The ethical violence of celebrity chat: Russell Crowe and David Gulpilil

摘要

Tracing patterns of repetition in media interviews with Australian film actors, Russell Crowe and David Gulpilil, this paper looks at how Andrew Denton's Enough Rope interview with Crowe, and Darlene Johnson's biographical documentary Gulpilil: One Red Blood, work through anachronistic norms that have made Crowe and Gulpilil intelligible to Australian audiences over several decades. Drawing on the post-colonial feminist discourse of Ahmed, Butler and Gandhi on ethical encounters with familiar and strange others, I argue that both Crowe and Gulpilil, under different conditions of intelligibility, resist the ethical violence of social and media norms on which their national and international recognition depends.