Introduction
1. The Traumatic Screen: Trauma, Psychoanalysis and Cinema
2. Revisiting the Scene of the Crime: Repressing the Past in Insomnia
3. Batman Begins, Again: The Temporality of Trauma in The Dark Knight Trilogy
4. Looking for the Secret: The Intersection between Trauma and Desire in The Prestige
5. The Dream has Become Their Reality: Acting-Out and Working-Through Trauma in Inception
6. Beyond the Void: Interstellar and the Possibilities of Post-Traumatic Growth
7. Keep Calm and Carry On: Combating Collective Trauma in Dunkirk
8. Conclusion – Ending at the Beginning with Doodlebug, Following and Memento
Stuart Joy is a senior lecturer in film and television at Solent University in Southampton, UK. His research interests include contemporary film theory and practice, media and cultural theory, film history and gender representation in film and television.
'Nolan's films have been explored in a number of critical works,
but this is the first study to examine his work—from Doodlebug
(1997) to Dunkirk (2017)—from a psychoanalytic perspective. The
characters in Nolan’s films typically have undergone a traumatic
experience and must reconcile past memories in order to move
forward. [Joy's] synthesized approach to trauma [...] looks at
themes of time, memory, identity, and narrative, motifs that are
recurring elements in Nolan's films. For example, he takes a
Freudian approach to exploring how the murder of the parents of the
young Bruce Wayne (Batman) affected Wayne's development. A solid
addition to the literature on Nolan.'
*CHOICE*
'Stuart Joy’s The Traumatic Screen provides a careful and accurate
analysis of the films of one of the most important contemporary
directors: Christopher Nolan. Nolan’s films are not without
criticism, and the final analysis might reveal that only a few of
the (justly) lauded works of Christopher Nolan are truly worthy of
the appellation “great.” Nonetheless, the best of Christopher
Nolan’s films are delightful intellectual puzzles that help provide
a deeper understanding of human nature, and Stuart Joy’s The
Traumatic Screen is a helpful guide to Nolan’s labyrinthian
films.'
*Jesse Russell, Voegelinview*
'Overall, a good arc is drawn across the structure of the entire
book, which repeatedly takes up the central themes of trauma,
desire, time and melancholy and substantiates them using film
examples. The analysis sections, each of which deals with the
respective film in great detail, are written in a particularly
comprehensible and clear manner. Even for readers who have not seen
the films, Joy has been able to close gaps in the content with
concise summaries and provides a very informative overall picture.
[...] The author goes into great theoretical depth, which is why
this work is definitely useful for further professional work.'
*David Brosch, MEDIENwissenschaft: Rezensionen | Reviews
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