Academic literature on the topic 'Nymphomaniac (film)'

This chapter examines The Human Centipede, Nymphomaniac, and Videodrome; films that push the boundaries of human objectification. The chapter draws on the works of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel and Jean-Paul Sartre, highlighting an ontological distinction between being “in-itself” and being “for-itself.” It is argued that though the objectification of key characters in these films, on the one hand, promotes a sort of nihilistic reduction of humans to meaningless bodies in motion, on the other hand, this same reduction potentially provokes a sense of sympathy in viewers who are also embodied, a

This chapter highlights Carrie's legacy. The influence of Brian De Palma's Carrie, in terms of themes, structure, and milieu, would be felt across not just the horror genre but also the comedy genre in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Carrie's focus on adolescents, its ‘final scream’ sequence, pre-occupation with bodily emissions, victim/hero/monster central character, contemporary settings, and pop culture references within a genre-straddling narrative would be referenced by and provide the inspiration, in one form or another, for a multitude of subsequent movies. The high school, or other educational establishment, became a regularly used setting, with the Queen Bee, school jock, nerdy hangers-on, ineffectual adults, delinquent boys and sexually promiscuous (bordering on nymphomaniac) girls all becoming stock-in-trade characters. Carrie's distinction lay not in it being the first horror movie to centre on a group of young people ‘under vicious assault’ in a contemporary setting or in it being the first to use psychic/supernatural powers as a central narrative theme. What Carrie did was popularise its distinct elements within its singular narrative that film-makers, of horror, comedy, or comedy-horror films, then used, consciously or unconsciously, as noticeable elements in their own films.

This chapter explores the inclusion of graphic sexual content in post-millennial cinema. Art films have increasingly incorporated scenes of unsimulated, hardcore sex acts—traditionally associated with pornography—into their narratives in recent years. Arousal, perhaps more so than any of the other themes explored in Extreme Cinema, wields the potential for affective dissonance. In these films, sexual transgression and eroticism might turn towards disgust, signifiers of pain might be confused for signifiers of sexual arousal, or morally objectionable content might elicit sensual arousal—at the intersection of violence and fetishism. The films discussed in this chapter include: Wetlands, Nymphomaniac Volumes I and II, 9 Songs, Helter Skelter.