Linda Williams '' Film Bodies: Gender, Genre And Excess'

In Linda Williams “Film Bodies: Gender, Genre and Excess”, she discusses the way films can provide viewers with a sensational reaction to the physicality of the body whether being in acts of pleasure or pure disgust. What I found interesting was Williams perspective on the way one receives what her adolescent son phrases as “gross” movies. Williams’s depiction of “gross” movies are horror films that tend to have vigorous violence or disdain towards female promiscuous characters. A convention of these “gross” horror film is usually the villain who is known as the psychopath craze killer, he is typically obsess with revenge and seeks out to murder every living being in the local area. These movies can also be known as slasher films with the continuance …show more content…
With that being said Williams compares the physicality of gross I several genres such as what her son refers to as “sad movies” better known as Melodrama and “kissy movies” better known as Romance. These movies hold no true form of discomfort to a mature audience. The audiences may experience some form of uncultured actions but nothing extremely grotesque that can be compared to severed body part or blood-spattered scene in horror and thriller films. In David Lynch’s psychological horror Blue Velvet, viewers are introduced to the character Jeffrey Beaumont who is a young man who helps a young attractive club singer investigate the case of her missing child. Dorothy Vallens appears as a femme fatale throughout the movie viewers sympathize with her but we don’t necessarily find her trustworthy at times. The scene were viewers are introduced to the severed human ear is the most natural gross value the film shares in comparison to Williams interpretation of “gross “sentiments in horror films. The scene is not overtly nasty or gory and offers a more realistic sensibility to