‘Wanna fight?’: utopia-dystopia in Nicolas Winding Refn’s recent cinema

Featherstone, Mark

Abstract

This chapter aims to read the cinema of the Danish-American filmmaker Nicolas Winding Refn through the lens of his utopian-dystopian representations of the city. In Winding Refn’s films it is possible to see the effects of the conversion of the utopia of the (post)modern city into a kind of infernal dystopia marked by on the one hand the absolute domination of objective culture and on the other hand the complete abjection of subjective, inner life. Winding Refn’s city is a pathological place by virtue of his representation of the separation between the built environment, which leads viewers to conclude they are watching a narrative unfolding across urban space, and the destroyed social relations of his protagonists, which causes the same viewers to wonder whether the space of this city is actually a city at all.

Citation

Featherstone, M. (2019). ‘Wanna fight?’: utopia-dystopia in Nicolas Winding Refn’s recent cinema. In Law, Cinema, and the Ill City (31-41). Taylor & Francis (Routledge). https://doi.org/10.4324/9780429442254-4

• Publication Date: Apr 26, 2019
• Deposit Date: Jun 7, 2023
• Publisher: Taylor & Francis (Routledge)
• Pages: 31-41
• Book Title: Law, Cinema, and the Ill City
• Chapter Number: 2
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.4324/9780429442254-4