Robert P. Kolker > Quotes

“A missing girl is missing only to the people who notice.”
― Robert Kolker, Lost Girls: An Unsolved American Mystery

“Every culture has a dominant ideology, and, as far as individuals assent to it, that ideology becomes part of the means of interpreting the self in the world and is seen reflected continually in the popular media, in politics, religion, education. But an ideology is never, anywhere, monolithic. It is full of contradictions, perpetually shifting and modifying itself as struggles within the culture continue and as contradictions and conflicts develop.”
― Robert Phillip Kolker, A Cinema of Loneliness

“The demand for commercial sex will never go away. Neither will the Internet; they’re stuck with each other. It may no longer even matter anymore whether the sale of sex among consenting adults is wrong or right, immoral or empowering. What’s clear is that no good can come from pretending that the people who participate in prostitution don’t exist. That, after all, is what the killer was counting on.”
― Robert Kolker, Lost Girls: An Unsolved American Mystery

“A basic premise of Expressionism was that mise-en-scène - the visual space of the film (as well as of fiction, theatrical presentation, and painting) - should express the stressed psychological state of either its main character, or more universally, the culture at large. Edvard Munch's painting The Scream (1893) best exemplifies this effect, though it actually predates and influenced the Expressionist movement. This painting of a figure on a bridge, standing in front of a violent multicolored sky, hands held up in anxiety and terror, is a dominant image for the twentieth century. It encapsulates the Expressionist desire to make the world a reflection of the interior anguish it has caused.”
― Robert Kolker, Film form and Culture

“Modernism in literature tried to rectify this by foregrounding narrative processes and making reading as complex as the reading and decoding of ordinary experience.”
― Robert Phillip Kolker, A Cinema of Loneliness

“A notorious dandy, Ray was wearing a derby hat and a plaid vest with a matching suit and a long plaid overcoat. As a final flourish, he was carrying a gnarled corkscrew-shaped shillelagh.”
― Robert Kolker, Lost Girls: An Unsolved American Mystery

“Film tends to support the dominant ideology when it presents itself as unmediated reality, entertaining the viewer while reinforcing accepted notions of love, heroism, domesticity, class structure, sexuality, history.”
― Robert Phillip Kolker, A Cinema of Loneliness

“All these frickin’ rich people with all this money who just want to blow it on coke and hookers. And then a whole bunch of homeless people, sleeping on all the corners, cold, hungry, smelling like urine. And then a whole bunch of prostitutes, trying to make cash. And then we all get to know each other.”
― Robert Kolker, Lost Girls: An Unsolved American Mystery

“But for all the challenge and adventure, their films speak to a continual impotence in the world, an inability to change and to create change. When they do depict action, it is invariably performed by lone heroes in an enormously destructive and antisocial manner, further affirming that actual change, collectively undertaken, is impossible.”
― Robert Phillip Kolker, A Cinema of Loneliness

“Ideology is not a slogan under which political and economic interest of a class presents itself,” write Rosalind Coward and John Ellis. “It is the way in which the individual actively lives his or her role within the social totality; it therefore participates in the construction of that individual so that he or she can act.”
― Robert Phillip Kolker, A Cinema of Loneliness

“The phantom promise of “artistic freedom” offered when the old Hollywood structure collapsed has turned into something of an economic nightmare where costs, salaries, profits, and reputations are juggled and manipulated, with the film itself all but disappearing in a mass of contracts and bookkeeping.”
― Robert Phillip Kolker, A Cinema of Loneliness

“Terry Eagleton writes that ideology “is the very medium in which I ‘live out’ my relation to society, the realm of signs and social practices which binds me to the social structure and lends me a sense of coherent purpose and identity.”
― Robert Phillip Kolker, A Cinema of Loneliness

“Dormer, in other words, had no special knowledge about these victims. He was playing the averages—working from a set of accepted assumptions made by many people in law enforcement about who typically goes missing and who gets murdered by serial killers. University of Illinois criminologist Steve Egger, author of a popular 2002 study called The Killers Among Us, has asserted that nearly 78 percent of female victims of serial murderers are prostitutes. That finding does not seem to have been replicated in any other research, but it’s become received wisdom.”
― Robert Kolker, Lost Girls: An Unsolved American Mystery