Dream in Place: Understanding Confinement through the Tactics of Fiction in Crystal Moselle’s The Wolfpack
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Beatriz L. Fínez
Beatriz L. Fínez is a doctoral candidate in Philosophy, in the Aesthetics and Theory of Arts area, at the University of Salamanca. She graduated in Philosophy and English Studies at the University of Salamanca, including a visiting scholarship at the University of Oxford. She completed postgraduate studies in English Literature at Oxford Brookes University and a Master’s Degree in Advanced English Studies at the University of Salamanca and Valladolid. In previous works, she engaged with narrative theory and the American postmodern novel, and her current research interests focus on unnatural narratology, deixis, deconstruction, and the work of Jonathan Swift and James Joyce.
Abstract
In 2015, Crystal Moselle won the Sundance Festival with her documentary The Wolfpack, an intimate view into the lives of Oscar and Susanne Angulo and their seven children. Confined in their Lower East Side by their father, Moselle offers a coming-of-age story showing the children’s gradual path to freedom as they narrate their unique way of coping with their imprisonment: they watch, perform, and record their favourite films as a way to create their own world in absence of an external reality. Such a situation not only reveals the exclusionary powers of American capitalism and their metropolis, where class, gender, and race intersect, but also, the tactics of ideals and illusions that oscillate between stagnation and dynamism in their troublesome connection with the dialectics of the “Inside” and the “Outside.” Understanding the “dream” as a pattern of confinement, as “(4.a.) [a] state of mind in which a person is or seems to be unaware of his or her immediate surroundings” (OED s.v. dream n.2 & adj.), we will undertake a spatial reading of the dream to analyse Angulo’s seclusion and their relationship with fiction as a world-building activity. Firstly, a historical and sociological approach is employed: an analysis of the American Dream through the reading of James Truslow Adams and Tocqueville to demonstrate how its nightmare resolve into the strategy of reclusion and differential exclusion. And, secondly, the philosophical perspective of Gaston Bachelard and Michel Foucault will articulate the doubleness of the dream (as both illusory deception and imaginative visions) and their spatial consequences regarding Angulo’s confinement.
Abstract
In 2015, Crystal Moselle won the Sundance Festival with her documentary The Wolfpack, an intimate view into the lives of Oscar and Susanne Angulo and their seven children. Confined in their Lower East Side by their father, Moselle offers a coming-of-age story showing the children’s gradual path to freedom as they narrate their unique way of coping with their imprisonment: they watch, perform, and record their favourite films as a way to create their own world in absence of an external reality. Such a situation not only reveals the exclusionary powers of American capitalism and their metropolis, where class, gender, and race intersect, but also, the tactics of ideals and illusions that oscillate between stagnation and dynamism in their troublesome connection with the dialectics of the “Inside” and the “Outside.” Understanding the “dream” as a pattern of confinement, as “(4.a.) [a] state of mind in which a person is or seems to be unaware of his or her immediate surroundings” (OED s.v. dream n.2 & adj.), we will undertake a spatial reading of the dream to analyse Angulo’s seclusion and their relationship with fiction as a world-building activity. Firstly, a historical and sociological approach is employed: an analysis of the American Dream through the reading of James Truslow Adams and Tocqueville to demonstrate how its nightmare resolve into the strategy of reclusion and differential exclusion. And, secondly, the philosophical perspective of Gaston Bachelard and Michel Foucault will articulate the doubleness of the dream (as both illusory deception and imaginative visions) and their spatial consequences regarding Angulo’s confinement.
Kapitel in diesem Buch
- Acknowledgments 5
- Table of Contents 7
- Confinement Studies in American Popular Culture 1
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Part I: Confinement Narratives on the Screen
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Cinema and TV Series
- The Individual vs. the Institution: Narratives of Confinement in New Hollywood Cinema 15
- Trapped in Bluebeard’s Castle: Disney’s Beauty and the Beast as a Self-Contradictory Story of Empowerment and Imprisonment 31
- (Dis)ableing the Confinement: Guillermo del Toro’s The Shape of Water and Mark Medoff’s Children of a Lesser God 47
- Transformative Power of Confinement and Subversion of Identity in The Experiment (2010) 63
- “Where the City Started and the Suburbs Ended”: The (Sub)urban Confinement of Post-Industrial America in David Robert Mitchell’s It Follows 87
- Never Let Me Go: Home, Family, and Confinement in Umma 103
- Confinement and Consciousness: Exploring the ‘ Nomadic Consciousness’ in Maid 117
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Documentaries
- Incarceration Documentaries after the Curious Eclipse of Prison Ethnography 133
- Dream in Place: Understanding Confinement through the Tactics of Fiction in Crystal Moselle’s The Wolfpack 151
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Part II: Confinement Narratives from/about American Prisons
- Claudia Jones and Angela Davis: Literature in Confinement 171
- Confined to the Margins: Necropolitics, American Identity, and Racial Separation in Assata by Assata Shakur 185
- Into the Lone Star Labyrinth: Texas Prison System Reflects The Death Gate Cycle Prison 201
- Our Time on the Rock: Narrating Voluntary Confinement in Tommy Orange’s There There 217
- “Have You Ever Seen a More Focused Killing Machine?” The Extreme Spectacle of Carceral Punishment in Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah’s Chain-Gang All-Stars 235
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Part III: Confinement Narratives within Performances
- Taylor Swift’s American Retreat: Covid, Cardigans, and Confinement in folklore 253
- In The Devil's Grip: Competing Narratives of Confinement in X: The Life and Times of Malcolm X Opera 269
- Index
Kapitel in diesem Buch
- Acknowledgments 5
- Table of Contents 7
- Confinement Studies in American Popular Culture 1
-
Part I: Confinement Narratives on the Screen
-
Cinema and TV Series
- The Individual vs. the Institution: Narratives of Confinement in New Hollywood Cinema 15
- Trapped in Bluebeard’s Castle: Disney’s Beauty and the Beast as a Self-Contradictory Story of Empowerment and Imprisonment 31
- (Dis)ableing the Confinement: Guillermo del Toro’s The Shape of Water and Mark Medoff’s Children of a Lesser God 47
- Transformative Power of Confinement and Subversion of Identity in The Experiment (2010) 63
- “Where the City Started and the Suburbs Ended”: The (Sub)urban Confinement of Post-Industrial America in David Robert Mitchell’s It Follows 87
- Never Let Me Go: Home, Family, and Confinement in Umma 103
- Confinement and Consciousness: Exploring the ‘ Nomadic Consciousness’ in Maid 117
-
Documentaries
- Incarceration Documentaries after the Curious Eclipse of Prison Ethnography 133
- Dream in Place: Understanding Confinement through the Tactics of Fiction in Crystal Moselle’s The Wolfpack 151
-
Part II: Confinement Narratives from/about American Prisons
- Claudia Jones and Angela Davis: Literature in Confinement 171
- Confined to the Margins: Necropolitics, American Identity, and Racial Separation in Assata by Assata Shakur 185
- Into the Lone Star Labyrinth: Texas Prison System Reflects The Death Gate Cycle Prison 201
- Our Time on the Rock: Narrating Voluntary Confinement in Tommy Orange’s There There 217
- “Have You Ever Seen a More Focused Killing Machine?” The Extreme Spectacle of Carceral Punishment in Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah’s Chain-Gang All-Stars 235
-
Part III: Confinement Narratives within Performances
- Taylor Swift’s American Retreat: Covid, Cardigans, and Confinement in folklore 253
- In The Devil's Grip: Competing Narratives of Confinement in X: The Life and Times of Malcolm X Opera 269
- Index
