Envisaging Community in Twenty-First Century US Film and Television: Neoliberalism, Relationality, Ecologies
This thesis explores interconnected questions of community, politics, neoliberalism, and ecologies in twenty-first century US film and television. Specifically, I examine the work of three American filmmakers — Kenneth Lonergan, Mike White, and Paul Schrader — whose works, I suggest, can be characterised as narratives of responsibility in their foregrounding of moral questions concerning community in a contemporary neoliberal American context. Yet the depiction of community in these works, this thesis argues, is often challenging and ambivalent. Moving across film and television works that respond to key (geo)political markers throughout the twenty-first century, such as 9/11, the aftermath of the 2008 economic crisis, and our ongoing climate emergency, the thesis draws on an assemblage of theorists — ranging from Judith Butler, Lauren Berlant, Jean-Luc Nancy, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, among others — to examine how US film and televisual media engage with questions of relationality and collective social responsibility, envisaging forms of political community amidst the multifaceted and destructive workings of neoliberalism in America. In Chapter 1, I analyse Lonergan’s *Margaret* (2011), examining the film’s depiction of community in a post-9/11 New York City, a setting in which questions of alterity and grievability are navigated. While I consider the film in relation to 9/11 and its allegorical dimensions, I also address the contested ethical implications of allegory as a rhetorical device and examine the ways in which these allegorical complexities are necessarily inflected by the film’s cursory engagement with questions of race. Beyond its engagements with 9/11, I also explore the film’s negotiation of individual responsibility and community in relation to neoliberal discourses pertaining to gender and postfeminism. Chapter 2 centres on White’s HBO series *Enlightened* (2011–13), analysing the complex affective dimensions that undergird the series’ critique of corporate capitalism in a post-2008 context. The series’ excoriation of neoliberalism, as the chapter argues, points to the necessity of a transversal ecopolitics. Indeed, I suggest that the series constitutes an ecological opening to renewed conceptualisations of community, inclusive of the nonhuman. Yet I also contend that *Enlightened* bears numerous contradictions and ambivalences in its utopian visions of ecological futurity and in its satirical and humorous thematisation of social responsibility under neoliberalism. In Chapter 3, I focus on Schrader’s *First Reformed* (2017), examining its engagements with nationalism, religion, capitalism, environmentalism, race, and individual responsibility. I think most explicitly about various ecological questions in relation to the film’s articulation of human-nonhuman relationalities. Crucial to this chapter is a consideration of how Schrader’s film-theoretical reflections on ‘transcendental style’ may be applied beyond an anthropocentric context, attuning viewers to the planet’s materiality, imperilled as it is by the climate crisis. Ultimately, the analyses here demonstrate the ways in which recent US film and television offer us provocative mediations of contemporary neoliberal America, envisaging how we may (or may not) move beyond neoliberalism to consider questions of relationality and community anew, including beyond the human.
ecocriticism, ecology, film studies, film theory, neoliberalism, US cinema, US television
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