INTRODUCTION TO TRAUMA AND MEMORY IN THE COVENANT (RITCHIE 2023). A CHARACTER ANALYSIS.
In Semester 1 of Film Theory 300, students are introduced to a number of varying perspectives on the creation, interpretation, and influence of the cinematic medium in twenty-first-century society. Lectures focus on postmodernism and its powerful influence on the artistic circumstances of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, and then examine the relativist / subjective approach taken to history through memory and trauma studies. For this essay, students were required to analyse Guy Ritchie’s The Covenant (2023) from the perspective of memory and trauma studies, focusing particularly on the character of Ahmed and his unique experience in a short, argumentative essay.

GUY RITCHIE’S THE COVENANT (2023): THE WHITE-SAVIOR INDUSTRIAL COMPLEX AND THE PORTRAYAL OF A MIDDLE EASTERN MAN’S TRAUMA BY MIA ERASMUS (SHE/HER)
This essay investigates the traumas experienced by the non-white character Ahmed in Guy Ritchie’s The Covenant (2023) through the theoretical lens of the white-saviour industrial complex. Mia presents a nuanced analysis of the film, noting that it is as complicated as postmodernism itself. Mia concludes that “The film is fifty percent a subversion of the white saviour trope and fifty percent an example of the white saviour trope” and is therefore characteristic of postmodernist pluralism.