Borderline Crooks

A plague-ridden Thebes, an Indian reservation, a Rio slum, a U.S.-Mexico border town, the LA hood, a California women’s prison. These are the settings for our examination of characters who run up against obstacles—from within themselves, their families and tribes, the economic and legal systems they live in—that lead them to make criminal choices. These choices, and the risks they provoke, taint the characters even as they dare us to care for them.

How do fiction writers, dramatists, journalists and filmmakers get us to invest our feelings in morally compromised characters? To answer this question, we will pull out the guts of their stories to examine their wiring—then try to put them back together again on our own. In the process we will examine classic attempts to say what makes an effective tale, and put to the test the idea that every type of story has “rules” that make it successful. A major segment of the course will be devoted to examining the structure of the feature film in relation to drama and the novel.

Texts

Oedipus Tyrannus, Sophocles (tr.Fagles)

This Is for the Mara Salvatrucha, Samuel Logan

Your House Will Pay, Steph Cha

The Round House, Louise Erdrich

The Mars Room, Rachel Kushner

Films

Boyz N the Hood (dir/wr. John Singleton, 1991)

Sin Nombre (dir/wr. Cary Jôji Fukunaga, 2009)

Cidade de Deus (dir. Fernando Meirelles, Kátia Lund/wr. Paulo Lins, Braulio Mántovani, 2002)

LA 92 (Lindsay/Martin, 2017)

Selected Materials

Aristotle, Robert McKee's Story, Judith Weston, Anabel Hernández, Matt Parker, Selected scenes from Casablanca (Curtiz, 1942), Thoreau, John Locke.