(no subject)
here's the abstract i sent the PCA/ACA conference this year and forgot to put a title on:
This paper develops the view that the horror film’s primary function in American culture is to provide a safe arena in which to discuss certain aspects of reality specific to our involvement in war, a function made necessary by our culture’s aestheticisation of war. This aestheticisation of war trades on images that contain nothing messy or confused, such as dead bodies or an ambiguous or humanized enemy, and serves to generate and sustain certain illusions about technological progress, the competency of governmental authorities and the military-industrial complex, the identity of the enemy, possibilities of apocalypse and our survival as well as our moral agency motivated by high or superior ideals. I will argue that illusions of this sort are constructed specifically to conceal certain possible realities that we find threatening to the psychological stability of our culture and that these illusions contain within their structures the reality they were constructed to conceal, resulting in an identifiable set of cultural anxieties that provide the underlying motifs of the horror genre. Horror films then act as a medium in which we are allowed to focus these anxieties externally and participate in a cultural dialogue in the context of fictional narratives and pretend, at least for the moment, that the realities we face by our active involvement in war is simply an exercise in morbid entertainment. This paper traces the parallel development of war and the horror genre in American culture from WWII through what has been christened our “War on Terror.”
This paper develops the view that the horror film’s primary function in American culture is to provide a safe arena in which to discuss certain aspects of reality specific to our involvement in war, a function made necessary by our culture’s aestheticisation of war. This aestheticisation of war trades on images that contain nothing messy or confused, such as dead bodies or an ambiguous or humanized enemy, and serves to generate and sustain certain illusions about technological progress, the competency of governmental authorities and the military-industrial complex, the identity of the enemy, possibilities of apocalypse and our survival as well as our moral agency motivated by high or superior ideals. I will argue that illusions of this sort are constructed specifically to conceal certain possible realities that we find threatening to the psychological stability of our culture and that these illusions contain within their structures the reality they were constructed to conceal, resulting in an identifiable set of cultural anxieties that provide the underlying motifs of the horror genre. Horror films then act as a medium in which we are allowed to focus these anxieties externally and participate in a cultural dialogue in the context of fictional narratives and pretend, at least for the moment, that the realities we face by our active involvement in war is simply an exercise in morbid entertainment. This paper traces the parallel development of war and the horror genre in American culture from WWII through what has been christened our “War on Terror.”