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Explores the way that popular film brings to a "sayable" level that which haunts us in the media headlines.
We are haunted by what we cannot fully identify, by what we cannot make identical to what we already are, have, and know. AIDS is visible, as is the South Central Los Angeles riot/revolt, the dead eyes of Amy Fisher, the pubic hair in Clarence Thomas' Coke, the Branch Davidian Compound shimmering in the distance, and much more. The intensity of all this does not escape the general public. Popular film plugs into this haunting power because it attracts a mass audience. This book is about what haunts the headlines as well as the Big Screen in America during 1990-1992.
"This book is so very topical—in the best of all possible senses. It uses contemporary films to comment upon broader social issues: violence, homophobia, sexual abuse, television, capitalism, class, marriage, ecology, democracy, greed, subcultures, and the list could go on. The fears of America—the hauntings by the Rodney King decision, presidential elections, wilding, Bensonhurst—inform and form the insights into the films as well. The mutual interplay is productive and exciting.
"The thesis that popular culture, though constrained by the Market and its values, plugs into what 'haunts' contemporary culture at large, is original, important, disturbing. This is a theoretically sophisticated work that wears its theory with grace. The bringing together of the personal 'hauntings' with the films and headlines is particularly effective." — Linda Hutcheon, University of Toronto
"The author tackles new territory in a strikingly new fashion; it is engagingly postmodern and reader-friendly. This book begins a project of cultural redemption, in that it is valuable to the scholar and the casual reader alike, and not an elitist text in any sense." — Wheeler Winston Dixon, University of Nebraska
Prologue
Basic and Postmodern Instincts: The New Popular Realism in Film
Hunting the Haunted Heart
Moving Laterally across the Capes of Fear
Rebels and Rioters with Unsayable Causes
Home Alone Watching the Rodney King Tape, Or, Having Jeffrey Dahmer Over for Dinner
Rocking the Cradle of Family Values
Free Market or Free Play?
Intermezzo: Between Film and Culture
The Free Play of Popular Film
Geckoid Democracy and the Garfieldian American Dream
The Unforgiven: Histories and "Indians"
Robbin' N' the Hood N' the Nabe
Guns and Provolone: 'Wilding' and Wiseguys Doing the Wrong Thing
After Bob Roberts: Was This a Postmodern Presidential Campaign?
The Final Dance around the Planet: Green Space versus Self Space
Notes