Artículos de revistas sobre el tema "M. Night Shyamalan"

De El sexto sentido de M. Night Shyamalan se destaca habitualmente el giro o “plot twist” que supone su sorprendente final. Sin embargo, como demostrará el presente artículo, el final de la cinta cuenta con numerosos antecedentes en el mundo del cine, incluso no reciente, y su verdadero valor ha de situarse más bien en la multiplicidad de interpretaciones que ofrece. El presente artículo pretende mostrar parte de esta diversidad presentando interpretaciones y análisis de críticos que saben encontrar en la película su capacidad de abordar cuestiones existenciales muy profundas.

This research entitled Character Belief and Behaviour Potrayed in M. Night Shyamalan’s Devil (2010) As A Psychoanalysis Study. In this research the researcher analyzes the character belief and behaviour toward superstition in M. Night Shyamalan’s Devil (2010). The object used in this research is a film by M. Night Shyamalan entitled Devil In analyzing the data researcher applied a qualitative research. The technique that used to analyze the film is by reading the script and watching the movie and then the researcher applied Carl Gustav Jung's theory of consciousness, namely personal unconscious, collective unconscious, and archetype. Data is collected by watching films and reading dialogue scripts. After analyzing the data it can be concluded that the reason why the character believes in superstition is due to the story of the character's mother and opinions that are repeated over and over. The behavior that is reflected by the character after believing in superstition is the character trying to solve the case using a religious point of view. Meanwhile the effect that arises after believing in superstition is that they succeed in knowing and realizing that the mastermind behind the case is devil.

Este artigo tem por objetivo analisar como o diretor M. Night Shyamalan a partir do filme A Vila (2004) utiliza a linguagem cinematográfica para mostrar como os símbolos (as cores amarela e vermelha) e o medo são retratados em uma comunidade do século XIX, cercada por uma floresta misteriosa. Para tal pesquisa, será priorizada a percepção hermenêutica da religião.

This article explores the use of music as a functional device which disguises the artificial construction of narrative media. The identification of the principles behind the specific positioning of musical material in the presentation of film and theatre reveals that in certain scenarios the aural accompaniment is not simply utilized as an emotive tool. Instead the polemic pursued in this article reveals that music also fulfils the practical purpose of camouflaging narrative leaps in time, space and dimension. Furthermore the comparative analysis of nineteenthcentury dramatic texts penned by Dion Boucicault and twenty-first-century films written and directed by M. Night Shyamalan establishes both an interdisciplinary connection between the two media forms and highlights the parallel musical practices employed in the past and the present.

As obras de arte contemporâneas dizem muito sobre a nossa época, sobre o modo como a percebemos e como a vivenciamos. É com esta intenção que buscamos neste trabalho fazer uma leitura dos espaços imaginários e da narrativa na pós-modernidade a partir do filme A Dama na Água do cineasta M. Night Shyamalan. Dentre os temas que o filme aborda estão a retomada do mito no cotidiano, a emergência do imaginário e o papel que a ficção tem na transformação da realidade. A metodologia da análise fílmica é realizada a partir da semiótica da imagem, da hermenêutica simbólica e do aporte fenomenológico, sobretudo, presente nas obras de G. Bachelard e G. Durand. No filme o lugar sofre mudanças a partir do reencantamento, da presença do mito e o espaço transforma-se à medida em que os personagens envolvem-se para salvar Story, ao passo que adquirem outra perspectiva para encarar o mundo a sua volta. O enredo traça uma ideia de despertar, como ir além, devolvendo à vida e ao lugar, o sonho de uma narrativa a muito esquecida. Com a narrativa sobre um livro dentro do filme e uma história que fala sobre história, a metaficção presente no filme entrecruza ao longo da trama os papéis da narrativa fílmica e literária, reservando um papel contundente à critica. É nesta atmosfera complexa que buscaremos encontrar na filmografia de A Dama na Água traços na nossa pós-modernidade latente.

Este ensaio tem como objetivo refletir sobre os principais efeitos dos projetos de lei nº 867/2015 e 193/2016, do “Programa Escola sem Partido”, no trabalho cotidiano do professor e na formação do aluno, e realizar algumas análises que patenteiam o equívoco dessa proposição. Alguns motivos presentes no longa-metragem A Vila, de M. Night Shyamalan, em especial a manipulação e o controle de corpos e consciências pela instauração do medo, além do obscurantismo e o despreparo, são utilizados como elementos alegóricos para discutir os perigos de uma escola estranha às práticas da liberdade. Apresenta-se uma revisão da literatura sobre os ideais do programa, com a seguinte organização: os aspectos constitucionais dos projetos de lei, suas implicações para o sistema político e, por fim, os impactos ao desenvolvimento do trabalho docente e à formação discente. Procura-se, ainda, desvelar, analisar e desconstruir o entendimento sobre ideologia, aluno, docente e processo formativo presente no texto dos projetos. Conclui-se com a retomada do filme “A Vila” e a discussão dos seguintes aspectos relacionados à tentativa de implantação da “Escola Sem Partido”: a negação dos conflitos e dos desejos; a implantação do medo e a manutenção da ignorância como recursos educativos e de controle; o apagamento das diferenças e a manutenção do status quo; e o perigo de uma coletividade que tolhe a manifestação das individualidades.

It is now widely acknowledged that the postracial fantasies ushered in by Barack Obama’s two-term election success are now in tatters. Yet debates on yellowface casting practices in contemporary Hollywood (also said to have evolved into “whitewashing” practices), in such films as The Last Airbender (M. Night Shyamalan, 2010), Aloha (Cameron Crowe, 2015), Doctor Strange (Scott Derrickson, 2016), Birth of the Dragon (George Nolfi, 2016), and Ghost in the Shell (Rupert Sanders, 2017), have resurfaced in recent times. These press controversies seem almost anachronistic after a generation of “intercultural” artistic theory and practice, “diversity” management training, and numerous academic discourses on otherness and difference, including those on cosmopolitan theory and practice. This article reviews yellowface practices and debates in contemporary times and puts them in dialogue with cosmopolitan aspirations of being “open to difference”, and argues that the latter cannot be taken as self-evident. It offers a way of thinking about yellowface practice via cosmopolitan pleasures evoked largely through modes of consumption, which “hollow out” the subjectivity of the character being depicted. On the site of the intersection between representation and subjectivity is where the identity politics occurs, yet, rather than universalising the issue, the article argues that a cosmopolitan approach should take on board localised conditions and contexts of production and reception in ways that acknowledge the multilayered complexity of the issues at hand.

American literary studies has shown that the symbolic exclusion of Native Americans from the Puritan and early national imaginaries was an essential component of the making of an American identity. This argument builds on reading practices that stress literary-historical contextualization. Our essay considers how M. Night Shyamalan's film The Village (2004) addresses the continuing relevance of Native American exclusion from the national imaginary not by faithfully representing “history” but by layering its narrative with multiple historical registers. Realized through editing, cinematography, and set design, these registers—seventeenth-century Puritan, turn-of-the-twentieth-century utopian, and “the present”—are stage-managed by a group of idealistic elders who wish to protect their community from the evils of the world outside. While most critics have reduced The Village to an allegory of post-9/11 United States political culture, we propose a viewing of the film as parable that marks historical collapses and exclusions as the limits of utopia.

Este artigo aponta as possíveis relações entre a narrativa do filme estadunidense A Vila (2004, M. Night Shyamalan) e as narrativas míticas. Utilizando o método fenomenológico buscamos descrever situações que aparecem na produção cinematográfica e compará-las as quatro funções do mito (Mística ou Metafísica, Cosmológica, Sociológica e Psicológica ou Pedagógica) propostas por Joseph Campbell. Antes de nos debruçarmos especificamente nas possíveis analogias entre a narrativa do filme e as funções dos mitos buscamos contextualizar as narrativas míticas sob a ótica dos pensadores Mircea Eliade, Joseph Campbell, Carl Gustav Jung e Monica Martinez. As narrativas míticas são compreendidas, por esses autores, como verdades que por meio de metáforas podem explicar a realidade para o ser humano.

Abstract: The main purpose of this document is to state the importance of taking into consideration the desires and needs of the spectators by the film production organizations in their mission of reaching the economic success. It establishes the importance that the economic values and aesthetic values plays in the films. It locates the different degrees of the dissatisfaction in which a spectator can falls into when he or she does not like the movie. Likewise, this paper analyze the filmmaking development of M. Night Shyamalan as well as his rise, fall and new arise by suffer and then eradicate the Lozano-Barragan Syndrome and the Sharknado Effect conditions; concepts that distinguish, first: those film production organizations that blame the dissatisfied spectator, for the box office failure, as well as, they argued that those spectators did not understand the movies nor nature of it; and the second one refers the consequences that meaningless movies, more than just entertain, cause in spectators. Finally, it make some recommendations that could be followed by personal from film production organizations to avoid these Lozano-Barragan syndrome and Sharknado effect in the pursuit of the spectator satisfaction and the increase of the income in the ticket office and the aesthetic values.Keywords: consumers, cultural industry, film production organizations, Lozano-Barragan syndrome, satisfaction, Sharknado effectJEL: Z11, M310Resumen: El presente documento tiene como finalidad plasmar la importancia que tiene el tomar en cuenta los deseos y necesidades de los espectadores en la misión de alcanzar el éxito económico que las organizaciones de producción cinematográfica se han impuesto. Se establece la importancia que los valores económicos y valores estéticos juegan en las películas. Se ubican los diferentes grados de insatisfacción en los que puede caer un espectador cuando no le agrada la película. Igualmente, esta investigación analiza el desarrollo cinematográfico de M. Night Shyamalan así como su crecimiento, caída y resurgimiento sufridos al padecer y, posteriormente, erradicar el Síndrome Lozano-Barragán y el Efecto Sharknado, conceptos que distinguen; primero: aquellas organizaciones de producción cinematográfica que culpan a los espectadores del fracaso en taquilla al argumentar que estos consumidores no supieron entender la película o la naturaleza del cine; el segundo hace referencia a las consecuencias provocadas en el espectador por las películas sin sentido más que sólo entretener. Finalmente, se hacen recomendaciones que pueden ser consideradas por el personal de las organizaciones de producción cinematográficas para evitar el síndrome Lozano-Barragán y el efecto Sharknado en la búsqueda de provocar satisfacción en los espectadores e incrementar los ingresos en taquillas así como los valores estéticos.Palabras clave: consumidores, efecto Sharknado, industria cultural, organizaciones de producción cinematográfica, satisfacción, síndrome Lozano-Barragán

In the years surrounding the turn of the millennium, there emerged an assemblage of American and Spanish horror films fixated on uncanny child characters. Caught in the symbolic abyss between death and life, these figures are central to the films’ building of suspense and Gothic frisson—they are at once familiar and unfamiliar, vulnerable and threatening, innocent yet unnervingly inscrutable. Despite being conceived and produced in two very different cultural climates, these films construct the child as an embodiment of trauma in parallel ways. In turn, these Gothic children express the wavering of narratives of progress which suffused the liminal moment of the millennial turn. Steven Bruhm suggests that there is “a startling emphasis on children as the bearers of death” (author’s emphasis 98) in popular Gothic fiction at the turn of the new millennium, and that this contemporary Gothic “has a particular emotive force for us because it brings into high relief exactly what the child knows ... Invariably, the Gothic child knows too much, and that knowledge makes us more than a little nervous” (103). A comparative analysis of trans-millennial American and Spanish supernatural horror films reveals the specifically threatening register of the Gothic child’s knowledge, and that the gradual revelation of this knowledge aestheticizes the mechanics of trauma. This “traumatic” aesthetic also entails a disruption to linear progress, exposing the ways in which Gothic representations of the child’s uncanny knowledge express anxieties about the collapse of temporal progress. The eeriness associated with the child’s knowledge is thus tied to a temporal disjuncture; as Margarita Georgieva explains, child-centred Gothic fiction meditates on the fact that “childhood is quickly lost, never regained and, therefore, outside of the tangible adult world” (191). American films such as The Sixth Sense (M. Night Shyamalan, 1999) and Stir of Echoes (David Koepp, 1999), and Spanish films The Nameless (Jaume Balagueró, 1999) and The Devil’s Backbone (Guillermo del Toro, 2001), and also American-Spanish co-productions such as The Others (Alejandro Amenábar, 2001) and Fragile (Jaume Balagueró, 2005), expose the tangle of contradictions which lurk beneath romanticised definitions of childhood innocence and nostalgia for an adult’s “lost” childhood. The child characters in these films tend to be either ghosts or in-between figures, seemingly alive yet acting as mediators between the realms of the living and the dead, the past and the present. Through this liminal position, these children wreak havoc on the symbolic coherence of the films’ diegetic worlds. In so doing, they incarnate the ontological wound described by Cathy Caruth in her definition of trauma: “a breach in the mind’s experience of time, self, and the world” caused by an event that “is experienced too soon, too unexpectedly, to be fully known and is therefore not available to consciousness until it imposes itself ... repeatedly ... in the nightmares and repetitive actions” (4) of those who have experienced trauma. The Gothic aesthetic of these children expresses the ways in which trauma is locatable not in the original traumatic past event, but rather in “the way it was precisely not known in the first instance”, through revealing that it is trauma’s unassimilated element which “returns to haunt the survivor later on” (Caruth, author’s emphasis 4). The uncanny frisson in these films arises through the gradual exposition of the child character’s knowledge of this unassimilated element. As a result, these children trouble secure processes of symbolic functioning, embodying Anne Williams’ suggestion that “Gothic conventions imply a fascination with … possible fissures in the system of the symbolic as a whole” (141). I suggest that, reflecting Bruhm’s assertion above, these children are eerie because they have access to memories and knowledge as yet unassimilated within the realm of adult understanding, which is expressed in these films through the Gothic resurfacing of past traumas. Through an analysis of two of the most transnationally successful and influential films to emerge from this trend—The Sixth Sense (1999) and The Devil’s Backbone (2001)—this article explores the intersecting but tellingly distinctive ways in which the American and Spanish horror films figure the child as a vessel for previously repressed trauma. In both films, the eeriness of the children, Cole and Santi respectively, is associated with their temporal liminality and subsequent ability to invoke grisly secrets of the past, which in turn unsettles solid conceptions of identity. In The Sixth Sense, as in other American ghost films of this period, it is an adult character’s subjectivity which is untethered by the traumas of the uncanny child; Bruhm suggests that the contemporary Gothic “attacks adult self-identity on multiple fronts” (107), and in American films the uncanny child tends to launch this traumatic assault from within an adult character’s own psyche. Yet in the Spanish films, the Gothic child tends not to threaten an individual adult figure’s self-identity, instead constituting a challenge to secure concepts of socio-cultural identity. In The Sixth Sense, Cole raises a formerly repressed trauma in the mind of central adult character Malcolm Crowe, while simultaneously disturbing the viewer’s secure grasp on the film’s narrative world. Ultimately, Cole raises Freudian-inflected anxieties surrounding childhood’s disruption to coherent adult subjectivity, functioning as a receptacle for the adult’s repressed secrets. Cole’s gradual exposure of these secrets simulates the effects of trauma for both Malcolm and the viewer via a Gothic unsettling of meaning. While The Sixth Sense is set in the present, The Devil’s Backbone is set during the Spanish Civil War (1936-39)—a violent and traumatic period of Spain’s history, the ramifications of which have been largely unexplored in Spanish popular culture until very recently as a result of forty years of strict censorship under General Franco, whose dictatorship eroded following his death in 1975. Unlike Cole, Santi does not arouse a previously submerged trauma within an adult character’s mind, instead serving to allegorically raise socio-cultural trauma. Santi functions as an incarnation of Gilles Deleuze’s “child seer”, a figure who Deleuze claims first emerged in Italian neo-realist films of the 1940s as a response to the massive cultural rupture of World War II (3). The child seer is characterised by his entrapment in the gap between the perception of a traumatic event, and the understanding and subsequent action required to move on from it. Thus, upon experiencing a disturbing event, he suffers a breach in comprehension which disrupts the typical sensory-motor chain of perception-understanding-action, rendering him physically and mentally unable to escape his situation. Yet in experiencing this incapacity, the seer gains a powerful insight beyond the limits of linear temporality. On becoming a ghost, Santi escapes coherent space-time, and invokes the repressed spectre of Spain’s violent Civil War past, inciting an eerie collision of past and present. This temporal disruption has deep allegorical implications for contemporary Spain through the child’s symbolic status as vessel for the future. Santi’s embodiment of cultural trauma ensures that Spain’s past, as constructed by the film, eerily folds into the nation’s extra-diegetic present. The Sixth Sense In The Sixth Sense, adult protagonist Malcolm Crowe is a child psychiatrist, thus unravelling the riddles of the child’s psyche is positioned as the central quest of the film’s narrative. The dramatic twist in the film’s final scene reveals that the analysis of the child Cole’s “phobia” has in fact exhumed dormant spectres within Malcolm’s own mind, exposing the Gothic mechanisms whereby the uncanny child becomes conflated with the adult’s repressed trauma. This impression is heightened by the narrative structure of The Sixth Sense, in which the twist in the final scene shifts the meaning of all that has happened before. Both the audience and Malcolm are led to assume that they have uncovered and come to terms with Cole’s secret once it becomes clear two-thirds into the film that he “sees dead people”. However, the climactic twist exposes that Cole has in fact been hiding another secret which is not so easily ameliorated: that Malcolm is one of these dead people, having died in the film’s opening sequence. If the film’s narrative “pulling the rug out” from under the audience functions as intended, at the climax of the film both Malcolm and viewer simultaneously become privy to a layer of Cole’s secret previously inaccessible to us, both that Malcolm has been dead all along and that, subsequently, the hidden quest underlying the surface narrative has been Malcolm’s journey to come to terms with this disturbing truth. Thus, the uncanny child functions as a symbolic stage for the adult protagonist’s unassimilated trauma, and the unsettling nature of this experience is extended to the viewer via the gradual exposure of Cole’s secret. Further intensifying the uncanny effects of this Gothic disruption to adult knowledge, Cole also functions like a reincarnation of the crisis which has undermined Malcolm’s coherent identity as a successful child psychiatrist: his failure to cure former patient Vincent. Thus, Cole is like uncanny déjà vu for Malcolm and the viewer, an almost literal re-evocation of Malcolm’s past trauma. Both Vincent and Cole have a patch of grey hair at the back of their head, symbolising their access to knowledge too great for their youth, and as Malcolm explains, “They’re both so similar. Same mannerisms, same expressions, same things hanging over their heads.” At the opening of the film, Vincent is depicted as a wretched madman. He appears crying and half naked in Malcolm’s bathroom, having broken into his house, before shooting Malcolm and then turning the gun on himself. Thus, Vincent is an abject image of Malcolm’s failure, and his taunting words expose a rupture in Malcolm’s paternalistic, professional identity by hinting at his lack of awareness. “You don’t know so many things” Vincent remarks, and sarcastically undermines Malcolm’s “saviour” status by taunting, “Don’t you know me, hero?”. Functioning as a repetition of this trauma, Cole provides Malcolm with an opportunity to discover the “so many things” that he does not know, and also to once again become a “hero”. Cole functions as a literalisation of Malcolm’s compulsion to repeat the trauma which has exposed a breach in his sense of self, and to gain mastery over it. On first viewing, the audience is led to believe that this narrative is the primary one in the film, and that the film is wrapped up when Malcolm finally achieves his goal and becomes Cole’s hero. However, the final revelation that Cole has been keeping yet another secret from Malcolm—that Malcolm has been dead all along—reveals that this trauma is actually irrevocable: Malcolm was in fact killed by Vincent at the beginning of the film, thus the adult’s subjective breach (symbolised by his gunshot wound, which he suddenly notices for the first time) cannot be filled or repaired. All Malcolm can do at the close of the film is disappear, as a close-up of his face fades into the mediated image of him, now his only form of existence in the world as we know it, on the home videotapes of his wedding which play as his wife sleeps. Thus, Cole evokes the experience of a violent, unassimilated trauma which is experienced “too soon, too unexpectedly to be fully known in the first instance” (Caruth 4), a breach in subjectivity which has only become consciously known to Malcolm through the “nightmare repetition” figured by Cole. This experience of a traumatic disruption to the wholeness and coherence of subjective reality is echoed by the viewer’s own experience of The Sixth Sense, if the twist-narrative functions as intended. While on first viewing we are led to believe that we are watching a straightforward ghost story about a paternalistic psychologist helping a young child with an uncanny gift, we learn in the final scene that there has been an underlying double reality haunting the surface narrative all along. Central to this twist is the recognition that Cole was always aware of this second reality, but has been concealing it from Malcolm—underscoring the ways in which Malcolm’s trauma is bound up largely with what he was unable to comprehend and assimilate when the traumatic event of his death first occurred. The eerie effects of Malcolm’s traumatic confrontation with the child’s Gothic knowledge is extended to the viewer via the film’s narrative structure. Erlend Lavik discusses The Sixth Sense and other twist films in terms of a particular relationship between the syuzhet (the way in which a story’s components are organized) and the fabula (the raw components which constitute the story). He explains that in such films, there is a “doubling of the syuzhet, where we are led to construct a fabula that initially seems quite straightforward until suddenly a new piece of information is introduced that subverts (or decentres) the fictional world we have created. We come to realize the presence of another fabula running parallel to the first one but ‘beneath’ it, hidden from view” (Lavik 56). The revelation that Malcolm has been a ghost all along shatters the fabula that most viewers construct upon first viewing the film. The impression that an eerie, previously hidden double of accepted reality has bubbled to the surface of our perceptions is deeply uncanny, evoking the experience of filmic déjà vu. This is of course heightened by the fact that the viewer is compelled to re-watch the film in order to construct the second, and more “correct”, fabula. In doing so, the viewer experiences a “narrative bifurcation whereby we come to notice how traces of the correct fabula were actually available to us the first time” (Lavik 59). The process of re-watching the film in an attempt to solve the riddles of Malcolm’s existence reveals the viewer’s compulsion to undergo their own “detective work” in a parallel of Malcolm’s analysis of Cole: the exposure of the child’s secret turns a mirror upon the protagonist and audience which exposes a fracture in the adult’s subjectivity. Discussing the detective story, Slavoj Žižek explains that “the detective's role is ... to demonstrate how ‘the impossible is possible’ ... that is, to resymbolize the traumatic shock, to integrate it into symbolic reality” (58). On first viewing, this detective work is realized through Malcolm’s quest to comprehend Cole’s secrets, and then to situate the abject ghosts the child sees into a secure framework whereby they disappear if Cole helps them. The compulsion to re-watch the film in order to better understand how Malcolm experiences time, consciousness and communication (or lack there-of) represents an analogous attempt to re-integrate the traumatic shock raised by the twist-ending by imposing more secure symbolic frameworks upon the film’s diegetic world: to suture the traumatic breach in meaning. However, there are many irremediable gaps in Malcolm’s experiences—we do not actually see him trying to pay for the bus, or meeting Cole’s mother for the first time, or pondering the fact that no other human being has spoken to him directly for six months apart from Cole—fissures which repeat viewings cannot repair. The Devil’s Backbone The Devil’s Backbone is set in the final years of the Civil War, a liminal period in which the advancement of Spain’s national narrative is disturbingly uncertain. The film takes place in an orphanage for young boys from Republican families whose parents have been killed or captured in the Civil War. In the middle of the orphanage’s courtyard stands an unexploded bomb, an ominous and volatile reminder of the war. As well as being haunted by this unexploded bomb, the orphanage is also haunted by a child ghost, Santi, a former inhabitant of the orphanage who disappeared on the same night that the bomb landed in the orphanage’s grounds. We learn mid-way through the film that Santi in fact drowned in the orphanage’s cavernous cistern: after being struck on the head by the angry groundskeeper, Santi was left unable to swim, and is shown sinking helplessly into the water’s murky depths. Thus, Santi’s death represents the ultimate extreme of the child seer’s traumatic entrapment between perceiving and understanding the traumatic event, and the physical action required to escape it. Both the ghostly Santi and the unexploded bomb exude an eerie power despite, and perhaps because of, their apparent physical incapacity. Such corporeal powerlessness is the defining feature of Deleuze’s “child seer”, as the breach in the sensory-motor chain comes to imbue the child who encounters trauma with a penetrating gaze which sees beyond temporal borders. Once he becomes a ghost, Santi escapes the bounds of linear time altogether, becoming forever fused to the moment of his drowning. Santi’s spectral presence warps the ether around him as if he is permanently underwater, and the blood from his head wound constantly floats upwards. The sensory-motor chain becomes completely severed in a cinematic moment which can be likened to Deleuze “crystal of time”. Like the dual layers of narrative in The Sixth Sense, this crystal of time sparks a moment of Gothic frisson as linear time collapses and dual modes of temporality are expressed simultaneously: the chronological moment of Santi’s death—a ‘dead’ present that has already passed—and the fractured, traumatic memories of this past which linger in the present—what Deleuze would call a ‘virtual’ past which “coincides with the present that it was” (79). The traumatic effect of this collapse of temporal boundaries is enhanced by the fact that the shot of Santi drowning is repeated multiple times throughout the film—including in the opening minutes, before the audience is able to comprehend what we are seeing and where this scene fits into the film’s chronology. Ultimately, this cinematic crystal symbolically ungrounds linear narratives of Spanish history, which position the cultural rupture of the Civil War as a remnant of Spain’s past which has successfully been overcome. Through uncanny repetition, Santi’s death refuses to remain lodged in an immobilized “historical” past—a present that has passed—but remains forever alongside the present as an ethereal past that “is”. Santi’s raising of Gothic knowledge incites the wavering of not an adult character’s self-identity, as in The Sixth Sense, but a trembling in conceptual models of linear cultural progress. As a ghost, Santi is visually constructed as a broken porcelain doll, with cracks visible all over his body, emphasising his physical fragility; however, in his ghostly form it is this very fragility which becomes uncanny and threatening. His cracked body fetishizes his status as a subject who is not fully formed or complete. Thus, the film presents the post-Civil War child as a being who has been shattered and broken while undergoing the delicate process of being formed: an eerie incarnation of a trauma that has occurred “too soon” to be properly integrated. Santi’s broken body visualises the mechanisms whereby the violent conditions and mentalities of war permeate the child’s being in irreversible ways. Because he is soldered to the space and time of his death, he is caught forever as an expression of trauma in the inescapable gap between perception, assimilation and action. His haunting involves the intrusion of this liminal space onto the solid boundaries and binaries of the diegetic present; his abject presence forces other characters, and viewers, to experience the frisson of this previously concealed traumatic encounter. In so doing, Santi allegorically triggers the irruption of a fissure in the progression of Spain’s socio-cultural narrative. He embodies the ominous possibility that Spain’s grisly recent past may return within the child mutated by wartime trauma to engulf the future. The final scene of the film ideates the threshold of this volatile future, as the orphaned children stand as a group staring out at the endless expanse of desert beyond the orphanage’s bounds, all the adult characters having killed each other in a microcosm of the Civil War. Ultimately, both Cole and Santi enforce an eerie moment of recognition that the previously unassimilated traumas of the past live on within the present: a Gothic drawing forth of buried knowledge that exposes cracks in coherent meaning. In The Sixth Sense, Cole reveals the extent to which trauma is located in “the way it was precisely not known in the first instance” (Caruth 4), haunting Malcolm with his previous failure before exposing the all-encompassing extent to which this past trauma has fractured Malcom’s subjectivity. Santi of The Devil’s Backbone alludes to the ways in which this process of eliding past trauma extra-diegetically haunts contemporary Spain, particularly because those who were children during the Civil War are now the adult filmmakers, political leaders and constituents of Spanish society. These disturbances of historical and personal progress are rendered particularly threatening emerging as they do at the millennial turn, a symbolic temporal threshold which divides the recent past and the “new” present. The Gothic child in these contexts points to the danger inherent in misrecognizing traumatic histories—both personal and socio-cultural—as presents that have long-since passed instead of pasts that are. ReferencesBruhm, Steven. “Nightmare on Sesame Street: or, The Self-Possessed Child.” Gothic Studies 8.2 (2006): 98-210. Caruth, Cathy. Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative and History. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996. Deleuze, Gilles. Cinema 2: The Time-Image. London: Continuum Books, 2005. The Devil’s Backbone. Dir. Guillermo del Toro. Perf. Fernando Tielve, Junio Valverde and Eduardo Diego. El Deseo S.A., 2001. Georgieva, Margarita. The Gothic Child. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013. Fragile. Dir. Jaume Balageuró. Perf. Calista Flockhart, Richard Roxburgh and Ivana Baquero. Castelao Producciones, 2005. Lavik, Erlend. “Narrative Structure in The Sixth Sense: A New Twist in ‘Twist Movies?’” The Velvet Light Trap 58 (2006): 55-64. The Nameless. Dir. Jaumé Balaguero. Perf. Emma Vilarasau, Karra Elejalde and Tristán Ulloa. Filmax S.A., 1999. The Orphanage. Dir. Juan Antonio Bayona. Perf. Belén Rueda, Fernando Cayo and Roger Príncep. Esta Vivo! Laboratorio de Nuevos Talentos, 2007. The Others. Dir. Alejandro Amenábar. Perf. Nicole Kidman, Alakina Mann and James Bentley. Sociedad General de Cine, 2001. The Sixth Sense. Dir. M. Night Shyalaman. Perf. Haley Joel Osment, Bruce Willis and Toni Collette. Hollywood Pictures, 1999. Stir of Echoes. Dir. David Koepp. Perf. Kevin Bacon, Zachary David Cope and Kathryn Erbe. Artisan Entertainment, 1999. Williams, Anne. Art of Darkness: A Poetics of Gothic. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995. Žižek, Slavoj. Looking Awry: An Introduction to Jacques Lacan Through Popular Culture. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1991.

In one of the earliest films about a whistleblower, On the Waterfront (1954), the dock worker Terry Malloy (Marlon Brando), who also works for the union boss and mobster Johnny Friendly (Lee J. Cobb), decides to testify in court against him and uncover corruption and murder. By doing so he will not only suffer retribution from Friendly but also be seen as a “stool pigeon” by his co-workers, friends, and neighbours who will shun him, and he will be “marked” forever by his deed. Nonetheless, he decides to do the right thing. Already it is clear that in most cases the whistleblowers are not simply the ones who reveal things, but they themselves are also revealed.My aim in this article is to explore the depiction of Edward Snowden and Julian Assange in fiction film and its connection to what I would like to call, with Slavoj Žižek, “Hollywood ideology”; the heroisation of the “ordinary guy” against a big institution or a corrupt individual, as it is the case in Snowden (2016) on the one hand, and at the same time the impossibility of true systemic critique when the one who is criticising is “outside of the system”, as Assange in The Fifth Estate (2013). Both films also rely on the notion of individualism and convey conflicting messages in regard to understanding the perception of whistleblowers today. Snowden and AssangeAlthough there are many so called “whistleblower films” since On the Waterfront, like Serpico (1973), All the President’s Men (1976), or Silkwood (1983), to name but a few (for a comprehensive list see https://ew.com/movies/20-whistleblower-movies-to-watch/?), in this article I will focus on the most recent films that deal with Edward Snowden and Julian Assange. These are the most prominent cases of whistleblowing in the last decade put to film. They are relevant today also regarding their subject matter—privacy. Revealing secrets that concern privacy in this day and age is of importance and is pertinent even to the current Coronavirus crisis, where the question of privacy again arises in form of possible tracking apps, in the age of ever expanding “surveillance capitalism” (Zuboff).Even if Assange is not strictly speaking a whistleblower, an engagement with his work in this context is indispensable since his outsider status, up to a point, resembles those of Snowden or Manning. They are not only important because they can be considered as “authentic heroe[s] of our time” (Žižek, Pandemic, 7), but also because of their depiction which differs in a very crucial way: while Snowden is depicted as a “classic” whistleblower (an American patriot who did his duty, someone from the “inside”), Assange’s action are coming from the outside of the established system and are interpreted as a selfish act, as it is stated in the film: “It was always about him.”Whistleblowers In his Whistleblower’s Handbook, Kohn writes: “who are these whistleblowers? Sometimes they are people you read about with admiration in the newspaper. Other times they are your co-workers or neighbours. However, most whistleblowers are regular workers performing their jobs” (Kohn, xi). A whistleblower, as the employee or a “regular worker”, can be regarded as someone who is a “nobody” at first, an invisible “cog in the wheel” of a certain institution, a supposedly devoted and loyal worker, who, through an act of “betrayal”, becomes a “somebody”. They do something truly significant, and by doing so becomes a hero to some and a traitor to others. Their persona suddenly becomes important.The wrongdoings that are uncovered by the whistleblower are for the most part not simply isolated missteps, but of a systemic nature, like the mass surveillance by the National Security Agency (NSA) uncovered by Snowden. The problem with narratives that deal with whistleblowing is that the focus inevitably shifts from the systemic problem (surveillance, war crimes, etc.) to the whistleblower as an individual. Moretti states that the interest of the media regarding whistleblowing, if one compares the reactions to the leaking of the “Pentagon Papers” regarding the Vietnam War in the 1970s by Daniel Ellsberg and to Snowden’s discoveries, shifted from the deed itself to the individual. In the case of Ellsberg, Moretti writes:the legitimate questions were not about him and what motivated him, but rather inquiry on (among other items) the relationship between government and media; whether the U.S. would be damaged militarily or diplomatically because of the release of the papers; the extent to which the media were acting as watchdogs; and why Americans needed to know about these items. (8)This shift of public interest goes along, according to Moretti, with the corporate ownership of media (7), where profit is the primary goal and therefore sensationalism is the order of the day, which is inextricably linked to the focus on the “scandalous” individual. The selfless and almost self-effacing act of whistleblowing becomes a narrative that constructs the opposite: yet another determined individual that through their sheer willpower achieves their goal, a notion that conforms to neoliberal ideology.Hollywood IdeologyThe endings of All the President’s Men and The Harder They Fall (1956), another early whistleblower film, twenty years apart, are very similar: they show the journalist eagerly typing away on his typewriter a story that will, in the case of the former, bring down the president of the United States and in the latter, bring an end to arranged fights in the boxing sport. This depiction of the free press vanquishing the evil doers, as Žižek states it, is exactly the point where “Hollywood ideology” becomes visible, which is:the ideology of such Hollywood blockbusters as All the President’s Men and The Pelican Brief, in which a couple of ordinary guys discover a scandal which reaches up to the president, forcing him to step down. Corruption is shown to reach the very top, yet the ideology of such works resides in their upbeat final message: what a great country ours must be, when a couple of ordinary guys like you and me can bring down the president, the mightiest man on Earth! (“Good Manners”)This message is of course part of Hollywood’s happy-ending convention that can be found even in films that deal with “serious” subject matters. The point of the happy end in this case is that before it is finally reached, the film can show corruption (Serpico), wrongdoings of big companies (The Insider, 1999), or sexual harassment (North Country, 2005). It is important that in the end all is—more or less—good. The happy ending need not necessarily be even truly “happy”—this depends on the general notion the film wants to convey (see for instance the ending of Silkwood, where the whistleblower is presumed to have been killed in the end). What is important in the whistleblower film is that the truth is out, justice has been served in one way or the other, the status quo has been re-established, and most importantly, there is someone out there who cares.These films, even when they appear to be critical of “the system”, are there to actually reassure their audiences in the workings of said system, which is (liberal) democracy supported by neoliberal capitalism (Frazer). Capitalism, on the other hand, is supported by the ideology of individualism which functions as a connecting tissue between the notions of democracy, capitalism, and film industry, since we are admiring exceptional individuals in performing acts of great importance. This, in turn, is encapsulated by the neoliberal mantra—“anyone can make it, only if they try heard enough”. As Bauman puts it more concretely, the risks and contradictions in a society are produced socially but are supposed to be solved individually (46).Individualism, as a part of the neoliberal capitalist ideology, is described already by Milton Friedman, who sees the individual as the “ultimate entity in the society” and the freedom of the individual as the “ultimate goal” within this society (12). What makes this an ideology is the fact that, in reality, the individual, or in the context of the market, the entrepreneur, is always-already tethered to and supported by the state, as Varoufakis has successfully proven (“Varoufakis/Chomsky discussion”). Therefore individualism is touted as an ideal to strive for, while for neoliberalism in order to function, the state is indispensable, which is often summed up in the formula “socialism for the rich, capitalism for the poor” (Polychroniou). The heroic Hollywood individual, as shown in the whistleblower film, regardless of real-life events, is the perfect embodiment of individualist ideology of neoliberal capitalism—we are not seeing a stylised version of it, a cowboy or a masked vigilante, but a “real” person. It is paradoxically precisely the realism that we see in such films that makes them ideological: the “based on a true story” preamble and all the historical details that are there in order to create a fulfilling cinematic experience. All of this supports its ideology because, as Žižek writes, “the function of ideology is not to offer us a point of escape from our reality but to offer us the social reality itself as an escape from some traumatic, real kernel” (Sublime Object 45). All the while Snowden mostly adheres to Hollywood ideology, The Fifth Estate also focuses on individualism, but goes in a different direction, and is more problematic – in the former we see the “ordinary guy” as the American hero, in the latter a disgruntled individual who reveals secrets of others for strictly personal reasons.SnowdenThere is an aspect of the whistleblower film that rings true and that is connected to Michel Foucault’s notion of power (“Truth and Power”). Snowden, through his employment at the NSA, is within a power relations network of an immensely powerful organisation. He uses “his” power, to expose the mass surveillance by the NSA. It is only through his involvement with this power network that he could get insight into and finally reveal what NSA is doing. Foucault writes that these resistances to power from the inside are “effective because they are formed right at the point where relations of power are exercised; resistance to power does not have to come from elsewhere to be real … It exists all the more by being in the same place as power” (Oushakine 206). In the case of whistleblowing, the resistance to power must come exactly from the inside in order to be effective since whistleblowers occupy the “same place as power” that they are up against and that is what in turn makes them “powerful”.Fig. 1: The Heroic Individual: Edward Snowden in SnowdenBut there is an underside to this. His “relationship” to the power structure he is confronting greatly affects his depiction as a whistleblower within the film—precisely because Snowden, unlike Assange, is someone from inside the system. He can still be seen as a patriot and a “disillusioned idealist” (Scott). In the film this is shown right at the beginning as Snowden, in his hotel room in Hong Kong, tells the documentary filmmaker Laura Poitras (Melissa Leo) and journalist Glenn Greenwald (Zachary Quinto) his name and who he is. The music swells and the film cuts to Snowden in uniform alongside other soldiers during a drill, when he was enlisted in the army before work for the NSA.Snowden resembles many of Stone’s typical characters, the all-American patriot being disillusioned by certain historical events, as in Born on the 4th of July (1989) and JFK (1991), which makes him question the government and its actions. It is generally of importance for a mainstream Hollywood film that the protagonist is relatable in order for the audiences to sympathise with them (Bordwell and Thompson 82). This is important not only regarding personal traits but, I would argue, also political views of the character. There needs to be no doubt in the mind of American audiences when it comes to films that deal with politics, that the protagonists are patriots.Stone’s film profits from this ambivalence in Snowden’s own political stance: at first he is more of a right winger who is a declared fan of Ayn Rand’s conservative-individualist manifesto Atlas Shrugged, then, after meeting his future partner Lindsey Mills, he turns slightly to the left, as he at one point states his support for President Obama. This also underlines the films ambiguity, as Oliver Stone openly stated about his Vietnam War film Platoon (1986) that “it could be embraced by … the right and the left. Essentially, most movies make their money in the middle” (Banff Centre). As Snowden takes the lie detector test as a part of the process of becoming a CIA agent, he confirms, quite sincerely it seems, that he thinks that the United States is the “greatest country in the world” and that the most important day in his life was 9/11. This again confirms his patriotic stance.Snowden is depicted as the exceptional individual, and at the same time the “ordinary guy”, who, through his act of courage, defied the all-powerful USA. During the aforementioned job interview scene, Snowden’s superior, Corbin O’Brian (Rhys Ifans), quotes Ayn Rand to him: “one man can stop the motor of the world”. Snowden states that he also believes that. The quote could serve as the film’s tagline, as a “universal truth” that seems to be at the core of American values and that also coincides with and reaffirms neoliberal ideology. Although it is undeniable that individuals can accomplish extraordinary feats, but when there is no systemic change, those can remain only solitary achievements that are only there to support the neoliberal “cult of the individual”.Snowden stands in total contrast to Assange in regard to his character and private life. There is nothing truly “problematic” about him, he seems to be an almost impeccable person, a “straight arrow”. This should make him a poster boy for American democracy and freedom of speech, and Stone tries to depict him in this way.Still, we are dealing with someone who cannot simply be redeemed as a patriot who did his duty. He cannot be unequivocally hailed as an all-American hero since betraying state secrets (and betrayal in general) is seen as a villainous act. For many Americans, and for the government, he will forever be remembered as a traitor. Greenwald writes that most of the people in the US, according to some surveys, still want to see Snowden in prison, even if they find that the surveillance by the NSA was wrong (365).Snowden remains an outcast and although the ending is not quite happy, since he must live in Russian exile, there is still a sense of an “upbeat final message” that ideologically colours the film’s ending.The Fifth EstateThe Fifth Estate is another example of the ideological view of the individual, but in this case with a twist. The film tries to be “objective” at first, showing the importance and impact of the newly established online platform WikiLeaks. However, towards the end of the film, it proceeds to dismantle Julian Assange (Benedict Cumberbatch) with the “everyone has secrets” platitude, which effectively means that none of us should ever try to reveal any secrets of those in power, since all of us must have our own secrets we do not want revealed. The film is shown from the perspective of Assange’s former disgruntled associate Daniel Domscheit-Berg (Daniel Brühl), who wrote a book about his time at WikiLeaks on which the film is partly based on (Inside WikiLeaks). We see Assange through his eyes and delve into personal moments that are supposed to reveal the “truth” about the individual behind the project. In a cynical twist, it is Daniel who is the actual whistleblower, who reveals the secrets of WikiLeaks and its founder.Assange, as it is said in the film, is denounced as a “messiah” or a “prophet”, almost a cult leader who only wants to satisfy his perverse need for other people’s secrets, except that he is literally alone and has no followers and, unlike real cult leaders, needs no followers. The point of whistleblowing is exactly in the fact that it is a radical move, it is a big step forward in ending a wrongdoing. To denounce the radical stance of WikiLeaks is to misunderstand and undermine the whole notion of whistleblowing as a part of true changes in a society.The cult aspects are often referred to in the film when Assange’s childhood is mentioned. His mother was supposed to be in a cult, called “The Family”, and we should regard this as an important (and bad) influence on his character. This notion of the “childhood trauma” seems to be a crutch that is supposed to serve as a characterisation, something the scriptwriting-guru Robert McKee criticises as a screenwriting cliché: “do not reduce characters to case studies (an episode of child abuse is the cliché in vogue at the moment), for in truth there are no definitive explanations for anyone’s behaviour” (376).Although the film does not exaggerate the childhood aspect, it is still a motive that is supposed to shed some light into the “mystery” that is Assange. And it also ties into the question of the colour of his hair as a way of dismantling his lies. In a flashback that resembles a twist ending of an M. Night Shyamalan thriller, it turns out that Assange actually dyes his hair white, witnessed in secret by Daniel, instead of it turning naturally white, as Assange explains on few occasions but stating different reasons for it. Here he seems like a true movie villain and resembles the character of the Joker from The Dark Knight (2008), who also tells different stories about the origin of his facial scars. This mystery surrounding his origin makes the villain even more dangerous and, what is most important, unpredictable.Žižek also draws a parallel between Assange and Joker of the same film, whom he sees as the “figure of truth”, as Batman and the police are using lies in order to “protect” the citizens: “the film’s take-home message is that lying is necessary to sustain public morale: only a lie can redeem us” (“Good Manners”). Rather than interpreting Assange’s role in a positive way, as Žižek does, the film truly establishes him as a villain.Fig. 2: The Problematic Individual: Julian Assange in The Fifth EstateThe Fifth Estate ends with another cheap psychologisation of Assange on Daniel’s part as he describes the “true purpose” of WikiLeaks: “only someone so obsessed with his own secrets could’ve come up with a way to reveal everyone else’s”. This faux-psychological argument paints the whole WikiLeaks endeavour as Assange’s ego-trip and makes of him an egomaniac whose secret perverted pleasure is to reveal the secrets of others.Why is this so? Why are Woodward and Bernstein in All the President’s Men depicted as heroes and Assange is not? The true underlying conflict here is between classic journalism; where journalists can publish their pieces and get the acclaim for publishing the “new Pentagon Papers”, once again ensuring the freedom of the press and “inter-systemic” critique. This way of working of the press, as the films show, always pays off. All the while, in reality, very little changes since, as Žižek writes, the “formal functioning of power” stays in place. He further states about WikiLeaks:The true targets here weren’t the dirty details and the individuals responsible for them; not those in power, in other words, so much as power itself, its structure. We shouldn’t forget that power comprises not only institutions and their rules, but also legitimate (‘normal’) ways of challenging it (an independent press, NGOs, etc.). (“Good Manners”)In the very end, the “real” journalism is being reinforced as the sole vehicle of criticism, while everything else is “extremism” and, again, can only stem from a frustrated, even “evil”, individual. If neoliberal individualism is the order of the day, then the thinking must also revolve around that notion and cannot transcend that horizon.ConclusionŽižek expresses the problem of revealing the truth in our day and age by referring to the famous fable “The Emperor’s New Clothes”, where a child is the only one who is naive and brave enough to state that the emperor is in fact naked. But for Žižek today,in our cynical era, such strategy no longer works, it has lost its disturbing power, since everyone now proclaims that the emperor is naked (that Western democracies are torturing terrorist suspects, that wars are fought for profit, etc., etc.), and yet nothing happens, nobody seems to mind, the system just goes on functioning as if the emperor were fully dressed. (Less than Nothing 92)The problem with the “Collateral Murder”, a video of the killing of Iraqi civilians by the US Army, leaked by Wikileaks and Chelsea Manning, that was presented to the public, for instance, was according to accounts in Inside Wikileaks and Inside Julian Assange’s War on Secrecy, that it did not have the desired impact. The public seems, in the end, to be indifferent to such reveals since it effectively cannot do anything about it. The return to the status quo after these reveals supports this stance, as Greenwald writes that after Snowden’s leaks there was no substantial change within the system; during the Obama administration, there was even an increase of criminal investigations of whistleblowers with an emergence of a “climate of fear” (Greenwald 368). Many whistleblower films assure us that in the end the system works; the good guys always win, the antagonists are punished, and laws have been passed. This is not to be accepted simply as a Hollywood convention, something that we also “already know”, but as an ideological stance, since these films are taken more seriously than films with similar messages but within other mainstream genres. Snowden shows that only individualism has the power to challenge the system, while The Fifth Estate draws the line that should not be crossed when it comes to privacy as a “universal” good because, again, “everyone has secrets”. Such representations of whistleblowing and disruption only further cement the notion that in our societies no real change is possible because it seems unnecessary. Whistleblowing as an act of revelation needs therefore to be understood as only one small step made by the individual that in the end depends on how society and the government decide to act upon it.References All the President’s Men. Dir. Alan J. Pakula. 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