Hostile Film Quotes

What is more, the whole apparatus of life has become so complex and the processes of production, distribution, and consumption have become so specialized and subdivided, that the individual person loses confidence in his own unaided capacities: he is increasingly subject to commands he does not understand, at the mercy of forces over which he exercises no effective control, moving to a destination he has not chosen. Unlike the taboo-ridden savage, who is often childishly over-confident in the powers of his shaman or magician to control formidable natural forces, however inimical, the machine-conditioned individual feels lost and helpless as day by day he metaphorically punches his time-card, takes his place on the assembly line, and at the end draws a pay check that proves worthless for obtaining any of the genuine goods of life. This lack of close personal involvement in the daily routine brings a general loss of contact with reality: instead of continuous interplay between the inner and the outer world, with constant feedback or readjustment and with stimulus to fresh creativity, only the outer world-and mainly the collectively organized outer world of the power system-exercises authority: even private dreams must be channeled through television, film, and disc, in order to become acceptable. With this feeling of alienation goes the typical psychological problem of our time, characterized in classic terms by Erik Erikson as the 'Identity Crisis.' In a world of transitory family nurture, transitory human contacts, transitory jobs and places of residence, transitory sexual and family relations, the basic conditions for maintaining continuity and establishing personal equilibrium disappear. The individual suddenly awakens, as Tolstoi did in a famous crisis in his own life at Arzamas, to find himself in a strange, dark room, far from home, threatened by obscure hostile forces, unable to discover where he is or who he is, appalled by the prospect of a meaningless death at the end of a meaningless life.

Operating theaters are not nearly as popular as dramatic theaters, musical theaters, and movie theaters, and it is easy to see why. A dramatic theater is a large, dark room in which actors perform a play, and if you are in the audience, you can enjoy yourself by listening to the dialog and looking at the costumes. A musical theater is a large, dark room in which musicians preform a symphony, and if you are in the audience you can enjoy yourself by listening to the melodies and watching the conductor wave his little stick around. And a movie theater is a large, dark room in which a projectionist shows a film, and if you are in the audience, you can enjoy yourself by eating popcorn and gossiping about movie stars. But an operating theater is a large, dark room in which doctors preform medical procedures, and if you are in the audience, the best thing to do is to leave at once because there is never anything on display in an operating theater but pain, suffering and discomfort, and for this reason most operating theaters have been closed down or have been turned into restaurants.

The Joke...Audience as reflexive cast; 35 mm. X2 cameras;variable length; black and white, silent. Parody of Hollis Frampton’s ‘audience-specific events,’ two Ikegami EC-35 video cameras in theater record the film’s audience and project the resultant raster onto screen - the theater audience watching itself watch itself get the obvious ‘joke’ and become increasingly self-conscious and uncomfortable and hostile supposedly comprises the film’s involuted ‘antinarrative’ flow. Incandenza’s first truly controversial project, Film & Kartridge Kulcher’s Sperber credited it with ‘unwittingly sounding the death-knell of post-postsctructural film in terms of sheer annoyance.

I believe the common denominator of the universe is not harmony, but chaos, hostility, and murder.

I spent my childhood and youth on the outskirts of the Alps, in a region that was largely spared the immediate effects of the so-called hostilities. At the end of the war I was just one year old, so I can hardly have any impressions of that period of destruction based on personal experience. Yet to this day, when I see photographs or documentary films dating from the war I feel as if I were its child, so to speak, as if those horrors I did not experience cast a shadow over me … I see pictures merging before my mind’s eye—paths through the fields, river meadows, and mountain pastures mingling with images of destruction—and oddly enough, it is the latter, not the now entirely unreal idylls of my early childhood, that make me feel rather as if I were coming home…

In America, Rousseauism has turned Freud’s conflict-based psychoanalysis into weepy hand-holding. Contemporary liberalism is untruthful about cosmic realities. Therapy, defining anger and hostility in merely personal terms, seeks to cure what was never a problem before Rousseau. Mediterranean, as well as African-American, culture has a lavish system of language and gesture to channel and express negative emotion. Rousseauists who take the Utopian view of personality are always distressed or depressed over world outbreaks of violence and anarchy. But because, as a Sadean, I believe history is in nature and of it, I tend to be far more cheerful and optimistic than my liberal friends. Despite crime’s omnipresence, things work in society, because biology compels it. Order eventually restores itself, by psychic equilibrium. Films like Seven Samurai (1954) and Two Women (1961) accurately show the breakdown of social controls as a regression to animal-like squalor.

He though continually about the apartment building, a Pandora’s Box whose thousand lids were one by one, inwardly opening. The dominant tenants of the high-rise, those who had adapted most successfully to life there, were not the unruly airline pilots and film technicians of the lower floors, nor the bad-tempered and aggressive wives of the tax specialists on the upper levels. Although at first sight these people appeared to provoke all the tension and hostility, the people really responsible were the quiet and self-contained residents, like the dental surgeons Steele and his wife.

Anderson's Moonrise Kingdom is just one of countless contemporary films, works of literature, pieces of music, and lifestyle choices where wishing for innocent times means fetishizing an era when the nation was violently hostile to anyone different.

The Average Occidental- be he a democrat or a Fascist, a Capitalist or a Bolshevik, a manual worker or an intellectual- knows only one positive "religion", and that is the worship of material progress, the belief that there is no other goal in life than to make that very life continually easier or, as the current expression goes, "independent of nature". The temples of this "religion" are the gigantic factories, cinemas, chemical laboratories, dancing halls, hydro- electric works; and its priests are bankers, engineers,film stars, captains of industry, record-airmen. The unavoidable result of this craving after power and pleasure is the creation of hostile groups armed to the teeth and determined to destroy each other whenever their respective interests come to clash. And on the cultural side the result is the creation of a human type whose morality is confined to the question of practical utility alone, and whose highest criterion of good and evil is material progress.

1)    The woman has intuitive feelings that she is at risk. 2)    At the inception of the relationship, the man accelerated the pace, prematurely placing on the agenda such things as commitment, living together, and marriage. 3)    He resolves conflict with intimidation, bullying, and violence. 4)    He is verbally abusive. 5)    He uses threats and intimidation as instruments of control or abuse. This includes threats to harm physically, to defame, to embarrass, to restrict freedom, to disclose secrets, to cut off support, to abandon, and to commit suicide. 6)    He breaks or strikes things in anger. He uses symbolic violence (tearing a wedding photo, marring a face in a photo, etc.). 7)    He has battered in prior relationships. 8)    He uses alcohol or drugs with adverse affects (memory loss, hostility, cruelty). 9)    He cites alcohol or drugs as an excuse or explanation for hostile or violent conduct (“That was the booze talking, not me; I got so drunk I was crazy”). 10)   His history includes police encounters for behavioral offenses (threats, stalking, assault, battery). 11)   There has been more than one incident of violent behavior (including vandalism, breaking things, throwing things). 12)   He uses money to control the activities, purchase, and behavior of his wife/partner. 13)   He becomes jealous of anyone or anything that takes her time away from the relationship; he keeps her on a “tight leash,” requires her to account for her time. 14)   He refuses to accept rejection. 15)   He expects the relationship to go on forever, perhaps using phrases like “together for life;” “always;” “no matter what.” 16)   He projects extreme emotions onto others (hate, love, jealousy, commitment) even when there is no evidence that would lead a reasonable person to perceive them. 17)   He minimizes incidents of abuse. 18)   He spends a disproportionate amount of time talking about his wife/partner and derives much of his identity from being her husband, lover, etc. 19)   He tries to enlist his wife’s friends or relatives in a campaign to keep or recover the relationship. 20)   He has inappropriately surveilled or followed his wife/partner. 21)   He believes others are out to get him. He believes that those around his wife/partner dislike him and encourage her to leave. 22)   He resists change and is described as inflexible, unwilling to compromise. 23)   He identifies with or compares himself to violent people in films, news stories, fiction, or history. He characterizes the violence of others as justified. 24)   He suffers mood swings or is sullen, angry, or depressed. 25)   He consistently blames others for problems of his own making; he refuses to take responsibility for the results of his actions. 26)   He refers to weapons as instruments of power, control, or revenge. 27)   Weapons are a substantial part of his persona; he has a gun or he talks about, jokes about, reads about, or collects weapons. 28)   He uses “male privilege” as a justification for his conduct (treats her like a servant, makes all the big decisions, acts like the “master of the house”). 29)   He experienced or witnessed violence as a child. 30)   His wife/partner fears he will injure or kill her. She has discussed this with others or has made plans to be carried out in the event of her death (e.g., designating someone to care for children).

Punishment cells were set up in the two-story cathedral ... Poles the thickness of an arm were set from wall to wall and prisoners were ordered to sit on these poles all day ... one's feet could not reach the ground. And it was not so easy to keep balance ... the prisoner spent the entire day just trying to maintain his perch. If he fell, the jailers jumped in and beat him ... Every little island and every little hillock of the Archipelago had to be encircled by a hostile, stormy Soviet seascape ... Escapes multiplied ... For half a year the sea was frozen over, but not solidly, and in places there was open water, and the snowstorms raged, and the frost bit hard, and things were enveloped in mists and darkness. And in the spring ... there were the long white nights with clear visibility over long distances for the patrolling cutters ... it was only when the nights began to lengthen, in the late summer and the autumn, that the time was right ... for those who were out in work parties, where a prisoner might have freedom of movement and time to build a boat or a raft near the shore ... and to cast off at night ... and strike out at random, hoping above all to encounter a foreign ship ... The whole long history of the Archipelago, about which it has fallen to me to write this home-grown, homemade book, has, in the course of half a century, found in the Soviet Union almost no expression whatever in the printed word. In this a role was played by that same unfortunate happenstance by which camp watchtowers never got into scenes in films nor into landscapes painted by our artists ...

In short, it was entirely natural that the newts stopped being a sensation, even though there were now as many as a hundred million of them; the public interest they had excited had been the interest of a novelty. They still appeared now and then in films (Sally and Andy, the Two Good Salamanders) and on the cabaret stage where singers endowed with an especially bad voice came on in the role of newts with rasping voices and atrocious grammar, but as soon as the newts had become a familiar and large-scale phenomenon the problems they presented, so to speak, were of a different character. (13) Although the great newt sensation quickly evaporated it was replaced with something that was somewhat more solid - the Newt Question. Not for the first time in the history of mankind, the most vigorous activist in the Newt Question was of course a woman. This was Mme. Louise Zimmermann, the manager of a guest house for girls in Lausanne, who, with exceptional and boundless energy, propagated this noble maxim around the world: Give the newts a proper education! She would tirelessly draw attention both to the newts' natural abilities and to the danger that might arise for human civilisation if the salamanders weren't carefully taught to reason and to understand morals, but it was long before she met with anything but incomprehension from the public. (14) "Just as the Roman culture disappeared under the onslaught of the barbarians our own educated civilisation will disappear if it is allowed to become no more than an island in a sea of beings that are spiritually enslaved, our noble ideals cannot be allowed to become dependent on them," she prophesied at six thousand three hundred and fifty seven lectures that she delivered at women's institutes all over Europe, America, Japan, China, Turkey and elsewhere. "If our culture is to survive there must be education for all. We cannot have any peace to enjoy the gifts of our civilisation nor the fruits of our culture while all around us there are millions and millions of wretched and inferior beings artificially held down in the state of animals. Just as the slogan of the nineteenth century was 'Freedom for Women', so the slogan of our own age must be 'GIVE THE NEWTS A PROPER EDUCATION!'" And on she went. Thanks to her eloquence and her incredible persistence, Mme. Louise Zimmermann mobilised women all round the world and gathered sufficient funds to enable her to found the First Newt Lyceum at Beaulieu (near Nice), where the tadpoles of salamanders working in Marseilles and Toulon were instructed in French language and literature, rhetoric, public behaviour, mathematics and cultural history. (15) The Girls' School for Newts in Menton was slightly less successful, as the staple courses in music, diet and cookery and fine handwork (which Mme. Zimmermann insisted on for primarily pedagogical reasons) met with a remarkable lack of enthusiasm, if not with a stubborn hostility among its young students. In contrast with this, though, the first public examinations for young newts was such an instant and startling success that they were quickly followed by the establishment of the Marine Polytechnic for Newts at Cannes and the Newts' University at Marseilles with the support of the society for the care and protection of animals; it was at this university that the first newt was awarded a doctorate of law.

The shouts continued to sound at the bus stop across the street. A shirtless man wearing a backpack was going around and grabbing women, stumbling here and there, and yelling with hostility. Everyone at the bus stop backed away. A group of able-bodied humans paralyzed by violence seemed incomprehensible. But that was the smoke bomb of monotony entering terrified lungs, lungs alive but too shocked to act. They were afraid of getting harmed themselves to rescue those who cried out in front of them. It was amazing that regardless of how much anger was in someone, the character they might have, and what adventure films they had seen, their body did not want to move when a monster ate in front of them.

I was thinking of starting at the old base in the first film or skipping over that and starting at a new base. We could start on the Ice Planet, which would be striking. We’ve never been there before, an underground installation in a giant snow bank. Very hostile, with wind blowing around and the cold. They’re saying, ‘We’ve got to get rid of the Emperor,’ which we never said in the other film.

Due to Tommy’s lateness, he almost always missed out on filming in mellow morning light. From noon to 5:00 p.m., when Tommy liked to film, you get a wide range of light conditions, most of which are hostile to camera lenses. This should explain why, in the finished film, the Rooftop scenes all look like they’re taking place in different climates and countries, depending on the angle and the shot.

Although it’s mostly just annoying, self-infantilisation’s pervasive existence in the culture could also be the harbinger of something more sinister. Last year, the comic book author Alan Moore suggested that the popularity of superhero films represents an “infantilisation that can very often be a precursor to fascism”. This might sound hyperbolic, but it’s true that a certain kind of kitsch infantilism was always a feature of Nazi art, which was hostile to moral ambiguity and formal complexity. Hitler himself was a Disney adult. If the desire to relinquish responsibility for your own life can be considered an infantile trait, it’s easy to see why this would make you more susceptible to authoritarianism. Today’s white nationalists – with their cartoon Pepes and their ‘frens’ – are as smooth-brain and babyish as any online community, while right-wing reactionaries have recently taken to eulogising 90s video games, Blockbuster and Toys R Us – a glorious past that has been robbed from us by wokeness.

We are sensitive to the odors of others and actively try to catch a whiff. By surreptitiously filming people after a handshake, scientists discovered that the hand that has done the shaking often finds its way to the owner’s nose. They measured how many seconds the hand spent there and even assessed the nasal airflow of some subjects. They found that after interactions within their gender, people take a moment to sniff their hand. Men and women do so equally: men with men and women with women. Handshakes between the genders don’t prompt the same inspection. Automatic-looking gestures (arranging one’s hair, scratching one’s chin) bring the hand close to the face, offering traces of the other’s aroma. Olfactory sampling allows people to assess the level of self-confidence or hostility of potential rivals. Even though humans use the opportunity to smell each other as predictably as rats and dogs, they do so largely unconsciously.4

So-called “Buyers Clubs” filled the vacuum by providing treatments that community doctors and their patients considered effective against AIDS, but that FDA refused to approve. “Dr. Fauci was a liar,” recalls Wallack, who researched Dr. Fauci intensively for her film. “He was utterly beholden to pharmaceutical companies and was hostile to any product that would compete with AZT. He was the real villain of this era. He cost a lot of people their lives.”36

But the main reason Trump won the nomination—and later the general election—was simpler than any of that: he fit the times. Trump had explored running for president twice before, and the voters had shown little interest. This time around, he turned half the country’s unease and confusion about what was happening to America into a powerful political response. In his own way, he articulated the anger that many middle- and working-class Americans felt over the excesses and condescension of the Democratic Party, the coastal elites, and especially the mainstream news media. Trump had diagnosed a decisive divide in the nation: the alienation of average Americans from the increasingly smug and isolated elites that had mismanaged the country and appeared content to preside over a declining America. They felt the old-boy system in Washington had sold them out and that it was time to disrupt the system. Many ordinary Americans were especially sick of the radical progressives’ shrill disparagement of America and scornful attacks on traditional values, and they were deeply frustrated by the wildly partisan role played by the media. In short, in 2016 many voters felt like the character Howard Beale in the 1976 film Network: “I’m as mad as hell, and I’m not going to take this anymore!” Trump’s pugnacious style worked. These frustrated Americans found in him a fighter willing to punch back, go toe-to-toe with the press, and mount a full-throated defense of America and middle-class values. They were tired of the cooing doublespeak of professional politicians and wanted someone who would tell it like it is—straight from the shoulder—and someone willing to follow through and actually do what other politicians said they would do but never did. Trump’s combativeness also enabled him to break through the distortions and smothering hostility of the partisan media and talk right past them, straight to the American people. For many, supporting Trump was an act of defiance—a protest. The more over the top he was, the more they savored the horrified reaction of the elites, especially the media. Arguments that Trump wasn’t presidential missed the point. Trump’s supporters already knew he didn’t conform to presidential norms. Their question was: Where had presidential norms gotten them? They wanted someone who didn’t conform. The Left was taking a wrecking ball to the country. Many fed up Americans wanted to strike back with their own wrecking ball.

Eyes of Laura Mars (1978)—This New York-set thriller operates on mood and atmosphere and moves so fast, with such delicate changes of rhythm, that its excitement has a subterranean sexiness. Faye Dunaway, with long, thick, dark-red hair, is Laura Mars, a celebrity fashion photographer who specializes in the chic and pungency of sadism; the pictures she shoots have a furtive charge—we can see why they sell. Directed by Irvin Kershner, the film has a few shocking fast cuts, but it also has scabrous elegance and a surprising amount of humor. Laura’s scruffy, wild-eyed driver (Brad Dourif) epitomizes New York’s crazed, hostile flunkies; he’s so wound up he seems to have the tensions of the whole city in his gut. Her manager (René Auberjonois) is tense and ambivalent about Laura—about everything. Her models (Lisa Taylor and Dar-lanne Fluegel), who in their poses look wickedly decadent, are really just fun-loving dingalings.

Someone get the camera and start filming!” the oni shouted. A yōkai with a weasel-like face rushed to do as told. The oni then leaned down and whispered in her ear, his grating voice and breath on her neck making Lindsay shiver. “You’re gonna die today, bitch. I’m gonna fucking kill you.” Oh, God! Lindsay felt her bladder threaten to go. Her body was a shivering wreck. She couldn’t control it. Her mind had become overridden with fear. She didn’t know what to do. She couldn’t do anything. She was helpless! The weasel-faced yōkai turned to face them, the camera on. The oni grinned as he gripped Lindsay’s head between his hands. Lindsay sobbed. This was it. She was going to die. She was going to die and there was nothing she could do about it. I don’t wanna die… Visions flashed before her eyes, images of her friends, of her family, of the people she would leave behind. Please… She thought about Kevin, the boy she still sorta liked, even though he was a male. Someone… She thought about Christine, the girl she did like, and regret welled up inside of her as she realized she would never see the yuki-onna again. Help… “I want everyone to watch this,” the oni said, but his voice sounded far away. Lindsay’s mind was locked, clammed up with fear and overflowing with remorse. “This is what happens to humans who think they can befriend us! You should all learn to fear yōkai!” This… this is the end. Lindsay closed her eyes, hoping against hope that it would make the end less painful, that maybe, just maybe, if she closed her eyes, she wouldn’t suffer as much. “Prepare for trouble!” “And make it double!” What? Lindsay’s eyes snapped wide open upon hearing two very familiar voices. She quickly looked toward where she heard the voices and couldn’t believe her eyes. There, standing in the center of the amphitheater, back to back, was Kevin and Lilian. Hope welled up inside of her breast. It was a hope that suddenly stopped, giving way to confusion instead, when she saw their outfits. Are they wearing leather spandex?

Lilian felt a fire burning in her soul, which manifested into ethereal flames that burned around her like an aura. She was so pumped up. They were going to do this! They had to do this! Then, once they started protesting, their sheer awesomeness would make everyone else snap to their senses and join them—just like in a shōnen manga! Yes, she could see it all now: Lilian stood in front of the camera, Kevin by her side, holding her hand. In front of them was a woman with a microphone and a cameraman stood behind her, filming their triumphant moment. “Ms. Pnév̱ma, you and your mate have just brought peace between humans and yōkai. What are you going to do next?” asked the woman with the microphone. “We’re going to celebrate by having sex!” Lilian declared. “Lots and lots of sex,” Kevin added. “Uh huh…” “And then we’re going to Disneyland!” The newscaster stared at her oddly, and even Kevin was looking at her like she’d said something strange. In response to their expressions, Lilian covered her mouth with her hand in a very Kotohime-esque manner. “Ufufufu, sorry. I’ve always wanted to say that at least once.

In his book about boys, Dobson found occasion to denounce Hillary Clinton, “bra burners,” political correctness, and the “small but noisy band of feminists” who attacked “the very essence of masculinity.” He praised Phyllis Schlafly and recommended homeschooling as “a means of coping with a hostile culture.” He advised girls not to call boys on the telephone (to do so would usurp the role of initiator) and encouraged fathers to engage in rough-and-tumble games with their sons. He lamented that films presenting moral strength and heroism had given way to “man-hating diatribes” like Thelma & Louise and 9 to 5, and that “lovely, feminine ladies” on the small screen had been replaced by “aggressive and masculine women” like those in Charlie’s Angels. Mel Gibson’s The Patriot, a tale in which Gibson starred as a Revolutionary militia leader who ruthlessly avenged his son’s death, proved the exception to the rule. 10

On its own, Moonrise Kingdom is a relatively harmless film. But for those of us who have been currently shocked by the “unadulterated white racism…splattered all over the media,” we might ask ourselves what has helped fuel our country’s wistfully manufactured “screen memory.” Anderson’s Moonrise Kingdom is just one of countless contemporary films, works of literature, pieces of music, and lifestyle choices where wishing for innocent times means fetishizing an era when the nation was violently hostile to anyone different. Hollywood, an industry that shapes not only our national but global memories, has been the most reactionary cultural perpetrator of white nostalgia, stuck in a time loop and refusing to acknowledge that America’s racial demographic has radically changed since 1965. Movies are cast as if the country were still “protected” by a white supremacist law that guarantees that the only Americans seen are carefully curated European descendants.

1 Cor. xv. 24: "Then cometh the end, when He shall deliver up the kingdom to God, even the Father; when He shall have abolished all rule and all authority and power." Christ will abolish these things, not merely in connection with evil, but absolutely. When He is supreme Monarch and there is no other power, friendly or hostile, in existence, then shall the Son also be subject to the Father, that God may be all in all. Who shall tell the majesty and glory of God's purpose? Let us cease to have circumscribed ideas regarding God and His Christ. He to whom a thousand years are but as yesterday when it is past and as a watch in the night, is moving on, despite our fret and worry. "For I doubt not through the ages one increasing purpose runs, And the thoughts of men are widened with the process of the suns." Who shall tell what lies beyond the handing of the Kingdom to God? Did you ever dream that there must come in the endless and illimitable time-which is not time, but eternity-a moment of weariness, a sense of monotony? Nay, think also of endless space. The sensitized film reveals stars which no astronomer has ever examined. Reach the further limit thus marked, and space is still before you. God is there, as here, limitless and unexhausted; and where He is, is love. All the things of which we have spoken are but the passing of His breath. While God and Love live on, there never can come weariness to the children of His love. "And every one that hath this hope set on Him, purifieth himself, as He is pure.

The conceptual auto-disaster. The volunteer panels were shown fake safety propaganda movies in which implausible accidents were staged. Far from eliciting a humorous or sardonic response from the audience, marked feelings of hostility were shown towards the film and medical support staff. Subsequent films of genuine accidents exerted a notably calming effect. From this and similar work it is clear that Freud’s classic distinction between the manifest and latent content of the inner world of the psyche now has to be applied to the outer world of reality. A dominant element in this reality is technology and its instrument, the machine. In most roles the machine assumes a benign or passive posture - telephone exchanges, engineering hardware, etc. The twentieth century has also given birth to a vast range of machines - computers, pilotless planes, thermonuclear weapons - where the latent identity of the machine is ambiguous even to the skilled investigator. An understanding of this identity can be found in a study of the automobile, which dominates the vectors of speed, aggression, violence and desire. In particular the automobile crash contains a crucial image of the machine as conceptualized psychopathology. Tests on a wide range of subjects indicate that the automobile, and in particular the automobile crash, provides a focus for the conceptualizing of a wide range of impulses involving the elements of psychopathology, sexuality and self-sacrifice.

Anderson’s Moonrise Kingdom is just one of countless contemporary films, works of literature, pieces of music, and lifestyle choices where wishing for innocent times means fetishizing an era when the nation was violently hostile to anyone different. Hollywood, an industry that shapes not only our national but global memories, has been the most reactionary cultural perpetrator of white nostalgia, stuck in a time loop and refusing to acknowledge that America’s racial demographic has radically changed since 1965. Movies are cast as if the country were still “protected” by a white supremacist law that guarantees that the only Americans seen are carefully curated European descendants.

But film sometimes flinches at the expertise of actresses, and the sympathetic viewer may come to realize that there was a mute honesty in Novak: she did not conceal the fact that she had been drawn into a world capable of exploiting her. Filming seemed an ordeal for her; it was as if the camera hurt her. But while many hostile to the movies rose in defense of the devastation of Marilyn Monroe—whether or not she was a sentient victim—Novak was stoical, obdurate, or sullen. She allowed very few barriers between that raw self and the audience and now looks dignified, reflective, and responsive to feeling where Monroe appears haphazard and oblivious. Novak is the epitome of every small-town waitress or beauty contest winner who thought of being in the movies. Despite a thorough attempt by Columbia to glamorize her, she never lost the desperate attentiveness of someone out of her depth but refusing to give in. Her performances improve with time so that ordinary films come to center on her; even Vertigo, Hitchcock’s masterpiece, owes some of its power to Novak’s harrowing suspension between tranquility and anxiety.