Hollywood Shot by Shot: Alcoholism in American Cinema

by Norman K. Denzin

Overview

To what extent have Hollywood feature films shaped the meanings that Americans attach to alcoholics, their families, and the alcoholic condition? To what extent has the mass culture of the movie industry itself been conceptually shaped by a broad, external societal discourse? Norman Denzin brings to his life-long study of alcoholism a searching interest in how cultural texts signify and lend themselves to interpretation within a social nexus. Both historical and diachronic in his approach, Denzin identifies five periods in the alcoholism films made between 1932 and the end of the 1980s, and offers a detailed critical reading of thirty-seven films produced during these six decades.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781351515344
Publisher:	Taylor & Francis
Publication date:	09/04/2017
Series:	Communication & Social Order
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	309
File size:	3 MB

About the Author

Norman K. Denzin

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments, Preface, PART I. INTERPRETIVE STRUCTURES, PART II. 1932-1962: DEFINING ALCOHOLISM FOR THE AMERICAN PUBLIC, PART III. 1962-1980: THE LOST ALCOHOLIC?, PART IV. THE 1980s: ALCOHOLISM THE FAMILY DISEASE, SELECTED FILMOGRAPHY, REFERENCES, INDEX

Editorial Reviews

As an adjunct to his earlier studies of real-life alcoholics, Denzin (sociology, U. of Illinois) analyzes the portrayals of alcoholism in American film. He finds that, with few exceptions, they are didactically anti-alcoholism, follow the medical establishment's views, and exaggerate both the problem and the ease of recovery. Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

Booknews

"Denzin has gone on an exhaustive bar-crawl through hundreds of movies, returning with evidence that the film about drinking is a genre of its own. He writes from sound knowledge about alcoholism—which, unlike other diseases, is frequently viewed with bittersweet romanticism." —Roger Ebert "Professor Denzin has produced a searching and provocative interpretation of more than a half-century of Hollywood's social and personal construction of the problem drinker in America. Readable by both lay persons and specialists, Denzin's book provides us with the most comprehensive understanding of this topic to date." —Stanford M. Lyman, Robert J. Morrow Eminent Scholar in Social Science, Florida Atlantic University "An eminent sociologist and leading authority on alcoholism, Denzin also writes skillfully about films as films and is comfortable with postmodern interpretive theory—a genuinely interdisciplinary work of the first order." —Robert L. Carringer, author, The Making of Citizen Kane “Denzin is a sociologist whose specialty is alcoholism and who has an interest in social psychology. His treatment of the alcoholic in American movies is informed by theories of symbolic interactionism and deconstructionism… It will most likely appeal to sociologists and film critics because of its extensive references, filmography, and bibliography.” —D. W. Hoover, Choice

From the Publisher