Atomic Housewives: Shutter Island and the Domestication of Nuclear Holocaust
ABSTRACT: Martin Scorsese's 2010 film Shutter Island is one of several post–September 11 cultural texts that use Cold War settings to challenge the trend in US culture to displace social and political fears by escaping to a nostalgia for an idealized postwar society. The film ostensibly replaces the protagonist's wartime trauma with a domestic tragedy while simultaneously undermining that replacement. Its attempt to bury the guilt for war crimes under worries about the collapse of the nuclear family confronts the United States' attempt to justify its actions in the War on Terror through a nostalgic imaginary of the Cold War.
Islands of lost souls
Scorsese's "Shutter Island" may be a faithful adaptation of a bestseller, but it's also his deeply felt homage to the cinema of the 1940s and 50s, says Graham Fuller, and a return to the paranoid interior world of "Taxi Driver"
The rhetoric of exorcism: George W. Bush and the return of political demonology
EVER SINCE THE commercial airline missiles destroyed New York City's World Trade Center on 9/11/01, images of violence and catastrophe have seared the collective mind. A popular image shot by freelance photographer Mark Phillips seemed to capture the face of a demon in a large plume of smoke emanating from one of the twin towers (see fig. 1). Soon after the Associated Press secured one-time printing rights to the so-called "smoke demon" image, it became available to Internet users who quickly disseminated it with foreboding commentary about the Christian apocalypse. For many evangelical Protestants in particular, the smoke demon provided evidence that the "current seat of Satan's power" resides in American financial institutions, and that the demise of the World Trade Center is a sign from God (or the Devil) that the end-time is near (Mikkelson & Mikkelson). The goal of this essay is to show how speech writers used a similar, demonic anthropomorphism to craft a righteous presidential rhetoric that helped overcome the widespread experience of anomie and speechlessness caused by the violence of 9/11. [FIGURE 1 OMITTED] To this end the essay proceeds in four parts. Part one provides a context for the study by describing the recent increase of demonic rhetoric in popular culture. Part two locates the demonic in relation to the religious genres of exorcism and conversion, two iterations of the larger cultural form of religious transformation. In part three, I examine the parallels between exorcism and the political purging of figurative bodies, specifically those that appear in the speeches of George W. Bush in the aftermath of 9/11. Finally, the essay concludes with a discussion of the implications of such a reading for rhetorical theory and practice, focusing particularly on the continued relevance of genre to the study of political discourse. Demons and Possession in Popular Culture The Demonic Default Similar to the childhood game of seeing animals in clouds or finding "the face of Mother Theresa in a cinnamon bun," the attribution of form, particularly a human-like form, to an otherwise vague and diffuse stimulus is an perceptual illusion termed "pareidolia" (Carroll 2002). According to the anthropologist Stewart Guthrie, pareidolic anthropomorphisms, such as the smoke demon, frequently concern religious figures, for the attribution of form to the ineffable in general is the psychological basis of religion (also see Cassirer). (1) Guthrie also claims that religious anthropomorphisms tend to attribute a given deity or supernatural figure with the power of speech (198). Gods and demons speak, and they often have the power to mute speech. From an evangelical perspective, for example, one could claim that Satan's destructive power on 9/11 momentarily robbed the U.S. citizenry of its voice, its power to name, and thereby its ability to comprehend and cope; with destruction and death, Satan silences. The ineffability of 9/11 has created numerous rhetorical acts designed to restore the voice and security of the polity, including a litany of rituals, speeches, and performances mourning the loss of the dead, commemorating rescue efforts, and celebrating communal bonds. Speakers who sought to assuage audiences by amplifying the virtues of the American people repeatedly used the words courage, honor, freedom, trust, and faith. In other words, the Western terminological repertoire for expressing goodness, secular and divine, is large. Those who sought to characterize the "terrorists" or their deeds, however, were limited in their expression. They described the terrorists' intent and motives as "evil," reducing human action to inhuman motion and thereby dehumanizing the racial/religious Other as monsters controlled by a malevolent force. The rhetorical invention of evil is difficult because Westerners have a limited repertoire of language for characterizing it. Historically, of course, the demonic personifications of religious discourse have provided the bulk of Western representations of evil (see Russell The Devil; Delbanco). …