Joy McEntee

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John Frankenheimer's 1962 adaptation of Richard Condon's The Manchurian Candidate is famous for the fractal surrealism of the sequence in which Major Bennett Marco (Frank Sinatra) dreams that his commanding officer, Raymond Shaw (Laurence Harvey), is a hypnotically programmed assassin-a ticking Communist time bomb in the guise of an all-American hero. Marco takes it upon himself to dismantle tne mechanism that makes Shaw so dangerous. In the course of trying to "rip out the wiring," he befriends Shaw, who, in a moment of drunken camaraderie, apologizes for airing his mixed feelings about his controlling mother (Angela Lansbury). "It's OK," says Marco, Forgiving Shaw's boorishness: "it's like listening to Orestes gripe about Clytemnestra." It might be tempting to dismiss this reference to tne Oresteia as pretentious, a gauche attempt to confer on a melodramatic film the high-culture kudos of tragedy. Stanley Friedman, for instance, un...

Charles S. Young and Susan L. Carruthers describe John Frankenheimer's The Manchurian Candidate (US, 1962) as a prisoner-of-war film. This article argues that, as such, it stages the responses of its male protagonists to trauma. Focusing on weeping, the article examines the representation of masculine traumatic symptoms in both Richard Condon's 1959 novel and Frankenheimer's cinematic adaptation of it. In a period of national shame about the unwon Korean conflict, Frankenheimer first feminizes his protagonists by rendering them hysterical, and then allows them to redeem themselves through heroic deeds of masculine role fulfillment. Drawing on the modeling of masculine hysteria by both Mark S. Micale and Elaine Showalter, the article is also informed not only by Bessel van der Kolk's descriptions of post-traumatic stress disorder but also by theorizations of tears in the writings of Tom Lutz, Steve Neale, and Linda Williams. Peter Brooks and Geoffrey Nowell-Smith mobilized ideas expressed here about melodrama. As a melodramatic enactment of masculine roles in the late 1950s and early 1960s, The Manchurian Candidate is both a trauma film and a “male weepy.”

Revenge is not an art for the forgetful. To enjoy revenge drama, you need to relish the struggle between a will to remember and a desire to forget. Four hundred years ago that tension generated revenge tragedy.1 This essay brings the memory of that old theatrical genre to bear on three of its cinematic heirs: The Debt Collector (Anthony Neilson, 1999), The Boondock Saints (Troy Duffy, 1999), and The Man Who Sued God (Mark Joffe, 2001). I contend that these three films remember and recycle early modern conceptions of revenge in order to dramatize a contemporary thinking through of the idea of the father.2 The question I ask is, "Why this, now?" What does revenge tragedy have to offer the contemporary cinematic father? My answer is that these films disinter elements of revenge tragedy and use them to explore potentialities of father's role in the post-backlash era. The father takes up retributive projects as remediation for having been "stiffed."3 All three films foreground the shortcomings, failings, and hypocrisies of the law.4 Billy Connolly stars in all of them as a father who affronts the law in some way: through revenge, vigilantism, or the perversion of legal practice.5 Each film links its central challenge to the law with a project for protecting or restoring the prestige of the father. The affront to the law is direct in both The Debt Collector and The Boondock Saints: the father becomes embroiled in revenge and vigilantism. In The Man Who Sued God the confrontation is more oblique: the father brings a novel and impertinent lawsuit that interrogates a fundamental premise on which the authority of state power rests, namely that the law claims to interpret God's will. These films constitute a minicycle about "retributive paternity" that forms a coda to a much larger cycle of revenge films I have described elsewhere.6 To demonstrate that these films constitute a cycle, we need only recall their plots. The Debt Collector is an "intensely depressive" drama, in which Connolly plays Nickie Dryden, who collects repayments for loan sharks (Paviour 90). Famous for his ruthlessness, he specializes in extracting pounds of flesh from debtors' relatives if cash is unforthcoming. Dryden, however, is not the only "debt collector" in the film. Keltie (the police officer who first arrested Dryden) emerges as a contender for the title. The narrative is concerned less with Dryden's original crimes than with what happens after he is released from an eighteen-year prison sentence. Apparently a reformed man, he becomes a fashionable artist and marries well, moving up the social ladder and becoming a stepfather. But Keltie regards Dryden's "reform" as irrelevant, because his life after prison is manifestly a reward rather than a punishment. Keltie determines to collect on a debt he regards as still underpaid, namely Dryden's "debt to society." Keltie mounts a campaign of public humiliation that escalates into a violent vendetta. Dryden loses his grip on reform and reluctantly responds in kind. Retaliatory violence escalates almost by accident, damaging both men's families. Finally, Keltie ambushes Dryden with a knife, but he loses the fight and dies. Dryden is tried for new crimes, and although he is again released, this time he has paid dearly: his stepson has died and his wife has become estranged. As Keltie warned Dryden, "All she'll see when she looks at you is fear, and pain, and loss." In The Debt Collector, the men who turn to revenge are unseated and discredited by it, and the vengeful father emerges as "a character upon whom you'd wish all the harm in the world" (Kelly 44). Of the three movies considered here, The Debt Collector depicts revenge in the starkest, most unprepossessing fashion, and the father's recourse to it is condemned. As Richard Kelly says, "this film is not on the side of the redemptive angels" (44). By contrast with The Debt Collector's gritty "sociological" realism, The Boondock Saints enthusiastically restores a camp glamour to vigilantism, embedding the father who takes the law into his own hands in a stylized and surreal fantasia. …

In a post September 11 era “the fight”, as a cultural construct, could hardly be more pertinent. We are seemingly forever poised on the edge of controversial U.S. led attacks on wayward Middle Eastern states and unexamined oppositions between the concepts of ‘good’ and ‘evil’ are evoked as valid justifications for battle. Our leaders muster us into wars of vigilance and national cohesion against unseen, unknown and uncomprehended terrorists hiding where communists once lurked under our beds. The articles in this issue examine fights in terms of media strategies and cultural divides in a range of contexts. Our feature article is a work of a fiction, an extract from the sharply beautiful novella Moving by Julienne van Loon, describing a fight between friends, maybe lovers. Set against the harsh backdrop of urban working-class Sydney, the fight here is personal, a spontaneous response to a hurt done, an expression of anger and frustration. Loon’s work explores the nature of physical st...

Previously unseen materials donated by the Stanley Kubrick estate to the London University of the Arts Special Collections Archive sheds new light on what has been a relatively ‘unknown’ period in the auteur’s early career, between departing Look magazine and forming Harris-Kubrick Pictures (1950-55)1.

The following case studies and analyses draw from this new, as yet uncatalogued material to reveal autobiographical resonances, such as Kubrick’s photographic work translating into film, his personality inflecting characterisation and the ‘lived’ milieu of Greenwich Village and greater New York City. The archival deposit includes numerous script drafts, scenarios and dialogue fragments, revealing Kubrick’s abiding concerns – obsessive love, psychosexual drama, jealousy, revenge, ambiguity, ambition and violence – lending it an overriding seediness and pulp aesthetic. It also presents a young man filled with creative energy and ideas, negotiating self-doubt while increasingly honing his skills as a writer and adapter, some of which remains adroit and affecting.

The Shining is a resource that keeps on giving. It has generated a whole “universe” of creative, critical and fan activity. Stanley Kubrick adapted The Shining once in 1980 and never looked back, unlike Stephen King, who has returned to The Shining materials again, and again. King was  famously unhappy with Kubrick’s adaptation.2 He made his own execrable readaptation (Stephen King’s The Shining, Mick Garris, 1997) and wrote a reparative novel: Doctor Sleep. There is more than a touch of revenge in these manoeuvres, as King sought to reassert authority over his story. Doctor Sleep was, in its turn, adapted in 2019 by Mike Flanagan and marketed as “Stephen King’s Doctor Sleep.” Despite this marketing, this film samples the visual and narrative strategies of Kubrick’s The Shining liberally and without apparent irony, deploying the cultural cachet and style of Kubrick’s film in ways that are simultaneously exploitative and reverential. This article examines this latest act of adaptation and reappropriation to discuss how King’s ongoing public war with Kubrick, waged indirectly through Flanagan as his adapter, “keeps the wounds of revenge green” (to paraphrase Francis Bacon) and continuously revivifies the cultural property generated by The Shining. Unlike King, Flanagan is not motivated by revenge, but he goes further than reappropriating Kubrick’s work: he “Hijacking” it, turning it to his, and King’s, purposes. This becomes particularly clear through the conception of family, where King reveals himself a sentimental humanist. This sentimentality is, of course, what makes King so amenable to adaptation Hollywood, but Kubrick lanced it like a boil. Flanagan seems to be a sentimental humanist as well, which means in this sense he reads Kubrick through the lens of King. This is the double valence of Doctor Sleep: narratively, stylistically, Flanagan gives the edge to Kubrick, but the tonal, ideological edge goes to King. The result is a misprision of the cult object that is Kubrick’s The Shining. Doctor Sleep translates what it means back into the language of King from which it was translated in the first place.

In Psychiatry and the Cinema (1999) Glen O. Gabbard and Krin Gabbard argue that representations of the psychiatrist were largely so positive in the late 1950s and early 1960s as to constitute a Golden Age of movie psychiatry. Their defence, however, falters on two points: their characterization of Dr. Richman in Psycho (Alfred Hitchcock, 1960) is open to challenge, and they apparently overlook Yen Lo (Khigh Dhiegh), the evil Communist brainwasher who dominates the bravura set pieces of The Manchurian Candidate (John Frankenheimer, 1962). Furthermore, they ignore the stigmatization of psychiatry by association with the phenomenon he is invoked either to explain or represent, namely the destabilization of binary constructions of gender. This article re-examines Dr. Richman and discusses Yen Lo as a monstrous psychiatrist who gives Frankenheimer an opportunity to screen a phobic response to gender liminality. Psycho and The Manchurian Candidate occupy a trajectory of equivocal representations of the psychiatrist in American horror and thriller movies from 1956 to 2016. These films evince continuities rather than discontinuities between the psychiatrists of Gabbard and Gabbard's Golden Age and those of subsequent eras.

Charles S. Young and Susan L. Carruthers describe John Frankenheimer's The Manchurian Candidate (US, 1962) as a prisoner-of-war film. This article argues that, as such, it stages the responses of its male protagonists to trauma. Focusing on weeping, the article examines the representation of masculine traumatic symptoms in both Richard Condon's 1959 novel and Frankenheimer's cinematic adaptation of it. In a period of national shame about the unwon Korean conflict, Frankenheimer first feminizes his protagonists by rendering them hysterical, and then allows them to redeem themselves through heroic deeds of masculine role fulfillment. Drawing on the modeling of masculine hysteria by both Mark S. Micale and Elaine Showalter, the article is also informed not only by Bessel van der Kolk's descriptions of post-traumatic stress disorder but also by theorizations of tears in the writings of Tom Lutz, Steve Neale, and Linda Williams. Peter Brooks and Geoffrey Nowell-Smith mobilized ideas expressed here about melodrama. As a melodramatic enactment of masculine roles in the late 1950s and early 1960s, The Manchurian Candidate is both a trauma film and a “male weepy.”

Commonly described as a melodrama, The Manchurian Candidate (John Frankenheimer, 1962) surprisingly alludes to various tragedies, notably The Libation Bearers, Oedipus the King, Hamlet and Romeo and Juliet. While several commentators have acknowledged these intertexts, none has investigated their implications for The Manchurian Candidate in particular and film criticism in general. An examination of this matter enables us to question the prevailing view—pioneered by Linda Williams—that the generic mode of Hollywood film is melodrama. My paper responds accordingly to Rita Felski’s assertion that film studies needs to pay more attention to tragedy. In examining how and why The Manchurian Candidate invokes and adapts its tragic precursors, I argue that although the film is incontestably melodramatic, its tragic pretentions reveal the possibility of generic hybridity in early 1960s filmmaking. Ossification of the demarcation lines between tragedy and melodrama has prevented critics from accounting for this phenomenon.

Stephen King and Stanley Kubrick are both important contributors to adaptation as an industry, so their contest over The Shining has the quality of a clash of the titans. This article discusses King’s commentary on Kubrick’s The Shining, as well as his two significant attempts at reappropriating the material: the miniseries Stephen King’s The Shining and the sequel novel Doctor Sleep. It interrogates the gender politics of each iteration, and pays particular attention to the moral status of the patriarch in order to test Greg Jenkins’s assertion that Kubrick’s tendency as an adapter was to ‘[imbue] his films with a morality that is more conventional than the [precursor] novels’ (original emphasis). It concludes that Kubrick’s vision of the patriarch is, finally, less morally conventional and certainly less sentimental than King’s, and possibly more horrifying.

In A Clockwork Orange (A Clockwork Orange. Dir. Stanley Kubrick. UK. 1971), and conspicuously so at the end of the film, Stanley Kubrick reworks his source material so that the masculine protagonist’s self-consciousness about the wrong he does is ultimately denied. Whereas Anthony Burgess’s novel ends with a chapter that sees Alex tiring of his violent ways and yearning for a family, Kubrick’s film excises that episode, and gives its audiences instead an image of Alex DeLarge (Malcolm McDowell) escaping into an ecstatic space, free of the three burdens with which Burgess potentially saddles him: repression, conscience and family. Kubrick liberates his protagonist so that he learns to stop worrying and just do what clearly enjoys doing, guilt-free. This paper traces the implications of Kubrick’s choices as an adapter, discussing the ‘gender work’ done by his adaptation. Via the intertext of Anthony Burgess’s ‘polemic’ about Kubrick’s adaptation, as well as feminist criticism, it examines ideas about family and gender, liberation and morality. It interrogates Greg Jenkins’s generalization that Kubrick’s adaptations tend to be more morally conventional than their precursor novels to ask the following questions: ‘Is Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange more morally conventional than Burgess’s novel? Is it amoral? Or is it masculinist?

Ambrose Bierce once described the freshman as a 'student acquainted with grief'. First year students are, indeed, subject to a series of rude shocks in their first weeks at University, chief among them the results of the first assessment. This is particularly the case in those ...

The idea that there is a transcendent element to masculinity — that there is something to being a man that is above and beyond the squalid vulnerabilities of the flesh — has been comprehensively interrogated by decades of philosophical work, but still, a nostalgia for it persists in millennial cultural products, including The Matrix and Fight Club. 1 In these films, a desire to regress to the ideology of masculine transcendence is seen in their thorough-going contempt for the flesh. In both films masculinity is defined by a ― paranoid…somatophobia.‖ 2 In The Matrix, Neo can only achieve his full potential by leaving his ― real‖ body behind, supine and comatose in a modified dental chair, while he escapes into the ― bodiless exultation of cyberspace.‖ 3 Fight Club turns to and on the body. The men who join Fight Clubs flail into each others' bodies, destroying the flesh in order to carve ― wood‖ from ― cookie dough.‖ Possibly more interesting than the movies' somatophobia, is that critical responses to the ways male bodies are mobilized in these films — and particularly to The Matrix —themselves manifest a desire to see through the flesh, to get past it, to leave the body behind even before the films do. 4 From the ― postmodern orthodoxy that the body is primarily, if not entirely, a linguistic and discursive construct‖ emerges a certain critical blindness about the way these films insist on screening male flesh as persistent, as ― real,‖ even in the midst of narratives about the deceptiveness of any idea of reality. 5 Both these films achieve their effects through a combination of photographic and digital imagining, and while a lot of attention has been paid to the digital, and what it might usher in — the capacity to simulate bodies that are not factual, that were never there — less attention is paid to the persistence of the photographic, which brings with it its old freight of indexicality: the idea that it captures and displays something that once was real. This critical silence intensifies when one considers that the men photographed — Keanu Reeves and Brad Pitt — are ― stars,‖ known or believed to be ― real‖ in the way the spectators are ― real:‖ immured in time and corporeality. My project here is to work into the relative critical silence about the persistence of the male body of the star in Hollywood cinema about the ― post-human.‖ Despite announcements that the digital image enables the ― dissolution of the factual,‖ neither Hollywood audiences, nor Hollywood artists, have got past embodiment yet. 6 It is important to attend to the tenacity of Hollywood's traditional, melodramatic aesthetics, which insist on the somatic.