Second Takes : Remaking Film, Remaking America

Remaking Film, Remaking America presents the history of English language cinema by focusing on cinematic remakes and on how cinema is being replaced by new forms of ""media"". Remakes, with their innate plurality, offer the most substance for concentrated cultural analysis of how movies reflect and shape American culture. Applying psychoanalysis, media and communication theory, and gender and sexuality studies to the archetypes and myths that recur in American culture reveals how movies are an increasingly dangerous surrogate for the actual. In our post-literate epoch, fantasy becomes the greater truth, violence a meaningful language, and the individual is removed from self by an increasingly more constricting visual culture. This book presents a close reading of such popular favourites as Disney's The Parent Trap, Hitchcock's Psycho, Kubrick's A Clockwork Orange, Lynch's Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me, Welles' The Magnificent Ambersons, Sirk's Imitation of Life, Ulmer's The Black Cat, Powell's Peeping Tom, Cronenberg's Crash, Wellman's The Public Enemy, Boorman's Point Blank, and Ferrara's Bad Lieutenant, while obscure motion pictures ripe for rediscovery including One More Tomorrow, Strange Illusion, Andy Warhol's Vinyl, Fassbinder's Despair, Forced Entry, Raiders of the Lost Ark: The Adaptation and Welles' The Immortal Story.