Glimpsing the narco monster : Mexico's horror and the anachronism of narrative
Abstract/Contents
- Abstract
- The central argument of "Glimpsing the Narco Monster" is that the story of the narco violence ravaging contemporary Mexico is a horror story. That is, as a necessary condition it implies the presence of a monster. In traditional works of horror, the humans regard the monsters they meet as abnormal, as disturbances of the natural order. However, in this present study I argue that the particular monster in this particular work of horror can and must be understood as a product of the specific environment (historical, economic, socio-political) that bred it; its "ecology". With what I heuristically term the Narco Monster, the goal of this project is to reveal aspects of both the monster and the ecology of its production. Accordingly, each of the three chapters in this study describes one formal feature of this construction: the monstrous, the neoliberal, and the spectacular. When Pontecorvo shot The Battle of Algiers (1966), detailing the Algerian struggle for independence from the occupying French in the 1950s, he used a pseudo-documentary style that offered a case study of modern warfare, achievable because the content and the form were near contemporaries. This is no longer the case. As such, the present approach is to analyse various types of film and visual media paratactically; that is, to study individual scenes as fragments (or events) that dialogue not with the rest of the narrative of the specific film but instead function as glimpses of the ecology of the Narco Monster and its horror story. It is through his methodology that I will offer new readings of key Mexican (and Mexican-American) cinematic productions of the current century: Señorita extraviada (2001), Backyard: El traspatio (2009), Miss Bala (2011), Heli (2013), El infierno (2010).
Description
| Type of resource | text |
|---|---|
| Form | electronic resource; remote; computer; online resource |
| Extent | 1 online resource. |
| Place | California |
| Place | [Stanford, California] |
| Publisher | [Stanford University] |
| Copyright date | 2018; ©2018 |
| Publication date | 2018; 2018 |
| Issuance | monographic |
| Language | English |
Creators/Contributors
| Author | Gibson, Samuel Blue |
|---|---|
| Degree supervisor | Ruffinelli, Jorge |
| Thesis advisor | Ruffinelli, Jorge |
| Thesis advisor | Hoyos Ayala, Héctor |
| Thesis advisor | Rocha, Marília Librandi |
| Degree committee member | Hoyos Ayala, Héctor |
| Degree committee member | Rocha, Marília Librandi |
| Associated with | Stanford University, Department of Iberian and Latin American Cultures. |
Subjects
| Genre | Theses |
|---|---|
| Genre | Text |
Bibliographic information
| Statement of responsibility | Samuel Blue Gibson. |
|---|---|
| Note | Submitted to the Department of Iberian and Latin American Cultures. |
| Thesis | Thesis Ph.D. Stanford University 2018. |
| Location | electronic resource |
Access conditions
- Copyright
- © 2018 by Samuel Blue Gibson
- License
- This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial 3.0 Unported license (CC BY-NC).
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