The Outlaw Machine, the Monstrous Outsider and Motorcycle Fetishists: Challenging Rebellion, Mobility and Masculinity in Kenneth Anger’s Scorpio Rising and Steven Spielberg’s Duel

Authors

  • Kornelia Boczkowska Adam Mickiewicz University, Poznań

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.18778/2083-2931.09.05

Keywords:

independent film, avant-garde and experimental film, road movie, masculinity, Scorpio Rising, Duel

Abstract

The paper analyzes the ways in which Kenneth Anger’s Scorpio Rising (1963) and Steven Spielberg’s Duel (1971) draw on and challenge selected road movie conventions by adhering to the genre’s traditional reliance on cultural critique revolving around the themes of rebellion, transgression and roguery. In particular, the films seem to confront the classic road movie format through their adoption of nomadic narrative structure and engagement in a mockery of subversion where the focus on social critique is intertwined with a deep sense of alienation and existential loss “laden with psychological confusion and wayward angst” (Laderman 83). Following this trend, Spielberg’s film simultaneously depoliticizes the genre and maintains the tension between rebellion and tradition where the former shifts away from the conflict with conformist society to masculine anxiety, represented by middle class, bourgeois and capitalist values, the protagonist’s loss of innocence in the film’s finale, and the act of roguery itself. Meanwhile, Anger’s poetic take on the outlaw biker culture, burgeoning homosexuality, myth and ritual, and violence and death culture approaches the question of roguery by undermining the image of a dominant hypermasculinity with an ironic commentary on sacrilegious and sadomasochistic practices and initiation rites in the gay community. Moreover, both Duel’s demonization of the truck, seen as “an indictment of machines” or the mechanization of life (Spielberg qtd. in Crawley 26), and Scorpio Rising’s (homo)eroticization of a motorcycle posit elements of social critique, disobedience and nonconformity within a cynical and existential framework, hence merging the road movie’s traditional discourse with auteurism and modernism.

Downloads

Download data is not yet available.

Author Biography

Kornelia Boczkowska, Adam Mickiewicz University, Poznań

Kornelia Boczkowska is Assistant Professor in the Department of Studies in Culture at the Faculty of English, Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań. She holds a PhD in English, and an MA in Russian and English. She is the recipient of several research grants and author and co-editor of two books and over twenty other publications on independent, experimental and avant-garde film in addition to space art and documentary film. Her current research is on landscape, travelogue and city symphony forms in the postwar American avant-garde and experimental cinema, and is funded by the National Science Center post-doctoral grant (no. UMO-2018/31/D/HS2/01553).

References

Aldiss, Brian. “Spielberg: When the Mundane Breaks Down.” This World and Nearer Ones: Essays on Exploring the Familiar. Kent: Kent State UP, 1979. 173–80. Print.
Google Scholar

Alford, Steven E., and Suzanne Ferriss. Motorcycle. London: Reaktion, 2007. Print.
Google Scholar

Allison, Deborah. “Kenneth Anger.” The Occult World. Ed. Christopher Partridge. Oxon: Routledge, 2015. 459–63. Print.
Google Scholar

Auty, Chris. “The Complete Spielberg?” Sight & Sound 51.4 (1982): 275– 79. Print.
Google Scholar

Baker, Brian. “The Occult and Film.” The Occult World. Ed. Christopher Partridge. Oxon: Routledge, 2015. 446–58. Print.
Google Scholar

Bianculli, David. “Interview with Steven Spielberg.” Starlog 102 (1986): 18–23. Print.
Google Scholar

Brothy, Philip. “Parties in Your Head: From the Acoustic to the Psycho- Acoustic.” The Oxford Handbook of New Audiovisual Aesthetics. Ed. John Richardson, Claudia Gorbman and Carol Vernallis. Oxford: U of Oxford P, 2013. 309–24. Print.
Google Scholar

Buckland, Warren. Directed by Steven Spielberg: Poetics of the Contemporary Hollywood Blockbuster. New York: Continuum, 2006. Print.
Google Scholar

Cohan, Stephen, and Ina R. Hark. Introduction. The Road Movie Book. Ed. Steven Cohan and Ina R. Hark. New York: Routledge, 1997. 1–14. Print.
Google Scholar

Corrigan, Timothy. A Cinema Without Walls: Movies and Culture After Vietnam. New Brunswick: Rutgers UP, 1991. Print.
Google Scholar

Cott, Jonathan. “Anger Rising.” Sunday Ramparts 7 May 1970. Web. 3 Jan. 2018.
Google Scholar

Crawley, Tony. The Steven Spielberg Story. New York: Quill, 1983. Print.
Google Scholar

Derry, Charles. The Suspense Thriller: Films in the Shadow of Alfred Hitchcock. Jefferson: McFarland, 2001. Print.
Google Scholar

Dyer, Richard. Now You See It: Studies on Lesbian and Gay Film. London: Routledge, 1991. Print.
Google Scholar

Elsaesser, Thomas. “The Pathos of Failure: American Films in the 70’s.” Monogram 6 (1975): 13–19. Print.
Google Scholar

Fonda, Henry. American Film Institute: Dialogue on Film. Volume 3. Number 2. Beverly Hills: Center for Advanced Film Studies, 1973. Print.
Google Scholar

Friedberg, Anne. “Urban Mobility and Cinematic Visuality: The Screens of Los Angeles—Endless Cinema or Private Telematics.” Journal of Visual Culture 1.2 (2002): 183–204. Print.
Google Scholar

Gordon, Andrew M. Empire of Dreams: The Science Fiction and Fantasy Films of Steven Spielberg. Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield, 2008. Print.
Google Scholar

Hammond, Michael. “The Road Movie.” Contemporary American Cinema. Ed. Linda Williams and Michael Hammond. Maidenhead: Open UP, 2006. 14–20. Print.
Google Scholar

Ireland, Brian. “American Highways: Recurring Images and Themes of the Road Genre.” The Journal of American Culture 26.4 (2003): 474–84. Print.
Google Scholar

Kendrick, James. Darkness in the Bliss-Out: A Reconsideration of the Films of Steven Spielberg. New York: Bloomsbury, 2014. Print.
Google Scholar

Klosterman, Chuck. Eating the Dinosaur. New York: Scribner, 2009. Print.
Google Scholar

Laderman, David. Exploring the Road Movie: Driving Visions. Austin: U of Texas P, 2002. Print.
Google Scholar

Le Gall, Michel and Charles Taliaferro. “The Recovery of Childhood and the Search for the Absent Father.” Steven Spielberg and Philosophy: We’re Gonna Need a Bigger Book. Ed. Dean Kowalski. Lexington: UP of Kentucky, 2008. 38–49. Print.
Google Scholar

Lounsbury, Myron. “The Bleecker Street Cinema.” Newsweek 25 Apr. 1966. Web. 15 Sept. 2017.
Google Scholar

Lowry, Ed. “The Appropriation of Signs in Scorpio Rising.” The Velvet Light-Trap 20 (1986): 41–47. Web. 29 Dec. 2017.
Google Scholar

Lynes, Adam. The Road to Murder: Why Driving is the Occupation of Choice for Britain’s Serial Killers. Eastbourne: Waterside, 2017. Print.
Google Scholar

Mekas, Jonas. “On the Baudelairean Cinema.” Movie Journal: The Rise of the New American Cinema, 1959–1971. New York: Macmillan, 1972. 85–86. Print.
Google Scholar

McBride, Joseph. Steven Spielberg: A Biography. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1997. Print.
Google Scholar

Mills, Katie. The Road Story and the Rebel: Moving Through Film, Fiction, and Television. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 2006. Print.
Google Scholar

Moore, Rachel O. Savage Theory: Cinema as Modern Magic. Durham: Duke UP, 2000. Print.
Google Scholar

Morris, Nigel. The Cinema of Steven Spielberg: Empire of Light. London: Wallflower, 2007. Print.
Google Scholar

Mottram, Eric. “Blood on the Nash Ambassador: Cars in American Films.” Cinema, Politics and Society. Ed. Philip Davies and Brian Neve. London: Reaktion, 2002. 95–114. Print.
Google Scholar

Murphy, Bernice. The Highway Horror Film. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014. Print.
Google Scholar

Musser, Charles. The Emergence of Cinema: The American Screen to 1907. Berkeley: U of California P, 1994. Print.
Google Scholar

O’Pray, Michael. Avant-garde Film: Forms, Themes and Passions. London: Wallflower, 2003. Print.
Google Scholar

Orgeron, Devin. Road Movies: From Muybridge and Méliès to Lynch and Kiarostami. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007. Print.
Google Scholar

Osgerby, Bill. “Full Throttle on the Highway to Hell: Mavericks, Machismo and Mayhem in the American Biker Movie.” Underground U.S.A.: Filmmaking Beyond the Hollywood Canon. Ed. Xavier Mendik and Steven Jay Schneider. London: Wallflower, 2002. 123–39. Print.
Google Scholar

Pirie, Dave. “A Prodigy Zooms In: A Child Cineaste Who Now Makes Movies and Money With Equal Facility.” In Time Out Interviews 1968–1998. Ed. Frank Broughton. London: Penguin, 1998. 104–06. Print.
Google Scholar

Rowe, Carel. “Myth and Symbolism: Blue Velvet.” Moonchild: The Films of Kenneth Anger. Ed. Jack Hunter. London: Creation, 2002. 11–46. Print.
Google Scholar

Sitney, Paul. Visionary Film: The American Avant-garde, 1943–2000. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2002. Print.
Google Scholar

Sontag, Susan. “The Aesthetics of Silence.” Styles of Radical Will. New York: Dell Publishing Company, 1969. 3–34. Print.
Google Scholar

Sterritt, David. Mad to be Saved: The Beats, the ’50s, and Film. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 1998. Print.
Google Scholar

Suarez, Juan A. “Pop, Queer, or Fascist? The Ambiguity of Mass Culture in Kenneth Anger’s Scorpio Rising.” Experimental Cinema: The Film Reader. Ed. Wheeler W. Dixon and Gwendolyn Audrey Foster. London: Routledge, 2002. 115–38. Print.
Google Scholar

Taylor, Philip. Steven Spielberg: The Man, His Movies, and Their Meaning. New York: Continuum, 1999. Print.
Google Scholar

Verrone, William. Adaptation and the Avant-Garde: Alternative Perspectives on Adaptation, Theory and Practice. New York: Continuum, 2011. Print.
Google Scholar

Wasser, Frederick. Steven Spielberg’s America. Cambridge: Polity, 2010. Print.
Google Scholar

Downloads

Published

2019-11-23

How to Cite

Boczkowska, K. (2019). The Outlaw Machine, the Monstrous Outsider and Motorcycle Fetishists: Challenging Rebellion, Mobility and Masculinity in Kenneth Anger’s Scorpio Rising and Steven Spielberg’s Duel. Text Matters: A Journal of Literature, Theory and Culture, (9), 81–99. https://doi.org/10.18778/2083-2931.09.05