Frank Krutnik

Cycles of sensation: popular media, thrills, and outrage

In a much-cited passage in her 1909 book The Spirit of Youth and the City Streets, progressive reformer Jane Addams sketches a dystopian vision of the modern city, in which the gaudy sensuality of commercial culture has engulfed everyday life. Such brash enticements – exemplified by ‘the flippant street music, the highly colored theatre posters, the trashy love stories, the feathered hats, the cheap heroics of the revolvers displayed in the pawn-shop windows’ (27) – threaten to overstimulate the senses while impoverishing the imagination. Urban youth and the lower classes are especially vulnerable to the allure of such cheap and accessible attractions, she posits, because they lack the moral fortitude to resist their seductive promise. For Addams, sensory indulgence of this magnitude threatens a harmful degeneration of sensibility. Such heady accusations reverberate through countless campaigns against popular media that trade in sensation – from Victorian stage melodramas and sensation novels, through carnival exhibits, pulp magazines, tabloid newspapers, films, radio, television, comic books, popular music, videotapes, mechanical amusements, the World Wide Web, and video games. These crusading ‘cycles of outrage’, as James Gilbert (1988) terms them, frequently involve attempts by middle-class authorities to censure cultural practices that are not for, by, and about them. Serving as a conduit for anxieties over cultural power and cultural production, popular cycles of sensation frequently invoke threats posed to hegemony by modalities of difference, including class, race, sexuality, gender, non-normative bodies, crime – and, especially, youth. Sensational forms of popular culture can certainly provoke anxiety through their content, which often flaunts the spectacle of socially deviant behaviour, bodily or sexual excess, or underground subcultures (criminals, outsider refuseniks, rebellious youth, etc.). Beyond this, however, they are also challenging by virtue of their affective potency, as they aim to incite extreme reactions from their audiences – feelings of shock, horror, excitation, emotional abandon, or stunned disbelief. Such affective intensification may be alarming to both liberal and conservative sensibilities, but it is a key feature of the operational logic of popular media. It is debatable, moreover, whether such sensationalism is ever simplistically ‘exploitative’. In their very excesses of representation and emotion, such media ventures hold the promise of delivering insight or revelation, of inspiring new ways of looking at cultural formations that are often taken at face value. While our principal focus here is on cinema, most of the papers also seek to explore intersections between cinema and other cultural forms or trends that

Theatre of thrills: the culture of suspense

This paper examines the suspense-oriented media forms that proliferated in the USA through the 1940s and 1950s. Coinciding with, and inspired by, the success of the distinguished CBS radio series Suspense and the output of Alfred Hitchcock, this broader culture of suspense included films, radio and television series, live entertainments, electro-mechanical amusements, and books, magazines, and comic books. Exploring how such media forms deploy and negotiate suspense as an attraction, as a production value, and as trigger for sensation, the paper interrogates traditional critical assumptions regarding its role as a technique of narrative. The paper argues, instead, that suspense is a vital and more widespread feature of popular commercial cultures affective modalities. With its capacity to stir and to stimulate, suspense has frequently been treated by cultural guardians with suspicion, and demonized as inauthentic, degraded, or even dangerous. While the CBS programme and Hitchcocks films deliberately set out to upgrade the cultural status of suspense, the paper argues that other contemporaneous forms that relied upon it – certain radio thrillers, comic books, and pinball machines, for example – provoked intense moral censure.

Barbed Wire and Forget-Me-Not, The Radio Adventures of 'Laura'

This article explores the audio rendition of films within the movie adaptation series that proliferated on US radio from the mid-1930s to the mid-1950s. Focussing on several versions of the 1944 film Laura, the article examines the institutional, ideological and representational negotiations involved in translating this property from the cinema screen to the airwaves. A celebrated example of film noir, Laura reveals an unusual handling of questions of gender and sexuality as well as highly eccentric storytelling strategies and a distinctive visual style. Drawing on a range of critical approaches, reviews and trade materials, as well as offering detailed textual analysis of filmic and radio material, the article considers what happens when such a distinctive film is adapted to a medium that communicates exclusively through sound and which operates within more tightly regulated commercial and institutional imperatives.