초록 열기/닫기 버튼
A number of recent films and literary texts critically look at imperial fantasy, a collective fantasy of return to the pleasures of the imperial past, or more broadly, a set of imaginations in which the subject “I” gains the privileged position while the Other survives to enrich the subject’s fantasy. By describing the imperial fantasy as occupying the space where we live, these texts suggest that we are never immune to the making of fiction, which encourages narcissistic regression to a state of imperial dominance. Henry Selick’s film Coraline (2009), in fact, provides a critique of imperial fantasy, although it could appear as a text for children. The film allows us to recognize that even a child might internalize imperial fantasies while living in a social setting where ideological fantasies are repressed. Despite its masquerading as a story of a child’s development, Selick’s film avoids reproducing fixed codes of self-improvement, finding that the obsession with self-development tends to construct the psyche of imperial desire. Arguing that Selick’s Coraline has created a political text for adults, rather than a pedagogical film for children, this paper seeks to explore how the film unsettles a fantasy of imperialism by decoding the visual representations in which the film engages.
