Longtime readers (or FKJ, PHD listeners) know that I grew up on award shows, and that my mom, uncle, and late maternal grandmother are decidedly ‘movie people.’ Talking about (analyzing, arguing about, gushing about) movies and tv shows is basically our love language. So it’s perhaps not surprising that, despite primarily researching and writing about radical social movements, I accidentally wound up in a Critical Media Studies PhD Program, where I learned all about pop culture as a site of struggle. As theory is wont to do, it gave me a framework to better understand my relationship to it; British Cultural Studies (an academic movement developed by anti-authoritarian Marxists) helped me realize that media isn’t a distraction from mass politics, it’s a place where the masses engage. I will forever defend culture and art as both politically important and also a meaningful space for pleasure. While Adorno (and others from the Frankfurt School) saw popular culture as a new opiate of the working class, BCS theorists (like Raymond Williams, Stuart Hall, Paul Gilroy, and others) argued that audiences aren’t dupes— that perhaps we can enjoy art and also not be useless to revolutionary struggle. Critical media studies practitioners who have a foot in liberation work never argue that representational politics on screen is revolutionary, but that it’s also worthwhile to unpack a text (movie, tv show, song, internet phenomenon, etc.) to help us understand more about culture, and thus about struggle.
I come to pop culture through many entry points: as a working-class kid who used movies and celebrity culture as a bit of a daydream escape; as a precocious youngster surrounded by a few smart and arty family members who introduced me to independent films; as an academic who sees the pedagogical value of deconstructing a text; and as an anarchist and feminist who wants to unpack meaning from screens as a tool to see what stands in the way of us getting free. And then there is the matter of pleasure, the simple joy of fandom — group texting with the queers about whether we love or hate that lesbian holiday movie, delighting in niche memes borne of a Jennifer Coolidge line or a Pedro Pascal smirk, relishing in the kind of punk/indie music that genuinely transformed my entire life…
It is in the spirit of the above that I share this conversation between me and anarchist writer Peter Gelderloos who, I was pleasantly surprised to learn, is also a bit of a movie person. We had a great time talking about movies this year, and we hope you enjoy this conversation to add to the Oscars discourse.
Recommended Resources & Movies Discussed
Peter’s substack: Surviving Leviathan
“Stuart Hall and the Rise of Cultural Studies” Hua Hsu
“Tar is the most talked about movie of the year. So why is everyone talking about it all wrong?” Dan Kois
“Fat Suit Attack: The Whale” Lindy West
Tar
Banshees of Inisherin
Till
The Woman King
Triangle of Sadness
Women Talking
She Said
Bodies Bodies Bodies
The Menu
The Whale
Fat
The Good Boss
Aftersun
Top Gun: Maverick
Everything Everywhere All At Once
Nope
Don’t Worry Darling
radical pop culture break.