Velvet Light Trap articles from March 1999

Velvet Light Trap archives from March 1999

Introduction.
March 22, 1999... In recent years, "ideology" has become an increasingly contested term to the point where its usefulness as a coherent critical concept has been Thrown into question. Yet despite the fact that ideology can no longer be designated, simply and...

"Beavis is just confused": ideologies, intertexts, audiences.(Critical Essay)
March 22, 1999... MTV's hit series Beavis and Butt-head immediately declares itself as selfconsciously youth-oriented. Its characters are animated teenagers who spend most of their time watching MTV; its settings include high school, fast food restaurants, and...

There's no place like home: the American Dream, African-American identity, and the situation comedy.(Critical Essay)
March 22, 1999... Few would argue with the assertion that the American Dream doesn't pack the ideological punch it once did. From the pages of national newspapers to Frontline, from books detailing the "fall from grace" of the American Middle Class to those who...

Not an Immaculate Reception: ideology, The Madonna Connection, and academic wannabes.
March 22, 1999... I still remember the edge in my colleague's voice, even though it's been almost ten years. I was about to be interviewed by a journalist, a journalist who wanted to report on the suddenly newsworthy fact that academics study Madonna. "Just...

Performativity in disguise: ideology and the denaturalization of identity in theory and The Crying Game.(Critical Essay)
March 22, 1999... When in Neil Jordan's The Crying Game (1993) the male protagonist's female lover disrobes to reveal a penis, the movie's much-celebrated "secret" effectively shocks unsuspecting spectators into a recognition that genders and sexualities are...

Race-ing Noir and re-placing history: the mulatta and memory in One False Move and Devil in a Blue Dress.(Critical Essay)
March 22, 1999... Black films use spatial narration as a way of revealing and linking Black spaces that have been separated and suppressed by white times, and as a means of validating Black culture. In other words, spatial narration is a filmmaking of cultural...

Tropical Multiculturalism: a Comparative History of Race in Brazilian Cinema and Culture.
March 22, 1999... by Robert Stam Robert Stam's Tropical Multiculturalism is a densely evidenced, yet consistently readable, treatment of the question of "race" in Brazilian cinema, frequently cross-referenced with considerations of the same topic in U.S....

High Contrast: Race and Gender in Contemporary Hollywood Film.
March 22, 1999... by Sharon Willis Each of the six essays in Sharon Willis's High Contrast sets out to show how Hollywood films of the 1980s and 1990s construct and mobilize particular configurations of racial and sexual difference and to suggest what these...

Representing the Woman: Cinema and Psychoanalysis.
March 22, 1999... by Elizabeth Cowie Freud's descriptive explanation of Woman as a "dark continent" has perversely stood the test of time within the rubrics of film criticism's examination of the role of females in cinema, both on the screen and in the...

Errata.
March 22, 1999... Please note the following errata in the Fall 1998 issue of Velvet Light Trap 42, for page 64 of the George Potamiano article, Movie Mad:Audiences and Censorship in a California Town, 1916-1926. The text below was inadvertantly omitted and...