Bit of a change of pace! I had the honor to be asked to speak at the American College of Greece (Deree) for Sociology Week. The theme was Social Causes and Impact of Populism and Extremism, which gave me the opportunity to break out the Nazis-in-film material I’ve unsuccessfully been trying to condense into a short-enough video. This talk was for an audience of Greek sociology students and faculty (Deree doesn’t have a film department). They were all lovely and responsive, so definitely listen through to the Q&A.

In this twenty-minute talk, I discuss the figure of the Nazi in pop culture from Star Trek to Fight Club, as well as where Hollywood leaves us vulnerable to fascist ideology in disguise.

[Below is a transcript of the intro and presentation. It does not include the Q&A that starts around 25:00.]

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Warning: this video contains scenes from the movie Showgirls.

Think you know what true happiness looks like? You might have learned that from Disney.

What makes a war movie look real or feel true? Why are Spielberg’s films considered such classics? And what was up with Inglourious Basterds anyway? (Warning: graphic violence, Holocaust scenes/references, spoilers for Schindler’s List and Inglourious Basterds)

Spirited Away is the best coming of age movie.

Update: This video was taken down by Studio Ghibli for copyright infringement. You can find an archive version here.

[By request: here is the original paper I wrote for my BA class “Film Violence and Voyeurism”, which I later presented at the 2013 ACTC English Majors’ Conference, and which I used as the basis for my first YouTube video “Understanding Psycho: The Uncanny”.]

One of the more curious things about Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho is its lack of a single protagonist to carry the bulk of the narrative. About a third of the way into the film the plot suddenly switches its focus from Marion—who (to the shock of everyone who assumed she was the protagonist) is brutally murdered in Hitchcock’s most famous sequence—to a murder investigation involving Norman, “Mother”, Marion’s lover Sam, and her sister Lila. Marion’s murder may be necessary to generate the investigation, but that doesn’t explain why Hitchcock dedicates more than forty minutes of his 110-minute film to what would, in the context of a straightforward whodunit, be merely a backstory. However, Marion’s story is not a red herring; it is just as important as Norman’s, and only by looking at the two together, as halves of a whole, does one begin to understand the importance of their relationship. In “In His Bold Gaze My Ruin Is Writ Large”, Slavoj Žižek argues for a reading where Norman serves as Marion’s uncanny double:

[He is] nothing but her mirror-negative… Marion’s world is the world of contemporary American everyday life, whereas Norman’s world is its nocturnal reverse… The relationship between these two worlds… is that of the two surfaces of the Moebius band: if we progress far enough on one surface, all of a sudden we find ourselves on its reverse. (227)

To understand Psycho, the film must be seen not as two separate narratives, but as a Moebius strip. By examining parallels between the two, it becomes clear that, like day and night, Marion and Norman’s stories are not separate but complimentary and cyclical.

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[Note: You guys said you were interested, so here goes! This started as a paper I wrote for an MA class called ‘Exploitation Cinema’ where I placed the NBC show Hannibal in a wider context of cannibalism in film. It’s a little rough, since I’ve cut it down by about 2,000 words and edited it to make it a little more accessible.]

In what is now an iconic scene from Silence of the Lambs (1991), Hannibal ‘the Cannibal’ Lecter taunts FBI trainee Clarice Starling by telling her about a census taker he once killed. ‘I ate his liver with some fava beans and a nice Chianti’, he says, sucking in a hissing breath as though relishing the taste that lingers in his memory. Lecter and his psychiatrist enthrall Clarice—and, by extension, the audience—with verbal reconstructions of his murders, lingering on the cannibal’s perverse sensual enjoyment. Yet while the early Lecter films show only titillating glimpses of the killer’s ‘art’, the camera in the NBC serial Hannibal (2013 –) lingers with an almost detached fascination on the artist’s corpse-tableaus and haut-cuisine dishes, as though tempting the audience with their grim beauty. Instead of titillating us with tales of gore, Hannibal’s Hannibal dismembers and prepares each corpse in front of our eyes, holding the finished plate under our noses as though to say, ‘There, doesn’t that look good?’ Lecter’s pleasure is no longer a sign of incomprehensible monstrosity; it has become our pleasure as well.

Where does this perverse allegiance between audience and killer come from? The cannibal figure in fiction has evolved significantly over time. In Cannibalism in Literature and Film, Jennifer Brown argues that cannibalism is common in fiction not because it has been much practiced in reality (anthropological evidence shows incidents of cannibalism are actually very rare) but rather because it is an almost universal taboo, thus serving as an easy indicator of threatening and encroaching Otherness. The view of the cannibal is that of dangerously ambiguous figure, one who crosses or disregards the essential dividing line that separate the human body (in most cultures considered sacred, superior, or inviolate) from animal bodies. Human consumption of human flesh upsets what Brown calls ‘the most fundamental boundary between the “self and else”’ (7).

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