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Session 6: Get Out the Popcorn! Wartime and Monstrous Movie!
Chair: Alexandro Silva

Forgive Me, Father, For I Have Signed: The Chiastic Monster in 300
Phil Fitzsimmons
Director - Fiji Practicum and Faculty of Education, University of Wollongong, NSW, Australia

This paper unpacks the conjoining of the linguistic and visual symbolism that underpins the malformed Spartan traitor Ephiales, named as a monster, who appears in the central visual facets of both the graphic novel and subsequent movie, ‘300’. Both these texts were based on the ancient Greek epic of the Battle of Thermopylae in which 300 Spartan soldiers formed the critical mass of a Greek coalition that against all odds briefly held at bay the Persian army. Using the principles of ‘deformed discourse’, the language use and physicality of this monster in both the graphic novel and movie reveal both in a narrative and figurative sense Cohen’s contention that monsters ‘are our children, …. Always returning bearing a sacred discourse from the outside, … asking how we perceive our world”.1 In this instance the visual misshapenness of the pure Spartan body and the associated language use pulls all the signs and signifiers in the 300 texts into a powerful cataphatic metaphor. One that reveals the precept that our basic societal institutions, especially the religious institutions, have become the new monsters.

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From the Enchanted Forest to the Desert: The Brothers Grimm as Contemporary Wartime Allegory
Ann Marie Cook
Menzies Centre for Australian Studies, King's College London

No abstract is presently available

Monster as a Victim of War: The Case of Homer in The Best Years of Our Lives
Amaya Muruzabal
Faculty of Communications, University of Navarra, Spain

One of the most surprising aspects of the American cinematography of the Vietnam war is the striking absence of films on this war during a decade, from 1968 to 1978. However, along these years, numerous horror films spread out with the Vietnam veterans playing the roll of a coming back monster. These films are not the only in representing the veteran as a monstrous figure: among others, film noir movies showed the ugliest face of the ex-combatant, his wicked nature. In some way, this trend has reflected people’s concern about a social process which is undertaken after each war, the readjustment of the veteran. However, on the other hand, it also shows the civil society’s unconditioned, almost irrational fear.
In The Best Years of Our Lives, a film directed by William Wyler in 1946, there is a character called Homer that returns home from the war without both arms. Two hooks carry out the functions of the hands, and Homer can do almost everything except to hug his sweetheart, Wilma. During the film, the character of Homer is presented as equal to the other veterans, but the point of view changes when he is with Luella, his little sister, and Wilma. Then, the praised “spectatorial democracy” Wyler stamped on the film disappears, and the expressionist techniques of the horror film are used. As many monsters, the veteran can only be confronted by children and women who offers themselves in sacrifice. Nonetheless, facing the veteran renders a great surprise, exceptionally represented in this movie: the knowledge of the monster’s weakness. Taking as a focus the representation of Homer in The Best Years of Our Lives, this paper will analyse the veteran as a monster and also a victim of the war’s wickedness. That is to say, why the fear the veteran incites is closely related to his condition of witness and actor in the ineffable experience of the evil.

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