This article concerns the question of stigma and the exclusion of individuals by a small community. Three films exemplify this process: Sam Peckinpah’s Straw Dogs (1971); Giuseppe Tornatore’s Malena (2000); and Lars von Trier’s Dogville (2003). Each of these is a study in atypical stigmatization and exclusion—the situations are atypical because the victims of social aggression are not stigmatized in the classic sense by having an unambiguously negative attribute (for instance, poverty, an addiction, a physical deformity, etc.) but are persons who differ from the group in a positive way.
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