By Martin Barker, Pluto Press, 2011

Reviewed by John Trafton

A “toxic genre,” argues Martin Barker, is one where “the production and reception environment already guarantees a struggle for any film” associated with a politically polarizing topic. Recent scholarly work on the crop of Iraq War films has addressed their revisions of war film codes, issues of agency, and the narrative role of trauma, but Barker’s book neatly binds together these approaches in pursuit of the answer to why these war films are deemed “toxic.” By posing this question, and going beyond textual analysis, A ‘Toxic Genre’ provides a more complex overview of contemporary war films, their function within popular cultural, and their role in the overall evolution of the war film genre.

With the plausible exception of Kathryn Bigelow’s The Hurt Locker (2009), the vast majority of these films have been commercial, and in some cases critical, failures. In examining the various reasons behind this trend, Barker engages in a extensive series of approaches: identifying what kind of stories these films tell, what tropes and themes provide the genre with connective tissue, the evolution of the figure of the American soldier, the spectre of war trauma in American culture, as reflected in these films, how these films chose to “explain the Iraq War” to their respective audiences, and how liberalized mass media informs the revisions to the genre’s visual codes. The best demonstrations of these ideas intersecting are in a chapter on the “success” of The Hurt Locker and a chapter on the pre-production of No True Glory – an Iraq War film that never came to fruition. Barker critiques The Hurt Locker’s critical impact and questions the film’s status as a financial success in contrast to other Iraq War films. With No True Glory, Barker outlines the history of the film’s pre-production and, based on the production and reception of actual Iraq War films, surmises what the result may have been like.

A strong feature of Barker’s book is its broad scope. A ‘Toxic Genre’ provides an expansive overview of the genre, indexing the important thematic and cultural content of these films and identifying the common threads that link them. This approach widens the book’s appeal from film academics to undergraduates and non-film scholars; the focus on reception makes this study accessible to a wide range of fields and interests. Additionally, courses in genre studies and film history would do well by engaging with Barker’s work, as his book is a valuable contribution to recent dialogue in both disciplines.

By contrast, Barker’s attempt to tackle a wide range of films and critical issues presents a minor shortcoming: questions remain that could have been clarified through more focused and in-depth textual analyses. Nevertheless, Barker’s multi-faceted approach provides new depth to the field and the construction of new methodologies for approaching it. Barker reminds us that, in his view, although The Hurt Locker represents the end of one cycle of Iraq War films, Hollywood is “not finished with Iraq.”

By Peter Stanfield                                                                                                     Rutgers University Press, 2011                                                                              Reviewed by Fredrik Gustafsson

In 1969, MoMA in New York presented a film series of 35 American films of (less prestigious) genres such as westerns, melodramas and crime films. How I wish I could have been there! Among the films chosen at least 20 are among the best films ever made, including titles such as Out of the Past (Jacques Tourneur 1947), White Heat (Raoul Walsh 1949), In a Lonely Place (Nicholas Ray 1950), The Big Heat (Fritz Lang 1953), Pickup on South Street (Samuel Fuller 1953) and The Lineup (Don Siegel 1958). That retrospective could be said to form the centre argument in Peter Stanfield’s new book Maximum Movies – Pulp Fiction (Rutgers University Press 2011), Stanfield wants to tell the story of how what was once considered trash, bad films or bad books of no artistic value, came to be considered masterpieces with both integrity and high artistic value.

The book is entertaining and informative. It is easy to read though the writing is clunky and mannered at times. (“The highly constructed eidetic moments that call forth an oneiric ambience punctuate the film in a heavy-handed manner.”) By far the best chapters are the first two, which tell the story both of pulp fiction and the critical and theoretical reception of these films and books. They were reviled by mainstream critics in the US and the UK, but also had strong defenders, such as James Agee, Otis Ferguson, Manny Farber and Lawrence Alloway. Alloway is perhaps not as well-known as the others but he wrote the program notes for that MoMA retrospective and in 1971 they were published together as Violent America: The Movies 1946 – 1964 (New York, MoMA, 1971). Other recurring figures are Jonas Mekas and Pauline Kael, and the likes of George Orwell, Edmund Wilson and Stuart Hall appear as well. But it is not just American and British writers Stanfield mentions, he also talks about how the French fell in love with pulp. After the first two chapters, which are more general, the next chapters are case-studies and they are less interesting, the book looses momentum as it moves towards its conclusion. The first case-study is about the adaptation from 1955, by Robert Aldrich and A.I. Bezzerides, of Mickey Spillane’s novel Kiss Me Deadly. The second case-study is about the films of Samuel Fuller, while the third is about Jim Thompson’s books and the films made from them.

The divisions between lowbrow art and highbrow art are more often than not just snobbery, and have little to do with the actual quality of the art works. And that goes for both sides. The constant sneer at pulp art, and for that matter Hollywood in general, from many critics and academics is tiresome and seldom based on actual knowledge but on superficial prejudices. Equally annoying is when, like Manny Farber sometimes, you turn it upside down and instead sneer at everything that is considered highbrow. Drawing lines in the sand is not helpful. On some level it is lazy criticism, an unwillingness to engage with all kinds of art, and instead of trying to engage with things that one does not perhaps understand or does not like it is dismissed as being unworthy. But a film like Kiss Me Deadly is as radical and disturbing as many films made by the French New Wave filmmakers – it even has jump-cuts. A film like Samuel Fuller’s The Crimson Kimono (1957) is only using its silly murder mystery as an excuse to make a brave film about race relations, much more daring then most films made at the time. (So it is a shame Stanfield does not mention this film at all.) At one point Stanfield refers to David E. James’s suggestion that “the Farber-esque action film contested Hollywood from within while the avant-garde did it from without.” Films like the two mentioned above are examples of this kind of action film. Sometimes it is a bit unclear as to where exactly Stanfield stands in relation to the books and films he mentions. It seems he sometimes regards them with an ironic distance, though that might just be his way of writing.

I found some interesting omissions. Stanfield writes about the French New Wave, Truffaut and Godard, but he does not comment on the fact that the New Wave was filled with pulp fiction. Godard’s Breathless (À bout de souffle 1960) is as much pulp as any of the American films he copies. Truffaut’s second film Shoot the Piano Player (Tirez sur le pianiste 1960) is based on a novel by David Goodis, one of the more well-known of pulp writers. Could it not be said that this helped validate that art form? Godard once said that the only things you need to make a film are a gun and a girl, and what could be more pulp than that? (It was actually D.W. Griffith who said it first.) I also wonder why nothing was said about superheroes. There was an explosion in American comics in the late 1930s and the 1940s of superheroes appearing, from right and left. Many of them were drawn by Jewish artists who partly used them as a way of combating the horror they felt with the rise of the Nazis and then the Holocaust. This is an important part of American pop art, and pulp fiction, and it would have warranted at least a comment. (To those who would like to read more about that I recommend Michael Chabon.)

For someone with previous familiarity with these films, filmmakers and writers, not much is new, neither in history nor insights. But for students or a more general audience there is a lot to be recommended in Maximum Movies – Pulp Fiction. If you study or teach popular culture, then by all means put it on the reading list.

By Mika Ko, Routledge, 2012

Reviewed by Andrew Dorman

The Sheffield Centre for Japanese studies in partnership with Routledge has produced a series of extensive works dedicated to situating Japanese cultural and political topics into the various contexts of east Asia, regionalism, globalisation, internationalism, and foreign policy. Mika Ko’s contribution to this series – Japanese Cinema and Otherness – tackles the deeply problematic issues of nationalism and multiculturalism in relation to cinematic representations of ethnic and cultural ‘others’ in the Japanese social milieu. Taking into account a variety of works from the 1960s onwards, the book strives to relate the representation of certain minority groups to prevailing discourses on Japanese national identity and contemporary trends of multiculturalism through a close analysis analysis of narratives and visual styles.

Ko’s work comes at a point when the study of Japanese cinema is becoming increasingly outward-looking in its scope. Very recent publications, such as Intellect’s Directory of World Cinema: Japan (2010) and Yoshiharu Tezuka’s Japanese Cinema Goes Global (2011) focus on the internationalisation of a cinema that has so often been essentialised as intrinsically Japanese. Going further back, Eric Cazdyn’s The Flash of Capital (2002) discusses the ‘break-up’ of national subjectivity (which Ko makes reference to) as a result of global interactions, while Koichi Iwabuchi’s Recentering Globalization (2002) traces the extension of Japanese cultural influence in mainland Asia as an affectation towards multiculturalism. Japanese Cinema and Otherness is not dissimilar from Iwabuchi’s work in the sense that Ko uses the rhetoric of multiculturalism and the idea of a more globalised Japan to focus attention onto the tenents of Japanese nationalism.

As a result, Ko’s work proves to be more inward-looking, turning attention back onto the nation and national subjectivity as much as uncovering representations of multicultural Japaneseness. Not only is this one of the book’s strengths, it also helps distinguish Ko’s argumentation from current research on the global dimensions of Japanese cinema and society. The end result proves to be an important addition to the field, particularly for the way in which it attempts to move beyond basic ideas of Japaneseness and nationalism towards a more complex understanding of how Japaneseness is both constructed and challenged in contemporary films.

One of Ko’s central contentions is that certain films which reflect multicultural sentiments in the contemporary society actively construct different ‘versions’ of multiculturalism that, over the course of the book, prove somewhat contradictory. Furthermore, the text sheds light upon dominant constructions of nationalism connected to multiculturalism suggesting the emergence of a new Japanese national identity that both subverts traditional notions of supposed cultural and racial homogeneity, and reinforces Japanese cultural exceptionality. As Ko argues: ‘while the resurgence of nationalism and the promotion of internationalism and multiculturalism may appear to be opposing trends, they are, in fact, two sides of the same coin’ (1).

In her investigation of nationalism and internationalism-multiculturalism as ‘two sides of the same coin’, Ko neatly divides her attention between dominant discourses of Japaneseness and cinematic portrayals of prominent minority groups. The opening chapter deals with the core tenements of national identity through an examination of controversial nihonjinron and kokutai ideologies. Tracing the development of these concepts (and their relation to the emperor system), Ko suggests that the promotion of contemporary multiculturalism and cultural hybridity disguise the maintenance of nationalism and functions to ‘neutralise’ the conflict between the ‘Japanese’ and their ‘others’ (31). The following chapters seem to bear this out, particularly in relation to the multicultural cinema of Takashi Miike and how his films Shinjuku Triad Society (1995) and Dead or Alive (1998) allegorise the breakup of national subjectivity and the distortion of Japan as a coherent geopolitical image.

Also notable is the attention given to the othering of specific groups – Okinawans and Korean diaspora or Zainichi. The research here is particularly revealing of how minorities are accommodated in Japanese cinema, yet in ways that maintain stereotypical images and contribute to what Ko refers to as Japan’s ‘cosmetic multiculturalism’. The analysis benefits from Ko’s continual awareness of the complexities evident in Japanese multiculturalism and her conception of it as cosmetic. What can be ascertained from this is that Japan’s increasing openness towards outsiders has a profound duality: on the one hand, cosmetic multiculturalism presents a challenge to cultural essentialism, while on the other it serves to assimilate outsiders in preserving Japan’s unique ability to absorb the foreign. Thus, as Ko maintains in her conclusion, multiculturalism in contemporary films represents both a confirmation and a challenge to cosmetic multiculturalism and nationalist ideologies (172). Ko writes: ‘We should remember that cosmetic multiculturalism may potentially offer a space where the negotiation between the ‘dominant culture’ and ‘other cultures’…take place. In other words, although the ‘otherness’ of ‘others’ can easily be exploited, at the same time cosmetic multiculturalism offers the possibility for ‘others’ to exploit it and turn it into a device for negotiation and resistance (169).

With issues of ethnic and cultural hybridity and multiculturalism continually (albeit slowly) being renegotiated in a nation often singled out as one of the most non-diverse in the world, it is a shame that this study is not more extensive in its scope, restricting itself mainly to Okinawans and Zainichi. Some discussion of other ‘others’ – Ainu for instance – may have added to the analysis of such a broad category like multiculturalism. Moreover, although the choice of films works well for the most part, ranging as it does from the work of Miike to Shohei Imamura’s Profound Desire of the Gods (1968) and Yoichi Sai’s All Under the Moon (1993), the textual analysis is at times muddled: it is difficult for example to see how the analysis of Swallowtail Butterfly (1996) fits alongside Miike’s films and the overall discussion as cosmetic multiculturalism. It is also unclear in the early stages of the book as to what nihonjinron discourses Ko views as standing in the way of Japanese socio-cultural diversity, for the most part the concept hovers over the work as a faceless spectre.

These are minor drawbacks however. Ko’s argumentation remains persuasive and her analysis highly revealing of the cultural positioning of ethnic and cultural outsiders in modern Japanese cinema. What results is an absorbing and thought-provoking study that contributes original scholarship to the field and which should prove to be an indispensible source for students and researchers concerned with constructions of Japanese identity and the politics of otherness in contemporary cinema.

By Dominic Pettman, University of Minnesota Press, 2011

Reviewed by Sarah Soliman

Any number of examples can be held up as supposed proof of mankind’s extraordinariness. Ancient wonders such as the pyramids, scientific milestones like the moon landing, and artistic output from Michelangelo’s David to Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby to The Beatles’ catalogue (and according to the author of Human Error, his own breakfast crêpes) all attest to the greatness of humanity. Our presumably unique capacity for thought, empathy, speech, and imagination distinguish us from all other earthly beings.

Or so we narcissistically think.

In Human Error, Dominic Pettman confronts the idea of human exceptionalism, arguing that human beings aren’t the privileged species we’d like to believe. Rather than being at the centre of the world, Pettman says we use the world as a massive and infinite mirror that ‘humanity requires…to reassure itself of its enduring beauty’. It reflects what we wish to see, reinforcing our mistaken perception about our own superiority. To challenge this fallacy, Human Error takes up an exploration of the ‘cybernetic triangle’, which has as its three points human, animal, and machine. Throughout the book, Pettman makes use of this triangle to reconfigure the place of the human amongst our animal and technological Others, pointing out that we are not as distant or dissimilar a species as our egos would have us believe.

Pettman makes reference, either in passing or through in depth analysis, to several films which shed light on the complex interrelationships between humans and our Others. Film itself serves as one such Other, an especially notable one for its reflective capabilities, which play a major role in convincing us of our uniqueness. Pettman says, ‘the human constantly reemerges through technologies of representation, reflection, and recognition.’ As we do with animals, humans attempt to distance ourselves from technology, imagining ourselves masters of the Other, and yet we rely profoundly on machines to make us human. Dean Martin may have sung ‘you’re nobody till somebody loves you,’ but perhaps it is more accurate to say that you’re nobody till somebody sees you. Until, that is, you are reflected back at yourself. In this way, film becomes the ultimate mirror for humanity – it both serves as an example of our technological mastery and literally shows us images of ourselves. This is addressed throughout the book, but is best encompassed in Pettman’s brief discussion of a work of early cinema, Workers Leaving the Lumiere Factory (1895). The self-explanatory title points to the desire to showcase the human, but Pettman observes that the film also demonstrates how ‘the machine itself is revealed as narcissistic’. We want to see ourselves, and so does the machine: ‘The first motion picture features the primal scene of the first motion picture.’ Like us, it desires reflection and recording, and this calls into question how different we humans truly are, not only from the living beings we share our world with, but even objects we often think of as inanimate.

The film camera is a continuing reference point throughout the book. Pettman devotes a chapter to the Werner Herzog film Grizzly Man (2005), which chronicles the life and death of Timothy Treadwell, who spent several years trekking into the Alaskan wilderness to live amongst grizzly bears. In Grizzly Man, Pettman locates a microcosm of the cybernetic triangle – Treadwell, the bears, and the camera Treadwell brought along with him to record his expeditions. Pettman regards the camera as an essential member of this trinity: ‘I want to designate Treadwell’s camera as not only the recording instrument that allows us access to his remarkable story and experiences but as a catalytic agent—a participant observer—on equal footing with the grizzly man and the grizzly bears themselves.’ Human Error is strewn with such insights, which encourage the reader to reconsider the way we regard the non-human amongst us.

Given the now ubiquitous use of social media, it is somewhat surprising that Pettman does not discuss the ways in which our lives have been transplanted into cyberspace. Social networking would seem to add a new dimension to any discussion of posthumanities. Perhaps a focus on Facebook, Twitter or Foursquare might revert to the human-centric discourse Pettman is trying to guide us away from, seeing as these technologies are so often used as tools of self-promotion. Still, a discussion from Pettman about habitual engagement with computers would be welcome.

Human Error marries knotty theoretical concepts with accessible cultural touchstones, in order to help guide the reader through some difficult territory; difficult not only because of the high minded theory that Pettman draws on for his analysis, but also because of the necessary hit to the ego that one must endure while reading. Pettman makes it an easier pill to swallow with his humour, and for anybody approaching the book with an open mind, Human Error should provide an insightful and entertaining reading experience.