Belton American Comedy Belton Somewhere in the Night Belton Horror and Science Fiction Kellner Cultural Studies Multiculturalism and Media Culture ONLY NEED TO LOOK AT PAGES 1 4 Lull Hegemony Althusser Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses NOT 48 52 Andre Stereotypes Grossman Film Noir s Femme Fatales MORE QUESTIONS WILL COME FROM FILM NOIR Place Women in Film Noir Anderson Introduction to Imagined Communities Schrock and Schwalbe Men Masculinity and Manhood Acts Bird Welcome to the Men s Club Homosociality and the Maintenance of Hegemonic Masculinity Belton American Comedy plays with sexual racial ethnic and class differences it is because our culture as a whole denies their existence in the supposedly egalitarian democracy of contemporary America Because comedy is never taken seriously American film comedy can often deal with these issues more openly than can other more official genres such as historical film or westerns o Repression therapeutic release cultural safety valve 164 top 165 170 171 For Sigmund Freud jokes function on an individual level as a form of liberation they provide those who laugh at them with a necessary therapeutic release from the serious worries and cares that oppress the average human being As a mass form the genre of comedy works to release that which society as a whole tries to hold in check In short whatever a society represses frequently returns in the form of comedy to taunt it More often than not American comedy regulates and gives order to the forces of chaos Ironically for comedy to achieve its goal of social cohesion integration and regeneration it must first unleash the leopard That is comedy must acknowledge the elements of disorder or difference at work in the society it seeks to depict Once exposed these elements must then be either erased by being dissolved into a larger unity or subsumed within an all encompassing system of checks and balances that neutralize them or at the very least hold them in place Comedy functions as a kind of cultural safety valve it lets off steam that would otherwise build up and explode destroying the entire system It is comedy s job to impose order on the disorderly and to contain or harness the explosive elements that it awakens and that give it its power Many comedies begin with a lack or deficiency that suggests the failure of society to resolve problem or differences Poverty emerges as an implicit critique of society s ability to provide adequately for all of its citizens Comedy liquidates that lack or solves that problem o Production Code 181 182 Screwball comedy was about the repression of sex which then became the genre s chief subtext Sarris argues that the genre was produced in part by the tightening of restrictions on the Production Code in July 1934 Changes in the code took place in response to a campaign by the Catholic Legion of Decency to ensure to sanctity of the institution of marriage by banning from the screen depictions of adultery and illicit sex scenes of passion seduction or rape sex perversion white slavery miscegenation vulgarity obscenity and other acts This campaign was prompted in part by the increasing sexualization of film comedy and other genres that took place in the early 1930s the chief target of the censors was Mae West as well as Hollywood s original platinum blonde Jean Harlow When the Code outlawed presentation of such sexually illicit relationships in movies a disconcerting tension was introduced into relationships between the sexes Men and women still wanted one another but their desire was denied Film Noir Somewhere in the Night o Historical background 221 film noir deals with a uniquely American experience of wartime and postwar despair and alienation as a disoriented America readjusts to a new social and political reality Film noir was discovered and christened in postwar France During the Nazi occupation which began in the summer of 1940 the Germans had banned the exhibition of American films in French theaters A flood of American films overwhelmed French audiences and critics were startled by the changes that had taken place in American film production during the war The prewar classical Hollywood cinema which was dominated by the rationality symmetry and order of their favorite directors had given way to a subversive strain of behavioral deviance in American films which were now dominated by crime corruption cruelty and an apparently unhealthy interest in the erotic American film from the French perspective at least turned grimmer bleaker and blacker o Themes 225 226 Aesthetically noir relies heavily on shadowy low key lighting deep focus cinematography distorting wide angle lenses sequence shots disorienting mise en scene tension inducing oblique and vertical compositional lines jarring juxtapositions between shots involving extreme changes in camera angle or screen size claustrophobic framing romantic voiceover narration and a complex narrative structure characterized by flashbacks and or a convoluted temporal sequencing of events Thematically film noir grapples with existential issues such as the futility of individual action the alienation loneliness and isolation of the individual in industrialized mass society the problematic choice between being and nothingness the absurdity meaninglessness and purposelessness of life and the arbitrariness of social justice which results in individual despair leading to chaos violence and paranoia o Production Code 229 230 is the body of censorship regulations governing what Hollywood was permitted to show on the screen played a crucial role in making films of the 1940s and early 1950s noir American films of the mid to late 1930s rarely dealt with these subjects but film noir frequently did often resulting in amazing displays of narrative contortion as the films alluded to prohibited material without directly violating the code Acts of sadism and violence regularly took place off screen Their intensity was amplified by violent or otherwise disjunctive editing or off screen sound effects Homosexuality figured prominently in the motivation of the plots of several original novels later made into film noirs but on the screen this motivation was concealed disguised or recast into another form It was desexualized and displaced occasionally in ways that laid bare deep cultural fears about homosexuality with an astounding clarity Thus the homophobia that prompts the central murder in Richard brooks s novel was transformed by
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