The following comparative article will focus on Les Invasions barbares ( The Barbarian Invasions) where Arcand reassembles his cast, a group of university lecturer friends, who are familiar characters from the first film, and places them around the bedside of their cancer-riddled companion, protagonist Rémy. In 2007, Arcand released L’Âge des ténèbres, to form part three of what is now known as his social commentary trilogy. Les Invasions barbares, an Oscar winner in the category of Best Foreign Language Film (2004), comes as the second part of the director’s earlier work Le Déclin de l’empire américain (1986) (The Internet Movie Database). The above is taken directly from the script of highly acclaimed French-Canadian writer-director Denys Arcand’s Les Invasions barbares (2003) and will be shown to link the character of Rémy to Julia Kristeva’s theories of the abject as presented in Powers of Horror (1982). “Oh, the rivers of sperm I spilled dreaming of her thighs!” (Rémy, Les Invasions barbares, 2003). To begin the discussion, an introduction to the film texts is essential. Specifically, the following article concentrates on representations of French-Canadian and Mexican adolescent masculinity as portrayed on screen in Alejandro González Iñárritu’s Amores perros (2000), and Denys Arcand’s Les Invasions barbares (2003).

With the primary understanding that cinema as a visual and aural medium both presents and represents significant commentary on culture, politics, gender and sexuality, the comparative examination that follows should highlight for the reader how connections between adolescent masculinity and monstrosity occur on the cinema screen. The focused study and textual analysis of film texts allow for necessary discussion on important issues that are sometimes absent or under-represented in other areas of political culture. This article will discuss the physical, psychological, and behavioural metamorphoses of the heterosexual adolescent male in particular as he is shown in cinema outside the horror genre. The monstrous-masculine then forms the background for an investigation into the connections between monstrosity and masculinity as is traceable in contemporary cinema. The term “monstrous-masculine” is one that is therefore derived from Creed’s thorough analysis of the “Monstrous-Feminine” (Creed 1993), but refers to the opposite, that is the interpretation of masculinity and the screened male body. In her 1993 book, The Monstrous Feminine – Film, Feminism and Psychoanalysis, Barbara Creed heavily relies on Julia Kristeva’s theories of abjection in her detailed study of femininity and the female body in horror cinema (Creed 1993, Kristeva 1982). University of Dublin “Monsters are meaning machines” (Gelder 6).

Amores perros sex scene