Presidential Power and the Modern Presidents : The Politics of Leadership from Roosevelt to Reagan

This thesis examines the presentation and functions of Protestant Christianity in cinematic depictions of the American South, focusing primarily on Hollywood’s civil rights narratives, from the 1960s to the present. It argues that religion is an understudied signifier of the South on film, used to define the region’s presumed exceptionalism. Rooted in close textual analysis and primary research into the production and reception of over a dozen films, the thesis deploys methodologies drawn from history, film, literary, and cultural studies. It questions why scholars have seldom acknowledged the role of religion in popular, especially cinematic, constructions of the South, before providing detailed case studies of specific films that utilize southern religiosity to negotiate regional and national anxieties around race, class, and gender.

Though scholars have recognized the intersections of race, class, and gender evident in the media’s construction of southern white segregationist, this thesis contends that religion adds further interrogative value to existing analyses of civil rights cinema in particular, and of Hollywood’s representations of southern race, class, and gender identities more generally. The thesis argues that the perceived religious zealotry of many segregationists supports Hollywood’s recurring presentation of the South as an irrational region, where religiosity and rabid racism cloud all judgment.

The perceived ‘southernization’ of America through the culture wars of the late twentieth-century encouraged many Americans to reconsider the legacy of the civil rights era, a movement that was being concurrently reshaped in the popular imagination by Hollywood dramas such as Mississippi Burning, A Time to Kill, and Ghosts of Mississippi among many other films. Examining the presentation of both white and black Christianity in these films, the thesis illuminates how cinema has routinely fabricated a simplistic binary of good and evil that pits a noble, yet reductive and static, religious African American community against zealous white trash and fundamentalists operating on the margins of society. So often to blame for the incendiary racial violence that marks such movies, these white villains are often associated with fundamentalism, in both rhetoric and actions, enabling filmmakers to offer a clear culprit for the South’s, and therefore the nation’s, legacy of racial intolerance and violence.

“Southern by the grace of God:” religion and race in Hollywood’s South since the 1960s

In a seminal article published in 2004, John Street argued that celebrity politics has provided a greater expression for the enhancement of democratic behaviour. Consequently, this analysis builds on Street's thesis to consider the worth of celebrity politics in an era of late modernity. To this end, it employs Henrik Bang's and John Keane's constructs of Everyday Makers and Monitory Democracy, which have emphasised the importance of ‘involvement’, ‘voice’ and ‘output’ in terms of representation, to provide an ideological framework to capture the value of celebrity politics. Subsequently, it may be argued that Barack Obama utilised a form of ‘liquid’ celebrity in his 2008 US presidential campaign to reconnect with a disenfranchised electorate. However, this article will critically assess these types of celebrity politics to contend that aggregated forms of ‘input’ drawn from celebrity activism may more truly affect political outcomes.

/pdf/the-democratic-worth-of-celebrity-politics-in-an-era-of-late-97ar7icyh2.pdf

The Democratic Worth of Celebrity Politics in an Era of Late Modernity

This essay examines how the film Black Hawk Down functions rhetorically to reconstruct the legitimacy of political and military institutions and policy, and the possibilities for efficacious, responsible citizen agency within the post-September 11, 2001 context of increasingly unconventional warfare. Black Hawk Down reconstitutes popular perceptions of war and the appropriate response of citizens to it. It continues a pattern of contemporary war films established by Saving Private Ryan in 1998, reducing the patriotic purpose of war to surviving and protecting one's fellow soldiers. This pattern is developed through a hyperreal spectacle of war that both encourages audiences to empathize with the dominant “pro-soldier” message and discourages critical public discourse concerning justifications for and execution of military intervention policy.

Public Character and the Simulacrum: The Construction of the Soldier Patriot and Citizen Agency in Black Hawk Down

This article explores an emerging “cultural turn” in intelligence studies, which, if fully realized, could entail the expansion of the discipline to include new methodologies and theories, and a mo...

https://tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/02684527.2019.1615711

The cultural turn in intelligence studies

Introduction 1. Film, Ideology and American Politics 2. Political Films in the Classic Studio Era 3. Hollywood on the Campaign Film 4. Action, Conspiracy and Paranoia in Hollywood Political Films 5. Political Biography in Film 6. Hollywood and America in the New Foreign Policy Era 7. Hollywood and Contemporary Domestic Politics

American politics in Hollywood film

In Capra's Shadow: The Life and Career of Screenwriter Robert Riskin

Hollywood screenwriter Robert Riskin was the head of the Overseas Branch of the Office of War Information during World War II. His role not only helped to shape the administrative and managerial strategy of the agency but also created a body of documentary film work that was arguably the most incisive of the entire war. And yet in most accounts of American propaganda production during the last sixty years, as well as specifically OWI conduct and development, Riskin's role has been confined to that of a functionary, a name that is only mentioned in cursory anecdotes. The aim of this article, therefore, is not only to foreground Riskin's contribution to the OWI, neglected though that is, but to argue that Riskin's documentary programme, Projections of America, was actually one of the most important, influential and substantive collections of propaganda made during the war.

https://www.jstor.org/stable/info/27557796

Ian Scott

Papers

American politics in Hollywood film

In Capra's Shadow: The Life and Career of Screenwriter Robert Riskin

From Toscanini to Tennessee: Robert Riskin, the OWI and the construction of American propaganda in world war II

From Pinewood to Hollywood: British Filmmakers in American Cinema, 1910-1969

From NASL to MLS: Transnational culture, exceptionalism and Britain's part in American soccer's coming of age