Posted on 04/22/2024 11:48:40 AM PDT by Angelino97
Taking up a discourse of idealised whiteness in conjunction with star theory, Sean Redmond frames white female stardom as a privileged yet restrictive state.
Locating Johansson within such a construction of stardom, Redmond looks to how her idealised white star image as resolved through her roles in Her, Under the Skin and Ghost in the Shell is simultaneously recognisable and alienating within these texts. As idealised white star, Johansson traverses the cinematic universe, moving with privileged access into roles, spaces and intimacies laid open for her. Yet as an unobtainable and non-reproductive idol, Johansson is also alienating, an embodiment of the loneliness, fragmentation and isolation that plagues contemporary (white) social existence...
In science fiction film one can see how the whitely markers of Heaven and Angel are transposed to the impressive vastness of utopian Space, and the figure of the Alien Messiah who descends to earth and is given symbolic transformative powers, such as the ability to heal, resurrect and, if wronged, seek vengeance. The Alien Messiah confuses and upsets binary reproductive structures, and is implicated in the non-reproductive framework of idealised whiteness since they are beyond reproduction and see it as a lesser form of evolution.
In Arrival, the Heptapods communicate in circular cryptograms which render time and space anti-chrononormative: they are beyond reproduction but allow Louise Banks, the whitely linguist in the film, to give birth again to the daughter that has already died...
Elizabeth Ellsworth calls this essential paradox the “double binds of whiteness,” whereby rationalised purity necessarily brings privileged white people closer to their own negation since they lack empathy and deny the sex drive that in the end would result in the eradication of the species.
In a great many science fiction films, the figure of the hyper-white scientist is presented as dangerous...
(Excerpt) Read more at link.springer.com ...
LOL, whatever you tell yourself to feel OK.
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