Buddy Holly Glasses, Tube Socks, and Angst: Hipster Boyhoods in Moonrise Kingdom

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Notes

1. Grief, What Was the Hipster: A Sociological Investigation, xvii.

2. Duggan, The Twilight of Equality? Neoliberalism, Cultural Politics, and the Attack on Democracy, x.

3. Finston, Discussion, in What Was the Hipster: A Sociological Investigation, 52, para. 6.

4. Biancolli, Moonrise Kingdom Review: A Poetic Film, in San Francisco Chronicle, para. 4.

5. Freud, Mourning and Melancholia, 586.

6. Grief, What Was the Hipster, xvii.

7. David Harvey explains we can “interpret neoliberalization either as a utopian project to realize a theoretical design for the reorganization of international capitalism or as a political project to re-establish the conditions for capital accumulation and to restore the power of economic elites” (A Brief History of Neoliberalism, 19) Although the realization of neoliberalism has been the latter, I argue the hipster's may be a body in position to help reclaim the former utopic project.

8. Oxford English Dictionary (OED). “Hipster.”

9. Broyard, “A Portrait of the Hipster,” Partisan Review, June 1948 (online).

10. Academy of American Poets.

11. Mailer, The White Negro: Superficial Reflections on the Hipster, 2.

12. Because “race” had always been an issue, by cultural necessity, for non-white bodies.

13. Mailer, The White Negro, 3–4.

14. OED. “Hipster.”

15. I point to this dichotomous releasing because reviews of his films typically center around their High Art, underground, hipster aesthetics, and yet Anderson is receiving accolades rivaling any mainstream writer and director, such as New York Film Critics Circle and MTV Movie awards, as well as nominations from Cannes, the Screen Actors Guild, and the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.

16. Brody, “What To See This Weekend: Moonrise Kingdom, Twice,” in New Yorker, 6.

17. Also worth noting: Sam chooses to follow the “Old Chickchaw Harvest Migration trail” to get here, having “expressed an interest in the island's indigenous peoples.” This migration seems to echo the hipster's role in gentrification practices in American and Western urban centers, such as the mass exodus of hipsters to neighborhoods like Brooklyn's Williamsburg, Washington DC's Atlas District, or Los Angeles's Silverlake, all formerly “ethnic neighborhoods” now populated largely by white 20- and 30-something hipsters.

18. Faludi, Stiffed: The Betrayal of the American Man, 52.

19. Carroll, Affirmative Reaction: New Formations of White Masculinity, 9.

20. Ibid.

21. Kidd, Making American Boys: Boyology and the Feral Tale, 2.

22. Bond Stockton, The Queer Child, or Growing Sideways in the Twentieth Century, 2

23. Sachs, Judyth, and Lise Mellor. “Child panic and child protection policy: a critical examination of policies from NSW and Queensland,” in Australian Association for Research in Education, 8.

24. Grief, What Was the Hipster, 10.

25. Halberstam, Gaga Feminism: Sex, Gender, and the End of Normal, 92.

26. Although it is certainly true, as Richard Dyer points out, that this eccentricity is possible because “white power secures its dominance by not being anything in particular.” (Dyer, White, 44.

27. Kidd, Making American Boys, 3.

28. Because the aesthetics of hipsterism always seem to cover over their reinforcement of often conservative values, parading instead as an alignment with truly Other-ed peoples and groups.

29. Clinton, It Takes a Village.

30. Peterson, “Family,” in Keywords for American Cultural Studies, 113.

31. Berlant, “Citizenship,” in Keywords for American Cultural Studies, 40.

32. Grief, What Was the Hipster, xvii.

33. Carroll, Affirmative Reaction, 3.