The writing that addressed the design and make-up of monsters, so to speak, in the "toolbox" section was useful. The game chThis was such a mixed bag.
The writing that addressed the design and make-up of monsters, so to speak, in the "toolbox" section was useful. The game changer piece for me was Margrit Shildrick's "The Self's Clean and Proper Body" for her analysis of how conjoined twins shake up Western philosophy's understanding of what and who is the individual. Suzuki's chapter on techno-Orientalism in narratives about the Pacific in US blockbusters had me reevaluating US made kaiju fare. Donna Haraway's theorisation of social nature that includes human, unhuman, machine had me neck-deep immersed despite it being easily three times as long as every other chapter.
However, as I read I became increasingly confused at the selection. A collection of mostly global north writers with a US-American editor published with a US-American college but not even Annalee Newitz's Lovecraft essay was focused on anti-Blackness, although she may have been the only contributor to cite a Black intellectual. Not a single contributor was of (visibly) African descent? Then, I read Weinstock's essay in which he wrote in all sincerity that monstrosity was no longer about appearance but "refers first and foremost to the intention and desire to do harm to the innocent" followed up by some of the most dehumanising rhetoric in the entire book. He, with serious intention, applied the monster label to fictional characters and IRL terrorists, unbothered, and I understood. It should have never been given the compliment of being published alongside's Puar and Rai's evisceration of Weinstock's points with their look at the "War on Terrorism and the Production of Docile Patriots".
Patricia McCormack's posthumanism essay punctuated how much the 21st century contributions flopped from the writers' lack of engagement with Black writers. It revealed to me that, despite the intellectualising of of "cross" this, "trans" that, and all ambiguities, whiteness is invested to an intense degree in the categories of "human" and "monster" such that, even when someone like McCormack's argues for the burgeoning irrelevance or lack of need for "human" as a category, her imaginaton can only take her to "we're all monsters, what joy".
Read Sylvia Wynter and stop waste mi time, please. Kmrct....more
...special effects have long possessed histories, identities, and continuities that extend beyond the onscreen shots and scenes in which we first enco...special effects have long possessed histories, identities, and continuities that extend beyond the onscreen shots and scenes in which we first encounter them. I LOVED THIS BOOK. I did not expect to be this enthused about Bob Rehak's 2018 contribution to NYU Press' Postmillenial Pop Series. What worked for me, as someone with no background in film or media studies, was that Rehak's focus on mega popular media properties and the popular narratives circulated about them in mainstream media provided easy points of familiarity from which he could launch his main arguments. Popular media reports SFX within an industrial framework. It's about the biggest Holywood studios competing to provide the flashiest spectacle in conjunction with specialised companies like Industrial Light and Magic. Pulling from French film theorist Christian Metz's writings, Rehak showed that how *we* think and talk about what appears on the screen influences what is categorised as a special effect or not; and with that determination of what is "special" and therefore an unreal or fake effect, and what is seen as real and therefore authentic. Rather than rely on a seemingly easy split of SFX being whatever is done on a computer vs what is created on a film set, he prefers to think of them as"degrees of intervention" in what we see on screen. With that understanding, the reader is primed to shift to thinking of SFX as an influential narrative tool that can not only build a franchise but have life outside, travelling through different kinds of media.
One of the most interesting questions Rehak raised for me was how one thinks about authorship when it comes to a particular style or even franchise in light of the complicated process and multiple persons that enable them to come into being. I can't get into all the good things. There's much about what *really* is responsible for Star Trek's longevity. George Lucas: auteur or master of his own plagiarist realm? With a new Matrix on the horizon the chapter on that bullet SFX and why the sequels flopped is especially relevant. What do audiences want from SFX? I need to shut up but this is, by far, the coolest book I'll read this year. If this sounds at all like your thing, go get it! ...more
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