Peaky Blinders serially and cumulatively critiques and subverts the (narrative) troping of trauma, both regarding its genesis and continuity/persistence, by diversifying and complicating its central properties and classifications in what, I argue, amounts to a parapractic approach to both trauma and historical fiction.
View More Ambiguity and Parapraxis: Serially Reframing Trauma in “Peaky Blinders”
The perennial popularity of films, mini-dramas, and documentary-style TV shows depicting serial killers reflects the symbiotic state between production and our fascinated consumption. As a culture, it seems we return to the scenes of violent and notorious crimes compulsively. Mark Seltzer implies the extent of our interest in this particular configuration of masculinity when he writes that representations of the serial killer and serial murder ‘have by now largely replaced the Western as the most popular genre-fiction of the body and of bodily violence in our culture’ (1).
View More Returning to the Scene: Seriality and the Serial Killer in Mindhunter (2017-)