Crime Films

During the period of American filmmaking referred to as the Hollywood Renaissance many conventions of classical Hollywood crime films were challenged or revised.

This essay will examine how many of the conventions of the classic noir detective film were reimagined. This essay will look in-depth at the two films; The Long Goodbye, as directed by Robert Altman in 1973, and Chinatown directed by Roman Polanski in 1974. Both of these films are considered neo-noir and feature a private detective protagonist uncovering a mysterious conspiracy. Both films are considered foundation works in the Hollywood Renaissance.

A collection of scholarly essays on Arthur Penn's 1967 film, Bonnie and Clyde. Essays on background, social and historical context, genre, costume, sound, music, and other facets from diverse perspectives by a distinguished group of film scholars. Edited and introduced by Rebecca Martin.

This article deals with current re-dramatizations of crime and popular criminologies. It analyses key elements of the popular criminological imaginaries underpinning a recent and highly successful film— Catch Me If You Can—in order to tease out the discursive, mythical and fabulist techniques by which it communicates particular imaginations of crime. Additionally, the article offers some conceptual and analytical anchors for interpreting filmwork so that other popular representations might be more easily situated within criminological analysis. We argue that popular media portrayals of crime are highly effective in sustaining particular conceptions of the interaction between crime and wider social conditions, and we explore four layers of discursive work through which this film communicates the causes and consequences of criminal behaviour

RESUMEN Aunque destacan el melodrama y el humor, en la filmografía de Almodóvar tienen peso las historias criminales que se caracterizan por tratamientos singulares, alejados de las convenciones del género; en ellas predomina la narrativa anticonvencional, la renuncia a los estereotipos y a los mecanismos de intriga, la ambigüedad del acto criminal o la ausencia de juicio moral y las motivaciones exóticas en los personajes. Los actos criminales están vinculados a situaciones extremas determinadas por el amor, el sexo, las pasiones y los deseos, que se sobreponen a la voluntad y libertad de los personajes. PALABRAS CLAVE Almodóvar, asesinos, violencia machista, crimen pasional ABSTRACT Although emphasizing melodrama and humor, the films of Almodóvar carry heavy criminal histories characterized by singular treatments, far from conventions of the sort. In prevails the unconventional narrative, the renunciation to stereotypes and mechanisms of intrigue, the ambiguity of the criminal act or the absence of moral judgment and the exotic motivations in the characters. Criminal acts are linked to extreme situations determined by love, sex, passions and desires, which overlap with the will and freedom of the characters.

Masculinity, in Lacan’s sense, is an imagination. To specifically theorise Chinese masculinity, Kam Louie examined the elements of wen (cultural attainment) and wu (martial valour) rendered through historical or artistic images, and Song Geng and Derek Hird guide the discussions about Chinese manhood represented in everyday life. With a Marxist perspective, Lo Kwai Cheung illustrated the dissolvability of Chinese masculinity under international capitalism. With reference to Aristotle, it is supposed that Chinese masculinity, similar to ‘tragicity’ in nature, can be represented through imitating actions and hence be perceived. Based on Aristotle’s understanding, we can regard actions as ‘iterable’ media (like Derrida’s understanding of written texts) which engender performances according to the genealogy of quantitative mimesis.

Integrating theoretical discussions with a chronological approach, my full paper will go through following points in order to summarise the changes in Hong Kong crime films from the post-Bruce Lee era to the 2000s: (1) Hong Kong crime film inherited the martial side of masculinity from action films and became a popular genre since A Better Tomorrow was well received in the mid-1980s. (2) Many directors diversified the interpretation of crime in the late 1980s and the 1990s, but remained a focus on the strength, nimbleness and boldness of men. (3) After the decline of Hong Kong film industry for several years, Infernal Affairs’s success renewed the representation of manhood. (4) From the 2000s to now, male characters in crime films are preferably intelligent and wisely-romantic, like the fragile scholar in ancient China. (5) While globalisation seems to be eliminating the Chineseness of Chinese masculinity, I argue that geographical specificity and different speed of cultural development lead to the impossibility of synchronic masculine similarity. (6) Through a brief discussion concerning Hollywood’s adaptation of Hong Kong films, I argue that local masculinity is not transformable.

“Lone Wolves and Stray Dogs: The Japanese Crime Film, 1931–1969” is a continuing collaboration between the Council on East Asian Studies at Yale University and the National Film Center of the National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo. Ever since the success of the French crime film Zigomar in 1911, the Japanese film industry has produced numerous movies depicting criminals and the detectives who try to apprehend them. Chivalric yakuza, modern mobsters, knife-wielding molls, hardboiled gumshoes, samurai detectives, femme fatales, and private eyes populate Japanese cinema, from period films to contemporary dramas, from genre cinema to art film, from the work of genre auteurs like Makino Masahiro to masters like Kurosawa Akira. Cinematic representations of crime have served in Japan to draw the boundaries of society and the nation, define the nature of reason and epistemology, shape subjectivity and gender, explore the transformations of modernity, and even express the desire for political transformation. Surprisingly, little of this rich lode of cinema has been introduced abroad. The film series, which took place over a period of four weeks in January and February 2015, presented some of the masterworks of Japanese gangster film, detective cinema, and Japanese noir, in subtitled archive prints that have rarely been seen abroad. The series concluded with a symposium featuring an international panel of experts on Japanese crime film, and a world premiere screening of a newly struck English subtitled print of the classic gangster melodrama, Chutaro of Banba. All films were screened in 35mm with English subtitles. In conjunction with the series, the Council on East Asian Studies at Yale University printed a pamphlet that features introductions to each of the ten films shown, as well as critical overviews of the genre penned by and Yomota Inuhiko (Kyoto University of Art and Design), Ōsawa Jō (The National Film Center, Tokyo) and Phil Kaffen (New York University). The publication was produced by the graduate students in the Department of East Asian Languages and Literatures and the Film and Media Studies Program at Yale under the supervision of Professor Aaron Gerow (East Asian Languages and Literatures; Film and Media Studies), and provides a detailed and enlightening introduction to this important genre of Japanese cinema. The film series was also supported by the Yale Film Studies Center and Films at the Whitney.

This essay, the final version of which was published as ‘Sherlock Holmes Version 2.0: Adapting Doyle in the Twenty-First Century’ in Sabine Vanacker & Catherine Wynne, eds., Sherlock Holmes and Conan Doyle: Multi-Media Afterlives (London: Palgrave, Crime Files Series 2013), pp.124-139, considers the enduring interest in Sherlock Holmes in the Twenty-First Century and analyses, in particular, the 2009 movie Sherlock Holmes, starring Robert Downey Jr., and the first series of BBC Television's Sherlock, starring Benedict Cumberbatch.

This treatise deals with popular heroic archetypes. It differs from previous research, because by exploring narrative structures of (anti)heroic fiction, it shows that essential parallels exist in transgressive heroic myths in Japan and the West. This is important since in recent decades we register general decline of moral perfectionism in contemporary popular fiction at the expense of morally ambiguous but charismatic “transgressive heroes”. These characters are honorable and “culturally permitted” despite their antisocial inclinations, extralegal violence, or motivation by vendetta (e.g. Robin Hood versus Nezumi Kōzō, or Al Pacino in Godfather versus Kitano Takeshi in Brother). Various culture-specific heroic archetypes are analyzed (cowboy, samurai, yakuza, gangster, social bandit, a military hero) as they appear in popular mainstream narratives (predominantly film) of Japan, United States and Europe. I offer an interdisciplinary methodological framework. While scrutinizing the production/consumption patterns of transgressive heroes and their narratives, I conflate Japanese philology, media studies, and semiotics of film. Furthermore, this research represents a significant departure from the perspective of Friedrich Nietzsche (the dichotomy of Dionysian versus Apollonian ideal of conduct, and the notion of overman) in order to illuminate the fascination by heroes that are located beyond the conventional categories of good and evil. My analysis found that elements of transgression, disorder, and tragic heroism are inculcated into popular narratives in a “hegemonic” manner, i.e. via the transgressive hero. This facilitates social order and relaxes frustrations of everydayness by leaping beyond conventions that usually bind people in society.

KEYWORDS
hero theory, antihero, transgressive fiction, Japanese heroes, Western heroes, good versus evil

Cynthia Rothrock is a martial arts performance legend of the 1980s who began acting in Hong Kong cinema in the late 1980s and became a transnational video star in the 1990s. At the height of her fame she was mobbed by fans from Germany to Indonesia and she made a stadium erupt in the USA, where her thirty-odd films were not shown in cinemas; the subject of hundreds of media articles worldwide, she has been the object of adoring fan web-sites and ‘shrines’, and features today in lovingly curated YouTube galleries of her best fight scenes. Yet in academic studies her work in Hong Kong is praised but rarely discussed, while her career is often framed as one of failure to become a ‘real’ star—that is, to get a big screen role in Hollywood. This article explores some of the reasons for the difficulty we have in accounting for an American performer's contribution to Asian popular culture, asking how critical questions might be reframed to take better account of Rothrock's Asian work.

L'articolo vuole, in modo breve e ricognitivo, mettere un po' di ordine sulla questione circa il cinema spagnolo contemporaneo, spesso bistrattato e maldestramente marginalizzato da critica e pubblico. Dagli anni novanta all'attualità (2017), l'articolo mette in rassegna titoli, registi, attori, generi, tendenze e forme estetiche per confermare la vivacità, la pluralità, la polifonia e il coraggio del cinem spagnolo.

Visions of the apocalyptic breakdown of society are commonplace in contemporary culture, and are rife with images of crime, violence, disorder, vengeance and justice. Taking post-apocalyptic fictions as its focus, this book explores the 'imaginary of disaster' that is so readily apparent in popular culture. It argues that such representations offer important insights into the social and political fears, anxieties, conflicts and fantasies that coalesce around the issues of crime, law and punishment.

Taking an innovative approach to the study of crime fictions - and drawing upon a range of inter-disciplinary scholarship spanning criminology, sociology, politics, theology, religion, history and film studies – the author offers a fresh look at just what our popular enthusiasm for stories of disaster can tell us about ourselves, and about our relationships to a rapidly-changing and seemingly chaotic social world.

During the last two decades more than a dozen Scandinavian films have been officially remade by US studios, and rights have been purchased for a number of others that have yet to receive a green light. While a remarkable increase on its own, the phenomenon reflects on a larger scale changing media industry considerations, story‐telling practices, and cultural assumptions in the Nordic countries and globally. Building on interviews with film practitioners undertaken in Scandinavia during the period 2009‐2013, this chapter analyzes 21st‐century film remake practice through a set of pan‐Nordic examples. The horror and vampire genres are among the most commonly remade film genres, arguably because, as evolutionary psychologists show, physiological and psychological responses to fear, appear to be largely universal, transcending linguistic, cultural, and social contexts. The chapter indicates that re‐make practice, process, and infrastructure provide excellent vehicles for conceptualizing global polyvocality in the entertainment industry.

This thesis examines the generic body of a vast group of commercial crime films produced in Italy during the anni di piombo, or Leaden Years, a time peculiarly marked by widespread episodes of political violence and tragic facts of terrorism (1969-early 1980s). Generally associated with film cycles and formulas popularly known as giallo (or giallo all'italiana) and poliziottesco, these films achieved resounding success at the national box-office by conjugating the aesthetic of foreign crime films and formulas with clear references to the grim and violent Italian reality. The aim of this thesis is to assess how, and to what extent, problems and concerns associated with contemporaneous historical events had effectively influenced their production and consumption, as well as their generic identity. In contrast with traditional (and prevailing) critical accounts, this thesis contends that these films and their generic images are less concerned with terrorism and related political extremism than they are with other contemporaneous social events, such as the reigniting of culturally deep-seated regional tensions, and the crisis of a national benchmark such as the patriarchal family. In discussing this point, this thesis provides a thorough historical contextualization of the Leaden Years which does not rest exclusively on political-terrorist issues, but takes into account other topical social problems, as well as reconstructing the cultural and political-ideological complexity that marked this era. Arguments in support of this thesis have been crucially elaborated through referencing historiographical material and critical sources mostly from Italy, in an attempt to further provide the examination of these films and of their generic identity with an Italian critical and cultural perspective to date scarcely represented in the Anglo-American film studies upon which the theoretical body of the Italian crime film is prevalently built. KEYWORDS: Anni di piombo; Italian cinema; Crime film; Giallo; Poliziottesco; Filoni; Terrorism; Political violence; Italian family; Regionalism.

On the heels of the discovery of a large amount of archive materials belonging to the Italian playwright Guglielmo Giannini (1891-1960), an online Omeka archive is being built. The article brings attention to Giannini's versatile personality and clarifies the role played by him in Italian cinema in the early twentieth century. After a brief description and overview of the newly acquired archival resources (comprising drama scripts, film scripts, film subjects, drafts of novels, etc.), the essay focuses on the various roles played by Giannini in the Italian silent film industry. Giannini was a critic and a director of the ‘militant’ magazine “Kines” while he also translated the intertitles of American films for local audiences. These activities help us to capture Giannini’s position with respect to the relationship between Italian and American cinema and the genres they conveyed, with particular reference to the ‘giallo’.

Genre-bending films rely on viewers' habitual responses to generic codes, misleading audiences into expecting conventional outcomes. The French Connection (1971) exploits spectators' expectations of police-detective-film formulas and thereby catches viewers off-guard, creating a more unsettling experience than the genre traditionally provides.

Updated for Impossibly Funky: A Cashiers du Cinemart Collection, this article traces the origins of the "Parker" character from Donald Westlake / Richard Stark and two of the adaptations of the first Parker book, The Hunter: Point Blank and Payback.

Made and released during protests, riots, and other social crises in Hong Kong, The Story of a Discharged Prisoner (1967) is a pivotal work that transitions between the conventions of the 1950s social-realist melodrama and the crime film that would flourish in the 1970s and 1980s and is a key cultural piece in Hong Kong’s changing structures of feeling during this volatile period. Lung Kong utilizes the crime film to challenge the dominant values of law and order and investigate how the system of colonial capitalist power in Hong Kong impacted social experience. This essay examines and contextualizes the industrial, historical, and sociopolitical context into which The Story of a Discharged Prisoner emerged to demonstrate how the film is a critical site for negotiating the reshaping of values in the emerging industrial city.

Des Portes de la nuit (1946) à Touchez pas au grisbi (1954) en passant par La Môme vert-de-gris (1953), le film noir français d’après-guerre frappe par sa diversité, sa richesse et son originalité.

Diversité des films et des récits : le pessimisme du «réalisme noir» contraste avec l’atmosphère ludique de la «série noire» parodique, elle-même très éloignée de l’univers interlope du «milieu» parisien dépeint dans le film de gangsters… Richesse des talents et des thèmes abordés: du tandem Carné/Prévert à Jacques Becker et Michel Audiard, via des stars comme Simone Signoret, Eddie Constantine ou Jean Gabin, le genre fait appel à des personnalités singulières pour explorer les anxiétés d’une France en mutation, marquée par la Seconde Guerre mondiale et confrontée à l’entrée dans la société de consommation. Singularité artistique et culturelle: loin d’être une simple copie du film noir américain, comme on l’a trop souvent suggéré, le film noir français constitue l’expression nationale d’une forme transnationale, et se distingue à ce titre de Hollywood. Pour évaluer la cohérence de ce genre instable, interroger ses enjeux identitaires et saisir les spécificités hexagonales du «noir», cet ouvrage propose, pour la première fois dans le champ académique, une analyse globale du film noir en France de 1946 à 1960.

This article, a seminal English-language appraisal of the then-neglected figure Jean-Pierre Melville, uses Un Flic (1972), the filmmaker's last completed production, to explore his minimalist, ascetic approach to film style, and the problems his career has posed for overarching histories of postwar French cinema.

Crime films have been the most enduringly popular genre since the dawn of sound era in Hollywood. Mob and gangster films are a sub-genre of crime films and deals with the mafia and their organized crime focusing on rise and fall of power. These films primarily have stacks of money, guns, flashy cars, illegal goods, cluster of goons, crime families, and a plot with a central theme coupled with violence. Hollywood gangster films in the 1930's had liberally drawn inspiration from the newspapers and books of the era. Films of gangster genre are strongly driven by themes such as power, loyalty, betrayal, rivalry, morality, revenge, masculinity, materialism etc. Motifs and symbols add structures and contrasts to effectively convey them. Gangster films, when viewed from an American perspective are to achieve the " American dream " that is to be rich and successful with the most power, one can obtain. The Godfather, a 1972 American crime film directed by Francis Ford Coppola exposes the dark side of the American dream. Betrayal, revenge, masculinity, morality, and violence are some of the predominant themes which drive the film The Godfather. This paper focuses on the study, portrayal and execution styles of three such themes, Revenge, Masculinity and Glorification of Violence and the motifs in the film The Godfather

In this paper the author compares Hong Kong filmmaker Johnnie To’s formal articulation of urban space in his internationally celebrated crime films with that in his locally popular romantic comedies. Drawing from recent scholarship on urban space in Hong Kong, Chinese, and broader East Asian cinema, he establishes that To’s films in both genres hinge on spatial relationships that are specific to rapidly forming metropolises. However, through close analyses of the crime films Expect the Unexpected (1998) and Breaking News (2004) and the romantic comedies Turn Left, Turn Right (2003) and Don't Go Breaking My Heart (2011), he contends that To’s crime films depict these spatial relationships within a framework of spatial continuity, while his romantic comedies do so within a framework of spatial fragmentation. These two frameworks play into the two genres separate dramatic needs: fatalistic confrontation for the crime films vs. delayed reconciliation in the romantic comedies. However, To uses these spatial frameworks within the two genres to explore the ways that urban design can either thwart or facilitate encounters between the inhabitants of a global city.

The aim of this article is to analyze​ two adaptations of Zygmunt Miłoszewski’s novels: ‘Entanglement’ and ‘A Grain of Truth’ – two books of Teodor Szacki’s trilogy. Although crime novels have been extremely popular in Poland, they have not been widely adapted – with an exception of Miłoszewski’s prose, which is because of his actions and consciousness, as he has gained media experience throughout years. The author describes the similarities between books and movies, especially those concerning the city’s description, ambience and themes. What is more, she compares the adaptation model, as ‘Entanglement’ introduced a new main hero – Agata Szacka instead of Teodor Szacki, which resulted in a few changes. ‘A Grain of Truth’, however, brings back a male protagonist. The author discusses the future for Polish crime novels’ adaptations.

Straddling popular generic cinema and the Japanese New Wave, Seijun Suzuki's work can be classified as a "pop-Brechtian" mixture of materials high and low.  This short essay reappraises Suzuki in the light of his FIGHTING ELEGY (1966) and YOUTH OF THE BEAST (1963), connecting his formally disjunctive work to the template of the Japanese New Wave.

Ce numéro, qui fête à sa manière le centenaire de la naissance de Michel Audiard, propose, en première partie, une longue étude sur la préparation de ce film mythique, à partir de nombreuses archives inédites qui révèlent la façon dont le trio Audiard-Simonin- Lautner a conçu l’adaptation du roman noir Grisbi or not grisbi ainsi que les conditions mouvementées du tournage. Dans la seconde partie, une équipe de spécialistes dissèque, chacun dans son domaine, la spécificité des Tontons flingueurs en essayant de répondre aux questions qui concernent la place éminente et singulière que ce film occupe dans l’histoire de notre cinéma.

Historically 'the Gothic' has embodied ideas of Otherness and repression, and a dialectic of attraction and repulsion. Gothic narratives reside in the space of what is known and what cannot (or will not) be known, with writers capitalising on the creative imaginations of their audiences through suggestion and implication. The contemporary fetishisation of forensic science challenges the ethos of such a narrative strategy by insisting upon a world that can always be definitively understood, through the lens of detailed genetic, biological, and psychological examination. And yet the Gothic sensibility remains, articulated in popular-cultural forms that resituate and redefine Gothic archetypes of villainy and Outsider-ness within the context of a broader interest in clinical human personality disorders. These clinical disorders serve as the new Other that postmodern audiences are attracted to and repelled by. Modern TV series such as Dexter embody such a concern with a contemporary version of the dark Gothic underside of human experience. In the UK this new criminal-Gothic landscape of the human mind is inextricably woven into the work of Lynda La Plante and Val McDermid, for just two examples, with criminal subjects lurking on the margins of society as peculiarly contemporary versions of the monstrous, part of an overarching fixation with the intricacies of psychological Otherness.

Książka ta jest pracą historycznofilmową, wykorzystującą jednak dorobek i ustalenia także innych dyscyplin: historii mediów, historii politycznej i społecznej, kulturoznawstwa czy literaturoznawstwa. Koncepcja rozprawy bazuje na dwóch zasadniczych założeniach. Po pierwsze, monografia ma stanowić diachroniczną analizę wycinka kultury Polski Ludowej – opisywać dynamikę rozwoju poetyki kryminalnych seriali i filmów telewizyjnych i wskazywać na momenty szczególnie dla tego rozwoju ważne. Przedmiotem zainteresowania są zatem strukturalne właściwości omawianych produkcji: aktualizowane schematy fabularne, sposoby konstruowania bohaterów, opozycje dynamizujące kryminalne fabuły, charakterystyczne motywy itd. Po drugie, omawiane przemiany gatunkowe zostały osadzone w szerokim – także pozafilmowym – kontekście, pozwalającym zrozumieć ich genezę. Wspomniane właściwości strukturalne zaistniały bowiem w określonej kulturowej ramie determinującej kierunek ich rozwoju. W ten sposób estetyczna, tekstualna analiza produkcji telewizyjnych uzupełniona została analizą kontekstualną, pozwalającą wskazać na pozafilmowe czynniki modelujące opisywany gatunek i jego charakterystyczne elementy.

Il saggio ripercorre tragitti ed evoluzioni del crime movie e della crime fiction d'ambientazione romana negli ultimi vent'anni, indagando come film, serie televisive e produzioni documentaristiche abbiano raccontato e rappresentato la malavita nata e sviluppatasi nella Capitale.

This article examines the relative absence of female investigator characters in contemporary Indonesian crime films. In order to better understand this absence, I place contemporary crime films into historical perspective and argue that the development trajectory of the crime film genre in Indonesia, coupled with the everyday realities of Indonesian gender politics, contribute to the persistent absence of this particular form of female protagonists. While the gender politics in the twenty first century Indonesia has indeed progressively advanced women's rights and status culturally, politically and economically, this progress is at best selective, and has not yet been extended to the extremely male dominated professions such as crime investigation, both on and off the screen. Off-screen realities indirectly structure the representations of gender on-screen, making female investigator characters remain largely unthinkable. Meanwhile, the consistent favouring of male heroism in Indonesian cinema continues to reinforce everyday gender stereotypes. This article reflects on these complex interactions between fictional representation and lived realities, and ultimately reveals the potent symbolic potential of the female investigator character.

This here paper is in fact the collection of my reviews of some of his films, those I have seen over the years and those whose critique I have been able to find in my own archives and on various Internet sites like Amazon where I publish them regularly. All of them are in English, but some are also in French since they were published on the now defunct, deceased, departed cinema site Nord-cinema. The French versions are NOT translations: the two languages work differently and translating is always a betrayal. I have also recuperated older reviews published on IMDb or Amazon before injecting the new ones. You will be able to see how I may have changed over time.

The review of Sudden Impact has been refused by both Amazon.com, Amazon.co.uk and IMDb for reasons I ignore. When that happens, since I know it is done by a machine that refuses some words I do NOT bother trying all over again. Once I was covering Black Boy by Richard Wright and I was quoting some sentences in which the black author used the word “nigger” and the word “negro”. The review was refused. So I made the effort of replacing these words (in Richard Wright’s own quotations) by N****, which is just as offensive to any moderately intelligent person, but the review went through and one smart aleck wondered in a comment why I did not use the proper word “negro” and I had no answer except that a machine has a list of words that are supposed to be banned and as for that this machine is not acting niggardly. The list is quite long though I have never found it published anywhere.

That’s the price to pay to be politically correct. I guess these mechanical censors might refuse the historic “American Indian Movement” because “I*****” is not politically correct.

In the first part you will find the five Dirty Harry films in chronological order and then in the second part fourteen films in anti-chronological order starting with Jersey Boys (2014). American Sniper is still to come.

Decalogue 5 appears to be overtly preoccupied with the specific political issue of capital punishment, yet it is equally concerned with the larger moral contexts which are inherently social - the Law, as the film decrees, manifests our responsibility to each other. While Kieslowski presents us with a murder paradigm which is fundamentally depersonalised, moral choice remains intimately subjective, even if the motivations of the characters are obscured here. The emphasis placed on observation and dissociation throughout Decalogue 5 implicitly critiques the emotional distances wrought between Modern subjects. From the outset, the narrative is framed as Piotr’s story, and the journey he undertakes (along with the audience) moves from an ideal of clinical objectivity - the detached moral frameworks of the Law - to the final annunciation of the personal ("I abhor it"). This article seeks to investigate that journey, highlighting the complexities of these seemingly irreconcilable positions.