Spielberg, 1998). In both of these cases, a broad arc of redemption is relatively clear even at a superficial level: Satan is responsible for the death of Father Karras (Jason Miller) so his colleague Father Marryn (Max von Sydow) exorcises Him from the body of a young girl, while Private Ryan (Matt Damon) is saved as compensation for his family’s loss of all his brothers.16 More subtly, redemption is based on the paradoxical abjection then elevation of the traumatised subject—a model with strong ties to Georges Bataille’s well-known

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theorisations of sacrifice—since trauma is perceived to bring subjects into privileged contact with the real. This is because it (temporarily) shatters the implied unity of the subject, before apparently restoring it to coherent wholeness (ibid.: 9–10, 18–28). It is also important to note the focus in King’s account of The Exorcist—like that of other sacrificial trauma films— on male protagonist Father Karras’ trajectory as sacrificial victim (rather than that of its possessed female protagonist Regan played by Linda Blair) (ibid.: 16). Indeed, the masculinism of the genre described by King is highlighted by her book’s title, Washed in Blood: Male Sacrifice, Trauma, and the Cinema. Furthermore, the Whiteness of the victims of trauma and the (usually star) actors who embody them in these films is paradigmatic and repeatedly referenced, in a fashion all too familiar from scholarship on horror films noting that victims are White, while monsters are encoded as physically darker (e.g. Berenstein 1996: 167–8). Detroit fits the broad profile of the sacrificial trauma film. The narrative spends 37 minutes of screen time focusing directly on intolerable mental and physical suffering, shown graphically through medium shots and close-ups of pools of blood, wounded bodies and expressions of terror. The style adopted for these sections is epitomised by its lighting, which eschews the high-key Hollywood look in favour of something more naturalistic yet carefully contrived for such an effect, typically for Bigelow subtly giving greater visibility than would be consonant with true documentary style. The film set included multiple small lights, artfully concealed in various nooks of the rectory used to stand in for the hotel to achieve a ‘neon look and period feel’ (Martin 2017). The strategy is calculated for maximum impact, combining apparent realism with the horrific spectacle of young men’s cold-blooded sacrifice in the service of no tangible end. King argues that film is an ideal medium for propagating discourses about sacrifice, quoting Shaviro’s account of cinematic pleasure as frequently linked to the destruction of identification and objectification and to the undermining of subjective stability, or cinema’s ‘tend[ency] towards the blinding ecstasy of Bataillean expenditure’ (Shaviro 1993: 33). Shaviro cites Bigelow’s work (emblematised by Blue Steel) as exemplary of his model. Detroit if anything seems to fit the bill even more perfectly, given its direct and drawn out dramatisation of trauma. The film also engages the representational framework of sacrificial Hollywood trauma in a context whose unusualness, and significance, is immediately obvious. Following Laura S. Brown, King notes the human tendency to label experiences as trauma only when they happen to members of the ‘norm’ group,

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in other words, ‘the discursive work of trauma which marks some events, bodies, and places as worthy of its mantle while others are excluded’ (2011: 25).17 It is, then, highly meaningful that the bodies that occupy this generic space in Detroit are Black ones. King’s emphasis on the cyclical nature of crises in White masculinity (ibid.: 5) points up the correlation between genres and history in this domain, such that we can understand new directions in the first to equate to interventions in the second. The generic centralising of African American trauma fulfils the commemorative function typical of war films and is perhaps the narrative’s most significant contribution to potentially shifting structures of feeling about Black subjects—especially in a Western context where such individuals’ suffering has been relatively normalised.18 From a point of view concerned with authorship, it is worth recalling here the accusations of looking past the issue of institutionalised racism that plagued critiques of the ending of Strange Days (Bigelow, 1995), set against a backdrop reminiscent of the 1992 LA riots. If for Caitlin Benson-Allott (2010: 38), the film ‘just neatly set [the problem] aside’, with Detroit Bigelow re-engages the issue forcefully. More importantly, the new narratives urgently called for by Fanon in 1961 to combat the self-hatred he connected with negative representations of Black subjects have taken considerably longer to emerge substantially within the mass-popular modes to which he was referring, and notably the (meta-)genre of sacrificial trauma. Taking over $24m worldwide (without considering the ancillary markets in which horror movies are known to perform well), Detroit is important in this respect.19 The desire evidenced here to widen cultural imaginaries and bring to the centre marginalised histories bears obvious similarities with the goals of feminism. Yet the effect of the presence of two women in the group of oppressed subjects in Detroit is more implicit. On the one hand, Detroit locates the threat of rape closer to being on a par with that of other kinds of bodily violence than do many other media discourses (see Gill 2007: 135–6; 140–1). Bearing in mind the well-publicised controversy surrounding Straw Dogs’ strong suggestion that rape victim Amy (Susan George) has ‘asked for it’—confirmed as intentional by the director in an astonishing interview in which he describes the character as ‘pussy under the veneer of being a woman’ (Prince 1998: 150)—Detroit could be seen as a scathing riposte to such discourses. In other words, the desire to forensically inspect the general processes by which appearances generate realities in this instance engages a loaded history of men reducing women

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to perceived sexual (over−/)availability on the basis of a voluptuous appeal that threatens (patriarchal) social control.20 However, these characters are not the key focus of the sacrificial trauma plot in terms of narrative time and they are from the outset treated somewhat less brutally than the African Americans, never appearing in line for a bullet to the back of the head—after all, as ‘bearers of whiteness’ White women ‘may exercise power over non-white people of both sexes’ (Dyer 1997: 29). One major function of the women’s presence is, rather, to render unlikely the feminisation of the Black male characters, as we see in a film such as Lethal Weapon (Richard Donner, 1987), where the epic potential of the traumatised African American body as symbol is undercut by such positioning. It also militates against the possibility of another dimension of the sacrificial trauma film that King identifies as characteristic coming to bear here: a similarity with Catholic rites that promise regeneration while suppressing the need for the female body (2011: 32). Instead, this body is pivotal to the traumas shown in Detroit, since while the ostensible reason for events is the search for a shooter, much of the action is taken up with the lead officer, Krauss, trying to stir his men into violence against the men they have apprehended, and much of this revolves around the imagined prostitution theme. Both Officers Flynn and Demens, Krauss’ two accomplices, are shown to become affectively invested in this notion, haunted by colonial- and slavery-era fears about Black male exploitation of the White woman’s body. Demens, the junior officer, is notably less engaged with the violent events than his two colleagues and has to be galvanised into violence. However, even he reacts to the discovery of two White women alone in a hotel room with a Black man, asking incredulously, ‘What are you doing here?’ Flynn jumps to conclusions faster, as indicated by an eyeline match showing him taking in the full length of Karen’s scantily mini-dress-clad body, sitting on a bed, when he bursts into the room, and his description of her to Krauss shortly after as unambiguously ‘a hooker’ despite her protestations to the contrary. His later explosion to the veteran accused of exploiting the girls, ‘You think you can come into my city and pimp out a bunch of young girls?’, in its evocation of turf wars, recalls Fanon’s (1952: 14) perception of Black male desire for White women as a signifier of desire for White identity. In other words, it is the encroachment onto what is perceived as White territory, rather than the exploitation of young women per se, at which Flynn appears to take umbrage; as one Black victim puts it, ‘They [the police] lost their minds

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when they saw a couple of White girls with a black man.’ White female sexuality plays, here, the role of focal point for male conflicts (further underlining the points of contact with When They See Us).21 These nuances of the generic format of sacrificial trauma in Detroit create an effect similar to that identified in war films Stop-Loss and The Hurt Locker, shifting the gendered topography of the form, now alongside (sometimes intersecting with) its racial coordinates.22 Significantly, while the racialised psychosexual dynamics apparent in Detroit are familiar from both other cycles of horror movies and social reality, they are more decisively foregrounded than has been the case typically in Hollywood films, where female Whiteness, as a de facto desirable commodity, is ‘everything and nothing’ (Dyer 1988: 45). Here, the women’s raced desirability is both commented on and visually underscored by the spectre of rape, making apparent the link between race hate and hysteria over the possibility of miscegenation. Such a combination of elements illustrates Sabine Sielke’s (2002) observation that ‘the rhetoric of sexual violence’ is frequently used in US literature and culture as a narrative device through which to explore broader issues. Furthermore, as reviews of the film—unerringly marked by the language of affect—attest, foregrounding the dynamic interactions between race and gender here heightens rather than undercuts the emotional force of their narrative push and pull. Indeed, while Diane Wolfthal argues that images (suggestive) of rape can enrich understanding of other political issues (in Heller-Nicholas 2011: 6), they can also dramatise them, cuing the imagined experience of a variety of threats to the coherence of the embodied self. Partly because violence is so normalised in Hollywood cinema as to have become potentially difficult to reinvest with shock factor, while graphic depictions of rape are still rarer in this forum, Detroit’s linkage of sexualised and other types of violence powerfully evokes (rather than merely symbolising) the juxtaposed violation of its African American protagonists’ subjectivities.23 There is another way in which thinking about Detroit as a trauma film is revealing as to the extent of its affective and representational sphere of reference: in terms of its allegorical function. According to King, sacrificial trauma films are always allegorical, about more than what they depict; the inscription of unseizable national traumas on individual bodies in war films, and perhaps especially War on Terror films, is a cogent example. King extrapolates from this observation that, in conjuring up further, past narratives, sacrificial films are inherently melancholic in the Freudian sense of pointing to an absence, just as I have argued in this book is potentially

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always the case with genre films. Detroit is engaged with the question of what remains in the absence of what we love, as when Aubrey’s father answers a journalist’s question as to his feelings about losing his son literally: ‘It’s a terrible pain.’ King also notes that in allegorising history, such films fetishise it (2011: 14–17). The charge of reducing or even pruriently objectifying trauma by giving it distinctive contours is a familiar one in the discourses around visual representations of historical atrocities. The notion of fetishism is also bound up with one framework implicitly evoked by some reviewers of Detroit; hence it is worth pausing to consider its implications. I refer here to Screen Theory and in particular Mulvey’s (1975) rapprochement of fetishism to objectification and voyeurism—including with a sadistic edge—in mainstream Hollywood cinema. Thus, for the reviewer from Cahiers du cinéma, a notably theoretically (often psychoanalytically) informed journal: As you’d expect from her ‘left-wing’ storytelling, Bigelow can’t telegraph clearly enough her empathy for the victims and her indignation at the judicial system, though she makes sure the film just happens to include some nonracist cops […]. Faced with such a sadistic set-up [as the merciless interrogation scene], one can’t help wondering where Bigelow’s interest really lies: in the frightened victims or the execrable spectacle of the over-excited and vaguely Luciferian young cop. Her ambivalent fascination with police uniforms is certainly on full display. (Mesmildot 2017)

The implication is that Bigelow, and by extension her film itself, adopts the subject position of the sadistic torturer Krauss, rather than that of the trauma sufferer(s); trauma is offered up for distanced, controlled consumption instead of opening up the possibilities for loss of self and fellow-­ feeling associated with shattered subjectivities (or their representation) by Shaviro or Bataille. Indeed, there is a parallel to be drawn here with critiques of Bataille’s work on sacrifice, with relevance in turn for Shaviro’s earlier cited openly post-Bataillean description of Bigelow’s body-focused filmmaking. Bataille describes witnessing trauma in terms of the (ultimately elevating) shattering of subjects’ psychic identity (Bataille 1989: 97). Shaviro draws on this claim to suggest that film viewers can also experience a loss of self. While Shaviro (1993: 43) explicitly offers his theories as a counterpoint to what he sees as the overemphasis on models of spectatorship based on

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control and voyeurism, so Bataille’s claims have been critiqued, a contrario, on the grounds of ignoring his position of mastery as he describes looking at images of torture, agony and death (see Hollywood 2002: 93). Whereas Bataille’s more abstract theories (which often do appear highly problematically to simply equate the witness and the real—rather than represented—sufferer) are not the primary focus of the present inquiry, when it comes to cinema, Shaviro’s influential ideas have much to offer. Evidently people experience films differently; indeed, we have already seen that Bigelow’s films may promote especially mobile modes of identification and engagement. Some viewers may remain less ‘passively’ immersed in, even overwhelmed by, the traumas they witness. However, to write off models of affective immersion on the grounds that they ignore the metaphorical and physical distance between the viewer and the diegetic action is akin to suggesting we should not analyse screen images as anything more than collections of pixels or the pattern of light on celluloid. In other words, it is my view that we can be viscerally affected by films that evoke exciting, compelling or shocking events while still knowing we are watching a film; indeed, the concurrent coexistence of distance and presence, knowledge and experience, in viewing films is the central tenet of this study. Crucially, my emphasis on the simultaneous rendering labile yet endurance of the self in film viewing distinguishes this model from Bataille and Shaviro’s more passive ones, which are more open to accusations of transcending ethics through espousing the ‘liberating’ loss of subjectivity.24 With this in mind, by giving (suppressed) histories a fairly universally, even bodily, accessible and widely disseminated form, a film such as Detroit can also make them impactful for mass audiences—even if at the inevitable cost of reductionism, as to varying degrees with all narratives. This is precisely the meaning of fetishisation that obtains in this context (and indeed King attaches no value to her observation), not the sense denoting a sexual or capitalistic perversion, as the term has typically become shorthand for, but rather meaning ‘to be excessively or irrationally devoted to [an object, activity etc.]’.25 This definition rejects the easy collapsing together of fetishism and the failure of ethics implied by Amy Hollywood (2002: 93) when she asks, ‘Can we ever fully separate the compassionate encounter with the other from that fetishistic and/or voyeuristic-sadistic look?’ If all encounters are suspect (and Hollywood’s statement does not credit formally experimental scrutiny of atrocities ‘askance’ with any more sanctity than direct looks) the only alternative is to look away—as History has

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been doing for generations. At the same time, accentuating excess and feeling beyond that which can easily be explained by logic evokes perfectly the power of many genre films. Recalling the paradoxical centrality of discourse and language in Freud’s original account of the mechanism of fetishisation (and melancholia) brings this definition on a par with my account of the heightened genre film, working through repetition and association that is mentally and corporeally experienced. What, though, are the specifics of those unspoken histories allegorised or fetishised by the story of Detroit? The film’s opening prologue, comprising images from artist Jacob Lawrence’s ‘The Migration Series’ and overlaid subtitles that together recount the history of African Americans in the twentieth century, migrating north in an often vain search for paid work, provides an obvious enough link to a broader history of oppression of this group in the USA post-1900. However, narrative and especially visual details in the film itself point further back. Specifically, one storyline sees Black security guard Dismukes (John Boyega), who was present at the motel shootings and did his best to placate the police and help their victims, fingered for the shootings. As he is led through the prison, the overcrowded cells where Black faces press helplessly against bars evoke images from our collective historical consciousness about the inhuman conditions in which slaves were kept and tap into a recurrent rhetoric comparing the contemporary US penal system, in which African Americans are wildly disproportionately represented as detainees, to modern slavery. The atrocity of slavery had been prominently dramatised just prior to Detroit’s production by, among other texts, the Oscar-winning 12 Years a Slave (Steve McQueen, USA/UK 2013) and the prize-winning, bestselling novel Homegoing (Yaa Gyasi 2016), which describes in appallingly minute detail the physical experience of such overcrowded conditions, explicitly knitting together different periods of African American oppression in the USA from slavery to the present day. The historical inequalities underpinning the mass incarceration of Black men specifically was meanwhile the subject of DuVernay’s 2016 documentary 13th, adapted from Michelle Alexander’s 2010 book The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness.26 In the same way that Detroit’s city setting works metonymically to emblematise a host of such social injustices against Black Americans in this film, King repeatedly foregrounds both the universal and especially national symbolic function of the sacrificial trauma victim.27 From this perspective, Detroit offers the history of African Americans as nothing less

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than The History of the USA. The film’s psychosexual dynamics are also important in this regard, for depicting a White paranoia about control of White women’s sexuality whose expression in cinema stretches back to The Birth of a Nation (D. W. Griffith, 1915), focused on the threat of rape posed by African American slaves. Even earlier, historians have shown, myths about White women’s sexual exploitation by ‘others’ were used in North America to justify violence against them, for instance in rape myths circulated by US settlers about Native Americans (Castañeda 1993). It is striking that weight is lent to the fear that Black men may be exploiting White women in Detroit for two reasons. Firstly, comparisons with the strategic deployment of rape myths by oppressive settlers suggest the central role played by negative emotions in constructing the imagined pimping scenario here, rather than vice versa, thanks also to the dramatic irony of our knowledge that the policemen’s suppositions are false (and quickly become difficult for even them to cling to when the ‘pimp’ shows his military ID). Feelings, then, equate to complex mental constructions, creating a feedback loop whose origins vanish into obscurity. Secondly, there is a bitter irony to the fact that it is the police themselves who look much more likely to represent a sexual threat to the women involved—tallying with the sociological fact that White men are far more likely to rape women of any colour than are African Americans (Cuklanz 2000: 10). The past allegorised by Detroit, then, as much as its diegetic 1970s present, issues a strident challenge to existing mythologisations of national origins casting White Europeans as heroes. Nor can the film’s resonances with present-day North America, especially for domestic audiences, be ignored.28 It is truistic that historical narratives work through the tensions of the era in which they are produced. Detroit is not merely a story about the bloodbath at the Algiers Motel in 1967; as the review in Empire also acknowledges, it is a film haunted by the multiple young African American victims of police brutality from this decade alone (Crook 2017: 33). These include innocent young men shot down in error such as, among many, many others, Trayvon Martin, Philando Castile, Walter Scott, Michael Brown (whose murder Bigelow cites as an influence [in De Semlyen 2017]), the twelve-year-old Tamir Rice, killed in a park in Cleveland when playing with a toy gun, and since Detroit’s release George Floyd, suffocated to death, and Jacob Blake, severely disabled through shooting.29 In this sense, Detroit is a film that could hardly be more engaged with its own epoch: a moment characterised by retreatism, suspicion of otherness and the politics of fear. Indeed,

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these issues have been dramatised fairly explicitly in several major films dealing substantially with racial strife in the USA all released the following year in 2018, police brutality drama The Hate U Give (George Tillman Jnr., based on an award-winning young adult novel of the same name by Angie Thomas), Oscar-winner Barry Jenkins’ If Beale Street Could Talk, and two of 2019’s Oscar-winners, Spike Lee’s BlacKkKlansman (winning Best Screenplay) and  Peter Farrelly’s  Green Book (Best Film), as well as being evoked by Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah’s bestselling short story collection Friday Black (also 2018). Detroit thus joins a wave of cultural texts—also prominently including the contemporaneous ‘Detroit ’67: Perspectives’ at Detroit’s Historical Museum (2017–2019)—whose work together serves to counter the drift towards erasure described by Nancy (1996), for whom the dead are less a Freudian presence that is difficult to let go of than vulnerable subjects all too easy to forget.30 History in Detroit is not, from this perspective, safely distanced and consumable but live and ongoing.31 As touched on in Chap. 3 discussing Vamps, shared experiences and the memorialisation of death and loss have played central roles in community-formation for other oppressed and culturally marginalised groups, most obviously queer ones (see Crimp 1989) (while #MeToo has attempted to leverage women’s shared experiences of trauma in a similarly unifying way). In a manner akin to my own sense, following Butler, that shared loss offers a powerful means to bind subjects affectively across identity categories (Harrod 2016: 68–9; cf. Marks 2002: xix; 91–110), Elizabeth Freeman (2010: xiii) sees in Butlerian melancholia ‘a figure of psychic fixation or stuckness that troubles the smooth coordinates of gender performativity’. The interests of racial and sexual minorities as well as all disempowered groups, then, clearly coincide in a drive to prise apart the skeletons propping up ‘normative’ categories of time, space and (therefore) genre in ways that Detroit brings to the fore. Benson-Allott is prescient indeed in her observation that Bigelow’s ‘politics unfold in her long shots and transitions, in her exploration of film as a time-base medium’, her ‘repeated engagement with Hollywood genres can be best understood as a challenge to narrative orders that only engage some people’s experiences of desire, violence, and death’ (2010: 43). In this respect, Bigelow’s work can be seen as akin to paintings by the artist Chris Barnard, such as ‘White Flight’, which critique the embedding of White male supremacy within the formal fabric of culture. Such a comparison raises a question that has underpinned many discussions of the

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ethics of Detroit, and which it would be disingenuous to ignore: the ‘problem’ of a White woman speaking for—and potentially spectacularising and/or profiting from—the experience of Black subjects (Barnard is also White). An emblematic commentary taking issue with this concatenation is provided by African American artist and Detroit native John Sims’ (2017) review for Al Jazeera, ‘Detroit: A Film by White People for White People’, where he critiques the narrative as reducing history to ‘a horror flick without context’ and a genre ‘mash-up’.32 There are a number of problems with the first argument, which suggests that to genrefy history is to travesty it. Voices even from within the African American community engaged with these very debates have pointed out the fallacy of the implied counter-argument, that ‘realism’ is somehow more ethical when it comes to portraying violence (see Fusco 2017). If in Chap. 3 I likened my valorisation of a genre aesthetic to Galt’s championing of the decorative as inherently oppositional in the context of Western film and cultural history, I agree equally with her view that ‘[t]o limit a properly political account of […] violence to a realist, gritty, or sparse visual style would not only be prescriptive but also insist on a masculinist aesthetic, steeped in colonial ideas about simplicity of form’ (2011: 13). Indeed, interpreting in this way the standard denigration of visually elaborate—and pleasing—films on the grounds of racialised fetishism offers a fruitful perspective for challenging such critiques of Detroit, as a film that is remarkably rich, in a slightly different way, in terms of both aesthetics and meaning, thanks to its intertextual address. As Galt explains, such an approach ‘enables us to think beyond a politics of representation and to see histories of bodily exclusion instead as underwriting the structuring principles of cinematic value’ (ibid.: 21). For Galt, in contrast, stylishness can actually impede voyeurism ‘by forcing viewers “to be admiring and appreciative rather than simply objectifying”’, while her suggestion that prettiness ‘can broker reimagined looking relations, enabling an outsider perspective to look otherwise at the world’ and wherein distance does not necessarily amount to ‘inauthenticity, colonialism or exoticism’ (ibid.: 274, citing Jack Halberstam) echoes my understanding of rich genre texts’ ‘mediated’ orientation towards their subjects.33 Moreover, a salient feature of Detroit that is consistent with horror films to an extent but arguably taken to extremes here is the already mentioned duration of the torture sequence. Scholars such as Courtney Baker and Jaimie Baron are more open-­ minded about White artists commenting on injustice perpetrated against

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people of colour and their ideas are pertinent here. Baker’s notion of humane insight (2015) describes well the attitude to Black suffering on display in Detroit and the film certainly offers an ‘evidentiary gaze’ that works against the logic of invisibility and historical amnesia that she argues perpetuates White privilege. For Baron (2019), the real justification for displeasure at what is sometimes perceived as theft of someone else’s history concerns many White Americans’ inability to share the sheer sense of physical threat (to themselves or their loved ones) experienced frequently by Black subjects. Bearing this in mind adds a further ethical to the comparison I have suggested Bigelow draws between the bodily threat of sexual violence experienced by the White women in Detroit and that of other forms of violence experienced by their male counterparts. While such an approximation on the film’s part may be crude, perhaps even open to criticisms of ignoring Mary Ann Doane’s warning that ‘[i]t is dangerous and very misleading to claim that the position of White women is analogous to that of blacks simply because both take on the role of Other in relation to the white man’ (1991: 231), and while I am aware of the non-neutrality of my own position as a White female researcher, to my mind it does suggest a genuine attempt to instantiate corporeally felt empathy in a form more immediately recognisable to a broader demographic, especially but not only White women. While in the postcolonial context feminist analyses have seen a patronising attitude towards women as intrinsic to the othering of subjects of non-European or US origins (see for instance Meyda Yegenoglu in Galt 2011: 152), there certainly is no doubt that women and people of colour are bound by a common interest in critiquing the dominant order. A philosopher of ethics such as Emmanuel Levinas may have pointed out the pitfalls of conceiving the Other in terms of the Same but in practice recognisable utterances are inevitable for speech— and cultural appropriation by extension so pervasive as to be meaningless. Further, there are ideological reasons why even within Black, Asian and Minority Ethnic Studies there is no consensus as to who should ultimately be speaking for whom. One such view is expressed in inspiring if utopian terms by Achille Mbembe, noting that for those who have been subjected to colonial domination, or for those whose share of humanity was stolen at a given moment in history, the recovery of that share often happens in part through the proclamation of difference. But as we can see within certain strain of modern Black criticism, the proclamation of difference is only one facet of a larger project—a project of

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a world that is coming, a world before us, one whose destination is universal, a world freed from the burden of race, from resentment, and from the desire for vengeance that all racism calls into being. (2017: 183)

Constructing Hate The above comments are consonant with reading Detroit as a film that, rather than merely addressing audiences in such a way as to channel their affective allegiances in what it considers appropriate directions (championing those outside the ‘norm’), as, for example, The Hate U Give unapologetically does, Detroit goes further. In typically Bigelowian fashion, surely informed by an apprehension that we need to understand causes to treat their symptoms, or strive for a postracial utopia, the film prompts the spectator to witness and even undergo, at least vicariously, the process by which such affects amass. The construction of (collective) subjectivities through negative experiences and affects, reminding us that politics begins at home, is indeed perhaps the film’s key focal point. Given that I have suggested sacrificial trauma films end up reifying the wholeness of the subject by ‘shattering’ and ultimately reconstructing it, yet have approached the films of my corpus and certainly those by Bigelow more generally from a postmodern standpoint concerned with discursive identities and constructed reality, it is worth clarifying how the ending of Detroit works in this respect. This is left open to more than one interpretation. In one sense, protagonist Larry, who escapes being killed but loses his best friend, is not redeemed in the terms valorised by mainstream society (as, say, a war hero might be)—because of his refusal to pursue his potential as a Motown singer, he is initially poverty-stricken and comes close to total destitution and homelessness. His statement that ‘I’m gonna lay low for a while’ suggests, indeed, attempting to remove himself as far as possible from discursive visibility. However, he eventually finds some sort of solace in a modest role singing for a church choir, as a final shot of his eyes raised tentatively heavenward would seem to confirm, allowing for at least the ghost of a Hollywood redemptive ending. This conclusion speaks to the notion of achieving ‘sombodiness’ precisely through, as it were, nobodiness: the loss of self through oppression giving rise to new collective identities for African Americans described by Ann Powers in the opening section of this book (not to mention the possibility of such dynamics operating across identity groups, as touchingly evoked by an earlier close-up of one of the girls holding hands with a Black man whom

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she’s never met before when forced into shared victimhood). At the same time, there is perhaps some sense here of Larry having seen ‘truths’ to which the other band members have no access. However, I read these truths in terms of insight into human nature, as opposed the truth of the Real in any Lacanian sense, since my understanding of Bigelow’s oeuvre and the authorial worldview it evokes conceives human subjectivity as caught up forever in circuits of representation.34 Indeed, as Shaviro himself puts it, ‘Bigelow affirms and celebrates visceral immediacy as an effect of simulation’ (1993: 5). This is apparent in Detroit because effects (and affects) of simulation are so heavily underscored for the attentive viewer. The foregrounding of genericity highlighted in this film is a key aspect of this celebration of the ‘effect[s] of simulation’. Yet I have already suggested that war films themselves do at least appear relatively closely entwined with social reality; in other words, this film’s pastiching of this genre in both specific and general ways might at least appear to place it at only one remove from the real. Other examples of pastiche in Detroit, however, foreclose engaging with the film as directly ‘authentic’ of profilmic reality even more decisively, because the earlier narratives imitated are themselves more ostentatiously unreal. Specifically, an early chase sequence prior to the motel sequences in Detroit, where Krauss pursues a looter through the city’s streets, strongly recalls the iconic chase sequence between Johnny Utah (Keanu Reeves) and the masked Bodhi (Patrick Swayze) from Point Break.35 This is most obviously because of the choice in both cases to have the injured ‘criminal’ escape by climbing over a fence, which the pursuer cannot scale in time to catch him (Figs.  4.3 and 4.4). The use of (sub)urban backyards as the setting for both chases further underscores the parallelism. Similarly, in an analysis that foregrounds the dense cinematic referentiality of Bigelow’s earlier oeuvre, Benson-Allott (2010: 38) has noted the difficulty and consequent rarity of shooting chase sequences around corners, as Bigelow does both here and in the aforementioned sequence in Point Break. While homocitationality is certainly an efficient means to shore up cinephilic author branding in a post-­cinematic reception climate characterised by infinite replay possibilities, the later instance suggests more than a display of auteurist virtuosity. Reverberations of the earlier sequence that culminates in the iconic shot of Utah firing his gun repeatedly into the air in frustration (Fig. 4.5) here colour the viewer’s (provided they have seen both films) sense of Krauss’ own feelings of rage and impotence (Fig. 4.6)—although

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Fig. 4.3  Bodhi escaping from Johnny Utah in Point Break

Fig. 4.4  A looter escaping from Officer Krauss in Detroit

it is apparent that the man he is following is no bank-robber but an opportunist everyman, who in any case bleeds to death, terrified, cowering under a car. We thus ‘understand’ emotionally one aspect of the genesis of Krauss’ later unhinged violence against the Black community without the film cuing its endorsement, in a fashion similar to the explanation for brutality implied by the opening of Zero Dark Thirty, as distinct from its moral

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Fig. 4.5  Frustrated masculinity in Point Break

Fig. 4.6  Frustrated masculinity in Detroit

justification. It is pertinent to recall here Cahiers du cinéma reviewer Stéphane du Mesmildot’s earlier cited comments about Bigelow’s interest in Krauss, in order to point out that while this interest indeed permeates the film, it need not in and of itself be either ideologically cynical or prurient, let alone sadistic. In fact, for Baker (2019) focusing on White ego is one means by which White artists can avoid mere voyeurism in the context of atrocities against African Americans and cue a humane gaze.

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The Point Break intertext—also implied by Mesmildot’s allusions to police uniforms, not to mention the chaotic yet intensely hierarchically organised FBI/police stations shown in both—throws into relief Detroit’s fascination with macho posturing, ‘the inherent minstrelsy of the gender/ genre performance[s] of “man”’ (as well as ‘woman’) (Alberti 2013: 24), alongside performativity more generally. The action movie is the genre of macho masculinity par excellence (see Tasker 1993; Jeffords 1994) and its typical narrative is one of the cultural scripts both rendered highly visible and celebrated by Point Break (Collins 2012)—including in the very scene Detroit pastiches closely, which features Reeves’ iconic overdetermined (in gender terms) gesture of firing a weapon impotently into the air. It is well known that Bigelow herself further described her surfing police procedural as a ‘wet Western’ (Tasker 1993: 163) and both films’ emphasis on shoot-outs brings this aspect of them to the fore. So too does the daring casting, styling and performance of the twenty-four-year-old British actor Poulter in the role of Krauss. The decision to cast foreign actors, including also the London-born Boyega as Dismukes, in two of the three main roles and encompassing White and Black American identities, is apt for Bigelow’s culturalist approach to understanding and constructing socio-­historical types and behaviours. In the same way that Reeves’ performance and Johnny Utah’s characterisation were informed by the actors’ personification of a cartoonish surfer archetype in the Bill and Ted franchise (while Gary Busey, playing his partner, had also embodied a surfer in Big Wednesday [John Milius, 1978]), Poulter ‘looks like Howdy Doody’ (Greenblatt 2017: 45) and just as his character’s behaviour directly reproduces a caricature of police brutality towards African Americans acted out by Carl earlier in the film, the actor verges on ‘hamming up’ the cowboy archetype as he struts, drawls and spits. This strategy throws into relief the truth of Burgoyne’s observation in the context of Zero Dark Thirty that ‘violence can find its conventions’ (Burgoyne 2014: 253, citing Sarah Cole). The definitive role of ‘genres’ of (gendered) performance in the events of Detroit is further foregrounded and ironised by Krauss’ repeated statements, once the police have started killing people ostensibly to find out who has the gun they heard, that they need to keep going in order to cow someone into a confession, true or otherwise. They must kill, by this logic, for the sake of appearances. This is the real meaning of Flynn’s chilling early reference in conversation with one of his victims to ‘what we both know is going to happen anyway’: once events are set in motion they have a momentum of their own. Such

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an explanation for the murders is strikingly anti-psychological, constructing the hatred displayed by Krauss and to an extent his colleagues as the consequence of social (and in this case legal) codes, rather than adopting clichéd popular ideas about human brutality as synonymous with sadism or explicable through idiosyncratic brain chemistry and/or (generally traumatic) individual experiences. Indeed, Krauss repeatedly constructs murder as his duty, a by-product of the preservation of a veneer of orderliness—a paradox played out in the grinning hospitality-employee rictus he adopts, memorably, as the traumatised girls are finally given permission to be ushered to safety and Karen stares at him in frank reproach for his dereliction of duty and abuse of power. The fact that films themselves are part of the web of culture that determines behavioural conventions is underscored by the choice to make specific as well as generalised generic references. Thus, Bigelow’s films ‘challenge the way we think about the relationship of agency to environment [and] acknowledge the effects Hollywood genres have on the way we see the world’ (Benson-Allott 2010: 43).36 To make the point even more literally, Detroit has one policeman shoot a man in a separate room because he has misunderstood that he was merely intended to pretend to do this in order to scare the others into giving up the desired information. Supporting Benson-Allott’s additional claim that Bigelow’s films ‘invite us to see differently’ (ibid.), or to perceive how culture determines our actions and experiences, this detail is a perfect (intratextual) expression of the way in which narratives paradoxically create the most material of realities, the extinguishing of life through a gunshot, or how constructed discourses impact directly on the real of the body. In this way, it mirrors the film’s approach to spectatorial address, wherein a highly corporeal and emotive impact is achieved through obtrusively contrived means. Detroit’s implication that ideas shape and are shaped by feelings, and have physical consequences, chimes with Ahmed’s argument that ‘it is through emotions, or how we respond to objects and others, that surfaces or boundaries are made: the “I” and the “we” are shaped by, and even take the shape of, contact with others […] emotions create the very effect of an inside and an outside’ (2004: 10). Emotions, then, dictate the ‘other’ status of certain groups or individuals in each subject’s eyes. From this perspective, the film comments not only on the nature of entertainment but that of (violent) conflict, in a way that transcends specific circumstances. In the words of Bigelow’s Director of Photography  on Detroit and Zero Dark Thirty, Barry Ackroyd,

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Kathryn’s work has a great sense of wholeness in that there’s a context for even the most isolated events […] It’s intimate but also epic. These qualities are found in the best stories—you show the struggle humanity faces in a personal way while also showing the consequences on a larger level. (Martin 2017: 10)

Stop-Loss’ and other contemporary war films’ intimation that conflicts are shaped at least as much by (embodied) psychology as rational thought is also graphically conveyed here by the film’s very opening sequence, which figures conflict as literally imagined, when a Black policeman pretends to rough up its Black owner behind closed doors, to maintain order through fear and appease his White colleagues’ thirst for vituperative action against the community. Such obfuscation of any ‘truth’ is further instantiated at the level of form throughout the confusing sequence, in which visual mastery is frustrated by multiple cuts, awkward zooms and partially framed action, with sections of the screen intermittently blocked by matter or indistinct in the naturalistic night-time and often outdoor lighting: an intensification of Bigelow’s chosen style throughout recent films and which conveys her work’s emphasis on reality as a bodily-subjective (notably visual) experience.37 The soundscape is similarly at once cacophonous and muffled in quality, at first especially, with voices almost drowned out by music and plot information available in snatches only for the attentive listener. In suggesting conflict is fuelled by imaginary projections about otherness catalysed by emotions and  feelings, Detroit, like both Zero Dark Thirty and Ahmed’s comments on affective identity-construction, evokes Knowles’ ‘enemy they thought they saw across the frontier’ as illusory. Here too it looks forward to the very title of DuVernay’s When They See Us, which surely refers to the undeniable reality of White prejudice. There is little need to underline the relevance of this assertion to the contemporary climate of hate politics and retrenchment, manifested most obviously by not only the BLM movement and backlashes against it but the planned or actual fortification of barriers between (national) communities globally.

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Historical Biography and Heritage: Marie Antoinette (Sofia Coppola, 2006) This close-up view of Marie Antoinette limits its scope partly in acknowledgement of the existence of a considerable body of analyses of Coppola’s biopic of the doomed French queen. Nevertheless, this film iconises perfectly certain aspects of heightened genericity in ways that have not been fully explored. To exemplify this claim, I will engage with two principal areas of existing discussion around the film: its embrace of a baroque aesthetic and its participation in the heritage film, broadly defined. Genre Baroque Saige Walton’s discussion of Marie Antoinette as a film displaying ‘characteristically baroque attachments to surfaces, surface-based display, and to a material-visuality’ (2016: 128) is useful for underlining the relevance of this and cognate theorisations of the baroque’s importance in contemporary film and media culture to heightened genre films, notably as made by women. The film’s focus on such ‘surface’ style through its ornate mise-­ en-­scène, including wildly lavish costumes and its on-location Versailles setting, is self-evident. Such a focus dovetails with the baroque in the first place to the extent that ‘the baroque conflation of surface/appearance with being/substance can be traced back to seventeenth-century absolutism, especially at the royal French court of Versailles’ (ibid.). In the second, it does so through an eschewal of classicism’s supposed calm beauty in favour of what Heinrich Wölfflin called ‘enhanced vitality, excitement, ecstasy, intoxication,’ (in ibid.: 10) through ‘entwining’ and ‘everywhere point[ing] out beyond itself’ (ibid.: 4, 108). Without citing the film’s much-­discussed montages of excessive material consumption and anticlassical anachronisms or instances of blatant disregard for verisimilitude (the featuring of Converse sneakers, US star actors and historically impossible spoken accents stands out), almost any single shot from Marie Antoinette conveys its aesthetic of sensory overload through sumptuous, opulent detail—in line with understandings of baroque style’s tendency to make meaning at the molecular rather than the overall narrative level (cf. Cubitt 2004: 221–225).38 Christine Buci-Glucksmann has championed the baroque’s figural approach to signification as propitious for expressing ‘an aesthetic of otherness’ through excess epitomised by the feminine (1994: 129). This is certainly closer to the anti-essentialism of the

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heightened genre film than to the more minimalist aesthetic displayed by many prominent examples of female-directed art films.39 Importantly, Buci-­Glucksmann’s study focuses eponymously on what she calls baroque reason as figural, in opposition to ‘the ontologies of high “modernity” in which the subject and reality are content or substance’ (ibid.: 140). For Walton, Buci-Glucksmann’s emphasis on baroque ‘obscurity’ does not go far enough in underlining the co-constitutive importance of signification and embodiment: ‘Baroque flesh revels in figurative possibilities (the copy or artifice of construction) as well as physical contact to achieve the art of entanglement […] Baroque language is founded on a simultaneous drive towards the copy (the figural) and contact (the literal)’ (Walton 2016: 127). Like my understanding of heightened genericity, Walton positions her concept of baroque language between textual and (too exclusively) embodied approaches, personified for her by Metz on the one hand and both Shaviro and Massumi on the other. Further, her citation of Roland Barthes’ lyrical description of language in Lover’s Discourse, if applied to film, suggests the mutual re-subjectification of the viewer in relation to the author that I have described as facilitated by my corpus: Language is a skin: I rub my language against the other. It is as if I had words instead of fingers or fingers at the tip of my words […] The emotion derives from a double contact […] I enwrap the other in my words, I caress, I brush up against, talk up this contact, I extend myself. (Walton 2016: 127)

Such an evocation of subjectivity as shaped by discourse in the communicative encounter can also be likened to Sean Cubitt’s (rather less positive) account of what he calls the ‘neo-baroque’ film, proliferating to his mind since the 1970s New Hollywood era. Thus, Cubitt details the spectator’s active ‘collusion’ in constructing an ‘entirely artificial’ diegesis, paradigmatically in Snake Eyes (De Palma, 1998) but also in franchises such as Star Wars and Blade Runner, among other examples, where we identify with the elaborate worlds on screen rather than their (guilelessly immersed) heroes, ‘enjoying both spectacular technique and the spectacle itself, illusion and the machinery of illusion’ (Cubitt 2004: 222). Walton’s interest in the baroque as a ‘formal system’ (2016: 142) privileges (alongside theory) intratextual aesthetic accounts of phenomenologically imagined textuality diagnosed in a general way through notions of surface and depth, whose notional opposition other writers including Pam Cook (2014) and Katarzyna Paszkiewicz (2018: 173–208) have also

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problematised in relation to the address of Marie Antoinette. Cubitt’s account, by contrast, is stridently intertextual and indeed cinephilic in its approach to the neo-baroque as narrated through ‘borrowings, residues, homages, reflexes, regressions, alibis, and quotations’ (2004: 225). It includes numerous concrete examples from films based on scripts ‘of algorithmic elegance’ (ibid.: 222) and displaying lavish production design, which might well be considered heightened genre films, but without interrogating genre’s determining role in the cinematic worldmaking he describes.40 Marie Antoinette prompts us to ask what it might reveal to consider heightened genericity as itself a form of figural aesthetic akin to the baroque, and with similar potential for feminised expressivity, in the context of the genre whose mise-en-scène is arguably the most ostentatiously baroque in the first place: the (post-)heritage film. Heightened Heritage The most extensive existing analysis of Marie Antoinette as a genre film is Paszkiewicz’s (2018: 173–208) eloquent reading, much of which informs the present take. Paszkiewicz claims this as perhaps Coppola’s most blatantly generic film, if for no other reason than on the basis of its studio backing, unique in her oeuvre. She explores in particular the biopic and the heritage costume drama as genre(s) engaged by the narrative. The present analysis will leave aside the biopic per se, other than to observe that Paget notes such films’ kinship with docudrama in terms of a dialectical relationship with both fact and drama (Paget 2011: ‘Introduction’). Focusing instead on Marie Antoinette as a heritage fiction, of which biopics are almost by their nature a subset, tallies with the view of docudrama as not working in a substantially different way from more ostensively fictional genres. Such an approach does not contradict Paszkiewicz’s intelligent reading of Marie Antoinette as in part a metafictional comment on the traditional masculine gendering of representations of history, and thus implicitly in part revisionist; however, my analysis will attempt to transcend the politics of representation in examining how textual affects, generated through genre, are themselves potentially politically significant, including in the context of women’s authorship. Paszkiewicz’s comparison of Marie Antoinette to female-authored historical costume dramas Orlando (Sally Potter, UK/Russia/Italy/France/ Netherlands 1993) and The Piano is often highly suggestive, not least about the generic structures underpinning so-called art cinema. On the

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other hand, such a choice of kindred texts is remarkably skewed towards idiosyncratic (feminist) auteur examples of a typically popular genre, a situation only partially remedied by a brief reference to the more mainstream The Duchess (Saul Dibb, 2008). Such an angle is symptomatic of Paszkiewicz’s view that Marie Antoinette positions itself in relation to genre, that it is a genre film but also not one—a perspective echoed by Fiona Handyside’s appraisal of Coppola’s work in general as ‘flit[ting] in and out of genre’ (2017: 37).41 Both of these statements could be applied to almost any film. The present analysis will consider Marie Antoinette as being more fully rather than (somewhat apologetically) only partially generic. A defining aspect of heritage films that lends itself perfectly to the workings of Coppola’s film is a tension between exuberant mise-en-scène and more downbeat narratives, especially when it comes to the fate of women and other disempowered characters (see Higson 1993: 109). In this vein, most commentators including Paszkiewicz agree that the tenor of Marie Antoinette’s ending is more mournful than that of its middle, as the queen prepares—albeit calmly—for death at the hands of her people. In fact, considering a divergence between the moods arising from narrative and mise-en-scène usefully nuances Anna Backman Rogers’ reading of Coppola’s work as a whole in terms of a strategy of ‘heighten[ing] and foreground[ing] the so-called “feminine” aspects of the image in juxtaposition to a mood of crisis, disorientation, melancholy and rupture’, such that darkness underlies her films’ light aesthetics (2019: ‘Introduction’, my emphasis). Perhaps it is this conventional heritage film contradiction that principally underpinned many detractors’ view of Marie Antoinette as ‘a more traditional heritage outing than anticipated’ (Romney 2006  in Paszkiewicz 2018: 184). However, the variant of heritage drama that best describes Marie Antoinette is undoubtedly the more transnational contemporary post-heritage strain that is typified by the kind of openly pastiched stylisation, including an anti-natural style of acting, anachronisms, high/low cultural references and hybrid genericity, that we see in Coppola’s (teen) heritage film (see Monk 2001; Vidal 2012: 100–2).42 To illustrate this point, close intertextual analysis is called for—after a further word on the choice of comparison film(s) on which to draw. While Claire Monk does identify Orlando and The Piano as post-heritage films, notwithstanding the co-production status of Orlando, Paszkiewicz’s comparison texts suggest not only auteurism but a certain Anglocentricism in the context of a genre that, while it was theoretically consolidated in Britain,

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proliferated elsewhere in Europe before it was normalised in Hollywood. European heritage is of course particularly important when it comes to a film about European history, ‘undoubtedly deal[ing] with the iconography of Frenchness’ (Paszkiewicz 2018: 187), and one directed by Coppola, who makes most  of her box-office revenue in Europe, whose persona is overidentified with European  cultural heritage and who frequently cites European cinema’s influence on her practice. For these reasons, Marie Antoinette is unusual within the films examined in these pages for requiring close  attentiveness to European genre history in its imbrication with Hollywood, even after the late twentieth-century moment when in heritage biopics ‘the markers of national identity fade away and the generic markers become more visible’ (Vidal 2012: 119). Handyside references Coppola’s background to similar ends in her book-length study of the filmmaker; however, in line with the discourse of exceptionalist auteurism she deploys to situate this work, like self-styled high cultural icon Coppola herself, she prioritises comparisons with the totemic directors of the (post)1960s European art cinema, from François Truffaut and Michelangelo Antonioni to Agnès Varda and Chantal Akerman. Coppola’s valorisation of surface, in which Marie Antoinette engages, is thus likened to the work of apparently very different (exceptionally slow-paced, decoratively minimalist and dialogue-heavy) films by Rohmer (Handyside 2017: 139). A more apposite comparison preserving links to 1960s and 1970s ‘New’ filmmaking waves might be with Europhile director Martin Scorsese’s The Age of Innocence (1993), an adaptation of the eponymous American novel that offers one example of the type of genre heightening in the transnational context heightening described by Belén Vidal.43 I will, however, draw directly on the popular European post-heritage film as a framework for understanding Marie Antoinette, and specifically on another lavish and self-conscious literary adaptation about a French queen imprisoned by gendered duty: La Reine Margot/Queen Margot (Patrice Chéreau, France/Italy/Germany 1994).44 As with Coppola’s film, the auteur status of opera director Chéreau may complicate this film’s positioning as popular; however, heritage films have always occupied a more middlebrow position than many other mainstream genres and, an adaptation of Aléxandre Dumas’ classic bestselling novel of the same name, La Reine Margot boasts a format and mise-en-scène that are quintessentially post-heritage, from its foregrounding of the female body as commodity to an extraordinarily excessive display of finery and ceremony, such as during the opening wedding sequence, alongside the painterly composition of many shots (see

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Pidduck 2012: 104; 2005: 61–7). These elements are also present in Marie Antoinette. Indeed, La Reine Margot is both more typical of the genre and much more similar to Marie Antoinette than Campion’s colonial-­era tale of rural life in New Zealand, or Potter’s time-travelling avant-garde Virginia Woolf adaptation, which was marketed as such rather than through an appeal to generic expectation. In the remainder of this section, I will home in anew on an already considerably discussed section from the middle of the film dealing with the queen’s more secluded activities at court in order to compare aspects of the sequence’s style with that of La Reine Margot, so far ignored as a predecessor by scholarship bound by national or taste-hierarchical silos. I will also make some further specific and general comparisons that can illuminate a feminist perspective on both films. Almost exactly halfway through Marie Antoinette, faced with her growing unpopularity at court and inability to seduce her husband and thus produce an heir whose making is her social purpose, Kirsten Dunst’s Antoinette displays a rare moment of weakness as she weeps against gilt doors. This is immediately followed by the film’s most iconic montage of excessive luxury in honour of the queen’s eighteenth birthday, in which fetish garments replace one another in quickly accumulating succession, gorgeous cakes and titbits are guzzled and champagne glasses overflow, all to Bow Wow Wow’s ‘I Want Candy’, then the queen is dressed up and styled. Finally, having exhausted the pleasures of court, Antoinette and her closest friends attend a masked ball at which she meets her lover Count Fersen in a rare if not uniquely erotic encounter within Coppola’s work (see Walton 2016: 148) apt for post-heritage’s centralisation of sexuality. Various commentators have quite rightly seen the makeover aspects of this passage’s central montage as evidence of Coppola’s interest in girlhood and its aesthetic associations, highlighting Marie Antoinette’s teenpic status. However, a focus on dressing up as such is prototypical of costume dramas (Bruzzi 1997: 36), a key subset of heritage films (without being limited to interaction with this genre). It is unremarkable, then, that La Reine Margot also includes a makeover of the queen. More notably, it too uses the device of masquerade to allow its protagonist to transgress her royal status and take a lover from outside the court, in a sequence in which Margot (properly named Marguerite de Valois, played by Isabelle Adjani) and her courtier Henriette go out into the street and the queen keeps her mask on and her identity hidden as she poses as a prostitute to have sex for the first time with her future inamorato La Môle (Vincent Perez) in an

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alleyway—exactly as Antoinette does when she initiates her affair with Fersen through flirtation in a shadowy gallery at the ball. More extraordinary is the fact that in both cases it is the queen’s mischievous red-haired lady in waiting who suggests the foray outside the court, creating striking visual and narrative similarities between the films (Figs.  4.7 and 4.8). When we consider further thematic resonances between these tales of women sold in marriage for the ‘good of their nation’ and whose bodies are treated as public property to be viewed (Antoinette) if not shared in incestuous rape between her brothers (Margot) and the repeat casting of the same actress, Asia Argento, as mistress to the King in both, the repetitions suggest direct influence in addition to generic similarity. I am more interested in the channelling of affect from La Reine Margot, like other post-heritage films, to Marie Antoinette in ways both specific and diffuse than only in reference-spotting, while underlining again that the two things can work together. As my image shows, the two films might on the face of it appear to engage rather different moods, with La Reine Margot typified by melodramatic tragedy and Marie Antoinette teen excitement. However, not only do many critics agree that the ending of Coppola’s film belies this picture, but the inclusion of the weeping scene underscores the fact that tensions pervade earlier, by capturing Antoinette’s anguished sobs in close-up then in a shaky medium shot after a jarring jump cut, all evocative of her disorientation and panic. Conversely, La Reine Margot is full of passion and vitality as well as mournful discontentment and indeed righteous anger elicited by and for its protagonist in ways bound up with its generic aesthetics. Its opening, for example, shows Margot being married against her will to Henri de Navarre (Daniel Auteuil) in a sequence practically unrivalled even in the over-aestheticised heritage genre for the sheer extent of pomp its mise-en-scène displays. Heavy, crashing crescendos of organ music join with ornate religious décor; giant, perilously balanced candelabras; stiff collars; brocade fabrics; and improbably large and elaborate headpieces in conveying the constricting price, indeed crushing weight, of Margot’s royal desirability. Recalling Angela Ndalianis’(2004) account of contemporary baroque aesthetics as multi-sensory, the ‘meaning’ of the sequence is its evocation through (codified) structures of the feeling of stupefying visual dazzlement, of fabrics and ornaments weighing and chafing, of a pulse set to the rigid and aurally oppressive rhythms of Church, state and patriarchy but also, as proud Margot remains composed and silent, of outer dignity as inner strength—a baroque manifestation of the way in which ‘seeming is being’ (Bornhoefen in Walton 2016: 150, original emphasis).45

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Fig. 4.7  Ladies of the royal household in La Reine Margot

Fig. 4.8  Ladies of the royal household in Marie Antoinette

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Also as with Marie Antoinette, even when it is not openly imitating another particular work of art, La Reine Margot’s affects often circulate through forms of actively anti-realistic stylisation not reducible to excessive mise-en-scène—although excess may not be an inapt term for their promiscuous intertextuality. For instance, during the seduction sequence, which is shot with a lower average shot length and a much more mobile camera than was typical of earlier cycles of heritage films, Henriette and Margot sweep through the grey and dirty streets like otherworldly beings in billowing, shiny blue cloaks and jet-black masks, experiencing an exhilarating freedom comparable to that which is enjoyed by Antoinette during the later film’s upbeat central section. In the first place, the use of blue is noteworthy both here and likewise dominating the colour scheme, in a pastel shade, at the end of the makeover montage in Marie Antoinette described above, during a moment of lassitude, when we recall Carol Mavor’s reading of blue as paradoxical ‘joyful-sad’, the point where bliss and jouissance meet the ‘sadness of mourning’ (Mavor 2013: 19–20). This supports both Backman Rogers’ (2019: ‘Introduction’) focus on the lived experience of ‘bittersweeet’ feeling in Coppola’s work and the complex affective reading I offer for both these genre films. It also complicates production designer Milena Canonero’s claims that taking liberties with colour and coordination comprised an area in which the crew attempted to distinguish the film from the putative average costume drama (Handyside 2017: 152; cf. Ferriss 2021: 102). Such a sequence seems, rather, to fit well with Cubitt’s description of the neo-baroque’s call to ‘identify’ with the generic world itself, here the recognisably folkloric sixteenth-century European street, peopled by an antithetically styled princess and pauper (a combination that evokes, too, as a further obvious antecedent to Marie Antoinette, the equally metafictional story of vulnerable royal femininity The Princess Bride [Rob Reiner, 1987], scripted by William Goldman, whom Cubitt credits as an originator of the neo-baroque screenplay [2004: 222])—even if both this film and La Reine Margot are also more swashbuckling and romantic than Coppola’s. Indeed, Backman Rogers (2012: 85) finds the forest in which Marie Antoinette is handed over to France from Austria redolent of fairy tales. The point I am making is that Marie Antoinette’s high stylisation and citational texture, far from being unusual, are both typical and indeed integral to the working of the (post-)heritage film as a prime example of a heightened genre film, dealing, in the words of its star Dunst, in ‘the history of feelings’ (Paszkiewicz 2018: 187). As Charles Tashiro notes in a passage describing production design in historical films that is so pertinent that I will emulate Vidal in reproducing it:

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Recognising the stylisation is part of the process of historical recreation, since such recognition adds to the emotional distance between viewer and event […] By recognising our recognition, the film shares our perspective, implicating each in the other. Three distances—spatial, temporal, emotional—combine to create a strong sense of presence. (in Vidal 2012: 115, original emphasis)46

Marie Antoinette underlines such presence’s bodily manifestations, by locating its referentiality in sensory activities; there is a parallel between the way in which external generic discourse works on the lived body and clothes are full of promise and power only in their relation to the human form. Significantly, this relationship of engineered proximity between spectator and world rather than character is triangulated by the felt imprint of the filmmaker when we bear in mind Cook’s observation that Marie Antoinette ‘mak[es] Coppola’s identity a central feature, to the extent that it eclipses that of Kirsten Dunst as Marie Antoinette’, among other ways through story design and by being ‘emblazoned across the flamboyant displays of costume and fashion’ (2014: 217), both of which elements are also highly generic. It would be erroneous to suggest that the sphere of affects engaged by these two films is identical. However, they both deal at times in vibrancy and indeed a feeling of empowerment through consumption (notably of men for Margot) but also in sadness. La Reine Margot revels more lengthily in melodramatic ‘ecstatic woe’ (Williams 1991: 737) but both films adopt the baroque aesthetic of anticipation and infinite deferral of meaning that is also proper to generic pastiche, such that even the more positive sequences enfold the promise of anti-climax, like the women’s seemingly insatiable appetites. A closer analysis of the montage sequence that in many ways epitomises the experience of watching Marie Antoinette bears out the cogency of these remarks. In the first place, while I have described the parade of goodies as a succession, a more apposite term to denote their revelation would be layering. After an opening slow track along a line of shoes designed by Manolo Blahnik to include anachronistic stilettos (Diamond 2011: 219), a graphic match shows three different pairs being picked up by women’s hands from a seemingly identical spot, emphasising accumulation, before the last pair are shown on feet. The following shot shows a decorative concertina-style fan being opened (literally unlayered) and lain down on top of several others; then we cut to a scene in which different fabrics are spread out on top of soft furnishings and/or, through

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jump cuts, one another, finished with a (layered) embroidered trim, before a cutaway to Antoinette and two of her ladies’ maids giddily appraising a dress seemingly fashioned from these. If the neo-baroque shifts identification from characters to production design, this is of course partly because the characters are determined if not subsumed by their (generic) worlds and nowhere is this more evident than in Marie Antoinette, including here as the trio of elaborately styled women resemble the triptychs common in seventeenth-century art and reproduce the triumvirate rhetorical structure adopted by the montage (layering three pairs of shoes). Such a view coincides with Handyside’s (2018) suggestion that Coppola’s films are rife with invitations to identify with patterns rather than people, including across the oeuvre. She also cites Todd Kennedy’s argument that a critique of the emptiness of consumption is structurally built into its representation in Marie Antoinette (Handyside 2017: 9) and the accuracy of this observation becomes more apparent as the montage continues. Firstly, the frenetic pace speeds up with an ensuing series of images that interweaves cakes, champagne, gaming chips and jewellery into its finery, notably echoing the triadic layering of the shoes with similar graphic matches involving necklaces and, humorously, a dog-­ collar, then the layering of graphic matches grows to include four shots (of shoes being taken out of boxes), then over ten (overhead shots of cakes), speeding up so fast it is difficult to keep count, before the editing beginning to slow a little to display the arrival of the camp hairdresser M. Léonard (James Lance) with his multilayered pouf wig for the queen and to-camera cheeky look. Once he has assured Antoinette that it is certainly not ‘too much’—in a moment itself layered through figure arrangement and setting with recollections of an earlier meeting between Antoinette and her husband (Diamond 2011: 221)—the pace slows even further to evoke the post-climactic boredom of the women as they drink yet another glass of champagne and flop back onto a pale blue sofa.47 The masked ball will provide the next distraction but the diminishing returns of consumable pleasures have been gently yet naggingly established. There is a pleasing irony to the fact that the word pastiche derives from the Italian pasticcio, a kind of cake or pie. More particularly, the dishes designated by the term are of a layered format. Coppola’s film may disavow Marie Antoinette’s infamous pronouncement about the virtues of cake but layered pasticcio symbolises well the workings of both the film’s molecular aesthetic and its more generalised generic pastiche. Indeed, while many, mainly narrative, elements of her work (and pronouncements

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she has made) suggest that the filmmaker has some unease with consumption—in which we might include entertainment—for its own sake as leading to infinite deferral, her film revels in the experience of generic style as codified meaning irreducible to a simple positive or negative affect.48 And after all, to extend the culinary metaphor, the proof of the pudding is in the eating. A more appropriate mouthpiece for this sensibility might be M.  Léonard. If self-consciousness is the logical endpoint of heightened genre, showing up its inherence to generic style full stop, then the accumulation of trappings of genre in cinema results in layered meaning that, like the infinite gestures of the baroque, can never be ‘too much’.

The Sports Movie as Docudrama in Lords of Dogtown (Hardwicke, 2005) Early on in Detroit, when Karen compliments Larry on his singing, he answers, ‘That’s who I am.’ Not only does this statement proleptically lend weight to the way in which that film’s ending reinvests its protagonist Larry with ‘somebodiness’ through spiritual song, but it stresses the way in which identities are contingent on both behaviours and embodiment: the combination of particular song lyrics with a unique voice. This idea arguably provides the very premise for Catherine Hardwicke’s contemporaneously set skating docudrama Lords of Dogtown. Thus, as critic Nancy Hendrickson observes, ‘what set the [film’s protagonists the] Z-boys apart was more than the [new] style of their skateboarding. It was their style. Period.’ (2005: 26) This is significant in the first place because, as Marie Antoinette so amply demonstrates, ‘reproduction[of “the historical” and its artefacts] transfers authority from origin to style’ (Matin 2012: 108), in a way that applies to both the protagonists and the authorship of Lords of Dogtown. In addition, a focus on style recognises that the identity of the group of mainly disadvantaged youngsters from the insalubrious stretch of beach between Venice and Santa Monica known as Dogtown on whom Hardwicke’s film focuses is an extension of the way they move their bodies. Likewise, discussing the real Z-boys in the documentary Dogtown and Z-boys (Stacy Peralta, 2001), their mentor Skip Engblom likens the individual animation of and embroidering upon existing formulae within skate style to the emotionally expressive activity of ‘playing the blues’, while dubbing each skater’s style ‘an extension of your personality’. Not only that, but the generic homophily between ‘male-oriented’, female-directed

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movies that feature in this book again threatens to tip over into formal citation, since this is a film about skating in which the sport’s moves are anticipated and mirrored by sequences of surfing, featuring a camera low to the water just as in Point Break. While they are not extensive, Sight and Sound dubs these memorable sequences featuring surfers weaving in and out of a reconstruction of the long demolished Pacific Ocean Park pier one of the film’s highlights (Davies 2005: 79). The comparison with Point Break symptomatises an uncontentious claim that Lords of Dogtown, charting the rise of Zephyr skating team who invented and popularised modern aerial skateboarding, participates in the modalities of the (teen) sports film, among other genres. At the same time, the preceding introductory description points up a feature of the film whose analysis can illuminate its heightened genericity and feminist interpretability: the defining status of a paradoxical engagement with the artificial in the narrative’s dramatisation of historical events. My analysis of the film will treat in turn its generic affiliations and aspects of its style more generally, yet still understood through a generic prism, in order to argue that it represents a hyper-fictionalisation of the historical real. My reading of Lords of Dogtown accords it the paradigmatic status of a film in which many of the claims for female-directed docudramas made throughout this chapter can be seen to culminate. Generic Textuality Lords of Dogtown is known perhaps above all as a fictionalised version of a pre-existing text: Dogtown and Z-Boys, a generally acclaimed documentary about a group of skaters mythologised in the skate community—and, thanks to the film, beyond—for supposedly reinventing the sport in the 1970s. The original film has received a certain amount of scholarly attention from a documentary studies perspective (e.g. Johnson 2009; Canha 2013) or as a historical record (Trippe 2014; Borden 2019: ‘Skateboarding at the Movies’); despite taking more than $13m worldwide (to Dogtown and Z-Boys’ $1.5m), Lords of Dogtown has received next to none.49 While the docudrama is sometimes mentioned as an afterthought, barely distinguished—and almost never in terms of a positive comparison—in academic and critical writings on the first film, it is particularly striking that its existence is simply not alluded to even in an analysis by David T. Johnson that argues for seeing Dogtown and Z-Boys as an adaptation (of works by Dogtown-based photojournalist and artist Craig Stecyk)—an approach

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that would seem to eschew the hierarchies of ‘originary’ value on which the deprecation of pastiche texts can repose. Such an omission illustrates the ongoing currency of concepts of fidelity, authenticity and historicity as well as a suspicion of entertainment as such in canon-formation, according to which a film such as Lords of Dogtown, as an adaptation of a documentary, perhaps of an adaptation, occupies the lowest of ground. On the other hand, the film’s docudrama status has rendered it largely invisible within popular genre surveys of the sports film with which it is so self-evidently aligned—a situation exacerbated by the fact that such studies are themselves extremely thin on the ground. I will therefore adumbrate the ways in which Lords of Dogtown dialogues with the sports film and, secondarily, other fictional genres, before considering how its generic meaning-making is coloured by its docudramatic status. It is important to underline here that, whereas other analyses in this chapter have rarely interrogated the docudrama per se, given its meta-generic and increasingly ubiquitous status, I see this mode as more central to the identity and address of Lords of Dogtown than is usual, precisely because it famously adapts a pre-existing documentary: although a feature film about the Z-Boys was in development before the release of the documentary, the presence of Stacy Peralta, himself a celebrity Z-boy, as director on the first film and writer on the second (although Hardwicke did an uncredited polish [Hendrickson 2005: 27]) cements the adaptive relationship between the two. Thus, while one critic opines that Lords of Dogtown can easily be seen as ‘direct translation’ of documentary to drama (Davies 2005: 78), according to a rare positive comparison by Alan Morrison’s (2005) review in Empire, ‘if anything [the docudrama] gives a more vivid impression of what it must have been like to hang out with the coolest kids on the block’: the skating is ‘fleshed out’ by the focus on characters. There is a certain holistic logic and pertinence to concluding this book’s extended, historically informed genre film analyses with a sports movie, in that, according to by far the most extensive postclassical account of the genre, offered by Bruce Babington, this genre is now recognised to have given us the very first feature film, in Corbett-Fitzsimmons Fight (Enoch J. Rector, 1897) (2014: 3). Like Aaron Baker (2003), Babington (2014: 5) also recognises the form’s overidentification with US narratives, including through films’ preference for the depiction of particularly American sports—even if he offers some challenges to such a US-centric reading. This is certainly true of skating as a sport strongly associated with California, especially in the 1970s, despite the pursuit’s important

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histories and manifestations elsewhere, such as in Australia and the UK.  The belatedness of the genre’s recognition as such only since the 1990s (with a parody suggestive of consolidated cultural familiarity, Sports Movie [David Koechner], in 2007) is even more surprising in light of Babington’s observation that sports tend to be an arena particularly charged with social meaning through aestheticised role-play (ibid.: 9)— much like (heightened) genre films. While skating films are listed by Babington as one example of sports films (ibid.: 14), features of the genre that Lords of Dogtown displays beyond its obvious centralisation of a sport include the ‘inevitable’ (ibid.: 26) featuring of a romance plot, in this case a triangle between protagonists Stacy Peralta (John Robinson) and Jay Adams (Emil Hirsch) and secondary character Kathy Alva (Nikki Reed), sister of the third Z-boy protagonist Tony (Victor Rasuk), added into the original story; the (ambivalent) portrayal of sportsmen as childlike, associable with the genre’s frequent hybridisation with youth films among other genres (and here teenpic staples including the tension between individual and group identity and the loss of a character’s virginity also feature); and the film’s view of sport ‘as an industrialised society’s postlapsarian pastoral, though, paradoxically, as the product of industrialism’ (ibid.: 27). The latter description is an apt fit for the way in which the lyricism of surfing in Lords of Dogtown is succeeded by a focus on the Z-boys’ honing of skating skills in urban spaces, in particular their exploitation of surfing techniques for skating in empty swimming pools (Fig. 4.9). The Z-boys’ confrontation with post-industrial urban life was summed up in 1976 by Stecyk in Skateboarder Magazine with words redolent of Babington’s description, reiterated by Dogtown and Z-Boys. Thus, for him, ‘skaters by their very nature are urban guerrillas: they make everyday use of the useless artifacts of the technological burden, and employ the handiwork of the government/corporate structure in a thousand ways that the original architects could never dream of’. Like all adaptations of history, and in common with the basic principles of drama, sports films including this one also tend to focalise a handful of characters, which constitutes one of the bigger differences between the docudrama and the more expansive documentary. Nevertheless, the mythologising of the Z-boys at the expense of other skaters, and the relative sidelining of women and ethnic minorities’ role in their story (through the figures of skater Peggy Oki and board designer and Zephyr Shop co-founder Jeff Ho) was an accusation levelled at both films (see Borden 2019: ‘Skateboarding at the Movies’).

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Fig. 4.9  Sport as industrial pastoral in Lords of Dogtown

Such a claim brings us back to the masculinism, and supposed conservatism, of the sports genre, concerned as it is with individual male success in worldly terms. A number of responses to such a critique of Lords of Dogtown can be offered from a narrative (generic) perspective. For instance, the film is highly ambivalent about the meaning of success in the context of counter-cultural sell-out, as the Z-boys are discovered and cut ties with the local Zephyr Surf Shop that originally lent them their name— possibly even more so than in the documentary version. A relevant, clear difference in the docudrama concerns the career failure of Jay Adams, whose falling into drugs and crime the documentary’s interviews lament. In Lords of Dogtown, however, his character, animated by Hirsch’s vital performance and the winner in the competition with Peralta for Kathy, retains a certain glamour in his refusal to compromise; Peralta’s choices are at least as likely to be questioned thanks to a late scene in which the two cross paths after he has become a global star with his own logo through sponsorship and it transpires through his sheepish admission that he has been in Australia but failed to go surfing at all. A final subtitle is also relatively forgiving of Adams, proclaiming that ‘Jay Adams is recognized as the spark that ignited the sport—the original seed’, then adding, ‘released on parole from drug-related charges, he continues to skate and charge big waves in hawaii [sic]’.

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Such relativisation of winning and losing is in fact common in sports films (Babington 2014: 20–22). Here, it also speaks to the Western pre-­ history of this narrative of California skating as a ‘frontier-tale’ (Borden 2019: ‘Found Space’). The buddy duo representing different ideals of masculinity aligned more closely with either nature or civilisation is a staple of later examples of this genre, as analysed by Wendy Chapman Peek (2003) in The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (John Ford, 1962), played on in numerous subsequent Westerns and reborn on the seas in Point Break—indeed, an instance where the other Z-boys jeer at Peralta for possessing that marker of socialisation and neoliberal incorporation that is a watch strongly recalls the teasing attitude adopted by Bodhi’s sports gang in dealing with liminal conformist sports star-surfer Johnny Utah in Bigelow’s film. As for the charges of Whitening and masculinising history levelled at both the Z-Boys films, Hardwicke’s insertion of Kathy Alva’s female Latinx identity to complement Tony’s male one merits acknowledgement.50 It could further be argued that the casting of John Robinson as Stacy Peralta overdetermines certain racialised connotations to a denaturalising extent. Robinson had recently played the lead in high-school shoot-out drama Elephant (Gus Van Sant, 2003), which achieved the startling feat of winning both the Palme d’Or and the Best Director’s Prize at Cannes, among many other awards. The film deals with an almost exclusively White male phenomenon (strikingly, all mass shootings in high schools have been perpetrated by students in this group), puts Robinson in a yellow T-shirt that matches his hair—bleached even beyond its natural blonde—and is made up principally of shots of White or pale-coloured institutional spaces lined by reflective surfaces. Also in the area of representational politics broadly defined, while nor does Lords of Dogtown advertise the homoerotic potentialities of its heteroerotic sports-adjacent action quite as clearly as does Point Break—notwithstanding long-haired and relatively conformist Peralta’s feminisation and the way in which sexual chemistry between same-sex characters is a defining feature of onscreen teen narratives (Kaveney 2006: 8)—this study echoes queer studies scholar Bradbury-Rance (2019) in suggesting that it is possible to offer readings that are positive for marginalised positions beyond such politics, notably through close attention to form.51 In the first place, this means thinking carefully about the ways in which Lords of Dogtown works as a heightened docudrama, by the same token transubstantiating narrative into a manifestation of its author.

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The sophisticated conception of docudrama offered by Paget underscores, firstly, the genre’s interpellation of an active viewer in the Brechtian mould, through its refusal to occlude the agency and fashioning that—as documentary theory now widely recognises—always underpins recordings of the real (2015). In other words, it cues us to ask questions about the choices made in translating history in a particular way and is thus increasingly, in what John Corner (2002) has dubbed the postdocumentary age, seen as less suspect than its notional forefather. ‘Docudrama lets in by the front door “arenas of representation” [Lipkin 2010] that can only ever arrive by the back door in news and documentary’ (Paget 2015). One such ‘arena’ highlighted especially boldly by a docudrama as ostentatiously fictionalising, indeed ‘mischief[-making]’ (ibid.), as Lords of Dogtown is surely the generic structuration of social relations. Paget’s notion of refracted reality outlined in the same passage, meanwhile, adopts the same terms I have used to evoke cine-fille authors’ mediating role in heightened genre films. His earlier (2011) explanation of what he sees as the virtues of the form chimes even more sonorously with a feminist aesthetics of genre authorship. Thus, Paget emphasises generic hybridity and kinship, notably between documentary and docudrama, suggesting that the latter mode ‘offers a matrix for how audiences must construct a mental model of the real as both documentary and dramatic’ that includes both distance and closeness—although I would privilege simultaneity over his ‘oscillation’ as a conceptual figure for this paradoxical relation that films instantiate for viewers (ibid.: ‘Introduction’). The directly following discussion of the author’s place in this triangulated arrangement with ‘text’ (itself, as we have seen, a notion with excess priced in) and audience is particularly useful. Drawing on R.  Maxwell, Paget notes that the act of pointing at something initially ‘draws attention to the pointer’, before diverting it towards the object of attention. Such a view contradicts the suggestion that historiography can be hived off from questions of fashioned textual identity to denote merely Political Events, limning a cultural history that takes in the individual and in so doing eschews private-public distinctions. The tendency to manifest its making and maker(s) is one of the characteristics docudrama shares with literary adaptation for Paget (ibid.: ‘Histories: fourth-phase hybridisation’), who later expands on this analogy to liken the genre to a meme, defined by Richard Dawkins as ‘a unit of cultural transmission’ (in  ibid.). The docudrama appears here as emblematic of heightened genre’s embrace of such a status. I will now turn to a consideration of the style of Lords of Dogtown

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specifically that ultimately foregrounds its granular reproduction of what we might call an aesthetic of cultural transmission. Heightened Style: Performativity and the Arabesque In the description of the gesturalilty of docudrama outlined above, Paget goes on to argue that ‘far from pointing out from itself towards a universal generalisable “reality”, the docudrama seeks to overlay the Stanislavskian emotional equivalence of “As If” with the documentary-indexical “See This!”’. Paget’s qualified reference to the Method school of acting associated with Konstantin Stanislawski parallels an allusion to it by John Alberti in his study of masculinity in contemporary romantic comedies. Alberti finds this tradition useful only up to a point in accounting for recent trends in the representation of masculinity in Hollywood comedy, where instead a more cogent alternative framework is offered by another improvisational school of acting: the 1950s Second City group. This school favoured an anthropological approach based on social observation over the psychologically informed Method, in keeping with ‘a performative approach to genres of gender’ (Alberti 2013: 63–4). While Alberti tends to use the terms genre and gender somewhat interchangeably in his book, performing a provocative slippage, his phrase could also be adapted to designate more literally the sports movie, and  most of the films analysed in this chapter, as exemplifying ‘genres of masculinity’. In any case, a performative approach based on mimicry describes well the style of acting adopted in Lords of Dogtown. In the first place, like Bigelow, Hardwicke did not shy away from casting known actors in her central roles. Among the boys, in addition to Robinson as Peralta, Emil Hirsch was a child-star with nine years of credits in popular film and television series behind him, while Victor Rasuk, playing Tony Alva, had starred in the successful Raising Victor Vargas (Peter Sollett, 2002), where he was also identified with Latinicity. In line with the auteurist practice of repeatedly using the same actors, Nikki Reed had starred in Hardwicke’s controversial, highly visible teen drama Thirteen (2003). All these actors bring a history of generally disaffected and/or rebellious US youth to bear on their roles. Other denaturalising star turns are offered by Rebecca De Mornay as Jay Adams’ mother and Heath Ledger, already highly regarded following major roles in popular films such as 10 Things I Hate About You (Gil Junger, 1999), A Knight’s Tale

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(Brian Helgeland, 2001) and the critically lauded Monster’s Ball (Marc Forster, 2001), here playing Zephyr shop co-founder Engblom. If the effects of such known actors’ presence are based on cultural association more than perceived manifestations of psychic interiority, so are those of the approach to acting adopted. Not only was Peralta involved in the production, but Tony Alva coached Rasuk. Hardwicke conceives this relation in strikingly bodily(-cum-spiritual) terms: ‘[The original Z-Boys] have the memory of skating in their bodies and souls and still do it best’ (Vontz 2005: 38). Although Hardwicke may be describing the important role played by mentors in training the actors to skate, their performances exhibit physical mimicry of the vocal and kinetic gestures and ticks of the men whom they bring to life through what Dennis Bingham’s analysis of acting in historical biopics calls embodied impersonation (2010: 79–81). Thus, Hirsch imitates Adams’ habit of gurning to shock, captured in photographs of him; Rasuk mimics the poker face and confident verbal delivery style that lends Alva his air of extreme confidence; Robinson’s languid bodily gestures evoke Peralta’s less aggressive, more dialogical style of interaction; and Ledger in particular copies impeccably the precise, somewhat muffled timbre and intonation patterns in evidence in Engblom’s extensive appearances in Dogtown and Z-Boys (where the others all also appear). Just as the Second City school saw social observation as a route to genuine embodied insight, so is Lords of Dogtown’s approach to performance entirely apposite for a film about the feeling of skateboarding, a sport whose allure is described by Z-boy Paul Cullen in Peralta’s documentary as an intense desire to experience copying others’ style—something he wanted, indeed, ‘more than anything else in the world’. Such a statement echoes closely, too, the powerful dynamics of embodied homosociality, played out through the mimetic structure of military and other activities depicted in Stop-Loss, underscoring the sports and war film’s commonalities through a focus on groups of, usually, men. If casting and acting style render Lords of Dogtown’s characters as overt copies of a particular original seen in its predecessor film, the same is true of its aesthetics more generally. Notably, both films’ scores invite 1970s nostalgia—as the repetition of Neil Young’s ‘Old Man’ acknowledges. This song’s injunction to its titular interlocutor to ‘look at my life’ as ‘I’m a lot like you were’ evokes an inclusive sensibility suited to the sentimental contours of the heightened genrescape, openly recognising while exploiting the fact that ‘musical convention harnesses musical association [and becomes] ingrained and universal in a culture[,] function[ing] as a type of

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collective experience, activating particular and predictable responses’ (Kalinak 1992: 12). In tune with its celebration of artifice, many of the relevant tracks are, however, themselves covers, or copies, including the reprisal of Pink Floyd’s ‘Wish You Were Here’ that also punctuated the earlier film. Lords of Dogtown’s visual appearance, in contrast, comprises not a copy of Dogtown and Z-Boys’ but rather an overtly manufactured world. In a manner that supports the recent drive to complicate relations of fidelity in documentary, the earlier film on the face of it appears almost more anti-­ realist. Notably, shots of analogue Polaroid photographic technology and views of the clapperboard are deliberately spliced in. However, the fakery of Lords of Dogtown is embedded in mise-en-scène. Notwithstanding the impressiveness of the film’s recreation of the Pacific Ocean Park pier that was demolished in the winter of 1974–1975, the structure evokes less realism than craft, including Hardwicke’s production designer expertise (Fig. 4.10)—like Coppola’s films, Hardwicke’s at times feel ‘designed as much as directed’ (Mayshark in Ferriss 2021: 84, 154). This is due in part to the inherent irreality of theme parks themselves, but also their history of overrepresentation in action genres, broadly defined.52 One instance recalled by Lords of Dogtown is the featuring of Santa Cruz’s boardwalk, also highly identifiable with surf culture, in vampire film The Lost Boys (also a key reference for Twilight). This proves an apposite comparison, too,

Fig. 4.10  The overtly reconstructed Pacific Ocean Park pier

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for its play on the Peter Pan myth, since in Dogtown and Z-Boys Engblom describes himself as Captain Hook to the disadvantaged Z-boys’ lostness. Indeed, bearing in mind the continuation of pirate thematics in the later film through inclusion of the humorous detail that an eye injury by Alva requiring a patch leads to him being mocked as just that, it would be little exaggeration to align the look of Lords of Dogtown with the extreme fantasy realm of Hook (Steven Spielberg, 1992) or the Pirates of the Caribbean franchise (2003–2017), despite an impoverished urban setting that would have been ripe for drab socio-realist aestheticisation. Like Bigelow, Hardwicke was clearly invested in the creation of a 1970s period feel, on whose elaboration she worked closely with cinematographer Elliot Davis and production designer Chris Gorak, with all three of them benefiting from degrees in architecture. This included colour-­correcting the film to resemble slides taken at the time (Silberg 2005: 32, 34), as well as the inclusion of home video-style footage amid the final credits, such that this film too adopts something of a postmodern multimedia aesthetic for its retro evocation. The cohesiveness of onscreen imaginaries of this period, including across this film and Detroit, is underlined by the fact that the film’s first intelligible line, spoken by Adams’ mother to her boyfriend as he rants in a nightmare, is: ‘Donnie, you’re not in Vietnam.’ However, Hardwicke makes (even) fewer bones about the constructed nature of her period setting feel (a detail which of course informs Bigelow’s greater cultural cachet), even as she absolutely ‘hope[s] the viewers get the feeling of being there [and to] evoke that feeling and emotion’, explaining: ‘I like things to look like reality but a kind of heightened reality, not what you’re used to seeing when you walk down the street’ (ibid.: 35, 32, my emphasis). In the final section of this discussion, I wish to engage with a term proposed for use in mise-en-scène by Galt and which proves ideally suited to illuminate aspects of Lords of Dogtown: the arabesque. Galt’s analysis of the pretty deploys the figure of the arabesque or ‘elegant curve’ in relation to flowing lines within the mise-en-scène; curvilinear camerawork, which she (somewhat counterintuitively) treats as an aspect of mise-en-scène in ‘shap[ing] scenic space’; and a more generalised aesthetic typified by the ‘foregrounding of form over the integrity of pro-filmic space’ (2011: 164). She associates the form with not only Orientalism, as in its historical derivation, but also with the feminine and potentially queer aesthetics that she sees as, in fact, bound up with the first.

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Although Lords of Dogtown, set amid urban poverty and shot on multiple types of film and digital video, sought to embrace a ‘rough’ rather than an overtly pretty aesthetic (Silberg 2005: 30), it could be said that a form of arabesque provides its very subject. The film glorifies a low-slung style of skating inherited from surfing waves, in which the board is almost constantly turning as it carves up space. To this end, it employs an exceptionally mobile, frequently swerving and looping, camera, including all kinds of mounted shots (and one on a surfboard for the water sequences). Hardwicke also hired professional skater Lance Mountain to capture mobile shots inside the pool, resulting in sequences that production designer Davis calls ‘very emotional in their beauty and fluidity’, while his description of how doing zooms by hand ‘enhanced the emotion’ connects this directly with embodiment (in ibid.). Just as Galt claims that in Marie Menken’s Arabesque for Kenneth Anger (1961), arabesques ‘are very much about the female filmmaker’s embodied point of view’ (2011: 170), despite her ostensibly male subject, so Hardwicke—who allowed very little of the film to be shot by a second unit—justifies using Mountain and others to closely track skaters characters’ movement on the grounds that ‘I have to be right there with them. I want to breathe the same air’ (Silberg 2005: 32). Needless to say, the I in this articulation encompasses (other filmmakers and) by extension her audience. It is also significant that Galt sets up the arabesque in opposition to the unfussy openness prized by (masculinist) classical realism, underpinned by a philosophical tradition invested in Platonic suspicion of imitation and in monotheism. If iterations of authenticity can function to uphold existing power relations, brazenly unreal genre films like this one trouble categories—just as the Z-boys caused commotion at the Cadillac National skateboarding competition in 1975 through their rejection of upright skateboarding methods popular in the 1960s. It is harder to imagine a more potent ridiculisation of individualistic, visually phallic conformity than the upstart Z-boys’ toppling of the handful of stiff and stately has-­ been stars left over from the ‘classical’ early 1960s skating era who feature briefly in both the Dogtown films.53 Lords of Dogtown, in its combination of aestheticised ‘in-your-face’ male kineticism with arabesque movement, might even disturb the category of the pretty itself, further complicating binaries such as East-West, female-­ male, queer-straight, yet it draws on many of the same resources as that aesthetic. It is perhaps through a consideration of its arabesque forms that the film can most readily be recuperated as troubling rather than

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reinforcing (Occidentalist) racial and sexualised gender norms, in the latter case recalling Ahmed’s (2007: 16) emphasis on the relationship between straight lines and straightness. Galt’s observation that Oriental style tends to be associated with craft and not Art sheds further light on the frequent dismissal of Hardwicke, despite both her commercial success and her evident claims to a personalised, yet cross-generic and dynamic, aesthetic (2011: 156)—although we have already seen that the exhibiting of aestheticised craft in Lords of Dogtown is emblematised by rather than limited to its use of the arabesque. The mixed review of the film published in Sight and Sound, for example, critiques Lords of Dogtown for not living up to either the documentary or to the photographs by Stecyk the latter references and showcases, on the following grounds: ‘Lords of Dogtown has the overly clean look of a film made for television. There are too many primary colours and not enough grit—for all the efforts of the hard rock and proto-punk soundtrack (recycled heavily from Dogtown and Z-Boys)’ (Davies 2005). There is little need to rehearse specifics of the histories underpinning such a condescending comparison with the ‘feminised’ small screen. A more interesting detail concerns the fact that colour represents another queer-inflected area valorised by Galt repeatedly throughout her book against the grain of a Western culture that has typically compared it unfavourably with narrative, as a perceived manifestation of dishonest, feminised primitivism. More generally, this discussion recalls the undermining of mise-en-scène construction in the critical appraisals of Meyers’ films identified by Jermyn and others alluded to in Chap. 3. Certainly the example of a heightened colour scheme lends weight to the argument that what has been prized in an auteur such as Douglas Sirke (or Jean-Luc Godard, Martin Scorsese and many others) remains snubbed when manipulated by the skilled female director. As for Sight and Sound’s (ironically, highly derivative) belittling of Lords of Dogtown for failed originality, Galt’s discussion of the arabesque points towards a further kinship with this book’s contrasting view of generic pastiche as paradoxically iconoclastic and invigorating. Discussing the extreme referentiality of Baz Luhrmann’s queer extravaganza Moulin Rouge! (2001), Galt argues that the film’s ‘deployment of the arabesque links abstract shape to more material forms of cultural citation’, contributing to its ‘evo[cation] of a history of mobile camera work [whereby] the trails of its historical reference suggest a constellation extending beyond those films it cites directly’ (2011: 169). Taken alongside the claim that in

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cinema arabesque style implies ‘a multidirectional, potentially endless motion’ (ibid.: 171), this appears an invitation to see the arabesque’s textual over-­spill manifesting itself in a form akin to heightened genre films’ rich generativity: a mise-en-abyme of the way in which overdetermined genre films work on individual, embodied viewers through collective structures of feeling established by earlier cinematic and cultural experiences. Lords of Dogtown exemplifies once again the fact that, rather than docudrama departing from this model, many recent films by women mine the form’s potential to exploit the embrace of ‘artificial’ citationality central to the processes described. There can be little better way to describe how heightened genericity can work in this respect than by reprising in iterative spirit from Galt words written by Virginia Wright-Wexman to describe the style of Max Ophüls, which ‘combines lyrical movements of incandescent emotion with endlessly repetitive patterns’ (in ibid.: 173).

Notes 1. See also Paget (2011). 2. An extreme case was Glenn Greenwald’s (2012) Guardian review, written before he had even seen the film. 3. For a full discussion of the extent of the CIA’s involvement, see Shaw and Jenkins (2017: 93–102). 4. Strange Days (995) is particularly obvious on this point by having the donning of a video headset allow wearers to experience prosthetic memories and emotions. 5. As have various other analyses, for instance, Burgoyne (2014); Nordine (2013: 76); Van Raalte (2017: 28). 6. Cf. Luke Collins’ (2012) reading of Point Break. 7. Shaw and Jenkins clarify that this is based on a real event (2017: 97). 8. Burgoyne later expands in this vein that ‘in a period when the cycle of revenge in war has escalated to almost a principle of statecraft, now dominated by bounties, extra-judicial killing, and payback, the film calls into view the costs of violence and its shaping effect on the imaginary and real textures of contemporary life’ (2014: 258). 9. See also Van Raalte (2017) and Burgoyne (2014: 249) on the film’s intimate address. 10. Stacey’s fourth example is the comparably enigmatic Orlando (Potter, 1992), famously focused on unexplained gender-switching and time-travel. 11. 9/11: The Twin Towers (Discovery Channel/BBC1, 2006), Generation Kill (HBO, 2008) and Homeland (Showtime, 2011–) are three television

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examples mentioned by Lacey and Paget amid a possible list far too long to enumerate; in addition to the Iraq War films already listed, World Trade Center (Oliver Stone, 2006) is a famously controversial film example. 12. It took $133m worldwide, to The Hurt Locker’s $49m (see www. imdb.com). 13. As with Zero Dark Thirty, authenticity is further underlined by the film’s critical press, for instance, Greenblatt (2017: 45), De Semlyen (2017), Crook (2017: 32). 14. I am here indebted to Burgoyne’s (2014: 259) perceptive recognition of the applicability of Kevin McDonald’s ideas about jihadi videos to contemporary war films. 15. See Burgoyne (2008: 7) on the war film as a body genre or on horror Linda Williams’ original (1991) theorisation of this category, including also melodrama and pornography. 16. However, King does point out that it is common for such redemption to work intertextually—we might say, at the level of genre—since protagonists in these films often die yet are replaced by future avatars in similar narratives. 17. Freeman (2010: 12) suggests Freud’s claim that the ego and human subjectivity are constituted by pain can explain the formation of group identities. 18. Studies have shown that US doctors prescribe more anti-depressants proportionally to White than Black patients. The documentary Ouvrir la voix/Speak Up (Amandine Gay, 2017) focalises in the European context the phenomenon whereby, in the words of one interviewee, ‘When a black person’s suffering, it’s nothing to worry about.’ 19. Figures sourced from www.imdb.com. 20. On this tendency, see, for instance, Foucault (1990 [1976]); Moi (1985: 167). 21. Rape was first made illegal in the USA because it was considered a property crime between men (Brownmiller 1975). 22. Although Detroit constructs the oppression of (White) women as comparable to if less extreme than that of racial minorities, rather than exploring the raced nature of some women’s specific histories of oppression—unlike with its more intersectional look at the way in which the murder victims’ Blackness and masculinity together offend the White policemen. 23. However, see Projansky (2001: 1–2) on the ubiquity of discourses and images connected to rape across the US media since the 1980s. 24. My approach also bears comparison here with Laura U. Marks’ version of haptic criticism to the extent that this ‘invites the critic to have faith that these encounters [with texts] may be transformative but they need not be

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shattering’, drawing a comparison with Leo Bersani’s account of gay male sexual erotics (Marks 2002: xvi). 25. http://www.dictionary.com/browse/fetishise?s=t. 26. See also https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-­us-­canada-­45261381. 27. This is particularly apparent in discussions of the trauma of 9/11, in some ways echoing—as King notes—Judith Butler’s work on this subject (King 2011: 121, 128). She also draws a more general comparison with Susan Jeffords’ and Barbara Biesecker’s work on the male body’s representational function as a tool for rewriting national history (ibid.: 6). 28. The ongoing racialisation of rape myths in Western culture as a whole has likewise been prominently manifested in recent years by the cultural panic surrounding stories of sexually motivated attacks on German women by migrants on New Year’s Eve 2015–2016. 29. The year 2018 also marked the twenty-fifth anniversary of the brutal, racially motivated murder of the British teenager Stephen Lawrence and the inauguration of a national Stephen Lawrence Day in the UK to take place every year on 22 April in commemoration of his life. 30. The suppression of past histories of exploitation and violence is similarly critiqued by Jordan Peele’s latest film Us (2019), also in a fashion that takes in but wholly transcends race relations. 31. As James Steenland (2019) has also pointed out, such an apprehension gives the lie to Jeanne Theoharis’ (2017) critique of the film as ‘the most irresponsible and dangerous movie of the year’ on the grounds of omitting Historical details of a 1967 people’s tribunal concerning the events—a critique of selectivity that is itself selective. 32. Sims also critiques profiting from ‘someone else’s history’. However, after the controversies and relatively low takings of Zero Dark Thirty, Bigelow could easily have chosen a safer, more bankable project if this had been an overriding motivation; indeed, it was considered a flop due to its high budget. 33. It is apt that Galt (2011: 265) and I also coincide in finding Ahmed’s use of the term orientation suggestive here. 34. If the Real is anywhere in Detroit, it rises up in the bile Dismukes throws up after the betrayal of justice that occurs in the trial’s outcome, a reaction against the vanishing discursive presence of any reality outside institutionally endorsed representations, even when there are several dead bodies to contradict this version of events. 35. Bigelow’s use of form to reference her own oeuvre is also identified by Benson-Allott in a discussion of Blue Steel, where she claims Bigelow’s use of blue gels creates ‘a kind of temporal layering’ (2010: 37). 36. See also Grant (2004) on Bigelow’s meta-cinematic interrogation of ‘male’ genres.

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37. See Martin (2017: 10) on the use of lighting to attempt to recreate the look of archival news footage for the street sequences and Grant (2004: 371), among others, on Bigelow’s focus on vision. 38. Angela Ndalianis (2004) links ‘neo-baroque’ aesthetics in contemporary entertainment culture to multi-sensory stimulation. 39. Shots of the ocean emblematise this approach in films by Jane Campion, Claire Denis, Agnieszka Smoczynska and Célina Sciamma, among others. 40. Galt’s (2011: 22) brief account of the potential (feminist) politics of Marie Antoinette’s ‘prettiness’ is also concerned with film style conceived on the whole transgenerically, while Backman Rogers’ following situation of Coppola’s feminist politics in ‘production design’ (2019: ‘Introduction’), despite her study’s repeated recognition of Coppola’s interest in film history and cliché, is openly anti-generic. 41. Cook sees the film as entirely ‘overturning genre expectations’ (2014: 224). 42. Paszkiewicz also notes that Marie Antoinette ‘could […] be placed within this tradition’ (2018: 186). 43. Like Francis Ford Coppola, Scorsese was a key member of the group of filmmakers associated with the so-called American New Wave, beginning in the 1960s. 44. Indeed, both films are part of series of versions of the same respective tale, as both were already adapted for cinema from novels. 45. While some scholars might argue that Dunst in Marie Antoinette is less objectified than Adjani in La Reine Margot, Backman Rogers notes that defences of Coppola’s supposedly exceptionally feminine gaze tie themselves in knots (2019: ‘Introduction’). 46. Cf. Handyside argues anachronistic objects in Marie Antoinette highlight ‘the gap between the time period depicted and the time of the film, as if here objects will be able to compensate for lack of historical proximity’ (2017: 121). 47. Handyside (2017: 158) finds the sequence to suggest female proto-­queer sociality through mise-en-scène. The use of layering also chimes with Bradbury-Rance’s description of lesbian sensibility as overdetermined and its visual figuration ‘a necessary pastiche’ (2019: 136, 142) and, more importantly, reproduces a refusal of heteronormative future-directedness that is inherent to all generic repetition. 48. Samiha Matin offers a subtle critique of complex affect expressed through style as a ‘reproduction strategem’ in Marie Antoinette without considering genre directly at any length (2012: 108). 49. Figures sourced from www.imdb.com. 50. Hardwicke’s longstanding interest in promoting Latinx women in a predominantly White society is evidenced by her inclusion of Dolores del Río in her 1993 design for Hollywood’s La Brea Gateway, ‘Four Silver Ladies

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of Hollywood’. She also reputedly lobbied for a more ethnically diverse cast in Twilight (Sharf 2018). 51. On homosociality specifically in erotic triangles like the one between Peralta, Adams and Kathy Alva, for instance, see Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s extrapolations of René Girard’s claims that, in her words, ‘in any erotic rivalry, the bond that links the two rivals is as intense and potent as the bond that links either of the two rivals to the beloved’ (1985: 21). 52. It seems likely that her own history of working on ‘masculine’ genre films including Tombstone (George P. Cosmatos and Kevin Jarre, 1994) and Gulf War drama Three Kings (David O. Russell, 2000) was a factor in Hardwicke’s readiness to explore masculinity here. 53. Cf. Ariana Cavarero’s (2016) critique of patriarchal ‘rectitude’ through (her book’s title) Inclinations.

Works Cited Adjei-Brenyah, Nana Kwame (2018). Friday Black, London: Riverrun. Ahmed, Sara (2004), The Cultural Politics of Emotion, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Ahmed, Sara (2007), Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others, Durham: Duke University Press. Alberti, John (2013), Masculinity in the Contemporary Romantic Comedy: Gender as Genre, London and New York: Routledge. Alexander, Michelle (2010), The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness, New York: The New Press. Babington, Bruce (2014), The Sports Film: Games People Play, New York: Columbia University Press. Backman Rogers, Anna (2012), ‘The Historical Threshold: Crisis, Ritual and Liminality in Sofia Coppola’s Marie Antoinette (2006),’ Relief 6 (1): 80–97. Backman Rogers, Anna (2019), Sofia Coppola: The Politics of Visual Pleasure, New York: Berghahn Books (British Library digital collection). Baker, Aaron (2003), Contested Identities: Sports in American Film, Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Baker, Courtney R. (2015), Humane Insight: Looking at Images of African American Suffering and Death, Chicago: University of Illinois Press. Baker, Courtney R. (2019), ‘White Out Conditions: Artists Bringing White Supremacy into View,’ Paper delivered at the Society for Cinema and Media Studies Conference, Seattle, 13–17 March. Baron, Jaimie (2019), ‘The Ethics of Empathy in of the north and Open Casket,’ Paper delivered at the Society for Cinema and Media Studies Conference, Seattle, 13–17 March.

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Bataille, Georges (1989), Tears of Eros, trans. Peter Connor, San Francisco: City Light Books. Béghin, Cyril (2013), ‘Les Obstinées,’ Cahiers du cinéma 686 (February): 26–27. Benson-Allott, Caitlin (2010), ‘Undoing Violence: Politics, Genre, and Duration in Kathryn Bigelow’s Cinema,’ Film Quarterly 64 (2) (Winter): 33–43. Berenstein, Rhona J. (1996), Attack of the Leading Ladies: Gender, Sexuality, and Spectatorship in Classic Horror Cinema. New York: Columbia University Press. Bingham, Dennis (2010), ‘Living Stories: Performance in the Contemporary Biopic,’ in Christine Cornea (ed.), Genre and Performance: Film and Television, Manchester, New York: Manchester University Press, pp. 76–95. Borden, Iain (2019), Skateboarding and the City: A Complete History, London: Bloomsbury (British Library digital collection). Boughn, Michael (2013), ‘The War on Art and Zero Dark Thirty,’ CineAction! 91: 19–26. Bradbury-Rance, Clara (2019), Lesbian Cinema after Queer Theory, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Brownmiller, Susan (1975), Against Our Will: Men, Women and Rape, New York: Simon and Schuster. Bruzzi, Stella (1997), Undressing Cinema: Clothing and Identity in the Movies, London: Routledge. Buci-Glucksmann, Christine (1994), Baroque Reason: the Aesthetics of Modernity, trans. Patrick Camiller, London and Thousand Oaks: Sage Publications. Burgoyne, Robert (2008), The Hollywood Historical Film, Hoboken: Wiley Blackwell. Burgoyne, Robert (2014), ‘The Violated Body: Affective Experience and Somatic Intensity in Zero Dark Thirty,’ in David La Rocca (ed.), The Philosophy of War Films, Lexington: University Press of Kentucky. Canha, Christopher da (2013), ‘Sub-Cultural Ethnography and the Case for Dogtown and Z-Boys,’ Film Matters 4 (1): 3–8. Castañeda, Antonia I. (1993), ‘Sexual Violence in the Policies and Politics of Conquest: Amerindian Women and the Spanish Conquest of Alta California,’ in Adela de la Torre and Beatriz M. Pesquera (eds), Building with Our Hands: New Directions in Chicana Studies, Berkeley: University of California Press, pp. 15–33. Cavarero, Adriana (2016), Inclinations: a Critique of Rectitude, Stanford: Stanford University Press. Collins, Luke (2012), ‘100% Pure Adrenaline: Gender and Generic Surface in Point Break,’ in Christine Gledhill (ed.), Gender Meets Genre in Postwar Cinemas, Urbana, Chicago and Springfield: University of Illinois Press, pp. 54–67.

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Cook, Pam (2014), ‘History in the Making: Sofia Coppola’s Marie Antoinette and the New Auteurism,’ in Belén Vidal and Tom Brown (eds), The Biopic in Contemporary Film Culture, London and New York: Routledge. Corner, John (2002), ‘Performing the Real: Documentary Diversions,’ Television and New Media 3 (3): 255–269. Courcoux, Charles-Antoine (2014), ‘There’s something About Maya: On Being/ Becoming a Heroine and “The War on Terror”,’ in Karen A. Ritzenhof and Jakub Kazecki (eds), Heroism and Gender in War Films, Basingstoke, Hants.: Palgrave Macmillan. Crook, Simon (2017), ‘Detroit,’ Empire 340 (September): 32–3. Crimp, Douglas (1989), ‘Mourning and Militancy,’ October 51: 3–18. Cubitt, Sean (2004), The Cinema Effect, Cambridge and Malden, MA: The MIT Press. Cuklanz, Lisa M. (2000), Rape on Prime Time: Television, Masculinity, and Sexual Violence, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Davies, Sam (2005), ‘Lords of Dogtown,’ Sight and Sound 15 (10): 78–79. De Semlyen, Phil (2017), ‘Breaking Point,’ Empire 339 (August): 11. Dequen, Bruno (2013), ‘La Guerre technocratique,’ 24 Images 161 (March– April): 66–67. Diamond, Diana (2011), ‘Sofia Coppola’s Marie Antoinette: Costumes, Girlpower, and Feminism,’ in Adrienne Munich (ed.), Fashion in Film, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, pp. 203–231. Doane, Mary Ann (1991), Femme Fatales: Feminism, Film Theory, Psychoanalysis, New York: Routledge. Dyer, Richard (1988), ‘White,’ Screen 29 (4): 44–64. Dyer, Richard (1997), White: Essays on Race and Culture, London: Routledge. Eberwein, Robert (2010), The Hollywood War Film, Hoboken: Wiley-Blackwell. Fanon, Frantz (1952), Peau noire, masques blancs, Paris: Éditions du seuil. Fanon, Frantz (1961), Les Damnés de la terre, Paris: F. Maspero. Feldman, Seth (1986), ‘Footnote to Fact,’ in Barry Keith Grant (ed.) Film Genre Reader, Austin: University of Texas Press, pp. 344–356. Ferriss, Suzanne (2021), The Cinema of Sofia Coppola: Fashion, Culture, Celebrity, London and New York: Bloomsbury Academic. Foucault, Michel (1990), ‘We “Other Victorians”,’ in The History of Sexuality, Volume 1: An Introduction, trans. Robert Hurley, Harmondsworth: Penguin, pp. 1–14. First published as La Volonté de savoir in 1976. Freeman, Elizabeth (2010), Time Binds: Queer Temporalities, Queer Histories, Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Fusco, Coco (2017), ‘Censorship, Not the Painting, Must Go: On Dana Schutz’s Image of Emmett Till,’ March 27 https://hyperallergic.com/368290/ censorship-­not-­the-­painting-­must-­go-­on-­dana-­schutzs-­image-­of-­emmett-­till/. Galt, Rosalind (2011), Pretty: Film and the Decorative Image, New York: Columbia University Press.

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Gill, Ros (2007), Gender and the Media, Cambridge: Polity Press. Gilmore, James N. (2017), ‘Zero Dark Thirty and the Writing of Post-9/11 History,’ Quarterly Review of Film and Video 34 (3): 275–293. Gitelman, Lisa and Virginia Jackson (2013), ‘Raw Data’ is an Oxymoron, Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press. Grant, Barry Keith (2004), ‘Man’s Favourite Sport? The Action Films of Kathryn Bigelow,’ in Yvonne Tasker (ed.), Action and Adventure Cinema, London: Routledge, pp. 331–384. Greenblatt, Leah (2017), ‘Detroit,’ Entertainment Weekly 1476 (April): 44–45. Greenwald, Glenn (2012), ‘Zero Dark Thirty: CIA hagiography, pernicious propaganda,’ The Guardian, 14 December. https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2012/dec/14/zero-­dark-­thirty-­cia-­propaganda Greer, Amanda (2017), ‘Towards an (Aesth)etiquette of Torture: Polite Form in Zero Dark Thirty and Standard Operating Procedure’, Film Criticism 41 (1). Grodal, Torben (1999), Moving Pictures: A New Theory of Film Genres, Feelings, and Cognition, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Gyasi, Yaa (2016), Homegoing, London: Penguin. Handyside, Fiona (2017), Sofia Coppola: A Cinema of Girlhood, London: I. B. Tauris. Handyside, Fiona (2018), ‘Death and the Maidens: Speculating about Spectral Incognisance in Sofia Coppola’s Films,’ Keynote delivered at Sussex Contemporary Director Symposium, University of Sussex, 16 May. Hawkins, Ty (2009), ‘Violent Death as Essential Truth in Dispatches: Re-reading Michael Herr’s “Secret History of the Vietnam War”,’ War, Literature and the Arts 21: 129–143. Harrod, Mary (2016), “As If a Girl’s Reach Should Exceed Her Grasp”: Gendering Genericity and Spectatorial Address in the Work of Amy Heckerling, in Frances Smith and Tim Shary (eds), Refocus on the Films of Amy Heckerling, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, pp. 53–72 Heller-Nicholas, Alexandra (2011), Rape-Revenge Films, Jefferson and London: McFarland and Co. Hendrickson, Nancy (2005), ‘Lords of Dogtown: Screenplay by Stacy Peralta,’ Creative Screenwriting 12 (3) (May/June): 26–27. Higson, Andrew (1993), ‘Re-Presenting the National Past: Nostalgia and Pastiche in the Heritage Film,’ in Lester Friedman (ed.), British Cinema and Thatcherism, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, pp. 109–129. Höglund, Johan (2017), ‘Can the Subaltern Speak Under Duress? Voice, Agency and Corporeal Discipline in Zero Dark Thirty,’ in Diana Brydon, Peter Forsgren and Gonlüg Fur, Concurrent Imaginaries, Postcolonial Worlds: Towards Revised Histories, Amsterdam: Brill Rodopi, pp. 281–301. Hollywood, Amy (2002), Sensible Ecstasy: Mysticism, Sexual Difference, and the Demands of History, Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

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James, Nick (2013), ‘Zero Tolerance,’ Sight and Sound 23 (2) (February): 9. Jeffords, Susan (1994), Hard Bodies: Hollywood Masculinity in the Reagan Era, New York: Rutgers University Press. Johnson, David T. (2009), ‘Playgrounds of Unlimited Potential: Adaptation, Documentary, and Dogtown and Z-Boys,’ Adaptation 2 (1): 1–16. Kalinak, Kathryn (1992), Settling the Score: Music and the Classical Hollywood Film, Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. Kaveney, Roz (2006), Teen Dreams: Reading Teen films and Television from Heathers to Veronica Mars, London: I. B. Tauris. King, Claire Sisco (2011), Washed in Blood: Male Sacrifice, Trauma and the Cinema, New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. King, Geoff (2017), ‘Responding to Realities or Telling the Same Old Story? Mixing Real-World and Mythic Resonances in The Kingdom (2007) and Zero Dark Thirty (2012),’ in Terence McSweeney (ed.), American Cinema in the Shadow of 9/11, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, pp. 49–66. Knowles, John (2016), A Separate Peace, London: Simon and Schuster. Lacey, Stephen and Derek Paget (2015), ‘Introduction,’ in The ‘War on Terror’: Post-9/11 Drama, Docudrama and Documentary, Cardiff: University of Wales Press (British Library digital collection). Lane, Christina (2000), Feminist Hollywood: From Born in Flames to Point Break, Detroit: Wayne State University Press. Lepastier, Joachim (2013), ‘Dark Dirty,’ Cahiers du cinéma 686 (February): 22–23. Lipkin, Steven N. (1999), ‘Real Emotional Logic: Persuasive Strategies in Docudrama,’ Cinema Journal 38 (4): 68–85. Lipkin, Steven N. (2002), Real Emotional Logic: Film and Television Docudrama as Persuasive Practice, Carbondale and Edwardsville, Southern Illinois Press. Marks, Laura U. (2002), Touch: Sensuous Theory and Multisensory Media, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Matin, Samiha (2012), ‘Private Femininity, Public Femininity: Tactical Aesthetics in the Costume Film,’ in Christine Gledhill (ed.), Gender Meets Genre in Postwar Cinemas, Urbana, Chicago and Springfield: University of Illinois Press, pp. 96–110. Martin, Kevin H. (2017), ‘Being There: Detroit Takes Viewers Through the City’s 1967 Riots,’ Digital Video 25 (9) (September): 10–12. Mavor, Carol (2013), Blue Mythologies: Reflections on a Colour, London. Reaktion Books. Mbembe, Achille (2017), Critique of Black Reason, trans. Laurent Dubois, London and Durham: Duke University Press. McClintock, Anne (2009), ‘Paranoid Empire: Specters from Guantánamo and Abu Ghraib,’ Small Axe 13 (1) (March): 57. McDonald, Kevin (2013), ‘Grammars of Violence, Modes of Embodiment, and Frontiers of the Subject,’ in Kevin McSorley (ed.), War and the Body: Militarization, Practice, and Experience, London: Routledge, pp. 138–151.

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Mesmildot, Stéphane du (2017), ‘Detroit,’ Cahiers du cinéma 737 (October): 56. Moi, Toril (1985), Sexual/Textual Politics: Feminist Literary Theory, London: Methuen. Monk, Claire (2001), ‘Sexuality and Heritage,’ in Ginette Vincendeau (ed.), Film/Literature/Heritage: A Sight and Sound Reader. London: BFI, pp. 6–11. Morrison, Alan (2005), ‘Lords of Dogtown,’ Empire 196 (October): 43. Mulvey, Laura (1975), ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,’ Screen 16 (3): 6–18. Nancy, Jean-Luc (1996), La Communauté désœuvrée, Paris: Éditions Christian Bourgois. Ndalianis, Angela (2004), Neo-Baroque Aesthetics and Contemporary Entertainment, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Neroni, Hilary (2015), The Subject of Torture: Psychoanalysis and Biopolitics in Television and Film, New York, Columbia University Press. Nordine, Michael (2013), CinemaScope 53 (Winter): 76–77. Paget, Derek (2011), No Other Way to Tell It: Docudrama on Film and Television, Manchester: Manchester University Press, Second Edition (British Library digital collection). Paget, Derek (2015), ‘Ways of Showing, Ways of Telling: Television and 9/11,’ in Stephen Lacey and Derek Paget (eds), The ‘War on Terror’: Post-9/11 Drama, Docudrama and Documentary, Cardiff: University of Wales Press (British Library digital collection). Paszkiewicz, Katarzyna (2018), Genre, Authorship and Contemporary Women Filmmakers, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Peek, Wendy Chapman (2003), ‘The Romance of Competence: Rethinking Masculinity in the Western,’ Journal of Popular Film & Television 3 (4): 206–219. Pidduck, Julianne (2005), La Reine Margot. London: I.B. Tauris. Pidduck, Julianne (2012), ‘Corps, genre et identité sexuelle dans les films en costumes et les fictions patrimoniales du cinéma britannique et français,’ Cinémas: Revue d’études cinématographiques 22 (22–3) (Spring): 100–125. Piotrowska, Agnieszka (2014), ‘Zero Dark Thirty—“war autism” or a Lacanian ethical act?,’ New Review of Film and Television Studies 12 (2): 143–155. Prince, Stephen (1998), Savage Cinema: Sam Peckinpah and the Rise of Ultraviolent Movies, Austin: Texas University Press. Projansky, Sarah (2001), Watching Rape: Film and Television in Postfeminist Culture, New York: NYU Press. Rosenthal, Alan (1999), ‘Introduction,’ in Rosenthal (ed.) Why Docudrama?, Carbondale and Edwardsville, Southern Illinois Press, pp. xiii–xxi. Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky (1985), Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire, New York: Columbia University Press.

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Sharf, Zak (2018), ‘Hardwicke Fought for “Twilight” to Feature Diverse Cast, But Stephenie Meyer Rejected Her Idea,’ IndieWire, October 3. https://www. indiewire.com/2018/10/catherine-­h ardwicke-­t wilight-­d iverse-­c ast-­ stephenie-­meyer-­refused-­1202009330/ Shaviro, Steven (1993), The Cinematic Body: Theory Out of Bounds, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Shaviro, Steven (2013), ‘A Brief Remark on Zero Dark Thirty,’ The Pinocchio Theory, 18 January www.shaviro.com/Blog. Shaw, Tony and Tricia Jenkins (2017), ‘From Zero to Hero: The CIA and Hollywood Today,’ Cinema Journal 56 (2) (Winter): 91–113. Sielke, Sabine (2002), Reading Rape: The Rhetoric of Sexual Violence in American Literature and Culture, 1790–1990, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Silberg, John (2005), ‘Production Slate: Skate Rats,’ American Cinematographer 86 (6) (June): 30, 32, 34–5. Sims, John (2017), ‘Detroit: A film by White people for White people,’ 5 August https://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2017/08/detroit-­film-­White-­ people-­White-­people-­170813124207182.html Stacey, Jackie (2010), The Cinematic Life of the Gene, Durham: Duke University Press. Stacey, Jackie (2015), ‘Crossing Over with Tilda Swinton—the Mistress of “Flat Affect”,’ International Journal of Politics, Culture, and Society 28: 243–271. Steenland, James (2019), ‘City and Cynicism: Detroit’s Paratext and Detroit’s Past (and Future),’ Paper delivered at the Society for Cinema and Media Studies Conference, Seattle, 13–17 March. Tasker, Yvonne (1993), Spectacular Bodies: Gender, Genre and the Action Cinema, London and New York: Routledge. Tasker, Yvonne and Eylem Atakav (2010), ‘The Hurt Locker: Male Intimacy, Violence, and the Iraq War movie,’ Sine/Cine: Journal of Film Studies 1 (2): 57–70. Theoharis, Jeanne (2017), ‘Detroit is the Most Irresponsible and Dangerous Movie of the Year,’ The Huffington Post 8 July 2017, https://www.huffpost. com/entry/detroit-­is-­the-­most-­irresponsible-­and-­dangerous-­movie-­this-­year_ b_5988570be4b0f2c7d93f5744 Trippe, Micah (2014), ‘Urban Guerrilla [sic] Playfare, or Skating Through Empty Cinematic Pools in Dogtown and Z-Boys,’ in Christopher Brown and Pam Hirsh (eds), The Cinema of the Swimming Pool, Bern: Peter Lang, pp. 181–191. Van Raalte, Christa (2017), ‘Intimacy, “truth” and the gaze: The double opening of Zero Dark Thirty,’ Movie: A Journal of Film Criticism 7 (May): 23–30. Vidal, Belén (2012), Heritage Film: Nation, Genre and Representation, London and New York: Wallflower. Vontz, Andrew John Ignatius (2005), ‘Take one: first look,’ Premiere 18 (5) (February): 38.

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Walton, Saige (2016), Cinema’s Baroque Flesh: Film, Phenomenology and the Art of Entanglement, Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press. Westwell, Guy (2012), ‘Zero Dark Thirty,’ Sight and Sound 23 (2): 86–7. Williams, Linda (1991), ‘Film Bodies: Gender, Genre, and Excess,’ Film Quarterly 44 (4) (Summer): 2–13. Woodward, Margaret (2019), ‘“I Didn’t Think I Would See You Again”: The Rape Revenge Film, Reincarnated,’ Paper delivered at the Society for Cinema and Media Studies Conference, Seattle, 13–17 March.

Websites www.imdb.com. http://www.dictionary.com/browse/fetishise?s=t. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-­us-­canada-­45261381.

CHAPTER 5

Conclusion: Communal Autofiction and Public Subjectivity in The Bling Ring (Coppola, 2013)

This book began its textual engagement proper by considering filmmakers closely imbricated with the history of Hollywood itself, as physical space in addition to global dream-factory and indeed dreamscape, and analysis of Lords of Dogtown has brought its own ‘action’ back to Los Angeles. This adds a further dimension to many of the claims made about that film as prototypical of docudrama and so in some ways the clearest example so far within these pages of all heightened genre films’ entanglement with material realities—even if such exemplification is designed to countervail any critical privileging of ‘fact-based’ filmmaking by reversing the poles of ‘truth’  and fiction. Micah Trippe (2014) emphasises the functioning of swimming pools within Hardwicke’s film as at once imaginary playgrounds and geographically localising spaces, powerful symbols of Los Angeles most famously immortalised by David Hockney. Drawing on Fredric Jameson’s (2000: 202–3; 189; 219–24) suspicion of postmodern architecture found typically in the region as epitomising the decried postmodern ‘efface[ment] of History’ bolsters the arabesque swimming pool’s resonance in the film as a symbol of resistance to classical doxa and in that sense as microcosmic of the postclassical Hollywood film industry. By way of a conclusion, I want to outline the possibility of a related manner in which Lords of Dogtown points towards and Coppola’s The Bling Ring realises more fully an expansion of the horizons of heightened genericity’s feminist potential with broader applicability: by intersecting with autofiction.1 The aim of such a conclusion is partly to suggest © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 M. Harrod, Heightened Genre and Women’s Filmmaking in Hollywood, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-70994-5_5

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avenues for further research. In both cases, considering autofictional genericity is an approach invited in the first place by the Los Angeleno identity shared by characters and filmmakers, alongside the on-location shooting (much promoted for Coppola’s film in relation to her privileged access to the homes of celebrities including Paris Hilton). Not only that, but both films are integrally concerned with space and its reimagining. Indeed, a further obvious comparison to be made between Hardwicke and her protagonists concerns their spatialised world-building through craft and ‘aggressive […] stylistic choices’ (Morey 2012: 12)—along with the accusations of commercialism that have dogged their success in such ventures. Similarly, both commercialism and an engagement with space, while they are concerns of critical and scholarly appraisals of all the filmmakers examined in this book, are particularly recurrent themes in appraisals of Coppola’s oeuvre. Beginning with the first, negative associations with money may have shadowed the work of Coppola to a greater extent than any other equally critically and commercially successful filmmaker.2 Needless to say, although or perhaps because it was made independently somewhat outside of this milieu, commodity culture in Hollywood is the very subject of The Bling Ring, where fetishism of celebrities and their possessions is at the same time explored through a spatialised reconstruction of identities, with ‘edgy’ yet aspirational contours comparable to those of the Z-boys’ personae. Thus, for the group of Hollywood children on whom the film’s true crime story focuses, incurring into celebrities’ homes to steal clothing and accessories equates to identifying with the famous victims. Protagonist Marc (Israel Broussard) even narrates his actions in terms of a desire to compensate for, perhaps alter or disguise, perceived imperfections in his image: ‘I mean, I know I’m not exactly ugly, I guess I just never thought of myself as an A-list kind of guy.’ In line with Suzanne Ferriss’ observations about the relationality of selfhood in Coppola’s oeuvre, supported by the sociological work of Erving Goffman, Anthony Giddens and Zygmunt Bauman (Ferriss 2021: 6, 27–28), the young robbers transgress the boundaries of the self by invading others’ private spaces. Consequently, the extreme openness of the unlocked and often open-plan houses (and one unlocked car) belonging to the celebrities of Coppola’s film echoes visually the porousness of identities in the narrative.3 As Fiona Handyside (2017: 118–19) also notes, this tendency is epitomised by one (TV presenter Audrina Partridge’s) made almost entirely of glass and shown in a long, high-angle shot to give prominence

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to its interconnecting spatial organisation (Fig. 5.1). A slow zoom in as we see the house being ransacked yet hear only the increasingly insistent song of cicadas inserts the spectator into the film’s subverted inside-outside spatial schema. The protagonists’ confusion of private and public life is later highlighted by dialogue comically juxtaposing the two, when the police ask Marc if he was aware his accomplice Rebecca was ‘taking stolen property across state lines’ by leaving town and he swaps their legal jargon for an ingenuously everyday and domestically framed worldview: ‘I thought she was just gonna go see her Dad.’ While the film transparently critiques such a confusion—in particular as catalysed by media technologies, which allow the gang both to see when celebrities are out and to show off their ill-gotten gains online, leading to their arrest—public and private subjectivities also coincide in the realm of film genres.4 Indeed, there is a certain irony to the fact that Coppola indicts the dominance of the fake in replacing ‘real relations’ yet her formal approach draws on the conventionalised and figurative to connect with the real, notably the viewing experience; while her film centres on the dematerialising self (and its attendant abrogation of ethical responsibility), bodies are all-important both within it and especially in terms of its address. Anna Backman Rogers gestures towards this contradiction in her assessment of the film’s triumph as residing ‘in its portrayal of the

Fig. 5.1  Audrina Partridge’s house in The Bling Ring foregrounds the interpenetration of private and public life

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heady affects of this postfeminist lifestyle […] in the service of a critique that never slides into misogyny’, even its total ‘immersion’ of the viewer in its affects (2019: ‘The Bling Ring’). However, she goes on to describe these affects in more negative terms than ‘heady’ would suggest (‘vacuity, irrational need, nihilistic boredom, self-destruction and the compulsion to repeat towards self-evisceration’) and argues that ‘high octane, neon lit moments’ are ‘starkly offset by moments of “dead time” between’ the metaphorical drug-like ‘hits’. While such a reading seeks to identify Coppola with a tradition of radical feminist art cinema out to destroy visual pleasure (Mulvey 1975: 7), I am much closer to Handyside’s account of Coppola’s films as offering ‘sheer fun’ (2017: 58). While there are quieter moments, these tend to be affectively quite neutral rather than suggestive of a downbeat mood, and I believe they can be experienced alongside without undoing the heady excitement. For instance, the visual overload of some of the montages of fashion items—highly reminiscent of similar sequences in Marie Antoinette—is occasionally undercut by an absence of audio track. This disjunctive combination of effects could be read obliquely as a comment on the spiritual hollowness of the pleasures of consumption; however, the quiet moments also simply aesthetically ‘heighten’ cinema’s intertextuality with photography, including fashion shoots (cf. Ferriss 2021: 154–5), and no cues signal a censorious interpretation clearly—an example that illustrates Coppola’s frequent identification with a smart, postmodern, ideologically slippery sensibility (Handyside 2017: 8, 28; Cook 2013 in Ferriss 2021: 197). The affective memory of the film, however, surely resides principally in the aforementioned high-octane fun of the bright colours and loud pop music that define its narrative image (Ellis 1981: 30), partially explaining the film’s relatively low box-office takings as symptomatic of a certain dissatisfaction on the part of her more European arthouse-oriented fanbase (see Webb 2018). It is doubly apposite to finish this study with reference to this film since I suggest that the genericity from which its heightened affects draw much of their force derives from a recently recognised genre—and one with extensive cross-media links, that is itself inherently bound up with questions of feminism and identity: the ‘neo-feminist film’, and in particular its subgenre the fashion film (Radner 2010: 3, 134)—with links back to Clueless. Apart from a focus on sartorial consumerism, ‘girly’ neo-feminist films often include a female star protagonist, typically a professional woman; romance and (nongraphic) sex; and makeovers.5 Handyside

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(2017: 3, 12–13) also invokes neo-feminist cinema—which she notes promotes female cult viewing practices—in relation to Coppola’s films but ultimately in order to argue for a relation of contrast, subversion and transgression (ibid.: 13–15). She bases this claim on details such as Coppola’s slow pacing and attention to materiality and texture (notably of clothes), as well as emotion, alongside her eschewal of an objectifying gaze. Handyside’s (ibid.: 74) own analysis of The Bling Ring as deliberately more strident than other films belies the first point and I find the others questionable and insufficient for a relation of subversion, rather than normal generic variation, in this case. Moreover, Handyside herself alludes to classic neo-feminist film Mean Girls (Mark Waters, USA/ Canada 2004) to explicate Coppola’s oeuvre (especially her short film Lick the Star [USA 1998]), partially justifying this on the basis that Mean Girls itself may be unusually self-aware thanks to the involvement of feminist star comedienne and writer Tina Fey in the script (ibid.: 50–3). This comparison exemplifies the vanishing status of the putative absolutely conservative and non-innovative genre film. Handyside’s description of Coppola’s mise-en-scène of ‘girls’ worlds’ characterised by extreme girly aesthetics (here notably of sparkle, as diamante and other bright silver-white ‘bling’ accumulate in montage) and, importantly, by what Hilary Radner has described as an attendant ‘girly emotionality’ drawn from neo-feminist rhetoric connotes affective generic enworlding, just as her description of The Bling Ring’s enactment of a ‘superior version’ of narratives of acquisitive neoliberal self-transformation through its theft plotline evokes overdeterminism: more rather than less genre (Handyside 2017: 34–39, Chapter 2 passim; 76).6 Indeed, The Bling Ring’s central topic is arguably a truth that underpins both fashion industries and genre film production (as well as much skate culture): the power of mimesis to yield pleasure. The fairly extensive use of white provides a paradoxically appropriate figure for Coppola’s approach to striking or gaudy genre aesthetics so visible elsewhere in this film, in the sense that rather than signalling a minimalist eschewal of the colourful materiality of the fashion film, white, as the absolute zero point on the colour spectrum, is produced in optometric terms by a convergence of other effects: a frenzy of excess like that associated with the desirability of the luminescent vampire in Twilight. Similarly, to its use in Elephant, as referenced by Lords of Dogtown, the pervasiveness of white also both exploits and potentially distances by rendering visible the affect-laden iconicity of the colour, and here specifically of ‘the ideal white woman within heterosexuality’ (Dyer 1997: 122), as in both

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neo-feminist cinema and Coppola’s own elite image (see Monden 2013: 148–149). The fact that the exceptionally wealthy extreme Aryan Paris Hilton, as well as Mean Girls star Lindsay Lohan, are among the celebrities referenced in The Bling Ring only reinforces this kinship, alongside the general slippage between local and imaginary Hollywood worlds which this film promotes and plays with. If Handyside’s attribution of feminist generic subversion in Mean Girls to a female author implies a dualistic view of genre as neutral (male) and transgressive (female), I equally find her approach to understanding the depiction of gender in The Bling Ring, and in particular the relation of protagonist Marc to his female co-leads, too binary to fully account for the sensibility and modus operandi of Coppola’s genre films, as emblematic of all those examined in this book. Handyside sees Marc as a ‘closeted gay boy’ (2017: 144). It is true that the slightly chubby-faced, full-lipped Broussard gives a moderately camp performance in scenes showing his everyday activities, while during the break-ins—all within female celebrities’ houses—he is as drawn to feminine accoutrements as his girlfriends. In one memorable scene alone in his own bedroom, he is shown wearing women’s clothing, specifically that other classic cinematic fetish object, a pair of (comically, shocking pink patent) stiletto heels (Fig. 5.2). If stilettos have been theorised within a psychoanalytic framework as a phallic substitute, the fact that it should be a biological male who is clearly

Fig. 5.2  Marc’s gender ambivalence

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deriving pleasure from the identity he assumes when wearing them underlines the chasm separating biology from gender identification. However, Handyside (citing Coppola) is right to point out that sexuality is de-­ emphasised in this film (ibid.: 55), where Marc describes his relationship with idol Rebecca in filial terms; indeed, sexuality remains a third wheel in the schema I have described, so much so that it is never clearly implied that Marc is gay, or otherwise. Similarly, not only do girls in The Bling Ring offer up ‘Suck my dick!’ to express defiance to their peers, a later scene has one of them, Sam (Taissa Farmiga), pick up a gun at the home of Megan Fox and taunt Marc with it. There is an implied sexual dimension to the phallic power trip in which Sam indulges as she teases, ‘Does it make you nervous?’. However, just as camp elements of Marc’s styling— such as dandyish scarves—are paired with occasional details coded as highly masculine, like his deep voice, here the fact that Sam taunts him for pushing a girl complicates the masculinity of the role she is temporarily inhabiting. Such novel combinations preclude engagements with the character dynamics through notional masculine-feminine binaries and instead imply unfixed identity categories (cf. Letort 2015). This is significant because the effect mimics the formal engagement with subjectivity across genders that heightened genre films invite. I agree with Backman Rogers, then, that Coppola’s films can address men through feminised experience, and with Handyside that her films’ critique of postfeminist values constellates these within a broader late capitalist framework that foregrounds the damage done to all people by heavily gendered commodity and other cultures (Backman Rogers 2019: ‘Introduction’; Handyside 2017: 31) As the closest the film comes to having a main character, Marc in The Bling Ring substitutes for the existentially lost young women represented by Charlotte in Lost in Translation (Coppola, USA/Japan 2003) or the young Marie Antoinette and as such he also personifies the ideal viewer of the heightened genre film: gender neutral for the purpose. Cross-gender engagement thus once more triangulates the author-character-audience relation. Gender ‘transvestism’ is also integral to the interpenetration of authorial and character subjectivities that is a particular feature of much autofiction. Autofiction might be best described as a distanced or reflexive form of autobiographically informed fictional exploration and thus, among other things, a circumlocutory expression and exploration of the self. That is not to say it allows some privileged access to a real—rather than discursive—self, any more than documentary has direct access to the real. In

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fact, these two apparently opposed forms have developed in recent decades a strong tradition of interpenetration, as Michael Renov has shown (though without using the term autofiction) in his examination of  ‘life “construction” through text construction’ in personal video essays (Renov 2004: xiii). This history of co-implication renders considering docudrama The Bling Ring as autofiction in this case logical. Autofiction’s relevance to Coppola’s work, often described as autobiographical, is in any case easy to discern through comparison of text and filmmaker biography in general and for The Bling Ring in particular. Despite the film’s (credited) origins in a newspaper story about the real ‘bling ring’, the world the film depicts is overidentified with Coppola in terms of its Hollywood celebrity milieu (as was the case with Heckerling and LA-based television production in I Could Never Be Your Woman) and the extreme prominence of fashion, integral to the director’s brand as both model and commercials director (see Lewis 2011; Ferriss 2021). Also as with Heckerling, Coppola’s acquaintances (Paris Hilton) and/or muse actors (Kirsten Dunst) appear in the film, rendering its autobiographical connections all the more evident in quintessential autofictional mode, manifesting the self through others. In this case, the obviousness of such points of contact for the public is evidenced by repeated references to them in press coverage, ‘establishing an equivalence between the director and her films’ (Ferriss 2021: 14) and in so doing expanding the scope of dialogical self-exploration enabled by autofiction.7 Considering The Bling Ring under this banner brings into view the overlaps between genre and personal account, by way of the profilmic real that genres refract, in a fashion intended to illuminate the apparent paradox of this book’s central claim that a seemingly impersonal fictional mode can provide a (perceived) conduit between an implied author and their audience. To explicate the performed but powerful intimacy such a roundabout approach facilitates, it is helpful to compare here the effect of a different form of metafictional self-awareness in cinema: direct address. Perhaps unexpectedly, this ‘can create a peculiarly intimate relation link between performer/character [here, author] and audience at the same time as helping to open up a kind of critical distance in the characterisation’ because it foregrounds the subject’s construction through conventionalised fictional tropes; ‘these supposedly opposed effects can work together’ (Brown 2012: 117, original emphasis). To summarise these points in simple terms, I have argued that all the films in this book evoke an implied author who is an expert in the art of

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genre. Some of them—perhaps those of Bigelow and Coppola most obviously—enhance such an evocation through inevitably (re-)engaging an authorial style that is recognisable, at least for cinephile audiences. In addition, The Bling Ring renders the mechanism by which an apparently concrete (though in fact discursively imagined) author is suggested for audiences more evident by customising its generic world in the image of a real milieu associated with the director’s public persona, underlining autofictional elements as constructed through a public imaginary. In this sense, such a film might be seen to epitomise the work of the heightened genre film through its mapping of an implied authorial subjectivity that is inherently communal: the apparently intimate but in reality open-bordered spaces centralised by the film. In focusing on the mise-en-scène of the home as a vessel for expression of the self in The Bling Ring, this book returns to the interest in domestic spaces examined through Nancy Meyers’ films in Chap. 3: its textual analysis comes full circle. There is a clear parallel between the disprizing of feminised bourgeois domesticity in the reception of Meyers’ films and of feminised ‘capitalist’ fashion in that of The Bling Ring (and Marie Antoinette). Likewise, we see familiar double standards at play in the tendency for Coppola’s emphasis on mise-en-scène to be viewed as frivolous and excessively material(istic). Many of these ideas are applicable to genre filmmaking itself, as a practice with no single ideological meaning. Like fashion and home decoration, genre films are at once intensely personal and public; like them too, they are irrevocably embedded in flows of capital and viewed as potential tools for controlling women. However, they are also, as Belén Vidal points out in relation to the meaning of clothes in period films, ‘an outlet for sensual pleasure, a means for empowerment and self-expression’ (2012: 106)—and without circumscription to feminised realms.8 Invoking autofiction also proves helpful here for providing if not a refutation then at least a counterbalance to the perspective that would dismiss films in this book on the same grounds as the fetish objects The Bling Ring focuses on, and which I do not deny it aestheticises, as merely commercial products that consolidate neoliberal circuits of power, perpetuating exclusionary hierarchies. That is, in the same manner that autofiction can be seen as always positing an ethical subject who exists for and through others (Richard 2010: 45), in generic-aesthetic terms, the films examined in these pages are in fact highly inclusive through their appeal to a ‘structure of emotional expectation and identity-making that imaginatively binds together [people] who may have nothing in common’

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(Matin 2012: 1999).9 Rather than merely reifying female directors in an auteurist mould, then, my model sees heightened genre filmmaking as an important forum for feminist expression in contradistinction to the increasingly individualistic tendencies of postfeminism. Such a feminism will not please everyone. Comprising a pragmatic response to patriarchal oppression, it trades radicalism for reach. Coppola’s films exemplify particularly well the international cross-border scope of heightened genres’ trans-categorical engagement of subjectivities, whether through focusing on global media and/or celebrity in the diegetic context of the USA (The Bling Ring, which in common with but even more than most of Coppola’s films took most theatrical profits in France, Italy and Germany), Europe (Marie Antoinette) or East Asia (Lost in Translation, 2003). A critique of Lords of Dogtown proves most illustrative of the problems associated with such a levelling approach. Thus, Dwayne Dixon accuses the film’s simulations of skateboarding of leading too readily to a ‘global youth imaginary’ in which differences are de-emphasised and transferred internationally. He goes on to describe a Lords of Dogtown-­ themed photo shoot for Japanese pop artist Takahiro as ‘a fantastic and globalised triangle of trans-Pacific imitation, nostalgia, appropriated style and mimetic performance’ (in  Borden 2019: ‘Skateboarding at the Movies’). In the first place, it is of more than passing relevance that the ‘culture clash’ photo shoot in question bears comparison with the absurd Japanese advertisement in which Bill Murray’s US actor is cast in Lost in Translation. While this is well beyond the intentions of the filmmakers or, as it were, the films in question, it does underscore the fact that the (conceptually and often actually) global reach of the films examined here is just one among many similarities between them. It is worth noting that women are now becoming just frequent enough directors of mainstream films for feminine homocitationality—by which I mean here women filmmakers citing other women filmmakers’ work—to be meaningful for wider audiences. As Handyside has pointed out in relation to Coppola, drawing on So Mayer’s work on Agnès Varda: ‘Film critics pay too little attention to this. We miss the communities they [filmmakers] build, introducing themselves as multiple, communal, complex and—above all—attentively discursive’ (2018). I conceive homocitationality as significant largely to the extent that it is perceived by audiences, rather than consciously intended by directors, and thus works like cinephilic (cine-fille) intertextuality as a whole, as described in these pages. Therefore, one of the effects of this analysis will I hope have been to bring out echoes not only within but across the oeuvres of different female filmmakers (and secondarily other

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practitioners—such as screenwriters including Melissa Rosenberg of Twilight or, transnationally, Danièle Thompson, who co-authored the film adaptation of La Reine Margot). The circular patterns that structure my own analysis’ aesthetic thus themselves take on significance. Nor of course are these limited to LA settings or the centrality of home. Just one other salient example concerns the unexpectedly close parentage of comedy, in focus at the start of Chap. 3, and documentary/drama, under the spotlight in Chap. 4, within a framework concerned with heightened or self-­ aware fictionality, when we note that for Tom Brown (2012: 41) these modes are united by an invitation to observe what James Naremore calls ‘plot machinery as machinery’. This recognition suggests another possible layer of meaning to ascribe to the title of The Bling Ring, as appropriate to describe mainstream female directors (and not just Coppola) themselves. Not only can these filmmakers be associated with commerce but more interestingly for our purposes with an inclusive, collective approach to meaning-making, which radiates outward like ripples on a pond to encircle each other’s films. In any case, from this vantage point, it requires surprisingly little stretch to see recent female-directed genre films as joining more marginal postmodern autobiographical cinemas in ‘engag[ing] in community building’ through their dialogical nature and often in ways linked to the postmodern sensibility (Renov 2004: xvii). This detail, so resonant for heightened genre, is relevant to the question of movies’ identitarian allegiances in that this aspect of the films’ address could be seen to further contribute to answering feminist demands for not just social inclusivity (taking in men and women) but sisterhood specifically, in opposition to patriarchy. (Indeed, arguing for the importance of the individual in delicate balance with a renewed emphasis on collectivity coincides with some aspects of a bourgeoning fourth ‘wave’ of feminism [Rivers 2017: 24].)10 Nevertheless, it should be apparent by now that I see this as ultimately a false dichotomy for popular cinema and such networks of discursive meaning-making as integrally bound up in rather than marginal to mainstream (‘patriarchal’) communication channels and communities. It is this book’s belief that the exchanging of one form of specificity for broad accessibility, or hyper-attentiveness to identity politics for more universal impact, described above and decried by many, results in a significant shift for female filmmakers’ cultural positioning and influence. From this perspective, global—and cross-media—reach is another string in the bow of the heightened genre film. Ian Borden (2019: ‘Skateboarding at the

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Movies’) opines that instances like the Lords of Dogtown-theming of a very different cultural product ‘demonstrate the danger of moving away from skateboarding as a real act, and into worlds of heightened simulation and fictionalised narrative’ (my emphasis); yet it is precisely the extreme generic artificiality of these films that makes them culturally versatile. Heightened genericity thus extends its transcendence of masculine-feminine categories to mount an overlapping challenge to spatial binaries that oppose the global to the local, and in so doing renders null the tendency to debase the latter as concrete, narrow, empirical and even bodily by postmodern geographers such as Jameson or David Harvey (Halberstam 2005: 28). Adopting such a perspective might even answer to calls by thinkers such as J.  K. Gibson Graham for the destabilisation of capitalism as a totalising theory, through an appeal to poststructuralist critiques of identity and signification (in ibid.), alongside a feminist revalorisation of the body: a bold place for a book that began by acknowledging the classed components of the postfeminist discourse it certainly draws on to end up.11 What is undeniable is that, if the argument of this book has proceeded from a reworking of Andrew Tudor’s view of genre as ‘what we collectively believe it to be’ (1974: 139) to claim that what we believe is generically determined and structured, the accelerated globalisation of collective imaginaries makes mass fictions all the more culturally powerful. The compromises involved in making films that embrace, underline and exploit the captivating power of their genericity seem more than worth it for many women filmmakers to share discursively in such world-building. In following this path, they contribute to shaping subjective landscapes across broad demographics, in a fashion that spills out from their practice into so many walks of life.

Notes 1. I also referenced autobiography in Meyers’ work in Chap. 3, while critical discussion of Marie Antoinette—and indeed all Coppola’s oeuvre—has sometimes highlighted autofictional interpretations (see Handyside 2017: 30, note 76; 12; 31–2; 40). 2. Cf. Backman Rogers (2019: ‘Introduction’) or Indiewire journalist Sam Adams (in Handyside 2017: 8). 3. Christina Lane and Nicole Richter (2011: 189) also explore tensions between ‘interior and exterior’ space in Coppola’s earlier films. 4. Eva Illouz’s description of advertising as based on an assumption about ‘things’ mediating human relations comes close to my description of genre cinema (Backman Rogers 2019: ‘The Bling Ring’).

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5. Radner distinguishes neo-feminism from postfeminism through what she sees as a looser relationship with earlier feminisms, instead viewing the trend as much more dominantly determined by neoliberal capitalism. 6. See also Chap. 4 on The Bling Ring as subverted fashion film specifically. 7. An interview with film journalist Matthew Street on BBC 3’s The Film Programme on 7 July 2013 provides a fascinating example in that Coppola appears uncomfortable with such comparisons http://www.bbc.co.uk/ programmes/b0368kpl. 8. Cf. Modleski on fashion in Handyside (2017: 140). 9. I here repurpose Matin’s comments in relation to Marie Antoinette, which originally refer to a ‘structure of emotional expectation and identity-­ making that imaginatively binds together women who may have nothing in common’. 10. Although Nicola Rivers is at pains to stress the complexities of and overlap between both movements, while I have already suggested that the growing exposure of intersectional Black feminist concerns in very recent years chimes discordantly with the filmmakers (though not necessarily the films) on which this study focuses. 11. It is apposite that Ferriss cites Karl Marx’s statement that ‘to be real […] is to have sensuous objects outside oneself, objects of one’s sense perceptions’ in a celebration of Coppola’s interconnecting multimedia, transhistorical ‘fabrications’ (2021: 129).

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Lane, Christina and Nicole Richter (2011), ‘The Feminist Poetics of Sofia Coppola: Spectacle and Self-Consciousness in Marie Antoinette (2006),’ in Hilary Radner and Rebecca Stringer (eds), Feminism at the Movies: Understanding Gender in Contemporary Popular Cinema, New York and Abingdon: Routledge, pp. 189–202. Letort, Delphine (2015), ‘The Cultural Capital of Sofia Coppola’s The Bling Ring (2013): Branding Feminine Celebrity in Los Angeles,’ Celebrity Studies 7 (3): 309–322. Lewis, Caitlin Yunuen (2011), ‘Cool Postfeminism: The Stardom of Sofia Coppola,’ in Su Holmes and Diane Negra (eds), In the Limelight and Under the Microscope: Forms and Functions of Female Celebrity, New  York: Continuum, pp. 174–198. Matin, Samiha (2012), ‘Private Femininity, Public Femininity: Tactical Aesthetics in the Costume Film,’ in Christine Gledhill (ed.), Gender Meets Genre in Postwar Cinemas, Urbana, Chicago and Springfield: University of Illinois Press, pp. 96–110. Monden, Masafumi (2013), ‘Contemplating in a dream-like room: The Virgin Suicides and the aesthetic imagination of girlhood,’ Film, Fashion & Consumption 2 (2): 139–158. Morey, Anne (2012), ‘Introduction,’ in A.  Morey (ed.), Genre, Reception and Adaptation in the ‘Twilight’ Series, Farnham: Ashgate, pp. 1–14. Mulvey, Laura (1975), ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,’ Screen 16 (3): 6–18. Radner, Hilary (2010), Neo-Feminist Cinema: Girly Films, Chick Flicks, and Consumer Culture, London and New York: Routledge. Renov, Michael (2004), The Subject of Documentary, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Richard, Annie (2010), L’Autofiction et les femmes: un chemin vers l’altruisme?, Paris: L’Harmattan. Rivers, Nicola (2017), Postfeminism(s) and the Arrival of the Fourth Wave: Turning Tides, Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan. Trippe, Micah (2014), ‘Urban Guerrilla [sic] Playfare, or Skating Through Empty Cinematic Pools in Dogtown and Z-Boys,’ in Christopher Brown and Pam Hirsh (eds), The Cinema of the Swimming Pool, Bern: Peter Lang, pp. 181–191. Tudor, Andrew (1974), Theories of Film (Cinema One), London: Secker and Warburg. Vidal, Belén (2012), Heritage Film: Nation, Genre and Representation, London and New York: Wallflower. Webb, Lawrence (2018), ‘Sofia Coppola: the Auteur as Creator,’ Paper delivered at Sussex Contemporary Director Symposium, University of Sussex, 16 May.

Website https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b0368kp.

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Index1

A Action, 5, 11, 35, 86, 90, 118, 138–140, 142, 144, 171, 172, 174, 176–179, 181, 183, 184, 189, 191, 194, 197, 207–209, 226, 230, 247, 248 Action (genre), 5, 11, 35, 172, 183, 184, 189, 207, 230 Action film(s)/action movie, 5, 11, 118, 142, 172, 183, 184, 189, 207 Action filmmaking, 35 An Affair to Remember (Leo McCarey, 1957), 82 Affect, 6, 11, 13, 15n2, 15n3, 24, 29–36, 38, 43, 53, 59, 63n14, 65n33, 65n35, 66n45, 79, 86, 87, 95, 99, 100, 102, 105, 106, 109, 115, 116, 125, 126, 132, 144, 148, 154n61, 154n62, 176, 177, 179, 181, 191, 195, 203, 204, 212, 216, 218, 219, 221, 237n48, 250, 251

affective response, 30, 53, 107 affect theory, 34 bodily affect, 109, 177 flat affect, 148, 152n49, 154n62, 180 heightened affect, 250 textual affect, 6, 11, 13, 212 Affect debate, 38 Affective, 2, 4, 15n10, 47, 52, 57, 58, 61, 62, 66n48, 105, 147, 148, 180, 195, 209 Affective address, 14, 21–36, 77, 87–88 Affective allegiances, 147, 203 Affective charge, 38, 132 Affective dimensions, 61 Affective dispositions, 32 Affective engagement, 28, 31, 179 Affective familiarity, 54 Affective force, 114, 115 Affective immersion, 197 Affective intensity, 35

 Note: Page numbers followed by ‘n’ refer to notes.

1

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 M. Harrod, Heightened Genre and Women’s Filmmaking in Hollywood, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-70994-5

289

290 

INDEX

Affective memory, 250 Affective mismatch, 148 Affective outline, 114 Affective paradigm, 32 Affective pleasures, 33, 130 Affective power, 30, 62, 84 Affective properties, 12, 110 Affective properties of the image, 130 Affective qualities, 33, 66n48, 115 Affective reaction, 14 Affective reading, 218 Affective realms, 35, 41 Affective register, 59, 83 Affective responses, 30, 53, 107 Affective states, 114 Affective theorisations of cinema, 103 Affective valencies, 184 Affective viewer investment, 183 Affectivity, 105 Affects of the genres, 137 Affect studies, 24, 65n34 Affect theory, 34 African American trauma, 193 Ahmed, Sara, 6, 10, 12–14, 32–34, 59, 61, 62, 66n46, 177, 208, 209, 233, 236n33 All the President’s Men (Alan J. Pakula, 1976), 179 American Graffiti (George Lucas, 1973), 61, 67n48, 98, 100 Arabesque forms, 232 Arabesque movement, 232 Arabesque(s), 228–234, 247 Arabesque style, 234 Audience consumption, 135 Auteurism, 22, 24, 25, 62n2, 118, 213, 214 politique des auteurs, 22, 41 Auteurist, 204, 256 Auteurist approaches, 21 Auteurist practice, 228 Auteur piece, 128

Auteur(s), 21, 22, 25, 29, 42, 63n5, 90, 122, 129, 213, 233 Auteur status, 21, 214 Auteur studies, 9 Auteur theory, 45 Authenticity, 37, 153n55, 166, 179, 182, 183, 223, 232, 235n13 Author(s), 8, 9, 13, 14, 24–27, 36, 42–50, 52–56, 61, 62, 63n5, 65n32, 80, 118, 129, 143, 148, 149, 150n20, 180, 204, 211, 226, 227, 252, 254, 255 Author brand/authors’ brands, 42, 48, 51 Author branding, 204 Author-consumer rapports, 52 Authorial agency, 38, 47 Authorial and character subjectivities, 253 Authorial function, 47 Authorial style, 13, 255 Authorial subjectivity, 47, 255 Authorial worldview, 204 Author label, 53 Authors and consumers, 52, 56 Authorship, 7–9, 11, 13, 14, 21–36, 39, 43, 48, 49, 60, 61, 81, 102, 118, 119, 193, 212, 221 author brand, 42, 48, 51 authorial style, 13, 255 implied author, 13, 48, 128, 142, 254, 255 Authorship debate, 48 Author’s subjectivity, 48 Autofiction, 13, 46, 47, 66n41, 165, 247–258 Autofictional, 46, 47 Autofictional elements, 255 Autofictional genericity, 248 Autofictional mode, 254 Autofictional theory, 47

 INDEX 

B Babington, Bruce, 223, 224, 226 Bande de filles/Girlhood (Céline Sciamma, 2014), 107 Baroque, 210–212, 216, 221 neo-baroque, 211, 212, 218, 220, 237n38 Baroque aesthetics, 210, 216, 219 Baroque language, 211 Baroque style, 210 Bataille, Georges, 51, 191, 196, 197 The Beguiled, 53, 82, 117, 151n35 The Beguiled (Sofia Coppola, 2017), 53, 82, 117, 151n35 Berlant, Laurent, 6, 15n10, 29, 48, 58, 59, 61, 66n46, 148, 154n62, 180 Berlantian, 152n49, 180 Big (Penny Marshall, 1988), 88 Big Wednesday (John Milius, 1978), 207 Bigelow, Kathryn, 5, 9, 11–14, 16n17, 23, 47, 57, 135, 136, 152n39, 152n46, 167, 169, 170, 173, 174, 177, 178, 180, 184–209, 226, 228, 231, 236n32, 236n35, 236n36, 255 Bill and Ted franchise, 207 Bin Laden, Osama, 167–169, 172–177, 184 Biopic(s), 11, 12, 165, 166, 210, 212, 214, 229 The Birth of a Nation, 199 The Birth of a Nation (D. W. Griffith, 1915), 199 The Blackboard Jungle, 100 The Blackboard Jungle (Richard Brooks, 1955), 100 BlacKkKlansman (Spike Lee, 2018), 200 Black Lives Matter (BLM), 6, 209

291

The Bling Ring (Sofia Coppola, 2013), 13, 47, 120, 247–258 Blue Steel (Kathryn Bigelow, 1989), 11, 16n17, 192, 236n35 Bodily affect, 109, 177 Bodily subjectivity, 114 Body genre(s), 80, 132, 171, 191, 235n15 Bridget Jones films (2001, 2004), 34, 42 Bright colours, 250 C Carrie (Brian de Palma, 1976), 127 Carrie (Kimberly Peirce, 2013), 82, 117, 135 Chick-flicks, 34, 36, 77, 105 Cine-fille, 1–15, 36, 40–43, 83 Cine-fille author, 43 Cinephile audiences, 13, 255 Cinephile auteur, 42 Cinephile(s), 31, 36 Cinephilia, 24, 36, 41, 66n48 cinephilic viewer, 95 Cinephilic, 22, 41, 62, 83, 166, 212 Cinephilic appeal, 30 Cinephilic circles, 25 Cinephilic competence, 39, 43 Cinephilic engagement, 41 Cinephilic intertextuality, 256 Cinephilic viewer, 95 Cinephilic viewing communities, 62 Citational, 101 Citationality, 81, 133, 234 homocitationality, 204, 256 Citational texture, 218 Citations, 14, 45, 57, 81, 94, 134, 211, 222, 233 Clueless (Amy Heckerling, 1995), 16n19, 98–111, 115, 117, 120, 129, 151n25, 151n32, 250

292 

INDEX

Codes of genres, 119 Cognition, 29, 30, 32, 35, 37, 65n35, 106, 131 Cognitive film studies, 2 Cognitive function, 32, 33 Cognitive processes, 171, 180 Cognitivism, 79 Colour(s), 8, 9, 15, 32, 77, 113, 116, 131, 132, 152n38, 199, 202, 204, 218, 233, 250, 251 Colourful materiality, 251 Colour scheme, 96, 218, 233 Colour spectrum, 251 Conceptions of the auteur, 129 Consumable, 200 Consumable pleasures, 220 Consumer(s), 24, 25, 41, 43, 48, 49, 52, 53, 56, 78, 80, 96, 111, 120 Consumer culture, 101 Consumer-interpreter-authors, 55 Consumerism, 87, 250 Consumerist, 93 Consumerist luxury, 94 Consumer society, 133 Consumption author-consumer relationship, 52 fashion consumption, 120 Contemporary women filmmakers, 11 Control of emotion, 173 Convention (s), 12, 31, 59, 60, 80, 91, 101, 105, 119, 126, 148, 154n62, 165, 176, 180, 182, 183, 189, 207, 208 Conventional, 7, 22, 100, 124, 129, 180, 213 Conventional genericity, 11 Conventionalised, 6, 12, 22, 60, 136, 249, 254 Conventionalised tropes, 28 Conventionality, 4, 80, 94 genre conventions, 91

Coppola, Sofia, 5, 10, 11, 13, 23, 42, 47, 53, 64n23, 82, 101, 117, 124, 210, 212–216, 218–220, 230, 237n40, 237n45, 247–258, 258n1, 258n3, 259n7, 259n11 Corbett-Fitzsimmons Fight (Enoch J. Rector, 1897), 223 Costume, 5, 104–107, 113, 210, 212, 215, 218, 219 Costuming, 139 Crime, 171, 185, 225, 235n21, 248 Crime (genre), 180 Crime drama, 165, 180 Crime fiction (s), 167, 171, 175, 180 Cross-generational subjectivities, 100 The Cultural Politics of Emotion (Sara Ahmed, 2004), 59 Cyclicality of genre, 143 D Date Movie (Aaron Seltzer and Jason Friedberg, 2006), 5 The Deer Hunter (Michael Cimino, 1978), 146 Depictions of rape, 195 Detective fiction(s), 171, 172, 181 Detective film, 180 Detective genre, 175, 180 Detective genre films, 175 Detective mystery story, 172 Detroit (Kathryn Bigelow, 2017), 9, 12, 47, 152n42, 165, 184–209, 221, 231, 235n22, 236n34 Disaster movie (genre), 185, 191 Doane, Mary Ann, 33, 34, 62n1, 65n40, 85, 202 Docudrama, 9, 13, 148, 166, 167, 177, 178, 182, 185, 186, 212, 221–234, 247, 254 Docudramatic, 12, 183, 223 Docudramatic tendencies, 46

 INDEX 

Dogtown and Z-Boys (Stacy Peralta, 2001), 221, 222, 224, 229–231, 233 Domestic spaces, 95–97, 190, 255 Down with Love (Peyton Reed, 2003), 34 The Duchess (Saul Dibb, 2008), 213 Dunham, Lena, 53, 54, 93 Dunst, Kirsten, 215, 218, 219, 237n45, 254 DuVernay, Ava, 9, 11, 186, 198, 209 Dyer, Richard, 4, 28, 29, 39, 83, 84, 105, 129, 194, 195, 251 E Elephant (Gus Van Sant, 2003), 226, 251 Embodied address, 36, 99, 102, 103 Embodied, affective psychic experiences and ideologies, 62 Embodied, affective sentiment, 35 Embodied approaches, 211 Embodied audience address, 43 Embodied being, 6 Embodied directorial address, 43–55 Embodied empathy, 113 Embodied engagement, 50 Embodied entertainment, 55 Embodied experience, 109, 111, 145 Embodied feelings, 41 Embodied femininity, 37 Embodied form, 183 Embodied human intervention, 172 Embodied impersonation, 229 Embodied mind, 145, 147 Embodied mind of a viewer, 51 Embodied nature, 177 Embodied real, 181 Embodied responses, 31 Embodied self, 195 Embodied subjectivity, 49, 171

293

Embodied subjects, 38 Embodied theories of film spectatorship, 52 Embodied viewers, 234 Embodiment embodied address, 36, 99, 102, 103 embodied impersonation, 229 embodied responses, 31 embodied viewer, 234 Emotion(s) emotion scholarship, 11 emotive address, 2, 3, 35, 128 links to genre, 148 Emotional, 2, 4, 29, 30, 41, 51, 52, 80, 85, 116, 119, 126, 140, 152n45, 154n61, 174, 177, 181, 219, 228, 232, 255, 259n9 Emotional attachments, 61 Emotional engagement, 31, 63n13, 110 Emotional entrainment, 147 Emotional experiences, 30 Emotional force, 195 Emotionality, 38, 83, 133 Emotionality of reactions, 133 Emotional meaning, 83, 177 Emotional politics, 55–62 Emotional pull, 125 Emotional responses, 51, 64n15 Emotional transports, 129 Emotional truth, 178 Emotion scholarship, 11 Emotive, 4, 12, 32, 50, 61, 77, 80, 83, 114 Emotive address, 2, 3, 35, 128 Emotive appeal, 185 Emotive function, 182 Emotive genres, 185 Emotive impact, 126, 208 Emotive patterns, 59 Emotive pleasures, 2 Emotive possibilities, 61

294 

INDEX

Emotive potential, 55 Emotive score, 176 Empowerment through consumption, 219 Ephron, Nora, 5, 11, 34, 79, 82, 83, 86, 87, 96, 149n7, 150n8 Eroticism, 99 Erotics, 51, 53, 57, 99, 101, 102, 109, 111, 116, 129, 215, 236n24 European heritage, 214 European heritage drama, 11 European post-heritage film, 214 Exceptionalist auteurism, 214 The Exorcist (William Friedkin, 1973), 191, 192 Externalised subjectivities, 171 F Factual authenticity, 182 Fairy tales, 85, 120, 124, 152n44, 218 Fantasy (genre), 11, 12, 54, 61, 66n46, 77, 87, 88, 101, 110–112, 116–118, 120, 125, 133, 134, 149n5, 171, 181, 231 Far From Heaven (Todd Haynes, 2002), 4 Fashion, 3, 9, 15n8, 36, 43, 54, 79, 104, 105, 108, 110, 125, 134, 141, 144, 172, 192, 203, 205, 219, 236n30, 250, 251, 254, 255, 258 Fashion consumption, 120 Fashion film, 250, 251 Fast Times at Ridgemont High (Amy Heckerling, 1982), 62, 101, 103, 104, 110 Feeling shapes, 29, 30, 84, 175 Feelings of nostalgia, 114 Felt empathy, 202 Felt evocation, 139 Felt experience, 51, 111, 132, 148

Felt imprint, 219 Felt intersubjective connection, 94 Felt knowledge, 182 Felt response, 55, 80, 179 Female adolescent sexuality, 126 Female audience, 35, 120 Female-authored remake, 12 Female authors, 9, 36, 53, 227, 252 Female authorship, 7, 8, 11, 22, 34, 48 Female-directed art films, 211 Female-directed genre films, 257 Female-directed Hollywood cinema, 1 Female directors, 7, 8, 35–62, 77, 89, 100, 101, 151n23, 233, 256, 257 Female-dominated fan art cultures, 44 Female fan cultures, 34 Female filmmakers, 6, 22, 23, 25, 38, 50, 169, 232, 256, 257 Female genre auteurs, 29 Female genre film directors, 91 Female-only space, 89 Female-oriented films, 34, 36 Female-oriented genres, 64n26, 83 Female progress, 105 Female realm, 6 Female sexuality, 122, 195 Female spectators, 35, 44 Female theorists, 111 Female viewers, 34, 35, 83 Female Whiteness, 195 Feminine, 26, 33–35, 38, 81, 95–97, 101, 109, 119, 121, 125, 134, 151n29, 173, 210, 213, 231, 237n45, 252, 256 Feminine and masculine cultures, 119 Feminine corporeality, 33 Feminine homocitationality, 256 Feminine-identified genres, 14 Feminine modes, 38 Femininity female sexuality, 122, 195

 INDEX 

female/women directors, 7, 8, 11, 25, 35–62, 65n33, 77, 81, 89, 93, 100, 101, 136, 151n23, 166, 233, 256, 257 female/women viewers, 34, 35, 83 female/women’s filmmaking, 5, 6, 21–62, 111, 117 Feminised expressivity, 212 Feminised girl-space, 121 Feminised sphere of emotion, 24 Feminism, 6, 7, 9, 10, 14, 25, 26, 34, 35, 37, 60, 66n42, 79, 150n18, 193, 250, 256, 257, 259n5 feminist film studies, 5, 7, 33, 42 neo-feminism, 93, 259n5 postfeminism, 9, 10, 36, 42, 64n21, 150n18, 256, 259n5 Feminist, 2, 7, 8, 10, 11, 13, 16n18, 21–23, 25, 27, 33, 34, 37, 43, 45, 52, 56, 58, 62n1, 63n3, 64n23, 85, 93, 118, 135, 151n35, 169, 178, 213, 222, 237n40, 247, 250, 251, 256, 259n10 Feminist aesthetics of genre authorship, 227 Feminist analyses, 35, 202 Feminist approaches, 29 Feminist camps, 116 Feminist cinema, 122 Feminist context, 43 Feminist criticism, 46 Feminist critique, 31 Feminist demands, 257 Feminist ethics, 56 Feminist film analysis, 22 Feminist film authorship, 48 Feminist film studies, 5, 7, 33, 42 Feminist film theory, 44, 56 Feminist generic subversion, 252 Feminist interest in the mainstream, 6 Feminist perspective, 109, 150n19, 215

295

Feminist possibilities of specific films, 23 Feminist questions, 2 Feminist readings, 66n47, 118 Feminist reception scholarship, 44 Feminist representation, 169 Feminist revalorisation of the body, 258 Feminist scholars, 64n28, 135 Feminist sensibility, 1 Feminist strategy, 116 Feminist studies, 37, 118 Feminist subversion, 135 Feminist theory, 6 Feminist thought, 34, 173 Feminist understandings, 129 Fidelity, 65n33, 86, 129, 223, 230 Film authorship, 11, 21–36, 49 Film genre, 2, 5, 21, 27–28, 37–40, 60, 62, 82, 103, 110, 132, 135, 136, 150n17, 175, 187, 249 Film genre representation, 98 Filmic conventions, 59 Film music, 107 Final girl, 121 Flat, 130, 148, 180 Flat affect, 152n49, 154n62, 180 Formal citation, 222 Foucault, Michel, 12, 13, 24, 31 Freaky Friday (Mark Waters, 2003), 108, 150n13 Freud, Sigmund, 91, 114, 115, 198, 235n17 Freudian, 171, 195, 200 Full Metal Jacket (Stanley Kubrick, 1987), 145, 187, 191 G Galt, Rosalind, 56, 57, 66n43, 79, 149n5, 175, 201, 202, 231–234, 236n33, 237n40 Gendered genre, 14

296 

INDEX

Gendered genre production, 135 Gendered implications of genre films, 174 Gendered space, 87 Gender-queer, 183 Generic citation, 57 Generic convention, 101, 165, 182 Genericity and emotion, 94 Generic overdeterminism, 189 Generic pastiche, 219, 220, 233 Generic spaces, 34, 59, 87, 96, 193 Genre(s) cyclicality of genre, 143 gendered genre, 14, 135 generic aesthetics, 115, 121, 216, 255 genre-mixing/genre hybridising, 28, 111, 118 genre narratives, 26, 87, 127, 143, 183 genre studies, 2, 22, 28, 36, 55, 59, 61, 65n37 meta-genericity, 5, 28, 38, 40, 102 Genre aesthetics, 12, 56, 128, 201, 251 Genre analysis, 23, 57 Genre baroque, 210–212 Genre categories, 121 Genre cinema, 22, 47, 57, 91, 147, 258n4 Genre cinema’s formal structure, 171 Genre context, 29 Genre conventions, 91 Genre criticism, 21, 27, 28 Genre filmmaking, 4, 5, 22, 23, 36, 55, 82, 148, 174, 181, 255, 256 Genre films, 4, 5, 11, 22–24, 28–31, 37–41, 43, 44, 46–48, 50, 52–55, 59–61, 65n31, 78, 80, 86, 97, 99, 107, 115, 134–136, 143–145, 148, 153n57, 154n59, 165, 174, 175, 183, 185, 196,

198, 210–213, 218, 223, 224, 227, 232, 234, 238n52, 247, 251–253, 255, 257 Genre hybridity, 89, 124 Genre narratives, 26, 127, 143, 183 Genre narratives’ identity, 87 Genre pastiche, 29–36 Genre’s heightened potentialities, 39 Genre storytelling, 121, 181 Genre studies, 2, 28, 36, 55, 59, 61, 65n37 Genre texts, 4, 11, 33, 78, 120, 201 Genrefy, 201 Genre-heightening, 118 Genre-mixing, 118 Genres of gender, 228 Genres of masculinity, 228 Gerwig, Greta, 1, 2, 5, 100, 101 Gigi (Vincente Minnelli, 1958), 103 Ginger Snaps (John Fawcett, 2000), 102, 126 Girls (2012–2017), 53, 54, 93 Gothic gothic sublime, 123, 124, 132 teen Gothic, 117–120, 127 Gothic sublime, 123, 124, 132 Grodal, Torben, 4, 5, 29, 30, 38, 43, 44, 58, 63n13, 112, 122, 126, 137, 149n3, 152n45, 171, 172, 180 H Halberstam, Jack, 10, 56, 85, 88, 89, 201, 258 Haptics, 50, 51, 122, 153n54, 235n24 Hardwicke, Catherine, 5, 10, 12, 13, 47, 101, 102, 117–119, 121, 122, 124, 125, 127, 128, 132, 152n38, 152n39, 221, 223, 226, 228–233, 237n50, 238n52, 247, 248

 INDEX 

The Hate U Give (George Tillman Jnr., 2018), 200, 203 Heathers (Michael Lehmann, 1988), 125 Heckerling, Amy, 5, 12, 62, 77, 98–104, 106, 107, 109–112, 116, 117, 151n25, 254 Heightened, 29, 37–39, 41, 43, 49, 51, 57, 61, 83, 95, 97, 105, 119, 122, 136, 137, 148, 212–221, 226, 228–234, 257 Heightened affects, 250 Heightened film genre, 37–40 Heightened genericity, 4, 11, 24, 36–62, 79, 104, 105, 111, 114, 115, 124, 130, 133, 210, 211, 234, 258 definition, 4 feminist potential, 13, 247 heightened genre address, 24 Heightened genericity and feminist interpretability, 222 Heightened genericity as itself a form of figural aesthetic, 212 Heightened genericity in films by women, 13 Heightened genericity’s feminist potential, 13, 247 Heightened genre, 4, 6, 16n19, 28, 36, 42, 48, 49, 57, 77, 83, 94, 99, 105, 120, 132, 148, 221, 227, 256, 257 Heightened genre aesthetics, 56 Heightened genre filmmaking, 5, 82 Heightened genre filmmaking as an important forum for feminist expression, 256 Heightened genre films, 46, 47, 53, 54, 99, 115, 134, 136, 185, 198, 210–212, 218, 224, 227, 247, 253, 255, 257

297

Heightened genre films’ rich generativity, 234 Heightened genre model, 9 Heightened genrescape, 229 Heightened genre’s mass recognisability as a mode of address, 125 Heightened ones, 80 Heightened version of genericity par excellence, 78 Heritage, 5, 8, 210–221 Heritage biopics, 214 Heritage drama, 10–11, 213 European heritage, 11, 214 Heritage films, 210, 213–215, 218 Heritage genre, 216 Heroic masculinity, 141 Historicism, 28, 51 Historicity, 167, 223 History, 4, 5, 8, 12, 36–38, 43, 47, 55, 56, 59, 63n3, 65n37, 86, 88, 103, 104, 111–113, 117, 122, 123, 134, 142–145, 147, 152n42, 154n61, 165, 167–169, 181, 184–209, 212, 214, 218, 224, 226–228, 230, 233, 235n22, 236n27, 236n30, 236n32, 237n40, 238n52, 247, 254 historicity, 167, 223 Homocitationality, 204, 256 Hook (Steven Spielberg, 1992), 231 Horror (genre), 132, 165, 170, 171, 191 Human subjectivity, 40, 171, 204, 235n17 The Hurt Locker (Kathryn Bigelow, 2008), 14, 135–143, 145, 153n56, 153n58, 154n60, 154n61, 167, 169, 176, 181, 183, 184, 195 Hypermasculinity, 143

298 

INDEX

I I Could Never Be Your Woman (Amy Heckerling, 2007), 98–112, 126, 151n29, 254 Ideals of masculinity, 141, 142, 226 If Beale Street Could Talk (Barry Jenkins, 2018), 200 Images (suggestive) of rape, 195 Imagined subjectivity, 53 Imitation, 4, 5, 9, 39, 78, 81, 105, 115, 122, 232, 256 Imitative performance, 147 Implied author, 13, 128, 142, 254 Implied authorial subjectivity, 255 Implied authorship, 48 Implied co-authorship, 81 Implied collective authors, 143 Inside-outside spatial schema, 249 Institutional spaces, 123, 226 Instrumental score, 106 The Intern (Nancy Meyers, 2015), 91 Intersubjective affect, 100 Intersubjective analysis of female authorship, 48 Intersubjective communion, 49–51, 56 Intersubjective dynamics, 55 Intersubjective mobility, 111 Intersubjective potentialities, 99 Intersubjectivity, 47, 51, 52 Intimacy/intimate publics, 48, 49, 58, 59, 61, 62, 105, 114, 178, 179, 254 Intimate, 51, 80, 116, 181, 209, 254, 255 Iraq films, 140 Iraq War film, 135–143, 149, 167, 235n11 Iraq War movie, 12 Iraq War narratives, 142

J Jameson, Fredric, 67n48, 103, 104, 120, 247, 258 Jamesonian, 86 Jermyn, Deborah, 14, 22, 37, 64n23, 89, 90, 93, 94, 96, 135, 151n22, 233 K Kinaesthetic empathy, 53 The Kiss of the Spiderwoman (Héctor Babenco, 1985), 38 Kristeva, Julia, 85, 91, 93 Kristevan, 91 L Ladybird (Greta Gerwig, 2017), 100, 108 Language of affect, 195 La Reine Margot (Patrice Chéreau, 1994), 14, 214–219, 237n45, 257 L’Arrivée d’un train à la Ciotat (Auguste and Louis Lumière, 1896), 80 Lepastier, Joachim, 175, 176, 179 Le Voyeur/The Voyeur (Alain Robbe-­ Grillet, 1955), 38 Little Women (Greta Gerwig, USA, 2019), 1–15 Localising spaces, 247 Lords of Dogtown (Catherine Hardwicke, 2005), 10, 13, 47, 60, 165, 221–234, 247, 251, 256, 258 Loser (Amy Heckerling, 2000), 111 Loss of subjectivity, 197 The Lost Boys (Joel Schumacher, 1987), 127, 230 Lost in Translation, 253, 256

 INDEX 

M Macho masculinity, 207 The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (John Ford, 1962), 226 Marie Antoinette (Sofia Coppola, 2006), 11, 12, 14, 120, 165, 210–221, 237n40, 237n45, 237n46, 237n48, 250, 255, 256, 258n1, 259n9 Masculine, 9, 11, 14, 29, 35, 38, 42, 43, 77, 85, 87, 96, 119, 121, 135, 136, 152n42, 173, 174, 238n52, 253 Masculine bias, 178 Masculine discourses of agency, authority and control, 41 Masculine-feminine binaries, 253 Masculine-feminine categories, 258 Masculine gendering, 212 Masculine genre films, 77, 121, 135, 238n52 Masculine identification figure, 121 Masculine power, 173 Masculine seriousness, 42 Masculine space, 96 Masculine territory, 134 Masculinism, 192, 225 Masculinity masculine/feminine categories, 258 masculine ideals, 95, 141, 142, 226 masculine spaces, 96 Master genre, 28, 165 Material consumption, 210 Mean Girls (Mark Waters, 2004), 251, 252 Meaninglessness of ‘subjectivity,’ 170 Melancholia, 114–116, 198, 200 Melodrama (genre), 2, 4, 5, 15n8, 29, 34, 35, 65n37, 82, 121, 122, 138, 143

299

Melodramas, 34, 85, 149n5, 185 Memento (Christopher Nolan, 2000), 29, 30 Men’s spaces, 96 Metafictional, 2, 212, 218, 254 Metafictionality, 79, 96, 137 Metafictional recourses, 83 Metafictional strategies, 60 Metafictional text, 30 Metafictional work, 45 Metafictions, 37, 43, 45–47, 172 Meta-generic, 102, 223 Meta-generic category, 185 Meta-genericity, 5, 28, 38, 40, 102 Meyer, Stephanie, 117–119, 127, 128, 130, 132 Meyers, Nancy, 5, 11, 14, 23, 37, 79, 87, 89–98, 150n19, 150n20, 150n21, 151n22, 233, 255, 258n1 Mimesis, 37, 49, 79, 80, 147, 251 Mimetic, 37, 80, 86, 130, 256 Mimetic approach, 5, 89 Mimetic fallacy, 12 Mimeticism, 79 Mimetic structure, 229 Mind-body, 34, 37, 171 Mind-body dualism, 34, 37 Mood, 15n2, 38, 58, 86, 96, 132, 213, 216, 250 mood-sphere, 179 Mood music, 58 Mood-sphere, 179 Music, 51–53, 55, 66n43, 95, 106, 107, 122, 126, 137, 151n26, 209, 216, 250 Music/score, 95 Musical terms, 52

300 

INDEX

N National traumas, 195 Near Dark (Kathryn Bigelow, 1987), 152n46 Negative emotions, 199 Neo-baroque, 211, 212, 218, 220, 237n38 Neo-feminism, 93, 259n5 Neo-feminist cinema, 251, 252 Neo-feminist film, 250, 251 Neo-feminist rhetoric, 251 9/11 attack, 137, 139, 169, 175, 177, 178, 181, 182, 236n27 Nostalgia In You’ve Got Mail, 77, 82, 84, 88 Nostalgic, 2, 61, 95, 127, 142 Nostalgic charge, 95 Nostalgic longing, 116 Not Another Teen Movie (Joel Gallen, 2001), 5 Notions of uncompromising and maverick masculinity, 141 O Occidentalism, 173 Once Upon a Time in the West (Sergio Leone, 1968), 137 Orlando (Sally Potter, 1992), 34, 212, 213 Overdeterminacy, 4, 112 Overdetermination, 10, 57, 130 Overdetermined, 15n8, 38, 42, 84, 125, 126, 131, 134, 145, 148, 176, 207, 237n47 Overdetermined genre films, 40, 44, 61, 86, 107, 234 Overdetermined images, 12, 140 Overdetermined narratives, 55 Overdetermined tropes, 47 Overdetermines, 63n13, 105, 226 Overdeterminism, 189, 251

P Pale-coloured, 226 The Parent Trap (David Swift, 1961), 89 The Parent Trap (Nora Ephron, 1998), 11, 77, 79, 87, 89–98, 150n13, 150n17 Pastiche, 2, 4, 21–62, 78, 79, 83, 94, 102, 104, 105, 107, 112, 115, 124, 129, 134, 142, 149n5, 150n7, 153n52, 204, 207, 219, 220, 223, 233 generic pastiche, 219, 220, 233 Pastiched stylisation, 213 Peirce, Kimberly, 5, 8, 12, 82, 101, 117, 127, 134–136, 140, 145, 147–149, 167 Peralta, Stacy, 221, 223–226, 228, 229, 238n51 Perceived authenticity, 166 Period melodrama, 2 The Piano (Jane Campion, 1993), 34, 64n23, 122, 152n41, 212, 213 Pirates of the Caribbean franchise (2003–2017), 231 Platoon (Oliver Stone, 1986), 142, 145 Point Break (Kathryn Bigelow, 1991), 204–207, 222, 226 Politique des auteurs, 22, 41 Porky’s (Bob Clark, 1982), 100 Pornographic films, 30 Pornography, 29, 80, 235n15 The Post, 179 The Post (Steven Spielberg, 2017), 179 Postfeminism, 9, 10, 36, 42, 64n21, 256, 259n5 Postfeminist, 9, 42, 95, 250 Postfeminist discourse, 9, 258 Postfeminist girlhoods, 124 Postfeminist identification, 9 Postfeminist ones, 10

 INDEX 

Postfeminist US cinema, 97 Postfeminist values, 253 Post-heritage films, 213, 214 Post-teen subjectivity, 100 Pride and Prejudice (Jane Austen, 1813), 83, 84 The Princess Bride (Rob Reiner, 1987), 218 Profilmic space, 14 Q Queer childhood as queer, 85, 88 queer studies/queer theory, 12, 36, 56, 59, 79, 85, 144, 153n57, 226 Queer aesthetics, 231 Queer affect, 116 Queer aspects of childhood, 85 Queer feminist theory, 6, 58 Queer-inflected area, 233 Queering, 60, 61 Queerness, 61, 88 Queerness of childhood, 88 Queer readings, 56, 59, 60 Queer sensibility, 144 Queer studies, 56, 59, 79, 226 Queer subjects, 60 Queer terms, 143 Queer theory, 12, 36, 85, 144, 153n57 Questions of genre, 119 R Rape, 186, 189, 190, 193, 195, 199, 216, 235n21, 235n23, 236n28 Red Riding Hood (Catherine Hardwicke, 2011), 117 Redacted (Brian De Palma, 2007), 140, 186, 190

301

Repeat spaces, 87 Re-subjectification of the viewer, 211 Revisionist feminist film historiography, 25 Risky Business (Paul Brickman, 1983), 100 Romantic Comedy (Elizabeth Sankey, 2020), 82 Rom-com/romantic comedy/ romcom, 2, 5, 9, 31, 34, 82–91, 93, 95–98, 107, 124, 126, 134, 149n6, 228 Ryan, Meg, 67n48, 83, 84 S Sacrificial trauma, 193–195 Sacrificial trauma film, 165, 185, 191, 192, 194, 195, 203 Sacrificial trauma victim, 198 Saving Private Ryan (Steven Spielberg, 1998), 191 Scenic space, 13, 231 Scholarship on genre, 27 Score, 2, 95, 106, 137, 176, 229 Scores as authorial flourishes, 106 Scream franchise (Wes Craven, 1996, 1997, 2000, 2011), 5 Screwball, 91, 95, 96, 150n20 Screwball comedy, 90 Screwball cycle, 88 Screwball elements, 95 Self-reflexive, 5, 28, 30, 103 Self-reflexively, 91 Self-reflexivity, 2, 27, 34, 39, 43 Selma (Ava DuVernay, 2015), 11 Sensation of nostalgia, 114 Sensoria, 49 Sensorium, 35 Sensory, 33, 80, 175, 178, 210 Sensory activities, 219

302 

INDEX

Sensory-emotive evocation, 122 Sensory evocations, 80, 81 Sensory experiences, 80, 122 Sensory representation, 80 Set It Up (Claire Scanlon, 2018), 90 The Seven Year Itch (Billy Wilder, 1955), 126 Shattered subjectivities, 196 The Shop Around the Corner (Ernst Lubitsch, 1940), 82, 83, 87, 88, 90 Silverstone, Alicia, 107, 111, 112, 114 Sirk, Douglas, 4, 93, 94, 233 Sleepless in Seattle (Nora Ephron, 1998), 11, 82, 84 Snark fandom, 129 Something’s Gotta Give (Nancy Meyers, 2003), 93–95 Space of genre films, 54 Space particular to women, 43 Spaces domestic spaces, 95–97, 190, 255 gendered space, 87 generic space, 12, 34, 59, 87, 96, 193 time-space construct, 86, 87 Spatial, 13, 87, 219, 249 Spatial binaries, 258 Spatial constructs, 86 Spatial exclusion, 34 Spatialised articulations, 13 Spatialised reconstruction of identities, 248 Spatialised world-building, 248 Spatial metaphor of proximity, 147 Spatio-temporalities, 38, 165 Spectre of rape, 195 Sphere of affects, 219 Sphere of masculine, 87 Sports, 5, 13, 96, 104, 121, 222–226, 228, 229 Sports films, 147, 222–224, 226

Sports genre, 224, 225 Sports movie, 165, 221–234 Sports Movie (David Koechner, 2007), 224 Stacy Peralta, 221, 223, 224, 226 Stewart, Kristen, 114, 118, 130, 140, 152n49, 180 Stop-Loss (Kimberly Peirce, 2008), 12, 14, 36, 77, 134–147, 149, 152n49, 167, 170, 180, 184, 189, 195, 209, 229 Strange Days (Kathryn Bigelow, 1995), 193, 234n4 Straw Dogs (Sam Peckinpah, 1971), 190, 193 Studies of film affect, 31 Studies of genre/genres, 27 Subjective, 39, 96, 109, 114, 129, 130, 209, 258 Subjective enworlding, 96 Subjective experience, 114, 119, 146 Subjective stability, 192 Subjectivity/subjectivities, 12, 32, 33, 40, 45–49, 53, 55, 64n27, 100, 114–116, 121, 129, 134, 147, 153n57, 170, 171, 177, 195–197, 203, 204, 211, 235n17, 247–258 authorial subjectivity, 47, 255 intersubjectivity/intersubjective communion, 49–51, 56 Subjectivity across genders, 253 T Teen Gothic, 117–120, 127 Teenpic, 5, 12, 77, 98–103, 105–108, 111, 112, 121, 124–128, 147, 151n23, 151n25, 165, 215, 224 Textual affects, 11, 13, 212 Textual genre, 51 Theories of embodiment, 2

 INDEX 

Theorisations of emotion, 115 Theory of affects, 30 13 Going on 30 (Gary Winick, 2004), 108 Threat of rape, 189, 190, 193, 199 Time-space, 147 Time-space construct, 86, 87 Tone, 15n2, 58, 80, 82, 86, 107, 142 Torben Grodal, 3, 171 Torture/torture porn, 168–173, 175, 177, 181, 185, 196, 197, 201 Trauma sacrificial trauma film, 165, 185, 191, 192, 194, 195, 203 trauma of rape, 190 Trauma cinema, 191 Trauma film, 195 Trauma of rape, 190 Traumatic images, 182 Traumatised African American, 194 Traumatised mind, 182 Traumatised subject, 191 Triangularity of reader/consumer, author and text, 80 Triumph des Willens (Leni Riefenstahl, 1935), 169 12 Years a Slave (Steve McQueen, 2013), 198 Twilight (Catherine Hardwicke, 2008), 10, 12, 14, 15n8, 16n19, 77, 100, 102, 111, 117–134, 152n45, 152n46, 152n48, 230, 238n50, 251, 257 U Undirected emotion, 176 V Vampire, 111, 112, 118–120, 122, 123, 126, 127, 129, 133, 153n51, 230, 251

303

Vamps (Amy Heckerling, 2012), 14, 98–102, 111–117, 200 Vietnam, 137, 141, 142, 144, 146, 178, 187, 189, 190, 231 Vietnam films, 142, 145, 187, 189 Vietnam war films, 190 W War film, 77, 134–138, 140, 143, 147, 148, 152n42, 154n60, 165, 167, 173, 175, 180, 184–191, 193, 195, 204, 209, 229, 235n14, 235n15 War genre, 187 War movie, 5, 36, 137 War on Terror, 149, 165–184, 195 Wayne, John, 145 Western (genre), 36, 39, 87, 137, 201 What Women Want (Nancy Meyers, 2000), 37, 93, 151n22 When Harry Met Sally (Rob Reiner, 1989), 82, 84 When They See Us (Ava DuVernay, 2019), 9, 186, 195, 209 White female sexuality, 195 White women, 194, 199, 202, 235n22 Woman director of allusive movies, 40 The Woman in Red (Gene Wilder, 1984), 126 Women, 1–15, 21–62, 79, 82–86, 89, 91, 93, 94, 96, 100, 104, 105, 109, 111, 112, 117, 121, 131, 133, 135, 136, 151n25, 169, 186, 189, 190, 193–195, 199, 200, 202, 210, 213, 216, 219, 220, 224, 234, 235n22, 236n28, 237n50, 252, 253, 255–257, 259n9 Women directors, 11, 25, 42, 65n33, 81, 93, 136, 166 Women directors’ approach to genre filmmaking, 55

304 

INDEX

Women filmmakers, 11, 14, 22, 23, 29, 256, 258 Women genre filmmakers, 24 Women making popular films, 5 Women’s aptitude for heightened genre filmmaking, 82 Women’s authorship, 7, 212 Women’s authorship in cinema, 23 Women’s contemporary mainstream filmmaking, 36 Women’s filmmaking, 5, 6, 21–62, 111, 117 Women’s mainstream work, 11 Women’s practice in genre filmmaking, 23

Women’s screen authorship, 22 Women’s subjectivity, 22 Y You’ve Got Mail (Nora Ephron, 1998), 34, 77, 79, 82–90, 96, 149n6 Z Z-boys, 221–226, 229–233, 248 Zero Dark Thirty (Kathryn Bigelow, 2012), 12, 47, 133, 149, 165–186, 205, 207, 209, 235n13, 236n32