New Review of Film and Television Studies

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Neoliberal theory and film studies

Anna Cooper

To cite this article: Anna Cooper (2019) Neoliberal theory and film studies, New Review of Film
and Television Studies, 17:3, 265-277, DOI: 10.1080/17400309.2019.1622877

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/17400309.2019.1622877

Published online: 16 Jul 2019.

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NEW REVIEW OF FILM AND TELEVISION STUDIES
2019, VOL. 17, NO. 3, 265–277
https://doi.org/10.1080/17400309.2019.1622877

Neoliberal theory and film studies

Anna Cooper
School of Theatre, Film, and Television, University of Arizona, Tucson, AZ, USA

ABSTRACT
Neoliberalism, in imposing ‘free market’ principles on all areas of life, trans-
forms older configurations of the self, society, culture, aesthetics, and the
relationships between them; it has increasingly been theorized as fundamen-
tally 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 discre-
diting 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.

CONTACT Anna Cooper annacooper@email.arizona.edu

© 2019 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group
266 A. COOPER

Of course films show people, social identities, communities, and spaces

impacted by neoliberal ideology – it would be hard not to, given neoliber-
alism’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 domi-
nant 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 neoliber-
alism, 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 possi-
bility 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 con-
siderations of economics, including studies of neoliberal economic transfor-
mations 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
 NEW REVIEW OF FILM AND TELEVISION STUDIES 267

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 con-
cepts 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 increas-
ingly critical stance and that ultimately has more materialist explanatory power:
neoliberal economic change, in Harvey’s view, is the cause of postmodern move-
ments 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 accumulat-
ing change to production, markets, technologies, and media/communications
has escalated so rapidly that it now constitutes not just a quantitative but
268 A. COOPER

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 reproduc-
tion, 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 transforma-
tions, 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 neoliber-
alism 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 neoliber-
alism 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 con-
tributes to the building of massive corporate conglomerates that stifle con-
sumer 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,
 NEW REVIEW OF FILM AND TELEVISION STUDIES 269

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), entre-
preneurship (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 neoliber-
alism 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 con-
tradictory logic’ (2016). Another author of note is Michael Blouin, whose book
Magical Thinking, Fantastic Film, and the Illusions of Neoliberalism reads con-
temporary 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
270 A. COOPER

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 20th
century, an international framework exemplified by the United Nations took its
place, wherein nation-states were themselves increasingly subject to suprana-
tional law. In the late 20th 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 reterritorializa-
tion’ (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 accumu-
lation’ (2000, 23) was conducted under the paradigm of the disciplinary
society, which is necessary to the production of an industrial labor force.
 NEW REVIEW OF FILM AND TELEVISION STUDIES 271

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 conscious-
ness 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 institu-
tions 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 frame-
work 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 activ-
ities 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
272 A. COOPER

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 rela-
tionships 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 inter-
relationships with cinema. The impetus for an analysis of neoliberalism and
 NEW REVIEW OF FILM AND TELEVISION STUDIES 273

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 intersec-
tions between neoliberalism and cinema, asking provocative new questions
about the complex, two-way relationships between neoliberal cultural trans-
formations 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 accom-
plish 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 neolib-
eral 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 panopti-
con-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.
274 A. COOPER

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 neoli-
beralism 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 quintes-
sential 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, transforma-
tion, 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
 NEW REVIEW OF FILM AND TELEVISION STUDIES 275

complex ways with ideology. The first two essays explore contemporary
issues related to neoliberalism and labor; they echo earlier work in neoli-
beralism 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, reconsi-
dering 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 reconsi-
ders 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 color-
blindness. Next, Erica Stein reconsiders New York’s grid as a cartography of
neoliberal urban values, arguing that even small-budget, indie, apparently resis-
tant 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 simulta-
neously 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 per-
spectives while simultaneously moving beyond the limited pathways heretofore
carved out by film scholarship. The work here substantively engages the inter-
sections between neoliberal ideologies – of labor, selfhood, gender, race, coloni-
alism, urban space, and so on – and the aesthetic, imaginative, and dramatic
aspects of cinema. It approaches these intersections as a complicated two-way
276 A. COOPER

street in which film studies has the capacity for unique contributions to neolib-
eral 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.

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