Doing Justice: A Ritual-Psychoanalytic Approach to Postmodern Melodrama and a Certain Tendency of the Action Film

Abstract

Conjoining ethnographic and psychoanalytic approaches, this essay analyzes audience reception of Rambo: First Blood (Ted Kotcheff, 1982) and the more recent Bourne films (Doug Liman, 2002; Paul Greengrass, 2004; Greengrass, 2007). Respondents attest to the ongoing importance of the cinematic experience in the digital era; in particular, they suggest that they sympathize with the action hero's precarious and melodramatic situation of "fighting injustice." The results suggest a need to broaden our understanding of the action genre and, more broadly, of audience investment in cinema narrative.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 4 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.