The American Weird by Julius Greve;Florian Zappe;

Author:Julius Greve;Florian Zappe;
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781350141216
Publisher: Bloomsbury UK

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From a Heap of Broken Images Toward a Postcolonial Weird

Ana Lily Amirpour’s Western Landscapes

Maryam Aras

“I watched the ‘Making of Michael Jackson’s Thriller’ video thousands of times. It taught me how to be an American” (Rizov 2014), filmmaker Ana Lily Amirpour said during an interview for the promotion of her first feature film A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night (2014). The behind-the-scenes documentary from 1983 accounts for all the hard work and dedication the best among makeup artists, choreographers, and costume designers put into the short music film that was to become one of the most iconic pop products of its time (MTV 1983).

“Why Michael wanted to make Thriller the most—he wanted to change into a monster,” makeup artist (credited as “monster maker”) Rick Baker explains in the making of. A few moments later, Jackson repeats: “You put this thing on and you slowly metamorphosize into this whole other person.” How to create “the perfect illusion” is certainly not what young Ana Lily Amirpour, child of Iranian immigrants, born 1980 in the UK, took away from watching the documentary “thousands of times.” Her films do, however, speak the language of American pop culture, of citation, pastiche, a fascination for the weird, of intermediality. What the filmmaker-to-be seemed to have learned from it is the very meaning of US pop culture—the space it occupies in US society and in people’s lives, the transformational power it contains, and the ways in which fiction and reality are so often intertwined. And, after all, that its products can be for everybody—as the scenes of fan crowds consisting of mainly black and latino/latina teenagers cheering Michael Jackson from afar suggest (MTV 1983).

In her two feature films, A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night (2014) and The Bad Batch (2016), Amirpour consequently rearranges classic American genres as the Western and the gothic movie, and she does it in a weirded fashion. Building upon long-established and postmodern imagery alike, she creates new meaning by resignifying and hybridizing those proto-American traditions. How does the weird in her work correlate with her stance of becoming American through watching the Making of Michael Jackson’s Thriller documentary? This chapter takes Amirpour’s self-placement as a starting point to discuss her understanding of Americanness which is—as argued here—fundamentally tied to the weird in her to-date two full-length movies. Characterizing her first movie as an “Iranian vampire spaghetti western” and setting her second film in an outdoor prison across the Texas desert inhabited by followers of a grotesque cult, Amirpour creates the western landscape as a “thematic space” (Bal 2009: 139) that acts through resignification and hybridization of long-established US-American imagery. In this chapter, I argue that both films make use of the weird as a basic principle of Amirpour’s vision of America.

The weird in Amirpour’s films takes (at least) two different shapes: It creates an aesthetic surface of a creative interplay of filmic citations, allusions, and symbols that are weird by means of hybridization and verfremdung. Here, she plays the keys of postmodern cinema coming from the position of her own Iranian Americana.

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