Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group

Jennifer’s Body and the American Devil

By W. Scott Poole

There are plenty of horror fanboys, and a lot of fan girls, who’ve been anxiously waiting to take a peek at Jennifer’s Body. The film’s combination of Megan Fox’s sex appeal and Diablo Cody’s signature dialogue (made famous in Juno and the United States of Tara) offers a feast for two disparate and usually incompatible groups: adolescent boys and those who like to like to see the conventions of the horror subverted with a bit of clever irony.

Fox plays Jennifer Check, head of the cheerleading squad who is deeply and sincerely lusted after by every raging hormone in her high school. In a nod to the evangelical paranoia of the 1980s, a “satanic rock band” (who in this 21st century update is an emo band called “Low Shoulder”) attempts to use Jennifer as a virginal sacrifice to Satan. Bad things happen, we learn, when you try to sacrifice a non-virgin to the Devil. Jennifer becomes an avatar of the Evil One and begins killing, and eating, every boy she can seduce while playing out a drama of toxic friendship with her best female friend, aptly named “Needy.”

Horror films, even the schlocky ones, draw on a host of cultural and religious anxieties. Panic over both female and male teenage sexuality, and its alleged dangers is certainly not a new theme in American culture. In 1734, Puritan divine Jonathan Edwards complained, with a thinly veiled metaphor, that the teens of his parish spent too much time in “company keeping.”

But Cody taps into an even more powerful stream of American religion and popular culture that I explore in my new book Satan in America: The Devil We Know. Jennifer is not the first woman to find her body becoming an instrument of Satan in the popular imagination. One woman accused of witchcraft in Puritan New England appeared to her victim floating above his bed and wearing a red bodice. Late nineteenth century discourses about contraception and abortion regularly made a connection between female sexuality and demonic influence (an image in the book from the National Police Gazette shows a young woman with scaly demon emerging from her vagina with a caption that reads “The Female Abortionist”). In the early twentieth century, silent film gave us “vamps” like Adele Farrington who, in a pre-code romp called The Devil’s Bondwoman (1916), portrayed a woman whose sexual appetites were so insatiable that she attracted Satan himself. By the 1940s, a comic book entitled Madame Satan told adolescents a similar story of a seductive woman who, using Satan’s supernatural power, attempted to lead men to destruction.

Cody has tried to turn the horror convention of the female victim of male violence on its head. Unfortunately, she may have simply replicated another, darker convention of women as source of evil. At the end of the day, Jennifer’s Body may have evoked more demons than it exorcised.

W. Scott Poole is associate professor in history at the College of Charleston. He is the author of the forthcoming Satan in America: The Devil We Know.

Brüno—The Global Minstrel Makes a Misstep

By Robert A. Saunders

Sacha Baron Cohen owes his career to two things: an uncanny talent for crafting and maintaining outrageous characters, and his ability to parlay controversy into professional success. In an interconnected world where cultural disorientation is the norm not the exception, his avatars—Ali G, Brüno, and Borat—unexpectedly emerged as mirrors of the age. While Baron Cohen may have initially performed simply for his fellow Britons, his pantomime ultimately reached across the world with massive ramifications. Whether it was intentional or not, Baron Cohen has created a new form of comedy: global minstrelsy.

According to Merriam Webster, minstrel is defined as ‘one of a class of medieval professional musical entertainers’ or ‘one of a troupe of musical performers and comedians of a kind originating early in the 19th century in the United States and typically giving a program of Negro melodies, jokes, and impersonations and usually blacked in imitation of Negroes.’

With Ali G, the Cambridge-educated comedian embodied the second of these two definitions (though with a twist), playing the part of an obviously white man pretending to be a black man to audiences which were not sure what race (or ethnicity) to which he actually belonged. His humor was effective because it toyed with the curious nature of British identity—in all its glorious ambiguities and contradictions—at the end of the 21st century. His minstrelsy, however, was only effective within a particular local context (the greater London metropolitan area—colloquially referred to as England); once he took it on the road, many of the jokes fell flat.

In his Borat guise, Baron Cohen played up the medieval, in his words, deeds, and corporeal and scatological humor. Borat worked through an insidious mixture of parody of “foreigners’ (particularly those of Second World, or, to put more crudely, post-Communist, extraction) and a biting critique of “Red State” American attitudes towards blacks, homosexuals, Muslims, and other “strangers.” With his roving reporter who supposed hailed from Kazakhstan, Baron Cohen took his spiel to the national level, playing with a whole country and its national identity.

Now he has launched his third—and undoubtedly his weakest— character on to the world stage: Brüno. If Ali G was a local avatar and Borat was a national effigy, then Brüno is the jokester’s first attempt at crafting a truly global manifestation of his minstrelsy. While Brüno makes frequent claims to his Austrian identity, claiming local roots alternatively in Klagenfurt, Tyrol, and Schleswig-Holstein (the first is a town in southeastern Austria, the second is a region in the extreme west of the country, and the third is a province of Denmark), Brüno is actually an exaggerated simulacrum of the transnational European: a creature that can only exist a world without borders, where homosexuality is as normal as (and certainly more fashionable than) heterosexuality, and style is paramount.

In 2004, the geopolitician Parag Khanna, in his article “The Metrosexual Superpower,” suggested that the European norm now celebrates femininity, image-consciousness, and narcissism (in contrast to American brutishness). Had Baron Cohen had a lighter touch, he might have been able to pull off a genuinely important film that evoked America’s low comfort level with denationalization, demasculinization, and postmodernity, all of which have grown out Europe’s post-war experiments in hybridization, cultural exchange, economic interdependence, and peacenikery. Instead, Baron Cohen overplays his hand with the trope of gayness.

In the recently released film Brüno, Baron Cohen employs every crass stereotype of gays, from an obsession with sex toys and sadomasochism to the notion that they are unfit parents due to their supposed promiscuity and attempts to “make” their children gay. Not surprisingly, the Gay & Lesbian Alliance against Defamation criticized the film’s portrayal of gays, particularly given its timing when a number of states are considering or have recently legalized same-sex marriage. Unlike Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan, which made fun of the self-selected “victims” (frat boys, bigots, and bumpkins), Baron Cohen seems to be just be picking on homosexuals.

Furthermore, portraying a quirky Teutonic queer for laughs just isn’t that funny, or at least it does not make sufficient fodder for a full-length motion picture. Mike Myers, the mind behind the blockbuster Austin Powers and Shrek series, came to this revelation in the midst of trying to bring his Dieter, the homosexual German host of the fictional talk show “Sprockets” in 1999. Myers was slapped with a $3.8 million lawsuit for abandoning the project, which he feared would “cheat moviegoers” in midstream. Despite embracing similar forms of humorous impersonation and even sharing a number of acquaintances, it appears that Baron Cohen did not learn from Myers’s misstep, or the huge advance that Baron Cohen received for developing the film assuaged any personal guilt over “cheating” his moviegoers by turning a mildly humorous sketch character into the subject of a motion picture.

Ultimately, Brüno proves to be simultaneously funny and a disappointment. As a work of art, it makes people titter, cackle, and crow (I attended a nearly sold-out premiere night performance in central New Jersey which generated nearly as many sustained peals of laughter as did Borat in the same venue). However, it was already clear by the end of its debut weekend that Brüno’s allure was fading fast. As to what Brüno does to Baron Cohen’s political project—which until now, demanded recognition if not universal respect—the result is an undeniable diminution of his position as a social critic. The man who used sophisticated—even revolutionary—comedic techniques to expose the veiled prejudices of British parliamentarians, American politicians, and countless “Average Joes” has undermined his own record by delivering an offensive and though entertaining parody of gays rather than those who hate and fear them.

Robert A. Saunders is assistant professor of politics at the State University of New York at Farmingdale and is the author of The Many Faces of Sacha Baron Cohen: Politics, Parody, and the Battle over Borat.

Manga and the Yankii Economy

By John Ingulsrud and Kate Allen

Juvenile delinquency is big business in Japan. It’s not the criminal or motorcycle gang activity itself, but its representation and the attraction of media products that depict it. The origins of the term yankii, according to Patrick Galbraith’s Otaku Encyclopedia, are various. (1) Most date back to the post-World War II days and actually do relate to “Yankee,” in the sense that the delinquents emulated the styles of their American counterparts and lived in neighborhoods with shops that sold US army surplus and other American goods. We sense that it was convenient to label delinquency as something foreign, so that the young people themselves could be seen as good kids.

Yankii stories and products are not new. There has been a steady number of manga devoted to these themes. The difference, according to the tabloid Spa!, is when several kinds of media and consumer products are available at the same time, which tends to happen in times of economic hardship. (2) Yankii stories are full of defiance toward the establishment with characters flouting social norms. Their discontent is directed toward the rich and powerful that perpetuate the situation and they feel no one is going to help people who do not fit in or have trouble in school.

Two films this summer are proving to be blockbusters, Crows Zero II and Rookies. Both are based on long-running manga series by Takahashi Hiroshi and Morita Masanori respectively. Crows Zero II, a sequel to the 2007 film Crows Zero, is proving to be more successful. Rookies, made on the heels of a TV series, is also a box office success. The yankii styles, the bad-look, are also a hit. For example, there is the hip-hop look of Inoue Santa’s Tokyo Tribe series; Crows Zero II has the school uniform look with multiple permutations on the Nehru-cut jacket; Rookies offers more of the same uniform look, plus variations on baseball gear.

Spa! magazine extols the yankii trend by stressing the values of honesty, solidarity, as well as the attention to family and community. They provide examples of former yankiis who have made good. At the same time, the trend also has a troubling side, such as the attributes of violence, vigilantism, and intolerance, plus a penchant for ultra-nationalism. Topics with this kind of edge are found in manga stories. A similar kind of edge is found in works employing moe representations found most often in manga for girls and women. Is moe porn or is it simply a style that fuses the cute, seductive and the pitiful?

Fortunately, Japan has comparatively few violent and sexual crimes. Therefore most people do not see the media as causing criminal activity. As the label yankii implies, although the acts are bad, the characters are basically nice kids. In the same way, the implication includes the readers and viewers who see themselves as nice people.

John E. Ingulsrud is Professor of Applied Linguistics in the Department of International Studies at Meisei University. Kate Allen is Professor of Linguistics in the School of Global Japanese Studies at Meiji University. They are the authors of Reading Japan Cool: Patterns of Manga Literacy and Discourse.

1. Patrick W. Galbraith, The Otaku Encyclopedia: An Insider’s Guide to the Subculture of Cool Japan, (Tokyo: Kodansha, 2009), 238.
2. “Yankii Supirittsu Sugoi Keizai Kōka (The Yankii Spirit Huge Economic Effect)”, Spa! Business Culture and Entertainment Weekly (June 23, 2009), 38-45.

From Brokeback to Milk: Progress in Hollywood's Representation of Sexual and Gender Minorities

By Eric Patterson

The 81st Academy Awards on February 22, 2009, were satisfying to a lot of gay people, and not just because the event was hosted by a hunky actor who's been the subject of persistent gay rumors, looks great in a tailored tuxedo, and has a name some jokingly say sounds like it ought to be x-rated, Hugh Jackman. The awards were acclaimed by many who identify as gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender, or queer and by their straight allies for the amount of progress they indicated Hollywood has made regarding the representation of sexual and gender minorities. Sean Penn received the award for Best Actor for his title role in Gus Van Sant's Milk and the film's screenwriter, Dustin Lance Black, received the award for Best Screenplay; in their acceptance speeches, both men spoke passionately about the significance of the film, which recounts the life of the pioneering gay activist and politician, Harvey Milk, and his assassination in 1978, less than a year after his election to the San Francisco Board of Supervisors. The film and the speeches of the two award recipients expressed unequivocal support for the aspirations of sexual/gender minorities. In his comments, Penn directly challenged current manifestations of the same kind of homophobic bigotry that Milk fought and that ultimately killed him, ridiculing anti-gay prejudice toward Hollywood and condemning the anti-gay protestors outside the awards ceremony: "You Commie, homo-loving sons-of-guns!…For those who saw the signs of hatred as our cars drove in tonight, I think that it is a good time for those who voted for the ban against gay marriage to sit and reflect and anticipate their great shame and the shame in their grandchildren's eyes if they continue that way of support. We've got to have equal rights for everyone." Black's message focused less on confronting the continuing hostility to sexual/gender minorities, and more on the promise of what glbtq activism can attain: "When I was thirteen years old…I heard the story of Harvey Milk. And it gave me hope. It gave me the hope to live my life. It gave me hope that one day I could live my life openly as who I am and that maybe even I could even fall in love and one day get married…" The experiences of the two men complemented each other, Penn demonstrating that straight people can become aggressive, outspoken, unapologetic allies of sexual/gender minorities, and Black showing the optimism that the "life-saving story" of Harvey Milk gives to many glbtq people about the possibility of full legal and social equality.

Another award given at last month's ceremony indicated the seriousness of the obstacles Hollywood can pose for those seeking to present sexual/gender minority people in film: for his portrayal of "the Joker" in The Dark Knight, the late Heath Ledger received Best Supporting Actor. Many critics and viewers agreed that Ledger should have received the Best Actor award three years earlier for his brilliant performance in Brokeback Mountain as the repressed, tormented ranch hand, Ennis del Mar, and that the Motion Picture Academy now was belatedly trying to atone for its failure to have recognized his remarkable work. Certainly it wouldn't have been the first time that regret for earlier misjudgments had been part of the Academy's decision-making process. Ledger's untimely death due to an accidental overdose of prescription drugs on January 22, 2008, may well have been a factor in the decision to posthumously award his performance in The Dark Knight, and the complaints elicited by the Academy's failure to recognize his performance in Brokeback also may have caused it to take Milk more seriously.

Of course, the success of Milk is primarily the result of the film's fine script, acting, directing, and photography, but extraneous factors often seem to play a role in the awarding of the Oscars. In 2006, the Academy not only failed to reward Ledger's fine performance as Ennis, but denied Brokeback the Best Picture award, though many critics and viewers, gay and straight, felt it deserved it. During the fall of 2005 and the winter of 2006, as critical and audience praise grew and grew for Brokeback Mountain, many were sure that the film would be the first centered on passionate love between men to win Best Picture. Brokeback eventually was nominated for a total of eight awards, but when the ceremony came on March 5, 2006, Academy members denied any awards to the film's actors, and made a surprising decision for Best Picture that many saw as a cautious and conventional choice that was the result of discomfort with Brokeback's explicit depiction of male-male sex and of homophobic prejudice and violence. As critics and viewers observed, it was difficult to understand how Brokeback's director, Ang Lee, its screenwriters, Larry McMurtry and Diana Ossana, and its composer, Gustavo Santoallala, could earn Academy Awards while the film itself, the result of their award-winning collaboration, was passed over. As has been pointed out by those who know how Hollywood operates, a large number of the approximately six thousand members of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences are older white men who identity themselves as heterosexual, one of the groups often least supportive of glbtq people. The sense that the Academy's response to Brokeback might have been affected by homophobic prejudice was reinforced by ugly admissions about the film from two prominent Academy members, the elderly actors Tony Curtis and Ernest Borgnine, who both said they had refused to watch what Curtis dismissed as a movie about "gay cowboys." That some Academy members had voted but had refused to see the main contender for Best Picture raised serious questions about whether the Academy had fairly judged the film, and whether its decisions and awards really carried any validity. Borgnine's bizarre comment in reference to Brokeback, that if "John Wayne were alive he'd be rolling over in his grave," indicates what is perhaps the chief source of hostility to the movie: its presentation of homosexuality in the context of the Western is unbearable to many men for whom that genre is the most central narrative of American masculinity and nationalism. Given some of Curtis's roles, especially as "Josephine" in Some Like It Hot (1959), his indignation was especially hypocritical and laughable. This year, then, many who followed the Oscars expressed the view that perhaps the Hollywood establishment was responding not only to criticism of its failure to recognize the abilities of Heath Ledger but, when it judged Milk, also to criticism of its earlier resistance to the significance of Brokeback Mountain.

The recent awards to Penn, Black, and Ledger certainly seem to show an increased willingness on the part of the Academy to recognize work that represents those aspects of the lives of men who love men that seem to have repelled its members in the past. Though no scene in Milk is as explicit as the scene in Brokeback depicting Ennis and Jack having anal intercourse, several episodes show men having sex, and the filmmakers seem to have sought to present a candid account of the exuberantly liberated world of the Castro in the seventies. The film emphasizes Harvey Milk's extended relationships, but also shows the cruising, casual sex, and affectionate demonstrativeness that was part of daily life for many gay men in that place and time. Also, as with Brokeback, most of the characters don't fit the established stereotypes of effeminacy that Hollywood (and the larger society) seem to want. As commentators and participants have noted, during the seventies many gay men deliberately repudiated constructions of gender that linked male-male desire with femininity, constructing a new, more masculine, often hyper-masculine style. Tracing Harvey Milk's life from the time he moved from New York to San Francisco in 1970, the film shows him and his friends gradually abandoning the more androgynous hippie styles of gender expression, with their ponytails and flowered shirts, and inventing the macho look of the "Castro Street clone," with jeans, flannel shirts, hiking boots, short haircuts, and facial hair. Indeed, because of his entry into mainstream politics, Harvey Milk penetrated even farther into the gender territory of straight men, adopting conservative three piece suits like those worn by Mayor Moscone and Dan White, becoming indistinguishable in dress from the men who sought to dominate the society, though his words and actions loudly asserted gay and lesbian equality. Milk had a sharp wit and frequently made funny, campy cracks, but his gay sense of irony was the opposite of being an expression of some sort of "feminized" despair or futility-- like many gay men, he used it as a weapon, stirring up his supporters and intimidating his rivals. And as his assassination proved, for a fag to begin to become a power broker-- a political boss like Tweed or Daley, as Moscone jokes to Milk just before White shoots them both-- is intolerable for some "real" men. Like Brokeback, Milk refuses to present men who love men at a "safe" distance from heterosexual men, but depicts them right in the middle of the straight male world. Milk demonstrates that gay men can challenge straight men for power and win in the intensely competitive realm of politics, and Brokeback shows that there are man-loving men even in the most archetypically masculine context of all, the American West. Both reject the pattern Hollywood usually has used, when it has depicted gay men at all, of constructing them as feminized figures belonging to the areas of society associated with women. The men in both films are very far from the desperate queens, flamboyant fairies, stylish dandies, silly clowns, and ineffectual eunuchs Hollywood often has favored, which partly accounts for the hostility to Brokeback three years ago and which makes the present success of Milk so impressive.

The Academy Awards to Milk also may have been affected by recent political events that have profoundly disturbing significance for glbtq people in California and throughout the nation. As the film recounts, in 1978 Harvey Milk was one of the leaders in the effort to stop the homophobic Briggs Initiative in California, which would have fired all glbtq teachers who were out about their sexual/gender identification; on November 4, 2008, another homophobic California state initiative, Proposition Eight, was passed, rescinding the right of same-sex couples to have equal access to the status and benefits of legal marriage. Despite efforts to mobilize voters to support the recent California State Supreme Court decision that legal marriage should be available to all adult couples, vast funding from the Catholic and Mormon Churches and other homophobic religious organizations helped to carry the anti-marriage initiative. Perhaps the most important political legacy of Harvey Milk's career is the recognition that the more glbtq people who come out, the more difficult it will be for those who fear and hate them to maintain legal, economic, and social discrimination against them. Indeed, the more difficult it will be for members of the majority to hate and fear them at all, since glbtq people are the majority's relatives, neighbors, and co-workers, though the majority often is unaware of it. The outcry by sexual/gender minorities over the successful effort to re-institute discrimination against them, which attacks the central relationship in the lives of hundreds of thousands of them, moved many straight people, showing them how deeply their glbtq family members and friends are hurt by homophobia. Though many members of the Academy undoubtedly have strong homophobic prejudices, especially against the masculinity and sexuality of gay men, they also undoubtedly know and have worked with many glbtq people, and may have been troubled by their relegation to a class explicitly denied certain basic human rights, and so perhaps may have become more receptive to a film passionately defending them.

The anger of sexual/gender minorities over Proposition Eight isn't the only protest that may have helped to change attitudes in the Academy. Brokeback Mountain elicited an extraordinary response from fans that still continues, and many were outspoken in their disappointment that the film did not receive the Best Picture award in 2006. In addition to the movie's official site, which includes personal testimony from many men who saw striking parallels between the experiences of Ennis and Jack and their own, Brokeback inspired the organizing of several independent fan sites, including the Ultimate Brokeback Forum; Bettermost, Wyoming, and Brokeback Mountain Forum; and Ennisjack.com, which between them have several thousand members. These also include testimony from large numbers of people, men and women, gay and straight, about the impact of the film and the story; members of the Ultimate Brokeback Forum have published a book collecting some of the most eloquent and moving statements, Beyond Brokeback: The Impact of a Film (2007). The failure of the Academy to award the film Best Picture led to thoughtful and constructive forms of protest by fans: the Ultimate Brokeback Forum collected contributions to purchase a full-page advertisement in Daily Variety thanking the creators of Brokeback Mountain, which was widely reported and discussed in the press; they also raised money to buy dvd's of the film and contribute them to rural public libraries around the nation, a highly insightful and compassionate way to try to reach out to and support the kinds of people Brokeback depicts, who struggle in isolation with their sexual/gender difference. And, when Heath Ledger died, they publicly honored him with a moving tribute, again in an advertisement in Daily Variety.

When one explores these fan sites, it's clear just how profoundly the Brokeback narrative affected not only those who recognized themselves in the characters, but members of the majority who have learned from it about the experience of sexual/gender minorities and who aspire to understand more and to be their allies. Interestingly, a large number of fans actively participating in the sites are heterosexual women. It's hard to know why Brokeback has such appeal for straight women, but it's certainly intriguing. Perhaps in part there's a parallel with the interest many straight men have in passionate relationships between women. Certainly it's well-known that, while many straight men feel threatened by sex between men (and employ references to it as a threat, in their ubiquitous use of the "F-bomb" and the middle finger as insults to other men), they often desire pornography that depicts lesbian relationships in ways intended to excite male viewers. As some popular culture scholars have pointed out, there already are well-established patterns in which heterosexual female fans fantasize about passionate relationships between men, as in the extensive community of straight women who write and read sexual fantasy material about the Star Trek characters Captain Kirk and Mr. Spock. Indeed, women started creating Kirk/Spock sexual fantasy material nearly forty years ago, and it now is widely available through the Internet. The Brokeback sites include much fan fiction, often written by women, that is inspired by Proulx's story and particularly by Lee's film, but that reimagines the narrative, extends it, elaborates the sexual and emotional relationship between Jack and Ennis, and sometimes provides alternate, happy endings. Such fan fiction may not only be analogous to male voyeurism regarding lesbianism, but also may be motivated by a desire on the part of straight women to wishfully imagine an alternative form of masculinity more sensitive and vulnerable than what they experience in actual relationships with men. In a widely publicized interview last fall, Annie Proulx expressed her impatience with fans who send her such materials, dismissing their unsolicited writings as "ghastly" and "pornish," and observing that a considerable amount of what she had received was from men who seemed to desire more extended descriptions of male-male sex than her story included. Of course, such communications must be an annoying distraction from her writing, particularly if they foolishly seek to "correct" her superb story, but they do indicate just how profoundly and powerfully the story and the film based on it have affected people, and they need to be recognized, however clumsy some may be, as a proof of the significance of her work and its impact in awakening readers and viewers to the experience and perspective of sexual/gender minorities and especially of men who love men. Annie Proulx clearly is an ally of gay men, but she seems to have been surprised to learn just how raw a nerve her creation has touched.

Though the recent forms of protest described here may well have caused the Motion Picture Academy to be more respectful of Milk than of Brokeback, it should be emphasized that Milk's success also is due in part to the continuing impact of a much larger effort, the remarkable series of achievements over the past several decades by independent filmmakers concerned to present the lives of sexual/gender minority people. Until relatively recently, the larger Hollywood organizations usually either have avoided glbtq-themed films or have constructed sexual/gender minority characters and issues as they are perceived by the majority, but independent directors, writers, and actors, some out gay men and lesbians, some straight allies, all struggling with a wide range of obstacles, especially lack of funding or adequate distribution, have explored the experience of sexual/gender minorities. From the mid to late eighties on, the New Queer Cinema, as it's been called, has challenged the boundaries of both content and form, going far beyond Hollywood's usual approaches to sexual and gender difference. Though the movement necessarily has produced small-budget, limited release films, these have helped to create the space that has made possible larger-scale films dealing directly with same-sex passion and political issues such as Brokeback Mountain and Milk.

The history of the representation of glbtq people in mainstream movies has become familiar to many through the research of film scholars, particularly the pioneering gay film historian Vito Russo and other more recent writers, such as Harry Benshoff, Sean Griffin, and Richard Barrios. Early movies, both in the United States and abroad, were notable for frequent-- if usually highly stereotypical-- depictions of sexual/gender minorities, but from the early thirties to about 1960 Hollywood's Film Production Code severely limited representation of glbtq characters, though filmmakers still found ways to hint at sexual and gender difference. With the collapse of the Code in the sixties, large-scale films began to depict sexual/gender minorities, but through the sixties, seventies, and eighties tended to trivialize and demonize them, constructing them according to established stereotypes and associating them with depravity, psychosis, crime, and violence. Notable examples are the treatment of sexual/gender minority characters in films such as Advise and Consent (1962), From Russia With Love (1963), The Detective (1968), The Sergeant (1968), The Fox (1968), Freebie and the Bean (1974), The Eiger Sanction (1975), Cruising (1980), Deathtrap (1982), Beverley Hills Cop (1984), Silence of the Lambs (1991), Basic Instinct (1992), and Braveheart (1995); of course, there are many more. Though in this period the Motion Picture Academy sometimes honored films that include significant glbtq content, those it chose tended to reflect prejudices against explicit sex, especially between men, and against aggressive political content, and stayed within the confines of established gender stereotypes. Midnight Cowboy (1969) won Best Picture, Director, and Screenplay, but the film carefully heterosexualized John Voight's hustler character and constructed his relationship with Dustin Hoffman as a bond between straight buddies. Dog Day Afternoon (1975) won Best Screenplay, going to the other extreme, presenting the two main characters, Al Pacino as a manic bank robber and Chris Sarandon as his transexual partner, as bizarrely entertaining freaks. For his role in Kiss of the Spider Woman (1985) William Hurt won Best Actor, but again the character, an overwrought, highly effeminate windowdresser, was a stereotype far removed from the experience of most straight-- or gay-- people. The massive suffering of the AIDS Pandemic produced Philadelphia (1993), for which Tom Hanks won Best Actor in a role as a successful lawyer struggling with the disease, but as many gay viewers noted, the empathy of those who made the movie didn't extend to a willingness to depict the sexual relationship between the gay male characters.

The history of independent filmmaking on glbtq themes goes back to the mid-Twentieth Century in the experimental films of Kenneth Anger, Jack Smith, Maya Deren, and others. Between the mid eighties and mid nineties the development of film education and the gay and lesbian liberation movements led to a wave of work by independent filmmakers such as Lizzie Borden (Born in Flames, 1983), Bill Sherwood (Parting Glances 1986, ), Gregg Araki (The Living End, 1992), Todd Haynes (Poison, 1991), Tom Kalin (Swoon, 1992), Rose Troche (Go Fish, 1995), Cheryl Dunye (The Watermelon Woman, 1996), and others that challenged Hollywood's approach to glbtq experience, both in terms of cinematic technique and subject matter. Independent British and European filmmakers (such as James Ivory, Ismail Merchant, Stephen Frears, Derek Jarman, and Rainer Werner Fassbinder) also showed new possibilities, and the outpouring of glbtq-related foreign and domestic films, and their success at independent film festivals and at awards ceremonies, demonstrated that there was a market for such films. Eventually this led to larger independent projects and to the development of special art film divisions at major studios which undertook production and distribution of more glbtq-themed films. These changes led to even more movies addressing sexual/gender minority subjects, such as Boys Don't Cry (1999), The Talented Mr. Ripley (1999), The Hours (2002), Far From Heaven (2002), Monster (2003), A Home at the End of the World (2004), and Brokeback Mountain (2005). Of course, Gus Van Sant, the director of Milk, was an important figure in the New Queer Cinema, with movies like Mala Noche (1985) and My Own Private Idaho (1991), and has successfully become involved in bigger projects while continuing to make more experimental films (such as Elephant (2003)). Milk itself owes a substantial debt to Rob Epstein's excellent documentary, The Times of Harvey Milk (1984), which won an academy award at a time when the industry was not receptive to a feature film on the topic. While the ongoing progress in the movie business toward more perceptive and innovative representations of glbtq people is clear, it has to be noted that Hollywood continues to maintain some of the traditional stereotypes. Though demonic gay killers like those of the past probably would meet with protests dwarfing those elicited by Cruising or Basic Instinct and so may be gone at last, effeminate stereotypes and tired fag jokes stressing straight male insecurity about gay men have been perpetuated by movies such as The Birdcage (1996), To Wong Foo, Thanks For Everything, Julie Newmar (1995), In and Out (1997), There's Something About Mary (1998), and I Now Pronounce You Chuck and Larry (2007). Indeed, films such as My Best Friend's Wedding (1997) have established a new pattern for de-sexualizing gay men and rendering them non-threatening to straight audiences, the gay man-heterosexual woman comedy (paralleled by other films and by TV's Will and Grace).

During the buildup to the Oscars in 2005-2006, when Jake Gyllenhaal and Heath Ledger discussed their roles as Jack and Ennis, both unfortunately indicated some discomfort and defensiveness about playing male lovers, and others, such as Gyllenhaal's friend Lance Armstrong, openly ridiculed and insulted their roles. Much to his credit, Sean Penn has done what the two Brokeback stars did not, explicitly and unequivocally affirming his commitment to playing a gay man, and articulately asserting the right of glbtq people to the same legal rights, benefits, and status as everyone else. He's a real ally, a straight man who's secure in his own identity, doesn't fear glbtq people and their sexuality, but respects them and wants them to have the same rights he has. I hope that this marks a shift toward a climate in which more and more members of the heterosexual majority will speak up as allies of sexual/gender minorities. The recent change in national politics seems finally to indicate that a majority in the nation want to affirm diversity and basic human rights, and will reject the many prejudices, including the overt exploitation of homophobia, that have been such a central part of political and social discourse in America. Many still resist seeing the parallels between the irrationality and inhumanity of racism and of homophobia, but perhaps the eloquence of allies like Penn, of gay artists like Black, and of films like Milk will help to change this. Although the administration of George W. Bush finally-- finally!-- is over, his supporters, especially the many "religious" homophobes, undoubtedly will continue and probably intensify their efforts to attack the rights of glbtq people, but as more sexual/gender minority people and real allies stand up to them, it may be possible to stop them. More and more young people today, straight and glbtq, seem to agree with Penn and Black, and to be fed up with those latter-day successors to Anita Bryant and John Briggs who want to impose their "religious" rules on the personal and sexual lives of others. The success of Milk may herald a substantial change in attitudes that finally will end discriminatory policies such as "Don't Ask-Don't Tell" and the "Defense of Marriage Act." As Dustin Lance Black said in his speech at the Academy Awards ceremony, "if Harvey had not been taken from us thirty years ago, I think he'd want me to say to all the gay and lesbian kids out there tonight who have been told that they are 'less than' by their churches, by the government, or by their families, that you are beautiful, wonderful creatures who have value. And no matter what anyone tells you, God does love you, and that very soon, I promise you, you will have equal rights federally across this great nation of ours. Thank you, God, for giving us Harvey Milk."

Eric Patterson is associate professor of American studies and American literature at Hobart and William Smith Colleges. He is the author of On Brokeback Mountain: Meditations about Masculinity, Fear, and Love in the Story and the Film.

What is Manga?

By John E. Ingulsrud and Kate Allen

The film, La Maison en Petits Cubes, won the 81st Academy Award for the Best Animated Short Film. Animator and director, Kunio Kato, started honing his skills as a schoolboy in his native Kagoshima in Southern Kyushu by drawing manga (1). While many Japanese people engage in creating manga, almost all Japanese people are readers of manga or have been readers at various times in their lives.

Manga is most often defined in English as simply “Japanese comics,” an accurate label from a media point of view, since there is little or no difference between manga and comics. Essentially they are made up of panels containing graphics and print. Both refer to “comic strips,” as well as longer narrative works, which are sometimes categorized by the more specific terms of “graphic novels”. Single paneled cartoons have also been called manga. Similarly television cartoons were referred to as manga up until the 1970s, when the term anime gained currency.

Manga publishing in Japan is a US$4.5 billion market and accounts for nearly a fourth of the total publishing market (2). These publications range from manga for children to manga for adults and cover every conceivable topic from sports, romance, drama, science fiction, adventure, and mystery, to niche interests such as business enterprises, gambling, fishing, cooking, and child rearing. Japanese manga are classified into a number of categories roughly corresponding to different age and gender groups. The market is evenly balanced between manga geared toward children and those targeting adults. In addition, there is a growing market for self-published dōjinshi, manga “fanzines”, parodies, and original works with large Comiket (comic market) conventions. Successful manga generate spin-offs such as toys, costumes, and other media products like animation series, light novels, television dramatizations, movies, and video games.

Most manga titles appear first in periodicals published in weekly, bi-weekly, or monthly intervals. They are readily available in bookshops, convenience stores, and station kiosks, but are generally not available by subscription. Shōnen manga (for boys), for instance, come in volumes of over 500 pages published on a weekly basis. These manga volumes may contain up to twenty serialized stories. The stories are printed on recycled newsprint, and except for the cover and a few pages of advertisements, they are set in black, printed on white or light-colored paper. Often groups of stories are printed in different colored text, giving a rainbow effect to thick volumes. These periodicals are inexpensive and read quickly.

The origins of manga come from multiple sources. The graphic figures can be traced to traditional temple scrolls and woodblock print illustrations, as well as Western caricatures and comics. Many scholars, however, insist that manga as we know them today began in the aftermath of World War II. A variety of factors such as the demand for low-cost reading material from an impoverished literate population, the presence of talented creators, and the cultural influence from the American Occupation all contributed to the surge of interest in manga. The nature of American influence has yet to be studied in detail, particularly in terms of literacy practices (the ‘how,’ ‘when,’ and ‘where’ of reading).

John E. Ingulsrud is Professor of Applied Linguistics in the Department of International Studies at Meisei University. Kate Allen is Professor of Linguistics in the School of Global Japanese Studies at Meiji University. They are the authors of Reading Japan Cool: Patterns of Manga Literacy and Discourse.

(1) “Kato Kantoku ‘So Heavy’ Academy Shō,” Nikkan Sports, February 24, 2009,.

(2) “Japan Economic Report, October-November, 2006. Japanese Publishing Industry,” JETRO, 2006, (accessed September 12, 2007).
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Too Famous To Be Funny? How Sacha Baron Cohen’s Fame Is Undermining His Comedic Project

By Robert A. Saunders

Sacha Baron Cohen is up to his old tricks again—literally. The masterful comedian who brought us Da Ali G Show and Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan is—much to his dismay—being recognized nearly everywhere he goes. Baron Cohen is currently filming his third motion picture based on one of his original characters. In this case, it is the flamboyant Austrian fashionista Bruno. The film, which carries the cumbrous working title Bruno: Delicious Journeys through America for the Purpose of Making Heterosexual Males Visibly Uncomfortable in the Presence of a Gay Foreigner in a Mesh T-Shirt, is being produced by Jay Roach of Austin Powers fame and is expected to be released early summer 2009. Unfortunately for Baron Cohen (who could safely count on his anonymity when making the Borat film), his global stardom has transformed Bruno into self-parody even before the movie has been released: a cruel turn of fate for a true satirist.

Throughout the past year, Bruno has been spotted in the Americas, Asia, and Europe, generating media coverage in each case. It began with sightings at the Wichita airport which were quickly posted to the Web, followed by much a publicized controversy over a gay wrestling match in the Ozarks. In Israel, his interview of Mossad agent and a Palestinian academic instantly made news around the world. In California, his abortive attempt to interview Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger (a fellow Austrian, of sorts) attracted even more media attention. The scene created a strange post-modern simulacrum of the main stream media reporting on a faux journalist trying to report on a mass-mediated personality. In Milan, he stormed an Agatha Ruiz de la Prada fashion show before being escorted away by police, who soon recognized him as a world famous trickster. He then made headlines in Paris after disrupting English designer Stella McCartney’s show by sucking on a tampon among other things. While such media saturation makes one hell of a pre-release marketing campaign, it simultaneously deflates Baron Cohen’s singular form of humor.

This is not the first time that Baron Cohen has had to grapple with the bittersweet effects of over-exposure. After the initial season of Da Ali G Show, he was so well known in his native Britain that he had to take his show on the road to find new rubes to ridicule. Freed of the shackles of familiarity, he was able to entice amicable Southerners into anti-Semitic rants and provoke fatuous fashion designers to prescribe concentration camps for the poorly frocked. It was during those years that Baron Cohen (as Ali G) scored most high profile interviews, including Newt Gingrich, Boutros Boutros-Ghali, Gore Vidal, and James Baker. Operating under the cover of an “educational program” for British youth, Baron Cohen’s cunning staff could rely on the insularity of Americans to guarantee both access and laughs. However, since the release of Borat—a film which grossed $260 million worldwide, the English mountebank is almost universally known across the Anglophone world (and well beyond it).

It is already becoming apparent that Baron Cohen’s social commentary cum guerilla comedy may not be able to withstand the fame he has single-handedly generated. Such a verdict was reinforced in October when Esquire named him as one of the “75 Most Influential People of the 21st Century,” but implied his once unique characters have already become a bit uninteresting. With the advent of globalized 24-hour news media transmitted via satellite TV, mobile phones, and personal computers, memes like Borat (and Ali G before him) are quickly injected into the cultural bloodstream of the world. An effective inversion of the dilemma faced by late 20th century anthropologists, Sacha Baron Cohen must go to ever more remote areas of the globe to interact with those who do not known him. These “field trips” ultimately detract from the original intent of Baron Cohen’s humor, which was to tell us about ourselves.

Unlike Ali G’s antics, which exposed a raw resentment to multicultural Britain, and Borat’s buffoonery, which exposed lingering racism and intolerance in the American South, Bruno will probably fail to break new ground. Surely, a few forced laughs will be gleaned from incontrovertible evidence of persistent homophobia in Arkansas, and we will smirk at the spoiled phantasmagoria of the contemporary catwalk fashion show—but to what end? Baron Cohen is inarguably a talented comedian and is already emerging as a bankable leading man (future roles include Sherlock Holmes and Abbie Hoffman), but there is a price to pay for such good fortune. Just as Aristophanes, Juventus, and Jonathan Swift learned in centuries past, fame and fortune blunt the rapier wit just as hunger and rejection sharpen it. However, it appears that Baron Cohen’s mass-mediated international recognition will wither his ability to speak truth to power long before the insidious lure of lucre saps his will to do so.

Robert A. Saunders is assistant professor of politics at the State University of New York at Farmingdale and is the author of The Many Faces of Sacha Baron Cohen: Politics, Parody, and the Battle over Borat.

Doors and Dreams: A Review of Wong Kar-wai’s My Blueberry Nights

by Thorsten Botz-Bornstein

Had somebody told me a year ago that one day Wong Kar-wai would make a film in which a young woman saves up $2,200 for a car, I would have said that this is simply impossible. Still, it happened. Wong going American is definitely less Wong, less Asian, less manga… The unreal atmosphere of modern Asia or the Hong Kong “culture of disappearance” permitted a playfulness that cannot be reproduced in New York or in the Midwest. In Happy Together, the other film Wong made in the New World, he had incorporated something of China into Buenos Aires, in particular a 1940s Shanghai atmosphere transported through tango. In his new film he uses atmospheric jazz. At times the film looks like an imitation of Wong or as if someone had told Wong how to make a “real” film, which doesn’t necessarily mean that the outcome is bad.

The big surprise is that everything is so coherent. Nothing is out of place, no unexpected characters pop up, no unfinished sketches are juxtaposed, no possibilities are left open, all characters are able to speak and no discourse has an unqualified status. However, this does not mean that this is not Wong at all. We are still plunged in a hallucinatory world of decadence, hysteria, and exhaustion, into spaces that are erotic (though less crowded), into an urbanity composed of neon lights, fast foods (with occasional cops) and coaxing characters, into low life (which is less low), and into ritualized speeches (which are less fragmented). And all this is edited in stroboscopic stop printing. The feel of the avant-garde or the experimental is still present, but it is now left to visual stylization, which makes it more artificial. Wong’s earlier play with closeness, distance, framing, as well as Christopher Doyle’s tinted photos or stains, were simply more spontaneous. The malleability that we appreciated in Wong’s earlier films has given way to a world in which things do not just happen (sometimes without reason) but are calculated like…in a film. In Chungking Express, we had two Mays, two wigs, two flight attendants… In My Blueberry Nights, the characters are carefully chosen and contrasted and relatively well oriented in their state of disorientation. No confusions, no overlaps are possible. Even the gambler Leslie is more calculating than anything else. With nostalgia we remember that only one film ago people would risk anything to get to a place called 2046.

We appreciated Wong’s earlier films because they were “abstractly melodramatic,” which means that they were not melodramatic at all. Things happened–-like in a manga–-from moment to moment, from aspect to aspect. Sometimes we found this metaphysical. Can we learn to appreciate the new Wong Kar-wai? We should try, because perhaps what has happened is simply that Wong has grown up. Wong’s new invention is Elizabeth, a girl who saves up money for a car, the most unmetaphysical thing that any human being can do. Beth’s unusual enthusiasm for real life gives the whole film a realist perspective. Without Beth, most people would vegetate in the usual Wongian autism – passionless, passive, detached, and unable to get involved in anything tragic. In My Blueberry Nights, people are still irresponsible, mourning unrequited love, searching for their identity, but they are more human. In other words, they behave like adults and not like children, and with such people one can create a real drama.

Elizabeth is amazing. She remembers others not out of a narcissistic desire (because she wants to be loved) but for their own sake. She goes even beyond that by asking: “I wonder how people will remember Arnie.” During the film she is able to change from a Wongian childish character, writing monological letters to Jeremy without giving him the opportunity to respond, into a considerate adult woman. Until now, no character in Wong’s films has ever been able to change; and, usually, his pathetic, self-enclosed creatures were rather obsessed by the desire “to be remembered.”

Elizabeth becomes adult, which means that she overcomes ambiguity. But this is a long way. Ambiguity is the big metaphysical value that permeates this film, symbolized by the swinging doors that should never be shut, by the camera shots through the window that locate people simultaneously inside and outside, and by the keys in a jar that belong to nobody. When you go through a door you might never come back (as does Arnie). Or you can be shot as it almost happens to Sue Lynne. Elizabeth tells her lover unambiguously, “I hope you both drop dead,” which is exactly what is not happening. Later she sees both him and his new lover in the house and does not dare to push the door. Arnie is living between death, and life and Sue Lynne wants to “send him through the door” by telling him “you are nothing.” When he is really gone, Sue Lynne tries to keep him alive by keeping his check hanging on the wall in the bar. The liberty she gains is ambiguous. When she finally leaves the town, Elizabeth says: “for her leaving this town was like dying.” The ambiguous attitude towards death becomes most obvious through Leslie, who, when told about her father, declares, “Dying or not dying, who cares?” But even this is not certain because, as she says later, “You can’t even trust yourself.”
The pivotal character is Jeremy, the axis towards which Elizabeth travels. He is only moderately affected by Wongian unrequited love troubles and eternalizes the world of his café by having filmed its interior from morning until night. But the café itself is called “Klyutch”, which means key in Russian, and Jeremy seems to spend as much time inside it as in front of the door. His ephemeral encounter with Katya takes place outside the café in spite of the cold. Jeremy’s strong point is that he knows from the beginning what Elizabeth yet has to learn: he understands the metaphysics of doors. When he tells Katya his dream, he ends like this: “A door slammed and the dream was over.” That’s what it’s all about: the doors separate dream from reality. The world inside the café is the dream and reality is outside.

What is the conclusion? In the very end, we cannot avoid living our lives like more or less autistic, self-enclosed beings, but from time to time we have to go outside in order to recognize that this dream is a dream and not reality. Elizabeth learns this, though it takes her a year. When she reenters the door of Café Klyutch, she has undergone the most unlikely thing we would expect from a Wong Kar-wai character: a change towards maturity.

Thorsten Botz-Bornstein is the author of Films and Dreams: Tarkovsky, Bergman, Sokurov, Kubrick, and Wong Kar-Wai (Lexington Books).

Oscars for No Country for Old Men

Although many people admired No Country for Old Men, some were repulsed by its nihilism and violence, and quite baffled when the film captured four Oscars (best picture, director, actor in a leading role, and screenplay based on material previously produced or published). To be sure, Joel and Ethan Coen, who wrote, directed, and edited the film based on a novel by Cormac McCarthy, have rarely lingered over sunny aspects of human existence. Nonetheless, No Country’s gore seems especially relentless, unrelieved as it is by either comic or heart-warming turns such as somewhat soften, brighten and humanize Fargo (1996)--another tale of mad violence, and the sole other Coens’ film to garner Oscars (best screenplay written directly for the screen and best actress in a leading role). Indeed, No Country’s relatively uniform style and tone set it apart from most of the Coens’ oeuvre. One might even argue that surprising shifts of tone and generic allusion in Romance and Cigarettes (2005), a film executive-produced by the Coens but written and directed by John Turturro, are more Coens-like than the path charted in No Country.

Errol Morris is another director who has won recognition at the Academy Awards for a film that is uncharacteristic of his work as a whole. Morris’s The Fog of War, which received the Oscar for best documentary in 2003 and the companion book subsequently published by Rowman & Littlefield in 2005, is more linear and conventional in its imagery, picture-sound relationships, and other aspects of form than earlier, more experimental films by Morris. The insertion of staged scenes in The Thin Blue Line, along with apparently whimsical optical and aural effects as in later films by Morris, provoked the Academy Awards committee to disqualify it from documentary competition. Alert to such doubts as to whether Morris’s films were truly documentaries, Roger Ebert wrote admiringly when The Thin Blue Line appeared, “Although he makes documentaries, Morris is much more interested in the spaces between the facts than with the facts themselves.”

To return to the Coens, though, if in forgoing in No Country the playful shifts of tone and generic allusion that distinguish much of their earlier work, including O Brother, Where Art Thou? (2000) as well as Fargo, they retreat from experimentation, Javier Bardem’s performance of the horrific villain Anton Chigurh in No Country possibly represents a new perception on their part, while he offers perverse compensation to the film spectator deprived of playful generic turns. Anton Chigurh is not merely a killer such as appears in other films by the Coens, or in Westerns by other filmmakers. Rather, as he keeps re-emerging abruptly, magically, a ubiquitous, wounded figure of destruction relatively free of bodily constraint as well as reason, he represents an evil spirit overtaking the world--or at least the Southwest, where the action occurs. If one accepts the notion that films reflect broad concerns of the society in which they arise as well as of the filmmaker, it’s not inconceivable that this new film bedecked with Oscars points to an unusual surge of pessimism and foreboding in the American psyche.

Ira Jaffe is professor emeritus and former chair of the Department of Media Arts at the University of New Mexico. He is the author of Hollywood Hybrids: Mixing Genres in Contemporary Films.

Issues Raised by Writers Guild of America Strike

by Vincent Mosco

The strike of the Writers Guild of America captured a lot of attention because it deprived millions of their favorite television programs. But the issues it raised will persist long after people comfortably settle into new episodes of CSI. Here are some observations to consider.

The strike demonstrated the importance of new media for old media industries and especially for their workers. After all, a central issue in the strike was the distribution of revenues from new media uses of traditional television programming. What, if any, compensation should writers receive for work that is increasingly repackaged for the digital world, especially the internet? With the producers proposing to end the system of residuals and develop new forms of compensation, and the writers determined to press for expanded residual payments, it came as no surprise that the WGA took to the picket line on November 1, 2007. The strike, which lasted three months and cost Hollywood an estimated $2.5 billion, was resolved with a deal that promised writers a stronger foothold in the online world. In the first two years of the three-year contract, writers would get a maximum flat fee of about $1,200 for programs streamed online. In the third year, however, they would receive two percent of a distributor’s gross, a key union demand. Other provisions include increased residual payments for downloaded movies and TV programs.

No one is sure what the size of the revenue stream will be from streaming and downloading, but it should be clear to anyone familiar with research on labor, especially in the communication industry, Hollywood workers would benefit from greater solidarity among its many unions. With separate unions representing directors, writers, actors and technicians, it is difficult for them to speak with one voice against increasingly integrated media conglomerates that dominate both old and new media. The Communication Workers of America which represents journalists, telephone workers, media technicians, and high tech workers has benefited from solidarity. But attempts to bring together the Hollywood unions have failed, often on very close votes. There are many reasons for this but a narrow craft consciousness and a guild, rather than a union, culture have been especially difficult to overcome. In essence, they have failed to match technological and industry convergence with the labor convergence that would provide Hollywood workers with the resources to defend their interests.

Finally, as a communication scholar, it was disappointing to observe how few researchers in the field commented on the strike to offer the historical background and context for the events. Academics, especially those working on the issues swirling around new media and the internet, need to spend more time on the labor dimension. It is not enough to ask: What will be next new thing? We also need to ask whether media workers of the world will unite.

Vincent Mosco is professor of sociology and Canada Research Chair in Communication and Society at Queen's University and co-author with Catherine McKercher of Knowledge Workers in the Information Society.

Michael Mann and Johnny Depp Make Public Enemies

By Steven Rybin

The recently ended WGA strike in Hollywood has prevented several new projects from getting off the ground, and several previously announced productions involving film director Michael Mann and actor Johnny Depp have been put on hold, perhaps indefinitely. Several planned Mann projects, including a film with Tom Cruise at Columbia, which Mann would only agree to direct if he could rewrite the script (which couldn’t be done during the strike) and a previously announced project with Depp based on the life of the spy Alexander Litvinenko, were shelved. It is the cancellation of those plans which has allowed Mann and Depp to plan their new collaboration. According to Variety, the project, an adaptation of the 2004 Brian Burroughs book Public Enemies: America’s Greatest Crime Wave and the Birth of the F.B.I., 1933-34, is partially based on the life of gangster John Dillinger and set during 1930s Depression-era America. Mann has made plans to film his own adapted screenplay of the novel with production set to begin in March of 2008.  The film is primarily set in Chicago, an environment Mann knows well; he was born there, and his film 1981 Thief was set in the city.

This is not the first time Mann has announced plans to shoot a film set in the 1930s: an earlier project, announced in the Spring of 2007, was to cast Leonardo DiCaprio in a film noir set in the 30s. That film – announced well before the WGA strike began – never got off the ground because Hollywood studios were unwilling to give Mann the large amount of money the production required (rumored at well over $100 million) in the light of the relative commercial disappointment and budget overruns of his 2006 film Miami Vice. Public Enemies, in many ways, seems a more natural follow-up, given Mann’s own filmography, which provides some explanation as to why the director might be attracted to material involving a dramatization of the FBI.: the federal agency is often a presence in the director’s crime movies, and rarely a sympathetic one. In the 1986 film Manhunter, Mann’s protagonist, Will Graham (William Petersen) is enlisted by the government to help catch a serial killer, an experience which very nearly destroys his relationship with his family, and in the recent film adaptation of the television series Miami Vice, the cavalier law enforcement of Sonny Crockett (Colin Farrell) and Ricardo Tubbs (Jamie Foxx) is placed in stark contrast to the ineffectual pencil-pushing methods of the bureau. And although Christian Bale has been signed to play FBI agent Melvin Purvis in Public Enemies, it is quite doubtful that the remainder of the (as of now unannounced) actors who will play the other federal agents in the film could carry quite as much on-screen charisma as a gangster played by Johnny Depp, making it likely that viewers’ sympathies will be directed as much towards Dillinger as the authorities chasing him.

Such skewed direction of sympathies, of course, is nothing new for the gangster genre, which has long banked on the likelihood of audiences becoming fascinated with dapper criminality. That Mann’s filmography remains rewarding despite what some would consider familiar crime-film clichés indicates where the strength of his cinema lies; as I have argued elsewhere, the value of Mann’s work largely derives from the way in which he and several very talented collaborators build upon the canvas of the familiar genre conventions with a rich, suggestive film style. But it is not only the conventions of the crime drama that Mann is working within and through: the star personas of his leads, per usual, would also seem to inform his casting. Depp is a veteran of performances casting him as an anti-hero: think of Captain Jack Sparrow in the Pirates of the Caribbean series, or the more recent Sweeney Todd. And Christian Bale (an exceptional actor who usually finds himself in films that cannot match his talent) seems a perfect choice to play a Mann FBI agent, given that many of his characters struggle with personal demons and character flaws despite finding themselves on the side of the law (think Batman Begins, Rescue Dawn, and the more recent remake 3:10 to Yuma). Genre and star persona, then, as in previous films such as Collateral, Miami Vice, and Heat, will be putty in the hands of Mann, who has quietly (relative to the more heralded careers of auteurs such as Martin Scorsese and Clint Eastwood) built up one of the strongest oeuvres of any American director since the decline of New Hollywood cinema in the late 1970s.

Steven Rybin teaches in the School of Interdisciplinary Arts at Ohio University and is the author of  The Cinema of Michael Mann (Lexington Books).