Projecting Paranoia

A wide-ranging and idiosyncratic look at sixty years of politics and film that uncovers how American movies have mirrored and even challenged anxieties and paranoid perceptions embedded in American society since the start of the Cold War. The first book to take a sweeping look at 60 years of film and analyze them thematically.

This provocative book reveals how Hollywood films reflect our deepest fears and anxieties as a country, often recording our political beliefs and cultural conditions while underscoring the darker side of the American way of life. Long before the war in Iraq and the economic crises of the early 21st century, Hollywood has depicted a grim view of life in the United States, one that belies the prosperity and abundance of the so-called American Dream. While the country emerged from World War II as a world power, collectively our sense of security had been threatened. The result is a cinematic body of work that has America's decline and ruin as a central theme. The author draws from popular films across all genres and six decades to illustrate how the political climate of the times influenced their creation. Projecting the End of the American Dream: Hollywood's Visions of U.S. Decline combines film history, social history, and political history to reveal important themes in the unfolding American narrative. Discussions focus on a wide variety of films, including Rambo, Planet of the Apes, and Easy Rider.

Against the backdrop of recent postmodern discourse on cultural theory, Eva Schwarz provides a gripping analysis of the concept of what she describes as visual paranoia. Her study is based on a detailed analysis of three films: Alfred Hitchcock’s Rear Window (USA, 1954), Michelangelo Antonioni’s Blow-up (GB, 1966) and Peter Weir’s The Truman Show (USA, 1998). The starting point of all three analyses is the representation of the postmodern media and information age as an incisive culture of the visual, which coincides with the general socio-political trend of cultural paranoia, the roots of which are to be found in American politics and society of the late 1940s and which has since permeated Anglo-American culture.The discourse on the truthfulness of images, the reality of visual representations and the visual as such forms the context out of which the theory of the development of visual paranoia arises. While other paranoia films, usually thrillers or science fiction films, concern themselves with the sociopolitical manifestation of cultural paranoia, the three films chosen for Schwarz's study focus on the fundamental crisis of the visual as such, from scopophilic paranoia in Rear Window to photographic paranoia in Blow-Up, culminating in the scopophobic manifestation of visual paranoia in The Truman Show.The once valid saying, "seeing is believing", can no longer be taken for granted. In postmodern times, the visual cannot be trusted any more.

This book focuses on all aspects of projection and identification, and addresses the problems and perplexities of projective identification. It is based on the First Conference of the Sigmund Freud Center of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

In recent years we have seen a continuation and perhaps even acceleration in the trend of popular culture having a discernible effect on politics. From The Daily Show to candidates’ use of Facebook and MySpace, politics have opened up to new technologies as we come online for the next generation. Our political world has become popularized, or our popular world has become politicized in a new way, facilitated by the entertainment media and new technologies. This volume’s authors attempt to make sense of the changing political popular world through a series of interdisciplinary essays that explore the ramifications of popular cultural depictions of politics drawing on literature in a variety of fields: political science, history, literature, fine arts and communications. We explore three major phenomena in a politicized popular culture. First, we explore the role that the entertainment media play in understanding politics. What is interesting about our fictional political worlds is we are allowed, as a people, to consider different political ideals without the baggage of our last vote or our ideology. We can step outside ourselves and challenge the way we think on particular issues. Second, we explore the real world of politics as it has been shaped over the last century of new technology. As powerful a medium television proved to be to politics, the latest technological breakthroughs have proved to be a paradigmatic shift. From Twitter to Facebook, our politicians are able to keep in almost constant contact with their constituencies, which has vast implications for the way political discourse will progress. Third, we explore what happens when the real world and media collide. Entertainment media change their messages when major political events happen such as the case when spymaster tropes were forced to evolve when 9/11 changed the international dynamic. Robert Ludlum’s Jason Bourne series had to be conceptualized on film in a new way after this event. The more connected our political world and our popular world become, and given the trends, we can only assume they will become increasingly intertwined, the more important it is for us to understand how these connections affect the world. This volume is a powerful pass at comprehending all that is happening across the politicized popular world.

Since the fall of the Berlin Wall, there has been a proliferation of German historical films. These productions have earned prestigious awards and succeeded at box offices both at home and abroad, where they count among the most popular German films of all time. Recently, however, the country's cinematic take on history has seen a significant new development: the radical style, content, and politics of the New German Cinema. With in-depth analyses of the major trends and films, this book represents a comprehensive assessment of the historical film in today's Germany. Challenging previous paradigms, it takes account of a postwall cinema that complexly engages with various historiographical forms and, above all, with film history itself.

Robert S. Robins and Jerrold M. Post, M.D., experts in political psychology, document and interpret the malign power of paranoia in a variety of contexts - in political movements like McCarthyism; in organizations like the John Birch Society; in leaders like Hitler, Stalin, Pol Pot, Jim Jones, and David Koresh; and among extreme groups that commit violence in the name of Christianity, Islam, and Judaism. Indeed, Robins and Post show that the paranoid dynamic has been aggressively present in every social disaster of this century. Robins and Post describe the paranoid personality, explain why paranoia is part of human evolutionary history, and examine the conditions that must exist before the message of the paranoid takes root in a vulnerable population, leading to mass movements and genocidal violence.

Examines how recent Argentine horror films engage with the legacies of dictatorship and neoliberalism. Argentina is a dominant player in Latin American film, known for its documentaries, detective films, melodramas, and auteur cinema. In the past twenty years, however, the country has also emerged as a notable producer of horror films. Blood Circuits focuses on contemporary Argentine horror cinema and the various “cinematic pleasures” it offers national and transnational audiences. Jonathan Risner begins with an overview of horror film culture in Argentina and beyond. He then examines select films grouped according to various criteria: neoliberalism and urban, rural, and suburban spaces; English-language horror films; gore and affect in punk/horror films; and the legacies of the last dictatorship (1976–1983). While keenly aware of global horror trends, Risner argues that these films provide unprecedented ways of engaging with the consequences of authoritarianism and neoliberalism in Argentina. Jonathan Risner is Assistant Professor of Spanish at Indiana University Bloomington.