Rolling Thunder: On the Spatial Politics of Border Crossing in Transcultural Media

Abstract

A man sits in the dark. He stares at a screen. He is watching something terrifying. George C. Scott stars as Jake VanDorn, a devout Calvinist and prosperous businessman from the country, who travels under a false identity to Los Angeles, San Diego and San Francisco to the porno underworld in search of his missing daughter. Posing as an important producer of adult movies, he finds himself in a criminal S/M subculture that produces snuff movies: that is movies, in which people are killed while the camera is running. Such a snuff movie is shown to VanDorn in a dark backroom. It depicts how a woman in bondage accessories is tied up by a man with a whip and abused until another person suddenly enters the scene and stabs the man. The newcomer immediately kills the young woman as well. After he removes the leather mask from her face, he uses a dagger-like knife to slit the throat of the victim who is screaming for help. And that is how the film ends.

Within the structured marketplace of myths, the continuity and persistence of particular genres may be seen as keys to identifying the culture’s deepest and most persistent concerns. Likewise, major breaks in the development of important genres may signal the presence of a significant crisis of cultural values and organization.

Richard Slotkin (1992, p. 8)

Now every evening

Well, just after supper time

He’d go into the back bedroom

And he’d lock the door behind

He’d lie awake, a telephone line stretched out across a chair

Just him and a few bad habits

He’d brought back from over there

Bruce Springsteen, Shut Out the Light (1983)