This series of accessible presentations dissects contemporary media trends and revisits some ‘old friends’ – with a particular focus on Hollywood film. Critic/theorist Richard Pettifer (AUS/GER) will discuss trends in anti-misogyny, collectivity, trauma recovery, and modes of spectatorship.
Sundays in December (8th, 15th, 22nd) from 19.00, lectures start 19.30
Public in Private Studio, Flutgraben e.V.
Am Flutgraben 3
12435 Berlin
In English, with Ukrainian translation
Contact phone: +491773733113 (whatsapp/signal/telegram)
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Attendance by donation.
A soup, a wine, and a talk, with Q+A discussion.
Online Streaming begins at 19.00 CEST, 20.00 Kyiv time: www.Youtube.com/@theaterstuck
Follow along: https://www.instagram.com/richard_pettifer_criticism/
with the support of Hannah Liashenko and Cultural Workers Studio.
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This series of accessible presentations dissects contemporary media trends and revisits some ‘old friends’ – with a particular focus on Hollywood film. Critic and theorist Richard Pettifer (AUS/GER) will use examples from the Horror, Weepies, and Superhero genres of late cinema history to discuss contemporary trends in anti-misogyny, collectivity, trauma recovery, and modes of spectatorship. The target will be re-thinking the way that we conceive of contemporary events, with particular focus on Carol Clover’s 1992 text “Men, Women, and Chainsaws”, and building cultural discourse around the 2022 full-scale invasion of Ukraine.
DECEMBER 8th:
Lecture 1) Re-watching the “Final Girl”
In the first of these informal Sunday lecture events, critic Richard Pettifer (AUS/GER) re-examines Carol Clover’s conception of the Final Girl in 1980s slasher films, comparing this with contemporary discourses on modes of identification and contemporary conceptions of female heroism.
The “Final Girl” is the last remaining survivor in the slasher film after all her friends have been killed. For Clover, the Final Girl draws her power from harnessing masculine and feminine properties simultaneously. She creates a split of identification for her largely teenage male audience of the 1980s horror film, who’s attention is divided between the resourceful, honest heroine, and the monstrous, masculine-coded villain, creating what Clover calls “Cross-Gender Identification” and a feeling of pleasurable paralysis for the audience, best represented by John Carpenter’s “Halloween” (1978).
Amidst the frenzy of today’s identity politics, Clover’s conception stands against the concept of empowerment through either symbolic representation or abstraction of boundaries, instead suggesting the true pedagogy occurs in identification through difference. This has implications for intersectionality and alliance-building, returning us to a general frame, and away from one motivated by a individualist logic of audience- and demographic-targeting employed by marketing and advertising. Using examples of heroines from Disney’s “post-Princess” period beginning with “Tangled” (2012), the figure of the heroine will be examined in relation to contemporary pressures of patriarchy, misogyny, and violence against women, as well as our ability to generate meaningful coalitions that resist these forces.
DECEMBER 15TH:
Lecture 2) Post WW2 “Weepies”, trauma recovery, pornography, and Laura Mulvey
The post-WW2 “Weepies” subgenre of cinema in the 1940s and 50s targeted newly-empowered audiences of women with figures of the “estranged returning man”, masking an unknown trauma. Films such as “Rebecca” (1940), “Spellbound” (1945) and “Brief Encounter” (1945) were designed to provoke visceral emotional and bodily responses in their female audience – as Linda Williams describes, a type of “emotional pornography” for newly-empowered women audiences of in that time, their primary motivation being the common experience of women attempting to re-integrate men returning from war as a newly estranged, monstrous threat.
In the second of these informal public lecture events, critic Richard Pettifer (AUS/GER) analyses Williams’ perspectives on pornographic spectatorship, and comparing these with Laura Mulvey’s conception of the patriarchal apparatus, reconsiders spectatorship and modes of viewing in light of their creation of power relations post-war: How do these blur and re-formulate power relationships between genders and other ideological constructions?
DECEMBER 22ND:
Lecture 3) Re-Historising Online Misogyny: some Superhuman responses
Contemporary political systems favour individualism because they understand that it makes you weak and submissive in the face of power structures, while offering selective access to its carefully-distributed survival prizes. In this context, Online Misogyny thrives by asking the individual to surrender shared social values for personal profit: the social is continually mined for its collectively-created resources, in a The-Hunger-Games style socialisation of risk. Online misogynists are the best examples of this betrayal, which often masquerades as something deeply traditional within the gender binary. Beginning with Neil Strauss’ 2005 book “The Game”, Online Misogyny has widespread and unanalysed outcomes, generating significant social distrust and various types of physical and psychological violence, particularly violence against women, who are forced to decipher between authentic and inauthentic approaches based on arbitrary, shifting criteria and blurred lines in a context of exponentially-compounding strategies. For men inside the gender binary, meanwhile, Online Misogynists offer a false version of ‘natural’ masculinity that is ideologically-fuelled and artificial, designed to maximise patriarchal control using vulnerable men as its tool, and presenting itself as a neutral agent through posing as observations or ‘coaching’ (as Strauss states, “don’t hate the player, hate the game”). As the language of online misogyny has spread into social media – and, with the presidency of Donald Trump in 2016, the political sphere – its ideological influence has become more widespread, offering what is arguably today’s dominant contemporary metaphor through which the world is viewed.
Against this, “community” – equal, shared, communal – is perceived as the biggest existential threat. Collective and participatory modes of viewing, in particular, allow re-imaginings of films that are ideologically individualistic into ones that develop social and collective viewing responses with traits of horizontality and consensus. Arguably the best examples of these are in superhuman cinema, where the individual superhero(ine) promoted by the Marvel and DC Comic universes can be ultimately replaced by a re-thinking of viewing practices. Relying on Will Brooker’s analysis of participatory viewing in Star Wars films in Using the Force (2002) and his own theoretical construct “Superhumanism“, critic Richard Pettifer (AUS/GER) points towards collective and communal love as the ultimate response to the inauthentic manipulations of the pick-up artist and their appeals to cynicism, and a root misconception of Darwin’s “Survival of the Fittest”.
Image credit – Ana-Maria Iordache
