Session 4: Heroes and Villains United
3rd Global Conference
Saturday 10th September – Monday 12th September 2011
Mansfield College, Oxford, United Kingdom
Dark Hero or Gothic Villain: An Interdisciplinary Approach
Shona Hill
Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand
An interdisciplinary approach takes the perspectives of at least two disciplines in order to develop, reorganise and/or modify them in search of a better understanding of the subject matter under discussion. Accordingly, in this paper, literary and sociological perspectives are explored and connected in order to examine contemporary images of dark heroes and gothic villains. I argue that this approach exposes modes of knowledge that are often excluded by virtue of the different disciplines separation from each other. To make this argument regarding the relationship between heroism and villainy, I investigate a scene from the television series True Blood. First I analyse the scene using William Day’s claim that in gothic fiction, identity is unstable because characters contain mutually exclusive dualistic tendencies. Second, I draw from sociological perspectives which expose inherent tensions within the modern habitus, the individual and collective sources of identity, such as Durkheim’s concept of the homo duplex. This concept suggests that a homo duplex nature, which consists of contradictory dualisms, is an integral part of being human, not merely a fictional theme. Overall I seek to explore what denaturalised disciplinary divisions can expose about villainy and heroism.
The Heroic Villain: Gregor Jordan’s Ned Kelly, The Melbourne Argus and the Jerilderie letter
Stephen Gaunson
School of Media and Communication, RMIT University, Melbourne, Australia
During his historic outbreak,Australian bushranger Ned Kelly in 1878 led an ambush and killing of 3 police officers; in 1880 at Glenrowan he planned to derail a trainload of 50 more. Yet despite this, the historical amnesia concerning Kelly has allowed him to be rewritten, by popular history anyway, as an honorable social bandit whose outlawry (including the robbing of 2 banks also) was just. Gregor Jordan’s 2003 Kelly film regarding this has been seminal for it not just echoes the language as authored by Ned in his Jerilderie letter, but, conveys a visual contrast to the damning press illustrations that were canvassed across a number of newspapers and journals during the outbreak. By it playing the role of mediator, Ned Kelly’s voice (once suppressed and censored by the popular press) is amplified for all, and certainly, this voice tells the sad story of a sensationalist press who opined him as a villainous terror of the Australian bush.
Download Draft Conference Paper (pdf)
007 License to Kill: Bond Villains and Links to Society
Tarren Smarr
Newcastle University, UK
The villains faced through out the duration of the popular film franchise, though a prominent character within himself, have made James Bond, more notable. One might even claim that the villains are more well known than the small gun toting, Aston Martin driving, martini (shaken not stirred) drinking spy. However, it is the villains that give an accurate reflection upon the society that shaped their characters. This paper seeks to identify major world events or tensions between countries based upon the portrayal of villains in the Bond series using a case study of selected films within the 1960’s and early 2000’s. Each notable villain is based, in one context or another, upon key issues facing western society and change depending upon the time in which the film was written and filmed. The paper also seeks to address how the hero has adapted from protecting the west to protecting interests of the free world as he is faced with globalized threats of villains.
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