Part way through the most recent Bond film, Skyfall (Mendes 2012), villainous antagonist, Raoul Silva (Javier Bardem) removes his facial prosthesis to reveal a horrific disfigurement. It emerges that Silva is a terrorist who targets political sites and public transport systems in a manner similar to Al-Qaeda’s attacks on the United States in 2001 and the London Underground in 2005. Alongside other productions of the new millennium, Skyfall illustrates how the terrorist figure is increasingly signaled, and even defined by physical impairment. Such films often display a particular fascination with the character’s peculiarity to the extent that it becomes not only pivotal to characterization but also to the narrative. Indeed, in Skyfall we learn that the cause of Silva’s disfigurement motivates his terrorist activities and certain scenes consciously present his physical difference as a source of spectacle, rather than as being merely incidental to the narrative. Although villainy has long been associated with some form of physical difference, since 9/11, it is especially associated with facial deviation. Moreover, if facially disfigured villains have appeared in films before 9/11, they did not necessarily display psychological or physical weakness. Contrastingly, the disfigured post-9/11 perpetrator is either psychologically or physically compromised in relation to his/her physiognomic aberration and is also often simultaneously coded as ‘other’ through subtle suggestions of homosexuality and foreignness, these combined features ostensibly constituting a ‘new wave’ of cinematic terrorist representation. While there is no obvious explanation for such a trend, these portrayals may be informed by real-world mediated imagery of radical Muslim cleric, Abu Hamza. Hamza, who had long been suspected of terrorist activity and was convicted of supporting terrorism in 2015, lost an eye and both hands, allegedly in a terrorist incident. One of his hands is replaced by a hook, and he is often pictured holding up his arm, the hook encircling his functional eye. Otherwise, this contemporary mode of signifying the on-screen terrorist may be a conscious effort to depart from other currently contentious terrorist stereotypes (especially the Islamic middle-Eastern character). Indeed, the film Iron Man (Favreau 2008) attracted criticism for its depiction of Afghani fundamentalists because of its portrayal of their leader, Raza (Faran Tahir) as a “typical Middle Eastern hysteric [who] rages about in inflated, un-translated gasps of Arabic” (Catalan). The association of facial disfigurement with bodily weakness and/or psychological instability stems from a broader trend in representations of masculinity, this itself connected to a range of issues beginning well before 9/11. The combination of physical and/or mental fallibility and facial anomaly therefore constitutes a unique development in post-/11 portrayals of terrorist figures. This essay therefore considers the association of disfigurement with the on-screen terrorist by arguing that recent representations of the post-9/11 era, though retaining allusions to ‘foreignness’, depart from Middle Eastern stereotypes to focus on deformity as an alternate means to reconfigure the ‘other’. With emphasis on the Bond franchise – because of its long lineage and preoccupation with villainy - and primarily referring to Casino Royale, and Skyfall, this chapter compares pre- and post-9/11 villains, and engages with theories of ‘freakery’ (Garland-Thomson), criminality (Lombroso), and terrorism (Kassimeris; Jackson; Nacos; Whittaker).

After a century of reinvention and reinterpretation, Western movies continue to contribute to the cultural understanding of the United States. Western archetypes remain important emblems of the American experience, relating a complex and coded narrative about heroism and morality, masculinity and femininity, westward expansion and technological progress, and assimilation and settlement. In this collection of new essays, 21 contributors from around the globe examine the "cowboy cool" iconography of film and television Westerns-from bounty hunters in buckskin jackets to the seedy saloons and lonely deserts.

Messengers from the Stars is an international, peer-reviewed journal, offering academic articles, reviews, and providing an outlet for a wide range of creative work inspired by science fiction and fantasy. It aims at promoting science fiction and fantasy in the humanities while, at the same time, providing a forum for discussion on all aspects of science fiction and fantasy by welcoming innovative approaches and critical methodologies to the critical and creative landscape

The book this chapter is from examines the ways in which the house appears in films and the modes by which it moves beyond being merely a backdrop for action. Specifically, it explores the ways that domestic spaces carry inherent connotations that filmmakers exploit to enhance meanings and pleasures within film. Rather than simply examining the representation of the house as national symbol, auteur trait, or in terms of genre, contributors study various rooms in the domestic sphere from an assortment of time periods and from a diversity of national cinemas―from interior spaces in ancient Rome to the Chinese kitchen, from the animated house to the metaphor of the armchair in film noir.

With reference to Aylish Wood’s concept of ‘timespaces’, this essay explores the sentient spaces of fantasy film.1 It suggests that digital technologies, either in producing computer-generated or computer-assisted effects, have extended the capacity and significance of film settings by endowing them with a cognitive awareness and physical articulation more in line with film characters than with backdrops for action. Wood contends that ‘digital effects produce spaces with the ability to transform, or […] have a temporal quality, thus adding an extra dimension to the narrative progression’2 and designates these temporally-extended special-effects spaces as ‘timespaces’. However, the digitally generated/assisted landscape often moves beyond Wood’s notion of a temporally-extended space, and rather, constitutes an enhancement of setting to the level of a sentient being. Moreover, this sentience invests the narrative with a causal as well as a temporal element. In other words, sentient spaces contribute towards narrative progression in ways beyond temporal extension. Trees are especially amenable to such effects, evident, for example, in Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire (2005) when animated tree roots malevolently ensnare one of its characters, Cedric Diggory (Robert Pattinson). The sentience of landscape is not in itself a new phenomenon, being evident in early fantasy film – for instance, the forest of The Wizard of Oz (1939) similarly assumes cognitive qualities. Yet, new animation and digital techniques facilitate a more credible anthropomorphism of settings, to the extent that they are either little different to animated characters or are conflated with them. Analogous to Wood’s contention for convergence between time and space in ‘timespaces’, this chapter therefore argues that settings have become credible sentient entities, with digital technologies effecting a diminishing/absent margin between character and setting. In so doing, it utilises the description ‘animated settings’ in relation to sentience in both the genres of animation and fantasy. Textually analysing a range of fantasy films, including the Harry Potter series (2001-11), Peter Jackson’s The Lord of the Rings trilogy (2001-03), and Steven Spielberg’s The Kingdom of the Crystal Skull (2008) amongst others, and referring to Wood’s ‘timespaces’ as well as Sigmund Freud’s theory of animism and studies of animation by Paul Wells and Chris Pallant, this essay posits a concept of sentient computer-generated imagery (CGI) as marking setting-character convergence.

Coming out of an international conference in Paris on "Global Identities" at the Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes during April 2011, these essays begin from the lived experience of groups and individuals as they problematize and engage their own social connectivity and historical directionality. The authors help us to understand as they assemble these building blocks how we can best approach a broader understanding of the emerging global processes of identity formation. The essays in this volume are organized around the four major themes that emerged from the Conference: Re-Imagining Group Identity, Embracing Hybridity, The Challenges of Assimilation, and Locating the Individual in the New Terrain. The groupings highlight the critical tensions which characterize these liminal spaces: the search for new commonalities among emerging communities and social groupings; a brief survey of the essays will reveal the enormous richness of the topics under discussion, through ethnography, interviews, popular culture, literature and poetry, musicology, religion, the culinary arts, history, and social theory.

This chapter is from a book which analyzes post-9/11 literature, film, and television through an interdisciplinary lens, taking into account contemporary debates about spatial practices, gentrification, cosmopolitanism, memory and history, nostalgia, the uncanny and the abject, postmodern virtuality, the politics of realism, and the economic and social life of cities. Featuring an international group of scholars, the volume theorizes how literary and visual representations expose the persistent conflicts that arise as cities rebuild in the shadow of past ruins.

This article considers differences between the representation of mutation in science fiction films from the 1950s and the present, and identifies distinctive changes over this time period, both in relation to the narrative causes of genetic disruption and in the aesthetics of its visual display. Discerning an increasingly abject quality to science fiction mutations from the 1970s onwards—as a progressive tendency to view the physically opened body, one that has a seemingly fluid interior–exterior reversal, or one that is almost beyond recognition as humanoid—the article connects a propensity for disgust to the corresponding socio-cultural and political zeitgeist. Specifically, it suggests that such imagery is tied to a more expansive ‘structure of feeling’, proposed by Raymond Williams and emergent since the 1970s, but gathering momentum in later decades, that reflects an ‘opening up’ of society in all its visual, socio-cultural and political configurations. Expressly, it parallels a change from a repressive, patriarchal society that constructed medicine as infallible and male doctors as omnipotent to one that is generally more liberated, transparent and equitable. Engaging theoretically with the concept of a ‘structure of feeling’, and critically with scientific, cinematic and cultural discourses, two post-1970s’ ‘mutation’ films, The Fly (1986) and District 9 (2009), are considered in relation to their pre-1970s’ predecessors, and their aesthetics related to the perceptions and articulations of the medical profession at their respective historic moments, locating such instances within a broader medico-political canvas.