Femme fatale

are at work in the portrayal of vampires. In vampire aesthetic, however, beauty is mostly conceptualized along the constructs of gender and sexuality. If a male vampire is conceptualized as a handsome martyr, the female one is conceptualized as a femme fatale, a sexually attractive woman bringing destruction. MAIN ARGUMENT: Forry’s observation about the conceptualization of vampires as beautiful along the lines of gender and sexuality is true, but it only applies to the modern culture, since…

The Battle of Albuera (16 May 1811) was fought during the Peninsular War. A mixed British, Spanish and Portuguese corps engaged elements of the French Armée du Midi (Army of the South) at the small Spanish village of La Albuera, about 20 kilometres (12 mi) south of the frontier fortress town of Badajoz, Spain. Since October 1810, Marshal Masséna's French Army of Portugal had been tied down in an increasingly hopeless stand-off against Wellington's Allied forces. Acting on Napoleon's orders, in…

The American Dream, once perceived as a positive promise, is actually an implication of natural selection identified in the concept of Social Darwinism. F. Scott Fitzgerald examines this survival-of-the-richest disarray in his novel The Great Gatsby through exposing the extremist nature of the wealthy. He presents the morality behind the monetary-driven American Dream as the unchanging and everlasting struggle to survive in the human condition. In the context of the novel, however, the primary…

Western’s a genre with a purpose For almost as long as the medium of filmmaking has existed so too has the Western first showcased in Edwin S. Porter film The Great Train Robbery. Though overall a simple film in retrospect the way in which it pushed the medium forward was revolutionary in containing a narrative. Cowboys are the initial American heroes of filmmaking which all others pull from; Westerns as a male focused genre the central genre trope of masculinity have been constructed on a…

In the U.S and the rest of the world, spies are revered by some and despised by others. The novel, The Sympathizer by Viet Thanh Nguyen offers us a chance to look into the mind of a fictional spy to try and understand what goes on in their mind. In most popular media, spies who are the main characters are often the most charismatic and smart people in the book or movies. In real life, spies are usually the people who don’t stand out. When comparing the accuracy from the novel’s portrayal of a…

Gangster archetypes: the gangster, the best friend, the canarian, the moll, the mother are some of the key factors that a gangster movie is made out of. This is, according to Hughes, something that any gangster film has to have in order to be a gangster film (215). All these archetypes are carefully defined and are not prone to significant changes which could be regarded as being in sync with the changes in the state of the society. Still, some of the archetypes did get some alterations, and…

Superhero Comic Books Berlatsky’s article, “The Female Thor and the Female Comic-Book Reader” (2014), argues that girls are interested in reading superhero comics as much as boys; there has been a lot of speculation whether comic books were created to entertain only the masculine audience. In order to stop the sexism that has been going around in the superhero comic book industry, Berlatsky uses the logos Aristotelian appeal to inform the comic book audience that girls have been a fan of comics…

Classical narrative structures are a central feature to any genre of hollywood produced movies, in which a story is beginning told to the audience through this media. However, it is quite seldom that spectators of the movies will be able to see the specfic result of the narrative, due to the structure base created by the director. These narratives are created to give an effortless approach to the audience, who are blind-sided by the no trace of the narrative structure. “Narrative process…

The theme of human sexuality in films by Peter Bogdanovich, Jiri Menzel, Gregg Araki and Gia Coppola display the sense of a perturbed and somewhat disconnected youth in their narratives. The central characters throughout each film face challenges concerning how they display their sexuality. In The Last Picture Show (1971) and Closely Watched Trains (1966) sexuality subtly represents having freedom and gaining respect from others; however, in The Doom Generation (1995) and Palo Alto (2013)…

Just like the world we live in today, detective fiction is a male dominated genre. Detectives are usually white males who solve dangerous crimes such as murder. If women are involved, they are usually characterized as damsels in distress or femme fatales. It is a man’s world; therefore, it is the sole responsibility of men to be the protectors. For centuries, we have lived in a patriarchal society and this mindset has influenced this genre significantly. Men are deemed better detectives because…