Book Description: Our Faith in Evil

Evil has been much discussed lately in sociopolitical contexts as has the subject of violence in entertainment. Using the genre of the horror story as a springboard, this study connects these two areas of concern in probing the interaction between forms of violent entertainment, consumers of violent entertainment, and the broader cultural context. It is argued that the structure of conflict within which violence is presented is a crucial factor in deciding whether portrayed violence will have mimetic or cathartic, corrosive or benign effects. Differences in dramatic structure between melodrama—of which the horror story is a variety—and tragic drama reflect different orientations toward conflict and evil. These differences provide the basis for distinguishing between the claims of opposing sides on the question of violent entertainment and thereby present a way to break the current stalemate in the debate over effects.

Dramatic structures and parallel conflict structures align in significant ways with culturally popular but contradictory traditions of moral structuring and evaluation. A critical analysis of melodrama and its conflict structure leads to a similar critical evaluation of popular moral teachings based on the dualism of good and evil. Ultimately, the triangular network between violent entertainment, consumers, and the broader cultural context conforms to a cyclical process of spheres of mutual influence that work to compound and reinforce attitudes toward conflict. Understanding this cyclical pattern of influence, along with the current cultural predominance of melodramatic structure and the category of evil that it projects, is a necessary step in confronting questions posed by violent entertainment and moving beyond the stalemate that currently exists. An extensive second section of the book examines several popular films and offers reviews illustrating the arguments and conclusions presented in the preceding chapters.

If, as Freud tells us, aggression and sex are innate drives in all of us, then violence is innate to humans and probably unavoidable. The question Desilet deals with is to what extent violence is usefully construed as evil and to what extent violence is encouraged by films. His 26 chapter study of Our Faith in Evil begins by establishing the method he will use to investigate his cinematographic theme. The methods section is written in a careful, measured way that makes it accessible to most readers. Desilet then divides the rest of the study into two major parts. In part one he argues his case and defines his terms. In this section of the book, he is at his most philosophical and psychological. Happily, he does not fall into the academic habit of using obscure and arcane language. Instead, he is lucid, fluent, and eminently readable.

What is fascinating about this part of the book is the depth to which Desilet goes to deal with our fascination with evil. He excavates everything from the significance of "defilement" in the Hebraic tradition to the notion of evil in "Cinderella." He regularly dips into the evil in closer neighborhoods with his investigations of corporations, sports, and comic books. However, he also investigates the origin of evil in the more remote provinces of the metaphysical and draws upon theorists such as Aristotle, Plato, and Kenneth Burke.

In Part Two, Desilet brilliantly and deftly illustrates his case by examining a series of films well known for their horrific and/or effective use of evil. These chapters advance Desilet's exploration of the relationship between violence and evil in melodrama. The impact of that nexus on society begins in Chapter 8 and runs through Chapter 13 on a theoretical level. The film analysis section shows this theory brought down to earth in your local theater or home entertainment center. His incisive analysis of such classics as "Psycho," "The Silence of the Lambs," and "Pulp Fiction" provide original readings full of insights. His treatments of more difficult to categorize films, such as "Bonnie and Clyde" and "The Passion of the Christ" are innovative and rewarding. Having written on "Bonnie and Clyde" myself, I found Desilet's revisionist assessment to be accurate about the context and the ideological agenda of the film. Unlike the consensus that has emerged over the years, he condemns the film because of the bad name it gives nonconformists. By the time you complete Part Two, you feel empowered to take on new films yourself. These exhilarating interpretations should not overshadow the truly informative sections of the first part of the book that examine theories of construction of evil in film.

Craig R. Smith
Professor and Chair
Film and Electronic Arts
California State University, Long Beach

Our Faith in Evil considers case after case of violent entertainment—including video games and other forms but concentrating on motion pictures—all the while developing a crackling, exciting dialectic between mimesis and catharsis. The author also introduces empirical evidence into the dialogue, testing and revising the ancient Greek critical concepts of imitation and purgation, with help from Kenneth Burke's insights, in a way that increases their relevance to tragedy, melodrama and their depictions of evil. Because of its close attention to a huge sample of the genre and to theoretical explanations, this book will instantly become a standard reference volume as well as a highly readable story.

Phillip K. Tompkins
Professor Emeritus
Communication and Comparative Literature
The University of Colorado at Boulder

This book is a wonderful read. Chapter Six is especially impressive. Here the account of Greek tragedy, with a little help from Kitto, Ricoeur, and Kaufmann, can be seen to apply so readily to one's own life and experience... meaning the likening of tragic conflict to conflict among family and friends—to which may be added cohorts and colleagues. Think also of tensions between teacher and student or master and apprentice... Family and fraternity—perfect pointers toward understanding the nature and depth of conflict in its tragic dimensions.... Moving from the previous focus on the fictional world, Chapter Fourteen rivets our attention, by way of a beautiful conceit, back upon the real world—and rightly so.... The book is a genuinely provocative and insightful piece of writing that broaches a significant alternative to the tradition of melodrama and its ethos of evil.

Many of the arguments in Our Faith in Evil are persuasive and very relevant to the subject of the potential effects of violent video games.

Introduction: Ultraviolence and Beyond
                • I—Film and Violence, a Classic Case History
                                “The problem with candy…”
                • II—The Culture and the Consumer
                                The American psyche
                                Inflaming the debate: “… can’t wait til I can kill you people…”
                • III—The Consumer and the Culture
                                Catharsis
                                Mimesis
                        Tonic catharsis: “It’s the joy you’ve got to talk about… the joy of cruelty”
                • IV—Method and Thesis

......begins with an account of Stanley Kubrick’s unprecedented action in 1974 banning his film A Clockwork Orange from further public viewing in the United Kingdom. Further events in the history of A Clockwork Orange relevant to issues addressed in the remainder of the book are highlighted, followed by a section devoted to characterizing the current state of the debate over entertainment violence. The concluding section presents the methodological approach and line of argument adopted in making the case for the book’s thesis.

Chapter One: Fictional Horror
                • The secret
                • The deeper secret
                • The riddle within the secret
                • The monster

......fastens upon the popular genre of the horror story as a compelling means of stimulating and organizing thinking about the appeal of fictional violence by interrogating James Twitchell’s analysis of horror.

Chapter Two: The Troubling, Doubling Self
                • The Doppelgänger
                • First crisis
                • Second crisis
                • I love you, I’ll kill you

......advances the discussion from the horror story to the problem of adolescent sexuality and describes how the notion of the Doppelgänger —the “double-goer”—informs and shapes the characterizations of the protagonist and the monster in the horror story and illustrates how this division corresponds to a split in the adolescent self that moves upon deeper self-divisions.

Chapter Three: Inside the Doppelgänger
                • Husk of a human
                • The transubstantiation of evil
                • The “fall” into living hell
                • Victim of fate

......demonstrates how, through the example of the Dracula story, the Doppelgänger or monster of the horror story reflects an inner conflict that derives from an external intrusion in the form of an alien agency identified as “evil.”

Chapter Four: The Origin of Evil
                • “…a part of ourselves… we do not recognize”
                • The mystery of “yielding” and the origin of evil
                • The separate origins of good and evil

......discusses the work of Paul Ricoeur in relation to mythologies of the origin of evil with featured attention given to the “Adamic myth” and the story of Genesis as presenting the dominant account of the origin of evil and providing the prototypical structure of melodrama informing the horror story.

Chapter Five: The Nature of Evil
                • Defilement in Hebraic tradition
                • Defilement in Hellenic tradition
                • From Genesis to melodrama
                • Abjection: death as ultimate reality

......borrows from the work of Paul Ricoeur and Julia Kristeva in showing the nature of evil implicit in the cosmology of the dominant tradition of evil and its relevance to the tradition of the horror story.

Chapter Six: Tragic Myth and the Origin of Evil
                • The plot: changes in fortune
                • The tragic vision and its version of conflict
                • As above, so below
                • Tragic vision versus despair

......distinguishes the tragic myth of the origin of evil from the tradition of the cosmology of evil derived from Biblical as well as Greek sources. This tragic cosmology is shown to be an opposing and separate tradition by way of the structure of conflict it models.

Chapter Seven: Alternative Applications of Greek Mythic Tradition
                • The “werewolf complex”
                • The “Frankenstein complex”
                • The ideal of “wholeness”

......introduces the views of Denis Duclos and Rushing and Frentz and their respective presentations of the "werewolf complex" and the "Frankenstein complex." In the course of their discussion of these "complexes" they draw upon Greek myth in ways that contrast with Ricoeur's focus.

Chapter Eight: Metaphysical Horror
                • Slipping into the metaphysical
                • Antagonism and synagonism
                 • Substitution of violence for conflict in melodrama

......summarizes the previous chapters and recapitulates the distinction between tragic drama and melodrama as offering differing orientations toward conflict that give rise to alternative approaches to understanding the effects of entertainment violence.

Chapter Nine: Violence and Melodrama
• Dramatic design and effects
• Counter-arguments

......summarizes the line of argument about melodramatic structure and identifies the primary ways in which this structure, when combined with deadly violence, exerts a negative influence on audiences.

Chapter Ten: Catharsis and Melodrama
• Scapegoating
• Amplifying emotional arousal

......presents a thorough examination of which emotions are aroused through melodramatic structure as well as the type of cathartic release corresponding to these aroused emotions.

Chapter Eleven: Catharsis Reconsidered
                • Weak and strong cathartic effects
                • Burke’s “charitable” interpretation of dramatic victimage
                • Plato and Aristotle realigned
                • Violence as sport, sport as violence
                • Amending conclusions of the AAP

......shows the comparative strengths and weaknesses of cathartic responses achieved through viewing tragic drama and melodrama which leads to a summary of the effects that can be reliably anticipated from viewing dramas corresponding in general ways to these structures.

Chapter Twelve: Melodrama and Fairy Tales
                • Cinderella
                • Hansel and Gretel
                • Little Red Riding Hood
                • Fairy tale and myth

......takes the conclusions from the preceding analysis and applies them to a critique of Bettelheim’s views on violence in fairy tales and makes recommendations about portrayals of violence for children.

Chapter Thirteen: Comic Books and Video Games
                • The case for empowerment
                • Which empowerment?
                • Real world education
                • Video games and the real world

......takes the conclusions from the preceding analysis and applies them to dominant themes and structures in comic books and video games and makes further recommendations about the structuring of violent content for adolescents.

Chapter Fourteen: Real Horror
                • Real world as melodrama
                • Chasing white whales
                • The “evil” in evil

......addresses the problem of applying the distinction between tragic and melodramatic structures to real world conflicts by using an illustrative comparison between the reflexive melodrama of the novel Moby Dick and the real life drama of Adolf Hitler, the Holocaust, and World War II.

Chapter Fifteen: The Melodramatization of American Culture
                • I—Conflicting Moral Codes
                • II—Competition and Commercialization
                                Corporate commerce: a case history
                                Raising the bar
                                Sports
                                Politics
                • III—Instrumentalization
                • IV—Individualism
                                East and West as contrasting traditions
                                East and West as parallel traditions
                • V—Explanation for Violence Statistics in the United States
                • VI—Summary

......exposes the way in which the problem of violence in American culture has been causally linked to sources of social tension such as competition, commercialization, instrumentalization, and individualism and critically examines these explanations in relation to the model of conflict projected in melodramatic structure. This analysis returns to the problem raised in the Introduction concerning the high statistics on gun crime and violent crime in the United States and presents and explanation for the difference in statistics between the United States and a country of equal economic and social development like Japan.

Chapter Sixteen: Whence and Whither: Conclusions and Recommendations
                • Interrogating the moral tradition
                • Censorship versus “immunization”
                • Education and cultural training

......provides a look back at what has been presented and a look forward at what might help over the long term to redirect public attention, concern, and action regarding the issue of entertainment violence in a way that will decrease the potentially destructive effects of portrayals of violence.

......this section presents a series of reviews of prominent films that illustrate and apply various aspects of the argument presented in the preceding chapters. These illustrations will hopefully help initiate a trend in film reviewing toward adding specific information about dramatic structure in relation to the violent content of films.

Chapter Seventeen: The Western as the American Myth
                • I—Legend, Truth, and Cinema
                • II—Tragic Drama versus Melodrama
                                Red River
                                Shane
                • III—Variations on the Western Melodrama

Chapter Twenty-one: Epic/Serial Melodrama: Star Wars, Harry Potter, Lord of the Rings