This blog focuses on the analysis of film and popular culture using the sociological perspective.
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Alan J. Pakula was a versatile writer, producer and director of cinema of the 1970’s through the 1990’s. Unfortunately, like his fellow overshadowed contemporary, John Sayles , Pakula was eclipsed by the light of the New Hollywood golden children of Lucas, Scorsese, Coppola, and Spielberg in the public consciousness. Adept at many genres, Pakula made a name for himself with the suspenseful…
Cinema has always been a lens by which to explore the human condition. Often, movies are cited as a mirror with which to reflect human choice and fallibility. Rarer is the acknowledgment that film can be a framing device for the understanding of the world. Cinematic socialization, often generalized by “the socialization of the media”, allows for social learning from within the proscenium of the…
The third film in my analysis of the films of Julia Ducournau is the allegorically harrowing Alpha. This Palme d’Or nominated film reaches back into the recent past, to bring AIDS and gay panic once again to the forefront, simultaneously intertwining COVID and trans panic into a salient cultural metaphor for our current context. While the overall application of this metaphor is clunky and less…
INTRODUCTION There is an interlocking relationship between the military, masculinity and the movies. This “Militainment” as it is colloquially referred, reaffirms and strengthens the reciprocity of war and cinema. This began with early depictions of John Wayne style heroism of the early to mid1940’s, to the more robust verisimilitude of current conflict depictions on the silver screen. The…
INTRODUCTION The subfield of Sociology that enquires about the development and establishment of knowledge, keenly referred to as “The Sociology of Knowledge” identifies four areas of knowledge production: Experiences, Interactions/Observations, Institutions, and The Media. In the area of the media, entertainment is often lost to the other media mechanisms of news and advertisements, veiling its…
INTRODUCTION We are currently living through a synergistic cultural moment of the rapid birth, maturity and dominance of algorithmic software, touted as “artificial intelligence”. Many of its uses can be subjectively perceived as more benevolent than others. The use in the Healthcare industry in screening for earlier cancer detection seems more universally embraced; while its use in screening job…
INTRODUCTION As another year ends, it is time for The Sociologist’s Dojo to rattle off the top ten Sociological films of the year. As with the last five years, I’ve decided to once again give readers a list of 10 events of the year that can be encapsulated in film. Understand that this is not an exhaustive list of events, nor even the ones that are “The Most Sociological.” Instead, this is to…
The second film in my analysis of The Films of Julia Ducournau is the genre-bending body horror thriller, Titane . Ducournau’s sophomore feature seems to crystalize and extend both the themes and the visuals she is interested in as a storyteller into a specified shape. The gendering of women and the patriarchal attempt to tame them, aging masculinity and the sense of identity loss that accompanies…
The first film in my analysis of the films of Julia Ducournau is the coming-of-age body horror film Raw. Ducournau’s full-length feature debut, draws on her interpersonal relationship with her parents and their expertise (gynecology and dermatology) along with her affinity for the works of David Cronenberg and Tom Hooper’s Texas Chainsaw Massacre . Centered in the throes of the zombie cultural…
INTRODUCTION There has always been an entanglement of The Criminal Justice System (CJS) and the media. Historically, that relationship has been antagonistic, especially in the news media where it is contentious to downright hostile. Journalists were known to pepper elected officials, law enforcement, and legal representatives (judges and lawyers) with pointed questions that were designed to get at…
