Anti-Humanist Film: Greed and Source Code

Abstract

This essay explores specific, rare, antihumanist narrative possibilities in Hollywood cinema that occur in the early decades of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, signified by two films: Erich von Stroheim’s Greed (1924) and Duncan Jones’s Source Code (2011).1 We contend that these films, separated by almost a century, mark two moments in which the normative humanism of Hollywood has been penetrated: once by Naturalism and once by Code. Both share a narrative logic in which human agency is in question, though the former constitutes a recognizable school while the latter is more a condition under which cinema operates, and which becomes thematic material in a body of films. They share,..