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That this book was originally conceived and contracted prior to September 11, 2001 has become virtually impossible, even for me, to believe. Since then the invocation of malevolence in political and social life and in our popular cultural fictions has seemed to mushroom, to have spread everywhere, and it is understandable how any discussion of the proliferation of negativity onscreen might be thought inspired by those horrendous events or aimed in response to them. Former Deputy Attorney General Eric Holder’s comment September 13, 2001 to ABC, “They are evil in a way that we rarely see in the history of this world,” sounds a currently prevailing sentiment, and also echoes and prefigures what has become a standard presidential litany about “Them”—the Taliban, the Palestinians, the Israelis, the Iraqis, the mailers of anthrax, the corrupt CEOs of billion-dollar conglomerates—being “Evil.” But even in the Golden Age before that Turning Point in History—as popular rhetoric is leading us to think of it—the screen had already shifted from a place where conventional dramatic unfoldings were staged with regular use of conflict and a lurking villain, to an unheralded new topos where—as the subtitle of this volume suggests—infamy, darkness, evil, and slime resided casually and everywhere as the stuff of the everyday. This book does not pretend to be the history of cinema we would need for showing in detail the long line of thieves, rapists, varmints, codgers, dodgers, manipulators, exploiters, conmen, killers, vamps, liars, demons, cold-blooded maniacs, and warmhearted flakes that populated cinematic narrative from its earliest days around I N T R O D U C T I O N From Bad to Worse MURRAY POMERANCE 1 1907 onward or for arranging in some sensible order the questioned (and sometimes questionable) screen morality of the precode era; the broad range of dramatic negativity before, during, and soon after World War II (ranging from Rhett Butler’s potty mouth through the offscreen torture and murder of the unctuous Bugati in Casablanca [1942] through the arrogant murder in Rope [1948]); the disintegrating social mores of the 1950s; the chilling and vicious political tactics of the 1960s; the institutional horrors that began to appear in a systematic way in the 1970s (Watergate and beyond); and the new visions of all these, as well as depictions of disconnected personality and fragmented community, that became a screen staple after 1980. This book does, however, intend to present a sketch, as it were, of the range of badness that filmgoers around the world have become accustomed to seeing on the screen and to give some hints as to where screen evil came from and how it functions as a staple of our film diet today. By the turn of the twenty-first century it had become virtually unthinkable to see a film entirely without a moment of egregious— typically fantastic—violence, destruction, immorality, threat, or torture. A man swallowed whole, on camera, by a mammoth shark (Jaws [1975]); a beheading, on camera, followed immediately by a shot of one of the observers biting off, and swallowing, his own tongue (Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence [1983]); a psychotic slasher murder (Psycho [1960]); a crucifixion (The Last Temptation of Christ [1988]); a man being presented with his wife’s head in a hatbox (Se7en [1995]); a metallic insect alien with three drooling mouths popping bloodily out of the chest cavity of a gentle man (Alien [1979]); an astronaut exploding inside a space suit when his helmet cracks (Outland [1981]); humans tortured by having hideous hungry vermiformities given leave to slither into their orifices (Star Trek: The Wrath of Khan [1982], The Matrix [1999]); a man being devoured by a giant reptile while he sits on the toilet (Jurassic Park [1993]); crowds of innocents butchered by military swordplay or gunfire (Doctor Zhivago [1965]); a group of apparent innocents butchered by gunfire (Three Days of the Condor [1975]); a crowd of mercenaries butchered by gunfire (Commando [1985]); people shot in the head (Stardust Memories [1980], Traffic [2000], The Prince of the City [1981], Dog Day Afternoon [1975], GoodFellas [1990]); date rape (Saturday Night Fever [1977], Bully [2001]); dental rape (Marathon Man [1976]); ravaging by dogs (The Boys from Brazil [1978]); death by ice pick at the back of the neck (GoodFellas [1990]); accidental electrocution (The Ice Storm [1997]); intentional electrocution (Goldfinger [1964]); dis-arming (Satyricon [1969], The Empire Strikes Back [1980], Total Recall [1990]); malevolent bisection (The Phantom Menace [1999], Black Hawk Down [2001...

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