8. Progress and Decay in the 21st Century

Abstract

Chapter Eight outlines the specific ways that transnational uncanny child characters trouble entrenched cultural investments in teleological progress via the theoretical framework of Dylan Trigg's 'aesthetics of decay'.The chapter argues that these child figures unravel the process of growing up and transform it into one of 'becoming', a Deleuzian term that designates a process of change that resists teleological goals and end-states.The analysis in this chapter centres on one of the most influential and critically successful films of the early 2000s, The Others (Alejandro Amenábar, 2001), which thematizes the decline of traditional, modernist conceptions of the child.