Screen Violence and Complex Storytelling: Trauma, Marginalization, and Stereotypes

Abstract

Since the mid-1990s, complex storytelling ignited a trend in the film industry towards more nontraditional narrative structures. Most film theorists agree that the popularity of complex narratives stems from the increase of digital media that permits spectators to interact with these films on multiple levels. Several film scholars ascribe the success of complex narratives to the riddle element, which prompts spectators to find clues based on directorial cues that allow viewers to decode the film. Some film scholars evaluate these films from a temporal perspective that restructures the text into a linear form to create coherence and meaning. Other film scholars consider the temporal and spatial anomalies within these narratives as a reflection on the fragmented state of modern existence. These theories are useful in analyzing these narrative structures and producing formal interpretations of the filmic text; however, more attention to the content of these narratives and the potential impact the messages within them may have on the spectator requires examination. This dissertation investigates the way in which screen violence fits within the formal structure of complex narratives, and how that violence is linked to trauma, marginalization, and stereotypes. This study reviews historical, political, and cultural influences that shaped Western perspectives on race, language, and gender. Specifically, colonial perspectives fostered a "white cultural imagination" that generated fantasies of the “other.” These fantasies support violence as a method to suppress multiethnic inclusion and maintain political, economic, and social dominance. When screen violence projects racism, sexism, or discrimination, it is sometimes employed to educate spectators and sometimes employed to re-inscribe colonial ideologies.