Session 1: Villains or Heroes? Which is it?
3rd Global Conference
Saturday 10th September – Monday 12th September 2011
Mansfield College, Oxford, United Kingdom
The Adorable Mr. Ripley: Crime and Morality in Highsmith’s Suspense Fiction
Daniela Chana
Department of Comparative Literature, University of Vienna, Austria
During the last two centuries, various philosophers such as Friedrich Nietzsche, Michel Foucault or Hannah Arendt took an effort in showing the relativity of definitions of terms like “crime”, “punishment”, “good” and “evil” as well as their often dangerous connotations. They fought against the belief of earlier philosophers (such as Johann Gottfried Herder) for whom the ideas of “good” and “evil” were given by nature and equal to everyone.
This discussion is not limited to philosophy, but also central part of the work of the suspense novelist Patricia Highsmith. By presenting adorable criminals like the intelligent, polite and cultivated murderer Tom Ripley who thanks to his talents in telling lies and imitating people never gets caught by the police, she makes the reader feel the insecurity of moral convictions. The readers are forced to identify with the criminal protagonist and therefore may start to reflect about justice, punishment and the power of manipulation.
In her five Ripley novels, Highsmith shows the complex structures which enable the criminal activity of her protagonist. For instance, Ripley would never be able to keep his game of hide and seek if he could not count on the support of a criminal network which provides him with faked passports and international connections. Another important role is played by his wife Heloïse who refuses to learn about the exact circumstances of his occupation and prefers to accept his money without asking any questions.
This paper will examine the presentation of the heroic criminal in Highsmiths novels as well as the author’s dealing with terms like “good” and “evil”, definitions of “justice” and “punishment” as well as “guilt”. Furthermore, moral motivations of changes taken in films which are based on her books will be discussed.
Download Draft Conference Paper (pdf)
Positive Villains: Tarantino’s Construction of Negative Characters the Audience Can Sympathize With
Anna Koronowicz
University of Gdansk, Poland
Quentin Tarantino is known for creating colourful characters. His movies are crowded with memorable characters, from Reservoir Dogs to Inglorious Basterds. They have a lot in common, but their most evident feature is that even the protagonists are not ‘heroes’ in the dictionary definition of the term. What is more, Tarantino has the ability to construct interesting characters who exist on the shady part of the law.
This paper takes one Tarantino’s movie, Kill Bill, and discusses the methods it uses in order to make its negative characters more positive. The cast of Kill Bill consists of the members of DVAS squad, the assassins working for mysterious Bill, their associates and friends. The protagonist is the Bride, Beatrix Kiddo, an ex member of the assassins squad, bend on revenge. Even though all the crucial characters are what could be called ‘evildoers’, the manner of their presentation evokes sympathy from the audience.
Tarantino uses both narrative and visual devices in order to make the audience feel some doze of sympathy to the characters. These devices include, but are not limited to, the use of back-story, retrospection, colour code and musical cue. The protagonist, the Bride, is generally perceived in a positive light, despite the fact her actions are far from heroic. Her opponents are not one-sided villains, each of them has at least one redeeming feature. Therefore, the audience is left with a sense of uneasiness, having seen one interesting, yet villainous character taking revenge on another, very much alike.
Download Draft Conference Paper (pdf)
Villains and Victims: A Complex Relationship
Ruth Amir
The Department of Multi-Disciplinary Studies, The Max Stern Academic College of Emek Yezreel, Israel
The Israeli Zionist ethos espouses a Manichaeistic worldview of the world in terms of actual or potential villains and heroes. In recent decades this ethos is altered by a villain/victim dichotomy in which the Jewish-Israeli society reconstitutes itself as an unreconciled eternal victims’ community.
This paper explores the politics of victimhood in Israel as a strategy and a tool of power in Israel’s relations with its Others. I argue that victimhood is used for at least three interrelated purposes. First, it is used inwards as an integrative tool which constructs, sustains and legitimizes the State and the collective it amid Others threatening to destroy it. Hence, suffering and death for the nation and the struggles surrounding them are endowed with virtue.
Second, the victim/perpetrator dichotomy is transposed as the victims’ community uses preemptive measures in order to control and dominate those perceived as a threat. The proactive use of force and the perpetration of injustices is reproduced in the domestic field.
Finally, this strategy of dominance from below throws the victim community into moral dilemmas, invoking feelings of guilt and shame. These give rise to coping mechanisms such as projection and introjection, and techniques of neutralization of guilt.
This Manichaeistic worldview and the emotion culture it invokes are destructive. Liberation from the destructive power of victimhood and with it the victim/villain dichotomy can contribute to the breaking of the vicious cycle of violence in which the victim becomes villain in order to prevent more atrocities.
The paper holds three parts. The first will deal with the evolvement of the Israeli ethos; the second will concern the strategic uses of victimhood for the perpetration of injustices on various “Others”; finally, I will discuss the dilemmas and coping mechanisms employed in order to reconcile the inconsistencies invoked by these strategies.
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