Oedipus the King as a Paradigm for Family Trauma Cinema

©2020 by the board of trustees of the university of illinois in a 2008 collection of essays titled Rethinking Tragedy, Rita Felski points out that despite a resurgence of work on tragedy in recent years, one area that has virtually ignored the subject of tragedy is film criticism (6). Although essays have appeared since that time on individual films, systematic work on the conjunction of the two media has not been done. Jennifer Wallace claims that “[f]ilm is not traditionally considered a tragic art form” (172): the pleasure and escapism associated with film viewing are inimical to the spirit and aim of tragedy. Yet she distinguishes certain subgenres of film that achieve a “new language of tragic cinema” (172), such as film noir, the epic film typified by the work of director David Lean, the Western epics of Sergio Leone, the European films exemplified by Krzysztof Kiéslowski’s Three Colours trilogy, and Lars von Trier’s “Dogma” school of filmmaking (172–76). I would disagree with the notion that film is opposed to the spirit of tragedy. It is my contention that the cinema today, as an organ of popular culture of mass proportions, plays a role in our culture similar to that which theater played for the ancient Greeks. Like Greek theater, which was intended to be performed and not read, film is a visual genre. Both Greek tragedy and film possess enormous cathartic power and broad aesthetic scope. The classical Greek tragedians, well aware that all that is necessary for a tragedy is a family, based many of their plays on transmitted myths about doomed families, above all the House of Atreus. Analogously, I have identified a further tragic subgenre in contemporary film in addition to those listed by Wallace: the cinema of family trauma in the United States. What do I mean by family trauma? Radical alienation between family members, addictions of all kinds, child and spousal abuse, child molestation and parentchild incest, sibling incest, loss of one’s child or parent, suicide, and murder—all in the family. Because the number of American films dealing with family trauma appears to have increased during the 1990s and especially around 2000, I focus on the millennium. Although family trauma is a perennial theme and also occurs in avant-garde and foreign films, its treatment in millennial mainstream American film often employs strategies of displacement, projection, repression, and sublimation in order to moderate traumatic experience that would otherwise be very difficult for actors to convey and/or for audiences to view. To mention a few examples: