Death in Classical Hollywood Cinema

verfasst von: Boaz Hagin

Verlag: Palgrave Macmillan UK

Enthalten in: Springer Professional "Wirtschaft+Technik" , Springer Professional "Wirtschaft" , Springer Professional "Technik"

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Über dieses Buch

Boaz Hagin carries out a philosophical examination of the issue of death as it is represented and problematized in Hollywood cinema of the classical era (1920s-1950s) and in later mainstream films, looking at four major genres: the Western, the gangster film, melodrama and the war film.

Inhaltsverzeichnis

Frontmatter

1. The Meaning of Death in Classical Hollywood

Abstract

In this book, I would like to examine ways in which death is made meaningful in classical Hollywood films. The question of whether death is, or should be, meaningful in general is far from settled. It has frequently been argued that death ought to be meaningless to us. Some philosophers have claimed that as an ungraspable nothingness, which is beyond our lived experience, death should not concern us. So long as we exist, death is not with us; and when death does come, we do not exist. Death is, or should be, nothing to us.¹ As the universal fate of all mortals, it reduces difference between humans;² and as inevitable from the moment we are born, it is a matter that, regardless of what we do, has always already been settled and cannot be caused or avoided.³ Yet, in fact, Western thought has always been occupied with death and its meanings, and death has been used to account for, to question, and to justify art, philosophy, religion, entertainment, political formations, violence, life as we know it, and our various ways of being.⁴

Boaz Hagin

2. Two Platos: Death, Truth, and Knowledge

Abstract

Because Hollywood’s storylines are linear and causal, an event in them can only directly affect the future. None of the classical Hollywood films I will be discussing involves time travel,¹ and so I believe it is not trivial to ask how an event in them can be meaningful in relation to the past, which cannot now be altered, that is, in relation to that which already exists and to that which has already taken place.² I would like to propose two ways. One, which I will discuss in this chapter, is by serving an epistemological or cognitive function, by enabling fuller access to knowledge of what was already there. And the other, which I will be discussing in the next chapter, is an ontological one, in which the past truth is embodied in the character who dies. In each chapter, I will also show some of the problems to which each method of rendering death meaningful can lead.

Boaz Hagin

3. Embodying the Past

Abstract

A second way for death to be meaningful in relation to the past is by destroying someone who could not be stopped in any other way. It is a death that is meaningful, indeed, morally justified, by bringing an end to an evil that has been shown to be immutable so long as the perpetrator is alive. Those who die are bad guys who refuse to abandon their evil ways; they are, in Slavoj Žižek’s terms, incarnated drives, creatures who persist in an unconditional demand with no trace of compromise or hesitation to the end.¹

Boaz Hagin

4. Melodrama and the Shaping of Desires to Come

Abstract

Initial and intermediary deaths serve as causes within a storyline and thus affect the future. Since the Hollywood film is based on causality through the actions of individuals, losing a character mid-story can put a terrible burden on the narrative and incur difficulties, challenges, and strains to the individual-driven causal storyline. In fact, the character most clearly affected by the death—the individual who dies—is also the one who, being dead, is no longer directly an active agent in the story. In this chapter, I focus on some of the changes a death can make so as to have an effect on the causal storylines despite, or rather exactly because of, the absence of one of the characters. In the next, fifth, chapter, I will show how death is or becomes an issue for other characters that remain alive and discuss the bonds that entangle living characters in the death of others and thus enable death to be meaningful in relation to the future.

Boaz Hagin

5. Cults of the Dead and Powers of the False

Abstract

Death, in order to be meaningful in relation to the future in a personal causal storyline, needs to be of interest not only to the dead persons but also to the living. The world of the living needs to enable the dead to exert some kind of influence, to alter in some way the goals and obstacles of those who remain behind. This chapter discusses the sorts of bonds that entangle living characters in the death of others.

Boaz Hagin

6. A Perpetual Present: Death and the War Film

Abstract

It is a remarkable achievement of the classical Hollywood system that it managed to deal with mass deaths in modern war.¹ The automatic, mechanistic, and indiscriminate wounding and killing of arrays of soldiers by bombings and machine guns is not easily depicted as meaningful. Is there an art of dying, which is useful in the twentieth century, asks Edith Wyschogrod, “when millions of lives have been extinguished and the possibility of annihilating human life altogether remains open?”² According to Peter Sloterdijk, the “incomprehensibility and technologized indignity of death in the modern war of artillery burst all categories of conventional meaning.”³

Boaz Hagin

7. Conclusions: The Ends of Classical Death

Abstract

Throughout this book we have elaborated and challenged ways of rendering death meaningful in classical Hollywood films. Each chapter has been devoted to a certain way in which death can be meaningful within Hollywood’s personal causal linear storyline, isolating specific cases and aspects of death from numerous classical Hollywood films spanning three decades and four genres. The historical contexts of the films have not been pursued as topics in themselves, and have been used selectively, only when they contributed to the creation of ways in which death can be rendered meaningful. In many cases, the sources used were clearly anachronistic.

Boaz Hagin

Backmatter

Titel: Death in Classical Hollywood Cinema
verfasst von: Boaz Hagin
Verlag: Palgrave Macmillan UK
Electronic ISBN: 978-0-230-27507-2
Print ISBN: 978-1-349-31439-3
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230275072