Since we've begun discussing dismemberment, it seems that I can't go two days without witnessing the loss of a body part. Yesterday, I averted my eyes while a serial killer in the HBO-produced mini-series Epitafios claimed his latest victim by engineering a pully system which allowed him to measure the weight required to rip a toe off of a foot. Bruno, the Argentinian psychopath, also enjoys a good decapitation and seems to have a fondness for fingers so I have no doubts that the body-part count will continue to rise.

Unlike so many horror films where the severing of limbs simply adds to the expected gore, in the noir crime thriller Epitafios, dismemberment resonates on a thematic level. The series begins five years after the incineration of 4 high school students who had been held hostage by an angry science teacher as the result of a miscalculation on the part of a hotshot detective, Renzo. With the removal of each arm, finger, head and toe, the serial killer reminds the police of the loss that he has suffered and that all implicated in the students' death have and will suffer. The wholeness that one feels when in the throes of a successful career or romantic love can be literally figuratively torn away with the toss of a match.

When woven into noir, dismemberment can do more than shock us. It shows us that feelings of wholeness that we imagine are ephemeral and precarious. That which seems to make us feel whole--a lover, a child, a limb, a talent--can be torn from us at any moment. When faced with loss, we can choose, like Renzo, to despair. We can choose to find something or someone else that can make us whole as Laura, a pyschologist implicated in the students deaths does when she marries and has a child. We can choose, like the serial killer, to reenact the moment of loss again and again with the hope of achieving control.

Each time that the killer adds to his collection of fingers, Renzo is pulled farther out of his depression. His search for the psychopath forces him to reconnect with his passion and his need for wholeness which is part of the killer's plan to make Renzo suffer. (You can't take away something from someone who has nothing to lose)
Just as he engineereed the toe removal system, he is setting Renzo up for pain.

I look forward to seeing how the story of loss plays out in Epitafios. My hope is that it shows the killer and the audience that it is the search for knowledge which energizes us rather than the object of that search.

Holeness [sic]

I remember reading St. Augustine on perfection, religion’s variation on the theme of wholeness. The conversation occurs across the final books of The Confessions, and concerns the relation between perfection and time. If I remember accurately, Augustine says time is an expression or perception of change. Perfection, however, is eternal and changeless.

By setting the argument up in this way, Augustine positions God and time in a relationship of opposition or contrast. This allows him to establish a theocentric hierarchy that maintains God-as-perfect-being is both prior to and superior to time-as-change. God's superiority lies in what Augustine presents as the self-evident fact that to alter perfection (say, by moving from the timeless realm of God to the historical realm of humanity) is to exchange a greater for a lesser state.

From the perspective of Augustine's model, time is always already a falling off from timeless perfection. We begin with loss, with ruined perfection. Said differently, time represents the unfolding of the nothingness out of which we were created or called. As such, time is both the medium in which we must work out our existence and the antithesis of the perfection or wholeness we are charged to seek.

I’d guess this is not the way most theologians describe Augustine’s model of the inverse relation of time and wholeness. But it is the way I remember it after having been surprised to find strong parallels between Augustine and Lacan (at least the Lacan of the writings on the mirror phase). Augustine recounts how humanity was called out of nothingness toward a perfection which it can never recapture. This is how he accounts for the collective memory of a "Fall" that we find traces of throughout both our collective and our individual lives. Lacan psychologizes this same narrative of primal loss to recount how the human infant is called from an original chaos (infants control very little in their world) toward an idealized wholeness that is then projected into the past as a lost Eden and into the future as an unreachable horizon. As Lacan has it, we assume our identities through an original and originating alienation. Self is always taken up from and through the (m)other.

All of this registers powerfully through our psychology and our art, but none of it is true (if by “true” we mean a one-to-one correspondence between statements and some verifiable ‘external’ state of affairs). Wholeness and fragmentation, perfection and fall, integrity and amputation are binary concepts that depend on each other for their coherence. They sustain an economy in which one cannot do without the other. (A 'top' is only so by virtue of a 'bottom,' and vice versa.) And if we want to understand both how and why such themes circulate in the stories we tell about and to ourselves, I think we need to attend to how this economy functions and to the cultural and psychological work that it is doing.

The underlying economy in stories and models of fall and redemption is unchanged by the fact that the voluptuous rapture of romantic love, the dyadic intensity of mother and infant, and the luminous certainty of spiritual or political conversion all feel like recovery of a lost wholeness – as if we’d found our other half, our personal savior, our once and future home. Even if for the wrong reasons, both Augustine and Lacan are right in this: we are, each of us, radically incomplete, irredeemably finite and frail. This is what each death proves. Everything and everyone we love is shot through by what Annie Dillard calls mortality’s blue streak of nothingness and what Emerson calls the lubricity of existence. It all explodes or slips away on remorseless currents of time.

I think the genre of horror plays with the fort/da economy of integrity and dismemberment in order to make this radical finitude more accessible to experience. Julia Kristeva writes about horror in terms of the theory of abjection – that hovering nausea in which we cannot tell if we are subject or object. One variation of abjection is found in the dread of being unable to distinguish the living from the dead. We see the theme addressed explicitly in films like Night of the Living Dead, short stories like Poe’s “The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar,” and myths of ghosts, vampires, and zombies. (Freud’s theory of romantic love, I would argue, is one vast ghost story. In it, love is contagion - the presence of the dead past in the living present. And ego integrity – his preferred brand of wholeness – is, if not cure, at least prophylactic.) But we also see confusion over where to draw the line between subject and object in countless other horror themes: the relation between mother and son in Psycho (what would Lacan make of this dyad? And what does it expose about one of the West’s core mythemes?), the theme of men making clothing and furniture out of the bodies of women (or the feminist variation of men 'objectivizing' women), and the kind of dismemberment featured in movies like Texas Chainsaw Massacre and Wolf Creek.

I’d like to examine Wolf Creek in particular from this perspective and to think about the difference between dismemberment as a source of humor and as an engine of horror (a marker of abjection). But for now, I think it enough to see that we look away from the fascinations of horror at our peril. Even if what we look toward calls itself paradise, to lose sight of the interdependent economy of totality and fragmentation is to blank ourselves to what is common in the human experience. We lose the very thing we have by being had.

I watched more fingers fly through the air last night, A joke was even cracked by the knife-wielding psychopath. But the humor served only to heighten the anxiety of both the victim and the viewer rather than deflect attention away from any lost. Wolf Creek tells the story of anti-Crocodile Dundee, a serial killer in the Australian Outback who has a nasty habit of luring tourists into an abandoned mining camp. Like lower-budgeted horror films such as Open Water and Blair Witch Project, it begins by alluding to real events which supposedly inspired it and then uses a realistic style to sustain a certain amount of authenticity which left my gut churning and my mind racing with questions such as: Would I have known to smash the killer's head in after I shot him?

As is so often the case, I also asked myself why I continue to subject myself to such torture. After so many splatter flicks, my fascination should have waned, right? I then wondered if I should I go back and read articles on the masochistic pleasure of horror in the hope of curing myself. I may pull out some dusty textbooks, but I doubt that I'll remove all horror flicks from my Netflix queue. Alas. Instead, I'll alleviate some of my own residual anxiety by chatting a bit about what interested in the movie.

Horror fans, especially those from major metropolitan areas, know that rural America is very scary. If you walk through rows of cornfields in the Midwest, you will find little boys with biblical names and sharp scythes. Southern Georgia is populated by in-bred families who enjoy banjos and pretty mouths. You can easily find cannibals in desolate parts of Texas because meat is very good to eat. And don't get me started on Kentucky. What I hadn't really thought of until last night, however, was that rural horror might just be a global phenomona and not confined to the States. But thanks to Hostel and Wolf Creek, I now know that villages in Slovakia can be just as terrifying as the South and the Outback as creepy as Western Virgia.

Now I'm dying (please don't take me literally) to know what rural horror looks like in other parts of the world. What's scares the urbanite in Germany? France? How about Italy? What about Japan, Korea or Argentina? What common anxieties are played on? Are Hostel and Wolf Creek inspired by American horror or are they pulling from a tradition within their own countries?

Is our need for wholeness one of those things which makes us human? Isn't it the search for meaning rather than the meaning which matters? The androids in Bladerunner became human for us at the moment they began to photograph their world and then organize those pictures into a narrative.

There are a number of ways to feel as if our life stories are coherent and meaningful. We can look for meaning in others. We can look for it in the gods. We can also find meaning through building an illusion of wholeness in ourselves spiritually or physically.The smoother our skin, the more symmetrical our features, the more chiseled our limbs, the closer we are to divinity. Happiness is a whole mind and whole body.

That moment when people understand that wholeness is just an illusion is a traumatic one. And narrative reveals the many ways we learn to deal with that trauma. (Which finally leads me back to where I had wanted to begin. . . dismemberment). Among the healthiest ways (I think) to deal with the trauma of lost wholeness is through splatter gore. Being able to laugh at the human condition (the fact that we will never be whole) allows us to keep our sanity. Imagine how Peter Jackson would shoot the Saving Private Ryan scene of which Margaret writes?

Dismemberment and Embarrassment

A psychologist friend of mine once complained to me that all her clients come to her wanting to get a closer look at themselves. She, on the other hand, has always hoped to gain a little distance. At the time this seemed the smartest thing a psychologist ever said to me, and right now it seems to fit into our discussion. Her point was that her clients' desires to dissect themselves never lead to self-knowledge. The illusion of wholeness achieved through distance (as in the mirror-stage) is at least more comforting, if not more enlightening. One just has to avoid looking too closely.

The two ideas we have running right now, intoxication and dismemberment, remind me of another film about losing body parts, or at least the threat of it. In the spectacularly stylised Omaha Beach landing sequence in (dickflickmaker) Spielberg's Saving Private Ryan, a soldier who is missing an arm wanders into the frame. Oblivious to the bullets flying around him, he searches through the bodies littering the beach until he finds the disconnected limb. Picking it up, he drifts aimlessly away. Literally disarmed by the violence around him, he serves for me as an analogy for our most basic fear about what images, especially violence ones, can do to spectators. The belief that violent images can disarm, that is charm, fascinate or intoxicate, drives the popular fear and condemnation of violent representations. Through intoxicating images (or ideas) we might possibly be opened up to suggestions we wouldn't ordinarily entertain, if we remained, so to speak, whole. Maybe this is why we worry so much about letting our children watch something like Lost while encouraging them whole-heartedly to read about it in books like Harry Potter, Artemis Fowl and Lemony Snicket. We don't think of kids as finished human beings, so we fear they might be particularly susceptible to images.

Apropos Poe. I have always been fascinated by the under-current and (as c-franklin pointed out in the quote) sometimes explicit element of embarrassment in his stories. I think there must be some connection between dismemberment and embarrassment. Last night I watched yet another TV program about the dangers of liposuction and cosmetic surgery and couldn't help but connect these poor people's disfigurement, and the accompanying embarrassment, with the ideas about dismemberment and wholeness circulating here.

Dismembering and Remembering

I once drafted but didn’t finish an article titled “Dismembering and Remembering in Poe.” It was about his short story called “The Man That Was Used Up.” The narrator is a quasi-detective figure investigating a character named A.B.C. Smith. The problem is that the narrator can’t get a definite fix on Smith. We can’t remember when or where they were introduced. As he says: “The truth is — that the introduction was attended, upon my part, with a degree of anxious embarrassment which operated to prevent any definite impressions of either time or place. I am constitutionally nervous — this, with me, is a family failing, and I can't help it. In especial, the slightest appearance of mystery — of any point I cannot exactly comprehend — puts me at once into a pitiable state of agitation” (The Annotated Tales of Edgar Allan Poe, p. 566).

The closer the narrator gets to composing Smith’s story, the more discomposed Smith appears to become. It eventually turns out, that Smith is a prosthetic man. Dismembered time and again in the war (the tale was published in 1839), he has been slowly replaced by mechanical arms, legs, and organs. So when he prepares for bed at night, taking off his various prostheses, there is no one left to hold the various mechanisms together.

This, I think, is a primal fear of detective fiction (think of how it plays out in Oedipus), and I think the “digital” updating of the genre in Kiss, Kiss, Bang, Bang brings us back to one of the West’s formative worries about human relationships – that trying to understand our lives can leave us both literally and figuratively cut off from ourselves.

Watching Harry, I laughed and winced on cue, but I felt the threat of what is explored in Poe’s tongue-in-cheek tale. At the center of this assemblage of “cuts” there might be nothing there.

Missing body parts could serve as the topic for a whole other blog, couldn't it? We could talk about how the missing body parts assume different body parts according to genre and gender. Nothing is funnier than a severed head rolling out of an overnight bag in black comedy. But a severed limb in movie like Hostel? Not quite as funny.

Just as Margaret says, the missing finger in the comic noir points to Harry's impotence as well as towards the direction of film noir. The first neo-noir that came to mind when reading the post was Romeo is Bleeding. It's been a century since I've seen the movie but Lena Olin's one-legged assassin remains etched in my mind. Unlike Harry, her lost body part becomes a symbol of her power and her ability to transcend gender. (I still love the cyborg fatale. I admit it) Although Boxing Helena has many flaws, the fact that its heroine achieves emotional liberation once her limbs have been amputated raises questions about castrated/castrating women. (I can't help but think of people who choose to get their limbs amputated.)

I probably should save the following for another thread, but I wanted to ask a question. Is there any way we can persuade network and basic cable television to eliminate commercials for absorbing shows? Perhaps HBO will buy the few series that cry for a commerical free ride (Battlestar Galactica, Lost, Resuce Me) After watching TV series on HBO and DVD, I'm finding it almost impossible to enjoy moments of entertainment intoxication. But like any addict, I can't seem to hold out. If it's on and I'm at home, I gotta turn it on.

If I were looking for paper topics for Kiss Kiss Bang Bang (and I have to admit I'm glad I'm not), I'd have to focus on the finger. One reason for this might be because my children have been running around a lot lately holding up one finger in imitation of Spongebob's starfish friend Patrick saying "If you hold up your little finger, you're intelligent." For Robert Downey Jr.'s Harry the on-again, off-again finger is pretty much a clear indication of his lack of knowledge (ok, so it's not his little finger, but it's a digit all the same). Despite his sometimes desperate attempts to hold on to his severed finger, its repeated lack "points out" how vulnerable he is. Try as he might and smart-ass that he is, he just keeps adding things up wrong. Harry's missing digit as a form of castration also further illustrates the homme fatal aspect that Cim mentioned. Though Harmony serves as the castrating woman, her dismembering is totally accidental. The second time the finger is removed, it is by the tough-guy couple, Mr. Fire and Mr. Frying Pan, who seem a kind of double for the Harry/Gay Perry pairing. And if anybody in this movie is doing the manipulating (the associations with the hand and fingers comes up again), it has to be Perry. The vulnerability of the human body played for laughs (the dog ultimately eating it or shall we say "sampling it") is just one of many aspects of Kiss Kiss Bang Bang that shows the direction in which noir is developing in contemporary Hollywood. Might we call it a digitized noir?

By the way, Germany beat Ecuador yesterday and things have returned to normal, at least until Saturday.

While reading Margaret's post, I experienced the rush that she writes about. The concept of entertainment intoxication is quite suggestive and contributes to a personal rush because it can be taken in so many directions and prompts so many questions: What is my intoxicant of choice? (Answer: Twisting narratives seasoned with spectacular violence and dark humor) What kind of rush am I looking for? (Answer: Different kinds. But like Margaret. I like the rush of ideas.) What would be my definition of a bad trip? (Answer: When the violence gets too dark and the line is crossed as in many a Harvey Keitel movie.) What indicates addiction? (Answer: Deep disappointment that your Entertainment Weekly didn't come on Saturday. Purchase of Soap Operate Digest to satisfy need for ongoing storylines.) Why are some intoxicants (e.g. beer) socially acceptable whereas others are not (e.g. heroin)? Why is it okay for a child to get lost in a Harry Potter book but not get lost in Lost?

Belatedly Jumping In

After leaving Cim to her own devices for a couple of weeks, I've finally managed to get my domestic ducks lined up well enough to add my two cents.

I've enjoyed reading Cim's blogs—seems like old times, so to speak--, but what speaks to me immediately is the comment made by c-franklin to Cim's blog on Battlestar Galactica and Rescue Me (two shows unavailable in the wastes of German TV) about "the model of TV as escape." One of the things Cim and I had in common in grad school was our firm belief in the intellectual and pedagogical value of fun (thanks to R: L. Rutsky). Personally, I don't see the need to make distinctions between escape and engagement, entertainment and enlightenment. Most recently I have begun to think about this in terms of intoxication, not as in vino veritas or through the wonders of psychedelics, but rather a kind of entertainment intoxication that allows me the rethink precisely because I get to escape, if only for a little while. It may be an exaggeration of style, as in a film like From Hell, or a quirk of narrative form, like in Memento, or even just an idea that occurs to me while I watching or reading that gives me what I can only call a rush. Humans have an innate need to alter their perception, to be intoxicated, otherwise fetuses wouldn't briefly clamp their umbilical cords to cut off the oxygen supply and give themselves a little rush. And that's why we went to all that trouble to come up with movies and TV: both provide an easy fix.

Unfortunately, I live in a country where TV is truly a wasteland, with only a few bright spots being imported or copied from more visually enlightened cultures. I'll get to why I think this is another day. Right now our TV landscape is particularly barren because of the Soccer World Championships. This afternoon, most of Germany will close down from 4:00-6:00 pm so that flag-waving, face-painted fussball fans can forget about everything else but the thrill of possibly routing world power Ecuador. Both teams are already qualified for the next round. The outcome today is essentially meaningless. Nevertheless, normal and normally thinking Germans are overcoming a half-century's fear of showing any form of nationalism in their enthusiasm for soccer. One might understand why Ecuadorians would get all excited and feel a sense of national pride. But Germans? Since WWII Germans have done whatever they could to distance themselves from the notion of the Volk, calling themselves Europeans rather than Germans, identifying more with the continent than the land. The intoxication of the World Championships seems to be allowing them to reengage German-ness in a way nobody really needs to get too worried about. And in the bargain they get to forget about the high level of unemployment, the imminent tax-hikes and the crisis in medical care for a few hours.

I'm just holding my breath waiting for the next season of Lost to begin. Matthew Fox speaks incredible German….

Finding paper topics in movies is a difficult habit to break once started. I remember wondering whether I'd lose my love of movies when I began studying film. What I found and what still seems to be the case is that I just added another type of pleasure to the viewing experience. Even after a good number of years away from the classroom, I still enjoy imagining how I'd talk about movies in a paper or to a class.

Kiss Kiss Bang Bang would be an absolute blast to teach in a film noir survey. I'm sure that professors and grad students all over will be adding it to their syllabi. From the genre (film noir) to the pairing of smart, talented bad boys (Val Kilmer to and Robert Downey Jr) to the chapter titles (inspired by hard-boiled detective fiction) to the title (I'm guess that it's taken from the Pauline Kael article), it begs to be put into dialogue with the genre itself, Hollywood and just a bunch of friends who have a thing for bruised detectives, sexy femme fatales and tricky plots.

One of the themes I might focus on in a discussion is how the function of the femme fatale falls to a male character. Harmony looks the part of the siren. As the product of a dysfunctional family and a wanna be actress, she is initially presented as a femme fatale. But she also seems to retain some Midwestern integrity which makes her different from those slipper dames in Out of the Past and Double Indeminity.

Even though Harmony and Robert Downey Jr.are paired, the more interesting couple is Val Kilmer (Gay Perry) and Robert Downey Jr. In fact, I might want to reflect on the homme fatale'ish features of Gay Perry. Like Willem Dafoe in To Live and Die in LA, he's aligned with visual style in a way that femme fatales typically are and in a way that Harmony is not. Kilmer seems much more adept at manipulating appearances than she is.

In a recent issue of Entertainment Weekly, a critic discussed how television has improved. He noted the higher quality of television and I have to agree. It could be the case that I'm getting incredibly dull in my old age or that I can't afford a babysitter each time that a new movies comes out, but television has become very attractive lately. I don't remember having so many shows competing for my attention. Just a decade ago, I was lucky to have The X-Files, NYPD Blue or Star Trek Next Generation. Now I find that I have to wait until my TV card has some free space before I can audition the newbies. Fortunately, NetFlix exists so that I can audition those newbies off season.

My own pilot season begins in May when repeats and reality shows rule the channels. Recently, I've been pleased to find that all the good things I've heard about Battlestar Galactica and Rescue Me are true. Though both emerge from very different genres, but they share a visual style and narrative interests that I'm happy to see are very hip today. The smart, funny and sexy characters exist in worlds so bleak that even the slightest trace of hope shines brightly. In BG, the creation of human beings rebel against their makers in the name of that which created human beings. A small number of human beings have survived and spend their days fleeing the Cylons hoping against hope that an old myth about Earth is true. Rescue Me's depiction of post-911 NYC may not be quite as bleak, but the Denis Leary makes up for the difference as a painfully funny anti-hero.

As I mentioned, I am textually promiscuous. Depending on my mood, I can find Laguna Beach as entertaining as my beloved Deadwood. One of my favorite indulgences is American Idol. Even though I don't like the songs most of the contestants choose, I look forward to the "moments" which Simon Cowell mentions throughout the competition. Each week, music gets arranged for the contestants, costumes are chosen and personalities are packaged through interviews with the hope that a star-making moment will be achieved. And as hard as everyone works to give a birth to a star, most people realize and accept that any star-making machine relies ultimately on magic more than science. Yes, Ryan made a conscious effort to highlight Kelly Pickler's naivete, but it was just something about Kelly herself which made her sparkle.

There have been books which attempt to quantify what makes a star a star. The entertainment industry is built on the belief that there is a process for making stars (and making hits). Shows such as American Idol have foregrounded the star making process. Although conditions can be arranged so that a star catches fire, the source of the initial spark remains mysterious. The magic of stars for me is grounded in that mystery.

My favorite star-making moments in movies: John Wayne in Stage Coach, Grace Kelly in Rear Window, Rita Hayworth in Gilda.

Whenever someone asks me why I like Deadwood, I think from now on I'm simply respond with Swearengen's threat to E.B.: "Gabriel's trumpet will produce you from the ass of a pig."

The adjective colorful does not begin to suggest the wondrous qualities of Deadwood's language. Having always been someone who preferred the cinematic, I'm a little surprised by how much I enjoy the language of Deadwood. As is the case when I listen to Shakespeare, I find myself completely absorbed in language of which I understand only about 70%. Rather than catch each and every phrase, I succeed in only following the linguistic drift. It's an interesting and oddly compelling sensation that I can also liken to the experience you might have when you're trying to apply classroom knowledge of a foreign language when speaking to a native.

The opacity of Deadwood's language might be one of the reasons that it hasn't taken off like the Sopranos. But the shadows of the sepia-toned Western town can work their magic if you stop expecting to understand each and every word. Yuu will find yourself enjoying the cadence of the language. Yes, Deadwood's language can feel as if it's as muddy as its streets but that earth is truly fertile stuff. (yeah, i'm stretching with that metaphor.)

First Tony Soprano coerced me into spending my Sunday nights with HBO. Then Carrie (and NYC)seduced me with her wit and style. After they worked their charms, there was Deadwood, Rome and now Big Love (Carnivale or Six Feet Under didn't captivate.) The shows created wonderful worlds and drew me into them.

I've thought a lot about the different reasons why I enjoy Sunday night HBO. Sex and the City didn't let all those really cool designer clothes cover up a very real heart. Watching Tony's tragic flaws lead to inevitable disaster is irresistable to me. Rome is as spectacular as it is compelling drama. But I hadn't realized until recently how much the programming shaped my viewing experience on HBO. Without commercials to temporarilly pull me out of the TV's shows fictional world, I realized that HBO's shows truly worked with each other to create different viewing experiences.

When Sex and the City preceded The Sopranos (Let's just forget Arliss. What was HBO thinking?), my Sunday night felt like more of an urban experience. I ended up wanting to revisit my roots in the Tri-State area. Perhaps Sex and the City left me a bit more cynical and detached when viewing The Sopranos. Maybe something slightly jaded surfaced in me which distanced me from the mobster's lives and made it easier to watch. But I definitely didn't end my night feeling as if I had been staring into the blackness of the human soul. Sunday certainly became a somber night when Al Swearengen followed in Tony's footsteps. After 2 hours of creative and often wondrous profanity and excessive violence, I felt emotionally drained. I often wondered if there was something masochistic about sympathizing with sociopaths for two hours.

Initially I was disappointed when I heard that Big Love would follow The Sopranos this year. I had grown to enjoyimmersing myself in blood and mud. However, I gradually grew to appreciate all the big, big love the Henriksson's had to offer. Sunday night became a night where the values which sustain the American family were reimagined as criminal. (And deeply middle-class me so enjoys such a depiction). Although many viewers seemed disappointed by the closing shot of The Soproanos this season, I thought it was a perfect way to end the season, especially when followed by the apparent outing of the polygamous family in Big Love. It reminds us that the most poignant human drama is taking place next door.

I've been thinking about how I'd write about Cars if I were in grad school. It would be great fun to look at the all shoes (or should I say tires) that walked the same path as Lightning McQueen in the movie. Within the movie itself, we can see signposts pointing to those heroes who wore the shoes (Yep, I should switch metaphors). Think about Newman in Hud or Cool Hand Luke. And of course there's the racecar's namesake Steve McQueen. Newman and McQueen both played characters who either chose to live outside the law or were forced to. Unlike their counterparts from classic Hollywood westerns, characters such as Cool Hand Luke, Butch Cassidy, and Bullit, did not end up seeing heir stories tied up in as neat a bow as Lightning's. In the sixties, as cars replaced horses, filmmakers began to question generic conventions. Contradictions that had been masked were set into relief. It became impossible for the reluctant hero to survive on the edge of the law. He couldn't simply marry the schoolteacher, keep his job as the town sherriff and keep his edge. In the sixites, we watched characters on screen who had to choose between the individual's needs and those of the society. It wasn't good enough to have your cake and eat it too. The hero might end up reluctantly help some kind of community (which was often a collection of criminals), but ultimately he'd have to escape society's constraints one way or another.

I'm imagining an ending for Cars that would take place with Steve McQueen and Paul Newman flick from the sixties. We might see Lightning crashing into the audience at the end of the race. We might see him driving off into the desert where he'd end up finding a town just like the Hudson (Newmans' car-achter) did in Cars. The only way for him to find a place in the community would have been for him to lose his bad boy image just as Hudson did.

Some other topics that would be fun to explore would be Cars and its outlaw hero as they relate to other genres such as road movies and racecar films.

Technically astonishing and highly imaginative, Cars will be one of the biggest summer blockbusters this summer. It's another Pixar creation which delights both parents and children with its humor at the same times as it warms their hearts with old-fashioned American values. A brash, talented racecar, Lightning McQueen (what a perfect name) learns that you can't achieve success without the help of friends and you can't find happiness without being able to help those friends. The film captures the nostalgia for 1950s small-town America where life was slower and gas was much, much cheaper. We learn along with Lightning Mcqueen that what ultimately matters is the community not the individual. Our reluctant hero is able to maintain his individuality, achieve success while still helping the community.

We've seen the conflict between the reluctant hero and society played out in countless films, including many westerns. But what makes Cars really interesting is how the conflict between individual and community is imagined and resolved. The film imagines America as a nation of gas-guzzling cars who find true happiness when taking the time to smell the roses (which might be masked by the exhaust of those cars) and enjoy the spectacular American West. In the film, the same car culture which has led to the creation of exburbs and suburbs that have contributed to the death of downtowns is used to celebrate the importance of community.

I'll talk more about Cars as a western later.

getting my feet wet

I'm going to be chatting about movies, TV shows, radio, books, magazine articles. Basically, anything textual. My hope is that I can persuade my friend Margaret (and anyone else who happens on this blog) to join in the dialogue. Just to warn you, I'm textually promiscuous by training and by personal taste. An ad during American Idol can be as appealing to me as a poem by Rilke.

But back to my erstwhile partner in crime, Margaret. At grad school, we found that we shared similar taste for violent films that I guess are considered the opposite of chickflicks. My dissertation was on meaningful violence in crime thrillers and westerns of the 40s, the type of violence that was meant to make you cringe while thinking about some larger moral or political issue. Margaret's dissertation focused on aestheticized violence, the kind of violence that wows rather than disturbs. But I'll stop talking about her work because as I mentioned above, I want her to join in.