QUEERBAITING, QUEER READINGS, AND HETERONORMATIVE VIEWING PRACTICES

2019 ◽  
pp. 41-52
Author(s):  
MONIQUE FRANKLIN
Keyword(s):  
Author(s):  
Kim Wilkins

Throughout Being John Malkovich, reflexive narrational strategies, diegetic absurdities, and fantastical plot points seek to disrupt the expectations and viewing practices associated with the conventions of mainstream narrative cinema—yet Jonze and Kaufman’s film does not abandon these conventions. Being John Malkovich (like all of Jonze’s films to date) is not comfortably categorized as “arthouse” or “experimental.” Rather, Jonze’s work employs the conventions of the dominant Hollywood norm in concert with eccentric plot devices and irony at various moments in order to subvert audience expectation, which results in an “offbeat” tone or aesthetic. Wilkins argues that the most absurd, or eccentric, narrative elements of Being John Malkovich—its ironic focus on celebrity and the ludicrous Malkovich portal—are precisely the mechanisms that enable an essentially unresolvable existential conundrum to be shaped into the conventionally linear narrative structure. Yet these utterly bizarre narrative inclusions also function as diversions; they aim to distract from or make humorous the very existential concerns they narrativize.


Author(s):  
Hikari Hori

It is impossible to understand the media-scape of Japan from the 1920s through 1945 without analyzing the implications of representations of the emperor as well as the effects of state-led- and voluntary self-censorship on their production and reception. The emperor’s portrait photograph (goshin’ei) was too sacred to gaze upon, and citizens and soldiers even died to protect it. It was preserved with extreme care in public institutions and battleships. On the other hand, paradoxically, Hirohito was the first emperor whose public appearances were covered by multiple mass media, ranging from personalized collectible postcards to newsreels, which were readily available for viewers’ scrutiny. These contradictory viewing practices, one prohibited and another accessible, disrupted the visual culture of emperor-centered disciplined and nationalized imperial citizenship. (122 words)


Author(s):  
J. P. Telotte

Abstract: This chapter explores the nature of the science fiction (SF) pulp magazine in the 1910s–1940 period, with a special emphasis on the influence of the most influential editor of the period, Hugo Gernsback. It outlines how the subjects and aims of SF in this period paralleled the larger modernist agenda that was also shaping the development of film, with a special emphasis on the visual impact of early film and early film-viewing practices. The chapter especially emphasizes how cinema’s emphasis on “attractions” or “astonishments,” as film historian Tom Gunning labels them, finds a corollary in the new genre of SF’s concern with “wonders.”


2006 ◽  
Vol 21 (S3) ◽  
pp. S76-S81 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kay M. Johnson ◽  
Karin M. Nelson ◽  
Katharine A. Bradley

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