Cult cinema and the ‘mainstreaming’ discourse of technological change: revisiting subcultural capital in liquid modernity

Abstract

This paper considers how generational ‘nostalgia’ for older technologies of cult cinema – especially the ‘inaccessibility’ of midnight movies or video nasties vs. the accessibility of online material – facilitates a kind of ‘retro’ subcultural capital. Decrying the presumed ‘death’ of cult cinema due to online video, scholar-fans and critics have produced what I analyse here as a ‘mainstreaming’ discourse. Alongside adopting a Bourdieusian approach, I address the shifting status of cult cinema in relation to Zygmunt Bauman's ‘liquid modernity’. Bauman's work enables me to argue that the ‘mainstreaming’ discourse of cult represents a resistance to technological and social ‘accelerations’ of media consumption. Cultist tastes and identities rooted in the past thus allow fans and scholar-fans to ground their personal self-narratives in an era of rapid technological and (consumerist) cultural change. As such, I conclude that a distinction-based approach to cult's ‘subcultural ideology’ can be productively extended by applying Bauman's work.

Keywords::

• subcultural capital
• fandom
• liquid modernity
• cult cinema
• mainstreaming
• nostalgia

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Additional information

Funding

This research received no specific grant from any funding agency in the public, commercial, or not-for-profit sectors.