Session 1: The Sex Appeal of Sociopaths

3rd Global Conference

Saturday 19th September – Monday 21st September 2009
Mansfield College, Oxford

Fearful Irony: The Case of Being Dexter(ous)
Shona Hill and Shilinka Smith
Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand and Senior Advisor, New Zealand Government Department, New Zealand

Certain films and television series create a type of fear that permeates deep beneath our skin. This fear is not necessarily stimulated by fright or suspense. Furthermore even attempts to unpack the basis of this fear often prove inadequate, yet people are frightened. We argue that in these cases, it may be useful to ask whether, or not, this fear is caused by a visual irony that is confusing and thereby unsettling. Are a certain juxtaposition of images responsible for a form of fear that is disturbing our categorisations of the world, our place in it and hence our underlying insecurities? To explore these questions more fully we will use images from the television series Dexter (2008) and the concept of visual irony. However when one defines the ironic as: ‘saying the opposite of what one means’ it is often debated whether images can be used to convey the opposite of what they show. That is, whether visual irony is possible. We maintain that regardless of whether formal visual irony is possible, or not, the notion of visual irony is a useful concept which can be utilised to reveal insights into this type of fear. We suggest that there is a certain type of visual juxtaposition which can cause a slowly creeping, unsettling fear. This fear or disturbance cannot be safely ordered into expected categories in the presence of a constant series of visual ironies, despite the viewer’s attempts to assimilate and normalise the subject matter. We contend Dexter has this fearful impact on viewers because it sets up a relentless series of visually ironic images, contextualised by a story that challenges taken for granted categories such as good and evil.

What killed Laura Palmer?:David Lynch’s Twin Peaks as a Dissection of American Fears
Anna Warso
Institute of English Studies, University of Warsaw, Poland

There is no better subject for a poem than untimely death of a beautiful woman, a wise man once said, and indeed it seems that no other event could have better served David Lynch to focalize and disclose fears and trespasses infecting the social tissue of Twin Peaks than the brutal rape and murder of the town’s golden girl, Laura Palmer.

In my analysis I plan to focus on the patterns of desire, displacement and transgression that underpin Lynch’s narrative and permeate these works of American fiction which, directly or indirectly, address the most severe cultural taboos. Laura Palmer herself will be approached and analyzed as a stylistic figure and a structural device necessary to trigger the developments of Lynch’s mock detective narrative.

Simultaneously, my analysis will examine means by which Twin Peaks subverts and deconstructs the framework of the genre it feigns to promote: the moment Agent Cooper leans to inspect Laura Palmer’s body, a malfunctioning lamp in the morgue seems to signal that science will be of little use (and logic will help inasmuch as pure chance) in the upcoming investigation. As the girl’s prom picture transforms into a Medusa-like image from the CSI shot, we witnesses yet another take on what psychoanalysis identified as one of the two “universal” taboos, disguised as crime fiction and intertextually linked to sources as varied as Puritan ideology, Emersonian philosophy and the gothic and grotesque of Edgar Allan Poe.