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Examines the many forms of cinematic "badness" over the past one hundred years, from Nosferatu to The Talented Mr. Ripley.
Violence and corruption sell big, especially since the birth of action cinema, but even from cinema's earliest days, the public has been delighted to be stunned by screen representations of negativity in all its forms-evil, monstrosity, corruption, ugliness, villainy, and darkness. Bad examines the long line of thieves, rapists, varmints, codgers, dodgers, manipulators, exploiters, conmen, killers, vamps, liars, demons, cold-blooded megalomaniacs, and warmhearted flakes that populate cinematic narrative. From Nosferatu to The Talented Mr. Ripley, the contributors consider a wide range of genres and use a variety of critical approaches to examine evil, villainy, and immorality in twentieth-century film.
List of Illustrations
Acknowledgments
Introduction: From Bad to Worse
MURRAY POMERANCE
I. IT'S A SLIMY WORLD, AFTER ALL
1. Flickers: On Cinema's Power for Evil
TOM GUNNING
2. Monstrosity and the Bad-White-Body Film
GWENDOLYN AUDREY FOSTER
3. Beyond the Thin Line of Black and Blue: Movies and Police Misconduct in Los Angeles
AARON BAKER
4. Genocidal Spectacles and the Ideology of Death
CHRISTOPHER SHARRETT
5. Bad, Worse, Worst: 8MM and Hollywood's Bad Boys of Porn
PETER LEHMAN
6. Toxic Corps: Rage against the Corporate State
KIRBY FARRELL
7. The Ghost World of Neoliberalism: Abandoning the Abandoned Generation
HENRY A. GIROUX
II. AUTEURS OF NEGATIVITY, ICONS OF DARKNESS
8. "How Will I Get My Opium?": Jean Cocteau and the Treachery of Friendship
WHEELER WINSTON DIXON
9. The Sweeter the Kitten the Sharper the Claws: Russ Meyer's Bad Girls
KRISTEN HATCH
10. Wanted for Murder: The Strange Case of Eric Portman
TONY WILLIAMS
11. The Arch Archenemies of James Bond
STEVEN WOODWARD
12. From Fu Manchu to M. Butterfly and Irma Vep: Cinematic Incarnations of Chinese Villainy
GINA MARCHETTI
13. On the Bad Goodness of Born to Be Bad: Auteurism, Evaluation, and Nicholas Ray's Outsider Cinema
DANA POLAN
14. The Villain in Hitchcock: "Does He Look Like a 'Wrong One' to You?"
WILLIAM ROTHMAN
III. THE CHARISMA OF VILLAINY
15. The "Evil Medieval": Gender, Sexuality, Miscegenation, and Assimilation in Cat People
ALEXANDER DOTY AND PATRICIA CLARE INGHAM
16. Wicked Old Ladies from Europe: Jeanne Moreau and Marlene Dietrich on the Screen and Live
E. ANN KAPLAN
17. Darkness Visible: Images of Nazis in American Film
LESTER D. FRIEDMAN
18. "The Whole Fucking World Warped Around Me": Bad Kids and Worse Contexts
CYNTHIA FUCHS
19. Searching for Blobby Fissures: Slime, Sexuality, and the Grotesque
REBECCA BELL-METEREAU
20. Crazy Like a Prof: Mad Science and the Transgressions of the Rational
INA RAE HARK
21. Tom Ripley's Talent
MURRAY POMERANCE
List of Contributors
Index