Werewolf Complex: America's Fascination with Violence America's Fascination with Violence

By Denis Duclos

Book Overview

- Why are there so many serial killers in the United States? - Why is American culture permeated with violence and cruelty? - Why should Jekyll and Hyde and the werewolf myth have such appeal in North American culture? - Could the global dissemination of American culture increase our murderous instincts?The author has provided an unexpected answer to these intriguing riddles as a result of his in-depth study of America's fascination with violence. He demonstrates that the representation of on-screen violence reflects America's deep-seated belief that society is only a fragile rampart holding at bay the beast latent in us all. It is this belief which has persuaded Americans to accept mechanized surveillance methods to catch criminals, and partly explains the proliferation of criminal legislation.This book argues that cultures which do not share this fear of hidden barbarity will remain unaffected by American-style violence. However, the author warns that if people do come to believe in the primacy of these primitive instincts, their children will have good reason to emulate what they see on screen.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1859731511
• ISBN13: 9781859731512
• Release Date: February 1998
• Publisher: Berg Publishers
• Length: 256 Pages
• Weight: 0.95 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.7" x 6.1" x 9.2"

Customer Reviews

Rethinking American Violence

As an academic researching the implications and attractions of violence in global "Hollywood' culture, I have come across few works as original, provocative, and compelling as this. Duclos' harrowingly in-depth, quasi-Lacanian study of the lives and loves of American serial-killers and their place in the mythos of our time has many virtues, not the least of which is its determination to undercut the customary opposition between censorious conservatives and carefree libertarians. For, while refusing to buy into any simplistic, mechanistic account of 'media effects', Duclos shows how calls for untrammelled expression of the will to transgress and demands for renewed control of basic instincts endlessly reinforce one another, feeding into a cycle of universal complicity. And is it not clear, right now, that loudly voiced concerns about the possibility that videos produce teenage psycho-killers, concerns which amplify and ramify themselves through the global circuits of the media, constitute something like a DARE that young people fulfill our own desiring/fearful phantasies about the unleashing of repressed forces of violent transformation? One of the book's few weaknesses is its evident unwillingness to face the difficulty of distinguishing between words and images that simply contribute to this feedback cycle, on the one hand, and those which reflect that culture without simply acquiescing to it (like Duclos's own book), on the other. How does one decide, for example, whether the cop-torture scene in Reservoir Dogs is a mere 'example' or a 'reflection' upon 'the werewolf complex'? Nonetheless, this book is indispensable for anyone interested in contemporary popular culture and violence.