Neoliberal theory and film studies

ABSTRACT

Neoliberalism, in imposing ‘free market’ principles on all areas of life, transforms older configurations of the self, society, culture, aesthetics, and the relationships between them; it has increasingly been theorized as fundamentally breaking with liberal and humanist values in place since the Enlightenment. This introduction to the special issue on Neoliberal Cultural Transformations assesses existing scholarship on neoliberalism and cinema and points to new paths forward. It provides an overview of neoliberal theory from the social sciences, including the Marxist approach of theorists such as David Harvey as well as political approaches like the work of Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Wendy Brown, and Philip Mirowski. I find that most work in film studies thus far has followed in the vein of Marxist theory, concerning itself almost exclusively with considerations of economics. Although the best of this work is compelling, I argue that the field of film studies is overdue for an exploration of political and biopolitical theories of neoliberalism and their connections to film texts. This is a two-way street; neoliberal theory needs film studies just as much as the converse, as cinema can offer unique insights into neoliberal transformations of the subject, society, culture, and aesthetics.

KEYWORDS:

• Neoliberalism
• film studies
• media studies
• Marxist theory
• biopolitics
• ideology
• subjectivity

Neoliberalism is much more than a matter of economics: it fundamentally alters older configurations of the self, society, culture, aesthetics, and the relationships between them. It does this by imposing the principles of competition, the ‘free market,’ and entrepreneurship on areas of life not usually considered economic in ways that have transformed virtually all aspects of social, personal, work, and creative life. It exerts intensified pressures on the individual – ultimately making its way into our very psyches and subjectivities, our very definitions of selfhood – while discrediting any concept of the collective. It also thwarts utopian impulses to overthrow it by continually redirecting revolutionary energies back into further neoliberal striving.

Cinema has a unique capacity to dramatize, embody, and/or reimagine various neoliberal cultural transformations, or alternatively to resist them. Of course films show people, social identities, communities, and spaces impacted by neoliberal ideology – it would be hard not to, given neoliberalism’s seemingly boundless dominance – and films can clearly give insights into what these look like and how such entities are being transformed. This is a major aspect of the work presented in this special issue.

Yet we must also consider the ways that cinema may participate in neoliberal mechanisms of social control by reinforcing – or alternatively, resisting – neoliberal hegemonies. Aesthetic choices in cinema are deeply and intricately linked to films’ reinforcement of and/or resistance to dominant ideologies. These relationships can be complicated to unpack, and it is the ongoing job of film scholars to do so. There seems to be something particularly crucial about engaging in this work when it comes to neoliberalism, in which we are living under a new kind of social control that reaches deeper into our minds and subjectivities than other regimes before it. As political philosophers Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri have argued, communications are an indispensable part of the neoliberal biopolitical machine, through which this machine ‘produces and reproduces master narratives in order to validate and celebrate its own power’ (2000, 34). Yet they, like other theorists of neoliberalism, don’t do much more detailed engagement with media texts, and indeed they could be accused of being somewhat reductive on the topic; any film scholar knows that moving images are incredibly complex, and it is never a simple job to slap the label of ‘master narrative in support of neoliberalism’ on any given text. Moreover, Hardt and Negri’s pronouncement doesn’t allow for the possibility of resistant texts, texts which seek to break the spell of neoliberal ideology in various ways. I argue that neoliberal theory actually needs film and media studies just as much as the converse, supplying much-needed nuance where so far there has been a dearth in unpicking neoliberal aesthetics and its intersections with neoliberal politics.

However, in its considerations of neoliberalism, film studies to date has been limited in its reach; the field has focused somewhat narrowly on considerations of economics, including studies of neoliberal economic transformations in global film industries and examinations of how the worlds of high finance or debt are portrayed on film. Although the best of this work is accomplished and compelling (as will be discussed below), in these pages I argue that the discipline of film studies needs to significantly expand its understandings of neoliberalism as well as methodological approaches to its study in relation to cinema. Other adjacent areas of study, including television studies and feminist media studies, have been more richly engaged with neoliberalism; indeed these fields were already developed enough a decade ago to prompt a reassessment in the aftermath of the 2008 global economic crash, and now even a second scholarly reassessment is on the horizon in the wake of Trumpism, Brexit, and the reemergence of racist nationalisms. Film studies as a field is well overdue to get on this train, and ride it into hitherto unexplored territories. Power, ideology, subjectivity: all are foundational concepts in film studies going back to the 1970s, and all have been profoundly transformed by neoliberalism’s immense reach. Given these changes, a critical reconsideration of various subfields within cinema studies is in order, and this issue of New Review brings together new work which is moving forward with such reconsiderations in areas including film’s intersections with race, class, the city, performativity, geopolitics, and celebrity. All of these essays examine not just representations of neoliberal culture – though they do this too, quite skillfully – but also how neoliberal culture is reshaping popular film aesthetics and politics, as well as the converse, how neoliberalism is enforced or resisted through cinema texts.

Neoliberal economics

Within Marxist-influenced thought, neoliberalism is defined as primarily an economic phenomenon: namely the ascendance of free-market principles, often at the expense of state power, in the global marketplace. Other effects on the social, cultural, or individual, however extensive, are seen to follow from this central development. David Harvey’s analysis has been particularly influential in this vein of thought. He argues that from the Enlightenment onwards, one of the main endeavors of capitalism has been the shrinking of space relative to time, and hence to money. Time-space compression, he argues, has been rapidly increasing over the past three hundred years; in this time, the earth has gone from an incredibly vast space, where the movement of goods and information from distant lands might take months, to an effectively much smaller one where such movements can now be instantaneous. Although this change has happened in a continuous (though not always smooth) curve over the past centuries, Harvey argues, in the early 1970s the world began to witness a kind of quantum event, a new ‘intense phase of time-space compression that has had a disorienting and disruptive impact on political-economic practices, the balance of class power, as well as upon cultural and social life’ (1990, 284). Harvey has variously called this phase postmodernity (Harvey 1990), globalization (Harvey 2000), and finally neoliberalism (Harvey 2005), landing on a term that communicates his increasingly critical stance and that ultimately has more materialist explanatory power: neoliberal economic change, in Harvey’s view, is the cause of postmodern movements in culture. In any case, he argues that over the past fifty years, time and space have shrunk relative to money so rapidly that it has ‘accentuate[d] volatility and ephemerality in fashion, products, production techniques, labor processes, ideas and ideologies, values and established practices’ (1990, 285) as well as communication and images of all kinds. The feedback loop of all this accumulating change to production, markets, technologies, and media/communications has escalated so rapidly that it now constitutes not just a quantitative but a qualitative reshaping of capitalism into a new form, characterized by a permanent state of volatility, ephemerality, and inequality. In the course of this work, Harvey’s work offers a major revision of historical materialism that takes into account the effects of capitalism’s uneven geographical development and its multifarious effects.

According to Harvey, the current globalized, neoliberal order has had a number of insidious effects on both societies and individuals within the system, including

… the creation of unemployment through down-sizing, the redefinitions of skills and remunerations for skills, the intensification of labor processes and of autocratic systems of surveillance, the increasing despotism of orchestrated detailed divisions of labor, the insertion of immigrants (or … the migration of capital to alternative labor sources), and the coerced competitive struggle between different bodily practices and modes of valuation under different historical and geographical conditions (Harvey 2000, 109–110)

All this means that individual workers are increasingly disempowered in the world economy, subject to conditions over which they have no control yet which exert a powerful influence over their lives. In addition, as capitalism increasingly inserts itself into and monetizes processes of social reproduction, workers are now ‘held captive within a “company store” relation to capital accumulation that renders [them] an appendage of capital at all moments of [their] existence’ (2000, 114). Neoliberal cultural transformations, then, can be traced to and are defined by what arises from these various economic developments.

Following in Harvey’s vein of historical-geographical materialism, most discussions of neoliberalism in film studies hitherto have focused on neoliberalism as an economic phenomenon. One prominent approach centers on how neoliberal economics is transforming global and local film industries. Jyostna Kapur and Keith B. Wagner’s 2011 edited collection Neoliberalism and Global Cinema, the first book to be published in English on the subject of neoliberalism and cinema, exemplifies the strengths of this methodology. They argue that ‘global cinema can, in the hands of Marxist criticism, become a lens into the political economy of neoliberalism and its far-reaching implications on culture’ (2011). The essays in their book do things like unmask the Hollywood industry’s ‘free market’ practices and expose the ways that the industry actually relies on state support (Miller and Maxwell), explore how Hollywood contributes to the building of massive corporate conglomerates that stifle consumer choice (Meehan); and examine how film cultures from Cuba to Singapore are affected by neoliberal political economy (Kapur; Tudor). Other strong work that has followed in a similar vein includes Antoniazzi’s (2018) analysis of the effects of neoliberalism on the European film heritage sector, and Sánchez Prado’s (2014) and Dayán’s (2017) investigations of the effects of neoliberal political economy on the Mexican film industry.

The first section of Ewa Mazierska and Lars Kristensen’s engaging recent anthology Contemporary Cinema and Neoliberal Ideology (2017) follows a similar path to Kapur and Wagner, looking at the political economy of neoliberalism as it relates to the film industry, exploring topics like corporate control of US indie cinema (Feshami) and the role of the internet in amateur filmmaking (Brown). In the second section, the anthology turns to the another common economically-focused approach in film studies: looking at cinematic representations of finance-related phenomena like debt (Mazierska), entrepreneurship (Schultz), and austerity (Barotsi). This section of the Mazierska and Kristensen anthology exemplifies the kinds of cultural analysis called for by Jean Comaroff and John Comaroff, prominent commentators on neoliberalism who advocate a (re)turn to social class and economic inequality as the primary categories for cultural analysis (2001). A lot of other journal-based work on neoliberalism and cinema also takes this approach; see for example Kinkle and Toscano (2011), Jaising (2014), Pepe (2016), and Boyle (2017).

The most extensive and penetrating work in this vein can be found in some excellent recent books that take more holistic approaches to economic analysis of neoliberal cinema. Dan Hassler-Forest’s Capitalist Superheroes: Caped Crusaders in the Neoliberal Age explores how the superhero genre offers a ‘stable mythology that expresses the fundamental beliefs of neoliberal capitalism’ (2012, 9). He links this genre to the politics of the Bush Doctrine, with its good-versus-evil justifications of unilateral war, as well as causing us to feel sympathy for and identification with powerful billionaires. In his latest book, on capitalism and transmedia world-building, Hassler-Forest explores how ‘transmedia world-building offers immersive, complex, and endlessly expansive spatiotemporal environments that provide pleasurable negotiations of global capitalism’s contradictory logic’ (2016). Another author of note is Michael Blouin, whose book Magical Thinking, Fantastic Film, and the Illusions of Neoliberalism reads contemporary films about magic as allegories of the immateriality of neoliberal economic structures (2016). Hassler-Forest and Blouin’s works consider in penetrating, original ways how neoliberal capitalist ideology informs the film text. Yet like other approaches relying on Marxist thought, they see neoliberalism as fundamentally if not solely an economic phenomenon, and this as its primary point of contact with film studies. In the next section I argue that this type of work – which has largely dominated film studies up to this point – has some significant limitations which this special issue aims to tackle.

Neoliberalism as discipline

Amongst various scholars in fields such as political science, philosophy, and sociology, there has been increasing consensus over the past two decades that neoliberalism’s power reaches far beyond the economic (and may not have ever been solely economic; see Mirowski 2013; Davies 2014; Peck 2010 as they chase down the origins of neoliberal philosophy). Authors including Hardt and Negri, Wendy Brown, and Philip Mirowski all address recent transformations in the state and other collectivities, and the complex interrelationships between these and individuals/subjectivities. Hardt and Negri were pioneers of this approach in their well-known 2000 book, Empire. While they concur with Harvey that ‘the primary factors of production and exchange – money, technology, people, and goods – move with increasing ease across national boundaries; hence the nation-state has less and less power to regulate these flows and impose its authority over the economy’ (2000, xi), they are more concerned with the development of a contemporary form of global sovereignty that they call Empire. Over several hundred years, Hardt and Negri argue, the European nation-state came into being and then metastasized into colonialism, which extended the nation-state’s boundaries but did not fundamentally alter its logic of rule. In the early 20^th century, an international framework exemplified by the United Nations took its place, wherein nation-states were themselves increasingly subject to supranational law. In the late 20^th century, globalization grew, or what Hardt and Negri call ‘the realization of the world market … defined by new and complex regimes of differentiation and homogenization, deterritorialization and reterritorialization’ (2000, xiii). This enabled the sovereignty of the international to transform globally into the sovereignty of Empire. The sovereignty of Empire, unlike colonialism, no longer has a locus, a seat of power; rather, this new form of power is ‘composed of a series of national and supranational organisms united under a single logic of rule’ (2000, xii). It has no spatial or temporal boundaries (2000, 11), applying evenly across the globe in ways that have scrambled what used to be clear distinctions between First, Second, and Third worlds. The United States occupies in some ways a ‘privileged position’ (182) within Empire because, Hardt and Negri argue, Empire had its origin in the U.S. Constitution, which is ‘constructed on the model of rearticulating an open space and reinventing incessantly diverse and singular relations in networks across an unbounded terrain’ (182). Empire, in other words, represents a ‘global expansion’ of the U.S. constitutional project (182). It is this transformation, and not the economic one, which Hardt and Negri believe drives contemporary modes of power.

Hardt and Negri deploy Foucault’s notion of biopower, put forth in his prescient Collège de France lectures in 1978–1979 (Foucault, Senellart, and Burchell 2008), to describe the relationship of the sovereignty of Empire to the individuals within it. They rely on and expand Foucault’s articulation of a historical passage from disciplinary society to the society of control. According to Hardt and Negri, the ‘entire first phase of capitalist accumulation’ (2000, 23) was conducted under the paradigm of the disciplinary society, which is necessary to the production of an industrial labor force. Disciplinarity is ‘accomplished through disciplinary institutions (the prison, the factory, the asylum, the hospital, the university, the school, and so forth) that structure the social terrain’ (2000, 23), defining spaces inside and outside these institutions and the logics that rule practices of inclusion and exclusion. Disciplinary society thus

… fixed individuals within institutions but did not succeed in consuming them completely in the rhythm of productive practices and productive socialization; it did not reach the point of permeating entirely the consciousness and bodies of individuals, the point of treating and organizing them in the totality of their activities. (Hardt and Negri 2000, 24)

In other words, although disciplinarity enforced certain behaviors within the walls of the institution, it still delineated a space outside those institutions that remained fundamentally private.

In the society of control, on the other hand, disciplinary power is converted to biopower; the object of the rule of biopower is ‘social life in its entirety’ (2000, xv); injecting capitalist processes into producing and reproducing the individual consciousness as well as every aspect of human interaction. This means that, as Hardt and Negri put it, the inside and the outside of neoliberal capitalism are becoming indistinguishable (2000, 196) – there is no moment at which people are not subject to its power, even in their most private lives, and it extends ‘throughout the depths of the consciousness and the bodies of the population’ (2000, 24). Empire achieves and maintains biopower through various mechanisms, including the growth of the surveillance state and large multinational corporations, which function as ‘immaterial nexuses of the production of language, communication, and the symbolic’ (2000, 32). Although Hardt and Negri do not elaborate, one may safely suppose that this includes media like film, which would point to the central significance of such media: in this view, film not only has the capacity to illustrate neoliberal ideology, but actually plays a central role in its enforcement and growth.

Another major scholar to propound the Foucauldian biopolitical framework is Wendy Brown, who in her book Undoing the Demos declares,

I join Michel Foucault and others in conceiving neoliberalism as an order of normative reason that, when it becomes ascendant, takes shape as a governing rationality extending a specific formulation of economic values, practices, and metrics to every dimension of human life. (Brown 2015, 30)

Brown argues that with the rise of neoliberal ideology, free-market logic has been increasingly applied not only to traditionally-defined economic activities like labor and consumption, but has actually extended ‘the model of the market to all domains and activities – even where money is not at issue – and configures human beings exhaustively as market actors, always, only, and everywhere as homo oeconomicus’ (2015, 31). In Brown’s account, this change has happened as governments, initially led by the likes of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, have been reoriented to serve the needs of capital rather than, as in classical liberalism, to be hands-off or to function as an offset to the negative effects of the market such as poverty (2015, 63). This shift means that ‘political subjects lose guarantees of protection by the liberal state’ (2015, 64) and are thus compelled into a new rationality of competition in which all subjects, their interior selves, and their bodies are conceived as entrepreneurial ‘human capital’ rather than as producers, sellers, workers, clients or consumers (2015, 65). This new ethics of the market guarantees that ‘every sphere and activity, from mothering to mating, from learning to criminality, from planning one’s family to planning one’s death’ (2015, 67), are guided by the necessity of permanent entrepreneurial competition and are completely transformed as a result.

Philip Mirowski objects to the Foucauldian, biopolitical approach for several reasons, yet uses his own evidence to reach similar conclusions about the pervasiveness of neoliberalism’s effects on subjectivity. He calls these effects ‘everyday neoliberalism.’ Mirowski argues that the late Foucault came perilously close to agreeing with neoliberal ideology in conceiving of the market as an all-seeing, all-powerful information processor (2013, 98) and of the state as naturally (and beneficially) limited by the neoliberal market (2013, 101). He further thinks that Marxist critiques have turned to the concept of biopower essentially because of the difficulty in chasing the ‘chain of causality stretching from the elusive executive committee of the capitalist class down to the shopper at Wal-Mart’ (2013, 99), but that in fact there are reasons why Foucauldian theory could never work with Marxism, since ‘dissolving all labor into entrepreneurialism of the self thoroughly undermines any Marxist concepts of exploitation and surplus value’ (2013, 100).

According to these perspectives, neoliberal cultural transformation is linked but is not reducible to the changing relationship between labor and capital, or any other issue of economics (traditionally defined). Rather, neoliberal ideology has ultimately taken on a life of its own as a mechanism of totalizing control over every individual and all social interactions everywhere. Neoliberalism has, in these accounts, affected virtually every aspect of human life: not just traditionally-understood economic spheres like labor practices (though it certainly has transformed those, with far-reaching consequences) but also areas like urban geography, human mobilities, practices of art and creativity, interpersonal relationships and family life, conceptions of selfhood, visions of utopia and dystopia, and of course configurations of race and gender. Although they are affected by neoliberal political economy, these spheres are not reducible to the economic or the material; they have histories and discourses of their own, each impacted in distinctive ways as neoliberal ideology has multiplied its force. And each of these areas (and undoubtedly others too) will have their own unique, complex interrelationships with cinema. The impetus for an analysis of neoliberalism and cinema that engages these frameworks, then, is to distinguish not only how film reflects but also how it enforces neoliberal ideology – or alternatively how it resists it. Films, of course, have the capacity to engage emotional absorption, invite identification or estrangement from particular types of protagonist or situation, produce particular subject positions, and so on. Cinema’s capacities in this regard are central to its engagement with ideology, and the specificities of this engagement with neoliberal ideologies, I submit, have yet to be fully studied.

Neoliberalism and media studies

This special issue brings together new work which explores the intersections between neoliberalism and cinema, asking provocative new questions about the complex, two-way relationships between neoliberal cultural transformations and film aesthetics. I’ve encountered three areas of media studies that can serve as models for the sorts of deeper engagement with neoliberal ideology advocated here: studies of reality television; studies of postfeminist media culture, and studies of postmodernism in cinema. The first two set admirable examples for the kinds of work we aim to accomplish in the articles that follow, while the last is arguably an earlier iteration of a kindred set of debates that’s now in need of revisiting.

Reality television scholars (scripted genres have received less attention) have long drawn links between this television form and neoliberal ideology. Laurie Ouellette’s seminal essay on Judge Judy traced this show’s delineation of neoliberal modes of citizenship in the ‘post-socialist’ state, arguing that it ‘train[s] TV viewers to function without state assistance or supervision, as self-disciplining, self-sufficient, responsible, and risk-averting individuals’ (Ouellette 2004, 224). Mark Andrejevic’s book on reality television (2004) explores the links between neoliberal celebrity and surveillance culture, arguing that the far-off promise of celebrity status lures the average media consumer into submission to panopticon-like consumer surveillance in the hope that they’ll be one of the lucky few to get rich doing so. Others have explored similar questions in relation to different genres of reality, for example Katherine Sender’s work on (the original) Queer Eye for the Straight Guy’s refashioning of masculinity as a disciplinary project in need of increased consumerism (2006), and Anna McCarthy’s work on suffering and trauma in reality television, which she argues ‘rewrites the history of the privatization of social insurance as, in essence, an opportunity for middle-class liberals to experience ecstatic therapeutic growth’ (2007, 32). These and other television scholars have been pioneering in viewing reality television as not merely a representation of but a mode of enforcing neoliberal modes of power, reflecting more sophisticated, biopolitically-oriented modes of understanding neoliberal ideology and exploring how these intersect with media texts in intricate ways.

Feminist media studies has long known that neoliberalism is, as Rosalind Gill and Christina Scharff put it, ‘always already gendered, and … women are constructed as its ideal subjects’ (2011, 7). Studies of postfeminism including Gill (2007) and Angela McRobbie (2009) have been well aware of this, exploring how postfeminist ‘chick’ texts – including makeover-themed reality shows as well as more traditional women-oriented narrative fare – prompt viewers to take on themselves new forms of self-monitoring and self-discipline in the name of postfeminist individualism, free choice, and empowerment. Later studies, most prominently by Diane Negra and Yvonne Tasker, revisited these issues in the wake of the 2008 financial crash and the ensuing ‘age of precarity,’ asking how postfeminist discourses were reshaped for these challenging times that disproportionately affected women (Negra and Tasker 2013, 2014; Negra, Leyda, and Lagerwey 2016; Davies and O’Callaghan 2016). I regard work in this area as exemplary of what can be accomplished when scholars chase down the effects of neoliberalism in a specific area of culture/identity, examining how existing discourses of (in this case) gender interact with neoliberal ideology in dynamic and continually evolving ways. One hopes that there will be many other such studies, including of race and colonialism perhaps most pressingly.

The final area of previous scholarship – one that to my mind is looming large over the debate about neoliberalism – is the question of postmodernism. Jameson posited a close, causal relationship between roughly the same set of changes to the economy that are now labeled as neoliberalism but that he called ‘late capitalism’; he called postmodernism ‘the reflex and the concomitant of yet another systemic modification of capitalism’ (1991, xii). Indeed, Jameson argues that postmodern ‘“culture” … . cleaves almost too close to the skin of the economic to be stripped off and inspected in its own right’ (1991, xv). He then pursues many strands of connection in his wide-ranging book on the subject; as is well known, he explored irony, play, self-awareness and pastiche as quintessential aspects of postmodern culture, while his chapter on film focuses on science fiction, the gothic, and nostalgia. Is neoliberal culture then simply an extension of the postmodern? Has analysis of neoliberalism in cinema already been substantially done under this older heading? If so, what can a new, neoliberal line of inquiry add? Is neoliberalism merely a new name for the same thing? Or does neoliberal culture express an intensification, transformation, or disruption of the postmodern, as Mark Fisher argues (2009)? My aim here is more provocation than literature review, for I think any answers will necessitate in-depth analysis that are outside the scope of this introduction; it’s a question that is woven throughout the essays that follow.

The articles collected in this issue build on these approaches, expanding them to the in-depth analysis of cinema and creating new methodological interventions, while keeping the focus on film’s capacity to engage in complex ways with ideology. The first two essays explore contemporary issues related to neoliberalism and labor; they echo earlier work in neoliberalism and cinema in their focus on an economic topic, yet push it several steps further into considerations of neoliberal subjectivity. Louis Bayman examines a set of films which he calls post-crash films of cruelty, exploring how representations of the labor of performance in films like Birdman (Alejandro Iñarritu 2014) and Nightcrawler (Dan Gilroy 2014) illustrate the transformation of Western conceptions of the self from liberal to neoliberal while simultaneously showing the neoliberal to be ‘disordered.’ Moya Luckett then investigates how ‘failed celebrities’ Lindsay Lohan and Tori Spelling tow a fine line between resistance to neoliberal discourses of the entrepreneurial self and reification of those same discourses through its location of failure as an individual deficiency rather than a systemic one.

The next two essays revisit key issues in postmodern aesthetics, reconsidering them in light of neoliberal theory. Natália Pinazza revisits the postmodern aesthetic strategy of metafiction from the perspective of the neocolonial periphery, exploring how several contemporary Argentinian films about filmmaking redeploy and transform metafictional practices to highlight neoliberal and neocolonial issues. Tim Vermeulen next reconsiders the ‘quirky’ aesthetics of filmmakers like Wes Anderson, which he has elsewhere called metamodern or post-postmodern, in terms of neoliberal capitalism, showing how narratives of escape from neoliberalism themselves may rely on neoliberal logics.

The final three essays are linked by their focus on space in contemporary U.S. cinema. Elizabeth Patton examines Get Out (Jordan Peele 2017) as a resistant text, situating this film within a broader history of spatial segregation in the United States and arguing that it repudiates neoliberal racial discourses of colorblindness. Next, Erica Stein reconsiders New York’s grid as a cartography of neoliberal urban values, arguing that even small-budget, indie, apparently resistant texts like Shortbus (John Cameron Mitchell 2006) actually push dominant narratives of ‘authenticity’ which contribute to urban gentrification. Finally, Gregory Frame examines how films about neoliberal dystopias including The Hunger Games (Gary Ross 2012) and In Time (Andrew Niccol 2011) reflect neoliberalism’s precarity and class-based urban segregation, while simultaneously proposing the quintessentially neoliberal solution of the individual hero as a panacea.

All the articles in this issue open up the field of film studies to new modes of inquiry about neoliberalism, incorporating both Marxist and Foucauldian perspectives while simultaneously moving beyond the limited pathways heretofore carved out by film scholarship. The work here substantively engages the intersections between neoliberal ideologies – of labor, selfhood, gender, race, colonialism, urban space, and so on – and the aesthetic, imaginative, and dramatic aspects of cinema. It approaches these intersections as a complicated two-way street in which film studies has the capacity for unique contributions to neoliberal theory as well as the converse. It is my avid hope that our work here will be merely an opening provocation, pointing to rich potential veins for further research.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.