The Affects of Animosity: Action Cinema, Enemy Making, and Moral Indignation as Film Mood
Publication: Canadian Journal of Film Studies
Volume 30, Number 1
Résumé
Résumé
L’auteur propose une analyse critique de la fabrication d’ennemis et des structures émotionnelles de l’animosité dans le contexte du genre cinématographique des films d’action. Il élabore au départ un cadre de référence théorique qui met en évidence le rôle central que jouent les émotions négatives et les formes d’antipathie qu’inspirent les personnages dans les pouvoirs rhétoriques du film de fiction. Dans le prolongement de cet apport théorique, il présente et définit la notion d’indignation morale comme ambiance filmique contribuant à entretenir les plaisirs que les films d’action tentent généralement de susciter, tout en proposant une orientation affectivement chargée de la violence filmique. Utilisant Jack Reacher (Christopher McQuarrie, 2012) comme étude de cas, l’auteur clarifie ensuite la façon dont l’indignation morale fait en sorte que la violence héroïque puisse être comprise comme étant moralement légitime et contribue au schéma idéologique selon lequel la vie des méchants n’est pas « deuillable ».
Abstract
This article offers a critical analysis of enemy making and the emotional structures of animosity in relation to the action film genre. Firstly, a theoretical framework is developed that highlights the centrality of negative emotions and antipathic forms of character engagement to the rhetorical powers of fiction film. In line with this theoretical contribution, the concept of moral indignation is introduced and defined as a film mood that helps sustain the pleasures that action films generally attempt to provide, while offering an affectively charged orientation of film violence. Using the case study of Jack Reacher (Christopher McQuarrie, 2012), the article then elucidates how moral indignation allows for heroic violence to be understood as morally legitimate and contributes to the ideological framing of the lives of villains as ungrievable.
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Notes
1.
François Truffaut, Alfred Hitchcock, and Helen G. Scott, Hitchcock (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1985), 316.
2.
Carl Plantinga, Screen Stories: Emotion and the Ethics of Engagement (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018).
3.
Tarja Lain, Feeling Cinema: Emotional Dynamics in Film Studies (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2011), 5.
4.
See David Bakan, John M. Broughton, and Petra Hesse, The Psychology of War and Peace: The Image of the Enemy (Berlin: Springer, 1991); Günther Schlee, How Enemies Are Made: Towards a Theory of Ethnic and Religious Conflict (New York: Berghahn Books, 2010); and Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic Politics (London: Verso Trade, 1985).
5.
Judith Butler, Frames of War: When Is Life Grievable? (London: Verso Books, 2016), 50.
6.
Murray Smith, Engaging Characters: Fiction, Emotion, and the Cinema (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995); Carl Plantinga, Moving Viewers: American Film and the Spectator’s Experience (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009); and Noël Carroll, “Movies, the Moral Emotions, and Sympathy,” Midwest Studies in Philosophy 34.1 (2010): 1–19.
7.
Carroll, “Moral Emotions,” 1–19.
8.
Plantinga, Moving Viewers, 88.
9.
Smith, Engaging Characters, 75.
10.
Carroll, “Moral Emotions,” 4.
11.
While some emotion scholars prefer to entirely separate the concepts of affect and emotion, I follow Plantinga in his interpretation of both terms as inherently entwined. While emotion is often used in relation to cognition and affect in relation to bodily sensations, the one can never be considered entirely independently of the other, and they are therefore used in a complementary manner in this article.
12.
Carroll, “Moral Emotions,” 9.
13.
Carroll, 9.
14.
Carl Plantinga, Screen Stories: Emotion and the Ethics of Engagement (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), 201.
15.
Carroll, “Moral Emotions,” 9.
16.
Carl Plantinga, Moving Viewers: American Film and the Spectator’s Experience (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009), 217.
17.
Todd Berliner, Hollywood Aesthetic: Pleasure in American Cinema (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), 144.
18.
Plantinga, Screen Stories, 50.
19.
Plantinga, 39.
20.
Plantinga, 39.
21.
Plantinga, 50.
22.
Plantinga, 68.
23.
Carroll, “Moral Emotions,” 19.
24.
Plantinga, Moving Viewers, 44.
25.
Torben Grodal, Moving Pictures: A New Theory of Film Genres, Feelings, and Cognition (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1999), 4.
26.
Christian Keysers, The Empathic Brain: How the Discovery of Mirror Neurons Changes Our Understanding of Human Nature (Scotts Valley, CA: Createspace, 2011).
27.
Jonna Eagle, Imperial Affects: Sensational Melodrama and the Attractions of American Cinema (New York: Rutgers University Press), 2017.
28.
Butler, Frames of War, 50.
29.
Debra L. Merskin, Media, Minorities, and Meaning: A Critical Introduction (London: Peter Lang, 2011).
30.
Elizabeth Lane Beardsley, “Moral Disapproval and Moral Indignation,” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 31.2 (1970): 161–176.
31.
Carroll, “Moral Emotions,” 11.
32.
Plantinga, Screen Stories, 181.
33.
Plantinga, Screen Stories, 189.
34.
Greg M. Smith, Film Structure and the Emotion System (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 70.
35.
Noël Carroll, Beyond Aesthetics: Philosophical Essays (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001).
36.
Grodal, Moving Pictures.
37.
Eric Lichtenfeld, Action Speaks Louder: Violence, Spectacle, and the American Action Movie (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2007).
38.
Harvey O’Brien, Action Movies: The Cinema of Striking Back (New York: Columbia University Press, 2012), 2.
39.
Eagle, Imperial Affects, 3.
40.
Lisa Purse, Contemporary Action Cinema (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2011), 43.
41.
Geoff King, Spectacular Narratives: Hollywood in the Age of the Blockbuster (London: I.B. Tauris, 2000).
42.
O’Brien, Action Movies, 1.
43.
Eagle, Imperial Affects, 145.
44.
Jim Kendrick, Film Violence: History, Ideology, Genre (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010), 21.
45.
Lennart Soberon, “Mapping the Menace: A Quantitative Content Analysis on Enemy Image Construction in the American Action Thriller” (working paper, Ghent University, Centre for Cinema and Media Studies, Ghent, 2018), 43.
46.
David Bordwell, On the History of Film Style (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997).
47.
Jim Hemphill, “Interview: Christopher McQuarrie,” Film Comment, 30 July 2015, https://www.filmcomment.com/blog/interview-christopher-mcquarrie/.
48.
Jonathan Haidt, “The Emotional Dog and Its Rational Tail: A Social Intuitionist Approach to Moral Judgment,” Psychological Review 108.4 (2001): 814–834, 814.
49.
Murray Smith, “Gangsters, Cannibals, Aesthetes, or Apparently Perverse Allegiances,” in Passionate Views: Film, Cognition, and Emotion, ed. Carl Plantinga and Greg M. Smith (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press), 217–238.
50.
Murray Pomerance, Bad: Infamy, Darkness, Evil, and Slime on Screen (New York: State University of New York Press, 2012).
51.
Berliner, Hollywood Aesthetic, 222.
52.
Noël Carroll, The Philosophy of Horror: Or, Paradoxes of the Heart (London: Routledge, 2003), 29.
53.
Jörg Schweinitz, Film and Stereotype: A Challenge for Cinema and Theory (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011), 102.
54.
Richard Dyer, White (London: Routledge, 1997), 210.
55.
Holger Pötzsch, “Borders, Barriers and Grievable Lives,” Nordicom Review 32.2 (2011): 75–94.
56.
Carroll, “Moral Emotions,” 18.
57.
Pötzsch, “Borders,” 76.
58.
Carl Plantinga, “The Scene of Empathy and the Human Face on Film,” in Plantinga and Smith, Passionate Views, 239–256.
59.
Eagle, Imperial Affects, 2.
60.
Peter Turner, Found Footage Horror Films: A Cognitive Approach (London: Routledge, 2019), 43.
61.
Carl Plantinga, “Spectacles of Death: Clint Eastwood and Violence in Unforgiven,” Cinema Journal 37.2 (1998): 65–83.
62.
Berliner, Hollywood Aesthetic, 143.
63.
Purse, Action Cinema, 108.
64.
Susan Faludi, The Terror Dream: Myth and Misogyny in an Insecure America (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2007).
65.
Eagle, Imperial Affects, 173.
66.
Plantinga, Screen Stories, 181.
67.
Sara Ahmed, “Affective Economies,” Social Text 22.2 (2004): 117–139.
68.
Sara Ahmed, The Culture Politics of Emotion (New York: Routledge, 2001), 47.
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Published In
Canadian Journal of Film Studies
Volume 30 • Number 1 • Spring | Printemps 2021
Pages: 126 - 149
Copyright
2021 Film Studies Association of Canada / Association canadienne d’études cinématographiques.
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Published in print: Spring | Printemps 2021
Published online: 29 April 2021
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Canadian Journal of Film Studies 2021 30:1, 126-149
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