The Invisible Hand in Popular Culture

by Cantor, Paul A.

• ISBN13: 9780813140827
• ISBN10: 081314082X
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2012-11-05
• Publisher: Univ Pr of Kentucky

Summary

Popular culture often champions freedom as the fundamentally American way of life and celebrates the virtues of independence and self-reliance. But film and television have also explored the tension between freedom and other core values, such as order and political stability. What may look like healthy, productive, and creative freedom from one point of view may look like chaos, anarchy, and a source of destructive conflict from another. Film and television continually pose the question: Can Americans deal with their problems on their own, or must they rely on political elites to manage their lives? In this groundbreaking work, Paul A. Cantor explores the ways in which television shows such as Star Trek, The X-Files, South Park, and Deadwood and films such as The Aviator and Mars Attacks! have portrayed both top-down and bottom-up models of order. Drawing on the works of John Locke, Adam Smith, Alexis de Tocqueville, and other proponents of freedom, Cantor contrasts the classical liberal vision of America -- particularly its emphasis on the virtues of spontaneous order -- with the Marxist understanding of the "culture industry" and the Hobbesian model of absolute state control. The Invisible Hand in Popular Culture concludes with a discussion of the impact of 9/11 on film and television, and the new anxieties emerging in contemporary alien-invasion narratives: the fear of a global technocracy that seeks to destroy the nuclear family, religious faith, local government, and other traditional bulwarks against the absolute state.

Table of Contents

Preface	p. ix
Introduction: Popular Culture and Spontaneous Order, or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Tube	p. 1
Freedom and Order in the Western
Introduction to Part One	p. 25
The Western and Western Drama: John Fords The Searchers and the Oresteia	p. 31
The Original Frontier: Gene Roddenberry s Apprenticeship for Star Trek in Have Gun-Will Travel	p. 59
Order Out of the Mud: Deadwood and the State of Nature	p. 97
Maverick Creators and Maverick Heroes
Introduction to Part Two	p. 131
Mars Attacks!: Tim Burton and the Ideology of the Flying Saucer Movie	p. 137
Flying Solo: The Aviator and Entrepreneurial Vision	p. 167
Cartman Shrugged: The Invisible Gnomes and the Invisible Hand in South Park	p. 189
Edgar G. Ulmer: The Aesthete from the Alps Meets the King of the B's
Introduction to Part Three	p. 215
The Fall of the House of Ulmer: Europe versus America in the Gothic Vision of The Black Cat	p. 223
America as Wasteland in Detour: Film Noir and the Frankfurt School	p. 243
9/11, Globalization, and New Challenges to Freedom
Introduction to Part Four	p. 271
The Truth Is Still Out There: The X-Files and 9/11	p. 277
Un-American Gothic: The Alien Invasion Narrative and Global Modernity	p. 299
Acknowledgments	p. 349
Notes	p. 353
Index	p. 435
Table of Contents provided by Ingram. All Rights Reserved.