on Watch along at 7pm tonight 29/10/2020 for free go to https://www.facebook.com/outforbloodcambridge/
Tonight, we’re screening a video essay by Dr. Darren Elliot-Smith, Senior Lecturer in Film and Gender at the University…
Posted by Out For Blood – Queer Horror Film Festival on Thursday, 29 October 2020
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As part of the Queer Fears Network takeover of the Gender Studies Research Group Blog, we are delighted to present Scott Mackay’s entry considering Queer Identities in Horror Gaming entitled: ‘Dark Souls III and Queer Overcoming: Alienation, Isolation, and Failure.’ (Dr. Darren Elliott-Smith, blog-editor)
When Laverne Cox called for more trans representation in media in the 2020 documentary Disclosure, she argued this was necessary due to the effects it would have on public perceptions of trans people in a time where representation in filmic media is moving towards a more sympathetic disposition. Her words hold more than just a modicum of truth; her own role in Orange is the New Black presents her with a multitudinously layered identity as complex on the screen as it is off, made possible because she is able to draw from her own experience. As a result, her character Sophia Burset’s emotions are palpable. Cox’s prescription to Hollywood is a call to arms to the wider media world to do better in the hiring and representation of gender non-conforming identities.
It likely wouldn’t ruffle many feathers among the reading community of this blog to suggest that the video gaming industry, despite its progress in recent years, remains still the final frontier. Game development and publishing structures are neither doing enough to include gender non-conforming identities into their creation processes, nor to represent gender non-conforming identities in playable characters. These concerns, and Cox’s too, highlight a very real appetite for representation yet, deeper still, they betray uniquely queer relations to feelings of alienation and isolation. In a brief exploration of how these unique relations manifest themselves in video games we will touch upon two AAA titles: F1 2020 [1], and Dark Souls III [2]; case studies in how to, and how not to, deal with representing queer identities in video games. Both games employ character avatar customisation options, and both represent monoliths of failure in their narratives for wo/men and queer identities.
The feelings of fear that queer individuals experience inhabit the same locations and exhibit similar responses to that of their normative counterparts; isolation feels lonely either way. Where queer fears differ is found in the process of relation. We see this when gender non-conforming individuals are greeted with the character creation segments so common in contemporary video games and their unique experiences and identities often can’t find the space to correlate themselves to the realities of the game. It is clear that F1 2020 isn’t about progressing pro-trans public policy despite the associated championship’s vocal gesturism in its ‘We Race as One’ campaign; it’s about real racing, and real racers wear helmets. The helmet gives the game an excuse for its sparse character creation options. It offers the player as many as 20 head model options meant to vaguely correlate to a mixture of ethnicities and jaw strengths, and a few even seem vaguely effeminate, but Tatianna Calderon remains the only playable woman in the game. What is even more striking is that F1 2020 is the first game in the series to allow the player to create their own team and choose their teammates. Calderon could feasibly be given a championship-winning car in-game and guided to what would be the first world championship won by a woman. Playing the game alone wouldn’t tell the player this though; it doesn’t expect this outcome and neither did its developers. What might be termed ‘Micro-aggressive Easter Eggs’ are found in moments like this in games where a gendered expectation is betrayed. The lack of fanfare for Calderon’s ‘maiden’ championship sums up the developer’s position: even though it is a programmed reality of the game, it likely won’t happen so it isn’t significant enough to address with even a single line of dialogue to commemorate it. When those with queer identities play this game they’re not only reminded that they are the exception, and isolated through the spartan nature of the character creator’s accounting for gender non-conforming identities, but that they’re also alienated from their achievements, through the game’s omission of the uniqueness of the achievement and the weight of the collective failure of those alike that came before it. This is an example of how queer fears operate differently to normative fears relationally; the pace of the grid at the 110 AI difficulty scaling doesn’t make me feel anywhere near as alienated as the inability to exist authentically within the car, even inside a helmet.
It might feel like an unfair comparison to parallel F1 2020 with Dark Souls III, two completely different games from different sides of the industry, but both games make use of a character avatar creator which encourages the player to represent themselves within the game, and so this encouragement is made to feel disingenuous when we are also made to conform our images to their specifications. To be clear, this is a criticism of avatar creators and ‘Micro-aggressive Easter Eggs’ more broadly than in just F1 2020’s; a current fear the writer has is that the spiritual successor to Dark Souls III, Elden Ring, won’t allow them the same subjectivity through their in-game avatar. So, this is an open plea to Hidetaka Miyazaki and FROMSOFTWARE, INC.: Please let me keep putting a beard on character models that also have breasts.
Dark Souls III, and its associated series, are monoliths of failure for hordes of gamers, queer or otherwise, and while its character creator offers two gender options it succeeds in many areas where games like F1 2020 fail: the player can create a character with breasts, and a beard. The gender categories it offers correlate better to AMAB (Assigned Male at Birth) and AFAB (Assigned Female at Birth) in their operation than any imposition of a defined role within the game, or the availability of certain face shapes. The only meaningful change it effects in the game is the gender of the NPC (non-playable character) Anri, who the player character can ‘marry’[3] in the latter stages of the game, but even this can be subverted with a ring that reverses gendered interactions when worn. The character model’s face and body can look as muscular, angular, soft, or blue as the player decides, and all options for both facial and head hair, and scars are completely accessible. This is an example of a more solid approach to depicting gender non-conforming identities in character customisation options and has since been taken up by developers as influential as Nintendo EPD whose Animal Crossing: New Horizons operates through a similar framework opting even to drop the ‘male–female’ labels entirely. In employing approaches like that found in this game, developers allow for a respite from the endless stream of ‘gender-critical’ abuse that gender non-conforming identities receive by allowing space for their identities to exist within the escapist spaces provided by the universes of their games.
How Dark Souls III and F1 2020 deal with wo/men’s and queer failure radically differs; despite Dark Souls III’s notably sparse storytelling within its ludo-narrative, there is space for an embodied overcoming of this failure spurred by the collective failures of those who have tried and failed before the player character to survive the ritual linking of the fire. With an ethos borrowed from Catherine Keller’s ‘Transfeminist Entanglements’, the player’s character can be read as a nexus of intersectional ash regardless of how their avatar actually looks, especially within the character’s own ‘world’. . This narrative, and process, provides the space for them to be read as transgressive bodies visually, compositionally, spiritually, and sexually. The presence in the games of Friede and Anri, Unkindled wo/men, demonstrates that these beings born of ash can and do reflect the pre-existent modalities of gender expression held by the previous owners of their constituent ash; indeed it makes little sense to base their expression in norms associated with reproductive categories when their ‘birth’ process is considered. The Ashen One is composed of a non-binary ashen flesh that appears as it wills it to. It builds upon the collective failure of those whose ash forms its flesh, and when they finally succeed their overcoming is secured through their failure.
Dark Souls III is an example of the greater life a truly great game can take on due to the depth of how its narrative is tied to its ludo-narrative. With few exceptions, the bosses of the game grow more difficult as the game progresses.[8] This is tied to each boss’ physical, magical, or spiritual prowess as referenced within the game’s narrative. This narrative-informed ludo-narrative style can be seen where the player fights sergeants before they fight generals. The Nameless King is both punishing and difficult to kill because, as an ancient god of war and lightning, he should be. It is also likely that a king be protected by his guards, as he is. This congruency between narrative and ludo-narrative also provides a queer-inclusive space, both within how the player is able to relate to the game by allowing them to create transgressive images, and within the game’s ‘world’ by providing a narrative that accounts for these transgressive images. Within Lothric[9] there exist beings animated from pools of intersectional ash and the appearance of these beings has a propensity to reflect this intersectionality. As a result, the transgressive image of the gender non-conforming player can both be seen and allowed for in-game, promoting a respect for their own subjectivity on behalf of the game’s developers; a stark contrast to the micro-aggressions betrayed in F1 2020.
Dark Souls III’s approach to depicting queer identities in video games, if modified to reflect Animal Crossing’s dropping of the labels, would serve well any future game that intends to implement a character customisation feature, as it not only allows for gender non-conforming individuals to see themselves within their character, but also within the game’s universe itself, which fosters a deeper connection to the content and takes uniquely queer experiences of alienation, isolation, failure, and overcoming seriously.
Codemasters, F1 Series (Codemasters Software), F1 2020 (Birmingham, 2020).
Disclosure: Trans Lives on Screen (2020, Sam Feder, Disclosure Films/Bow and Arrow Entertainment/Field of Vision (II), USA) with Laverne Cox as main contributor.
Keller, Catherine, ‘“And Truth—So Manifold!”: Transfeminist Entanglements’, in Intercarnations: Exercises in Theological Possibility (New York: Fordham University Press, 2017), pp. 35–46.
Keller, Catherine, ‘Tingles of Matter, Tangles of Theology: Bodies of New(ish) Materialism’, in Intercarnations: Exercises in Theological Possibility (New York: Fordham University Press, 2017), pp. 60–82.
Miyazaki, Hidetaka, Dark Souls Series (FROMSOFTWARE, INC.), Dark Souls III: Fire Fades Edition (Tokyo, 2017).
[1] Codemasters have produced a yearly arcade racing game under licence for the Formula 1 World Championship since 2009 (a Wii exclusive). The intellectual property of the officially licensed Formula 1 video game however predates Codemasters’ first entry to the series in 2009.
2004’s instalment, by SCE Studio Liverpool, also features a character creation segment. There are no women in the game, and you cannot create one in this game either. Despite this, the intro cutscene features an almost James-Bondesque objectification of multiple women. One shrugs suggestively wearing a small dress on a red carpet, another is translucently superimposed in underwear alone over a cut of cars racing, but neither are racers.
Codemasters chose to remove this feature in their early instalments to the series opting to keep helmet customisation alone. It was brought back in 2017 after they overhauled the single player structure of the game.
[2] Dark Souls III is the final instalment in Hidetaka Miyazaki’s Dark Souls series (FROMSOFTWARE INC.) that began in 2007 with Dark Souls.
[3] Plunge a ceremonial sword into them on an altar in a ritual that robs them of their inner darkness and gives it to the player character. This enables a third ending to the game where the player character inherits ultimate power and dominion. Hardly a heteronormative wedding.
[4] ‘The Ashen One.’ This is how the protagonist of Dark Souls III is referred to with no name of their own. However, they can eventually accept a name in dialogue with a painter NPC: “Ash”, referring to their composition, and that which defines them existentially.
[5] ‘The Unkindled’ are one of the game’s numerous depictions of humanity. They are ‘born’ through the conglomeration of several powerful ashes that form into one unified being. The process through which this occurs is not elucidated in-game, though we do witness the ‘birth’ of The Ashen One in the opening cut scene in which they raise fully-formed from a grave empty of all but ash.
[6] ‘Linking the Fire’ is one of the final goals of the game that the player can choose. This event is specifically a ritual trial by combat fought between the challenger (in the player’s case, them) and the union of the souls of all those who have previously succeeded in besting the trial: the Soul of Cinder (‘Cinder’, the antithesis of The Ashen One). The final stage of the trial sees Cinder’s fighting style regress to that of the Trial’s founder Gwyn, Lord of Sunlight, and God of the ancient land of Lords. Choosing to link the fire after defeating Cinder gives the player the option to fuel the fire that keeps the game’s ‘world’ lit with their own soul. The trial itself is meant to determine the combatant’s soul as suitably strong enough to be used as the fuel. This process repeats cyclically roughly every 1000 years according to characters from previous instalments of the series.
[7] ‘Saint’ being a title reserved for the successful, and the memorable. Four of the major bosses are examples of ‘Sainthood.’ This itself serves as the reason for the player’s animation. The fifth refuses to claim sainthood, but the ‘world’ itself demands it and so ‘Ash’ takes flesh.
[8] I’m looking at you Yhorm…
[9] The setting of the third instalment, following Lordran and Drangleic from the first and second respectively. Both settings also feature in Dark Souls III albeit reduced, over time, to ash.
Author Bio:
Scott Mackay (They/Them) is a non-binary agender PhD researcher and drag enthusiast with interests in queer and comparative theologies, hermeneutics, gender non-conforming representation in video gaming, critical theory, and theopoetics.
They are currently participating in the first year of a PhD in religion at The University of Stirling after achieving their masters of research with a thesis in critical religion and surveillance studies. Scott is particularly proud of bringing the high adrenaline action of competition paintball to the grounds of Salisbury Cathedral in a paper presented at the 2016 Implicit Religion Conference entitled: “All are equal before the eyes of the Marshall:” Community, Charity, Paintball, and Implicit Religion.”
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As part of the Queer Fears Takeover this October, we are delighted to re-post the Keynote on Queer Hauntology presented earlier this year at the Arts and Humanities Postgraduate Conference in 2020.
Abstract: This keynote builds upon my previous and current research into the emergence of the New Queer Horror subgenre in film and television (Queer Horror Film and
The central tenet of Queer Horror focuses on supposed aberrations of eroticism, sexuality, and gender. These in turn work to expose and highlight the
This particular keynote, presented in the form of a Video Essay, however, attempts to understand a particular trope of Queer Horror whereby the queer
To demonstrate, the keynote will focus on examples from Queer Horror Film and TV that exemplify Queer Hauntology as a means through which to confront
N.B. Please note this keynote contains references to suicide and may contain some explicit sexual and horrific/violent images and references.
See below for the Video Essay Keynote as hosted on Panopto:
VIDEO REMOVED only available for 2 weeks.
More Blog Entries coming this week, on Queer and Non-Binary Representation in Dark Souls III.
If you have any issues accessing the Video Essay contact us and we’d be happy to provide a direct link: gender@stir.ac.uk
Darren
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This week we have:
Strange Bedfellows: Queering Sex, Death, Masculinity and the Family in Joel Schumacher’s The Lost Boys and Flatliners
written by Ben Wheeler
After [the negative test] I think I got wilder. What my psychiatrist said that was really fascinating was, “No, you are desperately afraid of death. It’s like swimming out further and further every night in the ocean and seeing if you can get back, and when you get home it’s like, ‘I fucked death!’”[1]
This is Joel Schumacher recalling a conversation he had circa 1983 shortly after receiving news from his doctor that he did not have AIDS. It proves a useful starting point for a discussion of queerness in two of his films made in the following years: The Lost Boys (1987) and Flatliners (1990). Although each is a generic hybrid, both can be identified as horror, and represent conflations of sex and death while subverting traditional ideas about masculinity and constructions of the family in ways central to queer theory.
These facets of Schumacher’s cinematic world recall Leo Bersani’s influential essay ‘Is the Rectum a Grave?’ –published in 1987, the year The Lost Boys was released – which addresses issues surrounding, ‘the advent of the AIDS epidemic and the birth of queer theory.’[2] The conflation, or in Bersani’s terms ‘displacement’, of sex with death (as well as the death of traditional notions of masculinity) are here seen as the result of a pervasive sense of trauma that permeated gay subcultures in the 1980s through the physiology of gay sex, and compounded by media representations of both AIDS and homosexuality at a time when, ‘the family identity produced on American television [was] more likely to include your dog than your homosexual brother or sister.’[3]
In concluding his essay Bersani suggests that:
If the rectum is the grave in which the masculine ideal (an ideal shared – differently – by men and women) of proud subjectivity is buried, then it should be celebrated for its very potential for death.[4]
I would like to suggest that in the films of Joel Schumacher – especially these two horrors – one finds a sometimes playful, sometimes painful queer aesthetic isomorphic to the ideas set out in Bersani’s essay that represents a substantial injection of queerness into the late twentieth-century Hollywood mainstream.
Where better to start a discussion of sex and death than a film about a gang of vampires on the hunt for new recruits? Perhaps nowhere else are these apparent binaries so confusingly muddled than in a creature who is both highly eroticised and undead, delivers pleasure and pain through a bite, and promises both death and eternal life through the exchange of bodily fluids.
As Harry Benshoff suggests in Monsters in the Closet, ‘many monster movies (and the source material they draw upon) might be understood as being “about” the eruption of some form of queer sexuality into the midst of a resolutely heterosexual milieu.’[5] The Lost Boys playfully foregrounds the homoerotic tensions between the male leads Michael (Jason Patric) and David (Kiefer Sutherland) as they battle – allegedly – for the affection of the gang’s only female member, Star (Jami Gertz).
A close look at their first encounter, however, reveals something very queer indeed. Michael and Star’s first looks at one another, which signal their desire, are punctuated with shots of a sweaty, bare-chested, pumped-up male singer. The shots suggest that the female is being used to buffer or triangulate male homoerotic desires, and in just a few more scenes David and Michael are playing chicken together. Then Michael challenges David to a fight:
“Just you – just you – come on!” Making the homoeroticism of their male bonding apparent, David salaciously responds, “How far you willing to go, Michael?”[6]
As it turns out, Michael must go “all the way”. After drinking what later turns out to be David’s blood, both Michael and the Lost Boys hang onto the underside of a bridge whilst a train rolls overhead until they can no longer retain their grip and plummet into a smoky void – a scene Sutherland recalls as “a very sensual moment.”[7]
In the film’s climactic scene, Michael kills David after a prolonged tussle, with fangs and claws exposed, in what Carol Clover might refer to as ‘attacker and attacked [in] a primitive, animalistic embrace.’[8] David is finally impaled on a set of antlers in a moment that is both breathy and breath taking.
Following the subsequent penetration of the vampiric paterfamilias – Max (Edward Herrmann) – by Grandpa Emerson (Barnard Hughes), the suggestion would be that the queer sexual threat to the moral order posed by the Lost Boys had similarly been vanquished. Indeed, this had been the aim of the vampire-hunting Frog Brothers (Corey Feldman and Jamison Newlander) who tell Sam (Corey Haim):
“We’ve been aware there’s some pretty serious vampire activity in this town for some time … as a matter of fact we’re almost certain ghouls and werewolves occupy high positions at City Hall.”
This echoes what Bersani describes as the ‘charming illusion that “national gay leaders” are [politically] powerful.’[9] Moreover, the brothers’ stated mission to eliminate the local vampire group (“Kill your brother – you’ll feel better”, “Kill them all!”) taps into the ‘perverted logic of the gay-basher’[10] and recalls that, ‘the impulse to kill gays comes out as rage against gay killers deliberately spreading a deadly virus among the general public.’[11]
However, what is interesting about the world created in The Lost Boys is that it is not just the vampires who are coded as gay (they are described variously as ‘leather queens’[12] and ‘gay male pin-ups’[13]) with nominal hero Sam in particular:
coded so heavily as gay that one suspects the production designer must have had a direct pipeline into gay culture. Throughout the film, Sam wears a Mondrian-inspired bathrobe, a “Born to Shop” T-shirt, and his bedroom wall sports a sultry mid-1980s pin-up of Rob Lowe baring his belly and pouting at the camera.[14]
Even the supposedly hypermasculine Frog Brothers – whose paramilitary attire and posturing reference characters from Van Helsing to Rambo – spend most of their actual encounters with vampires screaming and clutching each other.
Moreover this is the story of two families: the Lost Boys themselves are a family, headed by Max, whose courtship of Lucy (Dianne Weist) is really about forming “One big happy family. Your boys … and mine!” The Emersons themselves are a far cry from The Brady Bunch, the family arriving in Santa Carla with Lucy fresh from a divorce and, by all accounts, a casualty of the hippie movement, finding her father growing marijuana at home, rejecting mainstream media propaganda and excited about a date with the somewhat morbid-sounding Widow Johnson.
At a time when Reagan’s America feared for the mythologised moral fabric of society in a way that had not happened since the 1960s, Schumacher was sneaking films about families steeped in the sex, drugs and rock and roll of that era in the back door, as it were.[15] As he himself has said, The Lost Boys is ‘about the fear we have of the Other – those who live outside of the mainstream.’ [16] But within its diegetic world, there is no “normal” against which to compare the vampires. Everyone in Santa Carla, regardless of age, class, or gender is – for want of a better phrase – a bit queer.
This exploration of the unknown via conflations of sex, death, pleasure and pain is again at work (and play) in Schumacher’s next excursion into the realms of the fantastic. Flatliners blends elements of science fiction and horror, and once again stars young, beautiful, up-and-coming Hollywood heart-throbs, this time as a group of medical students who set out to prove or disprove the existence of the afterlife by simulating death and then reviving each other.
The fetishisation of death is apparent from the outset. In an echo of David’s taunt in The Lost Boys (“How far you willing to go?”) it is Nelson Wright – Sutherland again – who initiates both the experiment and the idea of how “deep” each student is willing to go into the death experience as a determining factor of who will be allowed to participate.
As the film progresses however, it is revealed that the near-death experience is in fact profoundly traumatising as repressed memories, underpinned by guilt, manifest both emotionally and physically. The return of these repressed feelings threatens the subjectivity, sanity and even the lives of those who have participated.
Here once again we find echoes of Bersani’s essay, not only in the emphasis on guilt as a concomitant of both gay sex and AIDS-related death – ‘it is as if gay men’s “guilt” were the real agent of infection’[17] – but also the association of sexual acts with more than just “the exercise or loss of power … but rather a more radical disintegration and humiliation of the self.’[18]
Over the course of the film, the male protagonists who experience “death” find themselves at the receiving end of their most abusive behaviours in an escalating series of hallucinations that allow them to relive their most guilt-ridden repressed memories of accidental killing, bullying and the misogynistic videotaping of sexual infidelity.
It is as if, after assuming the position of vulnerability on the operating table – not dissimilar to the position that informs Bersani’s discussion of both straight and gay sex, that of powerlessness, of relinquished control, of being “under” – that they experience a radical shift of their perceptions of power and its operation in the world. In this position, Bersani posits, one finds the aforementioned, ‘masculine ideal (an ideal shared – differently – by men and women) of proud subjectivity’ and the potential for its annihilation, or in the case of Flatliners, its dramatic reconfiguration.
Interestingly, within this subversion of the psychodynamics of power there is an exception. Dr Rachel Mannus (Julia Roberts) blames herself for the suicide of her father. She has accepted responsibility for something that is revealed in her near-death experience to have been not her fault and beyond her control. There is then a suggestion here, in my reading of Bersani’s theory, that the shattering of male subjectivity may involve, as a corollary, female emancipation.
From the quote with which this discussion began to the idea Schumacher promulgated during the publicity trail for Flatliners that the characters “court death … and if you court death there will be consequences”[19] (said, it must be observed, with an undeniable and mischievous smirk on his face), it certainly appears that the director is aware of the prominence of the queer conflation or displacement of death with sex in his films.
In different ways and to different extents the ideas explored here inform more of Schumacher’s oeuvre as it continues into the 1990s. Falling Down (1993) suggests both the breakdown of the nuclear family as concomitant with the perceived waning of the dominance of straight, white masculinity in American society.[20] Batman Forever (1995) and Batman and Robin (1997) have now passed into legend as exploring and exploding the campy, homoerotic subtext of the mythology of the Dark Knight to the extent that the franchise had to be rigorously “de-queered” in the Christopher Nolan reboot.[21]
Most interestingly – for the purposes of this article at least – Schumacher’s 1999 film 8MM sees a return with a literal vengeance to the themes I have explored in The Lost Boys and Flatliners. It centres on a private detective who accepts the charge of proving that a snuff film discovered by a grieving widow amongst her husband’s possessions is a fake. When he cannot do this he resolves, agonisingly, to punish the 8mm film’s creators (and in the process himself) in escalating acts of moral masochism and violent retribution in the seedy underbelly of California’s porn and S&M scene.
To be continued…
Ben Wheeler is an independent researcher and is currently based in Fiji.
[1] ‘In Conversation: Joel Schumacher’ Vulture https://www.vulture.com/2020/06/joel-schumacher-in-conversation.html
[2] Bersani, Is the Rectum a Grave? And Other Essays, Preface
[3] Bersani, ‘Is the Rectum a Grave?’ p9
[4] Bersani, ‘Is the Rectum a Grave?’ p29
[5] Benshoff, Monsters in the Closet, p4
[6] Benshoff, Monsters in the Closet, p253
[7] ‘How The Lost Boys Made Vampires Sexy’ https://www.gamesradar.com/lost-boys-sexy-vampires-buffy-twilight/
[8] Clover, Men, Women and Chain Saws, p32
[9] Bersani, ‘Is the Rectum a Grave?’ p17
[10] Benshoff, Monsters in the Closet, p254
[11] Bersani, ‘Is the Rectum a Grave?’ p27
[12] Kalidi, ’10 Reasons The Lost Boys is the Gayest Vampire Movie, http://weareflagrant.com/10-reasons-why-the-lost-boys-is-the-gayest-vampire-movie/
[13] Benshoff, Monsters in the Closet, p253
[14] Benshoff, Monsters in the Closet, p253
[15] This socio-political connection is even indexed in the use of The Doors’ 1967 paean to difference People are Strange, but updated by 1980s group Echo & The Bunnymen
[16] ‘How The Lost Boys Made Vampires Sexy’ https://www.gamesradar.com/lost-boys-sexy-vampires-buffy-twilight/
[17] Bersani, ‘Is the Rectum a Grave?’ p16
[18] Bersani, ‘Is the Rectum a Grave?’ p23
[19] ‘Director Joel Schumacher discusses his film Flatliners in 1990’
https://www.today.com/video/director-joel-schumacher-discusses-his-film-flatliners-in-1990-85791301701
[20] See Clover, ‘Falling Down and the Rise of the Average White Male’
[21] See Winstead, ‘“As a symbol I can be incorruptible”: How Christopher Nolan De-Queered The Batman of Joel Schumacher’