ABSTRACT

In film as well, specimens of collective traumatic reliving are in lamentably short supply by historic standards. On the other hand, individual traumatic reliving has made itself very much at home on the silver screen. This most popular and most commercial of the arts has provided pure personalized instances of the mechanism on the loose in its manifold guises and disguises while probing its workings ever deeper. Beyond traumatic reliving Chinatown evokes, with the same blend of naturalism and symbolism, a broad spectrum of the public and private corruption endemic to modern life in the canons of film noir. Traumatic reliving was turned inside out by Christopher Nolan’s enigmatic Memento of 2000 about an insurance adjuster named Leonard. A delightfully inventive variant of traumatic reliving in the form of juvenile science fiction is the first and key episode, of Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man, loosely based on a comic strip of that name.