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This recent collection of essays provides a compelling and wide-ranging discussion of violence in the arts, provoked in certain terms, as editor Christopher Sharrett notes in his introduction, by the numerous school shootings at the time of its publication. These horrific shootings, writes Sharrett, seem to have arisen in a time “correlated with a devaluation of the human subject and the increased sense of no future that is the hallmark of late capitalist society” (11). The essays in this volume, therefore, circulate around representations of violence in this particular postmodern context. Published as a part of the Books in Contemporary Film and Television Series, the collection attends most closely to the violent visual image, whether it is rituals of bloodletting in current cinema, or the predatory camera work of tabloid television, or a series such as the wildly popular drama Cops. Essays range from such topics as The X-Files, the films of John Woo, iconographie serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer, and the martyred body of Mel Gibson, as well as discussions on such conspicuous ultra-violent films as Natural Born Killers , Kalifornia , and not-so-violent films such as Forrest Gump . The volume consistently resists positing that these representations are direct causes of further violence in contemporary society, opting instead for a more complicated reading. All of the contributors in fact appear to operate from the premise that the violent image is, as Sharrett describes it, an “artifact embodying ideological assumptions” (10). Sharrett is careful to note in his introduction, for instance, that the word ‘mythologies’ in the book's title refers less to Jungian archetypal narratives expressing the self than to a series of ideological rituals promoted by systems of power. He sees the book arguing for “the importance of the violent image in furthering an atomized society that has been in the making since colonial forces took possession of this nation” (10).
The ideological p