Homeland is built on the conspiracy plots that provide entertaining suspense in the television series, which also reflects the fear culture that has developed in the wake of 9/11. CIA agent Carrie Mathison embodies the paranoid framework that undergirds the narrative, leading her to question the visible and to posit conspiracy theories behind coincidental events. Appropriating the narrative tropes of the gaslight films, Homeland enhances the unstable narrative structure produced by the combination of conspiratorial thinking with the serial. This article explores five seasons of Homeland and analyses the conspiratorial narrative it unfolds, highlighting how the serial format allows the creators to envision several scenarios illustrating individual and mass manipulation on the international stage, promoting a signifying system that blurs the final political message of the series.
This excerpt from the prologue of The Leftovers introduces the traumatic event that propels the narrative of Tom Perrotta's novel The Leftovers (2012): two per cent of the world population suddenly disappeared on that fateful day of October 14 th creating immediate chaos. The novel focuses on the community of Mapleton and relates how its residents cope with the memory of the rapture three years after it occurred. An omniscient narrator gives insight into the characters' intimate journeys, raising philosophical questions about the meaning of individual and community life. The protagonists embody different life choices, suggesting the long-lasting imprint of the past over the present: Laurie Garvey has decided to join the Guilty Remnants, a community whose members are determined to honour the departed, while her husband Mayor Kevin Garvey strives to preserve social order in Mapleton. Although the novel's narrative structure borrows from the best-selling evangelical apocalyptic literary series entitled Left Behind by Tim LaHaye and Jerry B. Jenkins, which sheds light on the chaos that follows the rapture of those individuals chosen by God to be saved, The Leftovers departs from this tradition by highlighting the paths of survival on which the characters engage individually. Left Behind characteristically opens with a scene of rapture that prompts the unsaved to convert to Christianity as they face ensuing chaos in the forms of plagues, earthquakes, and wars 2. By contrast, The Leftovers articulates a secular response to the rapture and its adaptation into a television series prompts viewers to question the sacred texts and to ponder metaphysical questions that are in tune with contemporary cultural anxieties. 2 Drawing on Robert Stam's understanding of adaptation as a transformative process, this presentation aims at underlining how words turn into dramatic visuals in The Leftoversa television series that associates writer Tom Perrotta as co-creator alongside Lost
This article examines Errol Morris’s documentary Standard Operating Procedure (2008), which represents an attempt on the part of the filmmaker to demystify the media’s moralizing and dramatizing glance at the Abu Ghraib photographs that created a scandal when first broadcast on television in 2004. Through a forensic analysis of the digital prints used in counterpoint to the implicated soldiers’ testimonies, Morris strives to recontextualize the notorious snapshots. Although he reaches his goal and recovers the individual stories behind the iconic photos, he fails to humanize the soldiers – turned into monsters by the media. This study points to the limits of the participatory mode of documentary filmmaking, using the interrotron as the basis for an interviewing technique that undermines the power to self-representation.
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