外文原版娱乐性恐怖当代恐怖电影的后现代元素.docx

1、外文原版娱乐性恐怖当代恐怖电影的后现代元素 外文翻译Recreational Terror and the Postmodern Elements of the Contemporary Horror Film The universe of the contemporary horror film is an uncertain one in which good and evil, normality and abnormality, reality and illusion become virtually indistinguishable. This, together with t

2、he presentation of violence as a constituent feature of everyday life, the inefficacy of human action, and the refusal of narrative closure produces an unstable, paranoid universe in which familiar categories collapse. The iconography of the body figure as the site of this collapse. Henry:Portrait o

3、f a Serial Killer unfolds in this postmodern universe. The film, which details the sanguinary activities of a psychotic serial killer, was ready for release early in 1986 but remained on the distributors shelf until 1989, when Errol Morris, director of The Thin Blue Line brought Henry to the Telluri

4、de Film Festival(Village Voice 1990, 59). Among the obstacles the film faced was the unwillingness of the Motion Picture Association of America(MPAA) to give it an R rating .The reason? Its disturbing moral tone (McDonough 1990, 59). Fearful because an X rating means death at the box office for nonp

5、ornographic films, distributors lost interest. Even the director John McNaughton expressed concern over whether the film would find an audience. As he told Variety, Henry may be too arty for the blood crowd and too bloody for the art crowd (quoted in Stein 1990, 59). McNaughtons concern and the MPAA

6、s judgement rested on the films tendency to play with and against the conventions of the contemporary horror genre. What makes it an innovative and daring film also makes it difficulr to classify. This holds true as well for the postmodern horror film, of which Henry os emblematic. The boundaries of

7、 any genre are slippery, but those of the postmodern horror film are particularly treacherous to negotiate since one of the defining features of postmodernism is the aggressive blurring of boundaries. How do we distinguish horror from other film genre and the postmodern horror film from other horror

8、 films? In this chapter I will argue that the contemporary horror genre, i.e., those horror films produced since about 1968, can be characterized as postmodern. I will formulate a working definition of the postmodern horror genre based on generalizations drawn from the study of films which cultural

9、consensus defines as horror films, though not necessarily as postmodern ones. In the course of delineating the postmodern features of the contemporary horror genre, I will different it from its prior classical incarnation. THE QUESTION OF POSTMODERNISM In Monsters and Mad Scientists: A Cultural Hist

10、ory of the Horror Movie, Andrew Tudor (1989) charts the development of the Anglo-American horror genre, The primary distinction the draws is between the pre-sixties (1931-1960) and the post-sixties (1960-1984) genre, terms that roughly correspond to my use of classical and postmodern. Tudor parenthe

11、tically aligns the post-1960s genre with postmodernism and the legitimation crisis of postindustrial society by which he means the failure of traditional structures of authority (1989, 222). Although Tudor does not involve himself in discussions of the postmodernism per se, he does point out that th

12、e legitimation crisis of late capitalism may be the salient social context in which to ground the contradictions of the post-sixties horror genre. But before we can address the postmodern elements of the contemporary horror film, we must tackle the thorny issue of defining postmodernism. Social theo

13、rists represent is as a widespread and elusive phenomenon, as yet unclearly difined, its amorphous boundaries are hard to pin down. Andreas Huyssen portrays it as both a historical condition and a style, part of a slowly emerging cultural transformation in Western societies, a change in sensibility

14、(repr. 1990, 234). Todd Gitlin associates postmodernism with the erosion of universal categories, the collapse of faith in the inevitability of progress, and the breakdown of moral clarities (1989, 353). Jean-Francois Lyotard characterizes the posrmodern as entailing a profound loss of faith in mast

15、er narratives (claims to universal Truth) and disenchantment with the teleology of progress (1984, xxiv). Craig Owens indentifies it with a crisis of Western cultural authority (1983, 57). For my purposes, the postmodern world is an unstable one in which traditional (dichotomous) categories break do

16、wn, boundaries blur, institutions fall into question, Enlightenment narratives collapse, the inevitability of progress crumbles, and the master status of the universal (read male, white, monied, heterosexual) subject deteriorates, Consensus in the possibility of mastery is lost,universalizing grand

17、theory is discredited, and the stable, unified, coherent self acquires the status of a fiction. Although the political valence of postmodernism is subject to debate, there is much to be said for the progressive potenial of this paradigm shift. Clearly, the term postmodernism acknowledges a shift fro

18、m modernism, one not cleatly defined and unable to stand as a separate term. But this cultural transformation was not ushered in by an apocalyptic ending or a clean break. It was and continues to be a matter of uneven development, where, to heed a warning issued by postmodernists, development cannot

19、 be conflated with progress. Insofar as we can conceptualize this cultural transformation as a break, it might be more fruitful to speak of it as a stress break, not the result of an originary traumatic event but the cumulative outcome of repetitive historical stresses including the Holocaust, Hiros

20、hima, the Cold War, Vietnam, the anti-war movement, and the various liberation movements associated with the sixties: civil rights, blacks power, feminism, and gay liberation. Indeed, the impetus to situate postmodernism as a sixties or post-sixties phenomenon lies in the celebrated (or scorned) ass

21、ociation of that period with cultural contradictions and resistance to authority that figure so prominently in discussions of the postmodern today. THE RELAIONSHIP OF POSTMODERNISM TO POPULAR CULTURE The contemporary horror genre is sometimes criticized in modernist terms for being aligned with the

22、degraded from of pleasure-inducing mass culture. Critics relegate the contemporary genre to the ranks of ideologically conservative culture and excoriate or laud it for promoting the status quo through its reinforcement of such classical binary oppositions as normal/abnormal sexuality. Indeed, in Dr

23、eadful Pleasures (1985), James Twitchell portrays the horror film as a morality tale that demonstrates the dangers of sexuality outside the heteromonogamous unclear family. In contrast, the vexed relationship of the contemporary horror film to postmodernism is rarely articulated. When the contempora

24、ry genre is associated with postmodernism it is often to discredit one or both. For Kim Newman, the postmodern horror film refers to those eighties horror films characterized by camp. This comic turn signals for Newman a degneration, a dying out of the genres capacity to depict the horrors and neuro

25、ses of the age, a function he claims is necessary to culture but one that has been displaced and dispersed across other genres that are themselves increasingly hybird in form (1988, 211-15). He speaks as a disappointed horror fan for whom postmodern horror films fail to do what they are fitted to do

26、. Tania Modleski, on the other hand, is no fan of the genre. In The Terror of Pleasure: The Contemporary Horror Film and Postmodern Theory, she classifies contemporary horror films as an expression of postmodernism and concludes that the former illustrate what is most perverse about the latter. This

27、 position bears closer closer inspection. Although in principle postmodernism erodes all binary oppositions, Huyssen locates postmodernisms defining feature in its challenge to modernisms grounding distinction between high (artworld) culture and low (mass) culture. Postmodernism blurs the boundaries

28、 between art and mass culture. Ironically, as both Huyssen (repr. 1990 241) and Modleski (1986 156) argue, many postmodernists unselfconsciously reproduce the high culture/low culture opposition in its modernist Frankfurt School form in their own work. They say, in effect, that mass culture produce

29、pleasure, which inscribes the consumer into the dominate bourgeois ideology. In contrast, the decentered text produces jouinssance and takes an adversarial stance against bourgeois society. Modleski aligns the contemporary horror film with the letter form but questions its value for feminism. Modles

30、ki identifies the following as postmodern elements of the contemporary horror film: open-ended narratives, minimal plot and character development, and (relatedly) the difficulty of audience indentification with undeveloped and unlikeable characters. Modleski argues the the decentered, disordered hor

31、ror film, like the avant-garde, changes textual codes in order to disrupt narrative pleasure, and that as such it is a form if oppositional culture. (Huyssen notes that postmodernism appropriates and recyles many of modernisms aesthetic strategies, like the ones Modleski indicates.) Modleski aligns

32、the horror film with postmodernism and both with the disription of pleasure for women, given the lengths to which women have historically been denied pleasure, and consequently to question the limits of postmodernism for feminism. Modleski raises important questions. But her depiction of the contemp

33、orary horror films is flawed and therefore her comclusion is flawed. She fails to grasp the ways in which the contemporary horror is pleasurable, not only for a male audience but also for a female audience. Although the horror film is not necessarily critical or radical, it does contain, as Hutssen suggests for postmodernism, produc