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The Terministic Screen

Southern Illinois University Press

Contents

Acknowledgments............................................................................................................................................ixIntroduction: The Rhetoric of Film and Film Studies David Blakesley.......................................................................................1Part One Perspectives on Film and Film Theory as Rhetoric.................................................................................................171. Mapping the Other: The English Patient, Colonial Rhetoric, and Cinematic Representation Alan Nadel.....................................................212. Rhetoric and the Early Work of Christian Metz: Augmenting Ideological Inquiry in Rhetorical Film Theory and Criticism Ann Chisholm.....................373. Temptation as Taboo: A Psychorhetorical Reading of The Last Temptation of Christ Martin J. Medhurst....................................................554. Hyperrhetoric and the Inventive Spectator: Remotivating The Fifth Element Byron Hawk...................................................................705. Time, Space, and Political Identity: Envisioning Community in Triumph of the Will Ekaterina V. Haskins.................................................926. On Rhetorical Bodies: Hoop Dreams and Constitutional Discourse James Roberts...........................................................................107Part Two Rhetorical Perspectives on Film and Culture......................................................................................................1257. Looking for the Public in the Popular: The Hollywood Blacklist and the Rhetoric of Collective Memory Thomas W. Benson..................................1298. Copycat, Serial Murder, and the (De)Terministic Screen Narrative Philip L. Simpson.....................................................................1469. Opening the Text: Reading Gender, Christianity, and American Intervention in Deliverance Davis W. Houck and Caroline J. S. Picart......................16310. From "World Conspiracy" to "Cultural Imperialism": The History of Anti-Plutocratic Rhetoric in German Film Friedemann Weidauer........................190Part Three Perspectives on Films about Rhetoric...........................................................................................................21111. Rhetorical Conditioning: The Manchurian Candidate Bruce Krajewski.....................................................................................21312. Sophistry, Magic, and the Vilifying Rhetoric of The Usual Suspects David Blakesley....................................................................23413. Textual Trouble in River City: Literacy, Rhetoric, and Consumerism in The Music Man Harriet Malinowitz................................................24614. Screen Play: Ethos and Dialectics in A Time to Kill Granetta L. Richardson............................................................................27215. Postmodern Dialogics in Pulp Fiction: Jules, Ezekiel, and Double-Voiced Discourse Kelly Ritter........................................................286Contributors...............................................................................................................................................303Index......................................................................................................................................................307

Chapter One

Alan Nadel

One cannot colonize without a map, a gaze, and a narrative.

Since colonization is a symbolic action-albeit with innumerable material consequences-it requires a symbology. To say that Columbus discovered America, for example, is to say that he participated in a symbolic relationship in which his European sponsor was, a priori, superior and his "America" was, a posteriori, subordinate. According to the understanding of space encoded by European maps, in other words, if Columbus landed on an "unmapped" place, whatever he discovered there, by definition, would be subordinate, for maps make initial distinctions, distinctions that organize a gaze. And these distinctions, Michel de Certeau makes clear, are of a historiographic nature. They divide the nations with written "history" from those nations with unwritten history, so that the mapping of the new space is the writing of the colonizer's history. Because the discovery of "America" extends the map of Spain, it becomes part of the history of Spanish-or more generically European-exploration and conquest. The mapping of the New World-and by extension the bodies of those others who inhabit it-organizes the historiographic gaze just as the nominal rubric, "The Age of Exploration," thematizes it.

The narrative of colonization thus consists of innumerable acts, for example, of definition, redefinition, assimilation, appropriation, and exclusion, that facilitate the creation and definition of mapped space, so that to map is to participate in the rhetoric of colonialism, in that mapping extends and represents the gaze of the colonizer in the name of objectivity, neutrality, science. Maps project a representation as though the referents existed in nature, as though the matrix of measurement and gridwork simply reflected what was there-what was discovered to be there-rather than that they create the space on which the narrative of discovery can unfold by virtue of representing the other.

Just as the codes of mapping are thus rhetorical devices providing colonial narratives with a scientific ethos, so the codes of cinematic representation, especially in mainstream Hollywood-style cinema, are rhetorical devices providing the illusion of omniscience or, to state it differently, the ethos of objectivity to narratives that subordinate the deigesis to the desires of the spectator. Mainstream cinematic narrative, in other words, evokes the same ethos as mapping, in that both forms of representation create symbolic spaces that mask the arbitrary authority ceded, a priori, to the place whence the (geographic, historiographic, or cinematographic) discourse emanates. The spectator, as visitor to the symbolic space, is invited to share the privileged gaze of the colonizer.

In this light, The English Patient presents an extended rhetorical argument about the dimensions of colonial discourse in such a way as to connect that discourse to the codes of cinematic representation, thus revealing the seductive quality of colonial discourse as a form of cinematic romance from which the rhetorical tenets of mainstream cinema allow no escape. Since mapping is the literal act of turning the other into a representation, it is a rhetorical process, one that is requisite to traditional narrative cinema. That cinema constructs its narrative by means of plotting coordinates between a vast and unviewable world and a manageable, contained temporal and physical space. This coordination only becomes legible by virtue of its compliance with elaborate semantic and syntactic conventions. Since filmmaking, in this regard, is identical to mapmaking, the fact that the central characters in The English Patient are engaged as mapmakers thus underscores the ways that filmmaking and mapmaking participate in colonial rhetorical practices.

If mapmaking...