Diego Lingad

JSIS B 416 B
Media Representation of Trauma
22 January 2018

Ann Kaplan and Ban Wang, “Introduction: From Traumatic Paralysis to the Field of
Modernity.”
In “Introduction,” Kaplan and Wang discuss the complex and sometimes controversial
relationship between trauma and media representation, and argue that media representation
of trauma can give a valuable and nuanced insight into the transgenerational effects of a
traumatic experience. By giving a brief history of dissociation and the latency of trauma, the
authors establish the idea that traumatic events can manifest in less explicit ways through
cultural products years after the traumatic event. This complicates the representation of
trauma, as it becomes a sort of mystic event of the past, whose representation can risk being
aestheticized or over-simplified. No matter how unsatisfactory the representation of trauma
may be, the authors argue, there is much to be learned in how audiences react to the
representations, and how cultural trauma in films can be uncovered.

Janet Walker, “The Vicissitudes of Traumatic Memory and the Postmodern History of Film.”
Walker, in “The Vicissitudes of Traumatic Memory and the Postmodern History of Film,”
asserts that films, along with memory, do not necessarily reflect actual events and may reflect a
reimagining of the event. Primarily using the example of Saving Private Ryan, Walker analyzes
the filmic techniques that made the audience, both people who did and did not experience the
event firsthand, feel the film as “real.” Saving Private Ryan, Walker argues, was not realist in
the sense that it portrayed what happened on the ground, rather, the movie portrays the
“mind’s eye” which includes a combination of what the eyes see, the mental state, and the
popular narrative of what probably happened. Memory, Walker argues, requires outside
corroboration to find out what actually happened, but its vicissitude nonetheless has valuable
lessons on how events are constructed.

Antonio Traverso and Mick Broderick, “Interrogating trauma: Towards a Critical Trauma
Studies.”
Traverso and Broderick, in “Interrogating trauma,” claim that trauma studies as it exists
has limitations and requires rethinking, though not a wholesale rejection. The authors
introduce a limitation of dominant trauma studies, which primarily analyzes cultural products
through trauma, and lacks interdisciplinary analyses. However, this could also come with
complications, and further discussion is needed on the intersections of psychoanalysis and, say,
anthropological frameworks. The authors present these issues to illustrate that there is much
work being done in trauma studies, and much yet to be discussed in order for the field to better
be used to analyze representation of trauma all over the world.