Reading Response: Sue Harris

Sue Harris’s had put her emphasis on the Bourne trilogy, a commercially succeeded conspiracy thriller and action picture, as an example, and discussed the presence of conspiracy, surveillance and the spatial turn. One of the reference he had made that has caught my attention is by Fredric Jameson, who said that the genre of conspiracy thrillers is and “allegorical cinematic form” that not only reflect certain incidents or events happen in movies, but to a certain extent it  shows “the functioning of the world system”. This has led me to an extension of thought on the portrayal of Washington DC in the film, which the director did not use iconic architectures like the White House and the Capitol Hill to show the location, but it showed a lot of the surrounding landscapes to sculpt out the state itself. Moreover, fight scenes and building explosions were deliberately avoided to happen near government buildings, but instead they chose to destroy the Solomon R Guggenheim Museum in New York, by the infamous architect Frank Lloyd Wright. This could act as a respond to the socio-economic situation back in the days during the post war period where movies tend to avoid demonstrating actions that reminds people about how traumatising the war was, at the same time trying to create images that hinted the destroying of government authority. Indeed, this kind of mindsets still exist in movies nowadays such as how US movies usually destroy iconic buildings and structure in their country but they always like to destroy the Eiffel Tower (G.I.Joe: The Rise of Cobra), the Tower Bridge (Spider-man: Far From Home) or even the IFC, the HKBOC tower, or central district in Hong Kong (Godzilla Vs Kong).

Wong Ho Wang Caleb

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1 thought on “Reading Response: Sue Harris

  1. Noella Kwok says:

    I appreciate that you started your response by quoting Jameson from Harris’ text. When you are referring to film locations, it would be great if you can mention the name of the film as it is rather confusing now. For instance, All the President’s Men for Washington DC and Three Days of the Condor for New York. You have pointed that the film maker opted to use “surrounding landscapes” rather than the landmarks to represent the cities, you may wish to delve deeper into this point. Are the filming locations equally important as the actions or character development in the story line? Does the cities plays a part in those movies in comparison with more contemporary examples such as the Bourne Trilogy or the James Bond series?

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