Transfigurations: Violence, Death and Masculinity in American Cinema »

Asbjørn Grønstad is professor of visual culture at the University of Stavanger, Norway.

In many senses, viewers have cut their teeth on the violence in American cinema: from Anthony Perkins slashing Janet Leigh in our most infamous of shower scenes; to the 1970s masterpieces of Martin Scorsese, Sam Peckinpah, and Francis Ford Coppola; to our present-day undertakings in imagining global annihilations through terrorism, war, and alien grudges. Transfigurations brings our cultural obsession with film violence into a renewed dialogue with contemporary theory, challenging the orthodoxies of previous research on film violence and contributing a fresh perspective to how we might reconceptualize fictional forms of this particular kind of aggressive cinema. Asbjörn Gronstad argues that the use of violence in Hollywood films should be understood semiotically rather than viewed realistically; Tranfigurations thus alters both our methodology of reading violence in films and the meanings we assign to them, depicting violence not as a self-contained incident, but a convoluted network of our own cultural ideologies and beliefs.

 

Acknowledgments 7 Prolegomenon 9 Introduction Film Violence as Figurality 13 I Screen Violence: Five fallacies Empiricism 26 Aristotelianism 32 Aestheticism 39 Mythologicism 49 Mimeticism 56 II Filming Death
1 The Transfigured Image 65
2 Narrating Violence, or, Allegories of Dying 80 III Male Subjectivities at the Margins
3 Mean Streets: Death and Disfiguration in Hawks's Scarface 97
4 Kubrick's The Killing and the Emplotment of Death 116
5 Blood of a Poet: Peckinpah's The Wild Bunch 130
6 As I Lay Dying: Violence and Subjectivity in Tarantino's Reservoir Dogs 155
7 One-Dimensional Men: Fincher's Fight Club and the End of Masculinity 172 Postscript 187 Notes 191 Bibliography 221 Index of Names 261 Index of Film Titles 267 Index of Subjects 271