Bad: Infamy, Darkness, Evil, and Slime on Screen

by Murray Pomerance (Editor)

Overview

Examines the many forms of cinematic "badness" over the past one hundred years, from Nosferatu to The Talented Mr. Ripley.

Violence and corruption sell big, especially since the birth of action cinema, but even from cinema's earliest days, the public has been delighted to be stunned by screen representations of negativity in all its forms-evil, monstrosity, corruption, ugliness, villainy, and darkness. Bad examines the long line of thieves, rapists, varmints, codgers, dodgers, manipulators, exploiters, conmen, killers, vamps, liars, demons, cold-blooded megalomaniacs, and warmhearted flakes that populate cinematic narrative. From Nosferatu to The Talented Mr. Ripley, the contributors consider a wide range of genres and use a variety of critical approaches to examine evil, villainy, and immorality in twentieth-century film.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780791459409
Publisher:	State University of New York Press
Publication date:	12/04/2003
Series:	SUNY series, Cultural Studies in Cinema/Video
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	375
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 1.00(d)
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

Murray Pomerance is Professor and Chair in the Department of Sociology at Ryerson University. He is the editor of Ladies and Gentlemen, Boys and Girls: Gender in Film at the End of the Twentieth Century, also published by SUNY Press, and Enfant Terrible!: Jerry Lewis in American Film.

Table of Contents

List of Illustrations


Acknowledgments


Introduction: From Bad to Worse
MURRAY POMERANCE


I. IT'S A SLIMY WORLD, AFTER ALL


1. Flickers: On Cinema's Power for Evil
TOM GUNNING


2. Monstrosity and the Bad-White-Body Film
GWENDOLYN AUDREY FOSTER


3. Beyond the Thin Line of Black and Blue: Movies and Police Misconduct in Los Angeles
AARON BAKER


4. Genocidal Spectacles and the Ideology of Death
CHRISTOPHER SHARRETT

5. Bad, Worse, Worst: 8MM and Hollywood's Bad Boys of Porn
PETER LEHMAN


6. Toxic Corps: Rage against the Corporate State
KIRBY FARRELL


7. The Ghost World of Neoliberalism: Abandoning the Abandoned Generation
HENRY A. GIROUX


II. AUTEURS OF NEGATIVITY, ICONS OF DARKNESS


8. "How Will I Get My Opium?": Jean Cocteau and the Treachery of Friendship
WHEELER WINSTON DIXON


9. The Sweeter the Kitten the Sharper the Claws: Russ Meyer's Bad Girls
KRISTEN HATCH


10. Wanted for Murder: The Strange Case of Eric Portman
TONY WILLIAMS


11. The Arch Archenemies of James Bond
STEVEN WOODWARD


12. From Fu Manchu to M. Butterfly and Irma Vep: Cinematic Incarnations of Chinese Villainy
GINA MARCHETTI


13. On the Bad Goodness of Born to Be Bad: Auteurism, Evaluation, and Nicholas Ray's Outsider Cinema
DANA POLAN


14. The Villain in Hitchcock: "Does He Look Like a 'Wrong One' to You?"
WILLIAM ROTHMAN


III. THE CHARISMA OF VILLAINY


15. The "Evil Medieval": Gender, Sexuality, Miscegenation, and Assimilation in Cat People
ALEXANDER DOTY AND PATRICIA CLARE INGHAM


16. Wicked Old Ladies from Europe: Jeanne Moreau and Marlene Dietrich on the Screen and Live
E. ANN KAPLAN


17. Darkness Visible: Images of Nazis in American Film
LESTER D. FRIEDMAN


18. "The Whole Fucking World Warped Around Me": Bad Kids and Worse Contexts
CYNTHIA FUCHS


19. Searching for Blobby Fissures: Slime, Sexuality, and the Grotesque
REBECCA BELL-METEREAU


20. Crazy Like a Prof: Mad Science and the Transgressions of the Rational
INA RAE HARK


21. Tom Ripley's Talent
MURRAY POMERANCE


List of Contributors


Index