Film  Takes

Exercises  in  Rhetorical  Analysis

John S. Nelson

Poroi, 2, 1, August, 2003

The most powerful influence on the arts
in the West is – the cinema.¹
                                      — Kenneth Tynan

Works of art do not represent “reality,”
. . . art creates realities and worlds.²
                                  — Murray Edelman

Therefore cinema, especially popular cinema, is a powerful influence on realities.  These range from mundane details of everyday life to pervasive overviews of official politics.  In the words of Edelman, “art is the fountainhead from which political discourse, beliefs about politics, and consequent actions ultimately spring.”  Even “the conduct, virtues, and vices associated with politics come directly from art, and only indirectly from immediate experiences.”³  Events on the big screen of cinema are “hyperreal . . . typically more portentous than personal affairs.”⁴  These extend to television through re-runs, VCRs, DVD players, imitations and spin-offs, even movies made for television.  For us, cinema and television are “screens of power.”⁵  Thus they invite our rhetorical comprehension.

Our primary disciplines of power are politics, and our principal disciplines of politics are rhetorics.  The ancient Sophists invented rhetoric as the study-and-practice of oral, and especially oratorical, politics.⁶  This suited the politics of speech-in-action-in-public, predominant in Greece and Rome.⁷  Yet other media induce different politics.  Already in the Roman Republic, reliance on letters, writing, and reading was starting to produce republics of laws and legislation – words that stem from legere, to read in Latin.⁸  Print from movable type promoted the centralization of authority in modern sovereigns and later the rationalization of rule in bureaucracies.⁹  Telegraphy magnified the speed and scope of politics.¹⁰  Radio made even the highest politics more intimate, bringing them into the home and changing the tones of voice.¹¹  Television put images of politics into motion, reforming leaders and publics alike.¹²  The Internet seems to be obliterating national boundaries.¹³  For more than a century, the oratorical politics connected to classical rhetoric have been decentered by the electronic politics that still come together most powerfully in the cinema.

Every medium develops in tandem with distinctive politics, and every species of politics involves characteristic rhetorics.  To come to adequate terms with politics and lives in electronic times, we particularly need to articulate rhetorics of popular cinema.  This is the ambition of film takes.  They are not film reviews in the newspaper and newsmagazine sense, focused on whether to buy tickets or get rentals.  Instead they are film appreciations, tracing how cinema contributes to cultures and politics.  Thus film takes analyze what movies do individually and conventionally to help shape the looks and sounds, characters and settings, or standards and trajectories of our lives.  Chiefly they come to terms with the modes and moves of experience that films offer us.

Accordingly the good movies at the focus of a film take are more often popular cinema than high art.  They are “Hollywood” productions in the loose but telling sense.  Their planning, shooting, or financing need not come from California to qualify them under that category.  They might be written in Iowa, financed in France, filmed in Ecuador, and screened at Sundance.  The film is “popular” if it engages the modes and means of cinema succeeding in vernacular cultures.  by presentation or reception.  For a film take, this means parsing the rhetorics of plot, character, acting, lighting, sound, scenery, costumes, camera uses, genres, special effects, or other elements  that configure families of films and specific movies.

“Take Five!” can start the fifth performance of a scene, but it also can announce a break from the usual action:  a period for rest, relaxation, entertainment.  A film take is not exactly an orthodox work of scholarship.  It should be intriguing in topic, surprising in treatment, lively in style.  Some film takes are article-length but many run from 1,500 to 4,000 words:  long enough for something meaty, brief enough to stay provocative.  Keeping a film take snappy can be a key to its success.  The aspirations should include piquing the reader’s interest overall in how films do their rhetorical work.  Beyond that, the screen’s the limit.

A film take could inquire how conspiracies function as rhetorical tropes in popular films?  It might wonder what politics emerge from the chiaroscuro, dark streets, exotic angles, rotating fans, suburban settings, and corrupt police that characterize the recent resurgence in film noir.  Since films and comics use the super powers of superheroes to tame perfectionist politics, a film take could investigate what it says about current politics that superhero movies are returning to prominence at the same time as noir.  A film take may ponder what is happening culturally when westerns take a detour into horror in the likes of High Plains Drifter (1973), Unforgiven (1992), Tombstone (1994), Wyatt Earp (1994), or The Quick and the Dead (1995).  A film take could ask why the populist politics of movie musicals depend on dancing as much as singing.  What have movies been doing with Hamlet lately, another take might examine – and why.  How can horror films help people face evils in their everyday lives?  How do films that feature water reconfigure political power?  And how might Hollywood feminisms be remaking romance?

To track current releases is an impossible project for film takes in any scholarly journal.   Yet there typically should be an angle or two that ties a film take to a present setting for movies or for politics.  Film takes deal less in established classics than in recent films, less in individual works of art than in families of films.  In order to achieve adequate depth, though, the analysis almost always features a particular film or two.  The main aim is to inform re-viewing that can heighten the appreciation of movies already seen.  If the secondary effect is to motivate first-time viewing, that is a bonus.

Film takes are appreciations more than criticisms of movies, let alone “critiques.”  This is not because film takes lack critical acumen, but because they mostly target good films – in order to learn how cinema attains its rhetorics.  As a form, the film take is not for condemning movies as popular spectacles or television as mass entertainment.  Those books keep being written many times over, and we might wonder whether they still have much to teach us about either medium.  Nor is the film take a form for loosing the academy’s awesome arsenal for denigrating, denying, decrying, debunking, or altogether destroying the targets that analysts dislike.  The principle for appreciations is sympathetic connoisseurship:  seeking to understand how what we value might work, and doing so to share the joy with others.  Film takes are free to find faults, as they should where faults are to be found.  But there is seldom much gain – or enjoyment – from calling our attention to something for the purpose of explaining why it does not deserve our attention.

The targets of film takes are good films, not overtly political ones.  Not even the special interest of film takes in political implications of cinematic rhetoric can override the requirement for overall quality.  The idea is seldom to analyze movies about official or ideological politics.  Too few of those are especially good as films to justify such a focus for the full form of analysis.  Instead film takes seek to explicate the politics in effective films, even when they do not seem at first glance to address politics.  As the conventions of popular genres often suggest, the implicit politics of good movies often tie to the democratic concerns of ordinary people in everyday life.

Popular cinema is as close as we come these days for people in electronic societies to a communication technology of full-bodied, virtual reality.¹⁴  Film engages our senses more fully by far than print or even television.¹⁵  It brings to life the high, distant, official politics of state and war.¹⁶  Take the early scenes in Saving Private Ryan (1998), where Steven Spielberg places cameras and microphones to put us viewers into the midst of D-Day action, as though we were a soldier storming the beach, so that we can learn from experience why we must make good on the sacrifices of Allied fighters in World War II.¹⁷  Notice how Robert Zemeckis intersperses virtual and vicarious experiences in Contact (1997) to show how electronic communication has changed the foundations for political community in our times.¹⁸  Or consider the subtle interplay of virtual with vicarious and symbolic realities that Ridley Scott generates in Black Hawk Down (2001) to restore a sense of virtue and virtuosity to the 1993 American military action in Somalia.¹⁹  Film takes can analyze how movies make and remake our senses of reality.

Film notably embeds us in experiences of the ordinary, everyday, democratic politics of popular culture.²⁰  No art, no medium now treats these better, or more.  Consequently film takes can become exercises in figuring our how popular movies inflect the politics of ordinary people in their everyday affairs.  A movie may be “popular” from its modes of presentation or its arenas of reception.  A rhetorical analysis emphasizes the interactions of words and deeds with specific audiences, and a film take is no exception.  It just adds typical responses to other cinematic sorts of sights and sounds.

In making a film, a take is the unit of continuously recorded action.  Directors often shoot more than one take for each scene, in order to tap different performances of it.  Some takes prove better than others, at least for specific uses in a film, yet each aspires to a distinctive validity as a telling perspective on the events they show.  In analyzing a rhetoric of film, likewise, a take is a perspective on devices that movies use to make meanings, persuade viewers, and create realities.  Each take leaves room for others, even invites and elicits them in response.  My take on a movie or a genre can augment yours.  But it also can inflect, redirect, confound, or provoke your take.

More than mere entertainment, popular cinema operates as a virtual-reality apparatus by giving us a reservoir of new experiences and practicing us in a repertoire of key acts.  As Connie Willis says, “That’s what the movies do.  They don’t entertain us, they don’t send the message:  ‘We care.’  They give us lines to say, they assign us parts.”²¹  Thus the virtual realities of popular cinema enter into our venues of private experience and public action.  Popular cinema provides virtual realities that amply and powerfully augment – as well as affect – our political realities.

As this implies, popular cinema also influences political realities by making some of our memories of them and reconfiguring others.  Ancient Greeks recognized that memories can be the crucial platforms for action and the pervasive standards for achievement in politics.²²  For them, the stuff of community memories was the stories told in public about notable deeds and words they or their forbearers had witnessed.  For us, the stuff of shared memories is the movies that we see and discuss, time and again, throughout our lives.  “Novels, plays and films are filled with references to, quotations from, parodies of – old movies,” Kenneth Tynan argued.  “They dominate the cultural subconscious because we absorb them in our formative years (as we don’t absorb books, for instance); and we see them again on TV when we grow up.”  As Tynan added, “The first two generations predominately nourished on movies are now of an age when they rule the media.”  He saw it as “frightening to see how deeply – in their behavior as well as their work – the cinema has imprinted itself on them.”  Tynan observed that “Nobody took into account the tremendous impact that would be made by the fact that films are permanent and easily accessible from childhood onward.”  And he anticipated that, “as the sheer number of films piles up, their influence will increase, until we have a civilization entirely molded by cinematic values and behavior patterns.”²³

Recent cognitive inquiries provide diverse evidence that memories are just as important to political realities as ancient Greeks had inferred.²⁴  Research on cognition also confirms that audiovisual sources such as television and film are particularly potent for politics.²⁵  Therefore the mythic figures from popular films can be especially important for rhetorics.  Popular cinema influences realities by making or disseminating many of the aesthetics that configure electronic societies.  Particularly through popular genres of cinema, these styles help to prefigure the fields of events that we experience and the forms of responses that we rehearse.  This includes famous episodes when presidential words or deeds echo popular movies:  “Make my day!”  “Bring them on!”  And “All things considered, I’d rather be in Philadelphia.”²⁶  Mainly, though, this involves the larger looks and sounds of popular cinema permeating the ordinary modes of everyday life.  As film takes explicate, these are less matters of specific texts than diffuse subtexts, less aspects of  formal ideologies than informal aesthetics.

Here I do not mean aesthetics as studies of art or beauty – but more as their cultural and personal practices.  Aesthetics are styles.  They are the full-bodied capacities of feeling that help us sense what goes with what else, to what effect, and with what responses.  They are the looks, the sounds, the tastes, the touches, the auras and aromas that conventionally become an overall feel.  Thus they can be reproduced or appropriated from one situation to another.  The elements may change remarkably from one time to the next; yet they connect, complement, or coordinate with one another to tap much the same complexes of feeling.  Aesthetics in architecture include the classical, neo-classical, modern, art deco, pop, and post-modern.  Styles of clothing, even of life, among teenagers of late have ranged from nerdy or preppy to goth or grunge.  All these are “fashions” because they come in and out of favor.  Yet many manage to become lasting “looks” and “tastes” or sometimes even “sounds.”  Film takes often concentrate on these levels.

Styles are sensibilities and practices more than creeds.²⁷  Styles do not consist primarily of doctrines or principles, though sensibilities can be evoked in part by the sorts of principles that could serve as mottoes of action for the particular people who epitomize those styles in action.  To characterize a style, we often do well to settle first on a figure that epitomizes it.  This lets us specify how the figure embodies the style.  Then in doing so, film takes can analyze how these components work together in practicing the style.  Typically the name of the style signals how it coheres.  Minimalist aesthetics rely on a few, subtle signals of meaning.  Expressionist aesthetics press out “internal,” personal feelings into “external,” shareable sights and sounds so vivid that others are hard-pressed to miss them.  Goth retrieves and streamlines the gothic aesthetic going back to the nights, if not the exactly days, of Edmund Burke.²⁸  Grunge gets down and dirty in the dissolute suburb and the disillusioned city.  Film takes probe the politics of these and more.

Critics often trace the vices and virtues of works by any performers in any art or practice to their distinctive, enduring styles.  Is it any wonder that styles reach from aesthetic forms to moral characters, from rhetorical arrangements to political judgments, even from our manners of civilization to our modes of argument?  There are likely to be dimensions and dynamics of style for every sustained practice, ideology, or other form of politics.  Thus the styles analyzed by Robert Hariman come from recurrent settings:  international relations, courts, republics, and bureaucracies.²⁹  And popular genres of cinema typically depend on distinctive practices that arguably connect with recognizable styles of politicking:  legal, medical, journalistic, financial, science, business, military, and international thrillers, for example.  Likewise the academic novel – though seldom a thriller, of course – is apt to probe professorial styles of politicking; whereas the romance might trace political styles of the heart.  At least some styles of action come into their own as ways of crossing the boundaries between practices or situations.  That holds for styles of detection in crime and mystery movies.  Their solutions conventionally depend on the detective learning enough about the embedded settings for the target transgressions to configure clues that can stand out from the background dynamics of their places and activities.

Several science-fiction films exemplify the strong influence on politics of aesthetics for places or settings.  Stanley Kubrick’s 1968 vision of 2001 as streamlined in stark, clean, primary colors prefigured our future as one where space odysseys could begin as close as the regional airport down the road.  At a facility strikingly like that, we could board a space shuttle akin to an airliner, complete with microwave meals and service by a stewardess.  It would take us to a hub that orbits the Earth, rather than sitting in the suburbs of a metropolis, and we would go on from there by similarly routine means to the Moon or destinations beyond.  The Earthly habitat, too, would be clean, bright, and prosperous – with electric cars and clear waters of sparkling blue.³⁰  For years after that, Americans moved with increasingly confidence into this modernist world.

Then along came Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner (1982).  It evokes a cyberpunk future that fuses neon advertising to giant monitors.  Everywhere these cajole the losers left earthbound on a polluted planet subdued by dreary, dripping skies and littered streets.  Those venues resemble the warrens of medieval towns or recall the inscrutable bazaars of the exotic Casbah.  They teem  with cultural juxtapositions and crawl with strangers who connive simply to survive another day.  Looming above little people on the treacherous and dirty streets are vast arcologies in the Middle Eastern shapes of pyramids and ziggurats, closing themselves against the swarming insecurities of the grungy surface.  Huddling on the ground are old industrial buildings and hotels that house a population depleted in numbers and hope.  Street people show their edges with radical colors and clothes, retro tattoos, and deco-rations.  When John Leonard, the culture critic for CBS and the New York Times, wants to epitomize how California pulls America in dystopian directions, he puts onto the screen a few frames from the downer Los Angeles projected by Blade Runner.³¹

Next Terry Gilliam’s Brazil (1985) makes the art-deco touches in Blade Runner into an aesthetic of full-blown dystopia.  The streamlined curves become rounded audio receivers for the one-way communication of subjugation and the two-way screens for propaganda or surveillance.  Puffy pneumatic tubes for cooling, heating, or air supply loom from every structure; and nearly everywhere they are under apparent repair because the system suffers chronic breakdown.  The sharp and jagged lines of struts and cables that cut across these swoops and flows call to mind the continual intrusions of bureaucratic order into regimented lives.  The film’s fable of freedom as sheer fantasy reinforces the dismal prognosis that viewers of Blade Runner already could feel in their future bones.  The dream of liberation through personal computing trumpeted by Apple for the merchandising of its Macintosh model in 1984 stays at least as memorable for its grainy, gritty blue-gray.  The figures of digital dystopia that Blade Runner had launched and Brazil had developed stay prominent in the 1984 version of George Orwell’s 1984, directed by Michael Radford, many another film, and innumerable ads that permeate our anticipations of politics to come.  As Yogi Berra put it, we could know at a glance that “The future ain’t what it used to be,” and we could hear in a tune that it might never be that way again.³²  The modernist March of the State anticipated by Hegel in the nineteenth century and projected anew by technology in the twentieth has degenerated into a palpable sense of corporate decline and state terror.³³

The Matrix (1999) and its sequels might start to turn that around.  Their look trumps the blue-gray of a dystopian “real” with a striking blend of goth, noir, and martial arts.  The digital rain of glowing green on black already has echoed resoundingly through American advertising, sports shows, teen clothes, and current events.  The politics implicit in The Matrix aesthetic are to distrust the bright image of the bustling and reflective city, still the symbol of the triumphant civilization of the West.  Under the glittering surface, things are now dark and dystopian, to be sure.  Yet effective resistance and radical departures are possible.  More than that, they are cool.  Let us see, these movies challenge, what we might make of that.  And so we move cat-quick with Trinity and Neo past deadly obstacle courses that can look and work like video games, hinting at futures more rich in adventure than progress.  Such political aesthetics can preoccupy film takes.

As Hollywood knew instantly, however, 9/11 has called into question even the emerging looks and sounds.  Yet the terrorist acts have not undone all previous aesthetics or politics.  Old myths might collapse, but their fragments remain for making new ones.  The revelations of new truths through surprising experiences are literally re-veilings that invent rhetorics and realities in tandem.³⁴  Hyperbole can be too kind a word for declarations that art is dead in the wake of the Holocaust, that hope has been killed by the Gulag, or that irony is impossible after September 11.³⁵  To the contrary, such atrocities call forth art, irony, action, invention:  in a word, poesis.³⁶  We weave new fabrics of meaning from the remnants that we can collect as figures for sensing our altered surroundings and selves.  We forge new courses of conduct from the ruins that we can see now as foreshadowing the über-crimes that shock and the annihilations that appall, but also the individuals and institutions that endure or the virtues that we still can hope to prevail.

These endeavors we conduct in important part through popular cinema.  That makes the film take a valid, even vital, form of inquiry for our times.  Moving pictures are not just images that move but also images that move us.  Rhetorical analysis that omits movies misses too much.  Cinema engages our senses in different ways than speaking, writing, or printing.  We need film takes to learn the implications for our realities.

© John S. Nelson, 2003.

Notes

¹     Kenneth Tynan, “The Third Act:  Entries from Kenneth Tynan’s Journals, 1975-78,” New Yorker, 76, 23, August 14, 2000, pp. 60-71, on p. 64.

²     See Murray Edelman, From Art to Politics:  How Artistic Creations Shape Political Conceptions, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1995, p. 7.

³     Edelman, From Art to Politics, p. 2.

⁴     Murray Edelman, Constructing the Political Spectacle, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, p. 6.

⁵     See Timothy W. Luke, Screens of Power:  Ideology, Domination, and Resistance in Informational Society, Urbana, University of Illinois Press, 1989.

⁶     See John S. Nelson, “Political Theory as Political Rhetoric,” What Should Political Theory Be Now? Nelson, ed., Albany, State University of New York Press, 1983, pp. 169-240.

⁷     See John S. Nelson, “Commerce among the Archipelagos:  Rhetoric of Inquiry as a Practice of Coherent Education,” The Core and the Canon, L. Robert Stevens, G. L. Seligmann, and Julian Long, eds., Denton, TX, University of North Texas Press, 1993, pp. 78-100; Paul A. Rahe, Republics Ancient and Modern:  The Ancien Régime in Classical Greece, Chapel Hill, NC, University of North Carolina Press, 1994.

⁸     See Robert Hariman, “In Oratory as in Life:  Civic Performance in Cicero’s Republican Style,” Political Style:  The Artistry of Power, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1995, pp. 94-140.

⁹     See Marshall McLuhan:  The Gutenberg Galaxy, Toronto, University of Toronto Press, 1962; Understanding Media, New York, McGraw-Hill, 1964.  Also see Max Weber, “Bureaucracy,” From Max Weber, H. H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills, eds. and trs., New York, Oxford University Press, pp. 196-244; Hariman, “A Boarder in One’s Own Home:  Franz Kafka’s Parables of the Bureaucratic Style,” Political Style, pp. 141-176.

¹⁰    See Garry Wills, Lincoln at Gettysburg:  The Words That Remade America, New York, Simon and Schuster, 1992.

¹¹    See Kathleen Hall Jamieson, “The Flame of Oratory, the Fireside Chat,” Eloquence in an Electronic Age, New York, Oxford University Press, 1988, pp. 43-66.

¹²    See Jamieson, “The ‘Effeminate’ Style,” Eloquence in an Electronic Age, pp. 67-89; Garry Wills, Reagan’s America, New York, Penguin Books, (1987), second edition, 1988; John Hartley, The Politics of Pictures:  The Creation of the Public in the Age of Popular Media, London, Routledge, 1992.

¹³    See Pippa Norris, Digital Divide:  Civic Engagement, Information Poverty, and the Internet Worldwide, New York, Cambridge University Press, 2001; Cass R. Sunstein, Republic.Com, Princeton, NJ, Princeton University Press, 2001.

¹⁴    See John S. Nelson and G. R. Boynton:  “Making Sound Arguments:  Would a Claim by Any Other Sound Mean the Same or Argue So Sweet?” Argument in a Time of Change, James F. Klumpp, ed., Annandale, VA, National Communication Association, 1998, pp. 12-17; “Arguing War:  Global Television against American Cinema,” Arguing Communication and Culture, G. Thomas Goodnight, ed., Annandale, VA, National Communication Association, 2002, pp. 571-577.  Also see John S. Nelson and Anna Lorien Nelson, “Story and More:  Virtual Narratives for Electronic Times,” American Communication Journal, 1, 2, February, 1998, http://americancomm.org/~aca/acj/acj.html;

¹⁵    See McLuhan, “Movies:  The Reel World,” Understanding Media, pp. 284-296.

¹⁶    See Paul Virilio, War and Cinema, Patrick Camiller, trans., London, Verso, (1984), 1989.  Also see John S. Nelson, “The Dark Prince Stirs at Sunset:  Dracula and the Post-Western Politics of Film,” paper for the annual meeting of the Midwest Political Science Association, 2000; “It’s Good to Be King:  Mass Publics in Popular Films,” paper for the annual meeting of the Midwest Political Science Association, 2001; “Politics in Words, Words in Musics, Musics in Movies:  Bulworth, Bob Roberts, and Rhythms of Political Satire,” paper for the annual meeting of the Midwest Political Science Association, 2002.

¹⁷    See John S. Nelson, “Argument by Mood in War Movies:  Postmodern Ethos in Electronic Media,” Argument at Century’s End, Thomas A. Hollihan, ed., Annandale, VA, National Communication Association, 2000, pp. 262-269.

¹⁸    See John S. Nelson, “Reading Films Through Political Classics,” Politiikka, 4, 1998, pp. 286-296.  Also see Carl Sagan, Contact, New York, Pocket Books, 1985.

¹⁹    See John S. Nelson, “Honor, Revenge, and Virtue:  Ridley Scott’s Revival of Republican Politics,” paper for the Inaugural Conference of the Association for Political Theory, 2003.  Also see Mark Bowden, Black Hawk Down, New York, Atlantic Monthly Press, 1999.

²⁰    See John S. Nelson:  “The Politics of Evil in Popular Culture,” paper for the annual meeting of the American Political Science Association, 1995; “Power and Violence in Mediated America, with Special Attention to Recent Cinema,” paper for the annual meeting of the American Political Science Association, 2000; “Noir and Forever:  Politics As If Hollywood Were Everywhere,” paper for the annual meeting of the American Political Science Association, 2001.

²¹    Connie Willis, Remake, New York, Bantam Books, 1995, p. 48.

²²    See Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1958.

²³    Tynan, “The Third Act,” pp. 64-65.

²⁴    See Doris A. Graber, Processing the News, New York, Longman, (1984), second edition, 1988; Milton Lodge and Kathleen McGraw, eds., Political Judgment, Ann Arbor, University of Michigan Press, 1995.

²⁵    See Doris A. Graber, Processing Politics, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 2001.

²⁶    See Michael Paul Rogin, Ronald Reagan, the Movie, Berkeley, University of California Press, 1987; “Perspectives,” Newsweek, 142, 2, July 14, 2003, p. 23; Wills, Reagan’s America.  Also see Michael Ryan and Douglas Kellner, Camera Politica, Bloomington, Indiana University Press, 1988; Michael Parenti, Make-Believe Media, New York, St. Martin’s Press, 1992; Michael Parenti, Land of Idols, New York, St. Martin’s Press, 1994.

²⁷    See Dick Hebdige, Subculture:  The Meaning of Style, London, Routledge, 1979.

²⁸    Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Inquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful, Oxford, Basil Blackwell, 1987.

²⁹    See Hariman, Political Style.

³⁰    See John S. Nelson, “Political Mythmaking for Postmoderns,” Spheres of Argument, Bruce E. Gronbeck, ed., Annandale, VA, Speech Communication Association, 1989, pp. 175-183.

³¹    See John Leonard with Sunday Morning for CBS on August 18, 2002.

³²    Quoted in Jane Kenyon, “Pharaoh,” New Yorker, 68, 38, November 9, 1992, p. 100.

³³    See G. W. F. Hegel, The Philosophy of Right, T. M. Knox, tr., Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1952.

³⁴    See Nelson, “Reading Films Through Political Classics.”

³⁵    See Eduard Goldstücker, “Is There Any Future for Art?” The Center Magazine, 5, 6, November-December, 1972, pp. 4-8; Lawrence L. Langer, The Holocaust and the Literary Imagination, New Haven, Yale University Press, 1975; Thomas Shevory, “From Censorship to Irony:  Rhetorical Responses to 9/11,” Poroi, 2, 1, August, 2003.

³⁶    See John S. Nelson, Tropes of Politics, Madison, University of Wisconsin Press, 1998, pp. 150-179.  Note that “eco-poesis” is a project of environmental politics.