Hollywood and the representation of the Otherness. A historical analysis of the role played by movies in spotting enemies to vilify
Keywords:
Hollywood, Film Language, Otherness, Politics, United States, Vietnam War, 9/11, Cold War.Abstract
Hollywood has played a decisive role in shaping the recent and short history of its founding country, the United States. This paper aims at exploring the representation of peoples outside the Western standard in Hollywood movies to spot recurrences in portraying Others, especially in vilifying terms. The analysis of plots and characters in American movies in different historical stages reveal not only consistent patterns in the depiction of Otherness, but also an even more interesting need to define and reaffirm the Self through the opposition to changing Others that mainly depend on the historical and political period occurring.Metrics
References
ADORNO, T. A. & HORKHEIMER, M. (1979). “The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception”. In Oliver Boyd Barrett & Chris Newbold (eds.) (1995). Approaches to Media. A Reader. London: Arnold, pp. 77-80
CHOMSKI, N. & HERMAN, E. S. (1988). Manufacturing consent: the political economy of the mass media. New York: Pantheon Books.
CLARKE, D. B. (1997). The cinematic city. London: Routledge.
FRENCH, K. (1997). Screen violence. London: Bloomsbury.
FUKUYAMA, F. (1992). The end of history and the last man. London: Penguin Books.
FYNE (1985). “From Hollywood to Moscow”. Literature Film Quarterly, 1985, Vol. 13 Issue 3, pp. 194-200.
GAVRILOS (2002). “Arabs Americans in a nation’s imagined community: How news constructed Arab Americans reactions to the Gulf War”. Journals of Communication Enquiry, 26, pp. 426-445.
GREEN (1993). “Images of American Indians in advertising: Some moral issues”. Journal of Business Ethics, 12, 323-30.
HALL, S. (1997). “The Spectacle of the “other””. In S. Hall (Ed.) Representation: Cultural representations and signifying practices (223-279) London: Sage.
HARDT, D. & NEGRI, T (2001). Empire. Harvard University Press.
HILL, V. & EVERY, P. (2001). “Postmodernism in the Cinema”. In S. Sim (Ed.) The Routledge Companion to Modernism. London and New York: Routledge.
HYDE, M. & MCGUINNESS, M. (1994). Introducing Jung. New York: Totem Books.
HUNTINGTON, S. P. (1993). The Clash of Civilizations? The Debate. New York: Council on Foreign Relations.
HUNTINGTON, S. P. (1996). The clash of civilizations and the remaking of the world order. London: Touchstone Books.
JAMESON, F. (1991). Postmodernism or, the cultural logic of late capitalism. London-New York: Verso.
KAPLAN (1997). Looking for the Other: Feminism, film and the Imperial Gaze. London-New York: Routledge.
KEEN (1986). Faces of the enemy: Reflections of the Hostile Imagination. San Francisco: Harper & Row.
KELLNER, D. (1995). Media Culture. London-New York: Routledge.
KIMBALL (1991). Tenured Radicals: A Postscript, New Criterion.
LIPPMAN (1922). Public Opinion. New York: Harcourt, Brace & Company.
LITTMANN, G. (2015). “American Machiavelli”. In J. Edward Hackett (ed.) House of Cards and Philosophy: Underwood’s Republic. Chichester. John Wiley & Sons.
MERSKIN (2004). “The Construction of Arabs as enemies: Post-September 11 Discourse of George Bush”. Mass Communication and Society, 7 (2), 157-175.
READINGS, B. (1997). Pagans, Perverts or Primitives? Experimental Justice in the Empire of Capital. In Andrew Benjamin (ed.) Judging Lyotard. New York and London: Routledge.
RYAN, M. & KELLNER, D. (1988). Camera politica. The politics and ideology of contemporary Hollywood film. Indiana University Press.
SAID (1994). Culture and Imperialism, New York: Vintage Books.
SHAHEEN, J. G. (2003). Reel Bad Arabs. How Hollywood vilifies a people. Gloucestershire: Arris Books.
SHARMA & SHARMA (2003). “White Paranoia: Orientalism in the age of Empire”, Fashion Theory, 7 (4): 301-318.
SPILLMAN, K.R. & SPILLMAN, K. (1997). Some sociobiological and psychological aspects of “Images of the Enemy”. In R. Fiebig Von Has & U. Lehmkuhl (Eds.) Enemy Images in American History (43-64) Providence, R1: Berghahn.
TASKER, Y. (1993). Spectacular bodies. Gender, genre and the action cinema. London-New York: Routledge.
WORTH (2002). “A nation defines itself by its evil enemies”. The New York Times, February 24th, 2002. Sec. 4, p. 1
ZINN, H. (1980). A people’s History of the United States. London: Pearson-Longman. 3rd ed.
ŽIŽEK, S. (2002). Welcome to the desert of the real. London-New York: Verso.
Published
How to Cite
Issue
Section
License
Authors who submit to this journal agree to the following terms:
Authors retain copyright and ensure the magazine's right to be the first publication of the work as licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoComercial 4.0 International License that allows others to share the work with an acknowledgment of authorship of the work and the initial publication in this magazine, with no commercial purpose.
Authors can establish separate additional agreements for non-exclusive distribution of the version of the work published in the magazine (for example, to an institutional repository or publish it in a book), with an acknowledgment of its initial publication in this journal.
It allows and authors are encouraged to disseminate their work electronically (eg, in institutional repositories or on their own website) prior to and during the submission process, as it can lead to productive exchanges, as well as a citation more early and most of the published work (See The Effect of Open Access).
