Film Hero Research Articles

Masculinity, mobility and transformation in Punjabi cinema: From Putt Jattan De (Sons of Jat Farmers) to Munde UK De (Boys of UK)

This article explores the popular representation of masculinity in Punjabi cinema and how it has changed over the past three decades as the Punjabi film industry has gone from being regionally based to increasingly transnational. I look at how within Punjabi films, caste and class hierarchies operate as mechanisms for visibly marking the cinematic representations of hegemonic masculinity. The heroes of Punjabi films often belong to the landowning ‘Jat’ caste. The performance of their masculinity is typified by their ability to move between different rural, urban and transnational spaces. This ability to successfully navigate the unfamiliar terrains of the world outside their villages serves as a rite of passage to becoming a man, a testament to their masculine affirmation. The construction of the mobile gendered body of the Punjabi hero within Punjabi cinema represents a privileged site upon which Punjabi cultural identity is articulated both in India and within the Punjabi diaspora.

Heroic gay characters in popular film: Tragic determination, and the everyday

This essay discusses gay identity and notions of character construction relating to the concept of tragic determination in media representations. Issues of adaptation and the significance of the Dionysian and Apollonian drives within tragedy (relating to Nietzsche's foundational work) are explored. A key concept is the examination of tensions between civic usefulness and emotive potential. Through an examination of Alan Turing's disavowal as a gay icon (as a war time hero) in the Hollywood film Enigma (dir. Michael Apted 2001) in the substitution of a heterosexual romance, and conversely his sympathetic representation within the stage and television drama Breaking the Code (dir. Hugh Whitemore 1986), this essay reveals the problem of the gay hero in popular film, and its sensibility in diverse adaptations. In exploring the contemporary ‘heroic’ representation of gay political icons, Harvey Milk and Pedro Zamora, this essay also reveals a problem-oriented cinematic world where the spectre of the sacrificial/tragic gay self offers replacement for the historic subordinated and othered gay character. In this way, new stimulations of mainstream media commodity offer the potential of subaltern transgression, yet at the same time reinforce the periphery of diverse sexual identity.

Bridging the gaps: The construction of Paris in Luc Besson's Angel-A (2005)

ABSTRACTLuc Besson's Angel-A (2005), whose seemingly incompatible characters, genres and intertextual allusions reach reconciliation only in and by virtue of the space in which they are contained, foregrounds an eclecticism characteristic of twenty-first-century French films set in Paris. Like the film's heroes, Besson seeks to ‘make the most’ of Paris by turning the city into the film's chief protagonist and the bridges of Paris, particularly the pont Alexandre III, into the film's key signifiers of passage, suspension and connection. The sheer extravagance of Besson's view of the city also provides the key to the film's generic identity, which recalls the screwball comedies of the 1930s and early 1940s. The visual and structural importance of Paris in Angel-A further serves to figure the metaphorical bridge that Besson creates between his own work and a number of other films, both classical and contemporary.

The patient's heroic journey

The purpose of this study is to reinforce the notion that not only is the patient the focus of decisions on the pathway to recovery through the healthcare system, but this requires the support and cooperation of many healthcare professionals. By using a storytelling arc and character archetypes taken from the narrative theory of cinema, it shows how the patient's decisionpathway is similar to the journey of the hero in film, and that healthcare professionals have key and supporting roles in this story. It results in healthcare professionals matching specific archetypes encountered in film, and equates stages of the decisions pathway to events in film structure. The outcome emphasises the patient-centred approach and the necessity of interprofessional cooperation.

Tan Dun and Zhang Yimou between Film and Opera

Tan Dun's opera, The First Emperor—premiered in 2006 at the Metropolitan Opera and staged by the Chinese film director Zhang Yimou—was based on a preexistent film and was intended as a sequel to their 2002 film Hero. This cluster of films and performances, the intricate connections between Chinese opera and film, and Tan's and Zhang's prior work in both media offer an excellent opportunity for comparative study of the “operatic” and “cinematic” in musical and visual terms. The prominence of these figures and the charged context in which these works were created prompt investigation of their cultural and political implications as well.

Byron Society of America Sessions MLA Convention, San Francisco 27 and 28 December 2008

n December 2008, for the first time, the Byron Society of America organised not one but two sessions at the MLA Convention. The first session investigated connections between Byron and popular culture. This topic built on several recent studies that have sought to link Byron with the popular culture of his own time, as well as tracing later manifestations of Byronic sensibilities, themes and ideas. From Francis Wilson's collection Byromania: Portraits of the Artist in Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century Culture (1999), to the coda of Fiona MacCarthy's 2002 biography and the exhibition she curated at the National Portrait Gallery, to Atara Stein's study of The Byronic Hero in Fiction, Film and Television (2004), a number of Byron's critics have begun to pay useful attention to popular culture. The session was entitled 'Byron and/as/in Popular Culture', and took place at the San Francisco Hilton on Saturday 27 December. In choosing this title, with its unlovely hybrid conjunction, the aim was to identify three distinct ways in which this area of interest might be extended in new and productive directions: firstly, by exploring Byron's lifelong engagement with popular culture, from boxing to pantomimes; secondly, by thinking about the circulation of his works among a popular audience; thirdly, by engaging with the ways in which Byron and his works were appropriated and redeployed in popular texts. The three papers presented on the panel engaged in different but complementary ways with this topic. Susan Wolfson (Princeton) gave a paper called 'Picturing Celebrity: Byron, West, and LEL', which examined Benjamin West's portrait of Byron (the last formal portrait to be taken from life) and Letitia Landon's poetic responses to it. She showed how West represented an older Byron, tending to plumpness, who was out of step with the popular conception of the poet fostered by the Oriental Tales and the portraits by Thomas Phillips and Richard Westall. Landon's strategy when writing an ekphrasis on this image was to try to discover the earlier, more 'Romantic' Byron beneath the surface, as it were. In the process, she positioned herself both as an outstanding reader of Byron and as his true successor. Mark Shoenfield (Vanderbilt) offered a reading of Byron's relationship with The Satirist and other contemporary satirical periodicals in a paper called 'The Culture of Comparison: Byron in The Satirist'. He was especially interested in Byron's relationship with Hewson Clarke, who attacked Byron early on and was attacked in turn in English Bards. Schoenfield has immersed himself in the periodical writing of the period and his research has unearthed some wonderful examples of satirical swipes at Byron in the periodical press. Particularly entertaining were the mock applications for the post of Poet Laureate from Byron and Wordsworth, which appeared in The Satirist after Henry Pye's death left the post vacant in 1813. Finally, Dino Felluga (Purdue), who spoke on behalf of himself and Emily Allen about their joint research, gave a paper called 'The Sensation of Byron'. It examined Byron's appearance in the sensation novel of the mid-nineteenth century, focusing especially on Mary Elizabeth Braddon's The Doctor's Wife (1864), a rewriting of Flaubert's Madame Bovary adapted for the sensation genre. …

On Zhang Yimou's Hero: Counter-response

Zhang Yimou's film Hero is an investigation into culturalism, or the demand, embedded in the nation-state form, that all nations represent themselves through a unique and readily recognizable culture. Hero implies that this demand is a trap, and that the only way to global recognition among the ‘family of nations’ is through more direct cultivation of political, economic, and military power.

A Brief Response to Wendy Larson's ‘Zhang Yimou's Hero: dismantling the myth of cultural power’

Wendy Larson's nuanced essay on Zhang Yimou's film Hero, recently published in the pages of this journal, has prompted me to reconsider my interpretation of the film. Though persuaded by some of her contentions, I remain convinced that the film, whether intended or not, is an example of commercial cinema in ideological support of the state and, more broadly, of ‘totalitarianism in general’. In order to sustain our productive conflict of interpretations, I here offer a summary of the key points in Larson's argument, followed by a selective critical response of my own.

Wake up call from ′Stars on the Ground′

Byline: T. Sathyanarayana Rao, V.S.T. Krishna It might not be over stating, to say that movies have made inroads within the minds of the public since their inception. The Indian subcontinent too, is in line with this global scenario. Perhaps it will be a hard task to find a matching medium on par with movies in terms of the magnitude of the impact on the public psyche. Movies have immense potential in depicting the intricacies of human life. Further, movies go a long way in touching human lives in great detail. Unlike any of the other medium which humans have invented so far, movies are influencing persons hailing from all cross sections in our society, irrespective of their age, sex, education, occupation, intellectual levels and socio-economic and cultural backgrounds. These comments are of more relevance while one ponders over a recent Indian movie, Taare Zameen Par (Stars on the Ground), with a subtitle Every child is special as a timely reminder of an oft forgotten truth. The impact of the medium was borne out once again to us. A 19 years moderately retarded young boy reported with a series of complaints as stated by the relatives: that he would get up in the middle of the night and wander at large, to return in the morning hours and sleep in the daytime. During his roaming in the night hours it was reported that he gate- crashed into neighboring households and stole the dresses of women. Further, he behaved excitedly while interacting with women and tried to pull their hair and tug at their sarees and he would burst into laughter at his own acts. It was also reported that he refused to eat food, becoming aggressive and shouting at family members and was resorting to disrobing himself on the roads, often dancing nude. Unable to bear his wild acts and huge neighbourhood pressure, his family members had admitted him to a government psychiatric facility and he was kept on anti-psychotics and ECTs. The outcome was very poor. Following this, he was admitted into a rehabilitation facility. After repeated home visits by a psychiatric social worker, this young boy was encouraged to participate in a supportive social group interaction. In this social group in spite of his compromised communication skills, this boy opened up to express his experiences and feelings with considerable clarity. He revealed that he had been trying to imitate the heroes of films! Further, he stated that he felt dejected and appalled at being beaten up whereas film heroes are envied and applauded for the same kind of deeds on celluloid. Following this revelation the treatment process and the approach to this patient was drastically changed and the boy started showing good progress. A key aspect of this case study to be noticed seriously is the stupendous power of films and their ability to affect the thought process, as well as the emotional and behavior repertoire of different sections of our society. The recent gun-shootings in the school corridors in are also to be reviewed from the dimension of the role of media, especially the films and their impact on school children. On the other side of the coin there are several movies which can be cited which have demonstrated positive effects on the psyche too. There is little doubt that Mr. Shahrukh Khan could ignite team spirit and drive to fight out odds, through his Chak de India performance. The passionate patriotism was in line with Aamir Khan's classic film Lagaan. Even Swadesh could move many well qualified technocrats across the globe to feel for India. By the clarion call given by the role of space scientist, played by Mr. Shahrukh Khan sensitized viewers very earnestly to feel for one's own motherland, not to forget the smell of the soil where one is born and brought up, to respect our roots and to bond with the people of the land A keen psychiatrist, or for that matter any other concerned mental health professional can not remain aloof from the fact that movies are doing a plausible job in grasping the challenges to mental health issues and sometimes offering creative remedies. …

Borat the Trickster: Folklore and the Media, Folklore in the Media

Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan (2006) elicits extreme and contradictory audience responses. Some filmgoers find it amusing and clever, while others consider it repulsive, even obscene. Analyzing the film's hero as a traditional and archetypical trickster figure, a master of contradictions, a violator of boundaries, can help explain audience reaction. But while traditional folklore tricksters act in a fantasy world, Sacha Baron Cohen entered the lives of real people in trickster (dis) guise. For theater audiences removed from the interactions that created Borat, this film might serve the function of traditional trickster narratives, even as those appearing in the film feel exploited. By using real people and real situations, Baron Cohen has also precluded a follow-up or sequel: folkloric tricksters adapt with time, but a person immediately recognizable as a Hollywood figure cannot reassume trickster (dis)guise.

Zhang Yimou's Hero: dismantling the myth of cultural power

Zhang Yimou's 2002 film Hero has been acclaimed by audiences and attacked by film and cultural critics, who often interpret it as an example of fascist aesthetics that supports totalitarianism in general and the Chinese authoritarian state in particular. I analyse Hero as an investigation into the viability of culturalism, or a meditation on aesthetics and its relationship to political power under the conditions of the nation state and the ‘community of nations’ to which modern countries belong. Culturalism refers to the implicit nation state mandate that each nation must have a set of distinct cultural practices, ideas and forms that inspire love and delight in the homeland, are readily represented and performed, and are powerful enough to lure and capture the gaze of the outsider while simultaneously appearing authentic in the eyes of the insider. Hero shows the false underpinnings of culturalism, in the process dismantling a powerful twentieth-century myth.

Negotiating National Identity on Film

How are national identities transformed? If they are mostly narratives of belonging to a community of history and destiny to which people subscribe, those boundary-making procedures that constitute the political field by instituting differences can provide a tentative answer to this question. This paper is concerned with one such cultural practice, namely film-viewing. Globalisation, a boundary-blurring practice, has been the backdrop against which transformations in national identity are often discussed, either bemoaned as cultural imperialism or celebrated as ongoing hybridisation. This piece of research took Zhang Yimou’s controversial film Hero as a point of departure, and asked groups of Chinese audiences how they understood the Chinese identity it conveys. Although it is still a work in progress, provisional results are reported below.

Polyglot Joyce: Fictions of Translation (review)

Reviewed by: Polyglot Joyce: Fictions of Translation Tim Conley Patrick O'Neill. Polyglot Joyce: Fictions of TranslationToronto: University of Toronto Press, 2005. 301 pages. $55.00. In Woody Allen's Bananas (1971), the film's hero, Fielding Melish (Allen), inadvertently becomes the revolutionary leader of a small third-world country. Returning in Castro-like disguise to his own country, the United States, he is met at by a government dignitary and an “official interpreter.” When the dignitary asks Melish, “Did you have a good flight?” the interpreter repeats the question with his own Spanish accent; when Melish firmly says, “Yes, I did,” the interpreter in turn cheerfully says to the dignitary, “Yes, I did.” After a few exchanges like this, the interpreter is chased away by white-coated orderlies waving an oversized butterfly net.1 Even as the viewer's smile fades, the question lingers: Was this a good translator or a bad one? Has he not given Melish's Jewish New York idiom a newly Spanish flavour, thus making his words exactly what the dignitary wants and expects them to be—those of a Spanish-speaking revolutionary? Or has he committed the crime most biliously excoriated by Vladimir Nabokov (71), regarded by others (among them, Walter Benjamin [79–80]), and been too “transparent,” too “invisible” himself? To judge translation means to sketch out what either seems too much there or else not there at all. No wonder the translator is judged a lunatic. An astonishing number of butterfly nets would be needed to catch all of the translators of James Joyce. Patrick O'Neill has revealed the variety of admirable lunacies at work in rendering “moocow” into Spanish and Japanese, “scrotumtightening” into Czech and Italian, and “collideorscape” into Russian and French and has shown how these always daring, sometimes eccentric translators have sought to fly past those nets. Polyglot Joyce is first and foremost a history. Its first four chapters represent a unique and altogether welcome mapping of efforts to bring Joyce into new languages, new cultures, new times. As O'Neill himself suggests—with due respect to Fritz Senn, who has urged such work for so long and to whom O'Neill is very clearly indebted—it's a wonder that such a book has taken so long to appear. O'Neill enthuses about what he calls “the worldwide polyglot Joyce system” (19). For him, “Joyce is neither a unique and unchanging individual [End Page 249] nor a serial proliferation of variable individual readings but instead the sum of an entire shifting system of potentially endless variable readings, the sum ultimately, that is to say, of all the translations and readings of Joyce that exist (or indeed will ever exist) in any language” (8; italics in the original). Obviously “system” is a keyword in this book, and its repetition hints at a structuralist bent to the project, despite that sentence's final flourish of omnivorous postmodern inclusivity (which is fundamentally determinist anyway, isn't it?). Certainly the book enjoys lists, categories, and characterizations. O'Neill proposes this formidable catalogue of protean challenges faced by the translator of Joyce, including: the pervasive indeterminacy of his works; the densely textured structural and verbal networks that inform them; the encyclopedic employment in them of every imaginable variety of paronomasia, witticism, rhetorical device, and word play; a pervasive allusiveness to a highly specific and densely textured cultural matrix (historical, geographical, local, personal, linguistic, musical); an extraordinary (and increasing) tolerance for noise and apparent irrelevance; a remarkable sensitivity for linguistic and interlinguistic nuance; an increasing number of highly complex textual experiments such as “Sirens” and “Oxen of the Sun,” and the entire astonishing enterprise of Finnegans Wake; and, underpinning all the rest, an openly and mischievously declared intention to keep the professors on their toes for centuries. (70–71) Let us add to this list the often-troubled histories of the texts themselves, with all their attendant disparities and discontinuities (which O'Neill largely elides), the volatility of the Joyce Estate (which O'Neill is too polite to mention), and the ineluctable consciousness of Joyce's works as themselves forms of translation.2 About this last point O'Neill is puzzlingly circumspect...

The Byronic hero in film, fiction, and television

Brooding, dark, and sardonic, the outsized heroes of Byron’s great poems “Childe Harold” and “Manfred” are rebellious individuals who live by their own moral codes. The spawn of these Byronic heroes populate not only Victorian literature like Wuthering Heights and Melmoth the Wanderer but also films and television shows ranging from Clint Eastwood’s spaghetti westerns to Star Trek and Angel. In this elegant literary and cultural study, the author traces the development of the Byronic hero from Byron’s swaggering originals to Schwarzenegger’s Terminator character and Anne Rices Vampire Lestat. With a stroke of genius, she extends her portrait to include Byronic heroines in novels ranging from Emily Bront’s Catherine Earnshaw to Hardy’s Eustacia Vye, plus Sarah Conner of Terminator 2 and Ellen Ripley of the Alien movies (she could have also included Tess of the d’Urbervilles). Stein teaches English at California State University, Fullerton; her articles on the development of the Byronic hero have appeared in Popular Culture Review, Philological Quarterly, and other periodicals. She opens this eloquent examination with a definition against which she measures all contemporary manifestations of this character: “The Byronic hero is an outlaw and an outsider who defines his own moral code, often defying oppressive institutional authority, and is able to do so because of his superhuman or supernatural powers, his self-sufficiency and independence, and his egotistical sense of his own superiority.” Although this definition fits the heroes of Eastwood’s Dirty Harry movies, by the time he made Unforgiven the film interpretation of the Byronic hero had changed. In that film, the hero had been thoroughly humanized and stripped of his outlaw glamour. Byronic heroes also strut the stages and recording studios of contemporary music, although their persona differs from the arrogant and blustering Manfred. Rock stars like Morrisey and the late Kurt Cobain display the moodiness, melancholy, self-absorption, and self-torment that form the underside of Byron’s heroes. Finally, these heroic characters can be seen on the small screen. Stein compares the Q character from Star Trek: the Next Generation with some of Byron’s most memorable heroes. “Like Manfred and Lucifer,” she writes, “Q is completely contemptuous of humankind, deeming them inferior and puny in all respects.” Like any good interdisciplinary work, Steins brilliant book captures the depth of a particular idea—in this case, the Byronic hero—and with careful attention to detail, style, and cultural context, she skillfully develops the ways that popular culture develops this idea. Steins exceptional study inspires not only a fresh reading of Byron but also a careful look at cultural forms to see where Byron’s ideas continue to be reflected. HENRY L. CARRIGAN (August 18, 2009)

Pandits in the Movies: Contesting the Identity of Hindustani Classical Music and Musicians in the Hindi Popular Cinema

Toward end of V. Shantaram's 1955 classic and phenomenally popular Hindi film, Jhanak Jhanak Payal Baje, film's hero, Ghirdar, competes for artistic supremacy in kathak dance against another dancer, Ram Prasad. The competition (muqabala) proceeds in a series of virtuosic and overtly confrontational displays of dance prowess. The competing dancers employ all manner of rhythmic intricacy, speed, technique, dramatic gesture, loudness, and sheer self-assertiveness. Ghirdar's final triumph is ensured when he and his opponent engage in a series of simultaneous rhythmic turns, or chakkars, which are a standard feature of kathak performance practice. While Ghirdar maintains an elegant balance and poise during this performance, Ram Prasad becomes increasingly dizzy and disoriented, finally reeling from stage in defeat. Viewing this and other dance scenes in this film, it is easy to agree with Fredric Jameson (1992:10), who suggests that in a capitalist system, the quality of various forms of human activity ... has effectively been bracketed or suspended by market system, leaving all these activities to be ruthlessly reorganized in efficiency terms, as sheer means or instrumentality. Although Gopi Krishna, star of Ihanak Jhanak Payal Baje, was a highly respected classical kathak dancer of exceptional artistry, his prowess as a dancer throughout film is expressed in terms of quantitative extremes: his rhythmic compositions are longer and more complex, he dances faster, he leaps higher, he completes more turns, and so on. Thus comprised, and in terms of film's narrative, Krishna's quantifiable virtuosity is instrument by which his character overcomes all obstacles, thus ensuring both his artistic and romantic

Servant of the Story: Judas as Tragic Hero in Film

Servant of the Story: Judas as Tragic Hero in Film

On the Father Figures in Zhang Yimou’s Films: From Red Sorghum to Hero

Since Zhang Yimou’s film Hero was released at the end of 2003, it has stirred up very strong controversy among audience and critics in China. The theme the film presents touches the core issue of the cultural identity of contemporary China; how to posit and treat a father figure. This issue is an important index for the ideology and value system of contemporary China. The presentation of the father figure and its change reveals the general trend and transition of contemporary culture and the value system in China. From Red Sorghum (1987), the first film ever directed by Zhang, to Hero, the father image has always been central and critical. Of course, the father is not only a father in terms of biology, but also in terms of authority. Regardless of whether they physically show up in a film, how the director views the father figure deeply affects the tone and narrative logic of a film. From Red Sorghum to Hero, Zhang Yimou’s position and judgement on the father figure changed dramatically. This article e amines this change in more detail.

The public health service and film noir: a look back at Elia Kazan's Panic in the Streets (1950).

It is a sultry summer evening in New Orleans, Louisiana. An unknown foreigner of Latin or Middle Eastern descent named Kochak is murdered in a scuffle over gambling proceeds by Blackie, one of the port city's most notorious and brutish gangsters. By the next morning, the body of the unidentified man ends up in the county morgue, where the attending coroner becomes alarmed, not at the bullet wound, but rather at the evidence of a deadly infection that ravaged the man's body before he was shot, Within minutes, Dr. Clinton Reed, a United States Public Health Service (PHS) officer, is called to the scene. Reed examines a sputum specimen from the deceased under the microscope and identifies the bacterial culprit as the highly contagious and airborne pneumonic plague. He orders the cremation of the man's remains, the sterilization of all objects with which he came in contact, and doses of serum to vaccinate and streptomycin to treat those exposed to this virulent germ. Convening an emergency meeting with the local authorities, Reed warns that they have only 48 hours to track down the killers and probable plague carriers who threaten to spark an epidemic that could reach far beyond the city of New Orleans. Thus unfolds the drama of Panic in the Streets (1950), a film noir that relies on the familiar Hollywood staples of the gangster, gumshoe detective, and policeman to produce a tale that is as much about the hysteria that gripped the United States during McCarthyism as humans' instinctive fear of devastating diseases. 1 The film was directed by Elia Kazan and based on a story written by Edward and Edna Anhalt that was turned into a screenplay by Richard Murphy. 2 It was favorably reviewed in prominent newspapers and magazines, such as Time and Variety. But unlike other films of the era, Panic in the Streets captures the repressive political currents of the 1950s and expresses an optimistic faith in medical progress and the ability to control disease. The film's hero, Reed, played by Richard Widmark, is a public health servant whose determination to steer the correct course, against the objections and skepticism of many, saves New Orleans, and possibly the world, from a pandemic.

`A Good Body'

The figure of the embodied speaker has been central within feminist media and cultural studies and has been central theoretically to questions of how, when and where women can speak with authority. It has also been central to the feminist study of film and television representations in which women have been seen as simultaneously absent as subjects of discourse and overpresent as bodies/images. This article traces the connections between these issues and asks how we should view the recent emergence of the female professor investigator as a hero of popular film and television. It argues that these lecturer detectives are both figures of anxiety — embodying concerns about a perceived feminization of the public sphere — and transgressive figures. In their troubling and embarrassing tendency to evade containment and to speak from a position of embodied difference, they also offer an alter ego for the feminist academic.

A FISTFUL OF SHEKELS: SCRUTINIZING EHUD'S ENTERTAINING VIOLENCE (JUDGES 3:12-30)

In Judges violence is a typical means by which Yahweh orchestrates justice. It becomes the end for the good (such as, likely, Jephthah's daughter), the bad (such as enemy Sisera) and the ugly (such as the thoroughly unpleasant Abimelech). Just as Judges asks the question, 'Who is going to lead Israel?', it also implicitly questions the value of the means by which Israel shall be led. Likewise, the Western film genre creates a dialogue about violence; who may use it and when. It is also about access to the land and its governance. These mutual concerns are explored in a developed comparison between the Ehud narrative (Judg. 3:12-30) and some of the ambiguously virtuous violent heroes of Western films (particularly Clint Eastwood's Spaghetti Western creation, 'the Man with No Name'). It is argued that Judges presents a stylized violence that functions to romanticize and entertain. Ehud becomes an idealistic focus through the rhetoric of his violent act, as well as through his establishment as a hero in the form of a witty, tough-talking monolith. The conclusion explores some of the legend-making processes of the Western film genre as well as the way that process has been recently questioned through film—all of this for the purpose of reflecting on the ideological presentation of violence in the Ehud story and the possibility of its functioning as social satire.