Second Takes (ePub)

Second Takes: Remaking Film, Remaking America presents the history of English language cinema by focusing on cinematic remakes and on how cinema has been replaced by new forms of "media." Remakes, with their innate plurality, offer the most substance for concentrated cultural analysis of how movies reflect and shape American culture. Applying psychoanalysis, media and communication theory, and gender and sexuality studies to the archetypes and myths that recur in American culture reveals how movies are an increasingly dangerous surrogate for the actual. In our post-literate epoch, fantasy becomes the greater truth, violence a meaningful language, and the individual is removed from self by an increasingly constricting visual culture. This book presents close readings of such popular favorites as Disney's The Parent Trap, Hitchcock's Psycho, Kubrick's A Clockwork Orange, Lynch's Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me, Welles' The Magnificent Ambersons, Sirk's Imitation of Life, Ulmer's The Black Cat, Powell's Peeping Tom, Cronenberg's Crash, Wellman's The Public Enemy, Boorman's Point Blank, and Ferrara's Bad Lieutenant, while unearthing obscure motion pictures ripe for rediscovery including One More Tomorrow, Strange Illusion, Andy Warhol's Vinyl, Fassbinder's Despair, Forced Entry, Raiders of the Lost Ark: The Adaptation and Welles' The Immortal Story.