Clint Eastwood's Cinema of Trauma: Essays on PTSD in the Director's Films

by Charles R. Hamilton (Editor), Allen H. Redmon (Editor)

Overview

Throughout his directorial career, Clint Eastwood's movies have presented sympathetic narratives of characters enduring personal trauma as they turn to violence to survive calamity or sustain social order--a choice that leaves them marginalized rather than redeemed.

In this collection of new essays, contributors examine his films--from The Outlaw Josey Wales to Sully--as studies on PTSD that expose the social conditions that tolerate or trigger traumatization and (in his more recent work) imagine a way through individual and collective trauma.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781476667508
Publisher:	McFarland & Company, Incorporated Publishers
Publication date:	10/13/2017
Pages:	200
Product dimensions:	5.90(w) x 8.80(h) x 0.60(d)
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

Charles R. Hamilton is a professor of English at Northeast Texas Community College in Mount Pleasant, teaching film, literature, and composition, and an adjunct professor at Texas A&M University Central Texas in Killeen. He is the chair of the Adaptation: Literature, Film, and Culture area for the Southwest Popular/American Culture Association. Allen H. Redmon is a professor of English and film studies at Texas A&M University–Central Texas. His research on Carl Theodor Dreyer, Clint Eastwood, and Quentin Tarantino looks at the ways they undermine the violence their films tolerate (if not celebrate).

Table of Contents

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments
Preface
Coady Lapierre
Introduction (Charles R. Hamilton and Allen H. Redmon)
Civilian PTSD in The Outlaw Josey Wales (Sydney Sian Walmsley)
Welcome to the Ranks of the Disenchanted: Feminism and Pacifist Spectacle in The Gauntlet (Andrew Grossman)
Eastwood’s Depiction of Violence and PTSD in Private Citizens (Alison S. Wallace)
“What face do you put with your enemy?” Identifying Trauma in In the Line of Fire and Absolute Power (Mária I. Cipriani)
Mourning and Melancholia in Blood Work and Vanessa in the Garden (Fernando Gabriel Pagnoni Berns and Canela Ailén
Rodriguez Fontao)
The Trauma of Cyclical Violence in Mystic River (Charles R. Hamilton)
Moral Injury and Civilian Authority in the War Films of Clint Eastwood (Kathleen A. Brown and Brett Westbrook)
Belated Casualties: Delayed Stress Disorder in Gran Torino (James F. Scott)
National PTSD in Invictus (Laurence Raw)
“He’s here and he’s there”: Projecting Recovery in American Sniper and Sully (Allen H. Redmon)
Conclusion: Eastwood’s Perfect World (Charles R. Hamilton and Allen H. Redmon)
About the Contributors
Index