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  • "As Little As Possible":Trauma Aesthetics and the Case of Chinatown
  • Amy Parziale (bio)

Teaching the film Chinatown should be challenging given its depth, complexity, and lack of resolution, but students often walk away from a screening of the film saying the opposite: "That takes care of that" and "Now we know what happened." Examining Chinatown opens up critical debate and discussion in my classroom because of the very misunderstandings and pat interpretations we make as viewers.1 Training students to see what lurks on the margins of this and other films and to think critically about the cinematic choices made in their construction causes them to be more critically aware not only as consumers of film but also of the tightly knit sociopolitical issues associated with trauma.2

"Who doesn't know how to talk about movies? Of course, I'm going to get an easy 'A'!" I hear some version of this mistaken statement in each film class I teach. Students often come in with a particularly problematic set of assumptions about what it means to be in a class dedicated to film, assumptions that erase history, theory, and methodology from our study. They frequently lack the cultural capital assumed in any study of classic Hollywood filmmaking, including a basic understanding of genre, but are overly confident in their knowledge base. Inversely, when I teach trauma narratives, students arrive terrified of how difficult and complex any examination of trauma must necessarily be. They are intrigued by but petrified of the word "trauma," which is used in high frequency today but often goes without definition or context.

Trauma, Aesthetics, and Cinema

While the word has had its current psychological definition since the late nineteenth century, the term trauma continues to undergo revision and debate as groups, ranging from psychologists to government officials, attempt to make the definition match our current research on and the various conceptions, including many misconceptions, of the phenomenon. For my purposes both here and in the classroom, I define trauma as: The exposure to an event or on-going situation so beyond one's understanding of typical daily life that it leads to persistent re-experiencing, avoidance, numbness, and/or physiological arousal with significant impartment lasting more than one month.3 As Ron Eyerman has pointed out, "[O]ne should not speak of traumatic events, but rather traumatic effects" (62). [End Page 53] Even when defined in the American Psychiatry Association's Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (APA's DSM), posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) does not describe traumatic experience but its aftermath. Traumatic effects are difficult to ignore when large, previously unaffected groups of people share these symptoms, which helps explain why renewed interest in trauma tends to occur during post-war periods. In her most recent book Reading Trauma Narratives: The Contemporary Novel and the Psychology of Oppression, Laurie Vickroy connects traumatic aftereffects, and our interest in them, to their causes by defining trauma as "personalized responses to the late twentieth century's and the early twenty-first century's coalescing awareness of the catastrophic effects on the individual psyche of wars, sexual and physical assaults, poverty, and colonialization" (x). She continues on to relate this awareness to trauma narratives specifically: "Writers of these narrative, fiction or nonfiction, see trauma as an indicator of social injustice or oppression and as the ultimate cost of destructive sociocultural institutions. These literary narratives contextualize trauma for readers by embedding them in scenarios of social and historical significance" (x). In her earlier book Trauma and Survival in Contemporary Fiction, Vickroy defines trauma narratives as narratives that "go beyond presenting trauma as subject matter or in characterization; they also incorporate the rhythms, processes, and uncertainties or trauma within the consciousness and structures of these works" (xiv). Trauma narratives go beyond simply representing a trauma to attempt to represent the aftereffects of such catastrophes, which color and alter the entirety of these works. The introductions of both Vickroy's texts figure prominently in my early work in the classroom defining trauma and trauma narratives with students because her writing on the subject is insightful without being abstract or obtuse.

In trauma narratives, traumatic events and aftereffects are aestheticized through patterns and...

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