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This innovative book studies how films and texts re-imagine the past, and what it reveals about our contemporary culture.
This book analyzes early twenty-first century film and television’s fascination with representing the Anglo-American eighteenth century. Grounded in cultural studies, film studies, and adaptation theory, the book examines how these works represented the eighteenth century to assuage anxieties about values, systems, and institutions at the start of a new millennium. The first two chapters reveal how films like Gulliver’s Travels (2010) or the remake of Poldark (2015) use history to establish the direct relationship between the eighteenth century and the twenty-first. The final chapters examine pairs of productions for how they address and legitimate different aspects of contemporary ideology such as attitudes toward race and gender, or the connection between technological and social progress.
There is a wealth of literature on "Star Trek", and this book is a welcome and original contribution to it. The book not only sets "Star Trek" in dialogue with ideas and stories of utopia, community, self-improvement, that are central to American culture and history, but goes further to examine the ways in which these are taken up and used by 'ordinary' fans, who engage with "Star Trek" in complex and significant ways. Lincoln Geraghty explores, for example, "Star Trek's" multiple histories and how "Star Trek" has used the Puritan American Jeremiad, one of the nation's foundational texts to create a narrative that relates how through communal effort and personal change, utopia can be achieved. He discusses how fans define the series as a blueprint for the solution of such social problems in America as racism and war and shows how they have used the series to cope with personal trauma and relate to such characters as Data and Seven of Nine in moments of personal transformation. This is all in all an enjoyable and revealing book on "Star Trek's" active relationship with its many thoughtful fans.
The femme fatale occupies a precarious yet highly visible space in contemporary cinema. From sci-fi alien women to teenage bad girls, filmmakers continue to draw on the notion of the sexy deadly woman in ways which traverse boundaries of genre and narrative. This book charts the articulations of the femme fatale in American cinema of the past twenty years, and contends that, despite her problematic relationship with feminism, she offers a vital means for reading the connections between mainstream cinema and representations of female agency. The films discussed raise questions about the limits and potential of positioning women who meet highly normative standards of beauty as powerful icons of female agency. They point towards the constant shifting between patriarchal appropriation and feminist recuperation that inevitably accompanies such representations within mainstream media contexts.
A tidal wave of panic surrounded homosexuality and AIDS in the 1980s and early 1990s, the period commonly called 'The AIDS Crisis'. With the advent of antiretroviral drugs in the mid '90s, however, the meaning of an HIV diagnosis radically changed. These game-changing drugs now enable many people living with HIV to lead a healthy, regular life, but how has this dramatic shift impacted the representation of gay men and HIV in popular culture? Positive Images is the first detailed examination of how the relationship between gay men and HIV has transformed in the past two decades. From Queer as Folk to Chemsex, The Line of Beauty to The Normal Heart, Dion Kagan examines literature, film, TV, documentaries and news coverage from across the English-speaking world to unearth the socio-cultural foundations underpinning this 'post-crisis' period. His analyses provide acute insights into the fraught legacies of the AIDS Crisis and its continued presence in the modern queer consciousness.
Why does the secret agent never seem to die? Why, in fact, has the secret agent not only survived the Cold War - which critics and pundits surmised would be the death of James Bond and of the genre more generally - but grown in popularity? Secret Agents attempts to answer these questions as it investigates the political and cultural ramifications of the continued popularity and increasing diversity of the secret agent across television, film, and popular culture. The volume opens with a foreword by Tony Bennett, and proceeds to investigate programs, figures, and films such as Alias, Austin Powers, Spy Kids, the «new» Bond Girl, Flint, Mission Impossible, Jason Bourne, and concludes with an afterword by Toby Miller. Chapters throughout question what it means for this popular icon to have far wider currency and meaning than merely that of James Bond as the white male savior of capital and democracy.
From early examples such as Star Trek and Sapphire and Steel to more contemporary shows including Life on Mars and The Vampire Diaries, time has frequently been used as a device to allow programme makers to experiment stylistically and challenge established ways of thinking. Time on TV provides a range of exciting, accessible, yet intellectually rigorous essays that consider the many and varied ways in which telefantasy shows have explored this subject, providing the reader with a greater understanding of the importance of time to the success of genre on the small screen.