Cinema Thinking Affect: The Hustler's Soft Magic

Abstract

By means of an examination of a series of films that deal with the nature and scope of the adolescent world (such as Larry Clark's Kids, Gus Van Sant's Elephant, and Tim Hunter's River's Edge), the authors contend that adolescence is not a passage from childhood to adulthood. Rather, they argue that adolescence is a radical form of otherness that signals a moment on the road to becoming human. Their analysis draws from the repertoire of recent adolescence films in order to examine the tropes of sex and death as they are deployed in the valuation of the terms human and non-human, thereby shedding new light on the coding of difference that produces the ground of humanness.