Synopses & Reviews
While there has been a significant outpouring of scholarship on Steven Spielberg over the past decade, his films are still frequently discussed as being paternalistic, escapist, and reliant on uncomplicated emotions and complicated special effects. Even those who view his work favorably often see it as essentially optimistic, reassuring, and conservative. James Kendrick takes an alternate view of Spielberg's cinema and proposes that his films—even the most popular ones that seem to trade in easy answers and comforting, reassuring notions of cohesion and narrative resolution—are significantly darker and more emotionally and ideologically complex than they are routinely given credit for.
Darkness in the Bliss-Out demonstrates, through close analysis of a wide range of Spielberg's films, that they are only reassuring on the surface, and that their depths embody a complex and sometimes contradictory view of the human condition.
About the Author
James Kendrick is an Associate Professor of Film and Digital Media at Baylor University, USA. He is the author of Hollywood Bloodshed: Violence in 1980s American Cinema (2009) and Film Violence: History, Ideology, Genre (2009), as well as numerous book chapters and journal articles. He is also the film and video critic for QNetwork.com.
Table of Contents
Preface
Introduction—Steven Spielberg and the Politics of Bliss
Chapter 1—'I Didnt Want to See This': Weekend America and Its Discontents
in
Close Encounters of the Third Kind, E.T., and
PoltergeistChapter 2—'Americans Fighting Americans': Incoherence and Animal Comedy in
1941Chapter 3—'What Exactly Are We Applauding?' Indiana Jones and the Ideologies
of Heroism and American Exceptionalism
Chapter 4—'Lost and Done For:' The Rejection of War Fantasies in
Empire of the Sun and
War HorseChapter 5—'For the Worlds More Full of Weeping Than You Can Understand': Humanity and Inhumanity in
A.I. Artificial IntelligenceWorks Cited
Index