Darkness in the Bliss-Out

A Reconsideration of the Films of Steven Spielberg

AvJames Kendrick

Häftad, Engelska, 2014

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Beskrivning

While there has been a significant outpouring of scholarship on Steven Spielberg over the past decade, his films are still frequently discussed as being paternalistic, escapist, and reliant on uncomplicated emotions and complicated special effects. Even those who view his work favorably often see it as essentially optimistic, reassuring, and conservative. James Kendrick takes an alternate view of Spielberg's cinema and proposes that his films—even the most popular ones that seem to trade in easy answers and comforting, reassuring notions of cohesion and narrative resolution—are significantly darker and more emotionally and ideologically complex than they are routinely given credit for. Darkness in the Bliss-Out demonstrates, through close analysis of a wide range of Spielberg's films, that they are only reassuring on the surface, and that their depths embody a complex and sometimes contradictory view of the human condition.

Produktinformation

Utgivningsdatum:2014-07-03
Mått:150 x 224 x 13 mm
Vikt:360 g
Format:Häftad
Språk:Engelska
Antal sidor:248
Förlag:Bloomsbury Publishing Plc
ISBN:9781441146045

Utforska kategorier

Film inom Kultur

Mer om författaren

James Kendrick is an Associate Professor of Film and Digital Media at Baylor University, USA. He is the author of Hollywood Bloodshed: Violence in 1980s American Cinema (2009) and Film Violence: History, Ideology, Genre (2009), as well as numerous book chapters and journal articles. He is also the film and video critic for QNetwork.com.

Recensioner i media

James Kendrick is that rare critic who sees and understands the dark side of Steven Spielberg’s films. Kendrick perceptively explores the ways that Spielberg has grappled in film with the nature of human suffering and with personal and historical trauma. Kendrick reveals a depth of complexity in the films that challenges the popular understanding of Spielberg as being mainly a director of popcorn movies.

Innehållsförteckning

PrefaceIntroduction—Steven Spielberg and the Politics of BlissChapter 1—'I Didn’t Want to See This': Weekend America and Its Discontents in Close Encounters of the Third Kind, E.T., and PoltergeistChapter 2—'Americans Fighting Americans': Incoherence and Animal Comedy in 1941Chapter 3—'What Exactly Are We Applauding?' Indiana Jones and the Ideologies of Heroism and American ExceptionalismChapter 4—'Lost and Done For:' The Rejection of War Fantasies in Empire of the Sun and War HorseChapter 5—'For the World’s More Full of Weeping Than You Can Understand': Humanity and Inhumanity in A.I. Artificial IntelligenceWorks CitedIndex