| Through close readings of commercial films and contemporary cultural, political, and critical theory (particularly contemporary Marxisms), this project explores how our active and acted-upon knowledge of violence is determined and extended by Hollywood cinema under late capitalism in the fundamentally inseparable spheres of the epistemological, the political, and the experiential, which together comprise and structure what Gilles Deleuze calls a "mode of existence." This project seeks to accomplish three things: first, to recenter prevailing public and academic discourses surrounding the three (often separately-considered) titular terms by arguing for their interdependence and inseparability; second, to situate the ways in which this tripartite constellation fosters and requires what I call "the violent imaginary" (the commonly held image of "what violence is" that determines the contours of public, political, and academic debates); and third, to argue that this cinema's persistence in our current international multimedia landscape is in large part due to its indispensability in politically, materially, and culturally reframing violence in socially useful ways.;In the first section, "Concepts and Constitutions," Chapter One explores how recent cultural, critical, and philosophical trends have framed violence as a concept in ways both concordant and discordant with the violent imaginary and its historio-cultural foundations, while Chapter Two situates the cinematic apparatus as not only a central and vital mechanism in those processes, but also as an intrinsically violent machine that accommodates us to and implicates us in the violence of the violent imaginary. The second section, "Functions and Formations," extends and examines the implications of the first, focusing on how they come to bear on the late-capitalist mode of existence. Chapter Three emphasizes the political, examining how traditional conceptualizations of violence are problematized by contemporary transformations in bourgeois class consciousness. Chapter Four emphasizes the experiential, exploring how affective considerations may help us distinguish between "images of violence" and "the violence of images." Chapter Five returns to the epistemological, political, and experiential, tracing how pervasive tropes of melancholia, apocalypse, and suicidality in millennial Hollywood films point to specific resignations (and even new potentialities) in the full bloom of what Guy Debord calls "the integrated spectacle."... |
