This study examines American war films released during World War II to determine what kinds of persuasive appeals were used to propagate support among the American people for the war. As well, the symbiotic wartime relationship between the Federal Government and the Hollywood film industry was investigated. The examination of 37 war films, 10 per cent of the total number of war films released from 1941 to 1945, yielded 48 different aural or visual persuasive appeals. These appeals were characterized in the form of statements with which their communicators desired the audience to agree. Examples include "The enemy is a savage, whose actions are cruel and barbaric," "We will win because the enemy underestimates our will," or "The enemy bombs indiscriminately." The appeals were classified under five main categories found throughout the history of war rhetoric: Guilt (the enemy, not we, caused this war), Satanism (comparisons that create polarities between us and our enemy, with the enemy always characterized in the negative), the Illusion of Victory (America's ultimate triumph is inevitable), Apocalypticism and Typology (Biblical metaphors and allusions promoting the notion that "God is on our side"), and Territoriality (the enemy poses a threat to us, our families and the American way of life). In the analysis, the general appeal category of Satanism was found to be the most used, utilizing nearly half of the appeals found in the sample. A harmonic relationship was found to exist between the major appeal categories, resulting in inter-category cooperation, e.g., a Satanism appeal used to amplify an illusion of victory statement. As well, this investigation noted that the plot conventions, icons and character types found in typically American genre films of the 1930's such as the western, foreign intrigue spy film, and the gangster film, were utilized, especially during the first year of the war, to aid in the successful packaging of these appeals.

This dissertation seeks to offer a revision of the Lacanian film theory, which was prevalent during the 1970s but declined in the 1980s. The revision is an attempt to establish a Lacanian interpretation of film spectatorship by means of a new focus on Lacan's "real" to which the contemporary theorists paid limited attention. Underpinned theoretically by the concepts situated in Lacanian psychoanalysis, a discursive approach to locating the spectator in the film is applied to answer the following two questions: Why people love to watch movies and how movies make people "different." By means of Lacan's master discourse, the spectator now has two different roles in watching a film: producer and reader, which have different goals. While the former looks forward to a unified symbolic order, the latter seeks the jouissance. These two different roles cause a conflict within the spectator because of the film. Hollywood cinema is a special form of film designed to deal with this conflict by suppressing the spectator's role as the reader while maintaining his/her role as the producer. On the contrary, Avant-garde film is another form of film which seeks to satisfy the desire of the spectator as the reader by offering him/her the jouissance. The devices and techniques adopted by these two types of film are discussed and analyzed in this dissertation. The finding suggests that not only Hollywood movies, but also most of Avant-garde films, are failed to provide the jouissance to the spectator. Following Barthes's "the third meaning" and Heath's "excess," I argue that the author's style can help the spectator to obtain the jouissance while watching a film. The dissertation concludes that Lacan's film is a film with style.

This history of American Orientalism uses articulation theory to map the processes by which discourse around the representation of Arabs and Muslims moved from the symbolic to the material, resulting in public support for the 2003 War on Iraq. By tracing the circulation of images and meanings in both American popular culture and U.S. foreign policy, this dissertation argues that American Orientalism from the former, was increasingly drawn upon by foreign policy makers to nullify the so-called "Vietnam Syndrome," the American public's learned aversion to direct military intervention abroad. The action movie genre, and its use of American Orientalism to construct an American identity in binary opposition to its Arab Other, are shown to have contributed to the rise of a neo-conservative foreign policy paradigm in the United States, beginning with the 1991 Gulf War, and advancing to full dominance with George W. Bush's open declaration of his "War on Terror," based on a pre-emptive and potentially unlimited war doctrine. The contradictory constructions of the Middle East and their non-essential correspondences to changing economic, political and cultural contexts, are demonstrated by following the development of American Orientalism in U.S. culture and foreign policy discourse since the late 1800's, using a communication influenced, critical cultural studies approach guided by the theories of Antonio Gramsci, Edward Said, and Stuart Hall. The representative opposition of Arab and American identities, and American Orientalism's internal consistency across disparate spheres of discourse, are shown to have increased around the Arab-Israeli Wars of 1967 and 1973, as well as the 1979 Islamic revolution in Iran, conflating representations of Arabs, of Muslims, and of terrorism. Action movies of the 1980's and 1990's constructed a new American identity, whose politics, articulated to neo-conservative calls for a "resurgent America," are potentially more damaging than Hollywood's proliferation of Arab stereotypes. This dissertation closely examines the presence of American Orientalism, and accompanying support for neo-conservativism, in the public relations strategies of the 1991 Gulf War, in the films True Lies, Executive Decision, and The Siege, and in the televised statements of George W. Bush given during the days after September 11, 2001.

Thesis (M.A.)--Carleton University, 2001. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 166-174). Also available in electronic format on the Internet.

Thesis (M.S. )--Kutztown University of Pennsylvania, 2005. / Source: Masters Abstracts International, Volume: 45-06, page: 2705. Typescript. Abstract precedes thesis as 2 leaves (iii-iv). Includes bibliographical references (leaves 69-75).

The idea that gay men and straight women have much in common has a long cultural history, as seen in the work of sexologists, feminists, sociologists and cultural historians from the late 19th onward. Stories of relationships between gay men and straight women have been a significant, recurring phenomenon in American popular culture throughout much of the twentieth century, and the period from the late-1950s onward marks a time when such relationships became increasingly prevalent. With the weakening of Hollywood's self-censoring Hays Code and the maturing of television as a mass-market medium, the late-1950s/early-1960s saw the development of openly gay male characters who frequently shared friendships with straight women. Films and television shows featuring this dynamic grew more numerous and circulated more widely as time passed, but these developments progressed differently and at different rates for film and television. This study investigates the development, circulation and reception of representations of the gay-man/straight-woman duo as a cultural figure in North American film and television during the latter half of the twentieth century. As a set of texts in which sex and gender mediate each other in powerful ways, these gay-man/straight-woman stories produce rich analytic possibilities. Drawing on textual analysis, socio-historical context, and audience research, the project outlines the major relationship dynamics found in these gay-man/straight-woman texts (mother-and-son; perfect-couples; gals-and-pals), the historical shifts in their production and popularity, and the implications they hold for the ways our culture imagines relationships between men and women. Despite their gay cachet, the majority of these texts re-circulate normative clichés about gay male and straight female subjectivities and relationships, patterns that reproduce conventional, conservative thinking about who holds and deserves power and respect in our culture. Yet a few of these texts also provide alternative models for relationships between men and women, gay and straight, that contribute to more expansive possibilities for all: a culture of queer variations and relations. These examples affirm the emotional, social and affective value of relationships that cannot be neatly categorized into familial or romantic models, and argue for the importance of friendship as a form of social practice.

Honors Project--Smith College, Northampton, Mass., 2009. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 49-52).