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Contagion (2010) - Desire and Monstrosity in the Disaster Film: Alfred Hitchcock's The Birds

Details

  • article: Desire and Monstrosity in the Disaster Film: Alfred Hitchcock's The Birds
  • author(s): David Humbert
  • journal: Contagion (2010)
  • issue: volume 17, issue 1, pages 87-103
  • DOI: 10.1353/ctn.2010.0003
  • journal ISSN: 1075-7201
  • publisher: Michigan State University Press
  • keywords: Disasters, Motion pictures, Theory, Violence, The Birds (1963)

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Abstract

The theme of the relationship between desire and violence appears regularly in modern film criticism, and studies of this issue range in theoretical orientation from the Lacanian to the feminist.1 Though René Girard's view of this relationship is also regularly mentioned in studies of film violence, it is often with less than full appreciation of the way in which it contradicts central features of structuralist and psychoanalytic approaches to film, approaches that, until recently, have dominated film theory. [...] the very randomness, irrationality, and suddenness of the attack is the key to understanding the film.