Author:

M. Keither Brooker
Critical Position:
Author
Title:
Postmodern Hollywood
Publisher/publication:
Praeger
Place of Publication:
USA
Date:
2007
Chapter/ Article
Breaking up is hard to avoid
Subject/key points and potential for use
Capitalism/ historical context
Quotation
‘Despite its embedded critique of capitalism, the portrayal in Fight Club of the anticapitalistic guerrilla force seriously diminishes any potential
impact of that critique. For one thing, the bloody violence of the fight clubs hardly seems feasible as a means of transcending the antagonistic
social relations of capitalism. Nor does this fighting really seem preferable to the acquisition of IKEA furnishings. Furthermore, the guerrilla
force that arises in opposition to capitalism seems to have no ideological agenda other than pure destruction.’

‘After all, films such as Fight Club, Natural Born Killers and Requiem For A dream are so thoroughly about the impossibility of utopia that they
can offer a little in the way of utopian alternatives to the contemporary America they present as such a psychic wasteland.’

Author:
Mike Chopra-Gant
Critical Position:
Author
Title:
Hollywood Genres and Postwar America
Publisher/publication:
I.B Tauris & Co Ltd
Place of Publication:
USA and Canada
Date:
2006
Chapter/ Article
The troubled postwar family
Subject/key points and potential for use
Historical context
Quotation
‘The absence of fathers on military service (and mothers engaged in war work) destabilised the family, leading to a ‘relaxation of sexual
morality’ and to ‘neglect of children and so to a rise in juvenile delinquency.’

Author:
Stella Bruzzi
Critical Position:
Author
Title:
Men’s Cinema: Masculinity and Mise en Scene in Hollywood
Publisher/publication:
Edinburgh University Press
Place of Publication:
Cheshire, UK
Date:
2013
Chapter/ Article
How Mise en Scene tells the mans story
Subject/key points and potential for use
Masculinity in film
Quotation
‘The strains, the repressive instincts, the disavowals and all other attendant strategies deployed to hold up the ‘normality’ and hegemony of
white, middle class, heterosexual masculinity emerge furtively but frequently within classical Hollywood cinema, at a time when the explicit
questioning of masculinity’s status would have been more problematic. Though the cinematic expression of male anxiety is evidently not
confined to melodramas and film noir, the evocation of the ‘strain’ of masculinity is particularly interesting when functioning within a markedly
feminised space.’
‘Ultimately masculinity is stopped from descending into ‘pure spectacle’ by the acceptance of Mulvey’s psychodynamic paradigm, a paradigm
that is here reiterated at the expense of further discussion of style and aesthetics as generators of meaning.’