This article discusses how the choice of actress Gal Gadot to play Wonder Woman negotiates between comic book fans' expectations and society's gender schema. It has taken 75years for the industry to produce a movie adaption of Wonder Woman, perhaps due to the 'problem' of female muscles. This article focuses on the significance of Wonder Woman's muscles using theoretical frames from sports sociology. One frame is edgework, coined by sociologist Stephen Lyng about dangerous activities that amateurs perform. The second frame is the feminist analysis of women's muscles. Women navigate the boundary between what sociologist Shari Dworkin calls 'emphasized femininity' and what is beyond this femininity. The article introduces Wonder Woman's origin, then presents theory of edgework and female muscles, third, it analyzes Wonder Woman as bodywork and edgework, and, finally, discusses Gadot's Wonder Woman body as feminist physique.
Between heroes and villains is the antihero, a complex character who is an amalgam of, on the one hand, desirable character traits and, on the other hand, objectional behavior. Th is is the sympathetic gangster boss Tony in Th e Sopranos (1999-2007), caring family father and meth cook Walter White in Breaking Bad (2008-2013), and serial killer Dexter who kills other serial killers in Dexter (2006-2013). Th e antihero is a recurring fi gure in television drama where we build sympathies over long stretches of time, thus accepting morally objectional behavior because we are heavily invested in a character. Why do we like the antihero? Why not prefer a hero or be immoral and chose a villain? In Th e Antihero in American Television, cognitive fi lm scholar Margrethe Bruun Vaage discusses what moral engagements viewers have with an antihero, the nature of moral emotions and engagements, and why there are so many antiheroes in contemporary television? In Chapter 1, Vaage sets out the theoretical foundation for her journey into morally murky waters. Th e antihero-who is mostly a man-"truly is immoral in the sense that he is continually violating moral principles" (p. xi). Also, he is a stable element in what Jason Mittell coined complex TV, also known as quality TV and associated with HBO and Th e Sopranos. Complex TV wants us to refl ect. Vaage is a cognitive fi lm theorist and draws from moral psychology and moral emotions. A debate in media theory is whether a viewer shares a character's evil or not. Vaage draws on psychologists Jonathan Haidt and Joshua Greene's model of a dual-process morality: Moral judgment can be quick and intuitive (gut feelings) or deliberate, rational, and slow.
Angela Ndalianis is an Australian media scholar whose former publications include The Neo-Baroque Aesthetics and Contemporary Entertainment (MIT Press, 2004) and Science Fiction Experiences (New Academia1 Publishing, 2011). In The Horror Sensorium, Ndalianis shows how horror in different media forms engages our senses. The book analyzes a variety of engagements with media such as in movies, theme park rides, television series, novels, video games, and transmedia horror experiences such as ARGs (alternate reality games) in which the user is a VUP (viewer/user/player) participating in real life (marketing) stories. Her term "the sensorium" refers to "the sensory mechanics of the human body and to the intellectual and cognitive functions connected to it" (p. 1). The book concerns both perception and our making sense of such perception. Ndalianis thus avoids a dichotomy of sense versus meaning or sensory versus intellectual and regards the dualities as connected: When we perceive a disgusting monster, we are already interpreting our perception and reacting with disgust. The sensorium is "an interface" between, on the one hand, our physical and intellectual body and, on the other hand, an external world to which the media belongs. The book has an Introduction and seven chapters. The Introduction explains the sensorium, and first chapter introduces New Horror. The other six chapters examine horror experiences in different media. First, describing the sensorium, the author draws from studies on affect, cognition, and emotions with key names being Giuliana Bruno, Vivian Sobchack, Laura Marks, and Jennifer Barker. In later chapters, the well-oriented Ndalianis draws from a wide range of studies in art and new media. Now the interface between our
‘This world’s divided into two kinds of people: The hunter and the hunted,’ big-game hunter Rainsford says in The Most Dangerous Game (1932) and self-assuredly continues, ‘Luckily, I’m a hunter. Nothing can ever change that.’ Well, he will discover that in the manhunt movie even the hunter can become prey. The manhunt movie is a subgenre of the Hollywood thriller which joins two elements: big-game sport hunting and hunting humans. Sport hunting stirs up themes of nature and culture, morals and ethics, masculinity, and, finally, civilisation. Here, we will ask what happens when the subgenre is used in the Nordic thriller. The chapter has three aims. First, it establishes the central generic traits of the manhunt movie. Second, it sets up a theoretical framework of sociobiological and ecological theories with hunting as a reference point. And, third, it examines the Nordic version of the manhunt movie focusing on the themes of hunting, nature, social standing and civilisation. I look at the Danish drama The Hunt (Thomas Vinterberg, 2012), the Norwegian thriller-heist-comedy Headhunters (Morten Tyldum, 2011) and the Swedish thrillers The Hunters (Jägarna, 1996) and False Trail (Jägarna 2, 2011) by Kjell Sundvall.
Looking at television series True Blood (2008-), The Vampire Diaries (2009-), and The Walking Dead (2010-), this article analyzes positive emotions in horror: the sexual emotions, trust, and hope. The article starts by substituting the positive-negative dichotomy of emotions with seeing emotions as coming in a "package" (Solomon) and having a "story" (Frijda), thus working together and not in opposition. It goes on to discuss the interaction of predation and sex in True Blood, torture and trust in The Vampire Diaries, and disgust, despair, and hope in The Walking Dead. The article then considers horror emotions, positive and negative, from a functional and evolutionary perspective. Comparing horror to play fighting and fiction to the pretend of play, the article suggests four reasons why horror is attractive: we learn to feel emotions (sensation), to react to emotions (evaluation), control our emotions (action tendency in the here-and-now), and to experiment (action tendency and planning for what comes next).
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