The third film in my analysis
of the Films of Ana Lily Amirpour is the minimalist neon-soaked psychedelic Sci-Fi
film, Mona Lisa and the Red Moon. The final film in the unofficial “Apocalyptic
Anomie” Trilogy, Amirpour displays her mastery of subversion; circumventing
many of the usual tropes at every turn. From shot composition and storytelling,
to gender role expectations of characters and the micro level consequences of Disaster
Capitalism in post Katrina New Orleans, the film subtlety nods to genre
conventions and a maddening socio-political backdrop, while not directly
engaging in either. Instead, these elements become part of the complex flavors
of Amirpour’s cinematic gumbo that makes her work so engaging. This paper
attempts to pull apart that recipe, to see if the ingredients are as good as
the final dish.
PLOT
As
the Blood Moon rises over the city of New Orleans, a young incarcerated mental
patient uses her psionic powers to escape. Mona Lisa Lee (Jeon Jong-seo),
having her first taste of freedom, begins to interact with the local underbellied
denizens of “The Creole City.” Some people help her, while others take advantage.
But after an initial encounter, a tenacious cop (Craig Robinson) doggedly tracks
her across the city. Mona Lisa soon realizes
that fleeing “The Big Easy” is going to be more difficult than she thought.
HISTORICAL CONTEXT
Production
After the lack of
critical success and public ignorance of The
Bad Batch, Amirpour went back to basics, conceiving
of a small psychedelic story of a young superpowered immigrant yearning to be
free. Written in 2018, Amirpour individually went to each Cast member to
convince them to do the film. Zac Efron, originally picked to play Fuzz, was
later replaced by Ed Skrein in July 2019, just before the film began principal
photography.
Shot
on location by Ari Aster’s frequent collaborator, Powel Pogorzelski, the film’s
cinematography crackles and pops like the neon signs flickering throughout the film,
bathing the slick streets of New Orleans with a bubble gum pulpiness,
reminiscent of the early neo-Noir films of Michael Mann (Thief), complete with
its own techno-laden score. This combination gives the film an ethereal quality
that makes it seem beyond reality, near dream-like, fueling the heightened aesthetic
of the film. Amirpour has always been considered more of a visual filmmaker,
and coupled with Pogorzelski, they come up with some of the most unique shots of
New Orleans that isn’t the same 6 shots of Burbon Street, and the French
Quarter that every other filmmaker that shoots there includes. Alternatively,
Amirpour and Pogorzelski give us shots in front of laundromats, liquor stores,
at the intersection of dark deserted streets, and in strip clubs off the over
tilled tourist trek. This is the local’s New Orleans; the glitz and glamour is
the distant backwash of the story we are steeped in.
Katrina
and Covid-19
The
production of Mona Lisa and the Blood Moon was tangentially impacted by
two tragedies near a generation apart from one another: Hurricane Katrina and
the COVID-19 outbreak and lockdown. On Aug 29th, 2005, Hurricane Katrina
strikes the Gulf of Mexico, nowhere harder and more damaging than New Orleans.
At the time of landfall, the storm had slowed to nearly “tropical storm” status.
But, due to infrastructure neglect, fueled by environmental racism, nearly
2,000 people died and over a million individuals were displaced by the storm. In
the near 20 years since, Sociological data and analysis illustrate the way in
which the storms impact, and New Orleans reconstruction, was all about race and
class.
The storm disproportionally impacted people of
color in part due to the relationship between race and class. Because there is persistent
and worsening disparity in income by race in the United States, this affected
the ability for individuals to escape the storm. People who left had the money
to leave, or they had family that lived out of the area that they could retreat
to (a privilege that also skews white). Additionally, the more affluent also
lived in areas that were farther from where the Hurricane made landfall and
thereby incurred less damage or, due to their affluence, were easier to rebuild.
Unlike what the myth of
meritocracy would have you believe, the disparities between race and class are
systemically rooted in racism and obfuscated by the rationalization of
“cultural differences”. The two practices that mainly contributed to the
disproportional impact of Katrina by race, was the racially explicit covenants
of FHA loans that kept people of color out of more affluent communities and the
simultaneous industrial zoning of low-income residential communities that were predominantly
populated by people of color (Rothstein 2017). In 2005, the lower 9th ward, New
Orleans, was the closest to where the levees failed. They were comprised of lower
income and section 8 housing. These same individuals that sought shelter from
the storm, were ushered into the Superdome and subsequently forgotten for 5
days. Even though the threat of such an event loomed for years, the levees were
never repaired or strengthened because the direct victims of such an event
would inevitably be mostly non-white and poor. Thus, they were disregarded by their
local government (Belkhir and Charmaine 2007). This baked in structural
inequality was attempted to be further rationalized through the lunacy of “Act
of God” rhetoric, painting New Orleans as the modern Biblical equivalent of Sodom
and Gomorrah (Vaught 2009). This was an attempted misdirection by the news media
to absolve institutions from responsibility and economic accountability.
The response to Hurricane
Katrina was equally abysmal. Michael Brown, the then newly appointed director
of FEMA under George W. Bush, had little to no emergency preparedness training.
Thus, his decisions continued to make things worse. He denied emergency
response vehicles from entering the State from the surrounding areas unless federally
deputized, the same with any out of state rescuers, denied the distribution of
thousands of pounds of ice to hospitals that led to the invalidity of hundreds
of medications for hospital patients, and forced patients to remove their
hospital tags when they were evacuated which caused doctors to lose track of
them. This culminated in a series of reconstruction efforts that were fueled by
Disaster Capitalism, leading to city-wide gentrification.
Disaster
Capitalism is the joint governmental and private industry practice of taking
advantage of a major disaster, to adopt social and economic policies (with the
purposes of enriching elites) that the population would not accept outside of
extreme circumstances (Klein 2008). The government, or other private
organizations exploit the “Shock” of a natural disaster and prey upon the public’s
disorientation by pushing through pro corporate measures, what Naomi Klien
(2008) calls Shock Therapy.
This process is quite
easy to follow:
- Wait for
a Crisis to happen (or help to manufacture one through media influence)
- Declare a moment of “extraordinary
politics” and suspend partial or complete democratic norms.
- Develop
or pass a piece of legislation that rams through the corporate wish list.
(usually in the form of deregulation)
This process of disaster capitalism inevitably results
in gentrification. As the waters receded in New Orleans, the
city was divided up and promised to private companies
through government contracts. Companies like Halliburton, then Vice President
Dick Cheney’s former company, without any other outside bids. The rising of
property values due to the reconstruction increased the overall property taxes
and forced a lot of people out of the neighborhoods that they could afford
before the storm hit. We saw more white cultural trending businesses start to
enter the area; enticing more white affluent individuals to take up residence
in areas that before the storm, would seem undesirable. This was often coupled
with the use of dog whistling, racially coded language to thinly veil their racism
with a modicum of faux decorum. Additionally,
many of the extremely poor areas, the ones also the
hardest hit by the storm, (and were predominantly populated by Black residents)
were left to rot.
Amirpour
does not engage with Katrina and New Orleans directly in Mona Lisa and the
Blood Moon, but she does use it as a backdrop. Katrina acts as a lingering
thread of something that has been looming, a reality that the citizens of the
city just accept. It is in the empty lots, the abandoned shipping containers,
and the under-paved and minimally clean streets. Even 20 years later, Amirpour still
captures the impact of the unequal distribution of resources in just a single
frame.
Disaster
Capitalism was once again the culprit to tragedy during the response to the
COVID-19 pandemic. As the COVID-19 cases rose, stay at home orders were issued
to help stop the spread of the infection and save lives. Those who had more white-collar
office jobs that could easily transition to be done remotely from home, were
lucky. There was a rent/eviction freeze
implemented but it was an opt in situation where low-income individuals had to
qualify for rent forgiveness. Then, when the freeze was
lifted, the tenants had to pay all the back rent in order to stay in their
homes. However, the
US government also did not pay businesses to stay closed and barely gave
individuals COVID relief money that would help them make ends meet. This led to
massive
layoffs during the early part of the Pandemic.
Unfortunately, not all
individuals were allowed to work from/stay at home. One group, medical
professionals, doctors, and nurses were considered “essential workers”, there
to stop the spread and take care of the ill, sick, and dying. Given that this
was a health crisis, their definition and designation as “essential” makes
sense. Unfortunately, medical professionals were not the only ones that were
seen as essential workers. Grocery store employees and those in the food
service industry were also classified as ‘essential’. Even if you could make a claim
for Grocery store employees, it is ludicrous to think that fast food employees
should have been considered “essential workers”.
The definition of
“essential worker” in this way illustrated the relationship between race,
social class and the level of dehumanization one can experience at their
intersection. A good majority of the non-medical essential workers were part of
the “blue collar” lower class workforce; the workers that are doing manual
labor at or just above the Federal/State minimum wage (whichever is lowest). Workers
in these jobs often skewed younger and were more likely to be people of color.
Therefore, these workers were required to put themselves in danger of getting a
deadly virus for the purpose of maintaining the economy and providing services
for the more affluent. This dehumanizing
disparity was not lost on the workers themselves. This
proletarian hellscape was met with a mass of workers leaving their jobs it what
was called “The
Great Resignation” that
eventually culminated in multiple
industry labor strikes in the Summer of 2023. While Mona Lisa and the Blood Moon was
released well before the combined Writers, SAG-AFTRA Strikes that halted
Hollywood production for 5 months in 2023, the film’s distribution was affected
by the COVID-19 pandemic.
Mona
Lisa and the Blood Moon was shot in New Orleans in the summer of 2019 but,
due to the COVID-19 pandemic and lockdown, did not make it to the Venice Film
Festival until Sept 2021, with its wider release coming a whole year
later. Thus, even though the film did
not have to shut down production due to the COVID-19 lockdown, it did still get
caught in its under toe, causing a janky release schedule. Much of the
promotion and selling of the film by Amirpour and the cast had to be done
remotely to avoid physical contact. Additionally, because of the US lockdown,
and the overall fear of movie theaters as potentially being a “super spreader”
event, independent theaters began to close. These are the same theaters that
are more likely to present Amirpour’s films compared to the other major theater
chains. Therefore, without wide distribution, this is one of Amirpour’s least
known films with fewer critical reviews and only making $149,304 in its entire
theatrical run.
Mahsa Amini
On September
16th 2022, an Iranian woman, Mahsa Amani died in police custody, suffering
a cerebral hemorrhage caused by being brutally beaten by police officers after being
arrested under the draconian hijab law of 1979.
The decree requiring women to wear the Islamic head scarf was one of the
results of the Iranian revolution in 1979, following the ascension of the
Ayatollah Khomeini. For the last 45 years, if women ventured out without the
“proper” attire, they were likely to be arrested and subsequently beaten (as
Amani was), regardless of the increasing liberal public attitudes concerning
the Hijab since 2010. Amani’s death
became a catalyst, and Amani herself was martyred for the subsequent civil
unrest against the Government of Iran. Unfortunately, as inspiring and unifying
as this uprising felt in the moment, feeling the swell of civil disobedience
and social change by the people of Iran, their efforts ultimately failed to
change neither the power dynamics nor the oppressive laws that were put in
place by the patriarchal hyper-conservative religious minority in power; whom
through exercising massive police-orchestrated beatings of protestors, killed
hundreds, while injuring and detaining thousands.
The death of Mahsa Amani
occurred just 10 days after Mona Lisa and the Blood Moon’s premiere;
Amirpour, a fellow Iranian, found herself centering the protest and Iranian
conflict during press for her latest film. She was featured as an expert on The Sarah Silverman
Podcast where she described the Iranian government as a “medieval
regime” that resembles the orcs and Saruman from The
Lord of the Rings.
She stated that all regions of humankind need to ban
together to eradicate this evil. She
also expressed her faith in the radical nature of Gen Z in Iran, one that she
believed would create systemic change. Unfortunately, the failed revolution
says a lot about the enduring stability of embedded institutional systems of
power and how difficult it is to create meaningful change. Rather than change,
what is more commonly the case is just an exchange of the type/method of
brutality the people must endure.
SOCIAL ANALYSIS
Amirpour often describes all her films as being motivated by vibes, an aesthetic and sensibility that propels the audience through the story. The visual language of the film does as much interrogating of social and societal themes as the dialogue. The characters are often fully formed, and because we are only with them for a short time in the overall narrative, we experience only a snapshot of their life. Yet, in this liminality of the film’s run time, Amirpour addresses institutionalized mental illness and the subversion of gender roles.
Mental
Illness
Mental Illness is a
collection of psychological conditions that alters behavior including
psychological functioning of personality, motivation, or conflict. It is
regularly associated with an increase in subjective stress, generalized
impairment in social functioning, and threats to the physical health of
themselves or others. Mental Illness is usually (improperly) handled through
“the medical model” which perceives this collection of cognitive and
neuro-chemical disorders as something that needs to be fixed.
The medical model
permeates all aspects of the healthcare industry. This is a perception by those
in authority (typically doctors) that views patients, and the healthcare system,
through a “medical gaze” (Foucault 1988). This “medical gaze” is also a curative
model which perceives patients primarily through their affliction or diagnosis,
culminating in a cure for whatever disease, disability or deviance that they’ve
been assigned by the bureaucratic intake process of the hospital or doctor’s
office that admitted them. This process also invokes the classical labeling
theory where once the label is affixed, in this case, the diagnosis of illness,
all behavior on the part of the patient is refracted through that specific lens.
The more serious the medical conditions are perceived, the more the label
becomes a part of a patient’s identity, and the more difficult it is to be
released from the bureaucratic institution you are incarcerated in. This is
what has happened with the diagnosis of Mental Illness.
For much of human history
“the care plan” for the mentally ill was one of segregation, avoidance, and
ignorance. The credo was: “Put them somewhere, avoid contact with them, and
deny their existence.” Foucault (1988) discusses the “The Great Confinement”
where in 1656, the “General Hospital” was constructed in Paris. However, this
was not designed to just house the mentally ill, but included those considered to
be the transients of society, beginning the period of institutionalization for
the mentally ill and the rest of those deemed “undesirable”.
These
asylums and clinics were total institutions; a type of social institution that
combines aspects of residential community structure in formal (usually
bureaucratic) social order.
According to Goffman (1961) the Components of these
Total institutions are:
1)
All aspects of social life are
conducted in the same place and under the same single authority.
2)
Each phase of the member’s daily activity is in the
immediate company of a large batch of others.
3)
All activities are tightly scheduled.
4)
All forced activities are brought together in a single
rational plan to fulfill the aims of the institution.
5)
A person is often excluded from knowledge and decision
regarding their fate.
The “residents” are labeled and perceived through
their diagnosis; thereby causing them to be medicated and warehoused under the
guise of societal protection for the purposes of social control.
The central fiction that these
asylums and clinics trade on is their compassion. Through the construction of
their facility and where it is located, to the way that potential patients and
their family members are treated when touring the grounds, are all there to
invoke a sense of calm serenity. That care, quietude, and peaceful tranquility is
manufactured to put both the patient and their family at ease; convincing them
that they and their loved one will be taken care of with the utmost gentleness.
However, this practice masks the reality of these institutions, which is a
place to control, confine and work on patient’s bodies (Foucault 1994). Whether
that be through back breaking work, unnecessary surgeries, or pharmaceutical
testing, this dehumanization of the disabled and mentally ill was justified
through the valuing of societal protection for non-disabled people, over the
human rights of those that were.
Mona
Lisa Lee is a product of several of these carceral total institutions. Through
the film, we learn that her family attempted to immigrate to the United States,
but our draconian immigration laws separated the family[1] and threw her into the foster
care system. As she bounced around from one family to another, there were reports
of “strange occurrences” and violent outbursts. This landed her in the “Home
for Mentally Insane Adolescence[2]” where she remained dormant
in a state of near catatonia for 10 years until the start of the film. The
catalyst for her revival and extradition from the facility is the verbal abuse
experienced at the hands of an orderly which seemed to be common.
In contrast to the medical
model that proliferates the understanding of mental illness through the
healthcare system today, Horwitz (2003) sees mental illness more so as a social
construction that we actively create through our interactions with different
people. Much of the diagnosis of mental illness comes only after an inciting
incident that provides a level of social disruption in which the police are
called (Goffman 1967). This unfortunate circumstance is due to the
unwillingness in most states to reallocate community funds into a “Mental
Health Crisis” first responder program. It is through this interaction with the
police that they enter the system. By defining disruption as mental illness it
crystalizes its social construction status. We cannot separate it from the
culture in which it occurs, deriving from our understanding and policing of what
we consider “normal” (Horowitz 2003). Mental illness then can be perceived as
anything that is deviant.
Officer Harold (Craig Robinson) is the first responder to
intercept Mona Lisa as she exits Fuzz (Ed Skrein)’s car. Employing all the
general police tactics of cornering, debilitating (shining a light in her face)
and detaining, he calmly tries to incapacitate her by placing her in handcuffs.
It is at that moment that he realizes that he, like a lot of other police
officers interacting with people in mental health crisis on the street, is grossly
ill prepared and unfathomably out of his depth to handle the situation, as she
uses her psionic powers to debilitate him and escape. While Mona Lisa does not kill
him, this encounter fundamentally shakes Officer Harrold to his core driving
him to capture her.
Subverting Gender Roles
The
media as an agent of socialization, specifically gender socialization, is
powerful. Pop culture has the soft power to influence our understanding of the
world around us, especially about gender and the relationships along the gender
spectrum. Consistently, media becomes both a barometer and a time capsule for
how our culture perceives society, that when consumed, becomes the messages by
which we define and regulate our lives. This is what’s known as a gender feedback
loop: gendered messages shape our identity which we then play out on our bodies
through a complex gender performance, those performances then become messages
for others (Crowley, Foley and Shehan 2008).
Much
of the traditional binary centric gender socialization that women receive is
that their identity and agency is not solely wrapped up in their own interests
but determined defined and sanctioned by the relationships with other people.
Therefore, who they are is wrapped up in their social, family, and societal
connections with other people. Women are conditioned to identify themselves by
who they are related to. They are Bill’s wife or Tyler’s mother. This is a
product of the normalized white heterosexist Patriarchy that objectifies women to
facilitate male pleasure and emotional security. This infers that women’s
existence and interaction in society must be mainly performative in service to men,
whether that be a brother, husband, son, boss or even a stranger. This is
compounded by the complexity and totality of sanctions women receive when they
stray from these misogynistically stringent gender norms under Patriarchy.
These are the conditions under which women are perceived as being “likeable”
and provide context under which they are not. This “likeability” messaging is found
consistently in the media that we consume.
In all
media, but particularly in film and TV, the “likeability” of women is determined
by their worth/use to others (usually white men) within society. In a
capitalist society, that word becomes synonymous with “marketability” which not
only invokes a form of objectification but also imposes a morality structure (What
makes a ‘good girl’ “good?”) upon women as a form of social control (Bogutskaya,
2023). This gender policing happens especially in film, where the “good girls”:
the wives, the virgins, the daughters that listen to their fathers, and faithful
mothers are rewarded; solidifying the message that for women, their only access
to power is to embrace the patriarchy. Women then internalize these messages by
strangling a lot of the most unique (read as: *patriarchally undesirable*)
parts of themselves to be granted a chance at social acceptance. Thus, anything
outside of the specifically pliant and diminutively subservient image of the “good
girl” is considered “bad”. However, bad, or “Unlikeable” is also marketable,
but just as a cautionary tale, those characters that the audience loves to hate,
and want to see publicly punished. The bigger the transgression, the more
violent the punishment (Bogutskava, 2023). This is misogyny.
In
Mona Lisa and the Blood Moon, Bonnie Hunt (Kate Hudson) and Mona Lisa
Lee (Jeon Jong-seo) are not “likeable”. Instead, they personify two common
“unlikable” female tropes: The Slut and The Weirdo, respectively. The Slut is
the trope that shows women being erotic, holding the promise of sex, but not
having sex, her sexuality is performative, and she is then punished for her
choices (Bogutskava, 2023: 159). Bonnie is first introduced as an older stripper
who loses a fight with a diner patron who accuses her of “looking at her man”. During
the fray, Bonnie witnesses Mona Lisa use her psionic abilities. In the aftermath, under the benevolent shroud
of friendship, Bonnie takes advantage of Mona Lisa by making her use her
persuasive powers; first on douche bag tourist patrons at the strip club, then
on unsuspecting strangers at ATMs grifting them out of their money. Bonnie is
also a terrible single mother to Henry, causing him to run away. Finally, when
Bonnie and Mona Lisa are cornered by Officer Harold, she attempts to abandon
Mona Lisa and denies knowing her. Bonnie is Amirpour’s subversion of the
“hooker with a heart of gold” trope. She is complex, self-absorbed, with a willingness
to undercut anyone (even her co-workers) for more money. Yet, even with this
subversion, Amirpour still has her be punished for her choices. Towards the end
of the film, sans Mona Lisa’s protection, Bonnie is beaten and placed in the
hospital by the first men she and Mona Lisa scammed; whereby she comes to the
realization that she is both a bad person and a bad mother. Again, a cautionary
tale.[3]
Adjacent to the Slut is “The Weirdo”, someone strange and unusual, a typically solitary character. Mona Lisa has literally been isolated for ten years and does not know how to interact with people. Her abilities are also a common cinematic trope of the fearsomeness of Female power, especially when used on men (Bogutskaya 2023). While there is kindness in “the weirdo” it is usually reserved for certain people, in Mona Lisa’s case it’s Henry, Bonnie son, who she is willing to escape with. Additionally, since the weirdo is only looking ahead, and not looking at those around them, they often do not key into romantic cues, as they are looking for acceptance rather than love. This is seen in the film with every interaction between Mona Lisa and Fuzz. Mona Lisa is oblivious to the sleezy almost predatory behavior of Fuzz when they first meet. However, buying her snacks and giving her his t-shirt ingratiates himself enough for her to return to him when she and Henry want to flee New Orleans. Fuzz helps with hair cuts and new ID’s and asks for a kiss (as either reward or payment), which is barely reciprocated. At the end of the film, as she is on the plane to Detroit, even though her time with Henry and Fuzz was brief, it was memorable, for among them she finally found acceptance.
In
addition to subverting the gender norm tropes of “likeable” women with the
characterizations of Bonnie and Mona Lisa, Ana Lily Amirpour both leans into and
subverts masculine tropes in the characters of Officer Harold and Fuzz. Masculinity
as a social construct is fragile. It is not a fixed identity, but one that is
always in flux. Because of this, men are tasked/pressured to achieve their
masculinity in every social situation that they are in, otherwise that identity
will be shattered, making it difficult to piece back together. According to Connell (2005), while there are
many different types of masculinity, the way that masculinity can be expressed is
a configuration of practices within gender relations that are reconfigured over
strategies of legitimation (p84-85). What is often legitimate, are expressions
of both violence and control; when men express it, they achieve a sense of
masculinity, when that violence and control is expressed upon them, they are
emasculated. Mona Lisa emasculates Officer Harold when she uses her powers to
force him to take out his gun and shoot himself in the leg. For Officer Harold,
the only way that he can regain his masculinity is to capture Mona Lisa Lee.
Under this compulsion to reconfigure the shards of his masculinity, he ends up
aggressively berating Henry…a child.
This is illustrated in this quote from Bourdieu (1998):
“Manliness,
it can be seen, is an eminently relational notion, constructed in front of and
for other men, and against femininity, in a kind of fear of the female firstly
in oneself.” (p 53).
Conversely, Fuzz is presented as flashy sexist drug
dealing douche bag. His clothing, mannerism and speech patters all prime the audience
for his inevitable sleezy and potentially dangerous behavior. In another film, Fuzz
would have been the sexist example of which Mona Lisa would have punished to
display her power and her politics. Yet, this film is different. A reoccurring
mantra that shows up throughout the narrative is “Forget What you Know”, and
Amirpour makes certain that this applies to the character tropes as well. By the end of the film, we feel Fuzz’s
unrequited affection for Mona Lisa, and while he may be, in the parlance of a
younger generation, “a simp”; he is certainly one with a heart of gold.
CONCLUSION
Mona Lisa and the Blood Moon is eclectically
subversive, much like the writer/director herself. It is an embodiment of her
sensibilities. The outcast, the downtrodden, those on the fringes, these are
the people that Ana lily Amirpour has always been interested in; those
individuals that are just beyond the frame, blending in, a part of the overall
atmosphere of a scene. Yet, she consistently reframes them, centers on their
world. That world may be fantastical, it may be dangerous, but at its core
there is always a heart of people helping each other; whether that be out of Tehran,
in a desert wasteland, or catching a plane out of New Orleans. It’s about found
family, and the friends we make along the way.
REFERENCES
Belkhir, Jean Ait
and Christine Charlemaine 2007. “Race Gender and Class: Lessons from Hurricane
Katrina.” In Race Gender and Class v 14 (2) p120-152.
Bogutskaya, Anna
2023. Unlikeable Female Characters: The Women Pop Culture Wants You to Hate.
Naperville: Sourcebooks.
Bourdieu, Pierre
1998. Masculine Domination. Standford: Standford University Press
Connell R. W.
2005. Masculinities. Berkeley: University
of California Press.
Crawley, Sara, Lara
Foley and Constance L. Shehan. 2008. Gendering
Bodies New York: Roman and Littlefield
Foucault, Michel
1988. Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason New
York: Vintage Books
______________
1994. The Birth of the Clinic: An Archaeology
of Medical Perception New York: Vintage Books
Goffman, Erving
1961. Asylums: Essays on the Social Situations of Mental Patients. New
York: Anchor Books
_____________ 1967. Interaction Ritual: Essays on Face
to Face Behavior New York: Pantheon Books
Horowitz, Allen V.
2003. Creating Mental Illness. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Klien, Naomi 2007.
The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of
Disaster Capitalism New York: Knoph Publishing
Rothstein, Richard
2017. The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated
America. New York: Liveright Publishing
Vought, Seneca
2009. “An Act of God: Race Religion and Policy in the Wake of Hurricane Katrina.”
In Souls 11 (4) p408-421)
[1] It
was unclear if this happened at the border, or when they got caught.
[2]
Considering the distance from the prevalence of Institutionalization of the
1970’s I would have liked the filmmakers make better choices than have the
institution named the “Home for Mentally Insane Adolescence” even though such a
name is playing off of classic horror tropes.
[3]
However, there is a satisfying stinger with the end credits where The Bouncer
at the club where Bonnie works punches out the men who beat Bonnie when he sees
them on the street.
