Orr closely examines Memento's film fabric as well as its broader cultural implications, presenting it as the result of a natural progression in a decade marked by the transformation of classic film noir into a low-budget identity noir. Nolan's dis-linear identity noir opens a black hole of perception, making the audience share the same amnesiac quality with the beleaguered, lost protagonist. This creates an intensifying suspicion of what the truth is and whether it actually exists. Orr deconstructs Memento as an intersection of popular film genre and experimental montage, discussing Nolan's mise-en-scene reduction to pure image. The author examines the narrative loop of the film as a subject to disorientations, playing forward and backward in time without a serial return to the present. Orr juxtaposes this approach to the fast-forward culture of today, calling it a perverse culture of the rewind. that plays on electronic culture's fatal flaw of .impatience with the slowing image. Nolan makes this perverse reverse dependent on the art of simple montage, creating a protagonist strikingly independent of electronic paraphernalia Leonard does not use the tools of the contemporary investigator, such as bugs, camcoders, computers, or mobiles, but is instead reliant on text and image. This, Orr argues, makes him a fable for the information age, his lack of memory storage both a match and a metaphor for the disaster bound to strike if all the world's electronic technology were to crash. Leonard is thus reduced to pure hard copy, from the tattoos covering his body to the multitude of notes lining his inside pockets. In this respect, Nolan.s protagonist becomes the antithesis of the Kubrickian cyborg monster, a de-programmed humanoid whose retrograde amnesia mirrors this technological retrograde evolution.

Doherty creates a social, historical and cultural context to better understand the production environment in 1946, of which The Best Years of Our Lives could be considered a consequence.  Wyler, himself a veteran of the war, sought not to create a classical, heroic depiction of decorated servicemen’s celebrated and joyous return home, but rather, an honest film with rife with social and cultural implications.  Rather than giving audiences an idyllic and glorified portrayal of the return home, he recreated the difficult readjustment of veterans back into their “normal lives” at home.  That the film was met with wild success is a testament to Doherty’s argument that the postwar American audience found a deeper meaning in film, and sought it as a tool not to escape from, but to address social problems.

 

This book examines the portrayal of the war at different stages in books and movies of the time, and draws a correllation between the movie and the purpose it was considered to serve.  In the essay “New Heroes: Post-War Hollywood’s Image of World War II,” Philip Landon strives to characterize the common war film of postwar period.  He claims that “war films of that time shared a myth essentially similar to the western,” films that lacked critical acclaim due to their uniformity and generic context in portraying the war.  As Paul Fussell wrote, “Hollywood shared the mass media’s aversion to examining the actual horrors of the War’s mechanized battle fronts.”  The attempts of these war films were not to push any limits as far as conventions, depth and complexity of story, and level of provocation, but rather sought to create a “mythic hero remarkably well-suited to the mood and circumstances of post-war America,” as it was perceived by the studios.

This observation raises an interesting point touched upon in the biography of Samuel Goldwyn. During the war, Hollywood naturally made heroic war tales to instill sentiments of hope and pride in American citizens. However, Hollywood generally tended to apply this same belief to the immediate post-war period, Goldwyn included. Any actual dramatic portrayal of the war and its negative effects was considered a risky bet, especially casting a real-life double amputee with hooks for hands. But as the ARI analysis and the film's wild success both demonstrated, Americans were no longer disillusioned about the war, and in some way, shape or form, were seeking an outlet for this. The war had profound and negative effects on their husbands, fathers, brothers and sons who brought these effects home with them. The ability of The Best Years of Our Lives to translate the true-to-life experiences of returning veterans from all ages and socio-economic levels to film was groundbreaking at the time, and was what the American public wanted to see.

 

Director John Whitesell literalizes tropes of gender and racial identity confusion in his Big Momma's House 2, which meditates upon the nuanced difficulties of existing in society as an obese African-American woman, while in reality being a skinny black man. Martin Lawrence plays Malcolm "Big Momma" Turner, a humble FBI agent whose passion for national security motivates his subtextual fascination with cross-dressing as a 250+ pound, festively patterned muumuu-sporting woman.

To appeal to a wider audience, Whitesell has ingeniously pitched Big Momma's House 2 as mind-numbing comedy, pregnant with redundantly inappropriate and awkward quips and gags. However, Big Momma House 2's purportedly feather-light farce grapples with many a complex and politically-charged question regarding the role racial minority cross-dressing plays in contemporary American culture.

Martin Lawrence's dual identity as an ambitious young sharp-shooting National Security agent, driven by his unremitting patriotism to go incognito as an elderly corpulent female, provokes comparisons between his two radically different personae. In doing so, it raises an interesting question: how does our society corner successful young black men into performing absurd self-caricatures in order to be embraced by mainstream culture?

By challenging us to laugh at our own violent and repressive racial and sexual stereotyping, Big Momma's House 2 instigates important cultural conversations regarding America's deep-rooted societal prejudices: have these bigotries really evolved since the Civil Rights Movement, or have they just been transformed and made less recognizable?

The film suggests that if we can allow ourselves to reflect openly and honestly upon these questions and anxieties, instead of displacing them onto a grossly caricatured 250+ pound African-American woman, perhaps we can also preclude the culmination of a Big Momma's House trilogy.

Book about how films make stories and how those stories fit into culture. Focuses on editing and shot composition, but also on the ways they fit into culture through values and context.