Hiding homoeroticism in plain view: the Fight Club DVD as digital closet

A ‘Manual on Masculinity’? The Consumption and Use of Mediated Images of Masculinity among Teenage Boys in Ireland

“…' Of the limited number of male audience studies available, most challenge the notion that mediated violence encourages or endorses violent behaviour, claiming instead that mediated violence functions symbolically as a cipher for other -generally class-related -struggles and anxieties (Robbins and Cohen, 1978;Walkerdine, 1986;Fiske and Dawson, 1996;Lacey, 2002). In this study, however, discussions about David Fincher's film Fight Club revealed that participants did not read the film metaphorically but rather somewhat literally: it was not considered to be an interesting film because of its postmodern irony (Sconce, 2002), its blistering critique of and simultaneous internalisation of consumer culture (Church-Gibson, 2004), its masculinity-in-crisis rhetoric (Giroux and Szeman, 2001) or its homoerotic subtext (Brookey and Westerfelhaus, 2002) but because participants could relate it to a core concern in their lives, namely the realities of male violence and fighting in Irish towns, cities and suburbs. In the various group discussions about violence, many participants spoke of the fear of getting beaten up as one of the main problems that young men had to contend with, and cited bullying and an inability to discuss problems as key factors in male suicide.…”

Interstitial film viewing: community exhibition in the twenty-first century

“…This process is not dissimilar to that offered by the DVD wherein extra features such as the director's commentary (running at the same time as the filmic text) allow the constructions of the film to break down any illusion of self-contained unity. Nonetheless, Brookey and Westerfelhaus (2002) point out the way in which DVDs extras often inscribe a preferred reading inline with the media production centre behind the DVD. There is thus greater potential for active deconstruction of the text in community exhibition when it is community members and exhibitors who drive the parameters of the debate.…”

The digital auteur: Branding identity on theMonsters, Inc.DVD

“…While Parker and Parker do not mention it directly, their criticism seems rooted in auteur theory, and reproduces some of the same modernist assumptions that informed early approaches to autuerism. Brookey and Westerfelhaus (2002) discuss auteur theory directly, albeit briefly, in their analysis of the Fight Club DVD. Their approach acknowledges the commercial uses of the auteur, when they argue that the supposed intentions voiced in the commentaries operate to privilege preferred readings while discounting others.…”