Rocznik Komparatystyczny
“Things Have Moved on in the South,” Or the Art of Forgiveness as in Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri by Martin McDonagh (2017)
DOI: 10.18276/rk.2019.10-05
Cite
The full text is available
| ISSN: | 2081-8718 |
| eISSN: | 2353-2831 |
| Authors: |
Beata
Zawadka
University of Szczecin |
| Keywords: | film studies affective studies performative studies American South forgiveness |
| Issue / book publication date: | 2019 |
| Page range: | 10 (85-94) |
| OAI-PMH: | Metadata |
 
| |
Abstract
Martin McDonagh’s 2017 film entitled Three Billboards.. has been critically hailed as the film “about vengeance, violence and the acceptance of death,” controversial mainly “for its handling of racial themes” and considered “empty of emotional intelligence” as well as “devoid of any remotely honest observation of the society it purports to serve.” How come, then, that yet another embodiment of the U.S. South as culture’s “bad guy,” has managed to win so many accolades, including Oscar nominations (7) and Oscar awards (3) as well as e.g. 4 Golden Globe awards or 5 BAFTA awards? My paper attempts to approach this question by claiming that the film successfully “advertises,” much as its titular billboards do, and on all levels of its cultural production, contemporary southernness as the art of forgiveness. I am curious to see if and how such a vision of the South lets the region off the hook as culture’s aberration.
Preview PDF
Bibliography
- Bradshaw, Peter. “Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri – Darkly Hilarious Portrait of Disenfranchised USA.” The Guardian 12 (2018). https://www.theguardian.com/film/2018/jan/12/three-billboards-outside-ebbing-missouri-review-frances- mcdormand [accessed: 20.03.2019].
- Girgus, Sam B. Levinas and the Cinema of Redemption. Time, Ethics, and the Feminine. New York: Columbia University Press, 2010.
- Gleeson-White, Sarah. “Revising Southern Grotesque: Mikhail Bakhtin and the Case of Carson McCullers.” The Southern Literary Journal 33.2 (2001): 108–123.
- O’Connnor, Flannery. “Some Aspects of the Grotesque in Southern Fiction.” Mystery and Manners. Occasional Prose. Selected & Edited by Sally and Robert Fitzgerald. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1969 (1957). Kindle edition. Loc. 336–469.
- Röttger-Rössler, Birgitt, Jan Slaby. Affect in Relation. Families, Places, Technologies. London–New York: Routledge, 2018.
- Segrest, Mab. “Southern Women Writing: Toward a Literature of Wholeness.” Eadem. My Mama’s Dead Squirrel: Lesbian Essays on Southern Culture. Ann Arbor: Firebrand, 1985. 19–42.
- Spiegel, Alan. “A Theory of Grotesque in Southern Fiction.” The Georgia Review 26.4 (1972): 426–437.
- Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri. Dir. Martin McDonagh, 2017.
- Wilkinson, Alissa. “How Three Billboards Went from Film Fest Darling to Awards-Season Controversy.” Vox, 22 (2018). http://www.vox.com [accessed: 20.03.2019].