Framing Monsters: Fantasy Film and Social Alienation (review)

Aside from some Lord of the Rings-related books, it is difficult to recall many book-length scholarly studies of fantasy films published in recent years. Framing Monsters addresses this gap. Discourses of fantasy often celebrate the genre's potential for romance and escape, but Bellin resists this tradition by recasting the fantasy/reality dynamic that constitutes the genre's core, characterising fantasy as an apparently innocent mechanism that works to render various forms of social alienation innocuous. Although this may seem close to a traditional notion of ideology, ideological criticism tends to treat fantasy as a shell to be cast aside to get at a core reality. In contrast, Bellin's conception is distinguished by his insistence on the interlocking roles of fantasy and reality at the heart of the genre.

To illustrate, Bellin takes up the example of King Kong (Cooper and Schoed-sack US 1933), a film that continues to inspire two separate reception traditions – the first, an idealised popular-commercial tradition that emphasises the film's romance and pathbreaking special effects; the second, an academic tradition that focuses on the film's ideological and racial dimensions. Bellin discusses loving Kong since childhood, but later coming to an awareness of the film's racism. By refusing to disavow either personal history with the film, Bellin argues for a sort of love-hate relationship which fantasy is virtually designed to create: 'One should view the lovable fantasy and the hateful reality as interrelated and mutually sustaining … fantasy films function precisely to enable the paradox of loving what one under other circumstances might recognize to be hateful' (7).

Rather than developing a psychological theory of fantasy, Bellin commits to a historical project inflected by René Girard's concept of the scapegoat. Each chapter opens with a reconstruction of a particular historical context, followed by a context-based reading of one or two fantasy films that brings forward discourses of alienation linked to one of a series of social groups. For example, the chapter on The Wizard of Oz (Fleming US 1939) opens with a survey of utopian and dystopian discourses of technology that flourished in the 1930s. Bellin's interpretation then focuses on how textual elements – especially the distinct but paralleled figures of the Wizard (Frank Morgan) and the Wicked Witch (Margaret Hamilton) – establish a fantasy landscape defined by tumultuous discourses of technology that Dorothy (Judy Garland) – a stand-in for a Depression-era underclass or mass – struggles to negotiate.

Bellin demonstrates both a love of, and a talent for, reading fantasy films, and his commitment to historical research (based on secondary sources) gives this book distinction. His interpretations move easily among the genre's constituent elements – not just narrative, but also animation, visual effects and monstrous characters. And, in place of a certain type of criticism that treats fantasy in hasty, allegorical terms (e.g., readings that accent the military imagery in the Star Wars (1977–83, 1999–2005) or Lord of the Rings (2001–2003) sagas without accompanying historical research), Bellin situates each of his chosen films in carefully reconstructed historical contexts. In the case of films such as King Kong and Wizard of Oz, which have already received a great deal of criticism, the primary value of Bellin's work inheres in his recreation of unusually complete historical landscapes against which to position the films.

Bellin writes with clarity and passion, and this book will no doubt be a great aid to both educators and students. His work is arguably best when he takes up films that have not received much critical attention, such as Ray Harryhausen's Sinbad trilogy: The 7th Voyage of Sinbad (Juran US 1958), The Golden Voyage of Sinbad (Hessler UK/US 1974) and Sinbad and the Eye of the Tiger (Wanamaker UK 1977). As Bellin points out, it is astonishing that a filmmaker like Harryhausen, whose fan following is enormous, should have attracted so little scholarly attention over the years – an indication of the comparatively small...