In a message dated 10/16/97 6:13:16 AM, you wrote:

 

<<I find that many American movies of the last twenty years or so,

which depict an encounter with supernatural phenomena (e.g., Close

Encounters,

E.T., Contact, maybe 2001) tend to suggest the possibility of the

supernatural

offering an experience of transcendent redemption:  In each of these movies

something fantastic arrives from far away, from the future, or from another

dimension, equipped with superior intelligence, technology,  and --more

important--sensitivity, and releases the characters in the film, and thereby

the audience in the theater as well, from the intolerable or meaningless

or repressive existence they have known. By contrast, encounters

with the supernatural in American films of the 1930s and 40s like It's

a Wonderful Life and The Wizard of Oz seem to convey the message that in

fact American life as we know it is just fine, and that when it comes

down to it there really is no place like home.>>

 

As a longtime teacher of film at UCSC, let me say, I wish I had more

undergraduates like this....it sounds like a really interesting and

provocative topic.  It seems like your student has already read Leo Bersani's

Culture of Redemption - if not, he definitely should.  Bersani's work can

also be taken in conjunction with Kaja Silverman's (esp. Male Subjectivity at

the Margins which she wrote while in close association with Bersani at

Berkeley) -- her essay in that book, "Celestial Suture" deals with historical

trauma and masculinity in It's A Wonderful Life.  Both Silverman and Bersani

are very interested in the possibilities of an anti-redemptive art, so their

work should provide a useful jumping off point.

 

While I think that the focus on aliens as the latest figuration of "heavenly"

intervention is fascinating, he might also want to consider the spate of

"angel films" - many of them remakes of Forties films - that have recently

become so popular: The Bishop's Wife, Michael, Field of Dreams, and possibly

the unaccountably popular TV series Touched By an Angel and Highway to

Heaven.  The independent film, The Rapture (starring none other than Mr.

Supernatural Intervention himself, David Duchovny) also offers a very

provocative twist on this genre.  If he's interested in broadening the focus

to include European films, Wings of Desire, of course, would provide an

interesting point of comparison.

 

The problem that redemption narratives raise, according to Bersani's account,

is that they reduce the substance of everyday life to complete insignificance

by placing it in some sort of teleological schema: generating meaning only

through reference to some supernatural moment of utopian completeness or

completion (whether religious, political, or even epistemological, as in the

case of Flaubert's "encyclopedic fictions"), the content of human life is

thereby trivialized, debased, and demoted to the status of "what comes

before."  Tracing this notion through cultural shifts in American film

sensibilities sounds like a great project; I wonder if, in some of these remak

es especially, the idealized historical past constructed by Capra and others

doesn't become something of a supernatural entity itself.  Consider Field of

Dreams, for instance, in which the all-American specter of a

(pre-integration) baseball team serves to redeem the yuppie fantasy of a

return to a "simpler" time.  Aren't pastiche films like The Bishop's Wife,

Always, Heaven Can Wait basically about the fantasy of older, simpler

narrative forms returning to redeem a corrupt and deficient contemporary

culture too?

 

David Conner

History of Consciousness

UC Santa Cruz

 

----

To sign off SCREEN-L, e-mail [log in to unmask] and put SIGNOFF SCREEN-L

in the message.  Problems?  Contact [log in to unmask]