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Culture

Watchmen and Hunters: Reading Nostalgia, Repair, and Heroism in American Historical Fiction

    Watchmen (2019 and Hunters (2020) are both TV shows that engage with a deep sense of nostalgia and reparation: whether it is their counterfactual worldmaking with an ‘American god’ or a group of Jews who are on the ‘hunt’ to kill Nazis in post-war America, they both demonstrate how a longing for a different personal or historical past is inextricable from a desire to ‘repair’ the linear course of time. The insistent attempt to re-create personal and collective histories against the pervasive and overwhelming myth of American exceptionalism is symptomatic of a particular kind of cultural longing. Svetlana Boym’s useful categorisation of nostalgia into two kinds, restorative and reflective, along with her understanding of nostalgia as a longing for a home that ‘may or may not have existed,’ is central to the re-construction of a lost past both TV shows attempt (in their counterfactual worldmaking).[i] They speak back […]

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U.S. Television, Nostalgia and Identity – Editorial

The ubiquity of television has been written about extensively in both scholarship and popular writing; ever since the first commercial sets began replacing the hearth as the centrepiece of any American living area, television has dominated how we write and think about the United States. In 2020, a time unlike any other in recent memory, more people than ever stayed indoors with the television on, streaming platforms open, and consumed entertainment insatiably. Was it comfort and nostalgia for a pre-pandemic time that saw record viewing figures? A distraction from the uncertainty of the present? Or, simply, that more entertainment is being produced than ever and to stay afloat and abreast of popular culture one has to consume quicker than ever before?  This USSO Special Series brings together 10 scholars and their respective research into the televisual landscape of America both past and present, examining how nostalgia, revisionism, and other ideological […]

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Essentialism and the Revival of Black Power: Re-inventing American Integrationist Discourse

On July 24 2015, around 500 advocacy groups representing African American communities from all over the country met in a three-day conference at Cleveland State University to deliberate on the creation of a unified political front. Outside the conference facilities, demonstrators shouted slogans decrying what they perceived as deliberate institutional indifference to the plight of their communities in face of the dramatic upsurge of anti-Black racism, police brutality and violence committed by white supremacist groups. The slogans echoed in essence those raised the year before in what historians now call the “Ferguson unrest” in reference to the riots which broke out in two waves over the next four months following the death of 18-year old Michael Brown. The effervescent crowd fuelled further enthusiasm for the participants at the CSU conference who were by now intent on launching a political resistance platform to translate the slogans that had for long remained […]

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“The Greatest Infomercial in Political History”: A Presidency in the Age of Entertainment

  ‘Do me a favor. Do you paint houses too? What is this?’ asked House Speaker Nancy Pelosi in her final speech at the 2020 impeachment of Donald Trump.[i] By thus referencing Martin Scorsese’s 2019 film The Irishman, Pelosi likened the president’s language in his notorious phone call to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to that of a mafia goon. This incident is symptomatic of a remarkable symbiosis: while Hollywood has consistently reflected on U.S. politics, American political discourses have habitually drawn on tropes made in Hollywood. Hence, Trump’s reputation as a ‘reality TV president’ distracts from the fact that framing politics as just another form of entertainment is far from being exclusive to his governing style. To cite recent examples from the opposite political camp, 2021 impeachment managers announced ‘a fast-paced, cinematic case aimed at rekindling the outrage lawmakers experienced on Jan. 6’[ii]. And when asked to compare both Trump […]

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Playing Paranoid in The Lighthouse

  If the 2000s were infested with zombie horror and alien invasions, what can we make of the recent resurgence of Lovecraftian tentacled monsters in film and television? In a blog post from October 2016, Roger Luckhurst traces the re-emergence of Lovecraftian themes to Netflix’s Stranger Things, arguing that the series conjures a ‘sense that humans have irreversibly broken the planet, and that Nature is coming back to exact a terrible revenge’.[i] Writing on the eve of Trump’s election, Luckhurst’s diagnosis seems at once prescient and premature: the years that followed would see more popular re-imaginings of the Lovecraft mythos such as Color out of Space (2019) and Lovecraft Country (2020). Yet in retrospect, such narratives seem to align less with impending climate disaster than they do with Trump’s election and presidency. These re-imaginings of Lovecraftian horror generate diverse responses to the Trumpian age; indeed the ‘Cthulhu for President’ parody’s […]

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The Golden Years: Hollywood’s Fairy Tale History in the Age of Donald Trump

  It is obviously not advisable to get your historical knowledge from cinema, but during the presidency of Donald Trump, this became more tempting than normal. The chance to not only escape from reality, but into a different version of it, was hard to resist, and two films served this purpose in distinct and explicit ways. Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood and Martin Scorsese’s The Irishman (both 2019) allowed audiences to indulge in the fantasy of a different America. Despite few aesthetic similarities, they both presented alternate histories, representing oases of calm during the incessant media, and often real-life, spectacle of the Trump presidency. Hollywood allows us to imagine that the Sixties, with its music, sexual liberation, and good times (Tarantino is acutely aware that he is working within an established, simplified narrative) not only continued, but was able to absorb America’s reactionary elements with minimal disruption. […]

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Assassination Nation, Young Female Anger and Futurity in the Wake of Trump’s America

“Don’t take your hate out on me, I just got here.” — Assassination Nation   On 21 September 2018, Sam Levinson’s Assassination Nation was released into American cinemas.[i] With its hyper-stylised neon party scenes, soundtrack of push notification pings and extreme violence, some critics were quick to dismiss the film as a ‘badly bungled attempt at social commentary’ with an objectifying gaze.[ii] However, these voices tended to overlook or belittle the central female characters’ Gen Z status and its significance in their angry retaliation against an adult-led reign of misogynistic violence. Positioned as an excuse to trivialise Levinson’s use of social media in his storytelling, the central characters’ youth is often taken-for-granted rather than appreciated as fundamental to the film’s depiction of female rage.[iii] This article reframes Assassination Nation’s portrayal of specifically teenage female anger as a political force; a force necessary for survival and for futurity. Set in the […]

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Culture Shock: Representing border discourses and practices in the Trump era

On July 4, 2019, Hulu launched the tenth installment of its ‘Into the Dark’ horror anthology, titled Culture Shock and directed by Mexican Canadian Gigi Saul Guerrero. Culture Shock’s narrative development focuses on the crossing of the US–Mexico border by a group of migrants who are imprisoned in a border facility, where they are used as test subjects in an experimental program for brainwashing and assimilating Latinx migrants. Guerrero’s production was filmed in Santa Clarita, CA, and its script was partially rewritten by the director to make a statement against extrajudicial enforcement practices and the violent conundrum they represent. The US–Mexico border has been object of a progressive militarization through the years, in particular since the mid-80s when restrictive immigration measures began to be implemented; a further escalation was represented by the apparatus created as a consequence of the 9/11 terrorist attacks and by the Trump administration. For three decades, […]

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Hollywood in the Age of Trump: USSO Special Series

  Questions remain over whether former President Donald Trump will fade away or return, Grover Cleveland style, for another election cycle in 2024. Trump’s single term in office was memorable for its quality of sensory overload and contribution to a culture of partisan desensitisation in the Republican Party. The relationship between American Cinema and the political dynamics of the Trump years has, however, been less remarked on. This series explores both the allegorical and noticeably political relationship between Trump and American cinema. It focuses on issues as diverse as American politics’ recycling of Hollywood tropes, productions which grappled with the MeToo movement’s prominence in Trump’s single term and the cinematic role of nostalgia under the most ideologically unmoored administration in living memory. The series begins with an article by Anna Marini which discusses the allegorical representation of the US–Mexico border in Culture Shock (2019), the tenth installment of Hulu’s ‘Into […]

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An Epidemic of Presidential Ignorance: The AIDS Crisis and the US Presidency  

‘Epidemic’ is a powerful word. For something to be deemed an ‘epidemic’, it suggests something has gone terribly wrong. The ongoing response to COVID-19 has attracted a wide array of criticism from medical professionals, politicians and the American public. From downplaying the severity of COVID-19 to neglecting testing protocols and relief packages, it might appear that Donald Trump’s indifferent approach to COVID-19 broke new ground in overlooking a rapid response to a national health emergency. Perhaps most troubling of all, however, is that such a precedent was not new. The problematic response to the COVID-19 pandemic draws on an established tradition of poor health crisis policymaking, reinforcing the reality that the teachings of the 1980s AIDS epidemic remain unheeded today. Ronald Reagan’s response – or lack thereof – to the AIDS Crisis of the 1980s is a compelling example of presidential ignorance. Undoubtably problematic, the Reagan administration was slow to […]

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