Object's details: The Outlaw Machine, the Monstrous Outsider and Motorcycle Fetishists: Challenging Rebellion, Mobility and Masculinity in Kenneth Anger’s "Scorpio Rising" and Steven Spielberg’s "Duel"

Provider:Repozytorium Uniwersytetu Łódzkiego

Description

Title:
The Outlaw Machine, the Monstrous Outsider and Motorcycle Fetishists: Challenging Rebellion, Mobility and Masculinity in Kenneth Anger’s "Scorpio Rising" and Steven Spielberg’s "Duel"
Creator:
Boczkowska, Kornelia
Contributor:
Adam Mickiewicz University, Poznań;
Kornelia Boczkowska is Assistant Professor in the Department of Studies in Culture at the Faculty of English, Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań. She holds a PhD in English, and an MA in Russian and English. She is the recipient of several research grants and author and co-editor of two books and over twenty other publications on independent, experimental and avant-garde film in addition to space art and documentary film. Her current research is on landscape, travelogue and city symphony forms in the postwar American avant-garde and experimental cinema, and is funded by the National Science Center post-doctoral grant (no. UMO-2018/31/D/HS2/01553).;
kboczkowska@wa.amu.edu.pl
Description:
The paper analyzes the ways in which Kenneth Anger’s Scorpio Rising (1963) and Steven Spielberg’s Duel (1971) draw on and challenge selected road movie conventions by adhering to the genre’s traditional reliance on cultural critique revolving around the themes of rebellion, transgression and roguery. In particular, the films seem to confront the classic road movie format through their adoption of nomadic narrative structure and engagement in a mockery of subversion where the focus on social critique is intertwined with a deep sense of alienation and existential loss “laden with psychological confusion and wayward angst” (Laderman 83). Following this trend, Spielberg’s film simultaneously depoliticizes the genre and maintains the tension between rebellion and tradition where the former shifts away from the conflict with conformist society to masculine anxiety, represented by middle class, bourgeois and capitalist values, the protagonist’s loss of innocence in the film’s finale, and the act of roguery itself. Meanwhile, Anger’s poetic take on the outlaw biker culture, burgeoning homosexuality, myth and ritual, and violence and death culture approaches the question of roguery by undermining the image of a dominant hypermasculinity with an ironic commentary on sacrilegious and sadomasochistic practices and initiation rites in the gay community. Moreover, both Duel’s demonization of the truck, seen as “an indictment of machines” or the mechanization of life (Spielberg qtd. in Crawley 26), and Scorpio Rising’s (homo)eroticization of a motorcycle posit elements of social critique, disobedience and nonconformity within a cynical and existential framework, hence merging the road movie’s traditional discourse with auteurism and modernism.
Object availability:
free access
Rights:
This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 License.;
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0
Date:
2019.11.22;
2019
Type:
Article
Language:
English
Format:
application/pdf
Publisher:
Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Łódzkiego
Relation:
Text Matters: A Journal of Literature, Theory and Culture; 9
Subject:
independent film;
avant-garde and experimental film;
road movie;
masculinity;
„Scorpio Rising”;
„Duel”
Identifier:
2084-574X;
http://hdl.handle.net/11089/30854 ;
2083-2931;
10.18778/2083-2931.09.05
Data provider:
Repozytorium Uniwersytetu Łódzkiego

Similar objects

The Outlaw Machine, the Monstrous Outsider and Motorcycle Fetishists: Challenging Rebellion, Mobility and Masculinity in Kenneth Anger’s "Scorpio Rising" and Steven Spielberg’s "Duel"

Creator:Boczkowska, Kornelia

Date:2019.11.22 | 2019

Type:image

Relics of the Unseen Presence? Evocations of Native American Indian Heritage and Western-Hero Road Poems in Bruce Baillie’s Mass for the Dakota Sioux and Quixote

Creator:Boczkowska, Kornelia

Date:2018.12.01

Type:other

Najambitniejszy film Wima Wendersa [Wim Wenders’ Most Ambitious Film]

Creator:Waniek, Laura

Date:2020.12.31

Type:text

Ear to the ground. Searching for ourselves in each other

Creator:Stok, Witold

Date:2023.10.20

Type:text

Masculinity from the perspective of men with intellectual disability

Creator:Gutowska, Anna

Date:2020.12.15

Type:other

The “American duel” in the Makarewicz Criminal Code

Creator:Janikowski, Jarosław

Date:2023.12.29

Type:text

Boredom of travelling, boredom of waiting. Gus Van Sant’s “Gerry” and the theatre of Samuel Beckett

Creator:Popielecki, Jakub

Date:2009.06.13

Type:text

Dandism and duel: more on “a matter of honour” between Słowacki and Krasiński

Creator:Piechota, Marek

Date:2015.06.30

Type:text

Federacja Bibliotek Cyfrowych

Object's details: The Outlaw Machine, the Monstrous Outsider and Motorcycle Fetishists: Challenging Rebellion, Mobility and Masculinity in Kenneth Anger’s "Scorpio Rising" and Steven Spielberg’s "Duel"

Description

Similar objects