Alan Nadel

God's Law and the Wide Screen: The Ten Commandments as Cold War "Epic"

Cecil B. deMille’s Ten Commandments can be read as a major product of American cold war ideology, highlighting and localizing the foci of America’s political, theological, and economic conflicts. T...

The Ascent of the Falling Man: Establishing a Picture's Iconicity

Why is it that some photographs have a power of epic concentration, condensing larger moments in history into one iconic image? This piece about the photography of 9/11 addresses this question. Its focus is on one photograph in particular, Richard Drews image of the Falling Man. Central to the argument is the awareness of a paradox: to explore something quintessentially photographic – the force of images that give them iconic power – using a medium for reflection and communication that is inherently non-photographic: i.e. language. The author aims at accounting for the fascination of Drews image, in a struggle to find words to describe its impact. To that end he looks at how others – the photographer himself, and other creative minds, in essay form, fiction or graphic novels – have translated their fascination into language that may help us account for the way this image continues to haunt us.

Neoliberalism, Magical Thinking, and Silver Linings Playbook

A word-of-mouth hit in 2012, David O. Russell’s Silver Linings Playbook has been popularly discussed as successfully targeting an adult audience under-served in contemporary Hollywood, as “authentically” reflecting the parenting challenges of its star and director, and as portraying a “modern” romance about a sympathetic, deeply damaged protagonist couple.1 Less frequently recognized is how Silver Linings Playbook consolidates forms of social damage arising in neoliberal societies. Accordingly, we read the film as reflecting a postfeminist, post-recession narrative of social, familial, and economic pressures, and exposing the effect of those pressures on the struggle for intimacy in the twenty-first century. SLP engages a set of cultural narratives that produce a post-recession subject who restores his or her sense of self by re-narrating gender and family relationships. This re-narration reflects fictional control over psychological circumstances in order to compensate for uncontrollable material conditions. Specifically, the film, through a fantasy maneuver, invokes the compulsive nature of the current financial system in order to provide salvation for disenfranchised subjects by cathecting them to a flawed financialism.

Temperate and Nearly Cloudless: The 9/11 Commission Report as Postmodern Pastiche

“Tuesday, September 11, 2001 dawned temperate and nearly cloudless in the eastern United States”. Thus begins Chapter One of the 9/11 Commission Report, a chapter that bears the title, “‘We have Some Planes’”. As with all good pop fiction, the reader awaits to see what this quote means, although we know already that it will mark a crucial moment, one that renders the innocuous urgent, or gives meaning to a startling chaos of coincidence. Pop culture has taught us the formula well: Everything looks fine; high school kids sip pop and dance in front of the juke box; Ole Doc Jones is mowin’ the lawn while Mrs. Jones makes lemonade. BUT strange noises have been heard in the cellar; no one can find the cat; Mr. Grundy insists he saw flashing lights last night, but no one believes him because Mrs. Grundy says he’s been acting strange ever since she flushed his Viagra; mysteriously, all the clocks in Indianapolis have started running fast or slow by exactly 24 hours. Then we hear the message on the police radio: “we’ve got some planes…as large as football fields hovering over every Wall-Mart in the nation”. At last someone will believe the geeky newspaper boy and his big brother’s girlfriend, who knew all along he was on to something. Let’s hope it’s not too late.

Uncontained: Urban Fiction in Postwar America (review)

der neutral as, for instance, the liberal subject is said to be. The question is familiar from earlier debates over postmodernism; whatever his answer, articulating it would have avoided appearing to reproduce a mode of dominance he is otherwise at pains to undo. Murphets contribution to the growing literature about Los Angeles is his close attention to several literary texts; had he relaxed his theoretical rein, that contribution might have been larger.