Unarmed But Dangerous [2009]

Product Information

Although even scholars like Schell (2020) suggest that particularly the rise of Xi Jinping renders the traditional “framework of engagement” of US China policy obsolete and creates the need for a paradigm shift, Trump overshoots the mark by denying common interests and reducing the relations between the two countries to one single dimension: an economic zero-sum game. Trump turns inward, redefining China as an adversary in the name of the people. He leaves the missionary project of supporting China to build prosperity by fostering democracy and a free market. The US ceases to be a “freedom-fighter and purveyor of enlightenment and universal human values.” ( Vukovich, 2012) The narrative of “becoming the same” seems obsolete. From the viewpoint of past approaches to China, it might appear that China’s recent development made these adjustments necessary. The inside views of China, however, may suggest that China had been misunderstood in the past as assimilating, as being on the way to becoming like the West (ibid.). In this sense, Trump’s approach appears to be less colonialist and assertive regarding cultural differences. Expressed positively, Trump promotes an external politics of recognition ( Taylor, 1994). Enter stage left, ‘ Kung Fu Flid‘ (aka ‘Unarmed But Dangerous’), a film whose tag line goes –“They shot his wife, they kidnapped his daughter. They messed with the wrong Flid.” Standing out from the crowd indeed! Enter stage left, 'Kung Fu Flid', a film whose tag line goes - "They shot his wife, they kidnapped his daughter. They messed with the wrong Flid.” Standing out from the crowd indeed! These examples also show that Trump uses the accusations of his opponents to victimize himself. Trump depicts his accusers as acting out of political reasons, endangering the wellbeing of ‘the people’ for their own goals. This is also exemplified by the following exchange from July 22: “Question: […] Would you like to respond to Joe Biden, who, today, described you […] as the first racist to be elected President. […] Trump: […] it’s interesting because we […] passed criminal justice reform, something that Obama and Biden were unable to do. We did opportunity cities.” On the other hand, Jimmy seems to know who he’s dealing with, where to find people and so on - so maybe he does know these gangsters. But then again, they don’t seem to know him. Nobody recognises him, but nor do they express any surprise at seeing him. And let’s face it, he’s a pretty surprising character, both when you first meet him and when you see what he’s capable of doing to protect his wife and rescue his daughter.

Combining the two differentiations of angst and fear leads to the following apprehension. Angst enhances social cohesion either directly as a result of a diffuse category of enmity or mediated by fear in the case of the appearance of a concrete object. In both cases, the narrative fabrication of a range of objects of fear fosters cohesion—either on the level of potentiality or on the level of actuality, to use a Husserlian (1950) distinction. Both conceptions explain how social cohesion benefits from the narrative fabrication of a wide category of interlinked enemies, which in both conceptions is related primarily to angst. On March 18, a tweet of Trump’s account announces that he signed the “Defense Production Act” enabling him to use resources from the private sector to combat the virus, underlining that “we are all in this TOGETHER!” Beside emphasizing his alleged achievements regarding telehealth, he introduces the theme of increasing domestic manufacturing, i.e. “Made in the United States,” in response to the virus, and again asserts that Democrats and Republicans are unified by the effort of overcoming the crisis. During a press conference on the same day, Trump places COVID-19 in the proximity of natural disasters for the first time. These considerations can be condensed to the following assumptions. 1) Political communication in general is guided by the distinction of friend and enemy. 2) In populist communication this distinction appears as the difference of the people and allegedly corrupt elites, including news media. 3) Angst enhances social cohesion among the audiences of populist speakers either directly or mediated by fear. 4) Populist communication is more likely to produce a type of fear that populists benefit from when it depicts the elite as a diffuse category composed of various interlinked enemies. Truth be told, this is not a great film. It’s a plot-by-numbers, which sees the thugs of English mob boss Barry (Harper) burst into the wrong apartment. By the time they leave, Barry’s son has been shot in the balls by Jimmie Lovett (Harper), the actual resident; Jimmie’s wife, Lu (Watkins) also has a gunshot wound; and the thugs have run off with their daughter, Lola. To skip a bit in the story – not least because the explanation offered is shaky on a number of points – Jimmie goes after his daughter, while Barry goes after Jimmie.In the course of the preparations for a broader study on populist communication, data have been collected of publicly available political communication. The data comprise communication offers of governmental officials, news media publications, influential social media content, and public protest messages. The process of organizing and preliminarily examining the data in view of the theoretical preconceptions outlined above led to the tentative formulation of the following hypotheses: 1) News media as well as the dynamics of political communication based on the difference of friend and enemy help legitimizing populist claims and directing public attention toward them while feeding into a narrative of a diffuse category of threats that creates objects of angst and thereby enhances social cohesion. 2) With resources derived from popular culture such as reality TV, commodities, and pop songs, populists exploit the culture of political correctness, which is facilitated through the ascription of authenticity 4 (preliminarily understood in the everyday language sense as the interpretation of action as not governed by social norms or expectations but by the actor’s genuine inclinations and convictions). The outlined procedure bears elements of discourse analysis in three regards, which will be explained in the subsequent paragraphs after introducing the underlying understanding of discourse analysis. To Foucault (1969), discourses are social practices that create objects and distribute scarce resources, which relates them to power and makes them objects of political battles. Foucault might have focused more on the power aspect of discourses in his later works ( Foucault, 1976; Foucault, 1991), but without the aspect of the creation of objects, discourse analyses would be deprived of its matter. In his influential work on the discourse analysis of the sociology of knowledge, Keller (2011) also emphasizes the link between knowledge (of objects) and power. His method, however, rather prioritizes the analysis of discursive power relations. Unlike Keller, the analysis employed here is concerned with the discursive formation of objects and disregards its relation to power. Unlike linguistic discourse analyses, the analysis is not primarily concerned with identifying linguistic devices such as speech acts or tropes but with the formation of objects and thus acts as a method of the sociology of knowledge, which undeniably bears some hermeneutical aspects. The content analysis was informed by discourse analysis in the sense that it connected Trump’s utterances to broader discursive sources instead of trying to interpret them in as individual entities. Without the knowledge of, e.g., Western discourses on China or the neoliberal economic discourse, it is very unlikely that the content analysis would have been faithful to its data. According to Foucault (1969), however, these elements of different discourses can only be considered as such when they appear in their proper discursive contexts. In the same manner, an argument from the evolution-biological discourse ceases to be a part of this discourse when it is used to justify jealousy in a quarrel among romantic partners ( Kurilla, 2020b).

XL: When Frank Harper threw a hammer at Beau Baptiste – it was an amazing unplanned moment. It really freaked the art department as it nearly hit an antique silver platter, that they persuaded someone to lend us – apparently it was worth a fair bit. PH: How do you go about being original or creative with a limited budget in a genre that has seen pretty much everything? What was your approach? TS: We are the only people, to my knowledge, in the world that have made a film like this and a few people I have talked to have said we have also created a new genre "Flidsplotation"! When this film comes out maybe there will be a few more made which will be brilliant as there are a lot of talented actors out there who have disabilities and they need to be seen and heard. Considering the size of the dataset, more themes may still emerge from the data during further analysis. For the purpose of the current study, however, the author is confident that a sufficient level of theoretical saturation in the sense of Saunders et al. (2018) has been reached and that possible additional themes do not concern the focus of research. ResultsTS: The whole film in pre-production and when we were filming was funny and I did think to myself all the way through the process “I can’t believe that we are creating a film as off the wall as this!”

XL: When Frank Harper threw a hammer at Beau Baptiste - it was an amazing unplanned moment. It really freaked the art department as it nearly hit an antique silver platter, that they persuaded someone to lend us - apparently it was worth a fair bit.The Supplementary Material for this article can be found online at: https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fcomm.2021.624643/full#supplementary-material Footnotes The performance of fear as a medium of sociation is not so obvious although even Hobbes (1998) considers fear the means of state formation. Hobbes begins his “Leviathan” with an empiricist treatise on affects. Hobbes assumes that all humans share the same sensory equipment as well as related action tendencies. From this viewpoint, conflict arises because humans desire the same objects. This premise leads Hobbes to his conception of the state of nature in which homo homini lupus est. Hobbes’ state of nature subjects humans to a condition of perpetual fear of other humans. As a consequence, they use a considerable amount of their resources to protect themselves from each other. To Hobbes, perpetual fear combined with rational choice led humans to confer their innate, natural rights to a sovereign that governs human intercourse.

TS: The whole film in pre-production and when we were filming was funny and I did think to myself all the way through the process "I can't believe that we are creating a film as off the wall as this!" US China policies served Trump as a vehicle of distinction from the Democratic Party long before the pandemic came into play. According to Trump, China stole employment, especially blue-collar jobs with the support of the Democratic Party. In Trump’s narrative, his protectionist implementation of tariffs on Chinese goods and the trade deal with China benefitted the domestic production sector, especially the workers. The antagonism between Trump’s discourse and the Democratic Party’s approach can hardly be described with classic distinctions such as neoliberalism/socialism. In Trump’s depictions, the Democratic Party pursues neoliberal policies, i.e. free trade, internationally and a bureaucratic state domestically while Trump aims at internal neoliberal policies and external protectionist policies or, put differently, internal deregulation and external regulation. Trump prides himself on deregulating domestic markets for the benefit of “the people” and rebukes Democrats for overregulating the domestic economy to the disadvantage of US Americans.

Buy my books!

Making an Independent film is often about standing out from the crowd. The best Indie films, films like 'Pi', 'Clerks', 'Cube' or 'El Mariachi' had that little something that no one else did. A little something that would allow them the chance to stand out from the much higher budgeted, much better promoted competition. With a comedy or even a horror that can be hard, but with an action film? Well that can be almost impossible...